It continued to seem bizarre to Kate that Inez should have parents. Beneath the shock of knowing she was Bill’s daughter, a fact Kate had zero inclination to mention in Inez’s presence, there was the shock of her being anyone’s daughter. Some people just didn’t seem parented—didn’t seem as if they had ever been a kid, had ever been anything other than their fully formed, half-feral selves.
“Hello?” Inez snapped.
“Sorry,” she said. Then: “I suppose . . . I suppose that parents always want to correct their own mistakes through their children.” And now she heard how teacherly her words sounded.
The look Inez gave her was steady, weighted. There was a black patience to it, as if she would hold out for as long as it took for Kate to wither. Kate felt the unsaid sneer: Who are you?
“Whatever,” Inez said. “We’re having a massive Halloween party. Saturday before. You have to come. One last blowout before it’s over. And then—” she paused to take a very slow toke, a stagey calm to her motions “—then we’re going to burn the place to the ground.”
Kate’s laugh was false nerves. The weed was making her feel twitchy, making this roof seem too big, the drop beneath them too far.
“You have to come,” Inez said, holding out the joint to her again.
“Okay.”
“And you have to come in costume. A good one. Don’t even think about pulling some bunny ears shit.”
“Shall we go inside? It’s kind of cold.”
She wished she’d brought a sweater. Wished her legs weren’t bare.
“Who did you go meet the other night?” Inez asked. “Don’t try and play dumb. Who is she?”
“She?” Kate squawked. And then she realized it had been a trap. Inez was laughing at her.
“Don’t all the ladies love this hair?” Inez said, giving a tuft a quick yank. “I thought you were having a whole lez awakening. Ditching the Brit boyfriend et cetera. No?”
Kate covered her face.
“Oh, what, you embarrassed?”
“I’m so cold, can we please go in?”
“Not until you tell me who you’re fucking. Also, you should bring him to the party.”
And now Kate diagnosed the feeling within her. It wasn’t the weed, or it wasn’t just the weed. It was guilt, the worm of it. Her failure to connect this world, in which a version of her fucked this used-to-be-famous American writer, to the other world, the left-behind world, in which George attended dinner parties in Clapham without her, then went home to sit at his laptop to write her long e-mails describing his night. There was something earnest and self-conscious in these overwritten missives, as if he were penning his aperçus for some future biographer, who’d recall the months in which a love affair became a long-distance correspondence maintained between London and New York. He had, she realized, no idea. No idea at all. And his ignorance somehow made her furious.
Inez was snapping her fingers in her face.
“You alive in there?”
“I’m realizing I’m a shit person.”
She was shivering quite violently now.
Inez made a noise of exasperation, shrugged off her own jacket, and draped it, inexpertly, around Kate’s shoulders.
“No, seriously. I’ve done a terrible thing. I’ve cheated. I’ve been cheating and I just haven’t even really thought about it until now.”
Inez had a way of rolling her eyes, half-crossing them, and then letting her eyelids quiver as if from impending death.
If Kate couldn’t make her understand, if she couldn’t make Inez see, then she was all alone with her guilt and her unreasonable anger. So she had to go now, she had to get back to the apartment and get on Skype and tell him everything, tell him how she’d betrayed him and was ending it and he shouldn’t forgive her. She wouldn’t even give him a chance to say anything, she thought.
“Dude, it’s two in the morning in England.”
“What?” Kate said.
“Chill, okay? Just chill. I’m making you a cup of Sleepytime.”
And, wearing Inez’s jacket like a sorry cape, sleeves lolling empty off her shoulders, she allowed herself to be led indoors, where things were smaller, where there was a kitchen, and a kettle, and mugs, and an array of other objects all convinced of their own normality.
When it came to telling him, days later, she felt very little. Bill had offered her one of his tiny sky-blue pills and she’d saved it, wrapped in a square of bathroom tissue, and popped it before she did the dishes, wiped down the counters, Swiffered the floor. It felt necessary to put the place in order first. It meant that when she came to her laptop she could feel a cool proficiency. Dishes washed, stacked, dried, and now this, the final task to complete, while seated quite formally at the stranger’s kitchen table.
It seemed both impossible and marvelous that you could effect such a breakage with only words, that you could end a relationship just by speaking a phrase, like a magician, or a judge, or an auctioneer. She’d rehearsed certain phrases over and over, tested different permutations, all fake and empty for having been parroted by people real and fictional for decades and decades. The sentence that ended it was purely procedural, less like speaking and more like signing some official paperwork.
Still, it was the realest George had been in weeks. When he began to weep, silently, motionlessly, she could taste the tears, and it was terrible. The more she didn’t want to, the more she felt the salty sooth of them. He shut it down, said there was nothing more to say, and she did not protest.
She closed the laptop and looked at the immaculate kitchen in its silence, then walked into the pine-fresh bathroom and went to her knees, to a fetal pose, and pressed her face against the chilly clean tiles of the floor. She was a young person, in an old person’s apartment, in a ball on the floor. No one came to stop her, and the realization that no one would, not for months at least—that she could stay here, insane and immobile on the floor—snatched at her throat and she sat up, horrified.
Joni Mitchell was sitting in the doorway, placidly licking a paw, the feline equivalent of a bitch filing her nails.
“You don’t care,” Kate said, becoming a woman talking to a stranger’s cat. And the word care, the very idea of not caring, brought back the sight of George’s eyes pooling, the way he swallowed, the jump of his Adam’s apple, and how this had only sent the tears spilling down his face, and now something broke in Kate’s chest and it wasn’t her own pain, but his. His pain of her own doing.
She got up and left, and as she walked to Tompkins Square she remembered, not knowing why, the recently bereaved couple who’d come for Sunday lunch when she was eleven, how she’d helped her mum whip the cream for the apple pie but had held the beaters in it for too long, so that tiny flecks of yellow appeared—cream turned to butter—and how, mortified, she’d begged her mother not to tell the bereaved couple what she’d done. The shame at ruining a dessert for adults who’d lost their teenage son. As she’d covertly watched the dead son’s mother trying to force one forkful of pie and too-thick cream into her mouth, Kate had understood the phrase “holding it together” as a bodily reality rather than an idiom. It did not mean putting on lipstick and a brave smile. It meant the severe physical effort required to hold on to your body as it roiled with forces that threatened to tear it apart, to send every atom hurling in a thousand different directions, because that was how hard the pain seemed to scream. It meant the will, the force, of holding your physical being in one place, intact. Eleven-year-old Kate, destroyer of cream, Kate the wretched overchurner, had watched the bereaved mother’s fingers tremble, had faced the wild flash of her eyes as they rolled and tried to stay still, and had shrunk with fear at the mother’s voice, taut as the string of a bow. Beside the mother was the bereaved father, whom grief had made radiant.
Kate was not radiant. She was another sad girl crying a
lone on the streets of New York City, still weeping when she reached the park and not caring who saw. She walked curving paths through the scorched grass. It was a cooler afternoon now, and she reminded herself that this was the same place she’d been that first night, the night she’d heard fireworks and thought they were bombs. The weight of all that had passed, or all that hadn’t, made this memory somehow agonizing: the inadequacy of her tragedy, the unfairness of its feeling so outweighing its facts.
And here was the ancient lady in pink, still sparring, feebly. Kate wanted to sob when she saw her, wanted, specifically, to hold that sob in her rib cage like a fist and see what it could do.
26
She felt weird today and she did not know why. And not knowing was making her feel insane, twitchy. It was something, Inez thought, about having made Kate tea. Because she kept thinking about it—that tea with the moronic bear on the box, lolling in its pajamas and frilly nightcap. Now she realized that she had never made someone a cup of tea before this moment. That was just a plain fact and it seemed significant. The thing was, it had made her feel much older, suddenly, to do this for Kate, just the two of them, alone in the kitchen, not saying much.
27
Kate caught it the moment she stepped out the door: that edge in the blue air, among the leaf dust and bonfire smoke and cold soil—a note of summer’s mortality. Somehow, it was mid-October already.
Later that day, she found herself typing her old postcode into a blinking search bar, feeling the same faint mixture of titillation and disgust, an unpleasant sensation of lightness, that her occasional online porn searches brought her. She hit return hard: take me there now. And there it was, a satellite image of her childhood home, zoomed in so she was hovering above it at a vulture vantage. The house looked crouched and, in its slightly blurred state, a little vulnerable, a little compromised. A place she no longer lived. There was her childhood sandpit, the bright red plastic square of it flat on the lawn. It was no longer really there. Sally had finally got rid of it a year or so back, passed it on to some neighbor’s kid, but here, in virtuality, it was permanent, like a small flag waving to her from her past.
Within a week there was snow in New York, sudden and freakish. No one was ready for it, but Kate, with her small cheap suitcase of summer things, was more than unprepared—she was ambushed. She bought dead women’s clothes in thrift stores. Tweedish slacks, which bore the label of some long-gone ladies’ department store, a cable-knit sweater, a Navajo patterned blanket to wear as a scarf. They smelled sensible, in the way of old paperbacks, or houses with creaking wood floors. Bill had watched her peel off snow-drenched running shoes one afternoon—salt grit ringing the legs of her jeans—and showed up the next day holding something.
“Wanted to drop these off,” he said. A pair of large and ugly snow boots, bright red and puffy. It was declarative, the way he set them down on the kitchen table.
“My daughter’s,” he offered. “She never wore them.”
She stared at them. Shoes on a table were bad luck. Or did that superstition apply only in England?
“What,” he said, all out of patience, all out of charm.
“These boots belong to Inez?”
He whipped his scarf off and frowned.
“How do you know her name?”
“You told me!” she said. And it felt like a lie. The real lie, of course, was the omission. He still had no idea that she knew her.
She’d seen all this before, she thought, the shoes on the table, him whipping his scarf off. Déjà vu was a neurological accident of accordance. Someone had explained it to her once, but she’d forgotten the details. Something about different parts of the brain. This seemed, though, like a sick synchronism of people and things, not a science of neurons. Also, it all seemed very boring.
“You want me to just take them back?” he said, flapping his arms.
“No,” she managed. “I need them,” she said, adding: “For the snow.”
“For the snow . . .”
“Thanks,” she said. “Sorry, I meant to say thanks.”
“Sure,” he said, flat with irony. He picked up his scarf, was already opening and out the door, an exit too abrupt for her to find a “Bye.”
She sat and eyed the boots, the fat red accusation of them. And then picked them up and put them on.
Far away, academic terms had begun, a new school year. For the first time in her life these periods of time had nothing to do with her. She didn’t care. She was here, in dead people’s clothes and borrowed boots, out of time, and no one stopped her. Except, as she was coming down the steps outside, for a pair of tourists—an Italian couple?—the woman sweetly beseeching, and her husband stiff and silent and shy beside her, who wanted directions, they were looking for Bleecker Street, and Kate was so pleased to be asked—so giddy to be identified, albeit incorrectly, as someone who knew where she was going—that she told them absolute nonsense, with supreme, emphatic confidence. Straight on here, and then second right, and then a left, and it’s right there, pointing the way, smiling a big true smile. They beamed back and thanked her and made off happily in the wrong direction.
The subway walls this week were plastered with movie posters showing a New York under destruction. Tidal waves, plagues, explosions. A city being razed. The smashed and sundered wrist of toppled Lady Liberty, severed in the smoking wreckage, stone fingers still grasping the torch. And, striding from the wreckage, a movie star, grim-faced, bowlegged, fists by his sides, buff in a tight black leather getup, the man who will save us all. In a world, growled the virile voice-over in her head. This season. But which season, what was the season? Poor planet, so abused, so confused.
As she walked she became aware of the flash of her red boots walking beside her, reflected in the store windows. She felt a need to be away from all this, from streets and sidewalks, from surfaces that played her moving image back to her. To find grass and trees instead: natural things that reflected nothing.
Prospect Park in the snow was dazzling, full of children in bright clothes, shrieking. She found a bench, took a banana from her bag, and as she bit into it two things happened with perfect and horrible synchronicity. She saw the corpse of a white rabbit, its head clean gone, resting in a kind of poetic surrender beneath the tree opposite her, and there was at the same time the sound and sensation of her phone in her pocket. The bite of banana sat in her mouth like shame. She stared at the dead rabbit, its bloodless white fur, then stared at her phone. Another message from Inez that she wouldn’t answer, and then a text from Bill. Both of them were telling her to come to parties tonight.
The snow lasted one more day and then, on the Saturday before Halloween, it felt like the first day of summer again. The whole city was melting, dripping, leaves slick and shining, gutters gushing, light catching drips from scaffolding. Kate flung open the windows of the apartment and stuck her head out into the mild air. Everyone in T-shirts, coats over their arms, fanning themselves, amid crusted islands of snow like sponges with all the water sucked out of them. Bill’s text had been a summons. Old friend throwing a birthday/halloween blowout tonight, come. No question mark.
She decided she’d wear the shoes as a sort of costume. The towering, silvered, fuck-me edifices from Inez, not her other pair, the boots. To step in and strap on was to experience the world from a new vantage. She swore the air was thinner up here. Making her stiff and unsteady way through the East Village, step by elevated step, it seemed to her as if the city had pulled off a feat of time travel, cast itself back into the sweaty streets of weeks ago. Fat pumpkins dozed on dusty stoops, hiccups of time. The sky was burning up the day’s dust and smog at its edges.
She watched a young man with a bloody axe lodged in his skull stroll past, alone and purposeful, a businesslike glance at the phone in his hand. She would have liked to capture this moment—just a tiny video, seconds lon
g, of a guy with an axe in his skull, jammy blood gumming its edges, giving his phone a brief sober look. And then a bevy of laughing zombies, elbows linked, hyperanimated and raucous, the hems of their clothing carefully scissored into cartoon zigzags, their cheeks exquisitely purpled, and two young women, their faces masked with glossy pitch-black paint from which eye sockets and the serried white bones of teeth sprung ghoulishly. There were flowers in their hair and they wore cotton dresses splashed with other flowers. She raised her phone to photograph them, and one blew her a kiss at the precise moment the device made its pleasing sound, that mimicry of a camera’s shutter.
28
It looked to Inez like footage of germs: so many bodies making the roof, the usually wide-open empty roof, look too small a space. What was a party? Who were these people? Pretend dead celebrities, mostly. Watching from the water tower, she squinted down and picked out individuals in the mass. Lisa Left Eye Lopes, flailing condoms for earrings, grinding on Andy Warhol. Tupac and Amy Winehouse, taking a selfie, photobombed by a leering Frankenstein’s bride. Frida Kahlo and Frida Kahlo and a zombie Frida Kahlo—fake flowers, cheap makeup—sizing one another up, comparing and admiring. They were all, to her, intolerably disgusting. Clowns, all of them, painted and babbling in their half-botched costumes, their dollar-store trash, glitter and plastic. A heat rose from the bodies, a vast thickness she could reach out and feel. A text to Kate still went unanswered. She looked for her in the crowd but couldn’t think what she might have come as. Couldn’t, in fact, imagine her in costume.
She’d yanked the ladder up after her. It seemed pathetic now, to dress yourself up for other people’s eyes. To pretend, when everyone knew you were pretending. The porny Barbie makeup, the trashy red shoes and leopard-print coat: someone had paid her to do that. She wore ripped jeans, cut into haphazard shorts, an old T-shirt. A cut down her left shin, the promise of a bruise.
There was the problem of no place to go. The absurdity of being in a city this big and there being no place for her. Even if she slipped into one of the bedrooms here, full of somebody else’s stuff and mess, there’d be no lock on the door to prevent sloppy drunk bodies tumbling in, loud and horny, slurring their questions at her. But to be home, Broadway, alone in her childhood bedroom, dejected with Netflix while everyone else in the city, her father included, was out: that was too pathetic to even think about.
Neon in Daylight Page 18
