Free Dream Lover by Suzanne Jenkins

it. The first time we slept together, he got a room for us down the street. It was a crappy hotel, but not exactly a fleabag. He didn’t stay the night, but told me to, and gave me money to get breakfast in the morning. It was great not having to go back to Brooklyn in the middle of the night. For months, we went to that hotel a couple of times a week. I know why he got sick of the hotel. He found me a studio apartment in Midtown so he could take our “love life” a little farther onto the dark-side.
    “It’s time for you to move here,” he said. “There are things I want to do to you that I can’t do in a hotel room.” He laughed, coming to me and “pretend” biting my neck. Then he gave me some money. “Don’t spend all of this on your rent. If you can’t afford to live here, you should stay in Brooklyn. Do you understand me? I want you to save some of this each month.”
    At first, I did set some aside, but then I would see a dress or a pair of shoes and have to buy them. I have always been terrible with money.
    I found out quickly that if I demanded anything of Jack, I wouldn’t see him. He would stop coming to the bar, stop calling me. There’d be nothing for days. I never had his cell phone number, either. “I’ll see you almost every night during the week. I’ll call you daily. If that is not enough, tell me and we’ll stop this right now.” I thought I could do it. I thought seeing him that often would be enough. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t. I slowly got used to our life together. He’d come into the bar shortly before closing at two in the morning and have a drink or two and then he would walk home with me. He’d stay for an hour or so and go back to his own place. He never, ever spent the night.
    Weekends sucked. I hated being in that neighborhood on the weekends because it was completely dead. My windows faced the windows of an apartment next door. It was like a closet, dark and closed in. I didn’t know who lived in my building and didn’t want to know. I survived by working every weekend. I had to; there was nothing else for me to do. I didn’t have many friends in the city. All of my family was in Brooklyn and the few friends I used to have there had moved on. Jack never called me on the weekends. I didn’t know where his apartment was or what he did that couldn’t include me. In the early years, I would walk up and down Madison Avenue for hours at all times of the day and night, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.
    Then out of nowhere, I guess it was about 1999, I was forced to go to the ballet with my family because my sister’s brother-in-law had a small role in the production. As we were waiting in a long line to go in, I looked up just as Jack, in a tux, was helping a rather plain woman not much older than I was out of a limousine. He offered her his arm and she took it, smiling into his eyes. They walked ahead of all of us who were waiting to get into the nosebleed section; a photographer’s flash going off in their direction. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. For a fleeting moment, I had the impulse to run up to him and demand that he acknowledge me, but then I chickened out. What would he do if I embarrassed him in public? Was he famous? I thought his name was a pseudonym. Jack Smith? It just sounded fake. I didn’t have a computer but on the rare occasions I went home to Brooklyn, my sister would allow me access to hers for quick searches. I did find out that he was really Jack Smith. There on the Internet was a picture of him with a pretty, blonde woman at someone’s high school graduation. And then another of Jack and the young woman with whom I saw him at Lincoln Center, but this photo was taken at the Met at an art opening. In another photo, Jack stood with a man. The article was about some building project on the Lower East Side that would save the neighborhood. The neighbors were up in arms, calling Jack and this man “destroyers of New York” who were