Here was the New Museum with its stupid massive red rose, like something shoved there by a giant teenage boy, and, beside it, the homeless mission. An African American man was sprawled sideways on the pavement on a flattened packing box, singing. His clothes, which were layered and many despite the heat, were the saturated noncolor of the chronically unwashed. Proper homeless, she thought. Not like the twenty-something crusties with their gross dreads and brutish, ugly dogs, sitting outside the Strand with cardboard signs lettered prettily enough for five-dollar greeting cards. If they could put all that effort into their signs, she’d once said to Dana, couldn’t they put a little more effort into getting a job? And Dana had told her that she was a terrible human being. This guy had no sign or serifs, just a force field of smell. One eye seemed not to see, screaming its glistening white, and the other eye swiveled and caught her. She pulled off her headphones.
“Spare dollar, miss.”
She had never given a homeless person money before. It wasn’t callousness, exactly. Or maybe it was. But Inez could still feel her mother’s hand in hers, the strong grasp more reproving than protective as they’d walked fast past a man and his upraised Dunkin’ Donuts cup one day, muttering to her that it was better to donate to homeless charities than to give to individuals in the street.
Well, fuck you, Mom, she thought cheerfully. Hello,
individual-in-the-street. This would be a first, a bold new act, and as she peeled a fifty—a fifty!—from the envelope she felt herself swell with her own munificence and the massive craziness of having been locked in that tiny space. She handed it over casually, a wave of a note, and he grabbed it like a man killing a fly, scrunching it into his fist without looking or halting his singing. She stared at him.
“It’s a fifty, dude,” she said.
He kept singing.
“God bless, God bless,” he sang in his madness, ignoring her words.
Fuck God, she thought, thank me.
“I just gave you a fifty,” she said, loudly, but he wasn’t listening.
Surely fifty dollars was huge—day-changing, week-changing. And he didn’t even notice. She slammed her headphones back on, thumbed the volume higher, and now she was singing deaf and loud, tripping down the subway steps that would take her east into Brooklyn, oblivious to the premature fireworks, the first whine and burst of them in the still-light sky.
3
Bill woke up, stared into total darkness, and for a half second of hot terror he thought, almost calmly, Oh, here it is. That it had finally happened: he was in one of those black holes of boozed memory loss, actually inside it. Bullshit, of course. He was conscious, albeit with no idea where he was or how he’d got here. Gradually he began to make out very small lights above him, acknowledged that those lights were stars, that the ground beneath him was damp grass, that below that was solid earth, and that this was, yes, the real living world of Earth. With these discoveries made, it was time to roll onto his side, vomit voluminously, and then wipe his face on the ground like an animal, prostrating himself on his elbows. The bright tang of grass cut through the puke stench. And night air! Good, clean, glorious night air that he took in eagerly as he made his way onto his knees.
Taking its time, the world began to calibrate itself around him, tilting all its planes until they finally aligned. Okay, Prospect Park. He’d woken up in Prospect Park, and in this sick-drunk, fucked-up state, the name of the place struck him as hilarious. Prospect Park, in the dark. What prospects. Ha.
Time to piece it together. He’d been at the rooftop barbecue of an eminent former magazine editor—a pewter-haired, old-world fox, more scribbled sketch of a figure than man. There’d been mini lobster rolls, clam chowder served on ranks of porcelain spoons, and everyone drinking the same elaborate geranium-scented cocktails—his insides protested now at the memory—ostentatiously shaken by gym-bunny men in tight white shirts. Later, that party in the garden of a Park Slope brownstone. A small group of young teenage boys staring at him from a garden corner bright with fairy lights, brown eyes steeped in reproach, faces hushed like tiny monks. Shorts and ashy knees, baggy T-shirts and bony elbows.
And then? Fuck knows. But here he was.
He was clothed, at least, although barefoot. The darkness continued softening into gradations. Stars on the ground there—reflected, yes—a lake. He was near the lake. He patted his pockets to find, yes, familiar lumps of keys-phone-wallet. But no shoes. And the part of his mind that should explain to him where and why and when he’d taken his shoes off was miraculously missing.
“Where are my shoes?” he said out loud to the lake, a madman mumble. His feet were stuck all over with black wet bits of grass.
As he got closer to the lake, the dank reek of weeds and duck shit rose up and rolled toward him. But there was the moon on the water, the little rippling sonnet of it. He stood there, hearing the susurrus of the crickets, and thought about how he might possibly be the only human being in the park right now. One man, alone, in a massive dark park. The clock on his phone said 03:33. He also had this thing on it, an app costumed with a quaint rendering of an old-fashioned compass, which quavered and found north when he asked it to. This way, then, northwest. He tried to think of himself as intrepid.
Small pinecones underfoot, pieces of twigs, dry and crumbled leaves, damp cool grass, and then the cold metal serration of something, an upturned beer bottle top, so quick and vicious that he yelped, came down in a clumsy drop, took his foot in his hand, and pulled it toward him for inspection. Like a cookie cutter in dough, the bottle top had left an indented ring on the mound of his flesh and he rubbed it, mute and dumb.
Sitting there, on the damp ground, holding his own naked foot in his hand like some kind of forsaken mental patient, he became aware of a thing glowing against the base of a tree in front of him, a bright shape that he didn’t understand. His vision and his mind ran over and around it, but still the thing didn’t yield itself. He stood and limped closer and the shape became brighter. It had legs, four slender legs tucked beneath its body, like an image of motion suspended, a perfect Muybridge gallop, but the space where its head should be was empty. This was what his mind had struggled with, that miss-
ing piece; it was a goat, a baby goat, but also couldn’t be, because it was headless. There was something medieval in the image, but here it was, lying tenderly at the foot of a tree in Brooklyn.
There had been local news items about the mauled corpses of domestic animals. The mutant wildcat theory was popular, he remembered—some ungodly offspring of an escaped zoo beast and a stray. More plausible, and more ghoulish, too, was the psychopath theory, that some sick, sad human being captured the pets of moneyed Park Slope families and dismembered them here in the middle of the night. The headless kid seemed like a warning light. It said the space he moved in was just one layer, that there were so many more layers through which he moved obliviously, and that he’d just trespassed into a domain that was not his, like the sudden opening of elevator doors onto the wrong floor, into the wrong world.
Feeling foolish and afraid, he drew his phone out, held it up, and took a picture. As he did so every tree screamed with the assault of the flash, their branches like lightning rods in its sterile strobe, and he was suddenly hot with shame, as if he’d committed a dreadful impiety. He ran, an undignified scrabble, fueled by a boy’s fear of monsters, sprinting now, belting in bare feet until he hit Prospect Park West. The low stone wall marked park from street like a mythical boundary, separating nature from the realm of emptied trash cans and functioning streetlights and alternate-side parking rules. It was a relief to feel smooth paving stone underfoot, to look up and see stately, pale apartment buildings gazing out placidly over the darkness behind him.
He checked his phone for the photo, wanting to see that headless kid, wanting to know if he’d really seen it. The image was just a blare, a white blare. He stared, just one second, then deleted it.
&nb
sp; He retched viscous bile onto the clean sidewalk and wiped some cold streaks of bird shit from his feet. With a stitch in his side, he began to shuffle northeast, to Grand Army Plaza, where beneath the huge, illuminated arch he summoned dignity, and then a cab. There were so many gaps in his memory, stretches of time that he’d efficiently wiped out with vodka over the years, a tidal wave of it sweeping away the substrate. You really could kill time. Killing time drinking was not spending time, was not whiling time away, it was serving it up to oblivion. It felt at times like cheating death, playing death at its own game.
At home, dawn already creeping in like the sick joke it was, he rattled four Advil into his palm, downed them with half a glass of tepid tap water, and then looked at her bedroom door. Shut, which meant Inez was home. Good. He stood there for a moment, as if he expected her to wake up, sense him, and open the door, to sweetly welcome her father home at five a.m. He stared at the door a moment longer, turned, and went to bed.
4
The best thing about the apartment, Kate realized quite quickly, was the fire escape. Beyond the bedroom window and above the street you could nest there, held halfway between the inside world and outside world, suspended and sequestered. Today, she’d carefully furnished the space, made a small universe of select things: iced coffee, pack of cigarettes, cushion, book. Things to hold on to, to make you feel you were held on to. Which was a lie, of course. She was catastrophically unheld, and at the same time terribly conspicuous. That, maybe, was the worst thing about being lost: everyone could see you.
She’d had to ask for this iced coffee three times, as if she were speaking an entirely different language. Even before she’d opened her mouth, she had seemed to palpably discomfit the honey-haired barista. When she’d finally made herself understood and Honey-Hair had turned to shovel ice into a plastic cup, Kate checked her own shoes, left and right, and confirmed, definitively, that her soles were unshitted.
Everyone is invincible at eighteen. In that first year of university, in the weeks before she met George, Kate had experienced the sensation of being at the center of a web that tilted with her as she moved, as if the world were yielding to her, as if she were putting it in motion. Everything was smaller then. Now when she thought of Cambridge, she thought of the city’s model, on the raised circular plinth, about half a meter in diameter, on the edge of Market Square, the colleges cast in bronze, blocky and smooth as chocolate. You could loom over the model and put your forefinger on the street you were standing on. Just remembering this brought on a rush of claustrophobia.
She met George when their colleges shared seminars. His college—bigger, grander, more photogenic and famous—hosted. Two dozen of them sat around a huge round wooden table, where dead canonical poets had sat before them, soft January light pouring in through the windows. The second term was the seventeenth century. The first class was John Donne. They’d all bought the same edition, Everyman, handsome in its black-and-white jacket, the thin scarlet ribbon of a bookmark as proper as a Savile Row necktie. Only, the book in George’s hands was different. It was the first thing she noticed, his large hands holding that book, a charcoal-black volume with elegant silver lettering down its spine. He read aloud without hesitation, as though he already knew these rhythms. It was at least four months later that she realized the book in his hands was the same version everyone else had. He’d just taken the dust jacket off.
A few weeks ago, before she left, they’d gone to a friend’s dinner party. The friend—more George’s than hers—had just bought a West London flat, or rather her parents had, and the evening was an elaborate performance of adulthood. There were canapés from Fortnum & Mason, and place cards bearing names in careful calligraphy, a strict boy-girl-boy-girl seating plan around the table.
“Champagne?” the hostess kept saying to people whose flutes had been diminished only by a sip or two. She looked, bottle and eyebrows raised, as if she were about to strike a dainty bell.
George had sat opposite Kate, and as the dinner progressed he seemed to be drawing in the air around him, tightening it.
Who knows how the conversation reached the place it did. But one young woman called Annabelle began talking about pornography. She was petite, fine-boned, and her high voice seemed to undulate erratically, as though subjected to its own tiny weather systems, little breezes and quick currents over which she had little to no control.
“Ugh, it’s disgusting,” she said. “Just so degrading to women.”
And then something rushed into Kate, some renegade idea riding on a red-wine crest.
“Why do you think it’s degrading?” she heard herself say. Every eye around the table stared at her face. Her words had been strangely loud. Without looking at him she could feel George watching her. Annabelle frowned, then blanched and reddened, an impressive chromatic succession. With a kind of tremble of refusal, she said, this time to the plate in front of her, “It’s degrading!” And when she snuck a glance upward, at Kate, it was hot and sharp. She’d been made to repeat herself and sound stupid; she’d been held to her own opinion by another woman. She went on: “It’s demeaning to women. To be gussied up like objects and”—her eyes glinted now with what Kate feared were tears—“fucked like animals.” And she reached for her napkin to cover her mouth, as if she were wiping away that bad word. The table seemed to shift, in sympathy, unease.
“But isn’t it possible,” Kate had said, because why stop now, “that some women might like to be fucked like animals? That they might actually want and enjoy that.”
Kate saw the eyebrows of the young man to Annabelle’s left shoot up in a show of scandalized amusement; he took a large gulp of wine to show he was stifling a smirk. And then, “Oh-KAYYY!” the boyfriend of the hostess bellowed, a broad, good-natured putting-to-bed of the entire discussion. “Who wants Eton mess?”
People laughed, relieved. Kate rushed with homicidal urges. Annabelle extricated herself from her chair and walked stiffly in the direction of the bathroom. George issued Kate a deliberate, dark look, then refilled his wineglass.
She stretched her hand across the distance of white linen, reaching for his wrist. His arm jumped at her touch, knocked the wineglass over. A vast, blood-colored puddle spread as the bowl of the glass rolled away from its severed stem.
If the look he’d shot her a moment earlier had been dark, this one was like a black hole. An unequivocal, hateful Look. What. You’ve. Done. They didn’t speak in the taxi home. He had to be the first to say something. She would hold out. He had to apologize for that look, which she had then obsessed over with some strange devotion, like a child with a freshly grazed knee. He’d flinched when she’d touched him! As though she were something toxic. She sat up against the chill of the window, the London streets blurred with rain and streetlights, and cried silently and steadily. And when they were home, in bed, they talked in quiet, truncated sentences until hopelessness silenced them and they lay there in the no-light, miserable.
She brought herself back to herself now, and to this day, to this fire escape, to the cat inside that she was supposed to be sitting, to the tiny beads of condensation sheeted over the clear plastic of the cup of iced coffee like some lovely reptile skin, to bicycle bells on the street below. To the sight of a tall woman, with short white-blond hair, strolling down the sidewalk exuding ease.
Hot hair-dryer blasts and all the giddy top notes of expensive spritzes greeted her as she entered the salon. The stylist had tattoos of roses up her arms, and Bettie Page bangs, and if she saw fear in Kate’s eyes, she was professional enough to ignore it. Buxom, grinning, she hummed along to Rihanna as she calmly twirled Kate’s hair into a ponytail at her nape, and then, with no warning, jauntily scissored through its base. Kate felt a lurch. How did hot air balloons come down? How did they land?
Bettie Page held up the rope of hair in the mirror and gave it a morbid little shake as she grinned.
It looked thoroughly creepy, a thing neither dead nor alive. And then she tossed it on the floor. Kate saw the mistaken assurance in the gesture. It said, Fuck him, right? And the stylist kept working, humming, satisfied in her narrative: boy dumps gal, gal gets fierce new hair. No, that’s not it, Kate thought, that’s really not it at all. But how do you correct someone who’s said nothing?
Months ago, George had told her he thought she’d look good with . . . he didn’t have the words, had tried to describe the haircut to her, haltingly, heterosexually, and she’d frowned, picturing a TV news anchor in a royal-blue suit. It wasn’t a news anchor who’d given him the idea. It was a woman in one of his seminars. Facebook had thrown her up in a sidebar on Kate’s screen one day, announcing that George was now friends with her, and there she was, in a professional-looking photograph, with the shoulder-length bob and side-swept feathered bangs that George had failed to adequately describe.
Kate realized she’d been staring somewhere beyond herself in the mirror with an expression of contempt and she caught it, for a split second, as she came back to her reflection. Bettie Page had tenderly painted each section of her shorn head with a dye-dipped brush and wrapped each little bit in tinfoil as though preparing a series of snacks. Kate was to sit there and wait for them to marinate.
By the time the work was over, her face looked sharper, her eyes wider. She looked older, too, now that she was a white-blond woman. A little frightening, rather than a little frightened?
“Yeah?” said the stylist, and then—the final flourish—she handed Kate a mirror, spun her around, and showed her the back of her own neck. There it was, naked and strange. When was the last time she’d seen the back of her neck? Wasn’t there a sort of delicious indecency to it? She paid, tipping too much in her terror and pleasure, and once outside in the thick of the afternoon she kept reaching for it, this bare new neck with the sunlight on it, fingering the point where her short hair finished and her skin began.
Neon in Daylight Page 3