by Natasha Bell
He finds his hotel a couple of blocks from the subway, checks in and takes the stairs to his room. A small box painted a cheery yellow with a bed, a low plastic nightstand and a crooked lamp. He brushes his fuzzy teeth, gulps a mouthful of water.
By 1 p.m. he’s found a diner around the corner, complete with fluorescent lights and checked plastic booths, and ordered his first American breakfast, pancakes and all. He’s awake but only in that tired-behind-the-eyes sort of way. He drinks a cup of coffee and the waitress returns with the pot.
His plan was to go straight to Amelia’s address, but here in Manhattan he’s suddenly nervous. How does one go about confronting a woman who may have killed your wife? Who definitely fucked her? He thinks about the agent’s warning. What if jet lag makes him incoherent? What if she’s dangerous? Perhaps he should wait until he’s slept.
By the time he reaches this decision he’s drunk a small reservoir of coffee. It’s sunny and warm outside. He could walk through the park, take in a museum on the other side. That’s what people do when they come to New York, isn’t it? He feels strangely detached from himself, like he isn’t Marc Southwood here, but some other, normal person borrowing his body. He wonders how our girls are doing. They’ll have finished school and be eating dinner with his parents. He should be with them really, sorting out their new school applications, making sure everything’s okay with the buyers, booking a surveyor. But while life in York continues as always, Marc is here, taking a holiday from himself.
His jet-lagged thoughts free-form their way to the faces on the Missing People website. He’s always contemplated the poor families left behind, the bereaved individuals searching for their loved ones. The statistics say many left on purpose. Sitting here, where no one knows him and no one cares what he does next, Marc almost sees the appeal. He loves our children and of course he’d never leave, but he doesn’t love his life anymore. It’s liberating to sit alone and feel that for one afternoon he can forget who he is. He can do anything here and it won’t matter to a single soul, not even his own.
He walks through the park to the Met. He follows tourists and schoolchildren into rooms of famous paintings, stands alone in front of other, more obscure pieces. Every so often he has to turn away and take a breath. His connection to some of these works is so entwined with my passions that it’s impossible for him to stand before Hokusai’s The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, Jasper Johns’s White Flag or the intricate splatters of a Jackson Pollock without hearing my voice. He moves on to The Blind Man’s Meal and is so struck by the cold loneliness of the painting that he shivers before it. Is he Picasso’s blind man, fumbling ineffectively for his wife in this cruel city? After that everything seems tainted: Georgia O’Keeffe mocks his impotent manhood, Roy Lichtenstein splashes artificial color on his scrambled world and Modigliani’s Juan Gris looks out of the canvas with the same pity he’s seen on the neighbors’ faces.
He buys a pretzel from a cart on the steps and walks. He crosses at any green light, zigzagging to Times Square, where the crowds and the billboards spin his brain. He escapes down a side street, then another, a horn blaring when he walks on to a crosswalk with a red hand telling him to stop. His stomach growling, he ducks into a brightly lit shop and buys a hot dog drenched in toxic dressings. His feet ache. He paces back toward the hotel, studying the hurrying people he passes. He sees a woman in spike heels hail a yellow taxi and thinks of Joni Mitchell. An Asian boy who looks too young to be wandering around alone bumps into Marc, runs off without apology. A couple speaking heatedly in Spanish overtakes him. Eyes peer at him from beneath hoods and behind sunglasses. He feel conspicuous, like everyone around knows more of this world than he does. What does my poor husband have in common with these hardened New Yorkers? His eyes and ears and brain too full of stimuli to process anything more, he finds the hotel and lets himself back into his room. He flops on to the bed and falls immediately to sleep in his clothes.
* * *
He wakes at four thirty the next morning. He dresses and waits impatiently in the cramped room for a decent hour. As the birds chirp the city into life and the streetlamps flicker off for another day, he walks back to the same diner. He eats French toast drenched in maple syrup, thinking the girls would be jealous. He tries to focus. He’s going to find Amelia today.
He pays his bill and heads toward the subway. One transfer and two stops bring him to Penn Station. He’s carried with the crowd around a corner and up a flight of stairs to a fluorescently lit walkway leading in every direction. He chooses an exit at random.
The sun shines white on the blistering pavement and he smells concrete mixed with roasting nuts and bile. His brain flicks through thoughts of September 11 and London’s July 7. A childish voice chatters about why he’s always chosen cities like Durham and York, why men like him don’t fly across oceans to confront their wives’ lovers. He senses someone behind, impatient for him to move out of their way, to stop ruining their morning with his feeble existence. He picks up his pace. Hurrying pedestrians, trees growing from the sidewalk, bus shelters plastered with posters and random blocks of concrete all provide obstacles for his directionless journey. Eventually, confident no one is about to barge into the three feet in front of him, he looks up. There, mistily blurred above the dead straight street, he sees the immediately recognizable silhouette of the Empire State Building.
“Watch it, asshole,” growls a passing suit. He’s slowed almost to a stop staring at the iconic building. What’s wrong with you? he growls at himself this time, Of course you’re seeing the Empire State Building, you’re in New York—you are an asshole.
He looks across four lanes of taxis and horns. He reaches an intersection and peers to his right to decipher a blue sign, its white lettering declaring Fashion Avenue. On the diagonal, a fairy-lit billboard reads MACY’S. Underneath, revolving doors swallow and spew out bag-laden shoppers. He watches for a moment, his pulse calming, then turns down 7th Avenue. He walks until the elegant boutiques give way to eye-popping neon signs. By the fifth intersection he feels he’s walked into a different city. The street signs are less embellished, the crosswalk lights lower and a grimy yellow rather than sleek black. This feels more like what he’s looking for. He turns on to West 29th.
Fewer people dash along this stretch of pavement, but he has to navigate cars turning in and out of parking garages, scaffolding clinging to facades and red fire hydrants sticking up in the middle of the sidewalk. As he walks, businesses morph into apartment blocks. He passes 329 and digs in his pocket for the creased address, double-checking what he already has burnt into his brain: 522 West 29th Street.
At the next corner he finds a blue bar called Tom&Fi’s and wonders how young and cool you have to be to step in there. Without slowing his pace, he peers through the darkened glass and thinks he makes out people already sitting at the bar. Does Amelia hang out here? he wonders. The door swings open and he jumps, feeling conspicuous.
“See you tomorrow,” a leggy young woman shouts behind her as she exits the bar. She flicks a dark braid out of her face and catches Marc’s eye. She says nothing but doesn’t look away, just glares in a kind of bemused way. Do strange men often look at her in the street? Has she developed some kind of staring contest defense mechanism? It’s clear he’s going to look away first, that her tactic will work, but before he does he registers the tank top that finishes inches before her jeans begin, the long, tight stretch of her neck, the metal stud beneath her cupid mouth and the scattering of freckles on her high cheekbones. All that in a guilty split second where he feels like a dirty old man, though all he’s done is glance into a bar. He adjusts his rucksack and turns away, continues to the crosswalk where, humiliatingly, he has to wait for the lights.
Staring at the other side of the street, he realizes he’s only a couple of blocks away and wonders for the first time about the woman he’s searching for. What will she look like? How will she dress? Will he
r hair be long or short? So far he’s modeled his imaginings of her on my friends in the UK: the mums at school in their practical jeans, Philippa in her expensive suits and court heels, Susan with her silver rings and summer dresses. He’s assumed Amelia will be the same: a woman in her late thirties or early forties, adapting fashions and taste to the growing responsibilities of age. But what if she’s not? Perhaps her difference is what attracted me to her. She’s an artist with no children and no responsibilities other than to herself. Not since Al, anyway, his cruel brain reminds him. He forces the thought to the back of his mind and tries again to picture Amelia physically. Will she be wearing paint-spattered dungarees and have her uncut, tangled hair piled in a messy bun? Forgetting the decade, he pictures her as a Doris Lessing character or perhaps a moderately dragged Radclyffe Hall. What will she be doing at midday on a Friday? Standing at an easel listening to Tchaikovsky? Lying in bed smoking clove cigarettes with a much younger lover? Marc looks down at his dark jeans and leather shoes. He feels a million miles from himself. What does he know about artists and New York and the life Amelia might be living? What is he going to say to this alien being when she answers the door? He scratches his temple. Sweat forms around his collar. Will she even be there? What if she’s sitting in that bar downing neat whiskies right now? Or uptown at MoMA installing her next piece of fabulously incomprehensible art? What will he do if he finds no one in?
He passes through a badly lit tunnel, blinks in the sunlight on the other side. The tall buildings have fallen away and he can see the sky caressing parking lifts and railway bridges. An abandoned jacket hangs from a scrawny street tree. Posters half ripped from railings and temporary barriers tell him to “Just Dance.” He passes an orange storage shop with 517 painted on the glass. Next comes a blank gray building with 525 efficiently stamped to the heavily bolted door.
“It must be on the other side,” he murmurs, turning to face across the street. Opposite stands a squat, utilitarian, one-story building painted two shades of gray with opaque windows reflecting Marc back to himself. He looks left and right, then steps across the road. A small vertical sign reads “Alison Graves Gallery.” His heart sinks. Is it just a gallery address? It doesn’t even look open.
He peers further up the street. He can see two American flags and a sign reading “Jesus Is the Light of the World.” He feels sick. What is he doing here? What if Amelia really was involved in what happened at the river? He should have gone to DI Jones; he should have let the police handle it.
The Graves block dominates about a third of the street, but he can’t see a number. He walks back toward 10th Avenue. Next to the military gallery, divided by only a thin column of brick, he finds a dented, graffiti-plastered door with 522 stamped at head height. To its left is a metal block of buttons beside apartment numbers. He scans the tiny paper slips, but her name is not there. Marc punches the wall in front of him, regretting the act as pain soars from his knuckles.
You’ve come all this way, you can’t give up now.
He scans back up the list of names, lingering on the one reading Apartment Manager. He presses the circular metal button.
A moment of silence, then the crackle of an intercom and a gruff, “Yes?”
“H-hello,” Marc says self-consciously into the wall. “I’m looking for someone I was told lived at this address, but she doesn’t seem to be on the list of names.”
“So? Maybe she moved,” comes the terse reply.
“Yes, that’s what I thought. Her name’s Amelia Heldt. You wouldn’t by any chance have a forwarding address, would you?”
There’s a pause. “Amelia?” the voice finally says.
“Yes,” Marc says, his excitement audible.
“Hold on.” A click and then nothing. Marc waits on the doorstep for five or six minutes, inspecting his grazed and swelling knuckles, wondering if he’s been forgotten. Just as he’s contemplating the buzzer again, the heavy door swings open and a short, gray, unshaven man in a tatty dressing gown stands before him.
“Amelia’s never lived here,” the man says, squinting and shaking his head. “She pays me to pick up her mail and send it to her, that’s all. How’d you get this address?”
“From a gallery owner,” Marc says, adding, “I’ve come from England.”
“Thought I heard an accent,” the man says with a serious nod.
“I’m trying to contact her. It’s urgent.”
The man shrugs his sagging shoulders. “I have no idea where she is. I get her mail, then I post it uptown.”
“Can you tell me where?” Marc says.
“I guess. It’s not an address, though, it’s a mailbox number, so I don’t know if that’ll help.”
“That seems odd,” Marc says.
The man sniffs. “She moves around a lot, says it’s easier this way. She pays me cash and she’s a nice girl, so what do I care?”
“She comes here?” Marc says. He doesn’t want to hear about Amelia being nice.
“Yeah, you know, she stops by when she’s in the neighborhood to see if she can save me the hassle. I make coffee and she tells me about her gallery stuff. I used to take pictures, you know? Before my eyes got bad.”
“Oh right,” says Marc, shuffling his feet. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s how we met. She bought one of my pictures, wanted to use it for some project. Most of the time I don’t understand what she’s talking about, but she’s a good lady, passionate and caring. She asks about my kids.”
Marc stares at the old man, feeling both sorry for and a little revolted by him. How has he ended up like this, spilling his guts to a stranger on the doorstep? Marc tries not to wonder if he’s looking at a version of his own fate. “How long has this been going on?” he says.
“Jeez, ten years maybe. No, more than that, maybe like fourteen or fifteen. I don’t remember, you know.”
“That’s okay.”
“After I sold her the picture, she asked if I could do her a favor,” the man says to the air above Marc’s head. “I didn’t see why not, thought it’d be for a few months ’til she got a place, but I guess those months stretched out. The years blur, the tenants come and go and even my daughters forget to send birthday cards. But not Amelia. She always remembers. Known her since she was a fresh little thing, all bubbling about art school and wanting to make a name for herself. Say, are you the one who writes to her from England? I always notice the stamps with the little Queen’s head on, but Amelia never told me who they were from.”
Marc swallows. “That was my wife,” he says. “She studied with Amelia.”
“I see,” the man mumbles.
“My wife’s gone,” Marc says.
The man’s watery eyes meet Marc’s. “And now you’re trying to find Amelia?”
Marc nods.
“She doesn’t like to be easily tracked down,” the old man says. “Scared of commitment if you ask me. If she stayed in one place for too long, she’d have a dozen guys lining up to propose. Who can blame her, though? My marriage fell apart. They all seem to these days—”
“You really have no idea where she is?” Marc says.
“Sorry.” He sniffs again. “I wish I could help. You could try at the galleries around here. They know her next door, I think.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” Marc presses.
“Oh, a month or two ago. She had an exhibition coming up.”
“Do you know where?”
The old man shakes his head. “SoHo somewhere. I don’t keep up with these things. I might if I could go, you know, but it’s difficult these days. It’s not so bad, so long as there’s something on TV, I keep myself occupied.”
“Sorry,” Marc says, hoping to mask his frustration with a sympathetic smile.
“I’m sorry too.” The old man looks genuinely sad. “Look, I’ll get you that mail
box number.”
“Thank you,” Marc says when he returns. “You’ve been a lot of help.”
“I hope you find her,” the man offers before turning back to his gloomy hallway.
Marc looks back at the door for a moment, then walks the ten steps back to the gallery. It’s dark inside. He cups his hands around his face and peers through the glass but sees only an empty desk with a sagging orchid. He knocks, tentatively at first, then bangs with full-fisted frustration.
He stomps back and forth on the pavement, wondering what to do next. Eventually he reaches into his rucksack and tears a page from his notebook. He scrawls a message asking someone to get in touch urgently. He hesitates, then mentions Amelia and scribbles the name of his hotel.
He slips the note through the vertical letterbox and watches it disappear into the abyss. Is that the extent of his plan? Now what?
He rubs his eyes. He’s still jet-lagged. His stomach rumbles. He’ll find something to eat, then take the subway to the mailbox address, see if there’s anyone to talk to there. He wanders to a small park, chews a sandwich and then heads uptown.
Amelia’s mailbox is in a large facility with a suited receptionist who tells Marc the company’s reputation is built on their ability to provide a discreet, private service. He refuses to enter into further conversation and threatens to call security if Marc doesn’t vacate the premises. Unsure what else to do or what else he expected, Marc leaves. He steps back over the yellow bobbles on the platform and into a subway car. He stares at the scuffed metal grill beneath the seats and the graffitied windows above other passengers’ heads, avoiding eye contact. They stop, he thinks at Columbus Circle, but the announcer’s voice is muffled. Marc’s heart pummels in his chest. He prays he won’t cry. A guy by the metal pole closest to him plucks a ukulele. It begins softly, gentle notes offered tentatively to the crowd. He plucks a few bars, then a couple more, parts his lips and lilts quietly and solemnly: “Some-wheeere…oh-ver the rain-bow…” The guy opposite Marc crosses his legs with a sigh. “Some-wheeere…oh-ver the…” The musician taps his foot, picks up pace: “Some-day-I’ll-wish-upon-a-star-and-wake-up-where-the-clouds-are-far-behiiind mee…” The train slows to a crawl in the blackened tunnel as the man resumes his melancholy prayer. A woman a few seats down coughs. The train shudders back to full speed and the busker takes a breath before launching into a belting entreaty of the subway car. “If-happy-little-bluebirds-fly-beyond-the-rainbow-Oh whhhy can’t IIIIII?” He tips his baseball cap and clears his throat. The other passengers study the floor, gaze through the opaque glass. “Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I’m a student at Juilliard and trying to pay my tuition, so any donations are much appreciated.”