One Fifth Avenue

“Why?”

“I’m trying to work,” he said.

“So?” She yawned.

“I’ve got a rewrite due in four days. If I don’t get it finished, we don’t start shooting on time.”

“What’s the problem?” she asked. “They’ll wait. You’re Philip Oakland. They have to wait.”

“No, they do not,” Philip said. “It’s called a contract, Lola. It’s called being an adult and honoring your commitments. It’s called people are counting on you to produce.”

“Then write,” she said. “What’s stopping you?”

“You are,” he said.

“All I’m doing is sitting here. Watching TV.”

“That’s the point. I can’t concentrate with the TV on.”

“Why should I have to stop doing what I want to do so you can do what you want to do?”

“What I have to do.”

“If you don’t want to do it, if it doesn’t make you happy, then don’t do it,” Lola said.

“I need you to turn off the TV. Or at least turn it down.”

“Why are you criticizing me?”

Philip gave up. He closed the door. Opened it again. “You need to do some work, too,” he said. “Why don’t you go to the library?”

“Because I just got a manicure. And a pedicure.” She held up a foot and wiggled her toes for his inspection. “Isn’t it pretty?” she asked in her baby-girl voice.

Philip went back to his desk. The noise from the TV continued unabated. He put his hands in his hair. How the fuck had this happened? She’d taken over his apartment, his life, his concentration. His bathroom was littered with makeup. She never put the cap back on the toothpaste. Or bought toilet paper. When the toilet paper ran out, she used paper towels. And stared at him accusingly, as if he had fallen down on the job of making h

er life easy. Every one of her days was a never-ending orgy of pampering. There were hairstyling appointments and massages and exercise classes in obscure Asian martial arts. It was, she explained, all in preparation for some great, future, unnamed, and undefined event that would inevitably happen to her and would change her life, for which she needed to be ready. Camera-ready. And he couldn’t get her to go home.

“You could go back to your apartment,” he’d suggest.

“But your apartment is so much nicer than mine.”

“Your apartment is so much nicer than most twentysomethings’,” he’d point out. “Some of them live in the outer reaches of Brooklyn. Or New Jersey. They have to cross the river by ferry.”

“What are you saying, Philip? That it’s my fault? Am I supposed to feel guilty about other people’s lives? I don’t have anything to do with their lives. It doesn’t make sense.”

He tried to explain that one ought to feel guilty about other people’s hardships and struggles because that was how decent people felt about the world, it was called a conscience, but when pressed by her, he had to admit that feeling guilty was a legacy of his generation, not hers. She was, she explained, a child of choice—her parents chose to have her. Unlike previous generations in which parents, like his mother, didn’t have a choice about having kids, and therefore made their children feel guilty about coming into the world. As if it were the kid’s fault!

Sometimes it was like trying to argue with someone from another planet.

He got up and opened the door again. “Lola!” he said.

“What is wrong with you?” she said. “I haven’t done anything. You’re in a bad mood because your writing isn’t going well. Don’t you dare blame that on me. I won’t tolerate it.” She got up.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“Out.”

“Fine,” he said. He shut the door. But now he did feel guilty. She was right, she hadn’t done anything wrong. And he was in a bad mood. About what, he didn’t know.