Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  at his toes.

  He didn’t see her. His back was to the room, talking to the bartender, who shot Kate a sour look and moved away the moment she took her seat next to him.

  “Hey!” he said, surprised.

  “Hi.” A blissful purr, stretched out in the sun.

  She closed her eyes to him and as the corners of her lips rose, goofy, irrepressible, she felt him lean in and catch that smile with his mouth, hands in her hair again. She found the small square packet in her bag and pressed it into his palm, squeezing his fingers shut.

  “You go now.”

  He looked dumbstruck. How good it felt—to bewilder him slightly.

  “Oh, wow,” he said. “It’s been a minute.”

  Once he’d gone, she realized she’d forgotten to tell him the proverb. Something about sisterhood . . . something, whatever. It had faded away. She recrossed her legs on the stool, skin against skin, breathed deeply, and held the edge of the bar quite tightly, now that gravity seemed less sure of itself.

  She looked behind her to find him and saw him disappear into the men’s room. The way he moved through space was a thing she wanted to watch. Maybe she’d even tell him that—whisper it drunk, in his ear, the moment he was back. But you can ruin an easy thing by putting it into words. Tell a nonactor to just walk across the room and he’ll move like he’s on the moon, a man doing an impression of a man.

  Her eyes found a woman dressed for a carnival—a turquoise thong, a glittering edifice of a bra, offering up her breasts to the world in triumph. The woman was making her way to a trio of seated men who puffed up as she came close, readying themselves, and she saw this and perched on the arm of a chair, whispered something into an ear.

  Bill was smoothly taking his seat on the stool next to Kate. He followed her gaze.

  “You found someone,” he said. The drugs had made his eyes into soft flooded pools.

  “I just smiled at her.”

  “I think,” he said, speaking into her ear, “you should have a proper dance with her.”

  The opening bars of a Beyoncé song, a mighty wohh-ohhh-ohhh, came like some kind of summons. It was the same song that had been playing in the bodega that first evening, when she’d stood in horrified rapture in front of that humming cooler cabinet seconds before Inez walked in. When she was not yet Inez, a person, only a captivating unknown with no shoes on, buying cigarettes.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” Kate said, standing up.

  “Yes,” he said, both emphatic and dopey.

  The natural trajectory was roofward, as if pleasure, like heat, always rose. Perhaps all she’d remember of these weeks was a series of rooftops. The high points. Kissing in a cab, the drinks from the club falling at their feet, rolling around with a clunk, and then they were pulling up beside a hotel, a place that was more a monument to monetized eroticism than the strip club itself.

  On one of those very first days, those green and early days, stupefied with jet lag, inebriated with every breath of blue New York air, she’d duly walked the strip of an old elevated railroad spur that had been willed into verdancy. Every young person she passed had been a person pointing, telling their liberal visiting parents, “This hotel is famous for people fucking in the windows.” And so now, in the elevator of the same hotel, his body supporting her body, her face in his shirt, the sandalwood-and-sweat musk again, she heard her question, mumbled and messy: “Are we going to fuck in the windows?”

  “Do you want to fuck in the windows?” he said.

  She closed her eyes.

  As the elevator rose, he said, “You know that opening in Chelsea?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Those porny paintings.”

  Was he consciously avoiding the phrase “where we met”? The coupley cutesiness of it? She made a soft noise of assent. She felt she was barely there, could barely hear him.

  “I realized something,” he was saying, with the slow delicacy of the very fucked up. “Reflective surfaces. No one cared about the paintings, because they couldn’t take their own picture in them. Right?”

  He paused; she heard his thick, labored breathing.

  “They couldn’t see themselves in them. I don’t mean figuratively. Actually. Actually see themselves. Their actual faces. All they want to take pictures of is themselves. Galleries should just have shows with reflective surfaces. Or outright mirrors. Give the people mirrors. Give the people what they want.”

  But then the elevator came to a halt and opened its doors so slowly that it seemed to Kate almost coy, as if done for emphasis. That terrestrial mess of cabs, lights, bar noise was way down below, and now here they were, delivered to an unpeopled altitude where all the colors were blue. No sound but the gentle hum of the pool. He rolled up his trousers and she sat beside him on the edge, calves submerged, kicking at dream speed through warm water that was the same artificially perfect shade of turquoise as the stripper’s outfit.

  When he lay back he pulled her down with him so that their backs were flat against stone still soaked with the day’s warmth. She was thinking of this, of the stone’s physical memory of sunlight, as she felt a familiar pain. It occurred to her, dimly, that she was wearing a white dress. She reached back in time blindly and failed to find the putting-on of this dress. Did not know where she’d been or who she’d been when she got dressed this morning. He turned his face to her. It seemed as if his features were dissolving, as though they were losing track of themselves.

  “It was my birthday today,” he said to her. “Yesterday,” he corrected, because the glow at the edges of the sky was definite now; it was already tomorrow.

  She concentrated on getting her mouth around the shape of the word: “Really?”

  He said nothing.

  “How old are you?” she managed.

  It was what you asked, wasn’t it? Slowly, he turned his face away, back to the sky.

  “Twenty-one.”

  She was falling asleep when he spoke again.

  “You want to swim? We should swim.”

  He sat up, turned to look at her. She shook her head. And now he got to his feet, there on the edge, looming over her.

  Campy and teasing, “Sure you’re sure?” and then he began to fall, a fall that seemed to happen in slow motion until gravity ruined the illusion.

  Surfacing, scowling and gasping and whipping water and hair off his face, he looked the way people always do when they surface from swimming pools: as if they hadn’t expected to get wet. He pushed through the weight of the water to take hold of her ankles, run his hands up her calves.

  She was not so drunk, she observed, to not be glad she’d shaved her legs. He tugged; she resisted. He stopped; she relented. And then she allowed herself to be pulled in. Cotton got soaked through and clung to her skin, sucked away, clapped back.

  “I’m an artist in residence,” he said, mockery dancing around the words. She thought perhaps he was quoting someone or something. He persisted. “They give me a room here, for the summer. I’m meant to write in the room.”

  

  It was a small room, but one whole wall of it was a window, making a perfect square of city—an Instagram square. Their clothes made the sheets wet, imbuing them with the tang of chlorine, a smell she’d always associate with childhood. Drunk fingers finally yielded a common nakedness, the shock of the weight of him, the unfamiliar contours of his skull under her fingers, this great sudden strangeness of a body.

  At some point her hand pushed his head between her legs, his sodden hair around and between her knuckles, and she imagined she could taste it, her own body, but then, as if imagining could create becoming, his mouth was on hers, his slightly bloodied lips, and then time was splitting into three: the happening, the having happened, and the comprehending of both, which was its own dimension as her pleasure rose.

  She wo
ke with a full bladder, and when she sat, head bowed between her thighs to watch clots of blood fall with her urine into the bowl, it made her skull surge with disgust and beauty. Once she’d flushed and washed cold water over her hands, wrist, and face, she steadied herself in the bathroom doorway and looked at the bed.

  The sheets were twisted and falling off the end. On the floor: her own peach-colored briefs, twisted, stained. The white dress was a dirt-streaked, pool-damp crumple of fabric beside an empty bottle. On the bedside table, a pair of plastic cups, which she remembered grabbing from above the basin and ripping from their cellophane. The inches of champagne, effervescence gone.

  There was a spectacular crimson stain the shape of Australia, a Rorschach shout, on the sheets. In this moment it seemed like some exultant rejoinder to a red wine spill on a tablecloth, one night in London a thousand years ago. She was wearing just his boxers and enjoying it, a tampon string tickling her thigh. He was flat on his back, arms flung wide in an attitude of surrender that looked both abject and luxurious. His head was to one side, mouth slack with sleep. The fingers of his right hand were trailing the stain’s eastern border.

  They’d leave it behind, that stain; someone else’s problem. A maid, someone she’d never meet, would strip and bleach these bloodied sheets, maybe muttering some perfunctory prayer for a girl’s lost virginity. It was discomfiting to think of how many people had slept in this same bed, all their dreams and sex and breath and sweat.

  She curled herself under his arm. He stirred, stretched, a lazy stiffening of his dick.

  “Who did that man mistake me for?” she said.

  There was a pause, and part of her wanted him not to respond. Total silence, absolute peace, complete stillness.

  “What?” he said. He sounded annoyed.

  “The fat and gross old man last night in the hat who said something about legal age.”

  He was quiet for a moment, then muttered, “Oh, fuck that guy.”

  Yes, she thought. Fine. Fuck him, he didn’t matter.

  23

  Inez took off her apron and let it fall to the floor. Heather was in the stockroom, sitting on a plastic crate, her hand over her mouth in a quaint expression that seemed to say Oh my.

  “Yo, boss lady.”

  Her boss looked up from her screen.

  “Oh, Inez,” she murmured. She shook her head as she inhaled. She sounded appalled, but sweetly so.

  “What?”

  “I’m reading these Yelp comments,” she said. “Is it true you told a customer he was too fat to have a cookie?”

  Inez squinted for a moment, trying to remember. It sounded likely, to be honest. Then he materialized in her mind: the awful guy with the enormous ginger beard who’d swaggered up to the counter talking loudly into his phone, thereby incurring Inez’s loathing before she even heard him say, “Nah, dog, she was too ugly to fuck.”

  “Yeah, but he was a misogynist. And also he was fat. Like, super fat. Like, no-more-cookies-for-you fat.”

  Heather gave her a beseeching look.

  “Inez,” she began, hopelessly. Then, steeling herself: “We’ve got to have a talk.”

  “I’m going, by the way. Like . . . I’m leaving leaving.”

  “You’re quitting?”

  Inez nodded.

  “Oh.”

  “So now you don’t have to fire me. Cool, right?”

  “Oh, man.” Heather sighed. “Well, yeah, okay, then.”

  Inez raised her palm for a high five. Heather looked at it for a moment, then weakly complied. “So what will you do?” she asked.

  “Everyone seems, like, weirdly obsessed with asking me that. Like I’ve got cancer or something or I’m going to be homeless. I’m fine.”

  Heather nodded, smiled. “Yep,” she said.

  An awkward pause. Inez made to go.

  “Hey,” Heather added, pointing to a large package resting against sacks of beans. “Don’t forget that.”

  Inez stared at it for a blank second before she remembered what was inside: silver high-heeled sandals that cost a hundred dollars more than she made in a month here. The very last of the Carlos spoils. She hiked it up under her right arm.

  “Later, Heather. Thanks for being a chill boss.”

  They were princessy shoes, Cinderella-ish, and she thought of Kate, transformed by the fairy dust of drugs. She shall go to the ball.

  Inez pulled out her phone. When Kate answered after four rings it was with an uncertain “hello?” as if she didn’t trust the object in her hand.

  “Meet me in Tompkins Square in half an hour, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  

  Getting pizza delivered to the park was what Inez liked to think of as a signature move, a summertime coup. The delivery boy arrived at the eastern entrance at the same time she did, gratifyingly bewildered as she accosted him, called him “buddy,” and pushed a fistful of dollars into his hand. She had successfully claimed a whole bench by the time Kate arrived. The shoes were stashed beneath her, the pizza box beside her. The presence of pizza seemed to make Kate laugh.

  “Hope you’re hungry,” Inez said, flipping the lid open. She watched Kate pick all the curled discs of pepperoni off her slice, one by one.

  Kate looked up. “Vegetarian,” she said, apologetically. She’d made a little pile of them, a tiny bonfire.

  “I die if I don’t eat meat every day,” Inez said. “Seriously.”

  She pinched up Kate’s pepperoni pile, sprinkled it across her own slice, then wiped her fingers on a nest of paper napkins, streaking them orange with an oily residue.

  They ate in silence for a while. Inez considered telling Kate she’d just quit her job. She wondered how long, also, she could keep it from Bill and Cara. Her mother had sent five texts today about college applications. The last one had devolved to all caps: PLEASE RESPOND I AM WORRIED ABOUT YOUR FUTURE. Unhinged. What, exactly, was she worried about? What was the Future, in her mind, and why did it get her panties in

  a wad?

  “Hey,” Inez heard herself say. “You went to college, right?”

  “College? University. Yeah.”

  “My parents want me to go to college. They won’t shut up about it. Which is frankly fucking hypocritical of my dad, because he dropped out of high school.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Good question,” Inez said. She sighed, lolled her head backward. “Like, nothing. Teaches rich-kid idiots. Obsesses about coffee beans. Gets drunk all the time. He’s kind of pathetic, to be honest.” With effort, she lifted her head. “Was it a total waste of time, then, college?”

  Kate didn’t laugh at this. She looked as if she were at a college interview. She even put her slice down to concentrate, it seemed, on thinking her way to an answer.

  Finally: “Some bits, yeah. We had to read a lot of ancient dead poets and stuff. It wasn’t really . . . real. It didn’t really get me anywhere. But . . . I didn’t really know—don’t really know—where I want to go. Hence . . .”

  Kate made a vague movement of her hands: Here I am, aimless, eating pizza in this park with you. She added: “Why? I mean, why do you ask?”

  Inviting Kate to the roof that night had been why the fuck not, whatever, take it or leave it. But since then, it had become important to keep her. Inez didn’t know why. It was just a sense that Kate knew things that she needed to know, too. She ignored her question, asked her another instead.

  “You know what’s funny?”

  “What?”

  “You’re smarter than all of us,” Inez said. “And yet you act like . . .”

  Inez caved her shoulders inward, widened her eyes into what she hoped was cartoon abjection, set her mouth into a moronic moue—a grotesque of meekness.

  Kate winced. “Every time you compliment me,” she said, “you also i
nsult me.”

  “Yeah, well. You can take it.”

  Kate looked her in the eye.

  “You’re like this walking dictionary thing,” Inez persisted. “But you walk around like someone just shit on your shoes.”

  And as she said the word, she remembered.

  “Oh, hey, do you want your surprise or not?”

  “I thought this was the surprise,” Kate said.

  “Pizza? You’re way too easily pleased.”

  Inez drew the parcel out from under her feet. “Is it your birthday?” she said. “Is it Christmas? Is it Hanukkah?”

  Kate shook her head, laughing, as Inez shoved the parcel on her lap.

  “So why the fuck am I giving you a present?”

  Kate stared at it, speechless, like she’d never been given a gift before.

  “Oh my god, open it, for fuck sake!”

  And she did, slow enough to make Inez want to scream. When she eventually drew out one of the shoes, held it up to behold the spike of its heel and the silver rib cage of its structure, the red of its underside, she said, “Oh my god, Inez. Where did these . . .”

  “You think I stole them!” Inez said.

  “Did you?”

  “I can categorically fucking swear that I did not steal them. They were a gift. Well, a payment.”

  “Payment?”

  “Just try them on!”

  She watched her falter.

  “They’re really amazing,” Kate said. “But I can’t wear high heels.”

  “Why not, you got some kind of spinal injury?”

  “No, but I’ll incur one if I walk around in these.”

  “‘Incur’!” she said, fluting the word in mockery. “Don’t be such a pussy. You’re going to wear them. You’re going to wear them and know that your vagina will destroy any man that comes in your path.”