An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  The main thing about the Guardian in those days is that its outward appearance was as shambolic as its inner workings. Under every desk was a mountain of unwashed sports gear piled high on a bank of overloaded power outlets on top of which, inevitably, rested someone’s rank sneaker. Decades’ worth of cutting files and press releases towered on every surface until the inevitable landslide occurred. It was often speculated that a kind of slow-mo Pompeii was taking place so that one day years into the future, archaeologists would dig us all out from a bedrock of twenty-five-year-old book galleys and unused invitations to Internet 1.0 launch parties. After I moved to New York, I visited a friend at the Wall Street Journal and didn’t recognize a newsroom in which someone wasn’t doing magic tricks in the corner, or pretending to answer the phone as if it were the Communist daily—“Hello, Morning Star?”—or standing at his desk in his boxer shorts while changing for racquetball, or playing practical jokes that resulted in the evacuation of the entire building, all of which, in the world of American journalism, would trigger the swift and decisive involvement of HR.

  Six weeks into my job, Ian, my editor, dumped a stack of papers on my desk. “Read these and pick a winner,” he said. Most of the entrants for Student Journalist of the Year were long, terrible disquisitions about what the twenty-year-old in question thought should happen in the Middle East and which, at twenty-three, I personally found very juvenile. One stood out; a girl from Manchester University who’d written about schoolkids trying out for Manchester United. It was well researched, well written and well structured. “This one,” I said. Merope was eighteen months my junior, and twenty years later, she still takes it half in good spirit and half in irritation when I remind her that she owes everything to me.

  The years that followed can be visualized as a north London version of The West Wing, only with no budget for wardrobe and dialogue that revolved exclusively around where to have lunch. We arrived late and left late. We called one another on the way to the office, spent all day talking, had lunch together and talked all the way home. One day, a man with a large head took the seat opposite mine. Oliver was my age and had just graduated from Cambridge, and while he was neater than me and would push back the rising tide from my desk daily, in most other respects we aligned. On the wall above our desks, we affixed what were, we agreed, the two greatest tabloid headlines of all time—An Old Woman Beat Me for Being a Drunk When in Fact I Was Having a SEIZURE and A Careless Moment at a Garden Bonfire and Engelbert Humperdinck’s Son Was Engulfed in Flames—and began a conversation that is still going strong.

  Years later, a British friend who worked at a newspaper with a less cultlike nature and who got married at thirty and had kids like a normal person looked at me quizzically over drinks in New York. “What was wrong with you all?” she said. She didn’t mean this unkindly and I didn’t take it as such. I knew what she meant. She meant why were we all single for so many years? Throughout our twenties, when you’re supposed to be out having the romantic time of your life, figuring out who you like and don’t like, getting all the mistakes out of the way prior to settling down, we were at our desks until late or getting pissed at The Coach and Horses then calling one another on the way home to discuss where pigeons go at night, or what it’s like to work at the top of a crane, or to get “closure” on something someone had said to us that day, or to ask, with complete sincerity, “Hey, did we ever talk about time travel?” or simply to state, on the basis that the more trivial the observation, the greater the testament to the friendship, “We had lunch.”

  Occasionally, someone had sex, but it was rarely a good experience. Merope had a thing with someone in her building to whom we all hilariously referred as her “sex-door neighbor.” Oliver went on some dates with a woman we called, for reasons I forget, “the tea lady.” I became briefly obsessed with a low-grade narcissist, who after a few weeks thankfully threw me over for another victim. Our friend Leila actually lived with someone for a few years, but it didn’t work out, so she went back to seeing a guy she went to college with who’d come over on a Friday night and not leave her flat until Sunday. It was during this era that I got into a bad habit of treating dates like any other kind of unpromising material, so that when a man I’d been out with a few times told me about the death of his father, I dropped my head to one side and, to his apparent gratification and my enduring shame, said, “How did that change you?” I went on three dates with a nice but dull man in advertising, and when my colleagues found out they got his address from the electoral role and told me they’d sent him flowers on my behalf. (They hadn’t.) Everything was grist, nothing was sacred. In this way our twenties played out.

  Even when the sex-door neighbor was shelved and Merope got a serious boyfriend, nothing much changed. On her twenty-sixth birthday, it didn’t occur to Oliver and me for a moment that it might be intrusive to turn up on her doorstep at eight a.m. with coffee and croissants. “HELLO!” we shouted, cramming our heads round the door, while from the stairs her boyfriend gave a wan smile and a wave as Merope barged past him to let us in. We were ambitious and loved our jobs, about which, like most journalists, we had an inflated sense of importance, but looking back, the simple explanation for all this is that we loved one another. When we talked about the long-range future it was to joke that one day we’d all end up in the mythical Old People’s Home for Journalists in Devon and wouldn’t that be lovely. There were never any husbands or wives in these scenarios, although I think we all assumed that at some point we’d have to knuckle down and sort out our personal lives. In the meantime, the image we had in our heads was of us, our friends, our editors, all old together, doing exactly what we were doing then, but with shorter hours and longer deadlines.

  And then something terrible happened, something truly catastrophic. Merope got pregnant. The marriage she, Oliver and I had been in for eight years, in which we referred to one another as our “outboard brain” and took it as read that if one said to another “Don’t tell anyone else” it didn’t apply to the absent third party, was blown apart. Her boyfriend drove her to my house for crisis talks and waited in the car beneath my living room window. Merope and I stood there, like something out of a 1960s kitchen sink drama, my laundry on a drying rack in the middle of the room, fridge empty save for a can of Coke and some mushrooms. Even as my heart broke, I felt very strongly what a good thing this would be for her. A baby! Of course she should have a baby. Come to think of it—and I hadn’t thought about it much before then—everyone should have a baby. Shit, I should have a baby, not then, obviously, but at some point. A surge of panic shot through my system. How, I wondered, would I ever have a baby when I couldn’t stand to see anyone for more than three dates and was tipping away from men toward women?

  “I just thought I’d have you for longer,” I said.

  “Don’t say that,” said Merope. And we both wept.

  This was, of course, a love scene but we weren’t in love like that, although I know people occasionally wondered. And looking back, it is absurd to think that a twenty-nine-year-old woman having a baby with her boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband should have been received by our social group as so shocking. But women like us had our babies at forty, not twenty-nine, and she might have been a teen mother for the scandal it caused.

  Overnight, Merope’s pregnancy exposed the limitations of our lives, which seemed suddenly juvenile and small. I had always assumed that when it came to having babies, I’d make my three phone calls and figure it out, but faced with Merope’s concrete example, that plan—or lack of a plan, as it now appeared—seemed unrealistic. And while, throughout my twenties, I had been confident there was no fate worse than being married with kids and moving to the suburbs, now a fresh nightmare floated to mind: that of being a single forty-year-old woman sitting in the same chair at the Guardian that I had occupied since the age of twenty-three. A person could grow old and bitter and unhappy if she put too much investment in her identity as it per
tained to her news organization, not because it was “only” a job, but because, as Merope’s defection made clear, it wasn’t the only job. Not long after the announcement, she went on a Scandinavian cruise with her boyfriend and kept her phone off the entire time.

  And so I did something rash, partly driven by my ambition to avoid sitting in the same chair for the next ten years, partly because, at the age of thirty, I thought if I didn’t act immediately nothing interesting would ever happen to me again, and partly in a fit of petulant fury that my best friend had upped and got pregnant, with a man, of all things.

  “Is it because I’m pregnant?” said Merope miserably when I told her I was resigning and moving to America. I replied with all the grace and temperance of someone unexpectedly confronted with an unpleasant truth about themselves: “That is fucking unbelievably insulting, it’s not ABOUT you, how DARE you.” And we both cried again.

  It took a few weeks to get the juice up to act, and when I did, it was on the morning I’d had three fillings at the dentist and was as high as a kite on the drugs. Right, I thought, marching back up the Aldgate to the office. Let’s do this thing. When I got in, I sent an e-mail to the editor’s secretary asking for a meeting, and an hour later told him I was resigning my staff job to move to America. I had no plan, nowhere to live and a single friend in New York, but I had a four-year visa, and because I went there every five minutes for work, I figured it was just about doable.

  Alan went through the formal motions of offering me incentives to stay. “Do you want to go to Iraq?” he said mildly, which might seem like an odd offer, but war reporting, the noble end of my profession, is something toward which we are all at some level assumed to aspire. “No, thanks,” I said and sketched out an idea for him I had of freelance life that involved working for three weeks in New York, then going to sit on a beach in Mexico for two, and which, looking back, makes me wonder at the strength of the drugs I’d been given.

  Alan said something generous then, that even as I shook at the thought that I was doing the wrong thing—that I was jacking in a job I would have killed for ten years earlier—made me feel I’d be all right and wouldn’t die obscure, alone and broke, far from home. He said, “I envy you.”

  A few months later, I served my last day, and a week after that, Merope, Oliver and I went on a valedictory trip to Ireland, during which it rained the whole time and we bickered about one another’s map-reading and driving skills. A few days later, the news editor, who had known us both for ten years, clicked her fingers at Merope and said teasingly, “Are you the one who’s pregnant or the one who’s going to America?” Merope related this to me on the phone a week later, by which time I was standing on the thirty-sixth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, looking out toward New Jersey and this terrible mistake I’d made, my new life.

  * * *

  • • •

  I HAD GROWN UP with my mother’s stories of how it was to emigrate from Johannesburg to London; the coldness of that first winter; the unremitting coldness of the English; the disappointments of reality when held up against a dream. None of this had seemed relevant when I moved to the United States. After all, our circumstances were completely different. She had arrived in England at the age of twenty-seven, unemployed with scant savings and with nowhere to live after her week in the hostel ran out. When I moved to New York at thirty-one, it was to a job and an apartment. (The gods of fertility are capricious, heaven knows, but they are nothing compared with the gods of New York real estate, and before moving I had been blessed with a bona fide miracle—a below-market one-bedroom on the Upper West Side.) South Africans in London were regarded as lowly colonials; Brits in New York clung to the last vestiges of a national superiority complex. And while it took my mother three weeks to get to England by ship and seven years to save up the money to go back, I arrived at JFK after the usual seven-hour flight and went home for my first visit a pathetic three weeks later.

  And yet a few weeks in and in spite of all this, I was searingly, savagely lonely.

  I could go into great detail about those early days, the experience of moving somewhere for broadly cinematic reasons and then having to deal with the reality. Suffice it to say that, just as my mother had discovered, in 1960, that living in London was not like a montage of scenes from Waterloo Bridge, A Tale of Two Cities and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, forty years later I learned that life in New York is a little flat without the Carly Simon soundtrack.

  The answer, said my colleague Ed, a British immigrant of several years’ standing, was to “say yes to everything,” as a result of which I went to a lot of roof parties in Bushwick and club nights on the Lower East Side, including one called Ass Wednesday, at which a man in a leather thong shook his booty in my face while I tried to reach around him for bar snacks. I went to events at the British consulate and dark bars in which people read aloud from their unpublished novels. I even made a desultory effort to date in those first few months, trying to summon the same cavalier attitude I’d had in London and laugh it off when a man invited me to his loft, showed me his gun collection and a week later blanked me at a party at the Paris Review. Another, a banker friend of a friend, seemed to be laboring under the delusion that I’d won first prize in a competition to spend two hours auditioning for a part in his future. I went on lots of dates with passive-aggressive vegan women who did yoga and had strong views about bike lanes. But without my friends to discuss it with the following morning, these vignettes stopped being funny and started being depressing.

  A few weeks after I arrived, Merope’s baby was born.

  “She’s fucking cute,” said Merope on the phone from London. She sounded fierce, almost angry, not a tone of voice I’d heard her use before.

  “What was it like, seeing her for the first time?” I said meekly.

  “It was like being punched in the face by love.”

  This sounds gilded, I know, but she really did say it. My heart sank. I thought of my recent slew of disastrous dates and consoled myself with the thought that I was only thirty-one and in America—America!—where it is practically unconstitutional not to get what you want. The fact is, I’d half been hoping Merope would say, nah, it’s rubbish having a baby, you can strike it off your to-do list and get on with the rest of your life.

  Two months after arriving, I moved out of the skyscraper to a regular apartment downtown. A few weeks after that, I went to a Sunday brunch organized by friends of my cousin and met Dan, an editor at an entertainment magazine, who I knew was on my wavelength when he referred to the Freedom Tower as the Infidel Trade Center and on the walk home stopped dead in the street to look up at a branch and observe, “Wow, I’ve never actually seen a pigeon pooping before.” I met Sarah, a writer, at the birthday party of a mutual friend, and after introducing her to Dan, a new gang was born. A few weeks after that, Oliver moved to DC to cover the general election and by the following year was living in Brooklyn.

  Meeting L wasn’t a matter of thunderbolts. It was quieter than that, more surprising; the realization that love can be as simple as having someone see through you without running away. On the phone with her one night not long after we met, I started asking lots of intense questions about her childhood. About her family, and her childhood pet, and the time she got thrown out of French class for repeatedly saying “oui-oui.”

  “But were you just trying to be funny or were you trying to get thrown out?” I said, then asked four further follow-ups. On and on I went until eventually she burst out laughing. “Are you interviewing me?!” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  WRITERS BABY OTHER WRITERS; nonwriters don’t, not because they don’t care but because they don’t understand how feeble we are in the face of even the mildest criticism. A year later, when I plucked up the courage to give L a draft of my book, she read it on the bed in her apartment on the Upper West Side, while I lay beside her curled up like
a shrimp. “There,” she said, pointing over her pregnant belly to a passage about my mother’s late sister, a woman I had found extraordinarily difficult. “And there.” L read the passage again and turned to look at me critically. “Why are you being so cheap with the reader? Why don’t you say what you feel?” I felt like I was standing in the beam of a searchlight.

  I had imagined that finishing the book might clarify things between us. Then I’d thought that L’s pregnancy would surely change things one way or another. I had supported her efforts to get pregnant, but it had been hard and weird, and in the months after she conceived, I was sick with envy, not of the pregnancy itself—the three-year age gap between us had never felt more pronounced—but of the attention she received, and of the women with children whose advice she sought over mine. When the baby arrived, I was sure that that would finally throw some evolutionary switch and we would automatically know what to do. But that didn’t happen, either. I carried on spending three nights a week and all weekend at L’s apartment, and the rest of my time at home or traveling for work. It shamed me sometimes how relieved I felt to walk away from the stress and the crying and go home to my quiet apartment in Brooklyn.

  A male friend once complained to me about feeling pushed out in the delivery room, setting the tone, he said bitterly, for the entire parenting enterprise. I had thought this pitiful at the time. That’s rich, I thought. Typical man, doing less of the child care then complaining about feeling pushed out. But now I felt the same way. Worse, in fact, because I had no designated role. If I felt “pushed out,” pushed out from what, exactly? And yet neither of us wanted to move closer in.