Friendship (12 page)

Okay, cross “call Steve” off the list.

She stumbled out of the bathroom and into the half-lit common area of the apartment, slumping onto the futon and turning on the TV in the same practiced movement. A
Seinfeld
rerun came on and soothed her agitated brain and body, and she allowed herself a few minutes of this intense recuperation before she moved on to her next duty.

She pulled out the stack of mail from under the coffee table and as quickly as possible tore the pile of bills out of their envelopes. Two credit card statements, two student-loan bills, the electric, gas, and wireless Internet bills that she was tasked with dividing among the roommates and collecting money from them to pay, her health insurance bill—she still had COBRA coverage from being in grad school, even though she kept making a mental note to find out whether Freelancers Union might be marginally cheaper—and her phone bill. She saved for last a red envelope from her bank that seemed likely to contain bad news, and she wasn’t disappointed: a letter informed her that her repeated overdrafts were causing them to increase her overdraft fee.

She took out a piece of notebook paper and added everything up, then calculated how much she’d need to earn temping to pay it, and while the result was depressingly tight—and did not include such luxuries as food, toiletries, and abortions, all of which she would have to charge to her credit cards—it was manageable, as long as she didn’t take any more days off this month or in the foreseeable future. She’d have to take next Thursday off, it was true, but hopefully not Friday. It wasn’t great news, but it felt better to know.

Ever since her conversation with Amy on Sunday, there had been a thought in Bev’s mind that didn’t even qualify as a full thought—more of a sub-thought, a half-heard whisper thrumming under the surface of all her brain’s other activity. It had been about the idea of her pregnancy as a baby, and as likely her only chance at having one. This hadn’t made any sense to Amy, and Bev understood why; it wasn’t the kind of thing you could expect someone from Amy’s background to understand. But Bev’s parents had been young and broke when they’d had her, and still young and still relatively broke when they’d had her siblings. And although it hadn’t been easy not to have the same sneakers or breakfast cereals as other kids, she loved her sisters and her brother. Most of the time, she was glad she’d been born. Living in New York City was different from living in Minnesota, for sure, and she didn’t have her parents’ unwavering idea of Jesus as a busybodyish person who intervened in everyone’s lives, which she knew made rough moments easier to survive. But there was still something about having grown up that way that was making her feelings less straightforward than the piece of paper in front of her—not to mention the conversation she’d just had with Father of the Year Steve—told her that they should be.

The thought was simply that if she could imagine a way of supporting herself and a baby, she would do it. But she couldn’t, and so she wouldn’t. It was—it had to be—that simple.

18

In the end, they didn’t make Amy try to replicate the lo-fi viral success of “Strawberry Cheesecake Yankee Candle AT LAST!!!” Instead Jonathan and Shoshanna had fun splashing out on equipment and rentals for the first Vyideo shoot. Like a lot of people who have always been rich, they had no problem spending money on onetime follies, but they balked at ongoing minor expenses, like better toilet paper for the Yidster bathroom. They’d hired a professional makeup artist as well as a cameraman, who’d already spent a couple of hours lighting the corner of the office where a roll of white paper had been gaffer-taped to the wall. This was where Amy was going to be shot.

Amy glanced over toward the white corner as she hunched at her desk, pretending as always to be super busy. She felt simultaneously clammy and hot, as if she were coming down with the flu. In the opposite corner the makeup artist was unloading her little rolling suitcase full of tubes and compacts and palettes. Lizzie and Jackie stared unabashedly at the proceedings from their desks. If Jonathan and Shoshanna had bothered to glance at Yidster all day (they hadn’t), they would have seen that it had been updated just once, at 10:00 a.m., with a slide show about baby animals with spots on the tops of their furry heads that looked like yarmulkes. Amy had noticed but had not said anything about it.

Finally, Amy situated herself over in the corner in front of the camera. Jonathan situated himself in a swivel chair pumped up to its highest setting, to compensate for his short torso and maybe to make it seem more like a director’s chair. The cameraman nodded. It was time to start.

“Okay, Amy!” Jonathan shouted, even though she was about seven feet away from him. “We’re rolling! Go anytime.”

“This is Amy Schein, coming to you live from Yidster headquarters with today’s Yid Vid!”

“Cut! ‘Coming to you live’?”

“Sorry. What should I…”

“Just, don’t be hokey. Be yourself. Okay, start again.”

Amy shuddered inwardly. “Be yourself” was something she’d heard a lot in the early days of her job at the gossip blog; it had never meant “Be yourself” then and it didn’t now, either. Amy wished there were some way to explain to Jonathan that
real
directors, at least the ones who worked on those greatest-moments-in-pop-culture shows, lied to you and flattered you all the time to keep your confidence up: “That was great! I think we can get an even better one, though. Want to try it one more time?” was their way of saying you had been abominably terrible and were about to do thirty more takes.

“I’m Amy Schein, and this is today’s Yid Vid!”

“Cut! Ugh, can you just … say two words without moving your eyebrows? Two words. It’s not hard. Look at me right now, saying this. Did my eyebrows just move?”

They had, actually, but Amy figured that pointing it out to him was probably counterproductive. She wondered whether she should get Botox, just once, just to get her through this day.

“I’m Amy Schein, and this is a Yid Vid.”

“Cut! Okay, that was better, but now it’s a little flat. Can you just do ‘enthusiastic’ without, like, ‘spastic’?” Jonathan paused. “Heh, that rhymed. Sorry, hold on a sec.”

“Jonathan,” Amy said, finally losing her patience. “Are you
tweeting
that?”

He didn’t look up from his iPhone. “Don’t worry. I’m not saying it’s about you.”

Amy’s eyebrows did somersaults, but Jonathan was too immersed in his phone to notice. By the time he turned his attention back to Amy, she had made up her mind.

“Jonathan?”

“Yeah, okay, let’s go again. The intro, and then just go right into the first segment.”

“No, Jonathan. Can we stop, actually? I have to talk to you about … I can’t do this.”

He shrugged. “You’re right, you’re pretty bad at it, but you can do it. We’ll just edit it a lot. You can edit it, right?”

Amy’s heart was racing; she was so angry, suddenly, that she felt as if she might spontaneously burst into flames. Jonathan was everyone she had ever hated: the gossip blog boss who’d hung her out to dry, the landlord who’d raised her rent, the parents who didn’t even bother to humor her when she talked about her half-fledged dreams. She hated him so intensely, but not as intensely as she hated herself for putting herself in a position where she had no choice but to take orders from him.

She did have a choice, though. It was an idiotic choice, an overtly self-destructive choice, but it was her choice to make.

“Jonathan, this is it. I’m done. I quit.”

“Hmm?”

“I don’t want to work here anymore. I’m quitting. I’m not giving any notice. Effective immediately, I don’t work here anymore. You can find someone else to…” Amy searched for the right words. She didn’t want to confess that her job had largely consisted of doing nothing; it seemed undignified. “To keep your website up and running,” she finished lamely. “But this isn’t me, and I can’t pretend that it is anymore.”

“What do you mean, it isn’t you? Amy, you
are
Yidster. You’re the essence of Yidster.”

“What do you even
mean
by that?”

“You’re, you know, our target audience. Young, upwardly mobile urban Jews.”

“Well, I’m officially mobilizing downward. As of right now.” She turned on her heel and strode purposefully past the foosball table toward her desk to grab her purse. Lizzie and Jackie, who’d been doing their best to pretend not to be listening attentively to every word, struggled not to swivel their heads toward her as she hurriedly pulled a few lingering office necessities—flip-flops, a pair of gloves, deodorant—out of her desk drawers.

“I should have known better than to hire you. Isn’t this what you did at your last job, just flamed out? This is very unprofessional, Amy. You know that, right? And I’ll tell anyone who asks that you’re an unreliable employee.”

Avi, returning from a smoke break, caught the tail end of this sentence as he entered the office, just as Amy was about to walk out the door. “She’s leaving?”

“Good riddance to her!” Jonathan snarled.

Avi narrowed his eyes.
“Deserter,”
he hissed at Amy in a chilling whisper.

“Oh, get over yourselves, both of you,” Amy said, starting to feel a bit ridiculous. “Uh, bye, Lizzie. Bye, Jackie. Good luck. See you on Facebook and whatnot.”

“Um, bye,” said Jackie. “Good luck!”

Lizzie just stared, apparently too stunned to speak.

Waiting for the elevator was out of the question. Amy took the stairs two at a time, stopping to take deep breaths at the first-floor landing. Emerging onto the sidewalk, she decided to keep walking all the way home. She had to do something with this surplus of nervous energy; she had to stay in motion as long as possible.

It was cooler than she’d thought it would be when she left the house that morning; chilly air sliced through her light blouse—the unmistakable taste of fall coming more quickly than anyone had anticipated. Did she even own a good winter jacket? The one she’d bought a few years ago, at the height of her fiscal recklessness when she’d first gotten the blog job, was a piece of designer nonsense with detachable sleeves. Detachable sleeves! As if you’d ever think,
You know, what I really want is a jacket that will warm my torso but leave my extremities bare.
She had five hundred dollars in her bank account. Her rent and her credit card payments were due in a week.

If only she’d just been patient, feigned incompetence (really feigned it, not just
been
incompetent) until they fired her, so she could have gone on unemployment! She felt dangerously light-headed for a second and tried to force herself to notice her surroundings: the beautiful old houses, the deserted cobbled streets of Vinegar Hill, the stretch of scenic quaintness she was traversing between her work neighborhood and the industrial port of the Navy Yard.

There was a Buddhist temple on the corner, an anomalous multicolored cinder-block building that stood out among the brownstones. Its façade was covered by little Tibetan flags that fluttered in the wind. Impulsively, Amy sprinted up its front steps and tried the door, which was locked.

Just as she was poised with her finger over the bell, she heard noises coming from inside. She stopped. What had she even been thinking—that she would throw herself on the mercy of some wise old boddhisattva and learn to lead a life of mindful solitude? She ran back down the steps and kept running until she passed the tow pound and the Navy Yard, then jogged parallel to the BQE and finally up her own front stoop. A wave of exhaustion hit her as she unlocked the door to the building, and she dragged herself up the inner staircase with exaggerated, zombielike slowness.

When she arrived at her apartment door, she gasped: there was a letter taped to it. It was from Mr. Horton, or “99 Emerson LLC,” as he liked to call himself these days. It informed her that she had exceeded the proscribed amount of time in which to make her decision and was now being evicted. She had a month to gather her things, find a new apartment, and move.

Amy unlocked the door, fell into the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and scrabbled around behind a box of tampons until she found her emergency Camels, stale but still smokable. She felt too weak to go outside again, so she knelt by the open back window of her apartment and chain-smoked until she was about to pass out, then lay down on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. How was it possible that in just a few hours she had gone from okay to destitute and homeless? How could a destitute homeless person be in possession of a Comme des Garçons wallet, a pair of Worishofer sandals, a fridge with Moroccan oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes in it—all these accoutrements of bourgeois stability, but none of the actual stability itself? Should she call her parents? She could not even bring herself to imagine the conversation. She would call Bev. No, Bev was dealing with so much of her own shit right now. Really, she should call Sam. What was a boyfriend for, if not to console you when you were having a crisis?

19

Sam’s studio was in the Pencil Factory, a warehouse building in Greenpoint that reminded Amy of the best things about college. The stairwells always smelled like paint and hand-rolled cigarettes, and the whole thing was heated unevenly by big old radiators. Amy loved visiting Sam there, seeing all the other artists in the hallways and on the roof; it was so cheering to know that there were still people who made their living by creating physical things—even if some of them were commercial illustrators and graphic designers. Well, Sam wasn’t, anyway! He was just a guy who made giant oil paintings of Cuisinarts.

They went up to the roof to talk. It was still cool, and getting dark alarmingly early. Amy pulled out her pack of stale Camels. Sam made a face.

“What? I told you, I’m freaking out! I’m allowed to smoke!”

“I’m not going to want to kiss you if you smoke that, baby,” Sam said, pulling her close and pushing her hand away from the pack. Amy felt a stab of rage. Who cared about kissing? She needed to smoke more than she needed a kiss. But she put the Camels away. She also needed Sam on her side.