Chapter 7
They look all over the city. The Upper West Side is too close to Eve’s parents’.
Astoria is too far from Danny’s office. The Village is more than they can spend.
As they both develop public personas, they are also more conscious of where they live as a part of those personas.
Where will they be noticed or unnoticed? Where will they fit?
Sometimes, on the street, people stop them.
Eve is mostly stopped by women in their twenties with Blundstones and lots of rings.
Danny is mostly stopped by men in their twenties with wool coats and nice watches.
Basically, Brooklyn likes Eve and Manhattan likes Danny.
They compromise by living in Williamsburg.
They move into a two-bedroom garden-level unit between an overpriced smoothie place and an overpriced coffee place.
They invite all their friends over for a housewarming, and Danny asks everyone to bring a candle, which he insists is a storied Norwegian housewarming tradition his dad taught him about despite no firm internet evidence existing to verify this claim.
“I’m just saying, if you were going to make something up, we could have told them all to bring something of greater value,” Eve says.
“Gold ingots,” Danny says.
“Pints from Caffè Panna.”
“Diary entries full of salacious gossip.”
“You love gossip,” Eve says.
“I just love to examine the human condition.”
“Well,” Eve says, “in the spirit of embracing your Norwegian heritage: Jeg er interessert i ? kj?pe elgen din.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“ ‘I am interested in buying your moose.’ ”
“You know I don’t speak Norwegian, right?”
“You have some homework, then. I’m up to two sentences.”
“What’s the other one?” Danny asks.
“Jeg m? snakke med en mann om en fjord.”
“Meaning?”
“ ‘I have to speak to a man about a fjord.’ ”
“You really honed in on the important stuff,” he says.
“Sure did.”
Danny kisses her nose, like he finds her cute, and then her mouth, slowly, like he finds her beautiful. They kiss for a long time, there in the kitchen, in the apartment that is theirs.
Danny has the better bed, so they sell Eve’s.
Eve has the better drinkware—“It’s Anthropologie, Danny!
”—so they donate Danny’s gray IKEA mugs.
Eve has so many shoes, but she is spared the embarrassment because apparently Danny owns Nike Terra Kigers and Invincibles and Vaporflys and Alphaflys, and don’t even get him started on his quarter-zip collection.
On the walls, they hang up the vintage ski map and a painting of trees that Julian bought Danny for way too much money.
On the bookshelves (they need two bookshelves, which Eve takes as a moral victory), they stack old textbooks and pulpy romance novels and doomsday nonfiction and glossy literary hardcovers.
There are guitars, and photos from Julian and Gigi’s wedding, and a bowl of matchboxes from all the restaurants they’ve gone to.
There is also a large ceramic goose, gifted by Chloe in lieu of a candle at the housewarming.
“Am I regifting this? Yes,” she said. “But I do think he’ll be happy here, if you’ll have him. ”
When Eve fills the bathroom cabinets with her overabundance of hair stuff and teeth stuff and makeup stuff, she leaves the top drawer, the prime drawer, empty.
And then, when she unpacks the box labeled ACTUALLY IMPORTANT STUFF, she takes out a hundred crumpled, water-stained sticky notes and puts them there, in the top drawer.
The first time Eve showers in the new apartment, she discovers that the showerhead makes a thin, haunted noise when water comes out.
Ah, New York. She tries to match the pitch.
She turns the note into nonsense lyrics: “baby, new high, baby, dream wide.” She thinks it’s someone else’s song, but then again, she’s not sure. Maybe she’ll look it up later.
When she gets out of the shower, there’s a sticky note affixed to the mirror. It says:
You + me baby new high
Dream big baby, baby dream wide
:)
Very carefully, she folds it in half, and then she puts it in the top drawer.
Sometimes, at night, she wakes up and sees him on the other pillow facing her, his face gentle and young, his lips just barely parted.
She doesn’t know how long this feeling is expected to go on.
She asks Bug how to tell the difference between the honeymoon phase and a good relationship, and Bug suggests that maybe you can’t—maybe some relationships are just only good for a season.
Then she asks Bug what the odds are that she and Danny are only good for a season, and Bug tells her they seem to be doing great, but, of course, Bug cannot predict every twist and turn of the human heart.
So Eve just holds her breath and looks at Danny sleeping.
She wants the knowledge that she and Danny will last forever, but she knows she does not have the wisdom to handle it if the answer is no.
Eve has never felt like this before. Like she is so in love she has something to lose.