“Mandy, meet Katherine Pushkar, my new deputy editor,” he says. “You’ll be sharing an office with her.”
Katherine smiles up at me, kind and relaxed, and sticks out her hand to shake mine. She is in her midthirties, beautiful, with shoulder-length brunette hair and warmth that radiates. She swoops her hand around her to welcome me into what is not so much an office as a converted coat closet, but I have never felt more grateful. It is a room to call—at least partially—my own.
“Call HR, get all the paperwork taken care of,” Steve says, “and Katherine can get you set up on the computer. I’ve got to go deal with tomorrow’s cover.”
When Steve retreats into the newsroom, I can feel my nerves starting to rattle. Katherine whips around.
“I’m really glad you’re here,” she says. “I don’t know anyone either. I just came over from TimeOut.”
“Really?” I ask. “Oh that’s so rad.”
“Rad?” she repeats.
“I’m from California,” I say. “So yeah. You’re definitely rad, dude.”
Within the next hour, I make my way up to the fifteenth floor to meet with a tiny white-haired HR lady with huge black fashion eyeglasses to fill out a stack of forms. I look them over and realize that for the first time since I got married in 2000, I will now be marking “single.” Emergency contact? I have none. After running through the options (my ex-husband? my new roommates? my editor?), I finally scrawl my parents’ number in San Diego, 2,433 miles away. Screw it. If something happens to me, they can deal with it.
I hand the forms back. Then it’s off to another floor for my photo ID. The bored office worker snaps my picture and prints out my canary-yellow ID badge. I hang it around my neck. In the picture and on my face right now, I am beaming with pride.
I TAKE THE F train home that night, interrogating strangers on the subway to look for any anecdote I can cannibalize for content (“Hey, so, what are the latest trends? Got any celebrity gossip? Oh, you just want to be left alone? Sorry about that.”). Everywhere I go, I am a heat-seeking missile on the prowl for story ideas, rumors—any kind of dirt. Until I arrive at the Seventh Avenue stop in my new yuppie neighborhood, which is the epitome of spotless—a health food store and yoga studio on every corner.
My ID is still swinging around my neck—I can’t bring myself to take it off just yet. I walk up the stairs to the million-dollar brownstone, another small victory thanks yet again to a cold-call-emailing session.
Sex, job, and shelter. What couldn’t a confidently worded query to a stranger do?
Write it—and they will come. Or maybe you will.
Juanita, a fellow Northwestern grad, had received my forwarded email plea a few months back when Steve sent my official offer. Turned out she and her girlfriend, Lola, had a spare room, which they were looking to rent for $895 a month. She sent me pictures of their mind-boggling Park Slope paradise: teak bathroom decor, movie-studio-quality views, and a state-of-the-art stainless steel kitchen that looked straight out of a TV commercial for high-end cookware. Was I interested? Yes. Yes, I was.
“You’re back!” Juanita cheers when I walk through the door, and I see that a dinner party is in full swing with their friends—most of them coupled up—huddling around the kitchen to roll homemade sushi.
“Drink?” one of their friends asks, handing me some sake, and I accept the expensive miniature wooden cup so as to not seem weird. Every day I write in my “morning pages” long screeds about how I thought maybe life would be better without alcohol, but when push came to shove (it seemed impossible that you could actually choose not to drink), I didn’t want to be the weirdo who didn’t know how to have a good time.
“Not enough sex scenes!” one girl complains as someone pulls up an on-demand episode of The L Word in the background, and I introduce myself around the party. One girl wearing Ray-Bans and skinny jeans scopes me out and says she’d like to get to know me better, touching my arm, leaning in close. I have never been straight-up hit on by a woman before, and it is exhilarating and alienating all at once.
I concentrate most of my energy on just sipping my sake rather than downing it, like I want to so badly. The partygoers scream with laughter, repeating inside jokes and whooping at inappropriate revelations. I don’t feel like I click with anyone the way I did with Katherine at work. Juanita and Lola are a power couple, whose careers are taking off. It’s hard for me to distinguish between the Showtime series playing in the background and the who’s-broken-up-with-who small talk being made over yellowfin tuna and rice rolls around me.
“I think I’m just going to go back to my room.” I check out early with a smile and collapse onto the inflatable air mattress that is to be my bed for months to come—until Juanita spies a Craigslist freebie posting about an IKEA wooden-slat queen left on the street a few blocks over.
I shuffle my body around awkwardly, trying to get comfortable on the balloon-like structure that is my bed, finally give up, and pick up my computer. I need something familiar. Determined to make the kind of connection I didn’t at the party, I email a friend from Chicago a rant to try to soothe the emptiness that lingers in my gut.
“So these girls are ridiculously rich,” I write, feeling guilty as I covet everything around me, and wishing my hosts’ opulent lifestyle extended to their guest bedroom as well.
“I mean, whatever . . . I get along with them fine, and this’ll be fine and it’s cool. It’s just like this entire ‘Don’t forget to squeegee the teak in the bathroom!’
