Why We Came to the City Read online

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Kristopher Jansma

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Jansma, Kristopher, author.

  Title: Why we came to the city / Kristopher Jansma.

  Description: New York : Viking, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015044555 (print) | LCCN 2015047243 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-42660-8 (hardback) | ISBN 978-0-698-15213-7 | ISBN 978-0-698-15213-7 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Urban Life.

  Classification: LCC PS3610.A5873 W48 2016 (print) | LCC PS3610.A5873 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044555

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Leah

  CONTENTS

  Also by the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  Why We Came to the City

  Living Vicariously

  Five in a Million

  Fish Eyes and No Ears

  A Subjunctive March

  Shelter Island

  Jacob in the Waste Land

  The Disappointments

  II

  Why We Left the City

  Zugzwang, Ward III, 2010

  William on the Bridge

  The Wedding of Sara Sherman and George Murphy

  The City That Is

  Acknowledgments

  I

  We do have Prayers, you know, Prayers for forgiveness,

  daughters of mighty Zeus . . . and they limp and halt,

  they’re all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side,

  can’t look you in the eyes, and always bent on duty,

  trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin.

  But Ruin is strong and swift—

  She outstrips them all by far, stealing a march,

  leaping over the whole wide earth to bring mankind to grief.

  And the Prayers trail after, trying to heal the wounds.

  —Homer, The Iliad (trans. Robert Fagles)

  What can go wrong will go wrong.

  —Murphy’s First Law

  WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY

  We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime, then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them.

  Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management—who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and, more importantly, why—which even we didn’t know. Retire!, we wanted to shout. Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.

  Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home; we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity.

  In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly découpaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for our old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them.

  Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

  We couldn’t stop following the news. Every ten seconds we refreshed our browsers and gawked at the headlines. Dully, we read blogs of friends of friends of friends who had started an organic farm out on the Wachito River. They were out there pickling and canning and brewing things in the goodness of nature. And soon we’d worry it was time for us to leave the city and go. Go! To Uruguay or Morocco or Connecticut? To the Plains or the Mountains or the Bay? But we’d bide our time, and after some months or years, our farmer friends would give up the farm and begin studying for the LSATs. We felt lousy about this, and wonderful.

  We missed getting mail. We wondered why we even kept those tiny keys on our crowded rings. Sometimes we would send ourselves things from the office. Sometimes we would handwrite long letters to old loved ones and not send them. We never knew their new address. We never knew anyone’s address, just their cross streets and what their doors looked like. Which button to buzz, and if the buzzers even worked. How many flights to
climb, and which way to turn off the stairs. Sometimes we missed those who hadn’t come to the city with us—or those who had gone to other, different cities. Sometimes we journeyed to see them, and sometimes they ventured to see us. Those were the best of times, for we were all at home and not at once. Those were the worst of times, for we inevitably longed to all move here or there, yet no one ever came—somehow everyone only left. Soon we were practically all alone.

  Soon we began to hate the forever cramping of our lives. Sleeping on top of strangers and sipping coffee with people we knew we knew but couldn’t remember where from. Living out of boxes we had no space to unpack. Soon we named the pigeons roosting in our windowsills; we worried they looked mangier than the week before. We heard bellowing in the apartments below us and bedsprings creaking in the ones above. Everywhere we saw people with dogs and wondered how they managed it. Did they work from home? Did they not work? Had they gone to the right schools? Did they have connections? We had no connections. Our parents were our guarantors in name only; they called us from their jobs in distant, colorless, suburban office parks and told us we could come home anytime, and this terrified us always.

  But then came those nights, creeping up on us while we worked busily in dark offices, like submariners lost at sea, sailing through the dark stratosphere in our cement towers. We’d call each other to report: a good thing happened, a compliment had been paid, a favor had been appreciated, an inch of ground had been gained. We wouldn’t trade those nights for anything or anywhere. Those nights, we remembered why we came to the city. Because if we were really living, then we wanted to hear the cracking in our throats and feel the trembling in our extremities. And if our apartments were coffins and our desks headstones and our dreams infections—if we were all slowly dying—then at least we were going about that great and terrible business together.

  LIVING VICARIOUSLY

  Irene Richmond ran down the narrow foyer, helping guests get out of their coats, which were dusted with flakes of snow that had been coming down heavily all day and still drifted lightly onto the hotel balcony. Coats that cost more than she earned in a month and that were works of art themselves. Hoods lined with fox fur imported from Finland. A quilted sateen coat filled with goose down and patterned in the latest Japanese style of concentric circles. A long vest made of rabbit. Mongolian lamb’s wool. Irene got a thrill from just holding them, but it was always short-lived. By the time the guests had finished warning her not to crease the collars or wrinkle the hems, there was someone else making an even more fashionable entrance.

  During rare pauses, she checked her phone for messages from George and Sara. Nothing. And nothing from Jacob either. Twisting in front of the hallway mirror, she reseated the bobby pins that kept her blond hair up off her shoulders. She liked the way her neck looked in the golden light by the door. An elegant extension of her one bared shoulder. She hoped it wasn’t too much. Abeba had said only to look nice, but Irene had sensed an implication that she not look nicer than the guests. Juliette then added that it was important to look hip, which Irene took to mean young, vital, and strange. Therefore: cerulean leggings, crochet sweater dress, peacock feather necklace, and a braided skinny-belt. Irene hoped these projected the artistic, professional image specified. Every job had its uniform.

  She checked her eye shadow, which made her irises look a shade darker, almost black instead of blue. She rubbed at a spot beneath her left eye that had been there for a month now but had only recently begun to feel sore. Buzz went the door, and she was off to collect a giraffe-print bolero from the next artist or heiress to stagger in on midnight-black stilettos.

  The K Gallery’s annual holiday party at the Waldorf Astoria was always an impressive affair. All year Irene and her friends looked forward to this night, the second Friday in December. Not that they didn’t go out other nights, not that living in the city wasn’t sometimes glamorous, but never anything compared to this. There were seventy-eight people on the exclusive guest list, and renowned chef Marc Herradura was catering. Honest-to-God movie stars attended. Last year they’d seen that guy from The Office, and the year before that, Cyndi Lauper! This was that other New York: always around them but never visible. For this one night it belonged to them too.

  Even with the first big storm of winter going on outside and flights canceled at JFK and LaGuardia (only Newark soldiered on), they had nearly full attendance. All day the gallery’s owners, Juliette and Abeba, had been commanding Irene from one end of Manhattan to the other. They’d thrust her into snow-capped cars in Chelsea with a wrought-iron baboon skeleton (a steal at just $300,000) whose shrieking head had extended dangerously out the window into traffic. Wearing a pair of Abeba’s oversize duck boots, Irene had sloshed across the posh lobby of the Lexington Avenue hotel, aching under the weight of a moldy yam encased in bile-green polypropylene (starting at just half a million).

  Five years ago, when she’d first begun working at the gallery, Irene had gotten a thrill simply from being near such valuable art, but by this point she was considering telling the driver to take her and the oversize photograph of Trisha Birch’s genitals (one million flat) to the George Washington Bridge so she could hurl it out into the Hudson. Or maybe she would just keep going. On and on, out of the city. With the money this one photo was worth, Irene could paint all day and all night for another twenty years. Or start her own gallery. Or institute a progressive artists’ colony where young dreamers could take up their own work. She could help them avoid the eighteen-hour days, the perpetual temper tantrums, the name-dropping, the ego trips, the talentless and tormented. Except that, of course, outside New York City, the Trisha Birch photographs were more likely to get her arrested for indecency than for theft. Maybe in L.A., she thought. Maybe in London. Maybe on Mars, or Neptune.

  Juliette and Abeba were not terrible bosses, but they had all the fussiness of artists without the brilliance. They had an eye for slick marketing and could start a trend like nobody’s business. But the higher the K Gallery climbed in the Chelsea scene, the more Juliette and Abeba drank sickening amounts of Campari and spoke of selling everything and setting sail for the Marquesas like Gauguin. Rule one of living in the city, Irene had learned—as soon as you got there, you had to begin threatening to leave. She was theoretically putting money aside for a trip to France from which she privately imagined she’d never return, though it seemed like the same $350 or so kept entering and exiting her savings account; meanwhile the trip got more expensive and the exchange rate got worse and the gallery took up more time.

  Still, it was, as they said, a living, and far from a bad one. Even when she’d had to examine Teacup Yorkie feces to see which should be threaded alongside diamonds on a necklace for the Bryant Park show. Even cataloging seventeen years of Percy Bryson’s toenail clippings. But she had legit benefits and enough money to pay for a cramped studio apartment on East Fourth Street, where she could paint at night without disturbing a roommate. Plus she wasn’t starving. If not trips to France, her paychecks covered a vintage dress or two and movie tickets and bar tabs and green tea smoothies.

  Buzz! At last it was them: George Murphy and Sara Sherman.

  George wore a wide smile and a black pinstripe suit. Was it new? It was. Sara had gotten it for him last week at the Macy’s pre-Christmas sale, to wear to his postdoc interviews. Irene kissed his cheek and inspected his penny-coppery hair; it needed cutting. Irene could never resist the urge to ruffle his head lightly, for luck.

  “We made it!” George announced. His cornflower-blue eyes met the room over Irene’s shoulder and then fixed on her. When he spoke to her, or to anyone, they never drifted an inch. His three favorite words were, “Did you know—” and after saying them, he had a way of lowering his voice as he told you something terrific about some distant galaxy he was researching out at the North Shore Observatory, as if Andromeda B were a restaurant you might want to check out sometime. He seemed to want nothing more than for
others to find him handy to have around. Swiftly, he could explain to you: the mechanics of an elevator, the science behind a hailstorm, or the electric spark between your fingers and the fringe of your dress. A good Catholic boy from Columbus, someone had raised him right; George Murphy was attentive in a city of the attention-deficient, and for this he was always looked after.

  “No one’s ever on time to this thing,” Irene said. “Here, give me your coat.”

  But George was already hanging it up by himself.

  Sara slid in for a kiss from Irene. “Some big accident on the LIE,” she explained. Irene told her she looked stunning, and Sara said she must be mental; she’d come straight from the gym and was sure that she must reek, but of course she did not. Her long purple dress was discreetly sequined. Raven-haired and slender-jawed, Sara forever made Irene itch to break out her charcoals and sketch dark, elegant lines. No matter that she was technically not of the artsy crowd at this party—inside an hour, half the people there would believe Sara was the one throwing it. She’d glide from one conversation to the next, sometimes drawing one or two along with her until no one was a stranger to her, or to anyone, anymore. “Did you know” were also Sara’s three favorite words, followed not by a fact but by a person. She always knew someone you knew: a girl in your prom limo, your YMCA summer camp counselor, the barista at the coffee shop you frequent, a man you met at that bar in Chiang Mai, the boy whose hand you held on a third-grade field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Some people never forgot a face; Sara never forgot a connection.

  George played with his skinny knit tie in the hall mirror. “Six-car pileup. I’ve done this commute every day for five years, and I’ve never seen a crash that bad.”

  Irene watched as the mirror’s golden, thorny frame transformed George into a portrait: Man in Crooked Necktie. She wished she could tear the Claude Lozarette off the farther wall, melt the pigments off the canvas, and use them to paint George right there on the mirror’s surface—why not?—but the moment passed. The knot was fixed; he’d stepped away.