The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  There was a ghost there of how it used to be between us. We left the department and walked by the university bar. ‘Not there,’ Ralph said, not even turning his eyes towards the building. We kept walking, up the hill, into Newtown, and wound up in a small place where we sat at the very end of the bar in dim light. It was happy hour, two for one, and we drank tall red drinks made with berries and flavoured vodka.

  For one happy hour we actually found things to laugh about. We were buoyed by our sense of escape from the funeral gathering. There was a pause after we got the second round of drinks. The place was filling up and at a table behind us a woman was telling a story that grew more and more hilarious to her friends. Ralph lit a cigarette and looked at me out of the corner of his eye, smiling.

  ‘What do you think is so funny over there?’ he asked, and exhaled.

  ‘I don’t know. All I could hear was something about her not being completely naked.’

  He gave a pretend shudder. ‘Let’s be glad we can’t hear the rest.’

  We were pushed closer together at our end of the bar and more people crowded around us. My knees touched his. He recrossed his legs so that one of them touched mine.

  We didn’t talk about Ingrid. He told me a lot about what he was reading and listening to – too much opera, from the sound of it. I told him how it was going at the bookshop and my plans for law school the next year. He had plenty of his own ideas about what I should work on. We were a little pocket of intimacy there in the crowd. I couldn’t stop reflecting on the strangeness and the familiarity of it – silently, to myself, not letting it show, not wanting to break the spell.

  His hand brushed the flesh of my leg, just above the knee. It stayed there a second too long. My head swam. Behind the bar the blender whizzed, mashing up fruit. The two bartenders moved quickly, expressionless, filling glasses, pouring from bottles, taking money. It no longer felt like a bubble of intimacy around us. Instead I felt exposed to the air, as though every eye there could see straight through my skin to the wrestling blood inside. My breath was tight. I reflected with disgust on the conventional checklist of symptoms presented by my nervous system. The embarrassment came back too, of unrequited love gone on too long.

  Ralph stood, crushed his cigarette out in an ashtray in front of him. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.

  I finished my drink. When I rose and put my bag on my shoulder he was there again at my side. We left together, pushing our way out through a mass of people. The air outside was cool and sharp with smog, the sound of traffic loud on the street. Streetlights shone down.

  ‘Are you alright?’ he asked as he finished shrugging on his jacket. He rubbed his eyes, lifting his glasses up for a second, and looked at me. ‘I’ve found that it hits me, sometimes – at different times.’ he said, haltingly.

  It took me a moment to realise that he was talking about Ingrid. He was talking about grief. Was he giving me an alibi? Was he serious? I despaired, and the rage in me went quiet.

  ‘Sorry,’ he offered.

  ‘Just stop talking now.’

  He stopped. He was never going to kiss me.

  ‘I’ll phone you. Here – are you going home?’ His hand was in his wallet. ‘Here – I’m sorry – let me get you a taxi.’

  He was putting money in my hand, and turned away quickly, scanning the traffic, and raised his hand for a cab. It was like a bizarre rehearsal of old times. Putting me in a cab, quickly pressing a note into my hand the nights he didn’t crash on my couch or I didn’t end up at his flat. He always paid, for everything, once he knew that I didn’t have money like he did. Always swiftly, money out for the food or drinks or fare or tickets before I could open my own purse. At first I had snapped at him about it, but it made him even more painfully embarrassed, which was worse, so I gave in and tried to be graceful about it. I had tried to make up for it by giving him books and other things when I had the chance. Free video rental.

  It was all confusing, and for a moment I wanted to cross the street and walk down the several winding blocks to my old house, the terrace with the cool hallway. Home seemed a long way away.

  Ralph looked close to tears. He put his arms around me, his mouth on my hair against my ear. His arms were thin. Oh, let this be the end, I thought. The taxi had driven on but a bus sighed to a stop beside us. He was about to say something. I pulled away from him and stepped onto the bus. The doors closed. There were two fifty-dollar notes clutched in my fingers.

  ‘You’ll need something smaller than that, love,’ the driver said in a gravelly voice and turned the massive steering wheel around. I opened my bag, pushed the notes down inside and felt among the loose change settled there along the bottom for my fare.

  Part Two

  13.

  The sky was a dirty grey as my cab drove through Brooklyn from the airport to the city, speeding along expressways lined with tenement apartment buildings, stalling for long minutes at the entrances to the bridge. There was a moment when the skyline came into focus – it hadn’t been visible from my side of the plane as we had descended – and the line of skyscrapers seemed to reflect the grey of the sky with a darkly glittering sheen. I looked right down to the end of the island and saw the emptiness. It was the end of the day. It felt like night. The East River showed through the slats and cables of the bridge. Grey, grey. Banks of clouds seemed to lower themselves further. A ray of sunlight made its way through and hit the closed windows of a building as we passed over onto the island, turning them into squares of blinding gold.

  Ralph had written the address of his uncle’s apartment on a piece of paper, now folded into my pocket, a street just off Sixth Avenue in the Village. It was an area I knew well from the time I had spent here in the months after I finished high school, when I had practically lived for a while in the dorm room of a student at NYU. His room mate was rarely there, always staying with his girlfriend who had her own apartment in the East Village. When they finally broke up he was back at the dormitory, sulking and kicking cupboard doors closed. The student and I didn’t last long after that.

  The air smelled like evening – a soft dampness, grey like all the rest of it – when I got out of the cab. The apartment was in a tall, red-brick corner building set back from the street by a thin strip of garden, white blinds hanging closed in the ground-floor windows. I looked up and saw terraced levels on the higher floors. A delivery guy was coming out of the heavy glass front doors and he held one open for me. I dragged my suitcase through. The door of the first apartment inside to the left was open – the delivery guy had come from there – and a woman paused in the doorway, looking at me. She held a brown paper grocery bag in her arm.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Welcome.’

  It was hard to tell how old she was. Her hair was white. She was small, wearing a dark green dress. The interior of her apartment was hidden from view; it was her closed blinds I had seen from the street.

  ‘Hi,’ I replied. ‘I’m staying … um … upstairs.’

  ‘Good.’ She sounded pleased. ‘I’ll see you later on then.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The floor started to tilt beneath me like the plane turning on its side as it came in over the city. Her door closed quietly. I wondered who she was and whether she’d known I was coming or was just being randomly welcoming. There were two lifts set into the far wall. The button glowed red and machinery creaked in the distance. After a long time waiting I looked over at the stairwell, speckled granite stairs. The apartment was on the fifth floor. The lift came.

  The key slid into the lock on the apartment door easily and turned. Relief. The door opened smoothly, a large slab of dark, solid wood.

  The air inside the hallway felt stale and hot. There was a bedroom to my right. I heaved the suitcase in and set it down, glad to be rid of the weight. One corner of the room was filled with a bed made up with white sheets. White bed, white walls. Wooden floor. A tall, dark dresser. A square armchair, up
holstered in a pastel colour. I waited as my eyes got used to the shape of the room in the growing dark. A small amount of light filtered in through French doors. When I opened them the sound of the street below poured in with a rush along with the damp, soft air. It felt like rain was waiting there.

  The doors opened onto a small paved terrace scattered with plants growing in pots. There was a long cane lounge against the wall of the building and in front of it a long cane table, suffering from being outside. The varnished surfaces gleamed in places, joints painted deep red. I stepped out onto the terrace. Strings of Christmas lights hung around the walls in haphazard arrangements, unlit. I made a mental note to find the switch to turn them on later. Out here the air was alive with sound and a humidity that seemed to possess an energy of its own. A wave of fatigue hit me.

  Through it there came a small sound of movement, closer than the distant noise that drifted up from the street. It came from the end of the terrace, a metallic tinkling. As my eyes adjusted I saw a large, elegant wire structure in the far corner, where the brick parapets reached up to just above waist height. A cage. I went and stood next to it; the top reached my shoulder. Various swings and mirrors hung down inside, a series of trapezes and bells. It was a little palace for a bird. Big enough, with toys that jangled. The strings of bells sounded in the faint breeze. There was no bird. The cage was empty except for the ornaments and mirrors.

  It was 15 September. I wasn’t sorry to have arrived after the anniversary of the eleventh had already passed. The date itself had been my last day at work in the bookshop before leaving, and I’d concentrated hard on staying busy. Dusting shelves. Alphabetising. Replacing, reorganising, rearranging. Counting out change very carefully after a sale. Double-checking the amount in the till, the list of sales, triple-checking. Neil had kept an eye on me and reached out, too quickly, to catch the stapler when I dropped it while fumbling with an exchange receipt towards the end of the afternoon, as though he’d been waiting for me to fuck up somehow. He didn’t say anything, just handed it back to me and watched me set it back down on the counter, try again to make it work, open it, scratch my finger on a broken staple. I’d looked at the thin line of blood the staple had made when it scratched me, a drop pooling at one end. Neil had taken the stapler then and fixed it in one fluid movement, stapled the receipt and put it into the drawer. I’d taken a book that the next customer handed to me, keeping that one finger held away so it wouldn’t bleed onto the jacket.

  The sky beyond and over the terrace hung there, flat and uniform. A single pigeon flew by. Evening fell and I went back inside.

  The passageway was lined with several doors I took to be closets – look later, I thought – and at the end of the passageway were two rooms: a living room and a kitchen. The walls were set at strange angles so there was only one right angle in each of the rooms; the other corners were either oddly wide or too narrow. A leather sofa and chairs took up most of the space in the living room, separated by a coffee table with its top piled with magazines in neat stacks. Plants in pots lined the deep windowsill. A square frame of butterflies hung on one wall, many small bodies pinned and lifeless. I was disgusted for a moment before I realised that it was only a photograph. Small watercolours hung beside it. A subway map was tacked up to the other wall. My eyes followed the familiar lines of colour. Blue A line. Orange F line. Red 1, 2, 3. I looked at the downtown section of the map and was surprised to see that it was complete, showing the lines and stops for the World Trade Center. I wondered why the Met hadn’t printed a new map by now. Then it occurred to me that they must have, and this might be a souvenir. I pushed the corner of the map against the wall, securing it in place.

  The overhead light in the kitchen revealed an alcove housing a 1950s era table – spearmint green laminex and chrome – with two matching chairs. A rack for wine was generously stacked with bottles of red and white. In the freezer there was ice and a half-full bottle of Absolut. It was tempting, but tiredness overcame me and I searched for a glass for water instead.

  The cupboards seemed to contain only coffee and sugar, virtually no other food, but there were many glasses, bowls and plates. I checked the silverware drawers. The silver looked expensive. It looked like silver.

  I returned to the bedroom and saw that there was a small ensuite bathroom attached, tiled in white and turquoise blue. The blue tiles, occasional tiny splashes, reminded me of the ocean and my body lurched towards Sydney with a wavelike rush. I left the bathroom light on to light the bedroom and searched for pyjamas. The birdcage outside sent in its tinkling sounds through the open doors. I pulled them closed.

  The bed was firm. I lay on my back and thought about turning off the bathroom light. The doors were framed by long curtains pulled to each side. I thought about pulling them closed. A phone rang somewhere, rang and rang.

  When I opened my eyes it was still dark and I wondered for a moment whether I had slept through the entire day and into the next night. It was hard to tell. A digital clock on a table next to the bed said it was 4:15 am. I thought again about closing the curtains, turning off the light, and lay there instead until light began to show in the sky, turning it pink and grey. As it turned into morning I slept again, a thick and dreamless slumber that took me through until the early afternoon.

  I woke to see the sun again signalling a time of day different from what my body thought it was, though less brutally than before. The French doors glowed and the room was bright.

  A noise came from the kitchen, shocking in the stillness. The tap had been turned on, hard. I froze, disoriented, forgetting for a frightened moment where I was, what room, what city. The noises continued: music started up from the direction of the living room and the sound of a male voice humming.

  I quickly checked my clothes – pyjamas, blue, cotton, not obscene – and went into the hall.

  ‘Hello?’ My voice came out as a croak.

  The owner of the humming voice stepped into the kitchen doorway. He looked to be in his late twenties with hair carefully styled to look tousled. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Both were very clean. He smiled.

  ‘You’re Judy? Hi. How are you?’ He held a mug in one hand and was drying it with a checked towel. ‘Mrs Bee downstairs told me to expect you,’ he said. He turned back into the kitchen. ‘I’m making coffee. Do you want some? I’m Matt, by the way. How was your trip? You’re here from Australia? I would love to go there.’

  I accepted coffee in a white mug and drank it gratefully.

  ‘I didn’t know that anyone actually lived here,’ I said. The situation was confusing. Should I offer to leave? Why hadn’t Ralph mentioned a person living in the apartment? ‘I don’t mean to come barging in. To your space here. I thought it was empty. My friend Ralph – do you know Ralph? No. He said it was empty, it’s his uncle’s –’

  ‘No, no, it’s no problem,’ he assured me. ‘Rob sends his friends to stay here from time to time. Friends, acquaintances, people he’s met the night before, whatever. It’s fine.’

  Matt poured more coffee into my cup. ‘It’s not bad to have the company. And you have your own bathroom, thank god.’ He flashed me a smile. ‘I like my own bathroom.’

  It turned out that Matt lived there in the apartment in some kind of arrangement with Uncle Robert where he watered the plants and sent on the mail in exchange for rent. It sounded like a very good deal.

  ‘He’s a very generous guy.’ Matt shrugged. He had come in late last night. ‘I looked in on you,’ he said. ‘You were out like a light.’

  Matt slept in a bedroom between mine and the kitchen – one of the doors I’d thought was a closet. The proportions of the rooms kept surprising me, larger than they seemed they should be given the layout of the apartment. Matt’s room was the same size as the one I had taken, but with walls painted robin’s egg blue. Clothes lay strewn on the bed, the floor, the little desk in the corner. ‘I really need to do laundry,’ Matt said absently, and pulled the door closed.

&nb
sp; He gave me a tour of the apartment, which I evidently hadn’t explored very fully so far. A door across the hall from his opened to a gleaming bathroom in which all available surfaces were covered in jars and tubes of hair product and lotion, arranged in neat piles and rows. It smelled good, like oranges and mint. The mirror was misty around the edges from a recent shower.

  Two other doors in the passageway revealed large closets, both filled with clothes, shoes and other objects. Two sets of skis lay on the floor of one. Several rolled-up rugs were propped up in the corner of the other. One appeared to contain mostly coats – old tweed overcoats, leather jackets, parkas, long puffy sleeping bags, a velvet cape, a floor-length coat of luxurious pale brown fur. I ran my hand over it. The fur felt cold and strangely liquid. I drew my hand away.

  ‘Everyone leaves something behind,’ said Matt, walking back to the kitchen. ‘Put whatever you like in there. But there’s a closet in your room too. And the drawers. Go ahead and use them.’

  I sat down and put my hands around the coffee mug. It was cooling down. ‘I don’t know how long I’m staying,’ I said.

  ‘Well, welcome to New York anyway. Is this your first visit?’

  ‘No. I was here a few years ago. A couple of times.’ I didn’t know what to say, about having been here before, about why I was here now. The jet lag came on with a slow tilt, the wave again.

  ‘I think I’d like to go for a walk,’ I said. ‘I’d better have a shower.’

  ‘Do you have any plans for tonight?’ Matt asked.

  ‘No. I don’t have any plans.’ No plans, period, I thought. ‘I have to make some plans.’ I sighed.

  ‘OK.’ Matt sounded very focused. ‘Here’s the plan. Go for a walk. Have a shower, whatever. We’ll go out to eat later and you can tell me all about it.’ He turned away and began to run water to wash the cups.

  I looked around and noticed again the clean countertops and surfaces, free from dirt and crumbs. I understood now why it was that I had thought the apartment was empty.