All Sara wanted was to take care of Irene: shuttle her to and from her doctor’s appointments, make her chicken soup from scratch, sit with her on the couch watching ¡Vámonos, Muchachos! and wait until Irene fell asleep to pick her hair off the pillows. But Irene refused to allow any of this. She insisted on acting as if nothing were any different than before, like the rest of the world.
For instance, it was insane that Sara still had to wake up and get to the New York Journal on time and spend the bulk of her day in a gray cubicle, covered in orderly columns of Post-it Notes and tacked-up newspaper clippings. While her friend had cancer. She just had it. “I mean, hello?” she felt like saying to her dry-erase calendar. “Are you serious with this shit?” It was still totally full of precise, centimeter-tall lettering and meticulous color coding: red appointments, green deadlines, blue editorial board meetings, purple social engagements, yellow holidays, and intern schedules in brown.
Even though Irene had been adamant about sticking with Dr. Zarrani at Mount Sinai, Sara still went in to discuss the situation with her boss, Luther Halles, the editorial director. He gave her a few numbers — well, actually he told her to look the numbers up in his Contacts list — and said she could use his name, of course, for anything anytime.
“You could do a piece on this,” he said, rolling his Mont Blanc pen between his fingers. She did a quick mental check of whether she needed to order him more ink. “Even a multipart thing, you know? Young, invulnerable people with cancer. It’s compelling stuff.”
Sara hummed. “I’m not sure my friend would go for that.”
Luther got up and began pacing. The way he walked, he sort of led with his head, which whipped this way and that, tugging through his neck as if pulling the rest of his low, reluctant frame behind him. “Tell her this is important. Others can learn from her.”
She wasn’t sure that was on Irene’s list of current priorities.
“Hey. Does she have health insurance?”
Sara nodded. Juliette and Abeba were keeping Irene on the payroll.
“She works at this gallery in Chelsea.”
Luther made a face; it would be a better story if she didn’t have insurance, Sara supposed, with all the headlines about the legions of young people who were coming off their parents’ plans into part-time work and their parents’ basements. There was no room now for them here, with her whole graduating class on idle, waiting for this financial crisis thing to end. Now the people above them couldn’t retire and wouldn’t be promoted and so she and everyone else were stuck in assistant purgatory. Still it was better than being back home.
“The other thing is that I might need to take three weeks off,” Sara said as seriously as she could. She knew he knew she had the days saved up and he’d been dreading she’d try and use them. “Once she’s finally feeling better, I’m taking her to France.”
Luther didn’t reply, and didn’t really need to, as his eyes alone suggested that this wasn’t happening. She knew she’d be better off asking him to rename the paper The Daily Sara than asking for multiple weeks off. She was the paper’s unofficial closer. Whenever someone quit or was fired (which happened every other week), their abandoned projects were usually given to her to finish. Meanwhile she represented the paper in the Classroom Journalism Initiative and served on a steering committee for the new Web interface. When Luther traveled, Sara was the one trusted to book his hotels, dinners, cars, and flights and to find people to take his unused Knicks tickets if there was going to be a game. She spoke to Mrs. Sigrid Halles (a former Miss Norway runner-up) at least three times a day and kept track of the major life events of their children Laetitia and Laurence.
He seemed aware that this was a lot of work for one person, or at least he had given her a 5 percent raise last summer when she’d complained about it and given her a new title as head of the mentorship program, which meant she had use of the two interns. But using them was far more work than doing it herself, for both were clueless. They were only six years younger, but they were hopeless. God knew what they would do to the place if she were gone for three weeks.
Luther sat back down and pushed a stack of files toward her, which he’d finally signed after a week’s delay. “Why don’t you all go use my beach house? Shelter Island is great this time of year. It’s absolutely beautiful.”
“In March?”
“Oh, totally. I wouldn’t go swimming, but there are some excellent vineyards, and you’ll have the town to yourselves. It’s primal, I’m telling you. It’s so relaxing. I go out there some weekends just to think. Be in nature. Commune with the pounding surf and the wide-open sky. Check with Sigrid about it. We’re lending it to her nephews until early April, but you can have it for a couple days after that. It’ll be perfect. A long weekend on Long Island! On me.”
Sara thanked him with enough false gratitude that he’d be satisfied and promised she’d think about it, even though the idea of staying in her boss’s house — even his vacation house — made her feel awkward.
On her lunch break Sara went up to check out the Morningside Heights apartment. Since they’d arrived six years ago, the rents had climbed far faster than their pitiful raises. She found herself feeling grateful the housing market had just spectacularly collapsed (though she knew this was awful) because the rents weren’t increasing for the first time in six years. But they weren’t going down either. Occasionally she and George did find places that seemed within reach, but the listing would disappear before they finished their application. No matter, they had always already begun to get cold feet.
Because George couldn’t realistically come in from the observatory on his lunch break, Irene joined Sara to see apartments sometimes during the week. Most of the time she was either just coming from or going to an appointment at Mount Sinai, but she never said more than “It was fine” or “They don’t know if it’s working yet,” when Sara asked how it was going. Nothing would be determined until April, when this latest round of chemotherapy would be finished and new scans would be taken. That day they met by the steps of St. John the Divine and hugged, and Sara thought she noticed Irene wince a little from her light touch through her red pea coat. She looked pale, for sure, but then so did everyone; the sun hadn’t been out in weeks.
“Have you spoken to Jacob yet?” Sara asked, as they walked past the sculpture garden and down to the corner of 110th and Amsterdam.
“I saw him yesterday. He yakked my ears off about his stupid boss for an hour. They have this rule, apparently, where they don’t talk at work, except Jacob has to always wave hello to Oliver when he walks by his office, because everyone else does and so it might look suspicious if Jacob didn’t. But Jacob says that he’d rather just never say hello to anybody ever, including Oliver—”
This wasn’t what Sara had meant, but then a tour bus roared by, its double-decker top filled with elderly Europeans wearing complementary ponchos just in case the solid gray sheet of a sky made up its mind to rain. The tourists snapped photos of the cathedral as the bus idled at a red light, and then the light went green and they roared along toward Columbia University and the Apollo Theater beyond.
“Here’s the building!” Irene shouted. A hand-drawn sign taped to the door announced the open house, and the door itself was propped open with some wadded-up coupon circulars. Sara wrinkled her nose — the front hall was badly lit, the mailboxes were covered in permanent graffiti scrawl, and there was a distinct M. C. Escher lilting to the stairs as they walked in. At the first floor they knocked on the appropriate door and waited. A moment passed, and then the door swung open to reveal an elderly man wearing mascara, rouge, and a blond beehive wig. He wore a cerulean silk Ralph Lauren bathrobe that was tied just loosely enough to make his biological sex undebatable.