What She Saw...
Page 26
He did as directed. But it only made things worse. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t see straight. They rolled onto the mud. “Where do you live?” she asked him.
“I think your house is closer than mine,” he croaked. “And my roommate—”
“Let’s go to my house.”
THE WALK BACK to Phoebe’s apartment was long and wet enough to have a sobering effect on both of them. By the time they got to her door, they were too embarrassed to look each other in the eye. “This is my house,” she announced like a perfect idiot.
“I know,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” she mumbled.
They climbed the stairs single-file. She led him straight into the bedroom she and Neil had painted a fashionable shade of lime-green. “Cute,” said Bo, removing his socks, his shoes, his jeans, and his shirt. So he was naked, and even lovelier than she’d imagined, and shaking ever so slightly.
“Let’s get under the covers,” said Phoebe, surprised by the show of nerves on display before her. (Here she’d thought Boarding School Brandos’ emotional arcs begun and ended with rage-tinged melancholy!)
They climbed under Neil’s goose-down comforter and hugged.
Phoebe might have felt guilty.
Instead she felt happy for the first time in a long time— happy and warm and free and stupid and young.
Bo seemed to feel the same way. “Phoebe,” he said, pulling her against his boyish chest.
“What?” she said, locking her leg around his own.
“You know the day we met?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of stalker, but I recognized you the second you walked in.”
“From where?!”
“It was about a year ago on the F train. I was on my way to acting class. I don’t know where you were going, but you were wearing black tights, and you had your hair pulled back . . .”
Phoebe’s memory scrolled backward and landed on a fuzzy frame of a mostly forgotten March morning. “Was that you?” she squealed in disbelief.
“That was me,” said Bo.
“But your hair was short!”
“I grew it out.”
“You’re lying.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
“And look where we are now,” said Bo, pushing himself against the inside of her thigh.
“Speak for yourself,” said Phoebe, pushing him away.
But she pulled him back in the throes of their laughter. She figured she had the rest of her life to clean up the mess. And she was tired of thinking so much, tired of thinking everything through. And were there really nobler pursuits? Increasingly, it seemed to Phoebe that the rewards on this misery- and humiliation-drenched earth were few and far between.
Later but not that much later in the afternoon, she got out her violin and played Bo Pierce a nude rendition of one of Stinky Mancuso’s old anthems, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Somewhere along the way to hell—or was it heaven that awaited her? Who was she to say?—she’d learned the notes by heart.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to: Dan Menaker and Jeanne Tift, for giving me a chance; Maria Massie, for never losing faith; my loving parents, Peter Rosenfeld and Lucy Davidson Rosenfeld; my inspiring sisters, Sophie and Marina Rosenfeld; and also Christen Kidd, Carri Brown, and Dennis Ambrose; and the many friends who saw me through this book, editorially, existentially, and otherwise—especially Ariel Kaminer, Meredith Kahn, Malcolm Gladwell, Larissa MacFarquhuar, John Cassidy, Virginia Heffernan, Nina Siegal, David Kirkpatrick, Elyse Cheney, Matthew Affron, and (above all) Greg Pond.
Lucinda Rosenfeld
WHAT She SAW...
Lucinda Rosenfeld was born in New York City on the last day of the 1960s. She grew up in New Jersey and attended Cornell University. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Slate, Word, and Talk. She was a nightlife columnist of the New York Post from 1996 to 1998. She lives in Brooklyn.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in What She Saw . . . is based on an actual person and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Lucinda Rosenfeld
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition
as follows:
Rosenfeld, Lucinda.
What she saw in Roger Mancuso, Günter Hopstock, Jason Barry Gold,
Spitty Clark, Jack Geezo, Humphrey Fung, Claude Duvet, Bruce Bledstone,
Kevin McFeeley, Arnold Allen, Pablo Miles, Anonymous 1–4, Nobody 5–8,
Neil Schmertz, and Bo Pierce: a novel / Lucinda Rosenfeld.
p. cm.
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title
PS3568.O814 W47 2000
813’.6—dc21
00-029066
www.anchorbooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43018-2
v3.0