City of Likes by Jenny Mollen
Genres: Fiction Other
Book Preface
I shot up in bed, convinced that I’d just felt a cockroach tiptoe across my forehead. Repulsed, I raked my fingers over my scalp and ran my tongue along the inside of my mouth. “Oh my god!” I screamed. “I think I might have eaten one!”
“You didn’t eat one!” My husband called out from behind the bathroom door.
I switched on the light and scanned my bedside table, expecting to see a chorus line of roaches staring back at me. There was a flicker of movement behind the pile of childhood development books I’d spent the last six months forcing myself to read. It was as if the pests were taking a short break to change costumes before remounting their attack. “Iliya, this is insane! We can’t stay here.”
“It’s here or my mother’s place,” he calmly reminded me.
“How are those our only two options?”
According to the alarm clock, it was almost seven in the morning, but from where I sat, in our windowless tomb of a bedroom, it could just as easily have been the middle of the night. I raised my water bottle and slammed it hard onto my nightstand, determined to draw blood.
“You’re not gonna get them,” Iliya said. “They’re too fast.”
“I don’t want to get them! I want to call an exterminator!”
“You can’t call anyone. We’re not on the lease. We’re not even supposed to be here.”
“How are you so mellow about this? We are living in a roach-infested apartment with two children! This isn’t something we can just wait on.” I got up and stomped toward the bathroom door and flung it open.
Iliya was leaning into the mirror, flossing his teeth in his neurotic way, until his gums bled. “Cockroaches don’t hurt children,” he slurred, then spat into the sink before turning toward me. With his angular cheekbones and piercing blue eyes, he looked like one of those male models from a high-end cologne commercial. The kind of guy who says nothing until the last moment, when he locks eyes with the camera and whispers something nonsensical like, “Set your heart on fire with ice.”
I folded my arms and glared. “I’m calling Ken.”
“You’ve already called him five times,” he said. “You look psycho.”
“I am psycho!” I exclaimed.
“Besides, Ken’s on location.”
“In Toronto! That’s like five minutes from here.” I turned around and headed back into the bedroom, closing the bathroom door on his annoyingly Photoshopped body.
“By what, rocket ship?” Iliya laughed as he caught up with me.
“He’s busy shooting. You know actors. Give the guy a minute.”
“So now he’s all Daniel Day-Lewis and too deep in his craft to deal with a roach infestation at his apartment? Is that really going to be your defense?”
“Ken is a great guy and he’s letting us stay here for free,”
Iliya said for the millionth time. “You don’t even want to know what the roaches look like in Coney Island.”
Iliya was right. I didn’t want to know what the roaches looked like in Coney Island, nor did I want to know what his mother looked like without clothing. I watched him help himself to two identical black T-shirts in a basketful of clean laundry on the floor.
When Chelsea House offered Iliya the promotion, they expected him to jump without thinking twice. And he did. We all did. Head of global membership was a coveted position, one that he’d been gunning for since his early days with the club. It was, according
to Iliya, “an opportunity too good to refuse,” even if the bump in pay wasn’t that substantial. The company provided us with a small relocation fee, enough to cover the money we lost breaking our lease in LA and throwing our furniture into storage. But there were still hundreds of things to figure out. Iliya was tasked with finding us a temporary place to stay while I focused my attention on getting our tuition back from our son’s preschool and enrolling him in another one, selling our car on Facebook, and setting up goodbye playdates and drinks with every friend, co-worker and dog groomer we’d known for the past decade.
I sunk back onto the edge of the bed. “I should have known this was too good to be true. Wait a minute,” I said, redirecting my anger. “ You should have known this was too good to be true.” I watched Iliya study the two T-shirts and pretend not to hear me.
“A spacious loft in Tribeca for just as long as we needed it? Of course, that’s not a real thing! If Los Angeles taught us anything it’s to never believe the empty promises of actors.” I flopped backwards on the bed, then remembered the roaches. I sprung back up and gave myself a thorough TSA patdown. “Why would Ken do this to us?” I wailed.
“Hey. Ken is a good friend who’s worked his ass off for the current success he’s having, so I’m not going shit-talk him. His show is doing better than any other show on the History Channel.”
Iliya was proud of his former AA sponsor. Ken was the only person I’d ever seen Iliya have a phone call with that lasted longer than five minutes.
“Not to be a total buzzkill, but it’s about the Oregon Trail.” I couldn’t resist. “Eventually everybody loses an axel or dies of dysentery.” Iliya didn’t respond, most likely because he had no idea what I was talking about. His education was cut short at age fifteen, when he escaped the antisemitism of Ukraine and moved to Brooklyn with his mother and little sister. He never ended up re-enrolling in school. In order to help support the family, he went to work right away, promoting clubs and restaurants around Manhattan. And now, all these years later, he was back where he’d started.
Iliya’s plan was always to save up enough money so that he could open his own restaurant. It was going to be high-end and Russian, a spruced-up version of Veselka, his favorite East Village joint.
He’d been nurturing this dream ever since we met at Geiko, a Japanese steakhouse in Hollywood where all of the waitresses were forced to dress like horny geishas and where we both worked.
I let off a sigh. “Tell me why I agreed to do this again?”
“You didn’t like Los Angeles either,” Iliya reminded me. “You hated the traffic.” He was speaking as if we were two octogenarians reflecting on a life we’d lived centuries ago instead of one we’d abandoned just three weeks prior.
“Everyone hates the traffic, Iliya!”
He winced. “And the endless sun.”
“That’s just you. I have nothing against the sun. In fact, I like sunshine, and palm trees, and nice people who say ‘excuse me’
when they bump into you on the street.”
“There’s a difference between nice and fake. And how many of those ‘nice’ California people ever offered you a job? The kind of job you deserve?” He tilted his head. “You have to believe me.
This city is going to change your life.”
It was true, my life in LA hadn’t been perfect. I felt trapped in my air-conditioned apartment in the valley. My friends were either singles who suggested we meet for dinner at 9:30 p.m. or new moms who lived all the way out in Brentwood and refused to cross the 405 for playdates. Which meant I was alone ninety percent of the time. And while I wanted to get back to work, I couldn’t get hired to save my life. I’d only recently started trying to find a job, after Roman had turned four, but it felt as though the entire industry had changed in the few years I’d been sitting on the bench. New platforms were popping up quicker than I could download them, let alone figure out how to optimize them.
New York was the biggest marketing hub in the world. The city was bursting with energy and opportunity. And not just professional ones. Whenever we visited, it felt like a giant cruise ship where I could be a parent upstairs but also disappear downstairs to a life that was entirely my own. In theory, it was everything I’d been looking for. But the reality was already proving to be different from the postcards.
“Which of these shirts do you like better?” Iliya asked, switching gears.
I stared at him blankly. “Is this a trick question?”
“No. Why?” Iliya looked at me with that foreign-guy cluelessness that he’d perfected.
I shook my head. “They’re the exact same shirt.”
“No they aren’t.”
“Umm. Yeah.” I showed him the matching Gap tags.
“One is more washed. It’s a different vibe.”
“Feels like the same vibe to me,” I muttered. “I guess go with whichever makes you feel richer and skinnier?”
“I’m already skinny.” Sometimes my humor was wasted on him.
While Iliya pulled one of the shirts over his head, I marveled at the body of the man I happened to marry. Towering over me at six feet three inches, Iliya was more masculine than any guy I’d ever been into. Which wasn’t saying a lot, as the guys I dated before him turned out to be gay. Iliya gave me a warm smile. “It’s going to be okay, Meg. This isn’t our new home. It’s just until we can afford our own place.” He kneeled down to kiss me. “I gotta hurry,” he said. “Saro is flying in from London.” Saro was the CEO and founder of Chelsea House, someone Iliya emulated and feared in equal parts. “I’m still taking Roman today, right?”
Iliya was waiting to see if I would offer to take our son to school.
“It’s your turn,” I said, trying to stand my ground. I’d taken the kid to the last ten drop-offs. “Speaking of Saro, I saw that Chelsea House is hiring someone to run their website. Did you know about that?”
“I didn’t,” he said, averting his eyes. “Have you seen my wallet?” I grabbed a pair of jeans sitting on top of the dresser and fished out a dilapidated Velcro billfold. Iliya had used the same wallet since he’d turned twenty-one and refused to replace it. He claimed it kept him humble. It also served as a reminder that he hadn’t yet reached his financial goal. Over the years, people would give him new ones, which he would graciously accept then cast off into one of his junk drawers.
“Well, they are,” I said, my voice slightly quavering. “And I’d kill that position.”
Iliya held up his hand and shook his head. “You don’t want to run somebody’s website. And you know how I feel about us working together.”
“But we met working together.”
“And you hated me.”
It wasn’t until after Iliya fired me that we ended up getting together. And it wasn’t until after our first child that I forgave him for firing me. “But we’re stronger now, and we need the money, and I am good. Really good.”
“You’re better than good,” he said. “Running a website isn’t what you were born to do. You’re a writer.”
“A copywriter,” I corrected him. “There’s a difference.”
“And Chelsea House is cheap. You need to find a job that pays real money. Otherwise, what is the point of you going back to work?”
I balled my hands into fists. “The point is that we can’t afford to live in New York if both of us aren’t working. And if I keep
hearing the Paw Patrol theme song all day every day, I’m going to have a psychotic breakdown.”
“Summer is over,” he said. “Roman is back in school.”
“Well Felix isn’t,” I reminded him. “And you’re missing the point!”
“Look, I want you to be happy too,” he said. “I just don’t like the optics. I barely know this New York team. Imagine me going in today telling them that they needed to hire my wife, who hasn’t had a job in nearly five years.”
“Wow.” My voice cracked. “That was really low.”
“I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. It’s not that I don’t think you’re qualified. I just think it comes off as nepotism.”
“Said the guy who works for a glorified fraternity,” I shot back.
I found it absurd that Iliya, a dude who could not have been less moved by popularity, was the gatekeeper to one of most sought-after membership clubs in the country. He didn’t disagree, not deep down anyway.
But he was a hard worker. And if he didn’t want to lose his job, it was best not to think too hard about Chelsea House and all that it stood for. I hated the late nights, the drunken douchebags, the posers who spent all day scrolling their own websites on their laptops, the married women who were always slipping Iliya their room keys. I even hated the maddeningly hot waitstaff who waited twenty minutes before asking if you wanted a glass of water.
But running the club’s membership gave Iliya a cachet that no previous job ever had. People kowtowed to him. The club’s younger members invited him to their weddings and the older ones to their children’s bar mitzvahs. It was silly, but it felt good. And hopefully it would prove beneficial when he finally decided to do something on his own.
“You’re going to get a job you love,” Iliya said. “You had an interview yesterday, you have more today. You’re doing everything right. You don’t need me to hook you up with nonsense.”
“Thanks,” I said, wishing he could see how lost and obsolete I felt.
“You are going to be more than fine.” Iliya kissed me on my forehead like I was a child. I hated when he did that.
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