If We Lived Here

by Lindsey Palmer

  Sophia waved away the concern. “All my friends are older. High school kids are immature.”

  “She has a point there,” Nick said, emptying the remains of his glass.

  “Anyway, you should really come.”

  Nick shrugged his concession, and Emma, more than willing to spend the rest of the evening avoiding their current predicament, said, “Why not?” Her beer-fogged brain was still calculating the best subway route up to Seventy-second and Second when Sophia announced a car service was on its way. Moments later they were beckoned to the curb by a honk that sounded almost polite, as if to expose the car’s prim Upper East Side origins.

  Emma was expecting a stately high-rise with an equally stately doorman, vases of freshly cut flowers, and polished, shiny surfaces, but the car pulled up to a building as battered-looking as Emma’s own Lower East Side tenement. “Thanks, Gordon,” Sophia chirped. She reached to pat the driver on the shoulder, then shimmied her way out and guided Nick and Emma inside and up three sets of stairs.

  The door swung open, and a waifish guy in his early twenties planted a peck on Sophia’s forehead. “Darling, hello. Who’s this, your nanny?”

  “This is my tutor-slash-friend-slash-life-coach, Emma,” said Sophia, giddy. Emma felt herself blushing. “Also her lover, Nick.” Nick shot Emma a skeptical look.

  Post-introductions, Sophia pulled them into a large room that resembled the set of a down-market Benetton ad: Each of the dozen or so people was an unusual take on attractive, and each projected a variation on a thrift-store-chic aesthetic. Genevieve would’ve fit right in, with her long blond hair and vintage wardrobe, Emma thought. Emma considered texting her, before she remembered with a twinge her friend’s recent chilliness—although maybe Gen really was just busy with her nursing school applications, as she’d claimed. After a few moments, Emma realized that no one in the room had moved or spoken; they all lounged, wearing listless expressions and draping long, limp limbs across the furniture; she half wondered if there’d been a gas leak. Sophia made introductions, but Emma couldn’t quite follow the names that either sounded like medications (Allegrina? was it Frescaline?) or else just things (Branch, Lyric, Bird, did she say Nickel?). The painted walls were accented with snaking lines of poetry, some of which Emma recognized as Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda. Nick nudged her. “I need a drink, stat.”

  In the kitchen was a guy busy transferring most of a bottle of vodka into a plastic cup. “Aloha,” he said, his marble eyes a hypnotizing hue of blue. “I’m Wade.”

  “Oh,” said Emma, suddenly hopeful. “You’re the lawyer Sophia told us about.”

  “Did she?” Wade raised his eyebrows, which made his eyes pop even more vividly. “Yep, I’m doing the legal education thing at Hunter—starting with Constitutional Law this semester, and I think I’ll try Torts next. I’m taking it slow so I can really experience each class fully, you know? Also so I have time for my art.”

  “Your art—of course.” Nick said it with an edge, but Wade nodded in earnest. “Mind if I pour myself a drink?”

  “Be my guest, bud. And one for the lady?”

  Emma grabbed a cup, her hopes of getting help from Wade dwindling. “So then you’re not a lawyer.” She didn’t even bother phrasing it as a question.

  “I’m not sure I’ll end up taking the bar. It’s, like, I definitely wanna help people who get screwed over by the system, but at the same time, I don’t wanna be part of perpetuating the man’s bullshit with some elitist degree. I mean, what does it even mean to call oneself a Juris Doctor?”

  So that she wouldn’t have to respond, Emma gulped at her drink—vodka with a trickle of tonic. She decided they should leave, and was about to say so to Nick, but then Wade set his electric-blue gaze upon her, and she understood how he could get away with spewing such nonsense. No straight woman could laugh those eyes out of the room. Wade draped an arm each around Emma’s and Nick’s shoulders, and asked, “But what’s going on with you guys, I mean legal system–wise?”

  Their whole sob story tumbled out of Emma, as Wade “mmm-hm”-ed along in sympathy and Nick freshened all of their drinks.

  “Well, you’re screwed,” Wade declared after Emma finished describing the afternoon’s altercation. “I hate to say it, but if this guy wants to bogart your money, your only real recourse is to sue his ass. And the government’s slashed the shit out of the courts’ budgets, so you’re looking at a six-month wait time, minimum—and that’s if you make it before a judge at all. Usually they triple-book the cases. Even if you go all cheapskate and rep yourself, and even if you do get your case heard and manage to win, if this dude knows anything about how fucked-up shit is in the law, he can just straight up not pay. Then it’s on you to go all Sherlock on his ass and track down his assets, fill out a shit-ton of paperwork, freeze his bank accounts, and more or less mire yourself in a total cluster-fuck of governmental incompetence. Don’t even get me started on appeals.”

  “They teach you all that in Constitutional Law?” asked Nick.

  “Oh no, man. I sued my dad’s ex-wife over these Rolexes I’m positive she lifted from my pad, so I’m mad knowledgeable about the courts and all their bullshit. The judge had my back, but two years later, that shit’s still not resolved.”

  “Wow, I’m sorry,” said Emma.

  “Yeah, it’s a major bummer. Anyway, want my advice?” Wade clearly knew the power of his gaze; Emma was suddenly eager for his input. “Drop it. I know it’s hard as fuck, but try and get Namaste about that shit: Just let it go. So you’re out a few Gs? Tough shit. That’s life, man.” Wade raised his cup, and they all drained their drinks.

  Nick leaned into Emma and whispered, “Escape route, please, now.”

  Out in the living room, Sophia beckoned them to a couch. “How’d it go with Wade? Was he helpful?”

  Emma nodded, not wanting to get into it.

  “He’s really magnanimous, isn’t he?” Sophia winked; they’d reviewed the vocab word earlier that day. Emma’s pang of pride unfortunately also instigated a burbling of the alcohol in her system and an accompanying shot of shame; despite her knowing that Sophia would never say anything to her mother about tonight, it really was not okay for Emma to be out drunkenly fraternizing with her client. Once again she planned to announce that it was time for Nick and her to leave, but once again she got sidetracked.

  “Hey, I’ve got some sweet news.” The soft voice came from a girl on the futon, whose long strands were being twirled around the fingers of the boy next to her. Her hair was mesmerizing—it fell to her waist, and was jet-black but bleached in such a way to resemble dappled light through tree branches. “Zeke and I just decided to get married.”

  Sophia and the others cheered, but the girl and her hair-twirling friend—Zeke, presumably—remained placid, like they’d just announced their plans for lunch.

  Emma must’ve not been as quiet as she thought when she said to Nick, “How old do you think they are?” because the boy turned to her and said, “We’re seventeen.”

  Emma was shocked. As one of two card-carrying adults in the room (she didn’t count Wade), she felt a responsibility to say something sensible, like about the reverse correlation between marital age and divorce rate. Still, another part of her sensed the futility, and really didn’t want to delve into a sociological debate with someone from this crowd. Nick, likely feeling similar, excused himself for the bathroom.

  Despite Emma staying quiet, the newly engaged girl launched into her theory of marriage: “The way I see it is, if you’re going to get hitched, the only way to do it is super-young, like shockingly so, because then you’re still giving the finger to societal conventions. If you hit, say, twenty-five and you still haven’t made it to the altar, then you’ve gotta say, ‘Fuck it!’ to the whole thing. Because the last thing you wanna do is give in to the marriage-industrial complex that says your late twenties is the time to shack up, spend a shitload on some stupid white dress, and invite everyone you know to buy
you blenders and crap. You can’t be a slave to that bullshit.”

  “Totally, just like Emma and Nick,” Sophia exclaimed, slapping Emma on the thigh. “You’ve been together for years, right? You’ve never asked anyone to buy you a blender!” Sophia was definitely buzzed and, oddly, Emma felt relieved; she couldn’t bear it if her whip-smart client were engaging with such nonsense sober.

  “Hear, hear.” This from Zeke, who was now teasing his fiancée’s lovely hair into a horrible nest. “To not following anyone else’s expectations. To paving your own path.”

  “So what are your plans?” Emma asked, mostly to steer the talk away from herself.

  “Well, I get access to my trust fund when I turn eighteen,” the girl said, “then we’ll elope to South America, and embark on an epic trip around the southern hemisphere. You know, have a grand adventure and see the world!”

  Emma glanced around to see if anyone else was horrified by this so-called plan. But what she noticed was something else: What she’d first assumed were everyone’s thrift-store clothes she now saw lacked the shabbiness, the slightly off fit, the occasional loose seam characteristic of secondhand attire. Instead, Emma detected buttery cashmere, delicate silk, velvety leather, and what she now realized was probably real fur. Unlike a different kind of well-heeled crowd who would flaunt their duds’ designer labels, this group had selected their pieces to conceal their expense; their seemingly bohemian styles belied what closer investigation revealed to be fine materials and expert cuts. Next Emma turned her eye to the mismatched furniture. Again, no discolorations or signs of wear like one would find in Salvation Army stock. In fact, Emma could’ve sworn she’d seen that end table in the Restoration Hardware catalogs that had mysteriously begun appearing in her mailbox; she’d been disgusted to discover the company’s two-hundred-dollar throw pillows and forty-dollar mugs, wondering who would possibly pay such prices.

  She turned to Sophia, whispering, “Who lives here?”

  Sophia shrugged. “No one, really. Branch’s parents keep the place for when they have out-of-town guests, but mostly we use it to party.”

  All at once Emma realized that she’d had too much to drink. Through bleary eyes she squinted at Sophia, who was trading swigs from a bottle of Dom Pérignon with the boy who was maybe named Nickel, and Emma felt a sting of sympathy with a woman she’d previously dismissed as dreadful: Sophia’s mother. Mrs. Cole was dead set on her daughter attending college, preferably outside of the city, meaning far away from this posse of overprivilege. Everyone who was hanging around, using this perfectly good apartment purely to party, seemed devoid of perspective or real-world knowledge (with the exception, perhaps, of Wade’s expertise in how to sue your stepmom). Emma felt a pang then for Genevieve, who was the real version of what these people were posing as. Her friend had worked every odd job, had subsisted for weeks at a time on bananas and black beans to save money, and had always lived on the city’s fringes with a slew of roommates, all to support her dream of acting—what this crowd would call “her art”—and who, Emma now realized, was likely not filling out nursing school applications. Gen’s recent distance seized at Emma like a stomach cramp.

  Emma couldn’t tolerate the party for another minute. She had to escape this ridiculous crowd and this beautiful space where no one lived. She charged into the bathroom to find Nick and demanded they leave.

  “Oh, good. I’ve been waiting an hour for you to say that.” He zipped up his fly.

  Emma caught her image in the mirror, and saw she was fuming. “We just have to make a stop on the way home.”

  Outside the bathroom, she pulled Sophia aside. “Come on, we’re leaving.”

  Sophia protested, but Emma stood firm, citing Sophia’s school day that would begin in just seven hours. “God, you’re turning into my mother,” the girl moaned, which made Emma smile.

  Together the three of them staggered the four long blocks west to Park Avenue. Before delivering Sophia into the hands of the doorman, Emma instructed the girl, “For next week, take an entire practice SAT and write a personal statement—a serious one, I mean it. No excuses.” Emma wasn’t going to cut Sophia any more slack; it was time for her to face reality. Emma waved good-bye, thinking she, too, should take her own advice.

  With that, she and Nick boarded the downtown subway, both headed to their respective apartments, which they could each call home for a few more precious days.

  Chapter 17

  Recess patrol under normal circumstances required an extra-large coffee, and this week, when Nick had hardly slept at all thanks to the Luis crap, plus everything else he’d mired himself in, he could’ve used an IV drip of caffeine. Nick had requested library duty for his afternoon free, but it was probably his friend Carl’s idea of a practical joke to stick him instead with policing the post-lunch hordes set loose on the “playground.” Just as New York City bars called their concrete backyards “gardens,” New York City schools called their fenced-in strips of pavement “playgrounds.” Nick observed the urban recess with pity, feeling nostalgic for his own suburban school’s lush playing fields. But city kids didn’t seem to know what they were missing—they looked high on something as they darted across the blacktop in games of football and keep-away. Their small lungs released a series of screeches that made Nick want to scale the fence and flee.

  Nick mostly kept out of the mayhem. Although he didn’t subscribe to the “boys will be boys” attitude that ignored certain cruelties, he’d learned years ago that trying to micromanage the kids’ play tended to result in an “accidental” baseball to your gut. Still, when he spotted a notorious troublemaker swinging a metal bat way too close to a classmate’s head, Nick thought of his own recent head injury and felt a twitch of solidarity with the targeted boy. “Hey,” he yelled, jogging over, “knock it off.”

  The bully was slow to stop his bat’s rotations, and when he did he played it off like he was simply done working on his swing. “Whatever,” he snorted, strutting away. The picked-on kid looked mortified; Nick patted him on his back—narrow and bony—then returned to his post at the picnic table.

  He sat down next to Mrs. Gould. “Boy, could I use a smoke,” she said for the second time in ten minutes. Mrs. Gould’s desire for a cigarette was always a palpable presence on recess patrol. (Her other oneliner was “I sure wasn’t expecting weather like this,” which made Nick wonder if the existence of meteorologists had somehow eluded her notice.) Nick felt sorry for the woman, whose fidgety fingers were making him more desperate for a nap. He went for the next-best thing, coffee—hot! His tongue tingled with a scald that he knew would remain for days. Now Nick felt sorry for himself, too.

  He scanned the blacktop for the bullied kid, hoping he hadn’t suffered a bat to the head while Nick’s back had been turned. The boy was alone in a corner, kicking the shit out of a stick. Nick had imagined him to be a shy, sweet type, but now he realized the boy was no angel. If he were bigger he probably would’ve happily kicked the shit out of the bully, too. How terrible people are to one another, Nick thought, realizing even he wasn’t immune; he drowned his own guilty gut in gulps of coffee.

  That’s it, Nick thought suddenly, Luis must’ve been bullied as a kid. Who else grew up to be so angry, so haughty, so irrationally convinced that others were out to get him? It made sense. But Nick didn’t feel sympathy for the landlord. Everyone had their shit from the past, and part of being an adult was moving on and deciding to do the right thing; Luis clearly hadn’t learned this lesson. Nick brought two fingers to his mouth and blew a shrill whistle. “Hey, cool it over there,” he shouted. “Yeah, you with the stick.”

  Deciding to do the right thing. Nick was always drilling the importance of this concept into his kids’ heads, and yet he himself had been hanging out with Emma for days and not mentioned what had happened with Genevieve. With every interaction they shared, with every word he uttered, Nick was aware of the omission. Still, it never seemed like the right time, and it pained him to imag
ine Emma’s devastation. Plus, Nick was exhausted. He’d lain awake all last night, never managing to set aside his anxiety and fury for long enough to slip into sleep. He’d thought of Emma, then Genevieve, then Emma, and when he occasionally found himself replaying the hookup with Gen and fantasizing about another, he was overcome by a new wave of self-disgust. Now he downed the rest of his coffee, wishing he had more.

  Also there was Luis. Luis, who, after their disastrous confrontation at the bar, had taken three days to respond to Nick’s and Emma’s texts, and who’d then only begrudgingly agreed to meet up again last night. Although the couple had read up extensively on housing law—and they’d even drafted an official document to break the lease, based on a template they’d found on a tenants’ rights site—Luis had barely budged on his terms: He’d agreed to refund them the last month’s rent, and not a penny more. Plus he’d brought along his steroids-happy brother, a savvy move; when it came to intimidation, Nick’s knowledge of the Western literary canon was no match for the brother’s bulging muscles. More than anything, Nick and Emma had been terrified of not breaking the lease, and then getting a monthly bill charging them for rent to an apartment where they’d never even moved in. So they’d agreed to Luis’s preposterous offer, figuring they could sue later. And while Nick had been busy doing the math in his head of all they’d lost—first month’s rent, security, the broker’s fee, plus the cost of repairs—Emma had flung the pieces of the torn-up lease to the ground, stomped on them, and yelled, “We’ll see you in court, mister!” It was a bit dramatic for Nick’s taste, but he knew Emma just needed to vent. (Luckily the jacked-up brother seemed amused and not affronted by her antics.)