“Look, do you have thirty seconds?” he asked. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
He heard some shuffling, a closing door. “What’s going on?”
“I got a BBEC case. We’re going to trial maybe next month.”
“Really?” she said. “So that means partner?”
“In a couple more years, but, yeah—that’s what it means.”
“That is fantastic news. Congratulations, Jonah.”
“A lot of work went into it, so.”
Then there was a pause, and she said—with a kind of determined enthusiasm—“I really am happy for you.” And he guessed—knew—she was thinking about her own (ostensibly) stalled career. The next rung on the Ellis–Michaels ladder for her was vice president, and the company was notorious for its lack of female vice presidents—for its lack of females in any roles, in fact. As Sylvia explained it, they didn’t want to pay someone $500,000 a year to get pregnant.
He had another sip of the wonderful Scotch. It wasn’t that he was unsympathetic, but: “Is it impossible for you to be happy for me?”
“I just said I was happy for you.”
“Did you mean it?” She didn’t answer.
He could picture her: standing in some hallway—carpeted, fluorescently lit, all the cubicles around her empty for the night—wearing a suit with a sports bra underneath (otherwise, she said, the suits never fit right, her large breasts as much a burden to her as small breasts were to Zoey), her bobbed blond hair parted neatly across the top, the facile frown on her face that she always wore when they disagreed—as if she were neither angry nor culpable, simply tolerating the unpleasantness—her small, symmetrical nose ever so slightly flared at the nostrils. When they argued, it was easy for him to understand her success in a male-dominated industry. She could project formidable intensity in her face, in her five-foot-five frame. He guessed she’d developed this visible toughness from a lifetime of dealings with her father, but that relationship and its consequences she didn’t like to talk about. “I am truly happy for you, Jonah,” she finally said. “I am in the middle of a thousand things, but yes, I am truly happy for you. I’ll have Linda make us a reservation at Le Bernardin tomorrow night to celebrate.”
The last thing he’d wanted when he called had been to argue, and so he accepted her offer to move the conversation in a more amicable direction. “That sounds great,” he said. “I just wish you were here to celebrate with me tonight.” And before she could start to answer, he added, “And I know it’s not by choice. It’s only, y’know, too bad.”
“You are an excellent lawyer. You deserve this.”
“We can tell the broker we can look at six-thousand-dollar places.”
“That’s true,” she said. “There was the loft on Bond Street, remember? I emailed you?”
Lofts weren’t his preference; he had an affinity for closing doors. But he said, “Yeah, I remember. That place was great.”
“It’s exciting, Jonah.”
“I’m going to be in Boston a lot.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s an hour on the shuttle from LaGuardia.” And this reminded him of something he loved about her: how undaunted she was by circumstance, how adaptive and capable, in such contrast to—well, other people.
“Look, Syl, I know things haven’t been perfect lately,” he said.
“I can’t talk about that now,” she answered quickly.
“I know, I know, I just. I think we’re going to have a great future together.”
She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, in a hushed, measured tone, “That means a lot to me, Jonah.” Then, more loudly, “Anyway, I should get back.”
“Were you in early, too?”
“On the treadmill at four-thirty, in the conference room at six.”
“Jesus. Hang in there, Syl.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
“I love you.”
“Ditto. See you tomorrow.”
He hung up—reaffirmed, he felt, in his decision to end things with Zoey. He didn’t deny that an affection for her that had lasted nearly a decade would likely always be with him, in some form. But did she have any idea what it took to become a partner at a major New York law firm? Sure, B-girls worked long hours. But there were long hours, and then there were 17,500 hours. Sylvia could tell him he deserved to make partner and it meant something. She worked brutal hours in a brutal industry, too. She was a peer in that sense.
The bottom line was that it really wasn’t meant to be with Zoey and him. Maybe it could have been, once—but there were things you couldn’t control. For ten years they had been going nowhere, circling around the inescapable fact of their ultimate incompatibility. He and Sylvia, on the other hand, continued to steadily reach recognizable markers of relationship progress: from blind date to weekly dates; from weekly dates to thrice weekly; to (professed) monogamy and exclusivity; and now they were moving in together. No, things between them hadn’t been great lately, but they both concluded that that was because they didn’t see each other enough, and living together would help. And yes, he had fucked up with Zoey over the last several months. But he could call that the last reflexive twitches of an old habit—fading penile muscle memory, he thought with a smile. He could focus now—fully, and in full sincerity—on Sylvia. He swallowed the last of the Scotch, and in its satisfaction imagined he tasted a satisfaction with life in general. He went into the kitchenette and poured himself another glass.
He leaned against the stovetop (he might have checked if it was on, if he had ever turned it on) and scrolled through the numbers on his phone, eager to share his good news, his good mood. His father, a fund-raiser of indeterminate title with the Democratic Party, was in London on business that week, and it was two in the morning there. He would be in bed at this hour, likely, Jonah guessed, having eaten a lavish dinner with consiglieri of the Labour Party, likely with a woman lying beside him, either brought to London, or met in London, or, for all Jonah knew, the London girlfriend. Ever since his divorce from Jonah’s mother decades earlier, Jonah’s father had had many romantic partners, and they were not easily kept track of. Jonah briefly considered calling his mother, but only briefly. She ran a catering business, which, to hear her tell it, had been only one canceled wedding away from bankruptcy for the last decade. She tended to take news about his career as an opportunity to describe the trials and tribulations of her own. She acted as though he didn’t respect what she did, which had never made any sense to him until he realized that his father didn’t respect what she did. Jonah’s parents had a habit of making him a proxy for their complaints about each other.
His landing a major case that put him on a partner track was also not the sort of news he felt he could share with his law school friends, not without sounding arrogant: Most of them were at competing firms and had exactly this goal for themselves. Philip Orengo might be truly happy for him—but he would express this by telling him that BBEC was a corrupt multinational responsible for countless abuses in the developing world and Cunningham Wolf had now gobbled up the last of his immortal soul.
Eventually he came to the number of his cousin Becky. She was a cousin on his father’s side, was in her early twenties, had moved to New York a couple of years previously to take a job as an assistant at a record label. He didn’t see her as much as he should have, but he liked her, had always gotten along with her when their families gathered for holidays or weddings. She showed some of the free-spiritedness of his father’s side of his family. He called her.
“Jonah!” she cried enthusiastically when she answered.
“How’s it going?” he said.
“I can’t believe you called!”
“No, I know, work has been…”
“I was positive you’d forget my birthday.”
“Come on, we’re family,” he said, improvising. “Happy birthday, Becky.”
“Aw, thank you, Jonah! You’re coming over tonight?”
H
e stared at the black face of his microwave, as if some recollection could be summoned there. Had he seen an Evite to a birthday party? “Yeah, I was thinking about it. What’s the address again?”
“Three ninety-one East Fifty-third Street, between First and Second Avenues. Just call me when you get here, we might be up on the roof.”
“Three ninety-one East Fifty-third, between First and Second. I’ll bring champagne.”
“That’d be perfect,” she said. “I know everyone’s going to show up with beer, but one of Aimee’s friends is bringing a keg.” He thought it was possible he’d heard this Aimee mentioned before, but wasn’t sure. “We already started pregaming, so come over whenever you want. I’m already so drunk, Jonah.” He heard someone shout her name. “I’ll see you,” she said, and hung up.
He carried his glass of Scotch into his bedroom, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, then carried the glass into the bathroom. He pissed, reached under his shirt to put on deodorant, examined his face in the mirror: high forehead, deep-set brown eyes, dark hair retreating toward the crown of his head but still thick, his nose an ambiguous feature, he had always thought, appearing at some angles large and hooked in a stereotypically Jewish way; at others more classically Roman, like something off a bust of Caesar at the Met; and, when he looked at it straight on, as he did now, even a little narrow—an almost inconsequential part of his face. It was a handsome face, in some ways getting more handsome with age—and it occurred to him that realizing you had a handsome face was really all you needed to flirt effectively (but innocently!) with the girls in their early twenties who would be at Becky’s party. He drank down the remaining Scotch, sloshed green mouthwash around his mouth.
Going back into the living room, he put his wallet and keys in his pockets, checked his phone, and saw he had a text message from Sylvia: “7PM Le Bern confirmed. Looking forward.”
He wrote back: “Will it be a leisurely meal?”
After a moment she replied: “Not now!;-)”
His text had referred to certain escapades that had occurred during certain of their dinners. Sylvia was, generally speaking, a little stiff, a little restrained, when it came to sex. He blamed this on the Connecticut all-girls boarding school she’d attended, and on the fact that she’d never smoked pot. But she also had a transgressive streak, and after a few glasses of wine she sometimes gave him blow jobs in the bathrooms of fancy restaurants. It seemed there was at least a possibility they would add Le Bernardin to the list tomorrow. It was a pretty good quality to find in a girlfriend, he thought—and Zoey, for sometimes better but more often worse, was practically schizophrenic when it came to sex.
And so, with visions of dancing twenty-two-year-olds, excellent food and bathroom head, of professional success and a million-dollar salary and the whole cacophony of opportunity with which New York announced itself now filling Jonah’s head, he opened his apartment door and headed out for his Friday night.
* * *
Becky’s apartment building had all the character of a place a father wouldn’t mind paying the security deposit for his daughter to live in when she first moved to New York: new construction, doorman, garbage chute, double-dead-bolted doors, a plaster wall across the living room making of a reasonably livable one-bedroom apartment an only-just-livable two-bedroom. Not that Jonah was in any position to judge. His building had all the character of a place a lawyer who would never be home would choose to live.
Becky had certainly done more to personalize her living space than he had, as well. The walls had been painted a cheerful shade of yellow, there were framed photographs and posters from art exhibits on the walls, and for the occasion a HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign was strung above Becky’s bedroom doorway. Folding tables had been set up in the back of the living room, and these were arrayed with plastic bottles of booze, mixers and plastic cups, bowls of chips, cupcakes frosted in various pastel colors—these baked by Aimee, who, it turned out, was Becky’s roommate, and someone Jonah had been told about on several occasions. The promised keg was in the kitchen, sitting in a great plastic tub of ice; music Jonah recognized from Duane Reade played from an iPod plugged into portable speakers. The girl-to-guy ratio of the guests who mingled in pairs or in small groups was about 2:1—and Jonah couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for the packs of guys poking their heads into bars all across the city and finding the opposite ratio or worse, when what they were really looking for was this party. Indeed, when he’d come into the apartment and seen that Becky’s coworkers and friends-from-college had responded to the relative lack of available males by (as he’d often observed women do) getting especially drunk, he almost had some sympathy for himself—now firmly, firmly embedded in his relationship.
Relationship or not, though, he could still party with those present, could still celebrate BBEC by getting drunk. He’d followed the Scotches at his apartment with a couple celebratory birthday shots with Becky when he’d first arrived, then had a few beers from the keg, and now he was working on a vodka tonic prepared by Aimee, the alcohol-to-mixer ratio of which also happened to be 2:1. She and Jonah were talking in her room—she was seated at her desk, showing him on her computer the food blog she wrote, trying to convince him to read it as he stood over her shoulder.
“See?” she said as the screen filled with a photograph of streaked crimson ice cream in a small paper cup. “This is from Wednesday. The rhubarb-and-anise ice cream from the Emilia’s truck in SoHo is the best in the city. You’d know that if you read my blog!”
“I dunno, Aimee,” Jonah said mildly. “The McDonald’s on Forty-fifth Street makes a pretty good McFlurry. Maybe I should write a food blog.”
“Oh, come on,” she laughed, and tapped him gently on the leg from her chair—something she had been doing with increasing frequency, he’d noted. Though she was undeniably cute—Korean, pretty-faced, dressed insouciantly in a fedora and skirt—he concluded this touching was a permissible indulgence: maybe malum in se with regard to monogamy, but not necessarily malum prohibitum. “If you like fast food, you should at least stick to Shake Shack,” she continued. “I heard they’re going to open a new one near the new World Trade Center, or, like, whatever they’re going to call that now.” She started to type on the keyboard. “Here, let me show you something else.” He took another sip of his drink, drifted over to the photographs on her bookcase as she typed. “I’m actually really committed to all this,” she went on, in a slightly more serious tone. “A girl from my year at Barnard already has a book deal for her blog. Like, you can really make it happen.”
“All it takes is a blog and a dream,” he said, and she laughed.
“I never knew lawyers were so funny!” she said.
“You should see me in court,” he answered, but now one of the photographs had caught his attention. It appeared to have been taken at a restaurant, as Aimee and the two other women in the image were seated at a white-clothed table. The woman to Aimee’s right was also Korean, resembled her, though she had a rounder face, wore glasses—Jonah figured this was her sister. But it was the third woman in the photo who interested him: thin, long-necked, and very pale, with a mass of jet-black hair. And though she smiled thinly, there was a certain eeriness, he thought, to her look.
“There’s this little organic place on Allen Street I’m doing a post on…” Aimee was saying.
“Who’s this?” Jonah asked her, still looking at the picture.
Aimee turned around in her chair. “Oh, that’s my sister, Milim. That’s randomly the only picture I have of us together. She’s a doctor now. My dad is obsessed with her, of course.”
“No,” Jonah said, and tapped the glass beside the face of the pale woman. “Who’s she?” He could not quite identify what he found so strange about her—which had the effect of making her appear all the stranger. Her nose was unusually large, she had a black mole that dotted the top of a cheekbone, but it was the look in her eyes, he eventually decided, that was so odd: hollow—ghostly—as if she stare
d at the camera from a great distance, though it could have only been a few feet away.
“That’s Milim’s roommate at Yale. Judith.”
And then he remembered where he had seen this look before. “Judith looks like you just liberated her from a death camp.”
“Oh, don’t!” Aimee said, laughing. “It’s the only picture I have of us. Besides, that girl has a really sad story.”
He looked at this girl, Judith, for another moment—then shrugged and turned away. “Eh, some people’s lives don’t turn out the way they want,” he said with exaggerated insensitivity. He returned to the computer, which now displayed a picture of a (he had to admit very appetizing-looking) spinach quesadilla. “Y’know, I’ve been to Taco Bell a hundred times, and I’ve never ordered that,” he joked, and had every expectation of never thinking about Judith again.
“Those places are terrible for you!” Aimee said, tapping his leg again. “Seriously, you will drop dead of a heart attack, I am predicting that now.”
“Hey guys,” Becky said, coming into the room accompanied by a tall, square-shouldered man Jonah thought he maybe recognized. “What are you talking about?”
“Taco Bell,” Jonah said.
“Becks, you didn’t tell me your cousin looked like Jake Gyllenhaal,” Aimee said to her playfully.
“Right, he wishes,” Becky answered, giving Jonah a knowing glance. “Can you help Jasmine with the sangria? I think they’re messing it up.”
“Yeah, cool,” Aimee said, standing. “Jonah, promise me you’ll check out the blog, okay? It’s bigcitysmalltables.com. Leave me a comment and maybe we can try that ice cream sometime.” She winked at him and left.
“Sorry,” Becky said. “I swear I told her you had a girlfriend.” Becky was no more than five-foot-one, zaftig (as her mother, Jonah’s aunt Sheila, relentlessly put it), had long and curly brown hair, a mouth that smiled easily, a nose that was more overtly hooked than Jonah’s. She wore a bright red dress, over that a black jacket with the sleeves rolled up, and had a tiara in her hair, for her birthday.
The Book of Jonah Page 6
