Vintage Contemporaries, page 18
“Hillary Rodham, that’s what I call her—no offense if you’re a feminist,” he said, throwing a wink. “Man, she cooked up perfect, look at that.” He rooted around in the pig’s midsection, pulled out a few strings of meat. “You wanna try this?” Em looked away, said “No thanks” as loudly as she could. “Hey, just a joke,” he said.
In the kitchen, Emily’s father was holding forth on Georgia football, singing the praises of some running back or another. Roger was a tall man in his sixties with a ruddy face and neat gray hair. He didn’t look or sound like any art professor Em had ever seen. When he spoke, he gestured exuberantly with his hands. “I saw this boy hit the line and bam”—a punch of the air, his drink spilling on the floor—“Oh, sorry about that, Kent, he was ten yards downfield before they knew what hit ’em.”
Peggy sat at the table, holding a cocktail as some neighbor talked to her. Grown adults were usually better at masking their boredom, Em thought, and in her inability to do so Emily’s mom resembled her daughter, whose face also became a mask of impatience when Em wasn’t being interesting enough. Em thought suddenly that she ought to check on Emily. This seemed like a situation where she might need a supportive hand.
Emily, however, was fine. She was helping Grandma Catherine to her feet and leading a group who were planning on heading to the farm where the Virgin Mary appeared. “Oh good,” she said, tossing Em a key chain, “can you drive my grandma’s car?”
Now here was the adventure, Em behind the wheel of a Chrysler—yes, as big as a whale—leading a convoy of cars from the party, filling up more than her share of the lane up the highway north of town, Grandma Catherine directing from the passenger seat. Each time they approached an intersection, she said, “No, no, no, no, don’t turn here, oh YES, oh no, no, this isn’t it.” Finally she just said, “YES, this is it,” but Em already knew because she could see hundreds of cars parked in a field.
“We picked a good day,” Emily said as their group of twelve made their way toward the house where everyone seemed to be assembled. She was carrying a lawn chair she’d pulled from her grandmother’s trunk. “It’s not a weekend, so it’s not a total zoo.” She explained that the house was visitated on the thirteenth of the month, every month. The woman who lived there was the center of it all. “She smells roses, sometimes she collapses. It’s very menstrual, in my opinion.”
“Now hush,” her grandmother said, laughing. She was flanked by Emily’s aunt on one side and one of her church friends on the other, each of them with a light touch on her arm as she picked her way up the hill.
“Grandma, you can’t deny it!”
“She’s right, Catherine,” declared the church friend. “Womanhood in full flower.”
Emily unfolded the chair at the edge of the crowd, so far away from the house that Em could only sort of make out the figures standing on the porch. Banks of speakers were arrayed around the house, but at this distance whoever was speaking sounded like a Charlie Brown teacher. There was a familiar liturgical rhythm to it, though, and when the congregants in front of them began chanting along she realized everyone must be doing the rosary. Em watched her friend, standing next to the chair, smiling, her hand on her grandmother’s thin shoulder.
On the way back to the house, she tried to reconcile the Emily she knew—who made fun of “Jesus freaks” often enough that it made Em uncomfortable—with this person dutifully taking her grandmother on a pilgrimage. There was so much Em was still figuring out about Emily, but her commitment to her prejudices was one thing she’d thought immutable.
“Oh, good, you’re back,” Emily’s mom said. She was pulling on her coat in the front hall.
“What’d we miss?” Emily asked.
Peggy rolled her eyes. “Ugh, Walter. We’ve been fighting for an hour. I can’t take him anymore. Hi Mom,” she said as Catherine stepped through the door.
“You’re leaving?” Emily and Catherine said, nearly in unison.
“Yes—sorry—we’re just so busy, and Roger has an evening class. Did, uh, did Mary appear?”
“Everyone said she did,” said Catherine. “We couldn’t hear.”
“Hey, I think you need to be careful going out in the cold,” Peggy said. “You’re in the middle of chemo!”
“Mom, she’s fine.”
“And, you know, to stand in a field, that doesn’t seem worth it.”
“I was sitting down,” said Catherine. “I prayed for you.”
“Well, thanks for that,” Peggy said, rubbing her eyes. One of the church ladies led Catherine back toward her chair. “Emily, where are your bags?”
“I’m gonna stay here,” Emily said.
Peggy looked at her. “You haven’t been home in four years,” she said. In the living room, conversation had died down.
“I didn’t come down here to be home. I came to see Grandma.”
“You can’t spend a little more time with your father and me?”
“You’re the ones who are leaving!”
“Yeah,” called Walter from the living room, “why you leaving, Peggy?”
“Jesus Christ,” Peggy said.
Em said her awkward goodbyes to Emily’s parents. On his way out the door, Emily’s dad looked at Em blearily and proclaimed, “That’s not Emily.” (Emily was on the back porch, not saying goodbye.) Walter stuck around long enough to collar Em in a hallway and speculate with gruesome specificity about the sexual relationship he was certain Emily and Em were having. She twisted away, her face red, angry at him, angry at herself for being scared to respond.
In her chair, Catherine dozed. Emily’s aunt took the beer from her hand before it could fall to the floor. “I think your grandma’s drunk,” Em said to Emily as they sat on the back porch.
“I hope so,” Emily said. She lit a cigarette. “She’s definitely an alcoholic, but at least she’s a sweet drunk.”
“Not a mean one.”
“Not like some people.”
That night Em held Emily while she cried. She’d never held her before, never seen her cry before. She could tell, from the way Emily turned her head away even as she twisted her body into Em’s, that Emily felt humiliated. Finally Emily calmed down, sniffed a few times, and got up from her aunt’s guest-room bed. “Thank you for being normal,” she said. She carried her things into the bathroom and closed the door.
Em lay on the bed, listening to the water run. She thought back to when Emily had asked her to come to Georgia. What had surprised her was that Emily had needed her at the party for some reason. Emily always seemed to enjoy her company, even respected her, but had never needed her. She portrayed herself, Em realized now, as a person who never needed anyone.
She knew she should feel flattered—she did feel flattered—but she also felt frightened. While Emily had cried into her sweater, she hadn’t known what to do with her hands, or what to say. She wasn’t sure she was prepared for this kind of responsibility.
On the train home, Emily took Em’s copy of The Secret History. “I thought you said this book was smart,” she said outside Charlotte.
“It is smart.”
“It’s dumb as hell,” she said, “but I can’t stop reading it.”
“Well,” said Em, stung, “I’m glad you like it.”
“All I can think of is how much better your version of this story would be,” Emily said.
* * *
As she walked out for lunch, Dave at the front desk of her office building looked so chilly and miserable that she brought him a cup of coffee on her way back. He brightened and asked her to sit down. “Join me for a spell,” he said. “We haven’t talked in how long?”
She wasn’t sure she wanted to eat lunch in the lobby with her weird doorman, but Edith was in quite a mood today, so it wouldn’t hurt to stay out of the office, she supposed. “I’m so sorry about Jim,” she said. His poorly behaved dog had died over the holidays.
“Oh yeah,” he said gruffly. “He just seemed to know his time had come. I bought him a steak, even, at the diner, had them cook it up rare, but he turned away from it. In the end, I took him to the vet, and they gave him an injection. They were very kind about it.”
“Well, he had a good long life.”
“Yeah, fourteen years.”
“Are you going to get another dog?”
“Oh no,” he said seriously. “I’d never replace old Jim.” A tear had formed in one of his eyes, and with a red-and-white handkerchief he unselfconsciously wiped it away. “I think I might take up a hobby, though.”
“Just take one up?” Em had always assumed a hobby was something you had a preexisting interest in, but maybe she was going about it all wrong.
“Oh, sure and all. I thought I might want to learn to cook.”
As she took the elevator up, she rubbed her hands together to warm them. In the light of Dave’s simple grief for his terrible dog, she felt her emotions surging every which way. She thought of a photo she’d once seen of a canal system in Amsterdam, the water from the sea given dozens of channels to flow down, so that no one surge could overwhelm any one passage. She felt all her canals rising at once, and felt uncertain she possessed the capacity to keep them from overflowing their banks.
Before she’d left, Dave had described to her a dish “a woman friend” had made for him: chicken wings in a lemon sauce. “And she put ’em on rice,” he said. “And I asked her, ‘What’s in this rice to make it taste like that?’ Well do you know, she’d grated a little lemon into it.” He beamed. “Imagine!”
* * *
Em didn’t live in Sunrise Squat; she still lived with Louis, but in a less-horrible apartment on Fifteenth Street, next to a Chinese restaurant called Yummy Food. But she spent so many days and evenings in the squat that she knew pretty much everyone by name, and it had become generally understood that Em would often join Emily for her service hours. “Two Emilys for the price of one,” Lisa said once when she saw them laying tile in the lobby. Sometimes, when Emily couldn’t make it, Em just did the work herself and signed their name to the log sheets.
They didn’t talk about it much, but Em had come to see Emily’s position in the squat as one of the most exceptional things about her, and about her own life in New York. She looked back with embarrassment on the times she’d so confidently declared the Lower East Side was over, that it had stopped being revolutionary a decade before. It was so easy to live in a place without understanding what was bubbling under the surface, but she got it now. The Sunrise community was stormy, fluid, messy—the family downstairs straight out of “Luka,” the hooker down the hall who was forever in a fight with the squat about sneaking johns into the building, the endless debates about what to do with the city’s demands. The squats tended to attract people without great options, people who’d been, as Michael liked to say, “rumbling and tumbling through life,” but people looked out for one another, and the longer she spent there the more people looked out for her.
Emily wasn’t so enamored of the squat, even though it was actually her home, not Em’s. This was because everyone gave her a hard time about Rob. It was the universal opinion of everyone in the squat that Rob was bad news. He was a small-time dealer, so no one felt endangered, but they eyed his proximity to Emily—and his frequent presence in her apartment—warily.
“Look, I’ve seen it a lot,” Joe said to Em as she helped him install a radiator in a second-floor hallway one early spring afternoon. “Anytime you got a chick stuck to a dealer’s side like that, it’s no good. Like, what is their relationship?”
“He’s her boyfriend.”
Joe scoffed. “Boyfriend!” Joe was a drummer in a hardcore band, and Em liked to watch his muscled drummer’s arms at work. She and Emily had gone to one of his shows once. It had been so mind-bendingly loud that Em had to leave after two songs, but she still daydreamed sometimes about running a hand along his bicep. He was older than her, maybe thirty-five, and reveled in his position as the sage elder of the squat. “Does she even like him?”
“Sure she likes him.” But did she? It was true that Emily liked drama, and Rob delivered in that department. They were each always storming out of the other’s apartment and stormily reuniting and having stormy reunion sex that Emily would tell her about later.
“Hey, hold this here,” Joe said. “What do they have in common?” He flipped down his protective visor and Em did the same. The torch was too loud for them to talk, so Em just thought about his question for a while. Rob didn’t really care about theater or movies or art. They were both funny, when they were straight. The thing they most had in common, Em supposed, was that they both really enjoyed drugs.
When she tried to explain the squat to her parents, they were as baffled as she had once been. She liked to think of her dad in his beautiful apartment in Wicker Park. He was a handy guy, and had always seemed frustrated with his bookish daughters, who showed no interest in working around the house. What would he say if he saw her now? Grimy jeans and bulky protective gloves, holding a radiator steady while her friend welded it into place with bright blue flame. “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” she shouted.
Joe turned off the torch. “Pardon?”
Joe was married, anyway, which should have made him less suitable as a subject for Em’s fantasies but didn’t. Well, not married—he and Sofia had never gotten around to a ceremony, but they’d been together forever. Joe called her his old lady. Together the two of them had led the first wave of residents in the squat in the 1980s, lived the first hard years, when snow would fall through the roof and settle in the empty stairwell, when guys peed in beer bottles because there weren’t toilets yet. Em loved to hear Joe and Sofia tell stories of those years—the face-offs with the police, Joe and Michael and Enrique menacing drug dealers with wrenches when they tried to do business out of the basement, the hectic autumn when everyone quit their day jobs and worked 24/7 to fix the roof before the winter. It was exhilarating, the freedom to take a perfectly blank slate and transform it into something new just as you were transforming your life, too. In those days, Joe liked to say, every night was a party, and punk bands played shows in the basement. Everyone was older and chiller now. They left that shit to the newer squats.
Emily had moved in after most of the heavy lifting was done, after there were bathrooms on every floor, after a punk kid named Sammy rehabbed the third-floor apartment where she lived now, scrounging drywall from work sites and two-by-fours from Dumpsters. Sammy OD’d, was saved in the middle of the night by paramedics. His parents dragged him back to Houston. He never even came back to clean out his clothes and tapes. Joe and the other old heads still called the third floor Sammy’s floor, still did double takes when they saw Emily wearing his Oilers sweatshirt.
There were three nonnegotiable house rules: no stealing from your neighbor, no violence against your neighbor, and no drug dealing from the building. One day Joe and Michael took Rob aside and reminded him of that third rule, warned him that if he broke it even once Emily would be kicked out. Em wasn’t there but could imagine Rob, hands up, saying, “I get it, man, I get it.” She could imagine his slippery smile.
* * *
Jack Mortensen was in town, and Edith was beside herself. When Em arrived at the office, Edith was already there, burrowing through the files. “I can’t find it!” she moaned, holding her head. “Where have you been?”
Em considered a number of different ways to say This is when I always come in, discarded them all, and finally said, “What are you looking for? Can I help?”
“I’m looking for”—she pulled out a file folder—“Jack Mortensen’s”—she dropped the folder atop the file cabinet—“first book proposal”—she pulled out another file folder—“from 1982. I want to show it to him at lunch. Oh, he’s taking us to lunch. Are you wearing that?”
Em considered a number of different ways to say This is what I always wear, discarded them all, and finally said, “Yes.”
“Well, can you change? Jack likes girls in dresses.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s old-fashioned. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m not asking you to sleep with him. Just show the guy a little leg, will you?” In Edith’s opinion, Em behaved like a nun and needed to cut loose once in a while. Her previous assistant had hosted boozy salons in the office on Saturday nights; when one turned so raucous the police were called, she was fired, but Edith still spoke admiringly of her guts, and the quality of the boys she dated.
“I’ll find the proposal,” Em said. She shooed Edith away from the files, which were her domain, not Edith’s. Edith never opened the file cabinets, which had been carefully organized by past assistants for the benefit of assistants yet to come. The files were where Em learned about Edith’s authors and their various quirks and neuroses, immortalized in memos and faxes and, often, explanatory letters-to-the-future written by the assistant at the time. Through the files, she became acquainted with those predecessors. She knew them all now: Jenny, Edith’s first assistant a million years ago, who conducted long, passionate arguments with Edith via memo; Ethan, whose contract markups were thorough and precise; Tom, whose editorial notes verged, in Em’s opinion, on moronic; Claire, whose memos often included asides so funny that she was not surprised when Edith said she was now writing for television; Susan, who made payout mistakes Em was still cleaning up.
The MORTENSEN file took up almost an entire drawer. Em replaced the folders Edith had removed and scattered around the cabinet, then fingered her way patiently through the tabs. She believed in her fellow assistants. One of them had filed the proposal in the correct place, she knew it. It ought to be in the earliest correspondence folder, 1980–1984. Inside she found scores of flimsy faxes, the ink so faded that they appeared nearly blank; carbon copies of notes from Edith on the agency’s terrible letterhead; a sheaf of rejections from editors who she had to assume kicked themselves every day; four Christmas cards, all with messages identical to the card she’d opened just a few months before:
EDITH—
Here’s to the future!
