Free While the City Slept by Eli Sanders Page A

wearing boots with round toes and “two-inch, chunky” heels. Teresa tells him she’s had “a few” beers. Given a Breathalyzer, she blows a .151, which means she’s had more than a few. She’s arrested and later specifies it was four to five Bud Lights, consumed earlier that evening with friends at a gay dance club in Seattle called R Place. She was trying to get back to her condo in Renton. Her occupation: “Currently unemployed.” Paperwork processed, convertible impounded, she’s dropped off at a Denny’s where a friend picks her up.
    The arrest shakes Teresa. This is not how she thinks of herself. She gets a large fine, does forty hours of community service at a local chapter of the National Federation of the Blind and with a program called Books to Prisoners. By the time she’s done, her relationship with Amy isover.

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    S undays, Ann and Jennifer attend a progressive service in lower Manhattan. “She dragged me to Broadway shows,” Ann says. “And I dragged her to church.” Jennifer joins the church gospel choir, her Jewishness no obstacle because she’s fundamentally ecumenical, eager to accept community and connection wherever they present. Ann appreciates this, likes that Jennifer is open and spiritual. “Which is kind of a low bar to set,” Ann says, “but when you’re a lesbian, you think that nobody’s ever going to want to come to church with you.”
    What Jennifer likes about Ann is that she’s a good writer, smart, well educated, and even-keeled, and “she had that heart quality.” This is what Jennifer says about people she deeply connects with. They have a heart quality.
    It’s the first serious relationship either of them has been in. “It was like the butt of every lesbian joke, actually,” Ann says. “You know, like, three hundred fifty square feet, and two lesbians and four cats.” They’d each brought two. Ann is working at the World Trade Center for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Jennifer is working at Update Graphics, where she helps place creative temp workers at advertising firms, fashion houses, financial behemoths, all swollen with excess cash from the tech bubble. When people ask Jennifer why she isn’t doing theater anymore, she tells them, “I just need a break.” Privately, she feels her voice hasn’t fully returned, worries about her weight, begins realizing she can’t deal with the financial insecurity of auditioning full-time. It’s too much like thoseearly years at the yellow house, the hand-to-mouth existence, the food stamps, the beginning of a downward spiral always close. Plus, desk work is fine. One day, she tosses her musical theater song sheets in the trash.
    Ann wonders what’s going on. “Here she had these dreams, and she didn’t audition,” Ann says. “It was hard for me, because she clearly had the talent and the ability.”
    —
    One morning, Norbert Leo Butz is on the stoop of their Park Slope building. He lives there, too, one of those New York coincidences. Looks familiar to Jennifer, so she strikes up a conversation, and when Norbert tells her he’s an actor, she asks what he’s working on. “He was like, ‘Oh, I’m in
Rent,
’” she says. Jennifer has a friend from the conservatory who’s in
Rent,
too, playing his love interest. So they talk quickly about their mutual acquaintance, and then Norbert heads off into the day. She never sees him at the building again, because he moves out shortly afterward.
    —
    On September 11, 2001, Ann has just quit her job at the World Trade Center and has begun a new job as a financial planner. With the towers where she used to work in a smoldering heap, she quits her new job, too, and enrolls in seminary. Her relationship with Jennifer hasn’t been working for some time, both of them know it, and with a reminder not to waste time still being picked through across the East River, they split.

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    T eresa, needing work, takes a job as a barista at a Starbucks in Seattle. One day, John asks