I worked as an office temp that summer. That was what the madness of love had made me do: filing, Dictaphone typing. I had started back home in New York for a few weeks to raise money before my departure. An interview with a beige woman in a windowless office in a business park led to a $10 an hour gig in a windowless office in an allergist’s office in a different business park. For eight hours a day I filled out patient intake forms and filed medical notes, which I read, hungry for the intimate details of the lives of strangers.
I read files and drank coffee that was thick with powdered creamer and two sugars and listened to daily updates from one of the medical transcriptionists as she told the other transcriptionists about her baby’s chronic constipation.
And then, she said, with triumph, I massaged his anus with castor oil!
On the wall above one of the desks in the office someone had thumbtacked a vivid drawing of Jesus rising from the flames of the burning towers of the World Trade Center, rendered in blue Biro on the back of a pale green sheet of A4 copy paper. Each time I passed by the drawing I felt certain that leaving America was the right thing to do.
In Dublin it would have been more fun to work in a cafe or a restaurant, to pull pints of Guinness in Temple Bar, but I wanted my schedule to align with Paul’s, so that we could spend our weekends and evenings together. I signed up at a number of temp agencies, impressed them with my ferocious typing speed but not my completed undergraduate degree, and waited for the calls to come in. I worked as a receptionist at a giant office building, a secretary at an accounting firm, an HR assistant at IBM where I logged the presence and absence of bodies in cubicles.
Sometimes I was spoiled for choice with temp jobs. Sometimes I was not. During one of those times, the not-spoiled, desperate times, I took a job at a mobile-phone company in a business park in Tallaght, which meant that I had to take the bus into the city in order to take another bus out of the city, between ninety minutes and two hours each way, time I spent playing Snake on my Nokia and thinking about what a loser I was. The mobile-phone company was in the process of shutting down and I worked in an open-plan space with a dozen people and as many empty desks, because half of the team had recently been laid off. For this reason it’s not surprising that they didn’t seem to like me: in part because I’d been brought in to replace their departed colleague, and in part, I suspect, because the boss who had been brought in to ‘manage the change’ was, like me, an American. Unlike me, the temporary boss was an accomplished body builder, the kind of man whose shoulders and neck had fused into a singular block of spray-tanned muscle. When he entered the room to hushed, strained silence, he’d greet me with warmth; when he departed, the team would start talking again amongst themselves, usually about the horses they were betting on. They didn’t ask me if I wanted to bet on the horses, which made me feel like more of an outcast, even though I didn’t know anything about horses or betting. It’s amazing what will seem interesting when you’re outside of a group.
My job in the mobile-phone company was to put sheets of paper in large binders. I guess sometimes I had to punch the holes, and I am sure that I had to put the sheets of paper in some kind of order, but what the order was I don’t recall.
One day the American manager came into the room and handed me a large, well-stuffed manila envelope.
Jean, he said smiling, I need you sort out my receipts for me. For my expenses.
Sure thing! I said, with real enthusiasm brought on by the prospect of putting my binders and sheets of paper aside.
The receipts were rolled and folded. I flattened them one by one. Most were from Tesco, or Tesco Express. Some from a moderate-price business hotel. A handful from a chain restaurant that sold roasted meats. The receipts revealed that the American manager had been in Dublin for a couple of months and was staying a short distance from the business park. The receipts also revealed that he consumed dozens of tins of tuna each week, like a beloved, privileged cat. He bought ten or twenty cans at a time. Some regular tuna fish, some tuna steak, but still tinned. With the tuna he ate soy sauce: he bought two bottles of it every week. He also got through a bag or two of jelly babies. And on Sunday, sometimes, he went to the chain restaurant where he ate a Sunday roast and drank one pint of beer.
When I handed the receipts back to the American manager – flattened, stapled in a neat stack – he smiled and said, Thank you, and I smiled and said, You’re welcome, but after that I found it hard to look him in the eye, hard to manage the crucial piece of information I knew about him, about how he whiled away lonely nights in his hotel room. As an aspiring writer, I wanted to know the intimate details of strangers’ lives, but not this. After I organized the receipts, I’d sit in the room putting my pieces of paper in my binders, while around me the team buzzed their annoyance about the existence of the American manager, about the imminent demise of the company, and I’d think: At least I eat vegetables.
When I got a call for a job working as the receptionist and secretary for Dublin’s most important urologist, I was excited. Not because I was interested in urology. I was excited because the job meant that I didn’t have to commute to a business park, and I would have unfettered access to people’s medical records, which I’d so enjoyed at my first temp job that summer. After spending many hours in high school volunteering in the hospital where I was born, I’d realized that my childhood dream to be a doctor might have been driven more by my interest in people and their life stories rather than my genuine interest in science, not to mention the fact that unexpected views of blood had made me faint on several occasions. When the woman in the temp agency rang to offer me the job, she said: Do you know what a urologist does? and I said, Yes, and she said, Good, which was an ideal way for both of us to avoid saying the word: penis.
The office was across the street from a large hospital, on the ground floor of a Georgian terrace house. In the morning the doctor was in surgery, and it was my job to type his dictated medical notes, yelping occasionally when googling a term to make sure I spelled it right brought up a low-resolution photograph of something sinister or scabbed. At lunch I’d eat a cheese sandwich and then come back to the office to welcome the patients who had appointments with doctors in the afternoon. From my desk I could see right through to the examination room: it was elegant and book-lined, with the table right in the centre, as if the examination would be a performance, or display.
I was conscious that the urologist’s office was not a nice place to visit, so I spent a lot of time thinking about how to answer the door in the best way to patients who I assumed would be unhappy to be there. Some days, I experimented: sweeping the door and smiling my brightest American smile, exclaiming WELCOME! to one taken-aback gentleman on the other side of the door. Opening it slowly and mumbling a greeting while staring at my shoes to the next man. After their examinations the patients often had to sit down at the other side of my expansive antique desk to make further appointments. If the outcome of their examinations had been good this was an easy process. If the outcome was not good this was strained and awkward.
One afternoon after I’d worked for the urologist for a few days, he personally escorted a sixty-something patient and his grown-up daughter to my desk. This was not something that he had done before. Please book Mr X for a prostatectomy, he said, and then disappeared back into his examination room, shutting the door. This meant that the man had prostate cancer, I’d worked this out from previous googling, and when he and his daughter sat down at my desk, side by side, they were both crying: not wracking sobs, but with tears sliding down their similar faces.
All right, I said, realizing that everything I thought I knew about being efficient and friendly was now irrelevant. My eyes filled up with tears as I went down the checklist with them: name, date of birth, calling the hospital to confirm the timing, here’s your list of pre-operative requirements, nil by mouth. I tried to tell them these important things in a way that seemed professional but of course this was impossible because I wa
s crying while I did it, though they were kind enough to pretend I wasn’t, I suppose in the way that I pretended they weren’t crying, either. I cried and they cried and we all helped each other get to the end of the process, and then they got up to leave. I don’t know what I said to them. Goodbye? Good luck? Maybe I just tried to smile. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and felt I understood right then, right there, for the first time in my life, the kind of fear that cancer makes people fear.
I wondered for a while afterwards what became of them, of him, but of course I never found out. I wondered whether I was present for one of the most altering events in their lives, if that was the beginning of that man’s end, or if in years to come they would tell the story of the diagnosis and say: And there was this American girl there, making the appointment, and she was crying! But it wasn’t a big deal at all, was it, Dad?
As I recall, Paul and I only fought twice that summer: once when I suggested that instead of panicking about his upcoming driving test, he could feel confident that he had a girlfriend who already had a licence. Once when he tried to get me to go into deep water in the Irish Sea, at the icy spot in Dun Laoghaire harbour where plump Buck Mulligan went for his swim. Aside from that, Paul made me very happy, and I him. We moved to London together, we studied for our master’s degrees, we drank many pints of alcohol, made friends with other international students, complained about our common penury. We went on vacations to Spain where we mostly stayed still on sunloungers, transforming our bodies from Celtic and pale to shades of mahogany. I moved into a shared house in Clapham with Paul’s sister and her boyfriend and another flatmate. We drank cups of tea and cooked each other lavish dinners on rotation. I got a job at the pub in Clapham Junction train station, came home after shifts covered in handprint bruises from the clientele who grabbed and prodded me as I moved through their throngs to deliver hot chips and chicken sandwiches. I showed Paul the handprints and we accepted that they weren’t very nice, but were part of the job. Discussing our future, Paul and I agreed we’d stay in London for a year after we finished our degrees – this was the easiest way for us to stay together, because we both had EU passports and he did not have an American one – and then we’d move to the US together, New York or Boston, him to do his Ph.D., me to pursue my career in book publishing.
Paul went to Brussels in the autumn after we finished at the LSE, to do an internship. I stayed back in London, worked as a waitress, and applied for jobs. Most days I spent slumped on the sofa in the rented house in Clapham, waiting for my shifts, refreshing my email for news of job applications, watching music videos and the worst of low-budget reality shows on MTV: Room Raiders, a sort of blind-dating show where the contestants pre-screened other contestants for romance by digging through the contents of their bedrooms, scanning sheets with a blacklight for signs of cum. I don’t know if it was depression, or just acceptance, that led me to come to understand this was my life now: poor posture, satellite television, serving expensive once-frozen hamburgers to rich English people who drank too much at lunch. Paul and I spoke on the phone every night: he told me about all the fun he was having with his Brussels flatmates (four girls) and all the frites he was eating. He told me that he missed me, cried about it sometimes, but it was difficult for me not to feel hard done by when he was having a great adventure. I saw the rest of my life strung before me as beads on a necklace, each bead representing another episode of Room Raiders. After a while I’d seen all of the episodes, but when they aired again, I watched them, too, even though I already knew where the cum was.
Of course we didn’t stay together. Paul won a Fulbright scholarship and wanted to use it to go to study in Boston. By then, I’d gotten an internship in a literary agency, and didn’t want to give up the small purchases I’d clawed in the industry that I so desperately wanted to work in. Two years earlier I had believed that emigrating for a man was a good idea, but now, with the slightest taste of what it was to do work that I found meaningful, I resisted the call to do it again. Paul came back to London from Brussels for one final weekend to try to work it out. It was a Bank Holiday, so we spent three days arguing and crying and then going on pleasant outings. On our last day together we rode a tandem bicycle through Battersea Park, because I had always wanted to ride a tandem bicycle. When I was sitting in the front and steering, we rode for miles: straight and true. When Paul took the front seat, we fell off, again and again. The next morning we both sobbed while he left. We were finished. Maybe the bicycle was a metaphor for something. Maybe it wasn’t.
A few weeks later I was offered a job in publishing in New York City, working as the assistant to a literary scout. Maybe the distance between New York and Boston was one that could be overcome. I wrote an email to Paul and told him about the offer, that I had the chance of moving back to America, and then I turned it down. Even though I didn’t have another job in London lined up. Even though being without him felt, in some ways, like a kind of torture.
One day, I told people, again and again – my friends, my parents, the people who didn’t understand my decision, or at least seemed surprised by it – one day I know that I’ll wake up and know that I’m ready to go back to America, and then I’ll go. That’s what I said: One day. Not now. Sometimes when people asked me why I lived in London, I’d think: Because I’m trying to prove a point to someone who left me behind. But I never said it out loud.
4
You couldn’t stand up in the shower in the flat on Cephas Street. Lisa and I figured that out when we viewed the place the first time. The showers were tucked in the eaves of the roof and to use them you’d have to sit on the cold porcelain of the bathtub. But it was London in 2005 and we had our first jobs with pay cheques that came once a month, so of course this flat – renovated recently, with fresh cream carpets – seemed like a dream come true. Two years in London had helped me to understand that Americans had unreasonable expectations of cleanliness, of comfort. Before we moved into the flat on Cephas Street I’d lived for a summer in a house on top of a hill in Archway that was so thick with the filth of generations of flat-sharing inhabitants that everything I owned became covered in grease: my dresses, my books, my face. I’d not had problems with acne since my teenage years, and then only mild, but when my parents came to visit when I lived in that oily home and they beheld the state of my forehead and cheeks and chin, my mother, who rarely commented on my appearance unless I’d made an obvious effort, made the unprecedented suggestion that I should go to see a dermatologist.
So I moved out of the house of grease into the flat on Cephas Street with Lisa, the friend from Montreal who I’d visited in Paris and who was now working in her first fulltime job after completing her own master’s degree. Cephas Street was in East London, on the southern edge of Bethnal Green, and the flat was in a converted church: it had been built in the early nineteenth century, along with rows and rows of terraced houses for working-class people making their way in London. Bombing in the Second World War had mostly put paid to the terraces, but the church had remained as stacks of square council estates had been built up around it. There was still a cross on the top of the steeple, but below there were twenty-eight apartments containing an assortment of young professionals. When people came over they’d remark on how the churchyard had been paved over, to put up a parking lot. Wouldn’t it have once been a graveyard for the parishioners? they asked. I chose not to consider it.
The commute was pretty easy: forty-five minutes or so straight to Marble Arch from Bethnal Green tube station, where a plaque on the entrance that I used reminded me each morning that it had been the site of the greatest number of simultaneous deaths in the history of the Blitz. It was a little while before I learned that the deaths happened not because a bomb fell in that spot, but because people descending the stairs to take cover from what they thought was an attack, but which was actually weapons testing, trampled each other to death.
I still wanted to be a writer. I think that was what I had always want
ed: I’d professed interest at different times in medicine, psychology, politics. I’d been lucky to have had the kind of education that meant all of these things would have been possible at one time or another, but the truth was that all I wanted to do was write.
And yet: I also didn’t believe that I could write. Not for a living, not really. At twenty-three or twenty-four I believed that if I was really going to be a writer it would have happened already. That it hadn’t surely meant that I lacked the talent. In my interviews for publishing jobs, I said: I used to want to be a writer, but I know I’m not good enough, so I want to work with people who do have the talent! People hiring for entry-level publishing jobs seemed to like that expression of low self-esteem.
My job, the first one with the real monthly pay cheque, was at a literary agency in Marylebone, working as the assistant to a woman who was well known in the industry for striking great deals for her famous clients, and less well known for not being very kind to her long-suffering assistants.
Young people at the competing agency where I was interning before I got the job exchanged glances with each other when I told them I’d accepted the role. Don’t do it, one or two of them said, people who were friends with the assistant who I was replacing, it’s not a good idea to work for her.
These people have no idea who I am, I thought to myself, I am Jean Hannah Edelstein, young American woman! There is nothing that I can’t achieve with my pluck and sass. For while I was not assured of my skills as a writer, I was certain that I was good at reading, and drinking coffee, and wearing tweed, which was how I believed people working in publishing spent much of their time.
Also, I was desperate for a proper job. I had no problem getting interviews for jobs in publishing, but I seemed to have a lot of trouble getting offers. Once, two rejections in one day for the same role at two different companies. One said I did not have enough experience; the other called me overqualified. To make ends meet, I got a side job ghostwriting a book about hair colour for a tiny publishing company run by a divorced Eastern European countess and her new husband, a once-notorious armed robber. When the woman everyone told me not to work for offered me a job, I was ecstatic: finally, I could start my real life.
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