I was ten years old the first time I came to New York City: in Schenectady, about a hundred and fifty miles up the Hudson River, we spoke of it in hushed tones, with insinuations of danger. There were murders there, and bad things that happened in Central Park: sometimes, my parents hid their copies of Newsweek so that we children would not read the details. Everyone knew that if you went to New York City you did not take the subway, and if you did take the subway you did not touch anything.
The things I remember most from that first trip, a daylong jaunt with family friends who were visiting from Scotland, are the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, walking through Macy’s, and feeling afraid to touch things, because I understood that I should. I remember riding in a yellow cab with my mother and brother and sister in the back seat, with my father in the front asking the driver about his life before New York, in Russia.
But I also remember going to a diner within a stone’s throw of Penn Station, maybe the actual same urine-hued one, in the last hour before our train for home was due to leave. There, I drank a glass of chocolate milk with such enthusiasm – it was something I was not allowed to consume at home, but this was New York City – that the waitress brought me another one. On the house, honey! she said, and her generosity was almost certainly because I looked cute and was well behaved and quiet, but made me feel greedy and embarrassed, for by then I already had come to understand that to be female was to feel ashamed of the public acknowledgement of appetite.
Later, after the meal, we walked through the catacombs of Penn Station to catch our Amtrak home, and passed a man with one leg of his jeans neatly shredded into panels to accommodate the girth of his grotesque swollen calf. The man and I made eye contact and he smiled at me with what looked to me like broad delight, walking with the closest thing to a swagger that kind of leg could permit. The panels of denim swung. For ever after, his smile and his huge calf came to mind whenever someone mentioned New York City. Maybe that’s one reason why when so many of the people I went to high school and college with moved down to the city to seek adventure and peril in New York’s every day, I had avoided making it my home.
In the urine-coloured diner, at a table for four that felt designed to remind me that I did not have three other people with me, I ordered a turkey burger and French fries. With my glass of water, the waitress brought me two large dill pickles. The pickles made me feel special, until I noticed that the man at the next table also had been given his own pair, alongside his blueberry pancakes. I ate the pickles, which were softer than I would have liked, and stared at the rain and also at my iPhone, willing the clock to move forward to a time when it would be reasonable for me to get in a cab to Brooklyn to meet the man who would give me the keys to my new home. I thought about how, technically, if home is where your stuff is, I lived in the urine-coloured diner.
Isn’t it great, I thought, that some day I will reflect on my life on New York and know that everything after the first hour was an improvement?
My bohemian years took place in London, if by bohemian you can mean ‘paying the rent with cash advanced from my credit card for an apartment that had no running water three months of the year’. If by bohemian you refer to ‘eating oatmeal for breakfast and dinner and also lunch while waiting for a freelance payment’. If by bohemian you mean, when invited to a warehouse party in edgy Hackney Wick, you respond, ‘Will we be driving those little forklifts or just, like, carrying flatpacks?’
Arriving in New York for the first time at thirty-two felt like getting to a party and colliding at the entrance with a lot of people who got there before you: you’re trying to find space to hang your coat up while they’re trying to reclaim theirs, because they’re ready to go home. Or move to New Jersey, or to Long Island, or the Bay Area, or in the single most alarming case of leaving New York, to a town of four thousand people in South Dakota that was a three-hour drive from the nearest airport (that’s like being at a really good party and leaving it in order to go to an under-attended potluck dinner in a church basement, where everyone has brought the same shop-bought macaroni salad, where everyone is drinking sugar-free grapefruit soda out of wax-coated paper cups).
It’s not that these people who were blowing me farewell kisses almost as soon as I arrived thought New York was a bad party. It was a great party, the best ever, they’d had a fabulous time. It was a party that they would be referring to for the rest of their lives – their lives in Long Island or New Jersey or South Dakota – as ‘back when I lived in New York’. But they were leaving. They’d had their fill and they were ready to move on.
Behind the people at the door of the party, behind the people who are getting their coats, are the people who are determined to stay until the bitter end. Some of them are the life of the thing, absolutely. You can tell by the way they’re dressed that they have money. The party has gone well for them so far. They’re sticking around to enjoy what else it has to offer. But some of the people who are still at the party are unravelling around the edges. They’ve overdone the drugs and booze, or they’re feeling pretty bad because at their age it is no longer fun or interesting to be the footloose and fancy-free life of the party. They want someone at the party to take them home, already.
The men you want to meet at the party: well, they seem to have gone quite a while ago, on the arms of women who know the right time to leave a party, women who are a little younger than you, women who might be described as whatever it is that people don’t mean when they describe you as ‘interesting’.
Women who have very glossy hair.
Some of the late-stayers are more than willing to welcome you to the party – God knows, they are longing for you to inject some new fun and life into this waning affair!
But maybe it is really time for them to go home, to recognize that for them, the party is over. Their dancing is shit, they’ve run out of things to talk about. They may try to get you to go home with them, but if you do you will find that they live in suffocating apartments, small studios with views of airshafts, or dark wood-panelled rent-controlled places above a grocery store. When these men that you meet at the party lead you to their beds you’ll find that they haven’t bothered to make them, and in the morning they will offer to make you coffee in a way that means they don’t want to make you coffee. If you accept the coffee they don’t want to make, the men will talk at you while you drink it about how they should have left the party earlier to go to Los Angeles (and by the party, just to be clear, I mean New York, and by Los Angeles, I mean Los Angeles).
In the beginning, moving to New York at thirty-two felt like going to the kind of party that can make you wish you’d either gotten off your sofa earlier or never left home at all. And yet: here I was.
Then there was the matter of New Year’s Eve. I did have some friends in New York: girls from childhood who were now women. People acquired through my time in London who were now, like me, New Yorkers. But everyone still seemed to be away from the city for Christmas, or had plans with their partners. I could have stayed in Baltimore. Should I have stayed in Baltimore? I wondered, as the cab driver dropped me off in the freezing rain a couple of blocks from the apartment, because neither of us knew where it was and we didn’t like each other. But I had decided to come to the city because as long as I was in Baltimore I was technically homeless, adrift. I had decided to make my new life in New York. I needed it to begin.
My coworker Melissa was twenty-five, hilarious, beautiful and warm, close enough to graduating from college that she could still start a sentence ‘When I was in my sorority’ without irony. We’d become friends in Berlin when the company sent her over for two weeks with her new boss to get acquainted with everyone: we drank Aperol spritzes in a square in Mitte on a hot night and shopped for folksy German cardigans in the consignment shop around the corner from the office. When I was twenty-five a woman like Melissa was exactly the kind of confident American that I did not believe I had it in me to be. Melissa was the kind of woman I wa
s hiding from in England. When I was thirty-two, Melissa seemed like someone from whom I could learn how to be an American.
I would have liked to have stayed in on New Year’s Eve; if it existed, I would have liked to take some kind of drug that would erase the time between my arrival in New York and the reopening of the office. I had never longed so much to sit at a desk and answer emails, to have a place to go in the morning. But even before I saw my first roach cross the floor of the apartment that I was subletting, where I was sleeping in a pile of clothes and my deeply-discounted Ralph Lauren duvet as I waited for a mattress to be delivered, I knew that spending the night in on my own would not make me feel good. When Melissa posted on Facebook that she and a friend were looking for someone to buy a third ticket to Billy Joel at the Barclays Center on New Year’s Eve, I decided that $300 was a small price to pay to feel that I had a place to go on the dawn of 2014. Even if Billy Joel would also be there.
I met Melissa and her friend Kelly at a restaurant in the East Village before the show. They’d made a reservation for a prix-fixe meal and kindly squeezed me in. I wore a black dress that I’d bought for an office Christmas party a year earlier, did my hair with special care. I took a photo of myself before I left the apartment, because when you are alone on New Year’s Eve when you are thirty-two, you have to take a photo of yourself or no one will. And because the occasion seemed like something to record, as if there was a possibility that I’d look back on a photograph and think: Yes, I was happy at the beginning of my life in New York. Or: At least I did my hair with special care.
When I arrived in the restaurant, Melissa and Kelly were wearing black, too: they reminded me of when I was their age, in London, when just a couple of years in it felt like the sprawl of the city might still have a lot of prizes to offer, if I had the tenacity to burrow in and dig them out.
I felt old.
The waiter brought us the prix-fixe menu, and for the thousandth time in my life I said: I’m sorry, but I just need to tell you that I’m allergic to shellfish.
My allergy to shellfish is serious and boring: developed in my mid-twenties, resulting in anaphylactic symptoms and having to have this serious and boring conversation with waiters whenever I’m in a restaurant where shellfish is a risk. Quite often, the news is greeted with weariness, with the assumption that by ‘allergy’ I mean ‘preference’, that I am a woman who has a difficult relationship with food.
OK, said the waiter, we won’t bring you the amuse bouche, then.
OK, I said, and watched as Melissa and Kelly enjoyed something made out of shrimp. On the menu, the next course was listed as pasta with red snapper. I took a bite. I paused. I chewed and swallowed, because I did not want to be paranoid. I wanted to be polite. I looked at Melissa.
I think, I said.
This has lobster broth in it, she said.
I spat a mouthful into my napkin.
Excuse me, I said.
There was only one toilet in the back of the restaurant so I had to wait for a minute or two before I could push through the door and lock it behind me and commence attempting to make myself throw up. I’m bad at vomiting on command: my gag reflex has always held up fast and brave against the tickle of my index and middle fingers at the back of my throat. So it took some time before I managed to eject the mouthful of fish and pasta and lobster over my hand and into the toilet. I washed my hands and wiped my mouth. I stood at the mirror. My eyes were shot through with the red trails of capillaries that had burst from the pressure of heaving. I dampened a paper towel with cold water. I patted it across my face. I tried to preserve what was left of the make-up I’d applied before I went out.
When I returned to the table, my mouth was tingling, and Melissa was arguing with the waiter.
There was no shellfish in that, he said, I asked the chef, it does not have shellfish. You must have eaten shellfish earlier!
I didn’t! I said.
You must have, he said, and then he rolled his eyes.
The restaurant was close and crowded with people trying to make something of the last night of the year. Our table was dead in the centre. It felt like everyone was watching.
Do you think you should go to the ER? Melissa asked.
I would, I said, but I don’t have any health insurance until the 1st of January. Tomorrow.
The waiter served us the next course, which I couldn’t really contemplate eating.
I’m going to go and buy some Benadryl, I said.
This is how I remember Second Avenue on that night, at that moment: a blast of cold air, black skies, neon lights, me alone on the sidewalk, spinning around as I looked for the sign of a pharmacy or a corner shop. My head pounding from the two glasses of house white wine I’d drunk, and the vomiting.
I found a bodega, I bought some Benadryl, I swallowed it as I walked back down the sidewalk to the restaurant where we paid for our meal despite feeling like we really shouldn’t have to, under the circumstances. We took a cab to the stadium in Brooklyn, I sat through the Billy Joel concert, fighting the drowse of antihistamines and early-80s piano tunes. I registered the descent of glitter and balloons when Billy led the stadium in a countdown at midnight.
Afterwards, I said goodnight to Melissa and Kelly – they were going on to another party, one with people their own age, on the Upper East Side. They were kind enough to invite me, but I knew that a thirty-two-year-old rolling on Benadryl was not the companion that they were hoping for, and I walked from the stadium to my sublet apartment (a short distance, but still a silly thing to do on that much Benadryl) and brushed my teeth and went to sleep in my pile on the floor.
In the morning, when I woke, I felt fine. I went into the bathroom and turned on the fluorescent light and said: My face! My beautiful face!
I said it even though no one was there and even though I had never considered my face to be that beautiful. I said it even though the main thing I believed about my face was a thing that my college boyfriend had told me: It’s not that pretty, he said, but after a while, I got used to it.
I said it because it seemed like the right thing to say when confronted with a face that was blown up like it belonged to a person who had been defeated in a boxing match. My eyes were narrow slits. My lips beyond bee-stung. I took a photo and texted it to my friend Emily, a doctor.
I’ll write you a prescription for an Epipen, she replied.
My face returned to normal by the next day, but I sent the photo of it in its swollen state to the restaurant, requesting a refund. They refused. I sent them the photo I’d taken before I’d gone out that night, to demonstrate that I didn’t look like I’d been punched all the time. They refused again. I persisted, and in time the restaurant manager replied and said that I could have a refund, but only on the condition that I came back to the premises to discuss my complaint personally with the chef.
I tried to imagine having that conversation: me versus an angry New Yorker with a range of knives.
I declined.
6
Things improved after New Year’s Eve, for those first few weeks of my life in New York. I was lucky: the company that I worked for in Berlin had allowed me to transfer to the New York City office, so the setting of my work changed but my job did not significantly. My New York friends trickled back into town after the holidays, and I made a new one, Joanne, with whom I had many friends in common from London. She was another late arrival to the party, the person who makes you glad you made the effort to show up. I bought black jeans at Uniqlo. I learned that the solid chunks of brown ice at the intersections of wintry sidewalks were most often actually deep puddles. I found a studio where I could practise a particular kind of semi-cultish yoga: I sweated on my purple mat for ninety minutes to pounding trance beats, drank smoothies in the vegan cafe, relished the feeling of freezing sweat on my cheeks when I threw my coat on over my leggings and walked in the snow to the Q train.
Maybe this will be the year I’ll learn to stand on my head, I thought, maybe
a headstand is the thing that I will accomplish in 2014. I thought about it a lot, like a head-stand was a thing that was important.
I experienced novelties, things that all other Americans knew about but which were unfamiliar to me. To learn more about America, I watched a lot of Netflix, which I had never used before. I liked a show called Extreme Couponing, about people who were really good at using coupons, who shopped in giant American discount stores and stored the vast amounts of paper towels and Gatorade and tins of spaghetti that they got for nearly nothing in every nook and cranny in their homes: in basement pantries, in the crawl spaces under their children’s beds. Extreme Couponing was not the same as Hoarders, a show in which acquisition was not celebrated. I did not enjoy Hoarders as much.
I sat at bars in the East Village and Williamsburg. I drank wine and ate Brussels sprouts, charred black and covered in big flakes of salt that crunched. They cost $10.
Aren’t Brussels sprouts a loathed, disgusting vegetable, not a trendy bar snack? I said.
Where have you been? my friends said.
Europe, I said. I was in Europe.
I said this to friends and I said this to strangers, as if they cared. Baristas in coffee shops, asking me which size of cup I wanted: Gosh, I said, this small cup is so large to me, but then, until recently I lived in Europe. OK, said the baristas, a small then?
This Really Isn't About You Page 4