House Rules

by Ruby Lang

  He probably also sensed that she had almost called him many times. She really had to leave now before she said too much.

  This time, when she went to say goodbye, she kissed him on the cheek, the way an acquaintance would. “You take care of yourself,” she said, before giving him one quick last squeeze.

  She dashed out before he could answer, and once she was seated on the train, she closed her eyes.

  Well, against all odds, she’d run into her ex in her first month in town. It likely wouldn’t happen again.

  Not unless she wished for it.

  Chapter Two

  “Does she look the same?” Maxine asked.

  Simon was on the phone with his sister, who lived in Toronto. He was supposed to be finding out what gifts her kids wanted for the holidays. Maxine had four children all under the age of fifteen who she shuttled to school and tae kwon do and piano and skating lessons, but she had only one ex-sister-in-law who she never got to gossip about, so of course she wanted to hear everything about Simon’s accidental encounter with Lana.

  Simon was not quite as eager to recap events, although he couldn’t quite say why. “Yes. I mean, no. Of course, she’s going to seem a little different.”

  She wore her hair in a braid now instead of loose, but the tip curled up defiantly. She was thinner. Her skin probably wasn’t as firm as it once was. Around those golden-brown eyes he’d loved, he noticed little wrinkles, but those made her look softer, where before sometimes her face seemed stretched tight with worry. He liked how she appeared now, more still, more serene, even as he’d glimpsed her reflection in the cafe window, he’d felt slightly startled by her appearance—no, by her presence.

  There you are, finally.

  He hadn’t wanted to look away, dammit.

  Maxine was saying, “Men never notice anything. I want details.”

  “There wasn’t much to it. We updated each other about our lives, and she had to go to work. I got her number. In a city of nine million people, we’re probably not going to run into each other again, especially now that she’s doing something so different.”

  “So you’re not going to talk to her after this?”

  Max sounded disappointed.

  “You didn’t even like her.”

  “I liked her fine. I didn’t like that she left and cut off all contact in order to find herself like some Eat, Pray, Love cliché, and that you clearly never got over it.”

  “I’m—it’s been years. Of course I’m over it. I’ve dated. I’ve had long-term relationships—”

  “Two.”

  “I’ve got a very full life. It’s just strange encountering someone, anyone, after so many years. You’d be confused, too.”

  “I had dinner with my ex-boyfriend when he was in town and I didn’t feel flustered at any point.”

  “Were Allen and the kids there?”

  “Of course they were there.”

  She said it as if she’d proved a point.

  Simon shook his head. Maxine dragged them everywhere. They were a complete set. Simon’s once-foul-mouthed, glamorous, rocker of an older sister was now a person whose life was tethered completely to her kids and husband.

  People changed over the years. Simon didn’t understand it.

  “Well, I’m at least glad to hear you’re moving,” Maxine said.

  “Who said I’m moving?”

  “You were looking at apartments. And your place is crumbling, and tiny. You could afford more.”

  “I’d think you’d want me to hang on to the lease to pass the old family homestead to Noah.”

  Noah was Maxine’s oldest.

  Maxine snorted. “What gave you that idea? I tell you how crappy your apartment is all the time!”

  “But it’s rent-controlled, and it’s in a great location.”

  “At the rate things are going I doubt Noah’s going to want to move from Canada to the United States even if it is New York City. Get rid of the place, Simon. The windows are drafty. There aren’t any closets. Who knows what color the tile used to be or the bathtub—”

  “Hey, I clean.”

  “There’s so little light that I’m surprised your eyes haven’t migrated to the top of your head like those fish who live at the bottom of the ocean. It’s you against the years, Simon. You can scrub and declutter and patch up every damn day, but let’s face it, grime is the only thing holding those old walls up. I know you hate change, but sometimes I can’t understand how you’re still there. Part of me can’t believe that you and Lana used to both live in that tiny, cramped space together. With a piano. Sometimes, I don’t blame her for leaving.”

  Oh, that hurt. He didn’t know what to say.

  “What?” she said into his silence. “I thought you said you were over it.”

  He breathed in and out. “New York is expensive. The place I saw with Lana yesterday was almost triple the rent of this one without much more space. And it wasn’t that near the subway.”

  “You can afford it. You need a change.”

  “It’s an adjustment that I don’t know I want to make right now. Plus it’s almost winter. A terrible time to move.”

  As if on cue, his neighbor’s workers started drilling again.

  Maxine was saying something else, but he couldn’t hear. Unwilling to let her know what was happening, he covered his head and fled to his bathroom, shut the door, and folded himself down so that he could sit on the lip of his bathtub.

  The construction noise continued, and Maxine was saying something about the kids that didn’t require his full attention. He bent down and scratched at the tile with his fingernail. His sister was right. No matter how hard he scrubbed the tiles (and truth was, he didn’t scrub them that hard anymore) they were discolored and needed replacing. He was forty-four years old. He’d lived in this five hundred square foot apartment for more years than he cared to think. He’d kept the same job, more or less, lived in the same neighborhood. Sure, he’d traveled and had relationships and to most eyes probably had a fine life. But he also never invited friends over anymore. The old wooden floors sometimes gave him splinters, and he couldn’t open his kitchen window unless he tapped the frame with a mallet. Management dragged its feet because the rest of the building had gone co-op years ago, and they wanted him out so that they could finally sell the last of these rent-stabilized apartments to someone like his renovating neighbor.

  It made sense to move. It was why he’d been looking at new places to live. But, of course, scoping out rentals also became incorporated into his routine, until looking for apartments and not moving was part of what he did and how he was.

  “So you’ll remember all that and think about what I said?” Maxine asked as the drilling stopped, and a steady thumping began.

  “Sure.”

  Maxine sighed and said goodbye. She could always tell when he wasn’t listening.

  * * *

  “A bunch of us are going to O’Dells. Wanna come?”

  Almost all of Lana’s coworkers were in their twenties, cynical, beautiful, with bulging biceps and intricate tattoos. Much smarter and surer of themselves than she’d been at their age, that was for sure. They could probably drink her under the table, not that she planned on testing the theory.

  Lana was slowly cleaning up her station at Lore, the Pan-Asian restaurant in Chelsea where she cooked. She’d been on her feet for hours. Her legs were sore. Her arms were tired. She didn’t want to socialize, or end up much later in someone’s apartment smoking weed, as these nights generally went. She wanted to go home—not that she had one right now—and put on her wrist braces and sleep forever. She would settle for her cousin Julia’s couch and six hours of tossing and turning.

  Talia came up beside Lana and eyed her slow progress, but said nothing.

  “I’m probably going to take too long,” Lana muttered. �
�Have fun without me.”

  “Not trying to push you, but it would be better if you came. All that bonding shit so that we can pretend like we don’t want to go at each other’s throats with knives half the time. You know how it is. You have to be seen talking and drinking with everyone.”

  Lana sighed. “I’ve been seen all night.”

  Like many of the large, showy restaurants in this far western section of Manhattan, a good portion of the kitchen was on display. Patrons could watch her toil. Of course, the customers were probably more focused on the flashy sushi chefs at the front counter, but her work making hand-pulled noodles was showier than most. Flinging and twirling dough in the air, stretching, and doubling, and pulling at it until it became 2, 4, 16, 32—sometimes hundreds of distinct filaments.

  She liked the shaping and making the dough itself. She liked how different it was every day, testing the flour with her fingers, measuring it against the humidity in the air, against the strength she brought to it. She was always learning, though, and it made her self-conscious sometimes. The title “noodle master” felt like a bit of a misnomer. She’d started later in life and was probably still technically an apprentice, or whatever Western equivalent people used. There were many other true masters in the city, but at this circus of a restaurant it probably didn’t matter. The patrons got their show and their hand-pulled noodles, cooked fresh as they scrutinized her. The other staff were all right to her, probably because they didn’t see her as competition, partly because she had weird specialized skills, and partly because she seemed willing to teach them when she had time. Talia, especially, seemed interested in learning.

  “I can’t compete in drinking games. I’m old and tired. My arms would fall off if I lifted a glass,” Lana tried joking. Except it was true.

  Talia shrugged and moved off. Lana had probably offended her by not taking the young woman up on her offer—again. It was hard to know the right way of taking care of herself: should she get the sleep she needed, or should she do the work of making nice with her colleagues?

  It was tiring. And when she was tired, she started to see flaws in everything. Especially herself.

  As Lana finally headed for the subway, she wondered once again if it had been a mistake to return to New York. But the job seemed suited to her, and working for a well-known Manhattan restaurant would certainly burnish her resume. Plus, it offered health insurance, which was rare enough that even if the pay weren’t that great, she would have jumped at it.

  On the other hand, there was Simon.

  Cousin Julia’s place was a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. After a longer-than-planned rest on the couch, Lana downed the sludgy smoothie she’d left in the fridge and began her nightly routine. It was funny. When they were younger, Simon had been the one dedicated to schedules, and at first she’d tried to shake him up. Maybe she’d even been a little angry about it. She stopped practicing, and her playing became sloppy. She didn’t exercise. When it was time for him to work or study or practice, she’d sometimes distracted him with sex. It was hard to think about him, to see him, without a bloom of discomfort over what a mess she’d once been.

  As she washed her face and rubbed in her skin serums and moisturizers, as she carefully put salve on the nicks in her hands, and smeared lotion over her skin, she thought about everything she’d done wrong, everything she’d seen on his face earlier today. Despite asking for her number, he wanted to keep her at a distance. She knew him too well for him to mask his unease at seeing her. And of course, he knew her too well, too, not to catch sight of the regret for hurting him that she’d felt.

  It wasn’t guilt exactly, but it was something like it. It had been the right thing for her to leave, but doing it left so much pain and confusion. She’d loved him better and more deeply than any other person in this world. Probably still loved him more than anyone, for all that she didn’t really know him anymore.

  She fell asleep, as she had too often over the years, thinking about him. At 6:30 in the morning, her cousin Julia woke her up, sounding bubblier than anyone had a right to be at that ungodly hour. “I found you an apartment!” her much younger relative squealed.

  Lana rubbed her eyes.

  “A friend is moving to New Zealand. Isn’t it amazing? And he wants a long-term subletter for his two-bedroom in Harlem. It’s near the 2-3 and the C. You could just zip down to work and zip up again. It’s perfect.”

  It was taking Lana a long time to process what her cousin was saying.

  “Plus, he hasn’t put it on the market yet, so you’d save on the renter’s fee to a broker,” Julia babbled.

  She swung her shiny hair and started to make coffee.

  Lana sat up and tried to get her brain to function. “A two-bedroom. It’s probably more than I can afford.”

  Not that Lana could remember her budget numbers right now. Or what a number was.

  “You could get a roommate,” Julia said.

  “I’m forty-two years old. I don’t want a roommate.”

  “You’re forty-two years old, and you’re crashing on my IKEA KIVIK couch.”

  Tou-fucking-ché.

  “I’m going to tell your mom you were mean to me while I stayed with you,” Lana muttered.

  “At least wait until you’ve seen the apartment,” Julia said. “It may turn out I’ve been nicer to you than I’ve been to anyone in my entire life.”

  Chapter Three

  “Simon, it’s Lana.”

  He knew it was Lana. Of course it was Lana. He’d saved her name to his phone even though he had been pretty sure he wouldn’t hear from her for another seventeen years. Usually he let calls go to message, but he answered this one. He’d been in his apartment trying to work on his book and idly considering going online to find a date to distract him from thinking about the very person who was now speaking to him and whose call he’d scrambled to answer with such alacrity that he’d sent three pens skittering across his desk in his haste to pick up the phone.

  “I know this is going to sound kind of weird,” Lana was saying, “but I’m looking at an apartment in Central Harlem right now. It’s sort of a railroad-style with the living room and kitchen in the middle and two bedrooms on opposite ends of the house. And I was wondering if you’d like to come see it.”

  Simon blinked. He hadn’t been sure why she’d begun telling him any of this, and how her last sentence would conclude, but he never could have predicted that particular ending. And now she was waiting for him to answer.

  “I don’t quite understand. Are you asking me to see it because you think I should move into it?”

  Simon pressed the phone more firmly into his ear as he waited for her to answer. There was something about the way she was hesitating. “Yes. I mean me, too. It’s really nice.”

  He heard other voices in the background, and then she must have moved away.

  “It’s a two-bedroom,” she said again. “And it’s split so we could have privacy.”

  “Wait, who is this we? Lana, are you sure you’re okay? Did you call the right number?”

  A huff. “Yes. And I’m talking about me and you. You’re not going to make this easy are you?”

  “Maybe I’d like to, maybe I wouldn’t. But I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Simon Mizrahi, I’m asking if you’d consider being my roommate.”

  Maybe he was the one who wasn’t feeling all right.

  “It’s really, really nice, Simon. It’s on the top floor of a brownstone, and it’s bright even on this cold November day. It has a beautiful kitchen with a big stove, and exposed brick in the hallway, and crown molding. We wouldn’t have to pay a broker’s fee because the owner is my cousin’s friend, and he hasn’t even put it on the market yet. And the rent is really reasonable. He wants someone trustworthy, that’s all.”

  “If it’s so reasonable, why don’t you take it
on yourself?”

  “I know you’re looking to move, and it’s a little bigger than I need, and more than I was hoping to have to pay. I could probably swing it, but I wouldn’t have money for anything else.”

  “So you can’t really afford it.”

  “Whatever, Simon. It’s too good to pass up. You could have the larger room facing the front, if you want, and it would be almost the size of your entire apartment right now. And... I thought we could make a go of it because I know you. That’s the main thing. I’m sure you’d take care of it and be considerate. You’re exactly the kind of person this guy is looking for.”

  But was Lana the kind this landlord would like? No, that was uncharitable. She hadn’t been irresponsible in the last year they’d been together so much as she’d been trying desperately not to have those particular responsibilities anymore. One of those responsibilities being, presumably, him.

  Why was he even a little tempted to say yes to her?

  He closed his eyes. “You know why this is a bad idea—no, it’s not just one bad idea. It’s several bad ideas rolled into one large column of highly suspect ideas supporting a sign that reads, BAD IDEA.”

  “I’ve talked to other people already, Simon. If I had better choices I wouldn’t have asked. But still, what is so awful about this? What could be worse than what you’ve got now, Simon?”

  “Well, first of all, how do you know that we’d get along after all these years? How do you know I haven’t turned into some psychopath who stores people in my freezer?”

  “Please. If it’s the freezer I remember, it barely has room to keep a pint of ice cream.”

  He glanced at the ancient appliance then looked away. “I’m old and set in my ways.”

  “We’d have different hours. You could do all those things you used to love in the mornings. Go running. Eat toast at your desk, and get crumbs stuck to your arm. Sit at the piano for a couple of hours arranging parts. Heat and reheat that one huge cup of coffee—”