How Could She Read online

  “Do you know how good it feels not to have to rush back to Matt and Rachel’s and worry about waking up Cleo? I don’t have to check in for two whole hours.”

  “Wait, I thought you were staying at a hotel?”

  “I am,” she said briskly.

  “Your hotel has a curfew?”

  “It’s not exactly a hotel. It’s like a dorm-hotel. You get your own room for twelve hundred dollars a month. My friend Monika told me about it—she lived there last year when she was recording an album with the guy from Beirut.” Jeremy looked concerned. “It’s not sketchy, I promise,” Geraldine said. “You know those hotels where secretaries and models lived in the 1940s? It’s like that, but with Juilliard students and random foreigners. The girl across the hall is from Tokyo and does Japanese hair straightening.”

  “Can I see it?” Jeremy said.

  Geraldine felt her knees lock. “Men aren’t allowed above the ground floor.”

  “Then I’d like to see the ground floor.” Jeremy’s tone was more serious than Geraldine had known him to be capable of.

  They walked quietly for three blocks before turning onto Third Avenue, where Geraldine stopped in front of a building. A knot of young women were smoking outside the entrance. One of them glared at Jeremy and flicked her cigarette on the sidewalk. Inside, the corridor smelled of cleaning fluid, and Geraldine bit back the impulse to gag. A security guard sat behind a window working on a Sudoku puzzle and surrounded by a bank of television monitors.

  “He’s not allowed above the lobby,” the guard intoned.

  “We know,” Geraldine said sunnily. “I just want to show him the lounge. Jeremy, do you have ID?”

  When no response came, Geraldine turned around to face him.

  “You packed light, right?” he asked. She nodded slowly, knowing where this was headed.

  “Go get your stuff,” he instructed her.

  “Really, I’m fine,” she said stiffly.

  “It’s not up for debate,” Jeremy said. “Friends don’t let friends live like this. I’ll wait out front. Text me when you’re ready, and I’ll order an Uber.”

  11

  Rachel rolled her spiky massage balls further under her sitz bones just as her postpartum doula had shown her and waited for her computer to wake up. The machine finally made a loud spaceship noise, and Rachel was relieved that the only other people who’d shown up before ten o’clock were a couple of online editors who wore rose-gold headphones while they worked.

  Rachel was going to be in the office all week, putting in more than twice her usual hours. She was covering for Miriam, who was out on a press junket funded by the Albanian Tourism Association. Ceri had been iffy on the idea but signed off when Miriam offered to tack on a weekend in Moscow to meet with a couple of czarinas for a piece on the new Russian power players. “It can be inside their closets or art collections?” Miriam had put forth. “Do them both,” Ceri had told her. “And let’s think of a third package. Family heirlooms? We’ll blow it all out online.” Ceri’s delivery had been well oiled to the point that Rachel was sure her boss was just parroting another, savvier editor in chief at the company. Ceri didn’t know how to tag friends on Facebook, let alone break the Internet with a slideshow on despots’ samovars.

  The New York Times home page bloomed into view, and Rachel x-ed it out before she had a chance to see what Steve Bannon was up to. The new world order was unsettling as hell. It was also going to be Cassette’s undoing. Even Geraldine had figured out this much. Geraldine had taken it upon herself to put together a memo suggesting ways to “expand” Cassette’s “hermetic” point of view. “Would you mind looking this over and, if you don’t think it’s terrible, sharing it with Ceri?” she’d asked in an email, still not suggesting a specific night she could come by and hang out, as Rachel had requested. “I’m afraid if I send it to her, she’ll just delete it,” Geraldine had written. Her ideas were off-brand, but they possessed a looseness and relevancy that surprised Rachel. She’d nearly forgotten about Geraldine’s ability to weather-vane the culture, as she’d done at Province, suggesting a few of the magazine’s buzziest cover stories. Now, in Cambria font, Geraldine pointed out that nobody was forwarding recipes anymore, just articles about refugee kitchens and bodega workers on strike. The only socialite anybody was talking about was the president’s daughter. “The age of aspiration has given way to an age of anxiety,” Geraldine had written. Rachel told Geraldine an unsolicited critique might offend Ceri and suggested she bring up some of the ideas at her HR meeting instead. “I appreciate your read and your offer to get me in the door,” Geraldine replied. “I know you’re busy—seriously, I don’t know how you do it all. I’ll be here whenever you’re ready to introduce us.”

  Rachel knew she needed to come through on her promise. She could just stand up and take the elevator to the thirty-fourth floor and walk through the proverbial door itself, but first she had to edit a travel piece on the romance of backpacking, as well as Sunny’s upcoming column. This slightly terrified her; she and Sunny now texted daily, and Sunny had snuck a rendering of Rachel into a pastel drawing of pedestrians she’d just made for some museum talk she was giving. After peeking at the column—whose theme was horses—Rachel got started on the travel essay. It was good enough, with an emphasis on summer-camp nostalgia, and written by somebody named Eve Adoush. Rachel sent a new version back to the author within a couple of hours. Her main request was that Eve mention the new line of Moncler backpacks that the art director had already laid out on the page. “And maybe you could register somewhere that now is a particularly anxious moment, if you can find the right place to work it in?” Rachel wrote.

  She spent the afternoon responding to emails and slipped out a little after five o’clock. She’d get around to Sunny’s column tomorrow. The digital girls were still sitting in the exact same place, diligently clicking on God-knows-what. Mounds of work remained to be done, but Ceri had been out with the sales team since lunch, and Rachel was not going to miss her daughter’s bedtime. Rachel could put up with anything so long as she got to hold Cleo in her arms at the end of the day.

  Her phone was warm in her hand, and she refreshed her email one last time as she descended the subway stairs. There was a message from Ceri, who must have stopped by the office right after Rachel’s departure. “Did you leave already?” was the subject, the body empty.

  Rachel returned home to find Matt on his knees, helping Cleo use a foam bat to knock down a tower of Magna-Tiles.

  “Mama!” Cleo cried.

  “Hi, Schmoops.” Rachel ignored Matt’s dubious look—he hated that nickname—and gave them both kisses on their heads. “You two smell like bubble bath,” she told them.

  Matt whispered something into Cleo’s ear. “How day?” Cleo asked, pride at correctly parroting her father flashing across her face.

  “My day was good, little monkey.” Rachel smiled. “How was your day?”

  “Monkey.” Cleo laughed. Then she yelled “Book!” and ran into her bedroom.

  “We already ate dinner,” Matt said.

  “It’s not even six,” Rachel said with a light laugh.

  “We’re deep in the Cleo space-time continuum. I need to finish off some work.”

  “Okay, I got it from here. Let me just stuff my face for a second.” Rachel went into the kitchen and ate the remains of the mac and cheese that Matt had made. Then she opened the fridge and filled a water glass with pinot grigio. When she stepped back into the living room, she found Matt on the couch, too lost in his computer world to pass judgment on her heavy-handed pour.

  An hour later, when Rachel had delivered her daughter into a deep sleep, she came out of Cleo’s room and found Matt watching a video of what looked like a psychedelic ringworm colony. She settled in next to him and let off an exhausted sigh. “Guess what Cleo wanted to read?”

  “Fe-Fi-Fo Farm? Sh
e seems to like the goats.” Matt absently cupped Rachel’s knee with his hand.

  “‘Four goats dip into the moat,’” Rachel recited. “What does that even mean?”

  Matt shrugged. His chest muscles contracted beneath his MIT rowing T-shirt.

  “Who comes up with this stuff?” she mused, Googling the title on her phone. “So there’s the genius behind it.” She laughed and tilted the screen at Matt, who didn’t appear to be interested in the old lady in the picture. “This granny was canny enough to score a book deal.”

  Matt gave Rachel an incredulous look. “Don’t do this.”

  Rachel felt a catch in her throat. “What?”

  “You love books. Don’t talk about them this way.”

  “I might as well talk about them. I don’t have the time to read them.”

  “We’re all stressed out. I’m the one who only has a fifty-percent chance of tenure.”

  Rachel held her eyes level with his. She could feel the muscles in her cheeks pull down. “Of course you’re going to make tenure, honey. Everything’s going to be fine for you. Everyone loves you.”

  “Everyone loves you, too.”

  “Not in the same way. Everyone’s wondering what happened to me. I peaked too early. Here I am now, with two jobs but no career to speak of and a daughter I don’t get to see enough.”

  “You’re doing beautifully,” Matt said, massaging her shoulders. “You’re the best mother, and you’re writing a book about monsters.”

  “Sexy monsters.” Rachel grinned.

  “Smokin’-hot monsters. And when you sell it—”

  “If I sell it,” Rachel interjected.

  “When you sell it, we can talk about your shifting to just writing, if that’s what you want. People make adjustments all the time. Look at your friend Geraldine—she’s applying for hostess jobs at cocktail lounges.”

  “What?” Rachel jerked her head toward her husband. “How do you know what jobs Geraldine is trying to get?”

  “I was talking to Jeremy,” Matt said.

  “I don’t see the connection. Did he buy a restaurant?”

  “She’s staying with him,” Matt said.

  “No, she’s not,” Rachel said. “We just emailed today, about a meeting I’m getting her. She would have told me if she’d moved in with my friend.”

  “I’m glad to hear you refer to Jeremy as your friend,” Matt said. “He took her in a couple nights ago. She was staying at a maximum-security dorm. He says it was super sketchy.”

  “That doesn’t make sense—she’s not even legal here.”

  “Where there’s a will . . . ,” Matt said, shaking his head. “Can you picture Geraldine having breakfast with Jeremy, stirring her tea and telling him about whatever show she just saw at the Guggenheim while he tries to read his phone?”

  She was too stunned to reply. How had Geraldine thought it was okay not to give her a heads-up about this new arrangement? Rachel took a sip from her glass. The wine was cool, and it tasted clean, and there wasn’t nearly enough of it.

  “I can’t believe she didn’t tell me,” Rachel muttered.

  “It’s a little strange. But she’s got to be more depressed than she’s letting on. Have a little empathy.”

  “You think I lack empathy.” Rachel swallowed. “Can’t you ever just agree with me without telling me how I could be more enlightened?”

  “I could agree with every crazy thing you say, but then you’d be signing away your right to be taken seriously.”

  “So now I’m crazy? For such a nice guy, you can be really mean.” Rachel worked her body off the couch and stepped over a stack of Cleo’s stuffed animals and lacing toys. “And why is it just assumed that my job is to help her? Who’s helping me here?”

  “Rach, do you really want to be doing this?”

  Rachel didn’t reply. She locked the bathroom door behind her and slid down to the floor. With her back against the wall, surrounded by nothing but her own ugly feelings, she planted her face in her knees and began to cry.

  12

  I guess I’ve always had a soft spot for turtles.” Sunny used her most childish voice, and the members of the audience nodded encouragingly. She got nervous and hated live events, though the feeling never seemed to be mutual.

  Sharing the stage with Sunny were Yoni Subamariam, a handsome twenty-something poet whose multipart Twitter “compositions” were regularly retweeted by rappers and French intellectuals, and Monika Kull, a singer-songwriter who came from Edmonton and was filling in for a better-known musician who had to drop out at the last minute. The three of them were participating in “The New Pioneers,” a conversation series the Museum of Modern Art was putting on in collaboration with the independent publishing house Predicate Books.

  The events were meant to foster dialogue among visionaries in different disciplines—and, of course, to lure youngish people to West Fifty-third Street and inject new blood into MoMA’s membership pool. The series had developed a reputation as a mating ground for culture vultures—Sunny’s friend Jaycee was still dating a film editor she’d met at the drinks after the “Emo Emoji” chat. And so on a clear spring night that would have been perfect for jogging over the Brooklyn Bridge or drinking rosé at an outdoor table, some two hundred people had crammed into the basement screening room.

  Tonight’s topic was “urbanized nature.” Yoni had taken Metro-North round-trip from 125th Street to Fairfield, Connecticut, and tweeted an essay about the dilapidated views and colonialism. Monika had composed a couple of haunting songs—one about drinking whiskey under a clothesline, the other about a water bug who possessed the power to remind the singer she came from another land. Sunny had created a trio of watercolors that sat on an easel off to the side of the stage and were projected, thirty feet high, behind them. There was a dusky scene from the dog park where she took Stanley, ferns framed in an Upper West Side windowsill, and snapping turtles swimming in the Gowanus Canal, unbeknownst to the group of people crossing the wooden bridge. Sunny had thrown Rachel in there just to stay awake.

  “I especially love the snapping-turtle painting, because it makes me wonder what threats lie beyond what meets the eye,” the moderator said. She was a design and architecture curator, and her voice was velvety and she knew it. “I’m thinking of all the hidden contours of the city, all the nooks and crannies filled with unfathomable things for us to be afraid of.”

  Sunny grabbed a thick section of hair and tucked it behind her ear, nodding respectfully. The moderator’s attention shifted away, and Sunny eased into her Eames chair. During the production of the paintings, she had been primarily consumed with how shitty things were becoming with Nick. While she could pinpoint the most recent time she and her husband had had sex, she couldn’t do the same for the last time they’d properly kissed. He was supposedly mad at Sunny because he didn’t think she’d been warm enough to his sister, Barbara, during her recent visit. “Warm to her?” Sunny had objected. “She’s the one who goes stiff as a board if you try to hug her.”

  “Did you try?” Nick grabbed his keys off the silver tray and stormed out of the house. He’d met up with Jeremy and stayed out until two in the morning. Sunny had been too proud to ask if Geraldine had been with them.

  She needed to call Geraldine and set something up. Peter had been emailing Sunny to ask for Geraldine updates. Sunny didn’t know how to respond, not only because she didn’t know the answer. She wasn’t sure what kind of response would keep Peter at bay. Sunny wasn’t going to get any intel from Nick, not while they were in one of their silent fights. As soon as Nick woke up that morning, he said he had a lot of work to do and had the car brought over from the garage and drove straight to Long Island. He said that Sunny was welcome to meet him out there after her talk.

  Sunny tried to stifle the panic that was rising in her by surveying the crowd. There was her editor, M
iriam, a few rows back, wearing an uncharacteristically flamboyant top. Annie Reamer, a freelance writer who’d written a piece for Refinery29 on “Girl Crushes” and cited Sunny and Neko Case as hers, had planted herself in the middle of the second row. The second that Sunny spotted her, Annie gave an eager little wave.

  “Is that a notion you were playing with, Sunny?” the moderator asked.

  Shit. What notion?

  The stage lights shone down on her aggressively, and Sunny blinked hard, as if to shield herself from the scrutiny. “I’m not sure it was the notion I was playing with so much as the sense of the unnatural that surrounds us. We keep our trees in these tiny plots of dirt on the sidewalk and our dogs run around the park and dig up cigarette butts.”

  “But does that prevent our city from being a utopia?” Yoni chimed in, eager to bring himself closer to the center of the proceedings.

  Sunny cocked her head and tried to appear to be thinking hard. “I’m not sure anywhere in this country could be considered a utopia in 2017,” she said at last. This garnered a lukewarm laugh and few adamant claps.

  When the houselights came back up, everybody whispered excitedly about skipping the reception in the lobby. Sunny slipped her coat on and kept stride with a younger group, who flowed west to an Irish bar on Ninth Avenue that the museum art handlers liked to go to after work. She ended up at a back table in the warm room, fielding questions from a woman who worked in the museum’s development office. She wished Nick hadn’t so abruptly skipped town and left her on her own. She didn’t want to go home to an empty house. She shut her eyes. Everything felt crooked, and it wasn’t just the noncommittal April weather and horrible political situation. Something was the matter on a cellular level. She opened her eyes and watched Monika, who was tossing her long hair and dancing gracelessly by the jukebox. The best dancer Sunny had ever seen—the best unprofessional, tipsy dancer, that is—was Rachel, whose moves managed to be both funny and sexy. Sunny remembered how she would burn with jealousy at all the Province parties. Now she wished Rachel were here to keep her company.