New York for Beginners (21 page)

20

In the free state of Bayern, in the administrative district of Mittelfranken, between nearly endless fields and cow pastures, there is a small village called Herpersdorf with no more than 247 inhabitants. That’s where Zoe Schuhmacher had escaped to. She had moved back into her old childhood bedroom in her parents’ half-timber house. Nothing had changed in Herpersdorf. On the yellow city-limits sign you could still see the “Nuclear power—no, thanks!” sticker that Zoe and her friend Steffi had stuck there after their parents had strictly forbidden them from attending a demonstration in Wackersdorf, where a reprocessing plant for nuclear fuel rods was to be built. On the bookshelf she rediscovered her Hanni & Nanni
collection. And the huge blue stuffed Smurf that her Uncle Peter had won for her at a fair was still sitting on her bed, unworried about anything. Normally, it would have been creepy if nothing noteworthy had happened in a place after ten or fifteen years. But in this case, it was comforting. It made Zoe feel as though nothing bad had happened.

On the way to Herpersdorf, Zoe had thrown her cell phone in the garbage, and with it her American life. Her laptop was sitting in its bag, still packed, downstairs in the hall, and she’d told her parents that she wouldn’t be taking any calls, that she didn’t even want to know who was calling. She was back where she’d started. She’d basically come full circle. It had been a mistake to leave, Zoe was convinced in hindsight. Maybe even a prideful mistake. It had been a mistake to go study in Munich, to work at
Vision
in Berlin, and to go on to New York. It had been a mistake to think that the world out there was hers. It was certainly more colorful than it was here—more alive, and with more possibilities for growth. But it wasn’t hers.

“Don’t you at least want to talk about it?” her father asked at breakfast for the fourteenth time in two weeks, while Zoe stirred her granola morosely.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“At least an outline of what happened?”

“All right, fine,” she snapped. “Let’s get this over with: My new boss was a crazy person who treated his team like slaves. And the man I thought I was in love with unfortunately forgot to tell me he was married. The journalist Zoe Schuhmacher, who was nominated for the German Women’s Journalism Prize for her online feature about heartbroken mistresses, was a heartbroken mistress herself.”

Zoe’s father was silent. Zoe recognized that old trick from job interviews and doctors’ conversations with patients. It was supposed to make the other person talk. It almost always worked.

“The thing in New York, that wasn’t me. I’m not a debutante who will be introduced to high society at a ball, and I won’t be kept as a mistress in a million-dollar loft.”

Zoe’s father remained silent, but then her mother chimed in, destroying his tactics.

“Well, I’m glad to have you back here. I never understood what you thought was so great about America anyway.”

Zoe’s father gave her mother a cautionary look. She stopped talking but looked sulky about it.

“That’s the short version,” Zoe added. “There’s nothing to analyze or interpret. And this is the last time I’m ever going to talk about it.”

On
Sex and the City,
Carrie Bradshaw once said that it was hard to stand certain places, and even certain times of day, after a breakup. Every street became riddled with emotional landmines. Again, Carrie was so right. Zoe couldn’t remember if she had said anything to Vicky Fiorino under the Chrysler Building’s awning. But she knew that she’d hailed the next yellow cab and told the driver: “To the airport—JFK, not La Guardia.” Then she’d called Eros and asked him to get her passport from her apartment and to send it by messenger to the Lufthansa desk at Terminal One. She’d lied to him, telling him it was a family emergency so he wouldn’t ask any questions. After that, she’d booked a one-way ticket to Nuremberg via Munich. She had wondered for a moment if she should fly back to Berlin. But there were too many people there who knew her. One of them was Benni.

In that moment under the awning, when Tom’s wife—whose existence he’d never mentioned—stood there in front of her, Zoe’s world had collapsed. She had trusted New York to give her a fresh start. She had trusted Tom. Hadn’t she even called him a good guy at some point? How naive of her. How stupid. Why would someone who had made a career as a heartbreaker suddenly change? Even though he’d acted like he
had
changed for a few weeks. “
All my relationships end in chaos, Zoe. You don’t deserve that.”
Hadn’t he used exactly those words? What a dreadful trick!

Basically, Thomas Prescott Fiorino had only been using her. Zoe realized that in the cab to the airport. He was just like all those other men in her mistresses feature who kept their second, third, and fourth wives all over the world—and used them at their leisure. Had he really believed that she wouldn’t find out after they were living together? How did men manage to maintain several parallel relationships? Even on a purely logistical level it would be hard enough, but what about emotionally? Zoe thought it was all just too disgusting.

Later, on the plane, she had neither cried nor shaken, and she hadn’t fainted either. She just suffered nondescript physical pain. Love really was more of a drug than a feeling, she had thought in that moment. And she was obviously going through withdrawal.

In those hours, Zoe had switched to autopilot; her brain systematically checked off a to-do list to take her away from the crime scene as quickly as possible. She had ignored Tom’s texts and calls and had thrown her phone in the trash can at Gate 7 before boarding. Zoe had expected to feel a little bit less bad with every mile the airbus carried her away from the US. But in those six hours over the Atlantic Ocean, if her pain was being measured on a scale from 1 to 100, she would say that it had declined from a 100 to perhaps a 99.8.

Zoe’s best childhood friend, Steffi, was already waiting on her doorstep when Zoe went over to see her. Steffi was holding her baby, Lukas, who must be about three months old. Her daughter, Leonie, was obviously still at school—probably in the third or fourth grade by now. Steffi and Zoe had lived next door to each other and had gone to the same kindergarten and elementary school. Steffi had owned a Barbie swimming pool, and Zoe had a Barbie camper van. The two of them had, of course, ridden the exact same white three-speed bicycles with little pink baskets on the handlebars—the way best friends did.

“I’m so happy you’re here, Zoe,” Steffi cried as Zoe entered the garden gate. “You’re looking good.”

“Oh, come on,” Zoe answered, because she knew perfectly well that her mother had already briefed Steffi on her brokenhearted daughter. Everyone in the village was probably talking about it. But that was the way villagers were. When the prodigal daughter returned and wouldn’t leave the house for days, they were bound to whisper.

Steffi went ahead into the kitchen and put the almost-asleep Lukas in a baby carrier. She had already put some water on to boil. A box of herbal tea with a woman seated in the lotus position pictured on the front stood next to two porcelain teacups. The woman on the package looked so relaxed that Zoe wanted to punch her in the face.

“How are you?” Steffi asked cautiously.

Well, how was she? Zoe would have been happy to know that herself. “I feel kind of empty.” She couldn’t think of anything better to say.

They remained silent. It wasn’t an unpleasant silence, but it wasn’t a pleasant one either. Back when they were fifteen years old, Steffi would have said something like: “I know just how you feel.” Zoe would have felt better immediately, knowing there was somebody who 100,000-percent understood her. Today, at thirty-four, it was different. Not just because they had grown older and because life had turned out to be multifaceted and full of traps, but also because Steffi was living the exact same life that Zoe would be living now if she’d stayed at home in Herpersdorf and hadn’t gone to Munich to study, to work in Berlin, and to make her career in New York. Steffi was living in a parallel universe, basically. Steffi was Zoe’s mirror image and alter ego in one. Steffi’s life couldn’t have been further from Zoe’s, but in a way it was still so close.

After school, Steffi had done a banking apprenticeship in nearby Ansbach and married her high school sweetheart Andreas at twenty-five. For a wedding present, her parents had given her the lot next to theirs. Steffi and Andreas built a house and had two children. Back then Zoe had thought a life like that was straightforward, boring, and completely unexotic, but now she envied Steffi’s life. It was an honest life, a beautiful life. It was one that might have fewer ups and downs, but it also had more security. Steffi was one of those new moms who took their babies to Mommy and Me classes. She cooked and pureed her own baby food instead of buying the stuff in jars and spent her vacations with her husband and offspring in certified family hotels that used cute little smileys instead of stars for their ratings. Steffi had given up her job at the Ansbach bank and become a stay-at-home mom because she felt she owed it to her children. She herself had grown up as a latchkey kid and always had to make do alone at home after school. Of course Steffi and Andreas fought occasionally, mostly about his guys’ night at the local pub with his soccer buddies, which was more sacred to him than Christmas and Easter put together. And of course they fought about whether they could afford a third child. (Or about whether they wanted one, as Steffi interpreted it.)

All in all, it was a completely normal life. One that Zoe could’ve had, too.

Steffi poured the tea, put the annoying lotus-position lady back in the pantry, and set a bowl of undoubtedly fair-trade organic cane sugar on the table.

“Thoughts keep going around and around in my head like they’re on an endless carousel,” Zoe tried to explain. “I keep trying to find the point in time when I should have put on the brakes. When I should have realized that I was part of some awful movie plot.”

“You can’t expect that of yourself,” Steffi objected. “Things are always clearer in retrospect.”

“If only it were that way. If only I knew better now. But I don’t. Not in the slightest. I’m still utterly confused.”

“And what are you going to do now?” Steffi asked worriedly.

“I really don’t want to go back to Berlin. Benni’s there.
Vision
is there. I don’t want anything to do with any of that anymore. I’m tired of the big, wide world. It’s all artificial glitter. I have an interview at the local Ansbach newspaper this weekend. The editor-in-chief is one of my parents’ bowling buddies—do you remember?”

Steffi nodded.