3
SUMMER IN NEW YORK CITY IS A HELLSCAPE.
It’s hotter than my hometown in Southern California, and that heat is reflected off two-hundred-feet-tall glorified mirrors that shoot the sun right into your face. All the rich people flee to the Hamptons Friday afternoon like clockwork, and the really rich ones don’t come back until September, when the heat has fizzled away and it’s a comfortable, balmy, practically fall situation.
June is not that.
By the time I haul my suitcases into the building lobby, I’m drenched in sweat. My hair is stringy and stuck to my face, and my light gray lounge set is now dark gray with perspiration.
The doorman does his best not to wince.
“Oh, yes. Elle. We’ve been expecting you. Let me get those.”
Before I can half-heartedly insist on carrying them myself, all my things are loaded onto a luggage cart and deposited, with me, into an elevator that’s more spacious than the bathroom in my place in LA.
One of the top buttons is pressed.
There are just two units on this entire floor, and I’m about to spend my summer in one of them.
I unlock the door with my phone, already knowing with near certainty that I will get locked out one day because I’m terrible at keeping anything charged, and almost trip over the threshold.
The ceilings are twenty feet tall. Windows eat up the entire back of the room and show the city in a wider crop than I’ve ever seen it in. There’s so much of it, unobstructed, and so high above buildings that would normally block the bulk of the skyline from view.
This is insanity.
Everything is relative. We think of things compared with other things. I learned that in a marketing class Penelope roped me into in college. Twenty-five dollars is expensive for lunch, but not for a dress. Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money for a wedding, but not for a house.
This apartment is big for an office, for a restaurant.
This is huge for a house period, let alone one right in the middle of Manhattan.
My luggage filled up a hefty fraction of the apartment I just left. It’s a pathetic heap in this huge living room now.
Who needs this much space? I ask myself as I walk farther inside, feeling smaller and smaller with each step.
It’s just not practical. This room alone would need an army of Roombas to keep it clean. I hope that’s not a responsibility I’m meant to take on.
House-sitting during renovations. That’s it. That’s all I signed up for.
Rolling my shoulders and bending over with an impressive—and concerning for twenty-seven—crack, I go straight for my laptop, sticking out of my tote the way a baguette might if I were in some Netflix movie set in Paris. But I’m not in Paris.
Or in a movie.
I’m just writing one.
There’s a blank page before me, and I struggle to fill it, flight-tired fingers working overtime to get the words out: small observations, little ideas, kernels I hope will pop into some movie-worthy popcorn. All about a city I hate. A city that smells way worse than I remember.
Right on cue, my phone rings, and I take a deep breath before smoothing my annoyance into a semi-agreeable “Hey, Sarah.”
“Elle! Big summer in the city. How’s it going so far?”
I stare at the time on the oven. “Um . . . I’ve been here two hours.” And one of those hours was spent in an Uber that smelled like a sandwich was decomposing under the seat.
She laughs, then sighs wistfully. “Still, the city slips on like a sweater, doesn’t it? So comforting, so fitting.”
“It’s ninety-two degrees right now.”
Sarah laughs again, like I’m the funniest client she has, and not a screenwriter who has a strict no-comedy policy. Then she gets right to business. “So . . . any ideas yet?”
I blink and am very close to repeating that I’ve only been here two hours, but Sarah is one of the top agents at CAA, and just like my rule for comedy, I also have a strict no-starving-artist policy.
“Not yet,” I say, turning to look at the city in question through the giant windows. “But . . . something will come to me. It always does.”
“ Always, ” Sarah emphasizes, and it makes my stomach sink.
Because I haven’t written anything meaningful in almost a year, and she has no idea.
Because I have only three more months to write a screenplay that could change my life.
Because I’m supposed to set it in a city I hate. A city I thought I had escaped.
She hangs up, and coffee—I need coffee. For the exact opposite reason people normally need it.
I need it to relax.
I force myself to take my laptop, thinking inspiration might strike between here and the closest Blue Bottle, then make my way out of the apartment, even though I know I look like garbage.
Honestly, in New York City, I prefer looking like garbage. Never have I once walked the streets of the city in sweats and been catcalled, or had my ear talked off by a barista, or even been looked at. And that’s how I like it. The few times I had to stop by a bodega dressed up after a dinner or meeting, you would have thought I was a dignitary or reality star or Instagram model. The seas of New York parted for me: suddenly, doors were being held open. The guy at the deli counter, who had been certifiably rude to me on every other occasion, didn’t even recognize me in a skirt, and I had to keep popping my earphones out and saying “Huh?” because he was trying to make conversation. It’s not even about looks, I’ve decided, because there are thousands of girls more attractive than me in New York. It’s almost as if men see a woman who has decided to dress up and immediately think she’s dressed up for them .
The city’s changed in two years. Some stores have been replaced by social media–friendly, pastel-painted cafés. Outdoor seating is apparently a thing now. I don’t recognize the names of any of the healthy fast-casual places that will likely be replaced by another concept in six months, then another, and then another, like some endless trendy reincarnation.
I’m picky with my coffee shops.
It’s not about the coffee in most cases (though a smooth espresso certainly helps). It’s about the stuff people probably don’t care about.
The cups: I like a firm sleeve. I like the lids that have the transformer part that covers the drink spout and looks substantial, like a suitable hat for my drink. One that won’t crinkle beneath my mouth or fall off.
The space: I like tables tiny enough that no one will try to share one with me, but big enough to fit my laptop and drink and inevitable pastry.
The pastries: I like baked goods that get sourced from bakeries that don’t also supply Panera. I like variety. A single cream-filled doughnut. A flavor-ambiguous muffin. A big, flaky croissant that kind of looks like a crab.
The extras: Throw in toast. Bagels. Granola and yogurt.
I could spend my entire life in a good coffee shop, with just my wallet and laptop. Working in one feels like an indulgence, a college experience I got to keep. One of the best parts of my job is that a revolving door of coffee shops can always be my office.
I don’t recognize any of these coffee shop names, so I judge the essence of the shops by the people I see inside them.
The ballet-pink one that has the word “matcha” in the name and has a line of aspiring influencers waiting to take pictures in front of a tiny mural that somehow incorporates both coffee and wings? Pass.
The hole-in-the-wall with suited-up Wall Street types and to-go cups I’ve seen at Costco? No thanks.
Finally, I end up in front of a rickety-looking wooden door. The windows are slightly glazed. I would have thought it was a bar if I hadn’t seen a woman who looks a lot like me right now—messy bun, sweats, earphones in, laptop under her armpit—walk out eating the crème de la crème of coffee shop croissants: an almond one, dusted with sugar.
It’s been the kind of day I’m going to try very hard to forget, but the moment I walk inside this place, I feel . . . at peace. It smells like coffee, cream, and sugar and perfectly steeped tea. There are a dozen tables sprinkled throughout a space with high ceilings and a skylight, and there are even couches and a pastry display.
I’m home. I’ve officially found the coffee shop I’m about to haunt for the next three months and hope they don’t post a picture of me on the door with an X for how much I’m going to monopolize one of their tables.
For a few hours, I start to think maybe being back in New York isn’t so bad. It does have an endless array of coffee shops.
I don’t write while I’m at my new favorite table, but I go through all my emails and my to-dos—basically everything except for writing. And things start to seem genuinely okay.
Until I leave, filled with coffee and baked goods, feeling kind of like a latte myself, and it begins to rain.
At first, it’s just a drizzle. I start to hurry. It’s not so bad, just some dampening of my bun, some sprinkles on my hoodie.
Then, without warning, the skies break open, and I’m unceremoniously drenched.
Like a mother whose thoughts go immediately to her child, mine go to my beloved laptop, and I don’t waste a moment before slipping it beneath my clothing and protecting it with my life.
I run, nearly losing an eye in a sea of umbrellas, rain pummeling my head so thoroughly that my fancy silk hair tie becomes a victim to the storm and falls away, leaving me with long wet hair clinging to the side of my face.
I’m so drenched that by the time I reach the lobby, I’m almost turned away. Just as I’m about to start banging on the glass, the doorman recognizes me, and this time he does wince as I make my way across the marble floor, making squeaking and slopping sounds with every step.
My hair is in my face, my laptop is stuck to my stomach, and I don’t even process that there’s someone else in the elevator with me—perfectly dry—until we reach to press the same floor number at the same time and our fingers collide.
We turn to look at each other, and I nearly complete the process of becoming a puddle.
It’s him.
The guy on the magazine. The guy on the news.
The guy I made out with in a stairwell not too far away from this very elevator.
The Billionaire Bachelor.
Parker Warren.
I look away so quickly, I’m positive he hasn’t seen my face. Not that he would recognize me if he did. He’s probably hooked up with hundreds of girls since that night, if the press is to be believed. He practically lives on Daily Mail ’s homepage with the number of stories on him and his dating habits.
He presses our button, and the floor starts moving. Or maybe that’s me, maybe I’m about to pass out.
What is he doing here, in this building?
Going to my floor?
More often than I would care to admit, I would daydream about seeing him again one day. Shoving in his face that he was completely wrong about everything he thought I was, maybe with an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in my hand.
Not looking like a full-on mop .
The elevator stops, and I bolt out of it, head down, in the direction of my unit, so quickly that I’m inside before he even takes a step into the hallway.
It’s pressed against the other side of the door, breathing too hard, dripping onto the imported hardwood floor, that I hear the only other unit on this floor’s door open . . . then close.
He’s my floor-mate.
Talk about a movie moment, I think.
Only this time, it’s horror.