Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

He smelled her shampoo before he saw her. Rebecca turned the lights off to make the screen easier to see, and then Ruby slipped into the chair next to him, giving him the quickest, blink-and-you-missed-it kiss on the cheek. Harry turned toward her, smiling with all his teeth. Ruby reached over and into his mouth and gave his tongue a soft pinch. She loudly let her bag drop and rifled though it, like a dog digging for a bone.

“Is your bag just full of random loose-leaf paper?” Harry asked.

“Shh,” Ruby said. “Yes.” She found what she was looking for and slapped it on Harry’s desk. It was her mothers’ schedules for the next two weeks, printed off their joint calendar. “Dr. Amelia,” she said. “That’s their sex doctor. And now she’s our sex doctor, too, if you know what I’m saying. Her office is in Park Slope, which means we have at least two hours from the minute they walk out the door. And that’s a meeting with their purveyor in Jersey, which means they’ll be gone for like five hours, sniffing tomato plants or whatever.” She pointed at the name. It was still six days away, but there it was. Their next date. Harry felt his whole body relax. Maybe he’d just go to Brooklyn College. How could he leave? He could rent an apartment, and Ruby could live with him and just hide in the closet when his parents came over. He’d say that he had some other girlfriend, someone who traveled a lot, a Rhodes scholar! He was dating a Rhodes scholar who was in Barcelona for the year, and so he was holding on to her stuff, which was why there were two toothbrushes in the bathroom and purses hanging off the doorknobs. Maybe they would be over it by then and understand that Ruby wasn’t some bad girl in the first place, but the best girl — the only girl. It was all going to be fine. It was all going to be perfect.

“I love you,” Harry said, louder than he meant to. A kid with a stupid haircut in the row in front of them snickered, and Harry kicked the back of his chair. “I mean it, Ruby, I love you.”

“I know you do,” Ruby said. She reached over and pinched him on the arm, and that was enough for now.

Elizabeth was genuinely worried that Iggy Pop was dead. Either dead or adopted by some stupid kid in the neighborhood who couldn’t read and/or look at signs on telephone poles. It happened a lot — someone puts out a bowl of cream and a cat thinks it’s discovered a higher plane of existence. At least a few times a day, Elizabeth would see something out of the corner of her eye and she would think, Oh, thank God, Iggy’s right there , but then it was always a dust ball or a wadded-up T-shirt. When she walked to and from the office and to her listings in the neighborhood, she kept peering down driveways and onto front porches, even more than she usually did. Deirdre thought cats were disgusting pets and had very little sympathy.

“They’re wild ,” she said in between forkfuls of salad at their desk. “Cats were never meant to live with humans. I’ve heard about people who were killed— murdered— by their cats. That’s why we only have fish.” Deirdre plucked a walnut out of the salad with her fingers. “This place is so stingy. There are four walnuts in this entire salad.”

“Iggy Pop isn’t going to murder me,” Elizabeth said. “The worst he does is when he walks across your face in the middle of the night. But I’m usually awake anyway.”

“See, if I had a cat and it walked across my face in the middle of the night, I would take that as a warning sign. I think your cat isn’t missing — he’s out there gathering enough sticks and bones to build an army, I’m telling you.”

“I appreciate your concern.” Elizabeth leaned back in her chair. There was a lot to be done — she had to draw up contract information for the house on East Nineteenth, and for an apartment on Newkirk. She had to get another big house on Ditmas Avenue ready for its first open house, and the dining room still looked like an episode of Hoarders: Beanie Baby Special Edition . “I think right now I’d welcome his tiny army, though. I just want him to come back.”

Deirdre reached over and gave Elizabeth’s knee a quick pat. “I know, sweetheart. We’ll find that mangy little killer.”

The office phone rang, and Deirdre spun around to answer it. Elizabeth rubbed her temples with her fingers.

“It’s for you, I think,” Deirdre said. She had a funny look on her face, which meant only one thing.

Elizabeth picked up her extension. “Hello?” she said.

“Still holding for Naomi Vandenhoovel,” someone said.

“Right,” said Elizabeth.

What the hell? Deirdre mouthed.

“Trust me, I barely understand it myself,” Elizabeth said.

“Helloooooo from Ohio!” rang out Naomi’s voice.

“Are you actually filming at Oberlin?” Elizabeth couldn’t picture Naomi in Ohio. Not even Cleveland. Not even the Ritz-Carlton, Cleveland, where Andrew’s parents had stayed for graduation, despite the fact that it was a solid hour’s drive from school. She hadn’t realized that things were going to happen so fast — she’d sort of forgotten about it, on purpose, since signing their names, assuming that it would be ages before she’d have to tell Andrew. Maybe by then he’d have come around? It wasn’t a great plan, but it was all she had.

Naomi laughed. “No, no, of course not. We’re in Pasadena. But you should see it! We’re shooting so muddy. It’s very 1990.”

“That’s great,” Elizabeth said, though she was feeling flustered. She was still in the office, after all, and couldn’t suddenly have a freak-out with Deirdre and the rest of the O’Connells bearing witness. “What can I do for you?”

“All business! I like it! Hang on,” she said, and then Elizabeth listened while Naomi ordered a coffee with almond milk and three extra shots of espresso. “I was watching you and Lydia write this song, and so I wanted to call you! You look great! Very skinny, really great hair. Kind of a big mouth. Not like Steven Tyler big, but maybe Liv Tyler big. Actually, you know, you look a lot like a blond Liv Tyler. Young you, I mean.”

Elizabeth quickly moved her free hand to her head. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Don’t even worry about it! You look amazing! Just wanted to give you an update! The girls are so cute together. They’re, like, all over each other’s Instagrams already. You should check it out.”

“I will,” Elizabeth said. She thought for a moment, about herself and Lydia. Lydia, who had never liked her. It wasn’t like with Zoe, who was clearly in a class above in terms of sophistication but somehow found Elizabeth amusing anyway. Lydia had practically turned her back when Elizabeth entered a room, like a haughty cat or a sullen teenager. Which she had been, of course. “Wait, Naomi?” Her stomach sank.

“Mm-hmm?”

“It’s so funny that I haven’t thought to ask this before — what’s the time frame of the movie? I assumed it was mostly Lydia at the peak or… you know, up until the end. There isn’t a lot of college stuff in there, is there?” In her mind, her part of the story was a sliver at the beginning, before Lydia became LYDIA, and the movie really began. She’d wanted to see them all larger than life, which is how everything felt right at that moment anyway, but Elizabeth had assumed that the movie would have briskly moved on to the more glamorous stuff. But now she was faced with the sudden, terrifying thought that she had no input whatsoever about how their shared youth was going to be portrayed, and that Andrew was not going to be happy, not one bit, no matter how she tried to spin her misguided hope. She had wanted it for him as much as for herself — Elizabeth knew how much Andrew had loved the band, and Lydia, and her. Yes, that was part of it, too — Elizabeth wanted Andrew to see the movie and to remember how much he had loved her, once upon a time, when they were still kids and life was an endless, open ocean, stretching out at once in all directions.