Friendship (17 page)

The other option for Sally had been to sit in her study in their house in Margaretville and write there, but obviously that was never going to work. She would have just ended up sitting down at her antique oak desk at eight in the morning with a steaming cup of jasmine tea at her elbow, flexing her fingers over the keyboard, and then spending the entire day—without even breaking for lunch—on Facebook, looking at what her college classmates were doing now. She envied the ones with major museum retrospectives almost as much as she envied the ones with little kids or big, almost teenage kids. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, considering her recent decision to stop pursuing a pregnancy, she envied the ones who were knocked up. Did they have to be so show-offy about it? “It’s hard to work when a baby is kicking you behind your belly button!” one of the pregnant women had written the other day. That update had gotten so many likes, and Sally had felt like punching herself in the face. It made her wish she still had easy access to opiates. She hadn’t dosed herself with anything stronger than red wine in years, but reading that status update made her want to inject herself with pure oblivion. Instead, she had eaten a piece of frozen organic cheesecake and looked at Facebook for three more solid hours, as though the bad experience could be obliterated by additional ones, if she could just rack up enough.

So today she’d rolled out of bed, eschewed her felt slip-ons for No. 6 clogs, and headed out the door without even drinking a cup of coffee. She paused in the driveway to say goodbye to Jason. He was heading out for a run, after which he would spend the day happily engrossed, as always, in editing the design magazine that funded their life. He was wearing leggings, his nutsack making a goofy little knot in them that, as she hugged him goodbye, she tweaked gently, mindlessly, the way you’d tuck a stray strand of someone’s hair behind his ear. Then she’d gotten into the car and headed for the city.

There was a dingy Italian pastry shop where she ritualistically made her first stop before she settled down with her laptop somewhere less old-fashioned. She felt a strange obligation to the place, as if she were the only person keeping it in business, though of course elderly Italian people did that. She sat, as usual, at the bakery’s counter and drank a watery espresso and ate a little plate of odd-shaped cookies slowly, counting the bites toward the end, before ordering a box of cannoli to take home, even though Jason never touched them.

If she was extraordinarily lucky, she might run into someone she knew; this happened less and less often, though, and lately it hadn’t happened at all.

With the string-tied box of cannoli swinging in a plastic bag at her side, occasionally banging against her thigh, Sally walked briskly south on Second Avenue. She maneuvered around slower-moving walkers as though she were a car in traffic, crossing the street sometimes in order to avoid waiting at a stoplight. She had nowhere pressing to be, of course, but this somehow made her more determined to keep her pace up.

As she approached the corner of Houston Street and Second Avenue, dimly wondering where she’d go from there, an older couple caught Sally’s eye. A college kid was shrugging at them apologetically as he continued on his way across the street; they’d clearly just asked him for directions. “What are you looking for?” she asked them, unprompted. “St. Mark’s Place,” said the man; he was wearing stylish glasses and had a neatly trimmed white beard. Sally pointed north. “It’s the same thing as Seventh Street,” she offered helpfully. As the couple walked away, she heard the woman saying, “I thought it was the same thing as Eighth Street.”

“I mean Eighth Street! Eighth Street!” Sally shouted after them, unwilling to believe she’d made such a dumb mistake. Even actual tourists knew her old neighborhood better than she did now. She couldn’t believe it had really been almost twenty years since she moved into that second-story loft on Second Avenue. There had been a dress form in one corner, not because Sally ever sewed, but because she loved the way the form looked when she peered up into her own window from across the street. It was like a slightly eerie presence in the loft, beckoning her home.

Now, sometimes a chance errand—or, like today’s, a largely invented one—would lead her close to the building, and if she was in the mood, she’d walk past it. On the sidewalk across the street from her old apartment, attempting to be casual, she’d look up at the window, half expecting to see that headless woman’s shape somehow still there. The current occupants, whoever they were, had installed thick drapes that were always drawn. She wished someone would tear the building down.

The building would inevitably be torn down—so many of the surrounding old tenements and lofts already had been. Someday soon she would walk by and find the weathered brick structure replaced with one of the new black-and-silver towers named Azure, Core, Cerulean, Glaze, Spire. But while the stretches near Houston to the south and Fourteenth Street to the north had already been colonized in this way, her old building still stood, looking almost as it had when she moved in. She hadn’t really appreciated its beauty then. For all the pleasure she took in talking about her first years in New York, she barely remembered any specific moments in time. She remembered sensations, blurrily. The fuzzy, overheated warmth associated with the loft: a daytime feeling. And the neon, adrenalized nighttime feeling she associated with the streets and the bars. Sometimes she would get a hit of that feeling in the oddest places. The quality of light in an airport bar could do it, or the halo around a streetlight illuminating a deserted stretch of sidewalk in her sleepy town upstate.

She had assumed that staid adulthood came for everyone eventually, without exception or much effort—like a bus, if you just waited around for it long enough. It had taken meeting Jason to show her that she was wrong.

Their first night together they hadn’t had sex, just talked endlessly on her pink velveteen couch, amphetamines combining with the natural high of their easy brand-new intimacy to keep them awake till the sunrise turned the cut-glass ashtray they’d been filling into a prism that projected blinding splinters of light onto the wall behind them. A moment came when Jason asked Sally point-blank how she planned to sustain herself in the future. Did she think she would grow old here in this loft, handing her landlord envelopes thick with rubber-banded fives? He forced her to articulate her vision of gala receptions at museums in European capitals, and even on drugs she realized how ridiculous these fantasies sounded. Everything she’d thought of before as a “plan” was revealed to be more of a vague whim, but the weird thing was, she didn’t really mind. It was immediately clear that Jason had a plan. Jason had enough plans for both of them.

He had been six when his family moved to Queens from Seoul, and his earliest memories were of filling paper tubes with coins behind the cash register at the first of his family’s produce markets. Now they owned forty. He’d gone to Harvard and was finishing up a master’s in architecture at Yale, which he talked about as if it were a hobby, a fun diversion from the real work of running his design business. Unlike all of her friends, he was willing to admit that money was necessary, even important. Planning, perseverance, and money: with these, Jason turned what had seemed to Sally like an unpromising one-night stand into a relationship that had, at this point, spanned almost half of Sally’s life.

She remembered the moment of his leaving the loft that morning, after it had become clear that they’d been through too much together, now knew each other too well (and also were too sober, shading into hungover) to have the meaningless sex that had been their flirtation’s initial goal. He had smiled and touched her face after putting on his coat, then held up his palm and showed her the piece of glitter he’d removed from her cheek. “Sorry. That’s been bugging me since about two a.m.,” he said. “You have such soft skin.” After Jason left, she lay down to nap until her shift started that afternoon, but even though she was exhausted, she couldn’t fall asleep. She hadn’t been attracted to him initially, or so she’d thought. Bringing him back to the loft had been almost random; she’d liked their conversation, and he’d seemed so safe, so small and nonthreatening. But his chaste caress had communicated a huge amount of restraint, somehow. What depths of violent passion was Jason restraining? She imagined them and imagined them and then couldn’t nap, and went to work afterward in a daze of exhaustion, compounded by the kind of infatuation that feels a little bit like the flu.

Remembering that she’d once found the idea of sex with Jason mysterious and irresistible made Sally almost giggle now. She still wanted him, of course, but he was so familiar to her; the same person he’d been that night, but also completely different, kind of like the block she was walking down. Every inch of Second Avenue was rife with associations from Sally’s old life in the city; she remembered many aimless afternoons like this one, spent visiting various friends at the cafés and boutiques and bars and video stores where they stood behind counters all day. She remembered how she felt virtuous for distracting them for a few minutes, as though this were some kind of necessary work. Now everyone who worked in these shops and restaurants—indeed, nearly everyone who was walking down the street around Sally—was fifteen years younger than she was.

It was amazing how quickly you went from feeling uncomfortably stared at and catcalled every time you left your house to being functionally invisible. It seemed to have happened on the day Sally turned thirty-five. Or maybe by leaving the city she had broken some spell. Even though there was nothing about her clothing or her demeanor that marked Sally as a visitor, the suspicious natives could sense her foreignness, could maybe smell it. Perhaps it smelled like a humid suburban laundry room, that warm, damp, homey smell you almost never got in the city.

There had been an intermediate time in Sally’s life, before she and Jason had decamped to Margaretville, when she thought she had finally mastered life and was poised on the verge of fame and success, was indeed already a little bit famous and successful. It started after their wedding had been written up in the
Times
, with the headline “Designer and Painter Make Bohemian Living an Art.”

She had decorated Jason’s loft on Great Jones Street in a Day of the Dead theme and worn a Mexican wedding dress that she knew was slightly too transparent to wear without a slip, but she’d foregone the slip anyway, and in the
Times
photograph you could just make out one of her nipples denting the fabric. Jason’s friends included lots of semi-famous painters and playwrights and magazine editors, and in the months after the wedding Sally had devoted herself to entertaining. Jason loved having people over to the loft because it functioned so exquisitely as an advertisement for his design skills; invariably their richer dinner guests would end up hiring him to redo their own spaces in his trademark spare yet distinctive style. Jason’s signature quirks became quirks for many other people. He would tell them what to say about the oddball pieces, whether to claim them as family heirlooms or flea market finds. Sally spent her days shopping for perfect outfits and fresh flowers and occasionally even painting. Her mixed-media canvases—she had begun making them again—hung on the walls of the loft, and she remembered the excitement she’d struggled to conceal beneath a veneer of coolness when a photographer from
Paper
came to photograph her next to one of them. The brilliantly sunny loft with its huge west-facing windows had lent itself so well to photo shoots; she wished there had been more of them. They’d devoted a whole page to her profile, focusing a little bit less on the art than they did on the phenomenon of Sally and Jason’s parties and her interestingly seedy past (she had been candid about the stripping).

The move to the country had seemed like a victory lap: Jason had parlayed his business into the editor-in-chiefdom of an international design magazine, Sally could do her work anywhere, and of course their friends would visit all the time. Their friends would stay for weekends, like in a country-house novel. They’d toyed with the idea of keeping his loft as a pied-à-terre—how Sally wished she’d hung on to the lease at her rent-controlled Second Avenue loft!—but it had grown to be worth so much more than what Jason had bought it for that it seemed ridiculous not to sell. Plus, there were the theoretical eventual children to consider; Sally had her dated
Harriet the Spy
notions about the enriching aspects of city-kid life debunked by Jason, who had spent his formative years in Flushing, yearning to play outdoors while standing behind a cash register. They’d fought about it at the time, but eventually Sally had come to see the wisdom of the move. Now she loved the gentle rhythms of country life. She loved tending the garden, loved working when she felt like it. She had painted, then got bored with painting and got into ceramics, which led to a period during which she had run a small store showcasing work by local artisans for a few years—until it became too depressingly obvious that no one local wanted to buy any of the artisans’ work—and then finally settled into the idea of being a writer. She plugged away at her book every day, and she was confident, on a good day, that something worth showing would eventually come of her efforts. Everyone in her little town asked her how her writing was going; to them, at least, she was a writer. She didn’t miss the sense she had in the city that everyone crowded around her was brimming with shrill, seething ambition. She had long since canceled the subscription to
Paper
.

And now here she was, at the reincarnated café, finally sitting down to write. If she could avoid Facebook and focus, she might be able to make some kind of breakthrough this afternoon. A new energy, or maybe just the two espresso drinks, hummed in her veins. She felt on the verge of some kind of change. She would just quickly check her email and then begin.

Her email contained a message subject-lined “thank you!!!” and it was from Amy, the taller of the two girls who’d house-sat. Really late, but better late than never. With a twinge of embarrassment Sally remembered her wish to be friends with the girls, as though she could befriend a younger version of herself. But as she read Amy’s email, which was several paragraphs long, chatty and conversational about books she’d noticed in the house and full of charming, irrelevant personal details, Sally’s embarrassment faded: it seemed as if Amy, at least, wanted to be her friend, too.