Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,20

face. “Yeah, I see where you’re at with him. You’re thinking, Maybe someday. I’ll teach him. I’ll train him. When we’ve been together longer.”

Laura was embarrassed, but she had to laugh. Those had been her exact thoughts.

Callie didn’t laugh. Her brow creased, and despite her perfect makeup, she looked older. “There’s no evolution for guys like him. You can be with them, but the version of him you’re seeing right now is who you’re going to be with. If you’re okay with that, by all means.”

“But I …”

“But I luuuuhv him,” Callie mimicked. It was what Laura had been about to say. Callie was right. But what was Laura supposed to do, stop?

* * *

Laura was checking her email at alt.coffee again when she got an unexpected message: her sophomore-year roommate, Amanda, had found out she was living in New York from one of their mutual acquaintances and she wanted to hang out. They’d had very little in common then, but maybe they had more now? And they had lived together for a year, so there was an automatic semi-intimacy; Laura could remember how Amanda had smelled and what noises she’d made in her sleep, though she was hard-pressed to remember what her major had been. Via email, Laura made a plan to go over to “check out” Amanda’s apartment that night.

Amanda lived in one of the strange brand-new apartment buildings on Houston below Avenue C. Laura walked down beautiful First Street and then cut over onto the charmless blank concrete stretch and past a gas station to arrive in the lobby of the gray square building. To get upstairs, she had to tell the doorman where she was headed, and then he actually called Amanda to let her know Laura had arrived. She had never been in a doorman building before.

Amanda greeted her at the door and ushered her in with a hug. She still smelled the same, like Secret antiperspirant and gum and onions. She looked basically the same as she had in college, except that she’d traded her ironed-straight brown hair for a studiously stylish angled bob. Her makeup was perfect and even and thick, like a layer of fondant icing on a fancy cake. The apartment was big, and Laura knew she was supposed to be impressed, but it was deeply charmless and seemed not to belong in New York. One of the things that Laura liked about the apartment she shared with Callie was that it was a dark little warren of tiny rooms, basically a tunnel with space to turn around every so often. You could imagine the people who’d lived there a hundred years earlier; starving garment workers squinting over their piecework by lamplight. That appealed to Laura.

This place was carpeted. You walked in and you were immediately in the entire kitchen/living room. It was of a piece with the large prefab houses outside of Columbus where she’d hung out when her richer high school classmates’ parents were out of town. Amanda pulled her toward a coffee table and poured her a glass of red wine in a real wineglass, then one for herself in a wineglass that matched. She set the glass down on a coaster. Laura remembered suddenly that Amanda’s major had been communications.

“So how long have you been here? What are you doing? Isn’t it great? Tell me everything!”

Laura smiled and sipped the wine, which tasted salty and sweet, almost like food, not like sugared gasoline, as the jug wine she drank with Callie did. “This place is great,” she said because she knew she was supposed to. “Do you live here alone?”

Amanda cackled. “Oh my God, no; I have two roommates! It’s just like college, basically, we have to put a sock on the door when one of us is sexiled, but it’s worth it to be in a doorman building. I just feel safer. And I’m never here, anyway, I work all the time.”

“Where do you work?”

“I’m the assistant to the editor in chief of SPIN, it’s literally the hardest job ever. I have to be at my desk by eight, but I also have to go to all these shows. I never sleep. And my boss is such a slave driver.”

“Oh yeah, I know SPIN,” Laura said. It was a music magazine that covered mostly stupid arena-filling bands and was just starting to pay attention to bands that Laura knew and cared about. Maybe she and Amanda had something in common after all, apart from their hometown.

“Do