New York for Beginners (3 page)

3

In the arrivals hall, a short man in a black uniform and cap held up a sign with Zoe’s name on it. Her chauffeur. Without batting an eye, he took both of her suitcases. They were seriously overweight. At the airport in Berlin she would have had to pay a hefty extra fee to have someone carry them if she hadn’t flashed her new Senator Card. The chauffeur led her outside to a black Mercedes limousine.

The limo had been booked by Zoe’s half-secretary in Germany because Allegra normally refused to take taxis when she visited New York.

“Your feet get wet when it rains because the floors are full of holes. And when it’s hot, your thighs stick to the plastic seats,” Al had complained after her first (and last) journey in a yellow cab.

The New York sky shone with a promisingly bright shade of blue as Zoe and her driver stepped out of Terminal One. It had to have been at least 30 degrees warmer than in Berlin, where in the last two weeks of July it had reached the spectacular high of 60 degrees, with almost constant rain.

Zoe was happy about the nice weather until the humidity hit her. It felt like a frontal collision with a cement wall. She didn’t know which part of her body started to sweat first: her forehead, her upper lip, or her armpits. The sweat even started to run down the backs of her legs. If not for the row of classic New York yellow taxis right in front of her, she would have thought she’d landed on some Caribbean island, right before the afternoon thunderstorm. Summer in the city.

The driver held open the rear door of the limo for her. It seemed almost like magic that it was ice-cold inside. Zoe got in as quickly and elegantly as possible, like Kate Middleton. On the seat lay current issues of
The
New York Times
and
The
Wall Street Journal
. In the back pocket of the seat in front of her, which had been shoved forward as much as possible to offer maximum legroom, there were two bottles of mineral water—one sparkling and one still.

Zoe Schuhmacher felt like a Hollywood star who had just successfully shaken off the paparazzi. She let herself relax into the luxuriously cool leather seat.

The author and film producer Ephraim Kishon once said, “America is just a cleaner suburb of New York.”
How wrong he was,
Zoe thought. She asked her chauffeur to drive over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, as Allegra had recommended, rather than through the Midtown Tunnel. She wanted to actually see the city on her ride in and not feel like a vole blinded by the sun when it finally emerged into the light. As they turned off the Long Island Expressway onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and were about to drive over a rickety-looking old bridge that was full of potholes, the Manhattan skyline opened up on the other side of the East River. The glaring midday sun made the skyscrapers shine in hazy silver-gray—like a mirage—and the art deco spire of the Chrysler Building glittered like a thousand broken mirrors. Two helicopters hovered above the East River, heading toward One World Trade Center, the highest building in the Western world. Allegra liked to say it was giant middle finger, stretching into the air as if to say “Fuck you, Al Qaeda.”

In movies, New York City was often portrayed as a character in itself, Zoe remembered. Not in the leading role, but it always had a very important supporting role. It could play the role of the seducer, for example: stylish, powerful, and sexy, but just a little maladjusted. Like virtually any character played by George Clooney.

They drove over the Brooklyn Bridge, through lower Manhattan, and finally up 6th Avenue, until the driver turned onto 52nd Street and stopped in front of the green-and-gold striped awning of the Four Seasons Executive Residences. Schoenhoff Publishing had rented an apartment there for her first month.

“It’s furnished,” the half-secretary had informed her.

“Hmm, that could be interesting,” Zoe had answered, picturing the worn-out sofa in her first college apartment.

“Welcome home, Ms. Schuhmacher,” a doorman greeted her while opening the limo door. He’d obviously been briefed on her arrival. “My name is Devon. How are you?”

“Um, fine, and you?” She was trying out her best American English, remembering that Allegra had told her that Americans didn’t actually expect an honest answer to that question, or even any answer at all. A German, on the other hand, would tell you about her last migraine or that her dog was sick.

Devon took Zoe’s suitcases, dismissed the chauffeur, and held open the door to the foyer. The elevator stood open and ready at the other end of the room.

“After you, Ms. Schuhmacher.”

Zoe hesitated a little at first, and then added “Thank you” as a precaution. She wasn’t sure how to react to little courtesies like this. After all, German men almost never held doors for women. That bit of chivalry had been killed by feminism in the seventies. Most German men assumed that if women wanted to be liberated, they should open doors for themselves.

The elevator ascended noiselessly to the forty-seventh floor, where Devon took the lead again and unlocked Apartment 47C at the end of the hall.

“My pleasure, Ms. Schuhmacher,” he said. He tipped his cap and headed out toward the elevator.

Zoe hesitantly entered her new home. The architect seemed to have considered an entry hall to be a waste of space. The door opened up directly onto a furnished living room that looked like a showroom for Calvin Klein Home. The walls were painted in a shade the interior decorator had probably called “sand.” The “driftwood” carpet blended in harmoniously, and the sofa was a soothing “pebble.” It was more relaxing than an expensive psychiatrist’s waiting room. The only things missing were a gurgling indoor fountain and a statue of Buddha.

Zoe took a few more steps and let her fingers slide over the counter of the built-in stainless steel kitchen. Then she opened a door that led to a bedroom with a giant king-sized bed and a flat screen television that was almost as big. On the bed were seven pillows in various sizes and shades of mauve. They had been expertly laid out with a perfect karate-chop dent in the center of each pillow.

“Furnished. In boutique-hotel quality,” the half-secretary had insisted, and now Zoe finally believed her.

Zoe thought it was strange that she couldn’t find a single armoire in the entire apartment. She walked back and forth between the living room and the bedroom. There was no armoire in the entry area, and definitely none in the bedroom. But there were two bathrooms. Zoe was confused. Such an essential piece of furniture couldn’t possibly be missing.

“Am I supposed to put my clothes in the bathtub? Or in the oven, like Carrie Bradshaw?” she asked the bedroom door. Zoe liked to talk to herself when she was alone, or if she was angry. But she actually preferred talking to inanimate objects—they couldn’t talk back. She decided to call the doorman again.

“Devon, could you please come up again?” she asked a few seconds later over the house intercom. With its digital touch display, it looked like something out of a spaceship’s cockpit. Apparently you could do anything with it: let in visitors, order pizza, have laundry or dry cleaning picked up—but only if you had a degree in software engineering.

“Of course, Ms. Schuhmacher.”

Two minutes later he was at the apartment door. “What can I do for you?”

“As you can see, I’ve got a lot of luggage, and it won’t all fit in the oven. I realize space is at a premium in New York apartments, just like it was for Carrie, but this is really not going to work.” The air over the Atlantic must have been very thin, because Zoe realized that she was talking total nonsense. But she was way too jetlagged and too excited to switch on her brain before speaking. Devon looked at Zoe, then at her suitcases, then the oven, and finally back at Zoe.

“And what exactly can I do for you, miss?”

“I need an armoire.”

“You need an armoire,” he repeated slowly.

“Yes, and I don’t mind if the building management buys a cheap model. Or do you have another apartment for me? With an armoire, but without a second bathroom?”

“Second bathroom?” Suddenly the light went on behind Devon’s eyes. The corners of his mouth twitched. Was he trying not to laugh?

“Ms. Schuhmacher, have you had a look at your second bathroom?” he asked her kindly, opening the door in question himself.

At that moment Zoe wished the ground would open up at her feet and swallow her, forty-seven floors down to 52nd Street, and preferably to China, or wherever New York would come out on the other side of the globe. She was mortified. The room she’d assumed was a second bathroom turned out to be the most divine walk-in closet this side of the Atlantic. At least, that’s what Zoe thought it was, because she’d never set foot in a walk-in closet in her life. In Germany, most people had armoires. This was almost half as big as the entire bedroom. It was equipped with various shoe compartments, built-in hanging bars for short and long items, sliding baskets for sweaters and T-shirts, and even a hat stand. A full-length mirror with movable side-wings to view oneself from every possible angle completed the inventory. And the recessed lighting in the ceiling somehow made everything look beautiful.

Zoe sank into the mauve pillows on the king-sized bed and looked out of the floor-to-ceiling window that filled the entire west side of the room. The view extended to the Hudson River. It glittered in the afternoon sun. Who cared about American superficiality? She already loved this land of walk-in closets!

On Sunday morning, Zoe awoke completely destroyed in an extremely rumpled bed. Two pillows and a blanket were tangled in a sheet and had been trampled into a messy roll at the end of the bed. It looked like a battlefield. A casual observer would probably think that someone had either had spectacularly good sex or an extremely bad night. The latter applied. She’d fought with the air-conditioner for hours, and lost.

At first she’d simply turned up the temperature, from sixty-five degrees to seventy, because she was freezing. Who could convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in their head at two in the morning? It was some unnecessarily complicated formula with minus thirty-two, times something or other. Anyway, seventy was still too cold, so she’d gotten up again and changed it to seventy-five. When she discovered she was still freezing, she tried to turn down the fan that was constantly blowing cold air in her face. But that didn’t work. Even on the lowest setting, there still wasn’t a noticeable change in the wind speed. So she got up a fourth time, turned off the whole thing, and tried to open the window—which of course didn’t work. It seemed that windows in American skyscrapers weren’t made to open.

Over the course of the next few hours, she had removed first her long-sleeved shirt, then her scarf, then socks, and finally her pajama bottoms. She had pushed the bedcovers down as far as possible and sweated herself into an uneasy half-sleep. When it started to get light outside, Zoe was both dead tired and shockingly awake. It was some crazy physical reaction to the combination of sleep-deprivation and jetlag. She reached for the remote and turned on her personal home cinema. News. The reporter on the local channel New York One was actually trying to fry an egg on the sidewalk of 5th Avenue, and he was almost succeeding. The egg white started to solidify around the edges, and was even showing little bubbles.