Love Saves the Day

Josh never tried to get her to talk about the miscarriage. But he did keep trying to get her to talk about Sarah, to remember things. When they’d driven down to the Lower East Side to clean out Sarah’s apartment, he’d insisted on a “nostalgia tour” like his parents had always given him and his sister when they used to drive through Brooklyn as a family. “Come on,” he’d urged. “Tell a sheltered boy from Parsippany what it was like growing up in Manhattan. How often are we down here?”

And Laura had tried. She tried to re-create for him the open-air drug markets that had flourished on Avenue B and 2nd Street, ignored by the authorities for far too long because what could be done in the face of such large-scale—and lucrative—dedication to vice? When they drove past Tompkins Square Park, with its cheerful playgrounds, flowered pathways, and pristine basketball courts, it was impossible to make Josh visualize the Tompkins Square Park she’d grown up with, taken over almost entirely by tent cities erected by junkies and the homeless, and frequented by punked-out teenagers in dog collars and Sex Pistols T-shirts. Million-dollar condos and trendy restaurants had once been burned-out tenements where squatting artists lived, or SRO hotels that, for all their seediness, were still preferable to the violent squalor of the city’s official homeless shelters. “And—oh!—right there.” Laura pointed to a spot on the pavement. “That’s where my friend Maria Elena and I used to play Skelzie with bottle caps. Whenever we went out to play together, her mother would yell after us, Cuidado en la calle!”

The whole time she was talking, Laura found herself wondering why Sarah all those years later, had moved back to the Lower East Side. Had she thought she could rewrite the past? Play out the same scenarios but tack on a different ending? Hadn’t she realized that the Lower East Side she’d haunted these past few years had borne only the most passing resemblance to the place she’d landed in as a teenager, armed with nothing more than her high school diploma and a determination to see the world the way she wanted to?

Nevertheless, Laura’s memories made Josh smile. And nothing had ever made her feel like a whole person—had given her the same sense of belonging that the intimidating, shiny-haired women she worked with clearly felt—the way making Josh smile always did.

It wasn’t until he insisted on doubling back to drive down Stanton, where Laura and Sarah had lived, that Laura felt her throat tighten. “My mom used to pick me up after school every day and bring me back to the record store to do my homework,” she told him, “and I was fourteen when we moved away. I really don’t know this neighborhood as well as you think I do.”

Josh’s interest in all this was to be expected. He was chief marketing officer for a magazine publishing group whose flagship publication was a music-industry glossy, and the Lower East Side had once been ground zero for seminal movements in rock and pop. Of course Laura’s old neighborhood would seem like a theme park called Punk World or Disco Land, where tastefully “distressed” buildings re-created a semblance of the grittiness of yesteryear, and if you squinted hard enough you could almost see Joey Ramone or Wayne County lugging their gear down the Bowery after a set at CBGB. Laura herself had thought for a fleeting moment that she’d seen Adam Purple, an old man now, pushing a battered grocery cart filled with compost up Avenue B.

Josh hadn’t been one of the people in the meeting that day when Laura had gone to his offices with Perry for the first time, but he’d seen her struggling outside the conference room with two oversized briefcases while Perry lingered behind to schmooze. Josh had hurried to her side and said, “Let me help you with those,” taking the briefcases over Laura’s protests and walking toward the elevator with them. This had embarrassed her; it was an associate’s job to carry the briefcases when she went to a meeting, or to court, with a partner.

When he’d called her at her office four days later, she was even more embarrassed. He must have asked someone who’d been in the meeting what her name was and where she worked. She’d refused the first time he asked her out, not wanting to be that girl who got hit on at the first meeting she went to. But the second time Josh called, inviting her to a party his company was throwing to celebrate their April Latin Music issue, she’d said yes. She didn’t plan on being an associate forever, she reasoned. It couldn’t hurt to start showing her face at client events. Most associates who considered themselves partner-track made a point of doing so.