The Feeder and the Fish

I

The pizza place in Bushwick had vinyl booths cracked down the middle like dried riverbeds and a menu that listed only eight items in a font that looked like it had been chosen by someone who'd never actually eaten any of the food. Iris Chen sat in a corner booth with a slice of cheese that cost eight dollars and watched Leo Martinez eat it with the enthusiasm of a man who genuinely enjoyed things that could reasonably be described as garbage.

"You look terrible," he said, which was Leo's way of saying hello.

"You look exactly the same," she replied, which was Iris's way of saying she'd been thinking about him for longer than she wanted to admit.

They had known each other for eleven years. Eleven years of growing up next door, eleven years of him being there when her window broke during the October storm, eleven years of her stealing his hoodies in March and returning them in April stained with something she refused to identify. Then she'd gone to Berkshire for school, he'd dropped out of NYU sophomore year, and the sporadic texting began -- the kind of communication that consists of memes at 2 AM and the occasional "you alive?" message that demands a response but never gets the weight of a real check-in.

"I need a portfolio," Iris said, cutting her pizza into smaller pieces as though that might make the conversation easier. "Professional shots. My phone pictures aren't going to cut it."

"I shoot," Leo said. "You want to model? Or you want to shoot me? I'm flexible."

She stared at him. "You dropped out of journalism."

"Journalism dropped out of me. There's a difference." He leaned back against the cracked vinyl, which made a sound like a sigh. "I photograph things. People mostly. Sometimes nothing at all, just the way light hits a bodega at midnight. It pays poorly but it pays."

"Three meals," Iris said. "You said you'd buy me three meals."

"I bought you three meals," Leo corrected. "There's a tense difference."

II

Tara's Instagram story from that Thursday showed the three of them at a table in their South Street apartment, Iris laughing at something Leo had said, Leo holding Iris's camera like it might bite him. The caption read: "Some people think just because you share a kitchen you're a couple. The audacity of assumed relationships."

Leo saw it. Iris watched him see it, because Leo saw everything that had her name anywhere near it, like a fish that can sense the shape of the net before the water changes.

He didn't comment privately. He commented publicly: "Let people talk. I've got nothing to hide."

The reply came three minutes later from a guy named Marcus who Leo had known since they both worked at a coffee shop in Brooklyn Heights: "Bold words for a man who brings his girl dinner every Tuesday."

Leo deleted the comment. Iris saw the deletion happen. She didn't know what to do with that information, so she put it in the same mental drawer where she kept the things she couldn't name: the time he'd walked her home from the subway at 1 AM because she'd missed her stop; the time he'd shown up at her dorm with an umbrella and a bag of her favourite gummy bears and no explanation; the way he always remembered how she took her coffee and never asked her to remind him.

At a Friendsgiving dinner in November -- held in a basement apartment that smelled of sage and someone else's cooking, because neither of them could afford a proper kitchen -- a guy named Dave made a joke about Iris's "small-town Connecticut background" and the particular accent she tried to shed every time she opened her mouth.

Leo didn't say anything for a long time. Then: "She grew up in Ridgefield. You grew up in a studio apartment above a laundromat where the dryer smells like burnt lint. Let's not pretend geography is a character trait."

Iris watched Dave recoil. She watched Leo eat his mashed potatoes as though he'd said nothing unusual. She felt something shift in her chest, and this time she couldn't identify it as hunger.

III

The blocking happened on a Wednesday. Iris was at a bar on Broome Street -- not her usual bar, not her usual neighbourhood, just a place she'd walked into because the rain had started and the sidewalk was full of people who knew how to move through water without looking down -- when she saw him.

Leo, at a corner table, laughing with a woman she didn't recognize. She had the kind of face that belongs to photography: sharp angles, intelligent eyes, the kind of mouth that suggests she's always two seconds away from saying something that will get her fired or promoted. They were leaning toward each other across a table covered in reference materials and half-empty glasses of something amber.

It was professional. Iris could tell from the way the woman held her camera like she knew how to use it. It was professional and nothing more and exactly the kind of thing that makes professional and nothing more impossible to prove.

Iris blocked him on everything. Instagram. Twitter. Text. She did it methodically, like she was removing evidence from a crime scene, except the crime was hers and the victim was herself and the evidence was a man who had always shown up.

Three days passed. Three days of her phone not buzzing with his stupid observations about cloud formations. Three days of the shared apartment on South Street feeling smaller than it was and larger than it should be. Three days of eating takeout alone and pretending that this was what she wanted -- independence, autonomy, the freedom to not have someone who knew her order.

On the fourth evening, at 11 PM, there was a sound at her door. Not a knock -- a tap, tentative, the kind of knock that someone makes when they're not sure they have the right apartment and are preparing to leave quietly.

Iris opened the door. Leo stood in the hallway holding a paper bag with two smoothies and a bag of gummy bears. Her favourite. The strawberry ones, not the mixed fruit. He always remembered.

"You blocked me," he said. It wasn't an accusation. It was an observation, delivered in the same tone he'd use to note that the elevator was out of order or that the bodega on the corner was out of the good instant noodles.

"That's new," Iris said, because she could still do witty when she needed to.

"I'm always busy," he said. "I made time for this."

She looked at the smoothies. She looked at the gummy bears. She looked at his face, and what she saw was not the Leo who joked and teased and deflected with the kind of humor that made people like him before they knew him. What she saw was the Leo who had walked her home in the rain when she was fifteen and her bus pass had expired. The Leo who had sat on her fire escape at 2 AM when her father had called from a hospital three states away and she'd needed someone to sit with in the dark. The Leo who, despite having every reason to be annoyed, had stood in her hallway holding smoothies like some kind of ridiculous, dependable, unbearable peace offering.

"I saw you at the bar," she said.

"Yeah."

"With the woman."

"Yeah. Her name is Naomi. She works at the magazine. We were discussing my submission."

Iris closed her eyes. She closed them so fast that the hallway lights disappeared, and in the darkness she could see everything clearly: the way he always bought her coffee even when he said he'd forgotten his wallet; the way he kept every page she'd ever written in a cigar box under his bed; the way he had defended her at every turn and never asked her to acknowledge that he had.

"This is ridiculous," she said.

"Yeah," he agreed. "It is."

They stood in the doorway for a long time. The hallway smelled of someone's dinner -- garlic and onions, the kind of cooking that makes you hungry for something you can't identify. Finally, Iris stepped back and let him in.

IV

The gallery in Williamsburg was small. Not small in the way that artists describe small with a mixture of pride and resignation -- small in the way that means you can see all five photographs from a single standing position without moving your feet. The walls were painted a colour that the artist who'd decorated the space called "warm white" and anyone else would have called "the colour of disappointment."

Iris's five shots were hung in a row. Four of them were of Brooklyn: the bodega at 3 AM with its fluorescent glow casting long shadows across the sidewalk; the fire escape where Leo had sat beside her, both of them saying nothing because some silences are conversations; the cracked vinyl booth at the pizza place in Bushwick, empty now, the midday light slicing through the window like a judgment.

The fifth photograph was Leo's profile in silhouette, looking out over the East River at dusk. His face was tired but he was smiling, and the way the light hit him -- from behind, from above, from somewhere that suggested grace rather than geometry -- made him look like someone who had been through something and come out the other side not because he'd won but because he hadn't stopped walking.

The caption beneath read: "For the Feeder. Who fed me more than food."

Iris stood by the gallery door at closing time, listening to the last visitors file out with their expensive shoes and their expensive opinions about what art should mean. The door clicked shut behind the final person. The gallery went dark except for the small reading lamp by the entrance, its light pooling on the floor like something you could step into and stay.

"How was it?" Leo asked. He was standing in the doorway, as he always was, present at the edges of everything important.

"Good," she said. "You look like you want to say something."

"I want to say a lot of things," he said. "But that's not really my talent."

She smiled. It was a small smile, the kind that starts in the chest and takes a while to reach the face. "Come on," she said. "Let's walk home."

They walked through Brooklyn streets at midnight, the kind of walking that doesn't require conversation because the walking itself is the conversation. They were not holding hands. They weren't ready for that. But they were close enough that their shoulders brushed with every step, and that brushing, repeated over and over like a metronome, was its own kind of language.

The bodega glow followed them down the block. Somewhere a siren wailed and then faded. A train passed overhead on the elevated tracks, shaking the pavement slightly beneath their feet. Life, continuing in its unglamorous, honest, unromantic way.

"See you tomorrow?" Leo asked at her building.

"I know where you live," Iris said.

"That's not the answer I asked for."

She looked at him -- really looked, the way you look at someone when you're done pretending you don't care what they'll say next. "Yes," she said. "See you tomorrow."

Author Note & Copyright: