Eventually your brother and his wife get pregnant, and you can’t hate on that because it’s family, and also they’ve always been incredibly kind to you, your brother and you particularly bonded because of your father’s young demise, an overdose. You throw a baby shower, at which you drink too many mimosas and cry in the bathroom, but you are pretty sure no one notices. It’s not that you want a baby, or want to get married, or any of it. It’s not your bag. You just feel tired for some reason. Tired of the world. Tired of trying to fit in where you don’t. You go home that night and draw the Empire State Building and you feel hopeful doing this thing you love to do, so hopeful you look up online what tonight’s colors mean—the lights are green and blue—and find out it’s in honor of National Eating Disorders Day and you get depressed all over again even though you’ve never had an eating disorder in your life.
Nine months come and go, a baby could be born at any minute. You call your brother to find out when exactly, but they’ve been using a hippie-dippie midwife and he says, “We don’t know yet. Could be another week.” You are suddenly aswirl with enthusiasm. It’s going to be a girl. “Call me whenever you hear anything, anything at all,” you tell him. Then you have three intensely dull, soul-deadening afternoon meetings in a row and after that you are moved to a new cube, which you must share with a freshly hired coworker who is thirteen years younger than you and is hilarious and loud and pretty and is probably making half of what you make but still spends it all on tight dresses. It is a Friday. You go out for drinks in your neighborhood. You get lit. Then you call your dealer, whom you haven’t called in a few years. You can’t believe the number still works. He says, “It’s been a while since we last met.” You say, “I’ve been busy,” as if you need to justify why you’re not doing drugs anymore. You don’t buy that much, just enough, but then you meet a man at the bar—you both pretend you’ve met before although you haven’t, but it just feels safer that way for some reason—and he has more than enough for the two of you. Then you go home together, to your place, to tiny Manhattan in the window, to the piles of sketchbooks, and the two of you proceed to do all the drugs. This goes on for hours. There’s a little bit of sex involved but neither one of you is that interested in each other. Drug buddies, that’s about it. You can’t even get it up to get it up. Eventually he leaves, and you turn off your phone and go to sleep. You wake up on Sunday night. You turn on your phone. There are eight messages from your brother and your mother. You have missed your niece being born.
You don’t do any drugs after that, ever again. No rehab necessary. You start to see the world with fresh eyes. But the world looks the same. Job, apartment, friends, family, view. For a few weeks it seems like they might try to give you an enormous promotion at work, but then you realize you’ll have more responsibility so you wiggle your way out of it. This promotion would mean you’re staying there for a while. You lie to yourself: I should keep my options open. You never know what could happen.
Still you draw. This is the best part of your day. This is your purest moment. This is when the breath leaves your body and you feel like you are hovering slightly above the ground. On New Year’s, that day of fresh starts, you allow yourself to flip through some of the old sketchbooks. You recognize you have gotten better. You are not not talented. That is a thing that fills you up. You sit with it. You sit with yourself. You allow yourself that pleasure of liking yourself. What if this is enough?
A week later, you are leaving your apartment building and you notice a fence around the lot across the street. There is a sign up, a construction permit. A ten-story condo building. Starts in a month. You live on the fifth floor. This building will block your view, no question. For a second you wonder if this is a joke. You look behind you to see if there’s a camera filming you, waiting for your reaction, but no, it’s real, your life is about to change. At last, something surprises you.
It takes a year for the building to go up, and you watch the construction every day. Brick by brick. You can’t tell when it will be finished exactly, when you’ll finally lose the view, but you decide to throw one last party to signify the end. You invite everyone you know and you even allow children to come. Your friends toast the Empire State Building, and you. “It was a good view,” says one of your old work friends, her fiancé in tow. “It wasn’t a million-dollar view,” you say, “but it was worth fifteen hundred a month.” “You have such a good deal,” says her fiancé. “You can’t move, even without the view. You can never leave this apartment,” he says and shakes your shoulders.
The day the final brick is cemented and your view is officially gone, you buy a bottle of wine and order a pizza and sit at your table. You stare at air and nothing and brick. The thing that made you special is gone. You will never have that view back, nor that time. And all you have to show for it are these sketchbooks, which are useless anyway. You think about burning them, but what good would that do? And they’re the only things that prove you existed on this earth. You realize all along you were just trying to prove to yourself you were still alive. But if I don’t have this, am I dead? Surely not. Please, no. You take a bite of your pizza and a sip of your wine and ask yourself the question you’re finally ready to ask: What next?
Andrea
A book is published. It’s a book about being single, written by an extremely attractive woman who is now married, and it is a critical yet wistful remembrance of her uncoupled days. I have no interest in reading this book. I am already single. I have been single a long time. There is nothing this book can teach me about being single that I don’t already know.
Regardless, everyone I know tells me about this book. They are like carrier pigeons, fluttering messages, doing the bidding of a wicked media maestro on a rooftop in midtown Manhattan. Nothing will stop them from reaching their destination, me, their presumed target demographic.
My coworker Nina, the bangles on her wrist clinking, hands me her copy when she’s finished with it, even though I have never expressed an interest in reading it, let alone discussed it with her. She is newly single, and she is twenty-four. A woman who was not newly single, and also not twenty-four, would know better than to hand this book to another single woman.
My mother orders a copy for me online and it shows up one day, a surprise in the mail, without a note or a name attached, and it takes me a week to figure out who sent it to me. The whole time I am thinking: A ghost sent me this book. A ghost wants me to think about being single.
Finally my mother confesses she sent it. (She does not see it as a confession, of course. I am the only one who sees it that way.) “Did you get the book?” she asks. “Oh, you sent the book,” I say. “Mom, why would you send a book like that to me?” “I thought it would be helpful,” she says.
My sister-in-law, who lives in the hinterlands of New Hampshire and who has dedicated her life to taking care of her dying child, my niece, and spends her days contemplating mortality, mentions this book to me on the phone during my weekly Sunday phone call to her home. “Have you heard about this book?” she says. “Yes,” I say. “I have heard about the book.”