Silvia blinked and looked at me. I looked blank.
“It’s where they hatch things,” Nat said.
“What things?”
“Businessmen. Anyway, that’s not the point, the point is”—Nat gestured towards me and looked flustered, as if she were trying to pick tactful words—“that she should be meeting people in New York.”
“But I told her that would happen if she just walks around the city,” Silvia protested.
“Then she’s not walking into the right places,” Nat said, narrowing her eyes. “I’m going to set you up with some young people. It’s not good to spend all your time with the dying.”
I snapped my head up from the ground as if she’d yanked me by the hair.
“Ingrid is an architect. My son-in-law is too. He’s completely British, so you might appreciate his sense of humour better than me. They have a practice together, RQ + Partners, building the new thing over there.” She indicated behind her, through the wall, and then through the bedroom window, which looked out onto Roosevelt Island. “I’m joining a tour of the site. You must come. You’ll like Ingrid. She’s . . .” Nat paused, working out how old her daughter was now. “Closer in age to you than we are.”
After I’d set her up with an account on the genealogy website, we said goodbye to Silvia and went down in the elevator together. One of the Tonys on duty in the lobby told us to have a nice day, ladies, and I grinned through clenched teeth. We had to walk to get to the funicular that took us over the East River. We pushed through the turnstiles and stood waiting for the next of them to arrive. Nat corrected my thoughts, as if she could read them, by telling me that it was technically called an aerial tramway. I nodded and resolved to use the proper name aloud but continued to think of it as a funicular, because to me a tram sounds underwhelming, as if it just runs along rails on the ground, whereas this thing went up two hundred and fifty feet above the river.
The island, she explained, had been home to a penitentiary and a penitentiary hospital, a lunatic asylum, a smallpox hospital, and various structures that were built by convict labour. It had been renamed numerous times as well. Nat had been only once before, despite having always lived in Manhattan. It was in the eighties, when a cooperative had been established and a man she knew had persuaded her to visit.
I felt exhausted by her company already. At the same time, I felt a strange vibration, the source of it not immediately obvious, like a subway deep underground, and I knew that if I peeled away from her too soon, the mysterious feeling would disappear before I could locate it.
The funicular was crowded and we were too near the middle to see the view. I was standing too close to Nat for comfort, but there was nothing that could be done about it. Her breath tickled my ear every time she spoke. I can get quite aggravated by things like that. She was also an incurable name-dropper, and each time she asked if I knew a name, she jabbed a long red talon at me. I distracted myself from her inane conversation by wondering what sort of people went to the island now that it was no longer populated by the criminal and the insane. I studied the bodies immediately around us. Man with goatee. Man who looked like a Beatle. All the Beatles at once. Woman wearing newspaper hat. I’d grown used to how weird New Yorkers were, and I could now fit them into types. As I observed them, I noticed how strange it felt to be beside someone who knew my name, knew exactly who I was, and could have picked me out of a lineup. Up until then, the city had shown little sign of knowing me at all.
Nat gave me a taxonomy of New York society—each named individual was either terrible or terribly brilliant—and then a rundown of her own family. Her daughter’s husband, she said with pride, had taken their name when they married eight years ago (at which point Ingrid was already pregnant with twins), so he was now Robin Rooiakker rather than Robin Quinn. Robin had originally been his wife’s tutor at Cooper Union, nearly ten years ago.
“He’s rather older than she is, actually—he’s fifty-six. I think he condescends to me because I didn’t go to college. He can be very pompous, in fact. Ingrid says it is irony, but I don’t think that’s an excuse. He also,” she informed me conspiratorially, “has strange compulsions about washing his hands, and he wears a mask if he has to take the subway.”
I nodded, instinctively taking his side against her.
“He thinks of himself as the intellectual heavyweight of the family, but Ingrid was the one to secure the Cornell Tech project. Ingrid met the client, Walter Ruse, while doing jury duty some years ago, and they became great friends.”
Walter Ruse was brilliant. But this was all the evidence you needed, Nat added in the same conspiratorial tone, to see they did jury duty by zip code.
“I much prefer Walter to Robin, to be frank, and I can see my daughter does too, but it was always a rebellion. Wanted to upset her father and me by picking her tutor. She also knows I disapprove of divorce, but she doesn’t seem to be about to rebel against that anytime soon. Ingrid is very stubborn. She’s not a quitter. Always a perfectionist, even in kindergarten, just like me.”
Her candour meant that I felt I had to reciprocate with some kind of intimacy of my own so as not to be rude, but I didn’t trust her. I couldn’t decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren’t. This wasn’t because, like Nat, I was obsessed with classification, or working out how important people were and where they belonged through which names they knew and which family they belonged to. I just wanted to know if she would sting. The way I had gotten to know Silvia had been so slow, and yet I now knew nearly as much about Nat and her family, and New York society, as I had gleaned from Silvia since her first letter. There was something about this speed I mistrusted. Though I wasn’t giving her nearly as much information in return, she continued to accelerate.
“You should ask Ingrid where she likes to go out in the city,” Nat advised loudly as the rest of the cable car eavesdropped. “I’ve heard that the place people go to now is Third Square. Everyone wants to get into the Third Square,” she said, mimicking the voice of someone telling her this. I nodded.
“Where do you go in England?” she persisted. “Do you like the Wallace Collection? I loved it when I went there.”
It was impossible to avert my eyes from her bright and sticky makeup. Under the hot glass enclosing us it had begun globbing in her pores. Nat fanned herself, and me, due to my being pushed up against her angular shoulders, with a dark red Spanish fan. When she had finished with New York, she started on lineages of British families she knew. I said yes, no, yes, yes, know the name, don’t think so, nodded, or repeated the name back at her.
“Robin’s parents live on . . . something-mont Square, do you know it? In London. I guess not if you spent most of your time in the countryside. We’ve never met them—apparently they and Robin don’t get on. But he says they’re very grand people, British aristocrats essentially. There are lots of Americans living around that square now—I have some friends who moved in, I think. Sylvia Plath used to live there. I don’t know if that’s where she killed herself. Might be.”
She waited as if it would be natural to ask her a question. Several moments passed. Finally I had one. “Are the twins identical?”
“No. Boy and girl.”
“And do they have your surname as well, instead of his?”
“Of course. Thom and Rosa Rooiakker. I was pleased, as Ingrid doesn’t have any brothers. She’s twenty years younger than Robin, you know?”
I nodded.
There was a loud bang above us, like the snapping of an enormous rubber band. The funicular halted. I looked at everyone looking at each other, trying to tell whether this was normal. We hung there for a few seconds above the river.
“Don’t worry,” said a drawl somewhere to my left, and the whole car waited to hear why not, but that was all the relaxed voice said. Then, after a few seconds, the car started moving again and everyone acted like nothing had happened. The problem for me was that
I did not feel that the real disaster had been averted. In fact, the disaster of falling down into the river, water frothing upwards and rippling out and simultaneously sucking us under, would almost have been the preferred option. Now that we continued to glide upwards, a gilded bubble riding on the air with me safely inside it, my life might just turn out to be a nothing, a name that wasn’t even my own that nobody would remember. I began daring a disaster to happen, so that I might be called upon to act and so that something like animal instinct might surface. The real me, or the dead me who would be remembered for something significant, even if it was only a horrific accident.
We were descending. Gradually the chances dwindled.
“I don’t suppose you want to find out your real name,” Nat asked pretend-casually as everybody pushed towards the doors. “And if you did, would you switch?” I later recognised the theatrical line of questioning from PBS.
“I know what my biological father’s last name is already, if that’s what you mean. And no, I wouldn’t.” I might have added, “He’s in prison,” but the funicular landed and Nat strode out ahead of me.
I caught up with her greeting a blond woman in the centre of a group of about ten people. I guessed the woman was Ingrid. I didn’t know which of the condescending-looking middle-aged men assembled around her was Robin, so I considered them all as if they might be.
“Hi.” The blond woman waved at me. “Welcome. I’m Ingrid. I’m pretty sure my mother has told you everything about me.”
She was white-blond, like an ice pop that had had all its colour sucked out. Everything about her looked bitten or swept by an arctic wind. Hard, attractive. Extremely threatening.
“Where’s Robin?” Nat asked.
“He’s late. I thought he might be on your tram. We’ll have to start without him, I guess.”
Ingrid turned to the others assembled and spoke in a much louder, more genial tone. “We’re ready to begin if you are. Those of you I haven’t met, I’m Ingrid Rooiakker. My partner, Robin, will join us shortly. This is Walter Ruse, whom I’m sure you know.”
She gestured to a man beside her with a geometrically striking, light-cancelling beard that dipped on either side of his mouth like tusks. He wore navy-rimmed round glasses and an all-navy outfit, with an unseasonal turtleneck sweater that looked itchy and hot. He put his hand in the air at hearing Ingrid name him, closing his eyes with a deeply irritating smile. A tall, much younger man began handing round booklets with an RQ + Partners logo on the front in hot-pink foil, and I felt his eyes survey me intently as he gave me mine.
Walter and Ingrid led the group towards the water, where we turned left and began to walk along the western edge of the island. Our group was composed of two young architects, three more-senior-looking people (who, like Walter, seemed to wear outfits in only one colour), then five or six entrepreneurs and investors. Nat and I were the only women apart from Ingrid. Nat pointed out the “important” ones to me. “He is currently managing partner of a seed-stage capital firm . . . He has invested in companies like . . . He is the cofounder of . . . He does a mobile e-commerce app called . . . They do mentoring for startups . . . That one was a former chairman of something, but I’m not sure why he’s here.”
I started flicking through the booklet to understand how these people were, as its cover proclaimed, creating an incubator space for digital nomads. I hadn’t ever heard of a digital nomad. I hadn’t yet been called a Digital Native. I had no idea what any of it meant. I felt my feet drag slower and slower. I wanted to be alone again.
We started breaking apart into leaders and stragglers. I let myself drift to the very back, tipping my head to the sky. I listened to the seagulls crying, the low, manly sound of the tugboats, and the helicopters overhead, the wind shaking the last of the heavy blossom from the branches. I wasn’t trying to catch what Ingrid or Walter was saying over it all. I was thinking I should drop back far enough to get the funicular back to Silvia’s. I didn’t belong here.
This is the point at which I first met him. Dwight. I felt a hand on my back and jerked my head around.
His name didn’t scan well. I repeated it back to him. Dwight Nutt. Like it was inedible. He called himself Walter’s protégé. He had business cards. Fistfuls.
Innovation Consultant, App Developer, Apiarist
Broken down like that.
“Let me know if you want me to show you around the city,” Dwight said proprietorially, though he was in fact from Utah. That was the only way I knew he was into me, since he also gave his card to people not even on our tour.
10
* * *
When I got back, I showed Silvia the card.
“He keeps bees?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“In New York?”
“Is that bad?”
“Pretty dumb.”
As we were talking, a sound issued from the next room. A beautiful, winnowing, airy sound.
“What’s that?” Silvia said, alarmed.
I stared in the direction of my bedroom in disbelief. “I’ve got a message.”
Silvia watched me as I left the room, and I felt my face get hot.
It was Dwight. He had sent me a private message via Instagram and requested to follow me, even though my account was public. Which meant, I realised with horror, he must have already seen the picture I had posted of him standing next to Walter Ruse on the site tour, which I had purposefully captioned to make it look like I knew them. Would it be worse to delete it now? I accepted the request. Immediately Dwight liked the picture of himself.
Our first date nearly didn’t happen because he didn’t know that he did not know the meaning of rain check. When I thought he was cancelling, he meant we could go indoors or outdoors, depending on the weather. In the end it was hot, and we met outside.
He found me at Columbus Circle and escorted me into Central Park. It was uncomfortable to have to fall into step, to keep my swinging arm from brushing his, and to listen to him instead of falling into my usual trance. My surroundings became a distraction. A threatening periphery. Something that would make me forget a word midsentence or lose my way as I spoke. Dwight asked me if I knew what the name of a certain tree was, because he had an app which told you, and I put my hand on the tree because I did know the name, we had them near the house in England, but even though I had my hand on it I could not think what to call it.
I guess because of the pedantic way I had explained rain check to him, he said he was very taken by my Britishness. He had deduced also that I was quirky and promised me that he was too. The not-quite compliment hovered awkwardly among the horse smells and the sour smell of garbage in the heat, the sight of drunks wearing winter fleeces in the long damp grass. He hadn’t picked the right spot for a full compliment, let alone this hybrid version, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how uncomfortable they must be, the drunks, and it frustrated me that they did not take their fleeces off; it was like the way you watch someone sleep upright and keep jerking awake but insist on not going to bed. As much as I tried to concentrate on him, my people-watching-while-walking ritual was too ingrained. The whole way to the meadow we walked either just behind or just in front of a painfully anorexic woman in her fifties with a Walkman that jutted out from her pelvis, and when I wasn’t thinking about how strange it was to be walking with Dwight, I was thinking about who this woman was and whether she was following us.
“That’s my mother,” Dwight said casually when I pointed her out. “Just in case I’m on a date with a total psycho.”
“Oh!” I was startled and began to apologise. “Well, I’m actually—”
“I’m joking! My mother’s in Utah.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“And she wouldn’t let me go on dates.”
When he wasn’t making quirky jokes about his mother like this—it happened more than once—he mainly spoke at me, about his job and about his band, Jettisoned Airplane, an electronic music duo, which had been formed in March, insp
ired by the plane that had gone missing and not yet been found. Dwight was outraged that modern technology couldn’t find it. So outraged that when I admired the name Jettisoned Airplane, he pulled a face. His collaborator, Emile, had preferred it to Dwight’s favourite, Black Box. The concept for the band had been born out of a night spent with Emile discussing various theories and experimenting with various sounds to accompany them. The music, however, did not seem to have brought him any resolution, and Dwight was eager to go over all his theories with me.
“But in this day and age, how can a plane just disappear? When I wake up, it’s all about the missing plane.”
Instead of this shared interest endearing him to me, or providing a platform for further intimacy, I found that I felt possessive. I therefore declined to admit to my own compulsive interest in the case.
“The sea is pretty deep,” I said.
“If it crashed into the sea,” he said irritably, as if he were tired of explaining this, as if he had been personally dragged from press conference to press conference with the world’s media, “then debris should be floating, as should the flight recorders.”
I must have looked offended.
“Sorry,” he continued, more gently. “It’s just that the flight recorders, the black boxes, only emitted a signal for, like, thirty days. It’s keeping me awake at night, the fact that those beeps got fainter and fainter. I’m double-dosing Ambien right now.”
I was mainly interested in him because he had been brought up and lived, until only a few years before, as a Mormon. At first I didn’t know this and found him strange. Then, when I did know, I couldn’t tell what was weird about him because he was American, what was weird about him because he used to be a Mormon, and what it was about him that was just weird because he was a deeply abnormal human being pretending to be the type of person that Silvia felt was taking over the world. His lifelong ambition was to work for Apple so that he might play bocce on the landscaped lawns around 1 Infinite Loop. He said this had been the plan since he had arrived in the city and attached himself to Walter.
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