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091906
I think the couple that lives up the street has moved away. Maybe they broke up. The tiny hand-knit sweaters, each hanging from a miniature hanger in the window, are gone. The old gilt letters arranged to spell "LOVE" on the listing marble-topped table are gone, too.
Their names were Amy and Josh. They had met at the Pratt Institute. Josh was older, an architecture student interested in sustainable materials. Amy was a painter with a minor in letterpress printing and type design. They went to the Alibi and smoked too many cigarettes while beating each other at Big Buck Hunter. Amy liked to watch Josh's hands as he held the fluorescent orange rifle, the blunt tips of his long fingers, the dull sheen of his nails, the determined lines on the surface of each knuckle. His hitchhiker thumb.
He shot all the geese and the pheasants too. Later, as they rode their creaky, fat-tired Schwinns the wrong way up DeKalb Avenue, he asked her to come home with him. She thought about his hands and said yes.
It was awkward in his studio apartment. The bed was lofted and Amy stood there in her baggy Carhartts and her soft cup bra and stared up at it. Bed had always seemed like a descent to her. Josh watched her there, studied her rounded belly and the slow trickle of sweat that started between her shoulder blades and then dropped down into the fine hairs and dimples of her sacrum. He pulled the covers and comforters and pillows down from the bed and laid them on the floor for her. She turned off the light.
Months passed. They traded beers at the Alibi in for oversized nine dollar bottles of Montepulciano. Josh began to think of the house they might build. He stayed up late into the night, sketching and drafting, wearing through the elbows of his sweaters. Amy bought a cookbook and started knitting scarves.
They moved into the abandoned storefront in the spring. The rent was cheaper if they did the work themselves. Friends from school helped them put up the drywall, which Josh hated but it was all they could afford. Amy picked the colors-adagio, mayonnaise, philipsburg blue. She found curtains on sale at Urban Outfitters and hung them from the metal grates in the storefront's empty windows with clothespins she bought at the dollar store.
Josh graduated. They had a couple dinner parties. They bought wine glasses at IKEA. Amy made love notes with leftover scraps of paper and the Vandercook Press and mailed them to Josh's office in SoHo. They still held hands on the way to the subway.
They are what I have made them. I've peeked through their thin curtains and imagined a world where the pots hang neatly from the ceiling and all the art on the walls is real and all the indie rock is arranged in alphabetical order. I've looked at the marble table and the gilded letters and the tiny sweaters and thought to myself, "They must know." I've compared myself to them.
And now they're gone. I never met them. I never even saw them.
Their building has been repainted, restored. The sweaters are gone, and the golden letters too. The curtains have been replaced with blue cotton sheets. I know something now, though, that I didn't know before. Announcing your love in a window isn't enough.
Maybe Josh was a cokehead. Maybe his name wasn't even Josh. Maybe it was Randy and his girlfriend was allergic to fish. Or maybe he and Amy were just as perfect as I imagined. These days, that still doesn't get you very far.
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