Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

George hummed over the phone. “You think Irene’s going to be comfortable with that?”

“People have done worse things to other people than buy them trips to France.”

He laughed and didn’t take it further. “Hey, did we ever think about the New York Public Library for the wedding?”

“They’re booked solid.” Sara was hovering under the low blue marquee for the Letterman show, a block from her office.

“For when?”

“Forever.”

“How about Disney World?” George offered.

“Don’t say that unless you’re serious.”

“I’m not serious.”

“Because you can’t joke with a girl about getting married in Cinderella’s castle, mister.”

“I’m not serious! I’m not serious!” George shouted.

“You can get the character of your choice to officiate.”

George thought a second. “I want Quasimodo then.”

“You would.”

“Hey, next to Quasimodo I’m going to look good .”

“You always look good,” Sara said, leaning into the receiver as if she could kiss him through the mouthpiece. The smell of the pizza at Angelo’s filled her nostrils as a street sweeper swarmed by, picking up the torn ticket stubs and the spilled salads of the afternoon’s tourists; the shows would be opening in only a few hours, but the sidewalks were already teeming with high school classes and church groups and seniors who’d been bused in from New Jersey. They were all clinging tightly to one another, looking overwhelmed, scared to walk too far in any direction. Everyone kept checking phones and wristwatches. How much time before dinner? Let’s not be late. How long will that line take? How many blocks is it? Let’s just stay here and stare at the American Eagle billboard. I heart New York.

“Gotta run,” George said. “Cokonis is calling on the other line.”

“See you at the end of time,” she said.

• • •

Back in the office she killed an hour Googling “osteosarcoma causes.” She always came up with nothing, even after going up to the thirty-eighth page of hits. She was amazed how many different ways there seemed to be to say it: unknown . Does not have a concrete cause. Little is known about the etiology. The causes are not known. Scientists have not found the exact causes. The cause is not yet established. There are no known or apparent causes. One time she found, “While the causes are still unclear, doctors believe that his type of cancer starts with a DNA error in the body’s cells.” She’d thought she was on to something until she looked up “DNA error” and was met again with unknown . The causes are not known. Etc., etc.

She got up to make a cup of coffee in the pod machine in the kitchen. As it gurgled and spat, she lifted a sunflower-yellow packet of zero-calorie sugar and snapped it back and forth with her finger to compact the crystals inside. She imagined, in thirty years, opening a newspaper and seeing the headline: CANCER CAUSE CONCLUSIVELY DETERMINED. And everyone would go, “Damn, it was riboflavin the whole time! How did we miss that ?” She ripped open the pack of sugar substitute, emptied it into the coffee, and threw away the paper. Then she returned to her desk to find one of the interns waiting to confess that she’d broken the copier by forgetting to remove a staple from a three-page memo. These were the winners who’d gotten this chance while others their age sat at home. These were the people whose parents were too important for them to be fired. Dealing with the copier would take up what remained of the hour, just as the afternoon before had been lost to the other intern forgetting P came before Q and an hour’s filing needing to be redone.

What was another hour? What was another afternoon? Sara wanted to waste as many as it took to get through this awful month.

• • •

At seven o’clock Sara changed into a strapless sea foam dress that she’d had tailored from a bridesmaid’s dress used during the previous summer and headed downtown to meet Jacob. They were scheduled to check out a high-end seafood restaurant in Battery Park as a potential wedding venue. The planners hadn’t been able to get her in on a weekend day but had gotten the members of the Marcuso-Gerber Wedding to permit them to come see the space in action that night. Ordinarily Sara would have warned Jacob that they were only slipping in and out without bothering anyone, but given the oppressive weight of this March on her shoulders, she rather hoped he would get her out on the dance floor, or maybe start several fights with Marcuso cousins, or at least swipe her a slice of wedding cake that she could sink her troubles into.

Walking down Broadway, past the line outside Letterman and past the smells of Angelo’s once again, Sara dug her phone out of her purse and called her mother, only to discover that she had already missed a call from “Home.” No matter how many times she tried to impress upon her parents and her sisters that, between the hours of eight and six, she “worked,” that is, “had a job,” and therefore couldn’t take personal phone calls, they always, always called then and seemed annoyed and surprised that she was ignoring them. Such was the tone exactly of the voicemail then from Sara’s mother.

“Sara sweetheart, we really need to know the date for the wedding. We’re supposed to go to Ireland for three weeks in June next year and we have to book the flights now, but we can’t until we know if we should be in New York. You can still do it in Boston, by the way. Are you going to get a block of rooms? Hotels in New York are so expensive, we really want to reserve those right away, especially if you’re thinking about September, because that’s move-in for colleges and…”

Sara jammed on the delete button so hard that she thought she felt the glass crack on her phone screen, though George kept telling her this wasn’t possible. How exactly was she supposed to worry about wedding planning? She didn’t care at all. All she needed was enough space to successfully fit two hundred friends and family members, a five-piece band, a Unitarian minister, four steaming tables, and a three-tiered cake covered in vanilla buttercream — and yet nothing felt right.

She and George went to place after place. The rooftop of the NoHo Hotel and then an old ironworks called The Smithy, which had been converted into a medieval-looking space. The elegant Russian Dance Hall, the slick and seedy Club 99, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. George had vetoed Guillermo’s on the Water in Hoboken (“I’m not getting married in New Jersey”) and a huge ballroom inside one of the former World’s Fair buildings in Flushing. (“Really? Your mother is going to let you get married in Queens?”) There was brief talk of being married in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and doing a kind of Dickensian thing. There was a short investigation into what it would take to join the Rosicrucian Order, because Sara liked the Grand Lodge but it was only available for qualifying Masons. In one weekend alone, they had toured the Central Park Boathouse, a church converted into an artist’s collective, the Morgan Library, and NYU’s South Asian Institute. As with the apartment search, she was overwhelmed by a plurality of possible futures, each of which seemed as impossible to reach as April.

While she waited for Jacob to come down on the bus, Sara milled around the far-downtown neighborhood. Even under a heavy coat, she was freezing in her dress. She paced up and down Bowling Green and up past the mouth of the Battery Tunnel. Her face felt heavy with makeup, her hair tight in its twist. She willed herself to stop craning her neck every ten seconds looking for Jacob, and to stop checking her text messages and to just take that particular moment in. To hold on to the lingering crust smell of French bread still emanating from the closed Au Bon Pain up the block and to keep the resilient greenness of the grass in front of her. Keep the prickly chicken-skin bumps on her arms and the way they felt under her palms as she rubbed to stay warm. Keep the angle of the shadow that belonged to the elevated walkway, which was closed and dark, and the stairwell leading up to it was chained off. Keep the chains clanking in the cold gusts of a passing black town car. It’s too quiet down here , Sara thought. She could feel the particular wet chill of the Hudson from a block away, but she couldn’t see it. The buildings were too new even though this was the oldest part of the city.