‘Plenty of time for that, Alice.’
Noah says this over his shoulder as he leaves to make me that coffee, and I sit down hard on the edge of my new bed, Franklin at my feet. Seven nights. Half my money gone. Yet that same laugh bubbles up out of me again. The one that feels like cool water on a hot day.
‘You’re going to be all right, Alice Lee,’ I say out loud to the towels and the hangers and the chocolate-coloured dog. And it’s nice, in this moment, to believe it.
Ruby Jones is not all right.
For a start, her body and the clocks say different things. She has been in New York City a few hours, but she feels so disoriented, it could be days or mere minutes. When she opened the door to her studio apartment, she wanted nothing more than to crawl straight under the covers of the wide, low bed, which sat barely a stride from the door frame. But it was still early, so she put on a thick coat and ventured one block over to Broadway, hoping to stretch out her aching legs. Exhausted to have travelled so far, Ruby struggled to see the endless scaffolding and stores and sidewalk cracks, the people walking too fast, talking too loud, as anything other than props, extras, on a movie set. Caught somewhere between reality and delirium, she wandered up and down the street, aimless and cold, before buying a slice of cheese pizza for $1.27 and a $59 bottle of Grey Goose to wash it down. Taking this first New York supper back to her room, she was soon sitting cross-legged in the middle of that low bed, licking grease from her fingers and drinking vodka straight from the bottle.
Catching sight of herself in the floor-length mirror opposite the bed, Ruby could not help but laugh a little, her hand pressed up against her mouth to catch the sound. The woman in that mirror had hair almost as greasy as the pizza slice, ruddy red cheeks, lips that were starting to chap. What an ignoble start to her adventure, she acknowledged, pulling at the loose, purple-black skin concertinaed under her eyes, taking full stock of her tiredness, before returning the vodka bottle to her mouth.
This is so exciting Ruby! What an awesome thing to do! Omigod, you’re so brave!
After she announced her plan to move to New York for six months, it seemed everyone spoke to her in exclamations. There was something about what she was doing—quitting her day job, giving away most of her furniture and clothes, compacting her life into two metallic blue suitcases—that seemed to inspire people, her news triggering faraway looks and hushed confessions everywhere she went. I always wanted to … I wish I could have … Maybe one day I’ll …
For a while there, Ruby was privy to a whole world of secret desires, shared without invite by both strangers and friends. Now, vodka at her lips, the room rocking slightly, she finds it odd to think of all these people living ahead of her, somewhere in the tomorrow of Melbourne. From her new time zone, she will perpetually live behind them, chasing hours long ticked over in Australia, even though people back home assume she is the one out in front. Taking a self-appointed sabbatical to live in New York City, just because she can. She might as well have told people she was heading to the moon.
‘Am I brave or just crazy?’ she asks the vodka bottle and the room and her hazy reflection, none of which offer a satisfactory answer before she capsizes into sleep.
And now it’s 2 a.m. this next, first morning in New York, and she’s wide awake. The bed sheets are soaked through with sweat, and when Ruby stands up to go to the bathroom, she feels like she is pitching forward, as if her body wants to be somewhere else. Somewhere else. When she is already as somewhere else as she’s ever been. Here in this city of—what is it now? Eight million? Nine? No matter, given she knows exactly two people out of that number, a couple of former colleagues who have made it clear they would love to catch up, Sometime soon, Ruby. When you’ve settled in.
Well, she thinks. Here I am! All settled in. And not feeling very brave at all.
What would those friends and strangers back in Melbourne think of this admission?
Returning from the bathroom, still unsteady, Ruby sits down on the edge of her bed just as a siren starts up outside her window. It is a familiar sound in the dark, yet somehow different to the ambulance calls she is used to hearing back home. More melancholy, perhaps. Or—she moves to the window now, peers down onto the empty street—this New York siren seems resigned, somehow. Weary from overuse, as if the worst tragedies have already happened. It is another delirium-induced musing, this prescription of poetry to an ordinary thing, but something else, too. The beginnings of a new kind of loneliness, where Ruby will soon find herself talking to objects as if they are people, holding conversations with her hairbrush, and her vodka bottles, and the pillows on her bed, just to say anything at all. In these first, early hours, it is as if Ruby senses this impending isolation, the days ahead where she will barely speak to anyone unless she’s reciting her breakfast order or saying thank you to strangers for holding the door.
Turning from the window this first lonely morning, closing the blinds against the piles of black rubbish bags and jungle-gym scaffolds and scattering of parked cars on the street below, Ruby concedes that sleep is no longer an option. Instead, she carefully unpacks her suitcases, hangs up her dresses and jackets, lays out her shoes. When this task is done, empty suitcases stored by the door, she compiles a list of things that might make this room, with its clean linen and private bathroom, feel more like home. A glass for her vodka. A candle. Dishes for the microwave in the corner, and a vase for fresh flowers. Little anchors, trinkets to remind her that she lives here now.
Here. Ten thousand miles from Melbourne.
Ten thousand miles from him.
We both had to leave, you see. And maybe Ruby is right with this next thought, pushing through the vodka and jetlag and grey light of early morning:
Maybe the people who appear brave are merely doing the thing they have to do. It’s not a matter of courage, then, to pack up and leave a life. Just a lack of any other option, and the sudden realisation you probably don’t have anything left to lose.
I may be sleeping soundly this next, first morning, as she makes her lists and thinks her delirious thoughts. But make no mistake. Though we came from very different places, Ruby Jones and I might as well be the same person when it comes to how we landed here in New York City.
THREE
LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FIRST SEVEN DAYS.
It’s like I’m living inside one of those Sunday afternoon, old movie musicals you don’t mean to keep watching, but it’s all so bright, so joyous, you can’t look away. Even when it rains, which it does a lot, there are no grey skies here, not to me. Sometimes, when I am wandering through Midtown, I stop in the middle of the street, just for a second, to look at the Chrysler Building, glittering skyward from her perch on Lexington Avenue. I think she is beautiful, the way an old-time beauty queen is beautiful, all silver sparkles and sash and crown. I always wave to her, subtly, though I don’t think anyone notices, and then I get going across the street, so I don’t get run over by a cross-town bus or a honking yellow cab.
I know about cross-town now. I know about uptown and downtown, and the way Broadway rambles around like a river. I know about boroughs and blocks, and I know which side of the pavement to stick to. I’m not even afraid of those cellar doors anymore, the ones that lead down to basements filled with flowers and fruits and every other imaginable thing. It’s as if the girl who arrived a week ago has lived a year in this city, that’s how much things make sense already, in a way those small towns from my childhood never did.
There are so many places I have yet to see, whole new maps I am making, but for now it is enough to wave at the Chrysler Building, and walk block after block, taking pictures of every new thing I encounter. I love looking at the city through a camera lens; it changes everything when you are the observer, instead of the observed. This must be something my father understood, and Mr Jackson, too. The calm control you feel when you wind, focus, click. Perhaps things would have been different for my mother—perhaps things would have been different for me
—if she’d been on the other side of the camera, too. I do wish, when I let myself think about her, that I could show her what I’ve captured of this city she loved and left too soon.
I don’t know if the pictures I’ve taken are any good, mind you. The old Leica is not like any camera I have used before, and I’m still learning how to hold it, how to move the focus lever with my thumb and keep the small body steady with my other hand. The viewfinder is tiny; at first, I couldn’t see anything through the small window, but after a week, I think I’m getting the hang of it. It’s like learning to see a whole different way. When you adjust the aperture, narrow the opening of the lens, background objects come into focus. Kind of like you’re pulling the world into you, bringing it closer. Nothing seems so far away anymore.
I should thank Noah, mostly. I do thank Noah. Every night before I fall asleep. Because now that my first seven days are up, he’s letting me stay on rent-free at his apartment—a brownstone, I know this term now, too—until I get a job and can pay my own way. That’s how he put it when he made his offer over coffee and fresh bagels, part-way through that first week. I told him right then and there I didn’t want to be a charity case. But I had already fallen in love with my bedroom and the piano and the barrelled bay windows—‘What do you call these windows, anyway?’ I asked him, peering down onto the street—and I knew I would miss the wet leather of Franklin’s nose, the constant press of it against my hand. Besides, it was clear from the beginning that Noah would be easy to live with. He liked my questions about where to go and what to see in the city, and he didn’t ask too many questions of his own, though I did share a little about my life with him over that breakfast.
‘I don’t want to rely on you,’ I said. ‘Not after what I’ve been through. But I would really, really like to stay here.’
This is our solution: we will keep a ledger on the refrigerator door, a tally of my days here. Noah makes a new mark every morning, a quick flick of black ink on a white sheet of paper, so we have a record of what I’ll need to pay him back some day. As the days turn into weeks, those black marks will spread across and down the page, but I never do get around to adding them up. At the beginning of things, I just sort of see them as the sum of my survival.
If I can make it there …
You know how many songs there are about New York? When you live here, it’s like the streets serenade you. Remember when I said I would not squander my independence? If you knew what came before. Not even the stuff I told Noah, but the stuff before, and before, and before that. Well, you’d understand why it’s a place, not a person, I have given my heart to this time around.
I mean, can you imagine? That a place can feel like a person? That a place can comfort you and sing to you and surprise you. A place where simply stepping up out of the subway onto the street can give you that fizzing under the skin sensation you get right before you kiss someone? When I told Noah about this, when I said it was almost as if I had fallen in love with New York, he smiled funny, and called me Baby Joan, and I still don’t know what that means.
(Truthfully, he says lots of things I don’t understand.)
The point for now is this: I am happy. Whenever my worried feelings creep back in, I just head outside, no matter the hour, and I roam the streets and avenues and river paths until I shake the worry off. And this! Noah bought me a pair of sneakers. I came home from a long walk on Day Five, and there they were in a box on the bed, the price scratched off, so only the .97c part of the sticker remained. Purple, thick-soled, smelling of rubber and dye, and so much newness. It was like sliding my feet into the future. Into all the possibility ahead of me. That’s what I felt, and I may have cried a little, but I didn’t tell Noah that, or say thank you out loud, because I can already tell he wouldn’t like this kind of thing. I just wrote out an IOU from the post-it pad in the kitchen, sticking the word Sneakers on the refrigerator door, next to our ledger of days.
It is strange to think that only a week ago, everything I had was counting down to nothing, from my depleting cash, to the single roll of black and white film in my Leica, to my thin-soled shoes. My life was about subtraction and holding on to whatever was left over. Now the calculation has changed, life has spun me around, filled me up, and I am dizzy with happiness. I’m living in a stranger’s apartment, in a strange city, and thanks to both, I feel like I just might make it here. Noah with his ledger and his gift of new shoes, knowing without asking that all that walking around hurts my feet. And New York itself, baptising me with its spring rain, washing us both clean. This new, old city of mine, where if you look left, right, up, the view changes before your eyes. Of all the patterns, I already prefer the perfect lines the avenues make. The narrowing of distance to something you can see, understand. When I ventured further south yesterday, one street wound into another, right under my feet, with no warning at all, so that just a little veer to the left, and I was lost for the first time. I missed the certainty of my uptown avenues, the arms-wide openness of Columbus and Amsterdam, so I caught the 1 train home.
Home.
When I’m out there exploring, I see so many workers whizzing past me in their white sneakers and power suits. The quick legs and stiff arms of people in a hurry. I do not like the way they never stop and look around. They never look left, right, up, to see the city from a different angle.
Watching these people go by each day, I vow that when I get to their age, I will never wear a restrictive pencil skirt with sneakers. I will not stride along too fast for my surroundings. I will learn to walk slowly and gracefully in pretty high heels, or maybe stay comfortable in my sneakers, roaming the avenues, avoiding pencil skirts altogether.
These first seven days, I still think this is something I will get to decide.
Just a few streets over from Noah’s apartment, Ruby can barely get out of bed. It is as if the moment she stopped needing to be somewhere—work, brunch with her friends, her twice-weekly PT sessions—the weight of her sadness piled down on her, made her limbs and eyelids heavy. While I am traipsing around Manhattan, peering through my lens at the world, she remains stuck in her room, staring at the concrete ceiling, hour after hour sliding past her. From this prone position, she has had plenty of time to ponder her plight. Is this a midlife crisis come early? Extreme fatigue? Situational depression? Or is this simply what it feels like to be absent of hope, hollowed out?
You have to get to the worst thing, eventually.
Someone once told her that, a friend reasoning their way out of a run of bad luck. At the time they meant it as self-comfort, assuming there had to be a limit to their trials. Things could only get so bad before life turned around again. But now, blankets pulled up to her chin, the sounds of the Upper West Side clanging outside her window, Ruby wonders if she heard the sentence wrong. Maybe her friend was really saying you can only outrun your sadness for so long. It will catch up to you. Eventually. Back in Melbourne she had been living in a kind of emotional stasis, avoiding feeling sorry for herself by never really letting the reality of her situation sink in. Perhaps this was the worst thing. Pushing her feelings so far down they calcified, became an anchor. And now, with no place to be, no one to see, she has suddenly found herself unable to move.
And just what is that reality she’s been avoiding, the one keeping her in bed this whole first week in New York City, as winter turns to spring outside her window? Only this: the man she loves is going to marry someone else.
She knew this when she met Ash. Thought nothing of it. New co-worker at the ad agency, newly engaged, ho-hum, lots of people their age got married. It was only later, when Ruby knew the pressure of his hand on her hipbone, the weight of his lips on her shoulder, that this became the fact upon which her life turned. A wedding date was set, and her relationship to time changed. The future contained a marker, an end date, and somewhere along the way Ruby stopped making her own plans. She had an ever-decreasing amount of time to change Ash’s mind, to help him undo his impending mistake, and if tha
t meant living exclusively in the present, being available to him whenever he asked, it would be worth it when he did change his mind.
Except, he didn’t.
A little over six months from now, he will be a married man. The colour scheme has been decided, the tableware ordered. RSVPs are coming in, and Emma, his fiancée, has had two of her four dress fittings (she cried at the first one).
‘Did you—want to come?’
Ruby could never decide whether Ash’s halting question was naïve or cruel. Delivered as it was with his chest against her naked back, his left hand resting against the curve of her stomach. Now, alone in a different bed, across an ocean, she understands it was both, and something begins to stir in Ruby Jones. A small heat, as if someone is blowing on a fire deep inside her, willing it to burn. And just like that, oxygen applied, the first explosion occurs. One big enough to propel her out of bed and into her running shoes. Fully upright for the first time in seven days—if you don’t count the small circuit she has made of finding takeaway food and vodka to bring back to her room—she feels wobbly, uncertain. But as she ties her laces in double knots, Ruby feels anger coursing through her like fuel. Ash inviting her to his wedding—while she could still taste herself on his mouth—was a deliberate severing, a way to turn their connection to string. To reach for her body while pushing away her thoughts, her feelings, her heart, was cold and calculated. It hadn’t shocked her at the time because, in truth, that is how it always was with him.
No wonder she’s gotten used to pushing her feelings way down.
Outside it is pouring, but Ruby barely notices the heavy fall. She heads east toward Central Park, splashing through dark, oily puddles, wiping rivulets of rain from her eyes. When her muscles start to protest, she relishes the pain, pushes herself to go faster. If she’s going to outrun anything, she reasons, it will be that terrible numbness keeping her in bed all these days. Better to feel the ache of tight quads, taste the metal of her heart at work, than to let another day pass her by. Entering the park, feet crunching wet gravel, she heads for the nearest reservoir, the memory of a map in her mind, a look of determination on her face.
Before You Knew My Name Page 3