A component of our trouble—the thing that had taken our discontent from the back burner and poured it directly onto our laps—was that Hannah had, a few months earlier, been laid off.
It happened in winter, during an ice storm on a Friday afternoon: she called me crying from the break room and my first thought was that one of her parents had died. Is everything okay? No, she said, she was getting paid off. Paid off? Bribed? Not paid off, you fucking idiot, laid off! Laid off! Fired!
For two years she’d been working at the New-York Historical Society on the Upper West Side, standing an hour a day on the Q, eating eleven-dollar salads on Columbus Avenue for lunch. She’d been in their exhibit research department, writing signs and brochures and scripts for the guides to recite while they led tourists through exhibits about New York’s ports and Abraham Lincoln.
America’s most popular president, he is commonly associated with Illinois, where he made his mark as a lawyer, or Kentucky, where he was famously raised in a log cabin. Lesser known is the significant role that New York played in Lincoln’s adult life. “This budget has just been a disaster for us,” her boss explained; they were sitting in exactly the same positions as when he’d interviewed her. “I wish there were something we could do.”
We were lucky enough—i.e., we still had enough money from my job and our savings and our families—that Hannah being laid off was not an imminent practical disaster: we would, for a while anyway, be able to pay the rent, and buy groceries without scrutinizing per-unit prices, and keep our gym memberships. But practical disasters, it turns out, aren’t the only kinds of disasters. In the weeks and months afterward I came to understand, in a way I hadn’t really when my acquaintance with people losing their jobs had been mostly via CNN headlines and Raymond Carver stories, why being laid off—even laid off from a job you’ve enjoyed, as opposed to needed—was always high on the list of stressful things that could happen to a person, and to a relationship. All of our tensions seemed now to have been dipped in a horrible radioactive juice; some nights I’d wake up at three in the morning with my legs sweating only to discover that Hannah was awake and sweating too—we were tangled together like sheets of damp saran wrap.
The first visible outgrowth of her being laid off was that she decided we should move (she spent a great deal of each day demonstrating, via job sites, that the only jobs available in her field happened to be outside the five boroughs). Whether to move was, we both understood, a proxy war over whether to get married. This meant that every job offer she came across led to a tense, desolate conversation about something like the housing market in Philadelphia or the lack of public transit in Atlanta. Many nights, as we sat eating dinner, lifting our forks to our faces with the blank, weary expressions of refugees, I had the feeling that we were actors in a play:
The End of Love, now appearing at the Flea, acted with torturous realism by newcomers Hannah Rampe and Nick Beron.
I was working then, and had been for the last few years, as an assistant music editor. This meant editing music for movies, mostly mid-budget dramas that I would never have gone to see if I hadn’t had anything to do with them. I was the assistant to a thin, bedraggled man named Jeremy who did all the actual creative work—the composing and the arranging and the watching and rewatching of the same eleven-second scene, trying to decide whether the emotional tenor of the moment called for an oboe or a muted trumpet. My contribution was more technical than musical; all day I sat in a semi-darkened room in Midtown, wearing expensive headphones, staring at a thirty-inch monitor, adjusting sliders by increments too small to see. My dreams often involved Pro Tools mixing boards, jagged multicolored graphs of sound files.
I’d come to editing as a concession—my plan had been (just as Jeremy’s plan had been) to become a famous, or anyway a renowned, musician.
When I met Hannah I was just at the tail end of the period in which I believed this might actually happen. I’d made the regular station stops: a band that played talent shows in my Maryland high school, a series of tremblingly self-serious demos recorded on an eight-track, a biweekly appointment at the bar in Ann Arbor that paid in drink tickets. I played guitar and bass and piano and wrote songs that my dad, in a reflective mood, once said reminded him of the Cars.
And when I was a couple of years out of Michigan, I put out an album. This seemed, briefly, to be the success that I’d been dreaming of since I was twelve—a record label (now defunct) gave me actual money, I had an album release party, I went on a slightly depressing tour during which I put an incredible number of miles on my Camry. My mom, who’d never quite given up the idea that I should go to business school, sent me a congratulatory bouquet of balloons. Notices were somewhere between respectful and tautological (“Nick Beron’s
Pushing Off is a first album by a new singer-songwriter”). An online music magazine I’d only vaguely heard of named me one of that fall’s artists to watch.
It’s hard to say exactly when I decided this wasn’t for me. Some of it was the money. And some of it was that I think I’d believed, without ever quite articulating it to myself, that to release an album was to ascend to a celestial plane from which you only returned in order to play sold- out shows at Radio City and to grant enigmatic interviews to
Rolling Stone. That you could have an album out and still need to live with four room-mates in Long Island City, that my life for the foreseeable future was going to consist of opening for friends’ bands and sending out mass email reminders and playing shows for three people in the back rooms of Czech restaurants . . . I peered down the road and I balked. And music editing didn’t feel entirely like a self- betrayal (although my dad, that year for my birthday, got me a T-shirt with the word “sellout” printed across the chest). I was making decent money, I was using my musical abilities, I was occasionally attending premieres where people like Susan Sarandon and Jeff Garlin would waft thanks in my general direction. It was, of course, painful to see how little the world mourned the loss of Nick Beron the musician— there were no puzzled queries from disappointed fans, no pleas from record executives— but I was, occasional midnight pangs excepted, doing fine. Just as the function of most furniture is to fill up a room, the function of most jobs is to fill up a life. By the time I met Hannah it had been a year since I’d last played a show, and I was just becoming practiced at describing myself, with just the right mix of irony and self- deprecation, as a “failed musician.” I was twenty- six, with a beard I liked to scratch in moments of intense self- involvement, and round metal glasses whose lenses were perpetually in need of cleaning. I tended, a few minutes into any conversation, to find a way to mention the stars of whatever movie I happened to be working on, always in a tone that suggested that I wasn’t entirely sure who they were. “That must have been really tough,” she said.
“Which part?”
“Well, you said you always wanted to play music. So deciding to go into editing must have felt, I don’t know, like you were giving up on yourself, maybe. Is that bad to say?”
We had, I want to emphasize, met approximately twenty minutes before this conversation. I’d delivered versions of my music-industry spiel to at least a dozen people, and she was the first one who’d greeted it with anything other than nods of appreciation.
This was in the apartment of another assistant music editor, named Marisa. She’d invited a dozen people over for dinner to see her new place in Crown Heights (white-painted brick walls, sticky floors), and one of them happened to be Hannah, who she’d known at Oberlin. The rest of the guests were musicians, art teachers, personal assistants, one loud-voiced man who made sure that everyone knew he was just briefly touching down between stints in Berlin. This party was in January, so there was an air of picturesqueness: soap-flake snow falling outside, everyone in chunky sweaters.
When Hannah and I told the story of our meeting, we always stopped it at that first conversation about music—I’d given an obnoxious speech, she’d insulted me, and the rest was history. But I don’t think I really took her in until later.
After dinner—we ate spaghetti with capers at a long table that was really a woodworking bench—an activity developed of people trying to light Italian cookie wrappers on fire. The girl who’d brought them said that if you rolled them into a tube and lit them, they’d float up to the ceiling. Hannah was sitting next to me, and we fumbled together with the lighter and the paper, laughing and correcting each other in the way of high school lab partners. She was tall (even sitting down you could tell) with a long neck, dark hair piled on top of her head, dramatic facial angles. Somehow most of her personality was concentrated in her eyebrows and mouth; her default expression conveyed a readiness to find something hilarious or ridiculous. “These things,” she said, watching me fumble with the lighter, “are going to blow like Apollo 13.”
“Apollo 13 didn’t blow up. It reentered safely. That’s why they made a movie about it.”
“Good to know,” she said. (She was highly attuned to the male blowhard, as a species, for reasons that became obvious as soon as I met her father.) She took the lighter from me and leaned over the table to light hers. We sat back. And while the cookie wrappers up and down the table rose in weightless silent majesty, ours tipped together on their sides and smoldered.
Copyright © 2018 by Ben Dolnick. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
