New York for Beginners

by Remke, Susann

  “Hello,” Zoe said to her new colleagues. “I’m the new Senior Vice President of Creative Digital Solutions.”

  “That’s what I said,” the poisonous blonde answered. She pointed across the room with a manicured finger. “You get the corner office over there. Come on, I’ll show it to you.”

  Obviously, Zoe had been upgraded in her career from the longhouse of the masses to the personal tepee of the second-in-command—a tepee that came with a sofa and potted plants, as was certainly stated somewhere in a set of office infrastructure regulations. There was a cardboard box on the desk with her new business cards. Blondie sat down uninvited, with one buttock on Zoe’s new desk, her legs crossed casually.

  “Now tell me how someone like you managed to snag this job,” she whispered in a sweet, conspiratorial tone, as though she must have known Zoe since her Barbie-doll days, at least. “You’re very well acquainted with corporate management, aren’t you?”

  The question was either totally brazen or completely stupid. “We have a lot of respect for each other,” Zoe answered as neutrally as possible. The bitch could think what she wanted. She would anyway.

  “Well, that can’t possibly be the only thing behind it.”

  “That, and the fact that I’m damn good at what I do,” Zoe shot back.

  “Ah,” Madison replied. That variant of the story obviously hadn’t occurred to her. “And what exactly do you do here?”

  “First I’m going to scout around a little,” Zoe explained patiently. “I’ll visit other media ventures to learn more about their digital strategies and how they imagine earning money from them. This afternoon, for example, I’ll be visiting The New York Times. Besides that I’ll be writing my column for StyleChicks. And we want to add verticals for new themes. The arts, for example. And relationships.”

  “Yeah, yeah, the brave new world,” Madison chirped. Obviously it was too much information for her to process all at once. She lifted her butt off of Zoe’s desk and disappeared through the office door.

  Zoe glanced at her on her way out and made a quick mental note: Not to be trusted. Then she turned on the computer. She was overcome with an irrational hope that she had received an email from McNeighbor. Of course that was impossible, because he didn’t even have her email address. Yesterday evening, after her Broadway expedition, she had thought she’d heard sounds coming from 47A. Music, and something that sounded like dishes clattering while setting a table or emptying a dishwasher. Ear pressed to her apartment door, she had listened quietly and even held her breath—until she had gotten dizzy and started to feel extremely silly. She was acting like a twelve-year-old who’d fallen in love for the first time. But when she heard sounds again in the morning she couldn’t help but play spy a second time. She looked out her peephole to see who was walking down the hall. She only saw a maintenance man and a woman in yoga clothes, distorted through the lens, looking wider than tall.

  Zoe asked herself what the unwritten rules of a “friends with benefits” relationship were. Were they determined in bilateral discussions, or did they simply exist? After ten years with the Big Nice Nothing, she was woefully out of practice. And besides, what were the dating habits of New Yorkers, anyway?

  The legendary New York Times Living Room was on the twenty-eighth floor of the new building on 8th Avenue. This was Zoe’s first meeting for her new job. At reception in the ground-floor lobby, Zoe had to show identification and be photographed for her visitor’s pass. She was told that she wasn’t allowed to go to the Research and Development department alone. She had to wait until her host, Alex Sontheim, who held the impressive title Chief Technology Strategist, came to pick her up. Zoe observed the people who were streaming toward the eight elevators: a few stiff-looking suit-wearers who looked like they were from the legal department; a disheveled man in an unironed shirt with hair like Albert Einstein (probably a serious writer who’d proven his value long ago and didn’t need to impress anyone anymore); and a kid in jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and white sport socks with sandals. Under any other circumstances, he could have passed for a newspaper boy.

  “Hi, Alex!” Zoe walked toward him with her hand outstretched.

  “You must be Zoe,” he answered a little hesitantly, obviously wondering how she had recognized him.

  “We don’t know each other. You just look like someone who works in R&D,” she said.

  Alex laughed. Then he stuck his card in the elevator security device and brought her directly to the twenty-eighth floor, without stopping. Screens installed all along the walls of the hallway showed news being broadcast all over the world.

  “Welcome to the New York Times Living Room,” Alex said, after they’d passed through security at the end of the hall. The R&D department really did look almost like an apartment. Aside from a few desks, there were leather sofas, an open kitchen, flat screens on the walls, and various tables upon which sat laptops, Kindles, Nooks, Nexus tablets, and iPads of every generation. It sort of looked like Mark Zuckerberg had moved into the showroom of an upscale furniture store.

  Zoe and Alex stopped at a kitchen table whose top was actually a huge flat screen. The display featured different categories of news symbolized by virtual stacks of newspaper clippings. One was politics, another was culture. And there was a huge stack for various social networks, as though someone had ordered the categories according to their own interests.

  Alex explained the idea of “information shadows” that surrounded people who were active on the Internet. “We believe there aren’t individual information categories anymore. People don’t consume news in a planned window of time anymore, like reading the paper in the morning on the subway or sitting in front of the television in the evening. News is everywhere. It’s available at any time of day on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and NYTimes.com. That’s why it needs to be consumed differently.”

  “And readers aren’t just passive anymore, they generate news themselves.” Zoe added.

  “Exactly. The breakfast table is a classic place for communication, but in the future the communication will be multimedia-based.”

  Alex led her into the bathroom, in front of a mirror in which Zoe could see her reflection from the waist up. Alex pressed a button, and the mirror lit up like a television. Zoe saw a miniature version of the kitchen table and its contents on the left side of the mirror, and a miniature closet on the right, which was activated by voice command. Upon request, a virtual clothes rack slid forward to display its contents.

  “Flowered blouse,” Alex commanded. Three blouses in different colors appeared. Alex touched the one in the middle. It suddenly filled almost the entire mirror, and then positioned itself exactly over Zoe’s reflection.

  “Fantastic!” Zoe said. “So I can try on clothes without even removing them from my closet, and read the news at the same time.”

  “Or dictate emails, or check the weather.”

  “Isn’t this all a bit Jetsons? And why is The New York Times interested in my closet, anyway?”

  “Because we’re interested in how you’ll live in the future, and how The New York Times will fit into your life.”

  Two hours later, Zoe left the building from the 41st Street exit and walked toward Times Square. She was deeply impressed at how forward-looking The Times’s strategy was. It was ironic that the paper’s nickname was the Gray Lady.

  Zoe turned right at Times Square and had to keep zigzagging around groups of tourists staring with their mouths hanging open at the giant advertising screens. Zoe was looking for a specific little red food truck. It was only four in the afternoon, but her stomach was still set on German time and telling her that it was long past dinnertime. A long line stretched out in front of the Rickshaw Dumpling Bar. Allegra had told her that they had the best Asian dumplings west of China. Zoe studied the handwritten menu on the side of the little snack bar on wheels. “Nice Dumplings” was written in large le
tters across the top. There were pork dumplings with Chinese leek, chicken dumplings with Thai basil, and edamame dumplings with lemon-sansho dip. As a side dish, you could have sesame-noodle salad with chili. One of everything, please, she thought, but then decided to go for the vegetarian option. Two creatively dressed girls were standing in front of her in line. One was wearing an extra-large varsity jacket with hot pink chinos. The other wore a light-blue men’s shirt and striped seersucker pants with neon-yellow wedge shoes. Zoe reached for her phone. She had to post to StyleChicks again this evening.

  “Hey, you two look really great,” she said to the girls. “Can I take your picture for my fashion blog?”

  “Yeah, sure,” one answered happily before striking a pose.

  “What’s your blog called?” the other wanted to know.

  “StyleChicks,” Zoe said, and took a few snapshots. “We’re the most successful German fashion website. What’s your name, where are you from, and what are you wearing?”

  Zoe held up her phone to record their answers.

  The girl in stripes said, “My name is Hanneli, I live in Brooklyn and study at FIT. I’m wearing a men’s shirt by Pink, and pants from the flea market.”

  “And my name is Valentina. I live on the Lower East Side and go to FIT, too. I’m wearing a Lacoste jacket with J. Crew pants. And a Jil Sander beanie.”

  “Oh, and my shoes are Marc Jacobs,” Hanneli added. “Marc by Marc Jacobs.”

  Then all three of them ordered edamame dumplings.

  When Zoe returned to the Four Seasons Executive Residences, she paused in the hallway between 47A and 47C. 47A was completely quiet. Maybe McNeighbor moved out, she thought, the worst-case scenario racing through her head. After all, these were temporary business apartments. She considered knocking but couldn’t persuade herself to do it. Somehow it didn’t seem right to chase a guy who had ignored her for the past thirty-six hours. On the other hand, she had made up her mind to be foolish, and she’d already put it off once on Sunday. She decided to risk taking a step over the imaginary line that divided her side of the hall from McNeighbor’s when she heard the elevator doors open with a hydraulic swish. Zoe sprinted to her apartment, closing the door behind her as fast as she could. She was afraid to look out through the peephole in case someone could see that she was looking; they’d see a grossly distorted eye or something. So she pressed her ear to the door and tried to determine if it was actually McNeighbor. But according to her acoustic analysis, it must have been someone who lived at the other end of the hall.

  “You are being very silly,” she said to herself and sat down on her desk. But she couldn’t get her damn neighbor out of her head.

  She switched on her laptop and went to look over the photos on her phone for StyleChicks while her computer loaded. She’d received three text messages from Benni since checking her phone last.

  I know where u r now. Do u want 2 talk?

  Zoe, b reasonable!

  Can we ever b friends?

  This time, Zoe answered.

  No, no, and no.

  Zoe actually found it offensive that BNN wanted to be friends with her. What was the point of that? So that she could watch a live stream of his wedding to the blue avatar, and then see the photos of their (probably light-blue) babies? And watch BNN become one of those constantly stressed but sensationally happy fathers who fell into bed with exhaustion before the late-night news every night? Or maybe he’d sleep on the sofa because the light-blue babies were sharing the bed with his wife? No thanks!

  After Zoe calmed down again, she posted the pictures of the two girls on the blog. Then she Googled New York rental apartments. She had to find something by the end of the month at the latest. She entered her criteria on the Corcoran website, which had been recommended to her: 1BR, Manhattan, Nolita or SoHo District, outdoor space (a balcony would be nice, wouldn’t it? After all, she earned $180,000 a year!). But she got only one result: a one-bedroom apartment on her beloved Mott Street, with no balcony or terrace, for $5,500 a month. That has to be a mistake, Zoe thought. Maybe Corcoran was the real-estate agent for movie stars and only accepted VIP clients.

  She clicked on the second-best agency. There she got three results from her search. A loft on Mercer Street, completely decorated in white, for $11,000 a month; an apartment on Greenwich Street for $5,595 a month; and a dark hole of doubtful nature on Broome Street for $3,500 dollars.

  “Hmm, this could be tricky,” she said and sighed. This wasn’t how she had imagined things going when she had haggled for her new American salary back in Berlin. She knew that New York City apartments were expensive. But this expensive? After a few more searches, in which her requirements became looser and looser, it looked like all she could afford was an apartment in Brooklyn.

  6

  SEPTEMBER

  Zoe learned from her colleagues that the New York calendar had its very own seasons. Summer began on Memorial Day weekend and ended on Labor Day weekend. The summer rental season in the Hamptons ran on this schedule. One could rent a ramshackle three-bedroom hut disguised as a vacation house for $25,000 for the summer. Or the daughter of a Russian oligarch could shell out the $750,000 rent for a place in Bridgehampton, without the least effect on her father’s blood pressure. It was all documented on Page Six of the New York Post.

  In New York City, the first Tuesday in September was not just the first day of autumn, but also the first real work day of the season. In July and August, summer hours applied (eight in the morning until three in the afternoon) and dress was “summer casual” (bare legs, no ties). Starting today, the first Tuesday in September, it was back to business.

  Zoe wasn’t dressed for autumn, first of all because no one had initiated her into these mysterious traditions (or any other unwritten law of New York society), and secondly, because it was still at least 78 degrees outside—at seven in the morning. Aside from that, Zoe hadn’t managed to completely unpack her suitcases yet. She’d spent the rest of August shopping diligently, and now her new normal closet didn’t have enough space for all of her acquisitions. Zoe had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. On the top floor of a walk-up. For $2,850 a month.

  When she had finished moving out of the Four Seasons Executive Residences on the Friday before Labor Day and was closing the door to 47C for the last time, she mustered all of her newfound courage and pushed a note under 47A’s door. She knew from the doorman that McNeighbor would be staying there until the end of November, although she herself had neither seen nor heard anything from him since their last encounter. She’d written “Hey, stranger, I’d like to see you again sometime!” She added her cell phone number below. As soon as the slip of paper was irretrievable for even the thinnest of fingers, Zoe was overcome by the certainty that she was going to regret having left the note.

  Now, in Brooklyn, Zoe examined her reflection in an old full-length mirror with a peeling gold frame that the previous renter had been kind enough to leave for her. She decided she was ready for the big day. She wore a lemon-yellow Theory sheath dress with elegant, nude Michael Kors strappy sandals. She was ready to meet the CEO. Franziska von Schoenhoff had called in to say that she would be at the New York office to introduce new personnel. She wanted to introduce Zoe, the new Digital Queen, and the new head of the New York office. Zoe had heard through the office grapevine that he was an American, a friend of Franziska’s long-lost son. Justus Theo von Schoenhoff was actually supposed to take over Mama’s business someday, but during winter break of his final year of university, he had jetted off to Sravasti, India, for a course in Vipassana meditation instead of meeting his parents in St. Barts and had never come back.

  Zoe walked down the stairs of her new home. The red sandstone townhouse was on President Street in a pretty part of Brooklyn called Carroll Gardens. The office messenger at Schoenhoff, Michelangelo, had grown up in the area and assured Zoe that it was very safe. “Unles
s of course you want to open a ristorante,” he’d said. Then she’d have to pay protection money. So Zoe Schuhmacher rented herself an apartment in the ancestral territory of the New York Cosa Nostra.

  She walked along President Street, which was lined with big, old trees, and tried to remember where the subway station was. Apparently a new bakery/ice-cream shop with the unfortunate name of Momofuku Milk Bar had just opened right next to the station, as her new landlady had proudly announced at least three times. They had flavors of soft-serve ice cream that were so unique they were copyrighted. One such flavor was Cereal Milk, which tasted like the milk at the bottom of a bowl of Frosted Flakes, after the sugar had soaked into it. Zoe found the idea extremely clever. For the previous thirty-four years of her life she’d been convinced that one didn’t eat Frosted Flakes for the flakes, but for the milk that was left at the bottom of the bowl.

  Zoe found 2nd Place, Momofuku Milk Bar, and then the subway station. The ice cream would have to wait until after work—as a reward for what she was certain would be a spectacular day.

  The conference room had a view of the East River, and it was very full. Only senior editors were allowed to sit at the big table; interns and assistants sat on the windowsills or leaned against the walls. Zoe chose a chair at the back, on the left-hand side of the table. She was seated as far as possible from the enemy, just like the old days in Latin class. Both coffee and mineral water in funny tropical-print bottles that had actually been flown in from Fiji were available. And there were blueberry muffins. Zoe grabbed one immediately—after all, there clearly weren’t enough for everyone. She had just taken an extra-large bite when the CEO of Schoenhoff entered the room. She was sixty-four, was wearing one of those tent-like A-line Marni dresses that were so popular this season, and had styled her iron-gray hair into an artistic chignon. In the seventies, she had simultaneously built up a fashion-magazine empire and mail-order company. Twenty-five million copies of the legendary Schoenhoff catalogue, as thick as a telephone book, were released twice a year. Back then, it was eerily clever that the magazine Women’s Beauty Weekly had cheerfully praised a pink, bunny-shaped egg cooker (perfect eggs every time, guaranteed!) before Easter, which was then available in the catalogue for $12.99. Forty years later, the strategy would be called “synergy effect.”