I resented Jared for turning me into a curmudgeon before my time. I was not old enough to be so angry, to delude myself into thinking I would be the one to teach these pesky kids a lesson. But the feeling of powerlessness was all-consuming. They were like cicadas without the bonus years of dormancy. The whole family worked in shifts. Between 7 and 8 a.m., their yapping terrier was released so that it could give every stick of lawn furniture a piece of its mind. Before noon, a housekeeper came to collect the previous night’s beer bottles, tossing them in a garbage bag. Then Jared and his friends would emerge, well rested, recapping the night while the sister sat worshipfully at their feet. Later that afternoon, she practiced her dance routines. I couldn’t beat them.
One day, I decided to cut out the middleman. I marched into the local police station myself. I made an errand out of it: Grocery shopping, check. Laundry, check. Quick narc run, check. A sympathetic cop scribbled her direct extension on the back of a blank parking ticket. It felt electric in my hand. When Jared threw a party the next night, I unfolded the ticket.
“They might be the worst people of their generation,” I told her, gilding the pity lily.
After a mere hour, I peered out the window to see the cop standing in Jared’s doorway. The floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides of the house meant that I could see straight through it, to the glossy doors of more townhouses. Jared, stripped of his bravado by a woman in uniform, slumped his shoulders and shut the door. The music stopped. The chatter ceased. I flipped my pillow to the cooler side.
I woke several hours later to the choral opening of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” My subconscious had tried to incorporate this second wave of the party into my dreams. But my subconscious had done all it could. It was time to deliver me unto reality.
* * *
Weeks turned into months. I started keeping a notebook by my bed:
Jared spits grapes into the air and tries to catch them in his mouth.
Jared feels like he’s seen some pictures of your dick from the 8th grade.
Jared has decided tequila gives you diarrhea.
Jared thinks this is some Cheech and Chong shit.
Jared has discovered jazz.
By documenting his activities, I thought perhaps I could trick myself into thinking I had signed up for this. Like a scientist observing a nocturnal creature. Or I’d try to offset the hot rage coursing through my veins by envisioning scenarios in which Jared’s existence served to bolster mine. You know what I need? I need to Windex every surface of my apartment at 4 a.m. Thanks, Jared, for saving me the trouble of setting an alarm or buying drugs of my own.
The woman who lived in the apartment next to mine did not have the box seats I did, but she did have a four-month-old baby. I asked her if the people in the back ever bothered her.
“Oh, you mean Jared?” she groaned. “When we moved in, he was still a little kid. I thought he was so cute, playing in the backyard. But you know what they say about tiger cubs.”
“What do they say?”
“Don’t adopt tiger cubs.”
I felt the pulse of their lives steadily behind me. Not just physically behind me, but in time. I was watching them go through their formative years (some had lost their virginity, some were just pretending). I was waiting for them to grow up, desperate for the glue to set, for the clay to dry, for the inexorable metamorphosis that would bring about their conscious selves. But I couldn’t keep waiting without getting older myself. Their very existence highlighted my own aging in a way that jarred me. Before Jared, only events in my own life—a friend’s marriage, a sick parent, the twentieth anniversary of a seminal movie—had triggered ruminations on the passage of time. Which meant that, despite the stresses of aging, I had always had a manageable view of it. I reflected at will. But after Jared, my own mortality could smack me in the face at random. If I was in a good mood when I heard him, I found myself eager to learn something from his youth and to be reminded of my own. If I was in a bad mood, I never wanted to hear from a person so much as a day younger than me so long as I lived.
They say holding on to resentment is like letting someone take up space in your brain rent-free, and my rent was pretty high as it was. But I couldn’t help it. I talked about Jared to strangers, to editors, to physicians, to hairdressers and bus drivers. Okay, one bus driver. But I think we can all agree that’s one too many. I talked about Jared with people I admired—people who I meant to tell how much I loved their work but all that came out was Jared vomit. I talked about him at book fairs, in towns and cities across the land. I went on CBS This Morning to discuss an op-ed I had written but Jared had kept me up the night before, teaching himself to play “Go On with Your Bad Self” on the guitar. So I talked about him with Charlie Rose.
Out of helpfulness or exasperation, friends floated suggestions.
“Why don’t you—”
“Shoot them?” I interrupted. “I can’t shoot them.”
“—move out.”
It hadn’t occurred to me. Rather, it had occurred to me that murder was more of an option than moving. A true test of a New Yorker if there ever was one. I was fully aware there were other apartments I could live in, other boroughs I could go to. But to live in New York is to weigh
