City Mouse Read online

  It’s our turn now to get lucky, I thought. Time for the broker gods to cast their smiles upon us and reveal a gem amid the strass, an apartment for us to love and to hold, to close on and inhabit by the end of the year, and put Aaron’s nascent house lust to bed forever.

  We took the 96th Street exit and drove around the ramp to Riverside Drive. “They had two sinks in their bathroom,” Aaron said wistfully. “I love you, Jess, but can’t I just have my own sink?”

  Chapter two

  The next morning I left Aaron watching Nick Jr. with Phoebe while I ran the two quick blocks to Central Park, pushing the jogging stroller with Madison bundled inside. The late-November air was chilly, and I zipped my fleece up all the way, while following the running path down around the lake. The ancient oaks and maples were soaked in fall, a vibrant backdrop of reds and oranges and golds I knew would soon fade into winter’s quiet gray. Rounding the corner at 72nd Street, we passed a pod of Italian tourists staring up and snapping photos, and made it to the fountain just as our 9:15 Strollercize class was starting.

  I found an empty spot in the circle next to Liza and her six-month-old, Jack, wrapped like a burrito with his little round face poking out of his down stroller sack. Wanda, the trainer, nodded in my direction and continued with the warm-up. “Now reach your arms back and zipper that black dress. Come on now, get back there. Reach!”

  I stretched my arms up and then down my back as far as I could, grateful to be under the sky’s ceiling instead of stuck in a gym.

  In between stretches Wanda reminded us the new winter schedule would be starting soon. “And don’t forget, Get Your Sex Life Back Week starts today.”

  “Ha! What sex life?” Liza joked. Everyone giggled.

  “Exactly. Today we’ll be finding those Kegel muscles to help strengthen our pelvic floors. And tonight your homework is to put those babies to bed, turn off the TV, and surprise your partner with oral sex.”

  “Not in front of the children!” one of the moms cried, putting her hands over her baby’s ears, pretending to be aghast.

  “You had to pick the one week my husband’s in LA?” another mom moaned.

  Wanda just smiled. As the founder of Strollercize, she was on a personal mission to empower every new mom to not only get her pre-baby body back, but to wake up each day feeling confident and capable no matter how little sleep we might have had, or more likely not had, the night before. She wanted our resolve to be as strong as our triceps, and I tried the best I could to follow Wanda’s recipes for a fit and happy mom life, even if sometimes her methods seemed a little bizarre to me.

  “Ever heard of phone sex, Sarah? Straighten out that elbow and then stretch it over . . . That’s it. Better. This is your week to take control and rediscover the power of pleasure—every night for one week. Sex is like exercise: the more you do it, the better you’ll feel. Plus, you’ll burn extra calories. You can thank me later.”

  “But I read somewhere if you give a blow job and you swallow it’s like fifty calories,” Sarah said.

  “Who swallows?” Liza asked.

  I do, I thought. I hope it’s not fifty calories.

  “The average ejaculation has only about five calories, not fifty,” Wanda corrected. “And we’ll do an extra set of push-ups today to burn those. Now, hands on your hips and lace up that corset. Tighten up those stomachs and pull it all in.”

  I tried to remember the last time Aaron and I had sex every night for a whole week. Back when we were trying to get pregnant, probably. Or our last oral tryst: mutual oral tryst. Going down on me had never been his favorite foreplay, and it usually required me giving his head a not-so-subtle nudge southward. But could it be that he hadn’t been down there since before Madison was born? Since before I was even pregnant with her? God, I hoped I still had mommy amnesia, because if I was remembering correctly, that would be over a year ago. Not good. Maybe we could use a designated Get Your Sex Life Back Week; it would be hard to argue about houses or apartments or anything else with our mouths preoccupied. I felt myself blush even thinking about it.

  “Let’s roll!” Wanda shouted, and I fell in behind Liza, down the path past the boathouse. Liza always ran faster than I did, her blond ponytail bobbing with each long stride. She didn’t even need Strollercize; she’d barely gained twenty pounds during her second pregnancy, while I had once again gained a whopping forty. But since rooming together freshman year at Northwestern, we had tried nearly every food and fitness craze, more for laughs than anything else—from the Cookie Diet to Pilates reformer classes, circuit training, spinning, juice cleanses—and while most of them worked to make her already slender body even more slender, for me, it all depended on how much wine and late-night Ben & Jerry’s I deemed essential to go along with it.

  After college, Liza and I both moved to Manhattan, continuing to room together, and, give or take a year, followed along parallel marriage and baby tracks. A month after I had Phoebe, Liza had Thomas, and when I read about Strollercize on one of those mommy blogs, I convinced Liza to take a break from her SoulCycle addiction to try it with me. Beyond the kitsch factor, the workouts actually turned out to be a great mix of strength training and sweating—bonus, without needing a sitter—and also gave Liza and me the chance to catch up in person several mornings a week.

  We made a left up the Great Hill—it was a gradual climb and the hardest part of the route. I picked up my pace so I could swing in beside Liza and report the latest.

  “Yesterday we went to visit Aaron’s friend from business school who just bought a huge house up in Scarsdale, and now Aaron can’t stop talking about how much he wants one,” I panted, nearly out of breath as we neared the top of the hill.

  “A house? What happened to the apartment on 68th Street?”

  Wanda yelled, “Walk it in high heels over to the benches, ladies!” I stood up on my toes and twisted my hips, pretending to be wearing a pair of sexy four-inch heels.

  “The building didn’t have an elevator, and we couldn’t get past the thought of hauling a stroller up a three-floor walkup every day,” I replied. “The market’s still so crazy, we can’t compete for any of the places we even remotely like. I’m starting to lose hope.”

  In addition to Liza’s successful career, her husband Richard had just made partner at a big law firm. They lived in a 2,500-square-foot, three-bedroom co-op on East 73rd Street. They were staying.

  “Have you thought about Brooklyn? Someone from my office just moved to Williamsburg with her family and she’s been raving about it,” Liza said.

  “Legs wide, feet apart, and imagine you’re squeezing a credit card in between your butt cheeks,” Wanda instructed. “Bend your knees, come up, and squeeze.”

  “Aaron’s dad grew up in Brooklyn in a tenement with three brothers, two sisters, and a great uncle from Hungary,” I said, squeezing as tight as I could, trying to feel where my Kegel muscles might be buried. “Aaron can’t even think about moving there; he considers it a huge step backward.”

  “But Brooklyn’s not like that anymore, it’s really nice. Parts of it anyway. You can get some good deals on whole brownstones, if you’re willing to renovate.”

  “That might be, but Aaron won’t even discuss it.” I sighed. “The way things are going, we might as well move to Westchester.” It was the first time I had said those words out loud and I felt a knot in my stomach that wasn’t from the exercising.

  “Give me a break! You’re not moving to Westchester. Something will come up.”

  The final leg of the route took us back down in front of the fountain where we had started. We parked and locked the hand brakes on our strollers at the top of the stairs, and while Liza’s baby fussed, Madison sucked contentedly on her pacifier, wrapped in her tan sheepskin Bundleme. I bent down and kissed her forehead—she was born a total Strollercize pro. We left the line of babies under Wanda’s watch, ran down the thirty or so steps, and waited at the bottom for her signal.

  “Ready, set . . . spri
nt! C’mon, Jessica, pick up those knees!” she yelled. I tried to go faster but my leg muscles were completely fatigued. I tripped and missed a step, catching myself before wiping out, but finally made it up to the top. Wanda directed us back down for another round, and when we got to the top again we found her shooing off the tourists who were snapping pictures of our babies in their stroller lineup.

  As we packed up to leave, some of the moms worried out loud about where the photos might end up. I nodded along, but secretly liked the idea of a picture of little Madison in a grand leather photo album somewhere in Perugia, pasted on a page next to the glorious Central Park trees and the Delacorte Theater and the lake and the taxis and the Empire State Building—a part of me included as a New York attraction, right in the middle of it all.

  * * *

  That night, after we put the kids to bed, I was excited to start Wanda’s oral homework but Aaron had an emergency two-hour conference call with his West Coast development team and then conked out on the couch in front of the ten o’clock news. Not an auspicious kickoff to our nookie every night for a week.

  I spilled out the wine into the sink, put the leftover containers of tikka masala and rice in the fridge, and tied up the garbage bag to take out in the morning. I picked up a Let’s Rock! Elmo off the floor and threw it into one of the giant plastic toy bins that had overtaken our living room, bursting with board books and half-dressed baby dolls, a set of wooden instruments and dozens of assorted blocks in bright primary colors. But I had forgotten that this particular toy didn’t have an on/off switch—no doubt created by a sadist toy maker without any kids—and Elmo started shouting, “Elmo wants to play with you!” over and over, flashing and crashing his electronic drum and cymbal. The racket didn’t appear to disrupt Aaron’s hard slumber and I prayed it wouldn’t wake Phoebe and Madison sleeping just behind the door in the other room.

  In addition to the toys, piles had sprouted on our floor like mushrooms, half-read newspapers and size three diapers and empty water bottles going out for recycling. Our few shelves held some old hardcover books and a framed photo from our honeymoon, now almost seven years ago; our tan, pre-kid selves, smiling on the beach in Grand Cayman after snorkeling with the stingrays, an outing I had been nervous to take, but Aaron had assured me would be worth it. And he was right—peering through our masks underneath the turquoise water felt exhilarating and scary as a swarm of smooth, flat, prehistoric-looking sea kites whizzed by us, eating the bait right out of our hands. That day suddenly felt like seven million years ago. Now we fed mashed-up carrots and bananas to our children in a giant plastic high chair propped next to my parents’ old dining table shoved in a corner. And near our front door stood not one, but two enormous strollers, my one-seater for running and a double-wide, both too big to ever try to fold.

  I stared at Aaron, his head propped awkwardly on a throw pillow. My husband, lying there, genuinely exhausted. I hated how tired he’d been lately, how these conference calls had become our nightly norm. Tonight he found out that the new triggered e-mail platform wasn’t going to launch on time, and now he was going to have to hit the road this week to smooth things over with investors in San Francisco and Austin. Again.

  ZebraMail wasn’t supposed to be fraught with the same frustrations as his previous start-up ventures. This time, he was on the management team of a company with a big-name advisory board and the real possibility of a public-sell exit, if all went according to the business plan. But three years and three rounds of financing later, the e-mail marketing software space was flooded with clones, and we were both beginning to wonder if all of his hours of sweat equity and taking only a small cash salary had been worth it. Not that we ever spoke those words aloud. It was way too depressing to think that all the stock options and promises on paper we thought would be financing our future now might not be worth anything at all.

  I want to live better. For Phoebe’s and Madison’s futures. For our future. I didn’t know where our future would take us, but I knew I didn’t want it to be in these jam-packed six hundred square feet.

  I wanted to make a home for our family, a home with baked lasagna and recessed lighting and walls painted a color other than Linen White. To pick out fabric for a couch not made in Sweden and to buy a dining room table with upholstered chairs. To host my first dinner party. In less than three months I’d be thirty-four; it was about time we finally took our wedding china out of storage. I didn’t want the staid suburban life our friends had begun falling into, but I had to admit, I was starting to get jealous that they had at least decided, that they had started building their kitchens and their great rooms and their lives together as a family, while we were stuck circling, waiting for our runway. Circling for so long now Aaron wanted us to land in a house.

  Maybe some primal male urge to provide shelter had convinced him that we would be happier in the ’burbs, far from the city’s cramped quarters. But if my urban husband ever came face-to-face with the actual lawn he’d have to mow and the leaky roof he’d have to worry about fixing, I bet he’d truly appreciate our life in Manhattan with a doorman at our service to take in the groceries and the dry cleaning. Maybe a quick trip up to Westchester to look at a few houses in our price range—not nearly at the swank level of Scarsdale—might actually work in my favor. With luck, it would be enough to remind him that an almost-perfect two-bedroom a couple of extra blocks from the subway would be the right move for us after all.

  I pushed aside the four-foot stuffed tiger Aaron’s cousin had sent us as a baby gift and fought some other minor obstacles for access to my laptop, which rested on our mostly obscured antique wooden desk. Fingers fluent in my search routine, I quickly typed www.nytimes.com, clicked on Real Estate and then New York. But instead of heading next to my usual Manhattan, I took a quick detour over to Tri-State and scrolled down to the very bottom of the counties to find Westchester. The towns sprung up in a long alphabetical list: Ardsley, Armonk, Bedford, Briarcliff. I highlighted a few that were closest to the city—Pelham, Larchmont, Mamaroneck—and in a nanosecond, thirty-four houses appeared on my screen, each in a neat little rectangle.

  I scanned through and easily discarded the top and bottom ends. Then one caught my eye: a white brick house on—could that be right?—a quarter of an acre. Almost less land than our apartment was sitting on. But, I thought, it still counts as a house. I typed Aaron’s e-mail address and the subject line, Road trip next weekend? and paused, unsure if I should go through with this. But then I imagined the pleased look on Aaron’s face as he checked his messages the next morning and finally pressed send, feeling better and worse at the same time.

  I slid in behind Aaron on the couch, curled myself into his side, and he molded his warm sleeping body to mine.

  “Love you,” I whispered.

  “Love you too, Jessy-bear,” he said; he was the only person who ever called me by a nickname, one that had stuck from the first week we’d met.

  I gently led him into bed. He pulled me close under the covers and we drifted off to the seraphic sound of our babies’ breathing and the lingering smell of curry.

  Chapter three

  Who knew house hunting could be an aphrodisiac? Mamaroneck, Purchase, New Rochelle, Harrison—the more towns and houses we visited, the more energized Aaron’s libido became. Morning sex in the shower and then again at night on the kitchen floor. Fooling around like teenagers straining the springs of our tired old couch. One Sunday afternoon, with the kids pacified in front of the TV, we sneaked off and did it in our actual bed, justifying that the extra half hour of Little Einsteins might help boost their IQs anyway.

  The fact that we couldn’t get very much house for our budget in Westchester didn’t dissuade Aaron. Not even a little. Every flaw I casually pointed out to create fissures in his suburban fantasy (Renovating that bathroom would really cost us . . . Does that staircase look dangerous to you?) only drove him to want to see more. And to take off our clothes more.

  The houses were
n’t as bad as I thought they would be. Or maybe all of the listings we toured over those blissful December weekends just looked good through my sated eyes. Standing out back, in the freezing cold on those postage stamp–sized patios with Aaron’s arm tight around my shoulder, hearing his voice full of hope and possibility, I was actually starting to be able to imagine the cracked rocks replaced with sod and swing sets. The attic converted to a guest bedroom. The space we need to grow. Our outings hadn’t yet produced a home that hit everything on Aaron’s new lengthy list of house requirements, and for once I was happy he was so hard to please. I secretly hoped we’d never find a house, I just wanted to continue looking to keep the sex streak going.

  When one of Aaron’s colleagues suggested we might have more luck across the Hudson River in Rockland County where there was more land and a new express train, I convinced Aaron we should leave Rockland in the “maybe” pile for now, along with the listings and school-rankings research he’d compiled from towns in Bergen and Essex counties in New Jersey. I didn’t want to dampen his enthusiasm, but he agreed that a river crossing was too much chaos to deal with in the holiday traffic. Besides, I needed something hot to look forward to on those cold nights come January.

  * * *

  The Tuesday before Christmas, my phone rang at work. It was Liza.

  “Hi, Jess. Can’t talk but I found you an apartment. It’s absolutely to die for—and it’s on the Upper West Side! Write down this number.”

  I hadn’t told Liza about the house hunting; it was the first secret I had kept from her in our seventeen-year friendship. I wasn’t sure whether I was afraid she’d be disappointed in me that I’d caved to Aaron’s suburban wishes or if I didn’t want to fully admit to her or even myself that Aaron’s revved-up desire was making me happier than I’d been in a long time and I didn’t want to risk saying or doing anything to make it stop.