The characters in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Catapult
catapult.co
First Catapult printing: January 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Hermione Hoby
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-936787-75-3
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938488
Printed in the United States of America
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For my parents
1
Impossible to remember what she thought it would be, what she’d imagined it looking like, now that she was here. The door was brown, and Kate stood staring at it in a kind of paralysis, winded after three flights of stairs, a confusion of keys splayed heavy in her palm. Much like the new suitcase at her feet, these keys seemed to be an ugly prop, an aid to some kind of performance.
The apartment was owned by her mother’s onetime best friend, off on the postdivorce cliché of an around-the-world, Thailand et cetera trip. A week ago Kate had stared at this stranger’s face on a Skype screen, a face fussed with earrings and silk scarves, glitching in the sputtering Wi-Fi, exclaiming: “Oh, honey, I can’t believe you’ve never been to New York!” And then: “Oh my god, your mom and I had such adventures when we were your age. Because you gotta travel! You gotta live, you know?” And Kate didn’t know. Didn’t know what live meant, in this context. She suspected, though, that it meant something you’d see on a Pepsi commercial: jumping into a waterfall in your underwear, piling into an open-top car to the beach, that sort of thing. But she’d said “Absolutely” into the screen like she knew, like yeah, she totally knew. As though she were the kind of person who was up for it and down for it. The kind of person who wouldn’t be troubled, for instance, over how those two semantically opposed phrases could have come to mean, in essence, the exact same thing.
It was only now—a master’s degree completed dutifully, pointlessly; a commitment to a Ph.D. made miserably, uncertainly—that she realized the world truly did not give one single shit whether you’d done your homework. This skyline, for example: the extent of its indifference was operatic. She’d watched it through the window of the cab and heard blooming Gershwin and an earnest voice in her head, subsumed by its own parodies, saying, “He adored New York City, he idolized it all out of proportion.” The Empire State Building on the right, the Freedom Tower on the left, with its central spear naked on top. In the days before, Kate had nervously clicked her way around virtual maps, zooming in and out to learn the sequence of the bridges up the East River: Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg. Doing her homework. But she hadn’t zoomed close enough to see that the struts of the Williamsburg Bridge were pink. Who paints a bridge pink? Those struts had come at her too fast, a metronome assault of pink flashes on blue.
And now, here, these keys, this door. Its spyhole’s beady avidity. Too easy to imagine an eyeball pressed up to the other side, watching. The keys worked, a minor astonishment, and then the door opened. The apartment was small and cluttered, a sofa overpopulated with the kinds of throws and cushions that people describe as “ethnic.” Kate wondered what “Caucasian” cushions might look like, and the answer of course was these, because they were from IKEA, not Rajasthan, turquoise and purple and stuck all over with white cat hair, tufts of it spindled around the cheap sequins.
Somewhere in here was a cat to be sat. She couldn’t bring herself to call the cat’s name. The name embarrassed her, but it was more than that. Speaking anything out loud, alone in this other woman’s apparently empty apartment, seemed like an audacity. Speaking anything anywhere, in fact, had come to feel like that. Lately, she could think the words fine, could sense their calm gray delineations in her mind, neutral and precise, but when she began to say them, to actually shape them into sounds to propel out of her mouth, the whole project seemed to fail.
On the large bed under the window, a bed almost as big as the room itself, the cat was waiting for her, facing her, staring at her, paws tucked under itself, the pose prim and a little censorious. When she moved closer and reached her hand toward its head, it flinched to sniff at her fingers, then made a couple of twitches of its whiskers and looked away, disdainful.
It didn’t need her. The self-sufficiency of cats! Their implacability! To be a cat. But then, she remembered they were sociopaths—scientists had said so. There seemed to be a problem with applying the human construction of “sociopath” to a nonhuman species. Wouldn’t that make everything nonhuman sociopathic, in human eyes? Could that be right? It seemed quite arrogant. The thing to do was to assert, both to herself and to the cat and to the apartment itself, that this was her bed now, her territory. When she placed her hands on the creature now it seemed to entrench itself further, as if suctioning its soft underside to the sheets. She wobbled it feebly from side to side, trying to get a grip without hurting it. The cat looked both offended and embarrassed for her.
“Please,” she said in a voice barely getting beyond a whisper. Steeled herself and said it: “Joni. Joni Mitchell.”
As if she had been holding out to hear her name, the cat leaped, slipped out of her hands and onto the floor, where it paused to flick its tail once, like an indignant flamenco dancer. Then the cat turned and stalked away, tail straight and high above a puckered, evil-looking anus.
She put her hand on the warm patch it had left behind and lay down on the bed.
The street was three floors down but the sounds she woke to were so rude and immediate that it seemed as though all the sidewalk tables of the café had levitated—that the whole tableau of chairs, plates, glasses was suspended right outside this window, with freshly showered men and women dining while their feet dangled happily in the air. That bright percussion of knives on plates, overlaid on the swell of voices, and this light through the window of a still-warm evening, reminded her of being small: British summertime in the suburbs, the plangent chimes of an ice-cream van several streets away. And now a female shriek from the sidewalk so loud that she flinched. Then a man’s voice, booming unbelievably, urgent with his own humor, going, “No, no, no, but that’s before he even met her!” and then laughter, outraged and delighted, slapping all the tails of these words. How weird that she could hear these people, hear their every syllable, and they had no idea she was up here, listening, or if they did, they simply didn’t care.
She turned on her phone and watched it cast around for a signal, struggling. Eight thirty here, the evening just beginning, and one thirty a.m. in London, so late that it was already tomorrow. George would be asleep and oblivious. And her mother. Everyone, in fact, everyone who knew her was asleep right now.
Everyone needs a plan. That was the sort of thing George would say, something he’d wield from his well-ordered arsenal of maxims. He was doing a law conversion, and she hoped he would not be converted, but suspected it was already too late. He’d made his decision. Like always, it had been made simply, swiftly, confidently, irrevocably.
“You’re being crazy,” he’d said when she’d told him not to come, that she was going on her own. His words had an air of sensible finality, the genial confidence of putting this thing to bed: “You don’t want to do this.”
And that did it. That was perfect. In telling her that she did not want to do something, in the laughably egregious condescension of telling her what it was she did not want to do, he had succeeded only in letting her know that she had no choice but to do it. What could she do but smi
le a weird, wide smile at him and, robotically, make the series of mouse clicks that meant a flight to JFK, purchased with her dead grandmother’s money.
She’d buy a pack of cigarettes. That’d be a thing to do, a new prop to hold—one that would be less ugly than the suitcase and the keys—some kind of shortcut to poise or personality. This was a thing the living did—smoked. It was a way to know you existed as a person in the world: blackening up your lungs with nicotine and tar.
As a kid she’d had nightmares of witches. She would wake up and smell them on her pillow, a sour yellow reek. Loneliness, too, had a smell, she thought, and it was almost the same, that witchy reek. As she walked out into the world she feared she was trailing it behind her.
In the deli on the corner Beyoncé was singing on the in-store radio and a young man was grabbing a beer from one of the chiller cabinets, a practiced, swinging ease to the motion. As she touched an enormous bag of pretzels, pretending to be interested in it, some shift happened, some subatomic shuffle. She looked up before she could think.
A girl was standing in front of the counter, peeling off dollars. The bleached and frayed denim cutoffs she wore were butt-skimmingly short, cut high on the outer thighs and belted tight at her waist. A loose black top hung low from her shoulders, the upper part of her back gleaming with sweat.
“American Spirit,” she said. Her voice made Kate think of caves, their smooth, dry walls. “Yellow.”
As the man reached up behind him for the cigarettes the girl tilted her head and swept her hand across her hair, twisting it into one rope that she slung around her shoulder, a movement so fluent that Kate understood it to be habitual to the point of definitive. There was a worldly impatience to it, as though this length of hair were a wearisome but welcome thing. Kate thought of the way a mother hoists her kid on her hip, proprietorial pleasure humming through the sigh of it. She could almost feel it, the luxury of gathering up those black lengths, a musky smell rising from the weight of them.
A line of muscle stretched the length of the girl’s brown thigh, and it strobed as she cast her weight onto her right hip and began tapping her foot. She was shoeless! And the piston-pedal made by those tensed and naked toes scandalized Kate. To be barefoot, in a shop—store—to walk across all the hot dirt of the city on the skin of your soles.
The tapping of her foot seemed less like agitation and more like an expression of optimism and energy, a hunger for things. Its regularity seemed almost practical, as though this foot pedaled the engine that powered the girl’s world and she was simply keeping it going, pushing it forward, an impatient maintenance.
Kate stared, her fingers going a little slack around the pretzel bag. Maybe she was overthinking again.
But the girl’s jawline, the silhouette of it, somehow had the same merciless quality as the skyline seen out the window of the cab a few hours earlier. It was this detail in particular that drove a new conviction in Kate: if she were ever to get to know this girl, she’d fail her. She saw the girl throwing a basketball at her, blam, fingers outspread from the center of her chest as if to mime an explosion—catch it!—but instead of catching it Kate would flinch, fumble, drop it. She felt her blush begin to rise at this imagined incompetence.
And then, finally, the girl turned her head and looked straight down the aisle at her, black rounds of sunglasses set on a symmetry so perfect that it induced a kind of terror. Kate’s stomach fell. The girl began to withdraw her sunglasses with a sort of poisonous languor, and Kate jumped back to the pretzels before eye contact. This start, she knew, only underscored the gawking it was meant to conceal.
“Happyforth!”
Kate couldn’t have responded anyway—stones choking up her throat—but the girl was already walking out the door, giving rhythmic slaps to the base of the cigarette packet with the heel of her hand. The bottoms of her feet were filthy; every step was a flash of grimed black sole.
It had been, what, nine seconds? Nothing. It was the black-bottomed feet that filled her mind now, the sight of them as she’d walked away. A wolfish pang of wondering where she was going. The pretzels were still in her hand and she looked at them. An enormous bag. She put them back.
At the cooler cabinet were something like a hundred different waters. Fluoro-crystal-colored ones, glowing in the spaceship hum of refrigeration. Ones to energize you, ones proclaiming “Focus” and “De-stress,” infusions named Immuno-defense and Activate and Balance. There was even, my god, Arouse. And yet no one, as far as she knew, had managed to manufacture and market a water that would tell you who you were and what you should do and where you should be in the future. No isotonic called “Drink This and You’ll Know If Your Relationship Is Over and How to End It.”
At the counter, she parroted the girl’s words: “American Spirit.” The guy made an irritable wince at her and she repeated herself, repeating the girl, but the stones were back, throat-cluttering, and the words came out tremulously.
“Eh?” he said.
She swallowed, blinked, indicated the packets behind him, and made her third attempt: “American Spirit cigarettes? Those yellow ones?”
He dropped his wince and laughed. She had no idea what was happening. Finally, she realized she was being teased. He chuckled, reached for the cigarettes, and slapped them down on the counter with the lovely largesse of a bet well won. With a pinch and a flourish, he added a lighter to the pile—bright yellow, the same shade as the cigarette packet. “American Spirit for English girl!”
She thanked him.
He seemed to expect a little more, a chat or a joke.
She smiled weakly and could say nothing. His joy faded. With his palms on the countertop, he seemed to recede into himself.
“Thanks,” she mumbled again, pocketing the cigarettes.
When he slowly raised his hand to wipe sweat from his brow there was something mournful in the movement. It was a kind of sad salute goodbye. He continued to look at her, wordless, as she left.
She walked to Tompkins Square Park, which that evening was still nameless for her, just a park that smelled of scorched grass and dust and hot air threaded through with notes of marijuana. A low-slung sun burned all the day’s dirt into gold. There were so many faces here that for a moment Kate felt she was trespassing on a party. There was a consensus to their leisure, she could feel it, luminous and weird, a common sentience, as if all these people might turn in unison, any moment now, to look to her silently with wondering frowns—not exactly hostile, but certainly puzzled—that would ask who she was and what she was doing here. Friends and strangers were enacting their social lives all over this public space.
A trio of African American teenage boys, popping and flexing beside a miniature portable sound system, began to draw a crowd who clapped and nodded with an expansive, self-congratulatory indulgence, a great open willingness to be entertained. She became one of the crowd too, put her body between the shoulders of other people, one of the spectators watching torsos jerking, arms jolting out of sockets and swinging lifeless, eyes rolling back in heads. The performers’ faces displayed exaggerated expressions of astonishment at their own virtuosity. The crowd cheered again. Kate moved away.
Across the park a tiny old woman, humpbacked and sinewed, was shadowboxing and jogging feebly on the spot. She was dressed in Barbie-pink satin boxing shorts and a bomber jacket, and a blond wig bounced on her skull, threatening to jerk itself loose. To Kate she was unignorable, spectacularly so, and yet everyone ignored her.
Kate followed the park’s paths, the sensible curves of them prescribing the way. She had no idea how to be a body in space, of where to put herself and how and why. Along the benches homeless men were stretched out shirtless, heaving as they snored. Time had faded their tattoos and sun had darkened their skin so much that the two—inked flesh and unmarked flesh—were almost indistinguishable. Beyond them, on the grass, small groups of young white women in sung
lasses and scanty floral dresses had arranged themselves around mini-picnics of hummus pots and carrot sticks, and even the prostrate among them seemed to have configured themselves in ways that would flatter them in photographs, on their fronts with their chins in their palms and their ankles crossed in the air, Lolita-ish, or erect with their knees tucked to one side, pulling waists lean and long. Some of them were tattooed, too, but these were discreet and pretty little concessions to the act: a childish star on an ankle, or some bird, any bird, on a wrist. The kind of tentative adornment that they hoped lovers would remember, even fetishize, so that even if they were one body in a lifetime of many, he might say, years later, Oh yes! The girl with the star on her wrist. As if there weren’t galaxies of them.
The light was fading and the color of the sky began to find its way into her—the whole gathering night, unknowable, mushrooming in indigo and violet. Limbs gleamed with sweat all around her; the laughter seemed louder and her anxiety rose. This city, this time, this massive stupid gift of a free apartment, demanded something of her: a grandness, an expansiveness, some kind of vision, bold acts. And she was already failing with thoughts like these; dropping all the basketballs, butterfingered, dribbling apologies.
She’d made it up the three flights of stairs and had closed a series of doors behind her when she heard an obscene rupturing of sound, a noise splitting the air. The cat was crouched under the kitchen table, and Kate lurched toward it, but it yowled—a horrible, unheimlich noise—and shot away, seeking refuge without her. And now she was just a human cowering under a stranger’s table. Within the panic there was a small space for one thought, a sickly little pocket in which she was able to realize that if she survived, she’d be able to say the words “I arrived in New York the night of a terrorist attack.” A grim little tale to treasure forever. Where were you? people would ask, and she’d never not remember.
But now the sound of sky breaking had rumbled down quieter, like sonic rubble, and she crawled to the window to see signs of panic. There were none. She lifted the window with fumbling, frightened fingers. First an inch, then two, then all the way, and the heat rushed in, bringing the smell of cordite. On a rooftop, blocks away, she could see figures moving, ecstatically, looping wands of light in the air that left trails and sparks like tiny comets. She stared, stupefied. And then the word for those things came to her: sparklers. And then this knowledge, slow and steady: that people don’t dance on rooftops in the middle of a terrorist attack. Through the sputtering light trails, she began to see the words the girl had shouted to her in the bodega, forming sense in the spaces.
Neon in Daylight Page 1
