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PART ONE

JUNE

 

CHAPTER ONE

The night started unassumingly enough, at a wine bar near Etta's apartment in Tribeca, a dark, cavernous room located down an inconspicuous flight of stairs, where the twenty-eight-dollar cocktails all had ridiculous names like "Juniper Berry Jubilee" or "Hazy Hibiscus Morning" and the sommelier waxed poetic about their natural wine selection that Etta complained was "undrinkable." That kind of place. When I arrived, she was sitting in the single booth in the back, wearing a thin lilac blouse that hung off her knobby shoulders like tissue paper, drinking a gin and tonic through a straw. She had already ordered oysters and a frisée salad.

Once the server took my order, Etta narrowed her green eyes at me and said, "Want to go to Brooklyn?"

"What's in Brooklyn?" I asked. Etta never left Manhattan.

Her eyes now on her phone, the bluish glare casting an extraterrestrial glow across her face, she said, "Nothing much." I waited. "Well, just a party. Thought it could be fun?"

"I don't know," I said. "I'm kind of tired."

"Sam's apartment is really cool, though."

"Who's Sam?"

"A friend of a friend." It was always a friend of a friend. "So? Is that a yes?"

Etta loved Thursday nights; she used to say they were "our" night, and I liked that, an evening belonging to us. But Etta was not plagued by the same realities that would greet me come morning. She would sleep in, wake up with the satisfaction of having nowhere to be, and I would suffer through my nine-to-five with a splitting headache and dry mouth, the residual price of last night's "fun." We had graduated from NYU four years earlier, and while the rest of us signed leases on cramped apartments partitioned by drywall and shared with four other roommates, slogged through entry-level jobs fetching coffee for bosses who were tired and stressed but all the while addicted to this elusive idea of importance, and worked our way up, up, up the corporate ladder, praying we wouldn't end up like the people to whom we reported, praying the whole time the figurative ladder might collapse, Etta played house in the apartment her parents had bought for her.

I smiled, but said nothing. I always agreed to go with her in the end, but sometimes, I enjoyed pretending there was an alternative world in which I said, "No, thanks, I'm good."

"Please!" she begged, then noticing a couple at the bar staring, more softly, "Please. It will be fun."

I took a sip of my wine. "Okay, fine."

We picked at our starters. When it came, I offered to pay the check, but Etta laughed and slid my debit card back across the table.

The party was hosted by the same hipster trust fund crowd and art cronies Etta knew through her family, or friends of friends to whom she always said things like, "Let's get a coffee soon!" knowing her words were empty, the suggestion a strategic means of ending a conversation already dead on arrival. I learned that from Etta, how to say things you didn't really mean while still convincing people of your sincerity. I learned a lot from her.

In the elevator, Etta buzzed "P" for "Penthouse," and we zipped to the top floor, where a tall man with thick, slicked-back hair welcomed us to a loft with wood-beam ceilings and brick walls, the smell of timber and sweat wrapping around us. The floors vibrated from the music booming through speakers, something by Daft Punk, and the traffic droning across the Brooklyn Bridge beyond the windows.

Etta immediately knew somebody, which meant I would cling to her, be introduced as her "best friend from college," smirk my way through small talk that did not really include me. When the same guy who had greeted us materialized with two vodka sodas, I swigged mine like I was afraid he might ask for it back.

"I heard your parents picked up that Pollock at Sotheby's," a girl with a pierced septum and long black hair said to Etta, who nodded before quipping it would probably end up on the bare wall in her own apartment.

"Oh, outside your bedroom?" I asked.

"Ren," she said, turning to me, "a Pollock would never fit on that wall. It's much too narrow." She rolled her eyes, as if to say, This one, where did I find her? and the other guests laughed, but then she pulled me close and squeezed my arm and so I laughed, too.