The Sound of Her Laugh

Bri sat on the fire escape with her feet through the railing and a lukewarm beer sweating in her hand, and the whole city breathed around her, taxis groaning up Delancey, somebody's TV laughing through a window across the airshaft, the kid three floors up practicing trumpet badly and nobody telling him to stop. It was July and the air sat on her skin like a wet towel, and even at eleven at night the brick wall next to her still held the day's heat and pushed it back out at her like an apology that came too late. She was thirty-four years old, divorced eleven months, and she was drinking a beer she didn't even like because it was in the fridge and because buying the six-pack had felt like an act of optimism when she'd done it and felt like a lie now.

She could hear everything in this building and everything could hear her, that was the deal with a prewar walk-up, the walls were thin as cardboard and the hallway smelled like curry and old carpet no matter what season it was, and most nights Bri found the whole thing embarrassing, all her private life leaking out into public through the walls. Her neighbor across the hall could probably tell what night she'd cried and what night she'd cooked something real and what night she'd eaten cereal over the sink, and that thought should have bothered her more than it did. Lately she didn't have the energy for shame. Shame was a luxury for women who weren't tired.

It was her ex-husband's voice that showed up on nights like this, uninvited, sitting down on the step beside her like it still lived there. Mark had said it last summer, standing in the kitchen of the apartment they'd shared for a decade, in the tone he used for telling her the gas bill was high, like it was just information, like he was doing her a favor. You're too old to be exciting, he'd said, and then, worse, because Mark never knew when to stop, I stopped looking forward to coming home about four years ago, if that helps. She had been thirty-three at the time. Thirty-three. She'd stood there holding a dish towel and doing the math in her head, thinking, he means I peaked, he means the whole rest of it, fifty years maybe, is supposed to be the flat part of the line now, and then he'd packed his things over two weekends and moved in with a woman from his office who was twenty-eight and laughed at everything he said.

Bri tipped the beer back and it was mostly warm foam and she drank it anyway. The thing that got her, the thing she kept turning over like a stone with something underneath it, was that she hadn't even argued. She'd just stood there in the kitchen agreeing with him silently, nodding along inside herself, because some part of her had been collecting that evidence for years and here it was, notarized. He wasn't wrong, she'd thought, he's just a jerk for saying it out loud, and she'd carried both of those truths around for a year now and they didn't balance. The jerk part she could file away. The other part sat in her chest at night on a fire escape and weighed something.

Down on the street two women came out of the noodle place and stopped on the sidewalk laughing about something, heads thrown back, and Bri watched them the way she watched everything lately, like a woman reading a menu at a restaurant she couldn't afford. When had she last laughed like that. When had she last wanted anything enough to be loud about it. She worked, she came home, she sat out here, she slept, and once a week she called her sister and lied and said she was doing great. Eleven months of that. She wasn't sad exactly anymore, she'd burned through sad around February, but she wasn't anything else either, and nothing felt worse than nothing.

* * *

Friday night at the restaurant was its own weather system, and Bri moved through it on autopilot, four tops, two of them large, a bachelorette party of nine that ordered like they'd never seen money and tipped like they'd never seen it either. She was thirty-four and she'd been waiting tables since she was twenty-two, first at a diner in Queens and then here, an Italian place on Orchard with checkered tablecloths and a wine list that convinced people they were fancier than they were, and her feet knew the floor by heart. Sonny was working the bar section, twenty-seven years old, forearms out of his shirt sleeves, that easy grin he aimed at every woman who walked in like a sprinkler watering a lawn, and he'd been aiming it at Bri for months now with a persistence that should have been annoying and was, but less than it should have been.

He caught her at the well while she was ringing in an order of rigatoni, leaned an elbow on the rail, and said, "Table four keeps asking if you're single, and I told them I'd been wondering the same thing myself."

"You told them you were wondering," Bri said, signing the check. "That's a strange way to talk about a coworker."

"That's a strange way to dodge a compliment," he said, and he winked, and Bri felt it land somewhere in her sternum, a little spark she hadn't felt in so long she'd almost forgotten the wiring for it, and that embarrassed her, but the spark was real.

Brooke appeared at her shoulder the way Brooke always did, thirty-two, hostess stand, engaged to a patient man named Derek who Bri had met exactly twice, and she steered Bri toward the hallway by the elbow like they were headed to the walk-in. "Okay, I watched that whole thing," Brooke said, "and I need you to hear something, so listen."

"Here it comes."

"You are going to say yes to that boy, is what's going to happen," Brooke said, crossing her arms. "You've been a widow of fun for a year, Bri, I mean you've been moping around like a sad story we all have to be polite about, and I love you, but I'm tired. You need to get laid. I'm saying it because nobody else will."

"I'm not moping," Bri said, and Brooke just looked at her, and Bri blew out a breath. "Fine. Maybe a little. But Sonny, come on. He's a baby. He's twelve."

"He is not twelve, he's twenty-seven, an adult with a job and a car, which is more than I can say for some people I could name," Brooke said. "And listen, I'm not saying marry him. I'm saying get a drink. Feel something. When's the last time you felt something that wasn't a sore back or a rude table?"

Bri thought about the fire escape, and the warm beer, and Mark's voice saying too old to be exciting in his flat little facts voice, and she thought, well, he'd say a twenty-seven-year-old flirting with me proves him wrong, wouldn't he, and then she thought, who cares what he'd say, and the second thought felt better than the first. "A drink," she said. "One drink. And you have to be there, because if he turns out to be exactly what I think he is I want a witness."

"Done, I'll sit at the bar and pretend to be on my phone," Brooke said, grinning. "Bri. This is the best news I've had all week, and I'm getting married, so you know that's saying something."

After close, the crew emptied out onto the sidewalk in the wet heat, and Sonny fell into step beside her as if it were the most natural thing in the world, hands in his pockets, and said, "So I heard through the grapevine you might be talked into one drink."

"The grapevine has a big mouth," Bri said.

"The grapevine cares about you," Sonny said, and he did the grin again, the sprinkler grin, but up close, at midnight, with the streetlight catching the sweat at his collar, it did something different to her than it did at six on a Friday, it made her stomach drop the way a first step in the dark does. "There's a place two blocks down, no music, decent beer. One drink. You can leave whenever you want, I'm not going to be weird about it."

"He says, being weird about it already," Bri said, and Sonny laughed, and she hated how much she liked the sound of it, and she said yes.

* * *

They were ten minutes into the drinks, at a corner table under a ceiling fan that wasn't winning, and Sonny was telling her a story about a bridal party that had tried to pay their tab in loose change, and Bri was laughing, actually laughing, the kind that came up from the bottom, and she caught herself mid-laugh and thought, huh, so it's still in there. Sonny noticed it too, she could tell, he leaned forward like a man who'd just gotten a fish on the line, and said, "There it is. I've been trying to get that laugh out of you for six months."

"You've been trying that hard, huh," Bri said.

"Ask Brooke. I've got a whole strategy," he said, and the casual way he said it, like she was a campaign he'd been running, put a small cold finger on the back of her neck, but then he reached across the table and put his hand over hers, warm and deliberate, and said, "And for the record, I don't have a strategy right now. Right now I just want to keep sitting here," and the cold finger went away, and his thumb moved once across her knuckles, and Bri looked down at his hand on hers, younger than hers, smoother, and felt something in her chest unclench that had been clenched so long she'd mistaken it for her ribs.

He kept the hand thing going all through the second half of the drink, thumb moving, fingers drifting over her wrist, and Bri let him, and watched herself let him, like a woman leaning on a door to see if it would hold. He was fun. She'd give him that. He was easy to look at and he made her laugh and he paid the tab without making a show of it, and none of it moved her more than an inch. She kept waiting for the drop, the stomach thing, the want, and it never came, and by the time they got up to leave she'd stopped waiting and started just observing him the way she observed a table of nine, tracking what he'd need and when.

She did think, on the way out, about the thing on the stairs, because it kept coming back to her at odd moments. On her way down to meet Sonny that evening, she'd come around the landing on four and there was Nate, sitting on the bottom step of the next flight with his bike flipped upside down, fixing the chain, sleeves rolled up over forearms that had a gray scatter of hair and a couple of old white scars on one of them. His hands had been steady. That was what she kept coming back to. Not fast, not showing off, just steady, the chain feeding through his fingers like he'd done it a thousand times, and he'd looked up and said, "Evening," like they were two people who did this, said evening on landings, and she'd said, "Chain go?"

"Rust. She's older than me but she's got better bones." He'd wiped his hands on a rag, unhurried, and looked at her dress for exactly one polite second, no more, and said, "You look nice. Big night?"

"Small night. One drink."

"Small nights are the good ones," he'd said, and gone back to the chain, and she'd stood there a beat longer than she needed to, watching those hands work, and then gone on down the stairs with her heart doing something stupid and quiet.

(That was before the date, obviously, and now she was after the date, walking Sonny's block to the corner where the cabs stacked up.)

"You look disappointed," Sonny said. "Date's not over. I'm walking you to a cab. That's still in play."

"I'm not disappointed. I'm tired. I worked a double."

"A double," he said, nodding like she'd said something profound, and put his arm around her shoulders, and it was a nice arm, and it weighed nothing to her at all.

The cab came and he got in after her without asking, which she'd have let slide a year ago, and gave the address over her head, which she'd also have let slide, and she sat there with her thigh against his in the hot vinyl seat watching Delancey crawl by, and she felt like she was watching it through glass. Then he turned to her, grinned that grin, and leaned in, and she put a hand flat on his chest.

"Whoa," she said.

"Whoa whoa? Or whoa not yet?"

"Just whoa," she said, and meant it, and something in her chest went quiet and sad and clear all at once, because she'd wanted to want him so bad, all week, and here was the test and here was the result. His mouth was two inches from hers and there was nothing. No pull, no heat, nothing. He was a nice kid with a good grin and her body had nothing to say about him.

He sat back. To his credit he didn't push, he just looked wounded for a second, then covered it with charm. "Okay. Reading the room. That's growth for me, ask anybody."

"Ask Brooke, she keeps score," Bri said, and he laughed, and she got out at her corner and he waved through the window and the cab pulled off and she stood on the sidewalk in the July dark feeling like she'd failed a test she'd been sure she'd ace.

* * *

The apartment was an oven, the way it got at eleven at night in July with the sun long gone and the bricks still cooking, so she changed into a tank top and shorts and climbed out the window onto the fire escape with the last of a six-pack she'd had in the fridge since April, and Nate was there.

One window over, on his own stretch of the same iron lattice, sitting with his feet up through the rails and a beer in his hand, and he looked over when her window scraped and said, "Huh. Thought I heard you come in."

"You can hear me come in?"

"I can hear everybody come in. These walls are paper. I heard the guy upstairs propose to his girlfriend in March, she said no, then I heard him propose again in May and she said yes, so I consider myself invested in their marriage." He lifted his beer an inch. "Rough night?"

"How do you know it was rough?"

"You're drinking April beer," he said. "Nobody drinks April beer on a good night."

Bri laughed, a short one, and sat down across from him with her legs through her own rails, and the streetlight came up between them in a haze of bugs, and somewhere below a car alarm went off and quit, and she cracked her beer and said, "It wasn't rough. It was fine. That's the problem, I think. It was fine like a Tuesday."

"You went out with the kid from work."

"The grapevine has a big mouth and it lives in this building too, apparently."

"That grapevine is me, actually, Brooke told my cashier at the hardware store, and my cashier tells me everything, it's a disease," Nate said, deadpan, and Bri snorted into her beer.

"He's twenty-seven," she said. "He's twenty-seven and he has a car and a strategy. He told me he had a strategy for my laugh. Six months of strategy."

"And did the strategy work?"

"Yeah," she admitted. "Once. At the bar. Then it stopped working and I spent the rest of the night noticing it had stopped working."

Nate nodded slowly, looking out at the street, and took a drink, and said nothing for a while, which was a thing about him she'd learned, that he didn't fill silence the way everyone else did, he let it sit there like it was allowed, and the traffic hummed on Delancey and the