Steven Swiryn
The NoHo Star
In the NoHo Star Café at Bleecker and Lafayette, Sam sat stirring his coffee, though he used neither sugar nor cream. Habit—he had given up sugar and cream last winter. The menu offered him a “lonesome egg.” One egg, cooked how you want it. Sam didn’t want a lonesome egg. He wanted Marta to come back.
In the Café the day they’d met, Marta had been cursing her cell phone, trying to get Bluetooth working, and Sam had explained to her about “pairing” devices. That evening, he found himself updating the operating system on her computer. When he told his friend, Jenny, the NoHo Star’s blonde cashier about meeting Marta, Jenny started referring to her as his “up-date.”
“Dating will be good for you,” Jenny had told him, “as long as Marta’s not just using you for technical support.” In his early teens, when other boys spoke furtively of girls, spied on them, bragged about what they had seen or touched, Sam was in his basement with his electronics, sniffing solder and the burnt insulation of copper wire, or lost in Magic or Final Fantasy with his friend, Pudge. His projects ranged from a simple power source to a sophisticated radio telescope. Late in high school, he became intensely interested in girls, but he had missed the telephone stammerings and backseat fumblings that taught other boys what to say or not; what to do or not. He thought he would design an algorithm; sub-routines included ID_Girl, Meet_Girl, and something he labeled Count_Bases (both a musical pun and small pride at having made the JV baseball team) but, though it made theoretical sense, his code proved hard to compile, let alone run on a non-virtual machine. Writing code for the First_Base and Second_Base functions was as far as he got. Then, submersed in college math and computer science, he put the entire project on indefinite hold.
I’m no virgin, Sam told himself. A fix-up by his college roommate’s girlfriend. An encounter in the University Bookstore with that pig-tailed, near-sighted salesgirl. Then, he stumbled into Marta, who seemed to be impressed with his tech-savvy charm, and he did his best to keep up.
Sam cooked for her. He took her to theater and to movies. They strolled the Brooklyn Bridge; Sam had devoured McCullough’s book, and he explained the nineteenth century engineering to her. The days and nights with Marta astonished him. Many times, he found himself staring at her, waiting to see what she would do next. She moved in with him.
It lasted four months. Marta told him she liked his steadfastness. Then she drifted away and here he was at the NoHo Star, steadfast and alone. He had barely begun the programming project due next week, finding the keyboard suddenly untrustworthy. He felt himself struggling, disordered. At the NoHo Star, Sam always sat facing out toward the street, “to appreciate the day’s parade.” When Jenny had heard him say that, before Sam met Marta, she told him maybe he should stop “appreciating” and do some parading himself.
On the small table he straightened the book he was reading—today it was Piers Brendon’s, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Across from him was her chair—empty again. Marta had always sat facing the big mirror on the back wall as if, Jenny once pointed out to him, she needed indirection, as if she wouldn’t look the world in the eye. Jenny said Marta hid part of herself from him. Sam called this Marta's “Declaration of Independence” and made a schedule of times they could each be independent.
He complained to Jenny. “Does she want me to pay attention to her or to leave her alone?”
“Both,” Jenny told him. “The trick is balance and timing.”
“I don’t really get it.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Three weeks ago, Marta refused his demands that she tell him where she’d been all night. This morning, looking at her chair, set at a small angle to the table as if she had just gone to choose a pastry, he wished he were looking at her face. Marta’s face was a full oval framed in short-clipped hair that was almost black. She had eyes of polished agate, and a mouth that told unnecessary lies. Fairy tales, whispered in the dark.
Eight tables at the NoHo Star. Eight rotating stools upholstered in green plastic at the counter along the wall. Like eight bits in memory, each coded one or zero, occupied or empty, present or absent. Two ladies leaned across a window two-top to share gossip and toast with jam. An old man in a rumpled gray suit was digging at a half grapefruit with one of those too sweet, too red cherries punctuating the center. The man was saving the cherry for last; a red full stop at the end of a sour story. Sam had often saved things for later. Now, at thirty-four, he felt he had better not wait. There was spoiled milk and brown lettuce in his refrigerator. Jenny told him he needed another mouth to feed.
The broad Café window looked out on Lafayette and the park with the fruit and vegetable stand diagonally across Bleecker. Beyond the window was the sidewalk, with its fast walkers, backpack luggers, shopping bag toters, tank-top flashers, basketball dribblers, joggers and stroller pushers. One homeless man lurched among them, confronting as many as he could for coins. Even he, Sam thought, had purpose, direction. When he was refused, the man went on to another possibility, taking refusal in his shambling stride. Marta’s refusal—well, how could he just move on, he’d asked Jenny, as if Marta were being stingy with loose change?
Sam had fired off letters to Marta, first angry, then cajoling, then angry again, attempting to shine a bright logic on their being together. The letters were, he admitted to Jenny, more rain than shine. Sitting alone in his apartment, folding his pleadings into an envelope and scratching on a new address Marta cruelly gave him, he’d felt awkward and scattered, even a little lightheaded, lost in the churn of their history together. Like an old map opened and folded for exotic journeys, opened and folded many times and then left in a bottom drawer, Sam was coming apart at the creases.
When the light changed, the street poured with yellow taxis, honking and dodging through the green. He had made a spreadsheet. It organized each of their schedules and coordinated the available times for them to be together. He came home to find their spreadsheet on the floor of the birdcage. Marta had angrily accused him of stealing her independence. “Grand larceny,” Jenny called it, and she roared when he told her what Marta had done with the spreadsheet, renaming it a ‘spread-shit,’ until she saw that he couldn’t laugh about it. Then she said, “Maybe Marta is stealing from you, too.” A police car raced west on Bleecker, red and blue lights flashing on the street, off the window, on the Café wall, and off Sam’s knife and water glass.
Beyond the street was the park, with its dog-walkers and bench sitters, where the summer city trees were loden and still. Green railings and cartoonish light poles of the Eastside Subway funneled passengers up and down the steps. Sam checked his watch again; seven twenty-seven. Marta’s train would be leaving soon.
And then she was there, on the far side of the park, making for the green railings and steep stairs. He saw her spin 360 degrees, perhaps at some sound behind her, all in one motion that barely interrupted her stride. Her watch sparked in the August sun—a present from someone. She wouldn’t tell him who. In sandals and sunglasses, she crossed against the light. Her walk had the glide of a dancer, her purse swinging against her hip as she disappeared down the stairs.
~
In the Café, Jenny watched Sam watch Marta and, at a lull in her credit cards and cash, she came to him and sat down at an adjacent table. Sam was still staring at the top of the subway stairs.
“You could run down there after her.”
Sam didn’t look up. “She’ll say I’m crowding her.”
“She’d say you were paying attention.”
“She’d say I’m desperate. She’ll laugh.”
“You’ll find another girl, a better girl.”
Jenny rotated the Piers Brendon so she could read the title. She found Sam attractive, even good looking, in a raggedy sort of way, with his curly brown hair, tender eyes and wrinkled frown. And Sam didn’t need her to hide how smart she was. The night she first met him, over a year ago, was the night Charlie Schmidt dumped her.
She had followed Charlie from Topeka when he came to NYU for film school. When he left her, she found herself sitting, sobbing, at closing time in the Café. Sam was the last customer, and she spilled her grief and anger all over him, much, she realized later, to his discomfort. When he attempted an awkward retreat, she grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go. “He turned his back on me,” she wailed at him, “he actually turned his back,” and she pulled Sam to an empty table. “Why do I always melt for the cold ones?” Sam had not been a good listener but, once resigned, he remained there all night with her, trying in his awkward way to staunch her tears with stale coffee cake and melting ice cream.
Jenny was thirty, having survived high school’s awkward blues, college financial struggles and the long slog of small jobs and small loves of her twenties. She spent her off-hours reading at the public library or browsing at the Strand. Weekends, she spent time with a small group of friends in conversation at restaurants and bars or, when she had the money, at the Public Theater.
Recently, she did not have the money. She would soon have nowhere to live, if she wanted to stay in New York. She had been sharing a Brooklyn apartment with two women, stretching to afford her third of the rent. When one of them gave up on her acting dream last winter and returned to Cincinnati, Jenny worked extra shifts at the Café.
Now the remaining roommate had announced that she was moving in with her fiancé at the end of August. Jenny could not afford the flat by herself. Craigslist had produced only smokers and slobs. She had a few weeks remaining before she would surrender to Kansas, back to a laconic family and, well shit, clerking at the Safeway, probably. A man at the counter wearing a KC Royals cap had taken off his shoe and was pulling at the tip of one brown sock—the arid brown of the Sunflower State.
Jenny had seen the signs before Sam had. Marta’s late arrivals and early departures. Looks of boredom. The decline and fall. But then, Sam was always in his book or in his head. So Jenny was not surprised to find the laughter from the back table thinning and, more recently, just Sam alone, expecting Marta to pass through the door.
“You seem sad again this morning,” she told him.
“I’m not sad. Why do you say that?”
“Sam, you’re wearing black jeans and a black shirt, for God’s sake. It’s August.”
He sipped his coffee. “What time is it?”
“I see you every day, waiting for her. She doesn’t come in anymore. I know she was sparkly. But she wasn’t right for you. Probably thought Scrabble was a style of omelet.”
“We played Scrabble once.”
“I’ll bet she was good at it.”
“Not really.”
“The vocabulary of a shovel.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Sam, she left you weeks ago.” Her eyes tried but failed to be kind. “L-E-F-T-Y-O-U. Now you can draw all new tiles.”
“This coffee is shit.” Sam looked down at his cup. “And it’s cold.”
“I’ll heat it up.” Jenny turned to the twin carafes scalding on their hot plates. She refilled his cup and brought it back to him. “Did you ever notice that ‘carafe’ has only one ‘f’ and ‘giraffe,’ two?” she said. “Maybe it’s because the giraffe has a longer neck.” She laughed. “‘F’ is four points, by the way.”
“In French, ‘girafe’ has only one ‘f’,” Sam told her.
“Maybe French giraffes have shorter necks? Probably the wine and cigarettes.” And again she laughed; even Sam laughed. “You look tired,” she told Sam. The toast-and-jam ladies got up and shuffled to the register to pay and she moved to meet them there.
~
Sam watched as Jenny made change. She has nice wrists, he thought. Jenny had hair the color of Van Gogh’s wheat fields, changing in different light. Today, she wore it up, held there with a flock of black barrettes. Her blue summer dress buttoned down the front from an open collar. She accepted a few bills from two students.
Sam stretched and got up to leave. When he moved to pay his bill, he found Jenny checking off names and addresses on a yellow legal pad.
“Customers who left without paying?” he interrupted her.
“These are losers of another kind,” she said. “Possible roommates I got off craigslist. They’re all snorers, whores or just bores.”
“Poet.”
“I made up the ‘whores’ part, but the rest is true enough.”
“Where are you living now?”
“As of September 1st, it will be back in Kansas unless I find a place I can afford.” Jenny made a big X through the last three names. Without looking up she said, “Maybe I’ll just move in with you, Sam.”
Sam found himself staring at the way one point of her collar tilted up toward her ear while the other lay flat. Like wayward ears on a shelter dog. “I actually have a pretty comfortable couch,” Sam blurted out, then added, “There wouldn’t be a lot of privacy.”
“What if it’s the best I can do right now? Are you really offering?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He put both hands in his pockets. “Well, I guess—I don’t know.” He glanced out the window over her shoulder, then back at Jenny.
Jenny looked at her legal pad. “I could chip in $800 a month for rent. I could keep the place clean for you. I’ll bet you have dirty dishes in the sink.”
“Dishes get done on Wednesdays and Sundays. I don’t know if it would work. Let me think about it. Those things don’t always—.” He took his change off the counter. He watched the steady pulse in the hollow of her neck as she put the bills into the register. “Do you like stroganoff?” he asked.
“Stroganoff? Is that one ‘f’ or two?”
“I cook pretty good beef stroganoff. With two ‘f’s.”
“I’m vegetarian.”
“Oh.” Sam twisted one shoe into the linoleum.
“I’m done at three today,” Jenny told him again. “Come back to the Café and we’ll talk.” Sam had code to write. He spent the remainder of the morning in the world of “if... then... else...” statements, bubble sorts, and breakpoint conditions. Three days of unopened mail, diet coke cans and pizza boxes cluttered the table near his computers. He stared at the Film Festival poster on the wall and pictured Marta, the dark-haired thriller and Jenny, the blonde romantic comedy.
At two forty-five, he went out to get sweet corn, lettuce, peppers, cucumber and a few radishes and found himself, grocery sack in hand, outside the NoHo Star. Through the window, Sam saw Jenny reach under the counter for her purse and take out a small mirror and lipstick. She did what women do to their hair when they are about to leave a place. Then she called out something to the short order cook and the waitresses and was out the door.
She crossed to Sam. “Groceries?” she asked.
“Corn. Salad stuff.”
“Vegetarian,” she said. “Enough for two?” Sam snapped his head toward the subway stairs, though he knew it was too early. “I meant for you and me.”
“For you and me?” He opened his sack of groceries and looked in, as if he had forgotten what he had just purchased. He pictured his empty apartment and looked up at Jenny’s yellow hair. “We could roast corn on the grill. We could mix up a salad. I have radishes.”
“Radishes are bitter,” she said.
“They add color.”
“Well, O.K., then,” she said, and took his free arm in hers. The easy warmth of her bare arm against his felt like old flannel.
~
As they walked and Sam summarized the Brendon book, Jenny thought about whether a relationship with him had any chance of working out. He was in no condition to start something. To start what? What sort of relationship? What other choices do I have? It was only a few blocks to the walk-up where Sam lived: an old one-bedroom with wood floors and cobwebs. Three computers lived on a table on the east side of the living room: a Mac and a PC, both for testing, and Sam’s personal laptop. Jenny listened as he showed them off to her, elaborating on how they compared. He had named each of them, like pets. He made it interesting and she lost herself in his animation. Two parakeets agitated a cage in the tiny kitchen.
“Oh, budgies,” Jenny cried when she saw them, and put her hand up to the thin bars, “what are their names?”
“Von Neumann and Turing,” Sam told her.
“Of course.” With Sam, Jenny felt no need to pretend she didn’t know who von Newmann and Turing were. “Did Marta like birds?”
“She seemed to at first. She lost interest.”
“You make it sound like it was all her.
“I suppose it was half my fault. She said I would ignore her. It was all on the schedule. Figuring out the most efficient algorithms, debugging software, you have to concentrate. You can’t keep looking over at new shoes.”
“So you broke up over her shoes?”
“I would get mad if she was out late—somewhere. I don’t know what she expected.”
Jenny studied her own shoes for a moment, her favorite blue clogs. “Maybe she expected your attention, and when she didn’t get it, she looked elsewhere. If it was me, I’d want your attention—not all the time, but enough.”
“I’ve got to earn a living.” Sam moved to the sink, passing close to Jenny where she leaned against the counter. She could smell shaving cream. She watched as Sam put dressing on the salad. “How much is ‘enough’?” he asked her.
“In order to know how much is enough,” Jenny took a step toward Sam, “you have to be paying attention.” When he didn’t respond, she added, “Don’t look so bewildered.”
“I’m not bewildered; I’m analyzing.”
“You don’t look ‘analyzing,’ you look bewildered. If you want to look analyzing, close your mouth.” Jenny reached out and gently pinched his parted lips to close them, then crossed to the kitchen doorway. She pictured herself on her parents’ farm near Topeka.
Sam asked, “Did Charlie pay attention?”
“Charlie could be a good listener, but he got sullen, especially in public, when I understood stuff he didn’t.”
“Well, I wouldn’t do that.” Sam tossed the salad. “To tell the truth, Jenny, I haven’t had many girlfriends.”
She pursed her lips and let out a gentle puff of air. She supposed not. “What’s your father like, Sam?”
“My father? He still works for the New York Power Authority. Lives in his head, mostly. Came to all my baseball games, though.”
“Baseball.” She looked him up and down. Sam wasn’t what she would call wiry, but he did move with a fluidity that was there if you looked.
~
Sam roasted corn on a small charcoal grill on the fire escape while Jenny dished out the salad. After they had eaten Sam told her he had better get some work done. “Are you going to stay?”
“Well, I’ll just hang here for a while.”
He tried to lose track of her, poring over a sub-routine he was designing. Then he found himself typing the first simple code every beginning computer programmer learned:
print('Hello, world!')
Sam had written this program in many computer languages but it had never struck him before as desperate, to have the computer communicate to an outside world. A world that was, in Sam’s experience, not paying attention—of course that’s what Jenny says I don’t do. This program simply instructed the computer to output, “Hello world!” to the screen. He deleted “world” and typed, “Marta.” He looked up. Jenny was examining the poster on the opposite wall. He edited “Marta” to “Jenny?” then deleted these intrusions and went back to work.
A few minutes later, Sam looked up to watch Jenny moving along the bookshelf against the living room wall. He liked the way her shoulders turned and the tilt of her hip when she stopped to remove a book. Marta had been rougher. She’d never browsed among the books. She didn’t love von Neumann and Turing—said they were messy, demanded they sing to her, as if they were Oscar Issac and Marcus Mumford, for crap’s sake. Jenny was softer, interested. Teasing, but kind. She made good jokes and bad puns. She played with words and numbers. Sam liked words and numbers. He liked bad puns. He caught himself staring at her legs and forced his eyes back to his screen.
~
Jenny snorted and, slapping the book she had been browsing onto the table across from Sam, began scooping up dirty dishes and other mess he had neglected. She carried four armloads into the kitchen, dumping trash and washing dishes. Amidst the clang of spoons and clank of plates, she got no response from the other room to questions about where the cups belonged or which drawer he preferred for the can opener. Then Jenny moved to Sam’s bedroom, where she found piles of clothes on the floor and called out, “Look at all this shit.”
“You better go,” he said, getting up. “I have work to do.”
“You have a lot of space for Manhattan. I could help you keep it organized.”
“I have work. Marta never messed with my stuff.”
“Is this why she left you? You gave her a schedule for when she could expect you to notice her? I wouldn’t put up with that either.”
“Then go back to Kansas.” Sam strode to open the door, but Jenny did not follow and he skittered back to the bedroom. “I didn’t ignore her,” he said.
“You’re a mess,” Jenny told him.
“I—”
Jenny brushed past him to the living room, where a red couch, a portly three-seater with flared arms, stood against the wall. A round gray pillow dotted the end, with ‘Pluto, 1930 – 2006, Sorry’ scrawled in red yarn. “So, this is your famous empty couch.” She flopped down, hands laced behind her neck, head on the former planet, feet comfortably crossed. She watched Sam, mired in the bedroom doorway, staring at his computers.
“I have a deadline—,” he began, then turned and saw her. “What are you doing?”
“Just seeing how it would feel. Maybe I’ll stay right here.” Jenny settled herself deeper into the cushions. “I think you need another human. You’re by yourself even when there’s somebody else in the room.”
“I’ve got to work,” he repeated.
“If the other choice weren’t Kansas—” she muttered. She left the couch and slid into the chair in front of his laptop. She tried to read the code he was working on, a file called, “Relationships,” but it might as well have been written in Ancient Budgie. She typed her own line at the end of a section titled “Living Together.”
“What are you doing?” Sam rushed at her, rotating the laptop so he could read what she’d typed. “And then something unexpected happens? That’s not Python. Computers need exact instructions in a recognized syntax.”
Jenny pushed back from the table. “I don’t respond to exact instructions, Sam.”
“Unexpected would make it crash.”
“Not always. You take a chance.” She started to cross her arms in front of her chest, but not wanting to seem stubborn, she slid them to her sides as she moved to the hallway.
“Like with Charlie?” Sam said.
“OK, I crashed that time,” her hands came up again, “but it if wasn’t for Charlie, I’d still be in Topeka.”
“Hurts too much.”
“I can stand it.” She rose and moved toward the door. “Can you?”
As the door closed behind her, she saw over her shoulder that Sam had already turned to attack the keyboard.
Strangling the railing in her hand, Jenny plunged down the two flights of stairs, but she stopped in the vestibule. Turning back, she leaned into the buzzer by Sam’s flat number and held it.
“What!” The word spat into the vestibule, distorted by the ancient intercom.
“You’re a mess,” Jenny sent back. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“Changed your mind about what?”
“I’m not moving in with you.”
“What?” came the crackle of Sam’s voice. “I haven’t asked you. I’m not sure I want you here. I haven’t decided.”
“It’s not only your decision.”
There was only a hum from the box.
Then, faintly, “You’re going back to Kansas?”
Jenny put her mouth close to the speaker. “I’m not going to take up with some guy I have to talk to from two floors away through an intercom.”
“Take up with? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know yet,” Jenny said. The box was still and she walked out.
~
The next day, Sam was still trying to think this through. The way she threw herself onto the couch! Marta would never do such a thing, mess her hair, look undignified. And who ever found it funny how many ‘f’s something was spelled with? She was so damned interrupting. And what did she mean, “take up with?” What was she offering?
At five, Sam returned to the Café. Jenny ignored him. He ordered stir-fry with tofu.
~
Jenny stood behind her register, reviewing her legal pad, avoiding eye-contact with Sam. She thought about Kansas, the Café and about Sam’s couch. He seemed so blind to his role in losing Marta. What about Sam and her? Would that work? Would what work? What was she thinking—a couch to crash on for a short time? Rent she could afford? A friend to talk to and go places with? A lover? Would that work?
~
When Jenny finally came to his table, Sam stared at her. “Maybe you’re just another Marta. You’ll use me.”
“I—” She stood still. The short-order cook slapped a plate onto the service counter under the heat lamps. Jenny looked Sam in the eye. “I need a place to live.”
“With me? Using me?”
“If that’s using you, then, yes, I’m using you. I can’t afford my place anymore. I need to find another—” Jenny stepped forward, “and so do you,” she said, pulling out the chair at his table. He found himself staring over her shoulder. It was almost five-thirty. Jenny pointed to the grocery sack under his chair. “If you’re not careful, you may find that your life comes down to radishes,” she said.
But he wasn’t listening. Marta, in a pale orange dress, rose from the subway stairs and turned away to walk through the park.
Tears stumbled down Sam’s cheeks. “She’s not coming back to the Café, is she?” he said. “There’s no chance.”
“No chance.” Jenny echoed, as Sam watched Marta fade across the park. Jenny reached across the table and, with the heel of her hand, brushed each of his cheeks. “I’m not sure how easy it would be,” she said, “living with you. Don’t algorithms do the same thing over and over again?”
“I thought you needed to. Or it’s back to Kansas.” He was looking out the window again. “Good algorithms are reliable—steadfast.”
She poked at a strand of yellow hair that had fallen past her eye and then, reaching out with one hand on either side of his chin she centered his face on hers. “I was here all along, you know. Before you started with Marta.”
“You never said—” Sam wrapped his arms around the front of his t-shirt, holding tightly to his shoulders. “I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention.” He let go of his shoulders. “Jenny, I’m just lonesome is all.”
“Is that built into your operating system or just a bug in your software?”
“You made me laugh with that giraffe thing,” Sam said.
“Enough to have me sleeping on your couch? ‘Couch’ with two ‘C’s.”
“I suppose we could just write the code, debug it, and see if it runs.”
“Can you promise you won’t print out our schedule?”
“Von Neumann and Turing prefer the New York Times business section.”
Jenny put her fingers up to his lip. “What’s this from?” Sam flinched.
“What?” He put his own hand there, his fingers on hers.
“This little scar.” Jenny traced it.
“She bit me.” He felt his face flush at the memory.
“Marta? Just a bug bite, then.” Jenny looked at her hands. “I won’t hurt you, Sam. I’m using you a little. But I won’t hurt you.” She reached out her hand to seal a new arrangement.
“I’m not fragile,” he said, and they shook hands.
Steven Swiryn is a cardiologist who specialized in the care of patients with heart rhythm problems (cardiac electrophysiology). In retirement, he continues teaching, plays guitar and mandolin and, rarely, performs in sketchy coffeehouses and bars as a singer-songwriter. His first short story, “The Unicycle,” was published in the Bellevue Literary Review and was awarded “Special Mention” by the editors of Pushcart XL.
