Modern Lovers (23 page)

E
lizabeth sat on the porch, sweating. She had an appointment that afternoon with a couple from Carroll Gardens who wanted a house in the neighborhood—they had a three-year-old daughter and were pregnant with another. Zoe's house was exactly what they were looking for—big enough for all the people in their family but shabby enough that they could afford it. Deirdre had a listing for a house on Ditmas Avenue, but Elizabeth knew they wanted to be closer to the park than that. A few blocks made all the difference, sometimes—it wasn't unusual to have clients who gave you exact borders that they were looking within—sometimes it had to do with school zones, but sometimes it was just personal preference. If Elizabeth ever moved, she would want an apartment on Commerce or Grove or Bedford in the West Village, a tiny little tangle of streets. Not that she wanted to move—it was just a professional hazard, seeing how other people lived their lives and measuring against your own. She also didn't really want to sell Zoe's house—it would mean that Zoe was actually leaving the neighborhood, and if they weren't neighbors, what would that mean? Would she regularly text her for a last-minute dinner date? Not that Zoe had responded positively lately—though of course they were sorting through a lot, what with the fire and everything. Sometimes excuses weren't excuses. If Zoe moved, would they sit on each
other's porches and drink wine? How often would Zoe get on the subway for her? She didn't want to have to find out.

Elizabeth was sitting on the porch because Zoe was avoiding her—she wasn't responding to e-mails and texts, as if Elizabeth didn't know that she'd seen them. Sometimes she longed for the olden days, when you had no idea whether anyone had listened to your message, or that you'd called them six times in one day. Elizabeth wasn't trying to be a stalker; she actually needed to talk to her. She promised her clients that she'd ask about the likelihood of the house coming on the market, but even more than that, she wanted to know about Jane. Of course, it was all the same conversation, and one that Zoe was clearly trying to avoid. But being neighbors in addition to friends meant that Elizabeth knew when Zoe and Bingo were going to take their late-morning walk, and it wasn't breaking any kind of protocol to be sitting on her own porch at that same time, was it?

She saw Bingo first—his happy mouth open, with his leash dragging behind him on the sidewalk. Dogs were gloriously uncomplicated creatures—food and play and sleep and love, that was all they needed. People were so much worse. Zoe was a few yards behind Bingo, looking at her phone.

“Hey,” Elizabeth said, coming down her steps.

“Oh, hi, I was just about to call you back,” Zoe said, and tucked her phone into her back pocket. “Hold up, Bing.” She bent over and picked up the end of the leash.

“Is everything okay?” Elizabeth squinted, and shaded her eyes with her hands. “With us, I mean? Did I do something?”

“What? No! What would you have even done?” Zoe looked at the ground.

“I'm not sure,” Elizabeth said. “That's why I'm asking.”

“No,” Zoe said. “Really. We're fine! Things have just been hectic, with the fire, you know.”

“Of course,” Elizabeth said, dropping her hands to her sides. “It
just seemed like things were weird, and we hadn't talked about the house in a little while, and then the other day, with the pancakes, you and Jane seemed . . .”

“What? She is my wife, you remember.” Zoe sounded defensive.

“Of course! No, of course! I just thought, you know, that you guys were having some things, and we'd talked about the house, and I thought maybe there'd been some backsliding there. . . .”

“Backsliding? You're saying that me and my wife are
backsliding
into our marriage, out of your greedy little hands? God, Lizzy!” Zoe shook her head. “Maybe she was right! Is that crazy? I don't know! You honestly seem to be thinking more about your commission than our friendship, if I'm being honest.”

“No!” Elizabeth said. “That's crazy! That's not what I meant. I promise!” Everything was coming out wrong. Elizabeth wanted to tell Zoe that she was afraid of her moving away, afraid that she would want to move, too, to the apartment next door, just to make sure that they stayed friends for the next twenty years and the twenty after that, that she was sad about the idea of Zoe and Jane getting divorced and sad about her own marriage, too, that Ruby and Harry were getting too old to be called children, and what did they call them next? But her mouth wouldn't work right, and none of it came out. “Just, no, really,” Elizabeth said. “I promise.”

“Can we talk about this later?” Zoe gestured to Bingo, who was relieving himself on the sidewalk.

“Sure,” Elizabeth said. “I didn't mean anything by it, and of course,
of course
I just want you to be happy. And I'm not trying to sell your house out from under you. I just want to make sure I know what's happening. If you're telling me to pump the brakes, I will pump them, okay?”

“Okay,” Zoe said, a wistful look crossing her face. “It's just like, everything is all fucked up right now, both good and bad, and I don't
really know which end is up. I'm sorry.” She leaned over and gave Elizabeth a kiss on the cheek. “I'll call you.”

“Great,” Elizabeth said. “Please do.” Her clients could go live in Deirdre's listing—she didn't care about that. And she did hope that Jane and Zoe would work it out, sort of. They weren't like some of the couples she knew, who she actively thought should get divorced because they fought in public so much. They were somewhere on the middle of the scale, which is how she thought of herself and Andrew. They weren't lovebirds, like Zoe's parents, or even Deirdre and Sean, couples who rubbed each other's backs for fun, without being asked or complaining that they really needed a massage, too. Most couples she knew were in the middle, slogging it out.
Don't get divorced!
That was their shared motto. It was the only way to have a long marriage, the only way to have a truly solid family. Who needed happiness when you had stability? Wasn't that the idea behind Ferberizing babies, that a few nights of misery led to more sleep for everyone? Elizabeth looked down at her hand and realized that she was clenching her fist so tightly that her fingernails had left deep impressions in her palm.

Some people were the leavers and some were the left. Zoe was the former. Kitty's Mustache began to die when Lydia dropped out, though it didn't seem like it. Lydia had always been their weakest link, and Zoe's girlfriend at the time had a friend in the conservatory who played drums, and so that was an easy replacement. The only problem was that the new guy was a much better musician than the rest of them, which made their songs sound rinky-dink, amateurish. Nevertheless they played parties and shows all that year, even after graduation, when Zoe and Andrew were both otherwise unemployed and unoccupied. It was January when Zoe again decided that she'd had enough. She was tired of playing for freshmen clutching their first red plastic cups of beer. There was no one interesting there anymore, she said. She said that she felt old and pathetic, which was hilarious,
because the whole town followed her around like she was the Pied Piper.

Maybe that was a problem—being the coolest person for miles meant that there was no one to look up to. She knew that music wasn't for her—she wasn't one of those kids who wanted her parents' life. Zoe started spending more and more time with her art professors, drinking wine at their kitchen tables and talking about New York. When winter break rolled around, she announced that she'd had enough and that they would see what happened with the band in the spring, when Elizabeth and Andrew were out of school. It was a hiatus—that's what they said to all their friends. But there was no such thing as a hiatus for a college band. Elizabeth was saddest of all, because she knew that she'd probably never be in a band again, not a real one. College was a make-believe place, where you could decide to do something and just do it, where no one was going to tell you that you weren't good enough or talented enough. Elizabeth had plenty of self-confidence, but she knew her limitations.

What was a year? When they were in school, it seemed like something. Zoe was older and wiser, which is how Elizabeth always felt—like
The Sound of Music
and she was Liesl and Zoe was Rolf, and they were dancing around that gazebo together, minus the Nazi part. It was so funny, being a parent and realizing what a year actually meant. A year was nothing! And a school year was
truly
nothing—you could be born a day apart and be in two different grades, depending on the date. It was all so arbitrary. Elizabeth wished she'd known that earlier on in life. Zoe wasn't any wiser than she was. A year wasn't a long time. She was just bored in Ohio, and that was the end of Kitty's Mustache.

There was a girl in New York, of course—Zoe was never without one for long. This one was an artist and had been known (and much admired) for walking around the Oberlin campus wearing only a pair of overalls. The girl wanted to start a new band, a duo, and Zoe was
gone. It hadn't lasted very long—only as long as the romance, maybe six months—but it meant that when Elizabeth and Andrew arrived, Kitty's Mustache was a memory, not even Zoe's most recent project. It didn't matter that they'd been popular, that they'd had a record. There were so many indie labels that everyone they knew had had a record out—everyone had show posters and music videos and a box full of memorabilia. They weren't that special. It was Lydia who later made them special in hindsight, who made them a footnote in music history. And so they all moved on, and after a few years it seemed quaint, a sweet memory to tell their children about.
We were cool.
Sometimes, if Elizabeth didn't think too much about the specifics, it even seemed true.

T
here was one more SAT class and then the test. Harry wished it would last forever—he'd move into the karate studio if he had to and take all his meals with Eliza and Thayer staring at him, chewing with their mouths open like two stoned cows. Ruby was humoring him by letting him quiz her on vocabulary flash cards. During the day, they mostly had Ruby's house to themselves, and if one of her mothers did come home, it was easy enough to wait her out. The secret truth of parenting (in houses other than Harry's own) was that parents almost always had other shit to think about, boring stuff like taxes and dermatology appointments, plus their actual jobs and whether they needed to buy milk. Ruby told him that she'd been smoking for three years—in her bedroom!—before either of her mothers noticed. Harry couldn't imagine ever not noticing anything having to do with Ruby. The day before, she'd trimmed the front half of her hair two inches, and it was the first thing he saw. She looked like an Egyptian queen, and he'd told her so. “You make me want to shave my head,” Ruby said. “Just to see what compliment you'd come up with.”

She was wearing one of his old T-shirts—God, she could make an ancient, stained Rugrats T-shirt look good—and a stretchy little black skirt. The air conditioner in her bedroom window was so loud that
they had to turn the music way up, which made it hard to hear Ruby's answers to his flash cards, but Harry was reading her lips. They were listening to Otis Redding, and every now and then Ruby would jump off the bed and dance.

“‘Showing great joy'—come on, that's an easy one. Jubilant!” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Give me something harder.”

“You can't just do the hard ones. You need to make sure you know the easy ones, too. You can't give the easy ones away! That's how you rack up the points!”

“Harry, this is the SATs, not a video game.” Ruby clapped her hands. “Let's go, next.”

He flipped through the cards. Temperate. Gloaming. Cloister. Ruby knew them all. She got up and turned the fan so it was pointing right at her face. She had a few tiny pimples on her right cheek, and one of her earrings had gotten infected—she'd pierced that ear herself, in the bathroom at school—and the hole was still a little bit red. Harry wished that he could videotape every second he spent with Ruby so that he could look at it in twenty years. So he could show it to her in twenty years. So they could look at it together and show their children. A boy and a girl. Twins, maybe. Was it weird that Harry was picturing twins? They'd be light-skinned, like Ruby, with chubby arms and legs, like him.

Harry had been thinking a lot about the future.

He'd be done with Whitman in less than a year—graduation was in June. That was only ten months away. He'd already told Ruby that he loved her, and he couldn't imagine that changing anytime soon. He couldn't imagine it changing, period. What were the rules for when the best person you knew was someone you'd known all your life? Were you supposed to pretend to look elsewhere, just for due diligence? Harry didn't give a fuck about who else might be out there—it seemed literally impossible that there was anyone else on the planet who he would like more. It wasn't anything as cheesy as having a soul
mate—that was Lifetime-movie shit, soft focus and hokey. It was just math. Anyone else + Harry = stupid. He hoped that was one of the questions.

If he did well enough on the test, he could easily get into any of the city schools he wanted to go to, which wouldn't even be expensive. If Ruby kept working at her parents' restaurant, she'd make money. All they needed was a place to live. In eight months he'd be eighteen, and then his parents couldn't tell him not to see her. It was really just his dad, anyway, and Harry thought that there was a fairly high likelihood that he'd get over it soon.

Harry hadn't seen his friends in weeks, and he didn't care. Maybe that's what it felt like to be in love. Ruby hadn't been hanging out with her friends either—there were girls who Harry had seen her with every day for the last four years, Chloe and Paloma and Anika and Sarah Dinnerstein, but other than Sarah, he hadn't seen them all summer. That seemed weirder. He didn't really want to bring it up, because it might pop a hole in that magical, mysterious dream that they were clearly living inside, a world in which Ruby loved him back. But he wanted to know.

“Hey, what are your friends doing this summer? Chloe and them?” He chewed on his nails.

“Chloe's in Paris, Paloma's already at Dartmouth. They're on the quarter system—plus, there was some freshman camping trip beforehand. Ugh, I would rather die a slow, painful death than go on a freshman camping trip.” Ruby sighed. “Everyone is gone but me.”

“I'm not gone. I'm here.” Harry flipped through the flash cards, quizzing himself.

“I know,” Ruby said. “But you don't count.”

Harry looked up.

“Oh, come on, I don't mean it like that,” Ruby said. “I just mean that of course you're here. You're not done with school yet, and plus, you're just, like, always here.”

“Uh-huh,” Harry said. “I guess that's true. Would you rather I was somewhere else?”

“You're my love slave,” Ruby said. “This is the only place I want you to be.” She jumped back onto the bed, stuck her legs in the air, and tugged off her skirt.

“Is that your way of apologizing?” Harry asked. He pulled his knees into his chest.

Ruby flipped over and crawled the rest of the way toward him. “Yes.”

“I guess I could let it go with a warning. Just this once.” Harry closed his eyes and let Ruby take the flash cards out of his hand. They made a splashing sound when they hit the wood floor, and when Ruby started kissing him, Harry imagined all the words floating up in the air and making sentences about them, a miniature tornado of love poems. Maybe it didn't matter if Ruby loved him. Maybe his love was enough for both of them.