Modern Lovers (8 page)

E
lizabeth backed out of her driveway and drove the four-second commute to Zoe's house. She didn't even need to put the car in park—Zoe was waiting out front, wearing a sundress and a large, floppy hat, and she bounded into the front seat like an excited puppy.

“So, what's up first?” Zoe took off her hat and held it in her lap. “I feel very weird about this, but I really want to do it, so just pretend that I'm a regular client and not just your friend having a midlife crisis, okay?”

“You're the boss, boss. First up are two apartments in Fort Greene,” Elizabeth said. “Very different vibes. The first one is in the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, with a view to die for, very mod. The second one is a floor-through in a brownstone on Adelphi. Both are really, really nice.” She turned on her blinker and made the left onto Cortelyou, heading toward Flatbush. “Close to the train, close to restaurants, all that stuff.” She looked over at Zoe. “And if you want to stop, we'll stop, okay?”

“Sounds good to me,” Zoe said. She twisted the rings on her fingers. “What else can we see?”

“There are a couple of condos on the water in Williamsburg, and one in Dumbo.”

“I think I'm too old for Williamsburg.”

“You're retro,” Elizabeth said. “You're like a cassette tape. They'll go crazy for you.”

Zoe slumped over, pretending to be wounded. “Ack,” she said. “Thank you.”

“No, come on,” Elizabeth said. “You're just going to get the lay of the land, see what feels good. It'll be fun.”

“Okay,” Zoe said. She flipped down the mirror and patted the skin under her eyes. “Do I look really tired? I have been sleeping like shit. Like absolute shit.” She turned toward Elizabeth. “Tell me the truth.”

Elizabeth waited for a red light and then swiveled as much as she could in the driver's seat. Zoe did look tired—but they all did. It felt like a minute ago that they could stay up until two in the morning and still look like normal, well-adjusted human beings the next day. Now when she didn't sleep, no amount of drugstore makeup could disguise the bags under her eyes, and that's how Zoe looked, too, even beautiful Zoe.

“You do look a little tired,” Elizabeth admitted.

“Fuck, I knew it,” Zoe said. “I swear to God, it's all a plot. Jane is trying to make me look like a hideous monster so that no one will ever want to sleep with me ever again, and I'll just pretend to forget that we're unhappy, and then nothing will ever change, and we'll just be sad, lonely eighty-year-olds before you know it.”

A dollar van cut in front of them and Elizabeth honked her horn. “I hate driving in Brooklyn.”

Zoe rolled her eyes. “You sound like my mother.”

•   •   •

T
hey drove to the first appointment of the day, an apartment on the sixteenth floor, overlooking the Barclays Center. Zoe's house would sell quickly if they priced it right, and Zoe wanted to have a better sense of where she wanted to go before they put the house on
the market. If they wanted to sell. If they actually split up. It was the kind of maneuvering that would have driven Elizabeth totally crazy—a complete waste of her time and energy—if they hadn't been friends, but they were, and so it seemed like the least she could do. It was the equivalent of fantasy football, she guessed—people who couldn't actually play pretending that they had some semblance of control over the outcome of games on television.

“I could have a sofa over here,” Zoe said, gesturing toward the windows.

“Or over here,” Elizabeth said, gesturing toward the wall opposite.

“The kitchen's a little small,” Zoe said, and she was right, it was just a corner of the room with a few cabinets from Ikea and a cheap, glossy black countertop. She ran a finger over the lip of the stove. “This is a piece of garbage.”

“Not everyone is married to a chef,” Elizabeth said, wanting to make light of it, but it wasn't light at all, and Zoe turned her back.

“Not even me, pretty soon,” she said, and it was time to leave.

•   •   •

T
he next apartment was better, warmer. Elizabeth unlocked the door and walked in first, half a step ahead. As soon as she crossed the threshold, she could feel how much more Zoe would like it. No matter what she claimed to want, Zoe liked old things, and no shiny apartment building was going to be the right choice. The second apartment had moldings and curved doorways and hundred-year-old windows with wavy glass. She loved it.

“And there's a shared garden,” Elizabeth said, pointing out the back window.

“And we're three blocks from BAM!” Zoe clasped her hands together, her silver rings little punctuation marks between her fingers. “This is a good one, Lizzy.”

Elizabeth waited in the front room while Zoe poked around the
closets. “Do you want my measuring tape?” she hollered, but Zoe didn't respond.

When she was young, Elizabeth had imagined that she would live in a number of houses as an adult—a garret in Paris, overlooking a cobblestone street; on the beach in California. She and Andrew loved to talk about the possibilities. That was one of the things she'd always liked about her husband, how open he was to ideas. Peru? Sure! New Zealand? Why not?! But after Harry was born, and they found their house, it was harder to travel, to be bohemian in the way they'd always imagined they might be. All their money was in that house, in its bricks and plaster, and if they sold it, they would have to ask Andrew's parents for money to move anywhere more desirable, and no one wanted that. Not Elizabeth, not Andrew, not his parents. They'd made the trip from the Upper East Side to Ditmas Park eight or nine times, full stop. There were nominal reasons, as if they needed them: Andrew's father walked with a cane, and his mother couldn't be in an enclosed space without the fear of a panic attack, and so had been on the subway only a handful of times in her life. Of course they could take a car, but the distance was too much, psychologically. It was easier to make an annual pilgrimage in the other direction, up to the limestone and the army of doormen and the manicured medians of Park Avenue.

Was it too late for them to leave? Once Harry was out of high school, they would be free to make another choice, to move to an adobe house in Santa Fe, but could they make friends? At fifty? Maybe it was better to wait until they were seventy-five, old enough to move to a retirement community, a place on the coast of South Carolina that offered shuffleboard and karaoke. Andrew would rather die. Marfa, maybe, or a place upstate, near the Omega Institute. No place where they'd be surrounded by people like his parents. Sometimes Elizabeth looked at her husband and for a split second, he looked identical to the way he did as a twenty-four-year-old, with his sharp
chin and his hooded eyes. He was so much angrier than Harry, even now, after decades of trying to be the opposite of how he was raised. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't. When Andrew got upset, she could see the fury rise in his face like on a cartoon, red-red-red-red until his head exploded. Most of the time, he was able to dial it back down, but sometimes, rarely, he still exploded. Harry had only seen it happen a few times in his life, and every time, he had immediately burst into tears, the fire extinguisher to his father's four-alarm blaze. They worked in both directions, actually—whenever Harry was undone, by a broken toy or a skinned knee, Andrew swooped into action, calm and comforting, a perfect nursemaid. Elizabeth was grateful for that, for their joint sweetness. It was so hard to tell when a child's personality would harden and fix, but it seemed true that Harry was kind and quiet, a good boy.

“Whew,” Zoe said, appearing at Elizabeth's side. “I like this one a lot.” She bent forward at the waist and touched her toes. “I could live here, I think.”

“That's great,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, you can't live here, unless you want to move before you sell your house, or unless you want to buy this place and keep it empty for six months, but it's good to know what you're looking for.”

“Oh,” Zoe said. “Right.”

“Or the timing could work out—you never know how slowly people are going to move. We could hurry up with your house and drag our heels over here, and if you're not bidding against multiple other offers, it could work.”

They hadn't talked about a real schedule. Once the balls were in the air, things were going to get messy. The room got a little bit wobbly for a second, while both Elizabeth and Zoe suddenly imagined the fantasy becoming a reality. But “fantasy” was the wrong word—a fantasy was a thatched hut on a faraway beach, a fantasy was a white horse and a castle. The idea of Zoe actually getting divorced—of her
being
single
—was actually horrifying. It was a choice people made all the time, to end a marriage, but it had never happened to them, and they looked at each other for a minute, both grim-faced. If Zoe and Jane could do it, so could she, Elizabeth thought, the notion flickering across her brain quickly and vanishing like a phantom mosquito.

“Can we just sit here for a while?” Zoe asked.

“Sure,” Elizabeth said. They had other appointments, later in the day, but mostly she just had keys to empty apartments, like this one, and spending a few extra minutes wasn't going to throw off their schedule. This was how decisions got made in her business—sitting in empty rooms, listening to people's daydreams about furniture and imaginary children.

They sat down on the floor of the living room, or what would become the living room when someone moved in. Elizabeth sat with her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles, and Zoe leaned against the opposite wall, with her knees bent. The wood floors were gleaming, with defiant dust bunnies forming in the corners of the room. It was nearly impossible to keep an empty space completely clean.

“I've been walking through the house, making imaginary lists of what's mine and what's hers,” Zoe said. “It's surprisingly easy.”

“Oh, yeah? Like what?”

Zoe ticked the items off on her fingers. “The nice rugs are mine, the kitchen stuff is hers. The trunk we got at the flea market is mine, the records are mine, mostly. The ugly fucking lamp that I've always hated is hers.”

“Plus Bingo.”

“Bingo is nonnegotiable.” Zoe rolled her head back so that Elizabeth was looking at her throat. “Ruby, on the other hand . . .”

“What's going on with Rube?”

“It's all so typical.” Zoe shifted her head forward again and smacked her lips. “Teenage girls are teenage girls. Do you remember
what giant assholes we were? Or, you weren't, but I was. Ruby is kind of a giant asshole right now. Not always. When she has a stomachache or the flu and she feels awful, then she'll still crawl into bed with me and cuddle up and let me pet her, but otherwise? Forget it! She treats me like a warden. Not even the nice warden who gives you extra soap, but the mean one, with the nightstick. It's horrible.”

“What about Jane?” Elizabeth had often observed Ruby acting like an asshole over the course of her life, but it was an awareness she tried to suppress. Not liking your friends' kids was worse than not liking your friends' spouses. And it wasn't that Elizabeth didn't
like
Ruby—she was often funny, and dark in a way that Elizabeth found amusing—but there was a touch of the asshole there, it was true. You couldn't ever say that, though, no matter how true it was. When the kids were little, she and Zoe had been friends with another mom in the neighborhood, and this lady's kid was so horrible that they both mentioned it to her, that he seemed like a miniature serial killer in training, and she stopped speaking to them. Pretty soon she moved out of the neighborhood, and Elizabeth guessed it was to move closer to whatever prison facility her son was bound to wind up in. People just didn't want to hear it.

“Jane is hopeless. She doesn't even try. Which, of course, makes it so much easier. Jane and Ruby can go eat a thousand chicken wings together and not say more than three words, and they're fine, like a couple of frat boys. Ruby never says she hates Jane. She only hates me.”

“Ruby does not hate you, Zo,” Elizabeth said.

Zoe crossed her fingers. “Remember when all you had to worry about was how much breast milk they were eating, and what their poop looked like?” She laughed. “Parenthood is the only job that gets progressively harder every single year, and you never, ever, ever get a raise.”

“I'll give you a raise,” Elizabeth said. She stood up and offered
Zoe a hand. “Harry said he'd been hanging out with her in their SAT class, did you know that?”

“I am more likely to learn about my daughter from the mailman than I am to get any information directly,” Zoe said. “But that's nice. Chivalry, I guess?”

“I suppose,” Elizabeth said. She started to describe the look on Harry's face when he'd mentioned it—though he tried so hard to be casual, his cheeks were tight with disbelief and happiness—but she stopped herself. Ruby, like Zoe, had a long life of adoration ahead of her, and Elizabeth didn't feel she needed to fuel the fire. No matter how old you got, there were certain things that clung from childhood—a cool-girl meanness or a nerdy girl's pining for someone who wouldn't want her back. Elizabeth saw so much of herself in Harry, even in his silent crushes, the secrets he thought he kept. It was hard to be a boy, just like it was hard to be a girl. “Let's go,” Elizabeth said, and she opened the front door, happy to have the noise on the street come into the apartment and fill it with something other than her own thoughts.

R
uby didn't love the idea of working at the restaurant, but her mothers didn't really give her a choice. It was either work as a hostess at Hyacinth or get a job somewhere else, and anywhere else would require (at the very least) a résumé and an interview, not to mention the clothes she would have to buy at Banana Republic or wherever else lame people with boring jobs bought their gray pantsuits and white button-down shirts. Chloe was in France all summer, and Paloma was at her parents' country house for the month of June, until she left for a month in Sardinia at her parents' “cottage.” Ruby didn't miss them. Sarah Dinnerstein was around all summer, and Ruby wished she weren't. As soon as graduation was over, Ruby knew that the whole thing had been a setup—not the ceremony itself, but the years preceding it. She wanted to go into a witness-protection program somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, learn to break horses, maybe marry a cowboy, spit in a can for fun. Anything to get out of Brooklyn and her own life. But here she was.

Allie, the current hostess at Hyacinth, who had also been Ruby's babysitter, seemed to have left abruptly, but that happened a lot in the service industry. Her mom said they needed someone fast, and nothing was faster than Ruby. She agreed to work the lunch shift (which was always slow during the week) and then the brunch shift plus
dinner (after her class on Saturdays, and from ten a.m. to three p.m. on Sundays), which was always like being an infantry soldier on a very crowded battlefield. Ruby herself found brunch to be an infantilizing meal, but as her mothers loved to remind her, those long afternoons of eggs and mimosas paid for her tuition. The least she could do was show people to their tables and tell them to enjoy themselves. She didn't have to like it.

The hostess stand was near the door, across from the bar. Jorge, the daytime bartender, was also a stand-up comedian, and he liked to practice on Ruby while she sat and waited for people to come in. He was an okay bartender but not a very good comedian. The current bit was about how no one watched commercials anymore, and though Ruby wasn't really paying attention, it seemed to have something to do with a bunch of old white guys sitting around a boardroom table complaining. Jorge was going to be a bartender forever. Ruby laughed charitably when he stopped talking, because she assumed he was finished. She had her phone behind the stand and was playing Candy Crush, level 24.

“Hello? Did you see him or not?” Jorge was drying off glasses with a dish towel, twisting and stacking, twisting and stacking.

“What are you even talking about?” Ruby glanced up from her phone.

Jorge pointed to the left corner of the window. “Look over here. You know this white kid, Casper the ghost? He's been walking back and forth for like five minutes, just staring at you.”

Ruby shut her phone off and hopped down from the stool. She tiptoed to the end of the bar and peeked out the window. Dust was standing with his skateboard perched on his toe, leaning against the storefront of the Mexican bakery next door. “Oh, shit,” Ruby said, and scurried back to her post.

“You know him?” Jorge asked. “Do I need to go tell him to scram?”

“
Scram?
Are you still pretending to be an old man? I can't tell. No, thank you. I can handle this myself. I'll be right back.” Ruby tossed Jorge a stack of menus. “Just in case.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears and pulled open Hyacinth's heavy front door. “Hey!” she said to Dust. He was smoking and staring off into space, two of his favorite hobbies. “What are you doing, you stalker?”

Dust saw her walking toward him and smiled. He opened his arms wide for a hug.

Ruby smacked his hands away and crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see you, and I heard you were working.” Dust licked the pointy edge of his chipped tooth. “I was around the corner—it's not some weird stalker shit.”

Dust did have a friend who lived on Westminster. His name was Nico, and he grew marijuana in his closet and in the window boxes outside his bedroom. “Fine,” Ruby said. “Now you've seen me.” She didn't move.

“So is that kid, like, your boyfriend now? Your little private-school ninja bodyguard? Looked kinda young for you.” Dust cocked his head to the side. “You don't miss me?”

Ruby did miss Dust, sort of, but she would rather have been eaten alive by sewer rats than admit it. Mostly she missed his body, and that broken tooth. It was fun to talk to someone who knew how to flirt, and how to flirt while riding a skateboard. Harry had no idea how to flirt. That was entertaining, too, in its own way, but sometimes Ruby got tired of feeling like Mrs. Robinson. She had already decided that she would kiss Harry back if he ever tried anything, but now it was getting to the point where Ruby had to decide if she actually wanted to kiss him enough to do it herself. Whitman was small—if Harry had ever kissed anyone before, she would probably know it. There was no hiding anything—the whole school was packed so tight that you had
to squeeze past couples making out by their lockers, not like in the movies, where there were bleachers and football fields and stuff. The back staircase was where you could see real action, and Ruby herself had done some serious business there. Harry Marx, on the back stairs? That would be like seeing Dust in an SAT prep course. It just didn't compute. But maybe with some practice.

“I have to go back to work,” Ruby said.

“Text me,” Dust said. He winked at her and dropped his board to the pavement and was zooming away before she could say no.