by Andrea Meyer
Tonight Jake has a meeting with a gallery owner who supposedly likes his bizarre paintings, and I should be supportive of his burgeoning artistic career, but the idea of going home solo on my thirty-second birthday makes me sick to my stomach.
I spy a beer can someone’s left in the hallway and shake it to see if by chance it’s still full, cold, and fizzy before ashing into it. I balance my cigarette on the top of the can and reach my body forward over my legs, letting my chest collapse onto my kneecaps. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths, holding on to the bottom of my boots, gently nudging away anxious thoughts the way my yoga teacher advises. Then I lift my head from my knees, straighten my back up against the wall vertebra by vertebra, and breathe deeply in and out, before taking another hit of the cigarette.
Talking to Jake about his financial and professional woes helps take my mind off my own. The big news is I just bought an apartment. I never would have thought that I could afford it, but then my old yoga teacher, Tara, announced that she was moving to Vermont to open a studio and selling her magical mini-loft on East Eleventh Street between Avenues A and B, just as I was getting booted from my apartment. As one of those ethereal yoginis, Tara was determined to install “a loving soul” in her “space” rather than “gouging a stranger for a price dictated by an inflated real estate market. Om shanti” and sold it for substantially lower than the amount she would have gotten if she’d listed it with a Realtor. I’d been to Tara’s for tea and, as corny as it might sound, it felt immediately like home. Sunlight spilled through four enormous, south-facing windows onto rough, slightly slanted hardwood floors. She had redone the kitchen, with a new stainless steel dishwasher and fridge and glass-fronted birch cabinets. The bedroom was spacious for the East Village—big enough to fit a queen-size bed and a dresser and still run and jump around a bit—and had a walk-in closet and two small, east-facing windows that filled the room with light in the morning. When I went to scrutinize the place before buying, a pigeon was warming two tiny eggs in the nest she had built outside on the sill and her eyes met mine without fear. I took it as a good omen. I knew I could transform this space into my personal room of one’s own, that paragon of peace and self-examination that I had yearned for since first reading Virginia Woolf in college.
I thought I had found it once before. Days after my arrival in New York eight years ago, I landed an absurdly cheap railroad flat on East Tenth Street with hammered tin ceilings and charmingly warped floors. A friend of a friend was moving to an island in the Caribbean and didn’t want to give the place up, just in case she ever chose to relinquish tropical paradise for urban squalor. It was a great deal, but I always knew I could be booted if the landlord found out about me. A modicum of fear lived in the far reaches of my mind, a miniature tiger I could sense every time he sharpened his paranoid fangs on the inside of my skull. When my fears became reality, however, I was caught unawares. I was in the shower, actually, and heard pounding so loud I thought maybe my building was burning down. With the shower still running, I wrapped a towel around myself and made watery footprints to the door, only to find a burly marshal standing there. He forced the door open and said, “Put on some clothes, miss. You’re being evicted.”
I scrambled around still wearing a towel, trying to determine my next step. I threw my computer, underwear, DVDs of Manhattan, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, La Dolce Vita, and the complete second season of Sex and the City into a bag, while calling Courtney, who said I could stay with her, and then dialed a lawyer I once slept with who informed me that the marshal wouldn’t leave without me, so I had better go without a fight.
“Put on some clothes, miss,” the marshal said again. I snarled and threw my toothbrush, condoms, and teddy bear into the bag.
In the movie version of my life, I won’t have to change a thing.
That’s when my stellar housing karma kicked in again: The very next day, Tara sent an e-mail around saying she was looking for someone to buy her place. My parents said it sounded like a good opportunity and agreed to loan me the $25,000 I needed for a down payment and co-sign to ensure my loan and co-op approval. And after crashing at Courtney and Brad’s for a few weeks, I finally moved in three months ago. Between the mortgage, maintenance, taxes, and the lifetime repayment plan I set up with my parents, I pay about $1,400 a month. This is minimal by Manhattan standards, especially considering the amount of space I get for it, but hefty for a single, financially challenged editor of a struggling film magazine, especially one who has spent the last eight years subletting for $450 a month. Which reminds me. I drop my cigarette into the beer can, toss it into a nearby trash can, and hoist myself up off the floor.
Once reinstalled at my desk, I e-mail Clancy, an acquaintance who used to assign me movie blurbs at a trendy New York listings site, who just got a job at a new glossy women’s mag, Luscious, editing articles about the hot new venereal disease and the most effective sexual position for firming the buttocks. Film might be my passion, but I’m more than willing to write about cellulite-reducing sneakers and celebrities’ must-have beauty products if it enables me to pay my bills. I have been pitching Claney on average seven story ideas a week since she got the job, but so far nothing has stuck. I make my message quick and to the point.
Hey lady, any news on my last batch of story ideas? Can’t wait to hear what you think! xx, Jacquie.
Then I Instant Message my sister about more pressing matters: Jake is making me insane.
I hear the “You’ve Got an Instant Message” jangle and Alicia’s deceptively innocent-looking moniker, AliCat22, appears. don’t mention his name, she writes. makes me want 2 kick him *really* hard in the face. Nice.
Ever since we were kids, I’ve had the impression that my little sister physically feels my pain. I remember being in the doctor’s office with her when I was about seven and Alicia almost three. We were both on the examining table and the doctor informed us that I needed a shot. I was terrified, but held out my trembling arm like a brave little trooper. As the needle punctured my skin, I whimpered a bit, but it was Alicia whose face quivered before crumpling into tears. It’s the stuff of family legend (and it was pretty damn adorable), but here is something to ponder: If she actually, physically, feels my pain, then isn’t her drive to alleviate it a selfish act?
Alicia wants to rid me of the affliction that calls itself Jake and tells me so on a daily basis. But she doesn’t really know Jake. Sure, he wears a perpetual Billy Idol snarl on his lips. Sure, he occasionally makes me cry. But he does have his good qualities. Alicia doesn’t know, for example, that when we’re alone he actually smiles sometimes. And it feels good to be the person capable of making an unsmiling man smile. One word of praise from me, and he goes from looking like a small-town scam artist—lips a-pout, eyes darting as if he’s up to something—to resembling the dynamic front man for a boy band. Alicia also doesn’t know that Jake sleeps holding on to me so tightly that I have to pry his hands off me to go to the bathroom at night. She doesn’t know what I know about Jake: He is so unsure of himself that sometimes he lashes out at people more confident and grounded than he is, people like Alicia, an L.A.-born smart-ass, who scares the hell out of guys much tougher than Jake. I know that I shouldn’t excuse Jake’s behavior just because I understand it, but I do anyway. Because I do understand it. And because he’s so cute I don’t really want to live without him, or at least not until the weather warms up.
Jake’s just getting me through winter, I write back.
jacquie, it’s march
It feels like winter. It’s two degrees out.
any excuse, get rid of the loser already. he’s a drag a bimbo not smart enough 4 u an idiot illiterate MO-RON. looooze him
I’m not sure how to respond to this. I notice I’m inspecting a handful of my dark, wavy hair for split ends and biting off each one I locate, and flick myself with a rubber band around my wrist. It stings. My cognitive-behavioral ex-therapist taught me this trick to break my ba
d habits—like a well-conditioned little Pavlovian doggy. It occurs to me that I should flick myself every time I think about Jake.
He’s not illiterate, I write after doodling a pretty-girl face with long lashes and collagen-injected lips on my notebook. He e-mails, with some more or less forgivable spelling errors. And he has a book. I got it for him. I picture the untouched copy of On the Road still sitting on the arm of the couch where Jake was lounging when I gave it to him and add, He won’t read it.
can’t meet mr. right if you’re still sleeping with mr. retarded, she writes.
“Jacquie?” Steve’s voice interrupts our scintillating correspondence. “Will I be able to look at the rest of the text by tonight?”
“I think so,” I say, shuddering at our habit of leaving so many details until the last minute. “Copy editor’s dropping the last couple articles off before the end of the day. Do you want to give them a read tonight and I’ll go through them first thing in the morning?”
“Sounds good.”
I’m the managing editor of a small, cheeky New York film magazine called Flicks. With a staff of five (plus Chester), we all pretty much do everything—and too much of it. Steve gives final approval on all text and art, but since he is also the one raising money for our survival, he is too busy to get involved with details. Samantha oversees photography and helps Steve with ad sales. Trevor is our design god. And Spencer and I assign and edit text. Everyone contributes articles, but because we’re all swamped and cannot afford the army of freelancers we would need to fill our pages, Spencer and I end up writing most of the magazine as well. Sweet Chester tackles everything the rest of us don’t have time for, and I get the honor of dealing with the remaining muck—i.e., fact-checking, making sure we’re on schedule, and staying on top of the writers (who have slipped through Spencer’s fingers), photographers (who have slipped through Samantha’s), advertisers (who have slipped through Steve’s), the printer, the copy editor, and Trevor. It’s a tough job, as they say, but somebody’s got to do it. And because I absolutely, positively love it, that person is me.
The May issue of the magazine—theme: “May Day, May Day: Do Movies Just Suck?”—is shipping to the printer tomorrow, which means that all the art and articles have to be as close to print-perfect as possible.
“Hey, Sam?” I glance over my shoulder at the desk behind me. “Have you finished reading the text?”
“Yes I have,” she says, interrupting the hushed conversation she’s having on the phone. “I’ve been through it twice now. What about you, Mademoiselle Managing Editor? Gotten much work done aujourd’hui?” The way she peppers her sentences with Franglais makes the hair on my arms stand up in protest. Sam puts down the phone, wheels her chair swiftly over to me, and presses her lips together in what is supposed to resemble a polite smile, before aiming a crisp stack of marked-up computer printouts at my throat and wheeling back to her desk.
She picks up the phone and launches back into her hushed tones. At five feet tall, my twenty-seven-year-old coworker is a flawless, fairy-tale creature with azure eyes, a miniature Victoria’s Secret-model figure, and straight blond hair that falls to her waist. I’d envy her if she didn’t have a smug sense of superiority to match her looks. Samantha has one other object of envy: the ridiculously low price she pays to share a dream duplex in Chelsea with a handsome filmmaker-slash-trust-fund-baby, who hit it big when Sony Pictures Classics bought his independent thriller after a protracted Toronto Film Festival bidding war. His parents bought him the multilevel two-bedroom as a film school graduation present—and he charges Sam next to nothing to rent the spare bedroom. In New York, nobody has enough space, and everyone obsesses about real estate and dreams about pulling off that kind of coup.
The article on top of the pile is Spencer’s interview with the semi-talented squirt the press at the Sundance Film Festival just declared “The Next Big Thing.” His directorial debut is hitting screens in two months, and Spencer’s exploring the who-gives-a-shit? angle. Halfway through his second paragraph, in which he compares the experience of watching the film to eating rubbery eggs that have been sitting on the counter at Denny’s attracting flies for an hour, I hear AliCat22 summoning me.
seeing another apt today
Thank the LORD ALMIGHTY, I type back.
Alicia’s apartment search is not going fast enough. My sister moved to New York from L.A. a month and a half ago, following a midlife crisis at age twenty-eight. She announced that producing commercials was a useless occupation that no longer fed her soul; quit her job; moved out of her cozy bungalow in Venice; dumped her cat with our parents (like a restless teenage mom who isn’t ready to be saddled with a squawking kid); and came to New York to crash on half of her big sister’s brand-new bed in her big sister’s brand-new apartment. I love my sister, but after six weeks of tunneling through her mess to reach my closet and sleeping with a pillow on my head to block out her endless inter-time-zone chattering and late-night TV addiction, I asked her (very nicely) to please find a room of her own, and she has been searching ever since.
hate hate hate, can’t bear 2 c another $1400 hole
You’ll find something, they’re not all that bad.
yesterday saw 4 places, one on the scariest blk in Bklyn, Bed Stuy I think? rm the size of yer toilet, guy wanted $1000! he wuz cute tho ☺
Princess has yet to find a place in which she would deign to rest her more-than-a-little-demanding bones. However, her search is yielding unexpected perks: She met an Italian chef who invited her for a home-cooked meal; a wily jack-of-all-trades and the self-proclaimed mayor of Williamsburg, who promised to introduce her to the best bars in “the ‘Burg” (as those in the know call the hip Brooklyn ‘hood); and an actor so good-looking she became frazzled just breathing the same air as him. They fondled each other in front of his TV set and decided it would be best if she didn’t move in.
going out w/the actor tomorrow. nervous. might throw up.
Stop puking and find an apt please.
chill
Hey, are you at my place?
ya
Will you bundle up the newspapers and dump them in the recycle bin? Trash goes tomorrow.
sorry, out the door. late for spinning
“Hey, Jacquie?” I turn around to face Samantha. Still gabbing on the phone and examining her nails, she doesn’t even look up. “Have you gotten the Cate Blanchett piece in yet?” Samantha sometimes surprises me. She can sit there looking emphatically blond, gossiping with her friends all day long, and at the same time search photo archives online for just the right glamour shot of some British starlet, then out of the blue throw out something like, “Have you gotten the Cate Blanchett piece in yet?” I completely forgot that my cover story is running late and the copy editor saw it for the first time only this morning.
“Where the hell is Stella?” I ask no one in particular. “She was supposed to bring that and a couple of other pieces over by six-thirty. It’s six-thirty.”
Alicia IM’s again: i have a story idea 4 u, how looking for an apt’s a good way 2 meet guys. 3 more called today, one sounded cute. u shld try it
I dial Stella, the copy editor’s, number, and type: I’m not looking for an apartment.
so fake it
Stella picks up and I say, “Hey, where are you?”
“In front of the building in two minutes,” she says. “Come let me in.”
I check my e-mail again. A message from Clancy says, Sorry babe. Ideas won’t fly. V. picky here. Editorial mtg tomorrow a.m. if you want to try again.
I groan and leave my seat in a huff to buzz Stella into the building and wait by the elevator so she can physically deposit the precious folder of text into my hands. When the elevator arrives, Courtney gets out as well. My best friend since college, who’s taking me out for pre-fête dinner, is in classically Courtney party attire—that is an outfit that only Courtney can get away with: a flowing red skirt she nabbed for next to nothing at a Catherine Malandrino
sample sale, a thrift-shop tight yellow shirt with a bright, multicolored flower pattern all over it, unbuttoned to reveal a lacy peach bra, red patent-leather boots, a big pink plastic flower in her hair, and a short fake-fur coat from H&M that I covet. It is the kind of outfit a classroom full of sixteen-year-olds would regard with great admiration, which is only one reason she’s the most popular teacher at the ritzy Brooklyn private school where she teaches art. A guy walking down the hall lets his eyes wander from the top of her silky, black bob to the pointy toes of her boots, until she catches him staring and turns the color of sliced watermelon before dropping her eyes anxiously to her cherry-red fingernails.
“Love the flower,” I tell her. She grins a toothy grin that turns her eyes into green slivers and kisses both my cheeks. We walk back into the office.
“Hey, Jacquie?”
I look back at her over my shoulder. “I brought the champagne,” she says.
What champagne? I think as she pulls a Veuve Clicquot bottle out of her bag.
And on cue everyone starts singing. I spin around to see the staff beaming around a big, pink birthday cake with my name and seven candles on it. Courtney hugs me and says, “Happy birthday, old lady. You look stellar for your age.” Courtney is exactly five months younger than me, and has been reminding me of that fact since she and the rest of my freshman-year dorm floor kidnapped me on my eighteenth birthday and made me drink upside-down margarita shots and sing Prince songs in a fountain until I passed out in the arms of the arrogant frat boy I obsessed about for the rest of the semester.
We hold up plastic cups of bubbly, and Steve makes the toast. “Here’s to Jacquie’s annual twenty-seventh birthday! Last year’s was a blast and the one before that, but I have a feeling that this will be your best twenty-seventh birthday yet.” While we’re indulging in our first cocktail of the day and shoveling gooey chocolate cake into our faces, Jake finally calls.
