Re Jane (29 page)

“Do you guys just, like, have nothing better to do than talk about us behind our backs?” she said.

I faltered. Devon slumped in her seat and scowled.

I tried once more with Devon during dinner. I thought back to those early days at Gino's, when she'd look up at me not with anger but with an open friendliness. Except that was
before
. “I was thinking. What if you, me, Nina, and Alla went on one of our double dates? Maybe back to Gino's?”

Devon chewed and swallowed slowly, as if she were digesting my words along with the cassoulet. She took a big sip from her glass of milk. She wiped her mouth. She seemed to relish how uncomfortable her silence was making me. Finally she spoke.

“Could you please pass the pepper?” Those were the last words Devon said to me for the rest of the night.

* * *

When dinner was finally over, Ed offered to give us both rides home. We piled into the car. “But, Dad, why are you dropping
me
off first?” she asked. “You should be dropping
Jane,
in
Flushing.
”

“Oh . . .” Ed said. I was sitting beside him in the passenger seat, sensing that familiar blush bloom over his face and neck. He mumbled something about westbound traffic not being so bad on the BQE, then drowned out his own words by turning up the volume on the radio.

“But, Dad, it doesn't make
sense,
” Devon called out from the backseat.

Suddenly Ed's tone grew stern. “You really want to have this conversation right now?” It was the same tone he had used on me when I'd first started working for him. Devon mumbled no. We drove the rest of the way in silence, the slow chatter of WNYC in the background.

As we traveled westbound on the BQE, the downtown skyline rose before us. It looked nothing like the skyline I'd stared out at with Ed on the promenade. The negative space of the night sky looked so bare without the Twin Towers.

We pulled up to 646 Thorn Street. Devon had been in such a sour mood during dinner that I expected her to fly out of the car and into her house. But she trudged up the stairs slowly, as if she dreaded what awaited her there. There was a rustling in the bay window. And there Beth stood, the light streaming out from behind her. Her eyes fell on me, and I instantly shrank into my seat. Did she know? They shifted from me to her ex-husband, before falling back on me. Then she lifted her arm, as if to wave, but instead yanked the curtains, closing them firmly shut. Darkness resumed.

We drove on, to Flushing. Whatever static had been tingling between us earlier that evening had dissipated after Devon's arrival. I directed Ed to Gates Street, but with much reluctance. When we pulled up to the house, I did not want the evening to end like this. Not on this note.

“I'm really sorry about Devon,” Ed said. “She's just going through a phase.”

“She's right to be upset, after what I did. Then I pulled a runner on her”—I bit my lip—“and on you.” A wave of emotion threatened to overtake me, and I bit my lip again to quiet the flood. “I'm so sorry.”

Ed's hand waved through the air, dismissing the matter. “You shouldn't be. I put you in an awkward position. I should be the one apologizing.”

“Please don't think”—my voice caught—“that it didn't mean anything to me. That wasn't why I left. It actually meant . . . a lot to me. It still means a lot to me.” My words felt clumsy, but I couldn't leave the car without telling Ed how I felt.

The streetlights cast a shadow across his face, but it remained unreadable. It was presumptuous to assume that Ed felt the same way. I took his silence as his answer; my fingers fumbled for the door handle.

Suddenly Ed's hand shot out, pulling mine from the door. “Jane. Don't you ever leave,” he said with feeling. “I couldn't bear it again.”

His grasp was so warm!—it pulsed with life. I did not dare let go.

W
hen Nina called to say she knew of a great two-bedroom for us, I didn't think she'd meant in
Queens.
Nina was at best ambivalent about the borough, just as I'd once been ambivalent about Brooklyn. When we agreed to find a place together, we'd both initially hoped to live in Manhattan—only to find that our collective rental power priced us out of the city entirely.

“It's a ginormous floor-through unit. The rent's way below market value,” Nina said, giving me her Realtor's pitch. “Super-safe neighborhood. Laundry in the basement. Grocery store down the block. A short walk to the N. Minutes to the East Side.” I worked in the East Fifties, and Nina's office was on the Upper East Side. “Oh, and my great-uncle owns the building,” she added. “My cousin Rosie's been living there the last ten years, but she just up and left for Sicily to ‘find herself' or whatever.”

Queens.
The very borough I'd been plotting to escape my whole life. I thought about the path I was
supposed
to take, the one I'd charted out with decision trees and spreadsheets. Wall Street seemed a far cry away, like a whisper from someone else's dream.

Nina took my silence for reluctance. “Look, I'm not sold on Astoria either. It's just a bunch of Greek joints. But it's supposedly up-and-coming. Some craft-beer bar's opening up on Thirtieth Avenue. Or was it Thirtieth Street? I don't know—the neighborhood doesn't make sense to me yet.” Somewhere along the way, Nina had turned into a beer snob. “Maybe it's only a matter of time before Astoria becomes the shit-show going on over here.”

She had regaled me with stories of the changes to Carroll Gardens. For one, our beloved Gino's was now a fair-trade coffee shop with free Wi-Fi. New tenants were renting the ground-floor apartment of her family's brownstone. Nina described them as “Beth types. Enough said.”

With our starting salaries, neither of us was in a position to be choosy. And that was how we came to live in Astoria—a short ride from Flushing, and Food, and Sang.

* * *

The building at 917 Helen Street was a wood-and-brick three-family house on a residential stretch between Thirtieth and Thirty-first Avenues, sitting in a row of other three-family houses, all attached. You could hear the rumble of the N train overhead from a few streets away. It had a little porch out front and a Tudor roof whose sharp peak stretched to the sky. This was quintessential western Queens architecture.

What came with our cheap rent were caretaking duties: Collecting the trash and putting it out on the curb (we would have had to sort the recycling, too, but the city had temporarily put the kibosh on that). Vacuuming the staircases and sweeping the front porch. Shoveling the snow from the sidewalk and putting down salt. The tenants filtered their problems through us before we passed them on to Nina's great-uncle, who had retired a few years ago to Florida.

After Nina and I moved in, we became aware of the apartment's many . . . idiosyncrasies. Every now and again, the plumbing would gurgle and the hot water would suddenly run cold. Sometimes there'd be a blockage in the drainpipe. We'd call a plumber, and Nina would insist on shadowing him, the two of them crouched on their haunches, as plumbers are wont to do. I could sense Nina trying not to bother him with questions, yet she watched intently all the same. It helped that she was cute; the plumbers never seemed to mind Nina's hovering. “This is such a racket,” she'd say after she paid the bill and forwarded it to her great-uncle. “All he did was stick a snake down the pipe and yank a few times. Pulling up
your
hair balls, Jane.” (“Sorry,”
I'd mutter. Nina was always on my case about monitoring the shower strainer.)

Suddenly how-to manuals from Home Depot littered our hand-me-down kitchen table—a raw slab of wood set atop sawhorse legs, from Nina's father's basement workshop. Nina's reading materials were starting to resemble the contents of Eunice Oh's Manhattan Portage messenger bag.

One night that winter, it snowed, followed by thick sheets of rain. The snow became heavy and slushy, having absorbed the full weight of the rain. Nina and I had to keep taking breaks as we shoveled the front walk. The roof above us creaked from the accumulated snow, and at some point in the middle of the night it buckled.

That was the last straw. The house hardly seemed salvageable. As Nina and I spent the next morning calling around to get estimates from contractors, I asked her why her great-uncle didn't just sell the house or do a complete demo and build anew, Seoul-style. Weren't all these “little” expenditures like throwing good money after bad? “It's got good bones,” Nina insisted. “It just needs some TLC.”

We ended up going with a guy I knew through work, whose rates were higher but who seemed more trustworthy than his competitors. The other contractors would patch things up in a quick fix, only to leave behind a host of other damage in the process. There was no accountability in these one-off interactions.

And so my new life with Nina was beginning to take shape. When we weren't tinkering with the apartment, we did all the things people in their mid-twenties do in New York: we went to cheap happy hours in midtown, open bars downtown (where one-or-another liquor company was cross-promoting with one-or-another luxury-branding company), birthday parties at dive bars in the East Village, or housewarmings in carved-up apartments in Stuy Town or the far eastern stretch of the Upper East Side—which, at that time, seemed to be the only Manhattan neighborhoods people our age could afford. The invitations usually came through our co-workers or Nina's clients. Our social network was growing; we'd connect with people in that glib way that happens when you're shouting over loud music in a crowded bar, over the rising yeast stench of beer, as you're shouldering a heavy bag full of work files and balancing a drink in your hands. Those evenings would culminate in the ceremonious exchange of business cards with cell-phone numbers scribbled on the back and promises to connect on Friendster. (I took it to be the American equivalent of Cyworld.) Then, in your work in-box the next day, there'd be a follow-up e-mail with an invite to another party or open bar, and it would start all over again.

Sometimes Nina and I ventured to the few bars in our neighborhood, and I'd help her try to pick up men. We'd size up the smattering of potentials—compared to Manhattan there just weren't that many young people in Astoria—and scheme ways to throw her into their sight line. But more often than not, we'd talk about the course of our days. Nina loved and hated her job. Her showings were in Murray Hill, Midtown East, and the Upper East Side. She loved the sales aspect—at her core she was a people person—but anytime she'd try to voice her ideas for enticing more clients to her superiors, she'd be met with, “Yeah, we'll look into it,” followed by no follow-up. Yet she could not pilot innovations on her own without having a superior first sign off on them. She was one of hundreds of brokers at her company; it was a large, clunky boat that was slow to change direction.

I felt more ambivalent than Nina did about my administrative job. In the first month, I was completely disoriented—I was just dropped into the thick of it all and expected to navigate on my own. (My boss was the opposite of Sang—he was entirely hands-off.) I was now starting to fall into the rhythm of things, and I felt that in a year's time I would probably master everything I needed to know and could thereafter coast on a kind of autopilot. While my boss relied on me to look for cost-cutting measures, whenever I suggested we look into new ventures—doing an e-mail marketing campaign or hosting investor seminars to promote the company name—he'd shy away. He was risk-averse. It quickly became apparent that the mentality of the company was “If it ain't broke, don't fix it.” Could I see myself in this job forever? No. But still, a job was a job, and as Nina had said, you kind of felt lucky to have one at all.

Some weekends I'd help Sang out at the store. It would just be for a few hours here or there, filling in when he or my aunt had to run an errand or attend a church function. Then Sang would send me off with a bulging bag of fruit and vegetables—and never the moldy stuff.

But my nights always ended with Ed. I'd let myself into his apartment—he gave me a key—and would arrive to the warm, yeasty smell of bread baking, the sizzle of garlic in the frying pan. And there was Ed—standing in the kitchen, welcoming me with one of his rare smiles.

Freed of Beth's imposing culinary restrictions, his cooking now flourished. It was uncanny to witness. Ed's heroes—no simple preparations in themselves—metamorphosed into elaborate stews and roasts and desserts. He'd make a leek soup from a broth of seared pork bones, a slow roast of pork shoulder marinated in white wine and lemon, accompanied by a salad of shaved fennel and citrus slices and finished off with a chocolate mousse that bore hints of lemon peel. The way each course was built upon the previous one reminded me of Ed's handmade bookshelves back in Brooklyn. His rich meals were a hearty comfort during an unrelenting stretch of cold.

Afterward, we'd go to bed, and it was so different from that first time; my body, anticipating his touch, rose to meet his. Then we'd lie together in the dark, our arms and legs still woven together in warm, loose braids. We'd stare up at the cracks on the ceiling as if they were a constellation of stars, until we drifted off to sleep.

“Don't let him fatten you up!”
Emo would write in our e-mails back and forth. Emo being Emo, she wanted to know all about my dates with Ed. But even more than that, she loved hearing about my nights out with Nina. She found Nina's rotating cast of love interests fascinating—there was the insurance salesman, the firefighter, the disk jockey—her dates unfolded like Emo's episodes of TV dramas.
“Oh, to be young and pretty and living on your own in New York City! All the things I never got to do. After everything with your mother, your grandfather wouldn't dare let me out of his sight. This is such an exciting time for you, Jane. Promise me you'll enjoy it. Before it passes you by.”

* * *

But in the middle of the night I'd wake up to the cold panic of finding myself abandoned in an unfamiliar room—Ed no longer beside me, his warm arms no longer draped over my body. He didn't sleep well—which explained all our late-night sandwiches back in Brooklyn. It always took me a minute or two to reorient myself, to realize Ed had skulked off to work on his dissertation.

There was a stack of multicolored files that occupied a prominent spot beside his computer, which Ed jokingly called “The Thing.” One night I got up from bed and found Ed at his desk, scribbling furiously in a notebook. He was surrounded by a mess of newspapers and books. The radio hummed in the background. At the far end of the room, the television was paused midscene, casting a blue glow on the videocassette tapes scattered on the floor. But when my eyes fell on the bound stack of dissertation files, it was shunted off to the far corner of his desk. The same bright green file lay at the top of the pile.

“What are you doing,” I asked.

Ed, startled, looked up. “What? Oh . . .” He was still scribbling; he held up his other hand to signal,
Hang on a minute.
Then he put down his pen. “Sorry, just had to finish off a thought. WNYC was doing this segment on androids. It gave me a great idea for my next class—we're doing ‘The Wasteland.'” Ed was constructing a lesson plan on technology's effect on modern man, which he hoped would contextualize the poem. He gestured to copies of
1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange,
which were all flagged with multicolored Post-its. As he spoke—with gusto—his eyes lit up. Ed's approach to teaching shared the same interlinking construction as his dinners, as those bookshelves.

“So that explains
Blade Runner,
”
I said, nodding at the TV screen
.
It was Eunice Oh's fourth-favorite movie. “But how's . . . The Thing?”

As his bright blue eyes fell on the file stack, they darkened. Whenever Ed spoke about his dissertation, a shadow would fall over his face. It was the same burdensome expression he used to wear whenever he spoke about Beth over heroes in Brooklyn. “Every minute I spend on that thing is another minute I can't spend lesson planning. Honestly, it's so far from my mind right now.”

“But . . . don't you need to finish
that
”—
nunchi
told me to keep my tone light—“in order to get tenure?”

“If I keep working on
that,
I won't have time to build a new course prep, which
will
guarantee a teaching spot next semester. And course proposals are due in a week.” Ed let out a sigh. “Believe me, Jane. I know
I should keep working on The Thing. But it just doesn't feel right right now. Or maybe not ever.” Recognizing the growing tension of his tone, he lifted his shoulders into a
What are you gonna do?
shrug. “
Ah!
The glorious life of an adjunct.”

Sometimes Ed's dissertation felt like a holdover from an earlier life—life with Beth.

“Well, you know what the economists say,” I told him. “Forget sunk costs, focus on the marginal.”

“So you're saying I should cut my losses and move on?”

I shrugged. “Only if you think you're investing all this time and energy”—
and hope
—“into something that's no longer working.” But I knew Sang would have disagreed with that—he could not bear to see even the most far-gone of investments to go to waste.

Both our eyes fell again on the dissertation, bound in a tight stack.

Pretty soon The Thing was relegated from the desk to the shelf, from the shelf to somewhere tucked out of sight. We never spoke about it again.