I'm So Happy for You

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  Meanwhile, Adam, while bringing in no money, continued to buy books, movies, and music for no purpose other than his own entertainment. Had he really needed a new set of speakers to attach to his iPod? “Special delivery from Uncle Visa,” she said, entering the living room behind him. Adam turned around and fixed his hazel green eyes on her. He was still the cutest guy she’d ever been with, she thought. She secretly considered it a fluke that he’d agreed to marry her. She still felt unaccountably proud to be seen walking in the company of his Converse high-tops. She waved the bill in his face.

  “A lovely homecoming gift,” he said.

  As Wendy forced the bill into his hand, an envelope she hadn’t previously seen fluttered to the floor. It must have been caught inside the flap. She leaned over and lifted it off the floor. It was stamped “Certified Mail,” and it read, “OPEN IMMEDIATELY—TIME SENSITIVE DOCUMENT.” While Wendy ran her fingernail under the flap, she let her imagination run free regarding its contents: Just call this number to claim your expense-paid seven-day Caribbean vacation—and also to receive a year’s subscription to Sucker’s Rewards at the special discount price of only one hundred thousand dollars a month. Send your credit card number today! Offer only valid in the lower fifty states.… She unfolded the paper. The document was titled “Notice to Terminate Tenancy” and it was addressed to both Wendy and Adam:

  Dear Tenants,

  You are hereby notified that your tenancy of the premises is terminated on December 15, 2005 (last day of rental period) and on that day you will be required to surrender possession of the premises to the Landlord. Judicial proceedings may be instituted for your eviction if you do not surrender possession of these premises on or before the date above.…

  Wendy couldn’t believe what she was reading. If she understood correctly, she and Adam—never mind Barney and his metal chairs—were being thrown out of their apartment in less than four weeks. Last she’d checked, their landlord was a crabby old lady in a floral housecoat named Bedonna Rodriguez. According to the letter, however, the building was now owned not by a person but by an entity called Turnkey Holdings. No doubt the place would be torn down to make way for some shoddy condo development with rows of air conditioners bulging from its facade. Wendy had seen other houses on the block fall victim to the same fate. Surely we have legal rights, she thought. Then she recalled that their lease had expired the previous summer, and no one had asked them to sign a new one. Nor had they thought to ask for one. “Forget the Visa bill,” she said, her eyes scrolling down the length of the document. “We’re being thrown out of our apartment.”

  “What?” Adam grabbed the letter out of her hand.

  “I can’t believe it.” Wendy shook her head in despair as she sank onto the sofa and covered her eyes with her palms.

  “This is bullshit,” said Adam, scanning the letter himself. “I’m calling a lawyer.”

  “Lawyers cost money we don’t have.”

  “We’ll find one who’s willing to work on contingency. My dad’s a lawyer. He’ll help us.” It was as if Adam had temporarily forgotten that his father had just woken up from a coma. “I mean, when he’s better,” he said.

  “But they want us out by December fifteenth,” said Wendy. “That’s less than a month away. There’s no time.” It was at moments such as these that Wendy wished she had a husband who would at least impersonate the Man of the Family—that is, promise to find a new and better roof to cover their heads (and maybe even go back to work, if that was what it took).

  But after a few moments’ thought, all the Man of Wendy’s Family could come up with was: “This place is a dump, anyway.” He squatted before Polly, rolled her head in his hands, and said, “Come on, lil’ girl, let’s go out for some fresh air.” He grabbed her leash, then his keys. Then he disappeared back outside.

  Despite everything, Wendy couldn’t wait for him to get back.

  Wendy had never been crazy about their apartment. She held the puke green linoleum kitchen counters in special contempt. But it had wood floors and decent light. It was relatively quiet. Plus, their bedroom looked out over a sweet urban garden.

  Her attachment to the place increased exponentially after she began to comb through real estate ads for the first time in four years. Since she and Adam had last looked, prices seemed to have increased by 50 percent. A one-bedroom in Sunset Park, a working-class neighborhood to the south of the South Slope, now rented for what she and Adam were currently paying to live in their two-bedroom. Of course, she and Adam didn’t technically need a second bedroom. Adam could always set up his study in the living room or bedroom. But what if Wendy finally got pregnant? Then what?

  Wendy was at her office the next morning, pretending to edit an angry screed on the administration’s domestic surveillance programs titled “Send Bush to Gitmo”—while actually scanning the “no fee” apartment postings on Craigslist—when the following email arrived:

  Wen

  So you’re not going to believe this but it looks like you and I are going to be neighbors again after all these years!!! Yes Jonathan and I are moving to Brooklyn believe me I’m in shock too basically what happened is that we made this total low-ball bid on this brownstone in Cobble Hill right near Cobble Hill Park and we never thought they’d take it so we didn’t even bother telling anyone about it but what do you know our broker called us yesterday and said that the other offer had fallen through (the people couldn’t get a mortgage or something) and the owners were willing to accept ours!! Anyway the house needs some work (bathrooms kitchen etc.) but the proportions are amazing it’s 23 feet wide with a 14 foot high ceiling in the parlor plus it has these completely gorgeous carved marble mantels in every room I just feel so incredibly blessed I only wish we could afford it (ha) but really we’re going to be so poor in the next few years it’s not even funny seriously if you see me on the West Side Highway at three a.m. wearing hot pants and a bra you’ll know why Speaking of career stuff can’t remember if I told you that Jonathan is going back to the private sector? In any case he’s starting at Skadden in September in the white collar crime division (someone has to pay for the reno) Anyway hope you guys are well BTW am so beyond thrilled for Adam his father really is a hero xxoo Daf

  p.s. Assume you’re going back up to Boston for Turkey day? J and I are flying back to Michigan so he can finally yikes “meet the family” (wish me luck)

  The fluorescent light over Wendy’s cubicle was suddenly blinding to the point of intolerable. She leaned back in her desk chair and closed her eyes. She hated the way that Daphne omitted all traces of proper punctuation in her emails. “Wendy,” someone was saying behind her head. She immediately recognized the voice as belonging to Lincoln. But in that moment, she felt indifferent to his authority. “It’s not a good time,” she said without turning around. She couldn’t believe those words had come out of her mouth; what had she done?

  “As Her Royal Highness wishes.” Lincoln sniffed before walking away.

  Maybe she would lose her job, too, Wendy thought, as she listened to Lincoln’s Doc Martens fade into the background. Then she could feel even sorrier for herself than she already felt, if such an emotion was possible. Ever since Wendy had moved to the borough ten years earlier, she’d been fantasizing about buying one of its stately nineteenth-century row houses. And now Daphne, who’d been to Brooklyn maybe five times in ten years, was about to become the proud owner of one—even as she had the audacity to cry poor.

  At the same time, Wendy loathed herself for feeling the way she did. Envy was a bulldozer emotion; it had a way of wiping out all other impulses in favor of a single picture of want. As she closed Daphne’s message, Wendy tried to clear the slate. She told herself that she and Adam had a deeper and more meaningful relationship than Daphne and Jonathan would ever have, no matter how many square feet they occupied. Moreover, the puniness of her and Adam’s bank account freed them of the disfiguring illness that lately seemed to have infiltrated even their left-leaning socia
l circle: realestateitis. Wendy would go to dinner parties and find that there was only one conversation at the table that animated the guests other than the war in Iraq: the rapid appreciation of their New York City condos, co-ops, and town houses.

  “Well, Katie bought her place in ninety-seven for four hundred thousand, and she just had it reappraised for one point six,” they’d say. And “We’re not feeling like quite as big suckers as we did when we bought the place, because the apartment over us just sold for three hundred thousand more than we paid, and it barely had plumbing!” And “The sad thing is, pretty soon the only people who are going to be able to afford this neighborhood are corporate lawyers and Wall Street people. I mean, it’s great to see all the empty lots cleaned up. And it’s definitely a lot safer at night. But it still makes me sad.”

  Wendy was sad too, heartbroken even. But there was no need to lament your ceiling height—or even have the requisite “mixed feelings” over gentrification—when you didn’t own the floor beneath it. Besides, compared with the borough’s vast swaths of poverty and hopelessness, she and Adam were downright privileged, Wendy reminded herself. With his education and experience, Adam was sure to find a job as soon as he deigned to reenter the workforce. In the meantime, there was fruit in the fruit bowl, milk in the refrigerator, and a Marc Jacobs coat hanging on the coat tree (even if, technically, it hadn’t yet been paid for).

  And it was a luxury, Wendy knew, to work at a magazine of politics. (She could have been processing dry-cleaning tickets; she could have gotten hit by a bus.) There were also parents in the background who, at least on Adam’s side, would never let them go hungry. Wendy assumed as much, even if, to her private chagrin, Phyllis and Ron had yet to offer them a down payment on an apartment of their own. That said, someday she and Adam might inherit the equivalent of one, possibly even more. Not that they’d ever discussed the matter. Even in the most intimate marriages, Wendy had learned, there were certain subjects that were taboo for a spouse ever to mention—i.e., when your parents die, how much do you think we’ll get?

  But Wendy’s attempt to console herself failed. Because wherever you were on the socioeconomic spectrum, it never felt like you had enough. You still needed an extra million (or two or three) to become the person you were supposed to be, the person you saw others becoming. Just as those people who were ahead of you were clearly cheating you out of your rightful due in a ruthless zero-sum game. That was how the city increasingly made Wendy feel. She felt an unbridgeable chasm opening up between herself and Daphne. But it wasn’t even about Jonathan—not directly. It was about money: stupid, magical, filthy, actually quite useful money.

  When Wendy and Daphne were first starting out in the city after college, money hadn’t seemed to matter. At least, it had been easier to pretend that it hadn’t—back when they’d all occupied the same low-level media jobs, shared the same dingy tenement walk-ups, worn the same ripped jeans and holey sweaters, dated the same pretentious slackers. (Daphne’s were always taller and better looking, but still.) It had been sex that merited fascination and envy. Sex and beauty. Money couldn’t buy either one. It hadn’t been any easier back then. Maybe it had even been harder. At the very least, it had taken more energy to get dressed in the morning, since every new day carried with it the promise of unforeseen frisson for which one naturally wanted to look one’s best.

  But it had been different. More nerve-racking. More exciting, too. Back then, you got the feeling that your luck could change at any moment. Now the parameters of your life felt already drawn, your epitaph lapidary.

  It had also been easier to imagine then that Wendy and Daphne and their circle of friends were all actors in the same existential play in which the material world figured if at all as a mere backdrop to their anomie. That had been the fantasy. Only Daphne had ever come close to embodying it. Only Daphne had been light and floaty and fucked up in just the right way. Only Daphne had seemed sufficiently divorced from pedestrian needs. Only Daphne, with her skinny legs and runny eyeliner, had ever looked the part. (She always looked a little dazed and, at the same time, just this side of haughty.)

  She’d acted the part, too. Only Daphne had had the nerve to get by without a job. Only Daphne had tried heroin. (When Wendy looked back, she thought of all the stupid things she’d never done.)

  The irony was that it was Wendy—progeny of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, graduate of Hunter High School, patron of the Peculiar Pub before she was eighteen—who was native to the city, and Daphne who hailed from the sticks. Yet, after college, it had been Daphne who had been Wendy’s ticket around town. No one ever turned Daphne away from anything, even as Daphne herself often went under cover as one of her fabricated personae.

  One time, she’d been “Donna,” a “stripper in New Jersey.”

  Another time, at a book party they’d crashed at Pravda, a trendy Russian-themed bar in NoHo, Daphne had introduced herself to a group of suit-jacketed men as “Jackie,” a “colorist” at a hair salon uptown.

  To Wendy’s amazement, none of them had called Daphne’s bluff. “Huh,” they’d said, and “Really,” their eyes flickering behind their glasses like bulbs that hadn’t been screwed in tightly enough. “And what’s that like?”

  “It’s just a job.” Daphne had shrugged. “You know.”

  “Just a job,” the suited men had muttered, moving in closer, later staggering away as if wounded.

  Afterward, Daphne had laughed and laughed. Doubled over, she’d asked Wendy, “Ohmygod, did you see the face of that guy with the beard? He was trying to act all respectful and politically correct, like I was going to be offended if he asked me what I was doing at a party for a fucking biography of J. P. Morgan!”

  “That was too funny,” Wendy had told her.

  Too funny for me, she later thought. Looking back, it seemed to Wendy that all the best punch lines had belonged to Daphne. The joke hadn’t ended there. It turned out that most of Wendy’s friends, Daphne included, had upper-middle-class parents in the background who, one day, as their offspring approached thirty, had appeared as if from nowhere with down payments and extra sets of keys. Slowly, the talk had turned from William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch to kitchen countertops on which to serve lunch (i.e., the merits of granite versus Corian). Until one day, all anyone seemed to care about (Wendy included, but still) was real estate and babies, the latter having become just another necessary acquisition—along with Oeuf cribs and Bugaboo strollers, Wüsthof knives and Waterworks showerheads—in the pursuit of the perfect bourgeois home.

  Or was Wendy being unfair? Maybe her close friends were more complicated than that, Daphne included. Besides, until recently, Daphne’s disastrous love life had still been her main preoccupation. And wasn’t it Daphne’s right to make a home? Or was there, just maybe, another way of doing so? Was acquisition necessarily synonymous with maturity? Wendy wrote back:

  Daphne,

  I’m in shock! A whole brownstone. Wow. Congratulations. Not sure Cobble Hill qualifies as neighboring, but it’s a hell of a lot closer than Murray Hill. That said, looks like Adam and I are going to be moving—not sure where to yet. We just got an eviction notice, if you can believe it. The place is a shit-hole, anyway, but it’s still a huge pain in the ass having to look for a new apartment, especially with the holidays coming up. Anyway, that’s great news for you guys. Please send some real estate luck this way (i.e., to your future homeless friends).

  XW

  p.s. I want to hear all about your “meet the parents” moment when you get back. Speaking of in-laws, yes, we’re heading up to Newton, per usual.…

  Normally, Wendy would have followed her email to Daphne with emails to all of their mutual friends, relaying this latest news flash from Daphne-ville (snide commentary included). In that moment, however, Wendy found herself wishing only to hide from the world. It seemed to Wendy that when she and Adam hadn’t been looking—had been busy watching Twilight Zone reruns and checking their email and doing whatever
else they did with their time—the rest of the educated population had been busy preparing for the future: taking out thirty-year mortgages and transferring savings into Roth IRAs. She imagined an exemplary couple peering out their sparkling clean double-sided Marvin window glass, heads shaking with pity and scorn, as she and Adam lugged a urine-stained mattress down the street in search of a bus shelter in which to spend the night.

  Wendy arrived home from work to find Adam watching the Lehrer NewsHour on PBS. The death toll was rising in Iraq, and two talking heads were debating the merits of withdrawal. Wendy thought that despite Saddam Hussein’s being a bad guy, invading Iraq had been a terrible idea that would cause a needless amount of suffering and set a harmful precedent in the world. Just prior to the invasion, she and her colleagues from Barricade had participated in a large antiwar demonstration on the East Side avenues of Manhattan. Wendy had carried a placard that read, “Just Say No to U.S. Imperialism.” (Unsure where to buy really big cardboard, she’d asked a coworker to make her sign; otherwise, she might have opted for a slightly more subtle slogan.) Wendy had found the rally exhilarating, until the efforts of a certain horsebacked New York City police officer to contain the mob left her severely claustrophobic and doubtful that she had a future as a political activist.

  Or was that just an excuse? Maybe it was impossible to process the fact of mass deaths, the three thousandth suicide bombing, the four thousandth improvised explosive device. Maybe she’d grown disillusioned after Bush was reelected. Maybe Iraq’s descent into chaos seemed so preordained that she found it hard to continue to register shock and outrage. Whatever the case, Wendy’s interest in the war had waned, while her personal concerns had risen to the forefront of her mind—even as she was aware that compared to the daily threat of being blown to smithereens, those concerns were hopelessly banal. So she’d stopped trying to justify them. Which in turn had given her permission to be bitter. “I suppose you already heard that Daphne and Jonathan bought a brownstone,” she said, hanging up her coat.