#my google search history is such a mess lmfao. full of shit like popular perfumes early 1990s and what night did march 18th 1993 fall on

[saulweissberg]

sitting so close, just two feet of wood and tablecloth between them, saul could look directly into the eyes that had captivated him so greatly on march 18th, 1993. it might’ve been a thursday night, but saul couldn’t remember that particular detail, just that it was the end of his final year of undergrad and he was a few months away from being able to call himself a columbia university alumnus. he could remember a smoky house on w. 114th street, with drunken college students spilling out onto the stoop and even some out into the street. the living room wall had a poster for some movie called reservoir dogs, though saul had never heard of it, and there were christmas lights strung along the ceiling. it smelled like weed and cheap beer and the vague trace of coty’s exclamation. he thought he could recall madonna’s rescue me playing the moment he saw terry for the first time, but it was probably more likely to be some single off alice in chains’s second album—saul wanted to dance and have a good time at parties, not listen to downbeat flannel-clad guys with dirty hair whine about roosters or whatever—or that stupid spin doctors song he hated back then. it was a rather boring, typical cross-campus college party, if he remembered correctly.

it didn’t turn out to be a typical night, because that was where saul met his first wife. that was the party where he fell in love, instantly and intensely. tucked into the corner of the room, he had noticed the boy first. sharp-jawed with even sharper cheekbones, pretty lips, square shoulders. a clark kent-type, all corn-fed and from the accent he was able to briefly hear from across the room, an all-american country boy. grade a beef was what saul had commented to his friends as they observed him; jeremiah, sung-min, kenny, and dina either laughed behind their hands or rolled their eyes at his ribaldry as they always did.

they had all known saul for years; jeremiah had been his freshman year roommate and the rest he accumulated through various classes and parties he had attended throughout the previous semesters, so they were used to his bullshit. they found his antics funny, if they didn’t participate themselves, and when they didn’t, saul had a whole pantheon of other friends and acquaintances to flit to, suiting whichever need he had for the night. saul had been a restless man. when he found someone in a crowd that caught his eye, he had to meet them, and even if they hadn’t returned the attraction, he never left an interaction with a stranger upset or downtrodden.

that was why, when luke (as he later found out the name of him) moved to the side and revealed a smaller body behind him, his friends all exchanged looks and laughter. that lowenstein girl. dina told him how they were practically a barnard campus legend. unattainable, incredibly beautiful and even more aloof. anyone that tried to get close either got scared off by their calculating stare or their laconic responses. they had looked out of place in the environment, and dina remarked she was surprised they had even come to a party at all—allegedly, her sophomore year roommate’s boyfriend’s roommate tried to ask them to a sigma phi epsilon party and they gave him a blank look, mumbled something about zaha hadid, and took off in the other direction. again, though, allegedly.

well, there were plenty of rumors about saul around columbia, and only half of them were true.

okay, most of them.

so, yeah, he dated a lot. hooked up was a more accurate term, but not as polite. he basically got off the train from bridgeport and set off to enjoy everything he didn’t have access to in his little rich boy hometown. there were drugs and alcohol in connecticut, but it was different there. his peers snorted coke to get through country club clam bakes with their parents and stole their mom’s xanax pills to sell to public school kids. they brazenly drank from flasks on the golf course or ordered a scotch and soda at the charity gala bar, a dare in their eyes to the bartender to even think about telling their daddy because that would just get them fired, instead of filling up water bottles with vodka or hiding bottles of zima under their beds, deathly afraid to get caught. the rich kids saul grew up with were begging for their parents to catch them, but even when they did get caught, their parents didn't care as long as they didn't embarrass the family.

new york city and bridgeport might as well have been worlds away instead of just an hour. saul had to get a fake id to enter clubs in manhattan instead of just telling the doorman his last name and having them unclip the rope with an apology for the holdup. it was a foreign land where it wasn’t completely lawless, but the societal laws they had were the opposite of new england’s. his name wouldn’t open doors (often) anymore, but he could do ecstasy in a bathroom with a total stranger and make out with another guy in public without fear of something bad happening to him, as long as he stayed in the right neighborhood and didn’t enter the wrong sort of bar.

his name didn’t open doors, and he didn’t have to worry about tarnishing his family name. there was no worry that mrs. garvey down the street would tell his grandfather that she saw saul and his little friend aharon kissing on the porch. there was no fear that he’d get too drunk at the country club’s casino night and cause the other members to groan about they should’ve never let those weissbergs join the club. he could do whatever he pleased, as long as he kept his grades up. take some girl on a date, take some guy in an alleyway behind palladium, take some mystery pill and see what happened. then sleep between classes, spend hours in the library to catch up on days worth of studying, write up a paper on eisenstadt v. baird, then head back to the dorm for a nap, an episode of the phil donahue show, and then take another girl out…

it was a routine that he followed rather faithfully, and so what, he got bored easily! the world was his fucking oyster and he didn’t want to be tied down for more than a few weeks at a time. he wanted to sample everything in college because adulthood was looming darkly over him, a summit he was supposed to reach some day soon and finally be regarded as a man in the gentiles’ society. that meant a career, a wife, a family. no more fun. no more experimenting. a time to think about bringing shame on his family’s name again, but this time it would be his own family. his children, his wife, his fuckin’ dog and white picket fence or whatever bullshit he was supposed to get once he stepped over the threshold of maturity. all that boring stuff he heard his older cousins complain about, advising him to fuck as much as he could before he had some old ball-and-chain stuck at home.

he had to enjoy it while he could, so he did what he wanted and didn’t mind a slap across the face from an angry ex-girlfriend or a wistful look of longing from some beta zeta tau boy that didn’t want his brothers to know he was gay. he thought he fell in love often, then fell out of it just as easily, but that was a boyish notion. he didn’t know truly what love was until that snowy spring night.

the corn-fed guy moved to reveal the lowenstein girl, and suddenly it was like the lights in the theater dimmed and there was a spotlight shining down from nowhere on her. just like the movies, all the noise faded out—not the typical swell of classical music like in a film, he recalled it was horrifyingly hey ladies by the beastie boys—and everyone else in the room disappeared. her face was doll-like underneath her pall of soft, black hair and her stark paleness made her eyes shine all the more. she was short, made even smaller by the taller men around her and the little corner she tucked herself into might as well have stolen her away. her face wore an impassable expression, but their nails tapping against their cup indicated some anxiety.

well, if there was anything saul was good at, it was coaxing a wallflower out of their shell!

it hadn’t been a challenge or a dare by his friends, in fact sung-min told him to forget all about her and end the night with an easier target, but there was nothing that could’ve stopped him then. he bid his friends adieu with an overconfident raise of his brows and crossed the room, dodging college students making out on couches and trash littered on the floor as he made his way towards his fate. like with everyone and everything, especially since he arrived to columbia, he greeted her with an easy, self-assured smile and some opening line he couldn’t remember anymore.

he had grown into his body within the last few years, no longer one of the shortest kids in class and skinny as a rail; his shoulders had broadened, his chest sturdier, and he was finally an inch taller than levi—something his fraternal twin lorded over him since the fifth grade when he hit puberty and saul didn’t, but levi would forever remind him that he’d always be four minutes older and a last minute growth spurt could never change that. his body now matched his ego, so even if this beautiful, aloof student gave him the brush off, it wouldn’t crush his confidence. or maybe it would have, since he thought he had never seen such a beautiful person before, and he wanted to make her laugh more than he wanted his law degree.

and somehow, in his burberry sweater and gucci loafers, he got the girl that didn’t talk to anyone to talk to him. he was the envy of every man on the cu campus, and probably the envy of most women on the barnard campus, too. she smiled because he struggled to hear her over the crowd noise and rolled her eyes at him in a way that suggested she was entertained, not offended, when he kept calling her by the wrong name.

“it’s ketziya.”

“okay, katie, i’m saul. saul weissberg.”

“no, ketziya. ket-zi-ya.”

“yeah, katie. that’s what i said.”

even after she corrected him for the final time and he understood he was mishearing her name, he called her katie because it was their own private joke now and it felt special to call her by a sobriquet that no one else used before. like he had made a claim, in that smoky house on w. 114th street: you’re my katie, and fuck anyone that tries to take you away from me now.

they weren’t his katie now, though. they weren’t even terry. they were ketziya, looking at him with some unreadable expression, acting as if he had intruded upon their dinner.

“uh-huh.” saul replied, unconvinced. he doubted the building simply caught their eye, the exact restaurant where saul chose to dine that night, and just pulled them in by some unstoppable, invisible force. again, terry was a purposeful person. this wasn’t running into each other at the bank or passing by each other in the aisles of the grocery store. terry had followed him for some reason, seemingly spending their whole day just observing saul. “well, once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, and three times is…” he trailed off with a shrug, brows raising expectantly. 

my attention bothers you, why?

his temper flared. “because you haven’t given a shit about what i do with my life for the last twenty-five years and now you’re suddenly everywhere?” his composure slipped, his fist flexing on top of the table. he breathed deeply and pressed his lips together in order to calm himself—the last thing he needed was it getting around town that saul e. weissberg, esquire yelled at women in public. deacon edwards would surely have a field day with that one. he unfurled his fist and laid his hand flat on the tablecloth. “i just don’t understand why you care now.” besides their shared son, they had lived completely separate for twenty-five years. their lives had seldom intersected beyond micah’s school events or birthday parties or an occasional high holiday spent together for their son's sake. terry had no interest in what saul did with his time back in manhattan, so why were they so enthralled with his daily itinerary today?

any tenuous grasp he held on his composure snapped once again. what a talent they had for turning it all on saul! everything was always his fault, wasn’t it? never could say the right thing, never could make up for his shortcomings. it was a wonder why they were bothering with him at all, following him around like an amateur spy. “don’t you do that.” he warned, nostrils flaring. “don’t act like i’m being crazy or unreasonable.” if anything, he thought his reaction to his ex-wife stalking him was quite understated.

bringing his hands up to his head, he massaged his temples and screwed his eyes shut before he spoke again and snapped his eyes back open, “what is it exactly that you want, ketziya?” because he couldn’t believe there wasn’t some ulterior motive with them, or that this was all some happy accident. if not for their earlier encounter at the courthouse, if this had been the first time he saw terry all day, he might’ve sent over a drink or stopped by to say hello. he would’ve played polite like he had been bred to do, wished terry a nice night, and gone home without a raging fucking headache. “because i’m going to be leaving soon and if i see you outside of my house at one am tonight, i’m calling the cops.”

Terry hadn’t been startled. They’d sensed him sensing them, and, anyway, it was not as if they had made any concentrated effort to obscure their presence, no more than they were used to. He sat on the chair opposite her, drawing the attention of an aging couple sitting next to them as he did, and her fingers tightened around the stem of her wine glass as she contemplated his form, closer, now. 

Ketziya. Their real name, typically reserved for close friends and family, had always sounded so strange in his tongue. For a moment, Terry had contemplated using the same moniker they’d reserved for him when he was being obtuse—Saul Wiseguy—but decided against it. “Weissberg,” they said instead, taking a sip of their drink, allowing themselves to meet his gaze. They leaned back in their seat, cradling the drink in their hand, but found themselves perturbed by the question.

“You make it sounds like I have a nefarious agenda, Saul. I didn’t plan it,” they began, but only as a half-defense, not quite making a formal denial. “There hasn’t been a lot to do while I’m waiting for the fall semester to start anyway.” A lift of their shoulders, projecting nonchalance. “The building caught my interest, then you arrived, and I lost focus.”

Terry swirled the red in their glass, watching the dark liquid catch the light from the fixtures above them. Hadn’t that been where everything began? Of Ketziya Lowenstein turning up in some strange place, finding Saul Weissberg there, and then leaving with him? They let themselves sit in the memory—they did that more often these days, they found—for a little while. To drown in the sensory overwhelm, of garishly decorated red cups, bright lights, loud 90s music, stilted laughter, and overbearing young men and women grazing their arm and professing something about them being their first love, first heartbreak, and first regret, and whatnot, but all Ketziya was doing was standing in a corner with Luke, tapping their fingers rapidly against their cup, and counting down the days until their parents would watch them graduate.

Beloved Ketziya, first to attend college, first to graduate, first to leave home.

In truth, they’d wanted to leave. To ditch the party. To walk back to the residential halls with their only friend. To begin packing up what little they’d brought from their dorm room in preparation for moving out day. And, finally, to return to their second-floor apartment in Harlem, flanked between two other units of their tenement building, and which had sat just below their father’s butcher shop, the only place in the world where chaos made sense. 

Then there Saul was, sauntering across the room, tall and lanky and carrying a smile that was purported by the CU-Barnard gossip mill to have launched a thousand heartbreaks. They’d held the sleeve of Luke’s shirt but he’d walked away, instead, leaving Ketziya alone with this marvelous idiot of a man who’d called her by the wrong name and pushed a stray curl back into place as a stand in for an apology. His touch came abruptly and he’d stood too close, and the world was reduced to his blue eyes—solid and piercing—to his honeyed words, to the gap between them. That was one of the first few things they’d been taught: that it was not the light that created the space but the shadows cast against it. Only then did the space begin to transform, to move, to bring the objects comprising the space into focus. Everything existed in relation to everything else.

Even now, or especially now, she couldn’t remember who closed the gap first. Only that against the dark, there was movement, of a body orienting itself to the presence of another, colliding into each other. It was especially powerful to understand the world like this dialogue of contrasts: his thousand-times-over rehearsed movements against her tentative touches, his lightness against her severity, his evening stubble against her delicate skin, his practiced ease and her intense determination to make it work. That first kiss, too, had been a curious permutation of friction, heat, and light. Electric. An energy that she could control.

They wanted to remember something else, some other memory to better paint the picture of them in those early years. Maybe snippets of early conversation where their interests might have collided, where their worlds might have intersected. If they tried hard enough, they could picture vignettes. A memory of a memory. Swaying together as the train rattled into their station on 116th and Broadway. Kissing in library bathrooms scrawled with bad poetry and housing advertisements and political testimonies. Standing in the footsteps of Barnard Hall and watching his figure make the quick, hundred-foot trek from his building to hers. Taking a carriage ride through Central Park past midnight. Of crossing the boundary of 96th Street, past the elegant East Side of Manhattan, and towards the older tenements and storefronts with their loud signs, and introducing a Weissberg to their butcher father, who’d held the tightest of smiles and bid them some nice words before sharpening his chalef knife against the whetstone. 

They were petty comforts. Not even memories, really, but disparate pieces of images pulled out to assign meaning to the decades of resentment and pain and hurt and anger that came next. Because the truth of it was the next clear thing had been Micah, whose presence redefined their world, and the invocation of which promptly put an end to their recollections. 

Reality pulled itself back—to the restaurant, their pasta dish, the silverware, the wine, the presence of him. “My attention bothers you,” Terry said, simply, bringing again the glass to their lips. The weight of the memories slowly lifted with each sip, replaced by the coldness brought by the stern gaze of this man in front of her, whom they could not read at all, or maybe always could. “Why?” And after all this time? They asked, curious, but also in challenge. 

In truth, it was almost compelling to see Saul like this, with his fire contained, so at odds with the demeanor by which he’d moved through the world. Throughout the day he’d appear to almost enjoy wearing that mask of courtesy and professionalism and being the most agreeable person in the room. Yet here he was, jaw set, muscles taut, lips pressed in a thin, downward line, and a voice dripping with displeasure.

Another study in contrasts, then, because how was this man the Saul they knew, thirty decades ago—hell, three minutes ago? 

A muscle in their cheek twitched, intermittently, almost betraying the chuckle threatening to puncture through their lips. The false nostalgia of their encounter a month ago was gone. Now laid only him, older, more gaunt, and with buttons decidedly easier to press. “I’ve largely kept to myself. Fuck, Saul, I’m not trying to intimidate you.” With their free hand, they gestured towards him, the whole of him, the shape of him, and sighed. “You’re the one who keeps announcing their presence today.” A mild accusation, though not an entirely false one, threatening again to touch an indelicate truth. Terry was very much content to slither through the shadows. Only Saul had been daring—perhaps foolish—enough to bring them into the light.