Emily, meanwhile, lived a spartan sort of existence: though the walls of her apartment were covered, dorm-room style, with all sorts of colorful, kitschy prints, she owned no furniture save for a sagging bed, a small, battered couch that they pulled off the street, a child’s white dresser, and a matching desk, brought up from her parents’ house in Greensboro. In fact, it was kind to call her apartment such, for it was really a small, sloping room along the back wall of which the landlady had installed a two-burner stove and tiny fridge. This space represented one entire floor of a doll-sized back house on North Eighth Street, a block from the Bedford Avenue L stop. To get to the apartment, you had to walk through the front door of the building it backed (a four-story town house, long converted into dismal flats), out the back door, down a splintered wooden staircase, through a sad little cement courtyard, then up another staircase to the back-house’s front door. A surly Polish man lived above her, a jovial Mexican man below. Emily was friendly with both, as well as with a few of the tenants in the front house, a disproportionate number of whom were unemployed. As the girls often lamented, Emily’s kitchen had no sink—the landlady had been promising to install one for years—and her lone kitchen cabinet, a strange, ancient metal contraption, contained one ruined Teflon pan, one large tin pot for cooking pasta, a few chipped pieces of Pfaltzgraff picked up at the Salvy on Bedford, and four black mugs, bearing the name of her firm. She rarely spent money on herself, the way the other girls did, getting manicures and stupidly expensive haircuts.
Not that she needed to worry about the latter. Her red hair—once the same carroty shade as Dave’s—had darkened a bit in the years since college, to a streaky auburn, but it was still head-turningly beautiful, no matter that she’d cut it to her shoulders, which the girls thought made her look a bit boring, like the worker bees whose cubicles adjoined hers. In her off-hours, she still wore the sorts of clothes she’d worn in college—minidresses from the 1960s and enormous wedge-heeled shoes—and she arrived at the Labor Day party thusly clad, in an alarmingly short dress, printed all over with palm trees and men on surfboards. The top of the dress tied around her neck, leaving bare her bluish white shoulders and her back and arms. She’d planned on arriving early, to help Dave get the grill started and mix up some margaritas, but instead she showed up nearly an hour late.
“Clara called just as I was leaving the house,” she explained breathlessly, as she clomped through the threshold of Dave’s apartment and dropped her big straw bag on the sofa.“I could not get her off the phone. She was coked up. Have you ever been around people on coke?” Dave shook his head. He knew more pot-smoking types. “It’s the worst. They can’t stop talking. They think everyone is their best friend.” It’s good, Dave thought, that she can take this stuff in stride.
The party swelled, unaccountably, to unexpected proportions. By the late afternoon, Dave’s garden was filled with people—a full third of them, by Dave’s count, strangers—seated on the stacked railroad ties that lined the grassy area, sipping beer from bottles and gnawing happily on rib bones. The ribs and ceviche disappeared quickly, and Dave had to run out and buy hot dogs and tofu pups and potato chips at the fancy bodega on Court Street. Everyone seemed more excited by the hot dogs—blistered and bubbling—than the ribs, which was a bit annoying, after all that brining and marinating. Dave’s “date” for the party was Meredith Weiss, the dark-haired lawyer he’d been seeing, on and off, for more than a year—nearly two years, actually. His other girls had mostly moved on: the blonde poet now lived with a semifamous novelist, in a brownstone on Wyckoff (though she and Dave were still friendly); the yoga teacher was studying anthropology at Columbia and had moved up to Morningside Heights; the French girl had returned to France; and so on. Only Meredith remained.
He wondered if she might now be considered his girlfriend, if only by default; it had been at least six months since he’d seen anyone else. The idea kind of appealed to him, partly because—and he could admit this—he was lonely, with Sadie absorbed in her weird romance, and Tal pretty much gone, off playing poker with Philip Seymour Hoffman or whatever the fuck he was doing. Meredith was great, too, really great. Occasionally, he found himself saving up funny stories to tell her or reading things in the paper and thinking of her. He had a feeling that the evening would serve as a turning point; that, in bringing Meredith into his fold, he might now be able to settle in with her, to leave off the callow restlessness of his youth, exemplified by the Beth debacle, an episode that increasingly unnerved him; he still didn’t quite understand his behavior and preferred not to think about it.
In the garden, Meredith sat in a little circle with Lil, Beth, and Sadie, who had come without Agent Mulder, just as Emily had predicted. They all sat cross-legged on the grass, drinking the champagne Sadie had brought (typical Sadie; champagne for a barbecue) from plastic cups. They hadn’t been friends, per se, at Oberlin, but they knew enough people in common, he supposed. From across the garden he waved, and Meredith caught his eye with her own dark one and smiled, her little brown arms emerging from a plain black sundress, her shiny hair, almost as black as the dress, curling to her shoulders. Proximity to those pretty women, all of them laughing and waving their arms, somehow made her more lovely. How, he asked himself, could he have ever considered her simply one of many? How could he have taken her so lightly?
As the sky began to darken, Dave—who hadn’t eaten a thing, between manning the barbecue, mixing drinks, and introducing strangers—realized that he was, as was so often the case, on the verge of inebriation. He slipped inside the house to grab a glass of water and found there, to his surprise, Emily sitting on his couch with Curtis Lang, engaged in some sort of quiet, intense discussion. Emily appeared to be picking bits of apple out of a glass of sangria and feeding them to Dave’s cat, Thermos, who had a bizarre predilection for fruit (cantaloupe, in particular), but who would, no doubt, throw up all over the place later. Dave sighed and cracked his knuckles. Not trusting his voice, he nodded in their direction, grabbed a glass, filled it, quickly, with lukewarm tap water, and walked back out to the patio. Lil and Sadie waved their hands at him, gesturing for him to come over, but he was too tired to walk the ten feet between them. He sat down, heavily, in a chair, and grabbed a handful of tortilla chips (where had they come from? Had he bought them?).
“Dave,” Lil shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Dave, c’mere.” Wearily, he rose to obey her, clutching his water glass for stability. He wound his way to the back of the patio, where the previous owners had planted grass and bulbs, which had surprised him, his first spring, by sprouting into little purple and yellow and white flowers. Tuck was now manning the barbecue, smiling as he flipped hot dogs into the buns he’d neatly lined up on a plate. He would, Dave thought, do anything to avoid Sadie: his book was now three full months late. “He’s got to get it in,” Sadie had told Dave back in July, the last time he’d seen her. “They’ll make me cancel his contract. They will. This isn’t the kind of book that they can publish in five years. Ed’s not really in the news anymore.” He’d left the magazine and, was now, apparently, making a film. “A documentary?” Dave asked. Sadie shook her head. “A feature. A dot-com satire. Set in San Francisco. They start filming in the fall, I think.” Sadie, too, had moved on to bigger things. A novel of hers had unexpectedly made it onto the bestseller list and she’d been promoted again. Though she didn’t, Dave thought, seem particularly happy about it. “I’m just a little tired of tending to other people,” she’d told him. “I read these manuscripts and I think, ‘I can write a better book than this.’”