The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  “No,” Maureen says, uncertainly.

  “Any of those things?”

  “No…but they could start.”

  “But you haven’t had any yet.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Numbness? Tingling? Heavy sweats?”

  “Like…tonight?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Not tonight.”

  “In general?” I have to ask.

  “No,” Maureen says, in that uncertain voice, which makes me realize that she is thinking: But any of those things could start.

  I’m going down another list of symptoms, the answers to which could point us either toward a gas bubble or liver cancer, when Maureen says, “Oh!”

  “What happened?” I ask. In my mind, her appendix just exploded.

  “It’s gone,” Maureen says.

  “The pain is gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you—do you feel any kind of…?”

  “No,” says Maureen. “Thank you.” And she hangs up.

  * * *

  —

  I LURK AROUND THE OFFICE trying to look unobtrusive until Zara gets back from her lunch break, and then I ask her if she wants to have a cigarette outside.

  “I don’t smoke,” Zara says, looking at me as if I’m crazy.

  “I don’t either,” I hiss, darting my eyes around the room. “Come outside.”

  Zara walks with me down to the bodega on the corner. When we’re far enough from the office that I feel safe, I launch in.

  “She’s calling me at two A.M. now.”

  “Yeah,” Zara says, unsurprised.

  “About poaching eggs, and…she had this abdominal pain last night? And then during the day, it’s just like—she has questions about the pages. We keep starting over. But she never like…acknowledges having called, or anything.”

  “Right,” Zara says.

  “Is that…I mean, is that…?” I hesitate over the word normal.

  Zara chooses her words carefully. “I would say that people don’t often last here too long. That’s what I would say.”

  “How long have you been working here?”

  “A year,” Zara says. “Thirteen months, to be exact.”

  “And she calls you like this?”

  “No,” Zara says, “no no. I switched carriers. I told her that I was doing a back-to-the-earth thing, where I had a landline in my apartment, and I didn’t carry a cell. And I said I live with a lot of roommates. And she doesn’t really call me much but she does still email.”

  “What does she email?”

  “She emailed me a list of symptoms that maybe she was having, and she emailed me a recipe that she wanted to know if I thought it sounded right, and she emailed me the link to this online questionnaire she took that was about whether or not you’re a right-brain or a left-brain person.”

  “And do you email back?”

  Zara shrugs. “Sometimes I say my email is down?”

  “I guess what I’m asking is…” Are you straight? What products do you use that make you smell like balsam? Do you mind if I sniff your hair? Are you currently single? Is Maureen not going to pay me the thousand bucks if I stop answering the phone? Is Ev’s increased use of Grindr a sign that he’s tired of me sleeping on his couch?

  “What?” Zara asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Forget it.”

  We’re almost back at the office by now. The Upper East Side is sunny and brisk, the sidewalks almost empty except for an occasional hot mom in Lululemon, who jogs past.

  “The trick,” Zara says, “is don’t take anything personally.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  But Zara is already climbing the office steps. “Wait out here for three minutes,” she says, “then come in and say you were getting lunch at the deli. Maureen doesn’t like smokers.”

  * * *

  —

  MAUREEN CALLS ME THAT NIGHT, somewhere around eleven, which makes me think it must be a film-related epiphany. In the office we’d discussed Maureen’s questions about the characters, which involved her asking about “believability” and “interconnection” and whether I felt like their primary objectives were clear enough to land the themes of the film. At this point everything had changed so much and so often that I wasn’t sure what the themes of the film were, but Maureen seemed to feel a lot better after voicing her questions, which made me feel better.

  At eleven P.M. on the phone, Maureen’s voice is smaller than a bread box.

  “Can you come over?” she asks.

  “To talk about the movie?” I ask, cautiously.

  “I just don’t feel so good,” Maureen says.

  “I live in Astoria? So…it might take me a while?” I’m sort of hoping that Maureen will do that thing where she says forget it, thaaanks and hangs up, but she says, “That’s okay.”

  “And not all the trains are running,” I say, without knowing if this is true. Maureen doesn’t strike me as someone who knows which subway lines go to Astoria.

  “Can you just catch a cab?” Maureen asks, strained. She’s not used to this many obstacles.

  “There aren’t any cabs out here at eleven,” I lie.

  “I’m sending you an Uber,” Maureen says. “Text me your address and you can give me cash for it.”

  “I don’t have any cash,” I say, “but I’ll text you my address.”

  I hang up and sit for a bewildered moment. I’m not sure whether I’m more bewildered by the sudden backbone that has presented itself, or by the part where I gave in anyway. It’s at that point Ev stumbles through the living room drunk, his hand shoved in the back pocket of a twink who gives me a nod, and I realize that I might as well get in an Uber.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I SHOW UP AT Maureen’s, she’s wearing Lululemon leggings and an oversized white T-shirt with the word MARINA printed on it. My first thought is Abramović, but when she turns around I see CONNECTICUT YACHT CLUB printed on the back, and I realize it must be a gift from Joshua. She has a knit scarf pulled around her shoulders, and she’s snuggled into it like a little kid.

  “Hey,” I say, trying to take the temperature. I’m still not sure if Maureen is going to fix me with her flat, calm stare and inform me that she’s been thinking about Sherpas in Eastern Tibet, and feels like the screenplay could use a makeover.

  But instead Maureen says, despondently, “Joshua needs a new phone, his keeps breaking. I call him and it just goes to voicemail half the time and then his phone doesn’t even show him that I called.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Which is unfortunate, because he’s very responsive as a person, but his phone basically doesn’t work, I mean you’d think a phone in the twenty-first century would work, but his doesn’t work. And I’ve said to him, Joshua, I’ve said, I will buy you a phone. And he says, Oh I’ll do it. And he never does it. I think I might just go to the Apple store tomorrow and buy him a phone.”

  Maureen sinks down on the deck chair, and I notice that she still hasn’t unpacked. The boxes are where they were, the place is as bare of furniture as it was when I was here before.

  “That’s frustrating,” I say, when I realize that her silence is weighted with expectation.

  “Yes,” Maureen says, as if I’ve chosen the perfect word. “Yes, it is frustrating.” Into the silence that follows, she says, “Would you like a drink?”

  “Are you having one?”

  “Yes,” Maureen decides. “I am certainly having one.” She gets up from the deck chair and pads over to a bottle of scotch that’s been left haphazardly on top of an empty planter and a sack of potting soil. I almost expect her to say, “You can give me cash for this,” but instead she just opens it and pours a healthy dose—first into a champ
agne flute, fetched from a half-open box beneath the deck chair, and then into a jam jar, fetched from the countertop.

  “Cheers,” Maureen says, handing me the jam jar.

  “Cheers,” I say, and we clink.

  * * *

  —

  THE CHRONOLOGY OF THINGS GETS foggy, eventually. At first we just sit in the sunken, spread-open living room and Maureen keeps refilling our drinking devices as soon as they’re empty. Sometimes Maureen talks about Joshua. Joshua is just wonderful but he doesn’t answer his phone and he comes over less and less because he doesn’t like the trek from Connecticut and he’s very friendly, he has a number of close female friends from the Yacht Club, and Maureen really enjoys getting to know his friends, and appreciates that he’s so supportive of her by giving her plenty of space to pursue her artistic projects.

  I put everything through a decoder, I perform high-grade World War II–style code-breaking, and I come to the conclusion that Maureen is two-thirds of the way into a breakup. Maureen doesn’t seem to have come to that conclusion, so I don’t say much, and after a while I’m the one refilling her champagne flute every time it plunges precipitously toward emptiness. Maureen also talks about her family, who are equally supportive and who understand her ambitions because they are also very ambitious, very busy, highly directed, involved in a series of international business and philanthropic projects, far-flung (parents on UWS, cousin in Park Slope). The single salient point that emerges for me: Maureen lives in a world in which nobody picks up the phone except for her employees.

  By now, Maureen is slurring, and there isn’t a lot of whiskey left. I’m getting a little slurry myself.

  “I should head home,” I say, hoping she’ll call me an Uber.

  “Or you could crash here…”

  I shoot her a look. Maureen is tipped back in the deck chair, eyes closed. With strands of flat hair falling across her forehead, and the little pinch in her mouth relaxed, she looks oddly vulnerable.

  “I mean…you don’t have any furniture?”

  Maureen shrugs. “Sleepover,” she singsongs. “Whatever.”

  “Really?”

  “Whatever,” Maureen says, tipping her head forward into her hands. She massages the paper-thin skin around her temples. She looks both very very old, and very very young, and I construct a story in my head—briefly, in a single flash-pulse that feels close to an epiphany—about her. Her loneliness, her isolation, her desire to participate in the business of life. The way in which making movies—or micromanaging the making thereof—is actually a way to have human relationships. Her nights after her employees leave the offices, night after night in which she sits in this brand-new obscenely expensive apartment with boxes that she hasn’t even unpacked, and she waits until she can’t wait any longer, and then she picks up her phone and reaches out. Her drive, her ambition, how these things are threatening to a wealthy guy who owns a yacht, whose entire goal in life is owning a yacht. How ambition and drive isolate us all, in a way. After all, my family is in Orange County, and I’m sleeping on Ev’s couch, eating eggs for three meals a day and writing the same twenty pages over and over again because I wanted…what? To accomplish something?

  I see her so clearly right then, and the small threads of commonality strung between us. I see her in a way that Zara hasn’t been able to, might never be able to, given Zara’s caginess and judgment. Come to think of it, Zara smells more like canola oil than balsam.

  So I speak before I think. “Yeah,” I say, “okay, sure. Sleepover!”

  We curl up fully dressed on Maureen’s bed. The bed frame is solid oak, but the blankets and sheets are all weirdly kid-like—printed with flowers and animals. Her bedroom is equally empty, with the exception of a Japanese paper lamp sitting on the floor, plugged into the wall. Maureen collapses on the bed near the wall, already hugging a pillow. I’m going to turn out the lamp but she murmurs, “Leave it,” and that touches me even more—this girl going to sleep alone every night with a single lamp burning. The knit scarf is still wrapped around her and tangled into the blankets.

  I curl up behind her. I’m not sure if this is a sleepover where we touch or not, but then she scoots back until I’m the big spoon and she’s the little one. She grabs my arm and pulls it over her, and passes out completely.

  It takes me a while to fall asleep, even with all the scotch in me. I listen to Maureen breathing and I feel the softness of her knit scarf against my face when she moves, and I think about getting breakfast when we wake up, bagels and lox, laughing about the impromptu sleepover, laughing about these stops and starts with the movie. Listen, Maureen says over breakfast, I think we should take the day off from the movie. And I say, Yeah? And Maureen chews her bagel and she says, Let’s go to an art museum. She says, I’ve still actually never walked the High Line, Joshua always said we’d go together and we still haven’t, and I say, Fuck that, I’ll take you, and I do…and we do…and…

  When I wake up, I’m alone in Maureen’s bed, and the mid-morning sunlight is bright in my aching eyes.

  * * *

  —

  I SCRUB MY FACE IN the giant bathroom off her bedroom. The sink is the size of a tub, and the tub itself is a pounded-copper basin the size of a small SeaWorld pool. I pull my hair back, brush my teeth with a finger, and venture out into her apartment. It’s empty. I search the countertops for a note, a Post-it: Stepped out / Went for bagels / See you in a few. Nothing. I sit on her deck chair for a long moment, close my eyes, and pretend that all of this is mine. Nobody is coming home. It’s just me, here, in all this space and light.

  I start to feel a little bit sad, along with my hangover.

  I pull on my sneakers and head out into the blinding morning.

  * * *

  —

  I WAIT FOR MAUREEN TO call all day, without admitting to myself that that’s what I’m waiting for. I wonder if I should drop by the office, but that seems weird. I wonder if I should call Zara and ask her what to do, but I don’t have her number, and she hasn’t been particularly useful anyway. I wander around Ev’s apartment, from window to window, refreshing my phone. Maureen doesn’t email any suggestions for the screenplay. She doesn’t leave me any voicemails beginning with, “I’ve been thinking…” I don’t get any links to screenwriting manuals “just in case” I want to read them, with particular attention suggested for certain pages that Maureen has earmarked for me. Eventually I go sit in the Greek bakery on the corner, and drink cup after cup of watery coffee, and still there’s no communication from Maureen.

  I start to wonder if, in the light of increased mutual understanding (friendship, even?), she has come to realize that the latest set of pages is good.

  I start to wonder if she’s a little bit thrown by having let someone in, but also, maybe this is the first real friendship she’s ever had.

  I start to wonder if, post-sleepover, she called Joshua to tell him not to bother with those long irritating treks from Connecticut anymore. Newly empowered by a taste of friendship, she said, “I’d just rather you didn’t take up my time, Joshua.” Maybe she said, “I just don’t find yachts very interesting, Joshua. And besides, my friend and I have plans to walk the High Line.”

  By evening, I wonder if Maureen is dead. Did she leave the apartment too quickly and get hit by a cab? Was she groggy from a deep night’s sleep (or a hangover) when she stepped off the subway platform into an oncoming uptown 4/5/6? But Maureen doesn’t take the subway. What if she called an Uber, and the driver was some kind of radical militant, and he kidnapped her? “Eat the rich” is tattooed over his heart. “What are you doing?” Maureen asks him. “What have I done to you?” He gives her a cold, steely glare through the cat door built into his basement, then nails a plank of plywood over it, sealing off her last point of contact with the outside world.

  I decide maybe I should call Maureen.

 
Or email, which is less aggressive.

  Or text, which is less aggressive but more personal. A text is intimate. A text says: We slept in the same bed last night, and you told me about your shitty boyfriend, but I am choosing not to reference any of that as I write an economical and brief message about the screenplay on which we’re collaborating.

  Instead, I go online and stalk Maureen. She isn’t on Facebook or Instagram, so I resort to ancient tactics of intelligence-gathering: I type her first and last name into Google. Eventually I add Joshua’s name. I read brief interviews with her about her documentaries. I read a “Personality Profile” that includes her zodiac sign, her favorite color, and the question “What do you like about film-making?” (The answer is “Everything, I guess.”) I travel five pages back into Google and find an article about her in her high school newspaper (hometown: Greenwich, Connecticut), talking about how she’s been accepted into Amherst and has a promising life ahead of her. I find a picture of her from freshman year of college, women’s lacrosse team. She has the same long hair, pulled into a lifeless ponytail, and she’s looking at the camera with her lips pulled into a polite rictus. I find all the things I should have found before I started working for her, but I still can’t figure out why she isn’t calling me, or why I care.

  After a dinner of microwaved burrito from the back of Ev’s freezer, I email Maureen. I keep it really light and easy. Hey, I say. Looking forward to talking more about the pages I gave you. Let me know when a good time will be.

  It’s another forty-eight hours before Maureen replies. Hers is as concise as mine: Let me know if you can get on the phone in the next hour or two.

  I take a breath, and I call her. When she picks up, her voice is as small and distant as ever.

  “Maureen!” I say, “How are you!” and right away, I’m telling myself to tone it down. I sound jolly, almost avuncular.

  “Good,” Maureen says. She could be at the bottom of a marina. She could be on the moon. Her tiny voice is almost devoid of inflection. “Is this a good time?”