New York for Beginners (6 page)

She left and walked around the corner to Café Gitane, where she was seated at a table at the very back under an antique railway station clock. She ordered a hibiscus iced tea and a yellow-fin tuna ceviche from a waitress with a cute ski-jump nose and an Audrey Tatou haircut. She let herself sink back in the chair with a sigh. Zoe Schuhmacher didn’t feel like seeing the rest of Broadway today. She felt as though she’d finally arrived in New York.

Zoe pulled her laptop out of her backpack. She scrolled through her blog posts and then started typing again.

People who come to New York are people who want to change. Almost all New Yorkers come from somewhere else; hardly anyone is actually from here. That’s probably why it’s so easy to feel at home here, because no one actually is at home. This city seems to have a place for anyone and everything. For the poor and the rich, for the hip and the hopeless. New York is a promise for the future.

She clicked on “Post.” The first comments came almost immediately.

“Beautifully said,” wrote Stylebitch2000.

“Good luck to you! XOXO!” Miriam P. replied.

“There really is one city for everyone, just as there is one major love,” Al wrote.

Typical Allegra,
Zoe thought. Of course Al was following her best friend’s live blog on her first day in New York. Zoe answered, “And I, dear Al, am completely convinced at this moment that New York is my city.”

5

The Chrysler Building, the third-highest building in the city, stood on Lexington Avenue, not far from Grand Central Station. Zoe tipped back her head as far as it would go and looked up to see the top. Stainless steel gargoyles that had been inspired by the shapes of hubcaps, fenders, and hood ornaments decorated the facade. Even the building’s spire, glittering silver in the sun, was constructed of stainless steel.
At night, it must shine like the star on a Christmas tree,
Zoe thought. To Zoe, the Chrysler Building was the most beautiful skyscraper in the entire city, and now she was going to work there.

For days, she had been mentally assembling her outfit for her first day in the new office. She decided on the “boyfriend look” that was extremely popular in Berlin, with loose Rag & Bone jeans, a tight T-shirt under a men’s blazer, and lemon-yellow Sigerson Morrison pumps.
Most men probably wouldn’t waste a fraction of a second wondering what their new colleagues would be wearing,
Zoe thought, amused, as she got in the elevator and watched the numbers rush past on the display.

When she reached the twenty-ninth floor, Zoe was greeted by an ass. Directly behind the door in the entry area, a creature in a tight, high-slit pencil skirt was bent forward in front of a full-length mirror, fluffing up her wavy-blonde mane. Zoe paused with irritation and stared at two firm buttocks, which a male visitor would certainly have appreciated more.

“Hi, I’m Madison,” the creature said. It seemed she could actually stand upright. A bit
too
upright for Zoe’s taste. Her nonexistent tummy was sucked in, and her very existent breasts stuck out. It looked as though she was fighting against her center of gravity.

She escorted Zoe into the main room. “Darlings, this must be Zoe Schuhmacher, the new . . . yeah, what is she, actually? . . . digital thing. Be nice to her.”

Digital thing?! Be nice to her?!
Zoe would have been happy to strangle this woman.

Zoe looked around. It was the beginning of August. Summer vacation. Most of the chairs were empty. The few of her new colleagues who were in their silly American cardboard cubicles didn’t look that different from her old colleagues in Berlin. Most of them, with their size-zero figures, looked a bit too anorexic for Zoe’s taste. They had Bergdorf-blonde hair and London faces. Zoe had learned that meant they had their hair dyed at the luxury salon at Bergdorf Goodman. Apparently only Bergdorf could conjure up the preferred shade of blonde that was popular on the Upper East Side. And a London face was seemingly makeup-free apart from the lips, which were carefully painted in fire-engine red. A London face in New York—welcome to the globalized world.

“Hello,” Zoe said to her new colleagues. “I’m the new Senior Vice President of Creative Digital Solutions.”

“That’s what I said,” the poisonous blonde answered. She pointed across the room with a manicured finger. “You get the corner office over there. Come on, I’ll show it to you.”

Obviously, Zoe had been upgraded in her career from the longhouse of the masses to the personal tepee of the second-in-command—a tepee that came with a sofa and potted plants, as was certainly stated somewhere in a set of office infrastructure regulations. There was a cardboard box on the desk with her new business cards. Blondie sat down uninvited, with one buttock on Zoe’s new desk, her legs crossed casually.

“Now tell me how someone like
you
managed to snag
this
job,” she whispered in a sweet, conspiratorial tone, as though she must have known Zoe since her Barbie-doll days, at least. “You’re
very
well acquainted with corporate management, aren’t you?”

The question was either totally brazen or completely stupid. “We have a lot of respect for each other,” Zoe answered as neutrally as possible. The bitch could think what she wanted. She would anyway.

“Well, that can’t possibly be the only thing behind it.”

“That, and the fact that I’m damn good at what I do,” Zoe shot back.

“Ah,” Madison replied. That variant of the story obviously hadn’t occurred to her. “And what exactly do you do here?”

“First I’m going to scout around a little,” Zoe explained patiently. “I’ll visit other media ventures to learn more about their digital strategies and how they imagine earning money from them. This afternoon, for example, I’ll be visiting
The New York Times
. Besides that I’ll be writing my column for StyleChicks. And we want to add verticals for new themes. The arts, for example. And relationships.”

“Yeah, yeah, the brave new world,” Madison chirped. Obviously it was too much information for her to process all at once. She lifted her butt off of Zoe’s desk and disappeared through the office door.

Zoe glanced at her on her way out and made a quick mental note:
Not to be trusted.
Then she turned on the computer. She was overcome with an irrational hope that she had received an email from McNeighbor. Of course that was impossible, because he didn’t even have her email address. Yesterday evening, after her Broadway expedition, she had thought she’d heard sounds coming from 47A. Music, and something that sounded like dishes clattering while setting a table or emptying a dishwasher. Ear pressed to her apartment door, she had listened quietly and even held her breath—until she had gotten dizzy and started to feel extremely silly. She was acting like a twelve-year-old who’d fallen in love for the first time. But when she heard sounds again in the morning she couldn’t help but play spy a second time. She looked out her peephole to see who was walking down the hall. She only saw a maintenance man and a woman in yoga clothes, distorted through the lens, looking wider than tall.

Zoe asked herself what the unwritten rules of a “friends with benefits” relationship were. Were they determined in bilateral discussions, or did they simply exist? After ten years with the Big Nice Nothing, she was woefully out of practice. And besides, what were the dating habits of New Yorkers, anyway?

The legendary New York Times Living Room was on the twenty-eighth floor of the new building on 8th Avenue. This was Zoe’s first meeting for her new job. At reception in the ground-floor lobby, Zoe had to show identification and be photographed for her visitor’s pass. She was told that she wasn’t allowed to go to the Research and Development department alone. She had to wait until her host, Alex Sontheim, who held the impressive title Chief Technology Strategist, came to pick her up. Zoe observed the people who were streaming toward the eight elevators: a few stiff-looking suit-wearers who looked like they were from the legal department; a disheveled man in an unironed shirt with hair like Albert Einstein (probably a serious writer who’d proven his value long ago and didn’t need to impress anyone anymore); and a kid in jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and white sport socks with sandals. Under any other circumstances, he could have passed for a newspaper boy.

“Hi, Alex!” Zoe walked toward him with her hand outstretched.

“You must be Zoe,” he answered a little hesitantly, obviously wondering how she had recognized him.

“We don’t know each other. You just look like someone who works in R&D,” she said.

Alex laughed. Then he stuck his card in the elevator security device and brought her directly to the twenty-eighth floor, without stopping. Screens installed all along the walls of the hallway showed news being broadcast all over the world.

“Welcome to the New York Times Living Room,” Alex said, after they’d passed through security at the end of the hall. The R&D department really did look almost like an apartment. Aside from a few desks, there were leather sofas, an open kitchen, flat screens on the walls, and various tables upon which sat laptops, Kindles, Nooks, Nexus tablets, and iPads of every generation. It sort of looked like Mark Zuckerberg had moved into the showroom of an upscale furniture store.

Zoe and Alex stopped at a kitchen table whose top was actually a huge flat screen. The display featured different categories of news symbolized by virtual stacks of newspaper clippings. One was politics, another was culture. And there was a huge stack for various social networks, as though someone had ordered the categories according to their own interests.

Alex explained the idea of “information shadows” that surrounded people who were active on the Internet. “We believe there aren’t individual information categories anymore. People don’t consume news in a planned window of time anymore, like reading the paper in the morning on the subway or sitting in front of the television in the evening. News is everywhere. It’s available at any time of day on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and NYTimes.com. That’s why it needs to be consumed differently.”

“And readers aren’t just passive anymore, they generate news themselves.” Zoe added.

“Exactly. The breakfast table is a classic place for communication, but in the future the communication will be multimedia-based.”

Alex led her into the bathroom, in front of a mirror in which Zoe could see her reflection from the waist up. Alex pressed a button, and the mirror lit up like a television. Zoe saw a miniature version of the kitchen table and its contents on the left side of the mirror, and a miniature closet on the right, which was activated by voice command. Upon request, a virtual clothes rack slid forward to display its contents.

“Flowered blouse,” Alex commanded. Three blouses in different colors appeared. Alex touched the one in the middle. It suddenly filled almost the entire mirror, and then positioned itself exactly over Zoe’s reflection.

“Fantastic!” Zoe said. “So I can try on clothes without even removing them from my closet, and read the news at the same time.”

“Or dictate emails, or check the weather.”

“Isn’t this all a bit
Jetsons
? And why is
The New York Times
interested in my closet, anyway?”

“Because we’re interested in how you’ll live in the future, and how
The New York Times
will fit into your life.”

Two hours later, Zoe left the building from the
41st Street exit and walked toward Times Square. She was deeply impressed at how forward-looking
The
Times’s
strategy was. It was ironic that the paper’s nickname was the Gray Lady.

Zoe turned right at Times Square and had to keep zigzagging around groups of tourists staring with their mouths hanging open at the giant advertising screens. Zoe was looking for a specific little red food truck. It was only four in the afternoon, but her stomach was still set on German time and telling her that it was long past dinnertime. A long line stretched out in front of the Rickshaw Dumpling Bar. Allegra had told her that they had the best Asian dumplings west of China. Zoe studied the handwritten menu on the side of the little snack bar on wheels. “Nice Dumplings” was written in large letters across the top. There were pork dumplings with Chinese leek, chicken dumplings with Thai basil, and edamame dumplings with lemon-sansho dip. As a side dish, you could have sesame-noodle salad with chili.
One of everything, please
, she thought, but then decided to go for the vegetarian option. Two creatively dressed girls were standing in front of her in line. One was wearing an extra-large varsity jacket with hot pink chinos. The other wore a light-blue men’s shirt and striped seersucker pants with neon-yellow wedge shoes. Zoe reached for her phone. She had to post to StyleChicks again this evening.

“Hey, you two look really great,” she said to the girls. “Can I take your picture for my fashion blog?”

“Yeah, sure,” one answered happily before striking a pose.

“What’s your blog called?” the other wanted to know.

“StyleChicks,” Zoe said, and took a few snapshots. “We’re the most successful German fashion website. What’s your name, where are you from, and what are you wearing?”

Zoe held up her phone to record their answers.

The girl in stripes said, “My name is Hanneli, I live in Brooklyn and study at FIT. I’m wearing a men’s shirt by Pink, and pants from the flea market.”

“And my name is Valentina. I live on the Lower East Side and go to FIT, too. I’m wearing a Lacoste jacket with J. Crew pants. And a Jil Sander beanie.”

“Oh, and my shoes are Marc Jacobs,” Hanneli added. “Marc by Marc Jacobs.”

Then all three of them ordered edamame dumplings.