Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  5

  Inez clocked them as they came in. She recognized their faces from the other week, the same pair, come to fuck with her again, all twitchy grins and limbs springy with their mission as they jounced up to the counter. They had read the café’s Yelp entries and had come here on some kind of L.O.L. pilgrimage. She’d become a notoriety. There was a whole thread, Dana had said. The commenters were calling her the Notorious B.I.T.C.H. It was a thing.

  “Two iced coffees,” one of them said now. The shorter one beside him bit his fist and wheeled away and tittered. She gazed at them.

  “Uh, hi? I said, two iced coffees?”

  “Nah,” she sighed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re closing.”

  He looked around him. There were half a dozen patrons bent into their MacBooks, placid people with their sweating cups of cold brew.

  “Uh,” he said. “You’re literally open.”

  She folded her arms and let her head slowly fall to one side, frowning, pouting. She hoped that she looked thoughtful.

  “Are we?” she said.

  The guy spread his palms, exasperated, and Inez now tilted her head to the other side.

  “So you’re just not going to serve us? Loyal customers?” he said. Then he added, under his breath, “Fucking bitch.”

  “You know,” she said. “I hear they play indie rock in Starbucks now. Maybe you guys should go find a Starbucks.”

  “Burrrn!” said the shorter sidekick, fist to his mouth again. He needed a bigger repertoire of responses, Inez thought.

  “You know what? You’re not even hot,” the tall guy said. “You’re just a bitch.”

  As they walked out the door he raised his middle finger, brandished it vigorously, and a bearded man in a Sonic Youth T-shirt looked up with mild alarm, then glanced at Inez and quickly returned to his screen. She hoped he didn’t think she needed rescuing. He looked like the sort, dadlike. Dadly.

  She turned and pretended to clean the espresso machine so that no one could see her face. Her stomach felt sour and her brain ran a bitter, rapid monologue of fuck this and fuck this and fuck this.

  In the stockroom, Heather was on the phone, seeming stressed.

  “Yo, Heather,” she said.

  Her boss’s face flickered with a frown. She indicated wait a minute as she bent into the phone, nodding.

  Inez whipped off the apron. “I’m heading off early.”

  And Heather mouthed No! while her eyebrows did something extraordinary under the strain of trying to listen to whoever was on the other end of the phone.

  Inez flicked a peace sign at the Sonic Youth guy on the way out.

  

  Five minutes in, she knew for certain she hated the movie. Hating things: it tended to tell you who you were. Loving things rarely did.

  “Come on,” Dana had said with her amiable wheedle. “People say it’s great. It will be fun and dumb. But good-dumb. Smart-dumb. Also, it will be cool in there. Literally cool.”

  That had won her over, grudgingly. A downstairs darkness purring with the sound of unwavering AC units. A drastic change of temperature. Delicious darkness, calibrated with artificial cool. Plus a massive Diet Coke, packed with ice, sibilant with effervescence.

  “Why are there no brown people in this film?” she whispered in Dana’s ear, right into the shell of it, and it elicited a fierce shush from the woman who spun around in the seat in front of them. And then, to Inez’s irritation, there were black characters, including the heroine’s love interest. The heroine was an underweight brunette who pulled a lot of faces and was a sex therapist who’d never achieved orgasm. “Achieved”! As if you got a certificate. This was the movie’s central joke. The promo poster had testified to it being “the feel-good favorite of the summer,” and Inez’s hatred was now fortified by the remembered conviction that “feel-good” always filled her with hate.

  Here’s one thing her dad had taught her: walk out. When you think it’s bullshit, just leave. You can leave. They’d done that with a Disney film once. Nine-year-old her, small girl sandwiched tidily between her parents in velvety seats, scowling at a twirling and lash-fluttering princess, then whispering, in her dad’s ear, “This is stupid,” expecting to be scolded, or at least hushed, but instead he’d whispered back, “Yes. It is. Let’s go!” and, to Inez’s incredulity, and later her guilt, he’d taken her hand and they’d left her mom there. Afterward, she’d watched out the window of a Starbucks as her parents argued on the street, her mother’s eyes wet with rage, her father limp and shrugging, his fingers dangling, the shoal of pedestrians moving around and past them, paying an arguing couple no heed.

  Right now she was on the aisle seat; to leave would be the easiest thing in the world. The fake sex therapist and her two perky sidekicks grated harder with every frame.

  She leaned toward Dana again.

  “Dude,” she whispered, but an actual whisper this time. “I can’t watch this.”

  Dana’s response was to set her mouth, a tiny tightening, eyes fixed on the screen. Inez paused, considering her friend’s face in profile, wondering where it came from, this grim resolution to be entertained by garbage. She flicked her on the arm and Dana winced away. Inez stood, walked up the smooth artificial incline of the aisle, through the double doors, and leaped up the escalator in a few strides, giant cup of Diet Coke in hand.

  As she stepped onto the street the heat greeted her like some giant shaggy dog determined to fell her with the weight of its body. Her phone said 105º, and she took a screenshot, relishing the fake camera-shutter noise as she did so. An outrageous temperature. But the heat was real, at least. You still couldn’t air-condition New York City streets. You could build taller towers, shinier and sharper, but the heat would always stay unassailable. It turned the air yellow with the stink of sweltering garbage, it melted candy bars in their wrappers into formless goo, and it made all the heavy, waiting bodies on subway platforms drip with sweat. She loved this. She loved, too, that it blurred the skyline to mirage, enshrined “stay cool” as a valediction between strangers, and, best of all, made these streets less crowded. Everyone who could afford to be was catatonic in air-conditioned spaces, cowed by the extremity of the day. Here was some “feel-good” then: the heat, in its badness. It felt good to know the heat was bigger and badder than you. To know there was nothing that you could do about it.

  The ice in her cup was water now and she ripped the lid off, downed the remaining diluted Diet Coke inside, and lobbed it toward a trash can that was lavish with its own overflow. Flies were so drunk and listless around it that they looked like they might faint and fall.

  In Tompkins Square Park she found the bench where she’d first smoked weed, and as she lit up now—removing a natty little spliff sequestered between her cigarettes—her eye was caught by an old guy on the other side of the plaza. Other than she, and a homeless man passed out on a bench, he was the only soul here. He was bent over, all in white, engaged in some task. Inez squinted through the heat haze. He looked familiar somehow. It seemed as though he was tipping out cat food tins on the ground, working slowly, ritualistically, making little piles of them as if in accordance with some kind of map or sign. She watched him. No cats came. Maybe they were all dead from the heat. And yet he kept going. Once every tin had been emptied he straightened up slowly, saw her, and waved, blithe as a kid on a beach.

  She remembered now: he’d come to the apartment once, she thought, a year ago, maybe, with a cat in a bag. He’d kept saying to her dad, “Don’t let the cat out the bag, Willie!” like this was the funniest joke of all time. She’d been shocked then at how old he was, enough to be her grandfather. And here he was now, feeding nonexistent cats. Another singular freak of the park. She loved them all with a kind of dispassionate decisiveness: Barbie the boxer, forever sparring in pink; Junior the ninety-five-year-old sorce
rer with steel-colored dreadlocks; the gender-indeterminate young person who dressed as an angel, cheekbones smeared with glitter, enormous wings of different colors to match each outfit.

  As Inez inhaled now, a wave of heat made its way through her. It felt like a vertical worming, like the striated waviness of the screen effect in kids’ shows that denotes entering or leaving a dream. And then, coming toward her, crossing the park, another familiar person. The snaggletooth, the braid.

  She stood up, weirdly pleased.

  He was just steps away now, and from his vacant gaze, even before she saw the earphones, she could tell he was in some far-off auditory world.

  She raised a hand. “Hey!” she said. “Martin!”

  He looked up and faltered. He had to; she was standing right in his path, and they were facing each other, body to body. She found in his eyes nothing she understood. There was a fright in them. A pause. And then a quick blackening, like a blind drawn with a cord. He went on past her, arcing a wide berth, toward that basement apartment and the familiar closet, and did not look back to see her staring, mouth hanging open a little at his receding back and ratty braid.

  She sensed her dad’s mad friend with his piles of cat food, watching. He gave her another wave, slower this time, and she looked away, furious.

  6

  Bill turned onto Broadway, thronged and garish. It was a thoroughly stupid place to live, the main artery of the center of this city that thought itself the center of the world. He and Cara had bought the loft when the neighborhood had been a lovely scabrous wasteland of lawlessness and postapocalyptic potential, when being an artist and a scavenger and an addict were all the same thing. With inevitable sadomasochism, his mind formed a phrase: “A quarter of a century ago.” He repeated it, slowly, like fingers tightening around a wrist.

  A heavy young woman, maybe she was even a teenager, barreled toward him wearing an oversized T-shirt, fluoro-yellow, which shouted, in black letters ten inches tall, NU YORK MUTHAFUCKEN CITY. He let out an unintended “ugh,” the kind of sound his daughter unleashed every time he attempted to dispense parental wisdom. This girl heard, and shouted, “Fuck you, old dude!”

  These days, on Broadway, he’d find himself thinking of the kind of time-phased shot that seemed to feature in a lot of music videos from the nineties: in the center of the frame, intransigent, there’s a stationary figure on a crowded sidewalk and then, in dehumanized streaks of color put in motion, everyone else goes past—time contracted, segmented, and stitched. Except the figure in the center was never quite still; you’d notice fractional shivers, a stop-motion effect. Even if you stood still, time would fuck with you, rattle you.

  Home, finally, and he heard female laughter sounding from Inez’s room. Hers was one side of the loft, his the other, and as he made his way through the space to the kitchen the laughter burst out louder as her door swung open. There in the doorway was a tall black girl, broad shouldered, who saw him, yelped “Shit!” and slammed the door. She’d been wearing nothing but sky-blue underwear.

  “Sorry, sorry!” he shouted, slamming one hand over his eyes, raising the other in apology, even though she was already gone. He heard Inez’s cackle. A moment later, the door opened again. She and the girl: clothed this time, or at least as clothed as this sort of heat allowed.

  “This is Fran,” Inez said.

  “Hi, Inez’s dad!” the girl said, giving him a goofy little wave.

  “Hi,” he said. “Sorry about that. Didn’t know you were . . .”

  She grinned at him.

  “Coffee?” he said, hearing something helpless in his tone. “Something to eat?”

  The girl brightened even more and opened her mouth.

  “No,” Inez said. “We’re going out.”

  Fran looked over her shoulder, waved at him, and said, “Bye, Inez’s dad!”

  He caught a shred of their laughter as they were entering the elevator, cut short by its closing doors, and then that was that, they were gone. Dennis bustled over stiffly, sat neatly at Bill’s feet, then looked up at him meaningfully.

  “Well,” Bill said.

  Dennis held his gaze, searching, attentive, waiting for Bill to expand on this theme. And again Bill said, “Well! What to make of that, bud?”

  Bill watched him slump down and rest his head on his paws in a dog’s pose of resignation.

  Did Cara know about this new development? Had she known for ages? Would she say, “Oh, Inez’s girlfriend, yes, I know,” in that infuriatingly brisk way, as though the life of her child was—as with her many responsibilities at the firm—just another matter on which she was utterly up to speed, fully briefed, impeccably informed? And that clipped response would be a tacit reproach to him, a more junior employee, for not being abreast of things, for dropping the ball. Well, fuck Cara. He wasn’t going to consult her. He’d talk to Inez without her.

  He went and stood in the doorway of Inez’s room as though it might yield some kind of explanation of sexual identity. Her mess was spectacular, and he regarded it with a kind of admiration while leaning against the door frame. The clothes and stuff were ankle-deep and everywhere. He couldn’t trespass if he tried. His eyes moved around the room and counted five beer bottles. On the bedside table an ashtray had become a miniature Vesuvius. Beside it, a jumbo bag of peanut M&Ms, ripped open, spewing rainbow pebbles. The one bit of space was the bed itself, an island of twisted sheets, with a few scanty and rumpled garments that his eyes jumped over hastily. A lone blue M&M, crushed into the sheets, had left a small smudge.

  Later that day, he was lying shirtless on the sofa, remembering that small blue smudge, the sound of her laughter, when the door clicked. This often happened; he’d be thinking of Inez and she’d appear. But then, he thought of his daughter most of the time, so it was a matter of simple probability.

  She flopped on the floor with a slap, spread-eagled, and deftly toed off her shoes so the soles of her turned-out feet made two gray flags pointing toward him.

  “Well, hi, sweetheart,” he said.

  She didn’t respond, just panted, tongue lolling in a cartoon of exhaustion. Her outspread limbs claimed so much of the floor’s space.

  “Inez,” he said, this time both meaner and kinder.

  It must have been a tone he’d never used with her before, because she propped herself up on her elbows and looked at him.

  “What?”

  He hadn’t prepared anything. He became more aware of wearing nothing but the shorts she’d ridiculed, aware of his handfuls of soft flesh above their buckle, of the sweat on his back. She took in the sight.

  “I just want to say,” he began, and at this corny and uncharacteristic preamble, she scrunched her face into a frown. He persevered. “That . . . you know, I love you and support you whatever. And . . .”

  His voice sounded strange, even to himself.

  “Uh. Yeah. That’s great. Cool,” she said, with the what-the-fuck affect he knew too well, and she made as if to get up, to get out of there.

  “I mean, with your friend. Your girlfriend.”

  The word sounded as though it were wearing its own frame. She stared at him, incredulous, and then hooted a laugh.

  “Uh,” he said, pointedly.

  She kept laughing. He waited, sweating, humiliation and irritation rising. Finally:

  “Fran isn’t my girlfriend!” she shrieked. “I mean, we hook up,” she said. “But she’s not my girlfriend.”

  She enunciated the word with a mocking lurch.

  “I’m going to tell her you called her my girlfriend.”

  “No, Inez, you don’t have to do that.”

  She didn’t appear to have heard him. “I’m going to nap,” she said, making her way to the freezer. “Can we get sushi takeout later?”

  He watched her grab a fistful of ice cubes and press them into her sternum.

/>   “Sushi?” she repeated impatiently.

  “Yeah,” he said. “We can get sushi.”

  “From the good place this time, not the shitty one.”

  “Okay.”

  He couldn’t remember which was the good place and which was the shitty place.

  She looked at him as one cube escaped through her fingers and slid across the floor, skidding, leaving a shining trail.

  “You’re not going to forget and fuck off somewhere?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve got a thing, but it’s early, I’ll be back.”

  “Like, nine?” she pressed.

  “Fine.”

  He watched Dennis retrieve the ice cube and begin to crunch it with big, happy jerks of his jaw.

  

  There was a time when Bill had believed sex was everything. Some days, he had felt that all he had to do in this city as a moderately famous, passably good-looking man was walk into a bar and a woman would approach him. And not just bars: anywhere, almost. A store, a park—the fucking street! It was a miracle. Like an extended wet dream of existence: wet and ready mouths, cunts, endlessly. He’d felt sex to be everything in that it seemed to be driving the world. He didn’t mean the forces of capitalism, yada yada—not boobs and billboards—but something, well, almost supernatural, a kind of wild current moving life forward that only he’d tuned in to. He’d wanted to fuck the world, felt himself to be an ongoing roar, and for a while—a few years, maybe—it had seemed the world was roaring back at him, that the more he wanted, the more it gave him. He knew this sounded like a textbook example of mania. But even now, from this sobering distance of decades, it felt more like a truth than a delusion.

  Porn now was a kind of heartache. He’d summon flesh on his screen and the stirrings would be outweighed by a kind of dull pain in his chest cavity, a mourning of his own desire, maybe. He’d look down at his penis and chivy it, slap it gently back and forth like a person trying to rouse a drunk, but it would stiffen only to subside, some half-hibernating animal reluctant to venture back into daylight. He’d click in a joyless trance, in the hope that some body, any body, would wake him up. To feel some desire, and to desire more, was worse than feeling no desire at all. As for being desired, it still happened, but less and less: the small light that went on in a woman’s eyes when she realized who he was, or who he’d been.