Chinel! beckoned toward the dingy, nonworking fireplace with shellacked red nails: “Look at this, sweetie. A real prewar detail.”
Audrey didn’t move, and Chinel! came back to retrieve her. Blood rushed to Audrey’s face: hot and salty, like liquid fire. “I booked this appointment from Nebraska! You told me you had apartments in my range! You told me no problem!”
“Hun-ee,” Chinel! clucked, then rolled her eyes. But when she looked at Audrey, whatever she saw there changed her mind. She smiled crookedly, a real smile, like suddenly the game was over—nothing personal—and they could part friends. “I had you pegged all wrong. I thought you was the daughter of a rich man when you said you was going to Columbia. Forget the East Village. It’s Neva-Neva Land. Do ya-self a favor and go to stoodent housing up in Morningside Heights. They’ll find you something cheapa.”
Audrey didn’t bother saying good-bye, or even shaking hands. She left Chinel! in the dirty walk-up. After a thirty-minute search up and down 14th Street (she refused to ask for directions because—Dammit!—she could do this!), she found the crosstown L. It was only after she held to the metal strap, and the subway roared through its noisy tunnel, that she smiled. She’d never guessed she had it in her to yell at another person. Better still, yelling felt pretty stinking good.
After that day, she kept fighting. And scratching. And working. And learning the little things, like why dental floss was good and the creepy old men on 113th and Amsterdam were bad. And then one morning, she looked in the mirror, and discovered that she’d lost her sad-sack slump. Her hair wasn’t greasy anymore. And her smile happened to be kind of pretty. For the first time in her life, she looked happy. New York was where she belonged.
Even grad school worked in her favor. Turned out, she had real talent. If she’d been any good at reading people, she might have recognized the envy of her fellow students, and even a few of the teachers, whose snipes had not been intended to encourage but to undermine. But after growing up under Betty Lucas’ thumb, the subtleties of academic pettiness flew right over her head. Nothing stopped her, or even slowed her down.
By the end of her first year, the department chair selected her to help design New York-Presbyterian’s Pediatric Wing. Instead of shared bedrooms, she suggested small, alveoli-like rooms in clusters of three along the edges of the building, so the really sick kids still had their privacy, but they also got a view. Her design won the New York Emerging Voices Award in Architecture. That summer break, even though nobody else in her class landed so much as an interview for an unpaid internship, she had her pick of firms.
During her second year in school, with one aspect of her life in place, she decided to shoot for gold and shore up the other part, too. Her first effort was E-Harmony, but their standards against weird were too high, because after she filled out their hundred-item questionnaire, they told her she was unmatchable. Next she tried singleny.com, then smoked up with the last of Billy’s hash before her dates because she’d needed the courage. She let the first guy kiss her even though she didn’t like him, because a girl needs a first kiss. “Farmer’s daughters are my favorite! You’re as sweet as jelly!” he’d announced, and she hadn’t corrected him by letting him know that the closest she’d gotten to a farm was when Betty had worked as a secretary at the John Deere in Hinton.
She let the next guy get to second base. She liked him a little better, but not much. He’d lived with his parents in the Trump Towers, and kept talking about how much money he would inherit when they died. From the broken veins across his nose and the half bottle of Bombay Gin he downed, she got the feeling that she’d hooked herself a boozer. “You’re forty-two years old, right?” she’d asked, thinking such a question would shame him, but instead he’d answered, “I lied on the application. I’m forty-nine.”
Compared to his predecessors, Saraub was Prince Charming. His name was pronounced Sore-rub but his friends called him Bobby, because, before political correctness, that was what kindergarten teachers at Manhattan private schools renamed all the Indian kids—they didn’t like having to pronounce foreign words. Worse, she later learned, his real name was Saurabh, but the hospital