Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

Elizabeth was in her work clothes. In Manhattan, the agents wore outfits that looked like they could double as evening wear: tight black dresses and heels. Luckily, no one in Brooklyn wanted that. It made people uncomfortable, that much gloss, but she still had to step it up a notch. Her biggest concessions were ditching her clogs for a pair of flats and putting on actual pants in place of jeans. It was important to show respect for the fact that people were plunking down their entire life savings for three thousand square feet. Sometimes, because it was New York, people spent all their money on five hundred square feet. That’s when Elizabeth wore heels, when she felt a little bit guilty.

“You look nice,” Zoe said.

“I had to,” Elizabeth said. She dusted off her blouse. “I have a closing today, a house up in Lefferts.” She wondered how bad she normally looked. Her hair was straight and naturally blond, which is to say a light, innocuous brown, and cut short, just below her ears, with little bangs like a schoolgirl’s. She liked to think that she looked like a gamine, but that probably wasn’t true anymore, if it ever had been.

“Hmm,” Zoe said, not really listening. “Shall we begin the processional death march?”

No one was ever interested in the business part of Elizabeth’s job — all anyone ever wanted to know was if she found people’s sex toys or whether the sellers were getting a divorce. No one wanted to buy bad juju. If she were a better liar, Elizabeth would always have told prospective buyers that the sellers were retiring and moving to Florida after several happy decades in whatever space she was trying to sell, with entirely redone mechanical and electrical systems. That’s what people wanted — the promise of a satisfied life with very little work to do. Of course, no one in New York City was ever satisfied. It’s what kept her busy. Even people who liked where they lived kept an eye out for something better. Shopping for a new place to live was easier than shopping for a new husband or wife, and less traumatic than going into analysis.

They started on the ground floor — the kitchen was old but sweet, with a nicely expensive stove, well used. House shoppers would be impressed, even if the cabinets hadn’t been painted in twenty years. The dining room needed paint, too, and less furniture — Jane had stacks of chairs in all four corners, in case of an impromptu dinner party for thirty, which Elizabeth knew they often had. The living room was okay — ditch the family photos, the vintage knickknacks they’d so lovingly acquired at yard sales, Ruby’s piles of clothing everywhere. The staircase needed a little love — nails were poking up all over the place, and the skylight on the landing hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. Upstairs, all the bedrooms needed paint jobs, and Ruby’s needed a hazmat expert. The two bathrooms were pretty terrible, but not worth doing. Throw out the mildewy curtains, get all the dog hair off the floor. Whoever came in with that much money was going to want to do things their way. Elizabeth and Zoe stopped in the master bedroom.

“You want to talk about it?” Elizabeth asked.

Zoe sat on the edge of her bed, which was low to the floor and rumpled. Bingo padded over and sat down on her feet. “It’s been coming forever,” she said. “You know that. After Ruby was born, I didn’t think we’d last two years. Then, when we opened the restaurant, I thought we were done for sure.” She ran her hands back and forth over Bingo’s stomach. “But then when Hyacinth started doing well and Jane was always there, it didn’t seem as pressing. How sad is that? We were too busy to split up.”

“So why now? Why do it?” Zoe wasn’t the first to get divorced — slowly, Elizabeth and Andrew’s circle of friends had come closer and closer to the national average. At first, it was just one couple, then another and another. Now half of Harry’s friends had parents living apart from each other, and the kids bounced back and forth like tennis balls. Andrew sometimes expressed worry about it, whether Harry was absorbing some of that stress and angst from his friends, even though it had never seemed like an issue.

“The last time we had sex was in January.” She paused. “ Last January.”

“Sex isn’t everything,” Elizabeth said. She took another look at the bed that Zoe was sitting on. It looked like the bed in a hipster hotel, streamlined and Danish, a more expensive Ikea model — Zoe’s choice, clearly — the kind of bed where people did nothing but have sex or maybe read each other some translated poetry. Zoe had always had scores of lovers at school, and afterward — she’d had women chasing her down streets and out of dance clubs, throwing their phone numbers at her like so much confetti. Jane had sleep apnea and sometimes slept with a special mask that Zoe said made her look like the villain in a science-fiction movie, and yet it was Jane who had stolen Zoe’s heart at a bar, the kind of place where you were supposed to meet one-night stands, not wives, and Jane who had stolen her from Elizabeth.

Zoe shook her head. “It’s not nothing. I don’t know. I think we both finally came around to the idea that we could be happier apart. It’s one thing to be in a lull, but it’s another thing to stare down the next thirty years of your life and just be filled with depressing fucking dread. I don’t know if it’ll really happen, but it sure seems like it.” She gave Bingo a few good pats on his head. “As long as this guy comes with me, I’ll be fine.”

“Okay, so we need dog-friendly.” That ruled out certain buildings in the Slope and Cobble Hill. It was easier to think about Zoe and Jane this way, in terms of concretes, especially in an area where she could really help. Zoe needed her; it was nice.

“Dog- and old-queer-lady-friendly, yes.”

“Easy.” Elizabeth leaned against the wall. “So where would you want to move? Would you want to stay in the hood? Leave?” They’d been pioneers in Ditmas, planting the flag before the neighborhood had any decent restaurants or a good public school or a bar with a cocktail menu. Before tree guards, before block parties with bouncy castles.

“God, I don’t know. I mean, why am I here, right? It was sort of random, and now it’s home, but I don’t care about the outdoor space or a stupid lawn. That’s why people move to the city! I want that. I want to move somewhere where I can walk to a good movie theater by myself at nine o’clock at night, and eat pad thai, and buy jewelry on a whim. Does that exist? I want Ruby to think it’s cooler than wherever Jane goes. Jane’s talking about moving into a studio above the restaurant. She’ll be a monk until she finds someone else to be her housewife.” Zoe flopped backward onto the bed. “I need a massage. And some acupuncture. And a yoga class.”

“When did you guys do the roof?” Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens’ place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She’d heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three layers — the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup of old signage and other people’s failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she’d fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that’s how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down.