by Robyn Sisman
By the time they left the bar, the predicted rain had arrived, snarling the streets with traffic and shrouding the city in a gray gloom. They parted at the subway station. Lloyd traveled home on autopilot, staring into space. The melons were still there at the corner store, but he didn’t even notice them.
When the elevator opened at his floor, Lloyd could smell cooking, a rich concoction of onions and herbs. At least someone was having fun. He took out his keys, opened his front door and stopped in surprise. The antique table that Betsy’s mother had given them was set for two. Candlelight flickered on their best silver and crystal. In the wine cooler was a bottle of champagne.
“Surprise!” The swinging doors to the kitchen flipped open and Betsy emerged, beaming as if it were somebody’s birthday. She was all dressed up in a silk blouse and earrings, hair held back in a black velvet band.
Lloyd felt a stab of irritation. The last thing he needed was a farewell dinner when there was nothing to celebrate.
“Poor baby, you’re all wet.” Betsy hurried across to help him out of his raincoat. She wrinkled her nose. “Pooh, you smell of old ash-trays.” But she smiled to show she forgave him.
Lloyd let her carry his coat off to the bathroom, watching her smooth brown legs. His heart cramped with guilt and affection. Why hadn’t he called to tell her he wasn’t going to London?
“I’m sorry, I should have called you,” he said when she came back. “There’s been a change of plan.” He sat down heavily at the table, rattling the silver. “London’s off.”
Betsy’s smile only widened. “No, it isn’t,” she trilled. She picked up a piece of paper from the telephone table and waved it in front of his eyes. “Look.”
Bewildered, Lloyd took the note. On it there was a name—Susannah Wilding—and a London address.
“They’re sending someone else,” Betsy explained. “Sheri called here a couple of hours ago. No one knew where you were.”
“Sheri?” Why Sheri?
“She told me about that awful man in London. I was so shocked, Lloyd. What a thing to do, just to leave everyone up in the air like that.”
“But they’re sending someone else?” Lloyd hardly dared to believe her. “I can still go?”
“Apparently this Susannah person leaped at the opportunity, which means her own apartment in London will be available. It’s all working out beautifully.”
Lloyd felt a balloon of happiness swell in his heart. He was going to London after all. Kensington, Chelsea, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s—he checked the piece of paper—“Islington,” wherever that was. He pictured a white stucco house, big old-fashioned windows with a view of trees, maybe a real fireplace. Suddenly he could hardly wait to get out of this boxy little prison, with its mean ration of sunlight.
“But wait a minute.” Lloyd had spotted the fatal flaw. “If I’m staying in her apartment, where’s she going to live over here?”
“Aha.” Betsy’s eyes sparkled. “That’s the best news of all. I’ve been trying to fix this for weeks, but I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” She came over and sat herself on Lloyd’s lap. “You know what a mean old tightwad I’ve been recently?” she murmured, smoothing his hair. “Well, what do you think I’ve been saving up for?”
Before Lloyd could answer, Betsy jumped off his lap and flung out her arms triumphantly. “The English woman can stay right here!” Face glowing, she clasped her hands together. “Oh, Lloyd, isn’t it wonderful? I’m coming with you!”
Chapter Four
Suze dragged her overweight suitcase out of the air-conditioned terminal and paused as the steamy air outside smacked her in the face: American air, heavy with heat and car fumes, peppered with city grime, rich with the sound of uninhibited American voices. She took a deep breath. It felt marvelous. America! Suze thrilled. Cadillacs, Badlands, Dorothy Parker, gangsters, motels, Gone With the Wind. Spellings like “nite” and “kleen.” Tanned lifeguards who swept back their bleached hair, gave a knee-dissolving smile and drawled, “Coming to the beach party?”
Beyond the tangle of concrete ramps and fly-overs she glimpsed a strip of sulphurous sky, hazy with the afterglow of a hot summer weekend. Out there somewhere was New York City, waiting for her. She loaded herself up again and stumbled toward the queue of taxis. They were bright yellow, crouched low over scarred hubcaps, just as she had known they would be. She took her place in line behind a pair of fiftysomething women in sunglasses.
“I don’t know what my shrink is going to say when I tell her about Venice,” one confided nasally, at a decibel level that an English person might have used to address a conference.
“So don’t tell her,” retorted her friend. “What are you? A telephone-sex line? Let her find her own Latin lover, she should be so lucky.”
When Suze’s taxi rattled to a halt in front of her, no one got out to help her with her luggage. Perhaps customs were different here. Or there could be a dead body in the trunk. Awkwardly, Suze maneuvered everything into the backseat, climbed in and pulled the door shut with the piece of string provided. A rusting chrome plate showed where the handle had fallen off.
She shook back her hair imperiously. “Seventy-second Street,” she commanded.
There was a silence. “What street?” the driver asked eventually. At least that’s what it sounded like. The man was obviously a foreigner; perhaps he didn’t understand English accents. Suze repeated the address.
The driver took his hands off the steering wheel and twisted to face her. Dark eyes glittered through the grille. She hoped he wasn’t a serial killer. “Lady, I need avenue. I need East or West. Seventy-second, you know, this is very long street.”
“Oh.” Suze scrabbled in her capacious handbag—hairbrush, Evian face spray, trashy paperback, cigarettes, eye mask. At the bottom, among the sweepings of English change, she found Lloyd Rockwell’s fraying fax and read out his detailed directions. She hadn’t paid much attention to them when they arrived, thinking him over-fussy. Now she understood that they served a purpose. “I’m English,” she apologized, as the taxi lurched forward. “This is my first time in New York. Where are you from?”
“Bosnia.”
Suze felt her mind fog over with undigested geopolitical data. “Ah.” She nodded, feeling it wisest to leave the subject there.
The cab sped onward, left the ramp with a terrific wallop that bounced Suze right out of her seat and cruised out to join the highway. Suze peered eagerly through the window, reading the overhead signs with their half-familiar names—Queens, Triboro, Flushing—printed white on green in a spiky, unfamiliar typeface. Small wooden houses painted gray or green or brick red lined the road, each with its own porch and unfenced patch of worn grass, some with a flagpole from which the Stars and Stripes drooped in humid folds.
Well, every city had to have suburbs. Come to think of it, visitors to London had Hounslow to contend with on the slow crawl into the center. Suze hugged herself at such an arresting thought. This was what her trip was all about: new experiences, new thoughts. She would return a new person—sophisticated, mature, nicer, smarter, suntanned.
Suze subsided happily into the ripped upholstery. Thank you, Julian Jewel. She had never much liked him, certainly not as much as he liked himself. He probably cried out his own name during lovemaking. For weeks Julian had been poncing on about “my secondment to the States,” as if the president himself had found America impossible to govern without Jewel at his side. In fact, he was just another jumped-up copywriter with an ego bigger than his underpants. He was welcome to his car and his six-figure salary. Suze knew she had the best of the bargain.
Not that she was here to enjoy herself. Harry Fox had called her again this morning and given her a stern lecture. This was not a holiday, he had warned. Her job was to observe how the sister company worked, to get an overview of the New York advertising scene and most of all to soak up American culture and values so that she could contribute intelligently to the management of global accounts. He
reminded her of the agency that had spent megabucks on the launch of a cosmetics brand in the Far East, only to discover that the product name meant “fart” in Japanese. She was to write a report on her return. Suze said yes to everything, too excited to be intimidated. She had already rung up practically everyone she knew, casually dropping news of “my New York business trip” into the conversation. The reactions had been intensely gratifying.
“So why did you choose me?” she had asked Fox coyly, pushing her luck.
“No one else was free.”
The first person she had told was her father, whom she had dragged to the telephone from his darkroom to hear the news. The two of them were the “artists” in the family. It was from him that Suze had inherited her extraordinary hair—thick and heavy and the color of the very best vintage marmalade, and secretly Suze knew that she was her father’s favorite. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t something either of them would ever acknowledge in so many words, but there it was, a continuous source of warmth and confidence that glowed within her. It had been wonderful to hear him shouting his enthusiasm down the phone and making her write down the names of his favorite New York hot spots.
An irritated muttering from the front of the cab interrupted her thoughts. Suze saw that the traffic had become thick with weekenders trickling home to face another Monday morning. Curious, she stared into the cars that stop-started in the lane beside her. They were dusty and dented, crammed with dogs, golf clubs, tennis rackets, children, even small sailing boats that hung casually off open tail-gates. Young men in baseball caps crooked tanned arms out of open windows. One woman with blond hair cascading over a skimpy T-shirt had folded up her legs to rest bare brown feet on the dashboard. Here, Suze felt, were people who knew how to have a good time. Hooray: no more excruciating dinner parties.
She patted the bloated suitcase beside her. If there was one thing she knew about New York it was that you had to be hipper than hip. In her case were outfits to knock them dead. Suze had spent all of Saturday shopping and getting her hair cut, intending to spend Sunday morning cleaning her flat. But friends had lured her out for a champagne-and-pizza send-off, and she hadn’t woken up until midday. Such was her fragile state that it was as much as she could do to pack. Curiously, the flight had revived her. She had eaten and drunk everything offered, watched the action movie, then fallen asleep. When she awoke the plane was already circling over the ocean, ready to land, though miraculously it was still only seven in the evening. The cheering thought occurred to Suze that she was actually five hours younger than when she had set out from chilly London.
She glanced out the cab window and felt her heart leap. There at last, rearing out of nowhere, stretching as far as the eye could see, were the jutting towers of the Manhattan skyline, dark against a fiery sunset. No photograph or film clip or ad had prepared her for the magnificent reality, or for the almost religious exaltation it inspired. This was how an early desert traveler must have felt on seeing the Great Pyramids rise inexplicably from the empty sands. In the evening light, with its monolithic blocks cluttered against a bonfire sky, New York had the mythic quality of a necropolis built by a race of giants. Even as she watched, entranced, the road veered away from the view. Now the cab was stopping at some kind of tollbooth. Suze heard the jingle of coins, then the car sped down a slope between the criss-cross girders of the bridge, and she was plunged into the shadowed canyons of the city.
The taxi cruised down broad, straight avenues and shot across narrower side streets, progressing in sharp, angular movements like a knight across a chessboard—forward and across, across and forward—quite unlike the meandering motion of London travel. There were people out on the streets, walking, roller-skating, lounging at restaurant tables, their body language bold and expansive. Neon signs blazed brashly: PSYCHIC READER. NAILS. FALAFEL. MUFFINS. LIQUOR. DRUGS. SOUVLAKI. VITAMINS. The buzz was exhilarating. At length the taxi slowed, then came to stop outside an apartment building with an awning over the entrance. Suze paid off the driver, adding a gigantic tip to preclude abuse or knifing, and stacked her luggage on the pavement. Clammy air closed about her like a vise, gluing her clothes to her skin. For the first time she felt a qualm of anxiety, alone in a strange city as darkness fell.
“Ms. Wilding?” a voice inquired at her side.
Turning, she saw a powerfully built young man in uniform, with Prince Charles ears and a wide smile. “Yes,” she acknowledged, with a rush of relief.
“My name’s Raymond. Mr. Rockwell told me to look out for you,” he said importantly, stowing all her possessions about his person as if they were toys. She followed him through a dark lobby, and together they crammed into the small metal lift. As it rose in a stately fashion, Suze began to worry about how much she should tip him, mentally doubled the amount, and finally quadrupled it. They stopped at the ninth floor, and Raymond led the way to a wooden door studded with locks. He opened it, carried her bags inside and turned on the light.
Suze’s first impression was of a spanking, spotless tidiness that was faintly intimidating. To one side of the room was a large window screened by venetian blinds. Dumping her handbag, she walked over, pried the slats apart and found herself staring straight into an apartment in the block opposite. A couple were eating dinner at the window, framed in a little square of yellow light, like a miniature stage. She could even make out the pepper grinder on the table. Suze wondered who they were, what they were talking about, whether they were happy.
“All set?” Raymond asked.
“Yes. Sorry.” Hurrying back to him, Suze found her plastic wallet of virgin dollar bills, extracted a twenty and handed it to him with a smile. “Thank you for looking after me so well.”
“No problem.” Raymond grinned, trousering the note. “Here are the keys. I’ll be seeing you.”
As soon as he had gone, Suze kicked off her shoes and explored. It didn’t take long. The living room had white walls, parquet floors and pretty pastel fabrics that evoked the word “mumsy” in Suze’s mind. One end had been turned into a study area, with bookshelves, a leather club-like sofa and a sleek, modern desk with a fax and a computer on it—a fancy new Mac, she noticed. Not bad. At the other end, by the window, on a large table covered with luxuriant potted plants, she found a plastic folder inscribed with her name. Suze opened it, saw the title, “Household Hints” and decided to save it for later.
A bite had been taken out of the living room to create a tiny kitchen, which one entered via swinging doors, like a saloon in a Western. Inside were orderly rows of jars, polished steel fixtures and work surfaces so clean you could have performed heart surgery on them. Suze opened the wardrobe-size refrigerator and found that someone had thoughtfully left her milk, eggs, butter and a squat carton of orange juice. Suppressing a guilty pang about the contents of her own fridge in London, she returned to the living room and followed a narrow corridor lined with books. At the end was a bedroom, small and neat, dominated by a double bed with one of those flouncy things around the bottom Suze could never remember the name for. The window had the same view as the living room, and Suze noted that the couple had now disappeared and the light in their apartment had faded to a blue TV flicker. Beyond the bedroom was a bathroom, a little haven of American-style luxury with a glassed-in shower and piles of thick towels. Suze resolved that she would unpack, wash her hair, check out the TV and go to bed early to beat the jet lag. She had to be at work in twelve hours’ time.
A wave of fatigue rolled over her. She dragged off her jacket and lay down on the bed, staring into the semi-darkness. Around her, the room seemed to rise and fall, as if she were on a ship. She stroked the quilted material of the unfamiliar bedspread, soft under her fingertips. Her body pressed down into the contours of a stranger’s bed. Lloyd Rockwell, creative director: what was he like, she wondered? Suze had been out whenever he called, so they had communicated in a flurry of e-mails. His were straightforward, practical, rather formal—probably typed by some secretary with a bun.
She imagined a hand-shaking executive in his fifties, with an orthodontically perfect wife wearing one of those blazers with little gold buttons at the cuff. What was her name—Beth, Betty, Becky? Suze yawned. Her eyes closed. From the street below a medley of car horns and sirens drifted up. Beneath it were the bass notes of thrumming machinery and the roar and rumble of a city in full swing—the most exciting city in the world. She pictured poor old Bridget and Tobe, pacing the hall with a screaming baby draped over one shoulder, and smiled. Who said it was no fun being single?
Of course the credit-card killjoys would catch up with her eventually, demanding retribution for her shopping binge, but by then anything could have happened. She could have been talent-spotted and asked to redesign Cosmo. She could be living in a loft with a rich filmmaker. This was New York, after all, where people came to rein-vent themselves. Nobody knew her here. She had no past, no connections, no responsibilities. She could do absolutely anything she liked.
Chapter Five
The small house was of dirty yellow brick, packed tight in a row of similar buildings—late Victorian, Lloyd guessed. Purple weeds rioted in the narrow front garden behind black iron railings. Above the slate roof a jumble of chimney-pots and television aerials showed dimly against the louring evening sky.
“Picturesque, huh?” Lloyd gave Betsy an encouraging smile.
Outside the front door a tumble of black plastic garbage sacks awaited collection.
“Positively Dickensian.”
“Did I give you the keys?”
Betsy rolled her eyes. A soft rain began to fall.
