Sunset Park

past four months has saved her close to thirty-five hundred dollars, and for the first time in a long while she can breathe without feeling her chest tighten up on her, without feeling that her lungs are about to explode. Her work is moving forward, she can see the end looming on the far horizon, and she knows that she has the stamina to finish. The window in her room faces the cemetery, and as she writes her dissertation at the small desk positioned directly below that window, she often stares into the quiet of Green-Wood’s vast, rolling ground, where more than half a million bodies are buried, which is roughly the same number as the population of Milwaukee, the city where she was born, the city where most of her family still lives, and she finds it strange, strange and even haunting, that there are as many dead lying under that ground across from her window as the number of people living in the place where her life began.
    She isn’t sorry that Millie is gone. Bing is in shock, of course, still staggered by his girlfriend’s abrupt exit from the house, but she feels the group will be better off without that fractious, redheaded storm of gripes and thoughtless digs, she of the unwashed dinner plates and the blaring radio, who nearly pulverized poor, fragile Ellen with hercomments about her drawings and paintings. A man named Miles Heller will be joining them tomorrow or the day after. Bing says he is hands down the smartest, most interesting person he has ever known. They met when they were teenagers apparently, all the way back in the early years of high school, so their friendship has gone on long enough for Bing to have some perspective on what he is saying—which is rather extreme in her opinion, but Bing is often given to hyperbole, and only time will tell if Señor Heller measures up to this powerful endorsement.
    It is a Saturday, a gray Saturday in early December, and she is the only person in the house. Bing left an hour ago to rehearse with his band, Ellen is spending the day with her sister and the little twins on the Upper West Side, and Jake is in Montclair, New Jersey, visiting his brother and sister-in-law, who have just had a child as well. Babies are popping out all over, in every part of the globe women are huffing and heaving and disgorging fresh battalions of newborns, doing their bit to prolong the human race, and at some point in the not-too-distant future she hopes to put her womb to the test and see if she can’t contribute as well. All that remains is choosing the right father. For close to two years, she felt that person was Jake Baum, but now she is beginning to have doubts about Jake, something seems to be crumbling between them, small daily erosions have slowly begun to mar their patch of ground, and if things continue to deteriorate, it won’t be long before entire shorelines are washed away, before wholevillages are submerged under water. Six months ago, she never would have asked the question, but now she wonders if she has it in her to carry on with him. Jake was never an  expansive person, but there was a gentleness in him that she admired, a charming, ironical approach to the world that comforted her and made her feel they were well matched, comrades under the skin. Now he is pulling away from her. He seems angry and dejected, his once lighthearted quips have taken on a new edge of cynicism, and he never seems to tire of denigrating his students and fellow teachers. LaGuardia Community College has turned into Pifflebum Tech, Asswipe U, and the Institute for Advanced Retardation. She doesn’t like to hear him talk that way. His students are mostly poor, working-class immigrants, attending school while holding down jobs, never an easy proposition as she damned well knows, and who is he to make fun of them for wanting an education? With his writing, it’s more or less the same story. A flood of caustic remarks every time another piece is rejected, an acid contempt for the literary world, an abiding grudge against every editor who has failed to recognize his gifts. She is convinced that he has talent, that his work has been progressing, but it is a small talent in her eyes, and her expectations for his future are equally small. Perhaps that is part of the problem. Perhaps he senses that she doesn’t believe in him enough, and in spite of all the pep talks she has given him, all the long conversations in which she has cited the early struggles of one important writer