Love Saves the Day

5



Laura





LAURA DYEN’S FAVORITE PLACE IN THE WORLD, WITH THE EXCEPTION of her own bed on a Sunday morning, was found on the forty-seventh floor in the Midtown offices of Neuman Daines. The forty-seventh floor was assigned to the Corporate group, and Laura frequently had a quick lunch of deli sandwiches with her fellow fifth-year associates in what was grandly referred to as the forty-seventh-floor conference room—although in truth it was no more than a smallish meeting space. They’d spread newspapers and legal pads over the surface of the round table, where reflected globes of white light from the overhead fluorescents floated like water lilies in its cherrywood depths.

Often they used these group lunches as an opportunity to solicit one another’s unofficial input on opinion or adversary letters they were working on. But the lunches were primarily about camaraderie. Once they’d been a group of thirty first-years who’d started out as summer associates together. Now they were eight, the rest having left for other firms. Laura had gotten the same early-morning phone calls from recruiters as the others—still got them, in fact—but she’d also understood, in a way few people her age did, that those who jump around early usually end up jumping around forever. All she’d had to do to recognize the truth of this was look at her mother.

As much as Laura appreciated the fraternal spirit of these impromptu lunches, it was the early-morning or late-evening hours, when the conference room was empty, that she enjoyed most. She could look through the windows and all the way down onto the silent diorama of the city streets below, and the very silence of it soothed her. The Empire State Building was more than ten blocks away, but the illusion created by the height of her own building made it seem as though she were level with its peak. On hot summer nights, Laura would watch as its pinnacle was repeatedly struck by heat lightning, a display of kinetic energy rendered mute by the thick, reinforced windows of her office building. She’d grown up in a neighborhood loud with the twenty-four-hour cacophony of dance music blared from boom boxes, of police sirens and domestic arguments and glass shattering on pavement, the all-night hum of after-hours partiers that gave way each morning to the rumble of overcrowded buses and the metal clank of store grates rolling up. In the five-story walk-up she and Sarah had lived in, these sounds had been a constant assault, even with the windows closed. And they’d been intensified by the noise from their own building, babies wailing and neighbors flushing toilets or walking on the floors overhead.

People talked about the views to be had on higher floors, but Laura knew it was the silence, the serenity of heights, that one paid obscene sums for in a city like New York. Noise was one of a thousand indignities visited upon the poor. Money was the only thing that could buy the illusion of peace.

Perry had learned to look for Laura in the forty-seventh-floor conference room when the rest of the office was quiet. It was here that she came to think, to give her mind the break from computer screens and buzzing BlackBerrys and allow it to formulate creative solutions to knotty problems.

Perry poked his head in now and said, “It’s almost nine o’clock. You should get home to your husband like a good newlywed.”

Laura turned her face from the window. “I can’t. Clay just dumped this project for Balaban Media on me.” Clayton Newell was Neuman Daines’s managing partner, and a figure of terror to all the firm’s associates. “He says he needs it turned around by seven o’clock Monday morning.”

“Yes, but you and I both know Clay won’t be in Monday before ten thirty. It’ll keep.” Perry smiled. “The key to having a life in this business is training people to expect the best of you, not all of you at once.”

Perry Steadman was Laura’s “rabbi,” a senior partner who had recognized Laura’s potential early on and taken her under his wing. He was a short man in his fifties with thinning hair and a laid-back approach to his practice and his negotiations that belied the sharp mind at work behind them. And even though Perry’s “rabbi” designation was strictly metaphorical, he had a true rabbi’s fondness for quoting the Talmud. “Two cripples don’t make one dancer,” he’d told Laura more than once. “Everybody’s a cripple to some extent. The trick is never putting together two parties who are equally crippled, or crippled in the same way. Otherwise you’ll be up to your eyeballs in paperwork when they realize they can’t dance together.”

Not every associate was fortunate, or strategic, enough to find a rabbi, particularly one as influential within the firm as Perry. Perry was an acknowledged rainmaker, a partner who landed large corporate clients for the firm and then distributed the work to Corporate group associates. He’d noted Laura’s quick mind and rigorous approach back when she was still a summer associate, and when she was a first-year he’d made a point of routing her way the more complex of the memos and briefs first-years were expected to spend the majority of their time hammering out. Laura, who had attended Hunter College and Fordham Law in the city, noted with inward satisfaction how much more quickly she was rising than some of the Ivy Leaguers she’d started out with, although she was careful never to let her sense of her own success show outwardly.

She had come to specialize in contracts, and she was more at home among the language of contracts than anywhere else. There was something profoundly comforting in having all worst-case scenarios accounted for and resolved ahead of time, nailed down in the black-and-white precision of a signed and witnessed document. In a perfect world, Laura thought, all of life’s surprises would be anticipated and disposed of with equal ease.

It was Perry who’d decided a little over a year ago that Laura was finally ready to go to client meetings. She’d met Josh at the first of these meetings, which had lent the early days of their romance an air of the clandestine. She’d known how it would look to the rest of the firm, and to Perry in particular, if the fact that she was dating a client became general knowledge. Sometimes Laura wondered if maybe she’d agreed to marry Josh after only a few months of dating because marriage recast the whole thing in an indisputably respectable light. When she’d announced her engagement, Perry had hugged her warmly and said, “When love is strong, a man and a woman can make their bed on a sword’s blade. May your love always be as strong as it is now.” It had sounded nice at the time, although later Laura thought it was rather more portentous than an expression of congratulations ought to be.

Now, in the face of Perry’s admonishment that she finish up for the night, Laura found she wasn’t as eager to return home as she’d been in the earliest days of her marriage, only six months ago. Sarah’s things—mostly items salvaged from the record store she’d owned and then sold sixteen years ago—remained unpacked in the boxes stored in their spare bedroom. Still, the smell of old records and yellowing newspapers, the smell of Laura’s childhood, had invaded the entire upstairs of their apartment. Even the faint odor of a litter box threatened to unearth long-buried images and associations.

This displacement between then and now created an ever-present sense of unease, like a low-frequency sound she couldn’t hear clearly enough to identify, but that was disturbing nonetheless. Laura found herself using the downstairs guest bathroom whenever possible and avoiding going upstairs to bed until the moment when she literally couldn’t hold her eyes open anymore. Even so, her sleep was restless these days, leaving her almost more exhausted when she woke up than she’d been when she’d gone to bed.

She knew how eager Josh, a self-described music geek, was to go through all of Sarah’s posters and listen to recordings of songs on their original vinyl that hadn’t been available in nearly a generation. Josh was in love with the past. Stored in their home office were stacks of photo albums and summer-camp swimming awards and school report cards and even the twenty-year-old fraternity roster listing all the names and phone numbers of his pledge class. Laura knew he was wondering why she hadn’t looked through everything yet, even though over a month had passed since they’d cleaned out Sarah’s apartment. So far, however, he hadn’t pressed the point.

The only one who had spent any time going through Sarah’s things was Prudence. That her mother, of all people, should have decided to adopt a cat was something Laura still couldn’t understand. But it was clear that Prudence missed Sarah terribly. The cat had spent her first days with them both refusing food and vomiting, and her obvious distress had made Laura wonder if they’d made the right decision, or if perhaps Prudence would be happier living in a more cat-friendly household someplace else, despite her mother’s will. Only some deep reluctance to part with this final living link to Sarah had held her back.

At their Passover Seder three nights earlier, when Prudence had made such a mess of their carefully laid table, Laura had felt both deeply embarrassed by Prudence and deeply sorry for her. Like Laura, Prudence had been raised by Sarah. How could she be expected to understand the way normal families behaved at a holiday dinner? It had taken Laura years of careful observation as an adult to figure it out herself.

Still, it had been nice, these last few weeks, to see Prudence finally begin integrating herself into the general flow of life in their apartment. Digging out one of Sarah’s old dresses from the bag she’d salvaged from the trash room at the last minute had been the right idea. Prudence was starting to act like a normal cat again (as if, Laura thought wryly, there was any such thing as “normal” when it came to cats). Laura couldn’t help watching her, couldn’t help smiling at the way Prudence sprawled out on her back sometimes, four white paws in the air, in the patches of sunlight that fell through the windows. What would it be like, she wondered, to give yourself over so entirely to something as simple as that, to have no thought in your mind beyond, This sunlight is warm. It feels good.

Laura had noted Prudence’s fascination with the same flock of amber-and-white pigeons across the street that she found herself watching at times. Such unusually colored birds would have been prized in the neighborhood she’d grown up in, would have been kept and coddled in rooftop coops and eyed wistfully by young boys who would have tried to steal a few. Once, when she was twelve, Laura had sneaked onto the rooftop of the apartment building next to her own to cradle a young pigeon under the watchful eyes of its owner. The world before her was an uneven patchwork quilt of white cement and black tarpaper roofs, seamed by heavily laden clotheslines. Laura had never touched the warm feathers of a living bird before, never felt the intricate symmetry that molded the soft fluff into a resilient shell. The only feathers she’d touched were those found on sidewalks. Sarah had been furious when she’d found out Laura had gone onto the roof next door; two weeks earlier, a fourteen-year-old boy had plummeted to his death trying to leap from one rooftop to another.

Laura liked to watch Prudence looking out the window. At such moments, she wanted to stroke Prudence’s fur, to breathe in the cinnamon-and-milk smell of her neck and hear the low rumble of her purring. It had been a long time since she’d sat with a cat and listened to it purr, or felt the kind of peace that comes when a small animal trusts you enough to fall asleep in your lap.

But whenever she reached out to Prudence, she saw—no matter how hard she tried not to—an old man in tears, kneeling on a cracked sidewalk and crying out, She’s all I got! There was a terrible danger in loving small, fragile things. Laura had learned this almost before she’d learned anything else.

Laura knew her face must have taken on a faraway expression, because now Perry was repeating, “You should go home for the night.” And then, with a look of concern that was almost harder for Laura to bear than a direct reprimand would have been, “I wish you’d taken some time off when your mother died.”

“It wasn’t the right time,” Laura said. “I’d just taken off three weeks.” In fact, it was Perry, claiming that the directive came straight from Clay (who sometimes tried to mitigate his own capriciousness with equally random acts of generosity), who’d insisted that she take a full three weeks for her honeymoon. “And, anyway”—she paused to smile in a way she hoped would be convincing—“I’m fine. I really am.”


It had been a Tuesday in March, the first legitimately gorgeous spring day of the year—and an illusion of sorts, because the following week would be as cold and rainy as the depths of February—when Laura had gotten the call from her mother’s office. Even though Sarah had worked as a typist for the small real estate law firm in the East Thirties for over fifteen years, Laura had never met any of her mother’s co-workers. So when she’d heard a voice other than Sarah’s on the other end of the line, she’d known instantly that something was wrong, known it even before the woman’s hesitant voice had said, “Is this Laura? I worked, work I mean, with your mother …” She’d known before the woman went on to say things like heart attack and didn’t suffer.

Laura must have told a co-worker, must have told somebody what happened and where she was going, although afterward she could never remember. The next thing she knew, she was squinting in too-bright sunshine. I should have worn sunglasses today, she thought, and then wondered if she ought to be thinking about sunglasses now. Women in unbuttoned winter coats and men in suits with their ties loosened, people whose mothers hadn’t just died, walked at a more leisurely pace than they had in the brisker weather of the day before. They strolled past small cafés where people whose mothers hadn’t just died sat outside for the first time in months, and past the Mister Softee trucks that always seemed to spring up like fresh grass the instant the thermometer climbed above sixty-five. Laura had a sudden flash of memory, of Sarah bringing armfuls of fresh fruit on breathless summer nights to the hookers who walked Second Avenue, Laura hiding behind Sarah’s legs as the hookers thanked her and bent down to tell Laura, Ainchou a pretty girl.

By now Laura was aware that her scattered thoughts were a way of distracting herself, of avoiding the knowledge of her new reality (I have no parents) even as she hailed a cab and directed it to the morgue at 32nd and First, deep beneath the ground mere blocks from the desk where Sarah had died, high in a glass tower not unlike the building Laura had just left.

It was on a day much like this—when Laura had been, what, six? seven?—that Sarah had picked her up outside of her elementary school one Friday afternoon and announced, with a kind of happy mystery, “I got Noel to cover the store. We’re going someplace else today.” And Laura, still wearing her red backpack with the Menudo pin she’d begged Sarah for at the Menuditis store, had clasped Sarah’s hand and followed her to Eldridge Street and Adam Purple’s Garden of Eden.

There were dozens of community gardens on the Lower East Side in those days, but the Garden of Eden was far and away the grandest of them all. Adam Purple, a squatter and neighborhood eccentric, had spent a decade reclaiming what had been five lots of burned-out tenement buildings with plant clippings and compost he made himself by filling wheelbarrows and grocery carts with manure he collected from the horse-drawn carriages of Central Park. The result was a fifteen-thousand-square-foot formal garden bursting with roses, pear trees, climbing ivy, flowering bushes, and hundreds of other plants Laura couldn’t begin to name. At its precise center was an enormous foliage yin–yang circle.

Laura, with the limited perspective of childhood, had thought she’d known everything there was to know about New York City, especially her small corner of it. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, there was this! She felt staggered by the realization of how much beauty, unsuspected by her, had lived hidden within the bleak, shabby cityscapes she saw daily.

The afternoon sun had played mischievous tricks in Sarah’s hair that day, crowning her in a red-gold blaze. To Laura’s dazzled eyes, her mother had never seemed more beautiful. She looked like a fairy queen from one of Laura’s much-loved picture books. What magic was this that her mother had conjured? One moment they’d been walking down a glass-and-rubble-strewn urban street, picking their way carefully over crack vials and crumpled soda cans, and then suddenly they were overwhelmed by the spicy-sweet scent of roses and crocuses. Feral cats lazily opened and closed their eyes in the sun-dappled shadows beneath fruit trees, too serene to bother with the birds chattering in branches overhead. Laura thought of The Secret Garden, a book she had just begun to struggle through. Surely, she told herself, this very spot must be the most enchanted place in the entire world.

“Most people, people who live in other places, only think about dirt and noise when they think about New York and where we live,” Sarah had said as the two of them strolled, still hand in hand, through the alternating coolness and warmth of the garden. “They don’t know it like you and I do. They don’t know that we live in the most wonderful place in the world.” In an echo of Laura’s earlier thoughts, Sarah had winked and added in a stage whisper, “It’s our secret.”

They were standing beneath a cherry tree that had not yet begun to blossom, and Laura stopped Sarah to pull a sheet of paper from her backpack. Her teacher had made everyone in the class write a poem about springtime that day, and Laura was suddenly moved to read hers aloud to her mother. Blushing, because Laura hadn’t been a child who “performed” for adults, she read:

Winter is over

Gone is the snow

Everything’s bright

And all aglow

Birds are singing

With greatest cheer

Expressing their joy

That spring is here

Animals awaken

From their long winter sleep

Spring is like a treasure

We all wish to keep

Sarah had been charmed. “That is the most beautiful poem I’ve ever heard,” she’d said. “Did you know that some of the best poems are songs?” And Laura, who hadn’t known that but did know that her mother knew everything about music and songs, had nodded with what she hoped passed for the solemn wisdom of somebody much older, perhaps ten or eleven. “I think your poem is a song,” Sarah had told her. Then she and Laura had practically run all the way back to Sarah’s record store, where Sarah had selected a few albums from her enormous personal collection and made a phone call to a friend. Then they’d walked over to Avenue A and entered what looked like a perfectly ordinary twenty-story apartment building.

But it turned out there was a recording studio in the basement. Funny-looking block letters etched into the glass-door entrance proclaimed it Alphaville Studios, and Sarah said it was a famous place. A man Laura had never seen before, with a scraggly long beard and deep dimples, appeared from some hidden back office and greeted Sarah with a hug and a warm rubbing of cheeks. “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen the likes of you around here, girl.” He sneaked them into an unoccupied recording studio where Sarah put her records on a kind of machine that let her filter out the vocals until all they could hear was the music. Laura had been deeply impressed with Sarah’s knowledge of this complicated-looking equipment. Clearly, she’d spent a lot of time here once. With this realization came the insight, always shocking for a small child, that Sarah must have had an entire life all her own before Laura was born.

Sarah played around with various knobs and buttons until the percussion was a heavy, insistent thump thump-thump thump. That was when she had started to sing Laura’s poem. She’d made Laura sing along with her. And even though, in Laura’s opinion, it wasn’t a very good song, there was little in the world more delightful to her in those years than the sound of her mother’s singing.

Sarah had made a tape recording of the two of them singing together in the studio, which they’d listened to again at home that night before Sarah ceremoniously placed the cassette in a small metal box she’d shown Laura once, claiming it held her most treasured personal belongings.

The City bulldozed the Garden of Eden a few years later, and the metal box disappeared in 1995, the day Laura and Sarah lost their apartment. And now, Laura thought, there was nobody left except her to remember what Sarah had sounded like when she sang, nobody left alive who even remembered (because Laura realized that she didn’t) what Laura’s own voice had sounded like when she was a child.

Where did tapes go when they died? Did they go to a Tape Heaven? Laura felt herself on the verge of a giggling fit as this idea weaved through her thoughts, but she quelled it because by now she was standing in the lobby of the Morgue. Above her head was a motto inscribed in Latin. Laura drew on the Latin she’d picked up in her law studies to translate.

Let conversation cease, let laughter flee. This is the place where death delights in helping the living.


Perry wasn’t the only one who thought Laura hadn’t taken enough time to grieve. She was starting to feel like one of those dolls, the kind with a string in its back that, if you pulled it, forced the doll to repeat the same litany of phrases. I’m fine, she’d said when she’d returned to work the next day. I’m fine, she’d said after coming back from the half day she took for her mother’s funeral. I’m fine, she’d been repeating to everybody, to Perry, to her fellow fifth-years, to the hard-faced blond woman who answered her phone and filed her papers. I’m fine. I’m okay. You don’t have to look at me that way because I really am fine.

She remembered when she was younger and had started noticing that seemingly every pay phone in New York—not just the ones on the Lower East Side, but all the way up to Grand Central and beyond—had the words WORSHIP GOD etched into its metal base. Laura had wondered about the person who’d poured so many hours and days—months, even—into seeking out each and every pay phone in Manhattan. Had it been religious zeal? A sincere, if skewed, belief that repeating those two words so many times would actually induce others to worship God? Or had it been that the whole weight of this person’s soul had come to rest on those two words, endlessly repeated, and the act of inscribing them was the only way to exorcise the thought?

Laura was inclined to think it was the latter, because if she’d been able to take one of the dozens of paper clips she systematically unfurled over the course of a workday and use it to scratch the words I’M FINE on every desk, phone, and wall in the office, she would have done so. She appreciated everybody’s concern. But the burden of appearing to be fine, so as to keep others from worrying about her, was almost worse than simply allowing herself to feel bad would have been.

She was especially glad now that she hadn’t told anybody when, unexpectedly (and despite taking the appropriate precautions), she’d found herself pregnant only two months into her marriage. Of course, it wasn’t strictly necessary to tell anybody right away—in fact, it was accepted that you weren’t supposed to tell anybody until your first trimester was safely behind you.

Josh had been overjoyed at the news; he’d actually had tears in his eyes. But Laura had to spend a few hours composing herself before she could even get the words out, because her own first reaction had been panic. The best time for her to have gotten pregnant would have been four years ago, when she was a first-year associate and therefore more expendable to the firm—or it would be seven years from now, when she would (hopefully) have made partner. The fifth year was the worst possible time to take maternity leave. Now was the time to put in the hours, to take on the caseload, to wine and dine clients after hours and cultivate the relationships among partners that would—after a grueling, decade-plus slog—lift her to the heights of success she’d always striven toward. She’d seen other female attorneys who’d gone on reduced schedules once they had children. The idea was something of a grim joke among women in the firm, because what a “reduced schedule” meant in reality was that you ended up doing the same amount of work for less money. Most of them never regained their pre-pregnancy standing in the firm. Laura realized, too late, that questions like when they’d have children, and how many children they’d have, were among a million things she and Josh hadn’t discussed before rushing into marriage.

And she’d had deeper fears even than that. There were an infinite number of ways to be unhappy. Laura had learned from Sarah that marriage and children were no guarantee of avoiding any of them.

Still, it was impossible to ignore Josh’s happiness or remain untouched by it. One Sunday afternoon they’d painted the walls of their spare bedroom a soft, sunny yellow—perfect, as Josh had noted, for a boy or a girl. She thought about this peanut-sized thing—something made of her and Josh—traveling with her wherever she went, a secret sharer who sat in with her on meetings and rode with her on the subway and inhaled the same smoky-sweet smell of early winter that she did. She felt a kind of tender pity for it sometimes, so small and defenseless. Poor thing! she would think, and then wonder why she pitied it so much.

So the pregnancy had remained their secret, hers and Josh’s, which made things infinitely easier when, one Friday night in mid-February and just before the official end of her first trimester, the pain had started in her lower back and blood began to flow.

She’d returned to work on Monday, a bit pale and tired but otherwise not noteworthy in any way to her co-workers. Because she hadn’t told anyone she was pregnant, she didn’t have to go through the ordeal of telling everyone she no longer was. Not even Josh’s parents had been told. (“Let’s give Abe and Zelda a couple of months before they drown us in parenting advice,” he’d said.) The only exception they’d made—or, at least, that Josh had thought they’d made—had been telling Sarah. “Of course you’ll want your mother to know right away,” he’d said. Laura hadn’t bothered to correct him, because what could be more expected, more perfectly normal, than a young woman, pregnant for the first time, sharing the experience with her mother and leaning on her for advice and support?

But Laura hadn’t said anything to Sarah. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because when you told your mother you were pregnant with your first child, she was supposed to tell you how you don’t even know what love is until you hold your baby for the first time, or how you’ll never love anything in life the way you’ll love your child. Except that Laura already knew this hadn’t been true in Sarah’s case, and Sarah knew that Laura knew. So what could Sarah have said? You’ll love your baby, but only as much as you love some things and less than you love others?

Perhaps if Laura had told Sarah about her pregnancy, Sarah would have told Laura about the bottle of nitroglycerin pills Laura had found when she’d cleaned out Sarah’s bathroom. Sarah had been keeping her own secrets. And even though Laura was angry now, angrier than she allowed herself to realize, she could guess that Sarah’s reasons for saying nothing to Laura about her heart condition had been similar to Laura’s reasons for saying nothing about her pregnancy to Sarah. Because when your mother told you she was sick, you were supposed to tear up and hug her and beg her to do everything the doctor said because you absolutely couldn’t bear to lose her.

Sarah must have known that Laura couldn’t and wouldn’t have said any of those things. Not because they weren’t true. But because she and Sarah had already lost each other years ago.


Josh never tried to get her to talk about the miscarriage. But he did keep trying to get her to talk about Sarah, to remember things. When they’d driven down to the Lower East Side to clean out Sarah’s apartment, he’d insisted on a “nostalgia tour” like his parents had always given him and his sister when they used to drive through Brooklyn as a family. “Come on,” he’d urged. “Tell a sheltered boy from Parsippany what it was like growing up in Manhattan. How often are we down here?”

And Laura had tried. She tried to re-create for him the open-air drug markets that had flourished on Avenue B and 2nd Street, ignored by the authorities for far too long because what could be done in the face of such large-scale—and lucrative—dedication to vice? When they drove past Tompkins Square Park, with its cheerful playgrounds, flowered pathways, and pristine basketball courts, it was impossible to make Josh visualize the Tompkins Square Park she’d grown up with, taken over almost entirely by tent cities erected by junkies and the homeless, and frequented by punked-out teenagers in dog collars and Sex Pistols T-shirts. Million-dollar condos and trendy restaurants had once been burned-out tenements where squatting artists lived, or SRO hotels that, for all their seediness, were still preferable to the violent squalor of the city’s official homeless shelters. “And—oh!—right there.” Laura pointed to a spot on the pavement. “That’s where my friend Maria Elena and I used to play Skelzie with bottle caps. Whenever we went out to play together, her mother would yell after us, Cuidado en la calle!”

The whole time she was talking, Laura found herself wondering why Sarah all those years later, had moved back to the Lower East Side. Had she thought she could rewrite the past? Play out the same scenarios but tack on a different ending? Hadn’t she realized that the Lower East Side she’d haunted these past few years had borne only the most passing resemblance to the place she’d landed in as a teenager, armed with nothing more than her high school diploma and a determination to see the world the way she wanted to?

Nevertheless, Laura’s memories made Josh smile. And nothing had ever made her feel like a whole person—had given her the same sense of belonging that the intimidating, shiny-haired women she worked with clearly felt—the way making Josh smile always did.

It wasn’t until he insisted on doubling back to drive down Stanton, where Laura and Sarah had lived, that Laura felt her throat tighten. “My mom used to pick me up after school every day and bring me back to the record store to do my homework,” she told him, “and I was fourteen when we moved away. I really don’t know this neighborhood as well as you think I do.”


Josh’s interest in all this was to be expected. He was chief marketing officer for a magazine publishing group whose flagship publication was a music-industry glossy, and the Lower East Side had once been ground zero for seminal movements in rock and pop. Of course Laura’s old neighborhood would seem like a theme park called Punk World or Disco Land, where tastefully “distressed” buildings re-created a semblance of the grittiness of yesteryear, and if you squinted hard enough you could almost see Joey Ramone or Wayne County lugging their gear down the Bowery after a set at CBGB. Laura herself had thought for a fleeting moment that she’d seen Adam Purple, an old man now, pushing a battered grocery cart filled with compost up Avenue B.

Josh hadn’t been one of the people in the meeting that day when Laura had gone to his offices with Perry for the first time, but he’d seen her struggling outside the conference room with two oversized briefcases while Perry lingered behind to schmooze. Josh had hurried to her side and said, “Let me help you with those,” taking the briefcases over Laura’s protests and walking toward the elevator with them. This had embarrassed her; it was an associate’s job to carry the briefcases when she went to a meeting, or to court, with a partner.

When he’d called her at her office four days later, she was even more embarrassed. He must have asked someone who’d been in the meeting what her name was and where she worked. She’d refused the first time he asked her out, not wanting to be that girl who got hit on at the first meeting she went to. But the second time Josh called, inviting her to a party his company was throwing to celebrate their April Latin Music issue, she’d said yes. She didn’t plan on being an associate forever, she reasoned. It couldn’t hurt to start showing her face at client events. Most associates who considered themselves partner-track made a point of doing so.

Josh’s magazine had taken over SOB’s, a Brazilian nightclub in the West Village, and hired a live salsa band. The swoop and swirl of strobes overhead transformed the women’s dresses and flowing blouses into shimmering beacons of iridescent light. Laura felt like an undertaker in the black pantsuit she’d worn to work that day. Trays of mojitos crossed the floor and she drank three in quick succession near the bar, then felt so light-headed she had to sit down. Gratefully accepting an empanada from a passing waiter, she looked around the room for Josh.

He was in a corner near the back, conferring with underlings in headsets. Laura hadn’t remembered, perhaps hadn’t realized, how good-looking he was. His hands gestured as he spoke, his long fingers blunt at the tips. Laura ran her own fingers through her hair, trying to remember if she’d styled it that morning or simply let it hang loose to air-dry. She thought, What am I doing here? Josh looked up then and saw her. She watched him give a final instruction to the people wearing headsets, then lope across the room toward her. “You made it!” He smiled warmly and lightly bussed her cheek, the crowd behind Laura preventing her from backing up and offering her hand instead for a more decorous handshake. Shouting to be heard over the band, Josh asked, “Do you dance? Latin dancing is easier than it looks—promise!”

Perhaps it was the implied assumption that somebody who looked like her, an island of suit in a sea of business casual, wouldn’t know how to dance that propelled her onto the floor when normally she would have refused. At nearly five foot ten Laura was taller than a lot of men, but Josh was just tall enough to make her feel feminine. She found herself acutely aware of the smooth skin of his palm pressed against her own, of his breath on the top of her head whenever he twirled her in before releasing her. It had been fifteen years and at least six inches of height since Laura had last danced like this. She was pleasantly surprised to discover that her hips still remembered how to find the rhythm, that her movements still felt as fluid as if she’d done this only last week. The only difference was that she didn’t remember feeling quite this dizzy or short of breath dancing when she was younger. It’s the mojitos, Laura thought, and then she stopped thinking.

They danced through four straight numbers, Josh’s questioning look at the end of each (did she need a rest?) met with a reassuring squeeze of her hand (no, no she didn’t). She was surprised at what a strong partner he was. Laura knew her own dancing must look as good as it felt, because people were actually standing back to watch the two of them bevel their way across the dance floor.

Maybe if she hadn’t already been doing so many things that felt unlike her regular self (and yet, conversely, more like her genuine self than any other self she’d allowed herself to be in years), maybe then the rest of the night would have turned out differently. Maybe she wouldn’t have been so quick to tell Josh things she worked to keep hidden from her colleagues who, when they heard she’d been raised in Manhattan, assumed she meant one of the wealthier uptown enclaves around Park Avenue. Maybe she wouldn’t even be married to Josh now. Could a life truly turn on such things? On the electricity of fingertips on the small of her back, or a moment of swift elation that came from knowing a crowd of strangers admired her on a dance floor?

When they eventually collapsed, breathless, into a banquette, Josh’s blue eyes glowed. “You’re amazing. Where’d you learn to dance like that?”

“I grew up on the Lower East Side, and there was a huge Puerto Rican community,” she answered. “There’d be these enormous block parties with music and food. My mother says the first time she brought me to one, I was three years old and I slipped away from her in the crowd. It was an hour before she found me, in the middle of a group of older kids teaching me the steps. Everybody would dance, from little kids to grandmothers.” She smiled. “It was nice, seeing different generations dancing the same dances and enjoying the same music like that.”

Josh had been impressed. “When I was a kid, I would’ve given anything to grow up in the city,” he told her. “Living here was all I ever wanted. I had it all planned out. I was going to write music reviews for an alt-weekly and live in one of those shabby old downtown tenements with a futon on the floor and milk crates for furniture.”

His self-deprecation had made her laugh. “Somehow it doesn’t seem like that’s how things turned out for you.”

“No,” Josh agreed, in a way that struck Laura as a touch rueful. “I don’t even know if those ratty little apartments I was so excited to live in still existed by the time I got here.”

“I grew up in one of those ratty little tenement apartments. Believe me, there’s nothing romantic about poverty. Or bad plumbing, for that matter.”

Josh’s eyes took in Laura’s suit, which—for all its staid propriety—was clearly expensive. “Were you very poor?”

“Poor enough. Although I didn’t realize it until we … until I was fourteen.”

“What happened when you were fourteen?”

“Oh, you know.” Laura made a vague gesture and felt her cheeks grow warm. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she just chatter and flirt like any other woman talking to an attractive man in a nightclub? “One day you have to grow up and understand how the world really works.”

The band, having launched into a Celia Cruz number, sounded louder in the momentary silence that fell between them. Laura smiled in recognition and, wanting to dispel the solemn mood that had sprung up, said, “I love Celia Cruz. The family that lived on the top floor of our building used to play her records all the time.”

Josh’s face caught Laura’s smile. “So it wasn’t all terrible.”

“Of course not.” She was relieved that the conversation had resumed on a lighter note. “I mean, the heat and the plumbing never quite worked the way they were supposed to. Our building went up at the turn of the century, so things were always breaking, but there was also always this sense of how many people had lived in our apartment before we did. My mother and I would find things from time to time, like a scorch mark on the floor from an old flatiron. Or once when we were scraping off wallpaper, we found out that one room had been papered in nineteenth-century sheet music. My mother was very into music, and she was a bit of a romantic like you are, so she forgave a lot of what was sometimes uncomfortable about living there.”

“And you didn’t feel the same way?” he asked.

“I liked the people,” Laura said. “I think that part of it was actually a lot like what you used to imagine. We had a few performance artists as neighbors. The family upstairs had five kids, and their daughter who was my age was my best friend. And then there were the Mandelbaums in the apartment right above ours. They used to watch me sometimes when my mother was busy.” Laura’s smile held a hint of sadness. “They were married for over fifty years, and they were madly in love right up until the end.”

“True love!” Josh exclaimed. “Was it love at first sight?”

“Oh no.” Laura laughed. “They met through a mutual friend one summer at Rockaway Beach. Mr. Mandelbaum was short and already balding, but very hairy everywhere else. Although supposedly he had quite a way with the ladies.” Laura found herself slipping into the cadence and phrasing that Mrs. Mandelbaum had always used when telling the story. Max used to go with Rockettes before he met me, she would say, still proud some fifty years later of having vanquished these statuesque rivals for Mr. Mandelbaum’s affections. “Mrs. Mandelbaum was only eighteen and eight years younger than he was. So when their friend tried to fix them up, Mr. Mandelbaum said, I’m not going out with that child! And Mrs. Mandelbaum said, I’m not going out with that hairy baboon! But somehow they let themselves get talked into it, and they had an awful time. He took her to a roadhouse and left her sitting by herself in a corner while he danced with every other woman there. But later, when he was walking her home, he felt so sorry for the way he’d treated her that he started talking to her. They didn’t stop talking until they got to her door. Mrs. Mandelbaum used to say, And that’s when the love bug bit us both!”

Laura fell silent. She was inexplicably happy to talk about them now, with Josh, but lingering beneath the memories was always the pain she felt when she thought of the Mandelbaums. She was lost so far in the past that she was almost startled when Josh asked, “Did they have any children?”

“A son, Joseph. He was killed in Vietnam. They had a picture of him in his army uniform that they kept next to his Purple Heart in their living room. When I was little I used to think he looked so handsome, just like a movie star.” Laura looked down at Josh’s hands. “He looked a little like you, actually.”

The corners of Josh’s mouth turned upward in a way that accepted the compliment while also turning it aside. “Do any of the people you knew still live there?”

“No.” Laura would have given anything to sound less abrupt, but she couldn’t help it. “The building was condemned and we all had to move.”

Another silence fell. Josh lifted his drink to his lips, and Laura blushed deeply as she realized she was wondering what his mouth would taste like, or how it would feel to have him press her back against the plush of the banquette and put his hands on her. He slung his arm casually across the top of the banquette, and to Laura he smelled like rum and shampoo, like the warmth of dancing in a crowded room and freshly laundered clothes that could bear the strain. Laura’s nose even caught something that reminded her of the spikenard flowers Sarah had once tried unsuccessfully to cultivate in a small box hung from their apartment window. She found herself leaning subtly closer to him, the edge of his sleeve brushing against the back of her neck.

He looked at her then, and their eyes held. “Why don’t we grab some food?” Josh asked. “Raoul’s is somewhere around here.” And when Laura started to protest, thinking decorum demanded his presence until the party was over, he added, “I’ve been here long enough. They can wrap things up without me.”


They were together nearly all the time after that first night, whenever they weren’t working. Josh worked as hard as Laura did, although his hours weren’t as long. Since finishing law school and going to work for Neuman Daines, Laura’s first and only commitment had been to the firm. But now she found herself ducking out as early as seven o’clock some nights, because she literally couldn’t wait to see Josh. Life in the office, with its demanding hours and crushing workload, had started to feel like her real life, and everything else was just the blurry stuff around the edges. With Josh, though, her after-hours life suddenly stood out in sparkling relief. She remembered what life had felt like before she’d entered high school, when everything had become about the next test, the next grade, the next accomplishment. Josh had an easygoing charm, a goofiness so at odds with his good looks. His ability to make her laugh felt like a tonic for things she hadn’t even known were wrong with her.

Laura had always struggled to suppress an inner conviction that she was an imposter in this life she’d built for herself. A long time ago, when she’d still lived with Sarah, things had happened to them that would be unthinkable to the people she knew now. Things like the nearly unbearable humiliation and heartbreak of being fourteen and watching your mother pick through a waterlogged mountain of personal belongings flung into the street for the world to gawk at, in the hope of finding something, anything—a pair of underwear, a shredded childhood diary—that had been yours and private only the day before. Was it possible that anything like that could ever happen to Perry? Or to the other fifth-years at her firm? Or even to Mrs. Reeves, the woman who sat behind the firm’s mahogany reception desk where she’d answered phones and greeted clients in undisputed authority for the past thirty-four years?

Sometimes Laura imagined what Sarah’s life would eventually become, shuffling alone among the flotsam and jetsam of her former life crammed into that small, overheated apartment. The sadness she saw in Sarah’s face, whenever she brought herself to make one of her increasingly rare visits, made her feel both guilty and terrified. She felt like yelling at Sarah, It’s not my fault that you’re sad now, that you’re lonely. You made your choices. It took both of us to make our relationship what it is.

But the things Laura imagined might someday happen to herself, or to Sarah, were things that would never happen to Josh. One only had to look at him, to spend five minutes in his presence, to know that he was one of the anointed—him and all those belonging to him. Meeting Josh’s parents and sister for the first time in New Jersey over Sunday brunch, Laura had said politely, It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Broder. And Zelda Broder, formidable in chunky diamonds and frosted hair, had grasped Laura’s hand and exclaimed in her raspy voice, Josh, she’s lovely! Laura had looked around at the comfortable faces, listened to the loud conversations about work or eager exchanges of gossip that weren’t about the quixotic sorts of things that had formed the background of her early life with Sarah—discussions about the meaning of art in music, or painting banners for rallies that proclaimed HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT—and she’d thought, This is where I belong.

Josh was simply a person who enjoyed his life and his work. He was passionate about music and books, the way Sarah had been, but he viewed them as smaller gifts that made everything else better rather than ends in themselves. He could make something as minor as a spontaneous afternoon movie or midnight pizza order seem like a holiday, a treat they’d earned by working so hard. For Laura, the idea of hard work being rewarded with anything other than money and the security of knowing more work and money would follow was so foreign as to come as a revelation.

She would think about him all day, imagining Josh’s hands and Josh’s legs wrapped around her own, and her knees would tremble beneath her desk. Innocuous office talk, like, Laura, could you please come in here? or, The meeting is starting now, reminded her of the urgency of a please or now whispered in the dark. In her bed alone on the nights when she didn’t see Josh, her legs contracted and kicked restlessly, keeping her up for hours, as if they were desperate to walk away with or without her, desperate to walk back to him.


To fall in love in New York is to walk, and she and Josh spent hours walking all over the city, although when they were downtown Laura made sure they never went any farther east than Soho or the Village. Their long legs naturally took rapid strides, but they deliberately slowed their pace to save their breath for the conversations that went back and forth and around and around, never ceasing, like an endless game of tetherball.

Once, only a few months into their relationship, they’d walked past a store on the Upper East Side, one of those tiny boutiques whose window mannequins wore heartbreakingly lovely, stunningly expensive gowns. One of the dresses in the window, a floor-length spaghetti-strapped number, was made of silk the exact color of the soft inside of a peach. Laura had stood contemplating it for a moment and said musingly, “I’ve always wanted to wear a dress like this.”

“Then we should go in so you can try it on,” Josh had replied.

Laura had glanced down at her faded jeans and light sweater—her typical nonwork uniform—and laughed. “What’s the point? Where would I even wear something like that?”

“Trying on isn’t buying,” Josh had pointed out, and so the two of them went into the shop.

Looking at herself in the dress in front of the store’s three-way mirror, Laura had felt transformed. Her pale skin looked creamy and rose-tinged next to the soft peach of the dress, and her hair gleamed against the delicate fabric like jewels in a velvet case. She didn’t look like a lawyer with 150 pages of contracts to read through that night before returning to work in the morning, trudging to the subway with a shoulder bag so heavy that she was already developing back problems. She looked like someone who went whirling across polished floors before collapsing gracefully into a delicate chair with a glass of champagne and perhaps the smallest finger sandwich for refreshment.

“You should buy it,” said Josh’s voice, behind her.

“Are you crazy?” Laura whirled to face him. “Do you know how expensive …?” But her protest trailed off when she saw Josh’s face.

He looked at her as if seeing some version of herself she hadn’t met. It was a look Laura had seen sometimes on Mr. Mandelbaum’s face as he’d watched Mrs. Mandelbaum do the simplest things, like stand on her toes to pull a book from a high shelf, or pour boiling water from a kettle into a teacup. It was a half smile, stronger in the eyes than it was around the mouth. And even though Laura was very young when she’d seen it, even then she’d thought it was a smile that contained a lifetime of books and teacups, of sleepless nights next to a feverish son’s bedside and clasped hands years later at that same son’s graduation, months when the checkbook refused to balance and years of holiday dinners that were festive nonetheless. But, always, there had been this. This room. This woman.

“Marry me,” Josh said. “Will you marry me?”

He reached out to take her hand, but Laura took an instinctive step back. “Are you serious?” She felt perspiration collect beneath her arms and thought, Well, now I guess I have to buy this dress. “Do we even know each other well enough to get married?”

“I know how I feel,” Josh replied. “This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”

His voice was firm, his eyes clear as they looked into her own. He really has been thinking about it, Laura realized. A wisp of an idea curled around the edges of thought: That you never knew, truly could never know, what another person was thinking. And yet what was love if not the possibility—the promise, even—of perfect understanding?

“I’ve never been this happy with anybody else,” Josh continued, “and I can’t imagine ever being this happy with anybody else. Can you?” His hand remained outstretched. “If you can, then I have nothing else to say.”

Laura had always known that the world was made up of two types of people. There were those, like Josh (and Sarah, for that matter), who felt that life existed to be enjoyed for its own sake. It wasn’t that such people were necessarily irresponsible (Laura again thought of Sarah), but that the point of the responsibility and hard work and worrying over bills and all the rest of it was so that, in the end, you could enjoy your life. If all those things didn’t get you to the joy, then all those things didn’t matter.

And then there were those who knew that life was something to be battled and survived. If you were very careful, and if you worked very hard, you could get through it without anything truly terrible happening to you. That was the most it was reasonable to hope for.

Laura was the second type of person, but she hadn’t always been. She had been happy these few months of dating Josh, had remembered what it had felt like when she was young and any small thing—like the promise of visiting the Mandelbaums and spending long, uninterrupted hours with Honey the cat purring in her lap—had made ordinary days alive with the promise of joy to come. But she’d never really expected it to last. She’d been shoring up the happy days against the inevitable time when all she’d have left of them was the memory of what it had felt like, and the reality of struggling forward regardless.

Laura felt a stab of guilt now at the thought of saddling Josh with somebody like her for the rest of his life. But the thought, the half-suggested promise that maybe, just maybe, she could get it back somehow—that the silly songs Sarah had always listened to and sung about love and happiness and all the rest of it could be true, not just for a moment, but forever—was too much for her.

“Yes,” she’d said. She let Josh take her hand, and as he pulled her into his arms she repeated against his ear, “Yes, I’ll marry you.”


Sarah had finally met Josh, not long after their engagement, over lunch in a small East Village sandwich place. If the suddenness of their courtship had alarmed her, she’d hidden it well. She and Josh had talked music for a solid hour, and Sarah’s eyes shone in a way Laura hadn’t seen in years. For the span of that hour, Laura had seen the Sarah she remembered from childhood, the Sarah who spoke confidently and had interesting things to say. Not the Sarah of recent years, who chattered at Laura so relentlessly that calling her or going to visit felt like being taken hostage. After so many years of keeping her distance, Laura would think resentfully, it hardly seemed fair.

She had worried what Josh would think when he saw how strained her relationship with Sarah was. (Because how could anyone fail to notice how uncomfortable they were in each other’s presence?) Would he think there was something wrong with Laura? Reconsider the wisdom of entangling himself with someone whose family wasn’t as healthy as his own?

But Josh had been enthralled. “Your mom is the best,” he’d enthused afterward. “You have no idea how lucky you were, growing up with a mother who knew so much about music and cared about so many things.”

Laura had always imagined that someday, at some hazy point in the future, after she and her mother had forgiven each other for all the unforgiven things that stood between them, they would sit in Sarah’s apartment and talk across the battered kitchen table about Josh. Laura would say how falling for him had reminded her of the community pools Sarah had taken her to in the summers of her childhood, when Laura would allow herself to fall backward into the water and sink weightlessly to the bottom, the circle of sunlight reflected on the water’s surface above her expanding as she sank. That was how love felt, like sinking into light.

Sarah would smile ruefully and say something like, That’s just how it was with your father and me. And then Sarah would tell her what had gone wrong with Laura’s father. She had wanted Sarah to offer some tangible explanation that could be logically applied to Laura’s relationship with Josh, so Laura could say, Well, that’s something that would never happen to us. Sarah used to say that Laura tried to wear logic like an armor, but Laura knew that everything that had gone wrong for Sarah, and therefore for Laura, had been the result of bad logic, a willful ignorance of the basic laws of cause and effect.

She’d thought about having a discussion like this with Sarah, but whenever she’d tried opening her mouth to begin it, it had seemed to her that the inevitable pain and exhaustion, the excruciating dredging-up of things long dormant (what an attorney might call the “opportunity cost”), couldn’t possibly be worth it. Someday, perhaps, the right moment would present itself naturally.

Except that now, of course, that moment would never come.

Still, it was of some comfort to Laura that her mother had lived long enough to see her wedding. She and Josh had been married on a Thursday morning in the middle of September, in a Tribeca restaurant with only a handful of friends and family looking on. Laura was grateful they’d kept things small, as she wasn’t sure who she would have invited beyond a few co-workers. Perry in his suit and yarmulke, properly restrained and joyful for the occasion, had made her think of Mr. Mandelbaum. How he would have loved to have been at her wedding! My little ketsele a grown-up lady! he would have said.

Sarah, now forty-nine, had been as beautiful as Laura had ever seen her, still tall and elegantly slim, the lilac silk dress she wore turning her eyes a vivid shade of indigo. Laura and Josh had both been walked down the aisle by their parents, in the Jewish tradition. While they were waiting for their cue, Sarah had pulled Laura’s arm through her own. Laura could feel it tremble. Sarah looked as though she were about to say something, but instead she looked down at Laura’s bouquet.

“I carried lilies at my wedding, too,” was all she said.





Laura heard the sound of the TV from the living room as she pushed open the door of the apartment she shared with Josh, carefully hanging her coat and stowing her bag in the front-hall closet. A bit farther down the hall, she spied Prudence. Although she was lying down, the cat’s entire body was a coil of tension. She leapt up when Laura entered, took a few steps toward her, and then, seeming uncertain, turned and started back in the direction of the living room. Laura paused to wonder at this, even as she went into the kitchen to pour the two glasses of red wine she brought into the living room where Josh sat watching the TV with fixed attention.

“Sorry it was such a late night again,” she said, dropping a kiss on his cheek and handing him a glass. “How was your day?”

Josh clicked off the television and turned to face her. Something about the abrupt silence and Josh’s expression sent a flicker of panic darting through Laura’s stomach.

“Not so great.” Josh took a deep breath and exhaled loudly through his nose. “I lost my job.”