“I want to go,” I said, inspecting the bottles clustered on the counter. It was a modest collection but I assumed she had more in the fridge.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Jake said into my neck. He rested his chin on my shoulder and I never wanted to move.
“I don’t know. The Jura? I spend all this time studying these maps and I want to see the land.”
“You’re done with New York already? On to Europe?”
“I’m a quick study,” I said. I moved to lean against him but he was gone.
“You absolutely should go,” Simone said.
“I couldn’t go alone,” I said and looked at them. Jake was kneeling, looking into the oven, pressing buttons, and she hovered above him.
“Moni, the light’s broken in here again.”
“Darling, what do you want me to say? I am not blessed with your amateur electrician skills.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” he said.
“Where’s your wine key?” I asked, waving the bottle.
“Oh no, you’re not performing tonight. Jake will open it for us.”
I sat and Jake laid a dish towel over his arm and came up to me.
“Mademoiselle, the Puffeney Arbois, 2003.” He opened it roughly, in a manner I could never get away with, a bartender opening cheap bottles on the fly. He and Nicky could get a bottle open in seconds.
He poured a taste and I swirled it. The wine was the color of cloudy rubies, washing up the sides of the glass, audaciously fragrant and crystalline.
“So pretty when it’s unfiltered….It’s perfect,” I said. Disintegrating outlines all around, the glass, my skin, the walls, a blur of satisfaction that was totally foreign to me. I felt like I had arrived in a room that had been waiting for me my whole life, and a voice in my head whispered, This is what family feels like.
“A toast,” said Simone, holding her glass aloft. “The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”
“Emerson,” Jake whispered to me, but he was playing too, his glass held up in the air.
“This is to our little Tess. Thank you for joining us.”
I laughed at her use of restaurant jargon, the phrase we used as a welcome and a farewell. I always wondered who this ceaselessly festive “us” was, why exactly we were thanking the guests, as if they had provided a service, a contribution. I wondered how it felt for them to be sent back into the embittered, poorly lit outside world.
“Thank you for having me.”
We were quiet, passing the plates around. Part of me had expected that they would entertain me. But coming into her home this time, I wasn’t spit back out onto the street. I was becoming necessary.
“I had a strange feeling today,” I said, tentatively, wondering how people started conversations. Would it always feel like I was intruding with nonsense?
“Did you? Regarding what?”
“I was walking around Williamsburg…and it felt…ominous.”
“Was it the condos?” Simone said, concerned.
“I can’t even go over there anymore,” he said, mouth full, holding a chicken leg in his hand. He was going to finish his plate before I had my first bite.
“It’s happening so much faster than I anticipated,” said Simone. “When they changed the zoning laws in 2005, we knew that the end was coming. Friends lost their lofts left and right, but the speed with which it all disappeared…”
“2005. So I just missed it,” I said. “I thought so.”
“We always just miss New York. I watched it with this neighborhood. When I moved here everyone was mourning the SoHo of the seventies, Tribeca of the eighties, and already ringing the death knell for the East Village. Now people romanticize the Alphabet City of Jonathan Larson. We all walk in a cloud of mourning for the New York that just disappeared.”
“Okay, okay, but I love Rent, is that terrible?”
“I’m going to ignore that comment forever,” Jake said.
“Treacherous,” said Simone. “That kind of singsong nostalgia.”
“But I guess I was wondering if it will ever stop.”
“Stop?”
“I don’t know, the city?” I said. “Changing? Like will it ever rest?”
“No,” they said in unison and then laughed.
“So then we just dance ourselves to death?” I asked.
“Ha!” Simone smiled at me and Jake smiled looking at his plate.
“This is so good, Simone.”
“It’s always the simple things, well executed, that are memorable. I don’t concern myself with complexity when I have guests.”
“What was it like when you moved here?” I asked her.
“What was it like? The city?”
“No, I don’t know.” I turned to Jake. “What was she like at twenty-two?”
She groaned. “He doesn’t remember, he was a child.”
“She was a heartbreaker,” Jake said, “and I was not a child anymore. You had your long hair back then.” He was watching her and I wondered if I was going to be the kind of woman about whom they said, She was a heartbreaker.
“Oh god, Jake, don’t start. When Jake was a baby he would never let me put my hair up. Hysterical tears, panic. God forbid I cut it.”
“Tears?”
“I was very particular about women, even back then,” he said, and he nodded toward my hair, which was down. “I still think it’s too short.”
“Me?” I asked, but he was looking at Simone again.
“Long hair like that is for girls, Jake,” Simone said, touching hers, which sat at her shoulders. Mine was much longer.
“I knew you were a girl once! You must remember.”
“Yeah, Moni, tell her.”
“I remember much forgetfulness.”
“Come on,” I said.
“The city in the early nineties was rampant with crime. Everyone was still reeling from AIDS, entire communities had been wiped out, and all the neighborhoods were being rezoned for development. Gentrification has always been with us, but these were massive, government-subsidized overhauls, not just a new coffee shop or a block of renovations. Was it so much better then? Do I miss not being able to walk this block in the dark? I can’t say. But, as trite as this sounds, it was a very free time. And by free I mean that I felt free to pursue the life I wanted, and I could afford to. There were still dark spots in the city, fringes, margins, and I believed—still believe—that those areas are what make cities thrive. But being twenty-two…that was confusing.”
“Confusing?” I asked. “Is that the word I would use?”
“Seems to be the age that ladies run away from home,” he said. “I never got to see twenty-three.”
I hadn’t put that together, that Simone and I came to the city at the same time in our lives. Our first escapes.
“You survived,” Simone said to him, and to me: “It was confusing because I didn’t know what I was yet.”
“Does it get better?” I asked. Can it? was what I really wanted to ask.
“Aging is peculiar,” she said, moving a piece of parsnip around the plate with her fork. “I don’t think you should be lied to about it. You have a moment of relevancy—when the books, clothes, bars, technology—when everything is speaking directly to you, expressing you exactly. You move toward the edge of the circle and then you’re abruptly outside the circle. Now what to do with that? Do you stay, peering backward? Or do you walk away?”
“Aren’t you in a new circle?”
“Of course. But that circle for a woman is tricky.”
“Tricky?”
“It’s a circle of marriage, children, acquisitions, retirement funds. That’s the culture you’re asked to participate in. Now…if you decline?”
“You’re in your own circle,” I said. It sounded lonely, but also fearless.
“It’s not so bad.” She smiled. “There’s a settling of the mind. Think of it as trading bursts of inspiration for a steady, prolonged focus.”
“Don’t you think you were a bit reckless?” Jake asked sharply. I didn’t know which one of us he was talking to.
Simone was quiet for a moment and said to him, “I think I did the best I could.”
“Isn’t that part of it? Being reckless?” I asked.