Jami Attenberg - All Grown Up

Contents

T HE A PARTMENT

Youre in art school, you hate it, you drop out, you move to New York City. For most people, moving to New York City is a gesture of ambition. But for you, it signifies failure, because you grew up there, so it just means youre moving back home after you couldnt make it in the world. Spiritually, its a reverse commute.

For a while you live downtown with your brother and his girlfriend, in a small spare room, your bed jammed between shoe racks and a few of your brothers guitars in cases plus a wall of books from his girlfriends undergraduate days at Brown. You get a job, via same girlfriend. You dont hate the job and you dont love the job, but you cant sniff at a hard days work because you are no better than anyone else, and, in some ways, you are much, much worse. You acknowledge your privilege, and you get to work.

You start making money. You find a small, dusty, crumbling loft in a shitty waterfront neighborhood in Brooklyn. It has one floor-to-ceiling window, a tiny Empire State Building in the distance framed beautifully within it. Now you are home. Everyone in your life breathes easier. Shes safe now, they all think. At no point does anyone say to you, So youve stopped making art? It is because they dont want to know the answer or they dont care or they are scared to ask you because you scare them. Whatever the case, everyone is complicit in this, this new, non-art-making phase of your life. Even though it was the thing you loved most in the world.

But you have a little secret: while you are not making Art anymore you are at least drawing every day. To tell anyone about this would be admitting there is a hole in your life, and youd rather not say that out loud, except in therapy. But there you are, once a day, drawing the same thing over and over: that goddamned Empire State Building. You get up every morning (or afternoon, on the weekends, depending on the hangover), have a cup of coffee, sit at the card table near the window, and draw it, usually in pencil. If you have time, youll ink it. Sometimes, if you are running late for work, you do it at night instead, and then you add color to the sketches, to reflect the buildings ever-changing lights. Sometimes you draw just the building and sometimes you draw the buildings around it and sometimes you draw the sky and sometimes you draw the bridge in the foreground and sometimes you draw the East River and sometimes you draw the window frame around the whole scene. You have sketchbooks full of these drawings. You could draw the same thing forever, you realize. No man ever steps in the same river twice, for its not the same river, and hes not the same man is a thing you read once. The Empire State Building is your river. And you dont have to leave your apartment to step in it. Art feels safe for you again, even though you know you are not getting any better at it, that the work you are making could be sold to tourists on a sidewalk outside of Central Park on a sunny Saturday and thats about it. Theres no challenge to it, no message, just your view, on repeat. But this is all you can do, this is all you have to offer, and it is just enough to make you feel special.

You do this for six years. Brooklyn apartment in a changing neighborhood, why move when the rent is so cheap? Mediocre but well-paying job at which you excel; you receive a few small promotions. Volunteer work here and there. You march where your activist mother tells you to march. Pointless sketchbooks pile up on the bottom row of a bookshelf. Barely scratching a feverish itch. You also drink plenty and for a long time use, too, coke and ecstasy mainly, although sometimes pills to bring you down at the end of the night. Another way to scratch the itch. There are men also, in your bed, in your world, foggily, but you are less interested in them than in muffling the voice in your head that says you are doing absolutely nothing with your life, that you are a child, that the accoutrements of adulthood are bullshit, they dont mean a goddamn thing, and you are trapped between one place and another and you always will be unless something forces you to change. And also, you miss making art.

Other people you know seem to change quite easily. They have no problem at all with succeeding at their careers and buying apartments and moving to other cities and falling in love and getting married and hyphenating their names and adopting rescue cats and, finally, having children, and then documenting all of this meticulously on the internet. Really, it appears to be effortless on their part. Their lives are constructed like buildings, each precious but totally unsurprising block stacked before your eyes.

Your favorite thing is when a friend asks to meet you for a drink, a friend you have had a million drinks with in your life, and then, when you get to the bar, your friend stares at the menu and orders nothing, and you are forced to say, Arent you drinking? and she says, I wish, and she pauses dramatically and you know exactly whats coming next: shes about to tell you shes pregnant. And there is this subtext that you are lucky because you can still drink, and shes unlucky because she cant drink, she has this dumb baby in her. What a stupid fucking baby. In her.

Eventually your brother and his wife get pregnant, and you cant hate on that because its family, and also theyve always been incredibly kind to you, your brother and you particularly bonded because of your fathers young demise, an overdose. You throw a baby shower, at which you drink too many mimosas and cry in the bathroom, but you are pretty sure no one notices. Its not that you want a baby, or want to get married, or any of it. Its not your bag. You just feel tired for some reason. Tired of the world. Tired of trying to fit in where you dont. You go home that night and draw the Empire State Building and you feel hopeful doing this thing you love to do, so hopeful you look up online what tonights colors meanthe lights are green and blueand find out its in honor of National Eating Disorders Day and you get depressed all over again even though youve never had an eating disorder in your life.

Nine months come and go, a baby could be born at any minute. You call your brother to find out when exactly, but theyve been using a hippie-dippie midwife and he says, We dont know yet. Could be another week. You are suddenly aswirl with enthusiasm. Its going to be a girl. Call me whenever you hear anything, anything at all, you tell him. Then you have three intensely dull, soul-deadening afternoon meetings in a row and after that you are moved to a new cube, which you must share with a freshly hired coworker who is thirteen years younger than you and is hilarious and loud and pretty and is probably making half of what you make but still spends it all on tight dresses. It is a Friday. You go out for drinks in your neighborhood. You get lit. Then you call your dealer, whom you havent called in a few years. You cant believe the number still works. He says, Its been a while since we last met. You say, Ive been busy, as if you need to justify why youre not doing drugs anymore. You dont buy that much, just enough, but then you meet a man at the baryou both pretend youve met before although you havent, but it just feels safer that way for some reasonand he has more than enough for the two of you. Then you go home together, to your place, to tiny Manhattan in the window, to the piles of sketchbooks, and the two of you proceed to do all the drugs. This goes on for hours. Theres a little bit of sex involved but neither one of you is that interested in each other. Drug buddies, thats about it. You cant even get it up to get it up. Eventually he leaves, and you turn off your phone and go to sleep. You wake up on Sunday night. You turn on your phone. There are eight messages from your brother and your mother. You have missed your niece being born.