Trading Up (18 page)

“Oh, I
know,
” Janey said. She had made several visits to the Lowell herself over the years.

The two women exchanged an amused look of mutual understanding. There was between them not the bond of genuine old friendship, perhaps, but something nearly as strong: The natural affinity that two beautiful women have for one another that comes from having had similar experiences in life.

And a few minutes later, they were chatting excitedly as the rickshaw carried them down Fifth Avenue to Forty-second Street, where the fashion shows were staged under large white circus tents. Heads turned, and the awareness that they were being remarked upon only added to the animation of their conversation. As they pulled up to the entrance, the throng of photographers looked up in curiosity and raised their cameras.

“Here comes trouble,” one remarked.

“Who are they?”

“Janey Wilcox, Victoria’s Secret model. Mimi Kilroy, socialite,” someone hissed.

“It girls.”

“Except they’ve been around forever.”

“Aging It girls.”

“Janey! Mimi! Over here,” they shouted.

“Hey Janey, how’s married life?”

“We want to see the ring!” someone said.

“The ring! The ring!”

Janey held out her left hand.

Mimi put her arm around her waist and drew her closer. “So how is Selden, really?” she asked. “Are you madly in love?”

“He said the cutest thing on the plane coming back,” Janey said. “He took my hand, and with dead seriousness said, ‘Janey, we’re going to rule New York.’ ” They smiled for the cameras.

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s ev e n

three day s l ater, on Thursday morning, Patty Wilcox got up, went to the bathroom, and got her period.

Damn, damn, damn,
she thought. But what else was she expecting? Digger had been on tour for nearly the whole summer, and she’d seen him only once in the last two weeks, but for some stupid reason she’d been hoping that she would get pregnant. It was ridiculous—she was only twenty-eight years old and they’d been trying for a year and now she was really beginning to think that there was something wrong with her. It should have happened already. Especially since everything else in her life had gone according to plan—but that was only because she worked so hard to make everything right.

She inserted a tampon, and as she did so, she remembered about the puppy.

The last time Digger had been home, she’d said, “You know, I think if I don’t get pregnant next month, or even if I do, we should get a puppy. We can call it Triscuit.

Little Triscuit. Isn’t that cute?”

And he’d nodded, his mouth full of pizza. “Triscuit. I like it.”

“It won’t be a big dog,” she’d said, standing over him and stroking his hair, so his head bent back and those startling green eyes gazed up into hers. “But it has to have lots of personality. Like, it shouldn’t mind if we dress it up and take it to the Halloween parade.”

He had put his arms around her neck and pulled her onto his lap. They had started kissing like teenagers, and after a couple of minutes, she’d said, “You sure do like to make out a lot.”

“I know,” he’d said. “I guess I forgot to grow up.” They had looked at each other 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 99

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and laughed. This exchange was one of their favorite private jokes, which began on their third date when Digger had come to her apartment and pounced on her, and wouldn’t let her go for at least an hour. It was on that night, two years ago, when they’d both realized how serious their relationship was going to be.

“So you like the idea of the dog,” she’d said.

“I do,” he’d said, rubbing his cheek against hers. “I love you so much.”

“I love you so much, too,” she’d said. “If anything happened to you, I’d have to die so I could go to heaven to find you again.”

“How do you know I’d be in heaven?” he’d asked.

“Oh, you would be. I
know,
” she’d said.

So today was the day she was going to get the dog, she thought, pulling up her underpants. Well, it was something to look forward to anyway. Lately she’d been feeling insignificant. She wanted to make a contribution, but she feared the world wouldn’t let her and she didn’t know what she wanted to do anyway.

She put on a pair of low hip-hugger combat pants and a T-shirt she’d ordered from the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. She usually dressed like this, in the demo-cratic uniform of her generation, affordable to almost everyone and universally available. Then she got into the elevator and went down to the lobby and nodded at Kenny, a tiny man with newsprint-stained fingers. Kenny manned the newsstand and always brightened when he saw Digger, because Digger bought a pack of cigarettes from him every day when he was in town, even though he smoked only occasionally, just to give the guy some business.

“Hi, Kenny,” she said. Kenny was sitting on a metal folding chair next to the newsstand, where he seemed to perch for most of the day.

“Your husband coming home soon?” Kenny asked.

“Next week,” she sighed. “I can hardly stand it.” Kenny nodded sympathetically, as if he had firsthand knowledge of all the troubles a human being might suffer in the world.

Then she passed Sarouk, the sad-looking Middle Eastern doorman who was more of a security guard than an actual doorman—even if you were struggling with packages or bags of groceries, he wouldn’t leave his desk, but he would smile kindly, as if he, too, understood the difficulties of being middle class in New York, which meant carrying your own bags. “Hello, Sarouk,” she said as she went out onto the street.

The building they lived in, 15 Fifth Avenue, was a yellowish, crumbly old structure that had once been the Washington Square Hotel. You could still see traces of grandeur in the ornate gilded frescoes on the ceiling in the lobby, and in the grand marble entrance on Fifth Avenue with its gold scalloped awning. But no one ever used that entrance, as if it were fruitless to pretend that the building was 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 100

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still elegant. The walls in the hallways were stuccoed a sickly shade of green, and hundreds and hundreds of people lived in the building, mostly in tiny one- or two-roomed warrens with kitchens built into the ends of their living rooms. But Patty loved the building anyway. She loved the funny old ladies who had been living there forever, who still paid rent (probably about $400 a month for a one-bedroom apartment), and flaunted themselves in a variety of interesting getups. One had neon-purple-painted toenails and always carried a funny little dog that looked like a stuffed lion whose fur has been rubbed away by too much affection; another wore tank tops and hip-hugger pants and high heels with impunity, as if daring anyone to comment on the hanks of flesh that hung boldly from the top of her back and her upper arms.

The building was very bohemian, its denizens a mix of rich young show-business people like herself and Digger, who lived in the big gothic penthouse apartments at the top of the building, and hardworking middle-class types, who lived in the studios and one-bedrooms. They were either young people with a bit of glamour who seemed to be on their way up, or middle-aged people in their forties and fifties and sixties (Patty imagined that they were mostly single), who had accepted the fact that this was it, they weren’t going to make it big after all and the next significant thing that would happen to them was probably cancer. Some of them seemed beaten down by life, by the endless routines of meaningless jobs, and their clothes were always black and slightly misshapen and dirty, as if they’d been in mourning for a long time. But others seemed to have some bigger purpose in life, like the fifty-year-old woman who worked for the Animal Rescue Fund, who was brisk and cheery and determinedly friendly. Her apartment was across from the elevator, and whenever it opened on her floor, Patty would hear lively conversation coming from behind her door. And somehow, this always reminded her that there was good in life . . .

She was lucky and she knew it, she thought, as she stepped out into the sunshine. She would probably never have to worry about what would happen to her when she got old, but that was so far in the future it felt like it would never happen.

There were two young women standing near the entrance in what appeared to be a state of confusion, but Patty didn’t think anything about it—there was a bus stop in front of the building and a PATH station for the train to New Jersey nearby, so there were always people around who looked like they didn’t know where they were going. She began walking up Fifth Avenue and turned down Ninth Street, thinking about her life. Ever since she’d stopped working, she’d been having disturbing thoughts about the kind of woman she really was.

Recently, she’d been examining the fact that she didn’t have to work because Digger was rich. The reality was beautiful, but she couldn’t make peace with the 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:23 PM Page 101

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idea of it. Of course, she could have avoided this mental perplexity by keeping her job, but then she would have had to reckon with a different dilemma, because she’d become soured on her work. For at least a year before she’d quit, she hadn’t been able to prevent herself from seeing the truth: That producing documentaries about rock stars for VH1 was all about an inflated sense of self-importance on the part of everyone involved, including herself. It was possible to continue only by applying mental blinders that forced her to focus on the endless minutiae required to get the job done, and then she had to believe that getting the job done was of national importance. The system disgusted her and so she had finished with it, but that didn’t, she knew, make her an admirable person, just a privileged one. After all, almost everyone had to work their whole lives under the same conditions, hating their jobs but not having a choice about whether to have them or not. And so a part of her felt like a fraud for quitting.

And now, by not working and letting Digger support her, another part wondered if, morally, she was a whore.

Ever since she was a little girl, she’d instinctually been repulsed by the idea of the “traditional marriage.” She wondered why the rest of the world was not disgusted by a woman’s obviously cynical exchange of sex, housework, and child-raising for a roof over her head and food on her table. The fact was, the only way you could find true love was if you didn’t need financial support from a man. Otherwise, you made compromises and concessions; you had sex with a man you didn’t genuinely find attractive. You could convince yourself that it was okay, but really, Patty thought, it was all nothing more than an acceptable form of prostitution.

And now, here she was, having become exactly what she’d always despised.

Sixth Avenue was a teeming mass of humanity. A group of pimply boys slouched down the sidewalk, their baggy jeans hanging below the cracks in their asses. Old ladies wheeled shopping carts; a young woman marched by, shouting into her cell phone, “I’m glad you finally had the guts to tell me. This has been affecting our friendship for three years . . . !” In front of Balducci’s, the gourmet food shop for the well-heeled where she and Digger joked that everything in the store was $6, including eggs, a young homeless man sat wrapped in a blanket, looking pathetic and clutching a beagle in his arms. The man couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and a sign next to him explained that he was trying to collect $40

for a bus ride to Pennsylvania, but so far, in the past year that Patty and Digger had lived on the block, he seemed to have no intention of going anywhere.

On this particular morning, he was talking to a young woman who was folding up a blanket. “I’ve been on the street since 1997,” Patty overheard him saying proudly. “The homeless are coming back. The mayor’s going to be out soon, and then we’ll take back the streets.”

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Patty wondered how he managed to stay on the streets at all, since it was the mayor’s policy to collect up all the homeless people every night and stick them in shelters; some people even said they were bused out of the city. She took $20 out of her wallet and handed it to him, which was something she did nearly every week, out of guilt. She knew he probably didn’t deserve it, but she had so much money and he obviously had so little, what difference did it make?

He looked up. “Ah, my guardian angel,” he said. “How are you today?”

“I’m good,” Patty said. “I’m going to get a puppy.” The light changed. As she crossed the street, Patty thought that she was able to tolerate herself only because of love. Not the love that she had for herself, which didn’t seem to be much these days, but the love that she had for Digger. Between them, they had the kind of rare, miraculous feeling that people call “true love”—

that pure form of affection that makes it possible to actually believe those words in the marriage vow, “For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” True love, Patty thought, was the opposite of feeling like you had an empty place inside you; instead, you felt full, as if you’d eaten the most perfectly satisfying meal in the world . . .

On the other side of Sixth Avenue, two girls, heavy-set and dark-browed, dressed in black with thick-soled shoes (they were probably college students at NYU, Patty thought), stood in front of a table waving coat hangers. “Kill the Republicans now,” one shouted at passersby. “A Republican vote is a vote for the Middle Ages.”

“Down with Bush,” the other one shouted.

“Hey,” said the first girl, as Patty tried to walk by. “Are you Republican or Democrat?”

“What do you think?” Patty asked.

“The Republicans want to take away your right to an abortion.”

“I don’t want an abortion.”

“Are you for women or against women?” the girl asked suspiciously.

“For . . . ,” Patty said awkwardly.

The girl shoved a clipboard under Patty’s nose. “Then register to vote Democratic.”