Emma Straub: Modern Lovers

“Can we not? I’m tired, okay?” Andrew said. Elizabeth grumbled. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow. Love you.” He clicked off his bedside lamp and kissed Elizabeth on the forehead. “Good night.”

Elizabeth stared at the back of her husband’s head. His dark brown hair was going gray at his temples and in seemingly random spots around his head, but his hair was still thick and curly at the ends when it had been months since his last haircut, like now. She listened to his breath even out until it was involuntary and soft, inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale. Andrew had his share of anxieties, but sleep had never been one of them. He was like a robot — when it was time, he just closed his eyes and he was done.

It was funny to think about Lydia. When they’d all met, they were just two years older than Harry was now, a year older than Ruby. Elizabeth could remember so much about that time — how she felt when she walked into parties, what her skin looked like after three days of beer and no showers, sleeping with new people for the first time. Sleeping with people for the only time! She always assumed that she would have more years of exploration, of awkward mornings with strangers, but she and Andrew had met so early, and then she was done. Five men. That was Elizabeth’s entire sexual history. It was pathetic, really. Her friends who hadn’t met their spouses until they were in their thirties had easily slept with twenty people, if not more. Taylor Swift had probably slept with more people than she had, and good for her. Most of the parents at Whitman were a decade older than she was — she and Andrew had started too early, probably, before they were even thirty, an act that seemed horrifying to the other parents she knew, as if she’d been a teen mother. But Zoe and Jane, only two years into their romance, had Ruby, and Elizabeth had suddenly felt her biological clock (or her inner keeping-up-with-Zoe clock) ticking like mad, and they were right behind them, screwing every day between one period and the next.

Elizabeth was happy in her marriage, she really was. It was just that sometimes she thought about all the experiences she’d never gotten to have, and all the nights she’d listened to the sound of her husband’s snores, and wanted to jump out a window and go home with the first person who talked to her. Choices were easy to make until you realized how long life could be.

It was flattering, the way her song had stayed relevant. Some hits aged badly — no one felt that “Who Let the Dogs Out” accurately described their inner workings — but “Mistress of Myself” had aged better than most. Pissed-off young women, sensitive young men, teenagers of any description as long as they were angsty, breast-feeding mothers, everyone who had a boss he hated or a lover she wasn’t getting enough attention from — the song was applicable in a surprising number of categories. She’d written the lyrics quickly. It was the fall of her sophomore year, and she was sitting in one of the round orange chairs in the school library. Designed in the 1960s, they were called “womb chairs” because they were deep enough to crawl into, round and cozy, and surely there had been at least one student who had tried to stay in one for nine months at a time. The insides were upholstered, and it was best not to think about how hard they were to clean. Elizabeth liked to curl up in one of them and read or write in her notebook. Everyone else at Oberlin was all hot and bothered about Foucault and Barthes, but she was far more interested in Jane Austen. She was reading Sense and Sensibility for pleasure, and that’s where she saw it — on one of the very last pages, when Elinor Dashwood was trying to prepare herself for a visit from Edward Ferrars, with whom she was deeply in love but who she believed had forsaken her. “I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself,” Elinor thought.

Elizabeth understood it completely: the desire to be in control, the need to speak the words aloud. No one in St. Paul, Minnesota, had ever been truly her own mistress. Elizabeth’s mother and her friends all went to the same hairdresser, shopped at the same stores, sent their kids to the same schools. She was pretty sure that they all ate the same things for dinner, except maybe Purva, whose parents were Indian, and Mary, whose parents were Korean. Elizabeth swiveled the chair around so that it was facing the window, and opened up her notebook. The song was finished fifteen minutes later. She showed the lyrics to Zoe and Andrew and Lydia later that afternoon, and the rest of the song was done by the time they went to bed. The band was called Kitty’s Mustache, a hat tip to Tolstoy’s heroine. They were regular college kids, in love with the idea of their own cleverness. No one had ever thought of anything before. It was the best night of her life to date, easy.

She and Andrew weren’t serious. They’d slept together three or four times, almost always when they were drunk, or, once, on some Ecstasy that she thought was probably just aspirin with a tiny bit of cocaine sprinkled on top, like parmesan on a lasagna. Andrew was quiet and a little angry, an irresistible combination. He only wore black. Black Dickies, black T-shirts, black socks, black shoes. There was something rigid about him that Elizabeth liked, but she wasn’t sure. His parents were rich, and he hated them — it was an old story. Elizabeth was nineteen, Andrew was twenty, and it didn’t really matter. But then she was twenty, and then twenty-two, and then twenty-four, and then they were married. When Lydia asked the rest of the band if she could license the rights to the song, to actually record it and put it out, Elizabeth didn’t even need to think about it. She’d never had the chance to be the mistress of herself, not really. None of them thought Lydia could sing — empirically, she couldn’t. What could it possibly matter?

It had been hardest for Andrew, watching Lydia’s version of the song take off the way it did. Elizabeth believed that songs — great songs, perfect songs — belonged to the universe. Did it matter who wrote “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” when both Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday could sing the hell out of it? Good songs deserved to be heard. It was better to be sanguine about your own output. Why did it have to be emotional? She’d written it, she’d put it on the page. Lydia did a better job putting it out into the universe. Andrew was more of a hoarder. Zoe knew from her parents that the whole music industry was fucked, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

Since they’d graduated from Oberlin, Elizabeth had had three jobs. First she’d worked as an assistant to a former associate of her father’s, a lawyer who worked near Grand Central. Getting there from Ditmas Park had taken forever, and she worked so many hours that she often fell asleep on the subway home and woke up at the last stop, in Coney Island. Her second job was also as an assistant, but this time to an art-book publisher in Chelsea. Her boss was in the midst of selling her town house and moving to Brooklyn, and it was Elizabeth’s job to help. She was measuring walls and taping up boxes of books, packing and unpacking. That was how she fell into real estate. It was so long ago now that the job felt like a part of her soul, like being a teacher or an artist who made things out of sand. You never really saw the results — you just trusted that you knew what you were doing and that everything would work out okay in the end. Sure, every once in a while a television actress would buy a house from her and there would be photos of it in a magazine, but that wasn’t Elizabeth’s triumph, not really. It was a modest career, like being a flight attendant. She helped people get from one place to another.

It was hard to say what Elizabeth liked most about selling houses — she liked the imagination that was required. She liked walking into a space and considering the possibilities. She made a good percentage of her income selling apartments, some of them new and glossy and soulless, but what she really loved was selling old houses to people who appreciated them. Elizabeth swung her legs out of bed and slid forward until her feet hit the wood floor. The floorboards creaked, because the house was a hundred years old, and that’s what floorboards did. She got up and walked over to the window, over on Andrew’s side of the bed, and looked out onto Argyle Road.