“I don’t need your charity.”
“It’s not charity; I care about you. Is her neighborhood even safe?” Chase massaged his eyes again—a telltale sign he was getting a migraine.
Without thinking about it, Sharon went to the bathroom and got the large bottle of Advil. “Take some now before it gets worse,” she said.
It was something she’d done probably fifteen times in the past year alone, one of those small moments of intimacy long-term lovers take for granted. But then Chase did look up, and it seemed evident his dishevelment was very much because of their split.
“Thank you.” Lightly, he touched her shoulder.
It was a crack, maybe the first since their fight. Sharon closed the inches between them and pressed her lips to his.
“No,” he’d croaked. Then he kissed back, hard, before pulling away.
After that he just looked at her. Some echo of the way he used to, like she was his birthday and favorite dessert stuffed into the body of a pinup girl.
“Chase—” She started to say something but stopped like she should have stopped when they were arguing earlier in the week, like she was never good at doing when she was nervous.
“Shar.” Still holding her shoulders, he shook his head and told her he was already late for his flight.
“Please.”
“I’ll call you when I get in,” he said, and his tone suggested it might be the kind of call that changed everything. “We can talk then.”
“Promise?” She bit her tongue to keep from saying more.
He rubbed his temples again. “Yeah, I promise.”
Grabbing his bag, he was gone, the heavy metal door closing securely behind him.
* * *
Yes, Chase had said he would call, and while in the course of breaking up he’d told her he didn’t want to marry her and didn’t really know her anymore, he’d never been a liar.
Maybe he’d call the landline no one ever uses? Before getting in the bath, Sharon should get the cordless from the kitchen, just in case.
He doesn’t even know you’re here!
Sharon had told Chase she’d be moved out by the afternoon. Technically she is. She’s only back because she’d left her wallet, and it was late by the time she took the N train back to Manhattan and found it.
Maybe Chase is trying to call her at Kristen’s?
Except Kristen doesn’t have a landline, and Sharon can’t think of any reason Chase would know her college roommate’s cell number.
Another chug of vodka; maybe he thought she wasn’t moving out until tomorrow?
Better get the phone.
Naked, Sharon walks from the bathroom to the main room, means only to grab the cordless, but the peach blur of her reflection in the window catches in her peripheral vision. Already looking out, she can’t escape the compulsion to find the Chrysler Building in the jagged Manhattan skyline. Nearly three years she’s lived here, but every time—even now—she still cocks her head northeast, seeking out the steel crown.
She’d never seen it before college, but Sharon had known the Chrysler Building from movies, and of course as Captain Rowen’s World 1 headquarters in the Eons & Empires comics. But the first time she saw the building for real—on a city tour her second week at NYU—she’d been struck with an awesome sense of déjà vu. The sensation was something she’d felt comfortable sharing with Chase Fisher on their third date. It had been the first thing Chase had shown her when he moved here from the West Village. Taking her out on the terrace, he’d pointed right: “There it is.”
Now, because it might be the last time she has this exact view (No, Chase still might call), she walks toward the window, her reflection getting clearer and smaller as she approaches the glass. Pressing her palm to the mirrored version of herself, she finds the building where it always is.
Five blocks due north, the Empire State Building is bigger and closer. To the west, the still incomplete New York Times Building and the tower with the weird red light on the top that she’s always wondered about but never bothered to look up. All the skyscrapers so bright it’s never truly dark in the apartment, no matter how many expensive blinds Chase hung.
* * *
Up until the last six months, when she’d started getting rejection letters from every literary agent in the city, Sharon’s life had seemed to be on a great upward trajectory. Though high school had never been as engaging as in John Hughes films and QT Network shows, it had steadily gotten better. Laurel Young had kept her around, even after their fathers’ accounting firm fractured, and eventually Sharon became almost friends with Laurel’s group of girls and went on dates with the buddies of boys Laurel was seeing. Though she often looked at those high school dances and backseat make-out sessions as character research for a story, wearing Nicole Miller dresses and having young men pin corsages on her wrist made her mother stop asking if she was “having trouble fitting in.”
College had been a marked improvement. Friends, like Sharon’s freshman roommate, Kristen, had come so much easier, and her creative writing classes allowed her to be legitimately good at something for the first time. After years stashing stories in her sock drawer and pretending she’d rather be on a date than reading, she was finally rewarded for her proclivities. She wrote the student newspaper’s arts and entertainment column and got paid (albeit very little) to go to shows and readings. Professors encouraged her and offered to show her work to this literary magazine or that agent when she finished her novel. Fellow students turned to her for advice, and sophomore year she gave her virginity to a boy from fiction workshop who wrote a horrible song based on a short story she’d written about a girl obsessed with robots. By the time she graduated a whole year early, she’d published three pieces in small journals with good reputations, which her parents probably didn’t read but proudly displayed on their bookcase next to the paperback mysteries. Practically the entire NYU faculty guaranteed her a slot in the master’s program, which seemed to impress her folks, even if they didn’t understand what she was studying or wanted to be.
And then the pinnacle, three weeks into her second year of grad school, the magical meeting with Chase Fisher at the laundromat on MacDougal. Sharon was stuffing dryer-warm T-shirts and panties into her laundry bag when she noticed Chase at the counter picking up wash-and-fold. Normally she was annoyed by people who deemed themselves too important to do their own laundry, but when she saw him paying for his perfectly pressed and folded clothes, she’d felt a wave of recognition, a whispered “of course.”
It wasn’t that he looked good. He did (though with fine bones and thick, coal hair, he was probably too feminine to be considered conventionally handsome). It was that when he glanced over at her, she was struck with the distinct feeling that she already knew him. The same way she’d felt seeing the Chrysler Building four years earlier.
Her romantic experience at the time was limited to a handful of forgettable guys from college, but the moment Chase noticed her, it was a foregone conclusion that he would come over and offer to carry her laundry. It was completely inevitable that Sharon would accept and let him haul her bag up the four floors to the apartment she shared with Kristen on Bleecker.
“That’s so cool you’re a writer; I could never do anything like that,” Chase had said on their third date as they wandered around Washington Square Park after pappardelle and osso buco at Il Mulino.
Sharon smiled and explained how her novel was about a young woman kidnapped and murdered after hitching a ride.
“I’m sure you’ll be on the Times Best Sellers list,” he said, and she’d blushed but hadn’t disagreed. Her life was turning out so much better than she’d envisioned that she genuinely believed things were destined to go that way. A year later the two of them were living in this apartment looking at the skyline.
* * *
Through the window, the city is the same. But the inside of the apartment seems eerily the same, too, even though her things are gone.
There
’s the same rich brown leather couch and love seat, the same large TV mounted to the wall, and Chase’s rarely used Gibson guitar in the same corner, no more likely to be played. The only indications of the years she’d lived here are the empty chunks of space on the bookcases and patches of a faint sticky residue from the Post-its Chase used to write her. It’s as if this place has already erased her.
Back in the bathroom with the cordless phone in hand, Sharon picks up her cell, checks it in case she somehow missed a call.
No messages.
Her heart starts racing again.
Another chug of vodka to slow things down.
She needs to stay calm. Chase said he would call, and there’s no sense in jumping down his throat the minute he does. Better to be relaxed. Tell him she loves him and she’s sorry.
Setting both phones within easy grasp, she eases into the tub. The water has cooled a bit but is still hot enough that goose bumps dot her arms.
Seeing the utility knife in the corner, she thinks again of Nero.
It wasn’t only that Roman emperor who slit his wrists. Artists, too. Mark Rothko, or was it Jackson Pollock? And the woman who did the creepy photographs—Diane something.
All those scraps of things she used to know before her brain was full of celebrity gossip from Living (not full enough for a promotion, though).
More vodka and the world smudges, though it’s probably not possible to take effect that quickly, might simply be her melodrama.
Picking up the knife, she slides out the blade.
Wonders what made those others actually follow through.
* * *
There had been the day of the fire four months ago.
She’d been halfway through consuming a sleeve of saltine crackers waiting for Chase to get home from the hedge fund (which had been taking longer and longer lately) when Rodney—the youngest of the doormen—rang her bell with a package. The return address was a prominent literary agency in Midtown where Sharon had sent her manuscript. That it was a package seemed promising, like a thick letter from a college meant you’d been accepted. It was nice to feel hopeful; over the past two months, she’d exhausted all the agents of friends and professors, as well as a whole slew of the listings on Publishers Weekly. She’d even convinced Kristen, who had worked in the NYU Office of Annual Giving since sophomore year, to slip her a list of alums in publishing.
The optimistic feeling was short-lived. Tearing open the box revealed not an acceptance letter, but her original copy of the manuscript bound with the same rubber bands, as if it were so toxic that agents didn’t even want to throw it in their own recycling bins. Whereas the other rejection letters she’d gotten had contained glimmers of praise—“Ultimately too melancholy, but some artful language”; “a little too depressing for us, but extremely well written”—this one simply read: “Thank you for letting us consider your work. This is not a project we would represent.” No one had even bothered to sign it.
Only two years earlier, Sharon had been the toast of her MFA program. Now she was the one getting form letters from literary agencies.
In hindsight, burning the manuscript was a poor idea. At the time it felt wonderfully symbolic to get the big copper pot from the cookware set Chase’s stepmother had given them, place the manuscript inside, and throw in a lit match. Only the first few pages got a satisfactory char before the smoke alarm sounded and she took the whole thing out on the terrace.
The title page and prologue had begun to curl when the wind kicked up and improbably swept a lit page to the next unit’s balcony without extinguishing the flame. The neighbor, whom Sharon had never actually spoken to but disliked because she often wore nothing but a sports bra and low-cut yoga pants, had a deck chair, apparently coated in turpentine and lighter fluid, that actually ignited.
For a brief moment, Sharon simply stood there watching the small fire singe the seat of the chair. It seemed likely the tiny flame would quickly be put out by the wind.
That proved not to be the case.
Burning pot of novel in her hands, Sharon ran inside and doused the book in the sink, then raced to the neighbor’s door. After gently knocking, then gently pounding and getting no response, she hurried back to her own apartment. Dumping the burned pages, she filled the pot with water and scurried to the balcony. Balancing precariously on her own patio chair, she tried to heave the water in the general direction of the not-so-raging fire twenty-five feet away. The diminutive wave moved horizontally a few inches at best, but inertia caused Sharon to bumble forward.
Instinctively she dropped the pot and reached for the guardrail. Her breathing was heavy and ragged as she watched the pot hit the pavement with a clang muted by thirty-five stories.
That’s when the thought flittered across her mind.
Jump.
Follow the expensive cookware down to a dramatic end.
One leg on top of the six-inch-thick railing, Sharon slowly brought up her other foot. It wasn’t hard to balance on the thin metal strip. Gingerly, she eased away from the wall until the only points of connection were her feet on the railing and the tip of her left index finger on the brick.
Maybe she would have taken the leap into nothing or maybe she wouldn’t have. But when she glanced down, Sharon noticed a Rodney-esque form examining the copper pot remains on the sidewalk.
The trance was broken.
She remembered sports-bra neighbor’s smoldering deck chair and the novel remains in the sink. Remembered she had to come up with story ideas for the Living magazine all-staff meeting the next morning.
Stepping down to the safe enclosure of her own balcony, she called downstairs to the front desk. Her recounting of events must have sounded nonsensical, but the terms “fire” and “next door” got Rodney’s attention. A minute later he was at her door with the set of master keys and a fire extinguisher. Sharon followed him into Sports Bra’s apartment (surprisingly, there was a series of fierce, non-Zen oil paintings on the wall). The fire was basically out, but Rodney sprayed it aggressively anyway. The hole in the canvas seat that remained was the kind of thing that begged an explanation.
“I think it’s your responsibility to repair this.” Rodney offered a sad look as they walked back to the hallway. “I can check if the building insurance will cover it.”
Sharon was assuring Rodney she would get the new chair when the elevator dinged and Chase stepped out, already looking confused.
“Was that one of the pots Gen sent us downstairs?” he asked.
Perhaps sensing an impending lovers’ quarrel, Rodney quickly ducked into the open elevator car.
“I dropped it,” Sharon said, without further detail.
Shaking his head, Chase walked into their acrid-smelling apartment and examined the soggy burned manuscript.
“What is with you lately?” he asked.
The rational part of her realized she owed him an apology. An unfamiliar spiteful and malicious side (maybe the part that wanted to jump) suddenly found it exasperatingly unfair that Chase was kicking ass at his new gig as a portfolio manager, while she was still an editorial assistant at Living who’d been rejected by all the major (and several of the minor) literary agencies in Manhattan.
“I know it’s impossible for you to understand, but not all of us have the perfect life,” she’d said and stormed out.
He didn’t follow. With no destination in mind, she went to Dewey’s on Fifth and ordered one of their beers on tap, even though she rarely drank, and never beer. When she got back, Chase was already in bed so he could get up and go running at six (it had been a long, long time since she’d gone with him). There was a Post-it note on the closed bedroom door saying he’d paid for the neighbor’s chair. Sharon crumpled it up and walked out to the terrace, dropped it over the side. For a while she leaned over the edge, not searching for the Chrysler Building at all.
* * *
Even fuzzy from the alcohol and the no-longer-hot bathwater, Sharon can see the time glowing in
the window of her cell phone: 11:00 P.M.
Only ten in Chicago!
But no, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that Chase isn’t going to call.
In fact, when she’s being completely honest with herself, Sharon has actually called his cell phone … not obsessively, but once right before getting the truck and again when Kristen was in the bathroom. It had gone straight to voice mail both times.
Maybe he forgot to turn his phone on after his flight? She’s done that. When she and Chase had visited his mom in Hong Kong last year, Sharon had been so taken with the escalators and buildings growing from trees, she’d forgotten to switch it on for two days.
Even so, he’s not thinking about you. Not making you a priority.
Picks up the knife. Pushes up the blade.
Arbus.
Diane Arbus—that’s the creepy photographer who slit her wrists. Nicole Kidman is supposed to play her in a movie.
Taps the tip of her index finger to the sharp point. Presses until she hears the faintest pop of flesh (maybe it’s actually soundless, but she thinks there’s a pop).
Chubby dot of blood.
Sucking it off, she remembers standing on the railing.
Runs the blade across her left wrist. Not even enough pressure for a scratch.
Maybe she simply hadn’t hit rock bottom four months ago.
* * *
The start of the end began five days ago at the Living all-staff meeting when the executive editor announced that Julie—the other editorial assistant, who was four years younger than Sharon and had been at the magazine half as long—was being promoted to assistant editor.
Sharon had swallowed over a squawk.
With its focus on celebrities and their shoes, Living was far from her dream gig, but Sharon had thought she’d been doing a decent job of ordering lunches for the editors and writing the dry front-of-the-book captions (even if she did work on her too-depressing novel during the downtime). Julie, on the other hand, seemed to spend huge amounts of her day badgering editors for longer pieces to write and volunteering to cover events if the reporters were too busy—apparently that wasn’t annoying, that was ambition.
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 11
