In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (24 page)

She was sure Kristen and other people in New York had lots to say about it, and that they probably said it. Sharon was okay with that; she didn’t think she’d be returning to New York.

*   *   *

After two weeks of dinners and 6:30
P.M.
drinks with her parents, Sharon determined she needed to get another job. And despite spending much of her youth alienated in Cincinnati, the Queen City seemed as good a place as any to settle into.

She thought about doing something completely different—nannying or picking up composition lecture sections at Xavier—but scrolling through online job posts, Sharon found herself repeatedly coming back to a listing for a features writer at one of the city’s alternative weeklies. Her longest
Living
stories were two hundred words and most dated back to her earliest days at the magazine (when she’d been hesitant to blatantly write her novel at work), but Sharon suspected the simple fact that she’d been on the editorial staff at a major national magazine would carry a little weight. So she dug through the boxes Kristen had shipped for her clips and résumé, included a couple of the entertainment columns she’d written for
Washington Square News
in college to show range, and crossed her fingers
Cincy Beat
wouldn’t actually contact anyone at
Living
for a reference.

Within an hour of e-mailing her materials, Sharon got a call from Alice in features, asking her to come to Clifton for an interview.

The
Cincy Beat
office was cramped and dusty, with depressingly low ceilings and various newspaper articles taped to the wall. Set up on long folding tables were about eight workstations, each with an old iMac, stacks of paper, books, and used food containers. Sharon instantly liked it worlds more than the shiny
Living
offices on Avenue of the Americas, which were always kept pristine for when celebrities would come by. A handful of casually dressed young people were typing or talking on their phones, and she was glad she’d worn a black wrap dress and boots instead of the suit she’d briefly contemplated.

At most a year or two older than Sharon, Alice in features was dressed like a forties housewife in a vintage jumper and cat-eye glasses. Apologizing for the mess, she led Sharon to a couch very similar to the one in her old NYU dorm.

“So
Living
, what was that like?”

Sharon told her it was fun but fluffy. “I’m looking for the opportunity to do longer pieces.”

Nodding, Alice said they could definitely offer that, “a great salary, not so much, but you can pretty much get tickets to anything in town.”

Telling Sharon they liked her old columns, Alice sent her to interview an area artist opening his own gallery on Fourth Street for a trial story. Though Sharon hadn’t brought anything useful, such as paper or a recorder, she diligently headed out with the kind of drive she hadn’t had since her early days at
Living.
The gallery owner/artist was in the space setting up for the show and was happy to talk at length about his mission: promoting his own work, which had been rejected by the city’s established galleries. Sharon was able to twist Warhol’s quote about fame into the lead—“Billy Franklin is creating his own fifteen minutes”—which worked well, as his pieces were all pop art prints of old comic books and starlets like Paris Hilton. By day’s end Sharon had e-mailed the article to Alice in features. Within the hour, Alice called to offer the job.

A week in, Sharon had written about secondhand stores offering retro cooking classes (meat loaf and deviled eggs), the public library’s funding campaign, and late-night fine dining options.

Cincy Beat
didn’t pay well, but the salary was enough for a used Jeep Cherokee and a weird third-story apartment in an old, chopped-up house on Mcmillan Street that came furnished with worn but interesting things—rolltop desk, kitchen table with foldout wings, tiny box television. In the bedroom, the floor was so slanted, pens and cups and most other things would fall off the desk and tumble across the room. By definition it was transitory, the kind of place you couldn’t stay very long, but whenever it came time to leave, Sharon didn’t think she’d be going back to New York.

*   *   *

Without Sharon, the city kept on going; sometimes news came her way.

There were always magazines around the
Cincy Beat
office, and she skimmed them regularly for possible feature ideas (for the meetings where she actively pitched things, something she never did at
Living
).
The New Yorker,
the Sunday
New York Times Times Magazine
, and
The New York Eye
were always good for a trend story. So she read the articles about downtown architecture and new exhibits at the Whitney, and it was okay. Her time in Manhattan felt coated in Vaseline—obscured and dreamlike.

Because of its focus on celebrities,
Living
wasn’t a particularly useful source for ideas. But thumbing through one issue a few years in, she saw the annual “100 Sexy People” cover package had been written by Julie, the editorial assistant who’d been promoted the week before Chase died. Julie had apparently done all the interviews (including one with the guy who played Captain Rowen on that
E&E
origins show that Chase had mentioned and she’d dismissed), and there were pictures of her laughing and posing with the stars.

“Good for her,” Sharon said to no one in particular.

She still didn’t think she’d be going back to New York.

*   *   *

Not when Laurel Young-Griffin brought Sharon to her book club in the suburbs. The women—most married, all pinot grigio drinkers—were impressed that Sharon had lived in Manhattan. Everyone seemed to have gone to see
Cats
/
Phantom of the Opera
/
Wicked
for their honeymoon/anniversary/company convention, and they were eager to tell tales of taxicab and shopping victories.

Sharon still didn’t want to talk about New York or her Vaseline-obscured life there, but she adored how, even after all those years, Laurel still brought her along with her friends, even if the book club women were no better a fit than the glossy-lipped girls from high school.

So she told them about seeing
Wonderful Town
when her parents visited and discount shopping at Century 21. On the rare occasions when she told a story involving Chase Fisher, Sharon would simply say “my ex,” with the kind of war-weary gesture the women used when comparing their own husbands unfavorably to the men in the books they read. In her head, Sharon created generic, faceless figments of herself and Chase that she could talk about without sinking into the Earth’s core. Occasionally that old life did sound interesting, but Sharon still didn’t think she’d be going back.

*   *   *

Her neighbor in the old chopped-up house did something at UC Medical Center a few blocks over on Goodman and was nearly always clad in scrubs. He’d bob his head when he saw Sharon in the hall or by the bank of mailboxes in the foyer.

One night when Sharon was in her underwear and glasses transcribing notes from an interview, he knocked on the door. After checking the peephole and re-wrapping her discarded wrap dress, Sharon opened.

“I’m Scott Underwood; I live next door,” he said, as if they hadn’t seen each other leaving their respective apartments a dozen times. “Sorry to bother you, but I locked myself out.”

“Do you need to call a locksmith?”

“Actually, I was hoping you’d let me climb out your window onto the ledge. It’s pretty easy to get back in through my window.”

Sharon looked at him blankly.

Scott Underwood assured her he had done this all the time with the girl who used to live in her apartment.

There were mounds of clothes and old newspapers and half-full cans of Diet Coke everywhere, but she let him in, nervously stood by as he pushed up the window and balanced on the narrow stone ledge (flicker of a memory—standing on the railing at the Madison Plaza). After fiddling with the latch on his own window, Scott disappeared to the tune of a low-level crash. Ten seconds later he knocked on her door again.

“I made it.” He smiled, brown hair adorably mussed. “Thanks for your help.”

Sharon nodded. “Nothing like a little B&E to get to know your neighbors.”

“I owe you,” he said, and she told him not to worry about it.

But the next night, he was at her door again—wearing black pants and a ribbed sweater, not scrubs—asking if he could take her out for a drink to thank her.

They went to a local bar that catered more toward grad students than undergrads and had fewer peanut shells on the floor. Scott told her he was a surgical resident who was fighting very hard to remain committed to general surgery, though medical school loans were pushing him toward plastics. She told him she had moved back from New York and worked at
Cincy Beat.

“I read that,” he said excitedly.

“Really?”

“Well, I see it in the dispensers.” He smiled again. There was a gap between his front teeth, and she liked the way his tongue poked through.

Two weak gin and tonics later, Scott walked her the two blocks back to the chopped-up house on Mcmillan. At her doorstep, he bent down to kiss her.

She stopped him.

Mumbling an apology, he started backing into his apartment, but she reached for his hand.

“I had a really good time, tonight, I’m…” There really wasn’t a good way to explain what she was. In mourning? Denial? Scared of melting should she say her ex’s name aloud? “I’m not dating right now.”

He nodded as if that made sense, and things were awkward until two weeks later, when Sharon forgot
her
keys and knocked on Scott’s door.

He helped break into her place through his, and they forged a kind of friendship where they’d hang out in one of their apartments (usually his, he had a cleaning lady and a bigger TV) after work if they were both home at a reasonable or quasi-reasonable hour. It turned out that being a resident actually was a lot like doctor TV shows—everyone dated everyone and rarely left the hospital—and Scott was genuinely enthused to have a friend with no affiliation to UC. Some nights they’d rent a movie or play Trivial Pursuit, or she’d get
Cincy Beat
tickets to a concert or play. He ate bowls of cereal at all hours of the day and turned her on to the merits of the Frosted Mini-Wheats supper.

At first he was hesitant to talk about girls he went out with, but then he actually started asking her for advice. Sharon would occasionally see women sneaking out of his apartment in the mornings; they were almost always wearing rumpled scrubs of their own. She tried not to be jealous.

“Are you a lesbian?” Scott asked one night after six months, when they were eating Captain Crunch and hate-watching a horrible rom-com starring Kate Hudson and Jake James. “Not that it matters…”

“Junior year, my college roommate and I made out during a game of truth or dare. Otherwise, no.”

“Just not dating.” He nodded. “I remember.”

While Sharon suspected their friendship may have been largely based on the fact that he was too tired after marathon shifts at the hospital to look for a social life outside of their chopped-up house, she also knew that she could have told him about Chase Fisher breaking up with her and dying. Still she kept quiet.

It took him more than a year and countless Netflix rentals before he brought up her scar.

“Did it hurt?” he asked.

“What?”

Next to her on the couch, he sheepishly ducked his head toward the thin pink mark on her left wrist. “I’m sorry; they taught us to look for stuff like that during psych rotation.”

“It’s fine.” For the first time in a very long time, she allowed herself to think about the bathtub. About Nero. About waiting for Chase’s phone call that never came. “I was drunk, but yeah, it was actually pretty excruciating. I only got to the one.” Smiling flippantly, she held up her unblemished right wrist.

“Did you…,” Scott started.

She knew he wanted to ask what made her do it, what happened to make her stop. Knew that the moment was a fulcrum. If she was ever going to tell him about Chase and running out of the Madison Plaza, it was now. And if she did, their relationship would go one way, and if she didn’t, another. Knew that they could never be more than flirty friends if she didn’t tell him.

Enough time had passed that she suspected she might no longer fall through the flooring to China if she spoke Chase’s name.

But she didn’t.

“I never really meant to go through with it, like, not even at the time,” she said, which was a chunk of the truth, if not the whole thing. “I was just being melodramatic and stupid.”

“That’s good, I guess,” he said, and she supposed it was.

*   *   *

From New York, Kristen sent funny e-mails about disastrous Match.com dates she went on, people they both knew from school, and her job at the NYU Office of Annual Giving. Every couple of weeks, she’d call, and after a year, she flew out to visit.

“Who leaves New York to vacation in Cincinnati?” Sharon joked, but she was touched that Kristen used her time off to come see her.

Pulling her
Cincy Beat
connections, Sharon scored them tickets to see
Glengarry Glen Ross
at the Playhouse and a nonsensical installation piece at the Contemporary Arts Center that appeared to be nothing more than disassembled parts of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle on the floor.

Scott went with them to the Skyline Chili on Ludlow, where they gorged on three-ways and cheese conies but still managed to find room for black raspberry chip ice cream cones at Grater’s down the street.

Charmingly, Scott picked up the check.

“You ladies can pay me back by playing truth or dare later,” he said, and Sharon swatted his side.

“You told him?” Kristen didn’t sound remotely displeased. They had both been such tragically good, good girls in college that they often recounted this very brief dalliance into Sapphism. “She tells everyone; it’s her best story.”