Fashionistas (10 page)

M
aya lives in the Future, in a sleek silver thirty-five-story building on the corner of Third Avenue and Thirty-second street. It looks like one of those pictures of the twenty-first century that you used to see, the sort that depicts nuclear families in their polyester jumpsuits enjoying life on Mars. Its Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow quality is what attracted Maya in the first place. Enamored of all things kitsch, she was hooked the second she wandered past it on the way to the movie theater. Other people see the town houses on Bedford or the towers on Central Park West and lose their hearts but not Maya. Maya needs a steel-plated facade, a space-age lobby and the word
future
spelled out in red letters in that clunky old computer font.

A one-bedroom in the Future does not come cheap and Maya has had a steady stream of roommates, some better than others, all of whom have lived behind a thin artificial wall that went up as quickly as it will come down. The L-shaped living room lent itself to graceful subdivision and
the resulting spaces are not large but certainly comfortable enough to justify the rent.

Maya lives on the fringe of two neighborhoods. She’s almost Gramercy, not quite Murray Hill. Getting there is a challenge, especially when you’re coming from an apartment on the Upper West Side, and even though she e-mailed me the schedule of construction the MTA is doing on the N and R trains, I’m surprised to find out that they’re not running from Times Square. I arrive at her dinner party a half hour late and with a sad bouquet of dying daffodils in my grip. I meant to bring wine, but when I couldn’t find a liquor store I grabbed a bunch of flowers from a Korean grocer. I considered and dismissed the idea of buying a bottle of twelve-percent merlot at the supermarket. There are worse things than showing up empty-handed.

Answering the door in oven mitts and her mother’s cast-off apron, Maya welcomes me with an exuberant hello and sends me to her bedroom to drop my backpack. Her bedroom is small and fits only her bed (double) and dresser (makeshift collection of plastic milk crates piled one on top of the other and secured with duct tape). The walls are white, bare and smooth, a pile of paperbacks congregate in a confused crowd at the head of her bed and clothes hang from a metal rod installed on the back of the door to accommodate the overflow from the narrow closet. Next to the bed is a paint-splattered garbage-picked stepladder that serves as a nightstand. A picture of her family—mother, father, brother, other brother, Grandfather Harry—rests next to an alarm clock.

The disheveled, half-finished, seams-still-showing bedroom is in sharp contrast with the living room, which is unnaturally neat and organized. Maya didn’t just scour estate sales and flea markets for the right blend of Eames and Sears, she internalized a philosophy. The result is a living room that has the disturbing sterile air of an Electrolux commercial. You
never touch anything because fingerprints on the Formica are like a reproach: You really should be wearing white elbow-length gloves.

I duck my head into the kitchen with offers of assistance, but I’m handed a stack of cloth napkins and sent away to do busywork. Folding napkins and placing them next to plates is not the sort of helpful I want to be, but I content myself with making odd, fanlike creations that resemble abstract swans. Today the card tables are set up on the sleeping side of the Sheetrock wall. Maya’s roommate, a small Indian woman who worked as a pastry chef in one of Manhattan’s finest French restaurants, had recently returned to her home-town in Goa with fifteen hundred dollars of Maya’s money. She’d opened envelopes addressed to Maya, extracted checks and deposited them into her own account. This theft, coming in the wake of two major disappointments—agent and boyfriend—hardly registered on Maya’s radar. Her only complaint was that Vandana had spelled
deposit
wrong, adding an
e
at the end.

“I’m a copyeditor, for God’s sake,” she said. “It offends me on a professional level.”

This is why she’s having a dinner party tonight. Temporarily free of the constraints of communal living, she wants to revel in the novelty of going to bed with dishes in the sink, of having people over until four in the morning, of leaving three card tables smack-dab in the middle of the room. I can relate to the giddy feeling of temporary freedom. Before my roommate moved out two years ago, I cherished those evenings when I had the place to myself.

With seven swans swimming on the table, I can distract myself no longer and reluctantly submit to Connecticut small talk in the living room. Maya’s high school friends are pleasant. Sophie, Beth, Tina and Michelle (in descending height order, which is how they always arrange themselves) are pleasant and blond and have politics but the wrong kind and
employ the sort of social graces that earn the approval of people like Emily Post and Queen Elizabeth II. They make me uncomfortable. Their conversation is always town and country, and even though I don’t know who these people are, they continue to drop names as if they’re pistachio shells. Mrs. Frothingham-Smythe, no doubt a social scion in Greenwich, doesn’t play well in New York City and anecdotes about her son’s shocking behavior (refusing to join Ashley Bennett in mixed doubles!) don’t carry the same narrative weight. I stifle a yawn and glare at the kitchen door, willing Maya to stick her head out and say she needs help killing the fatted calf.

I’m sitting next to Greg, Beth’s fiancé, a meek Walter Mitty type whose vivid inner life is not a determined fact. His stare is often blank and empty, and it’s very easy to assume that he’s not piloting an eight-engined navy hydroplane in his mind.

“How are you, Vig?” he asks me, revealing that he knows my name. We have been thrown together a few times at Maya functions, but this is the first time he’s ever addressed me directly.

Before I can answer, Beth, who is sitting adjacent to me, breaks off her story about Edna McCarthy’s highlighting disaster (zebra stripes!) and says, “Yes, how are you, Vig?” Her voice has a convincing touch of sincere concern but I’m not fooled. She is only asking because the manual says she should and she’s not about to be outmannered by her timid fiancé.

“I’m fine. Things are busy at work,” I say, giving the sort of stock answer you do to aunts and uncles you only see at Christmas and Easter. “How are things with you?”

I direct this question to Greg, but he doesn’t answer. He’s been with Beth for so long that he doesn’t open his mouth or take a deep breath or even formulate a thought. He knows the routine too well to bother with these things. “Greg has some very exciting news.” She pauses here to give me a second to prepare myself. “He just got a promotion. Say hello
to Slokam-Beetham’s new junior VP of marketing management.”

“Congratulations,” I say, although I don’t really believe this position exists. It sounds like nothing.

Beth beams. “Thanks. We’re so happy. It’s what we’ve been waiting for. Now we can start looking at houses.”

I ask the requisite follow-up question—“Oh, where are you going to look?”—even though I know the answer. They’re going to look within five minutes of Beth’s mother, in Riverside, in Cos Cob, in Old Greenwich.

While Beth rattles off the expected response with one curve ball, Westport, tossed in for good measure (now that Martha has moved!), I glance at Greg, whose expressionless face suddenly reminds me of a goldfish staring dumbly at the world outside its glass bowl. Jump out, I want to say, jump out and breathe the air. But I don’t. I won’t interfere in things that I know nothing about. Maybe fresh air will suffocate him.

The conversation turns to topics outside my demo (18 to 35, urban, single) like fixed-rate mortgages and quality of schools and property taxes and I excuse myself. There are some things I cannot listen to, even to be polite.

In the kitchen, Maya is grating manchego. “How’s it going out there?” she asks, sprinkling the cheese on the asparagus tartlet appetizer.

“They’re having a very grown-up discussion about school districts. Beth is reciting reading-level statistics and percentages of kids who go on to college. It’s making me very depressed,” I say, leaning against the counter and watching her work. “Are you sure you don’t need help?”

“Here. Lightly season the salad.” She hands me a pepper grinder. “I know. It gets to me too sometimes—the house, the SUV. I don’t get it,” she says, putting the appetizer into the oven.

“It’s not that,” I insist, but it is that—at least partly. I don’t want the house in the suburbs and the gas-guzzling SUV and the uniform green lawn and the smug satisfaction of having a guest room. Space, just like everything else, is a commodity, and sometimes it comes at too high a price. But I envy their clear-sightedness. I envy the confident way they know what they want. The people in the other room are immaculate; there isn’t a speck of doubt on them.

“What is it?”

I’m incapable of doing anything lightly and the salad suddenly looks speckled. I take out the leaves hardest hit, mostly the top layer, and throw them in the garbage when Maya isn’t looking. Then I toss the salad with orange plastic tongs. “I don’t know. I think it’s their certainty. They know what they want,” I say, trying to put my finger on it, “and they’re going after it without paralyzing themselves with too much thought.”

“They want to be their parents. It’s not something they think about,” she says dismissively. Then she inspects my handiwork, wipes her hands on a striped dish towel and withdraws a bottle of red wine from the cabinet. “You lasted more than a half hour,” she observes, uncorking the cabernet sauvignon after a small struggle. “I expected you to come hide in the kitchen long before now.”

Although Maya is still fond of the old high school gang, she can’t spend too much time in their company without wanting to hit her head against a brick wall. There is an unremitting sameness about who they are: investment bankers and lawyers and insurance salespeople and accountants.

“It’s the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,” she said one night over Midori martinis—tumbled, of course.

We were in the lounge at the Soho Grand hotel, dwarfed by giant lampshades and bathed in golden light. “Yes,” I said, although I think the world has many more crimes than this.

“It’s a poem,” she explained, “that always reminds me of my friends from high school.

“They’re not so bad,” I say now, thinking now how easy it is to starve dreamlessly.

Maya laughs, assuming I’m only being polite, and pours the wine. But it’s more than a reflex, more than just instinctive diplomacy, that sparks the statement. Childhood friends are continuity, uninterrupted connections between selves, and you hold on to them. You hold on to them and you love them, but sometimes they’re not quite comfortable. New York City and Greenwich are like the Galapagos and mainland Ecuador. There’s a wide gulf between the two, and a different language has developed over time.

“H
ustle?” I ask, squinting my eyes to make sure I read the word right. Maya has given me my own copy of her new life manual. She reduced the font to seven point, printed out three months’ worth of terms and bound the fifty pages together with a thin blue ribbon. The end result is a book with print so small it’s like the condensed version of the OED—you need a magnifying glass to read it.

“What’s this?” I asked earlier, when she’d handed me the crude notebook.

“It’s the pocket edition. You’re my sponsor,” she said in a tone that suggested she was spelling out the obvious.

“Your sponsor?”

“Yes, my sponsor. It’s your job to keep me on track,” she explained, as if giving herself a keeper were an everyday experience. “I’m like an alcoholic and these are my steps to recovery. When you think I’m straying from my core objectives, you have to reel me back in.”

I accept the responsibility of sponsorship because I don’t believe it’s a long-term commitment. Maya will get bored
with accountability and regimens within a week and move on to something else. This is her way. In the dozen years I’ve known her, there have been many first days of the rest of her life.

“What does ‘cultivate hustle’ mean?” I ask now, laying the book on the table—the pocket edition is too thick for a pocket—and starting the long cleaning process. Maya’s small kitchen doesn’t have much counter space and to compensate she stacks dishes and puts them on the floor. She wants to leave them on the floor overnight but I can’t do that. I can’t sleep knowing mice are treating her kitchen like the fairground in
Charlotte’s Web.
I put a pile of salad plates into the sink.

“You know hustle,” she says, watching me with disapproval. It’s her house and her dinner party and there is no way she can let me clean up without feeling agitated. I use my thumb to scrape off dried cheese and Maya huffs angrily. My every action is like a rebuke. “Here—” she pushes me aside and puts on yellow rubber gloves “—let me do that.”

“I know hustler.”

Maya gives me a disgusted look and explains. “Since I no longer have an agent and quite possibly might never get a new one—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You haven’t even started loo—”

Maya interrupts with a dripping yellow hand. “Uh-uh. August 15,” she says.

Her comment is nonsensical and I stare at her for a second. “What?”

“Terms of reference, August 15.”

I find August 15 and read aloud. “Face reality.”

“Check,” she says. “The reality of the situation is that I don’t have an agent and there’s the very real possibility that I’ll never have an agent again. I’ve got to deal with that.” She squirts blue dishwashing liquid onto a sponge. “Actually, I did deal with it, four days ago. I’ve moved on to new challenges.”

“But, Maya, you’re going to get a new—”

“Buh!” she says, raising her hand like a traffic cop’s. “I’ll have none of that soul-destroying optimism in my house, only clear-eyed cynicism tempered with despair.”

“That sounds horrible,” I say, appalled.

My clear-eyed honesty earns me an annoyed look. “Vig, you’re my sponsor. Either support me in everything I do or let me find someone else.”

Neither option is acceptable, so I change the subject. “You were explaining hustle….”

“Yes, since I no longer have an agent and quite possibly might never get another one, I need to find a satisfactory backup career in case best-selling author doesn’t work out. I can’t copyedit all my life.”

Copyediting is one of those tedious jobs you’re glad someone else has to do, like data entry or toll collecting, and I’m not surprised that Maya wants to get out. Editors treat copy departments as though they are necessary evils that must be endured—like traffic on the way to your summer share—and I’m amazed that she’s lasted this long.

“What do you want to do?” I ask. This is the question I ask myself almost every morning when I wake up and the answer always escapes me. I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, so I stay at
Fashionista
year after year hoping one day blinding inspiration will strike. Maya is different. She’s always known the answer and suddenly it doesn’t seem fair that she find a second dream before I find a first.

Maya shrugs. “I’m taking suggestions. I’m supposed to know by August 30, so please get your ideas in by the twenty-eighth at the latest.”

There is now a clean stack of dishes next to the sink along with bowls and serving utensils and I pick up a towel. I don’t know where anything goes, and I start opening and closing cabinets until I see something familiar.

“In the meantime,” she continues, “I want to try writing magazine articles. That’s where hustle comes in. I need to be
more proactive in pitching ideas. Waiting for you to become editor in chief and start assigning me stories doesn’t seem to be working.”

“I didn’t know you were so invested in my career,” I say, a green plastic colander in hand. I’m staring at the cabinets, trying to remember which one has the plastic bowls. This is like a game of Concentration and I’m losing. “What magazines are you going to pitch?”

“It seems like a good idea to start with the ones I copyedit for. I know people there.”

Maya works mostly for women’s magazines such as
Glamour
and
Cosmo
and
Marie Claire.
Their field of interest is small and articles travel a limited circuit from sex and relationship back to beauty and health. I can’t see Maya embracing any of these things. “You know you’re just going to be writing stories about antioxidants and ten ways that it’s okay to change for your man.”

She makes a pained expression. “It’s never okay to change for your man.”

I point a spatula at her. “Terms of reference, August 19— Stop thinking independently.”

“You’re not helping,” she says, rinsing a red, green and yellow plate. Maya’s collection of dishes has been culled from flea markets and thrift stores across the country. No two plates are alike, but they all have pictures of pretty flowers on them.

I
am
helping. This is what she asked of me: clear-eyed cynicism. “Look, even if you do manage to shrug off the label of copyeditor—and I’m not saying you will; these magazines pigeonhole you early and they pigeonhole you deep—you’ll be bored out of your mind. I know you, Maya. Test-driving sunscreens is not the sort of thing that will get you out of bed in the morning. It’s unsatisfying and dull and so dour and humorless that you might as well be writing stock reports for AT&T,” I say angrily. Service items are fact-gathering missions; they’re black and white. Maya is Technicolor. She’s a Matisse painting and Venetian glass.

This isn’t what she wants to hear, and she takes her anger out on a defenseless whisk. It is bent in all the wrong places by the time she’s done cleaning it. “It’s a beginning,” she says, her temper under control now. She tosses the deformed whisk into the drying rack. “I have to start somewhere and this is it. I’ll cultivate hustle, write a few articles for women’s magazines, put together a portfolio of clips, make a name for myself as an ingenious writer who makes even dull topics interesting and then wait for the good assignments to pour in. A couple of hundred words on which suntan lotion provides the best UVA and UVB protection is a small price to pay. All I have to do is cultivate hustle. It’ll be fine,” she adds in a calm voice, as though she is comforting me and not herself, “you’ll see.”

I’m not so sure I will see but I don’t say anything. I only hold my hand out for a wineglass and wipe it dry with a damp cotton towel. Maya is convinced that small changes ripple across the pond of your existence. She believes that they snowball into massive alterations that affect everything. But life is not like that. You are not an airline. You can’t remove a single olive from every salad served in first class and save one point two million dollars.