New York for Beginners (2 page)

“Why are you spelling that out?”

“I don’t know. Probably because I’m so angry at him. And at you. You obviously still love him.”

“That’s ridiculous! Why would you say that? I spread a pound of garden cress seeds on the designer rug that his darling mother gave him for Christmas and watered it carefully until it sprouted. I moved out of our apartment while he was on a business trip. Jesus, I’m moving to another continent without telling him!”

“That was all a reaction to what he did. Under the circumstances, you probably could have gotten away with murder.”

“Do you really think so?”

“What? That you could get away with murder, or that you love him?”

“That I love him.”

“Yes, I really mean it. You still love that wimpy guy who stays in his airplane seat until the seat belt light goes off.”

“I do not,” Zoe said. She stared down at her glass.

“You do, too! I’ll explain it again since you’re a little slow today. Your darling Benni wants a relationship, but only one that’s easy for him. He wants a royal rose garden without having to water it. He wants a Labradoodle, or whatever those silly dogs are called that are so fashionable right now. The ones that don’t eat or shit or need to be walked. He wants kids, but not now, just someday. He wants them delivered sleeping through the night, quiet, and potty trained, and he certainly doesn’t want them living permanently with him in his designer apartment. Your darling Benni doesn’t want any responsibilities, my dear. He only wants one thing: the possibility to wait and see. He’s completely terrified of conflict or risk. He’s a wimp. When are you going to see that?”

“I’d rather have a wimp than some asshole in a three-piece suit in the Lufthansa Senator Lounge whose ringtone is the theme from
Jaws
.”

“Of course you don’t want some discontinued eighties model who can’t tell his own kids apart. But there has to be something between Mister Cuddles and a great white shark.”

“There must be,” Zoe said. She drank the rest of her champagne in one gulp.

They made their way to the security line. Zoe hugged her friend tightly. “I’m going to miss you, Al.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll come visit you in the Big Apple very soon.”

2

When the plane landed for her layover in Frankfurt, Zoe made the trek to Gate C16, where an Airbus A380 was waiting for her. Even boarding the new megaplane was special. As over five hundred economy passengers entered through several gates, depending on where they would be seated, Zoe and the other business-class passengers went up the stairs to the upper level. So far, so posh. It was a typical business-class cabin: wide, comfortable seats, thick blankets, and generous storage space. But with almost a hundred travelers in the cabin, it somehow didn’t feel quite so special—despite the fact that the ticket cost around four thousand euros.

This bird is just too big for me
, Zoe thought. But as she tugged on the complimentary dark-blue Lufthansa socks, she realized with glee that there were cosmetic samples from Clarins in the goodie bag.

Since being promoted to editor-in-chief of
Vision
, Germany’s leading fashion magazine, Zoe belonged to the so-called inner circle of Schoenhoff Publishing. That meant she got a company car (an Audi A3), business-class seating (but only for flights over six hours), and half a secretary. The other half belonged to the chief copyeditor. In the meantime, Zoe had managed to collect enough miles for a Senator Card. She had been to Fashion Week in London, the Hong Kong Chanel store opening with Karl Lagerfeld, photo shoots in Cape Town, plus her weekly trips to meet advertising clients and media agencies in Munich. The list was endless. However, Zoe had never been to New York. She only knew it from what she’d seen on
Sex and the City
, and that was quite a lot, she thought. Normally, only her boss flew to New York. But her boss was Allegra Sollani, her best friend, so Zoe couldn’t exactly complain about it. And anyway, Zoe considered herself more of an Asia fan.

Since the seat next to her was free, she had a clear view of her fellow travelers. There were two men in suits with gelled-back hair, iPhones and iPads, and super-thin MacBook Air laptops that bore stickers with the inscription “Berg & Partner Consulting.” They commented loudly and pitilessly on every passenger that walked down the aisle, making a game out of trying to guess their professions.

“Chairman of the board for a tire manufacturer,” Consultant Number One said in a stage whisper.

“No, head unionist for VW, traveling by air for a change,” Consultant Number Two insisted, trying to one-up his colleague.

“Ex–front man for a nineties boy band with a cocaine problem.”

“Daytime-TV actress who’s just had the fat sucked out of her ass, on her last shopping trip before appearing on
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!
”

Then they lost interest in their little game. Consultant Number One yawned widely and stretched his long limbs into the expensive extra legroom, while Consultant Number Two complained. “It’s so much more fun in a smaller plane when the poor cattle-class bastards have to run the gauntlet through business class.”

Zoe shuddered in disgust as she turned toward the window. “Men, asshole category, generation 2.0,” she murmured.

After the three-course meal that always seemed pleasantly long when one was flying west and had daylight but was always annoying on the trip back to the east, Zoe fell asleep. Revenge was exhausting.

Two hours before landing, the flight attendant draped a white cloth over the unfolded, empty table next to her, and Zoe woke up. She had slept through three-quarters of the flight into her new life.

My new life
, Zoe thought as she stretched. She was almost tempted to spell it out, L-I-F-E, like Allegra had this morning. This was a big step for her, to finally be independent from the undead Benjamin Nikolaus Nigmann. And after a total of nine years working as a journalist for fashion magazines, three of which were spent as the editor-in-chief of
Vision
, Zoe had started to develop a “been there, done that” attitude. Somehow all the ideas for articles seemed the same: “Orgasms: Faked or Fact?”; “Blood Red for Nails and Lips!”; or “Angelina Jolie: Now I Know What I Want from Love.” Recently she couldn’t shake the feeling that the headlines she had created for the latest
Vision
cover were identical to those she’d written seven years ago.

She had an increasingly nagging feeling that she needed to do something new. Something she had a serious passion for. Something with substance. But what? Open a yoga school in Ibiza to bring peace to others? Be an animal-rights activist in the African bush? Start a carbon-neutral organic-frozen-yogurt chain that served flavors like green tea, lavender, and chocolate rice pudding?

Even Allegra had noticed Zoe’s discontentment. “You need a new playground, sweetie,” she had remarked when Zoe didn’t want to move on to another division of Schoenhoff Publishing. But Zoe knew that wouldn’t have helped, either.

Then Zoe had a brilliant idea.

After Benni had quit his graduate literature program, he’d become more and more interested in software programming—or
coding
, as insiders called it. He encouraged Zoe to start a fashion blog for
Vision
. StyleChicks by
Vision
had mutated into a successful fashion and shopping platform. Management became aware of Zoe’s talent and sent her to a crash course in new media, where she learned all about search-engine optimization, keyword campaigns, and monetization through partner businesses. To be precise, she learned a lot of stuff that no normal person had a clue about. Afterward, she interned at the French branch of
The Huffington Post
in Paris, at Net-à-Porter in London, and at the Etsy offices in Berlin. When she returned to Schoenhoff, Zoe developed a new-media concept for all of their fashion magazines. A little later, management offered her a very lucrative job with the clever-sounding title of Senior Vice President of Creative Digital Solutions. Location: New York.

She declined.

Zoe’s declining was also a man’s fault, like pretty much everything else meaningful in her life. Benni, whose third start-up was about to crash due to lack of funds, couldn’t decide again. Berlin or New York? Germany or the US? Pills or poison? In the end, he decided not to decide. Which meant staying in Berlin. So Zoe stayed in Berlin, too.

In retrospect, one could rationalize and justify any decision.

“Berlin is simply a much nicer place to live,” she explained to Allegra, who only rolled her eyes. “It’s not as dirty, loud, or full of Americans.”

She had faithfully echoed Benni’s opinions until exactly a week later, when his “first true love” had made her debut on the stage of Zoe’s life.

The Airbus A380 descended quietly and gracefully over Long Island. Zoe could see the wide sand beaches and the villas of the rich and beautiful people in the dunes behind them. The Hamptons. A few moments later, the huge plane glided over a more densely populated area, broken up here and there by a golf course or a green area stuck between two highways that was supposed to be a public park. Then the Airbus extended its landing gear and touched the runway with surprising delicacy. After disembarking, Zoe followed the other passengers to passport control at John F. Kennedy Airport.

JFK.
How powerful that sounded. And sexy. Like the Mafia and Marilyn Monroe, like Thanksgiving in Hyannis Port. The Germans should have thought twice before they named Munich’s international airport after old Franz Josef Strauss, a former Bavarian prime minister. FJS just didn’t have the same ring to it.

A loud American voice wakened Zoe from her musings.

“American citizens and green card holders to the left,” a uniformed security guard was saying every thirty seconds or so. The real Americans glided through nonexistent lines, and the tourists were waved into a column at least five hundred strong. “Visitors with ESTA or visas to the right.”

Well, that’s a nice welcome
, Zoe thought as she waited. And waited. When she finally reached the immigration officer’s counter, she laid down her passport and customs form.

“You have a work visa?” the immigration officer asked without looking up.

“Yes, sir.” Zoe answered. “I have a journalist visa.”

“Right thumb on the scanner, please, and then the rest of the hand,” he ordered. He took her fingerprints. Then she was photographed.

Zoe felt like a dangerous criminal—like the most illegal immigrant of all—even though no immigrant could be more legal than she was. It had cost her at least three hours of her life to fill in the twenty-page online application for her US visa. The American immigration office knew more intimate details about her than her mother, her employer, and her doctor put together. Yes, she was single, and no, she didn’t have AIDS or tuberculosis, or any other contagious diseases. She didn’t belong to any terrorist organizations and did not intend to execute any terrorist attacks during her visit. She had never been arrested, and had never broken the Hague Convention or taken a kidnapped child out of the country. She couldn’t offer any Nazis sympathy, either. From now on she would earn a yearly salary of $180,000 from Schoenhoff Publishing USA, Inc., and in her new New York tax bracket she would immediately have to give up 38 percent of it. Her father was born in Nuremberg on the fifth of December, 1955, and was a practicing doctor. His address and telephone number were requested. The application form went on like that, endlessly.

They might as well ask me when I had my last period
, Zoe had thought while filling it out.

“Left thumb, then the rest of the left hand,” the officer said.

But the online forms weren’t nearly the end of it. Afterward, Zoe had to have an interview at a US consulate. She had decided on the Frankfurt consulate, thinking it would be less crowded than the one in Berlin, and she had made the first possible appointment, at 8:40 in the morning. The result was that she had to stand in the pouring rain with about thirty other people in a line in front of the consulate building. Thirty wet minutes later, she was allowed to go through security (No cell phones! No keys! No umbrellas!). Then she had to take a number and sit in a waiting room with the other thirty people who obviously also had appointments at 8:40 with the only available consular officer. During the “interview,” which took place more than an hour and a half later, she only had to hand over the filled-in forms (which she had already submitted online) by sliding them under a bulletproof glass window. Zoe had never been in East Germany when it was still the German Democratic Republic, but she imagined that the bureaucracy back then must have worked the same way. And the results had been clear to see when the Berlin Wall had come down . . .

“And what exactly is your profession?” the JFK immigration officer asked.

“I’m the new Senior Vice President of Creative Digital Solutions for Schoenhoff Publishing.”

“What’s that all about?” he wanted to know. He looked up from his computer keyboard for the first time and assessed Zoe intensely, as though he’d just discovered a new species.

“I’m supposed to seamlessly integrate the new media with the old. Blogging, social networking, archiving.”

“And that’s called journalism these days?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“Absolutely!” Zoe answered.

“Well, what do you know,” he said, shaking his head. He stamped her passport and waved her through. “Welcome to the United States!”

She smiled politely as a precautionary measure. It wasn’t generally a good idea to question the opinion of anyone in uniform. Then she walked toward baggage claim as fast as she could without actually running. She wanted to get there before Mr. “Welcome to the United States” could change his mind. She heaved both her suitcases from the baggage carousel, thinking they must be dizzy from riding around in circles for hours. Then she went through customs and another security area, and finally made it to the arrivals hall.

“Get ready to step out of your comfort zone and dare to be foolish,” Allegra had said, offering a pearl of wisdom when Zoe announced her intention to come to New York. And that’s exactly what Zoe planned to do with her future.