The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘You’re a clean freak,’ I said, mainly to myself.

  It was Matt’s turn to sigh. ‘Procrastinating,’ he said, resignedly. He took my cup, just emptied, from the table.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Tell you all about what?’

  ‘Well. Whatever it is you’re doing here.’

  He had already washed the cups and cleaned down the clean counter. He folded the tea towel neatly over its rail on the oven.

  I remembered before I went into my room. ‘By the way. I’m Julia. NotJudy.’

  Standing in the shower it occurred to me that I could be Judy. Why not? Judy in New York. What would Judy be like? It was impossible not to think of Judy Garland, heels clicking, red shoes sparkling. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.

  The water fell hot and steady and had its own city smell, metallic and oddly deep. I washed the plane from my skin, layers sloughing invisibly down the drain.

  There wasn’t that much left of me in the city, I thought, but probably too much to make up Judy. Just Julia.

  When I stepped out onto the street an hour later the full dislocation of my senses struck me hard. My head felt twice as big as it should be, and disconnected from my neck, as though it were a heavy balloon wanting to drift away – it would surely fall to the ground though, so large it felt on a weak string – I gathered determination and walked. The avenue was busy with cars and people.

  I bought a bagel and coffee at a busy store around the corner, and ate and drank standing at a narrow bar in the shop window. The coffee was sweet and creamy and did something to unzip the film around my head. The sun shone down. It was the tail end of lunchtime, the street full of people hurrying more than usual.

  Once outside, I turned and faced south. The avenue swooped down in a straight line. Summoning strength at every step, I walked south. If not today it would never happen, I thought. I would walk every day, as I liked to do, but if I didn’t do it today then every next day would become an avoidance that would only get harder to face down. Blocks and corners passed until I reached the ragged snake of Broadway, the one affront to the symmetry of the grid. The further south I went the more conscious I was of the empty part in the sky where the towers should have been. The street filled with the smell of sweet roasting nuts from vendor carts on one block, pretzels on another. By the time Canal Street presented itself I was exhausted. The footpath was a throng of people jostling for space, drifting onto the road, cars honking. ‘Excuse me,’ someone said shortly as we bumped into one another, making it clear that I was at fault. There were a thousand different handbags in just one tiny shop, nothing more than a hole in a wall, and all the same bags in the shop next door. Colourful watches laid out on folding tables. Baby turtles in a plastic tank with a handle on top, noses pressed against the sides and tiny front arms spinning. More handbags. I turned around and walked back.

  Matt came in the door just after seven to find me slumped on the couch in front of the television. Beautiful teenagers were behaving badly on the screen. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘It’s just down the road.’

  We went to a noodle place a few blocks away, and when my steaming bowl of soup arrived I was glad to be there. Matt ate some kind of stir-fried dish that smelled like chili and mint, sprinkled through with pieces of fluorescent red pork. He let me sketch a brief version of what I was doing in the city, the story of my lost friend.

  ‘I thought I’d go down there, this afternoon, on my walk,’ I said. ‘I guess I forgot how far away it is.’

  He nodded sympathetically. ‘Take the subway.’

  ‘Right.’ I drank my soup.

  ‘It’s a letdown.’

  ‘The site?’

  ‘Yep. I go down there to Century 21’ – a massive discount department store near where the World Trade Center had been. ‘This shirt is from there – it’s Prada, for thirty dollars. Anyway. There isn’t much to see. A lot of tourists.’

  Matt told me about himself. He worked at a gallery down in SoHo, a big space that showed a lot of sculpture. ‘I’m one of the guys who move stuff around, set up the shows, you know. Hang the paintings, straighten the rails. Some heavy lifting. Some carpentry. Order in the wine. General running around.’ At night he was doing a course in graphic design at the New School. He had a kind of likeable candour, and a self-deprecating tone from time to time that softened the edges of his confidence in himself. He seemed very honest and probably available. Exactly the kind of guy I would never fall for. In any case, I suspected that he was gay, and I was grateful that he was not attractive to me.

  ‘What’s on at the gallery now?’ I asked. ‘Anything worth seeing?’

  ‘Oh, it’s kind of interesting,’ he said. ‘A couple of installations. There’s one with snails … I don’t know. It’s a little dull actually. Very conceptual.’

  I asked if he knew Maeve and Grey. He looked at me more warily. ‘Your friend was Ingrid Grey?’ he asked. I’d said earlier only that she had been a student, hadn’t said her last name.

  ‘They’re heavy players,’ he said. ‘Maeve’s gallery is one of the most powerful in the city. She has a few big names. She and Grey together can make an artist.’

  ‘Or break them?’

  ‘That I’ve never seen. But they’re a tough team.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Do you know her?’ he asked. I said I did, a little. He shook his head. ‘She’s a ruthless gorgon,’ he said mildly. ‘Underneath it all.’

  It was an image that clarified the menace I’d sensed under the surface when I’d seen her around Ingrid, the scheming brain inside.

  When I asked if Matt had known Ingrid, he said no, but that he had seen her around. ‘She would come to the openings sometimes, some of the art parties. Museum stuff. I always saw her with Fleur, you know, the girl. The artist. Haven’t seen them for a while. Well, obviously.’ He looked embarrassed and reached for his drink, a beer. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said.

  ‘You look like you’re about to fall over,’ he told me with a smile.

  I was so tired that I laughed, in way that felt almost like crying, and couldn’t stop for a long minute.

  We went back to the apartment, and the walk seemed so much longer than it had on the way there.

  14.

  When Friday came at the end of that first week it was a surprise. The haze of jet lag had put the days out of order, with no routine to give them meaning. But when I went out into the street that night there was no mistaking the aura in the air. The voices of people hurrying by all had an elevated pitch of excitement to them; women talked quickly to each other as they walked together, their tall heels hard on the concrete. There was a purpose to their stride distinct from the ordinary weekday walk – reaching forward an inch further, covering more pavement, a little faster. Others were slowed down, exhausted, or relieved that the week was over. The evening felt heavy with possibilities, but I was separate from it all and in a self-pitying kind of mood; those possibilities seemed to be reserved for others.

  The jet lag had worn off by then but I still felt like an offbeat, slow and mangled, against the pacing of the street. People crowded the footpaths waiting for cabs and taking the steps up and down to the subway at a pace. My appetite disappeared and I walked on and crossed 14th Street, past the place I had been heading for, a little store I had taken to stopping at for food at the odd hours of the day when hunger struck. A turn around a corner took me to a street lined with several restaurants. The fast-walking women up ahead turned into one. Passing it a minute later I saw their legs seated on stools at the dimly lit bar inside. The whole block was full of people greeting each other, answering phones and laughing. A woman alone on the footpath, cheeks pinched in the cold, snapped open her phone. ‘Where are you now?’ she asked in a rush.

  Halfway down the block there was a restaurant with a large window onto the street. A man was sitting alone at one of the tables inside. It was set only for one, with one elegant glass and a bottle of
wine resting beside him. He was reading a book, which he held open with one hand while he drank from the glass in the other. I was transfixed by the same voyeuristic fascination that comes from watching someone through their living room window. He seemed quite comfortable, although that might have been an act.

  I could be doing that, I thought, enjoying a nice meal and a drink on a Friday night in a restaurant on my own. I felt a pull inside, out of the cold. But I started to feel conspicuous standing there in clothes that were clearly not suitable for this calibre of restaurant – jeans and an oversized, black sheepskin jacket that I had found in the closet. It smelled faintly of cedarwood, a nice smell. The woman who had been talking into her cell phone walked past with a man at her side now, whereabouts known, and through the door into the vestibule and interior of the restaurant.

  A wind pulled through and dropped the temperature on the street. It was too cold to stand still for long. The moment of identification with the man’s comfortable solitude was gone, an illusion. My desire for company sickened me, and I envied him. I went to find some food to take back to the apartment.

  The lights were on inside the ground-floor apartment when I returned to the building with my arms full of gin in a brown paper bag, cigarettes and slices of pizza. The window was still, no curtains twitching, a light on inside.

  I paused outside the door. There was a little peephole set into it, the kind that lets you see out from inside and shows whoever is there in a long, distorted fish-eye view. The piece of glass glinted inside its circular frame.

  When I went out the next day I stopped outside a storefront crammed with images and small objects: souvenir versions of the Statue of Liberty; the Manhattan skyline in a snowdome. A magazine clipping was stuck to the inside of the shop window so that it showed onto the street: a picture of the New York, New York casino in Las Vegas with its replica of the Twin Towers made into a makeshift memorial after the attacks. The miniature towers stood there, backed by a fountain, their base surrounded by wreaths. The fountain sprayed behind them like the plastic snow in the snowdomes. One mourner was pictured sitting in a squat on the ground nearby, eyes cast low.

  The shop entrance was blocked by racks of cards that spilled out onto the street. I turned one around. It teetered and spun with a creak. There was a glut of images of the city but hardly any of the towers, giving the impression that they were being tactfully avoided. Or maybe they were sold out. The United Nations building was a popular image, smooth and monolithic. The Empire State Building was there too. There was a stack of cards at the bottom of the rack featuring the towers, just the towers, with the whole city a fuzz beneath them. Alone, they looked different. When they were shown as part of the old skyline the image drew attention to its transformed shape since then, the hole in the sky you could see from anywhere on the island.

  There was another card, post-September 11. In this one a hand held up a picture of the towers in front of the camera, against the skyline, so the picture filled in the gap and repaired the view. The Brooklyn Bridge stood there in front of the towers in the picture, its two lovely vaults echoing the two buildings. Now the gap of space visible through the vaults anticipated their absence. The thin white edges of the held-up picture framed the sky around the buildings like a shield.

  This was what my eyes had been doing, I realised, wanting to hold up a screen of memory against that impossible hole in the sky, blue and invisible. This hole was of a different order to the actual hole in the ground, which I’d only seen images of, which seemed to present such a clean wound. The hole in the ground was also somehow impossible, an affront to the imagination: it was impossible to believe that such a small-seeming foundation could have held up such buildings; impossible to believe that such a space could have contained all their wreckage. But the hole in the sky was just their size, their image filled it exactly, the blueness of that clear day closed around it. Their absence was so difficult to imagine that it had seemed to me sometimes since I’d arrived that they had not really gone at all but had been rendered invisible by magic, cloaked by the air around them like a spaceship in science fiction. The hole in the sky radiated so intensely that it had become presence.

  I took the card, took three of them, another three. One to send to Jenny, one for Ralph, more for myself. I went to enter the shop to pay but paused on the threshold, stuck between the racks of cards. The interior of the shop burned with claustrophobia, crammed with cluttered shelves that towered up to the ceiling. Rows of little Lady Liberties met my eyes, red torches glowing in the dark inside. I readied my money, smoothed out the paper bills, and stepped inside.

  Later on, I went out to get bagels and ran into Mrs Bee from downstairs in the vestibule inside the first set of front doors where the mailboxes were set into the wall. She was closing a mailbox and locking it with a small key, several envelopes in her hand. I said hello and she smiled warmly at me.

  ‘Going out?’ she asked. She looked immaculate, her white hair swept up in a comb, long linen dress.

  ‘Just around the corner,’ I replied. On impulse, I added, ‘I’m getting bagels. From around the corner. Can I get you anything? Do you want a bagel?’ It was hard to imagine her eating bagels.

  ‘That’s so kind of you,’ she said. ‘I’ve eaten. But I would love one for later. Can I offer you some tea? When you get back?’

  I thanked her and said yes.

  At the bagel shop I didn’t know what kind she wanted and bought poppy seed, sesame, plain and raisin. The bagels were fat and shiny and warm. I ate mine, plain with cream cheese, on the way back to the building.

  I knocked at her door, imagining the view through the peephole viewer. She let me in and took the brown paper bag from my hands.

  ‘What’s it like out there?’ she asked.

  ‘Warm,’ I said. She nodded sagely.

  The door opened directly onto a living room that had windows at one end onto the street. The floor was carpeted in a light mossy colour with a faint pattern of fern leaves. There was a fireplace against one wall with what looked like a gas-powered fire in it, unlit, just the fake coals sitting there, and a long, stone mantelpiece over it. The wide ledge was lined with photographs in frames and other objects: a ceramic rabbit, three glass vases, tall candlesticks, a crystal ball on a lacquered stand. On the opposite wall a gilt-framed mirror reflected back the whole array. A sofa with deep seats faced the window, a plain coffee table in front of it. Two armchairs sat across from the sofa, under the windows. In one corner there was a tree growing in a wide terracotta pot, its branches reaching almost to the ceiling. She saw me looking at it. ‘It’s a ficus tree,’ she said. ‘Sit down. I’ll make us some tea.’

  I sat on the sofa and she disappeared through an archway into the next room. A few minutes later she brought in a tray and rested it on the coffee table. The tray held a large, earthenware teapot, dark brown with rounded edges, and two china cups on saucers. They were white with a coloured stripe around the top edge, one jade green, the other pink.

  ‘It’s nice to finally meet you,’ she said.

  I wasn’t sure what to say.

  ‘Robert called to tell me you were coming,’ she continued. ‘He’s an old friend. You’re a friend of his nephew, is that right? And Matt’s here, isn’t he?’

  I said that he was.

  ‘That’s good. He’s lovely. I have a spare key to the apartment too.’ I wondered if she was a caretaker of some kind. Then she said, ‘There’s a caretaker – he lives in the building across the road, takes care of both buildings.’

  She poured the tea gracefully straight from the pot, no strainer, so that leaves drifted down and settled along the bottom of the cup. She offered milk but I drank the tea black, enjoying its smoky taste.

  ‘How is your visit so far?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  She nodded again, knowingly. I didn’t have a sense exactly of being scrutinised by her as much as an unsettling feeling of being already known, having already been
read somehow, swiftly as a brief page of writing.

  She took a long breath and pressed her lips together. ‘Let’s see,’ she said, and made a small gesture with her hand. I had almost finished my tea, and thought that she was asking for my cup. I offered it to her, along with the saucer, but she said, ‘No,’ and smiled. My confusion must have shown. ‘I’m going to read the leaves,’ she explained.

  I hesitated, but I was curious and didn’t refuse. She asked me to turn the cup three times in its saucer, and then turn it upside down. I did. It clinked softly. We watched it sit there for a minute while the small amount of liquid left in it trickled away and pooled in the saucer.

  The whole room smelled faintly of tea, like a canister of good English Breakfast when it is first opened. There were no floral tones in the smell at all, just earthy, toasted, brown notes.

  She picked up the cup and looked into it, turning it around in her fingers.

  ‘What does it say?’ I asked her.

  She tilted the cup towards me so that I could see into it. Around her left wrist was a wide silver cuff covered with a delicate tracery of engraved, interlocking lines. Fine dots made a line around the middle of the cup.

  ‘There’s your journey,’ she said, indicating it with a finger. ‘It extends all the way around – but broken in points.’

  Her eyes moved over the clumps of leaves. There were no shapes there I could see, no patterns. ‘A flower,’ she said, and gave me a quick, happy glance. ‘When it’s leaning towards the seeker like that – the standard meaning for the flower is that praise and compliments are coming your way.’

  ‘The seeker?’

  ‘The person seeking a reading. The person whose cup it is. In the cup, the handle is considered to represent you. Your direction.’

  ‘What kind of flower is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Look,’ she said. Her finger pointed to a gathering of leaves near the rim, near the handle. I could sort of see a flower – a stem; petals. ‘There’s another one,’ she said, indicating a similar clump further down.