A week in, Sharon had written about secondhand stores offering retro cooking classes (meat loaf and deviled eggs), the public library’s funding campaign, and late-night fine dining options.
Cincy Beat didn’t pay well, but the salary was enough for a used Jeep Cherokee and a weird third-story apartment in an old, chopped-up house on Mcmillan Street that came furnished with worn but interesting things—rolltop desk, kitchen table with foldout wings, tiny box television. In the bedroom, the floor was so slanted, pens and cups and most other things would fall off the desk and tumble across the room. By definition it was transitory, the kind of place you couldn’t stay very long, but whenever it came time to leave, Sharon didn’t think she’d be going back to New York.
* * *
Without Sharon, the city kept on going; sometimes news came her way.
There were always magazines around the Cincy Beat office, and she skimmed them regularly for possible feature ideas (for the meetings where she actively pitched things, something she never did at Living). The New Yorker, the Sunday New York Times Times Magazine, and The New York Eye were always good for a trend story. So she read the articles about downtown architecture and new exhibits at the Whitney, and it was okay. Her time in Manhattan felt coated in Vaseline—obscured and dreamlike.
Because of its focus on celebrities, Living wasn’t a particularly useful source for ideas. But thumbing through one issue a few years in, she saw the annual “100 Sexy People” cover package had been written by Julie, the editorial assistant who’d been promoted the week before Chase died. Julie had apparently done all the interviews (including one with the guy who played Captain Rowen on that E&E origins show that Chase had mentioned and she’d dismissed), and there were pictures of her laughing and posing with the stars.
“Good for her,” Sharon said to no one in particular.
She still didn’t think she’d be going back to New York.
* * *
Not when Laurel Young-Griffin brought Sharon to her book club in the suburbs. The women—most married, all pinot grigio drinkers—were impressed that Sharon had lived in Manhattan. Everyone seemed to have gone to see Cats/Phantom of the Opera/Wicked for their honeymoon/anniversary/company convention, and they were eager to tell tales of taxicab and shopping victories.
Sharon still didn’t want to talk about New York or her Vaseline-obscured life there, but she adored how, even after all those years, Laurel still brought her along with her friends, even if the book club women were no better a fit than the glossy-lipped girls from high school.
So she told them about seeing Wonderful Town when her parents visited and discount shopping at Century 21. On the rare occasions when she told a story involving Chase Fisher, Sharon would simply say “my ex,” with the kind of war-weary gesture the women used when comparing their own husbands unfavorably to the men in the books they read. In her head, Sharon created generic, faceless figments of herself and Chase that she could talk about without sinking into the Earth’s core. Occasionally that old life did sound interesting, but Sharon still didn’t think she’d be going back.
* * *
Her neighbor in the old chopped-up house did something at UC Medical Center a few blocks over on Goodman and was nearly always clad in scrubs. He’d bob his head when he saw Sharon in the hall or by the bank of mailboxes in the foyer.
One night when Sharon was in her underwear and glasses transcribing notes from an interview, he knocked on the door. After checking the peephole and re-wrapping her discarded wrap dress, Sharon opened.
“I’m Scott Underwood; I live next door,” he said, as if they hadn’t seen each other leaving their respective apartments a dozen times. “Sorry to bother you, but I locked myself out.”
“Do you need to call a locksmith?”
“Actually, I was hoping you’d let me climb out your window onto the ledge. It’s pretty easy to get back in through my window.”
Sharon looked at him blankly.
Scott Underwood assured her he had done this all the time with the girl who used to live in her apartment.
There were mounds of clothes and old newspapers and half-full cans of Diet Coke everywhere, but she let him in, nervously stood by as he pushed up the window and balanced on the narrow stone ledge (flicker of a memory—standing on the railing at the Madison Plaza). After fiddling with the latch on his own window, Scott disappeared to the tune of a low-level crash. Ten seconds later he knocked on her door again.
“I made it.” He smiled, brown hair adorably mussed. “Thanks for your help.”
Sharon nodded. “Nothing like a little B&E to get to know your neighbors.”
“I owe you,” he said, and she told him not to worry about it.
But the next night, he was at her door again—wearing black pants and a ribbed sweater, not scrubs—asking if he could take her out for a drink to thank her.
They went to a local bar that catered more toward grad students than undergrads and had fewer peanut shells on the floor. Scott told her he was a surgical resident who was fighting very hard to remain committed to general surgery, though medical school loans were pushing him toward plastics. She told him she had moved back from New York and worked at Cincy Beat.
“I read that,” he said excitedly.
“Really?”
“Well, I see it in the dispensers.” He smiled again. There was a gap between his front teeth, and she liked the way his tongue poked through.
Two weak gin and tonics later, Scott walked her the two blocks back to the chopped-up house on Mcmillan. At her doorstep, he bent down to kiss her.
She stopped him.
Mumbling an apology, he started backing into his apartment, but she reached for his hand.
“I had a really good time, tonight, I’m…” There really wasn’t a good way to explain what she was. In mourning? Denial? Scared of melting should she say her ex’s name aloud? “I’m not dating right now.”
He nodded as if that made sense, and things were awkward until two weeks later, when Sharon forgot her keys and knocked on Scott’s door.
He helped break into her place through his, and they forged a kind of friendship where they’d hang out in one of their apartments (usually his, he had a cleaning lady and a bigger TV) after work if they were both home at a reasonable or quasi-reasonable hour. It turned out that being a resident actually was a lot like doctor TV shows—everyone dated everyone and rarely left the hospital—and Scott was genuinely enthused to have a friend with no affiliation to UC. Some nights they’d rent a movie or play Trivial Pursuit, or she’d get Cincy Beat tickets to a concert or play. He ate bowls of cereal at all hours of the day and turned her on to the merits of the Frosted Mini-Wheats supper.
At first he was hesitant to talk about girls he went out with, but then he actually started asking her for advice. Sharon would occasionally see women sneaking out of his apartment in the mornings; they were almost always wearing rumpled scrubs of their own. She tried not to be jealous.
“Are you a lesbian?” Scott asked one night after six months, when they were eating Captain Crunch and hate-watching a horrible rom-com starring Kate Hudson and Jake James. “Not that it matters…”
“Junior year, my college roommate and I made out during a game of truth or dare. Otherwise, no.”
“Just not dating.” He nodded. “I remember.”
While Sharon suspected their friendship may have been largely based on the fact that he was too tired after marathon shifts at the hospital to look for a social life outside of their chopped-up house, she also knew that she could have told him about Chase Fisher breaking up with her and dying. Still she kept quiet.
It took him more than a year and countless Netflix rentals before he brought up her scar.
“Did it hurt?” he asked.
“What?”
Next to her on the couch, he sheepishly ducked his head toward the thin pink mark on her left wrist. “I’m sorry; they taught us to look for stuff like that during psych rotation.�
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“It’s fine.” For the first time in a very long time, she allowed herself to think about the bathtub. About Nero. About waiting for Chase’s phone call that never came. “I was drunk, but yeah, it was actually pretty excruciating. I only got to the one.” Smiling flippantly, she held up her unblemished right wrist.
“Did you…,” Scott started.
She knew he wanted to ask what made her do it, what happened to make her stop. Knew that the moment was a fulcrum. If she was ever going to tell him about Chase and running out of the Madison Plaza, it was now. And if she did, their relationship would go one way, and if she didn’t, another. Knew that they could never be more than flirty friends if she didn’t tell him.
Enough time had passed that she suspected she might no longer fall through the flooring to China if she spoke Chase’s name.
But she didn’t.
“I never really meant to go through with it, like, not even at the time,” she said, which was a chunk of the truth, if not the whole thing. “I was just being melodramatic and stupid.”
“That’s good, I guess,” he said, and she supposed it was.
* * *
From New York, Kristen sent funny e-mails about disastrous Match.com dates she went on, people they both knew from school, and her job at the NYU Office of Annual Giving. Every couple of weeks, she’d call, and after a year, she flew out to visit.
“Who leaves New York to vacation in Cincinnati?” Sharon joked, but she was touched that Kristen used her time off to come see her.
Pulling her Cincy Beat connections, Sharon scored them tickets to see Glengarry Glen Ross at the Playhouse and a nonsensical installation piece at the Contemporary Arts Center that appeared to be nothing more than disassembled parts of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle on the floor.
Scott went with them to the Skyline Chili on Ludlow, where they gorged on three-ways and cheese conies but still managed to find room for black raspberry chip ice cream cones at Grater’s down the street.
Charmingly, Scott picked up the check.
“You ladies can pay me back by playing truth or dare later,” he said, and Sharon swatted his side.
“You told him?” Kristen didn’t sound remotely displeased. They had both been such tragically good, good girls in college that they often recounted this very brief dalliance into Sapphism. “She tells everyone; it’s her best story.”
Kristen said nothing about the story of how Sharon broke up with her boyfriend and was supposed to move in with her but didn’t.
After they’d sent Scott to his own apartment across the hall, the two women did end up in Sharon’s bed together. It wasn’t so they could make out, Sharon’s couch just sagged uncomfortably in the middle.
“We should send Scott a picture,” Kristen joked. “He’s kind of cute.”
Tall, gangly, and blond, Kristen looked almost nothing like her, and Sharon wondered if it was a look Scott would like. Wondered if she minded.
“So it’s your turn to come visit next,” Kristen said the next morning at passenger drop-off.
Sharon nodded over the lump in her throat. But she still didn’t think she’d be going back to New York.
* * *
With Scott busy doing surgical residenty things one Thursday night, Sharon decided to check out the E&E show that Julie’s Living article had reminded her she’d forgotten about.
Like all QT shows, E&E: Rising’s cast was young and otherworldly attractive, and the special effects weren’t particularly good. But it was relatively true to the comics, and the guy playing Captain Rowen was even better than Michael Douglas had been in the movies.
It had been nearly two years since Sharon had thought about her widely rejected manuscript or writing fiction in general. But as the E&E characters hopped from world to world, where things were slightly to extremely different, she began to conjure up a story: a too-pretty young man who doesn’t do his own laundry falls in love with a girl in the West Village. And maybe he and the girl break up, but he gets to go on and do other things. Sharon didn’t even consciously realize it was about Chase Fisher.
That’s how it started.
A sentence here and there, the odd paragraph when she had the time. It wasn’t something she did when she was supposed to be writing features at Cincy Beat, not something she told Scott or anyone else about. Six months in she had nearly two hundred pages.
Still, she didn’t think she’d be going back to New York.
* * *
In Sharon’s second spring in the chopped-up house on Mcmillan, Scott went to Chicago to take the medical boards. When he got back, he knocked on her door with a bottle of champagne.
“Do I have to start calling you doctor now?” Sharon asked.
“I’ve been a doctor since finishing med school, but, yes, I now insist.”
She called him “Dr. Underwood” as they got tipsy on the Perrier-Jouët in her apartment and all through celebratory filet mignon and lobster at The Precinct Steakhouse.
“So I got a fellowship at Weill Cornell in New York,” he said. “You should come, too, keep me company.”
He may or may not have been kidding, but they both knew it wasn’t going to happen.
“I’m gonna miss you,” he said.
“Me, too.” (In fact Sharon’s heart would legitimately hurt the first time she saw the new tenant in Scott’s apartment—an apple-shaped law student, who often blared classical music—fiddling with her keys across the hall.)
“You know, we could have been an amazing couple,” he said.
And Sharon knew that, too. “In an alternate universe, I’m sure we are.”
When he left three weeks later, she would give him Kristen’s contact info and silently promise that she would be happy if the two of them fell in love and got married in some over-the-top affair at the Plaza. But that night, after dinner, she held Scott’s hand as the two of them bumbled home drunk on red meat and red wine. Kissing him full on the mouth in the hall separating their two apartments, she felt exactly what it would be like to invite him in—a surge of lava and butterflies.
Sharon still didn’t think that she would return to New York.
* * *
And she continued to think that as she had Sunday dinners with her parents, read bestsellers with Laurel’s book club, got promoted to features editor when Alice left for a gig at Cincinnati magazine, and completed three hundred pages of the novel about the man that Chase Fisher never got to be.
But then one day, when she’s in the Cincy Beat office finishing a piece on upcoming movies filming in Cincinnati, the music writer two workstations over rocks back in his chair to ask Sharon a question. “You know anyone at The New York Eye? Looks like they’re hiring.”
The petroleum jelly covering lifts, and it’s all so clear. Scanning The Eye’s Happenings section with Kristen their first semester at NYU. Passing around a copy and sharing three-dollar soy burgers at Dojo on Fourteenth Street with the other MFAs. Chase bringing home copies of the tabloid on his walk back from work: “I know you like it better than the Voice.”
And then it hits. A tingling in her nose, a mounting pressure in her bones, an overwhelming need to return.
Sharon waits until she’s back in her apartment in the old carved-up house on Mcmillan (Vivaldi floating in from the law student’s unit next door) before she checks the job posting on Mediabistro. The Eye is looking for a features editor/writer for their expanding Web presence. They probably want someone much younger, someone to work for nearly nothing in the impossibly expensive city.
Feeling the gravitational pull of the crooked floor in her bedroom, Sharon writes her cover letter and sends it off with her clips.
“I’m going to be in New York next week, if that works for you,” she tells the editor who calls to ask if she’d be able to come in for an interview. She doesn’t bother inquiring if they have the budget to fly her out, assumes they won’t.
By the time Sharon books her flight and calls Kristen to see if she can
stay in Astoria for a few days, she knows that, whether or not she gets the position, she’s moving back to New York.
Tears and embraces with Laurel Young-Griffin.
Comped cupcakes and cheap wine at the Cincy Beat office.
A ride to the airport with her parents, who seem genuinely sad to see her off.
“You’re always welcome to come back,” says her father, and she thanks him.
As they cross the Suspension Bridge (like the Brooklyn Bridge) into Kentucky, Sharon wonders, if the cables snapped and the car plunged into the Ohio River, would they paddle to the Cincinnati side even though Covington is closer? Wonders if you always swim home. And if that means that eventually she’ll come back to this city she’s realized isn’t half bad.
Kisses good-bye, baggage checked, and the security line (extra scrutiny because she has no return trip booked). A straight shot from CVG to LGA, baggage claim, the taxi line, and the worn leather of a cab’s backseat.
As they head toward Astoria, Sharon glimpses the city skyline, and it does feel familiar. But when the crown of the Chrysler Building comes into view, she’s once again floored and amazed.
That, too, feels like home.
9 would you tell me if you were?
LOS ANGELES
Adam Zoellner is “TV’s Sexiest Bad Guy.”
This title is being bestowed upon him by Living magazine in its upcoming “100 Sexy People” issue. While most of the other selected sexies are too busy doing sexy things to speak with the poor man’s Us Weekly, Adam’s new publicist (aka Phoebe’s friend Evie Saperstein, who opened her own firm in LA) has spun the honor into a two-page feature in Living. Adam is in the back of a Town Car on his way to meet a reporter at The Ivy, with Evie beside him going over what not to say.
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 19
