Since being promoted to editor-in-chief of Vision, Germany’s leading fashion magazine, Zoe belonged to the so-called inner circle of Schoenhoff Publishing. That meant she got a company car (an Audi A3), business-class seating (but only for flights over six hours), and half a secretary. The other half belonged to the chief copyeditor. In the meantime, Zoe had managed to collect enough miles for a Senator Card. She had been to Fashion Week in London, the Hong Kong Chanel store opening with Karl Lagerfeld, photo shoots in Cape Town, plus her weekly trips to meet advertising clients and media agencies in Munich. The list was endless. However, Zoe had never been to New York. She only knew it from what she’d seen on Sex and the City, and that was quite a lot, she thought. Normally, only her boss flew to New York. But her boss was Allegra Sollani, her best friend, so Zoe couldn’t exactly complain about it. And anyway, Zoe considered herself more of an Asia fan.
Since the seat next to her was free, she had a clear view of her fellow travelers. There were two men in suits with gelled-back hair, iPhones and iPads, and super-thin MacBook Air laptops that bore stickers with the inscription “Berg & Partner Consulting.” They commented loudly and pitilessly on every passenger that walked down the aisle, making a game out of trying to guess their professions.
“Chairman of the board for a tire manufacturer,” Consultant Number One said in a stage whisper.
“No, head unionist for VW, traveling by air for a change,” Consultant Number Two insisted, trying to one-up his colleague.
“Ex–front man for a nineties boy band with a cocaine problem.”
“Daytime-TV actress who’s just had the fat sucked out of her ass, on her last shopping trip before appearing on I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!”
Then they lost interest in their little game. Consultant Number One yawned widely and stretched his long limbs into the expensive extra legroom, while Consultant Number Two complained. “It’s so much more fun in a smaller plane when the poor cattle-class bastards have to run the gauntlet through business class.”
Zoe shuddered in disgust as she turned toward the window. “Men, asshole category, generation 2.0,” she murmured.
After the three-course meal that always seemed pleasantly long when one was flying west and had daylight but was always annoying on the trip back to the east, Zoe fell asleep. Revenge was exhausting.
Two hours before landing, the flight attendant draped a white cloth over the unfolded, empty table next to her, and Zoe woke up. She had slept through three-quarters of the flight into her new life.
My new life, Zoe thought as she stretched. She was almost tempted to spell it out, L-I-F-E, like Allegra had this morning. This was a big step for her, to finally be independent from the undead Benjamin Nikolaus Nigmann. And after a total of nine years working as a journalist for fashion magazines, three of which were spent as the editor-in-chief of Vision, Zoe had started to develop a “been there, done that” attitude. Somehow all the ideas for articles seemed the same: “Orgasms: Faked or Fact?”; “Blood Red for Nails and Lips!”; or “Angelina Jolie: Now I Know What I Want from Love.” Recently she couldn’t shake the feeling that the headlines she had created for the latest Vision cover were identical to those she’d written seven years ago.
She had an increasingly nagging feeling that she needed to do something new. Something she had a serious passion for. Something with substance. But what? Open a yoga school in Ibiza to bring peace to others? Be an animal-rights activist in the African bush? Start a carbon-neutral organic-frozen-yogurt chain that served flavors like green tea, lavender, and chocolate rice pudding?
Even Allegra had noticed Zoe’s discontentment. “You need a new playground, sweetie,” she had remarked when Zoe didn’t want to move on to another division of Schoenhoff Publishing. But Zoe knew that wouldn’t have helped, either.
Then Zoe had a brilliant idea.
After Benni had quit his graduate literature program, he’d become more and more interested in software programming—or coding, as insiders called it. He encouraged Zoe to start a fashion blog for Vision. StyleChicks by Vision had mutated into a successful fashion and shopping platform. Management became aware of Zoe’s talent and sent her to a crash course in new media, where she learned all about search-engine optimization, keyword campaigns, and monetization through partner businesses. To be precise, she learned a lot of stuff that no normal person had a clue about. Afterward, she interned at the French branch of The Huffington Post in Paris, at Net-à-Porter in London, and at the Etsy offices in Berlin. When she returned to Schoenhoff, Zoe developed a new-media concept for all of their fashion magazines. A little later, management offered her a very lucrative job with the clever-sounding title of Senior Vice President of Creative Digital Solutions. Location: New York.
She declined.
Zoe’s declining was also a man’s fault, like pretty much everything else meaningful in her life. Benni, whose third start-up was about to crash due to lack of funds, couldn’t decide again. Berlin or New York? Germany or the US? Pills or poison? In the end, he decided not to decide. Which meant staying in Berlin. So Zoe stayed in Berlin, too.
In retrospect, one could rationalize and justify any decision.
“Berlin is simply a much nicer place to live,” she explained to Allegra, who only rolled her eyes. “It’s not as dirty, loud, or full of Americans.”
She had faithfully echoed Benni’s opinions until exactly a week later, when his “first true love” had made her debut on the stage of Zoe’s life.
The Airbus A380 descended quietly and gracefully over Long Island. Zoe could see the wide sand beaches and the villas of the rich and beautiful people in the dunes behind them. The Hamptons. A few moments later, the huge plane glided over a more densely populated area, broken up here and there by a golf course or a green area stuck between two highways that was supposed to be a public park. Then the Airbus extended its landing gear and touched the runway with surprising delicacy. After disembarking, Zoe followed the other passengers to passport control at John F. Kennedy Airport.
JFK. How powerful that sounded. And sexy. Like the Mafia and Marilyn Monroe, like Thanksgiving in Hyannis Port. The Germans should have thought twice before they named Munich’s international airport after old Franz Josef Strauss, a former Bavarian prime minister. FJS just didn’t have the same ring to it.
A loud American voice wakened Zoe from her musings.
“American citizens and green card holders to the left,” a uniformed security guard was saying every thirty seconds or so. The real Americans glided through nonexistent lines, and the tourists were waved into a column at least five hundred strong. “Visitors with ESTA or visas to the right.”
Well, that’s a nice welcome, Zoe thought as she waited. And waited. When she finally reached the immigration officer’s counter, she laid down her passport and customs form.
“You have a work visa?” the immigration officer asked without looking up.
“Yes, sir.” Zoe answered. “I have a journalist visa.”
“Right thumb on the scanner, please, and then the rest of the hand,” he ordered. He took her fingerprints. Then she was photographed.
Zoe felt like a dangerous criminal—like the most illegal immigrant of all—even though no immigrant could be more legal than she was. It had cost her at least three hours of her life to fill in the twenty-page online application for her US visa. The American immigration office knew more intimate details about her than her mother, her employer, and her doctor put together. Yes, she was single, and no, she didn’t have AIDS or tuberculosis, or any other contagious diseases. She didn’t belong to any terrorist organizations and did not intend to execute any terrorist attacks during her visit. She had never been arrested, and had never broken the Hague Convention or taken a kidnapped child out of the country. She couldn’t offer any Nazis sympathy, either. From now on she would earn a yearly salary of $180,000 from Schoenhoff Publishing USA,
Inc., and in her new New York tax bracket she would immediately have to give up 38 percent of it. Her father was born in Nuremberg on the fifth of December, 1955, and was a practicing doctor. His address and telephone number were requested. The application form went on like that, endlessly.
They might as well ask me when I had my last period, Zoe had thought while filling it out.
“Left thumb, then the rest of the left hand,” the officer said.
But the online forms weren’t nearly the end of it. Afterward, Zoe had to have an interview at a US consulate. She had decided on the Frankfurt consulate, thinking it would be less crowded than the one in Berlin, and she had made the first possible appointment, at 8:40 in the morning. The result was that she had to stand in the pouring rain with about thirty other people in a line in front of the consulate building. Thirty wet minutes later, she was allowed to go through security (No cell phones! No keys! No umbrellas!). Then she had to take a number and sit in a waiting room with the other thirty people who obviously also had appointments at 8:40 with the only available consular officer. During the “interview,” which took place more than an hour and a half later, she only had to hand over the filled-in forms (which she had already submitted online) by sliding them under a bulletproof glass window. Zoe had never been in East Germany when it was still the German Democratic Republic, but she imagined that the bureaucracy back then must have worked the same way. And the results had been clear to see when the Berlin Wall had come down . . .
“And what exactly is your profession?” the JFK immigration officer asked.
“I’m the new Senior Vice President of Creative Digital Solutions for Schoenhoff Publishing.”
“What’s that all about?” he wanted to know. He looked up from his computer keyboard for the first time and assessed Zoe intensely, as though he’d just discovered a new species.
“I’m supposed to seamlessly integrate the new media with the old. Blogging, social networking, archiving.”
“And that’s called journalism these days?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“Absolutely!” Zoe answered.
“Well, what do you know,” he said, shaking his head. He stamped her passport and waved her through. “Welcome to the United States!”
She smiled politely as a precautionary measure. It wasn’t generally a good idea to question the opinion of anyone in uniform. Then she walked toward baggage claim as fast as she could without actually running. She wanted to get there before Mr. “Welcome to the United States” could change his mind. She heaved both her suitcases from the baggage carousel, thinking they must be dizzy from riding around in circles for hours. Then she went through customs and another security area, and finally made it to the arrivals hall.
“Get ready to step out of your comfort zone and dare to be foolish,” Allegra had said, offering a pearl of wisdom when Zoe announced her intention to come to New York. And that’s exactly what Zoe planned to do with her future.
3
In the arrivals hall, a short man in a black uniform and cap held up a sign with Zoe’s name on it. Her chauffeur. Without batting an eye, he took both of her suitcases. They were seriously overweight. At the airport in Berlin she would have had to pay a hefty extra fee to have someone carry them if she hadn’t flashed her new Senator Card. The chauffeur led her outside to a black Mercedes limousine.
The limo had been booked by Zoe’s half-secretary in Germany because Allegra normally refused to take taxis when she visited New York.
“Your feet get wet when it rains because the floors are full of holes. And when it’s hot, your thighs stick to the plastic seats,” Al had complained after her first (and last) journey in a yellow cab.
The New York sky shone with a promisingly bright shade of blue as Zoe and her driver stepped out of Terminal One. It had to have been at least 30 degrees warmer than in Berlin, where in the last two weeks of July it had reached the spectacular high of 60 degrees, with almost constant rain.
Zoe was happy about the nice weather until the humidity hit her. It felt like a frontal collision with a cement wall. She didn’t know which part of her body started to sweat first: her forehead, her upper lip, or her armpits. The sweat even started to run down the backs of her legs. If not for the row of classic New York yellow taxis right in front of her, she would have thought she’d landed on some Caribbean island, right before the afternoon thunderstorm. Summer in the city.
The driver held open the rear door of the limo for her. It seemed almost like magic that it was ice-cold inside. Zoe got in as quickly and elegantly as possible, like Kate Middleton. On the seat lay current issues of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In the back pocket of the seat in front of her, which had been shoved forward as much as possible to offer maximum legroom, there were two bottles of mineral water—one sparkling and one still.
Zoe Schuhmacher felt like a Hollywood star who had just successfully shaken off the paparazzi. She let herself relax into the luxuriously cool leather seat.
The author and film producer Ephraim Kishon once said, “America is just a cleaner suburb of New York.” How wrong he was, Zoe thought. She asked her chauffeur to drive over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan, as Allegra had recommended, rather than through the Midtown Tunnel. She wanted to actually see the city on her ride in and not feel like a vole blinded by the sun when it finally emerged into the light. As they turned off the Long Island Expressway onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and were about to drive over a rickety-looking old bridge that was full of potholes, the Manhattan skyline opened up on the other side of the East River. The glaring midday sun made the skyscrapers shine in hazy silver-gray—like a mirage—and the art deco spire of the Chrysler Building glittered like a thousand broken mirrors. Two helicopters hovered above the East River, heading toward One World Trade Center, the highest building in the Western world. Allegra liked to say it was giant middle finger, stretching into the air as if to say “Fuck you, Al Qaeda.”
In movies, New York City was often portrayed as a character in itself, Zoe remembered. Not in the leading role, but it always had a very important supporting role. It could play the role of the seducer, for example: stylish, powerful, and sexy, but just a little maladjusted. Like virtually any character played by George Clooney.
They drove over the Brooklyn Bridge, through lower Manhattan, and finally up 6th Avenue, until the driver turned onto 52nd Street and stopped in front of the green-and-gold striped awning of the Four Seasons Executive Residences. Schoenhoff Publishing had rented an apartment there for her first month.
“It’s furnished,” the half-secretary had informed her.
“Hmm, that could be interesting,” Zoe had answered, picturing the worn-out sofa in her first college apartment.
“Welcome home, Ms. Schuhmacher,” a doorman greeted her while opening the limo door. He’d obviously been briefed on her arrival. “My name is Devon. How are you?”
“Um, fine, and you?” She was trying out her best American English, remembering that Allegra had told her that Americans didn’t actually expect an honest answer to that question, or even any answer at all. A German, on the other hand, would tell you about her last migraine or that her dog was sick.
Devon took Zoe’s suitcases, dismissed the chauffeur, and held open the door to the foyer. The elevator stood open and ready at the other end of the room.
“After you, Ms. Schuhmacher.”
Zoe hesitated a little at first, and then added “Thank you” as a precaution. She wasn’t sure how to react to little courtesies like this. After all, German men almost never held doors for women. That bit of chivalry had been killed by feminism in the seventies. Most German men assumed that if women wanted to be liberated, they should open doors for themselves.
The elevator ascended noiselessly to the forty-seventh floor, where Devon took the lead again and unlocked Apartment 47C at the end of the hall.
“My pleasure, Ms. Schuhmacher,” he said. He tipped his cap and headed out toward the elevator.
Zoe hesitantly entered her new home. The architect seemed to have considered an entry hall to be a waste of space. The door opened up directly onto a furnished living room that looked like a showroom for Calvin Klein Home. The walls were painted in a shade the interior decorator had probably called “sand.” The “driftwood” carpet blended in harmoniously, and the sofa was a soothing “pebble.” It was more relaxing than an expensive psychiatrist’s waiting room. The only things missing were a gurgling indoor fountain and a statue of Buddha.
Zoe took a few more steps and let her fingers slide over the counter of the built-in stainless steel kitchen. Then she opened a door that led to a bedroom with a giant king-sized bed and a flat screen television that was almost as big. On the bed were seven pillows in various sizes and shades of mauve. They had been expertly laid out with a perfect karate-chop dent in the center of each pillow.
“Furnished. In boutique-hotel quality,” the half-secretary had insisted, and now Zoe finally believed her.
Zoe thought it was strange that she couldn’t find a single armoire in the entire apartment. She walked back and forth between the living room and the bedroom. There was no armoire in the entry area, and definitely none in the bedroom. But there were two bathrooms. Zoe was confused. Such an essential piece of furniture couldn’t possibly be missing.
“Am I supposed to put my clothes in the bathtub? Or in the oven, like Carrie Bradshaw?” she asked the bedroom door. Zoe liked to talk to herself when she was alone, or if she was angry. But she actually preferred talking to inanimate objects—they couldn’t talk back. She decided to call the doorman again.
“Devon, could you please come up again?” she asked a few seconds later over the house intercom. With its digital touch display, it looked like something out of a spaceship’s cockpit. Apparently you could do anything with it: let in visitors, order pizza, have laundry or dry cleaning picked up—but only if you had a degree in software engineering.
New York for Beginners Page 2