Modern Lovers (4 page)

J
ane had taken to sleeping in the guest room. Now that Ruby knew that they were having problems, problems that might actually end their marriage, it felt both better and worse in the house. She and Zoe didn't have to pretend that everything was fine, but Jane had enjoyed pretending. She enjoyed it so much that she would often make it all the way through the day and evening and only remember when she got home after the dinner rush and Zoe glared at her from her spot on the couch. Jane couldn't turn on the television; she couldn't change the music. She could choose to sit quietly and not bother Zoe, but if Jane was on her laptop, getting work done, she'd get shit for that, too. It was as if Zoe thought that they were all just swimming through oceans of time, endless vast amounts of time. Who sat in one place for three hours reading a book? Maybe that's why they were talking about getting divorced. Dr. Amelia, the couples therapist they'd seen years ago, said that all marriages went through rough spots, and that it didn't mean the union was faulty or unsound. It just meant that you had to kick a few tires, or tighten some bolts, or adjust the seasoning. Dr. Amelia hadn't been afraid of metaphors. Sometimes, when they were sitting on the low orange sofa in her office, Dr. Amelia would tilt her head back and go through long lists of them, trying to find the right one.

It wasn't like the beginning, when they spent their days eating their way through the Chinese shopping malls in Queens, or when they opened Hyacinth and they were both on their feet fifteen hours a day, too exhausted to fight, or when Ruby was born and they were too in love to have to. Now Zoe spent so much time hunched over her computer, working on the payroll and the schedules and the billing, that Jane took it as a silvery stop sign. Somehow, now that they weren't needed in the space every second of every day, instead of having more time together they had less. Jane went to dinners at the James Beard House by herself, she drank whiskey with the cooks after closing at the bar down the street. For the first time in her life, Zoe went to bed early. There were big problems and little problems, the latter of which seemed to multiply in the night like rabbits. Jane cared about Yelp comments too much, she drank too much. She didn't care about Zoe's friends. She didn't care about her own friends. She didn't have friends! She was too bossy, she wasn't bossy enough. She didn't care about Patti Smith. When they met, Zoe was wild, and Jane had felt like a steadying force—her sturdy body anchoring Zoe's rangy limbs to earth. That's what she still wanted to be. It wasn't the word, or the feeling, of failure, which is what Jane's mother was so mopey about, having to call her aunts and uncles and cousins, and tell them that it hadn't worked. Her mother acted like it was an affront to Jane's gayness, the divorce, like she'd been granted the right to vote and then slept through the election.

The guest-room bed was full size, a lumpy leftover futon. Until recently, they'd kept it folded up unless Ruby had a friend sleeping over, and then they'd drag the mattress onto the floor of her room and the girls could jump and flop all over it. Kids didn't care. Jane cared. Her back felt terrible, and so did her knees. Standing up at the restaurant was bad enough, but sleeping on a piece of glorified cardboard was worse. Every morning, she rolled off to one side and had to come
up through hands and knees, as if she'd just crawled across a desert. She felt like she was a hundred years old. Meanwhile, Zoe was always dipping in and out of Pilates classes. She'd been wearing makeup, a glittery dusting on her eyes, some bright pink on her lips. It was hard not to feel as though Zoe was dancing on her grave. It wasn't as if Jane had ever kept Zoe from doing whatever she liked—it didn't make sense. Jane liked it when things made sense. It wasn't even a question of rocking the boat—Zoe was carving the boat in half with a chain saw. God, she was as bad as Dr. Amelia.

They were just moving into true summer—tomatoes were perfect, round and sweet. Soft-shell crabs were perfection. Corn was everywhere, so fresh you could just peel the silk back and eat the kernels right off the cob. Hyacinth was less busy in July and August, when so many people left the city, but June was still brisk, and Jane woke up thinking of specials to add to the menu. She almost always opened her eyes to visions of food—not breakfast, never breakfast—things she could serve at the restaurant. A dessert with strawberries and peppercorns. A salad with enormous watermelon radishes and fat wedges of avocado. Fresh pasta with asparagus pesto. And then she'd think about Zoe.

They'd always talked about what would happen when Ruby left home—when she was little, it seemed like a hilarious nightmare, the idea that this tiny, helpless creature would ever be able to pay her own bills or pull open the fridge door. When she was five or six and in school every day, Zoe had flipped out. At first, it was thrilling—so many hours in the day! such freedom!—but then she began to complain about how much time Ruby was spending with other adults, worrying that she was going to be influenced by them. “They're
teachers
,” Jane would tell her. “That's what we're paying them for.” It didn't matter—Zoe was always five or ten minutes early to pick Ruby up, pacing back and forth in front of school, as if she thought that her
daughter might have forgotten her in the hours she'd been gone. In those years, Zoe clung to Jane like a loving barnacle. They were a power couple, rich in kale and quinoa and fizzy glasses of rosé.

Jane rolled onto her side. The ceiling fan was on, whirring around in circles. The house was quiet, but there was some construction going on outside. Jane could have sworn there used to be rules about jackhammers on weekends, but there they were. It was so strange to be in her house, sleeping in another bed. She felt embarrassed, and ridiculous. What did any of this have to do with sleeping arrangements, anyway? All she wanted was her normal, easy life. She thought it wasn't anything they couldn't fix. Maybe once Ruby left home, things would be easier. There would be more space for them to talk—to argue, even. It wasn't as if Zoe was prone to the idea of divorce—her own parents had stayed married through the seventies and eighties and cocaine and all the rest. They were still married and drank gin and tonics together in front of the fireplace, though Los Angeles was usually too warm for them to turn it on. Jane loved Zoe's parents for many reasons, but that's what it boiled down to—she loved that they were happy, utterly devoid of neuroses.

She and Zoe were a mixed marriage, both racially and religiously speaking—Jane was a Jew from Long Island who'd been taking ulcer medication since she was a teenager, and Zoe was a Martian who never worried about anything, who believed that Chaka Khan played
everyone's
sweet sixteen. They'd always balanced each other out, but now Jane felt like instead of balance, she'd just been a brick tied to Zoe's ankle, a rusty anchor trying to drag her under. Maybe, after all this time, it turned out that Zoe was right, that working hard and having fun were all that mattered, and everything else should just vanish in a puff of smoke. Ruby's clothes, Ruby's grades? The server at the restaurant who was always high, like Hyacinth was the Odeon and Bret Easton Ellis was about to walk in the door? Her mother's latest fight with her postal worker about how she was stealing her
magazines? She wanted to let it all go. All Jane wanted was to look at Zoe's beautiful face every day for the rest of her life.

“Zo?” Jane said. She stood up slowly, her knees creaking. “Rube?” She walked with stiff legs into the hall and peered into the other bedrooms. There was no sign of either her wife or her daughter. “Guys?” she called, her voice loud and clear. The house was empty. This is what it would be like for the rest of her life—calling into empty rooms and waiting for responses that weren't coming. Getting married was the easy part, even though they'd had to wait until Ruby was twelve to do it legally. When they got together, it was all balloons, all hope. Now that they knew what the future held—what the future looked like—it was much harder. Why couldn't everyone stay young forever? If not on the outside, then just on the inside, where no one ever got too old to be optimistic. Zoe would have laughed at her, standing like a mope in the middle of the hallway in her pajamas. Jane had no idea what time it was. Was it too late? She rested her forehead against the wall.

T
he SAT prep course was held on Saturday mornings in a karate school on Church Avenue, the northernmost thoroughfare in the neighborhood, populated by laundromats, bodegas, and the occasional coffee shop that sold freshly baked scones and croissants to the laptop crowd. The class was two hours long, every week for eight weeks—two whole months. Harry didn't mind much. He didn't have anything better to do, and it was nice to get out of the house, almost healthy. Taking tests didn't scare him, and he was pretty sure that he didn't have to get a perfect score in order to get into the schools he wanted to go to—maybe Bard or Bennington, somewhere small like Whitman but without any of the people. Reed sounded good. A little crunchy, but good. Being far away was a bonus.

Harry pulled open the door to the studio. There were folding chairs set up facing a dry-erase board along the back wall, and a projector screen was already showing off the crowded desktop of somebody's laptop. A few other kids were milling around, and about half the chairs were occupied. Harry ambled over to the back row and sank into a chair. He recognized two girls from his grade sitting in the front row and pulled his hood down over his eyes.

“Hey,” someone said, smacking him in the back of the head.

Harry put his hand up to protect himself, spinning around as quickly as he could. Ruby stood behind him, smiling.

“Oh,” Harry said. “Hey.”

They hadn't spoken since graduation. After the Dust incident (girls like Eliza and Thayer, now four rows ahead of him, had christened the event “#dustup” on Instagram, which they thought was hilarious until Ruby threatened to kill their parents), Ruby and Harry hadn't even been in the same room. Harry had walked by Ruby twice, once when she was sitting on her front porch with her dog, and the other when she was standing on line at the grocery store on Cortelyou, buying milk and the same hippie deodorant that his mother used. He hadn't said hello either time, because it was much easier to stare at the ground than it was to figure out what to say, but he had spent a lot of time smelling his mother's deodorant.

Ruby picked up someone's backpack that had been sitting in the chair next to Harry and moved it over one. “Mind if I join you? I hear the shrimp cocktail is out of this world.”

“And the martinis,” Harry said. “Very good olives.” He had a momentary panic that martinis didn't have olives, and that he sounded like an idiot.

Ruby let her bag drop to the floor with a thud and then slid into the folding chair. “Are they going to dim the lights? It is definitely my nap time.”

“I don't know,” Harry said. Ruby was six inches away. Her breath was toothpaste-minty. “I'm sorry about the other day.”

She looked surprised. “Why? That was fucking awesome.”

“No, I mean, I'm glad and everything. I'm just sorry that that guy was being such an asshole. At your graduation. That sucks. And I'm sorry that I had to tell your moms about him. I just hope . . . you know, that I didn't get you into trouble.” Harry was sweating. The
plastic folding chair was digging into his back. He pushed his hood off and then pulled it on again.

“It's cool, man,” Ruby said.

A woman with glasses and a large Starbucks iced coffee walked to the far side of the room, the direction they were all facing, clapping her hands like they were a roomful of kindergartners. She waved a stack of paper. “Hey, guys, I'm Rebecca, and I'll be your SAT prep tutor for the next eight beautiful Saturdays! I went to Harvard, and you can too! Let's get started! Who's down with some vocab quizzes?”

“Oh, dear Lord,” Ruby said.

“Want me to tackle her too?” Harry said. Ruby laughed so loudly that Eliza and Thayer both turned around, saw who it was, and quickly snapped to attention.

“I like your energy!” said Rebecca, flashing a double thumbs-up.

Ruby let her head loll back and pretended to hang herself.

I
t wasn't a kind first thought, and it wasn't a very hopeful one, but it drove Elizabeth slightly bonkers to think that Jane was going to profit from Zoe's foresight and investment and commitment. That was marriage, agreeing to share bank accounts and bookshelves, even when you didn't want to, even when it made things messier in the case of an eventual split. In her years as a real-estate agent, Elizabeth had come across several couples with separate checkbooks, which seemed like a red flag. Too cold-blooded, too pragmatic. It was like announcing that you hadn't decided if you were going to stay married or not. Take me, take my overdraft charges! Take me, take my embarrassing number of books with teenage vampire protagonists! Elizabeth had never considered the alternative—it was as bad as signing a prenup. Why bother getting married, going through with all the pomp and pageantry, if you didn't think it was going to last? It was far easier to live in sin and not have to deal with the paperwork.

She knocked on the door—Zoe was on the sofa reading a magazine and waved her in through the window. Elizabeth opened the door and glanced up—the ceiling in the vestibule was cracked and needed a new coat of paint. Looking at the house was easier than looking at Zoe and telling her what was broken and needed fixing. They had always been close—in college and even more so in the years after,
when they'd lived together inside these very walls—but after marriage and crawling children there wasn't an easy way back. Like many, their friendship had slipped a disc somewhere along the way. Yes, sure, they would sometimes have dinner, just the two of them, and then they'd have a Big Talk about everything in their lives, but that was only once every three or four months. Their friendship was still there, but it also felt like it was a million miles away, viewable only through a time machine and a telescope.

“Do you want to talk?” Elizabeth asked. It had been her idea to come over. Zoe had expressed some interest in knowing what the house was worth, just in case. “Do you have a piece of paper? I want you to write it all down so that you can talk to Jane about it, about what needs to be done, okay?” Elizabeth had been in the house a thousand times—more, maybe—had lived here, had slept on the couch, had thrown up in the toilet. She had a good idea of what needed to be done, but she needed to show it all to Zoe. It was impossible to really see a space when you'd lived there for so long. All the eccentricities began to seem normal—the way you'd never properly rewired the doorbell, and so you had to push it extra hard to the left; the way the guest bedroom was two different shades of cream, because . . . well, why was it? It was a mistake, just a part of life, but now someone else was going to buy that mistake, and that someone was going to offer a hundred thousand dollars less because of it.

Elizabeth was in her work clothes. In Manhattan, the agents wore outfits that looked like they could double as evening wear: tight black dresses and heels. Luckily, no one in Brooklyn wanted that. It made people uncomfortable, that much gloss, but she still had to step it up a notch. Her biggest concessions were ditching her clogs for a pair of flats and putting on actual pants in place of jeans. It was important to show respect for the fact that people were plunking down their entire life savings for three thousand square feet. Sometimes, because it was
New York, people spent all their money on five hundred square feet. That's when Elizabeth wore heels, when she felt a little bit guilty.

“You look nice,” Zoe said.

“I had to,” Elizabeth said. She dusted off her blouse. “I have a closing today, a house up in Lefferts.” She wondered how bad she normally looked. Her hair was straight and naturally blond, which is to say a light, innocuous brown, and cut short, just below her ears, with little bangs like a schoolgirl's. She liked to think that she looked like a gamine, but that probably wasn't true anymore, if it ever had been.

“Hmm,” Zoe said, not really listening. “Shall we begin the processional death march?”

No one was ever interested in the business part of Elizabeth's job—all anyone ever wanted to know was if she found people's sex toys or whether the sellers were getting a divorce. No one wanted to buy bad juju. If she were a better liar, Elizabeth would always have told prospective buyers that the sellers were retiring and moving to Florida after several happy decades in whatever space she was trying to sell, with entirely redone mechanical and electrical systems. That's what people wanted—the promise of a satisfied life with very little work to do. Of course, no one in New York City was ever satisfied. It's what kept her busy. Even people who liked where they lived kept an eye out for something better. Shopping for a new place to live was easier than shopping for a new husband or wife, and less traumatic than going into analysis.

They started on the ground floor—the kitchen was old but sweet, with a nicely expensive stove, well used. House shoppers would be impressed, even if the cabinets hadn't been painted in twenty years. The dining room needed paint, too, and less furniture—Jane had stacks of chairs in all four corners, in case of an impromptu dinner party for thirty, which Elizabeth knew they often had. The living room was okay—ditch the family photos, the vintage knickknacks
they'd so lovingly acquired at yard sales, Ruby's piles of clothing everywhere. The staircase needed a little love—nails were poking up all over the place, and the skylight on the landing hadn't been cleaned in a decade. Upstairs, all the bedrooms needed paint jobs, and Ruby's needed a hazmat expert. The two bathrooms were pretty terrible, but not worth doing. Throw out the mildewy curtains, get all the dog hair off the floor. Whoever came in with that much money was going to want to do things their way. Elizabeth and Zoe stopped in the master bedroom.

“You want to talk about it?” Elizabeth asked.

Zoe sat on the edge of her bed, which was low to the floor and rumpled. Bingo padded over and sat down on her feet. “It's been coming forever,” she said. “You know that. After Ruby was born, I didn't think we'd last two years. Then, when we opened the restaurant, I thought we were done for sure.” She ran her hands back and forth over Bingo's stomach. “But then when Hyacinth started doing well and Jane was always there, it didn't seem as pressing. How sad is that? We were too busy to split up.”

“So why now? Why do it?” Zoe wasn't the first to get divorced—slowly, Elizabeth and Andrew's circle of friends had come closer and closer to the national average. At first, it was just one couple, then another and another. Now half of Harry's friends had parents living apart from each other, and the kids bounced back and forth like tennis balls. Andrew sometimes expressed worry about it, whether Harry was absorbing some of that stress and angst from his friends, even though it had never seemed like an issue.

“The last time we had sex was in January.” She paused. “
Last
January.”

“Sex isn't everything,” Elizabeth said. She took another look at the bed that Zoe was sitting on. It looked like the bed in a hipster hotel, streamlined and Danish, a more expensive Ikea model—Zoe's choice, clearly—the kind of bed where people did nothing
but
have
sex or maybe read each other some translated poetry. Zoe had always had scores of lovers at school, and afterward—she'd had women chasing her down streets and out of dance clubs, throwing their phone numbers at her like so much confetti. Jane had sleep apnea and sometimes slept with a special mask that Zoe said made her look like the villain in a science-fiction movie, and yet it was Jane who had stolen Zoe's heart at a bar, the kind of place where you were supposed to meet one-night stands, not wives, and Jane who had stolen her from Elizabeth.

Zoe shook her head. “It's not nothing. I don't know. I think we both finally came around to the idea that we could be happier apart. It's one thing to be in a lull, but it's another thing to stare down the next thirty years of your life and just be filled with depressing fucking dread. I don't know if it'll really happen, but it sure seems like it.” She gave Bingo a few good pats on his head. “As long as this guy comes with me, I'll be fine.”

“Okay, so we need dog-friendly.” That ruled out certain buildings in the Slope and Cobble Hill. It was easier to think about Zoe and Jane this way, in terms of concretes, especially in an area where she could really help. Zoe needed her; it was nice.

“Dog- and old-queer-lady-friendly, yes.”

“Easy.” Elizabeth leaned against the wall. “So where would you want to move? Would you want to stay in the hood? Leave?” They'd been pioneers in Ditmas, planting the flag before the neighborhood had any decent restaurants or a good public school or a bar with a cocktail menu. Before tree guards, before block parties with bouncy castles.

“God, I don't know. I mean, why am I here, right? It was sort of random, and now it's home, but I don't care about the outdoor space or a stupid lawn. That's why people move to the city! I want that. I want to move somewhere where I can walk to a good movie theater by myself at nine o'clock at night, and eat pad thai, and buy jewelry on a
whim. Does that exist? I want Ruby to think it's cooler than wherever Jane goes. Jane's talking about moving into a studio above the restaurant. She'll be a monk until she finds someone else to be her housewife.” Zoe flopped backward onto the bed. “I need a massage. And some acupuncture. And a yoga class.”

“When did you guys do the roof?” Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens' place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She'd heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three layers—the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup of old signage and other people's failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she'd fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that's how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down.

“Five years ago, maybe? Shit.”

“It's okay,” Elizabeth said, turning back to face Zoe, who had covered her face with a pillow. “It's okay.”