So where and when had she gone wrong? Emma was suddenly back to Lily Bart, near the end of The House of Mirth when the protagonist had fallen so far. Despite her beauty and her wardrobe and all her potential, a series of small missteps left Miss Bart alone and penniless, abandoned by her friends and shamed by society. Emma reveled in her own self-pity. Today was the day after Labor Day, the unofficial start of getting back to business, and here Emma was forcing down a sad sandwich of dry turkey and wilted lettuce, wearing dirty clothes (at least Annie had brought her her suitcase, so she could change out of her muddy maid-of-honor dress), and waiting for the bleeding to abate in her boyfriend’s brain. She felt alone. Annie and Eli were off to Africa, Genevieve was back in New York, Nick was sleeping off his head trauma, her parents were an ocean away, and Mr. Griffin had cursed her out for being bad at her job. To top it all off, in a few weeks, she and Nick would become homeless.
Emma tore open a carton of chocolate milk, which she’d bought in an attempt to comfort herself. Her sip tasted sour, and she sprayed it out across her tray. She checked the expiration date: August 15. Of course her milk would be bad, she thought, pouting. She heard laughter, and turned around to see a table of kids, most bald and all skeletally thin, playing cards. Emma chastised herself for her self-absorption. She imagined Gen telling her to buck up, so she stood up, tossed out the milk, and headed back to her boyfriend.
“Great news,” Nick said, greeting her with a kiss. “I’m good to go.”
Chapter 12
The discharge nurse had warned Emma it would take weeks for Nick’s brain to recover, meaning his main job for now would be to rest. He seemed to split his days between sleeping and sitting on his couch munching Saltines. He wouldn’t be cleared to go back to school for at least another week—the D.C. doctor had put him in touch with a colleague at NYU for a follow-up. Maybe they feared Nick would keel over and collapse in front of his students, Emma wasn’t sure. But whatever the legitimate reasons for Nick’s extended respite, she couldn’t help feeling envious, wishing she too had a doctor’s note excusing her from everyday life. Alas, she couldn’t call in a sub to take over her responsibilities. And those responsibilities—nine clients, plus the manic refreshing of Craigslist apartment listings during rare breaks—along with Nick’s fragile state, provided Emma with enough fodder to keep putting off the serious talk she knew they needed to have.
In truth, Emma wouldn’t have known where to begin. She felt angry and resentful, but was unsure whether she had a right to be. After all, Nick was seriously injured. Plus, she knew he would’ve rather been back at school. He talked about it regularly in his sleep, tongue thick with lesson plans as she shook him awake to ask him those inane questions about spelling words and the President. When the nurse had told Emma how important it was to monitor Nick’s brain recovery, and then prescribed a strict regimen of middle-of-the-night wake-ups, Emma had nodded like a hyperactive string puppet. But it was exhausting work. Genevieve had volunteered to help with some of the caretaking, but so far Emma had felt reluctant to rope her friend into Nick’s stale-smelling den of recovery. And although when Nick finally called his parents they’d offered to fly out, Nick had insisted it wasn’t necessary, and they’d quickly conceded. Instead they’d sent a modest fruit basket of apples and oranges, a preprinted Get Well Soon! placard toothpicked into one of the Granny Smiths.
So Emma was on her own tending to Nick night after night, with no break to escape to her own apartment for a stretch of solitude or uninterrupted sleep. If this was a preview of what it would be like to shack up for good with Nick, Emma was not thrilled.
Still, Emma soldiered on, lining up back-to-back apartment visits after work each day. After two hours spent drilling Isaac on SAT geometry (Mrs. Goldstein had booked her son a double session), Emma rushed out to visit what sounded like a promising pad—a Park Slope one-bedroom with exposed brick and a claw-foot tub, one block from Atlantic Center and all the major subways. When Emma arrived, she double-checked the address. The apartment jutted out of a building’s second floor and hung directly over the three-way junction of Atlantic, Flatbush, and Fourth Avenues, cars careening all around. Emma imagined her wake-up there: a surround-sound alarm clock of honking horns and a thousand commuters, plus construction noise of the stadium going up across the street. When Emma pictured moving to Brooklyn, it was not to live on one of the borough’s busiest intersections, neighbor to a 20,000-seat arena. She didn’t even make it inside.
At her next appointment, Emma arrived at a South Slope building and, while distracted looking for the right bell, was startled by a “Psst.” A couple skulked out from behind a bush. “Whatever you do, do not move in here,” the woman hissed. “The place will seem great at first—high ceilings and hardwood floors, the whole deal. But the landlord’s a psychopath. The building’s infested with rats, and if you complain, he’ll turn off your heat in retaliation. Half the units have sued him in housing court. Seriously, Google the address.” The man handed Emma a card that read Prospect Ave Tenants for Fair Housing, then said, “We broke our lease, and it cost us thousands of dollars. We’re just here as volunteers, trying to help others avoid the same hell we went through.”
“Alrighty,” Emma said, fidgeting the card, not sure what to make of the creeping duo. She decided whether it was the landlord or this bug-eyed pair who were crazy, she wasn’t going to risk involvement. She thanked them and walked away.
Next up, Emma ventured to Gowanus to check out a loft with rooftop access. She met the realtor and together they ducked inside. Emma perused what must have been the foyer, narrow but neat with a futon and side table against one wall, and oddly featuring a sink and stove tucked into a corner.
“So what do you think?” asked the realtor.
“Good so far.” Emma looked up expectantly.
“Oh, the bathroom’s off this way. It’s cozy, but it does the trick. Quaint, right?”
Emma peered around—so this was it? The space barely fit the two of them standing side by side. “The ad said 825 square feet.”
“That’s right, my mistake. I meant to write 285. I’m dyslexic, so, you know.” The realtor clicked his pen open and shut, open and shut.
Emma wanted to throw a tantrum. She wanted to let loose on this slimeball with a middle-man’s moocher of an occupation. He probably thought he was so clever to trick innocent people into wasting their time to come see the world’s smallest—sorry, “quaintest,” “coziest”—apartment, then claim a learning disability, so that calling him out on his asshole-ness would make her seem like the asshole. Instead, Emma took a deep breath, shook the guy’s hand, and managed, “Good luck renting this gem.” She slammed the door on her way out.
The next day, Emma arranged visits to apartments in Clinton Hill, since she was scheduled later to accompany Sophia to an info session at nearby Pratt Institute. (Mrs. Cole was paying Emma simply to sit there with her daughter in order to make sure the girl actually attended.) Since Sophia showed up wearing a paint-splattered tracksuit and looking like she hadn’t washed her hair in a week, Emma directed them to seats in the back. “Pay attention, okay?” she whispered. Sophia pretended to pass out in her chair.
The presentation began, and as the admissions officer rattled on about state-of-the-art studio spaces and majors in sculpture, ceramics, and more, Emma fantasized about returning to school to study art. She pictured late nights in the pottery studio, throwing vases and bowls, maybe meeting a talented mentor who shared her artistic vision, and—Emma stopped herself when she realized she was plagiarizing the fantasy from the movie Ghost. She flashed guiltily on an image of Nick at home in his haze of recovery.
She glanced over at Sophia, who was absorbed in covering her Pratt pamphlet with doodles of the presenter. Emma was about to snap her to attention, when she noticed that most every other kid in the room was similarly occupied. Emma felt a blip of excitement for Sophia, hoping the girl also realized that she was in the right place.
&nbs
p; “So what did you think?” Emma asked her at the end.
“I think it seems pretty dumb to throw away 50K a year just to do the art I’d be doing anyway.”
Emma nodded. She resisted pointing out what Sophia knew to be true, that fifty thousand dollars meant very little to her mother, who was heiress to her late father’s multimillion-dollar estate; as Sophia had explained it to Emma, her grandfather had started a line of bacon-infused snack food that Kraft eventually bought up for a killing. Emma decided to bag the rest of the rah-rah college pitch. She honestly wasn’t even sure college was the right path for Sophia. “Anyway, I have to run to see an apartment. Are you okay getting home?”
“Can I come?”
“Excuse me?”
“Can I come see the apartment with you? My mom texted me that she Netflixed that Banksy documentary. I’d do anything to avoid a movie date with my mother.”
“Um, okay, I guess so.” Emma felt put on the spot. “As long as you understand that this is not going to be some Newport mansion tour.”
“Duh, we’re in gritty Brooklyn.”
Emma suppressed a laugh. They were standing on a pristine campus cloaked by a canopy of oak trees, surrounded by beautiful, stately buildings; only someone who lived in a doorman building on Park Avenue would call this gritty. “Seriously though, if you’re going to tag along you’ll have to suspend your usual judgment. No snark.”
“Snark officially suspended. So where are we headed?”
“Let’s see, up to Myrtle.”
“Ooh, sounds like the name of some eccentric great-aunt. Let’s go!”
A week earlier, Emma never would’ve suspected she’d be apartment-hunting with her seventeen-year-old client, instead of with her boyfriend, but little had gone as planned lately. When she and Sophia arrived at the address she’d texted to herself, there didn’t seem to be a buzzer. Emma knocked on the door, hollering, “Hello?”
An old man in a suit and tie leaned his belly out of an upstairs window. “Greetings, my friends. Catch!” Emma reacted fast, snatching a key from the air just before it would’ve landed on the bridge of her nose. The key’s chain bore a bloody Jesus on a cross.
“It’s the top lock,” the man yelled down. “Turn it counterclockwise and meet me upstairs.” His accent had a musical lilt that was maybe Caribbean; embarrassingly, it made Emma think of frozen daiquiris and sunbathing.
Inside, the house smelled musty and looked like a funeral home. A vase of fake flowers sat on a mahogany bureau and a gaudy mirror filled half the wall. Emma and Sophia tentatively approached the staircase, which was lined with red velvet carpeting. Emma squeezed her client’s shoulder. “If this guy turns out to be an ax murderer, your mother is going to kill me.”
“We’d already be dead, right? So no sweat.”
The door at the top of the stairs bore a series of bumper stickers, each dictating a command: “America, don’t forget to thank God!” “Pray today!” and “Love Him now!”
“Love who? Where’s the antecedent to that pronoun, am I right?” said Sophia, and the door swung open before Emma had a chance to praise the point but also correct her: It was “love whom.”
“Hello, my friends. What a fine day we’ve been blessed with today. Come in.”
The first thing Emma noticed was the plastic—all three couches were covered in it. Next she saw the teddy bears. There must’ve been at least a dozen of them, gracing the surface of every cabinet and table. The man noticed Emma looking, and said, “They’re collector’s items, very hard to track down.” He held up a bear and Emma saw that a small set of wings extended from its furry shoulders. “My angel bears watch over our home.”
Emma decided to change the subject: “So what’s the square footage here?”
“Oh, I don’t know, we didn’t measure. But it’s the whole floor. Right now my wife and I live up here. As soon as we rent it out, we’ll move downstairs with our daughters and their families. Take a look around.”
“Have you had any problems with vermin?” Sophia asked, then added under her breath, “Or perhaps silver-tongued serpents?” Emma pinched her.
They wandered the rooms, which were large and filled with light, if a bit run-down. In her mind, Emma tried to remove the clutter of old-fashioned furniture and stuffed animals, and she found she could imagine a pretty nice apartment.
Sophia held up an angel bear, and put on a childish voice: “Thou shall not kill, thou shall not commit adultery, thou shall not—”
“Stop it,” Emma snapped, spotting the landlord. She swatted away Sophia’s hand.
“So, friends, what are your thoughts?” he asked. “I should tell you we lowered the price since we put up the ad—to $1,600 per month. Our priority is to rent it out quickly.”
Wow, Emma thought. The apartment was hundreds of dollars cheaper than other places she’d seen, and twice as large. So what if the landlord seemed like a religious nut? So what if he’d be living—
“So, do you and your daughter go to church regularly?” he asked, interrupting her thoughts.
Sophia whispered, “He means me.” Jesus, how old did this guy think Emma was?
“Mom and I have fallen a bit off the Christ bandwagon these days,” Sophia said. “We’ve moved more into agnostic territory.”
Emma glared at her, relieved that at least she hadn’t mentioned Judaism.
“Well,” said the landlord, resting his hands atop his belly, “my wife and I run a Bible group that meets every Tuesday. We certainly hope our tenants will attend. It’s very important to us to maintain a positive Christian atmosphere in our home. It would be a pleasure for us to help save your souls.” His smile made him look like a Cheshire cat.
“Thanks, we’ll think about it,” Emma said quickly, then shook the man’s hand. Bargain rent or not, she was out of there, dragging Sophia behind her.
Outside, Emma felt a wave of self-pity, slipping back into Lily Bart despair.
“Cheer up, my sister,” Sophia sang out, like a Pentecostal preacher. “I’ll take you to a revival meeting, we’ll praise the Lord Jesus, and all your troubles will melt away.” She dropped the sermon routine: “Or, if your evil plot to ship me off to college succeeds, then you and your man can bunk up in my old bedroom. Although having my mom as a roommate would probably be worse than living above that psycho dude.”
“All right, Ms. Smarty-Pants, I think it’s time for you to mosey on back to Manhattan.” But Sophia had managed to cheer her up; Emma was glad the girl had tagged along. Emma escorted her to the subway, then checked her agenda: She was supposed to see a 1.5-bedroom in what the ad claimed was Boerum Hill, but which, based on price and vagueness of listed location, Emma suspected actually abutted the nearby housing project. These realtors clearly had the same kind of training she’d gotten in P.R., filling their posts with spin and euphemism to mask every imperfection and emphasize any puny perk, spooning out the happy images of home that hopeful renters ate up. Well, right now Emma wasn’t biting. She blew off the appointment and headed home to Nick.
It wasn’t yet dark when Emma let herself in to Nick’s apartment, but her boyfriend was already asleep. The sight of him sprawled out on the couch, jaw slack and thin film of drool streaming from his lip, made Emma wish she’d suggested dinner with Sophia, and delayed both of their trips home. She decided that tomorrow she’d take Gen up on her offer to help with Nick—even if just to hang out with him for a couple of hours. Nick had avoided reaching out to his friends since his injury, and it would be good for him to see someone other than Emma, someone who wasn’t so burnt-out on benevolence.
“Come on, babe, up we go.” Emma eased Nick, half-asleep, to his room and into bed. She planted a kiss on his forehead and checked the clock: 8:04 p.m. She had three hours before she’d have to rouse him awake with the questions, her very last round after a week of prescribed interrogations. Nick was already snoring when she tiptoed away.
Emma changed the channel from ESPN to FOX, which was airing New
Girl. Jess was bantering with one of her attractive male roommates, a flirtation Emma suspected would last two seasons max before they finally got together and the show got dull; happy couples didn’t make good TV. At the commercial break, Emma logged into Seamless and, in an act of carnivorous rebellion, ordered herself a cheeseburger from Five Guys.
When Emma later went outside to dump the evidence of her meat eating, on a whim, she kept walking until she ended up in a pub. She perched herself on a barstool and ordered a Stella, then nursed it, fidgeting and watching the other patrons. Back before Emma had met Nick, she’d sometimes ventured out alone to bars. She’d hoped she might attract a different kind of guy from the fratty dudes who approached her when she was out with Annie or the hipsters she met while with Gen. And she’d been right, although the guys who’d sought her out solo tended to be married men in their forties—not Emma’s thing. Now she tried to be inconspicuous, as she watched a group of early-twenty-somethings chatting and flirting and flitting around one another like butterflies. She guessed this was the start of their night, and who knows where they’d end up in two hours. Emma knew exactly what she’d be doing: easing Nick awake to check on the progress of his healing.
She ordered another beer, then immediately regretted it. One of the girls from the group leaned over the bar, exposing serious cleavage as she waved down the bartender. The girl’s tube top seemed silly in this dive bar, but she did look fantastic. Emma herself had on a worn button-down; she tried to remember the last time she’d donned a tube top—years ago. She was starting to feel like a cross between a Peeping Tom and a parasite, creepy and pathetic for trying to suck some vicarious fun out of a group of strangers. She finished off her beer and slinked out.
At eleven on the dot, Emma jostled her boyfriend awake. She began with the usual suspects—“Who’s the President?” “What’s the date?”—which Nick aced. Emma wondered if he could spell a more challenging word backward and, giving in to her curiosity, channeled her best impression of a spelling bee host: “Please spell ‘paradigm’ backward. That’s ‘paradigm,’ noun, as in ‘You are proving to be a paradigm of recovery.’ ” Nick struggled, but eventually, with brow furrowed in concentration, he managed the word. Emma kissed him on the nose, delighted that he’d successfully performed the trick, like a circus animal. She dismissed what she imagined as Gen’s horrified reaction, not quite caring that she was being a little cruel. She improvised a couple more questions: “Do you love me?” (“Of course”), and “Are you happy being my boyfriend?” (“Yes, I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”) Emma’s heart fluttered, and she felt a pang of what had been lying dormant since Nick’s fall in the woods—lust.
If We Lived Here Page 11
