And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  “For real?” José abruptly stood up, as if he were afraid she might change her mind.

  Sophia nodded. For real.

  28

  Yo, Helen, whassup? Roy here. But I guess you know my voice.

  —Man, it is so harsh what happened to you. I’m really, really sorry.

  Magda told me she was, like, making these tapes for you and so, I thought, shit, I could make you, like, a CD, you know? So you wouldn’t be falling too far behind on what was happening in the music scene. So there are, like, five songs on this CD. One for every year we were friends, which I guess is kind of corny, but someday, when you’re better, we can listen together, and I’ll tell you why I picked them.

  —After your accident, I gotta tell you, I felt really low. Like it was my fault. I mean, if I hadn’t left, you never would have ended up with that old guy. What was up with that? He sounded like a real loser. I guess I shouldn’t say that. He was probably cool—’cause, I mean, you wouldn’t go out with someone who wasn’t cool—but I asked around a little in the L.A. music scene. Well, okay, I asked my dad. He asked his friend Larry and, like, nobody had heard of him. I mean, that’s cool. Everybody has to start somewhere. It’s just, you know, he wasn’t that young or anything. It’s just, what we had was so special. I don’t know if that comes around ever again. My dad says the first time is always like that, but I don’t think so. I think what we had was special. We could have even gotten married someday. Maybe.

  —I’m not blaming you for hooking up. I mean, shit, I hooked up with some chicks here in New Jersey. Because, I mean, you said that was okay. But those girls were just, like, I don’t know. Cold. You know what I mean? Cold-blooded bitches. Like every thing was, what are you going to do for me? I guess that is the way of the world. But I never saw you that way.

  —It looks like I might be coming back to L.A. Greg and I are thinking about getting a band together. He didn’t get into any colleges he applied to so he’s, like, let’s hang. And I’m like, cool, because I didn’t even apply to college. Education is so bogus, if you ask me. It’s just, like, teaching everybody to think the same, act the same, dress the same. It’s, like, University of Abercrombie, you now? Old Navy U. The College of Starbucks. Where’s the originality? My mom is totally cool with that. As she pointed out, she didn’t exactly have an extra fifty thou sitting around anyway. And my dad isn’t exactly in a position. So, shit, whatever. I can always DJ bar mitzvahs until we’re discovered.

  —I don’t think having me around was, like, really part of my mom’s life plan. Some of her boyfriends are only, like, five years older than me. Isn’t that so fucking weird? I mean, my dad always went for younger chicks, too, but that was different. I don’t know. I mean, to each his own. But whatever. Sometimes I’d, like, play video games with one of her boyfriends and he’d be, like, this is cool, and my mom would be there, like, drinking her white wine, smiling in the background.

  —Anyway, my dad’s lawyer is filing a lawsuit to get me a share of the house. Did I tell you it sold? Yeah, we’re not neighbors anymore. No more late-night visits, no more, “Arise, sweet Juliet” or whatever your dad used to say. I never understood half of what he said, but he was a cool guy. And your mom. She was a little scary, but I guess if I had kids, I’d feel the same way about someone like me. But shit. By the time you wake up out of that coma, I think I’ll really have made it. You’ll see.

  —Okay, peace. Stay cool. Stay beautiful. I love you.

  —P.S. I don’t have the rights to these songs or anything, so don’t, like, play this for any policemen or anything.

  29

  harry paid for the too-expensive hotel Sophia stayed in while she looked for a place in Manhattan. Initially, she protested but he insisted, claiming he could write it off as a business expense for Swimming with Fishes, his new company, which was turning out to be a surprising success. Just the week before, he had posed in a swimming pool for the cover of L.A. Magazine holding a bottle-nosed pleckie between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s a million times better than acting,” he told Sophia. There were a few problems with the business. The fish still bit, but since so few of his clients actually swam in their pools, it was less of a problem than he had anticipated. Also, it was necessary to change the pool water every three months, which, given the fact that Southern California was a desert, did somewhat defeat the environmental benefit of the undertaking, but it was a point no one seemed to have noticed.

  The expensive hotel was a plea sure. At first. Previously, when she and Darius had visited the city, they’d stayed at a Holiday Inn in Chinatown, ostentatiously congratulating themselves for having found the best deal in the city. “And so clean,” they’d remark to their friends in California. But the particle board nightstand and polyester blend sheets of the place had always depressed her. It was the way of the city, she consoled herself—people went out as much as they did because their apartments were so crappy. At the expensive hotel, the satin sheen of the sheets gave her a small thrill when she went to bed, and though she was used to regular sightings of celebrities in L.A., in the hotel, you could practically see the pores on their noses. One night, she rode up in the elevator with an inebriated rock star who kept grabbing the breast of a girl less than half his age. The girl moved the hand away and smiled in a “Men!” way at Sophia, who could remember being nineteen and dancing to the man’s voice. Another night, an aged movie star famous for her gravelly voice cast an imperious eye on the black sneakers Sophia liked to wear on her long city walks. But mostly, the people in the elevator were businessmen who ignored her. Once one of them arched his eyebrow at her in a way that seemed like an invitation. She was so grateful to be noticed, she could have kissed him. But she declined whatever he was offering with a half smile, demurely keeping her eyes on the floor. I am not fit for human contact, she said to herself.

  By the end of her first week, the fawning doormen (did she tip them every time they got her a cab?) and the eight-dollar cups of coffee from room service began to oppress her. She needed a place of her own, but the furnished sublets she’d seen through real-estate agents had all depressed her. Each had the same pale beige walls, pull-out couch, banal seascapes, and packets of nondairy creamer in the maple-veneer cabinets.

  “Don’t you have anything with more personality?” she asked her real-estate agent, an unpleasant young woman who seemed to have constant problems with her shoes.

  “Honey,” the woman said, dangling a stiletto heel from her toe, “these apartments are designed not to have personality.” Sophia sighed. Why was a woman fifteen years her junior calling her “honey”? And why did she have to pay her a month’s rent for a six-month sublet? To finance her “sabbatical,” Sophia had cashed in a mutual fund she’d started back when Helen was born. The money had grown considerably over the years, but at this rate, she’d be broke in six months.

  It would be easier and cheaper to look for an empty apartment but she didn’t want to be weighed down with objects. One of the worst parts of leaving Los Angeles had been the pain of leaving the house: Who would weed her perennial beds or chase the squirrels from her bulbs? Who would know where she had bought that pair of sheets with the cherry blossom pattern? That set of royal blue towels? Who would remember the thousands of meals served on that set of blue faience dishes? Sometimes, she felt the record of her entire adult life could be found only in those every day objects, the tools she had used to serve her family’s endless needs. And, in the end, for what? So they could leave when it suited them.

  It was Miranda who suggested she check out one of the populist bulletin boards that had sprung up on the Internet. Mostly, people seemed to be looking for roommates who liked cats, did not smoke, play loud music, do drugs, or have overnight guests. Apartments that sounded like possibilities were in neighborhoods she had ruled out during her long walks. The Upper East Side felt too suburban, Midtown too chaotic, Chelsea too young, the Village unpleasantly overrun with tourists on the weekend, the Lower East Side t
oo dirty. She liked the wide-open space of Tribeca and the cones of silvery light reflected off the river, but there were no listings for furnished apartments down there. Finally, on the Upper West Side, she found something that looked promising.

  SUBLET AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY—French professor (Columbia U.) seeks professional, mature adult to sublet charming book-, light-filled apartment on Upper West Side. NO pets. No shares. References.

  The price was half what she’d been looking at and did not include a finder’s fee. Sophia considered how best to reply.

  Hi. My name is Sophia McMartin. I am visiting New York from California…

  She stopped typing. Why was she in New York? Could she write the truth, that a part of her had always felt that she hadn’t really lived until she lived in New York? That one of her regrets in marrying Darius was missing the chance to mea sure herself against that city, to throw herself headlong into its hurly-burly and see how she fared? Now that she was there, wandering its busy streets, going to museums alone, ordering room service because she felt too self-conscious alone in a restaurant, she feared she had waited too long. The city seemed like a shop where every item on the shelf was spoken for. Walking the streets, going to movies, riding the subway, she felt envy for every one—the Wall Streeters checking their watches and tapping their feet, ever mindful that time is money, money is time, the NYU kids with their arty self-absorption, even the weary West Indian nannies on their way home to Queens. They all had a purpose in life. A reason to get out of bed and propel themselves into the maw of life. No, that would be entirely too much information. It would make her seem too emotional, too unstable. She should be terse, to the point and, like a New Yorker, identify herself by what she did.

  …on leave from my job at the Bollanger Museum. Please ring me for a convenient time to look at the apartment.

  She hit Send. There were, according to the search engine on the site, twenty-one more entries that met her criteria. She knew she should keep looking, experience had told her that for every ten things you try in life, you can only reasonably expect one to work out. But she had a good feeling about this apartment. If she sent out queries on any other apartment, she feared she would compromise the pureness of the feeling. She took a walk, idly browsing the ludicrously expensive boutiques on Madison Avenue. When she arrived back at the hotel, pleasantly tired from her walk, the bar was buzzing with the after-work-drinks crowd. The first time she’d heard that roar, it had made her so wistful, she’d gone upstairs and fixed herself a martini from the minibar. After a few sips, she knew it had been a mistake. What was there left to do at six-thirty in the evening but get more drunk? At least if she had an apartment, she could busy herself with buying food, making dinner, cleaning up. Hotels took too much of the work out of life.

  As she unlocked the door to her room, the phone began to ring.

  “Hello?” she answered, breathless.

  “Sophia?” the woman’s voice was softly accented. “I am Micheline. You sent an e-mail about the apartment.”

  “Yes,” Sophia answered, trying not to sound excited. People didn’t like to give you things if you wanted them too much. “Is it still available?”

  “It is. Could you come see it tonight?”

  “Tonight?” Sophia started to say no, it was too spur-of-the-moment. She needed time. But time for what? That was the old Sophia talking, the one who had obligations that could not be dropped at a moment’s notice. The new Sophia had nothing to do.

  The apartment was on the third floor of a five-story limestone building, a few blocks south of Columbia University. The block felt prosperous and abandoned—perfect for muggers. She rang a buzzer and went back outside, as Micheline had instructed. Somewhere above, a window opened and a woman’s head appeared.

  “Hello!” the head yelled, followed by a falling sock weighted down with two keys. Sophia picked up the sock and used the key to open the door. She could tell from the marble floor and crystal chandelier in the lobby that the building had once been grand, but over the years it had been reconfigured and rented as apartments, reflecting the changing fortune of the neighborhood.

  Micheline Theroux lived in a one-bedroom apartment that overlooked the street in the front and an airshaft in the back. There were details a real-estate agent would call charming—a nonworking marble fireplace, intricate moldings, and a parquet wood floor—but the kitchen was cramped and unrenovated, with linoleum that needed replacing and a bathroom faucet that leaked.

  “It’s perfect,” Sophia announced, forgetting her vow to play it cool.

  Micheline smiled. She was slim, around Sophia’s age, with hair cut in a severe pageboy style and smudgy black lines under her eyes that made her look vaguely racoonish. Sophia wondered if she had been crying.

  “I was so glad to get your e-mail because I am leaving tomorrow,” she said, folding a shiny aqua raincoat, a color Sophia would never dare. “My father has had a heart attack and is in the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sophia said.

  Micheline shrugged her shoulders in the dismissive way of the French. “Your whole life, you know your parents are going to die before you. But when it happens, you’re surprised.”

  Sophia nodded. She had a lot to say on that particular subject but kept her mouth shut. She was so out of the habit of talking, she couldn’t be sure what would happen if she were to open her mouth. The last thing she wanted to do was let loose the unstable avalanche of loneliness that had been building inside ever since she had called Darius to say she was leaving for New York. Some part of her had been gratified by the stunned silence on the other end of the line. How dare he think himself unsurprisable when it came to her. Another part of her felt as if the membrane that kept the sane part of the brain from the insane part had been stretched too thin by the move. The other day at the Met she’d stood a full fifteen minutes in front of a Goya depicting madness as a winged monster hovering over a distraught man. According to the museum’s commentary, the tortured man was the artist himself. That’s just how it feels, she’d thought, wondering if the winged monkeys from The Wizard of Oz were based on the painting.

  “Anyway,” Micheline continued, “I need to do some work at the university in Paris, so it all works out. A friend has agreed to take my classes for the rest of the semester. If you take the apartment, every thing will be perfect.”

  Sophia was startled by how quickly the woman made up her mind. If it had been Sophia, she would have agonized for days over a prospective tenant in her home.

  “You’ll want references of course,” Sophia said.

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  The question she dreaded. “I needed a change.” She shrugged.

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes, but my husband stayed in California. He doesn’t like the cold.” Sophia wasn’t sure why she added that last lie.

  “And what are you doing here?”

  “I walk. I go to the theater.”

  “That’s all?”

  The bluntness of the French. She had forgotten.

  “I am going to start art classes soon.”

  “Ah, where will you study?”

  Sophia hesitated. It was true, she had thought about taking art lessons more than once but she had done nothing to make it happen. “I am still trying to decide.”

  Micheline reached into her purse to extract an electronic organizer she turned on with a roll of her thumb. “I have a friend who is teaching at the LeBraun School, you must call him.”

  Sophia recognized Micheline’s type. She was the sort of woman who was forever fixing other people ’s lives, pushing phone numbers on them, making connections, insisting you follow her suggestions. At any other moment in her life, Sophia would have brushed her off as a know-it-all nuisance.

  “His name is Coleman Kramer.”

  “It sounds familiar.”

  “Doubtful. He got one glowing review in the Times twenty years ago, but pretend you’ve heard of him, it will make his day
.” Micheline raised a plucked eyebrow as she handed Sophia the number. “A charming man, but not to be taken seriously.” Sophia understood that to mean Micheline had slept with him.

  “Does he know that?”

  “He’ll be the first to tell you.”

  “I’m actually separated from my husband,” Sophia volunteered for a reason she didn’t entirely understand.

  “Yes, me too.” The two women smiled at each other. Sophia left soon after with a set of keys, a handwritten receipt for three months’ rent, and Coleman Kramer’s phone number.

  Later that night, while informing the clerk at the front desk of the hotel that she would be checking out the next day, she glimpsed the profile of a man at a desk through an open door. Something about him looked familiar. Going up in the elevator, she tried to place the man’s face. Was he famous? Had she met him in California? Did Darius know him? In her room, she undressed, turned on the faucets of her bathtub, and lowered herself into the water. With her eyes closed, she let the excitement of the day settle into her. She had an apartment. A home. A place she could settle into, albeit temporarily. And it had all happened so quickly, as if it were somehow meant to be.

  Suddenly, she remembered where she had seen the man at the desk. He was the one who had noticed her in the elevator. Her face went hot with humiliation. He wasn’t flirting, he was paid to smile at her. How mortifying. She thought of the time a few years before, when she and Darius had agreed to meet in the bar of the most expensive hotel in Athens after a day of separate sightseeing. She had arrived half an hour late to find her husband in a state of aggravated self-pity. Apparently, a knockout Nordic—big tits, corn-silk hair, milky blue eyes—had sat next to him and struck up a conversation. He could hardly believe his luck. After a few minutes, she asked, in a very friendly, matter-of-fact way if he would be interested in a “date.” Darius had blushed, thanked her profusely, told her he was immensely flattered but was, in fact, married and would have to decline her offer. She had smiled at his answer. “That’s okay,” she said, putting a hand on his thigh, “most of my clients are.”