38

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I had a birthday recently and this piece seemed appropriate. It’s from a collection called ‘New Yorkers.’

Best,

Sam

38

She was at the center of her social group, the prettiest one, the most interesting one, the one everybody noticed. It had always been that way, it seemed to have nothing to do with anything she did, she was on the quiet side, a bit strange actually once you got to know her, said rude things out of nowhere, got drunk very fast and went into a private, head-tossing space that was wearying for everyone around her, sometimes just bailed on social engagements, suddenly asked for her bill while everybody was still eating, announced that she was leaving a party before it had really begun, never bothered to explain herself, never had any sense of the gloom, the feeling of a broken promise, that settled on a room just after she’d abruptly left.

Andrea was her best friend and steered her through an overlapping succession of social groups, each one with exactly the same dynamic as the one before. There was the off-campus crowd in college, bohemian, hipsters-in-development, then the hard-drinking derelict crowd of their early 20s, who went to Meatpacking and tried to figure out which ones of them lined up to which characters in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and then the surviving remnant of that group, the ones who got the better of their drinking, managed to pay their rent, kept their heads just above water in three-person railroads and five-floor walkups, who made a living if not in the arts then adjacent to the arts, and then finally the interesting people who seemed to glom onto them exactly in the way that, in college, certain popular suites had had strays orbit around them like moons, these were people who had made significant amounts of money in mysterious niches, as art appraisers or book doctors, who were lonely, had enough time on their hands to suggest things like dinner parties and rooftop cocktails. Andrea was a ‘maven’ — always had been — skilled at meeting people and connecting them, she loved to assemble two different groups of people and then at the right moment have them meet one another, it felt like the moment in poker or in gin rummy when everybody around the table lays down their cards and shows what they have, and Sasha was great at these moments, something about her lent just the right air of mystique to these meetings, and then of course there was the whole sub-culture of men who were secretly in love with her, who made a point of cultivating Andrea’s friendship, and then on some slow afternoon — they always seemed to do it while Andrea was cutting something on the chopping board or else when they were sitting around her living room with wine and mezzo between them — they confessed themselves, asked Andrea if she thought they had a chance, and Andrea always reacted in the same way, sidelong, taking a moment to absorb herself in her wine or her chopping, and then saying matter-of-factly that she didn’t think they did, Sasha had extremely particular taste and one thing she didn’t like, that was kind of a disqualifier, was guys who skulked around, who didn’t declare themselves directly to her.

But Andrea wasn’t the sort of person to hold a grudge, at least not for someone she thought of as interesting. She relayed the latest declaration to Sasha — it was assumed that there were no secrets between them — and Sasha frowned her gray eyes, looked genuinely puzzled, asked if Andrea could let them know that she really valued them as friends.

It was a good life, and they were both instrumental in it for each other, and if there was something mercantile about their friendship, if, for instance, when they were alone and strained for immediate gossip, they struggled to find anything to talk about, found each other’s mannerisms to be a bit put-on and stale, well, they were aware of it, the mercantile aspect actually was the heart of the relationship, they had felt it the first time they chatted, Sasha, who was a heavy smoker at the time, leaning against one of the class buildings, Andrea deciding that this was one of the rare moments when she should bum a cigarette, and, coughingly, she’d talked about the personalities of various cities, concluded that New York was the only one you could actually be friends with, or maybe San Francisco in a kind of pen pal-y, mutual admiration way, and Sasha had smiled wryly as she sucked on her cigarette, like this was a line she’d heard before but still had it in her to find it amusing, and very quickly, as they were entering into the maneuvering for off-campus housing, they had sensed a mutual benefit in one another, Sasha had no idea how to make friends and needed a skilled curator like Andrea if she weren’t always going to be lonely, and Andrea, who was at the time reading every existentialist and continental philosopher she could get her hands on, was keenly, painfully aware of an ordinariness in her that she could never quite eradicate, knew she needed someone like Sasha to elevate her. And even if they didn’t spend all that much time together — Andrea’s allegiance was to her group, her freshman year suite and their satellites, who were already organizing nostalgic meet-ups and reunions by senior year, celebrating their old glory days, while Sasha tended to disappear either into some art project or a three-month ill-fated romance — they had scoped each other out as friends who might stay friends after school was over, a subtle, important distinction by which they separated each other out from the rest of their social circles. They didn’t get blackout, didn’t talk with abandon, didn’t binge-watch TV shows on weekends, spoke in measured, coded ways, like adults, ran into each other while doing something completely different, and, by common agreement, sat on a campus bench or followed one another to the more pressing errand, had long conversations in that way, afterwards evaluated them very favorably to one another. “That was a great talk,” Andrea might say, and Sasha with her grey, wintry eyes would scan the buildings around her as if memorializing the place where they had had such a good conversation, and then Andrea, her voice reverting to cheerful, ironic college style would invite Sasha to some event to which she might or might not turn up. Once, when Andrea was following Sasha to the dressmaker’s — she was getting fitted for a formal dance — they had been talking about work and career, trying to lay out their lives in a rational, balanced way. Andrea was in an earnest phase where she asked people lots of questions. She was asking about how family, how political causes, could factor into the lives they were describing, and Sasha was answering in a detached, cool girl’s voice, and then Andrea said in her thoughtful, interviewer’s way, “How important is making it to you?” and Sasha whipped her head around, like this was what she had been waiting for, and said, “It’s everything,” and they had come up to a street intersection and had to separate slightly to weave around traffic and they seemed both to walk with an extra jolt in their step, as if they had just formally certified the terms of the friendship.

They lived in the same house senior year, although Sasha was always at the studio or her boyfriend’s, and then they moved to New York. Andrea had the usual flirtation with graduate school, did a desultory master’s, was right back where she started after it was over. She was at a party and a friend of a friend said that her friend was stepping down from a position in publishing and looking for a replacement and could Andrea do it. She had no credentials, had spent so much of college feeling insecure about not really connecting to literature or philosophy, but the friend of the friend said it was no problem, Andrea could do it, and, when she got it, the job turned out to be mostly social. There were lots of phone calls and e-mails, lots of social connection, and Andrea’s firm prided itself on retaining the tradition of the long lunch, she spent a great deal of time gossiping with writers and agents, very quickly she was told that she was ‘promising’ and within a year or two she began to hear that she was ‘invaluable.’

While Andrea was in grad school, Sasha got herself connected to a celebrated filmmaker, a woman in her 40s famous for always wearing dark glasses. At first she dealt mostly with coffee and dry cleaning but when she showed that she was able to withstand her boss’ tantrums, just fixed her wintry eyes on a point in the distance and agreed with the criticisms and did what she was told, she was brought closer and closer to the heart of her boss’ creative work. When she was 26, and at her lowest, feeling that grad school and god knows what else of her education had been an enormous scam, Andrea had been on facebook and seen a series of photos of Sasha on the carpet at some film festival. She was accompanying her boss who was giving an interview, she was standing to the side, brushing her hair back, looking a little unhappy, looking also completely comfortable where she was, and Andrea had actually had to close her computer, take a few long panted breaths, it was the feeling, which was her least favorite and most familiar feeling in life, of coming into contact with the unattainable. Sasha, when she was complimented on anything having to do with her job, evinced complete indifference. She had taught herself to edit somewhere in her 20s, she considered the networking and mood-stabilizing duties she performed for her famous filmmaker to be hack work, she felt that the thing she did that mattered was when she was alone with her edit software. She made a series of experimental films that she shot, scored, and edited all by herself. They tended to be very moody, filtered shots of wind tunnels, of wind blowing through leaves, of the flickerings of sunlight on beaches and on benches. There tended to be voices off-camera, the sense of an important scene playing just out of view. Her films were very focused on the peripheries of things. Andrea had the queasy feeling every time she watched one of them that they might actually be completely brilliant.

In a sense everything was exactly how they’d both pictured it back when they were in college and dreaming of New York and trying to catch, in visionary outline, some farfetched idea of their lives. They had jobs and degrees of success and friends and cute apartments. And they had each other — and, for each of them, the other one was a not-inconsiderable part of their well-being. They never lived together, apart from that half-hearted stint senior year of college, when Andrea had vouched for Sasha to her friends after Sasha had missed all the housing deadlines, but they were in parallel, they had moved to New York at the same time, they exchanged book and movie recommendations, they owed each other complex and interlocking favors, they went to each other’s housewarmings and sometimes helped carry things for each other on moving day. By their early 30s, they had accumulated a whole string of milestones in one another’s life. A new boyfriend of Sasha’s, Daniel, who had been introduced to her at one of Andrea’s parties, had asked Sasha in the confessional phase of the relationship who her best friend was and Sasha had had to think for a long time about it and then said, with mild distaste, “Probably Andrea,” and Andrea couldn’t have said the same — there were dibs on that title from her college group, even from some camp and childhood friends — but, when Daniel, drunkenly and inconsiderately, repeated Sasha’s conversation back to her, she was thrilled to hear it.

That was around the time when Sasha started to have a bit of a crisis. It was silly things. She saw the movie Her and wept uncontrollably, clutched at Daniel’s hand across the armrest in the movie theater in the scene where the Amy Adams character presents her videos of people sleeping and Joaquin Phoenix can’t understand them. Afterwards, when they’d huddled from the rain under the theater’s awning, refused to get a cab or to explain why she was so upset, she’d just had Daniel hold her, as her body shook either from emotion or the cold. Another time, when she and Daniel had been having a completely ordinary fight, something about the way he sometimes teased her, repeated her mannerisms in a way that she suddenly found offensive, she had stormed back towards her apartment, just accelerated away from him as they were walking home after lunch, and then refused to answer him no matter how many times he buzzed or called or texted or even shouted to her out the window. That had been on a Sunday, his computer, everything he needed for work the next day he had left in his bag at her place, and he called Andrea, got her to pick up just as his phone was dying, sat on the ottoman on her floor, his fingers caressing his temples, asked her what was happening, what had he done wrong, what was he not understanding here, and she tried, in a very patient, and slightly pissed-off way, to explain that that was just Sasha, how Sasha had always been, a bit rude, a bit temperamental.

They were each other’s main person throughout their thirties. He had a good job, Daniel did, he traveled often and brought Sasha along with him on trips. Sasha sorely needed these, she spent too much time in edit suites, she had a tendency to underestimate sun and surf. And when she was back in New York, Daniel was a terrific support. He came by her suite with boxes of Toblerone and white chocolate, which she devoured, the wrappers forming neat semi-circles around her keyboard. Her boss liked him, actually encouraged Sasha, whenever he stopped by, to go to the park, to take breaks to ‘go cuddle with Daniel.’ He proposed to her once. It was a very complicated operation. He asked her to take him clothes shopping; it was long overdue, she couldn’t refuse. And at each store they went into they stopped in the women’s sections, found something really great-looking that just so happened to be in her size. The music in each store was remarkably good, MGMT and Franz Ferdinand and Weezer and The Decembrists, the bands she’d been into as a teenager that had pretty much disappeared from airwaves. She also kept running into friends of hers, who had strangely unplanned afternoons, who seemed willing to follow them from store to store. Andrea, whom they bumped into at Everlane, had a whole picnic basket full of wine and food — a friend had ‘stood her up’ last minute — and suggested that everybody, it was a real cortège by this point, go out to the park together, and there was a banjo player and accordionist who seemed to attach themselves to their group, and then Daniel’s best friend from childhood popped out of the bushes with engagement rings. And Sasha was so excited, cried and embraced everybody, went around the group one-by-one and told each of them how much they meant to her — she had an ability to rise to the occasion, that was one of the first things Andrea had perceived about her, back in the pre-dawn of their friendship — looked so happy and satisfied that nobody noticed whether or not she’d actually said yes.

She went into funks. She broke up with Daniel for a wide variety of reasons. Every time she did, Andrea was summoned as an emissary. She went to Sasha’s place, she sat on the edge of the bed while Sasha sat on the floor beneath her, tugged at the roots of her hair as she talked, gave whatever the current explanation was why Daniel didn’t quite cut it for her. Gently, Andrea asked what it really was about, whether there was something else underneath it, maybe she was stagnated in other ways, for instance, in her career, and Sasha pretended not to hear, kneaded the roots of her hair with her hands as if she were softening flour. The apartment was very neat, everything done in white-and-black, her edit station given pride of place at the sunlit spot by the window, her musical instruments hung on pegs on the wall, her easel and paints wedged into a corner. Andrea always found it impressive, she thought of this often during these talks, the winding descriptions of Daniel’s shortcomings, that no matter how low Sasha might actually be feeling, how disordered her own inner state, it was somehow never reflected in the space around her.

More and more, this was how they interacted. It felt like state visits, it felt like she was Daniel’s crack negotiator. When they met, they tended to be at nice restaurants, the kinds of places Andrea had scoped out with her writers. They talked about work, that seemed like the right conversation for the setting, Andrea was making a run at her boss’ position as her boss approached retirement, Sasha was thinking about striking out on her own, trying to find a way to do it that didn’t wipe away, in a stroke, the ten years she’d spent cultivating her boss’ good favor. They were delicate maneuvers, the conversations were strategic, the phrase ‘gentle pressure’ was used a lot, second glasses of wine were considered and ordered, it was enjoyable, it was exactly, somehow, what they’d always pictured their friendship turning into.

***

When she was 38, Sasha suddenly started calling Daniel again. They had been broken up for a couple of years, he was in a quasi-relationship with an aspiring model, but when she called he came over, he took off his shoes at the door, he hung his coat on the peg she’d designated for guests. He usually came over with flowers or at least Toblerone. She wasn’t really interested in any of that, in his gestures or in his description of where things stood with his maybe girlfriend. She just wanted sex. She sat on the bed and he sat on the chair across from it and at same point she spidered her legs around his, she had her feet pressed hard against his calves, she yanked him towards her. She had been an indifferent, inattentive lover in the times they were together, but now she was exploratory, creative. She seemed mesmerized by his penis, she glided her fingers very lightly along the length of it as if she were playing a scale, she held him tight as she spread her legs wide, guided him into her, she seemed to not want to let go of him for a second.

Afterwards, he asked the hard questions. He was a clever guy, a shrewd appraiser, he traveled the world, he visited private collections, auction warehouses, he stared at objects and assessed the value of them. He wanted to know what Sasha was after, given all the manifold, much-discussed shortcomings of his, his forgetfulness, his self-absorption, his neediness, a certain lack of nerve that he’d maybe shown in one or two random altercations, given all of those defects, which he wasn’t contesting, he wanted to know if she were willing to overlook them, if she were able to see the qualities in him that outweighed everything she found so detestable. And Sasha seemed to be in a very different place, she had never been exactly excellent with direct questions, and now she ran her fingertips down her flank, she watched, as if it were very far away, the spiral her hands made as they ran over her thighs and knees.

After about three months the calls to Daniel stopped. Andrea had another friend, Jason, one of these non-practicing lawyers doing some hard-to-follow thing with policy. He had been at a party of Andrea’s and he had done well, been witty in that blasé lawyer’s way. Before he left he got Sasha’s number and when he called she answered, suggested a bar that was just downstairs of where she lived. He was asking her about where she’d grown up, what her family was like, and she leaned across the table, swirled her head around his, it felt like a kid’s game, like she were daring him to kiss her, and he rose to it, stood halfway, pressing his body against their hightop, reached for her hips, her shoulders. She left before they’d paid for their drinks; she insisted that they knew her there, she’d settle up next time.

Jason found her very much as Daniel did, she was aggressive and curious and single-minded. She left deep scratches on Jason’s back and shoulders.

About a month after she’d started seeing Jason, Sasha was pregnant. She told it to him by text message, as a way of explaining why he shouldn’t come over to hook up with her. She said she had morning sickness and wasn’t feeling well. And then she didn’t respond to any of his follow-up texts.

Jason didn’t know Andrea very well, but, like everybody else before him, he went to her when he needed help with Sasha. He called her from the coffee shop downstairs of Sasha’s. He’d taken a Saturday to stake her out, had actually waited on the front steps of her building, slid in behind a neighbor who held the door open for him. He’d pounded on the door to Sasha’s apartment. He could clearly hear her inside, heard her footsteps moving around, heard the Weezer album she’d been listening to on repeat, she didn’t even bother turning down the volume to hide from him. He’d retreated to the coffee shop, called Andrea who said that she could come straight over. She found him hunched over at the counter, a Danish and a cold cappuccino in front of him. He looked like some sort of secret agent, which in a sense was what he was doing — he figured that if he sat at the window of the coffee shop and didn’t take his eyes off the street he might catch Sasha leaving her apartment. His eyebrows were furrowed as he talked, he ran his fingers over his temples, which, Andrea thought, was exactly the same gesture she’d seen Daniel make when he was over at her apartment, the first time he and Sasha had had a real fight. He looked a great deal like Daniel actually, even the same neat-trimmed sideburns — Sasha had very conventional taste in men, always blandly tall and handsome. Andrea didn’t like Jason very much, she found him sleazy, she couldn’t quite remember why she’d ended up inviting him to her party, but this was hard on him, she could see that, he was married, there was a whole whirlwind of possibilities and complications that had opened up before him and he couldn’t act on any of them, couldn’t do anything, until he had talked to Sasha — and it should have been such a simple thing, the one simple thing in the whole equation, for Sasha to just open her door for him.

“She probably thinks I’m going to talk her into an abortion,” he said thoughtfully. She could see his lawyer’s brain working, the way he was plotting out the counter-argument and then the riposte to that. “But it’s not that at all, that’s her kid, that’s my kid, I wouldn’t want an abortion, I don’t think.” He shook his head emphatically. “And she’s special, you know, it’s not like we know each other very well, she just kind of showed up in my life, but she’s a really cool, a really classy person, I can see that, and I wish her all the best, I really do, and if there’s a way I can be involved, I mean really involved — that’s what I was coming over to express to her, it didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t even get a chance to speak.”

Andrea heard him out, this technique that she’d practiced so much, with her group in college and all their various, constant complaints, with all of Sasha’s admirers, she’d just take in information, like a detective, nodding crisply each time something new, something factual, was said to her. Then she did the same thing Jason did, she waited for a neighbor to open the front door for her, she climbed up the stairs to Sasha’s apartment. She heard the same album, their college music, from inside. “It’s me,” she said, “it’s Andrea, it’s just me.”

The apartment was the neat black-and-white cube it always was. The easel was out, and Sasha’s watercolors spread around it. She’d started a new painting, she had rays of sunshine, wind through the trees, she’d started with the periphery, like she always did, working towards the center as if it were a jigsaw puzzle. She’d either paused with this painting or abandoned it. She was straightening her clothes, taking the containers she’d stored under her bed and refolding the ones she wanted, creating toss piles for the ones she didn’t. She seemed willing to hear out Andrea so long as Andrea didn’t interrupt the flow she had.

“First of all,” Andrea said, “you owe Jason a chat. You do and there’s no way around it. I think he’s decided to stalk you, he’s going to stake out in the coffee shop until you at least speak to him. Second,” she continued, “you need to tell Daniel something — have you let him know yet? And then, third, I’m just trying to figure out, and this is just me talking, I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing here, like what do you want out of this, I mean globally, like what’s the plan here, what do you see yourself doing moving forward?”

Sasha had been folding and tossing with real energy, she’d obviously hit a rhythm and wasn’t willing to be interrupted by anything Andrea said. “The plan is I’m having my baby,” Sasha said. “That’s the plan.”

“Here? Having the baby here?”

“I’m thinking I’ll move to a place that isn’t a walk-up,” Sasha said. “This might get hard on my back.”

“And after that?”

“After that it’s hard to say,” Sasha said and chuckled to herself like it was some kind of private joke.

“Jason – ?”

“I don’t think Jason has much to do with anything,” Sasha said. “He’s a nice guy.” She seemed to hover over that, evaluate it, she stared towards the front door and couldn’t decide if she really had enough of a basis for saying that. Shruggingly, she unraveled an old t-shirt of hers, started to fold it up.

“And what about your job, your career?” Andrea persisted, in the same tone she used for her most unworldly writers. “What about striking out on your own, your production company, the films you’re going to make?”

Sasha groaned like they’d been over all of this before, like she was regretting letting Andrea in. She put her clothes down and sat in the center of her piles.

“There are lots of single mothers,” she said, “they pretty much all have jobs of one kind or another. If they can do it, I can do it too. I have the way I like living, and I know how I’m going to raise my kid — I know exactly how I’m going to do it, and I’m sure I’ll be really good at it, and the main thing I need, the only thing I need really, is to have no interference from anybody while I do it.”

Andrea rose to her feet. She was steaming, furious, in the way of somebody who knows that they are right but has somehow run out of arguments. What she wanted to say was a whole torrent of things, it had to do with Sasha’s narcissist boss, with the time she’d put in there, it had to do with the films she made and the incomplete look that all of them had, it had to do with plans she’d had, promises she’d made, at least implicitly, back when they were in college, but Andrea was a very disciplined conversationalist, that was what had made her good at her job, what had made her such an excellent, loyal friend to so many people, she knew always how to bite back on her tongue. She felt the need to say something since she’d stood up so dramatically. Sasha was looking at her curiously, as if from a great distance.

“What about Jason?” she said again. “What are you actually going to do about him?”

“I’m sure I’ll talk to Jason eventually,” Sasha said.

***

It had been good that Andrea hadn’t lost it with Sasha in that moment. She became a kind of fairy godmother to Sasha during her pregnancy. She helped her with the move to the first-floor apartment, off in a cheaper, remote part of Brooklyn. She brought her foodstuffs to satisfy her various cravings, cantaloupe and chicken and whole hunks of cheese, ran errands for whatever supplies Sasha realized she needed and couldn’t get herself — of course pregnancy had turned out to be more difficult than she’d anticipated. It seemed like a role that Andrea was born to play. Jason visited a couple of times. Daniel was there frequently — at first for long, intense talks and then when that didn’t have the desired result just to drop off white chocolate and Toblerone. She carried her pregnancy well, Sasha, she had a real glow to her almost from the beginning, the dreamy way she’d rest her hands on her belly. Everything else in her life seemed to have dropped off. She worked from home, which, as everybody knew, was really no work at all. The easel stayed in the corner, the instruments on their pegs. The edit software looked tidy and untouched without the ring of chocolate wrappers around it. As well as she carried her pregnancy, she looked silly even so, her thin modelesque legs with her big belly, the way she tottered down the building’s front steps, leaning on the railing or Andrea for support. There were so many people in New York that were like this, reflected Andrea, who was really very struck by the change in Sasha, astonished by it and disappointed in her — this was what childbirth always was like in the city, she thought, the thing you did when you were out of ideas, when you had exhausted everything else.