Friday. The Kid is here. I pick her up from The Co-Parent’s midday. The part that strikes me as abnormal is that having her here seems so normal.
Her Friday afternoon writing class meets online rather than in Park Slope. But otherwise: For dinner I fry tofu, cut up a carrot in addition to the steak/mashed potatoes/asparagus I make for The Girlfriend and me. (The Kid’s a vegetarian with a narrow palate.) While I’m making dinner she asks me to lower the volume of my R.E.M. mix. My post-prandial neighborhood stroll includes her. Aside from being able to walk down the center of Classon Avenue at 8 p.m. without a care for traffic: pretty typical.
For pleasure she’s following a 30-creative-writing-prompts-in-30-days exercise, except “I’m going to take longer than 30 days to do it so it doesn’t feel like homework.”
“Will you do the prompts in order?”
“Yeah. Otherwise I’ll do all the prompts I like first, and then I’ll have a bunch at the end that I don’t like, and doing those will feel like homework.”
“Sounds smart.”
The first prompt: Write a 500-word story about an impulse buy that leads to intergalactic warfare.
Her version: a gold-digging trophy wife, Elena Karahelios, makes a living convincing wealthy men to fall in love with her so deeply they disdain prenuptial agreements. She celebrates her second divorce, from a Greek tycoon, by buying expensive shoes (I suggest Manolo Blahniks; are those au courant?). She covets a pair on display, the last ones in the store; she grabs the left shoe at the precise moment an extraterrestrial under deep cover on a research mission to Earth grabs the right shoe.
“I’m not sure how the war is supposed to break out,” she says.
“You’ve spent most of your 500 words creating the Elena character. I think you can sketch the war sparingly and still make good use of the word limit.”
“It seems sort of silly.”
“It’s the prompt that’s silly. If we’re talking intergalactic warfare, we’ve left the world of plausibility.”
“That’s true.”
The night before The Kid’s arrival saw my first fight with The Girlfriend since the start of CoronaWorld. Considering we’ve structured our 33-month-old relationship on intermittent distance, and considering that her son’s Covid-19-induced dormitory closure has moved him into her room, her into my apartment, we’ve done remarkably well. Having experienced both, we’re each determined to avoid partnerships either tempestuous or icy. We agree: if we’re routinely fighting, or routinely feeling distant when together, we’d rather be single. Partly because of our histories, partly because we’re amicable, we can count our fights on one hand, recall them by name: 1). Walking to Tennis; 2). Phoenicia Cabin; 3). Milan/Lake Como; 4). The Night The Girlfriend Left My Apartment. Now, one for the thumb: 5). The Night The Girlfriend Couldn’t Leave My Apartment.
We don’t even have a disagreement. The Girlfriend spends the day in a series of stressful phone calls about real estate. She’s selling in Southern California, buying in Brooklyn; before CoronaWorld the transactions looked straightforward. Now complications arise. Because she’s been renting out the home, U.S. tax law sees her not as a homeowner but as an investor — the financial implications are daunting. The Brooklyn house she wants to buy costs less than the SoCal house; how to invest the profit? Phone calls to financial planners hit her with bewildering requirements, dizzying options. Should she invest in commercial real estate? Buy property upstate?
Then there’s the Brooklyn house. She’s agreed to buy on an emailed handshake, has yet to sign a contract. The 70-something owner, selling without a realtor, is sick; his younger brother, who lives with him, has tested positive for Covid-19. So reports the owner’s daughter. They have to sell, the daughter implies; we infer the house is a bequest, its sale proceeds to be divided among multiple heirs. Still, the owner was acting unhurriedly before CoronaWorld; will the illnesses complicate the sale? Should The Girlfriend be looking for other Brooklyn properties?
During this string of calls The Girlfriend reads an email from a colleague asking for help, responds hastily, responds again with her phone number — then gets a text asking for bank account details. She blocks the number, reports the spam to her IT department. I’m not functioning well, she says. I’ve never seen her at this level of anxiety.
Over dinner she explains the real estate details to me. I get confused, ask for clarification. We both sound angry. I give advice; she says it’s helpful. We still both sound angry. She changes the subject, talks about how many windows across the street are dark, their owners evidently out of town; one entire three-story apartment building seems abandoned. Why do you sound so angry, I ask. Why are you, she asks. I request a 15-minute break. We retreat to separate spaces. I call a friend; by the time I’m done, she’s in bed. We sleep with an ice wall between us — unprecedented. The only time we’ve let the sun set on a fight was The Night The Girlfriend Left My Apartment. In CoronaWorld, that’s not an option.
In the morning we talk it through. It was a series of misunderstandings. Our stress is spiking off the charts. Let’s face it: It’s CoronaWorld. And it’s not just the house; The Kid is moving here. The Girlfriend and I have established a rhythm that will have to change. The three of us have always gotten along fine, but we’ve never co-habited for long, certainly not under CoronaWorld conditions. Just how long will CoronaWorld last?
In the event, the normality of The Kid’s arrival brings relief, as well as gratitude. Thanks, Kid.
(New York state numbers as of Friday: 229,642 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 3.3 percent; 630 dead, to a total of 12,822, up 5.2 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 2,080, to a total of 32,435, up 6.9 percent.)
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