On My Knees (8 page)

Once I received confirmation that the package had arrived, I began to obsessively check my mailbox for a thank-you note. I imagined Roth would say something to the effect of how sexy and funny I was, how much he enjoyed meeting me, that he would love to read my book. Whatever he would write, I was certain, would be charming and I would, perhaps, even find a lovely antique frame to display it prominently in my home, if I ever got one.

When people came to visit, they would inevitably ask me what it was. I, of course, would act distracted. “What?” I would ask. They would have to repeat the question and in repeating the question, I would know that they were paying full attention. Only then would I answer. I would pause and strain my neck as though I needed to get a better look at what they were talking about. Maybe I would even giggle a little. Casually I would say, “Oh,
that,
I had no idea what you were talking about
.
That’s just a note from, um, Philip Roth.”

Of course, this would impress them immensely. “You know Philip Roth?” Very nonchalantly I would say something vague and interest piquing like, “We’ve spent a little time together,” or maybe even, “We have a mutual friend . . .”

Even though this scenario was absurd, I took solace in my fantasy. Since all else had gone to shit, at least I would have this to remind me of how far I had come. And also because I have never followed the rules, per se, I have taken a lot shit from a lot of people throughout the course of my life. My parents have always been extremely supportive—albeit a bit skeptical—of my decisions. But there are many other people—my parents’ friends, other members of my family, the list goes on—who have just been waiting for me to land on my face and crack my skull open for not being more obedient.

It’s always been the same story: “Peri is doing
what?
Peri is going
where?
”

Or, as Uncle Bark once said, “You are building your future on a pile of sticks.”

I don’t blame people for this reaction; we have been bred to be sheep but I refuse to kowtow to convention. It’s too boring. In my mind,
not
taking risks has always been a bigger risk than taking them. The sense of security that comes from jobs that confine you to a beige cubicle farm is false. I’d always known that but when Lori’s brother, Guy, was killed on September 11, I became more convinced than ever.

And so sometimes it’s nice to say to all of the people who have tacitly agreed to live their lives in the most banal, mundane, expected way possible: “And by the way, fuck you. I may be illegally squatting in my dead grandmother’s apartment in the East Village, but at least I have a letter from Philip Roth on my wall.”

After I sent the cherries, I waited a week.

Then another.

And another.

Eventually, it became painfully obvious that I was waiting in vain. I never even got so much as a cherry pit from him. I don’t care
who
you are, if someone sends you two hundred of the best cherries in America, the very least you can do is send them a fucking thank-you note.

Who knows? Maybe I deserved what I got; my intentions were not exactly pure to begin with. And you know what Sir Walter Scott says. Or maybe you don’t know what Sir Walter Scott says. I’ll tell you what Sir Walter Scott says. He says, “Oh what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive.”

And really, who am I to argue?

Right when I thought things were taking a turn for the better, they took a turn for the worse. And then, they got worse yet. After it was eminently clear that I was never going to hear from Philip Roth again, I received an e-mail from Andrew Wylie. Anyone who knows anything about the book world knows that Andrew Wylie is the most powerful and ruthless literary agent in the world. He represents the biggest names in the industry—dead and alive—everyone from Nabokov to Rushdie. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted with me.

And then it hit me. Wylie was Philip Roth’s agent. Roth was
finally
reaching out.

I opened the e-mail. It read:

Andrew Wylie and Lady Susie Sainsbury

Invite you to dinner in honor of

Michael Boyd

Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company

On

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Drinks 7:15 PM

Dinner 8:00 PM

Dress Code: Business attire, ties required

And there he was, God, in all his glory, smiling upon me. I had no idea who Lady Susie Sainsbury was, what the Royal Shakespeare Company was, or even who Michael Boyd was, and to be frank, I didn’t really give a shit.

I wondered if I could bring a guest? Maybe I would bring Nico? No, that was a terrible idea. It would obviously be better to bring a girlfriend. Maybe Hanna? Certainly two good-looking women are better than one. I wondered if Roth would be at this dinner. Then I chided myself for having floundered in my self-confidence. Obviously Roth himself had suggested I would be a good addition to what was obviously going to be a very exclusive literary event.

I didn’t want to RSVP from my personal e-mail address since the e-mail seemed to be from someone at his agency rather than from Wylie personally. I decided to be clever and respond as though I were
my
assistant responding on my own behalf. This would send a clear message that they were dealing with someone who was very important in her own right.

I wrote:

Periel Aschenbrand would be pleased to attend dinner and drinks on June 19. She has asked me to convey to Andrew that she thanks him for the invitation and looks forward to meeting him.

Sincerely,

Julia Mead, Executive Assistant to

Periel Aschenbrand

I hit
SEND
.

Then I sent
another
e-mail that said, “Please confirm receipt of this e-mail,” so it would seem like my assistant was really on top of her shit.

And
then
I started planning my outfit.

I was thinking sexy, but chic, and that perhaps I’d wear my high-waisted black pants, with suspenders and the lace Christian Louboutin spike heels that Nico bought me for my birthday last year. I pulled out a strand of Chanel pearls. I thought,
This necklace will provide just the right touch to balance rock and roll with downtown chic
—which is often how I regard my sense of style.

I tried everything on.

I looked in the mirror.

I thought,
You look perfect.

I took everything off and hung the outfit on a hanger.

I hadn’t felt so good in a very long time.

Ever so pleased with myself, I sauntered back over to my desk and logged back in to my e-mail account.

I saw that I had received an e-mail from the reception desk of Mr. Wylie again. I thought,
How lovely. He probably told his secretary to personally reach out to me immediately and tell me he was looking forward to meeting me as well.

I clicked
OPEN
. The e-mail read as follows:

Many thanks for your e-mail.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wylie and Lady Sainsbury’s invitation seems to have been misdirected to your account. It was not intended for Periel Aschenbrand, who is not invited to the dinner and drinks on June 19th. We apologize for this mistake, and for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Please confirm receipt of this e-mail.

8

Life Is a Daring Adventure or Nothing

D
espite my suffering, I didn’t regret a single second I had spent with Noam. I was a better person for having been with him—smarter, deeper, less reactionary, and more introspective. And Nico, for all of his flaws, had given me hope when I had none. It may have been misguided hope, but still it was hope. And for that I would forever be indebted.

Although we hadn’t really resolved anything, Nico’s birthday was coming up and I wanted to give him something special. He was difficult to shop for because he had everything he wanted and he certainly didn’t
need
anything. He had beautiful homes filled with incredible art and books and curiosities from his travels around the world. But he had always been fond of vintage items and photography, and I had just unearthed an exposure meter from the 1930s that had belonged to my grandfather and I knew he would love it. I wrapped it beautifully, enclosed a seductive photo of myself, and wrote another mortifying letter that I should have burned instead of sending.

Nico,

I understand very little about the way technology works, but I’ve managed to glean that exposure meters have something to do with measuring light, which means, well, absolutely nothing to me. Shedding light, on the other hand, is quite another story. And while I’m sure you’re just fine as far as equipment goes (in fact, I know you are) this belonged to my father’s father, my grandfather Seymour, and I think it’s pretty amazing.

Seymour, for better or for worse, did very little in the way of passing anything else down to me, nor, during the course of my life, did he shed light on anything in particular. But he sure had a lot of very cool stuff, which I’ve managed to snag, and that’s good enough for me.

Given all that, I suppose one thing I did learn from him is that if we don’t expect things from people that they are incapable of giving us, we are rarely disappointed. And disappointed is certainly no way to go through life. I don’t really know much about else about Seymour, even though he only just died a few years ago.

It’s entirely possible that Seymour was a fascinating individual—his things certainly seem to indicate as much. If you can learn about people from the things they accumulated throughout the course of their lives, it’s possible that my grandfather was more interesting than I ever knew.

My impression is that my grandparents lived a very safe life. Helen Keller said: “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

It’s an interesting point.

Put that way, the thing to choose seems so fucking obvious.

I do remember once, when I was about five years old, visiting my grandparents, and convincing them to let me play on the swing set. I was swinging higher than I had ever swung before and was having an absolute blast. And then I fell off and I hurt my knee really badly. So badly, that to this day, I still have a scar.

So, maybe, in the end, I learned more than I thought. I learned I’m willing to fall and hurt my knee. I learned my knee will heal. Because if you want to soar, you have to be willing to fall . . .

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing, right?

Given that, in addition to everything else I’ve said, I’ll say this, too:

I love you.

P

S
oon after Nico’s birthday, he invited me over for dinner. Nico could be really romantic when he felt like it and I was sure my letter had moved him and was absolutely certain that he was going to tell me that he had thought long and hard and was ready to really give us a chance. When I got there, primed and ready for him to profess his love to me, he told me that several other friends would be joining us and that we’d all be going out. I was expecting an intimate evening for two and he had planned a fucking dinner party.

This put me completely over the edge. Neither one of us was prepared for what came next but this was truly the straw that broke the camel’s back. My reaction was completely out of left field, but I was so disappointed and felt like such a fool that I totally lost it.

I started screaming, at the tops of my lungs, “I am so sick of this shit. You invite me over for dinner and then you tell me that we’re actually going out with six other people. I don’t want to go out to dinner! One second you want to be with me and the next second you are totally unavailable. If that’s how you want to be, you can find someone else to do that with, because
I’m not that girl!
”

Nico was in shock. And to be honest, I kind of surprised myself. I was not expecting to bug out like that and to be fair, Nico never said a word about an intimate evening or even alluded to anything of the sort. He had just asked me if I wanted to have dinner. We’d had dinner hundreds of times. He had given me no indication that tonight would be any different. Despite the fact that all evidence pointed to the contrary, I had convinced myself that Nico and I were destined to be together. I don’t think he meant to drive me so crazy, but he definitely bit off more than he could chew. I certainly don’t think he had any idea how fucking psycho I was going to get. I don’t think I had any idea how psycho I was going to get either.

Because, of course, anyone who is actually
not
“that” girl does not need to
say
she is not that girl. Anyone who is
not
“that” girl
certainly
doesn’t need to scream she is not that girl at the top of her lungs. Anyone who is screaming “I am not that girl” at the top of her lungs is screaming “that” because she obviously
is
that girl. She may not
want
to be “that” girl, but she is. I really never had been that girl before. I had turned into someone that I could not recognize and in screaming that, I think my brain was trying to remind the rest of me that once I had not been broken.

With that, I stormed out.

With the mail next day, I received a letter from the management company at Tishman Speyer. It read:

To whom it may concern,

Please be advised that it has come to our attention that Lillian Aschenbrand has passed away. Please be further advised that the lease renewal that was to be offered to Ms. Lillian Aschenbrand is hereby revoked due to her death. If the apartment is not surrendered, the Landlord intends to bring holdover proceedings against the estate.

Should you wish to discuss this matter further, please contact the office.

Very truly yours,

Joseph Michael Lopez, Legal Affairs Unit

I immediately called good old Herbert Lust, attorney at law. He said, “Sounds like it’s time to start looking for new digs.”

I
had lived in almost every neighborhood in New York and knew from experience that apartments are like everything else in the city: it was possible to find something amazing, as long as you were willing to hunt. My list of requirements was not as long as it was specific. The apartment
had
to be a one bedroom; there was no way I was moving into a studio. And it
had
to be below Fourteenth Street. Ideally in Nolita. Unless you have millions of dollars at your disposal, living in New York City is all about compromise. Like most great things in life, you have to be willing to give something up to get something else. And I was willing to give up a lot if it kept me from moving into a shithole. I proceeded to e-mail every single person I knew.

A
few weeks later, after looking at approximately 4,836 apartments and reaching out to every single person I had ever met in my life, a friend of a friend told me to call Bill Yen. I’d heard Bill was a shady Chinese kid but my friend swore that if anyone could find an apartment within my budget, it would be Bill (read: Chinese Mafia). So I called him with my long list of requests. A few weeks later, Bill called me back and was like, “I have the perfect apartment for you. It’s not on the market yet because it’s in the middle of getting renovated, but if you’re interested, you have to come see it today.”

You’d think people were giving away the cure to cancer instead of letting you rent shitty, overpriced apartments. I was totally skeptical that Bill had the “perfect” apartment for me. To begin with, real estate agents are shady. I mean, they’re pretty much one step above used-car salesmen. Real estate agents in
New York City
were some of the scummiest liars I had ever met. I didn’t have any experience with real estate agents who may or may not have been affiliated with the Chinese Mafia, but I didn’t have high hopes.

Bill met me on the corner of Mott and Broome, right at the border of Nolita, Chinatown, and Little Italy—and right around the corner from where I had lived with Noam. Bill had shaggy black hair and looked way more hipster than Mafia. He talked really slowly, like he was stoned, which he very well may have been. He nodded at me to indicate that I should follow him, which I did, down Mott Street for about a half a block. He stopped in front of a glass storefront with Chinese writing on it and a bunch of people who were alternately baking, screaming, and watching what looked like a Chinese soap opera. He smiled a toothy smile and said, “This is it.”

I was like, “What do you mean, this is it? You want me to live in a bakery?”

You may think this is a joke, but believe me when I tell you that I had seen apartments with the shower stall
in
the kitchen—literally in the middle of the kitchen—so this was not outside the realm of possibility. Bill said, “No, dude. That’s it.”

He nodded his head toward a nondescript red metal door with graffiti all over it right next to the bakery. And when he opened it, there was a long, decrepit hallway filled with garbage bags and the scent of freshly baked goods mingled with rotting vegetables. The inside of the building was dingy and dark and literally looked straight out of a whorehouse from the 1970s.

I loved it.

And then I saw the stairs. And there was the compromise—the building had no elevator. Many years ago, I lived in a seven-floor walk-up and wanted to kill myself every single day. I was like, “Please don’t tell me it’s on the top floor.”

Bill was like, “It’s on the top floor, dude, but it’s a great spot and it’s gonna be brand-new.”

By the time I reached the fifth floor, I was ready to collapse. “I guess I should be thankful it’s only five flights, huh?”

Bill was like, “Dude, I live on an eighth-floor walk-up, but my rent is only eight hundred dollars a month, so, you know, whatevs. This is a great spot.”

I hate it when people tell me how great things are when they are right in front of me. It’s like I’m seeing the same exact thing you’re seeing. I’ll be the fucking judge of whether it’s great or not, thank you very much. I walked into the apartment and there was soot and construction shit everywhere and like four Chinese men covered in white paint and dust crouched on the floor eating rice.

Bill was right. The apartment
was
being gutted. I couldn’t believe it, everything was brand spanking new—wooden floor, the kitchen, the stove, the cabinets, the bathroom, the bathtub—everything. You could tell it had been a studio but they had put a wall up, so now it was a one bedroom. It was a small one bedroom, but still for little old me it was huge. It was in the right neighborhood, it was the right price, and I loved the apartment. But the stairs were a serious bitch. Bill said, “You should check out the roof, dude. No one ever goes up there, so it would be all yours and it’s awesome.”

Of course no one ever went up there. There were probably sixteen apartments in the whole building and I was more than certain that most of them were occupied by eighty-year-old Chinese people. I poked my head out the front door and walked up
another
set of stairs. I couldn’t believe it. The roof was huge
.
And it had incredible, sweeping views of lower Manhattan. When I came back downstairs Bill was like, “Whaddaya think?”

I looked at Bill and his hipster haircut and his ripped-up denim jacket and his worn-out sneakers and his dumb beanie hat and I said, “I think it’s awesome,
dude
.”

Bill gave me a big toothy grin and was like, “I told you it was a great spot. And the owner’s pretty cool. The only thing to know is that the Chinese are like yellow Jews, so as long as you pay your rent on time, you’re all good.”

I handed Bill a deposit and made my way back to Grandma’s. I had some serious packing to do.

W
hen I got back to the apartment later that evening, I realized that nine months had passed since my grandmother’s death, since Noam and I had broken up, and since my debacle with Nico had started. It didn’t take a genius to know that this was my chance for a rebirth. I still hadn’t had any real closure with Noam but at least I could say his name without bursting into tears, and I may have still been a little obsessed but I hadn’t spoken to Nico in weeks. He had called me a bunch of times since my meltdown, but I didn’t answer the phone and I deleted the messages without even listening to them. I hadn’t even watched
Law and Order
for almost two weeks. I was determined to come back to myself.

Hanna came over to help me gather the last odds and ends. The second she walked through the door I could tell something was off. I was like, “What’s wrong?”

Hanna: “I’m panicking. I’m such a loser.”

Me: “Will you stop saying that! You’re
not
a loser. What happened now?”

Hanna: “It’s Dan.”

Me: “Oh God. Not him again.”

I couldn’t believe she hadn’t gotten rid of this guy yet. The first time she went out with him—the
very
first time
—he told her he had a girlfriend. And then he told her he
didn’t
have a girlfriend. This enormous red flag was apparently not enough to make her realize that Dan was super sketchy. So she had sex with him and then she panicked that she had sex with him too soon. The sex part didn’t concern me. What concerned me was that she slept at his house.