But here I was, a grown woman, who understood the value of time and presentation. I’d arrived early because I didn’t know the neighborhood all that well. Fort Point. An old manufacturing district along a channel that led to the harbor, transformed in recent years. David and I once had dinner at a nearby restaurant where we had to reserve a table weeks in advance. The area had been an enclave of industrial buildings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, David said then. And though I’d already known that much, I hadn’t known the architectural terms he’d used—classical revival, Romanesque. Masonry and timber construction. I hadn’t known that iron, sugar, and wool had once come through the wharves. That you could, if you wanted, trace whole histories of wealth and exploitation, through these streets. And it struck me now, walking slowly on this cloudless day, calming my pre-interview nerves, that the few other associations I had with this part of town concerned work.
The first was a memory from around the time my father and I dropped the holiday liquor off with the older couple in the pink room. It’s winter and it must be school vacation because I’m at a childcare program while my parents work. I’ve spent a lot of my life here, it’s a familiar place, a repurposed Victorian house in our town outside Boston, and I know all the teachers. Suzanne, with her long dark hair, her high-waist jeans and ski sweaters, is my favorite. They’ve planned a special field trip for us, into the city, to the Children’s Museum right around here in Fort Point, but that’s not what I remember. Before we go to the museum, we go to Suzanne’s apartment, which is only a few blocks away. She sits us all down in a circle and we eat our packed lunches in a cavernous room on wide, scuffed-up floorboards painted black. The walls are brick and a huge, arched window opens onto gray sky. There’s an unmade bed in the corner illuminated by a lamp, a few empty wooden frames leaning against a wall, and a long curtain that separates this area from a room she calls her studio. At the time, the details don’t conform into an interpretation—that the large wooden pieces are stretcher bars for canvas, that Suzanne is an artist who lives in a loft and takes care of kids to pay her rent. I only know that she lives in a kind of space I’ve never seen before. That my parents don’t live in a place like this and I somehow know they never will. They’re not like Suzanne. And I want to be like her, not them.
The second memory was newer but even so, it was already a long time ago. I’ve finished my sophomore year of college, I’m home for a few months, and in addition to a summer job, I have an unpaid internship two days a week at a foundation for filmmakers. They award grants and loan equipment out but they have no money—this isn’t Hollywood or New York. I can attend screenings and other events for free, though, and I’m getting experience, as they say. In an office of three rooms with worn industrial carpeting and a configuration of whatever furniture was left by former tenants, I mostly answer calls on a relatively new phone system, the most up-to-date device in the room. I’m nervous when I first learn how to hold, transfer, and otherwise direct calls because I don’t want to get it wrong and because Nick is standing over me, showing me which buttons to press. I’m jumpy around him, but something sinuous and slow is also taking place. Nick does many things—works here, teaches at the art college, mostly wears black, makes me nervous. He’s not yet thirty years old. One day he shows up in a white T-shirt because it’s too hot out for black. There’s a task that needs doing, he tells me. It’s taking a sack of mail, about three feet high, to the post office by South Station. I’m not sure why it has to go to that specific post office, but it does, and before 2:30 p.m. It’s a trip on the T far enough away to require a transfer between lines. We can’t pay for cab fare, he says, but we’ll do it together. It’ll be fun. He doesn’t have to go with me, so he must want to go with me, I think. And I spend most of the morning thinking this, thinking about him while filing and doing mailing-list data entry. He’s late getting back from lunch, though, and this is before everyone has cell phones. There’s no way to reach him and this mail has to go out, so I do it myself, struggling to find a good way to hold the heavy, unwieldy sack. There’s no good way. People in the street and on the train give me sorry looks but nobody moves to help. I want to drag the bag but I’m too conscientious to do that. The postal worker I finally reach at the bulk mail area is like a long-lost relative, and in the few seconds where he relieves me of my burden, it’s a homecoming.
“Godspeed,” he says to the sack, heaving it into a cart.
Once it’s out of my hands, I’ve never been so light, so weightless, I might float away on the breeze by the water, the channel, which cools me off and keeps me from immediately feeling disgusting. The disgust comes, though, increasingly, on the subway platform, and when I climb the stairs back to the office, I’m damp with sweat but it’s not in any way sexy. It’s made my hair frizz in a way I don’t like and I smell. Nick looks at me like I’ve fallen off a treadmill, like it’s painful to watch but hard not to laugh.
“Oh, fuck. I’m sorry,” he says. “I got caught up and totally forgot.” He doesn’t say with what. “I’m really sorry.”
“I feel gross,” I say. “It’s so fucking hot out.” I should be filled with hate and anger toward him but it’s not there. Anything that sharp and solid has melted from me. Only abjection remains.
He gets me water from the tap in one of the random mugs by the mini-fridge and I gulp it down. And then he does something that almost makes me cry. He asks if I want an extra T-shirt of his he’s left at his desk.
In the bathroom, where the stall is thickly painted black, the fluorescent light is falling down, and duct tape holds white tiles to the wall, I wash myself at the sink and I don’t put my bra back on before putting on his shirt. It’s cool against my skin, it’s clean but it has his scent and I want to live in it. I see in the mirror that wearing his shirt somehow makes my hair look better, mussed up. I could make this my style, make it work for me.
He’s back by his desk in the other room when I come out and I’m grateful there’s no admiring glance, no patting himself on the back for doing me this favor. I start on some clerical work, moving my tongue to my upper lip, tasting salt from sweat that had dried there and not been washed off. I wait for the phones to ring and I don’t see him again until the end of the day. When his girlfriend, I assume, shows up to meet him. Dark sunglasses pushed up into her sooty hair, smudgy eyeliner, a black dress that is essentially a very long tank top. Maybe she’s not his girlfriend—not to the extent that she knows I’m wearing his shirt. Or maybe she’s just pretending not to know or care. But Nick pauses, pulls back a little, when he enters the room and looks at me in his shirt, not with self-satisfaction or pity but something else. Some new interest that hasn’t fully formed into desire. While this is happening, she is talking, from somewhere in the muffled distance, about it being too sticky to sit outside and drink and so they should go to the air-conditioned repertory theater with the Fassbinder retrospective.
“Have a good weekend, Emily.” He looks back, twice. Figuring something out.
Nothing ever happened between us, I would say whenever the topic of old crushes came up in conversation with friends, and with David once. But a whole world opened up in a look. I used to sleep in his T-shirt. I have no idea where it is now but I kept it for years.
A discreet sign marked the entrance to the building where Samira worked, a three-story brick warehouse with tall windows, converted to retain the dust-beam shadowiness of the original. The ground floor was a lofty, empty space—mostly an open stairwell of iron and concrete whose proportions seemed designed to slightly, pleasantly displace you. To make you feel you were in transition, on your way to someplace you wanted to be.
I switched my flats for the heels and headed up two flights to the top. I pressed a button, heard a click, and pushed a metal door into what looked more like an inviting living room than an office. There were large plants. Polished wood. A pair of lamps with malachite bases. An atmosphere of warm luxuriousness that I understood to be a reflecti
on or extension of Samira.
Before I was introduced to her, I met with Jenna, tiny as an actress, coiled into a black sweatshirt in the cold air-conditioning. Pretty, symmetrical face, light eyes that landed on you, flitted away, came back. I towered over her, but like an elk that would saunter off if it lost interest. Astonishingly, she did her best to welcome and hold me there. Advantage: me. She struck me as competent and resourceful, but the roomy sweatshirt made her seem not intimidatingly so. She didn’t tell me exactly what her role was but she seemed to have most of the responsibilities of an assistant as well as some of the authority of a second-in-command and the relied-upon judgment of a gatekeeper. I passed, evidently, and she let me through to see Samira, who told me to call her Sam when she came by to take me to a different corner of the space, set off by glass partitions.
Sam was around my size, dressed in vintage Levi’s, a gray T-shirt, a navy blazer. She didn’t look me up and down, not obviously, but she seemed to take me in, to scan me with an extrasensory power. I wondered if she understood that I’d put just enough effort in to look effortless today, and if so, would this recognition interest her? Would she sense her own kind?
“Hi,” she said then, as we sat, after we’d already said hello, as if this were our real language and now we could freely speak it. There was a warmth, a luxuriousness to her tone, and as we freely spoke our language, it wasn’t simply old professional habits kicking in—the ability to talk to people. It was a refreshment, a reawakening—interwoven with the discussion of my work history, establishing that what she needed was something I could offer, was the kind of expressive, giving conversation that returns to you some part of yourself. When it took a personal turn, it only felt natural.
“I really didn’t know what to make of this city for a long time,” she said, after detailing the path that had brought her here. “And I didn’t know what to make of myself in it.”
“When we moved here I thought I had forgotten how to think,” I said.
“Yes! I would go to these faculty parties with Olivier, my husband—parties is too generous a word—but I would go and stand there, glass of wine in hand, early evening in a richly paneled room, leaded windows, ivy just outside, the kind of environment I might have once styled for a shoot, and the women would ignore me and the men would compliment me but always on the wrong thing, in the wrong way. Or I’d listen to them, the women and the men, tell me all about their work and never once ask me about what I did or what I thought. It was this total excess of self-regard combined with—”
“A complete lack of curiosity?”
She nodded in exaggerated affirmation.
“Like they knew only what they knew and that was all there was to know?” I added.
“And they don’t know how to read your signals and you start to forget that anyone does.”
My eyes were drawn to the shelves of art and fashion books along the wall. Volume upon volume of signals.
“It really fucks you up!” She laughed. “I think it’s fair to say I started this whole project out of spite. But it’s grown, of course. I’ve grown.” Her smile-frown scorned the whole enterprise of self-betterment, of personal growth, but then undercut that with a hint of earnestness. “I mean, I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
“But those are the best kind of ideas,” I said.
It was a conversation that reminds you that you can still carry on a conversation, that under the right circumstances it can come back to you just like that, and that just maybe, occasionally, the purpose of life is enjoyment. I want to describe the experience with Samira like colored dye injected into water, the moment when it’s swirling, creating trails.
It stunned me a bit, after. We’ll be in touch soon, she’d said, clasping my hand, transferring some promise for the future. On the stairs, on my way out, I kept returning to that moment. And on the sidewalk, swapping out my shoes, and crossing the street that led out to Fort Point Channel to walk along the waterway, I thought: I want to do this. With Samira. What was this feeling? The desire to keep walking, to stay in this world I had entered.
Like a well-heeled tourist, I wandered for a while, stopping in a sleek, airy café, to order an Arnold Palmer. I didn’t have a city anymore, but maybe I could make this one mine again.
I thought about calling David, getting on the T, going by his office, but I didn’t. I considered texting Stella, because we were in each other’s contacts now, but I didn’t do that either. I just finished my drink and continued to walk, past the landmarked architecture, looking up at arched windows and wondering which one Suzanne the artist lived behind in another life. Eventually, I made it back to the garage, to the car. I hardly remembered driving home.
THE DINNER PARTY
I wanted the evening to be celebratory. There was no occasion to mark, no news to cheer, but I had this feeling, this compressed fizziness, a sense of being on a cusp. I tried to keep it to myself but it leaked out here and there. I caught myself whistling themes from old sitcoms no longer in syndication. Doing little dances around David. Sliding my feet, making geometric motions with my arms. A celebration of cusps, then. It was Saturday, four days after my interview with Samira, who’d responded quickly and warmly to the thank-you email I’d sent. More soon, she’d written.
Late afternoon light. Stella and David were out on the back porch, setting the table. I was in the kitchen, music playing while I made a salad, when I heard Liz and Felix drive over the gravel outside. Old friends. We’d known each other for so long I sometimes had to stop and think of the origins—that I knew Liz from our very first year of college, then she met Felix, then I met David. We all lived in New York for a time, then we moved, then they moved, and now here we were in proximity to each other again.
I headed out front. So good to see you! we all seemed to say at once, and it was really true. In the months since we’d lived at Alder, we’d been to their house and met them out once or twice, but this was the first time we’d had them over. We weren’t the closest friends anymore, we didn’t confide in each other that much. But I knew I could confide, in Liz especially, and it was this level of trust, I thought, mingled with a sense of possibility, that made being around them comfortable without ever being boring.
“Emily, this place!”
Liz stretched her arms overhead and out as far as they would go. She had a strong body, lean but graceful, that motherhood hadn’t taken. Liz was a choreographer. Though she hadn’t done so much choreography lately, which I gathered was something of a sore spot, and now I remembered how a mutual friend had once posted about successfully registering her children for various intricately timed summer activities, and had used the word choreography to describe the accomplishment. Liz took a screenshot and texted me: “That is not fucking choreography!! That’s called scheduling. Get the fuck over yourself.” I liked how fiercely Liz valued her work. That, and how exquisitely petty she could be.
Liz and Felix had two children, a four- and a six-year-old, whom they’d left with a sitter. We’d promised to have their whole family out here but Liz insisted on limiting it to the adults this evening. She was giddy and liberated to be away from her girls, and it wasn’t an act, but I think she also played it up a little, for what she probably thought was my sake. I couldn’t blame her. It was a situation where you couldn’t quite put a foot right. She wanted children and she had them. I wanted a child and I didn’t. It might balance out at some point. Maybe David and I would, somehow, someday, have a child. There were still avenues, other than those we’d already been down, that David and I had discussed but those discussions were immersed in exhaustion and trepidation and, ultimately, postponement: we could . . . at some point . . . maybe. Perhaps the balancing would come when we were old, older, when Liz was out of the thick of it, when her children had left home. But where would any of us be by then?
They brought wine and beer and a berry pie or tart from a bakery I was supposed to have heard of. I directed them through the kitchen and ou
t back to where David and Stella were. The introductions were warm and friendly but I caught Liz looking Stella up and down. It was a subtle assessment, but comprehensive. Liz had gotten what she needed, it seemed, and then—excitedly, without a moment to lose!—she asked for a tour of the house, while Felix expressed no such interest. And so it was the two of us in the kitchen, Liz opening a bottle of prosecco, pouring two glasses and handing one to me, and I sensed that Liz had a plan. She was, at the very least, onto something, after something, and even though I was technically giving her the tour and she was following me, she was in the lead.
Soon she was in our bedroom, just as Stella had been during the storm and before my interview, except not just as Stella had been. There was no mystery with Liz, there was no heightened sensitivity, no subtle, ongoing negotiation. Liz had always had a kind of innate authority, and therefore a certain presumptuousness that Stella didn’t have. The way she occupied space was different from Stella, who seemed to want to make a home where she could. Stella wanted a nest while Liz simply wanted a perch. Wanted to orient herself, her body, only temporarily. The stakes were lower, it was easier, not as unnerving. It made me happy to watch Liz move about these rooms, my room, even to ham it up, draping her upper body like a jaguar along the top of an upholstered wing chair, louche, champagne flute in hand.
“So . . . Stella came with the place?” she asked.
I laughed, unsure what to say.
“I need someone like that,” Liz said, casting Stella as a live-in assistant, which threw me because Liz was usually correct in her assessments of the world. She wasn’t always kind or complimentary but she was generally right.
“It’s not . . .” I said.
The Summer Demands Page 7