Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  “Silly? Irene, this is serious.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “Who else knows? Does Jacob know?”

  “No,” Irene sighed. “William’s the only one who knows.”

  “But you barely know him!”

  “He was here, and I got scared, I guess,” Irene had said matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t matter. He sort of left me at Penn Station. He’s probably waiting for me to call him, but—”

  “You told him you had cancer and he—what?”

  It had then taken a good twenty minutes to back up and get the whole story before the cab driver deposited them, and Sara helped Irene navigate the cocoon into the storeroom. And though it had all seemed fine at the end of the day, Sara continued dwelling on it. They had always told each other everything. So why hadn’t Irene told her right away? It killed her that when it was all said and done and Irene had been cured, this would still be there between them.

  All Sara wanted was to take care of Irene: shuttle her to and from her doctor’s appointments, make her chicken soup from scratch, sit with her on the couch watching ¡Vámonos, Muchachos!, and wait until Irene fell asleep to pick her hair off the pillows. But Irene refused to allow any of this. She insisted on acting as if nothing were any different than before, like the rest of the world.

  For instance, it was insane that Sara still had to wake up and get to the New York Journal on time and spend the bulk of her day in a gray cubicle, covered in orderly columns of Post-it Notes and tacked-up newspaper clippings. While her friend had cancer. She just had it. “I mean, hello?” she felt like saying to her dry-erase calendar. “Are you serious with this shit?” It was still totally full of precise, centimeter-tall lettering and meticulous color coding: red appointments, green deadlines, blue editorial board meetings, purple social engagements, yellow holidays, and intern schedules in brown.

  Even though Irene had been adamant about sticking with Dr. Zarrani at Mount Sinai, Sara still went in to discuss the situation with her boss, Luther Halles, the editorial director. He gave her a few numbers—well, actually he told her to look the numbers up in his Contacts list—and said she could use his name, of course, for anything anytime.

  “You could do a piece on this,” he said, rolling his Mont Blanc pen between his fingers. She did a quick mental check of whether she needed to order him more ink. “Even a multipart thing, you know? Young, invulnerable people with cancer. It’s compelling stuff.”

  Sara hummed. “I’m not sure my friend would go for that.”

  Luther got up and began pacing. The way he walked, he sort of led with his head, which whipped this way and that, tugging through his neck as if pulling the rest of his low, reluctant frame behind him. “Tell her this is important. Others can learn from her.”

  She wasn’t sure that was on Irene’s list of current priorities.

  “Hey. Does she have health insurance?”

  Sara nodded. Juliette and Abeba were keeping Irene on the payroll.

  “She works at this gallery in Chelsea.”

  Luther made a face; it would be a better story if she didn’t have insurance, Sara supposed, with all the headlines about the legions of young people who were coming off their parents’ plans into part-time work and their parents’ basements. There was no room now for them here, with her whole graduating class on idle, waiting for this financial crisis thing to end. Now the people above them couldn’t retire and wouldn’t be promoted and so she and everyone else were stuck in assistant purgatory. Still it was better than being back home.

  “The other thing is that I might need to take three weeks off,” Sara said as seriously as she could. She knew he knew she had the days saved up and he’d been dreading she’d try and use them. “Once she’s finally feeling better, I’m taking her to France.”

  Luther didn’t reply, and didn’t really need to, as his eyes alone suggested that this wasn’t happening. She knew she’d be better off asking him to rename the paper The Daily Sara than asking for multiple weeks off. She was the paper’s unofficial closer. Whenever someone quit or was fired (which happened every other week), their abandoned projects were usually given to her to finish. Meanwhile she represented the paper in the Classroom Journalism Initiative and served on a steering committee for the new Web interface. When Luther traveled, Sara was the one trusted to book his hotels, dinners, cars, and flights and to find people to take his unused Knicks tickets if there was going to be a game. She spoke to Mrs. Sigrid Halles (a former Miss Norway runner-up) at least three times a day and kept track of the major life events of their children Laetitia and Laurence.

  He seemed aware that this was a lot of work for one person, or at least he had given her a 5 percent raise last summer when she’d complained about it and given her a new title as head of the mentorship program, which meant she had use of the two interns. But using them was far more work than doing it herself, for both were clueless. They were only six years younger, but they were hopeless. God knew what they would do to the place if she were gone for three weeks.

  Luther sat back down and pushed a stack of files toward her, which he’d finally signed after a week’s delay. “Why don’t you all go use my beach house? Shelter Island is great this time of year. It’s absolutely beautiful.”

  “In March?”

  “Oh, totally. I wouldn’t go swimming, but there are some excellent vineyards, and you’ll have the town to yourselves. It’s primal, I’m telling you. It’s so relaxing. I go out there some weekends just to think. Be in nature. Commune with the pounding surf and the wide-open sky. Check with Sigrid about it. We’re lending it to her nephews until early April, but you can have it for a couple days after that. It’ll be perfect. A long weekend on Long Island! On me.”

  Sara thanked him with enough false gratitude that he’d be satisfied and promised she’d think about it, even though the idea of staying in her boss’s house—even his vacation house—made her feel awkward.

  On her lunch break Sara went up to check out the Morningside Heights apartment. Since they’d arrived six years ago, the rents had climbed far faster than their pitiful raises. She found herself feeling grateful the housing market had just spectacularly collapsed (though she knew this was awful) because the rents weren’t increasing for the first time in six years. But they weren’t going down either. Occasionally she and George did find places that seemed within reach, but the listing would disappear before they finished their application. No matter, they had always already begun to get cold feet.

  Because George couldn’t realistically come in from the observatory on his lunch break, Irene joined Sara to see apartments sometimes during the week. Most of the time she was either just coming from or going to an appointment at Mount Sinai, but she never said more than “It was fine” or “They don’t know if it’s working yet,” when Sara asked how it was going. Nothing would be determined until April, when this latest round of chemotherapy would be finished and new scans would be taken. That day they met by the steps of St. John the Divine and hugged, and Sara thought she noticed Irene wince a little from her light touch through her red pea coat. She looked pale, for sure, but then so did everyone; the sun hadn’t been out in weeks.

  “Have you spoken to Jacob yet?” Sara asked, as they walked past the sculpture garden and down to the corner of 110th and Amsterdam.

  “I saw him yesterday. He yakked my ears off about his stupid boss for an hour. They have this rule, apparently, where they don’t talk at work, except Jacob has to always wave hello to Oliver when he walks by his office, because everyone else does and so it might look suspicious if Jacob didn’t. But Jacob says that he’d rather just never say hello to anybody ever, including Oliver—”

  This wasn’t what Sara had meant, but then a tour bus roared by, its double-decker top filled with elderly Europeans wearing complementary ponchos just in case the solid gray sheet of a sky made up its mind
to rain. The tourists snapped photos of the cathedral as the bus idled at a red light, and then the light went green and they roared along toward Columbia University and the Apollo Theater beyond.

  “Here’s the building!” Irene shouted. A hand-drawn sign taped to the door announced the open house, and the door itself was propped open with some wadded-up coupon circulars. Sara wrinkled her nose—the front hall was badly lit, the mailboxes were covered in permanent graffiti scrawl, and there was a distinct M. C. Escher lilting to the stairs as they walked in. At the first floor they knocked on the appropriate door and waited. A moment passed, and then the door swung open to reveal an elderly man wearing mascara, rouge, and a blond beehive wig. He wore a cerulean silk Ralph Lauren bathrobe that was tied just loosely enough to make his biological sex undebatable.

  “Oh!” Sara almost knocked Irene backward down the rickety staircase.

  “Yes?” he asked, as if nothing were odd at all, looking them up and down eagerly.

  “We’re here to see the apartment?” Sara managed, eyes flitting from the wig to the open bottom of the robe, to the side of the doorframe.

  “Come on in,” he said. “You know it’s only a one-bedroom, don’t you?”

  Sara had to purse her lips to stop giggling as Irene slipped an arm around her waist.

  “Oh, we’ll only need the one bed.”

  The man laughed, and the gruffness gave away his masculinity even more than the powdered-over Adam’s apple.

  “Let’s come back another time,” Sara said, trying to wriggle gently away from Irene.

  “Come on,” Irene said, reaching up to brush some of Sara’s raven hair from her forehead. “I’m sure Ms. . . .”

  “Daphne.”

  “I’m sure Ms. Daphne doesn’t have all day to show us around.”

  But Irene took her sweet time poking around the closets and the kitchen, seeming to relish the way Sara kept close at all times. “Oh, your mother would hate this wallpaper. It’s so perfect!” Irene said as she ran a hand over the velvety-floral patterns in the living room.

  “It’s all original,” Ms. Daphne explained. “At least since the sixties.”

  “You’ve lived here that long?” Sara asked.

  “Oh, honey,” he exclaimed. “You’re making me feel old now.”

  Irene dragged Sara through the door into the bedroom, where an old armoire hung open, revealing an assortment of beautiful gowns. Sara’s eyes wandered instead toward the mirrored vanity, which was overflowing with heavy-duty makeup. Ms. Daphne blew into the room after them and then eased himself onto the low-slung bed, which rippled unnaturally as he stretched out on it.

  Irene hooted. “There’s a water bed! Sara, come try this out.”

  Sara stifled a laugh as Irene bounded toward a spot on the bed, then felt a pang. How could Irene have cancer and be goofing around like this? There she was, making herself comfortable on the water bed and wiggling her eyebrows suggestively at Sara.

  Ms. Daphne clapped his hands together. “For another three hundred I’ll leave the bed. Don’t worry, it’s very sturdy!” This offer seemed to, finally, break Irene. She began giggling uncontrollably, which made Sara start to giggle as they excused themselves and rushed out, nearly tripping down the stairs. The girls didn’t stop running until they were back in the park, winded. For just a moment it felt like nothing had changed at all.

  “I could kill you!” Sara shouted, as Irene leaned against a low rock wall for support. “He . . . was this close to getting us in the bed!”

  Irene was practically crying, she was laughing so hard. Then she leaned over the wall and threw up what looked and smelled like a grapefruit that she’d had for breakfast. Sara rushed off to a nearby kebab truck for napkins. When she got back, Irene was cleaning herself with a fistful of snow she’d scraped off the wall. They each caught their breath.

  Finally, Irene stood and threw one arm around Sara. “Totally worth it,” she declared.

  • • •

  Sometimes Sara called George without even realizing, on afternoons like that one when she was wandering through Times Square on her way back to the office after a late lunch. She just found her phone against her ear, ringing. Then when George picked up, she didn’t know what to say.

  “What’s up, buttercup?” he asked brightly from the other end of the phone. In the background she could hear Allen playing a loud video game, blowing up aliens with rocket launchers. “Could you turn that down?” she heard George say.

  “We’re taking Irene to France. I’ve decided.”

  George laughed. “Did you also decide to rob a bank, because—”

  “No,” Sara said. “I’m going to pay for it. I’ll call my mother after work and tell her I’m taking it out of my grandfather’s money.”

  This was what she called it to George, and even to herself, though it wasn’t really her grandfather’s anymore and hadn’t been since she was fifteen and his great decline had begun. Slowly he had lost the ability to form cogent sentences, to walk, to lift a spoon to his mouth. Sara’s mother had set up the pool house for him and his nurse, and at night she’d sometimes heard him howling out there. Her parents and sisters never talked about it, then or now. Then one day Sara had come home from school to find a note on the refrigerator saying that they’d all be going to his funeral on Saturday. She had tried to tell George all of this, but he didn’t really understand. How could he? And so now it was just she who knew firsthand what happened when the human body began to come apart at the seams. Who knew there wasn’t time to waste. That illness cared nothing about money or fairness or the things you planned to do later.

  George hummed over the phone. “You think Irene’s going to be comfortable with that?”

  “People have done worse things to other people than buy them trips to France.”

  He laughed and didn’t take it further. “Hey, did we ever think about the New York Public Library for the wedding?”

  “They’re booked solid.” Sara was hovering under the low blue marquee for the Letterman show, a block from her office.

  “For when?”

  “Forever.”

  “How about Disney World?” George offered.

  “Don’t say that unless you’re serious.”

  “I’m not serious.”

  “Because you can’t joke with a girl about getting married in Cinderella’s castle, mister.”

  “I’m not serious! I’m not serious!” George shouted.

  “You can get the character of your choice to officiate.”

  George thought a second. “I want Quasimodo then.”

  “You would.”

  “Hey, next to Quasimodo I’m going to look good.”

  “You always look good,” Sara said, leaning into the receiver as if she could kiss him through the mouthpiece. The smell of the pizza at Angelo’s filled her nostrils as a street sweeper swarmed by, picking up the torn ticket stubs and the spilled salads of the afternoon’s tourists; the shows would be opening in only a few hours, but the sidewalks were already teeming with high school classes and church groups and seniors who’d been bused in from New Jersey. They were all clinging tightly to one another, looking overwhelmed, scared to walk too far in any direction. Everyone kept checking phones and wristwatches. How much time before dinner? Let’s not be late. How long will that line take? How many blocks is it? Let’s just stay here and stare at the American Eagle billboard. I heart New York.

  “Gotta run,” George said. “Cokonis is calling on the other line.”

  “See you at the end of time,” she said.

  • • •

  Back in the office she killed an hour Googling “osteosarcoma causes.” She always came up with nothing, even after going up to the thirty-eighth page of hits. She was amazed how many different ways there seemed to be to say it: unknown. Does not have a concrete cause. Li
ttle is known about the etiology. The causes are not known. Scientists have not found the exact causes. The cause is not yet established. There are no known or apparent causes. One time she found, “While the causes are still unclear, doctors believe that his type of cancer starts with a DNA error in the body’s cells.” She’d thought she was on to something until she looked up “DNA error” and was met again with unknown. The causes are not known. Etc., etc.

  She got up to make a cup of coffee in the pod machine in the kitchen. As it gurgled and spat, she lifted a sunflower-yellow packet of zero-calorie sugar and snapped it back and forth with her finger to compact the crystals inside. She imagined, in thirty years, opening a newspaper and seeing the headline: CANCER CAUSE CONCLUSIVELY DETERMINED. And everyone would go, “Damn, it was riboflavin the whole time! How did we miss that?” She ripped open the pack of sugar substitute, emptied it into the coffee, and threw away the paper. Then she returned to her desk to find one of the interns waiting to confess that she’d broken the copier by forgetting to remove a staple from a three-page memo. These were the winners who’d gotten this chance while others their age sat at home. These were the people whose parents were too important for them to be fired. Dealing with the copier would take up what remained of the hour, just as the afternoon before had been lost to the other intern forgetting P came before Q and an hour’s filing needing to be redone.

  What was another hour? What was another afternoon? Sara wanted to waste as many as it took to get through this awful month.

  • • •

  At seven o’clock Sara changed into a strapless sea foam dress that she’d had tailored from a bridesmaid’s dress used during the previous summer and headed downtown to meet Jacob. They were scheduled to check out a high-end seafood restaurant in Battery Park as a potential wedding venue. The planners hadn’t been able to get her in on a weekend day but had gotten the members of the Marcuso-Gerber Wedding to permit them to come see the space in action that night. Ordinarily Sara would have warned Jacob that they were only slipping in and out without bothering anyone, but given the oppressive weight of this March on her shoulders, she rather hoped he would get her out on the dance floor, or maybe start several fights with Marcuso cousins, or at least swipe her a slice of wedding cake that she could sink her troubles into.