“A Cautionary Tale” was first published in the March 23, 1987, issue of The New Yorker. It was collected in Under the 82nd Airborne (1992). It is currently most readily available in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador).

Of the many Deborah Eisenberg stories I cherish, I return most often to “A Cautionary Tale,” her brilliant, acidetched portrait of young people finding their way through an increasingly plutocratic New York. Even among such other gems of her Collected Stories as “The Custodian,” “Twilight of the Superheroes,” and “Some Other, Better Otto,” it shines with what, in the words of one character, “in my opinion is, like, an irrefutably fatal dazzle.”

The story, simple enough in outline, goes like this: Patty, an ambitious, conventional, earnest young woman, moves to New York, subletting a rent-controlled apartment from a devious college friend. Unwittingly she also acquires the absent college friend's burdensome neighbor, disheveled and impoverished Stuart, who is a crucial decade older than Patty. Over the course of a year, as Patty tries and fails to establish herself as a graphic designer, Stuart loses all his freelance jobs, falls behind on his rent, and moves into Patty's apartment. Not what Patty thinks of as boyfriend material, Stuart is brilliant, literary, self-destructively honest, and deeply hypochondriac as well as actually frail. He reads to Patty from Tristes Tropiques when he's in a good mood; quotes Christopher Marlowe after failing to lure her into bed; and—he's a committed socialist— tries to persuade her that her desires for success are unworthy.

Comic scenes ensue; also tragic scenes; also unbearably touching recognitions and reversals. A restaurant owner offers inexperienced Patty a waitressing job; when the restaurant catches on, Patty finds herself making money and meeting interesting people. Hapless Stuart sinks further, while a wealthy couple with co-op ambitions creeps into the upstairs apartment. Meanwhile such fabulously funny and heartbreaking minor characters as Mrs. Jorgenson, who has a habit of falling asleep on the hall floor; building superintendent Mr. Martinez, who longs for the family left at home in Colombia; and Ginger, “the gorgeous but moody prima of a troupe of huge male dancers,” play their crucial roles in the plot. Patty and Stuart grow further apart, and eventually part.