The Edge of Falling (2 page)

Claire is the daughter of Edward Howard, the rock-and-roll photographer. She lives in this gigantic loft in Tribeca with no doors and wears leather year-round. She’s always in the front row at fashion shows. She’s crazy tall, about five ten to my five two, and she’s got these long blond locks that look fake. They are. When you first see Claire, you imagine she’s the definition of stuck-up, an Abigail Adams type. But she’s the most genuine person I know. She’s the kind of girl who would give a homeless guy her purse on the way home from school and not even take anything out first.

She’s also a model. She was in the Marc Jacobs show last year.
Vogue
called her “amorphous.” We had to google the definition. That article ran the same week the
Post
declared me a hero. “At least we know what that means,” Claire said.

“Hey, crazy,” Claire chimes.

She’s always calling me crazy, even though that is about the furthest thing from the truth. She’s the crazy one. She once spent the night on the balcony of James Franco’s Parisian hotel room. She tricked the front desk into giving out his room number. He didn’t even come home, but she waited there for him all night. I have no idea what she would have done had he shown up. I’m not sure she did either, but that’s
the difference between Claire and me. Unknown possibilities excite her.

“Speaking,” I say.

“Are you moping at home?” she asks. I imagine her hands stuck on her hips. Raised eyebrows.

“Good morning to you, too.”

“It’s eleven thirty a.m.” The phone gets distant, like she’s suddenly far away, and I know she’s just put me on speaker. Claire is the queen of multitasking. I think it comes from her dad. I did not inherit that particular trait from my parents. My mother can barely drink water and eat food in the same meal.

“And why do you have to assume I’m moping?” I push on. “I could be having an incredibly productive morning.”

“Because I know you,” she says, ignoring the last part. “You’re probably in the kitchen, still in your pajamas, bemoaning the fact that no one understands you.”

“That’s pretty specific,” I say, gazing down at my Paul Frank monkey pj’s. Claire bought them for me for my birthday last year. She wrote “crazy pants” on the label.

“Am I wrong?”

“No,” I say, picking up the catalog my mom has abandoned. Saks fall line.

“So what are you up to today?” she asks.

“The usual,” I say, studying some patent-leather boots.
“Going to Barneys with my mom, meeting up with Abigail for lunch.”

“Yuk yuk.”

“Come on,” I say. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“I think you’re going to spend the day locked in your room.”

“Locked?”

Claire sighs, and I hear the phone click off speaker. Her voice is clear when it comes through again. “I’m worried about you,” she says. “You’ve barely left your house since June.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

“Don’t ‘yeah, well’ me. You had celebrity status for like a millisecond and you didn’t even take advantage of it. You know what I would do to be in the
Post
?”

“But you were in
Vogue
,” I point out. “Isn’t that better?”

She huffs, an
I can’t believe I have to explain this to you
noise. “
Vogue
is no Page Six.”

“I’m blessed,” I deadpan.

“Come downtown,” she says. “We can have lunch here. I won’t even make you go outside.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Well, we can hang out on the terrace.”

“I’ll think about it.”

She makes a kissing noise, her signature sign-off, and hangs up.

The truth is I’d like to go down to Claire’s. Her mom is cool—part old Hollywood, part bohemian hippie—and there are always prints of some new band or famous celebrity lying around on a coffee table. Sometimes her dad pulls us into his studio and asks our opinion on things. The man has photographed the cover of
Vogue
and
Rolling Stone
more times than Annie Leibovitz, and he still wants to know what we think. Their family is like that. They rely on each other. And since I’ve known Claire for so long, I’ve become family too.

I haven’t really been spending too much time with Claire this summer, though. For one, she was in Europe all of June and half of July, but for another, I really hate lying to her. Not that we talk about that night or anything, but she doesn’t know what really happened. It just seemed easier not to tell her, and then it seemed easier to keep not telling her. That’s the problem with lying: It’s just so damn easy to do.

I head upstairs and decide to change. Our townhouse is three stories, with the kitchen and living room on the first floor, Peter’s and my bedrooms on the second, and my parents’ room and a gym on the third. My dad’s study is off the kitchen. “The worst place to work,” he always says. “Food is too distracting.” Not that he’s ever here. He manages a hedge fund, and he travels a lot, but I know this summer hasn’t just been about work. He doesn’t want to be
around what happened. I’ve heard that some people manage their grief by compartmentalizing and staying busy. I think my dad has been on a plane every other day since January.

If he’s back, Peter isn’t currently home. I peek into his room, then head into mine. I pull out some jean shorts and a white gauze top. It’s about one hundred degrees outside, and it’s crucial to wear as little clothing as possible. I grab my hairbrush from where it’s resting on the dresser, careful to keep my eyes trained off the picture of Trevor and me. It’s one of us from the winter formal two years ago. He has his arms around me and my head is leaning back on his chest. I think about how it felt that night. How he took me out to the terrace of the Gansevoort, overlooking the Hudson River, placed both hands on the sides of my face, and kissed me.

That was before so many things, though. Before everything, really. Now I don’t even know if he’s ever going to talk to me again.

I decide to head outside. I shout good-bye to my mom, but the insulation in our house is so impossibly good that she doesn’t hear me.

The heat when I get outside is suffocating. It hits you like a fan straight to the face. I turn down Sixty-Fifth, toward Madison. Abigail’s building is one over from mine, closer to Park, so this is generally my route of choice.

I have this game I’ve played since I was first allowed to wander New York alone—which, incidentally, was young. Probably too young, but that’s one of those strange things about growing up here: Your parents tend to forget it’s a city and not just your hometown. I tried to enforce some rules with Hayley, but Hayley wasn’t one of those kids you had to really fence in. She was smart. She knew the entire alphabet before she was two years old, and she had memorized the Manhattan grid by three years later. She was the kind of kid who had the potential to grow up too fast, because despite her soft brown hair and nose freckles, when she opened her mouth, she could hold her own. People would talk to her like an adult. They treated her like one.

Anyway, the game goes like this: Every time I get to an intersection, I cross whatever street has a walk sign. I only generally play when I have a few free hours, because there are times I end up very far from where I started. I’ve lived here my whole life, but even I am surprised by where the game sometimes takes me. That’s the thing about New York: You can own it, it can belong to you, and you’ll still never completely know it.

I’ve never met a single other person who likes to play besides Trevor, and that could have just been because once upon a time he liked doing things I liked doing.

The light changes at Sixty-Fifth and Fifth and I head
downtown, then cross over to Central Park. If you asked me point-blank whether I like living on the Upper East Side, I’d probably tell you no, but the truth is I really enjoy being this close to the park. I love the anonymity of the park, the fact that, even after spending my entire life on this block of Manhattan, I can still get lost in there. Maybe it’s why I play this walking game in the first place: to keep some of that spontaneity new New Yorkers are always going on about. People who come to New York from somewhere else love to say things like “in the time it takes you to cross the street, anything could happen.” The thing people forget, though, is that that’s true about every town. Not just New York.

The light changes at Forty-Seventh Street and I head farther west, over to Sixth Avenue. I catch a light breeze that fails to pull my top off my back. It’s stuck straight on now, and I can feel the beads of sweat gathering at the back of my neck, threatening to drop. You wait all winter for summer in New York, and then it comes and that’s miserable too. In the city, anyway. At the beach the summer is exactly as it should be.

My brain goes on autopilot when I play, and without even realizing it I’m down in the Twenties and crossing over to the Hudson River. There is a nice breeze off the water, I’ll admit it, and I close my eyes, briefly, and take it in. School starts tomorrow. School with the return of Abigail
and Constance and not Claire. I wish she still went there. Last year was miserable without her.

I quit playing the game as soon as I hit the Hudson—it’s too hot not to stay on the water—and decide that I’ll drop in on Claire after all. I was probably always planning on it, but that’s the thing about the walking game: You can’t really plan on anything.

Claire lives on the top floor of 166 Duane Street, one of Tribeca’s chicest buildings, and the doorman lets me up immediately. His name is Jeff Bridges, like the movie star, and he kind of looks like him too. Speaking of movie stars, Claire’s building is crawling with them. SPK used to have a place here, before she split from her husband. I’d see her on the elevator with her kids. She’s smaller in real life. Most movie stars are, I’ve noticed.

I take the elevator to the penthouse and twist my ponytail up into a bun as the doors open. No matter how air-conditioned their place is, it’s always just a little bit too warm in there in the summer and just a little bit too cold in the winter. It’s the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the place. They mirror whatever weather is outside.

I figure Claire is probably upstairs on the deck sunbathing, but I call out for her anyway. You never know.

I’m surprised when she answers me. “Kitchen!” she yells.

The Howards’ house is pretty much the opposite of ours.
While my mother redecorates every eighteen months on the dot, the aesthetic usually vacillates between Italian villa and Parisian glamour. It’s not exactly minimal, if you know what I mean.

Claire’s apartments have always been totally modern—sleek, sharp lines. They redecorate, but when they do it’s always subtle, the kind of thing you don’t notice until months later, when you’re admiring a lamp or picture or whatever and you realize it wasn’t always there. The loft has barely any doors, and it’s all white, interspersed very sparingly with color—shots of fuchsia and green and midnight blue. And of course there are massive photographs everywhere. Their entire apartment looks a little bit like an art gallery, right down to the fact that there is barely even anywhere to sit.

I make my way into the kitchen—a massive stainless-steel industrial affair—and find her standing in front of the refrigerator in a see-through gray sundress that is probably actually lingerie.

“I thought you weren’t coming over,” she says, spinning around and giving me a wide smile.

I smile back. “No you didn’t.”

Claire is so beautiful that it could literally take your breath away. I mean that. When she walked in the Karen Millen show last fall, I think more than a few people had to remember to exhale. She’s all legs and arms and hair—the kind that glides down her back. Fake, yes. But still beautiful. When we’re out
together, even if it’s just on the street or something, nearly every person we pass turns around and looks at her. They think she’s famous, possibly that she’s even someone else, that they’ve seen her on TV or in movies. She once did a guest stint on
The Vampire Diaries
, but that’s all she’s done besides modeling so far. She says she’s too all over the place to commit to a career, but I think she secretly wants to be an actress, and I could totally see her in California. Maybe she doesn’t think she could cut it; I’m not sure. It’s hard to think of Claire having any insecurities.

I shrug. “I felt like walking.”

“You
walked
here?” Despite her five-ten frame Claire never wears anything but heels. Walking more than a block without a driver following her is pretty much her definition of hell.

“You know I do that,” I say, lifting some more strands of damp hair off my neck and securing them back in my bun.

“It’s like a hundred degrees out, though,” she says.

“Not like,” I say. “Actually.”

She opens the fridge, takes out an Evian water, and slides it across the counter to me. I twist off the top and down half the bottle in one swig.

“Where are your parents?” I ask, wiping the back of my hand across my mouth.

“Europe,” she says. “Maybe Italy?” She starts munching on a green apple, then holds it out to me. I shake my head.

“You weren’t invited?” I ask.

It’s very unusual for Claire’s parents to travel without her. When she was away June and July, she was with them. They’ve never cared about pulling her out of school. She once went to school in Prague for a whole month. Her father travels all the time for shoots, but if her mom goes, generally Claire does too.

“Of course I was
invited
,” she says, setting the apple down. “I just didn’t want to go.” She looks at me, her eyebrows raised.

“Still?” I ask.

Claire nods, her eyes wide.

Claire has been hooking up with the front man of Death for Grass, an up-and-coming indie rock band. She’s been seeing him since the Fourth of July, which in Claire time is like decades, and I figured this week they would be calling it quits. Claire isn’t exactly known for her long-term relationships. She’s got a six-week attention span, even when traveling. You could set your watch to it, and right now, the timer is about to go off.