* * *
But dinner Saturday night ended up being at our place in Astoria instead of at Ed’s. His new oven had blown out; despite Ed’s best tinkering, the pilot light failed to engage, and the electrician wouldn’t come until Monday. When Ed arrived at our apartment with grocery bags from all over—his brow slick with sweat—he had an air of tension about him.
Nina and I greeted him at the door and relieved him of his bags. As we unpacked the groceries, he rummaged through the cupboards. “So, Ed, what’re you making again?” Nina asked.
“Boeuf bour— Beef stew,” he said, peering inside a cabinet.
“It’s a little hot for stew, don’t you think?”
He rifled through. “Where’s your thyme?”
Nina and I looked at each other. “We don’t have any,” I said. “We’ve got garlic powder?” She held out plastic spice shakers. “And oregano.”
Ed shook his head. “Don’t you girls ever cook?”
“I cook,” Nina said defensively. “Just not your fancy stuff.” She ate the same three meals every day: granola and yogurt for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and pasta for dinner. Every Sunday night she cooked a batch of bolognese sauce and chopped up her vegetables for the week. When I wasn’t with Ed, I ate cornflakes for breakfast, turkey and mustard for lunch, and rice and kimchi for dinner.
“I swear . . .” he muttered to himself.
He waved away Nina’s and my offers to help. Back at his apartment, our division of labor was simple: Ed cooked, I did the dishes. I heard the sounds of his bustling about in our kitchen—punctuated by the occasional grousing and opening and slamming shut of drawers.
Nina and I sat at our sawhorse table, each of us catching up on some work. Nina had landed her first big assignment: she was representing the sale of a building, a mixed-use property on the Lower East Side. The seller was a guy from Bay Ridge about our age, someone Nina had met at a happy hour a few months back. He’d inherited the building from his late father and was eager to unload it as quickly as possible. The problem was, this guy was completely at a loss about everything from building repairs to finding tenants, and Nina had to pick up the slack in order to ensure a sale—any sale.
“I’m just supposed to line up the buyer. But in the meantime, David’s expecting me to manage the whole property, too,” she said. She showed me some quotes she’d gotten from property-management companies, as well as estimated costs for some minor repairs.
“You could just do all this,” I pointed out. “Then you wouldn’t have to outsource any of the repairs.” Indeed—over the course of the past few months, Nina had been able to fix more and more of the little things plaguing our apartment as well as the other two units, relying far less on calling a plumber or an outside handyman.
I looked over the statements and sketched some calculations on a napkin. “Let’s say you charged him like five percent per unit a month to do the maintenance. You’d still make a decent cut, and you’d be saving him around twenty percent. Plus, it’d make things easier for him, because he’d only have to deal with you.”
Nina looked over my work. “Jane, you’re a genius. I love when you dork out on your numbers.”
I shrugged. “It’s all there. Just pointing out the obvious.”
Ed called from the kitchen, “You ladies have a meat thermometer?”
“No!” we shouted back in unison. The air was filled with the smell of seared meat and sautéed vegetables.
“I’m starving,” Nina said. Then she glanced up at the clock. “It’s almost nine-thirty! What’s taking him so long?”
Beth had once said the same thing about Ed’s elaborate renovation plans. I swear, we would’ve moved in much sooner if Ed hadn’t insisted on everything being “just so.” It took forever for him to pick out the wood and get the finish just right. Yet it was something they had in common; Ed cooked the way Beth spoke—with countless digressions and an unrelenting quest for perfection. It was funny: Ed, despite having grown up doing blue-collar work, moved about the kitchen in an unhurried, languid fashion. Sang once had a worker who moved like Ed. By the end of the day, that worker was fired.
“Ed sometimes goes a little obuh—I mean, overboard,” I said, getting up from the table. “I’ll tell him to hurry up.”
Perhaps it was because of our rather rudimentary kitchen or the fact that I’d rushed Ed and he’d had to abandon a few key steps, but dinner was a disaster. The stew was supposed to simmer for at least two hours; instead it boiled for thirty minutes. It tasted more like a pot of cooked wine than anything else, and the beef was tough and gamy. The bread was a little raw and yeasty. Ed’s meals did not seem to translate outside his own kitchen.
“This shouldn’t be your first introduction to boeuf bourguignon,” Ed said as we took our seats around our table—warped and scratched and streaked with paint primer.
“Hey, better late than never,” Nina said graciously as she poured wine into juice glasses. But she snuck another look at the clock; it was after ten.
“Well, in all fairness, I didn’t have a lot to work with.” Ed held up his glass. “Girls: seriously?”
“What? So we don’t own wineglasses,” Nina said, less graciously this time. “At least our stove was working.” She slapped her hands together. “Anyway, let’s get this show on the road.”
* * *
To make up for lost time, we ended up taking a cab into the city. Which turned out to be a horrible idea, as westbound traffic on the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge was at a standstill; it was, after all, Saturday night, and all of us B&T people were jamming our way into Manhattan.
“Where’s this party again?” Ed asked.
“Twenty-eighth and Second.”
He rolled his eyes, just like his daughter. I pinched his arm—Nina was the one who’d found Mikhail that apartment.
After we crossed the bridge, we hit more traffic on Second Avenue. “Hey,” Ed called out to the cabbie, tapping the Plexiglas partition. “Can you pull over up here?”
I put a hand to his. “Ed, what are you doing?”
“It’ll be faster to walk.”
“We can’t. Our shoes.” I was wearing sneakers, but Nina had on strappy heels. She hadn’t brought her usual change of flip-flops once we’d decided on a cab.
“Okay, fine,” he said as we inched, slowly, down Second Avenue.
By the time we arrived at the party, it was after midnight. The apartment was packed; we were engulfed by tangles of men with cropped, gelled hair and popped collars and women in bright-colored, tight-fitting outfits and matching heels. I understood why Nina had wanted to get there earlier. We could have claimed a spot with easy access to the bar. Nina could have had first-mover advantage with what she called coveted “face time” with Mikhail. Ed took one look around the apartment and said, “I need a drink.” He left us to fight his way to the bar.
Nina shrugged as if to say, Whatever. Then, suddenly, she grabbed my arm. “That’s Mikhail,” she whispered.
Nina hadn’t lied, exactly, when she said Mikhail’s features were Clark Kent–ish. But his black hair was slicked back and gelled to a crunch. His blue eyes looked sharp, like fractured glass, and the pale rosiness of his high cheekbones was delicate, like a porcelain doll’s. His tight-fitting black button-down shirt had two too many top buttons undone, revealing a bare, hairless chest that was surprisingly, jarringly, quite tanned. The shirt was tucked into a pair of flared jeans, and his black leather belt had a silver buckle that matched the silver buckles of his shiny black loafers. Nina’s taste in men was so predictably B&T. (The only exception to that rule being Joey Cammareri—B&T refurbished as hipster.)
I could only catch glimpses of Mikhail through the throng of red-miniskirted women encircling him. “Damn it,” Nina said, yanking at the hemline of her black dress. Mikhail lifted his arms, like Moses parting the sea. The red waves of women ebbed away, trickling
back into the crowds. He walked—sauntered—toward us; there was an affected hitch in his stride.
“Nina!” he said, draping an arm around her. Then he noticed me. “Hello, Nina’s friend! You ladies are having fun at my party?” He had the faint hint of a Russian accent. “Now that you’re here, we are,” Nina said coyly.
“Ah, Nina, you flatter. Now it is my turn.” He lifted his arms again and swept them around the apartment. “You are good broker. Tell me, what else you are good at?”
Nina’s eyes darted from side to side, the way they did whenever she was given a compliment. Ed, returning with the drinks, rolled his own eyes at me. Obviously he’d just overheard Mikhail. He wedged himself between Nina and me and handed us each a bottle of beer. He himself was drinking scotch. Nina inched away slightly; I knew she was trying to make it absolutely clear that Ed belonged with me.
She jumped in to make introductions. “Mikhail, this is Jane’s boyfriend, Ed.”
Mikhail evaluated Ed, sizing him up and down. “Call me Mike,” he said, pumping Ed’s hand. “Mikhail works for a hedge fund,” Nina said. “All kinds of big deals, huh? Movers and shakers?” She shimmied her shoulders for added effect.
“Yes,” Mikhail said, “she is right. And tell me, my friend, where do you work?”
“I’m a college professor,” Ed said. He did not specify where.
Mikhail mused that Ed must be a “smart man.” While the two began to talk, I saw that Nina was staring up at Mikhail with the same unabashed gaze she’d once reserved for Joey Cammareri. It was very unbecoming. Of course, it was only when Nina didn’t really give a shit about a guy that she was most sought after. Mikhail did not return her gaze.
Suddenly the tone of Ed and Mikhail’s conversation changed. Mikhail said, “It is concerning, yes? To invest in such a path for the future, with so little returns? When there’s more money in private sector?”
Ed gave me a look like, Is this guy for real?
Mikhail went on. “My friend, you know the average year-end bonuses in my company are—”
“You can’t assign a quantitative value to the pursuit of knowledge,” Ed interrupted.
I ran a hand down his back. His muscles were tense. “Hey, Ed,” I interrupted. “Your glass is empty. Let’s go get you another—”
Ed handed me his red plastic cup. “Let me put it to you plainly . . .” he said to Mikhail as I stared at his empty cup.
Despite my best efforts to catch her attention, Nina was still locked in her moony-eyed gaze. If she wanted to look like a hanger-on, that was her problem.
I left them, fighting my way to the kitchen. Standing by the fridge, I saw a group of three—two guys and a girl—that seemed set apart from the others. I’d noticed them earlier in the night, because we were the only ones dressed as we were—fitted jeans, T-shirts, and Converse sneakers. I caught a strand of their conversation: “. . . but there’re like zero start-up costs.”
The three of them were so engaged I couldn’t help but be drawn in. Then the guy in the glasses noticed me. “Hey, nice kicks,” he said, nodding at my feet.
“Right back at you. All.”
We took a moment to admire our matchy-matchy sneakers. (After more than a year of patent-leather heels in Korea, it was a treat to wear comfortable footwear.)
“Sorry, I’ll let you guys get back to your thing,” I started to say, but the girl shook her head. “We were just talking shop,” she said. “I’d tell you more, but—”
“You’d have to kill me?” I said.
“More like I’d put you to sleep.”
One of the guys—the one wearing glasses—turned to me. “We run a mobile software start-up. She’s our tech guy”—he pointed from the girl to the other guy, in a green T-shirt—“and he’s our marketing guy.”
“And who’s your business guy?” I asked him.
He pointed a thumb at himself. “You’re looking at him.”
“So if you’re wondering how we ended up here,” the girl said, “Mikhail’s my cousin, and I dragged these poor dudes along.”
The guy in the green T-shirt said, “I was promised hot guys”—he surveyed the room and wrinkled his nose exaggeratedly—“but turns out it was false advertising.”
“Not me, though,” the guy in the glasses added quickly.
The girl laughed. “You were promised hot girls.”
“So, um . . .” I said, changing the subject, “where’re you guys based?”
“In Queens. Astoria,” the girl said.
“Get out,” I said. “I just moved there. But I thought everyone in the hood was—”
“A middle-aged Greek lady?” the glasses guy said. “Then I must hide it well.” Which made me laugh.
The guy in the green T-shirt asked, “So, like, where are you originally from?”
When you’re a person with an ethnic tinge, you get asked this all the time. After I named my neighborhood, the rounds of inquisitions usually didn’t stop until I gave them the answer they wanted to hear: “Korea” or “Asia.” (And once an otherwise well-meaning old woman had asked, “The Orient?”) And that was how I always used to answer the question, too. Until I went “back there” and learned that that place was not my home.
“I’m from Queens,” I said. “I grew up in Flushing.”
But this time the line of questions ended there.
“A native in our midst!” Green T-shirt cried, and he made an exaggerated gesture of worship—head bowing, arms hailing. He tried to rally the others to do the same. The gesture was so unabashedly corny that I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Beer shot from my mouth and sprayed the glasses guy in the face. “I’m so sorry!” I said as he took off his glasses and began to wipe them with the hem of his shirt.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, blinking the beer from his eyelashes.
“Please,” his friend said. “You just made his day.”
“Here—” I held out the napkin wrapped around my beer bottle. “But that’s soaked in beer, too. Never mind, I’m not any help . . .”
The glasses guy was taking the napkin from me when Ed approached. “Jane, I thought you were getting us drinks. You left me with Bulgakov over there.”
“I got caught up with these guys,” I said. “Here, I’ll introduce you.” I gestured to the group. “I don’t actually know your names—”
“It’s late. I’m beat.” Ed glanced at his watch, not even looking their way. “And I have to be up early tomorrow.”
“I don’t.”
“Jane.”
“What.” Just because he was cranky didn’t mean he had to drag us away. He saw that I was having a good time; couldn’t he just suck it up? I thought that that was what people did as couples.
Ed turned to face me. It was then that I noticed the lines tracing either side of his mouth, forming ever-so-slight jowls. He looked exhausted. Maybe I should’ve had the nunchi not to have invited him here in the first place.
“Fine,” I said, relenting. Ed put his arm around my shoulders; the guy with the glasses looked away. I said good-bye to the group. Just as Ed was steering me from their circle, the girl touched my arm. “Hey. We do this Meetup thing on Saturday mornings at Athens Diner. Just a mix of start-ups and neighborhood folks. You should come by sometime.”
Nina was sitting alone on the sofa, arms crossed; we pulled her to her feet. And then we left Mikhail’s party.
We shared a cab back to Queens. The three of us were folded in the backseat, the air thick with tension. I could tell that Nina was upset about something; her lips made a tight line. But instead of spitting it out the way she normally did, she just sat there. If she wasn’t going to talk, I wasn’t going to make her. We dropped her off first, before Ed and I went on to his apartment.
It was almost two when we got home. “I can’t believe I had to spend the whole
night saving your friend from that nutjob.”
I remembered how upset Nina had looked as we left the party. “Maybe she didn’t need you to save her—”
“It’s not my fault that she’s prickly around me lately,” he interrupted. “Ever think she’s just jealous that you have a boyfriend and she doesn’t?”
“That’s just ridiculous.” But she had said, Don’t you kinda miss the old days? earlier that evening, while we were waiting for Ed to show up.
“I can’t believe I have to be up in a few hours. Queens just renewed my contract for the fall.” The fatigue from his voice momentarily lifted. “They ended up assigning me that extra course.”
“I’m so happy for you.”
“You really sound it,” he said. “If this is about leaving early, then I’m sorry, Jane. But I already told you that’s not my idea of a good time.”
“Well, you just know everything, don’t you?” I said. “I met some genuinely cool people back there. I would’ve introduced you, but you were too busy—”
“I wasn’t going to stay and watch some guy flirt with you,” Ed said sharply.
“He wasn’t flirting.” (He might have been. But that was beside the point.) “They were telling me about their new start-up. Don’t make me feel guilty for wanting to try something new.” For once, I almost added. “I love you, Ed. And I want you to share these new things with me.”
“I can already tell you right now, Jane,” he said, pulling back the duvet and sliding under. “It’s overrated. All those superficial encounters, they’re touch-and-go. I’m just saving you the trouble.”
“Ed, would it kill you to make some effort?”
The instant the words flew from my mouth, I froze; those were Beth’s words, not mine. I could see the recognition sinking in with Ed. His eyebrows were pinched together, the way they used to be whenever he sat across the breakfast table from his wife. His ex-wife.
I climbed into bed, curling away from him. But Ed reached his arms out to me. Gently he turned me so that I faced him.
“All I want to do in my time off is to have a nice meal with you and enjoy your company. Jane, I love you. I only want to be with you.”
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