“A panini’s really just a grown-up grilled cheese, isn’t it?” she asked, and I giggled and agreed.
After that, we talked more easily. I described my horror of the subway platforms, hellish in the August heat, and she commiserated, saying that summer in New York made everyone “completely hysterical” and “basically insane,” and then telling a long elaborate story about the night she bought an air conditioner, all the cabs and tips and smiles it had taken to get it home, the drama of installation, the fear that it might tumble from her fourth-floor window. When she told me about waking up in the middle of the night to pat it, as if it were a fussy baby, I laughed and laughed, more from relief that she was being nice to me than anything else.
We chatted a bit, too, about the past decade. Not high school, not college, but our twenties: her stint in art school, the series of graphic design jobs she had held, my peripatetic wandering across the country, the time in Iowa and Oakland, the stints in Montauk and Nebraska.
“Iowa?” Her gaze sharpened. “Iowa City? The Workshop?”
This was a revelation: in certain New York circles, the entire state of Iowa was reducible to a single graduate program. I nodded, thinking she would be pleased, even impressed, but instead she pouted. “You’re not writing plays?”
In high school I had written a one-act in which the biblical Eve fights with the biblical Adam, then stabs him in the heart. Senior year, it had won all sorts of prizes, local and eventually national, but before that, when it was just an extra-credit project for English class, I had cast Lacie as Eve, and her boyfriend, Leo, as Adam. For six glorious weeks I had rehearsed them in the English teacher’s classroom.
“Oh, that,” I said now. “That was just kind of a high school thing. In college I got more into fiction writing.”
“But you were so good!” she protested.
I caught my breath. She did not sound upset, did not sound like she was even thinking of the accident.
“I just got into fiction,” I said again, more firmly this time, and she dropped it, asking instead what I was up to in New York.
“Oh, just—writing. I’m working on a novel.” I flinched. “I’m going to try to tutor rich kids too. I think it’s the easiest way for me to make money. I mean, without taking off my clothes.”
This was my line, and I felt a surge of triumph and relief as I delivered it, thinking I sounded debonair, as if I would strip, if SAT prep weren’t so damn easy.
But Lacie wasn’t that easily distracted. “What’s your novel about? Can I ask?”
“Ah, you know.” I coughed a little. “I’m actually not telling anyone.”
“Oh, okay.” Lacie’s face scurried in understanding. “Yeah, totally. That’s what writers do. I get it.” She crumpled up her napkin and waxed paper. “Well. This is a tease, I know. But I should get back.”
We said goodbye ambiguously. Or maybe not. If I had lived in New York longer, I might have understood that Lacie’s “Let’s hang out sometime” essentially meant “Let’s never see each other again,” but as it was—especially because she gave me her number—I believed her.
Her last words to me were “Well, give me a shout if you’re ever in Ditmas Park.”
My expression must have been blank, because she added, as if I had caught her out, “Okay, technically it’s Prospect Park South, but nobody knows where that is.” She raised her eyebrows at some unspoken irony.
I gulped, nodded, and watched as she walked away. Her loose tendrils, the boxy glasses, the jumpsuit at once unfussy and hip, were all so artlessly graceful, so casually perfect, that from within me came jealousy’s old familiar throb.
After another hour baking in Bryant Park, I was sweaty and damp, yet Portia Kahn was nothing if not gracious when I was ushered into her office, cooing “Such a pleasure!” while ignoring the darkened half-circles beneath my pits. “After all our conversations on the phone.” She pressed my hand. “How long has it been? So nice to see you again. What you’ve written, it’s just incredible. Your voice is so raw.”
If you have been writing in the dark for the greater part of your twenties, if you have scraped by on glorified secretary jobs while your college classmates pulled down six figures at Google or launched themselves into exciting and rewarding careers as immigration-reform lawyers, if on the cusp of your Saturn’s return you moved to a small Midwestern town simply to find relief from all the mind-numbing office work, if you then labored in the cornfields for two years, rising in blue-black January mornings to icicles dangling daggerlike from the attic windows of your garret apartment to write your little thermal-wearing heart out, working and working and working on the almost prerequisite and certainly predictable thinly veiled autobiographical novel, then these words will be balm. Grace. All you’ve ever wanted to hear.
My final year, Portia had come to Iowa as a visiting literary agent. A tiny elegant bird with silver earrings and pearly pink nails, she had stood before us and assured us that she loved the short story, loved a good collection, which we all knew meant: I hate story collections, story collections don’t sell. Like every other agent, she wanted novels.
When she left two days later with a stack of manuscripts I had been confident, though I made a great performance, as did everyone else, of exclaiming over how terrible my novel excerpt was. But I knew: what I had done as a teenager was so shocking that there was no question it would hook her.
When she called a month later, I had again pretended great humility. Alone in my attic apartment, I hummed polite demurrals while she exclaimed, “Rose! You’re so talented. And this novel! It’s just extraordinary.”
There were, though, just a few things. Some minor points. Questions, really. For the next two hours she talked, and I typed, and when we were done I had a five-page, single-spaced Word document with structural changes, character questions, plot notes, suggestions for added scenes and deleted scenes, narrative arcs that might be “strengthened,” and interiority that might be “more fully revealed.”
But who was I to complain? She had called my novel extraordinary.
So for the next three years I wrote and Portia advised. Always success seemed right around the corner. As I traveled from Iowa to Oakland to Montauk to Nebraska, she followed, a voice on the phone, cajoling and promising, sweet-talking and demurring. Urging me forward, but cautioning “not yet.” Not quite yet.
And now here she was. Draped in black, with the same pearly pink nails and silver earrings, she was still almost unbearably elegant, but when she said, “Your prose has this…” and then avoided my eye to stare into space to find the exact phrase, “granular specificity,” I saw—as I hadn’t before—that behind this smooth woman there was a nerdy girl who had once taken refuge in books. It made me trust her all over again, this dweeby, eager bookworm poking out behind the classy façade of Portia Kahn.