If We Lived Here Read online

  “Thanks, love.”

  A growling stomach finally jolted Nick out of the gaming universe. In the fridge, he found the veggies he and Emma had hauled back from the farmers’ market last weekend. But no, this last day of freedom was not for leafy greens. Nick paged through his takeout menus, decided on Thai, and, fifteen minutes later and still in boxers, he answered the door to accept the brown bag. He knew if Emma had been there, she would’ve been mortified. She would’ve spent the whole meal obsessing over what the delivery guy had thought of Nick’s state of undress, wondering how traumatized he’d been by their crass American culture (she always assumed delivery guys were immigrants, even though Nick himself had delivered pizza in college).

  But Emma wasn’t there, so Nick turned on ESPN and wolfed down his Pad Thai, burping at his leisure and zoning out to a recap of last night’s Yankees game. See all the things he could do alone in his own place?

  But Nick wasn’t being fair, he knew, in writing Emma off as the disapproving girlfriend. In fact, she’d once told him she wished she could produce the same thunderous belches that he managed. Still, Nick needed a target for his general anxiety, and his girlfriend was an easy pick. Which was also why, at three p.m., he got dressed and set out to find a bar, happily resenting the reaction he imagined from Emma.

  Nick believed daytime drinking was acceptable in the following situations: at brunch, while watching sports, on vacation, and after a particularly rough school day. He reasoned he could add one more occasion to the list: the day you officially found out you were shacking up with the old ball and chain…. There, he caught himself doing it again, casting Emma as some kind of sitcom girlfriend. If anyone was a ball and chain, it was Nick, always trying to convince Emma to ditch a night out with Genevieve and reel her back home to hang out with him. Still, he needed a drink.

  The Irish pub he eventually chose was less depressing than the first two he’d passed, whose few dazed patrons looked as if they spent most of their weekdays planted on a barstool. But it wasn’t exactly cheerful, either, with sticky floors and air heavy with stale beer and lemony disinfectant. Inside the dark space, sunlight seemed like a mirage.

  Nick sipped at a Guinness and half watched an ancient Seinfeld episode on mute. It was the one where Kramer starts multitasking in the shower—washing dishes as he also washes himself. No wonder none of the Seinfeld characters ended up in real relationships, Nick thought; he couldn’t imagine bickering with Emma over who left the lettuce by the loofah. It was funny to think how Nick had grown up watching this show, worshipping the jokes about Jewish New York that couldn’t have been more foreign to small-town Ohio. In retrospect, it seemed like soaking up all that culture had been preparation for eventually meeting Emma. The first time he’d joined the Feits for dinner, during one of Emma’s parents’ rare trips back to New York from their home in Spain, her mom had served an actual chocolate babka for dessert.

  Halfway through Nick’s second beer—he’d switched to the IPA—a trio of women poured in to the bar, all chatter and flowery perfume. They claimed the three stools to Nick’s right and ordered a round of tequila shots. Nick smiled noncommittally. They were of an age that would make the normally confident Emma suspicious—twenty-six or twenty-seven. That was how old Emma had been when they’d met, so she assumed it was the age Nick preferred most in women. “It’s only natural, evolution-wise,” she’d once explained in that know-it-all way of hers that usually masked nerves. This had been right around her thirtieth birthday. “Men want their women young and fertile. If they started lusting after more mature ladies, the human race would be in trouble, right?” Nick had felt like Emma was blaming him for some imagined wrong, yet he’d still denied it, citing Halle Berry, Naomi Watts, and Sofia Vergara as examples of older women he would happily go to bed with.

  Still, though Nick never would’ve admitted it, there was some truth to what Emma had said. But it wasn’t for the reasons she’d cited. In Nick’s experience, women in their mid-twenties generally weren’t too concerned with what he’d dubbed the stage-of-life calculus—meaning where they stood career-and relationship-wise, who was ahead of whom, and where they felt they should be or deserved to be by that particular age. Whereas, the closer a woman crept toward thirty, the more obsessed she became with checking off the boxes that someone somewhere at some point in time had decided made for a fulfilling, successful life: the job promotions, the relationship advancement, the procreation. And Nick couldn’t stand that kind of thinking. To him, all that stuff flew in the face of the happiness that came from living in the now and appreciating where you were and who you were, not to mention who you were with.

  “Cheers?”

  Nick looked up to see one of the women handling two shots, one extended to him.

  “Thanks,” he said, accepting the glass. “Though it’s kind of early for the hard stuff, am I right?”

  “It’s a three-day weekend, last one of the summer. That means celebration!”

  “Sure, why not?” Nick threw back the shot along with the women. “So where are you ladies headed for Labor Day, the Hamptons?”

  “Yeah, right. More like Coney Island.”

  “That’s more my style, too. Funnel cake and carnival rides. Though they got rid of Shoot the Freak, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah, but there are still plenty of dirty old Russian men hanging around.” This from the prettiest one, whose green eyes were now glinting at Nick as she sidled over to the stool on his left. Now he was surrounded. He glanced at the others. Well, it was hard to say who was prettiest. They were all sweet and sweet-smelling, talking over one another about weekend plans.

  “We’re doing a day trip to Beacon for the art museum, and another one out to Long Beach to go surfing.”

  “That’s ambitious,” said Nick.

  “Eh, we’ll probably just end up sleeping off our hangovers and wasting the day watching Real Housewives marathons.”

  Nick laughed. Emma was the only person he knew who, without fail, followed through on any plan she set; it was admirable, but it could also be exhausting. He ordered the four of them another round, intent on getting a little tipsy.

  Nick knew one of the girls would eventually ask him what he did for a living; it happened after the third tequila. “I teach fifth grade,” he said, and then waited for the inevitable: the three of them oohing and aahing like he was some kind of saint.

  Back when he’d started out in education, long before he met Emma, Nick’s friend Carl had welcomed him to the brotherhood by explaining the girl-related perks. “Mention you’re a teacher, and as long as she’s not a gold digger or a lesbian, she’ll fall all over you,” Carl had said. “One-night stands only, though. As soon as they realize you have to be in bed by ten every night and that you can’t afford to take them to the latest Momofuku outpost, they’ll leave you for a lawyer.”

  Carl’s advice had been on target, and over time Nick had honed his seduction technique. Over drinks he’d talk about how much his students inspired him; he’d divulge just enough to draw admiration, then he’d transition to it’s-getting-late banter. Nick had told himself he was too busy to get involved in a real relationship. But then he’d met Emma, who’d proved immune to his charms. When he’d mentioned a student who’d been struggling with cursive, hoping to elicit an affectionate “Aw!” Emma had instead snapped, “God, I can’t believe you’re still teaching that junk. It’s so twentieth century. If kids want to have any chance of future success, they need to learn how to brand themselves and create a savvy Web presence.” Emma had been working in P.R. at the time, and Nick couldn’t tell whether or not she’d been joking. He’d had no choice but to be smitten.

  “That has to be the sweetest job ever!” cooed the green-eyed girl now. Nick nodded, feeling a surge of delight; how simple and entertaining this was. From deep in the recesses of his brain he pulled out the old anecdotes, the ones so many girls (but not Emma) had eaten up. The stories still worked, apparently; as he performed the rap
s he’d written to help kids with spelling, the girls edged their stools nearer, closing in on him.

  Eventually Nick noticed his empty stomach. He asked his companions if they were up for a bite.

  “I could eat.” It was the pretty one. “How about takeout, maybe at my place?” She touched Nick’s thigh, which sent little buzzes of electricity up his leg. Nick gaped at her, wondering if her eyes’ sparkling was a trick of the light. He wouldn’t soon forget that gaze, a seduction much more potent than his heroic teacher routine.

  Nick snapped to attention. “Shit. The wedding. Emma. I have to pack.”

  “Ahem, it’s Mallory.”

  “Huh? No, not you.” Nick didn’t feel drunk, but when he tried to think of a breezy way to explain himself or smooth over this situation, his brain churned like sludge. He said simply, “Emma’s my girlfriend.” His stomach cartwheeled; the walls wavered.

  “Seriously?” The girl’s voice dropped an octave. “I’ve been wasting my time for the past six hours talking to a guy with a girlfriend? ” Six hours? Nick glanced at his watch and was shocked to discover the hour and minute hands pointed jointly at the 12. It was like he’d tripped into some twisted version of “Cinderella”: midnight an accusation.

  “Shit, I’ve got to go. I’m sorry.” On his way out he heard one of the girls say, “Forget about that asshole. He’s just like every other dirtbag we meet here.”

  Back home, Nick stumbled out of his clothing, then collapsed naked into bed. A thought drifted through his head—was he really like every other dirtbag, as the girl had accused him? He was snoring before he could formulate an answer.

  Chapter 5

  Nick jolted awake to his ringtone’s victorious pumping of the Rocky theme song. He was sprawled naked across his bed, and his head shivered a sensation he greeted with reluctant resignation. He eyed his phone: nine missed calls from Emma, another one coming in now. “Hello?” he squeaked, his throat parched.

  “Where the hell are you? We were supposed to meet at nine. Our train leaves in twenty—no, nineteen minutes. I’ve been trying you all morning. Tell me you’re, like, ten feet away from me and about to swoop in from behind for one of those romantic train station reunions. Please say I didn’t just wake you up.”

  Nick cleared his throat, swiping a nugget of sleep from his eye. “No, I’m up, I’m up.”

  “And you’re ready to go, right?”

  “Of course.” In fact, Nick wasn’t even sure if his suit was clean; he’d been meaning to check all week.

  “Okay, then you might just be able to make it. Don’t bother telling me now what happened. Grab a cab and get your ass to Penn, ASAP.”

  A wave of nausea rippled through Nick’s insides. He doubled over. “Em?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not going to make the train. I’m so sorry.”

  Emma sat slumped on her suitcase, her maid-of-honor dress draped across her lap and probably growing reprehensibly wrinkled. She sucked at a too-sweet orange shake, which she’d bought from Smoothie King out of self-pity. Waiting for her delinquent boyfriend at Penn Station, she’d seen the arrivals and departures boards update themselves several times over and was lamenting the fact that two more D.C.-bound trains had come and gone since the one they’d been scheduled to board. The crowd around her had also turned over at least twice. Everyone was hurrying this way or that, intent on this or that gate, headed to this subway or that cab line, all knowing exactly where they needed to go. It seemed unnatural to stay still for so long in a train station. Emma was a loiterer, and despite the fact that Nick was supposedly now on his way, she felt officially neglected.

  Not for the first time, Emma began imagining herself as the character Lily Bart in the opening scene of Edith Wharton’s classic novel The House of Mirth, a single woman in a New York train station, anxious and alone and probably being judged by every passerby. Emma didn’t kid herself that she possessed the protagonist’s infamous beauty, but she did identify with Miss Bart’s nerves—about making the right moves, and fearing mistakes, and figuring out how to parlay her assets into a life of success and happiness.

  Emma had first encountered Lily Bart during her debut week of grad school, in a Twentieth-Century Women’s Novel survey, and something about that train station moment had struck her as particularly poignant (she’d dreaded solo train travel ever since). In fact, that first scene in The House of Mirth was partially responsible both for Emma’s decision to focus her doctoral studies on Edith Wharton’s novels and for her later decision to abandon those same studies. Emma had initially homed in on Wharton’s comedies of manners because she’d been fascinated with the strict, antiquated social conventions that governed that 1920s universe of Manhattan high society. How bizarre that those young women poured all of their talents and energies into the hunt for a suitable partner! How absurd to have one’s life dictated and restricted by such a long list of esoteric rules, to have one’s choices so limited, to have the slightest misstep spell ruin from a solid reputation and a life of respectability! And how clever and savvy Wharton had been to both satirize and celebrate this world, often within a single sentence.

  These were the kinds of explanations Emma had rattled off when people asked her about her doctoral studies at the glum little cocktail parties thrown by Cornell’s English department. And yet, if Emma had been brutally honest—with others or with herself—she would’ve admitted that partly she was intrigued by a world that handed so many answers to its denizens on a tastefully decorated silver platter. It was a world in which everyone knew exactly what was expected of them, exactly what they were to wear and say on any given occasion, and exactly what a good life looked like. Never mind that Wharton took pains to uncover how insipid this so-called good life could be—Emma was still intrigued, and more than a little envious of those debutantes whose lives were bound so tightly by corsets and curfews.

  Emma, of course, had grown up being told that she could be whatever she wanted to be and, earning top grades and honors whenever they were doled out, she’d actually believed it. Never once had she seriously considered that at some point she’d have to decide what that “whatever” would actually be. Even in college she hadn’t had to choose; Brown let you sample whatever classes you wanted and then labeled the collective dabbling a degree in General Studies and sent you on your way. And so, after four years of acing her courses but never settling on any one area of interest, on graduation day Emma had stood on the side of the commencement stage, clutching her summa cum laude diploma and paralyzed with terror. Packing up her college apartment, she’d bathed herself in tears of self-pity. It had all been a lie, she’d moaned to her roommates, those gifts of freedom and possibility, those tales about the sky being the limit.

  This epiphany had sent Emma into a tailspin that resulted in two months spent nestled under a comforter in her childhood bedroom devouring hefty paperbacks. Although Emma’s retreat into story had been motivated by a simple desire to escape the real world, her mother had mistaken it for a passion for fiction and, fed up after a summer of waiting hand and foot on her college-degree-holding daughter, had dropped on Emma’s bed a stack of applications for Ph.D. programs in English Literature. (A year later, when her parents had suddenly sold the house to Emma’s brother, Max, and transplanted their lives from Westchester to Madrid, Emma had wondered if this push for grad school had been premeditated as a way to get her out of the way.)

  At the time, Emma had flipped through the pamphlets, comforted by the familiar photos of stately architecture and verdant quadrangles. She’d shrugged “Why not?,” then committed herself to completing the applications with the same level of rigor she devoted to any task she set her mind to. Though the idea of a life in academia didn’t exactly thrill her, Emma had felt anxious to be back in school again, learning and achieving and impressing her professors and classmates. When she’d been accepted to Cornell’s prestigious program, she took it as a sign that it was the right path. So it was more than surprisi
ng when, cracking open the first book of her first semester, which happened to be Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Emma had found herself falling fast in love.

  But that love hadn’t lasted. Years spent monomaniacally immersed in Wharton’s world—analyzing and reanalyzing the texts, and then analyzing others’ analyses and counter-analyses of those same texts—all while living in isolating and often snow-submerged upstate New York, had changed Emma. By the time she was twenty-five, four years into her program and more inclined to mop the bathroom floor than attempt to make sense of her dissertation notes, Emma had started to feel overwhelmed by all those train station moments in Edith Wharton World. She’d had trouble remembering that she was studying fictional accounts of a century-old society, and not immersed in the society herself. For a while she believed she could walk through campus and happen upon Undine Spragg or Ellen Olenska or countless other characters from Wharton’s oeuvre. That is, if she ever did walk through campus; going outside had become a rarer and rarer event. Hiding out in hibernation, surviving mostly on the care packages of pastries her parents sent from their bakery in Madrid, Emma had found herself unspooling into vertigo, twisted up with dread, disoriented by where she was living and what she was doing with her life.

  And if that wasn’t enough to contend with, Emma had also started reconsidering her girlfriends and their melodramatic concerns that she’d once dismissed as beneath her attention—the obsession over pretty dresses and makeup, and the scheming supposedly necessary to snatch up a good guy. What if these things weren’t in fact trivial but instead of utmost importance? Marinating in a single pair of sweatpants for a week at a time, Emma would scare herself with a long list of what ifs. What if she became one of Wharton’s heroines, pushing thirty, still on her own, and all but put out by society? What if she suddenly realized how blind she’d been to the workings of the world and only understood much too late the importance of acting in certain ways and working toward certain milestones? Only in the breeziest ways had Emma relayed these fears over the phone to Annie. Her friend had been working as an executive assistant at the time, planted behind a sleek desk in stilettos and a suit, wiling away her days checking Facebook and flirting with both her boss and her intern. Still, Annie had detected something was seriously wrong with her best friend.