Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  Then, finally, in a very small voice: “She totally doesn’t feel the same way. I know.”

  “Well,” he began. “Maybe they don’t . . . but . . . okay. Well, this is the thing.” With relief he felt like he was here now, that he’d finally found some small scrap of something that he could give her. “I don’t think,” he said, “that love is ever a waste.”

  She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and fiercely avoided eye contact. She addressed the question to his knees: “What do you mean?”

  “I mean . . . it’s . . .” He was feeling something, almost a surety now, but he spoke quietly to make his conviction less embarrassing. He was looking at her knees; they were talking to each other’s knees, which were an easier thing to talk to than eyes. “You know, loving, feeling love, is a . . . is kind of like a human privilege? It’s never a waste. I think. I mean, the thing is feeling it, not whether it’s reciprocated. You know?”

  This was both total bullshit and totally true. For Dana’s sake, right now, he’d choose the latter. A pragmatic sincerity. He didn’t mean better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. He meant better not to lose. Better to love, never have the person, and never lose.

  He didn’t tell her about the waking fucking hell that was the deterioration of a marriage, the bottomless black hole that was the love of your life turning into a stranger, the heartbreak, mind-break, body-break, everything-break of a breakup of that kind, that all that agony was far more intense, dense, and crushingly huge an experience than was the love that had preceded it. Unrequited love, that was a walk in the park. Or, rather, a delicious itch to scratch. Who cares if the itch worsens the more you scratch? Keep on scratching, deliciously.

  She didn’t say anything. She sniffed deeply, drawing up the trembling globule of snot, nodded a bit, and pulled her upper lip long in an effort to stem her nose. It was hard to ignore.

  “I’m just going to grab you a tissue, okay?” he said.

  She nodded, bringing her sleeve up to shield her nose. The bathroom was a jog down the corridor. He pulled fistfuls of toilet paper from one of the stalls, and then realized he probably had too much in his hands. That it would look as though he were having a joke at her expense. He unwound half, placed it awkwardly on top of the dispenser as though it might be saved, as though someone might actually come in here and elect to use an already-torn-off bit of tissue in a semipublic bathroom.

  By the time he’d jogged back the classroom was empty. He gawked at her absence like a dolt; it took him undue time to process the fact of her having gone. On the desk where she’d been sitting was a torn-out page of her notebook. He picked it up and read, in quite small letters in the middle of the page, “thanks, sorry.” He realized he’d never seen her handwriting. Why would he have? It was neat and almost old-fashioned-looking—as though it came from a courteous, quieter world. He stood there, thank-you note in one hand, toilet roll in the other, like some kind of travesty of a Hindu god, giving with one, receiving with the other. Paper to receive shit and paper to bear gratitude.

  He pocketed the note and kept it, as a way of honoring unrequited, late-adolescent love. Which she’d look back on in twenty years’ time, most likely, with humor and affection. It’s never love, as soon as you feel the next love. Because isn’t that a prerequisite of the condition? That you tell yourself everything that came before wasn’t really it.

  10

  Kate heard George before she saw him: heard the line open up, heard him rustling about a bit as the little slow-circling ouroboros icon communicated its efforts. She could already see her own face, small and pinched and elvish in the bottom right corner of the screen in a little square. Every time she caught her own image, on screen or mirror, there was the half-second arrest of nonrecognition before she remembered: same face, new hair.

  The blue snake circled and circled, forever failing to reach its tail, and she stared, understanding it as the embodiment of her dread, the doomy sense that he was going to hate her new look, and her simultaneous craven desperation for him to love it. She felt like a teenager about the whole thing. It was humiliating. And then his face, tired and crumpled, there on her screen. His eyes came into focus.

  “Oh my god!” he said. “Wow!”

  “Do you like it?”

  She couldn’t help herself, blurted the question.

  His hesitation juggernauted over her.

  “Do you?” he said.

  “Yes! Of course I like it, I did it. But I asked you!”

  “Well, if you like it, that’s all that matters.”

  This felt like the most sententious thing of all the sententious things he had ever said to her.

  “What made you do it?” He corrected himself: “I mean, what made you decide to get it done?”

  A tightening throat, an actual tremor in her bottom lip. She bit down. Shrugged.

  “Oh god, Kate, please don’t be all offended! It’s just different!” he said. A patient appeal to reasonableness, rationality. “You just look so different. It’s a shock.”

  She nodded as if he’d accidentally communicated more than he meant to. As if his comment had been grimly illuminating, which it had.

  “Kate?” he said. Confusion flickered over his features. “Look, I don’t understand, what do you want me to say?”

  “A shock,” she repeated, lightly.

  And then his face clouded. He frowned, looked stricken, and his eyes cast about the screen. She was looking, she realized, at a face that couldn’t see her or hear her. He was suddenly alone, it was obvious. It was the first time she’d seen him like this, looking at her with such obvious blindness, so unaware of itself. The video must have died at his end.

  “George?” she said to him. And then, to the air: “Fucking Skype!”

  He stuttered back into movement, opened his mouth to speak, and then his face froze again, blurred into a Francis Bacon rictus. She clicked away the window, hung up, folded her laptop shut, and pushed it away.

  Ten minutes later, having washed her face, drunk a glass and a half of water, and smoked a cigarette on the fire escape, she tried again. There was a meek and miserable detente while she tried to ignore his furtive little glances at the haircut. His eyes kept flicking upward, as if there were tiny airborne creatures orbiting her skull. She asked him about his studies, dutifully. He responded, dutifully. Small pauses grew longer. These pauses had the feeling and flavor of a sea, slate blue, waveless. And she and he were small white boats, visible to each other at intervals, bobbing so slightly, but with all that wide, dark water between them.

  “How’s Lauren?” he said, and there was a tinge of accusation in the question.

  “I’m seeing her,” she promised. “She e-mailed me. About doing something later today. I’ll e-mail her.”

  

  Lauren’s e-mail to her, subject line “new york new york!!!!!!!!!!!!” had begun with “hellloooooooo!!!” and the exclamation points had caught in Kate’s eyes like grit. She had wondered, with unkindness, whether there might be some correlation between sexual repression and incontinent exclamation point usage. Lauren had suggested tea uptown. Kate had politely parried with art: an opening in Chelsea that the Internet had recommended to her in some spry, sardonic lines of sidebar.

  She arrived early by mistake, but as she turned west onto the gallery’s block she caught sight of Lauren, a small figure standing with her back against one of the building’s walls, tense, bowed into her phone. There was something planted-looking about her, a fixed quality, with a humility to the posture. It was perhaps her flat shoes, her literal groundedness, thrown into relief by the heeled women who thronged past.

  Lauren looked up, startled, at this person standing expectantly in front of her.

  “Hi,” Kate said at her. Nothing. “It’s me . . .”

  And then the click of recognition in her eyes.
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  “You cut your hair!” she piped, hastily adding, “It looks great!”

  Kate brought her hand, again, to the back of her neck.

  “It’s great!” Lauren insisted, mustering more emphasis this time. “I just didn’t recognize you! It’s very short.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “Here I am.”

  “Here we are!” said Lauren. “In New York!”

  They stood there, two short British women in their flat shoes. A far-off despair suggested itself to Kate. It would have been better, almost, to have known truly no one here. Either that or to have one real friend, an actual kindred spirit. The foremost image Kate had of Lauren was of her playing croquet with a weedy mathematician boy on the college lawn. And now she was here, doing a Ph.D. at Columbia on Fragonard.

  “So!” Lauren inhaled. “What are you doing here?” She had raised her eyebrows to convey compassionate confusion. “Oh, you don’t have to tell me!” she added. “I mean, if you don’t want to.”

  “No, no,” Kate said. “No, it’s not private or anything. I’m just, well, I’m just sort of taking a break here. And trying to, you know, work out what’s next.”

  They looked at each other.

  “How’s the Ph.D.?” Kate said brightly, before Lauren could ask anything else.

  “Good!”

  They smiled and nodded, and then Lauren looked behind her, into the bright noise of the building, and said, “It looks quite crowded in there.”

  Her tone had been so apologetic that Kate found herself replying, “Oh, don’t worry!” As if the crowd were Lauren’s fault. As if this had been Lauren’s idea. As if she were forgiving her for it.

  “Shall we try, anyway?” Kate said. “To go have a look, I mean?”

  The show was ten enormous square paintings of video stills of pornography. Ultra-close-up shots of brutally lit pink pudenda that looked surprised and shocked by their own baldness, and monstrously, comically large dicks, engorged and veined—superreal flesh, photorealistically rendered on canvases fifteen feet tall. Running across some of them, in lower quadrants, were meticulously wrought striations and wobbles of static—renderings of the visual interference of the pause button on a rewound stretch of overplayed VHS. The room was crackling with flashbulbs and iPhones raised to one another. There was something religious-looking about iPhones raised en masse, Kate thought, little earnest lights of witness. One spectator had sculpted and lacquered her hair into a giant pair of lips, jaunty on the side of her head, and she moved with dancerly cautiousness, all her vivacity channeled into her eyebrows rather than any movement of head or neck.

  Lauren, with teeth clamped together, pulled a quick little grimace somewhere between a valiant smile and the physiognomic equivalent of “eek!” But Kate wanted this pack of bodies now, the noise, the champagne breath of loud conversation. She excused herself, told Lauren she was going to find a bathroom, and then headed toward a randomly selected corner as if she knew the way. The crowd was so dense that within a few seconds of movement, a few elbows passed and shoulders dodged, she looked back and couldn’t see Lauren at all. At that moment she found herself expelled into a pocket of space in front of a painting. Everyone around her had their backs to it.

  No monstrous dicks in this one. It was a zoomed-in shot of a woman’s face, in ecstasy, or in a mime of ecstasy, and it filled the canvas. Kate felt herself blush as she took in the enormous open mouth and then the semen. A mouth with pink-sheened lips and very white teeth. A thin strand of hair fell over the right side of her face, over one heavily shadowed and mascaraed eye, shut so that you could see the crevasses in her eye shadow where the papery skin of her eyelid wrinkled.

  It occurred to her that this face belonged, or had belonged, to a real woman. There’d been a camera there, in the moment, capturing it as film or photograph for the painter to paint. A specific moment, faked or actual, a real woman who was now in the world somewhere, buying dog food or shaving her legs, oblivious to Kate staring at a blown-up image, oil-paint rendered, of her face and some man’s come.

  And then she became aware of a body beside her.

  “The artist,” a voice said, in a vaguely Germanic accent, “is always the man who talks to no one, and looks the least pleased to be here.”

  She turned. He was a white guy, shaved head, dour in the eyes, something criminal in the swell of his forehead. His clothes were black. He looked straight ahead.

  “Are you,” she said, the question querulous and ridiculous, “the artist?”

  Finally he turned to her. His eyes remained void. She could not have said what color they were.

  “But,” he said, in a slow monotone, “I’m talking to you.”

  She was at a loss. And then, like an automaton, or a cold-blooded reptile, his head swiveled back to face the canvas. A tall, groomed woman thrumming with officiousness burst out of the crowd, clamped her hand on the man’s upper arm, said, “Guillermo, I need you,” and, still expressionless, he allowed himself to be led away.

  Kate looked back to the canvas, to the outrageous, obscene mouth, and wondered if the moment that had just happened had really happened. There was no one beside her to laugh with. Lauren wouldn’t get it. Not that she quite knew what it was she wanted her to get. On the canvas now she saw not the image but the surface of paint, the tiny ridges of dried oils, all the crests and crusts of matter.

  And then she felt it on the back of her neck: someone looking at her. It wasn’t alarming, this feeling of being watched. It was arresting and exact.

  When she was seven, her mother’s friend Clara had shown her the trick with a wineglass. How to pinch it between forefinger and thumb on the stem, right beneath the bowl. And then to dip her other forefinger in the liquid and run it around and around the circumference of the lip. The sweetly eerie flute sound that rose from it. This was what she heard now, a wet finger on a wineglass, but as a sensation rather than sound.

  She turned. Only one person was facing her. He was tall, a little unkempt, one hand hanging at his side, his fingers loose around the neck of a bottle of beer.

  He smiled at her with a small lift of his eyebrows that seemed intended to indicate some kind of question. As though he knew her already, as though they shared some kind of small private history that he was reminding her of, asking, Remember? Only she didn’t remember, or she didn’t think she did. Who was he? There was a light of familiarity in his eyes but she couldn’t place it. So she smiled, hazily, feeling the blood rush to her face yet again, raised her eyebrows a little too, to question his question, or to ask what it was.

  He didn’t flinch, and her face got hotter. She looked away, waited a moment, and then pushed into the crowd again. She wondered if perhaps he’d watched her the entire time, as she’d craned her neck, the slow movements of her head as she’d stared at that enormous painted face.

  She couldn’t find Lauren. She craved air. And then, over several shoulders, between two moving heads, she glimpsed her, by the exit, hunched once again into her phone.

  “Sorry!” Lauren said automatically.

  “I couldn’t find the bathroom,” Kate explained.

  She looked a bit green.

  “Are you okay?” Kate asked.

  “Oh no, I’m fine! I just get these migraines . . . I’m really sorry . . .”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  “I’m sorry, it just came on. Sometimes alcohol . . .”

  “Do you want to go? Shall we go?”

  Lauren faltered.

  “I don’t want to ruin your night,” she said, a vein in her temple bulging, “but I think I just need to go lie down. But you should stay.”

  Kate helped Lauren into a cab and waved her away—“Feel better!”; “I will!”—and wondered if Lauren was feeling the same flood of relief she was.

  She texted her for good measure—feel better and get home safe! x—as i
f officially signing off on her duty. When her phone vibrated in her pocket a moment later she didn’t even take it out to look.

  Outside, perched on the narrow lip of the building’s long windowsill, she lit a cigarette. Being alone felt like a kind of exultation. In this city she’d seen women, of all ages, drinking on their own. Human beings who thought nothing of taking their place at a bar, ordering the damn drink they wanted, paying for it. And if someone approached them, fine, but beside the point. This didn’t really seem to happen in London. She was storing up these differences, saving them as evidence, though of what—for what purpose—she didn’t know. She was inhaling long and hard when someone sat down beside her.

  “Hi,” he said, with a small glance.

  It was the same guy she’d felt on the back of her neck, staring at her as she stared at the painting. She made as if to answer, was choked by the smoke, but he didn’t seem to notice. He kept going.

  “I know this is a thing people say,” he said, frowning, placing his beer bottle at his feet. “But I saw you in there and I think I know you. Do I know you?”

  He was close enough for her to register that he smelled of sandalwood. An unbelievably good smell. She found her breath, shook her head, and said, hoarsely, like this was her first ever cigarette, “I don’t know.”

  He really did look familiar. Her mind reached in all directions, but she found nothing. And then his gaze fell to the cigarette.

  “Can I bum one of those?” he said.

  She nodded, held out the packet to him.

  “It’s your last one,” he said. “I can’t take that.”

  No conviction in the statement. She noticed the way his fingers lingered, hungrily.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Take it.”

  Only when he’d accepted her lighter, lit up, inhaled, and returned it—only after all this did she realize where she knew him from. Not real life, but a book jacket photo. A much younger version.