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The problem with the city is that it lies to you. It lies to you all day while you're at work, through the windows and doors, warm breezes creeping in around the cracks and sun shining temptingly through the blinds. With its whispering of the sunny, sleepy streets outside it tells you that there are better things to do than type memos at a cramped and sticky desk for a man who smells of Marlboros and sexual assault; that two in the afternoon is a fine time to abandon a board room for the boardwalk; that your skirt would look even nicer being walked down Sixth avenue, plus there’d be the added bonus of no leering boss looming in your shadow with his eyes slip-sliding all over your breasts—but no pressure—maybe you’d rather be here? (says the city—skeptically, pointedly). Then when you’ve left the office for the safety of home it changes tack so quick you’ll get whiplash; it lies to you all night, too, on the evenings when you should be reading or sleeping or doing the laundry, when it says: you don't need money in your purse to have fun, girlie-girl, just show up anywhere with a smile… wear some heels and flash some upper thigh, we'll go for a ride…
It whispers at you all day and all night; it tells you that the grass is greener and the lights are brighter and the parties are swankier on the other side of whatever window you’re leaning against. It lies and you listen because it’s so, so good at it. And you have to learn over and over and over again not to trust the city farther than you can throw it—go ahead, just try it—and that actually there isn't anything better to do in the hot stinking streets of New York City than your job—certainly not at two in the afternoon.
Grazi learns this particular lesson—New York City Streets comma Two in the Afternoon comma Sans Money—when she gets fired from her aforementioned job because she refuses to get on her knees in front of Mr. Pack-A-Day and finds herself thrown out on the curb with her shoes squeaking sweatily. Grazi learns—or really, already knew and had managed to forget—that mostly you do need money to have fun; a glimpse of thigh takes you some places but they aren't fun places or safe places or places you'll tell your ma about later. She knows all about these deeply unclean and unsafe back alleys, all these places where the city stops laying down its shiny veneer and gilt leaf and reveals its rusting, crumbling base layer, all the dark corners that haven’t met a mop or sunlight or a moment of human decency. The city lies sweetly and flashily but it's rotten down to the foundations; this uncomfortable, ungovernable city with its nasty little putrid heart.
Grazi is used to liars but the kind of lying the city does makes her crazy. All the lights and colors and the thrilling whirlwind of music from every street corner telling you: best city in America, in the world, in the galaxy—the aliens will stop here first, you watch. Then one day you slide through dog shit in new pumps, plummet off the curb like gravity has redoubled itself, and sprain your ankle so bad you can't wear the pumps, not that you would, they're covered in dog shit and you don’t even have a job to wear them to anymore. And while you're lying on the ground getting your breath back—looking up at the shard of a new building you can't remember anyone asking for, people stepping over you like they can't see you—you hear somebody say 'Whore,’ in a voice like a poison-dipped dart. That’s the city for you. It lies its sweet little lies and then it rubs your face into the ditch, reminds you that you aren't even worth the grimy penny lying next to you on the sidewalk.
New York City: it’s a lying little bitch.
But it’s home, is the thing. It’s got all of Grazi's favorite things clamped between its teeth: diners and jazz, egg creams and black-and-whites, dive bars and the Ritz and the best kind of hot spring days, the ones in which everybody’s dresses come out creased and surprised after a long winter in the closet. Even after she’s unceremoniously shifted out of the only three-square block of streets she’s known or loved since she was still allowed to run around naked in them, even after she’s moved into a dark and stifling one-bedroom with her mother and an aging cat—a cat who dies immediately and portentously upon introduction to the new apartment, and whose death means Grazi’s first task in her new neighborhood is to figure out how to dispose of a small feline corpse (she throws it in the river; it haunts her for years)—even after all that, she still walks home down streets frosted white, past the taxi cab gridlock, and feels the city pull a smile from between the stringy muscles keeping her ribs connected. Even the horribly hot and sweaty afternoon after she’s lost her first real job, the first job she’d been qualified for, the first job that made the American Dream feel not just real but actually attainable and which has now been snatched out of her painted fingertips, the city breathes a sigh of humidity into her lungs and tells her: pick up your feet, honey, and get back on that horse; there are better things to come.
Maybe Grazi’s a sucker, or maybe she’s an optimist, or maybe New York City is just really good at its job—because she can almost believe it. Better things, she thinks, and picks herself up.
— —
Better things, at first, means Tony. Tony comes to find her, tracks her down through the shriveling grapevine of old contacts and mutual friends, comes and knocks on her apartment door one day, out of the blue, like an omen of more to come. “Hiya,” he says, with his hat literally in his hands, it would have been funny if Grazi hadn’t been gulping down her surprise like a dog with a tendon-y piece of chicken. “Hi,” she says back, blankly. “You wanna cookie or something?”
Tony laughs with his own tendon-y surprise. “Yeah, okay.”
They share a plate of cookies. Tony tells her he’s been back on Manhattan for a few years but has only just started tracking old friends down—he’d run into Riff on the subway by chance and it had made him homesick; their old haunts are long gone or long changed but he’d decided he wanted to find the rest of the Jets, and the Jets’ girls.
“I never thought of myself as a ‘Jet’s girl’,” Grazi says lightly, to hide her annoyance. (Secretly she’s always considered herself a Jet, she’d hung out with them enough, hadn’t she? She remembers putting two and two together vis-à-vis ‘Sarah’ and ‘Anybodys’, meaning the day she’d realized they were the same person, meaning the day she’d realized Sarah had started calling herself a Jet and had even earned her own nickname—Grazi had laughed with the other girls about it but jealousy had risen green in her belly; the tangled roots of that jealousy had never quite been torn out of her.)
“You ain’t,” Tony says, in surprise.
“And screw you too,” Grazi says. “What—the second I stop dating a Jet I ain’t in the club? Why’re you even here, then?”
“No—I mean, you ain’t a Jet’s girl. You’re a Jet.”
“Oh.” Grazi feels her face flush hot. That was the thing about Tony—he never stopped surprising you. He was good down to his marrow, Tony was. A real good egg. “Why don’t I get a nickname, then?”
Tony smiles. “You want one? I always called you Tootsie behind your back.”
Grazi hits him, and remembers that he’s a good egg with an expiration date, or maybe a hairline crack.
When they say goodbye Tony gives her his phone number, but Grazi finds it strangely hard to actually dial the thing: she puts it off for a few weeks, then a few more, then a month has gone by and she’s still out of a job and embarrassed about it, and embarrassed about being embarrassed about it; she doesn’t want to explain herself. The thing is that she doesn’t have any references and can’t actually type that fast, or even accurately: she hasn’t had much practice since leaving her certificate classes and they can’t afford a typewriter to practice with since she isn’t making any money. Welfare keeps them fed and Grazi’s ma keeps hinting that maybe she should go out, try looking for a husband instead of a job—”maybe if you wore a little more lipstick, honey”—but Grazi’s heard the city sing sweetly at her with her own money in her pocket and independence making her toes tap and there’s no turning back now, she's got that Feminist Flu or whatever they're calling the virulent strain of determination running rampant through the veins of twenty-something women in the swinging sixties. She wants to work. So Tony’s number languishes unused on her bedside table and she thinks over and over again: when I have something to say, I’ll call him.
Then Riff finds her, too. Well—Riff doesn’t so much find her as bump into her on the street, do the biggest double-take she’s ever seen, blush so hard he looks like his skin’s about to peel off, and mumble: “Hey, you.” It’s an anticlimactic meeting after six years. It’s a little insulting.
“‘Hey, you’,” Grazi repeats. “That’s all I get?” Maybe it’s a little, uh, confrontational, because Riff reels back like he’s been slapped and if his cheeks could have gone redder they would have, instead the blood bleeds into his forehead and down his chest, too, like it might as well spread out since it’s been called up out of his heart so forcefully. Grazi didn’t mean it like that, though, or only a little, and it's not worth ribbing him for—she reaches out and drags him forward, hugs him until the breath has left his lungs with a whoosh.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Riff—why haven’t you come around? I missed you.”
“I—” Riff says, under her arms, then doesn’t continue. When the silence lasts a little too long and feels a little too heavy, she wonders, bizarrely, if he’s crying. But when they pull back from each other, his eyes are dry. “I missed you, too,” he says finally. They look at each other for a long moment, and then they both start laughing at exactly the same time, shaking their heads at the maddening coincidence of it, how the world works in mysterious and wonderful ways; maybe there’s a God up there but Grazi thinks no, it’s just that the city has an agenda and its agenda is chaos.
“Tony’s been around,” she says. “He mentioned he’d seen you. Christ, Riff, I didn’t even know you were still in the city ‘til he said so.”
“Sorry,” Riff says, and his mouth does a funny twisting lilt of a smile, like a hitched gasp. “I’ve been working’ up the guts to come round.”
“I’m that scary?”
“Kid—you’re a switchblade.”
Grazi laughs like a rib has been knocked loose. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d missed him.
Riff takes her out for a meal, although she’s not sure he can afford it. It’s only later that night that she realizes she’d never learned much of what he’s been up to over the preceding six years—only that now he’s living in Greenwich Village and painting walls for a living—mostly he asks about her, hanging on every word of her answers like he’s a desert plant sucking water out of the parched sandy soil. She tells him that she’s still living with her ma; she’d been about to move in with Dalton but they’d split about six months ago. She tells him she had learned how to type and got a job as a secretary downtown. Then she tells him about losing the job, about the humiliating day that had started with a broken bra strap and ended with her boss tossing her out on Broadway with his belt still unbuckled, clinking when he moved, like a final admonishment. Riff gets tight around the mouth and offers to find him, to show him what’s what, maybe with the help of a sharp object or a blunt metal one. She says no, but adds (jokingly! it's a joke!) that if Riff could follow him home to his apartment one day and steal forty bucks in back pay and maybe his favorite cigar cutter, she’d be grateful. When they leave the restaurant Riff hugs her goodbye—he’s warmer and fuller than she remembers—and she feels that old crooked finger of love pluck a harp string deep in her chest.
Two weeks later Riff shows up with forty bucks and a cigar cutter that looks way too close to the one Grazi remembered for it to be a coincidence—she kicks him in the ankle then invites him in for lunch.
After a few more lunches it becomes clear that Riff and Tony are seeing each other a lot these days, like maybe every day as far as Grazi can tell, Riff always seems to be just coming from seeing him or just off to see him. ‘You’re friends again, then,” she says, and Riff smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Never weren’t, I guess. Just hit some rocks.”
“Bring him around next time,” Grazi says, and Riff does. They go to All State Cafe for hamburgers and Tony berates her gently, unmeanly, for not calling. Riff and Tony don’t just seem like friends again, they seem easy and warm and comfortable with each other in a way that feels oddly adult, somehow, like they’ve both grown out of whatever rough-edged competitive chafing had existed between them for as long as Grazi can remember. They drop into the booth next to each other and Riff slides over a water glass and a set of cutlery and the salt shaker, one after another, in three quick motions like they’ve done it a thousand times. When they talk they talk around each other and it takes Grazi five minutes to fall into the conversation with them, to slot herself into the quick-moving river-run of chatter.
“You find a job yet?” Riff asks around his hamburger.
“Nope,” Grazi says, and pushes down the embarrassment and blood-red fear before it can show in her face. “One of you is paying for me, by the way. In case you wanna suddenly remember you forgot your wallet.”
“You don’t care where you work?” Tony asks, putting his own burger down. “My boss’s secretary up and quit, like, yesterday. It’d be Brooklyn, though.”
Hope swells up hot. “Brooklyn would be okay,” Grazi says. “Are you kidding? Brooklyn’s easy. But I don’t have a reference.”
Riff puts down his own burger, gaping at her. “That motherfucker pulls his pants down on you and then won’t even give you a reference? I’ll do more than steal a fuckin’ cigar cutter—”
“Don’t go back,” Grazi says quickly, but can’t keep herself from grinning. “I’ll never forgive myself if you got caught.”
“You won’t need a reference if I pass on your name,” Tony says. “They’ll trust me.” It’s not bragging or bluster, just Tony’s usual straightforward earnestness.
“Okay,” Grazi says, and tries not to let hope overwhelm the pragmatic whispering pessimism native to all New Yorkers. “Yes. Thank you—I’d like that.” A week later she’s got a job. Maybe she’s supposed to learn a lesson about networking or maybe she feels a little gross about it, like wonders how fair the free market can really be if all it takes is the right person’s word in the right ear, but mostly she’s just grateful. Such are the ways we ignore the world’s tiny inequities.
The job is mostly mindless but it pays well, the hours are easy, and she likes Brooklyn; she spends her lunch breaks reading in Prospect Park. She starts saving money. Her boss never asks to see her breasts, although she does catch him looking at her ass once. Well, that’s alright. She’s got a nice ass.
“You do,” Tony says, when she jokes about it one day. “If you’d stop bending down, maybe he’d get some work done.”
“I’m at a desk!”
“He only remembers when you aren’t, I think.” Grazi wonders if he’s flirting, but it doesn’t feel like it did when they were seventeen and cracking terrible innuendo-laced jokes in each other’s direction. It’s not exactly heat sitting behind his eyes; she would have called it fondness, actually. This makes her love him a little bit more. It might even be real, this time.
Riff keeps coming to lunch because it’s a habit, now, and mostly he brings Tony but sometimes not. He jokes with her ma and plays with the new kitten and clicks on the radio every time he comes in, just to see what’s playing. He doesn’t flirt, either—maybe they’ve all grown out of it—and Grazi’s never quite forgiven him for dropping her without warning so many years ago, but even so. She always did have a softly squished-in piece of heart tissue devoted to him, and now he’s poking at it; maybe he doesn’t mean to but he does.
Although she and Tony are technically co-workers they don’t see each other during the day much, or ever—she’s in the Brooklyn office, he’s the one putting the company’s buildings up—but they start meeting after work, and Riff joins when he’s free from his own job, wherever that happens to be. They meet in Brooklyn or outside Tony's apartment and then find a diner or a smoky bar. Sometimes they go dancing, and Grazi alternates between taking Tony or Riff to the floor. They're both just as good as they were at seventeen, and neither of them abandon her for anyone else halfway through the night. Sometimes she dreads the day one of them finds a girl—then she’ll have to choose. For now she’s living between them, half in love with both of them, a strange and lovely dance across the New York City nights.
— —
Tony moves in with Riff after she’s been at her job for a month and a half; Riff’s roommate has moved out and Tony’s lease is up, the timing couldn’t have been better, is what Tony says the day Grazi helps him carry boxes into a buddy’s truck. “It’ll be like when we were twelve,” Tony jokes, as he walks into Riff’s place with the first box and puts it down next to a chaotic pile of paints and brushes. “Dirty socks every which way.”
“Not exactly like when we were twelve,” Riff mutters. He meets Tony’s eye, then coughs and says: “We’ll be doin’ our own dishes, for one. You better pull your fuckin’ weight, buddy.”
“I do my dishes,” Tony says, offended. “Don’t go accusin’ me of shit before I’ve even lived here an hour.”
“Okay, okay,” Riff says, grinning. “Trial period of two weeks—then I’ll make a judgment. You better be on your best goddamn behavior—your name ain’t on the lease, I know my rights.”
“And I know you can’t afford this place on your own.”
“There’s plenty of people lined up to take the room, asshole, I’m a fuckin’ catch.”
“Boy,” Tony says, dryly. “How’d I get so lucky?”
Grazi watches them squabble and feels a slide of warmth down her ribcage. She loves these boys—her boys—like pieces of her childhood packaged up and transplanted.
“You gonna help with these boxes or what?” she says, to Riff. “I just painted my nails.”
Riff narrows his eyes at her. “You say that every other day, you know.”
“Well—it’s true some of the time. It’s true today. And Tony’s got enough stuff to fill the Met, it’ll take all day if you don’t get off your skinny ass.”
Riff hauls himself up and whaps Tony’s head on the way past: “You come into my place, fill it with your junk—”
Tony chases him down the stairs; by the time Grazi’s outside, Riff is wheezing laughter from a headlock.
The apartment has two bedrooms but Grazi's not stupid: after they’ve lived there a month she realizes she's only ever seen one of the doors open, no matter who's coming out of it. By then she’s realized that it’s not just starving artists who move into Greenwich Village for the cheap rent and light police presence; the day it all clicks into place Grazi has to disappear into the bathroom and take ten minutes to compose herself. Riff and Tony. Riff and Tony. So this is what they're hiding. So this is why they’re hiding: down here with the artists and the junkies and the queers.
At first it gives her a sick, betrayed jolt of discomfort—like stepping off a curb she hadn’t seen coming. Then a lot of things make sense all at once: like how she and Tony had always been just a bit out of step. Like how she and Riff had always been out of step. Even when she had loved Tony so hard she ached with it, even though she and Riff sometimes still felt like two sides of the same coin, complementary halves, it had never felt like she and they had wanted the same things from each other. And meanwhile, Tony and Riff had always orbited each other, two moons in improbable orbit, a physical inevitability. They’re in step, she realizes, and have been forever, even when they were fighting, even when they weren’t talking. Christ, she’s been stupid. One day Tony drifts a hand across Riff's back as he walks by and Riff smiles a small, tender smile into his mug—Grazi's heart breaks, breaks, and breaks again. Her beautiful boys: she’s in love with both of them, and they’re in love with each other. Go figure.
She never says anything to them but when the shock and the aching sadness have eased a bit she finds it’s okay—nothing’s changed. They’re the same to her, and to be honest, yeah, she’s still a little in love with both of them, and probably always will be, but that’s okay, too. What is a heart for, except to break.
She only wishes they didn’t have to lie. She can’t figure out how to tell them they don’t, or not to her, anyway. Sometimes when they’re all drunk at a bar on Waverly she wants to lean forward and tell them: ‘It’s okay, you know. I won’t tell a soul. You can be in love while I’m around.’ She doesn’t, though. She waits for them to tell her.
— —
"Anybodys," Riff says one night, and his hand shoots out, wraps around someone’s wrist. They’re all three drinks in at a bar that’s too dark and too loud but Riff’s hand moves like a piston: no hesitation, sure and quick, his eyes sharp and narrowed.
Grazi looks up and the guy Riff has caught by the wrist has jerked around; he registers Riff’s face and then Tony’s and then Grazi’s. He looks like he's seen a ghost or maybe his own death; he goes white as a sheet and rigor mortis-stiff.
"Anybodys," Tony breathes, when he’s seen who it is, and his mouth falls open. He’s up and out of his chair in half a second and pulls Anybodys close, wrapping his arms around him like he’s pulled the kid out of the grave himself. Anybodys is stiff and then he’s not: he relaxes into the embrace and Grazi sees his face over Tony’s shoulder and sees the shock in it, and then the relief, and then the fear. His eyes are on Riff, and Riff is watching him. When Riff gets up, too—pulls them both into his arms so that they make a strange little nucleus of peace in the heaving bar—Anybodys’ face collapses in on itself. Tony may consider Grazi a Jet but she knows this particular moment isn't for her; she slips out a cigarette and gets off her chair. They don’t even notice she’s leaving.
When she comes back they’ve pulled up another chair for Anybodys, who nudges Grazi’s shoulder as she sits down: “I dunno if you remember me—” he starts, but Grazi cuts him off. “‘Course I do, moron. How could I forget the kid that stole my pudding twice a week?” He smiles and ducks his head; she nudges him back and says: “It’s good to see you again.”
Anybodys is almost how Grazi remembers him: soft-featured, pointy-chinned, curly hair swept up off his forehead. But Grazi remembers him in the background, out of focus, disappearing around corners and into shadows—this Anybodys holds his back straight and his shoulders up, looks her in the eyes and laughs with a quiet, low, cackling laugh. He looks at Tony like Tony has brought him six years’ worth of Christmas presents all in one colossal Santa’s sack. He looks at Riff like he’s trying to figure him out, or categorize him, or maybe recategorize him. He looks at Grazi like she’s a warm plate handed to him on a cold day; like he’s looking forward to getting around to her.
“What are you calling yourself these days?” asks Tony, as if either of them have given up their nicknames—not that Tony’s nickname counts as one, but Riff is still Riff, that name like a pin through a wing—given to him by Tony, in fact, so long ago Grazi doesn’t remember his real name and wouldn’t be able to use it if she did.
Anybodys smiles. “Anybodys,” he says, and laughs. Tony grins: “No shit. Old habits die hard, huh?”
“Guess so. Guess I got so used to it I didn't want any different. I got a pen name too, though.”
“A pen name! You writing?”
“I’m reporting,” Anybodys says. “For the Times.”
“No shit,” Tony says again, and shoots a look at Riff—Grazi knows they’re both thinking the same thing: all those times they’d spat vitriol in the direction of the skinny zipper of the New York Times building, complaining about reporters who were corrupt or ignorant or just plain stupid.
Anybodys catches the look, too. “You can say it,” he says. “I don’t like ‘em either. I got the job to cover the shit they ignore or mangle so bad it's like it's happenin’ in a different goddamn country.”
Riff’s face splits in two, his smile is so wide. “Boy,” he says, and reaches over to ruffle Anybodys’ hair, rough and fond. “Makin’ the Jets proud.”
There’s a funny second in which the look on Anybodys’ face drifts somewhere between anger and pride—his expression a fulcrum balanced precariously, disaster on one side, triumph on the other. It tips into triumph but Riff has caught the hesitation, they all have, like they’ve all stepped over the same missing step on a rotten staircase. There’s so much unsaid at this table—the wood itself sinks treacherously under the weight of the past, of all the things they won’t talk about tonight, or maybe ever. All the little ways they were cruel to each other. All the little ways they were poisoned by their parents and the city and the world until they were tearing each other's throats out by the jugular, sometimes without understanding why, or that they were even doing it.
And what they did to each other isn't even the beginning. They did a lot worse to other kids.
“What do you cover?” Grazi blurts out, because she has to get them past the skipping awkwardness of the moment.
Anybodys looks at her, smiling. “Youth gangs.”
“No—really?”
“Well—not only,” Anybodys allows. “They’re dyin’ out anyway. I’ve been doin’ youth culture though. Local activism. Civil rights, and the feminist rallies. The gay liberation marches, and—and that kinda thing.” His eyes flick, once, to Riff and Tony, to the sliver of space between them. “Direct action, basically,” he continues, to Grazi. “And how kids are involved. There’s a gang of ‘em floating around the Village—mostly they’ve been kicked out of their houses, ended up here. I’ve been following ‘em around, interviewing ‘em when they’ll let me.”
“That’s great,” Grazi says. “I never knew you were interested in writing.”
“I wasn’t,” Anybodys shrugs. “But I figure: if you know something, and it’ll help somebody, you should figure out who to tell.”
Grazi smiles. “I like that.”
“Where’re you living?” Tony asks him. “Around here?”
“Yup. Just down the street.”
“We’re neighbors, then. Or close to.”
“Just like old times.”
“Just like old times,” Tony agrees. They’re all grinning again, grinning like idiots, grinning like the world’s an oyster bar and the champagne has just arrived, like a door that’s been closed for years has just opened itself up wide and welcoming.
— —
Since Anybodys lives so close—and Grazi spends ninety-five percent of her off-duty hours in the village—they all spend a lot of time together, starting immediately. At first Grazi is annoyed to have to absorb an outsider, but only for a few days—after that the dynamic resolves, and Grazi realizes what made Anybodys a Jet in the first place, like why the others tolerated him from the start and eventually absorbed him into their ecosystem, possibly without even being aware that they were doing something that had been, frankly, pretty fucking radical for the buttoned-up, conservative decade in which The Price of Salt caused the old guard all over the great tight-assed nation to wring their liver-spotted hands in consternation.
Because Anybodys is funny—dryly, observantly funny, the kind of funny that makes you realize how much of your face and body and soul are out for display when you don’t mean for them to be, or forget that they are. The kind of funny that makes you think: how the fuck did he know that? He never jokes at her expense, or, indeed, at the expense of any of them—but sometimes he makes a remark that Grazi feels down to her bones, like Anybodys has held her up to the sun and found her light-catching flaws.
One day Grazi says something snide about a city official—one of many Moses men—and Anybodys says: “Well, you never did suffer fools.” Grazi laughs, and then she thinks, with a little bit of discomfort: I think that’s true. Another day Tony relays the news that an old neighbor of theirs has died, a horrible woman who had made a sport of ensuring that the Jets were always on the run from somebody, be it the cops or a hound or a more spritely neighbor. Apparently Mrs. Blithely has died at church, unexpectedly, some kind of attack mid-service, and they all sit around the table over their drinks for a few seconds, wondering what the etiquette is for mourning a woman you hated, but who nonetheless probably did a good thing or two and didn’t deserve to die. Then Anybodys says, solemnly: “I wonder if she accidentally happened to look at Mr. Blithely. That’d kill anybody.” The others, after a moment, burst into blasphemous giggles while Anybodys looks on innocently.
So, yes, Anybodys is funny, but he’s also good and kind—occasionally sharp-tongued, but it’s never aimed at them. He buys the first three rounds of drinks every other Friday, joking that it’s the New York Times paying them back for all the articles that did them so dirty as kids. (Riff always gets the three most expensive drinks he can buy; Grazi and Tony get cheap beer to compensate.) When Tony dislocates his shoulder at work, Anybodys helps carry his shit around and open bottles, if Riff isn’t around to do it. He likes to talk about the city—how it's changed, and changing—but he seems to intuit when Riff’s eyes go hard and blank and will skate on to a new topic without pause. (Things Riff won’t talk about: guns, or prison. Robert Moses, and the Moses Men cronies. San Juan Hill.) When Grazi bursts into tears on a Thursday night because her ma’s rent is going up and her purse has been stolen on the subway and it’s fucking freezing and she’s trying to quit smoking, Anybodys rubs her shoulder sympathetically, distracts her with stories from the newsroom until her voice has stopped wobbling, and then takes her home in a cab.
Grazi quickly learns that Anybodys is also a good listener, like, freakishly so: one day he brings her three Bartlett pears because she’d said they were her favorite and the green grocer outside his walk-up had happened to have them. Grazi flushes all the way up to the roots of her hair because the feeling of being observed like this is so strange—she’s used to having her ass admired and occasionally somebody hands her a box of bad chocolates or a wilting bouquet but nobody’s brought her a bag of fresh pears before; she doesn’t think anyone else even knows she likes pears.
Two days later she sees a bag of ginger snaps and picks them up because Anybodys had said weeks ago that they reminded him of his little sister: they had been her favorite before she’d died at ten, of scarlet fever. Anybodys gets a look on his face like “oh,” and “you win this round,” and maybe “but this game’s not over yet, girlie-girl.” And it does become a game: Riff and Tony look on with amusement as Grazi and Anybodys bring each other presents—small, simple things—pulled from more and more obscure references and memories and half-remembered preferences. One day he brings her a small can of coffee she likes so much she makes him show her the store he bought it from. The next week she drags him to her favorite cafe; while they’re there he mentions he’s never had a bagel (how can that be possible, she asks with no small amount of horror) and so two days after the cafe she also drags him to her favorite bagel shop on the Upper West Side. Afterwards they walk past old streets and marvel at the changes made to the area; Riff isn’t there to be annoyed so they also spend a lot of time complaining about the city’s mismanagement of planning funds.
From then on they spend a lot of time dragging each other around to their favorite places in the city, sometimes with Tony and Riff, sometimes without. One day they walk ten miles up the island, just because. They might have walked more, if Grazi had been wearing shoes that allowed it.
“Who was that?” her ma asks her curiously when she comes in; she was spying from the window.
“Uh,” Grazi says. “Just a friend.”
“He's a looker.”
“Yeah,” Grazi says, and finds she's smiling a little goofily. “He is.” That night she wonders—not for the first time—what it would be like to kiss Anybodys. She wonders a bit further, too. When she turns onto her stomach and slides a hand between her legs, she's picturing the curve of Anybodys’ mouth and his fingers wiping foam off the rim of a beer glass. The twisted roots of jealousy don't feel so much like jealousy anymore.
— —
“He likes you,” Tony remarks one day, when he and Grazi are walking through the park together, waiting for Riff to get off work.
“Nah,” Grazi says, but she blushes to the roots of her hair again; she’s been doing that a lot lately. “He’s just sharing his places, same as we all do.”
“And buying you presents.”
“He’s showing off how much he pays attention to us.”
“Anybodys knows everything about me, down to which shoe I put on first in the morning,” Tony says, patiently. “And he ain’t ever gone out of his way to pick up shoelaces ‘cause I mentioned I broke one last week.”
“He’s kind.”
“Yeah,” Tony allows. “He is. But he also likes you.”
Grazi doesn’t say anything for a moment: her head is so full of questions she doesn’t know which to ask first. They’re walking on the wet sodden grass next to the colonnade; she stops walking and takes her hand out from under Tony’s arm, digs in her purse for a cigarette and then remembers she’s quit and takes out her compact instead. She absently snaps the metal tin open and shut a few times: click-click. Click-click. “What does he—” she starts, then immediately abandons that question and starts a different one: “How would we—uh—I mean, how does he—” She stops, takes a deep breath. “Oh, Christ. I don’t know how to do this.”
Tony’s quiet for a long, long moment. Then, without looking at her, he says: “I figured it out.”
Grazi bites her tongue, but Tony doesn’t say anything else and he doesn’t look at her. Finally she says: “It’s different.”
“Yeah,” Tony says, and shrugs. “But, you know. Also not. You just gotta talk to him.”
“What if he doesn’t like me.”
“He does.”
But Grazi isn’t sure. Anybodys is hard to read; he doesn’t talk about himself much, although he manages to do so without ever sounding evasive or secretive. He’s more like Riff that way: Tony and Grazi can talk about their days and the past and their fears and triumphs easily, they like to share and they’re easy to read. Riff and Anybodys take some cracking open. Anybodys in particular keeps himself buttoned up, keeps his emotions close to his chest and, for the most part, off his face. He doesn’t share much about his life or work unless faced with a direct question; Grazi knows things here and there but not as well as he seems to know all of them.
Which is why it’s a surprise when Anybodys invites her along to talk to a source, one cold Saturday in February. They’d met for lunch at a sandwich shop that Anybodys had recommended, and when he says, “I gotta meet somebody after this,” Grazi asks “Who?” without thinking about it.
“Uh,” Anybodys says. Grazi immediately flushes. “You don’t have to tell me,” she says, quickly. “If it’s like—a date, or whatever.”
“It’s not,” Anybodys says, and amusement catches like a spark in his eyes. “It’s work.”
“Oh.” Grazi is unreasonably, mortifyingly relieved that Anybodys is not going on a date.
Anybodys hesitates, running a french fry through his ketchup, then looks up and says: “Do you wanna come with me?”
“Can I?”
“Sure. He won’t mind—you just gotta promise not to leap to any judgments.”
Grazi pretends to gasp, putting her hand dramatically to her mouth. “Me?” she says, wide-eyed, and flutters her eyelashes. “Judgmental?” Anybodys only smiles.
They meet Anybodys’ source in a park; he’s a bird-boned kid with hair to his shoulders and a swaying walk like his hips have got better places to be. He isn’t wearing enough clothes for the weather—it’s still cold—but he’s wearing a feather boa as a scarf and the highest platform shoes Grazi has ever seen on a fifteen-year-old, let alone a boy. He’s wearing smudges of baby blue eyeshadow across both eyelids. He greets Anybodys warily and then turns to glare at Grazi, who immediately wishes she hadn’t come: the kid’s got an evil eye like you wouldn’t believe.
“She’s okay,” Anybodys says, and glances at Grazi. “She’s my friend. And she’s got a couple quarters in her purse. Just sayin’.”
The kid looks more interested and Grazi shoots a look at Anybodys. He shrugs. “I mean—neither of us would turn down a coffee, if you’re offering.”
Grazi groans and goes across the street to a bakery, comes back with two coffees. Anybodys and the kid are already chatting; Grazi suddenly realizes that she was sent away so that the kid could be eased more comfortably into whatever conversation they’re about to have. She hands over the coffees and sits down, all of them lined up on a bench under the bright, sharp, late-winter sun.
“Thanks,” says the kid. “I’m Sam.”
“Nice to meet you,” Grazi says. “I’m Graziella.”
“You’re very pretty.” Sam says this very seriously, like it’s of great importance.
“Thank you,” Grazi says. “I love your boa.”
After that Sam warms to her, and the three of them chat happily over their coffee. Sam doesn’t seem to feel the cold, and it might be because he’s got the energy of a small yappy dog: it bounces his knees and flails his arms out, and on several occasions he gets up to mime a part of whatever story he’s telling. He’s got the comic timing and casual goofiness of a vaudeville star; Grazi wants to drag him down to the theater district and plop him in front of a director, say: ‘Check this kid out—he’s got something.’
After a while Anybodys prompts, gently: “You said there’s been some trouble at the Workshop?”
Sam nods, and stands up very suddenly. “The neighbors don’t like it,” he says, and hops from foot to foot, on his high boots. “The Workshop. They tore some shit—stuff—” he glances at Grazi, then recommits; “—tore some shit up and broke down the door. It’s totally broke, now, Kady’s been trying to fix it all day.”
“What stuff got torn up?”
“Like, the art. Marianne was making a birdhouse and they smashed it.”
Anybodys has tensed up next to Grazi; she can feel him under her arm next to her.
“Marianne—remind me?”
“She’s my age, Black. The skinny one.”
“You’re all skinny, kid.”
Sam laughs; it rings bright and cheerful. He sits back down. “That’s true, mister. But Marianne’s real skinny. And she’s got dreads, like, down to here.” He gestures at his waist, and Anybodys nods.
“Okay, yeah—I remember. So her stuff got smashed?”
“Yup. And a bunch of other stuff, too. But that birdhouse was real nice. It had a blue door.”
“Any cops?”
“Nah.” Sam shakes his head. “I think somebody called ‘em, ‘cause I heard somebody yelling something into a phone. But they never come unless there’s a gunshot.”
“You wish they had?”
Sam hesitates. “I dunno. Wish they’d caught the shit-bags who did it, but, uhh—” He looks at Grazi again, then back at Anybodys, who nods for him to continue. “Dan had some junk on him,” Sam says.
“Smack?” Anybodys asks, and Sam nods. “And there was weed, too,” he admits. “Some acid. Kady doesn’t know,” he adds quickly. “She wasn’t there and she wouldn’t like it. Don’t tell her.”
Grazi feels her skin crawl. Sam is too young to be doing that stuff, isn’t he? Even if he’s not the one doing it, anyone his age would be too young to be sticking needles in their arms. Her heart is beating hard under her coat, and she’s starting to feel a little queasy.
“You’re on the record,” Anybodys is saying. “I told you that already.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “Well, don’t put that part to my name, okay? Or, I dunno, don’t let Kady read it?”
“Pretty sure Kady reads the paper, man.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Truth, justice, and the American way,” Anybodys deadpans, and Sam looks at him blankly. “What, kids don’t read comics anymore?”
Sam snorts. “Hell no.”
Anybodys shakes his head mournfully. “I’ll bring you one next week.”
They keep talking, and Grazi’s alternately fascinated and horrified by the conversation: Sam is cheerful and collected when he talks about his friends and their various activities around the village; he plays it off like he’s living the high life—no parents, no school, no rules. But when he mentions where he’s sleeping—the street—and the kids with him—too many, too young—Grazi blanches at the idea of them all out in the cold. At some point it becomes clear that Sam must have been kicked out of his house to end up here, in Greenwich Village, without a roof over his head. He mentions drugs a few times, and the next time he hops up to mime out a story Grazi suddenly wonders if the frenetic jittery energy is coming from something more hard-hitting than caffeine, in fact he clearly hasn’t even touched the coffee except to use it as a hand-warmer. Grazi wishes she’d bought him some food, instead. Sam talks about the cops, too: the casual cruelty; the threats; the rapes. Grazi is suddenly glad she hasn't eaten anything. She thinks she might vomit anyway; the only thing that saves her is the press of Anybodys’ thigh against her own, a comforting warmth.
By the time Sam is looking impatient to leave, Anybodys’ questions have slowed down, too. They hug him goodbye—Grazi sneaks her last two bucks into his pocket—and let him strut away down the street. Grazi’s shivering: from the cold and from something else, too.
“What can we do?” she asks, abruptly. Anybodys looks up; he’s scrawling some notes on a thin notebook Grazi hadn’t realized he was carrying around. “For Sam. For any of them.”
Anybodys doesn’t say anything for a minute. He looks at her, then flips the notebook around and puts it back in his pocket. He gets up, then holds out his hand; she lets him pull her to standing.
“We tell people about it, I guess,” he says finally. “That’s what I do. I listen to people, get their stories out of ‘em. Get ‘em written down and published, and hope people are paying attention.”
“Does it feel like enough?”
“No,” Anybodys says, immediately. “Never.” After a moment, he adds: “But it’s better than nothing.”
That night Grazi walks up Sixth towards Times Square, watches the lights get brighter and the clothing get flashier. Every time she blinks, she sees Sam’s bare legs and the bruises on the inside of his arm. She walks past a cop standing in his own wash of cold blue light and her fists clench, involuntarily. The buildings loom insistent and glittering and she has eyes on her the whole way—she’s wearing her new coat and high heels, her hair is at its best bounce and curl, and she looks like she belongs here, in this golden and neon metropolis. The city begins to whisper, and then it begins to shout; it’s beckoning her into every doorway and pulling her past ropes with promises of beautiful things and expensive people and some hypnotic combination of the two; it's summoning her with music filtering past light-refracting bottles and the occasional doorman smiling at her like they want to be calling after her: ‘You’re the girl we want. You’ve made it. The others, who knows. The others, well—they didn’t have what it takes.’
Oh, but the city lies. It’s lying to them all. Pick up a golden stone of pavement, find the rot underneath. They’re killing their own—they’re leaving their own behind. New York City, with its poison-filled heart and its broken promises. She knows it; she's always known it—and the worst part of it is: she’s part of it. She’s been the lie and the liar and the lied to, sometimes all at once; she’s suddenly so sick of it she can’t stand to look at anybody, not least her own wavering reflection in the city’s plate-glass windows.
By the time she’s at forty-second she’s seething inside; it’s disgust and fear and spiking pain, but mostly it’s fucking anger, like a plaque has been building up inside of her on the calcified struts of her body’s support, maybe for as long as she’s been alive—definitely as long as people have been moving her out of her homes and pricing her out of her neighborhoods—and the plaque of this angry frustration is only now sloughing off, floating into her blood stream and spiking an emotional immune response, making her feverish and shaky. There’s a nest of snakes coiling through her limbs and up the rungs of her spine and into each shivering tip of her finger, and they’re all hissing: And so? Do something do something do something. She wants so badly to tell the truth.
The next day she asks Anybodys if she can help him conduct interviews. He nods, smiles, and hands her a notebook.
— —
Anybodys kisses her for the first time in Prospect Park, under a dripping willow and a birdsong-blue sky, on a warm spring day, a day on which Grazi has broken out her first spring dress from its winter hibernation. They'd spent the afternoon following a kid around Brooklyn as he showed them local haunts for haunted runaways. It should have been grim but was not; the splashing sun had cheered everyone up and brought out smiles and goodwill from all corners. They'd danced the jitterbug with a group of kids in Park Slope and watched another group throw up a mural (unsolicited, beautiful) onto the side of Borough Hall. There was a community here, Grazi realized—same as in the village—a group of strays who had found each other and were making the city that didn't want them take them in anyway.
They'd ended the afternoon in the park and Anybodys had waited until she was gazing up at the weeping tree before leaning forward to kiss her—lightly, sweetly—on the mouth. They’ve been drifting towards it for weeks but Grazi still manages to be surprised: their first kiss is an awkward clumsy meeting of mouth and teeth, and Grazi laughs with shocked, embarrassed delight until Anybodys tries to turn away and she takes his face in her hands to make him do it again.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, and smiles at him. “I don’t mean to laugh. I’m happy.”
Their second kiss is better. She grins against his mouth and thinks: Finally.
They'd already planned on meeting Tony and Riff for drinks, which is unfortunate because Grazi can feel Anybodys at her elbow like he's got a hand on her, although they aren't touching, he's close but he's maintaining half an inch of hot, static-y space, like she'd burn him if they touched. It must be pretty obvious what's just happened because Riff and Tony clearly figure out what's what in five minutes flat; twenty minutes after they've all sat down Tony drains his drink, puts his glass back on the table firmly, and says: "I'm real tired." Riff glances at him sideways, smirks, and drains his own drink. "Me too," he says, and then yawns ostentatiously. "You kids gonna be alright on your own?" He hasn't lost his smirk, and Grazi kicks him under the table. He kicks her back, then gets up; they're out the door before Grazi or Anybodys have time to say anything else.
There are two seconds of loaded silence, then Anybodys shifts slightly and his arm presses up against Grazi's. She grins into her beer and leans back. They finish their drinks and don't order anything else; finally Anybodys says: "I got that coffee you like, if you wanna come back to my place." All Grazi can do is nod.
Fifteen minutes later Anybodys is handing her a cup of coffee and instead of taking it, Grazi leans forward and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth; without a word Anybodys puts the cup down and kisses her back. Grazi lets her arms fall around his shoulders and soon she’s lost in it: the slide of Anybodys mouth against her own, the pressure of his fingers into her waist and her hips and the small of her back. There’s a melting heat at each touch of his fingertips, and it runs down her skin and through her blood to pool between her legs. She shivers when he kisses her neck; shivers again when he runs his hand up the back of her head, through her hair.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she whispers into his curls, and gasps at the push of his thigh between her legs. “I’ve never—I’m not—”
“You don’t have to,” he murmurs into her neck, into her flushing heated skin, up her thrumming arteries. He pulls back to look her in the eye: “Do you want to?”
“Yes,” Grazi says, and pulls in a breath. “Yes, yes. I do. Are you crazy? Of course I do.”
Anybodys’ smile dawns clear and sweet. “Me too,” he says. “I want to.” He cups her face in his hands and leans in, drops their foreheads together. “I’ve wanted to.” He kisses her, deeply, like he’s pouring himself in, like Grazi’s a vessel he’s trying to fill, like he’s pulling himself through the space between their mouths. Grazi opens herself up and lets him try. He’s walking them backwards, slowly, a hand on her back and another on her ass—sure and deliberate but undemanding, like he’s holding her up. They topple onto his bed and she pushes into his thigh, feels the pressure like it's easing something deep under her diaphragm, or maybe just above the pulsing center of her soul.
On the bed he unbuttons her springtime dress, slowly, button by careful button; she shakes under his fingers brushing the skin underneath each one, like a promise to return. When he unclasps her bra she gasps at the brush of his hand against her nipple. He looks up at her and his eyes are wide and wondering, like he can’t believe he’s here, above her, a hand laid below her breastbone. Then he dips down and takes her nipple in his mouth.
“Jesus,” Grazi says, but it’s more like a gasp, really, not even that—an exhalation of surprise and wonder and awe that just happens to have the name of the prophet in it, clamped into it to give the gasp shape. “Fuck,” she says, and that comes out like a swear ought to: rough and broken, the ‘k’ like a kick on her soft palate. Anybodys flicks his tongue against her nipple and Grazi almost doesn’t notice his hand slide into her underwear; she’s having a hard time remembering her own name, let alone keeping track of all the different parts of her and how they relate to each other.
But then Anybodys’ fingers slide over the swell of her clit and she yelps, like, actually yelps, it’s not even a sweet, sexy yelp, Grazi’s a master of sweet and sexy yelps but this isn’t one, it’s like her chest has squeezed it up through her throat without asking permission first and Anybodys yanks his hand back like he’s been electrocuted.
“Sorry,” Grazi gasps, and reaches down to grab Anybodys’ hand. “God—sorry—no, keep going—God, keep going—”
Anybodys drops his head between her breasts and Grazi can feel him smile against her skin. Then instead of sliding his hand down into her underwear again, he pushes himself down until he’s crouched below her and slides the cotton down her hips. When she kicks them off her feet, he gently pushes her knees up and kneels between her legs.
‘Oh, fuck,” she says, when Anybodys presses his mouth to her. “Jesus—fucking—Christ—”
It’s like no sex she’s ever had. God knows she’d been lucky with partners: she and Tony had never slept together and the farthest she’d been with Riff had been a blowjob she wasn’t sure, in retrospect, that he’d actually wanted—she and Dalton had had reasonably good, reasonably satisfying sex for almost the entire six months she’d allowed him into her bed. But he’d never done this, and this was something else—this was like magic or a wish fulfilled, like finding out that she’d been seeing in black and white for her whole life and now somebody had shown her the color red. Anybodys’ hands on her ass and hips; his breath hot on the inside of her thighs; his tongue flicking against her and over the swelling of her clit: it’s all of it together overwhelming and exactly, exactly, what she needs.
Grazi’s babbling nonsense into her own arm as her hand clenches hard in Anybodys’ hair because she can’t seem to make herself stop talking; she thinks she hears herself sobbing, reevaluates it as laughing, and then she stops listening entirely because Anybodys is hitting something with his tongue that arches her back hard against the mattress and drags a moan like a prayer out from between her teeth. The room swells in and out with her breathing. There’s color leeching in from the corners of each eyeball, unrelated to the decor of the room, deep purples and green that feel more like an abstract dreamscape than actual vision. Anybodys hums against her and something at the base of her pelvis flutters—snaps. She comes so hard under his mouth she stops being able to see anything, even with her eyes open: waves of oscillating colors flood out from the center of her vision like psychedelic tide-pools and when she slaps a hand to Anybodys’ forehead, pushing him back as her body convulses into hypersensitivity, she’s not seeing her hand on his head as much as she’s feeling him under her, warmth and life. Real and honest and truthful as an aching, open heart.
— —
Later, she’ll carefully strip Anybodys’ shirt off, then his jeans. He has a tight stretch of fabric wrapped around his chest, under which it swells, faintly, as he breathes. She’ll run her fingers down the fabric gently, then dip two fingers under the waistband of his boxers, look for his reaction. He’ll be watching; he’ll kiss her gently on her mouth, on her jaw, into the crook of her neck. He’ll push his boxers off and position her hand; she’ll crook a finger and watch his throat bob and his mouth fall open. He’ll guide her through the rest: tell her what he wants, what he likes, what he doesn’t. He whispers all of it into the hollowed space between them, where their hearts beat hard against each other. She’ll watch him come undone under the press of her own fingers.
For now she pulls him up from between her legs and murmurs into his hair: Thank you thank you thank you. She kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, kisses the taste of herself out of his mouth until she can taste him again, kisses him until they’re laughing and shaking and giddy.
Maybe tonight the city’s telling truths—one or two, anyway. Maybe it was telling the truth the whole time, when it whispered of better things across the street, on the horizon, just around the corner of the week. Maybe, Grazi thinks, Anybodys was the truth the whole time.