a/n: i have a love-hate relationship with stories about new york city. this is the hate. this is also only the first chapter of something new that i have floating around in the back of my head, which involves a lot of cider and a certain smirky individual, but also a lot of learning when we finally have to grow up. let me know what you think, and if i should continue. much love, inez.
"It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was…
Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to be young in New York…I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs…"
-Joan Didion, "Goodbye to All That"
She wasn't completely sure when it all dissolved, but went something like this: she was walking down Central Park West one day, and trying to pretend like she belonged there; like she wasn't an outsider in every way, even though the barista at her local corner coffee shop had known her name for a year now. Men in suits shoved past her, women with strollers, teen girls who should have been at school, but they were on some trip with their choir-slash-band-slash-theater-troupe and they were performing for five minutes in some lesser known concert hall, a back alley of Carnegie, and she realized that she had begun to think of life in terms of back alleys of Carnegie, and she began to hate herself.
Her apartment was tiny, but it was bigger than most, by city standards. The cast of Friends tells every aspiring twentysomething lies about what the realities of living in the city that never sleeps. She thought back to her twentieth year, about large, high-ceilinged villas in Italy, about winding side streets with cobblestones and hide-and-seek views of renaissance basilicas, and there, on Central Park West, boots stained with the street slush of December's Christmas snow, she cried.
She was flying home in three days—not to Italy, no, that was only home for that short while, and well, we all know how stories about escapes to Italy turn out—and for once, she was ready. Her mother would cry on Christmas Eve, her aunt would bring her newest boyfriend of three weeks, who wouldn't know how to carve a turkey, and she would wonder when her life had become a series of purposeful evasions, and how she desperately depressed she must have been to want to revert to those holiday memories, and to not mind one bit.
There, on Central Park West, she cried harder, and got more strange looks, and jaywalked across to the park, collapsing on the nearest bench that was not claimed by stay-at-home mothers gossiping about their husbands' newest job prospects or sketching young artists or homeless men with garbage sacks as defense against the lingering snow flurries.
It was a gloomy day in New York, even at Christmastime.
She wished for cider, fresh from apples from her childhood best friend's orchard. She wished for boots that didn't pinch her toes for sake of New York style. She wished for meals other than Thai takeout and that she hadn't believed she'd find a fifth-floor walkup in Chinatown or Little Italy with a neighbor with exceeding charm and a handsome, tall build. She wished, for once, that she hadn't been too busy telling herself stories to notice the truth of it all.
She didn't have a terrible job. She was the secretary to the secretary to the personal assistant of some editor or another of Harper's, or something like that.
Something like that. She should have been teaching in an inner-city school in the Bronx, or working for a nonprofit, or doing photojournalism, like she'd always dreamed of—she'd dreamed all of those dreams, but never of being a secretary to a secretary to a personal assistant, no, never that one.
At some point, don't all things like dreams fragment, though? She would say so. Yes, certainly. She'd swipe violently at her tears while sitting on the bench in Central Park, and she'd warn each of those young artists to not pour the entire depth of their souls into something in a city that eats people alive.
New York City is for the young and bright-eyed, Joan Didion once said.
New York City was not for her, then. Not anymore.
She realized while she was packing up her final bag and working on her letter of resignation—immediate; secretaries of secretaries of personal assistants are so disposable in New York that they don't need to submit a proper two weeks' notice, even at Harper's—that she was depressed.
She didn't know why she hadn't known earlier. She'd barely been dragging herself out of bed and into her cigarette pants for months now. The subway to Midtown got more and more wearisome by the day. Her refrigerator was as empty as the day she had moved in. Nothing she packed into her three suitcases seemed especially relevant.
Cigarette pants? What would she do with those in rural Virginia? That Gucci tote that her boss's boss gave her for Christmas last year? She'd used it once, then been afraid of it, and had exchanged it for the hand-me-down leather tote that her aunt had gotten from Madewell some five years ago. If anyone in Roseville, Virginia saw her carrying a Gucci purse, they'd never forgive her. Honestly, maybe she'd never forgive herself.
Did she need the pictures of her and her first-year-in-New-York roommates all out on Broadway at eight at night one of a hundred times, in cocktail dresses meant to attract the Ryan Goslings of the Melting Pot? She hadn't spoken to them since their lease was up and their landlord decided to sell out to someone doing sort of renovation experiment that they couldn't afford to be a part of. They'd all found their Ryan Goslings, had affairs, and been divorced by now, anyway. All but her. She'd gotten invitations to the first weddings, but not the seconds, and that reminded her, she should really throw out those invitations. Why had she held onto them all these years?
Why had she held onto any of it all these years?
It was a question that wasn't to be answered by her. We can rarely answer those types of questions for ourselves. But we'll get to that bit later. Much, much later.
She kept them anyways—the cigarette pants, the pictures. She gave the Gucci purse to the woman in the apartment across the hall from her, wished her well—she was the secretary to the secretary to the personal assistant of some advertising executive for Trump, and we all know how tempestuous that organization can be. She'd need all the Gucci she could get.
She gave her lamp to the little old lady who had a knack for collecting those sorts of things for the tables of the only family-owned coffee shop in her area. She willed off her sparse, secondhand furniture and pots and pans to the next renters of the shoebox apartment.
She walked to Times Square, to the Met, to the doors of the New York Times offices, and said her goodbyes. No one heard her.
Then she left.