College by the time she met Penny.
It wasn’t until Penny’s first overdose on heroin thatI began to understand what was going on. Even though it had been over a month since we’d seen each other, I was still her emergency contact at the bar, so two days after she hadn’t showed up I got a call. I tracked down Chloe, who tried at first to cover it up. She floundered with a story that Penny was home with the flu, but only after I showed up at their apartment on the Lower East Side and pounded on the door did she finally tell me the truth. Penny was on the psych ward at Bellevue, where she had been transferred after detoxing in the emergency room. The hospital wouldn’t release her for at least a few more days. Chloe told me later that night that she wanted Penny to move out, that she was a disaster, and that the whole scene was too much for her to handle. Never mind that it was Chloe who’d introduced Penny to heroin, we packed Penny’s things and moved them into my studio in Murray Hill. Chloe gave me a letter to give to Penny, breaking things off, I assume, since I never read it. Whatever she wrote convinced Penny not to try to change Chloe’s mind.
Penny lived with me the rest of that year. There’d be two more overdoses, hundreds of dollars stolen from my wallet, and a suicide attempt before Penny finally agreed to go to a rehab I found outside Seattle. I flew with her there and stayed the first few days, but then returned to New York to my job. She stayed in that rehab for eight months and then moved for a year and a half into a nearby sober house with other women in recovery. By then I’dbeen out to Seattle to visit her a dozen times. Penny’s family, like mine with me, wanted nothing to do with her when she came out to them, which was the Christmas after our first year in New York. It’s not an original story except that we decided to tell our parents the same night. We timed it to dinner, which was six o’clock in both of our houses. In my case, my father left the table and my mother wept into her napkin. In her case, they asked her to leave the house and come back only when she had, her father said, cleaned up her act . She knocked on my door that night, slept in a sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, and we went back to New York together first thing in the morning. My mother eventually came around, but only after my father had died, and even then she asked that I not rub it in her face by telling her about girlfriends. Meeting them, and of course there only ever was one, was out of the question. So she died doing the best she could, but in the end we barely knew each other.
After that Christmas, Penny and I were, for each other, clearly the only people we could count on. Besides my job at the Lowell and the people I worked with there, Penny was my entire world. Every free weekend or vacation I had I was on a plane to Seattle to see her. On one of those trips I met Kelly. She was the manager at the Holiday Inn not far from Penny’s sober house, and one night after I’d flown all day from New York, she checked me in. She was agitated, I could tell, but professional. I found out later she was working the check-indesk because one of her employees had called in sick at the last minute, and as a result she had to miss her nephew’s basketball game. There she was, in her gray cords and green Holiday Inn blazer, wrinkling her nose like she always does when she’s pissy. I remember watching her for a long time, her head down, red hair jammed into a ponytail with loose strands floating from her head like spun gold, processing my credit card and mumbling under her breath all the while. Finally, she looked up, and for the first time I saw her eyes—green and gold and flashing like Christmas trees from her freckle-splattered face. I don’t know how someone like me, who had never before even had a girlfriend, could recognize love when it arrived, but I did. I’d dated a little in New York, but women scared me.
It wasn’t until Penny’s first overdose on heroin thatI began to understand what was going on. Even though it had been over a month since we’d seen each other, I was still her emergency contact at the bar, so two days after she hadn’t showed up I got a call. I tracked down Chloe, who tried at first to cover it up. She floundered with a story that Penny was home with the flu, but only after I showed up at their apartment on the Lower East Side and pounded on the door did she finally tell me the truth. Penny was on the psych ward at Bellevue, where she had been transferred after detoxing in the emergency room. The hospital wouldn’t release her for at least a few more days. Chloe told me later that night that she wanted Penny to move out, that she was a disaster, and that the whole scene was too much for her to handle. Never mind that it was Chloe who’d introduced Penny to heroin, we packed Penny’s things and moved them into my studio in Murray Hill. Chloe gave me a letter to give to Penny, breaking things off, I assume, since I never read it. Whatever she wrote convinced Penny not to try to change Chloe’s mind.
Penny lived with me the rest of that year. There’d be two more overdoses, hundreds of dollars stolen from my wallet, and a suicide attempt before Penny finally agreed to go to a rehab I found outside Seattle. I flew with her there and stayed the first few days, but then returned to New York to my job. She stayed in that rehab for eight months and then moved for a year and a half into a nearby sober house with other women in recovery. By then I’dbeen out to Seattle to visit her a dozen times. Penny’s family, like mine with me, wanted nothing to do with her when she came out to them, which was the Christmas after our first year in New York. It’s not an original story except that we decided to tell our parents the same night. We timed it to dinner, which was six o’clock in both of our houses. In my case, my father left the table and my mother wept into her napkin. In her case, they asked her to leave the house and come back only when she had, her father said, cleaned up her act . She knocked on my door that night, slept in a sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, and we went back to New York together first thing in the morning. My mother eventually came around, but only after my father had died, and even then she asked that I not rub it in her face by telling her about girlfriends. Meeting them, and of course there only ever was one, was out of the question. So she died doing the best she could, but in the end we barely knew each other.
After that Christmas, Penny and I were, for each other, clearly the only people we could count on. Besides my job at the Lowell and the people I worked with there, Penny was my entire world. Every free weekend or vacation I had I was on a plane to Seattle to see her. On one of those trips I met Kelly. She was the manager at the Holiday Inn not far from Penny’s sober house, and one night after I’d flown all day from New York, she checked me in. She was agitated, I could tell, but professional. I found out later she was working the check-indesk because one of her employees had called in sick at the last minute, and as a result she had to miss her nephew’s basketball game. There she was, in her gray cords and green Holiday Inn blazer, wrinkling her nose like she always does when she’s pissy. I remember watching her for a long time, her head down, red hair jammed into a ponytail with loose strands floating from her head like spun gold, processing my credit card and mumbling under her breath all the while. Finally, she looked up, and for the first time I saw her eyes—green and gold and flashing like Christmas trees from her freckle-splattered face. I don’t know how someone like me, who had never before even had a girlfriend, could recognize love when it arrived, but I did. I’d dated a little in New York, but women scared me.
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