Emerging Markets
It’s absurd.
She’s not going to stay at his place.
She’s not.
Lili’s disciplined about work that week: commuting uptown, staking out the library until closing hours. Kerr’s full edits
are constructive but grueling. She has to split open her thesis, draw and quarter her draft to extricate ideas wound together
too tightly, elucidate what’s unspoken, but she’s determined to make this good; determined to eventually look at her ideas,
her words, and feel something like pride. Maybe then she’ll feel relief; a split second of security—fragile and foreign fucking
peace—in having accomplished enough, for a moment.
But it’s exhausting. The hour commute uptown, if she’s lucky; the scramble to get showered, dressed, out the door; the strain of her bag heavy with her laptop and annotated books; the dwindling battery on her phone; the tangle of her charger, headphones, pens; the train ride back each evening, crushed against tired commuters.
She has to cancel dinner with Jackie and her parents; she can’t help with prep for Amina’s upcoming art show downtown.
Her inbox keeps buzzing: emails from the farm, the scramble of other staff trying to figure out the volunteer schedule, planning the upcoming workshop intensive upstate, pulling together the right collateral for forthcoming fundraising rounds.
She has to ignore it all, along with the sharp spike of anxiety at the thought of the damage her paycheck will suffer from missed shifts.
You’re fucking up, she thinks, as she files the emails away along with Kerr’s persistent pings of job postings—CLIMATE POLICY WITH UNDP. IN ADDIS
ABABA. YES? NO?—You’re letting them down.
By the time she starts to see new coherence in the blown-apart bits of her argument—finally sinking into that lucid, thoughtful
state of mind where good work feels possible—the library staff announce closing hours, it’s dark outside, time to head home.
The glint of his keys, shoved in her desk drawer, becomes appealing then.
No, Lili, she thinks, shoring up her stubbornness. No.
She’s stronger than that. Even if she’s gnawing her cuticles raw with nerves; even if she’s having trouble falling asleep
at night, trying to understand what she could possibly say that’s new in this field; even if she keeps glancing at her calendar,
wondering how on earth she’ll hit the deadline of next Friday’s meeting with Kerr—Lili sets her shoulders, swipes her MetroCard,
and tries to snag the same library table by the window, hidden by the stacks.
It’s Friday night, almost a week out, when she caves. Already home from campus, she’s nowhere near done for the day. It’s
late, and she feels like she’s never had an intelligent thought in her life; her friends are drunk, getting ready to head
out—what does she expect, it’s the weekend—and Amina zips into Lili’s room to steal her eyeliner, Vince Staples blasts from
a speaker, Jackie’s making everyone do shots, vodka sloshing over glasses—Lili will not be cleaning that up—and there’s a new bar on Grand where one of Jackie’s modeling friends knows the owner, and then a loud
crash, wood splintering, some roared laughter, a groaned curse from James—“Oops!” Jackie giggles—and Lili is fucking fed up.
Grabbing the keys, she throws her work into her tote and escapes the apartment, heading for the train.
After Bowery, the J clears out. Lili gets out at Canal, greeted by fluorescent lights, shiny plastic suitcases lined up on the streets for sale, alongside the callous leather of counterfeit handbags.
Metal bar grating is pulled down over shuttered storefronts and nondescript shipping companies; awnings glow with Chinese characters and aggressive scrawls of graffiti, WeWorks and Duane Reades languish under construction scaffolding.
Boys in worn Vans kick the wheels of their skateboards, smoking on the curb of Lafayette.
Crowds of Citi analysts and downtown agency kids head towards the subway.
It’s hot and humid, an exhale of night through the city.
As Lili heads down Walker into Tribeca, the streets grow narrower, quieter.
Little canyons in the city, slips of the moon between the buildings.
His street is empty. Lili peers into the darkened galleries, closed for the night. Places containing too little art to justify
their rent: a spare canvas, maybe a sculpture or fiber art piece or two. At the end of his street, lingering outside the corner
restaurant, there are men in suits and loosened ties, women in sleek dresses and high heels. Laughing, smoking: work dinners,
expensive mezcal, high-end Mexican small plates.
When she goes to open his front door, she’s surprised by the doorman, welcoming her. Lili folds the keys awkwardly into her
palm. Of course, his staff would still be here.
“Hi—um, Ale—Mr. Petrov gave me his—”
“Of course, Miss Marwan,” he says with a professional, solicitous smile. “Please, go right on up. My name is Louis. Let me
know if you need anything.”
It’s dark and blessedly silent in the loft. Standing on tiptoe, Lili turns on the light above the Lacanche range he definitely
doesn’t use. The scale of the open room—towering ceilings, low-slung furniture—is staggering. The intentional emptiness of
wealth. She makes out the familiar shapes of the huge white couch and living room furniture, the wooden dining table stretching
the length of the room. The tall windows, the sprawling Twombly canvas. The shadows of the loft feel teeming, intimate.
Hesitant to wander further, Lili sets her bag on the kitchen island. She runs her fingers over the thin veins of white and
gold shot through the black marble. Opulent, ridiculous, but also—she grudgingly admits, alone—beautiful.
Shaking her laptop out of her bag—hoping whatever security cameras he has get a good view of the worn Bernie 2016 sticker slapped to the back of her computer—Lili starts working.
The steady clatter of her keyboard is a quiet sound.
When a severe weather alert blares from her phone, she ignores it.
Flash floods, hurricane warning hitting the city: the same thing multiple times each summer.
It’s almost midnight when she gets up. The blue-light filter on her computer has turned her screen almost orange. Exhausted,
she feels drained of her thoughts in a good, clean way; like she’s managed to grapple with her work, rather than be defeated
by it.
Scanning Uber, surge pricing is exorbitant. She frowns, glancing out the windows. It’s raining hard. Vague concern gnaws—she’s
going to be soaked by the time she gets home—but she packs up her things, heads downstairs. It’s only a five-minute walk to
the subway. She’s shouldered worse.
“Miss Marwan, it’s looking bad out there,” Louis, the doorman, says. “Let me call the car around—”
“I’m fine!” she insists. “It’s just some rain, no one needs to drive in this.”
It is not just some rain. She’s soaked in seconds. She doesn’t make it a block before a surge of wind hits her, laden with
vicious rain, so strong and furious she has to dig her heels in to keep from staggering backwards. She clutches her bag to
her chest, trying to protect her laptop from water damage. Broadway is a mess, cars skimming through water, overflowing storm
drains. The stairs down to Canal Street station are slick with runoff. Waiting on the platform, Lili watches water rise on
the tracks, dripping down from the ceiling. The train is not coming.
Don’t be an idiot, she thinks.
It’s fine. It’s an emergency. She’d stay over at any of her friends’ apartments if she was stranded. Desperate times, desperate
measures. He gave her his keys; essentially gave her license to burn his place down, make it a squatter’s paradise, restart
Occupy Wall Street in his living room. She can stay one night.
Back at the loft, she texts Jackie.
(12:31 a.m.) hey, i’m going to stay at a friend’s tonight. don’t want to head out in this rain.
(12:31 a.m.) are you safe?
(12:33 a.m.) yes! i’m back home xx
(12:33 a.m.) which friend!
Using one of the guest bathrooms, Lili shucks off her soaked clothes, turning the shower as hot as it will go. Outside, a harsh hit of thunder cracks. It’s not soothing, the sound of this storm. It feels urgent and precarious, the hurricane straining the city to its limits.
In the shower, she lingers. Her apartment just doesn’t compare, the hard pressure and limitless hot water instantly available
here. Heavy water beats down on her, and she exhales. She feels that edgy, irritated agitation, brewing but shoved down these
last few days. Easy enough to ignore when she works, but harder in these moments.
Enough, Lili, she thinks. You’ve gone months without sex before. Pull yourself together.
After the shower, she wraps herself up in a large, fresh towel. She hangs her clothes to dry, yawning. She finds packaged
toothbrushes in a drawer, probably touches of a thoughtful housekeeper.
Pausing in the guest room, she glances at the bed.
She needs to get good work done again tomorrow; she never sleeps well in a new bed.
His bedroom is dark, curtains partially drawn.
The storm still rages, humid and oppressive, but in this dim space, there’s a protective distance from the nightmare outside.
His bedsheets are pressed, the silk cool. Lili has to wrestle to get them untucked, like in a hotel room. Even in fresh sheets,
his scent is there, along with her exasperated arousal. Stretching out, she tries to take up as much space in his bed as she
possibly can. She huffs, unable to reach both edges of the bed at the same time.
It takes a few frustrated attempts—grasping for faceless men and women, memories without much meaning; pushing away recollections
of him; there’s this sound you make, when you’re close—to bring herself off before she gives up. Watching the rain lash against the windows, she falls asleep.
The next morning, the rain—torrential, dark skies dangerous—still hasn’t abated. But waking up, Lili stretches with a calm
heaviness of rest. She slept the night through.