Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  “Like what?”

  “Like you think I’m a stupid child.”

  “I don’t think you’re a stupid child.”

  “What do you think of me?”

  “I love you,” she said, and the phrase seemed to her like a tiny flag stuck in a sandcastle.

  He sighed and then, when he spoke again, his voice was different, worn out.

  “So you can’t tell me when you’re coming back.”

  “I’m coming back,” she said. The statement sounded unsure of itself. She meant it, but as she’d said it, the phrase had seemed to falter under its own weight. “I just don’t know when. A month, maybe . . . But I’m coming back.” She added, for good measure, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry I woke you,” he said.

  “You didn’t,” she said. “I was awake. I said that. I told you that already.”

  They both waited. Kate began examining a hangnail on her left thumb; it seized her attention instantly and completely, this tiny scrap of skin, the raw red shred beneath. She clamped it in place with her forefinger and then, pressing hard, positioned it between her teeth and bit it off, wincing. The phone static seemed almost soothing now.

  “George,” she said, very quietly.

  “What.”

  “I really need to pee.”

  He even laughed a bit.

  “Go,” he said.

  8

  “Humiliation needed,” the posting began. Inez appreciated how terse and precise the few lines that followed this request were.

  Here’s what she’d realized: that she wasn’t doing it for the money, but for something about the money—the alchemy of the thing. The way that some thought tucked all tight and private in a fold of a stranger’s mind could get out into the world, and make dollar bills materialize, wadded into ballast for the butt pocket of her jeans. She felt a middle-finger-raising kind of love for the idea of them all—God bless them all and fuck them all—the perverts and the loners and the weirdos.

  Today was leaden, too humid, everything sickly with heat. Central Park was bleak, the lake the same murk as a paintbrush jar, hot rain and wind blistering whitecaps across it. Uptown was another world.

  His building was stone, formidable, pillars facing the park. A man in a gold-trimmed peaked cap, shoulders quivering with gold-tasseled epaulettes, opened the door to her. Young black men paid to guard the palaces of old white people. As Inez slid her headphones off they released a desiccated torrent of Wu Tang into the marble lobby and he winced. She yanked the cord out to kill it.

  “Mr. Cavallo,” she said. “On the ninth floor.”

  The doorman tilted his head toward the concierge, another costumed man behind a desk, and he stared at her coldly as she approached. On the other side of the lobby, facing his desk, were two armchairs, angled as perfectly as props on a stage. The thought of anyone actually sitting in them, of denting their turgid cushions with an ass, was absurd.

  “Mr. Cavallo,” she said again. “On the ninth floor.”

  “Your name?” he said, picking up the phone with a gloved hand, eyes on her like she might grab it from him at any moment.

  “What?” she spat, a bit panicked.

  “Your na—”

  “Maria.”

  He tightened his look on her as he said into the receiver, “Maria here for you, sir.”

  A pause.

  “Ninth floor.”

  “I know.” Dick.

  The elevator had wood panels, mirrored panels, and a dim, artificial light that made her face painterly, eerie. She watched her reflection scoop wet strands of hair out of her face, pull the whole lot of her hair behind her neck and over one shoulder. As she squeezed, a few drops of rainwater fell through her fingers to the parquet and formed a shameful puddle. She thumbed a hasty text to Dana: the address, his name. Dana responded instantly with seven question marks, then: ffs.

  When the doors opened they did so with a kitschy microwave ting, straight onto the expanse of his apartment. An L-shaped cream leather sofa was slung beneath long, rain-slicked windows overlooking the park, the treetops like the moss in an architect’s model.

  There were specificities. He was exacting. In his first e-mail, he’d enumerated the insults she should use, all of which referred to his genitals. Lack thereof, basically. They were vile and ridiculous, and she’d memorized all six suggestions. “Dickless piece of shit,” and so on. Before she left home she’d said them softly into the mirror as she plucked a few stray eyebrow hairs.

  And apparel, that was the word he used: she should wear scarlet shoes, high heeled, and a leopard-print fur coat. She saw now that these were provided, laid out, as he said they would be, on the beige armchair in front of her. She shed her fucked-up Chuck Taylors, made a small pile by the door, and found this other woman’s clothes. There were traces of some powdery fragrance on them, an auntly sort of scent that made her think of crystal perfume bottles, plump hairbrushes, the word boudoir.

  There were two stages. First, she was to stride into the bedroom, shoes clacking, to find him. She was a little stiff and unsteady; the shoes were too big, she had to grip them with her toes so her heels didn’t slip out. The action of toe-clenching, though, seemed to tighten and focus her fury. He was where he said he’d be, in the exact pose he’d promised, but even so, the sight of him was a shock. He was old, fifties, and in a charcoal suit, crouched and fetal on the floor. Thinned white hair trimmed close to his tanned skull. Expensive aftershave rising from his thick neck—a scent like cognac, cedarwood, leather; the smell of money and cruelty. The shock was that he was barefoot and that the clean, pinkish soles of his feet were as puckered as baby flesh. He looked like a man at prayer. That, or someone racked with despair. Child’s pose, they called it in yoga. Not a pose for a man.

  When he twisted his head and looked up at her, she felt beltless in the backseat of an accelerating car. But the words were there, there, rude and ready, on the tip of her tongue, and she began to spit them, tripping them out, striding. Would the faked fury start to feel real? She hurled the words, thick and fast.

  The e-mail had stipulated that when he bowed his head and covered it with his hands it would be her cue to lodge one of her shoes in his ribs and say, “Get up.” But when she saw his hands creep to his skull, she forgot that it meant something. It looked so pathetic, this grown man cradling his own head on the floor. She became more savage in her insults. It was only when he let out a little perturbed grunt of a whine, tightening his hands so the knuckles went white, that she remembered to stop, to push her shoe, the hoofy red point of it, into his side, feeling the softness of his suited flesh beneath.

  “At this point you will drag me to my laptop, which you will find on the black chaise longue by the window. You will demand that I buy you high-luxury fashion items. You will continue to insult me. The items you demand I buy you can be anything you wish but they must be expensive. Say ‘buy it for me now’ and use the insults I already listed. I suggest you have at least three or four items in mind before our allotted time together. Beforehand please provide me with a postal address to have these sent to you so as not to interrupt the flow. Please reply to confirm you have read and understood. Then kindly delete this e-mail.”

  She hadn’t deleted it. She’d read it several times, stumbling on “so as not to interrupt the flow,” a phrase she found embarrassing. hithisiscarlos@gmail.com was, she supposed, just like xmariaforeverx—a parallel universe of an in-box for this purpose only. A thing he kept from a wife or girlfriend who would never know about checks written in lush black fountain pen and encased in stiff cream envelopes (the space for her name blank).

  “Dear Maria, yes I understand you wish to keep your identity private, you may fill in your name yourself.”

  “Dear Maria”! Ave Maria. Full of grace.

  

  When the packages
started materializing at the café, huge black boxes with their contents cocooned in cream tissue paper and black silk ribbons, Inez stared at them as if presented with something exhumed. The truth was she hadn’t accepted that there might possibly be any connection between the performance of him hunched at the screen, filling a virtual cart with designer clothes, and this, her real world, the clickclickwhir of the espresso machine and the cloudy faces of the regulars.

  Heather—who clearly doubted both Inez’s devotion to quality coffee and her commitment to, or even awareness of, customer service, but maybe knew that a skinny girl of impeccable facial symmetry was good for business, and rested her palms over her eyes with yogic simplicity when Inez refused to do a single early morning shift—handed the packages to her with a long look, and Inez seized them with a slow and unthanking snatch. It was pretty obvious that their contents were not coffee-shop-wages kinds of purchases. Heather probably thought she was a trust-fund kid. Well, she was, sort of, just not the Chanel jacket kind.

  Inez’s personal requirement for clothes was that every item of apparel be, in some way, visibly well-worn. Laddered and ripped low-denier tights, busted old jeans with holes for knees to jut through, scuffed boots, soft frayed cotton. Scorned every girl who tried or looked like she tried or tried to look like she tried. Like all aesthetics of artlessness, it required time and attention. She applied herself to thrift-store racks with professional methodology and ruthlessness, steadily flicking through hanger after hanger. The kind of T-shirts that made the grade were those that had turned and turned in so many wash cycles that the fabric had been worn almost translucent.

  The truth was the pristine clothing in the black boxes freaked her out. The first jacket that had arrived had python-skin lapels. Actual skin, from a dead snake, glossy, stiff. She had touched it and shuddered—repelled, excited.

  She didn’t keep a thing. Straight to eBay, Unused, with tags, Buy It Now!, an outfit for someone else to dress up in. As fake and corny as the red stilettoes, the fur seemed more stuffed toy than coat. It was all, she thought, a mess of so many fictions, the way some men made women—out of the red shoes from a cigarette ad, the coat from a music video in the eighties, not caring that these things were already mockeries. If she performed the performance, if she acted it out while laughing to herself, didn’t that exempt her, in some way?

  9

  When Bill came into the kitchen the next morning Inez was there with some boy, hip-hop tinnying out of the phone on the table. Fran, then, must be last week’s news.

  “We have speakers, you know.”

  Inez shrugged. She was cross-legged on the counter, smoking, bare limbs sticking out from a baggy T-shirt. She’d sloppily scissored off the sleeves, the crenellations of her ribs visible through the slashed arm holes. Bill’s mind caught on the black-and-white image of a band on its front and stalled, dizzy, senile, struggling to place the T-shirt, to believe in it as a thing he’d once bought, owned, worn. Armless, and hanging loose on a body that had not been in the world when the Velvet Underground had played, it was now some other thing entirely.

  And this boy, some stranger in his kitchen. They were always skinny musicians. Pale, from Adderalled days spent bent over their laptops in their bedrooms, building beats. Strange creatures, always something girlish about them. Sometimes—rarely, now, if he was honest—they wanted to shake his hand and call him “man,” imagining (and anticipating telling their friends later?) that they were “vibing” with him, famous author dude. They’d read his book when they were sixteen. It changed their life, man, like seriously. And he hated them for believing their lives had been changed by something so ultimately vapid, a deficient thing, full of flash and short on truth. Hated, even more, the small, craven part of himself that was pleased and flattered and wanted to hear this and would never not want to hear it. Hated, most of all, the oblivious ones who had no clue who he was, or what he’d been. Who just saw girl’s dad.

  Inez raised her chin at him like a cowboy in a saloon, that nod that seemed more like a kick. Had she unconsciously copied it from him? He felt the movement as his own as he watched. Or perhaps it was instead the stuff of DNA. There was a legacy. God.

  “Bill, Xander. Xander, Bill.”

  Rarely “Dad.” He hadn’t, of course, been “Daddy” for a decade. Probably never would be again. Maybe not until he was frail and fading. Maybe then sentimentality would finally crack her. This boy—shirtless, lank-locked, bug-eyed, skin the color of old milk—set down his coffee, wiped his hand on his jeans, and thrust it out to Bill with such exaggerated swiftness that the rest of his body had to catch up with it in a slapstick careen.

  “Hey, man,” he said, “really good to meet you,” and he nodded as he said it, not so much a gesture of deference as an effort to will this sentiment into mutuality.

  “Hi,” Bill said, and took the hand briefly.

  Shaking hands at nine a.m. while wearing a dressing gown felt absurd—and, oh god, here it came.

  “Hey, man, I gotta say, I like, loved your book, like seriously.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Yeah. Like, shit, that bit when he’s running across the roofs? And jumping between them? Still with the cigarette in his mouth?” And then he clapped his hands to the sides of his head, widened his eyes in freak-out, and exhaled an awestruck “Fuuuuuuuuuuck. You know?”

  Bill winced, grimaced a smile, and Inez snorted so loudly that she keeled over to one side. She rolled flat on her back, legs lolling over the counter’s edge, her head inches from an earthenware bowl of bananas, kicking her heels dopily, hooting. Few people, he realized, could inhabit their own amusement so bodily as his daughter did. It seemed especially pronounced this summer. He’d made no comment, for example, on this new penchant of hers for shoelessness—for running around downtown Manhattan like some kind of overgrown Mowgli. At moments, this barefootedness endeared him, seemed to him one more sign of her inimitable, anarchistic spirit. But mostly he just thought, God, what tiresome nonsense. Nonsense that would end in a bloodied foot and a six-hour wait in the ER. Maybe this was the problem with his parenting. No consistency.

  She was still convulsing, and the boy took in this spectacle of hilarity with an easy brightness, a stupid question on his lips.

  Bill knew she loved it when people made this mistake. And he loved to watch her laugh. So, in a way, it was worth it. He turned to make coffee. Inez, finally sitting up, let out a kind of whinny of recovery.

  “That’s not in the book!” she said, making a show of wiping her eyes. “Running across the roofs. That’s totally not in the book. They just put it in the movie.”

  “Oh shit, no way!” said the boy cheerily. And then, undaunted, “My bad!”

  How was it, Bill thought, that this kid could invest such complaisance in the phrase, could make bad sound good? “Don’t worry about it,” he muttered, like the kid was worried.

  Trent James, running. Give the people what they want.

  Inez, relatively composed now, lit a fresh cigarette. He wanted to resleeve her, clothe her in timeworn cotton. Yesterday, when she’d suffered to be grabbed into a hug, he’d caught the smell of her skin, and it was the smell of Cara, and his stupid heart leaped at the lie of his wife in his arms. His wife as she’d been back then, years or even decades ago. Before Inez. Not the stranger that she was now, a heavy-bottomed representative of her past self, pillaring the Connecticut community along with her placid financial-services husband. His wife had a husband! Sometimes that made him laugh. She had become the kind of person they used to mock together.

  It was too much, as well, that Inez’s body should yield the ghost of her mother but no trace of her own three-year-old self. Nobody had warned him about this, that he would grieve for the small bundled body of her, that portable person who shrieked with glee and wrapped monkey limbs around him. The weight of her lost to sleep on his chest, he ached for that. Had he appreci
ated those years? Of course not. They were terrible, exhausting. But he remained a diligent custodian of select moments, washed and rewashed in memory so many times that they’d become glassy.

  “Nice T-shirt,” he said to her. “Thought you were allergic to guitars.”

  He had never known his daughter to listen to anything other than hip-hop.

  “Whatever. I like the image,” she said.

  “Not a fan of sleeves?”

  Cigarette still in her mouth, she stretched her arms straight above her head, straining taut her stubble-shaded armpits. Blowing smoke out her nose she said, from the side of her mouth, “Let ’em breathe!” Loudly she sniffed her underarm.

  “Yeah, your lungs would agree with that, too. How are the tar deposits?”

  “Oh, I’ll kill myself before they get too heavy, don’t worry.”

  “Reassuring to hear. Wouldn’t want you growing old or anything.”

  “Dead at twenty-seven.”

  “Right. That’s always been my hope for you, sweetheart.”

  In the corner, Xander laughed, nervous and staccato, a rising four-note ha-ha-ha-ha, and glanced between the two of them, rubbing one hand up a tattooed forearm. He looked uncomfortable, now, to be shirtless, and hunched his chest inward as though that would conceal his nakedness, his useless nipples ringed with scant black hairs. Bill enjoyed this. Liked that his daughter was showing off to discomfit a boy who found himself unwashed and half-naked and smelling of sex in her father’s kitchen.

  “Kettle?” she said, and threw a look at its rattling lid.

  He hadn’t really slept last night, just skidded along in the shallows. He directed the thin arc of steaming water into the Chemex, made lazy spirals in the grounds, and noted, dimly, that he was running low on beans. He bought them at a place around the corner that had once been a grimy adult video store but was now a temple to the sanctioned porn of scrubbed oak counters, reclaimed subway tiles, and six-dollar cortados in diddy glass tumblers. The young husband and wife owners—whose mutual attraction must have had something to do with them having the same shoulder-length hair, a wheaty blond color that became mussed around the edges of their faces as they bent into espresso steam—had looked out at him coolly, gazing with no recognition, when he’d turned a shiny page of a magazine last week.