Her breathing wavered now above the liquid surface of sleep. Cradled in the sugary opulence of sex and fine bedding, she enjoyed a few moments of peace before the tides dragged her back towards her own self-loathing. Her parents had brought her up to believe she could do anything with her life, but had neglected to suggest something in particular or to mention that endeavour was requisite. She stared at the ceiling and saw a vague, gloomy premonition of how her life might not turn out to be.
‘Let’s get drunk,’ she said, knowing Finn so little.
An hour later, she exited the cab on Ludlow Street as if on to a red carpet. The Gay Hussar restaurant (page 78 of the guidebook, double-circled by Dilly) was almost full, a wall of noise. The owner was a tall, raven-haired woman wearing bright red lipstick and a polka-dot tea dress that hinted at a passion for swing dance. She led them to the table for four by the window that Dilly insisted on and warned them they’d have to share it when the place was full.
‘This is the best table in the place,’ Dilly whispered, implying previous visits that did not exist.
An old-time jukebox perched on the wall played the Squirrel Nut Zippers. Books torn and scuffed by love filled shelves too high to reach. Dilly pulled a Moleskine notepad from her clutch bag and ended its virginity by writing the words ‘effortlessly shabby’. She stuck out her arm to block the owner, almost punching her in the womb. ‘Can we get a pitcher of mojito?’ she asked, impatiently. The owner narrowed her eyes, withered Dilly, and walked away.
‘Not into cocktails,’ Finn said.
‘No, no, you have to, please, that’s how I imagined it.’ She sat upright, breathed in and smiled deliriously as she checked out the restaurant’s contents, material and human.
The restaurant was filled with good noise, through which a waitress came to them, hidden behind the jug of mojito she carried with both hands. She was tiny, Japanese-looking and spoke with a pale, smoothly arched New York accent. She was polite and pretty, her hair held back by a single silver clip that sat at an angle. She wore a grey sleeveless dress that had the simplicity of a uniform.
‘I LOVE her look…’ Dilly said, as she watched the waitress go. She grinned at Finn, poured the drinks and patted the seat next to her. ‘I’m so happy,’ she sighed. He sat beside her and they kissed with the taste of the rum on their tongues and soon, in the blood-rush of snatched alcohol, they were groping beneath their menus, and she moaned in his ear her dreamy plans for their future.
‘You’re gonna have to sit opposite each other, we need the table.’ The owner stood over them. Beside her stood a man who was exactly the kind of chic urban horse-whisperer Dilly pictured when she masturbated.
‘They can have those two seats, I want my man next to me,’ Dilly said, pointing to the seats opposite and already slurring a little.
‘That doesn’t work,’ the woman said.
‘It works, sure it works, two seats is all we’re using.’
‘You gotta sit on one table, two other people don’t want to sit looking at two strangers.’
Finn disentangled himself and returned to his seat. The horse-whisperer took a seat next to Dilly and pitched a brief smile diagonally across the table in between Finn and Dilly. He was a little older than Dilly, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven, and extremely good-looking, rugged, stylish. The Japanese waitress appeared and inflamed Dilly by kissing the man on both cheeks.
‘Siouxsie coming?’ the waitress asked.
‘Yeah, I’m early,’ the man said.
‘Get you a beer?’
‘Thanks, Amy.’ He took a palm pilot from his breast pocket, Marlboro style, and slouched back on his chair to use it.
‘I’m so getting one of those,’ Dilly told the man, leaning across to him. The man smiled but kept it brief.
Finn went to the jukebox. On the graffiti-strewn wall, someone had written The stars are my Chandelier. He held the sides of the jukebox, kicked off with ‘London Calling’ and sang, perfectly in tune, word for word with Joe Strummer, beneath the volume of sound already in the place. His voice brought the Japanese waitress to a standstill as she passed close behind him. She watched him singing into the jukebox, her face at his chest height. Finn closed his eyes and pictured Steve Bachelor, the landlord of the Robinson Crusoe pub on the estate back home, who played Finn and his friends bands from the ancient past, the Clash and the Fall and the Ramones, when they were twelve years old, from a set of speakers aimed out of the windows of his flat above the pub on to the concrete yard where Finn and the other boys rode their bikes and made ghettos out of Steve Bachelor’s doomed car restoration projects.
‘Great voice…’ The waitress’s words yanked Finn back into the room. ‘Where you from?’ she asked.
‘England,’ he said. She was so tiny he felt the urge to crouch down. ‘Where you from?’
‘Queens.’
‘I meant…’ He stopped himself and felt like an unworldly fool.
She helped him out. ‘My dad’s Japanese.’ She smiled and her skin smoothed across her cheekbones like pools of moonshine beneath the jet-black pupils of her eyes.
‘What should I eat?’ he said, to keep her a second longer.
She sized him up. ‘The burger is pretty magnificent. You could handle it. Alternatively, you never regret a lamb shank polenta.’
Dilly poured the last of the mojito equally into her tumbler and Finn’s, and placed the glasses side by side to check they were level. She pressed the empty pitcher against her forehead and looked through the glass at a distorted view of the women in the restaurant – their bodies, hair, clothes, accessories, their mannerisms – lustfully dissecting them and instinctively fashioning the edited highlights into one great evening, which would, ideally, be shared with a guy like the one on their table; good-looking, older than her, a match for her, interesting and effortlessly cool, working in graphic design. She was twenty-four years old for Christ’s sake; she was ready now for the sort of life a man like him would bring to her, although she doubted if he would ever want her the way Finn did, and that was a lot to give up.
As Finn returned, Dilly squeezed out between the tables, gripping the handsome guy’s shoulders and grazing her pubic bone against his broad, muscular back. ‘Need more booze,’ she said, ‘gotta keep this show on the road.’ She squeezed the man’s biceps. ‘Look at you!’ she said, ‘I mean, you can be, like, a graphic designer or something and have muscles like this. It’s the only thing I miss about this fucked-up country.’ She pointed at Finn. ‘He’s got the muscles but that’s it.’
Finn bowed his head. The handsome guy watched Dilly being ignored at the bar, a detail that told him all was right in the world. ‘I guess I have no idea why she thinks I’m a graphic designer.’
‘She lives in hope that everybody is,’ Finn said.
Dilly returned, throttling a bottle of wine by the neck. She poured three glasses and slid one of them in front of the guy, who pushed the glass an inch back in her direction before taking a swig of his beer. The man’s girlfriend arrived and Dilly became sullen. Finn watched the third glass of wine sit in the no man’s land between the two couples. It made him uneasy. He stretched out his leg and tapped Dilly’s ankle with his foot, in the hope of encouraging her to angle her body back towards him. Dilly ignored him and looked expectantly at the couple and Finn realised, with dread, that she was drunk, and waiting to be introduced by a man who didn’t know her to a woman who knew her less.
‘You remember Angela?’ the girlfriend said to her man, as she took her seat.
‘Sure,’ he said.
‘I just bumped into her. She quit documentaries and she’s a rap artist now and we can go see her tomorrow night at Lambs to the Slaughter.’
Dilly leaned towards Finn and whispered loudly, ‘That’s what I want! Isn’t that great? One minute you’re a film-maker, the next you’re a rapper? I want that.’
The girlfriend angled her chair away, so that every sinew and nuance of her body told Dilly to fuck off. Finn
needed no instruction on how to ignore people whose drinking left him fearful of their next move. He turned his attention to the view outside of a gap on Ludlow Street where a building had been demolished. The site hoarding was covered in fliers and in front of them the sidewalk smokers were lit by blue neon light spilling from the bar and grill alongside.
The Japanese waitress came over. She and the girlfriend hugged and rocked.
‘You look so sexy tonight, Soooze!’
‘Thank you, Aimz!’
Dilly mimed being sick. She filled her glass. Finn looked down at the waitress’s tiny feet, at the small tendons outlined beneath her pale grey canvas plimsolls, at the way she balanced on one leg, tapping her calf muscle with the non-standing foot, and he logged her name. Amy.
‘Cozy,’ Amy said, addressing the object of Dilly’s thinly hidden lust, ‘if you’re ever looking for a singer, this guy has an awesome voice.’ She pointed at Finn.
‘That right?’ Cozy said.
‘Not really…’ Finn said, with the diffidence that had no traction in this city.
‘You play?’ the girlfriend asked. Finn shook his head and she slugged her beer and turned away, finding Finn’s modesty irksome.
Dilly raised her head. It seemed unstable on her neck, a couple of kilos heavier than it had been pre-mojito. ‘Cozy!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s an interesting name for a… for a name.’
The girlfriend tested her. ‘After the drummer….’
Dilly shrugged and pulled a face. The name meant nothing.
‘What drummer?’ Finn asked.
‘Cozy Powell,’ Cozy said. ‘He was a drummer in the seventies and eighties. My dad was a roadie for him. Worshipped him.’
‘It’s a great name,’ Finn said.
‘It is,’ Cozy’s girlfriend said.
Dilly shrugged. ‘The past doesn’t cut much ice with me.’
‘He can play “Dance with the Devil” out of his nostrils and it sounds like a full drum kit,’ the girlfriend said, to annoy Dilly, and because it was true.
‘But I’m not gonna.’ Cozy smiled.
Dilly snorted. ‘Men are so repressed. You won’t drum; he won’t ever sing for me even if I milk him dry.’
Finn bowed his head. The table fell silent. Dilly slumped for a moment, then scraped her chair back and marched outside. She made her way along a line of smokers on the sidewalk and bummed a cigarette. Finn had never seen her smoke before.
‘How old are you?’ Cozy asked Finn.
‘Nineteen.’
‘How is being nineteen in 2006?’
‘Better than eighteen in 2005. When were you last nineteen?’
‘Ten years ago.’
Finn filled a tumbler with water and slid it into Dilly’s place to await her return. He glanced at Cozy, who was watching him.
‘Sorry about…’ Finn motioned towards Dilly’s empty chair.
‘No need,’ Cozy said.
‘You and her…’ the girlfriend, Siouxsie, said, ‘it’s kind of like watching Buzz Lightyear dating Cruella de Vil. How come you met?’
Finn thought about this a while, then shrugged. ‘Just lucky, I guess.’
Cozy smiled, then laughed.
‘You’re alright,’ Siouxsie said, tossing her hair back, and nodding her approval.
Dilly returned to her seat, re-energised. ‘I’m sorry, I was crass. I apologise. Hey, I am going to sit in this place and write a novel. I love it here.’
‘I thought you were going to rap,’ Siouxsie said.
‘Maybe so. Maybe so. I’ll write the whole thing here, and it’ll be like an unhindered, brilliant stream of consciousness, not held back by normal narrative rules, just a flow. It’ll be very quick to do and it’ll be non-edited, not even the typos. I’m not wasting my time on all that crap when I’m writing for the cellphone generation. Like a Lars von Trier approach to the Great American Novel. I’ll do book signings here, where I wrote it, put this place on the map.’
It wasn’t clear who she was talking to. It was only clear that she was talking.
The check was a reminder to Finn that he was poor. Dilly watched a bead of sweat form on his forehead as he read the numbers and she, as if her greatest gift was to never cease to amaze, sobered up and held her purse beneath the table and discreetly took out a sheaf of twenties and slipped the notes into Finn’s hand. She got up and headed unsteadily for the restroom, stopping to whisper in his ear, ‘You take care of it.’ And, save for the detail of the whispered words, Cozy had taken all this in, and told himself that he had judged her harshly.
‘You like music?’ Cozy asked.
‘I’m nineteen.’
‘There’s a band on now,’ Cozy said. ‘You two should stay.’
‘Thanks,’ Finn said. ‘You two are cool.’
‘She is, I’m not,’ Cozy said.
Through a wall of thick brown drapes, the restaurant opened into a small venue with an old tiled hose-down bar and burgundy-painted walls covered in fliers: GUSTAFER YELLOWGOLD’S WIDE WILD WORLD, GRETCHEN WITT, FREE MUSIC FESTIVAL FEATURING 3PM LA, VERNISSAGE SONGWRITERS SERIES, ABI TAPIA, JIM CAMPILONGO ELECTRIC TRIO, THE ANIMATORS, KRISTIN DIABLE, SPOTTISWOODE & HIS ENEMIES, ALL NIGHT CHEMISTS.
Above the bar a collection of old tin trays were stuck flat to the wall like dartboards; SPARKLING ROCK SPRING WATER, SCHLITZ, WILLIAM YOUNGER, BALLANTINE ALE AND BEER, HAMM’S (a canoeist gliding through an impossibly blue canyon river), BLATZ (America’s ‘great light beer’), PEOPLE’S BEER (‘it hits the spot’). Dilly threaded her arm through Cozy’s and gazed at the trays. ‘Don’t you think the graphics are perfect?’ she said. Nothing, but nothing, was going to shake her belief that Cozy worked in this field.
‘Classic…’ Cozy said, going along with her version of the universe.
Siouxsie handed out four beers and a band tuned up. A trickle of people entered the parted drapes. Dilly put her beer down on the bar and slid it away. ‘Of all the people in the whole world I wish could be like, it’s Nico.’
‘She’s dead,’ Cozy said.
‘Don’t let that put her off,’ Siouxsie said, and wrapped her arms around Cozy’s waist and stroked his buttocks.
‘Did you do that interview?’ Cozy asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it was fine.’
‘What interview – are you famous?’ Dilly asked.
‘No. It was just a local art publication, that’s all. I make decorative glass. It was just a super-fast thing.’
‘What did they ask?’
‘Just random stuff. Favourite things.’
‘Ask me. What did they ask? Ask me. Interview Dilly.’
Siouxsie looked her dead in the eye. ‘When did you first start using glass as a medium?’
Dilly looked confused then grinned. ‘Nooooo! That doesn’t work. Something about ME!’
Siouxsie drawled a question, to placate her. ‘What living person do you most admire?’
‘And it’s meant to be arty answers?’
‘It’s meant to be the truth.’
‘Frida Kahlo, definitely.’
‘You’re not a reader of the obituaries…’ Siouxsie muttered.
‘What?’ Dilly said.
‘Living…’ Cozy reminded her.
‘Oh, if she’s dead, then Mary Portas.’
‘Who?!’ the Americans asked.
‘Mary Queen of Shops! She’s English and she transforms crappy little clothes shops into really great businesses and she’s very cool for an older woman sort of thing. I heard her interviewed and thought, yeah, yeah, you know what, I have time for you, lady, I could be you in a hundred years’ time.’
Cozy looked blank. Siouxsie turned to Finn and shoved an imaginary microphone beneath his chin.
‘Finn….! The living person you most admire?’
Finn pointed at Cozy. ‘Him.’
The three of them laughed, lazy, drunken laughs.
‘Why is that funny? You don’t even know him?’ Dilly smiled but looked lost
.
‘Just is,’ Cozy said, and set up four glasses of Jack Daniel’s with the barman. People squared up to the stage in readiness. Cozy and Finn chinked glasses covertly, with body language that announced an intent to have a good night and not give a damn. Dilly poured her liquor equally into the other three glasses, handed her empty glass to Finn and shoved her way to the front of the crowd, where she stood motionless and stared without expression at the lead singer.
The set came and went and was the kind of okay that liquor made good. Finn shadow-drank throughout, using the movement of people around him to tip on to the floor more than passed his lips. Siouxsie put her arms around Cozy and Finn and smiled provocatively as Dilly returned to them and Dilly hated her with all the strength she had, which suddenly felt like not enough strength to survive New York City.
‘You guys should come back to our apartment and have a little smoke,’ Siouxsie said.
Dilly snorted disdainfully. ‘Sure, where is your apartment, 1973?’
‘Yeah,’ Siouxsie drawled, ‘’cos smoking weed was a real seventies-only thing.’
Crowds would have flocked to see the two of them mud-wrestle.
In the cab, Dilly grew melancholy. They crossed the water to Williamsburg and the wind billowed in through the windows. Finn’s delight at not knowing where the hell they were was identical in its force to Dilly’s fear of not knowing, and her despair at wanting so much from any given moment that she felt perpetually poor.
Williamsburg was dark and quiet by the shore. The cab pulled up on Kent Avenue and Finn watched the lights of Manhattan shape-shift in the black waters of the East River, which sat like an oil slick covertly powering the island by night. Dilly loitered in the back of the cab and pulled Finn back.
‘I’m gonna take this cab on back to the hotel, but you should stay and have fun.’
Men Like Air Page 8