If We Lived Here (17 page)

“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

R
ecess 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 one-liner 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 imagine 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.)

So now, here they were, more than eight thousand dollars in the hole, and Nick, broke and exhausted from insomnia and worry, with twenty minutes still remaining of recess. Nick’s phone beeped in his pocket, reminding him of a saved voicemail. It was his current landlady, asking for the third time if he still wanted to renew his lease, insisting it was urgent he let her know. Nick had kept the message for seventy-two hours now. The beeping reminder soothed Nick, even as it made him burn with shame. He watched the kids all around him—the athletes diving to score a point, the dancers gyrating to their iPods, and the indoor kids huddled around a stack of Pokémon cards—everyone escaping into some kind of fantasy. They were playing, and in a way Nick felt like that’s what he was doing, too—playing with the idea of staying put, of not embarking upon this next step of cohabitation, of wondering whether the Genevieve incident was some kind of sign, of letting Emma down and thus safeguarding himself.

It was cowardly, of course, but Nick had been raised to always have a Plan B. It was why he invariably looked up an alternate subway route and why he stored a week’s worth of canned goods in his pantry (for which Emma made merciless fun of him, often forecasting imminent disaster). You never knew what might happen to derail your plans. Nick needed this particular Plan B. Because what if they really didn’t find another apartment? Or what if Emma found out about Genevieve and not only bagged the cohabitation idea but the whole relationship, too? Or what if Nick decided to give in to the part of him that was paralyzed with anxiety by the idea of moving in with his girlfriend?

Commitment-wise, Nick understood that moving in wasn’t getting married, and it certainly wasn’t having a baby—that truly unbreakable bond with another person. Most of his friends from childhood had long since tethered themselves to a wife, taken on a mortgage (although, to Nick’s credit, that was much more manageable in suburban Ohio than in New York City), and were now onto their second or third kid, coaching their sports teams and limiting their socializing to weekly football with the guys. But contrary to what some people claimed, Nick felt moving in
was
a big deal. He’d heard enough horror stories of couples who’d jumped into it too soon, broken up, and then had to keep living together since neither person could afford the lease solo. One acquaintance had thrown out his back from sleeping on an air mattress; another’s ex had had the nerve to bring home one-night stands to their studio. Not that Emma would ever do that to Nick (and he hoped he wouldn’t do such a thing to her, although who knew, considering recent events?). But the point was, Nick was scared. He knew he would eventually tell his landlady no, that he wouldn’t extend his lease, but he wasn’t yet ready to make the call.

Nick went to chuck his coffee, careful not to get tangled in the undulating jump ropes nearby. Along with their fancy footwork, the double-dutchers were chanting what sounded to Nick like: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” Weird. He asked his student Jasmine what it was all about.

“Ms. Mitchell taught us,” the girl said. “It’s about a king who married a whole buncha wives, but he ditched each of ’em in crazy ways. We like jumping to it.”

“Ah, Henry the Eighth,” Nick said, wondering why playground rhymes were always so absurd. He remembered the girls in his elementary school had sung a song praising the taste of Winston cigarettes. Jasmine executed a particularly deft jump as she yelled out, “Beheaded!” How morbid. Nick imagined Emma’s head on the chopping block, and immediately felt guilty. Of course he wanted to live with her. He asked Mrs. Gould to cover for him, and then slipped away to call back his landlady and say he was moving. Where, of course, and how they would afford it, he still didn’t know.

 

On his way to Emma’s, Nick stopped home to check his mail: catalog,
Vegetarian Times
magazine, and—
shit—
a thick packet from the hospital in D.C. Nick tucked the unopened envelope into his bag, too terrified to find out what his insurance hadn’t covered of the three-day stay. That was reason enough to move, he thought, to dodge the bill collectors. Nick’s bank account had dwindled to nearly nothing, and he wouldn’t get paid again until October first. To calm his nerves, he ducked into a deli and grabbed a six-pack, charging it to his card.

That night, as Emma compiled a list of apartments to look at that weekend, Nick couldn’t get the double-dutch rhyme out of his head:
Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.
It seemed like a bad omen, although at least it ended somewhat positively—“thrived” would’ve been better. “Emma,” he said, “we need to talk.”

She looked up from her scribbling.

“I’m in trouble here. I don’t know if you can front the money for renting a new place, but I just don’t have it.”

“Well,” she said, not skipping a beat, “hopefully we can find a place where they only ask for first month’s rent. And, let’s see, I get paid next Friday, the twenty-eighth, so maybe a landlord would let us wait to pay until then. I’ll go down to the court next week to start our case against Luis. Hopefully we’ll get our money back soon.”

“Before October first? As in ten days from now?”

“You never know.”

“Em.”

“What?” She’d gone back to her list. Her talent for denial was almost admirable.

“Come on, Em, you know none of those things is going to happen.”

When she looked up, Nick saw that her eyes were glassy with tears. “Shit,” she said, “Shit, shit, shit.” It seemed she’d been working so hard to stay positive that, now that she’d abandoned the act, she was falling apart. Nick felt himself copping out of the other piece of his confession.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

“I feel like we can’t win. I mean, how many weddings did we have this summer—
five?
And do you have any idea what I spent on Annie’s bridal shower and bachelorette party, not to mention that Versace maid-of-honor dress? I won’t even get into my monthly student loan bill—I’ll be paying for grad school till I’m fifty. But still, I bring lunch to work every day. I put money aside every paycheck. I hardly ever buy twelve-dollar cocktails, no matter how delicious they look. I’ve been so good! How was I supposed to know I’d have to save up for two moves, not just one?” She was trembling, and Nick pulled her onto his lap. “You know what’s crazy? Last time I talked to my parents, they went on and on about how free they feel now that they’ve cashed in all their savings, and how amazing it’s been to just start over and live simply. To them being broke is romantic.”

“They think everything is romantic, don’t they?”

“Yes! They really do live on a totally different planet from the rest of us.”

Nick rubbed Emma’s back, thinking how inconvenient it was, considering their predicament, that her once-wealthy parents had gone bohemian. Personally he found it crass how openly the Feits talked about their finances, but to them it was a hobby. They still lived better than most everyone he knew, with their sprawling pied-à-terre and extravagant wine collection. Still, Nick knew that if Emma went to them for help, they’d start preaching about silver linings, supposedly to buck her up, but then provide no actual help. Nick had supported Emma in the aftermath of many such previous lectures.

“Emma, we need a backup plan.” Nick had already given this a lot of thought. After abandoning his other Plan B of staying put in his apartment, he’d considered who might lend them money. His parents were not an option. They’d always made it clear how proud they were to help Nick through college, but graduation was the end of the line, period; when he visited home, he and his dad split nine-dollar diner tabs right down the middle. But there was another relative of Emma’s: “So I know you don’t love the idea of asking your brother for help—”

“
Max?!
Are you kidding me? No way in hell am I turning to Max for money.”

“Well, it would just be a loan.”

“To think of Alysse lording that over me every time I saw her. To have her look at me with her sad doe eyes and say, all fake-concerned, ‘So how are you guys doing,
really?’
as if she wouldn’t love every minute of us being her charity case. No. I’d honestly rather be homeless than ask them for a pay-out.”

“Well, we may just end up homeless then.”

“How about I ask Annie? Eli is loaded, and I’m sure they’d help us out.”

Nick bristled. Eli was no more than an acquaintance, plus he considered himself such a hotshot. Nick couldn’t imagine involving him in their finances. He’d probably tell his asshole buddy Connor all about it, too. “No way,” he said.