Newark, New York
By Charles Joseph Green
It began with an innocent misunderstanding, as precarious social situations often do. His first clue was the questioning look her face began to portray as he answered. Most patrons would have responded to her inquiry by naming a borough or perhaps a specific Manhattan neighborhood, even the equally vague and curt colloquial, “The city”.
The second clue was her peppering of questions regarding his favorite haunts – had he been to Lightness on 14th Street or perhaps Darkness on 41st Street? Where did he brunch on Sundays? He kept smiling politely and swimming through the questions – he wanted to see her again. His conversational focus began to fade though as he considered her young but elegant face; then it came roaring back as “You really should host one of our charity dinners, since you are a New Yorker” penetrated the veil of his consciousness.
When answering her introductory question of custom amidst the clamor of surrounding donors, their tightly formed groups emboldened by established intimacy, he had, in fact, responded with the both honest and accurate “Newark”, but she heard “New York” (at least she didn’t mistake his reply for the dreaded artlessness of “New York City”). He tried hard to imagine the benevolent benefactors of New York, the tireless champions of philanthropy, trekking to the old grittiness of the Gateway City (a gateway to what, he always wondered). In the best of cases, a trip to Penn Station would await them. In the worst of cases, a transfer at Hoboken – he imagined them attempting to search on their phones “why does the PATH smell that way?” only to discover an absence of signal.
Adorned in this emerging sense of shame, he pictured a sitcom character once referring to his Gateway as “the murder capital of the Northeast”; he recalled the local politicians tearing at each other’s limbs like wild dogs, struggling to take credit for the modest level of gentrification the working-class second city had spurred in recent years. And while Philip Roth’s former muse simply constituted affordable rent and a manageable train ride into the city to the son of parents who had not attended “a school in New Haven”, he also understood the heedless construct of these watchful social specters, blindly ascribing identity on the basis of residence. His stomach sank as he turned the tenuous situation over in his mind.
“So, will you do it?”, the elegant face pressed.
Bio: Charles Joseph Green is an emerging fiction writer who crafts stories that focus on the consequential but often unnoticed aspects of ordinary life. He lives in Connecticut and can be followed on Instagram: @fromthedeskoffictionalmusings.
Author’s Note: I spend a lot of time thinking about social misunderstandings and find that topic to be very interesting in general. I used to live in Manhattan and then later New Jersey, so I know those geographies fairly well. I happened to mention the city of Newark in a discussion a while back and it occurred to me how much it sounded like “New York” because I was speaking so quickly. Aspects of the story just came to me in that moment and from there I worked on creating a situation where the misunderstanding would create tension – a gala/fundraiser type of environment, classism, potential embarrassment in front of a romantic interest, etc.
