Read Online Emerald City by Jennifer Egan - Free Book Online

that startled Rory at first. He had never heard it before. “New York!” Vesuvi cried. “That’s priceless.”
    Stacey smiled. She seemed as surprised as everyone else.
    Vesuvi rocked forward in his chair, so that his heavy boots pounded the floor. “I love it,” he said. “New York. What a perfect comeback.” Anouschka just stared at him.
    It began to seem very funny, all of a sudden.
    A chuckle passed through the group like a current. Rory found himself laughing without knowing why; it was enough for him that Vesuvi had a reason. His boss gazed at Stacey in the soft-eyed way he looked at models when a shoot was going well. “It’s a hell of a place, New York,” he said. “No?”
    “The best,” Stacey said.
    “But she has gone only here!” Anouschka protested. “How does she know?”
    “Oh, she knows,” Rory said. He felt reckless, dizzy with the urge to make Anouschka angry. “You don’t get it, do you?” he said.
    “What can I get when there is nothing?” she retorted. But she looked uncertain.
    Vesuvi dabbed with a napkin at his heavy-lidded eyes. “Next time you go to New York,” he told Stacey, “take me with you.”
    This was too much for Anouschka. “Fuck you!” she cried, jumping to her feet. “I am in New York. You are in New York.
Here is New York!”
    But laughter had seized the table, and Anouschka’s protests only made it worse. She stood helplessly while everyone laughed, Rory hooting all the louder to keep her in her place.
    “That’s it,” she said. “Goodbye.”
    “Go back to Japan,” Rory cried. He had trouble catching his breath.
    Anouschka fixed her eyes on him. Her makeup made them look burned at the rims, and the irises were a bright, clear green. He thought she might do something crazy—he’d heard she once punctured an ex-boyfriend’s upper lip by hurling a fork at him. He stopped laughing and gripped the table’s edge, poised for sudden movement. To his astonishment, the charred-looking eyes filled with tears. “I hate you, Rory,” she said.
    She yanked her bag from under the table and hoisted it onto her shoulder. Her long hair stuck to her wet cheeks as she struggled to free her jacket from the chair. Rory thought of his high school lunchroom: girls stalking out mad, clattering trays, their long, skinny legs skittering on high-heeled shoes. He felt a pang of nostalgia. She was just a kid, Anouschka—so much younger than he was.
    “Hey,” Vesuvi said, standing and putting his arms around Anouschka. “Hey, we’re just having a joke.”
    “Go to hell with your joke.” She turned her face away so that no one could see her crying.
    Vesuvi stroked her back. “Hey now,” he said.
    Chastened, the group sat in guilty silence. Stacey and Rory traded a look and stood up. No one protested as they slid their jackets on, but when Rory opened his wallet to pay for their drinks, Vesuvi winced and waved it away. Anouschka still clung to him, her face buried in his neck.
    Vesuvi spoke to Stacey in a lowered voice. “I’ve got something coming up you’d be perfect for,” he said. “Who are you with again?”
    Stacey told him the name of her agency, barely able to containher joy. Rory listened unhappily; Vesuvi said this all the time to girls, and forgot the next minute. It was just a pleasant salutation.
    They left the restaurant and headed toward the East Village. Rory longed to reach for Stacey’s hand, but she seemed far away from him now, lost in her thoughts. Outside a market, a boy was perched on a stool cutting the heads off beans. A barber swept thick tufts of dark hair into one corner of his shop. From an overhead window came music, and Rory craned his neck to catch a glimpse of someone’s arm, a lighted cigarette. The familiarity of it all was sweet and painful to him. He searched the dark shopfronts for something, some final thing at the core of everything else, but he found just his own reflection and Stacey’s. Their eyes met in the glass, then