The building where my boyfriend lived was filled with Jews from Westchester County. When I say “filled” I don’t mean every apartment, on every floor. How could that be possible? It was a big building, more than twenty stories, with six or eight one- and two-bedroom apartments on each floor, some with balconies, all of them with good bathrooms and kitchens and solid wooden floors that didn’t tilt or peel. But I didn’t know about the building—it was far beyond my paygrade—until my cousin Kit moved in, and through her, I met a whole slew of others, friends or friends-of-friends of Kit who, like her, had grown up in Scarsdale or Rye or one of the better river towns, or whose families had belonged to the same country club or had played golf together, who had gone to the same handful of summer camps, the same handful of the better East Coast colleges, and who, like their parents, seemed destined for a life of ease and shine.
I wasn’t like that—I had literary aspirations and worked at the bottom rung of a literary magazine that barely paid me a living wage—and had no interest in sports of any kind, let alone golf, which I regarded with the horror of a true malcontent. I lived with tw roommates and one of my roommate’s pet ferret in a small building downtown, where my own room looked onto an airshaft and the toilet often backed up. I liked my two roommates, though. Mary was bright, optimistic, and interested in geology, with this coppery, bright cheerfulness that I’m pretty sure went back to her calm, midwestern upbringing. She’d go on these day-long weekend outings to places like Fort Tyron Park or the Palisades and come back talking about Manhattan schist and the rift valley left over from the breaking-apart of the Pangaea, its striping and tilting. My other roommate, Lynn, taught kindergarten at a public school in Brooklyn, and came back to the apartment with stories about this-or-that kid, what she’d done and said, and had a steady boyfriend who was in law school in Philadelphia, where she spent most of her weekends. So more often than not I found myself in the apartment alone on Saturdays and Sundays, and more often than not I spent that time reading and going to bookstores, hoping every time that I’d meet someone handsome and kind and smart, someone who would notice me in the Literary Fiction aisle and sweep me off my feet with his love of Tolstoy or Elliot (George, not T.S) or—it didn’t matter, and it never happened. Instead, what happened would be that I’d poke around and peruse the aisles of the new Barnes and Noble at 17th Street or the Strand further downtown or if I was up to the walk, Argosy, buy a book or not, and if I was feeling adventurous, take myself across the Brooklyn Bridge or all the way downtown to the tip of the island, where I’d think about taking the Staten Island Ferry just for the fun of it, and gaze out over the water. Sea birds. Pigeons. The smell of diesel.
Other than my roommates, I had few friends in those days. I was new to the city, just finding my feet at work, and trying (and failing) to write, or at least failing to write anything worth reading. I saw Kit regularly, but she was busy with boyfriends and sports. She was a great athlete, seeded first on the tennis team when she was at Princeton, and she continued to play competitively after college, too, at country club tournaments, which was something else I knew about but not really. My sisters and I had been raised in what may as well have been, from the point of view of Kit and Jews like her, with Ivy League degrees and killer back hands, the back-and-beyond: Birmingham. There, we lived in a strange modern house that my father loved and my mother didn’t know what to do with, decorating it, against its own will or design, with antiques and yards and yards of chintz. It was not a particularly happy girlhood, not for me, and probably not for my sisters, either. My older sister always needed to be right, to win the conversation, to score the final point. My little sister primarily wanted nothing more than to be in her good graces. Mainly what we did was fight, although in time my younger and older sister formed an alliance, leaving me on the sidelines entirely except when the two of them, together, and for reasons I could never tease out, decided it was time to teach me a lesson.
Kit, however, wasn’t like that, and though a fierce athlete, when it came to how she operated in the world, how she aligned herself and followed her inclinations, didn’t seem to have a single competitive cell in her body. Certainly not with me. Though throughout most of our childhoods I was so intimidated by her—by her popularity and bright shining personality, by her perfect fall of straight brown hair, by her blue eyes and athletic talent, that I could barely speak in her presence, but by the time I landed in New York we’d become great friends. This occurred as a result of her having spent the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Princeton living with us, in Birmingham, where she had an internship at the NAACP through the influence of my father. That was the summer before my junior year in high school, and I was taking classes in art and writing at Birmingham Southern, but at night, after dinner, the two of us would huddle together and talk for hours, and in this way she became the older sister I always wanted.
When Kit finished Princeton, she moved into a one-bedroom in the building and began to work as a trainee at Morgan Stanley. Two years later, when I moved to New York (and moved in with Mary and Lynn downtown), Kit and I resumed the friendship that had started that summer in Birmingham. So, even before I met my boyfriend, through Kit, I met six or seven other people who lived in the building. Like Kit, they all worked in investment banking or some other well-renumerated occupation, and also, like Kit, had grown up in a classy, old-money New York suburb.
Kit lived for racket sports, which she played after work and on weekends, sometimes taking Metro North from Grand Central to her parents’ home in Rye so she could play at her parents’ country club. It was there that she met Adam. He, too, had been a champion college athlete, though in his case it was winter sports he loved, chiefly skiing, at Dartmouth, which he’d chosen specifically so he could compete on its ski team. He’d grown up in Scarsdale and was close to his family. Kit talked about him incessantly.
But I didn’t meet Adam until Kit invited me and my boyfriend to her apartment for dinner. As we I slid down the elevator from his place on an upper floor to Kit’s on the seventh, I felt a sense equipoise that came from feeling that I’d finally been admitted to a club that had every reason to reject me, and in fact, during my childhood, had made it clear that I had no place in it. It was true, I didn’t. I slept with stuffed animals, talked to trees, and had weird, dark looks and dark tangly hair that my mother despaired over. On this last point, until I was sixteen or so, my father referred to me as “the ugly duckling.” It didn’t matter how much I protested, or how much he protested that the whole point of the story was that the ugly duckling grows up to be a beautiful, majestic swan (fuck you, you stupid fucking ducks); the appellation stung me. Just in case I might forget my status, now and then one or both of my sisters would circle me, saying “Quack, quack, quack.” Neither of them was beautiful or even pretty, so I used to wonder what they were going on about. And then, almost as if my father’s obliviously insensitive assessment had come true, I did become pretty. Not pretty enough to be able to tell my sisters to fuck themselves, but I wouldn’t have anyway, because I was scared of them. Not the way I’d been scared of Kit, earlier. With Kit, I was scared of her because I knew I could never achieve her lofty heights. I was scared of my sisters because they were mean.
Kit was so happy, hopping and flitting around Adam, sitting on his lap, playing with his hair, talking about the friends they had in common from their respective colleges and summer camps (hers in Maine, his in the Berkshires), and how well their two sets of parents had gotten along; only a week earlier, they’d all had brunch. I could tell right away that my boyfriend liked them, and not just Kit (everyone liked Kit) but the whole set-up, with both of them referencing time spent at an old-fashioned lake resort in Maine that my boyfriend had long wanted to go to, and the attractions of the Upper East Side, including why they preferred it to other neighborhoods. When Kit admitted that she wasn’t really a city girl, that eventually she envisioned moving to a house in a suburb or even in the countryside, my boyfriend grinned ear to ear and said that he too preferred the suburbs, where he had also grown up, in an expansive brick Georgian with front and back staircases and a maid’s room.
My boyfriend’s apartment, on an upper floor, was hardly small. It had two large bedrooms facing west across Central Park and another, smaller one tucked behind the front entrance hall, two bathrooms with green fixtures and white tiles, and a large central room that served as the living and dining room, with a kitchen off to the side. He was very rich, and could easily have afforded something even nicer, though it was hard for me, then, to imagine what a man still in his twenties and working with his two cousins and one sister for the family business would do with an even bigger, even more prosperous and well-equipped apartment. There were two high-end Magnovox TVs, expensive art, thick rugs, and facing sofas of beat-up brown leather that he told me had come that way. “Pre-weathered,” he called it. As for the ex-girlfriend, I knew nothing about her other than that she went by Suz (presumably her name was Suzanne or Suzannah) but my boyfriend liked to call her “Shoes,” for her apparent love of footwear. On occasion he’d tell me about that—her shoes, not her personality or what she looked like or even what she did or where she’d gone to college, all the details that I lived for and was curious about. “She had loafers in every color—green, red, even blue. Whoever has heard of blue loafers? And the sandals, and oh my God, the clogs! She had to have special compartments built into her closet to hold them all.” I pictured her as a vain, vapid, spoiled Jewish girl who wanted nothing more than to shop and go out to lunch with her girlfriends. Whereas I, myself, had artistic and literary ambitions and hadn’t grown up in a cushy East Coast suburb, let alone in Scarsdale. I wore my own dark hair in a braid down my back and worked at a literary magazine where I was paid next to nothing but got to meet famous people like Cynthia Ozick (twice) and once, amazingly, Philip Roth.
In my second year of college I’d been madly in love with a boy so dreamy and ethereal—he was given to wild burst of poetry—that my mother called him “a pretty little bird.” He was loved by many women, out of my reach, and older than I was by two years. But I threw myself with such vigor that in the end I was the one who got him. Then I was happy. Sex with him was easy, our two bodies knowing what to do despite neither of us having had much in the way of previous experience. We slept together like two caterpillars in his college-issued single bed, his arms around me, his chest pressed against my back, and I felt transported, chosen. I’d never been chosen before, not by anyone, not by anything. For the duration of our time together I was floating, I was high, he was my drug. With him, my skin cleared up, my eyes brightened, and the hair that had sent my mother into fits of despair grew so thick and long that more than once I was approached on the street by people claiming they worked for a modelling agency, and might I be interested? But then he graduated from college and soon thereafter replaced me; from that moment on, I’d wanted nothing more than to be chosen again, to be intoxicated by love and desire.
It was easy for me to attract men. I was pretty in an elusive, dark way, and though I wasn’t particularly hungry for sex, I was desperate for admiration, and without calculating or so much as realizing what I was doing, I became highly flirtatious, pheromonal, emitting whiffs of promise and desire. I went with boys to parties and jazz clubs, drank too much, slept with them, but compared to my college boyfriend, all others were as exciting as skim milk. When I finished college and moved to New York, the pattern remained, except now the boys were older, in law or medical or business school, or they worked in offices. If I liked them, if they were smart or handsome or were interested in the same books I was interested in I might follow the thing to a couple of romps in bed before I either became bored or, more likely, slightly sickened, because by now the man (whoever he was) would be in love with me and want me as his girlfriend, to sit next to him in the alum section of college football games and to meet his family. With others, I’d go out once or twice and when they leaned in for a kiss or dropped hints about staying over I’d leave them on the front stoop of my building, making sure that both sets of double-glass doors closed and locked behind me. Where did they come from, the men and boys I flirted with and sometimes slept with and, mostly, didn’t like? One I met on an airplane, when I was flying back to New York from seeing my parents in Birmingham. He was a lawyer, and so blonde he looked like he could once have been a spokesperson for the Hitler Youth; he’d been in Birmingham on business. He worked for a big, brand name law firm, and was very handsome, but when he took me out to dinner later that week there was something cold and unexpressive on his square-jawed face. He insisted on walking me to my building, and when he got there said he’d come in, but I slammed the front door before he could squeeze in after me. For weeks after that dinner, I glanced around every time I left my building.
So, I was doing all this—dating, I guess you could call it—working at the literary magazine, seeing Kit now and then and tromping all over the city for something to do on weekends when I met my rich boyfriend at a fundraiser. I was there because my father insisted that I go in his place, saying that there would be a lot of important Jews there, that it wouldn’t kill me to network. I put on my most conservative dress, blue with white piping, and I was so bored by all the talk of Israeli politics and market investing that I wanted to cry. As I was leaving, I met my boyfriend, who I thought was very funny if not particularly good looking, and the next night he called me and asked me to go out dinner. I didn’t know, then, that he was very rich, but on the second date he told me—not in so many words—and when I asked Kit if she’d ever heard of him, she told me that his family owned New York.
I don’t know if I hated him from the very beginning or only after we started sleeping together or perhaps even a little bit after that, when he began to make noises about my moving in with him and getting engaged. He wasn’t bad looking, but he disgusted me, especially in bed, where his weight on mine felt like a sodden washcloth, and where everything about him was clumsy and over-eager. He prodded me like I was hamburger meat, pounding, pushing. He’d go at it for hours until he could have an orgasm, while I just lay there, a vessel of his pleasure, and suffered a rash of urinary tract infections. On weekends, he took me shopping, buying designer blouses, beautiful high-heeled shoes and handbags, a winter coat of gray-and-white checks. Before we went out, he dressed me. We went out incessantly, to meet his friends for dinner or to go to fundraisers or to dinner at his eating club or dinner with Kit and Adam or lunch with his family at their palatial modern summer house on the beach in South Hampton. And then, after a day or two, back to the building and his apartment on one of the upper floors, where my beautiful clothes hung in the closet of the second bedroom, and where I submitted to his ardent, wet kisses, his eager, wet lovemaking.
When in early fall I agreed to marry him, I knew full well that I hated him, that he was all bluster and charm, that already he was destroying me and my fragile, though earnest, sense of self, of inhabiting myself. But I wanted to show my sisters—and after them, everyone I’d ever known who’d written me off or dismissed me or diminished my prospects or decried my talents—that I was someone, that I could be a person of note. I was certain that by marrying him the glamour that his wealth attached would attach to me too, and that I’d manage to transcend not only him, but myself. The ring he gave me was a perfect diamond surrounded by sapphires; his parents gave us a blow-out engagement party on the terrace of their house in South Hampton; pictures of the two of us started appearing in the social pages. I had all those beautiful clothes. Perhaps my college boyfriend would find out who I was marrying, or better yet, see a picture of me dressed in one of my, elegant, expensive dresses, and realize who he had given up. Perhaps he’d try to get me back.
One day at work, a writer of about my age came by the offices to meet with my boss, who had just accepted one of the writer’s short stories. I, too, had read the short story (I was the first reader for almost everything that came in ) and had liked it, but hadn’t thought it was anything great or even worth a second read. The writer had alluded in his cover letter to having been asked to submit, though, so I passed his story on. Now my boss, a man in his late sixties with a lot of gray hair who in the summer liked to wear Hawaiian shirts, came out of his office wearing his winter uniform of white cable knit sweater and brown corduroys. I was brimming over with envy: for the writer, whose first story was soon to be published in an important magazine, for my boss, who as editor of the magazine was famous in his own right, and for every young writer who’d managed to be published.
“And have you met my assistant, Nancy?” my boss said.
“Sort of,” the writer said. He was about my age, sloppy in jeans and an oversized flannel shirt, with copper colored hair and very white skin. He stuck out his hand and introduced himself and when he and my boss came back from lunch, he asked me if he could call me; I said yes. On our first date we had spaghetti and went back to his apartment in Brooklyn and stayed up all night talking and the next day, when my boyfriend (now my fiancé) called me at work to tell me he’d been worried out of his mind, I burst into tears and told him that I had a right to have my own life. Then my boyfriend got really mad and said that though I had a right to my own life, that he’d never try to impose his will on me, he had a right to know where I was, and with whom. When I told him the truth—that I’d been up half the night talking to a writer, mainly about books, he said: “And you screwed him, too, is that what you’re saying?” Then I felt sick with anger and called Kit. She told me not to worry about it, that it was clear that my boyfriend was simply worried about me, adding that, under the circumstances, he had a right to be.
That night my boyfriend and I went out to dinner with Kit and Adam. Kit and my boyfriend spent the whole evening talking to each other about venture capital and derivatives and things that I didn’t understand and had no interest in, leaving Adam and me alone in our own conversational zone. I told him about growing up in Birmingham and he told me about his two older brothers and how he preferred Vail to Aspen, because even though Aspen was a real town and Vail wasn’t, Vail had the advantage of being one large ski resort, where you could start on one mountain and ski to the next, whereas at Aspen, he said, the mountains were separate entities, and you could only do one mountain at a time. All I wanted to do was scream and get up from the table, but instead I sat through the whole awful dinner. Afterwards I went back to the building, where the four of us rode the elevator up, letting Adam and Kit off on the seventh floor while my boyfriend and I went to his floor, towards the top, with its amazing views, and had awful sex.
Two weeks later the red-headed writer called the office and asked me if I’d go to dinner with him, offering to go out in my neighborhood if I preferred. I told him a spot I liked and we met there at the appointed hour. All along I’d been planning to say goodnight after dinner and take the subway back uptown to the building, but instead I went back to Brooklyn with the writer, and spent the night in his enormous, drafty front bedroom, in a shabby house that he shared with three other people and a cat. It was strange. He didn’t seem to notice my large, sparkly engagement ring, and when, in the morning, I pointed it out, and asked him what he’d made of it, he said that it hadn’t occurred to him that it was an engagement ring, that he didn’t notice such things. Then he asked me who I was engaged to and if I loved him. I told him my boyfriend’s name and who his family was, and the writer whistled. I said I had to leave, I had to go back to the building and smooth things over with my fiancé, and the writer said he wished I wouldn’t, that I’d stay.
Kit married Adam in a ceremony held in her parents’ enormous back garden in Rye; there was a big white tent and a five-piece band. Kit wore her grandmother’s pearls and her mother’s wedding gown. Adam and Kit went to Lake Como for their honeymoon, and one morning about two months after Kit and Adam returned to New York and moved into her apartment in the building, I found out I was pregnant. I didn’t tell my boyfriend, though. I couldn’t bear the thought of his pleasure, the wide beaming grin that would spread across his face, the happy prattle and stupid jokes he’d make. I didn’t feel well: I was anxious and though not so nauseous that I had to vomit, it was as if my entire body were filled with soap flakes and noxious fumes. During this time, my older sister came to town for a conference (she was a lawyer) and insisted on taking me out for an early dinner. Her voice on the phone was even meaner and more serious—a hard-edged monotone—than usual. Surely, she wanted something from me, but what that might possibly be I couldn’t fathom. But the day before we were to have dinner I began vomiting with such force and misery that I had to cancel, and as I lay on the bathroom floor of my boyfriend’s apartment discharging what looked like black gruel, I felt a tug in my innards and began to bleed. When my boyfriend got home from work and saw me lying there, covered in bits of puke and blood (I’d cleaned myself up, but not entirely) he began to yell. It was so strange. He stood over me, his face turning red, asking me what the hell I’d done to myself. When I explained that I must have had a miscarriage he began to cry. Why hadn’t I told him? What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I be more like Kit who was happy and normal?
A few weeks after my miscarriage, Kit called me on the phone, begging me to come over before Adam got back from work. When I appeared, she burst into tears and told me that she was miserable, that Adam wanted to spend every weekend with his family in Scarsdale, didn’t have much of a libido, and wore slippers when he got out of bed at night. “Slippers!” she said. “Who wears slippers before they even turn thirty?”
About a year after Kit’s divorce, I opened the paper to see that the red-headed writer had published his first book, a novel about a vet-tech who falls in love with a Great Dane named Nancy. I wrote to him in care of his publisher. I’d long since broken off my engagement and moved back to my small dark room and my two nice roommates, but was still working at the literary magazine, where I’d been promoted and had even had one of my own short stories published. The red headed writer wrote back, and then we started talking on the phone and having lunch; in that way we gradually got to know each other. Although he’d since grown a beard to counter balance his receding hairline and, he told me, worked full time at a vet’s office because what he got for his first book wouldn’t begin to cover his expenses, he made up for both his lack of money and lack of hair by loving a lot of the same books I loved and making me pancakes on Sunday mornings and when, years later, I had twins and quit my job at the literary magazine to stay home with my babies and write, he started writing a book about that, too, but in the end he didn’t write it. I did. It was my story to tell.
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Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including Food and Whine (Simon and Schuster), The Art of Dumpster Diving (Turner) and a collection of short stories, You’ve Told Me Before, forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. Her short stories have additionally been widely published in small and literary magazines. She is also a painter.