“It’s five in the morning where you are?”
“I’m in Wisconsin.”
“Oh.” Ivy would not have considered the fact that Wisconsin was in the same time zone. She reminded me of that old magazine cover that portrayed the way New Yorkers thought of the rest of the country. Though he was not crass about it, she did not really consider Chicago part of the Midwest that F. Scott Fitzgerald called that “vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
How could I frame my honest rejoinder to Ivy’s question without long-distance insulting her?
“Give me a moment to gather my thoughts,” I said. “I’ll call you right back.”
“Really?” said Ivy.
“Hell is murky,” I told her. “I’m referring to the time of day.”
“Good good,” said Ivy. I thought I’d caught her out. But no one caught Ivy Torres out. “Screw your courage to the sticking place, Lady MacBeth.”
I dragged myself to the bathroom and brushed my teeth, which always had a bracing mental effect on me. I tried to contemplate what I would say to discourage Ivy.Fuchsiawasn’t “that kind” of women’s publication, which is to say, a monthly manual for a geisha who daylighted as a stockbroker but really wanted only to pleasure her man. We did stories about the wage gap, teen pregnancy, and mentorship, and, in fact, sometimes features about sex—about women’s medicine, sexual health, and sexual dysfunction, not about thirteen ways to give a blow job.
The fact that Ivy had called me instead of someone else was shorthand for her nascent desire to designate me as the presumptive sex columnist... and for the second time in a week, I found myself ready to draw a line in the sand. Not only did I believe that the whole premise could be borderline misogynistic—more about men’s happiness than women’s, about binding that big lug to you with bedroom tricks—but I just wasn’t qualified. I didn’t really care. While Ivy didn’t know this—nobody knew this—I liked sex well enough but I had not yet met the person who could inspire me to feel like one of my college quad-mates who loved sex so much that she told me she was surprised people could think about anything else.
Let Marcus do it.
A man writing for women about their sex lives could either be a great big blockbuster or a great big black eye forFuchsia. Either one would do the magazine good, with great big gossip.
I again pictured Ivy next to her floor-to-ceiling bedroom window, ten feet wide framed in golden lights and tiny blue mirrors. I’d been at her place once, for the holiday party last year. It looked like an ad forCoastal Style, everything big and blue and gold and tapestried... and immaculate, despite the fact that Ivy had three little boys, aged two, four, and seven. Her sons were actually IVF triplets from a single egg hatch or... batch or whatever you called it. I knew this because once, in aburst of intimacy so rare I don’t think I ever summoned a response, Ivy confided, “We didn’t want to do the multiples thing to them, or to ourselves.”
Ivy’s children were not very well-behaved. On the same day she told me about their triplet-dom, she also said, “My children are wild beasts. The only windows that open in our flat are ten feet off the ground and they need two keys to open them that we keep in two different safes the way other people keep guns.” Ivy’s husband, Telly, was a medical researcher who invented a widget that revolutionized the accuracy of laser eye surgery. Neither of them had to work, but Ivy loved to work, so she did. Her husband stayed home with the children.
I’d sneaked into Ivy’s closet for the briefest moment during our annual holiday party and found it as intimidating as a cyclotron lab. There were the expected high and low rods, drawers, and shoe cupboards, but also something truly eerie: a photograph of every piece of clothing tagged with smaller sticky-backed photos of relevant accessories. This was Ivy’s private world and the importance within it of my so-called specialty was like a hand around my throat.
I also felt even more keenly the gap between us, six years of life and six million degrees of privilege.
I was fashionable by fraud. I wore only variations on white—cream, bone, stone, porcelain, fog, parchment, pearl, seashell—and I wore the same twenty articles of clothing over and over in different configurations. My wardrobe included one great pair of white crepe Alice + Olivia pants, one Khaite Noma midi dress, one Valentino blazer. People thought it was on purpose. All my work clothes came from this Lake Forest resale store called Such Sweet Sorrow (as in parting is such sweet sorrow, as inRomeo and Juliet). Slim socialites went there to consign their Bottega Veneta boots. I loved the fact that it had formerly been a bank. I told myself I was traveling light, like a real writer living on cheese and whiskey on the Rive Gauche in 1940. I kept my civilian clothes in flat boxes under the bed in my little River North aerie.
I loved my apartment, one partitioned room in a converted warehouse, with a massive floor-to-ceiling steel-gridded window and a network of pipes far overhead. The pipes were at least shiny, though they occasionally belched out terrifying clatters and sighs. The only walls enclosed the bathroom, and they were about eight feet tall, so, no matter how desperate my need, I couldn’t use the toilet when anyone else was there. My parents thought that the brutally minimalist furnishings were totemic rather than systemic, that having two chairs instead of four at my aluminum kitchen table was a statement, and it was a statement: the statement was that I couldn’t afford four chairs. The big black rag rug with red ribbons woven throughout was a discard from a previous resident, as was my black velvet couch.
It was mine. My name and mine alone was on the mortgage.
I already missed it. I missed tucking it in and saying goodbye every morning. I missed the sweet orange glow when the timer turned the lights on at six each night. I hated to think of anyone sleeping or peeing or having sex or even breathing in my small pristine home. But to completely give myself to this investigation, there was no practical purpose to shuttling back and forth to Madison and Sheboygan from Chicago. I decided to sublet it, preferably to someone who would pay the full tariff, my mortgage plus more, but only use it one or two nights a week. I would be a squatter at my sister’s squalid digs, a ramshackle house that looked like the opening scenes of a horror movie, with her three silent roommates, whom my dad called Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather. There was a spare room, albeit with no electricity or heat, where Nell and her silent crew stored boxes. They could put their boxes in that murder basementof theirs, which was at least pretty clean. For a grad student, money was more useful than space.
I remembered the last time I’d been there, to pack up.
Although it turned out to be a more important day, at the outset I thought that my biggest decision would be whether to put my white clothes or my normal clothes in storage. I decided on a little of both, to alternate between dressed and dressed up. (This was something only I would think, despite everything else at stake... but I still couldn’t forget the dark eyes of Felicity’s lawyer, whose photos I gazed at online to a degree that was embarrassing.)
The next time I saw him, I wanted to look good, although he was probably married to his college sweetheart, who was probably a neurosurgeon. There was no mention of his personal life online, which would make sense given the kind of people he had to work for every day. (As my mother reminded me when this all began, most people charged with crimes had done what the police said they did, andguiltyorinnocentcould be terms for whose story held up best.)
I put an ad on Big Site and my place was sublet within two hours, at a third more than I was paying and with the specification that I was promising four months but could redact that promise with one week’s notice if I had to. I drew up a legal document I printed off from a website. I put my few bins of belongings in the storage cage in the building basement, then I packed my car and drove away.
Was all this going to be worth it?
I was still being paid the same thing I’d had two years before when I started working forFuchsia. I didn’t know anyone who’d ever received a raise, although perhaps they were sworn to secrecy in case the idea caught on. Writing was supposed to be one of those things you did for love, like being a priest or a ballerina, that required a lot of training in order to make very little money.
Now, however, well before I had proven that I could do anything new, before I had written a single word, was not the time to ask Ivy for a raise.
I pulled the car over. I called Ivy.
I swear she picked up before the ring finished.
I said, “Ivy, we should be having this conversation in person, and I’m sorry that we’re not. I need to run something past you. I wouldn’t bother you unless it was important...”
