New York for Beginners

by Remke, Susann

  Zoe’s father was silent. Zoe recognized that old trick from job interviews and doctors’ conversations with patients. It was supposed to make the other person talk. It almost always worked.

  “The thing in New York, that wasn’t me. I’m not a debutante who will be introduced to high society at a ball, and I won’t be kept as a mistress in a million-dollar loft.”

  Zoe’s father remained silent, but then her mother chimed in, destroying his tactics.

  “Well, I’m glad to have you back here. I never understood what you thought was so great about America anyway.”

  Zoe’s father gave her mother a cautionary look. She stopped talking but looked sulky about it.

  “That’s the short version,” Zoe added. “There’s nothing to analyze or interpret. And this is the last time I’m ever going to talk about it.”

  On Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw once said that it was hard to stand certain places, and even certain times of day, after a breakup. Every street became riddled with emotional landmines. Again, Carrie was so right. Zoe couldn’t remember if she had said anything to Vicky Fiorino under the Chrysler Building’s awning. But she knew that she’d hailed the next yellow cab and told the driver: “To the airport—JFK, not La Guardia.” Then she’d called Eros and asked him to get her passport from her apartment and to send it by messenger to the Lufthansa desk at Terminal One. She’d lied to him, telling him it was a family emergency so he wouldn’t ask any questions. After that, she’d booked a one-way ticket to Nuremberg via Munich. She had wondered for a moment if she should fly back to Berlin. But there were too many people there who knew her. One of them was Benni.

  In that moment under the awning, when Tom’s wife—whose existence he’d never mentioned—stood there in front of her, Zoe’s world had collapsed. She had trusted New York to give her a fresh start. She had trusted Tom. Hadn’t she even called him a good guy at some point? How naive of her. How stupid. Why would someone who had made a career as a heartbreaker suddenly change? Even though he’d acted like he had changed for a few weeks. “All my relationships end in chaos, Zoe. You don’t deserve that.” Hadn’t he used exactly those words? What a dreadful trick!

  Basically, Thomas Prescott Fiorino had only been using her. Zoe realized that in the cab to the airport. He was just like all those other men in her mistresses feature who kept their second, third, and fourth wives all over the world—and used them at their leisure. Had he really believed that she wouldn’t find out after they were living together? How did men manage to maintain several parallel relationships? Even on a purely logistical level it would be hard enough, but what about emotionally? Zoe thought it was all just too disgusting.

  Later, on the plane, she had neither cried nor shaken, and she hadn’t fainted either. She just suffered nondescript physical pain. Love really was more of a drug than a feeling, she had thought in that moment. And she was obviously going through withdrawal.

  In those hours, Zoe had switched to autopilot; her brain systematically checked off a to-do list to take her away from the crime scene as quickly as possible. She had ignored Tom’s texts and calls and had thrown her phone in the trash can at Gate 7 before boarding. Zoe had expected to feel a little bit less bad with every mile the airbus carried her away from the US. But in those six hours over the Atlantic Ocean, if her pain was being measured on a scale from 1 to 100, she would say that it had declined from a 100 to perhaps a 99.8.

  Zoe’s best childhood friend, Steffi, was already waiting on her doorstep when Zoe went over to see her. Steffi was holding her baby, Lukas, who must be about three months old. Her daughter, Leonie, was obviously still at school—probably in the third or fourth grade by now. Steffi and Zoe had lived next door to each other and had gone to the same kindergarten and elementary school. Steffi had owned a Barbie swimming pool, and Zoe had a Barbie camper van. The two of them had, of course, ridden the exact same white three-speed bicycles with little pink baskets on the handlebars—the way best friends did.

  “I’m so happy you’re here, Zoe,” Steffi cried as Zoe entered the garden gate. “You’re looking good.”

  “Oh, come on,” Zoe answered, because she knew perfectly well that her mother had already briefed Steffi on her brokenhearted daughter. Everyone in the village was probably talking about it. But that was the way villagers were. When the prodigal daughter returned and wouldn’t leave the house for days, they were bound to whisper.

  Steffi went ahead into the kitchen and put the almost-asleep Lukas in a baby carrier. She had already put some water on to boil. A box of herbal tea with a woman seated in the lotus position pictured on the front stood next to two porcelain teacups. The woman on the package looked so relaxed that Zoe wanted to punch her in the face.

  “How are you?” Steffi asked cautiously.

  Well, how was she? Zoe would have been happy to know that herself. “I feel kind of empty.” She couldn’t think of anything better to say.

  They remained silent. It wasn’t an unpleasant silence, but it wasn’t a pleasant one either. Back when they were fifteen years old, Steffi would have said something like: “I know just how you feel.” Zoe would have felt better immediately, knowing there was somebody who 100,000-percent understood her. Today, at thirty-four, it was different. Not just because they had grown older and because life had turned out to be multifaceted and full of traps, but also because Steffi was living the exact same life that Zoe would be living now if she’d stayed at home in Herpersdorf and hadn’t gone to Munich to study, to work in Berlin, and to make her career in New York. Steffi was living in a parallel universe, basically. Steffi was Zoe’s mirror image and alter ego in one. Steffi’s life couldn’t have been further from Zoe’s, but in a way it was still so close.

  After school, Steffi had done a banking apprenticeship in nearby Ansbach and married her high school sweetheart Andreas at twenty-five. For a wedding present, her parents had given her the lot next to theirs. Steffi and Andreas built a house and had two children. Back then Zoe had thought a life like that was straightforward, boring, and completely unexotic, but now she envied Steffi’s life. It was an honest life, a beautiful life. It was one that might have fewer ups and downs, but it also had more security. Steffi was one of those new moms who took their babies to Mommy and Me classes. She cooked and pureed her own baby food instead of buying the stuff in jars and spent her vacations with her husband and offspring in certified family hotels that used cute little smileys instead of stars for their ratings. Steffi had given up her job at the Ansbach bank and become a stay-at-home mom because she felt she owed it to her children. She herself had grown up as a latchkey kid and always had to make do alone at home after school. Of course Steffi and Andreas fought occasionally, mostly about his guys’ night at the local pub with his soccer buddies, which was more sacred to him than Christmas and Easter put together. And of course they fought about whether they could afford a third child. (Or about whether they wanted one, as Steffi interpreted it.)

  All in all, it was a completely normal life. One that Zoe could’ve had, too.

  Steffi poured the tea, put the annoying lotus-position lady back in the pantry, and set a bowl of undoubtedly fair-trade organic cane sugar on the table.

  “Thoughts keep going around and around in my head like they’re on an endless carousel,” Zoe tried to explain. “I keep trying to find the point in time when I should have put on the brakes. When I should have realized that I was part of some awful movie plot.”

  “You can’t expect that of yourself,” Steffi objected. “Things are always clearer in retrospect.”

  “If only it were that way. If only I knew better now. But I don’t. Not in the slightest. I’m still utterly confused.”

  “And what are you going to do now?” Steffi asked worriedly.

  “I really don’t want to go back to Berlin. Benni’s there. Vision is there. I don’t want anything to do with any of that anymore. I’m t
ired of the big, wide world. It’s all artificial glitter. I have an interview at the local Ansbach newspaper this weekend. The editor-in-chief is one of my parents’ bowling buddies—do you remember?”

  Steffi nodded.

  Zoe killed time until her job interview by taking walks. Since she’d been back in Germany, the sun hadn’t come out even once. Zoe hadn’t seen a single strip of blue sky—that had been practically an everyday occurrence in New York. All around Herpersdorf, fog was lying over the fields in milky, dense, heavy swathes. She followed the path along the horse pastures, which were lonely and empty in the winter, and tried to find the place in the woods where she and Steffi had built a tree house when they were children, and the World War II bunker they’d discovered but never dared enter. If she was being honest, she was trying to find herself.

  It didn’t exactly help that her mother, who was waiting for her at home—Zoe knew it—was secretly glad that the Yankees had driven her daughter back home. Karin Schuhmacher had a serious problem with Americans. She didn’t trust a nation that had “elected a B-class actor as their president,” “established their status as a world power through an arms race,” and “brought the epidemic of obesity over to us with their fast food.” Those were all direct quotes from Karin Schuhmacher. Zoe didn’t think her mother had ever even seen a movie with Ronald Reagan in it.

  If Zoe had stayed in America, her mother would never have come to visit. Before Zoe moved to the dreaded country, her mother explained that she would never travel there, on principle. It was easier to be prejudiced from a distance.

  “Please have a seat, Zoe. How are you doing?” the editor-in-chief of the Ansbach newspaper asked. He had basically known her since she’d been born. For the past hundred years now, her parents had gone bowling with him and his wife every Friday. Zoe’s mother had set up the interview with Mr. Gottfried for her. She was under the impression that Zoe’s life needed to be put back on track—at home. And what could be more on track—and closer to home—than a leading position at the local newspaper?

  “The position of Department Head for the weekend supplement has just been vacated,” Gottfried said. “Would you be interested?”

  “I can imagine myself doing that,” Zoe answered.

  So now Zoe would write about the rock and pop bands at the Taubertal open-air music festival, the Old Town Festival, and the debate about whether businesses should be open on Sundays. Substantial content. Honest, down-to-earth news. Basically, this was Zoe’s Steffi-self. Just what she had wished for.

  She was to begin February first, six weeks from now. It would be as though nothing had happened.

  And so, just in time for Christmas, Zoe Schuhmacher delved back into her past. She went back to the time before Berlin and New York, and she suppressed the sinkhole in her heart as if it belonged to someone else. A psychologist would probably have told her that every ending of a relationship was like a little death; a grieving period is necessary and important. Zoe knew that. In her experience, women usually dealt with their grief by crying for weeks and stuffing their faces with gallons of ice cream. And men did it by going out for a drink, or a few, as though there was no tomorrow. Everything was fine again after that. Zoe decided to go for the male version because it involved fewer calories. The fact that it was really quite difficult to find her beloved Häagen-Dazs in Ansbach played a significant role in her decision as well.

  Café Unrat at Drechsel Gardens was an Ansbach institution. In Zoe’s younger years, it had been the pub to go to. Since then, it had managed to do something very rare: It had become a classic. It was the Burberry trench coat of pubs. Fittingly, it was named after a professor whom Marlene Dietrich had seduced.

  On Christmas, Café Unrat always turned into a real-world Facebook. Everyone who’d grown up near Ansbach returned home to their families, from Nuremberg, Munich, Berlin, or Hamburg, in December to gather under the Christmas tree, eat Christmas goose and red cabbage, and exchange gifts. Later that evening, they would all get together, without any planning, but with the purposefulness of migratory birds, at Unrat.

  “Zoe, sweetheart, it’s so nice to see you.” The maître d’, who was wearing a silly red Santa hat, hugged Zoe tightly. “Santa Baby” played in the background.

  Almost everyone from Zoe’s class at Theresien High School had shown up. Up until now, Zoe had always been a big fan of high school reunions, because she was secretly a little proud that she had managed to make it out of this one-horse town, out into the big, wide world. Now, however, she felt like a has-been. Reunions were always an encounter with your own history. They were also an encounter with yourself. And Zoe Schuhmacher didn’t feel like meeting herself right now. Because reunions were only fun if your life was going well—if you could present wedding pictures of a Dr. So-and-So, your newborn triplets, or at least a house, car, and a boat. But what if you’d just been dumped and moved back into your childhood bedroom? Then you hid in the darkest corner of the bar, next to the restrooms.

  So why had Zoe bothered to show up at Café Unrat at all? She felt that people who had been dumped deserved a little bit of self-indulgent masochism. And she wouldn’t let anybody take that away from her.

  “Hi, excuse me. I’m looking for Zoe Schuhmacher,” she suddenly heard someone say. She couldn’t believe who was standing there in front of her.

  “How did you get here?” she asked a little stupidly.

  “Via GPS. Global Positioning System, to be exact. This lovely little place would be impossible to find otherwise.”

  Here in Ansbach, Allegra seemed like some kind of alien. She was wearing a mustard-yellow cashmere dress under a black men’s jacket, and her hair was pulled up into one of those artful ponytails that looked more like “I’m about to attend the Oscars” than “I just worked out.”

  “Allegra! Seriously!”

  “Actually, I got here by Alitalia, Lufthansa, and Europcar. Naples—Rome—Frankfurt—Nuremburg—Highway A7—State Road 2223. I’ve always wanted to explore Herpersdorf by Ansbach, capital of Bavaria, Southern Germany, mien Deern,” the born-and-raised Hamburg native responded in Zoe’s local dialect.

  Zoe was certain that Allegra had never, in her entire life, apart from Munich, set foot in the state of Bavaria.

  Zoe was slowly running out of patience. “How did you know I was here?”

  “Eros told me you flew back to Germany on the hush and disappeared into thin air. The editorial office contacted your parents at some point, of course. What did you think would happen?”

  “What are you doing here, Al, if you already knew that I’m still alive?”

  “Zoe Schuhmacher, this is an intervention!” Al answered. She wore the serious expression of a doctor on VIP Rehab telling his washed-up patients on live TV that it was really time they stopped doing coke.

  “What?”

  “An intervention. A rescue. Enough of all this self-pity and back-to-your-roots stuff! You don’t belong here anymore. There’s no such thing as a future in Herpersdorf.”

  “And what else would you suggest I do, Miss Therapist?”

  Why does everybody have to get involved with my life? Zoe wondered, annoyed. She wanted to suffer in peace. End of story. Didn’t women measure the depth of freshly broken relationships by how long they suffered? If she had understood more math than basic fractions, she would write a binomial formula for it now. Something like:

  suffering2 x length2 = depth

  “I just finished the Italy part of my own Eat-Pray-Love Journey. I’m off to India in January. Do you want to come?” Al asked.

  Do I? Zoe wondered. What did she have left to lose? And she had time until February 1, anyway. Right now, she felt like those strange days between Christmas and New Year’s, which would begin tomorrow. They were neither the old nor the New Year, but some kind of desolate no-man’s-land in between. So Zoe decided spontaneously that India would be the perfect
place to begin the New Year.

  21

  JANUARY

  Zoe had always been a little intimidated by India. She would have much preferred to go to Italy, had Allegra given her any choice in the matter. Not just for the pasta, but also for the Italian guys who hit on even the ugliest tourists without batting an eyelash. Hearing a stranger call her “cara mia!” would make her feel like the most beautiful woman on the planet. Apart from that, Zoe wasn’t great with misery, weird smells, and maimed body parts. And in her opinion, cows belonged in a pasture, not on the street. Maybe that was the real reason that she had ended up at a women’s magazine instead of as a war reporter for CNN.

  When Zoe and Allegra landed in Pune after a fifteen-minute flight from Mumbai, the temperature was 68 degrees. The humidity was surprisingly low and there was a slight breeze. A driver was already waiting for them. He explained that the name Pune came from the phrase punya nagari, which apparently means “city of virtue.”

  Allegra hadn’t booked rooms in Elizabeth Gilbert’s ashram in Ganeshpuri, where guests were asked to scrub the floor with toothbrushes as a token of selflessness. That would have been too much for her. And besides, it ruined your fingernails. Instead, they were registered at a kind of Club Med for those in search of meaning, called Osho International Meditation Resort. During the flight, Al had informed Zoe that in the seventies, hippies came from all around the world to worship Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who later took on the name Osho. Zoe could still remember his singing followers, with their orange-red robes and shaved heads, whom she’d often seen in Nuremberg’s pedestrian zone as a teenager. They always wore such serene expressions that it worried her mother, who pulled Zoe away quickly. What Zoe didn’t know back then was that those followers had mostly found their inner peace in a horizontal position. In 1990, when Osho ascended to nirvana, his popularity quickly declined and his followers moved on to other trends—like aerobics or tarot cards. Everything had its time. But, as it’s commonly known, trends return in waves, which meant that twenty years after Osho’s death, his commune flourished once again, more strongly than ever. His very worldly Rolls Royce collection, which had been paid for with his followers’ donations, was long forgiven and forgotten.