Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  Skimming through clips felt indistinguishable from swiping through the various dating apps he’d installed six weeks ago. The same joyless trance. Swipe right. Swipe wrong. He was “seeing” someone, as the euphemism went. He’d swiped right on a divorcée, a tawny-haired marketing manager retraining as a Pilates instructor; didn’t buy books but for the annual beach-read bestseller. Had never heard of him. Good. Fine. It had instantly become an arrangement.

  She required a specific method to come and she’d stated it with a directness he found extraordinary, issuing instructions as if she were telling the delivery men where to put the washer-dryer. One finger in her asshole, two in her cunt. Not like that. Like this. She took a long time. And then, finally, his fingers cramping, jaw locking, she usually got there. Whereupon he’d kneel back, tugging surreptitiously at his now-flagging dick, waiting until she was sufficiently recovered for fucking her not to feel indecorous. Immediately afterward, she’d retrieve and wriggle back into her underwear and this irritated him, seemed almost rude. She’d make a sort of murmured grunt as she did so, and he understood that this was intended to sound postcoitally soporific, to signal her satisfaction and her need for instant sleep, but to him it sounded like his dismissal. Time for him to retrieve his pants, wincing as the buckle hit the floor, and creep out.

  7

  A man was towing a grand piano down the street, and the spectacle struck Kate as reason enough to follow. She watched tourists stop, turn, and smile, vague and stupefied, reaching for their cameras as he passed, tugging the enormous thing along doggedly, as if they were both late for an appointment. She kept her distance. She didn’t want him to notice her, she just wanted to follow him. People talked about how perfect Manhattan was for walking. The grid system! they said. Its simplicity! But it was the simplicity that stymied her, the rigid right angles that quashed the art of wandering by demanding of you the exactitude, the confidence and conviction, of knowing when to turn right and when to keep going. Kate did not know where she was going but the man and his piano did. They were heading north up Thompson Street, straight toward the big arch of Washington Square, where the fountain gushed like some permanent pom-pom exalting the feat of the structure beyond it. Right beneath the arch, the man parked and went through a sequence of precise motions that culminated in the snappy assembling of a stool. Then he gave a quick, dapper little hitch to his trousers, sat, raised his hands, and began to play.

  It was Rachmaninov, and she felt a silly pulse of triumph for recognizing that. If there were someone here beside her, someone that she knew, she could turn to them and smile and say “Rachmaninov!” and perhaps they’d be impressed.

  She found a seat on the edge of the fountain. The stone was hot against her thighs and the air was filled with water and light, small shimmers of both. Kids and not-kids were paddling and splashing one another. Young guys lounged with their feet in the water, headphones on, eyes closed, blissed out, some with their forearms flung over their faces, protecting them from the sun. She watched a toddler in a frilly hat run toward the man and his piano and then stop, stupefied. His mother caught up with him, arms outstretched.

  Cigarettes smelled so much better in sunlight, she thought, as she lit up. Something had lifted in her. Now it was okay—good, even—to be sitting somewhere, purposeless, watching some man play a grand piano in a park. He was younger than she’d first thought—a graduate student, maybe, dressed in ugly cargo shorts and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. Reddish hair gelled upright into a series of little spikes. Just a normal guy who’d chosen to drag the most cumbersome of all instruments through the streets of downtown New York on an intensely hot day.

  “I love this guy,” said a voice beside her. “He doesn’t give a fuck.”

  Kate turned, and the world lurched for a moment. It was the girl from the bodega. The one who’d looked at her on her very first day in New York and said, “Happy Fourth!”

  The bodega girl had once again removed her sunglasses and now was sitting, just a few feet away, one knee hitched up under her chin, squinting in the brightness, scratching her ankle.

  “Yeah,” Kate said, and she looked back to the pianist as if to confirm his continued state of not giving a fuck. There he was, fingers running up and down the keys, sound tumbling out.

  The girl turned to her and smiled and in doing so ratcheted her beauty into something brutal. But then a gust of impatience passed over her face, taking the smile with it, and she said: “So how many, again?”

  “What?”

  The girl gave her a look.

  “How many,” she said. “How many do you want?”

  The two of them stared at each other.

  “You’re Kate, right?”

  Again, the world lost its composure. The Rachmaninov sounded frenzied now, and louder, and she wished it would stop for a moment, that he’d just shut up for a second so she could get her bearings.

  “How do know my name?”

  “Becauuuuse,” the girl said, very slowly, cautiously, as though Kate were mentally impaired, yet also somehow tilting her tone on that stretched second syllable into something like a warning. “You texted me?”

  “No,” Kate said bravely. “I didn’t.”

  She sounded feeble, like an accused child who’s so abject in their denial that she only convinces everyone, even herself, of her guilt. Could she have texted her? Could she be suffering some kind of selective amnesia? Maybe this was linked to the not-being-able-to-speak thing. Maybe these were the early signs of some rare neurological disorder. She wouldn’t know for sure until she dropped unconscious one day. And even then she wouldn’t know, because she’d be unconscious.

  The girl was still staring but now something was lighting up the edges of her eyes and the corners of her lips.

  “Your name is Kate?”

  “Yes.” Kate nodded. This was true.

  The girl looked at her for a beat.

  “But you didn’t message me, yesterday afternoon, about tickets?”

  That weird emphasis on the word made Kate feel uneasy.

  “No . . .”

  The girl kept staring, and then burst into laughter. Freeze-frame, screenshot, sell all the toothpaste in the world. And then she snapped her gaze back to Kate, who wilted, while sweat pooled in what she remembered, uselessly, was called her philtrum.

  “So you’re not here to buy Adderall?” she said. “You’re just sitting here, chilling at the fountain, and your name’s Kate?”

  Kate nodded, and brushed away the sweat.

  “Oh my god. That is so fucked up. Ha. I must have freaked you out. So you’re a Kate. I’m Inez.”

  And she put out her hand. It was surprisingly cool. Kate hadn’t expected that, she’d expected hot skin and a hard grasp. Instead, her fingers took Kate’s with a kind of detachment. Kate thought of picking up a pebble on a beach—the smoothness and self-sufficiency of a stone. How different Inez’s hand felt to George’s. How strange that an entire person’s being—or, at least, the illusion of it—was there in the touch of a hand.

  She took in Kate’s expression and laughed again. “You looked so freaked out.”

  So: she was the wrong Kate. And things came back to themselves, steadied, and the piano music now sounded lighter and more spirited, just some natural and pleasant extension of the fountain’s sound and the movement of water. She remembered to breathe and then, her thoughts catching a spurt of hysteria, she looked at Inez squarely (an audacious act) and said, darkly, “Where’s Kate, then?”

  They held each other’s gaze for a beat, just long enough for complicity to kindle there.

  Then Inez snorted. “Murdered? Whatever, fuck her—fuck the other Kate.”

  And Kate laughed a little, too, repeated it in her mind. Fuck the other Kate.

  “Do you want some Adderall, though?” Inez added, fleetly.

  “Adderall?”
>
  “Yeah,” she said, with impatience. “I come here to sell Adderall.”

  “I don’t—”

  “To students. They think it helps them concentrate.”

  “I’m not—”

  “They take it and then sit at their laptops all night like fucking zombies writing their essays. You want some?”

  Kate shook her head. “Sorry.”

  Inez. Now that she had a name, the girl and her beauty became marginally less terrifying. And now that she herself had been mistaken for a stranger, had displaced someone, she felt somehow powerful. She’d slightly fucked with the world. Emboldened, she offered her a cigarette. As Inez saw the yellow packet, instant recognition electrified her features.

  “Dude, that’s my brand!” she said, seizing one.

  “Really?” Kate said, hearing her own feigned ignorance, the way it weakened her voice.

  “Ride or die for that all-natural nicotine,” Inez said, and Kate couldn’t tell if she was joking. Then, scrutinizing Kate’s face as she pulled a lighter from her pocket: “You look familiar.”

  The sweet hiss the cigarette made as Inez inhaled.

  “Maybe you just have one of those faces,” she went on. “People always tell me I look familiar. I think I just have one of those faces. You know?”

  Inez turned to look at Kate and calmly blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

  “Do I look familiar?” Inez said. Before Kate could answer she spoke again: “You blush a lot.”

  It was a plain statement. An observation, not a judgment.

  “Like, a lot.”

  “Yes,” Kate said, stupidly.

  “Why?” Inez said.

  “I don’t know.”

  But Inez kept looking at her, waiting for something more.

  “I suppose,” she tried, “I just get embarrassed. Things embarrass me. I get self-conscious.”

  Kate couldn’t tell whether the answer had satisfied her. Inez didn’t say anything, but flexed her lips in a way that suggested she was digesting the words, then looked to the grand piano man.

  “He’s not embarrassed,” Inez said.

  “Nope,” Kate said.

  Beside him, a couple were now dancing, badly. He was twirling her, or trying, but she was going the wrong way and laughing at the failure of it.

  “They’re not embarrassed,” Inez added, jerking her chin at them.

  The man was all loose and playful in the hips, overdoing it in an effort to get his woman to loosen up. She looked stiff, reluctant, finding his sashaying laughable, too aware that people were watching and that Rachmaninov wasn’t really the sort of music you could salsa to anyway.

  “Even though,” Kate said, trying out a switchblade of sarcasm, “he should be.”

  Inez responded to this small unkindness with a loud laugh, a daylight sound, an unbidden thing, and Kate felt a rush.

  “He looks like he just took his first salsa class,” Kate added. She was smoking too fast, inhaling too hard, making herself dizzy.

  “Yeah,” Inez said. “And she looks like she’s about to dump him.”

  Kate ground out her stub on the stone beside her and Inez took out her phone and scooted closer, asking Kate for her last name. She began scrolling through Facebook on her screen with both thumbs, exhaling smoke from her nostrils like a beatific dragon. Kate saw her own face materialize on the small rectangular plane in Inez’s hands.

  “Baby got a haircut,” said Inez, looking down at the image: an already-outdated librarian person. Kate felt the blush rise again, and her hand going to the back of her neck.

  “Yeah,” she said, and then she felt her phone buzz: Inez da Souza has added you as a friend.

  “Da Souza,” said Kate, approvingly.

  “My mom’s last name. Feminism or whatever.”

  Inez looked down at Kate’s phone, its screen saver. “Is that your boo?”

  In the picture George’s face was lit with a small and reluctant smile. She’d directed him into this photograph, on a late afternoon a year ago in his Cambridge room, telling him the evening light was too perfect to miss. It was perfect—low and long in the sky so that all the planes of his face were rendered with drama. He’d been grumpy about it, in the way that boyfriends are obliged to be when their girlfriends insist on taking their picture, and he’d held that expression of skepticism on her, the half-raised eyebrow, the moue of cynical reluctance, a photo face that was no good to her, until she’d pretended to give up, and then, as his face fell back to normal, had whipped her phone back out and snapped.

  “He’s a babe,” Inez said.

  “He’s in London,” she responded. Inez seemed not to have heard her.

  “Do you get fucked up?” she said.

  “What?”

  “You know, do you like to get fucked up? Because then you wouldn’t feel embarrassed.”

  She said it so straightforwardly.

  “I don’t really like coke,” she said, feebly, making a guess. “I did it once and . . .”

  Inez exhaled smoke and regarded her with a sort of indulgent amusement. “Coke’s overrated. That’s some dumb rich-bitch shit. It burns your soul out. It’s just Adderall for dicks with money.”

  “I’m not really . . .” she said.

  “I’m talking about psychedelics,” Inez said.

  “Oh.”

  “You should try some,” she said, hitting the side of Kate’s knee. Then she was on her feet. “I’ve got to get uptown.” She held out a fist for a bump, and Kate, getting beyond her bewilderment, complied.

  She watched Inez go, watched her make that scoop of her hair over her shoulder so that her neck was bare to the sun, watched the currents this caused, the involuntary gazes.

  The piano man played on. It was Chopin now. Or it sounded like Chopin. The dancing couple had gone and in their place was a group of teenage girls holding up their phones at him and laughing. Kate couldn’t tell whether they were mocking him or delighting in him. Perhaps they didn’t know either.

  She tried out the sound of Inez’s name in her head and the syllables made a rhythm that got stuck there, an upswing and a triple fall: Inez da Souza Inez da Souza Inez da Souza. She looked down at the phone still in her palm and composed a text to George.

  think I just made friends with a drug dealer

  She paused, looking at the words.

  she called you a babe, she added.

  She considered the message for a moment. And then held a key down so it gobbled the words away backward, deleted.

  

  In the apartment she stripped to her underwear and spent a few ungainly moments positioning herself, the laptop, and the beer on the bed next to the blasting air-conditioning unit. Her old, wheezing laptop’s iron-hot underside necessitated a trip to the sofa to source the least cat-haired cushion as a buffer between thighs and machine.

  Inez had 673 friends on Facebook. Zero mutual friends, naturally. There were 353 pictures of her on her profile, and Kate began to click through them, knowing, at some level, that she would look at every one. Most of them seemed to have been taken at night; they were blurred and flashed with streetlights, club lights, the whiteness of her teeth and the brightness of her eyes. When she reached the end she began again without pausing.

  It was her phone that interrupted her again. From George: are you awake?

  Are you awake? never meant “are you awake?” It meant “please” or “help me.”

  She told him to call her, and with the small whoosh of the message dispatched she began to feel a dread grow within her.

  She answered the call, waited a half second into the connection.

  “Hi,” he said, and his voice was crushed and dark.

  “What’s up?”

  He didn’t speak, she didn’t speak. The transatlantic void
seemed to make something solid out of the space between them—the sound of the phone line, of its emptiness, had a rough texture, a noise like old carpet being churned.

  “George?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, strangulated.

  “Grem.” His nickname. “Are you okay?”

  Another long pause, and the “yeah,” when it came, was so unconvincing that she found it funny.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  And then his voice, still high with desperation. “I shouldn’t have called. Go back to sleep . . . I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not asleep!” she said. And then, more gently: “I wasn’t asleep. I’m awake.” Guilt scratched at her. “It’s like, eight here,” she persisted. “It’s not even dark outside. Just talk to me. What’s wrong?”

  She stared at an image of Inez on the laptop screen while she waited for his words. In the picture Inez was sitting on the street at night and her bare legs formed a diamond in front of her. It was taken from above, by some friend or lover standing over her, and Inez had thrown her head back, eyes closed, mouth stretched into an exaggerated faux-punk sneer to meet the camera. Her throat was long and bare, an invitation, or a dare. Finally, George’s voice came through. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “What?” she said. She’d heard him, but she’d not heard him. She’d been staring at the sheen from the camera flash.

  “George?” She thought she heard him swallow.

  “What are we doing?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what are we doing? What are you doing there, with me here? Why aren’t you here, what are you doing there? When are you coming back? Are you even coming back?”

  “George . . .”

  “Don’t say my name like that.”