The big secret of the city of New York is that no matter how much they may try to hide it, white-collar New Yorkers in Manhattan are all out-of-towners. Municipal records show that only twelve people were actually born and raised in Manhattan during the last twenty-five years, and of those, nine are now studio executives in California and the remaining three are pursuing independent research in former Soviet republics. Leora lived in an apartment with two other out-of-towners named Lauren and Melanie, boring people who always answered questions with questions: “I went to SUNY Binghamton? I majored in psychology?” Their jobs were so boring that Leora couldn’t even remember what they did. She vaguely remembered Lauren telling her, tossing her voice up at the end of each sentence, “I keep track of Web sites? For our clients?” Melanie technically did something involving fund-raising, but judging by the number of forwarded e-mail jokes she sent Leora every day from her office account, it seemed unlikely that she ever did any work. Of course, Lauren and Melanie were not the only people Leora lived with on Amsterdam Avenue. During the past three years, she had traded in a roommate at a rate of at least one every nine months as various roommates—all of whom might as well have been named Lauren or Melanie—left to move in with their boyfriends. Survival rates on Amsterdam Avenue were shockingly low.

Leora and Lauren and Melanie slept on futons, ate off of hard plastic picnic plates, hung their posters on the walls using poster gum, and lived their evenings by the light of halogen lamps. They recycled their newspapers, deleted their answering machine messages, and rarely were in the apartment at the same time. They each bought their own food and never even considered consolidating their shopping, preferring somehow the three half gallons of orange juice that clogged up the refrigerator each week. Every woman for herself. Only Lauren bothered to clean the bathroom. There were a few pots and pans, hauled in by various parents on various move-in days and duly bequeathed to the apartment at large upon move-out, but only the spaghetti pot received any kind of regular use. The vast majority of their drinking glasses were mugs embossed with the names of insurance companies. It was as if all of them had signed a secret unwritten lease stipulating that it wasn’t worth buying real forks or getting things framed or having real beds, that this wasn’t real life but rather some kind of dress rehearsal for it, that they wouldn’t be there long. In the meantime, months and seasons and years passed, five different Laurens and Melanies had cycled through the place, and Leora was still eating Parmesan cheese.