Break in Case of Emergency Page 2

  Not Ditmas Park, as Jim took to calling their immediate area, was home to a Ditmas Avenue but not to a park or parklike domain, a source of perverse delight to Jim.

  “The name itself is a broken promise,” Jim had said, “and thus it’s an honest and forthright guarantee of all the broken promises that Not Ditmas Park can offer its citizens in terms of amenities, community spirit, and educational opportunity. The name tells a meta-lie in service of a greater truth.”

  “It’s smart to get in on the ground floor of an emerging district,” the real estate agent had said. “Or, in this case, the fourth floor. You guys are ahead of the curve!”

  “We don’t really need the second bedroom,” Jen had told the real estate agent. “But, you know, we’re married now, and—”

  “And aspirations,” said the real estate agent with a wink. “You’re young!”

  “We’re not that young,” Jen said.

  Their closest subway station stood atop a perpetually dripping overground train line, where the fronts included a dollar store, a liquor store, and a “development corporation”; the indignities of time, weather, and pigeon droppings had chiseled the development corporation’s fabric awning into a trompe l’oeil of corrugated tin. What Jen and Jim guessed to be an exposed sewer pipe snaked past one end of the hoarding fence around the train tracks. Behind the plaza sat a mysterious brick-and-concrete hut that evoked an armored-car repair depot near Checkpoint Charlie. The annihilating climate of Eastern Bloc filthy-slipshod brutalism was encapsulated in their nearest post office, which looked and smelled like it had been excavated from the rubble of a gas main explosion, replete with broken metal locks hanging from its doors and service windows, as if smashed in haste to rescue trapped survivors.

  Jen and Jim lived within cardboard-thin walls and floors and ceilings unencumbered by insulation, all echoing beams and sound-conducting metal. If you pushed back a chair or Franny the cat batted your keys off the coffee table, the downstairs neighbors heard it. If you coughed or flushed a toilet, your upstairs neighbors heard it. To play recorded music with a bass line was a premeditated act of revenge. Residents who rarely met one another’s eyes in the elevator or vestibule would register displeasure with their neighbors’ squeaky hinges and furniture-rattling footfalls by leaving cans of WD-40 and fuzzy bedroom slippers on one another’s welcome mats, offerings shot through with the sinister supplication of a cat dropping a headless field mouse on the back porch. Jen and Jim gingerly maneuvered around on their toes at all times to avert the wrath of their downstairs neighbor, a replica in pallid flesh-folds of an Easter Island statue perched in a motorized wheelchair who had spent much of Jen and Jim’s move-in weekend pounding her own ceiling with a broom handle in protest.

  The building’s architectural quirks struck Jen as most problematic on late Saturday evenings, when the upstairs neighbors’ ungulate children repaired to their grandparents’ house and their parents would celebrate their reprieve with a thumping multiroom sexual odyssey—what Jim called their “weekly all-hands meeting”—often scored to Buena Vista Social Club or, on at least one harrowing occasion, Raffi’s Singable Songs for the Very Young, whose material provided a ready template for marching band–style refrains that the neighbors synced with recognizably percussive motions.

  FIVE! LITTLE! SPECKLED! FROGS!

  SAT! ON A! SPECKLED! LOG!

  EATING! THE MOST! DELICIOUS! BUGS!

  Then, occasionally, what sounded like a lamp would chank to the floor or a bedside table would whomp over on its side, followed by the scrabbling of either a small dog’s or a large cat’s paws as it fled for safety to another room.

  “Should we tell them?” Jen asked Jim late one night as they lay in bed, eyes wide in the dark, as the woman upstairs improvised a bellowing descant to her husband’s rapid Raffian melody. “It’s like they’re invading their own privacy.”

  ONE! JUMPED! INTO! THE POOL!

  WHERE! IT! WAS NICE! AND COOL!

  THEN! THERE WERE FOUR GREEN SPECKLED FROGS

  “I’m just glad they’re happy,” Jim said. Their downstairs neighbor broomed her ceiling, just once, as if in warning.

  After the end of her Federloss job, Jen might have assumed that she and Jim would be giving their neighbors more opportunities to invade their privacy now that she was unencumbered by the everyday stresses and timesucks of gainful employment. But Jen and Jim convened fewer all-hands meetings during her enforced sabbatical, for no reason that either could have pinpointed, save perhaps for a sheepishness that floated around the post-layoff Jen like a twilight cloud of gnats. She began too many emails—even to Meg, even to Pam—with “I know you must be totally busy, but I just wondered…” She thanked friends too profusely—even Meg, even Pam—when they met for coffee or a drink, and Jen always insisted on paying. She avoided parties, because she’d “have nothing to say.”

  “I just find it hard to do small talk if I can’t account for my time,” Jen said to Meg on the phone.

  “Right,” Meg replied, “because there’s always a velvet rope and a horde of squealing fans around the guy at the party who wants to talk about his job.”

  Jen kept an Excel spreadsheet on her elderly laptop titled REAL JOBS AND OTHER JOBS. At first, tapping through fingerless gloves at a kitchen table made dizzy on its oak-finish-and-particleboard haunches by the humidity swings of too many New York City summers, Jen applied for only REAL JOBS: grantwriting, speechwriting, communications work for any worthy cause she could find. But as the winter grew colder and bleaker, she put in for more and more OTHER JOBS. She applied to write copy for the Feminist Porn Collective, but belatedly discovered that she would be paid mainly in feminist porn. She landed an interview to be the research assistant to an elderly romance novelist and semireclusive candle-wax heiress, only to find out ex post facto that the novelist had employed a total of six research assistants over forty years, and each was a white male with a poetry MFA and/or a direct or family connection to Phillips Exeter Academy. She drafted a few speeches for a third-party mayoral candidate whose campaign platform included the abolishment of both private schools and gender designations on government forms. She acted as writing tutor to the sixteen-year-old son of a well-known entertainment lawyer, until she refused to help him forge a Vyvanse prescription, whereupon the teen told his mother (untruthfully) that Jen had absconded with his Modafinil prescription. Jen did not disclose to her charge that she herself had a prescription for a similar cognitive enhancer, Animexa, which she renewed at increasingly irregular intervals following the loss of her blue-chip Federloss Foundation health insurance.

  “You live in a fake neighborhood,” the sixteen-year-old had informed Jen one day.

  “Ditmas Park?” Jen replied. “It’s real. I’ve been there.”

  “You live,” the sixteen-year-old said, “in a real estate agent’s neologism.”

  This bothered Jen, mostly because the decision to live in a real estate agent’s neologism had originally been a marker of grown-up prudence and long-term thinking: The mindful marrieds enter their thirties, conserve their resources, steadily pay down their student loans, live well within their means, reserve space for a hypothetical tiny future boarder.

  “Feather your nest,” the real estate agent had said.

  Now, even living in a real estate agent’s neologism seemed like a grim necessity bordering on presumptuous overreach, regardless of the scuffed thirdhand furniture, the chewed gum–like residue constantly and mysteriously accumulating between the kitchen tiles, the canoe-sized kitchen separated by a cheap flapping strip of countertop from the deluxe canoe–sized living room, the dry rot in the windowsills, the closet doors eight inches too narrow for their frames. Even Franny the cat seemed like a luxury, all those unmonetized hours logged napping and grooming.

  Jen began writing down every single purchase she made in her notebook. With the same fountain pen, she also drew a picture of each item. Her student loan debit was represented one month by
a graduation cap, another month by the hand-forged wrought-iron gate her college class had walked through on commencement day. Cat-food purchases were represented by drawings of Franny in various states of odalisque repose. Jen made stippled pencil drawings of toothpaste tubes and physics-defying stacks of little tissue packets from the pharmacy and curlicuing cornucopias from modest grocery runs.

  The first entry in Jen’s notebook was the price of the notebook. Inside the open notebook, Jen drew a picture of the open notebook, then another inside that one and another, collapsing infinitely into the center.

  That

  “So, any news?” Jen’s mom asked.

  Jen’s mom never telephoned her, but if Jen did not call at regular intervals, Jen’s mom would complain to Jen’s dad, who would then send an email to Jen asking why she was ignoring her mother. The subject heading of these emails was “Your Mother.”

  (Jen’s mom became agitated, however, if Jen telephoned her too frequently. “Enough! I’m fine,” she’d say in lieu of greeting if one of Jen’s calls followed another too closely. The acceptable interval between calls widened and narrowed at will.)

  “Any news on work, you mean?” Jen asked. “Not just yet.”

  “Could that Meg find you a job?”

  Meg was a program director at the Bluff Foundation for Justice and Human Rights, a private behemoth so agelessly fortified by old money that its temporary hiring freeze was itself a metric of dire economic crisis.

  “Meg has been really helpful,” Jen said. “But obviously I don’t want to put it all on her to find me a job—”

  “Fine, fine,” Jen’s mom broke in. “Anyway.”

  Jen never knew if her mother’s conversational style was symptomatic of mere incuriosity or rather of an extreme wariness of any social transaction remotely resembling confrontation, which presumably included most exchanges of words. At cousins’ weddings and sisters-in-law’s baby showers, Jen watched with dismay as her mother attempted to mingle with people she’d known all their lives: arms folded in front of her as a shield, chin pulled defensively to her neck, poorly conditioned limbic system misinterpreting a niece’s attempts to inquire about her protracted kitchen renovation for a passive-aggressive face-off between two opposing parties.

  “Could that Pam help you?” Jen’s mom asked.

  Jen had been dating Jim for nearly two years before he ceased being that Jim.

  “That Pam always helps me, in her way,” Jen replied.

  Pam

  A few weeks into her post-Federloss unemployment, Jen had started spending several afternoons a week at Pam’s place. This pleased Jim, because Pam and her boyfriend, Paulo, were artists, and Jim thought of Jen as an artist, too.

  “I was never an artist,” Jen would say. “I never made art. I drew things. I painted things. People.”

  Pam and Paulo rented a cheap cavernous space in Greenpoint close to Newtown Creek, the site of one of the largest underground oil-and-chemical spills in history. On the walk from the G train stop to Pam’s, Jen could never discount the possibility that her air sacs were swelling with some kind of fine fecal mist of gamma rays and chlorinated benzene byproducts, a carcinogenic ambience that Pam enthusiastically leveraged in last-minute rental negotiations with their absentee landlord. The front half of Pam and Paulo’s space, which was about the size of Jen and Jim’s entire apartment and shared a wall with a tavern, served as a studio by day and a gallery by night. Paulo had divided the back half into four narrow, windowless “rooms” created by particleboard partitions that stopped two feet short of the ceilings. Pam and Paulo slept in the largest partition, while a transient cast of roommates—tourists and students and the hollow-eyed recent survivors of imploded live-in relationships—took up monthly or quarterly residence in the other three spaces.

  In the front studio, the drafting table, the kitchen table, and a futon relocated from the master bedroom were currently paired with miniature towers made of stools, pillows, and stacks of oversized books. Each stack was jerry-rigged to support Pam’s leg, which had been crushed in a hit-and-run the previous year when a delivery van made a squealing right turn and threw her from her bicycle. Three operations and hundreds of hours of physical therapy later, the leg—which looked perfectly normal at first glance, and both shiny-swollen and shrunken at second glance—was still grinding and wheezing in its sockets. Jen imagined that Pam’s powers of concentration were such that she’d occasionally see a drop of perspiration splat onto her laptop, and finally notice that the usual dull ache in her leg had escalated into jangling agony, thudding away at the double-glazed windows of Pam’s flow state as her conscious mind deliquesced into oneness with Final Cut Pro or the Artnet biography of Sigmar Polke.

  Jen and Pam had met their freshman year of college in a drawing class, where Pam had been impressed by Jen’s hyperrealistic technical abilities and Jen had been enchanted by Pam’s impassive terribleness—her wobbly, allegedly one-point-perspective Still Life with Cranberry Vodka and Froot Loops had so appalled their drawing teacher that he accused Pam of exploiting his class for another taught by his ex-girlfriend, “Kitsch-Kraft and Outsider Art: Toward a Deliberately Bad Avant-Garde.”

  Later, though, Jen experienced the growing recognition that Pam was “a real artist.”

  “You’re like a real artist,” Jen blurted out drunkenly to Pam the first time they went to a party together.

  Jen’s talent-spotting acumen was confirmed their junior year, when Pam started convincing people to allow her to take their picture first thing in the morning, before they got out of bed, before they even fully awakened. Pam would then mock up the unairbrushed, usually unflattering photograph as a faux magazine cover, billboard, or author’s jacket photo. The photos, taken in weak dawn light, were dusky, pearly, sometimes slightly out of focus; the best ones looked like secrets or accidents, or secret accidents. Pam called the pictures Wakes.

  She started with the people who spent the most time under the roof of the drafty, creaking, badly wired hundred-year-old Colonial house that Meg, Pam, and Jen rented four blocks from campus. The first Wake, of Pam’s then-boyfriend, looked like a seventies rock star’s mug shot: alarmed and defiant, dazed and hairy. In the second Wake, a puffy-faced Jen ducks bashfully away from the camera; her face is captured in three-quarter profile, her hand blurring upward to check for traces of dried sleep.

  The third Wake, of Meg—who was Jen’s friend first, whom Jen had introduced to Pam at the “You’re a real artist” party, which it often occurred to Jen to point out, though she never did—was the revelation. A double gash of mattress marks swooped across Meg’s right cheekbone like a panther’s caress. Her hair, which usually fell in computer-generated gentle waves, swirled and crashed around her heart-shaped face. Meg’s lips fell slightly open; the strap of her tank top wiped sideward, tracing the curve of her shoulder. Instead of ducking away from Pam’s camera, the half-asleep Meg leaned into it sensuously, chin forward, eyes heavy and intrigued.

  Pam knew what she had. She blew up the picture big enough to swallow an entire gallery wall at her end-of-semester show. It was a stunning photograph, raw and gorgeous and discomfiting in its intimacy. That it was a stunning photograph of Meg—old-money Meg, moderately-famous-last-name-demi-campus-celebrity Meg, Phi Beta Kappa–as-a-first-semester-junior Meg, paragon-of-the-public-service-community Meg—made the photograph an event.

  Now everyone wanted a Wake. The campus weekly kept an issue-to-issue tally of everyone who had a Wake and should have a Wake and desperately wanted a Wake, and also a regularly updated online ranking of existing Wakes, with Meg permanently and ceremoniously lodged at No. 1. Pam won a grant to create a single-edition magazine composed of nothing but Wakes. Clem Bernadine, editor of the campus humor magazine, submitted his shirtless and chaotic Wake as his yearbook picture. Joseph Potter, a beloved tenured professor of theater studies, used his one-eye-closed Wake as the jacket photo to his book Dre Gardens: Hip-Hop, New Money, and the Performance of the Sel
f.

  Pam was now intuitively aware of her genius for talking people into doing things that were not ostensibly in their interest. For her senior thesis project, she convinced the university to allow her to change the signage on several sites around campus to verbatim transcriptions of graffiti from the men’s bathrooms at the art school. Instead of directions to the buttery or the law library or the Women’s Center, visitors during Parents’ Weekend puzzled over commands and epigraphs such as STOP DRAWING D’S AND DRAW BIG TITTIES INSTEAD and SILENCE IS GOLDEN BUT DUCT TAPE IS SILVER and SINCE WRITING ON TOILET WALLS IS DONE NEITHER FOR CRITICAL ACCLAIM NOR FINANCIAL SUCCESS, IT IS THE PUREST FORM OF ART—DISCUSS, all presented in the university’s elegant house typography, Demimonde Condensed Blackletter. (The sign outside the university art gallery’s parking lot, which temporarily read FIRST-YEAR BOYS ARE TOY BOYS, may have caused the most consternation.) Pam also kitted out a trailer outside the art school as a fake “visitor’s center” and filled it with mock posters and brochures advertising the art school. The promotional materials glowed with wholesome and bright-eyed ambassadors of the future of contemporary art, lounging on the campus green or peering rapturously at the art gallery’s resident Pollock, their thoughts and hopes amplified in Demimonde Condensed Blackletter captions along the lines of DON’T JUDGE ME I ONLY NEEDED MONEY FOR COLLEGE or I HAD SEX WITH YR TRASH CAN IT WAS OKAY.

  “I heard some guy call it ‘interventionist art,’ but that made you sound like a substance-abuse counselor,” Meg said to Pam at her senior thesis show. Meg was looking over Jen’s shoulder at a thick, glossy “informational packet” that Jen held in her hands, titled STOP WRITING YOUR NAMES HERE HALF THESE PEOPLE ARE BROKEN UP ALREADY.