“Name.”
The woman behind the boxy glass desk didn’t look at me when she asked. Instead, she stared behind me, toward the double doors that opened gracefully onto Madison Avenue, as if she was waiting for someone more important to show up.
“Eliza Bennet,” I responded, forcing from her, finally, eye contact.
“Like—”
“Yes,” I said, cutting her off. It had been seven years since I first heard that reference, and I no longer found it charming. I go by Eliza now. Not as lace-veil, silver-cross as Elizabeth the Mother of Mary, but still a tribute to that girl; to a part of my life I couldn’t forget. No matter how hard I tried.
The woman focused on her computer and while she searched for my name in their database, I scanned the sign-in sheet on top of the glass. It wasn’t unlike the one in Willits—a line of printed names beside a line of messy signatures.
“Here you go,” the woman said, handing me a paper sticker with my name printed on it. I almost affixed it to my chest before stopping myself—thank God. People like us don’t put stickers on our one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar cashmere sweaters. That’s not something people like us do, I reminded myself then. And many times after.
Ashleigh and Brittany waited for me at the entrance to the fifteenth-floor office suite, like overly enthusiastic hostesses at a bad restaurant.
“Eliza!” Brittany squealed as the elevator doors opened. I put on a smile and approached them kindly, despite wondering how long they’d been standing there and how many people had fallen victim to their misguided excitement before I showed up.
“We’re thrilled to have you join the team!” Ashleigh said, shaking my hand like she was trying to be the professional one in their relationship. A good cop/bad cop kind of thing. It was about as trustworthy as a handshake in an interrogation room.
Once I was at my desk and told to “sit tight” until my boss Hilary arrived, the room began to fill quickly. One fashionable white girl followed by another fashionable white girl in their cool ripped jeans and bodycon dresses and oversized blazers.
Lena stood out amongst the rest, like a bull in a Lilly Pulitzer store. She wore a black dress that floated over her bones-only body like she was always walking in the path of the wind or a perfectly placed invisible fan, and white sneakers. They were platform, making her usual five foot nine seem more like five foot eleven, but they were sneakers. And I bet it needled at Brittany and Ashleigh.
Lena didn’t stop to greet me as she passed my desk on the way to hers, as so many others had. Instead, she glided down the aisle of white desks like it was her wedding and she didn’t have a care in the world. I’d looked her up, obviously—I’d looked everyone up—but she was the one. Lena Cunningham. Twenty-seven. Graduate of the Yale School of Drama. Wrote an award-winning play that dramatized William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” She and her ex-boyfriend were arrested two years ago for getting drunk, ripping down a stop sign on Lafayette Avenue, and then attempting to install it onto the top of a police vehicle in protest. She donates to three abortion rights organizations, grew up in SoHo, and lives in the West Village.
When I was researching this PR agency and I saw her photo online, smizing like she’d invented the form, I immediately recognized her. She’d help me live in this world. She’d help me become one of them.
When I moved to New York, I got an apartment in the East Village, a hole-in-the-wall studio on the second floor above a Chinese food place with a Roman bath in the back room. It was a piece of shit—holes the size of my fist stuffed with browning mouse filler, roaches under the oven that had been dead for decades, a radiator that screamed bloody murder in the middle of the night. It wasn’t what I had pictured for myself in the Big Apple, but it was all I could afford—I scraped together all the money I’d made in college and after to pay for it until I got the PR job. It would do for the moment.
And it was all mine.
The exterminator I called was my first friend in New York. He was a broad, ghoulish man named Fyodor who was bald and looked like he might have a side hustle as one of the gargoyles on the side of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Every Sunday morning at 7:15 a.m. he’d knock on the door yelling “exterminator” as if I didn’t already have our weekly date scribbled into my calendar. As if I hadn’t started looking forward to it. Week three I had coffee waiting for him on the counter. He took it with heavy cream, which I kept on hand for this purpose only. Week four, he brought me a greasy bag of paczki his wife made fresh that morning.
“Why do you live here?” he asked week five, after we found a golf ball–sized hole in the back of the closet that hadn’t been there two weeks prior. He had been so frustrated when it appeared behind my rain boots that he slammed his workbag against the wood floor so hard that whatever was inside the hole squealed. “This is a piece of shit apartment. Piece of shit. They rob you to make you pay for this.”
“It’s cheap, Fyodor. You want to pay my rent for a high-rise in SoHo? Then I’ll move tomorrow.”
He laughed loud, from his gut, like a roar. “You need to find a rich man, Miss Eliza. Very rich.”
I thought about that Cher quote, “My mom said to me, ‘You know, sweetheart, one day you should settle down and marry a rich man.’ I said, ‘Mom, I am a rich man.’” That’s how a good feminist would have responded: I don’t need a rich man, I’ll make it big in New York City all by myself. I’m a strong independent woman.
“I’m working on it,” I told him, instead.
I was really working on it.
I interviewed for the job at the Brit & Ash Agency from my mattress on the floor while I watched a roach slowly suffocate to death between my double-paned windows. I told them I was out of town, that I would love to interview, but that I wasn’t going to be able to do it in person. Thankfully it was before video chats were the norm, so I could get away with wearing underwear and the coffee-stained Hanes T-shirt I got in a pack at the bodega for eleven dollars, while slurping down my fifth ramen noodles of the week and proffering my passion for writing press releases for high-end designers.
I’d done my research to know exactly what they wanted me to say. I spent hours at the Tompkins Square Library googling until I found Lena, then Brit & Ash, then the opening for a senior account executive. It was no surprise to me that two days after my interview they offered me the job. I’d made sure I was the perfect candidate.
I just couldn’t see them in person until I confirmed I had a job. Because I couldn’t see them in person until I could buy the kind of clothes I needed and to do that I had to make sure I’d have a salary to pay off the Nordstrom Rack credit card debt.
It was three weeks into the job that Lena and I first spoke. I had just plucked a transparent glass mug from the cabinet in the kitchen and was holding it up to the light to see if the edge was actually clean. The top-of-the-line dishwasher in our office’s kitchen had nothing on all the Tom Ford reds and Armani purples.
“They burned the coffee today,” Lena said, standing in the doorway, leaning against the arched entrance like she was modeling her tailored jeans and strappy white bodysuit. “Let’s go across the street.”
I couldn’t see my boss Hilary at her desk from the kitchen, but I could hear her. She typed like she was angry at her keyboard for betraying her, like she had lead strapped to the tips of her fingers. The sound had become so annoying I’d convinced myself it was performative; that she wasn’t actually busy but pretending to be.
“She’ll literally never know,” Lena said, sensing my hesitation. “She hasn’t looked up from her computer once in the last hour.”
We took the hallway and elevator in silence, but it wasn’t awkward, and I didn’t feel the need to fill the space with the sound of my voice. I felt like whatever I wanted to say around Lena needed to be important; I needed to think about it and have it fully conceptualized in my own head before I could speak. She wasn’t the kind of person who befriended just anyone, and I wanted her to befriend me. I needed her to.
She was cool, but not in that “cool girl” male gaze kind of way that had become so popular—the one who knows football players by jersey number and drinks Bud Light and wears her hair up to bars; the one that men have deemed approachable because “she’s one of us.” Lena was cool in the female gaze. Which meant she wasn’t approachable at all, but incredibly intimidating. She was the kind of woman other women hated. Because they want to be her. But they didn’t know how. I did.
I had some practice shadowing someone until I became her. Until I blended right in.
This wasn’t that different. But the stakes were a lot higher now.
Outside our building, Lena stepped off the curb confident there were no cars coming before she even attempted to glance to her left and right. This, I learned, is a New Yorker instinct. No one here waits on the sidewalk—you walk as close to the approaching cars as possible. They might be busy, but you’re busier. And they’ll never hit you. Because they’ll go to jail. Sure, you might die in the process, but there’s also consequences for them. It’s a kind of nihilistic revenge that would only be fulfilling in a place like this.
She began to move across the street before the light turned red and before the cars passed, getting closer and closer but walking so confidently I’d believe even the drivers trusted what she was doing. I followed boldly behind her, standing up straighter, making myself bigger, by association. It was her attitude, that was the key. The gives-no-shits confidence she imbued—whether she felt it inside was irrelevant. The New Yorker shrugging things off. There’s nothing we haven’t seen and nothing we won’t do. We’re New Yorkers. We’re a different breed.
I expected to walk into the Starbucks across the street from the office where I was first introduced to the concept of people willingly spending seven dollars and fifty cents a day on ten ounces of slightly burned coffee, often just for the ambiance of bringing that paper cup to their mouth. I’d been there once before with Hilary—I got a Pike Place Roast and she got a soy latte—and when I asked for regular milk, instead of a nut variety, she looked at me like I’d just admitted to being the Son of Sam.
“I don’t do chains,” Lena said, walking past Starbucks’s stone entrance, a line of suited men and bloused women inside. “Shop small, and all that.”
Instead, we turned the corner and headed south on Fifth Avenue.
“What are you really doing here?” Lena asked. For a brief moment, I felt myself stop in the center of the street, my feet pausing over a white crossing line like they were stuck in concrete quicksand. She couldn’t possibly... “—in New York,” she continued. I put one foot in front of the other without skipping a beat, without her realizing that just a millisecond before my head was spinning. “There are PR firms everywhere. Why here? What’s your New York City Romance?”
“My what?” I asked.
“Your New York City Romance. Everyone has some movie that sent them here, romanticizing the city so it seems more approachable.”
It was like a light went off in my brain; suddenly that old Rolodex, the one that had been acquiring dust since freshman year of college, was awakened, pulled out of an old filing cabinet in the back of my brain and ready to get back to work. Magazine headlines I hadn’t thought about in years flew across my line of vision like a tennis ball in the US Open: Classic Romances Everyone Needs to See. Tips for a First Date from These Five Classic Romances. Meg Ryan’s Take on—
“You’ve Got Mail,” I said, hoping she didn’t ask for one plot detail.
“Interesting...”
We rounded the corner of 18th Street and stopped outside a glass-walled shop; a four-inch coffee cup epoxied to the glass door was the only thing letting you know it was a café.
“I would have pegged you for The Devil Wears Prada or Working Girls,” Lena said as she opened the door and we walked inside. “But You’ve Got Mail is a classic, I guess.”
“I’m not a big movie person,” I said, nodding at my confession. That was a fine thing to say. Vague, but admissive. Not something that would put me in any category Lena wouldn’t approve of.
“Me neither, honestly,” she said. “But I’m always curious. You can tell a lot about a person by their New York Romance.”
“What does You’ve Got Mail say about me?” I asked as we approached the counter.
She looked at me for the first time in this entire conversation, straight into my eyes. It was worse than being read. It felt like I was being analyzed, like she was looking for one crack in my story.
“I haven’t decided yet,” she finally said.
When she looked away from me, she ordered a matcha latte with oat milk, and asked what I wanted as she pulled out her black Amex. “Next round’s on you.”
While we walked back to the office, I realized I never asked what her movie was. I wanted to know what it said about her, as much as she wanted to know what mine said about me.
“Oh.” She laughed after I asked. “I grew up in the city. This place has never been romantic to me. That’s what’s great about New York. We all hate it here, but no one will ever leave.”
I didn’t understand the concept at first. I hadn’t romanticized this place at all; even that wasn’t something I could afford to do. It was hard to think this was the city of dreams when my closest friend was an exterminator and I had to give myself cold-shower facials once a day to counteract the bloating from my salty but cheap ramen noodle diet.
She was right about one thing: I didn’t come here for the job. I came to the job for her.
It was easy for me to learn from Lena. Every item of clothing—from jeans to a wool coat—should be tailored, so I found a woman named Wendy on Avenue A. Never leave the apartment without styling your hair, so I bought a blow-dryer and a straightening iron and a curling iron and some spray Lena uses that smells like perfume and is supposed to protect you from heat. Fresh flowers—on your desk and in your living room—from a bodega where you’re on a first-name basis with the owner and the cat are essential. Wear heels no matter how tall you are. Walk fast whether or not you’re in a rush. Never look up.
That one I actively disobey.
I often walked home from work to save the two-dollar-and seventy-five-cent subway fare and to get in a free workout. Though I told Lena I belong to the Equinox on Broadway and the Tracy Anderson on 59th, a gym was a luxury I couldn’t afford yet. When I walk, I watch strangers’ apartments like their windows are TV screens into an HBO drama. The couple eating dinner on their four-by-two balcony are trying to get pregnant and just had yet another disappointing negative test. The bright cartoon emanating from the fourth-floor corner are two kids being distracted by a teenage babysitter whose boyfriend is coming over later to fuck her in the rich couple’s bed. The twinkle lights on a penthouse’s terrace belong to a lonely woman reading Elin Hilderbrand and waiting for her husband to return from a business trip.
I wondered what people thought about me—the girl sitting on her fire escape every night, drinking from an eleven-dollar bottle of wine, swiping through Lena’s Instagram like she was a celebrity I was desperate to one day meet.
I’d been nervous that my You’ve Got Mail selection put a wrench in the friendship I hoped would have blossomed after our coffee date. She did say that I was paying for the next round, which meant there would be a next round, a shrivel of hope that kept me going when two weeks passed without Lena saying more than a handful of words to me. She said good morning once, but Kelsi, my bootlicker desk mate whose phony smile was plastered on her face even when I caught her crying in the bathroom, responded before I could. Lena complimented my Golden Goose sneakers as she passed my desk once, but she was gone before I could come up with a catchy way to say thank you. I wore those shoes every day after that.
I wanted to keep my head down, give her space, not seem like a needy follower desperate for her friendship, but it was hard. I couldn’t tell if I needed to initiate the next interaction since she instigated the first. Lena seemed like the kind of person who was always in charge, who led the group and made the reservations and decided who her friends would be.
I had started to wonder if maybe those are traits she likes in a friend, too, until one day at 7:00 p.m. Lena moseyed over to my desk and asked to grab a drink.
“There’s a new bar opening in SoHo,” she had said, standing over me. “A friend from college is the mixologist and there’s a soft opening tonight.”
I’d go wherever she needed me to. Especially when that thing involved college friends.
“I would not have picked this name,” Lena said as we were greeted by a bouncer outside the new bar. He took our IDs like he suspected we might be underage, which was not yet a compliment, but still annoying; a way for this city to make you feel like a child despite paying for yourself to be here.
I looked up at the sign above the door, a raw-edge wooden plank swinging gently off the brick building.
“‘Doll’s Eyes,’” I read.
She shrugged as she took her ID back. “If you ask me, that’s the name of a Halloween haunted house, not a craft cocktail bar.”
“It’s a poisonous berry,” I said, remembering the way their striking color—white berries with a black dot, clustered on a long red stem—stood out amongst the fall foliage like something from another planet.
The first time I saw them, on a branch in the back near the sugarhouse, I was a kid, attracted to them for their strangeness. When I reached out to touch one, my brother William grabbed my arm so hard it ached for days.
“If Mom and Dad don’t grow it, then don’t touch it,” he told me. I snuck back out there two days later—I wanted to lick it, see how my body would react to poison—but the stems were gone.
“That makes it a little more interesting,” Lena said as we walked past the bouncer and into the bar.
Inside was crowded and too dark, like they had forgotten to turn on one of the chandeliers. The decor made me feel a familiar kind of dizzy—wooden dining chairs hung from the ceiling, a collage of paintings of sixteenth-century women with their breasts out sat crooked along one wall, the wood floor was uneven like you were always on the verge of tipping over. The whole thing was a bit of a mind-fuck and made me feel confused in the same way I would get as a kid when we were punished and forced to stay inside for weeks on end. If the sun doesn’t touch your face for long enough part of you starts to question whether the sun still exists.
Lena and I posted up in the center of the bar, where two seats opened for us. Normally I would have assumed that was a coincidence, but I soon realized that’s just what happens to Lena. It would eventually be something that happened to me, too.
A bartender with a handlebar mustache and blue eyes that looked painted onto his face greeted us, the nose ring in his septum shifting slightly as he smiled. Lena never begged for attention. All she had to do was put her butt in a stool and her elbow on the counter and smile, the bartenders would be fighting to serve her.
The drinks were all named for other poisonous berries, a theme I appreciated because it was as subtle as you wanted it to be. Only girls who grew up on a farm would recognize it. Girls like me, though that was not something I was going to admit to Lena. I had my backstory laid out by this point and growing up in a religious cult was not part of it.
I’m twenty-six, from Providence, Rhode Island, a place I visited for research and determined to be the most innocuous but interesting New York–adjacent city to claim residency. Everyone seems to know someone from Rhode Island, but most people haven’t been there themselves, thus removing the risky conversation starter: Oh, I love that bar on that road with cobblestones, what’s it called again? Though, I memorized my way up and down the modest winding streets, so I’d probably be able to keep up. I have no siblings, no parents—no relatives to speak of—a guaranteed conversation-stopper. No one wants to ask for more details from an orphan who doesn’t want to talk about it.
I knew that part of my backstory needed to involve an Ivy League school, a place that would be unabashedly accepted by this elite crowd. But not one as dull as Harvard that would raise eyebrows. People from Harvard don’t apply for jobs at the Brit & Ash Agency. I figured I could just fake it—put whatever school I wanted down on my resume—but I had a brilliant idea after watching an episode of Law & Order: SVU. I started calling the less exclusive schools—UPenn, Columbia, Cornell, Brown—claiming I was from a grad school admissions office looking for the missing transcript for Elizabeth Bennet. I was hoping I’d get lucky. Perhaps there was an Elizabeth Bennet whose experience I could borrow. I struck gold at Brown.
“Hmm, Elizabeth Bennet,” the admissions assistant at Brown hummed when I called. I could hear the click clack of her keyboard aggressively typing in the background. “I don’t see anyone with that name, I’m sorry.”
I’d gotten used to that answer—prepared to pull my usual no problem, I must have the wrong number, so sorry for the inconvenience! that I’d offered to all the other schools I’d already called. But before I could respond, she said, “Oh wait, maybe you mean Eliza Bennet? Class of 2014?”
That could work. I was the Covenant University class of 2013, but I could pretend to be one year younger. People pay good money for doctors to send their faces back in time; turns out all you need to do is claim the identity of a younger person.
“Yes,” I said quickly. “You know what, my apologies, it’s absolutely Eliza Bennet. That’s what I meant. Can you fax over her file?”
I liked the name Eliza immediately. It seemed to suit me better than Elizabeth ever did. And it absolutely seemed to suit New York. Eliza Bennet. That’s me.
“I’ll have the Black Lotus,” Lena said to the bartender after scanning the menu for less than a few seconds. She knows what she likes to drink, what cocktails suited her, got her the perfect kind of tipsy. I didn’t have that in my arsenal yet. I had no idea what to order.
“Surprise me,” I told the bartender, leaning in confidently so it came off as flirting and not as stressed indecision. “I trust your taste.” I locked eyes with him like I was supposed to and smiled. Then looked away bashfully, like I was hiding a blush.
“I’ve got the perfect thing,” he said, walking away.
This was the kind of guy I’d been taking home since I moved to New York City—a bearded beatnik who wanted nothing more than to eat me out and then fuck me while I clawed at his tattooed chest. This guy seemed like he’d choke me if I asked for it. And he wouldn’t be bothered by the fact that my apartment consisted of a mattress on the floor, three cooking pots, a Thanksgiving-scented candle, and a computer charger. He’d call it art.
I found them easy to find and easy to get rid of. An unemotional need-based desire-filler. Ever since that night, that was all I wanted sex to be. Detached. Fun. On my terms.
“You continue to surprise me, Eliza,” Lena said when we got our drinks back and Handlebar Mustache had written his number on my napkin.
“I want to see what that mustache can do,” I told her, slipping the napkin into my bra. I wouldn’t call him later, but I wanted Lena thinking I would.
“Until you’ve had a woman between your legs, you’ll never know how good it can really get,” she said, taking a sip. I’d argue that true pleasure came with a ball gag and a couple slaps across the face, but this seemed like a hill she was willing to die on, so I’d let it rest. She dated around, I saw that on her Instagram—pictures of her kissing a guy, naked on vacation with a woman. I liked that about her. Sex was just sex. It didn’t carry any baggage. No matter how much I tried to rid myself of mine, it was always there, lumbering over my back.
“Oh. My. God.” Lena put her drink down on the bar and looked past me to the back, where leather booths lined the narrow walls. “I went to college with those guys. That’s—oh shit...” She stood up and snagged her drink and purse in one motion. “We have to say hi. These guys are better flirts than the bartender anyway.”
I took a deep breath as she started to move past me. This was it. It was happening.
“Is that Graham Walker,” I heard her say as she approached the table. The sentence echoed in my head for days after that, bounced around inside my brain until I was light-headed, until I couldn’t quite see straight.
When I turned around, Graham’s sweet face appeared from behind a banister, smiling and carefree, and I blacked out for a moment. I couldn’t think or speak. But I felt myself moving toward him like a magnet, until I was standing beside Lena as they hugged. This was it. My life here was finally about to start.
I shook his hand, soft and thick as Lena introduced us. “This is my coworker Eliza,” she said. “It’s literally a Yale reunion in here.” She moved on to the next person, but Graham’s eyes stayed on me.
“It’s nice to meet you,” he said. “Here—” He slid down the booth as I slipped in next to him, feeling small and fragile next to his rower’s frame, the muscles I could tell existed underneath his effortlessly cuffed button-down. I sat on the edge of the booth, half my butt perched off it for fear of getting too close to him.
Lena ordered tequila shots to celebrate their college reunion and they all reminisced about the epic rugby house parties and getting laid in the stacks and that one professor who got fired for having an affair with a student even though everyone knew it wasn’t his first—“or last,” Graham joked.
With each drink Graham and I drew closer, gravitating toward each other like it was inevitable—and it was, I’d made sure it was—until our legs were touching. Until the hair on his arms tickled mine. Until he told me he worked in finance. Until he told me he was from Vermont. Until Lena mentioned I wanted to fuck the bartender. Until I noticed Graham stiffen, uncomfortable with the thought. Until I brushed my hand against his thigh, long enough for him to realize it wasn’t an accident. Until he put his hand on my bare knee. Until he and I locked eyes when I stood, my heart racing, knowing exactly what I needed to do to lock him in. He likes a bad girl. I am a bad girl.
I didn’t wait in the single-person bathroom more than thirty seconds before the door inched open just enough for him to slip inside and lock it behind him. We stood a foot apart, staring at each other, my heart rate rising with each pulse, the sensation between my legs exploding as I looked at him.
When we kissed I felt it over my entire body.
When he slipped his hand into my pants, my knees almost gave out.
When I came, the image of our wedding was the only thing I was thinking about.