Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  “William Marrero,” she said, somewhere between a question and a statement. It didn’t sound satisfactory to her, didn’t seem like a complete explanation.

  “Bill,” he corrected. And then, miserably: “But yeah.”

  He turned, took in her blush.

  “You love the movie.”

  “I’ve never seen the movie,” she said, truthfully.

  “You’ve read my book,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Jesus. You must be the only person who’s read the book but hasn’t seen the movie. So you read the book and . . . You thought it was overrated. Yes?”

  The heat had spread out across her chest, up her neck, to her ears.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m being an asshole.”

  She took a small drag of the cigarette and then said, in a fumbled rush, “I don’t want to be the young woman telling the famous author she loved his book.”

  She dropped the butt beside her, toed it dead, wiped the sweat off her forehead.

  “Well!” he said. “Well, I’m insulted now—I’m insulted that you’ve mistaken me for the sort of man who’d mistake you for that sort of woman.”

  She decided to be amused, even though this whole exchange made her teeth ache in her skull. He seemed oblivious to anything excruciating in his words or manner.

  “You’re clearly,” he said, eyes lit up, “not the kind of young woman who goes around telling older men how much she loves their work.”

  “How do you know that?” she said, and didn’t know whether she was indignant or flattered.

  He exhaled, looking out across the road as though it contained subtle mysteries. Her gaze followed his, then drifted upward: a giant blue billboard advertising self-storage for as little as $9 a month.

  “Your hair,” he said simply. “No sycophant would have that haircut.”

  She didn’t tell him the haircut was only days old, not really even hers yet. She just laughed.

  He turned to her and said nothing. It was an inquisitive sort of look, but essentially neutral, as though he were making an objective appraisal of what her face might speak to.

  “What?” she said quietly.

  11

  “Base,” said the new guy.

  Inez looked at him in the mirror: dark shape, wound tight, fists in his lap, there on the edge of the bed. A streetlight outside the shaded window seeped yolky orange into the room.

  “Begin with the base,” he said, impatient now as he indicated the things spread out in front of her on the dresser. “Foundation.”

  She squeezed out some tan liquid on her fingertips. Not her shade, too pale for her, but whatever.

  “Slowly!” he said as she began patting it on. More gently now: “Really slowly. Really take your time. Like you cannot do it slowly enough.”

  He was kind of attractive, she thought. A little soft, a little doughy around the middle, but handsome. Dark haired, light skinned, a thin gold chain hanging over his T-shirt, tiny diamond stud in his ear. He looked like he’d worked out a lot a few years ago, but now, sliding into mid- to late thirties, had finally ceded the elliptical to enchiladas. Weights to weed. His left biceps read “Shayla” in large, shaded-in italics.

  Inez thought about how desire sometimes made men’s voices weird. She looked at her reflection and, in an action borrowed from an ad, placed her fingertips either side of her nose and drew them outward and downward, streaking the biscuit-colored substance into rays. Making the motion languorous, as if she were in some kind of trance.

  She could feel his arousal in the room. Could tell without looking. It was a kind of extrasensory boner perception she’d unwittingly honed these last few months. Put that in a college application essay.

  She made sure not to meet his gaze now, to just keep her eyes on her own face in the mirror and begin this pantomime of transformation. To sit there, in her torn and worn and gently fucked-up clothes, and slowly apply a whole heavy faceful of makeup in the bedroom of a small apartment in Crown Heights. To give him what he’d asked for—specifically, what he’d paid for. It had taken so little time for her to stop being afraid of these encounters. Or, at least, to be less afraid. It was satisfying, in these moments, to add up all the money she was making in these hours. To compare it with her café wages. It made her feel privately hysterical.

  “More,” he croaked.

  She pretended to ignore him as she began blending the foundation with a little dainty wedge of sponge, along her jawline and the sides of her nose, tilting her face this way, that way, primly. This was stupid, but it was also kind of satisfying to watch her skin change, watch it even out into this blank, slightly paler uniformity.

  “Blush,” he said.

  “What?”

  He wanted her to blush, like, on command?

  She thought of the girl in the park, her amazing sudden reddening, the way it kept happening. She, Kate, could probably blush on command.

  “Apply blush!”

  Oh.

  “Base, blush, bronzer, highlighter, eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick.”

  He reeled it off like a child who was too old to be asked to recite the alphabet.

  “Right,” she said. And then: “How do you know this?”

  “Can you not, like . . .” He sighed. “Look, I don’t want to sound like a real dick, but can you not talk? It’s kind of better if you don’t talk.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  She swirled the brush vigorously in a bright pink compact.

  “YouTube,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  She splayed the brush, dense with powder, into the hollow of her cheek, a space made deeper with the jaw drop of her huh.

  “I know it from YouTube.”

  “Oh yeah. Those girls who have, like, fifty million subscribers?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know, I don’t really look at . . .”

  “But wait,” she said. And now she turned around and looked at him, face to face, ignoring his irritation. “If there are like a billion videos of girls putting on makeup, if it’s like, a thing, which it is, I mean, not in the way your thing’s a thing, but . . . why am I here?”

  He rubbed his eyes, and muttered, “Jesus Christ.” Then, raising his gaze, steeling himself with an inhalation: “Those girls on YouTube aren’t in the room. It’s a real-person thing. A real person in the room.”

  Now he stared intently at the ground between his feet and made a slicing motion, fingers angled downward, as he repeated: “In. The. Room.”

  “Right.”

  One of her cheeks was a bright, artificial pink. His gaze drifted to it, and then back to her eyes. Something changed in his face.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five,” she said.

  “No way,” he said.

  She could tell, just from the tone of his voice, that libido had left the room.

  He was shaking his head, rubbing his skull. “Nuh-uh. Shit, man. Tell me you’re not fourteen or something.”

  “Oh my god, I just told you I’m twenty-five.”

  “Nah, you’re shitting me.” With a kind of desperation he flung a hand toward her face and said: “You don’t even know how to put makeup on! You can’t even contour! I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t know how to put on makeup! Girls I know see that mess, they’d pass out, I swear. Just tell me I’m not . . . I’m not messing around with a minor. Are you a model? Are you one of those teenage models or something? I swear, if you’re . . .”

  “Ew. I’m not a minor. And fuck modeling.”

  “You at college?”

  “What are you, like, my guidance counselor?”

  “Fifteen?”

  “No!”

  Indignant.

  “Seventeen?”

  “No.”

&n
bsp; Less indignant now.

  “Nineteen,” he said, looking at her.

  She blinked. Turned back to the mirror.

  “Shit. For real? That’s how old my niece is, man. My sister’s kid.”

  “I’m not your niece. I’m not anybody’s niece.”

  He looked at her strangely. “So what’s your whole deal, then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You do a lot of”—he made a surprisingly elegant twirl of his left hand—“a lot of this kind of thing?”

  A gentlemanly evasion. She shrugged. “What’s your deal?”

  “My deal?”

  He puffed himself up a bit, indignation dressed as amusement. “What you see is what you get, man. I was straight with you, right? I’m being straight with you: I just wanna watch women put on their makeup. No lie, that just does it for me.”

  She considered this, considered him.

  “What?” he said, with a half-cracked smile. “You scoping me out?”

  “Well, I’m here,” she said.

  “I swear . . .” he said, and shook his head gently, as if he were threatening something, but didn’t know what.

  “A real person. Here in your room.”

  He puffed up again, pulled his tummy in.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Nah.” Had he noticed her glance at his arm?

  “My kid’s mama,” he said, angling his tattoo toward her. “We still friends, we’re cool.”

  “Cool.”

  She picked up the lipstick, brought it to her mouth, and eyed him sidelong in the mirror. Stupid, really, how easy it was. She swept it over her bottom lip in slow motion.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She smacked her lips gently and pouted. Now she popped open a little pot of eye shadow, blue and iridescent, like it was 1988. Then the mascara. Its wand came out with a soft pop, and as it did so she heard the sound of his belt buckle, then his zipper. As long as he didn’t want her to—. As long as he didn’t expect—.

  She swallowed a small lump of dread and began swiping on the blackness, top lashes, bottom lashes, then the other eye, from a pink tube that smelled like fake strawberries.

  His breathing behind her quickened.

  She glanced and wished she hadn’t: the pants around his knees already, the fast and frightening movements. He was bowed over but in that second he raised his head and saw her stare.

  “Fuck,” he hissed. “Don’t.” He cowered away from her while his right arm, Shayla, was still pumping, unrelenting.

  She whipped back to the reflection of her overdone, sex-doll face in all its lurid, porny shades. She sat very still. It seemed stupid that a person would plainly state their want, shamelessly, show her into his home, peel off a stack of twenty-dollar bills for her, and then, when it came to the moment he’d wanted and waited for, be embarrassed. A quick, ugly groan came from behind her and made her shut her eyes.

  When she opened them, the grotesquery of her reflection was still there. The makeup seemed to have immobilized her features, immobilized who she was. The sound of tissues; the fumble of zipper and buckle. Then a full silence. She held it and held it. And then she broke it.

  “Do you have baby wipes?” she asked.

  “Huh?” he said.

  She lifted a pointed finger to the side of her face like a gun. “Baby wipes. To wipe this shit off.”

  12

  It seemed to Bill that the bartenders all looked Amish. They were lean young men in collarless shirts, wearing suspenders, and all of them had facial hair—

  bijou mustaches, or bushy whiskers, or ludicrous slabs of beard. They worked the space behind the bar like a stage, joshing and flaunting their homosocial horse-

  play—snapping damp washcloths at each other’s thighs, giving fist bumps.

  He was here because he’d overheard some childless adman at that Fourth of July party drop the name and, thinking he should take Kate somewhere fashionable, had thought, Ah yes, that will do. Everyone here, it seemed, was twenty-two and exquisitely androgynous: men with long hair and delicate cheekbones and silver rings on their fingers, women with pixie crops and undercuts and wide, handsome jaws, sitting with their knees spread, elbows out.

  Perhaps, he thought now, with equal hope and despair, she might not come. He’d wait until eight thirty, take his phone out, and scroll through Twitter—a place where he lurked anonymously behind a blue egg and a handle of random numbers—and then he’d go.

  They should have just met in a dive bar. He should have taken her to old Brooklyn—Maxine’s, just a block away, with sports TV on too loud and gum-cracking, chronically underwhelmed Donna grimly pouring dollar shots. And Marty, the fixture at the end of the bar, a man who, with geological slowness, had been shrinking inside the stiff carapace of his leather jacket for decades. Old Fort Greene when Myrtle Avenue was still Murder Avenue. Not artisanal Brooklyn 2.0, with its oysters and heirloom-everything menu and fifteen-dollar old-fashioneds.

  When he’d watched her fingering the back of her neck in front of that terrible painting he’d wondered how many women in this city had the same haircut. A thousand? Ten thousand? It occurred to him that there was an exact figure, an exact number that existed which, barring some extraordinary folly of a statistical project, no one would ever know. He’d been struck by her fingers, their slenderness and their rounded points, like paw pads. He’d thought about what it would feel like to test each tiny cushion of them between his teeth, with tender bites, one two three four five.

  She looked like she belonged here. The thought struck him as she walked through the door and he watched her cast her eyes about anxiously, looking for him. She was one of these young people, with her cropped white hair and her mannish clothes. He’d written her off; he’d thought she wouldn’t come; and now he didn’t know whether it was dread or delight he was feeling. Then her eyes found him, found him already staring, and her face leaped with what he thought was relief, but could it have been chagrin?

  “I’m thinking,” he said, while she maneuvered herself into the booth, her face red, sweat glistening on her temples, her knees banging his, her mouth apologizing for it, “that I should not have brought you here. That I should be showing you old Brooklyn.”

  “Oh,” she said. She pushed damp hair from her forehead, awkwardly. Then: “Do you . . . want to leave?”

  “No!” he said. “No. I’m fine. I mean, do you want to go somewhere else? I mean, I’m fine here, if you’re fine.”

  She opened her mouth.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “We can do pretend-old Brooklyn.” He waved a hand at the sepia prints. “Instead of old-old Brooklyn.”

  “What’s old-old Brooklyn?”

  “Oh, you know.”

  She didn’t, it seemed.

  “Dive bars. Grimy, stinking dive bars with ossified alcoholics who remember the good old crack epidemic days. Grubby old unsexy Brooklyn with people shooting up and shooting each other.”

  “Unsexy Brooklyn is sexy too, though,” she said.

  She had arrived a little drunk, perhaps?

  “Because you fetishize that, too, right?” she added.

  He laughed. “I do?”

  “Do you?”

  For a moment there rose in him the hope that perhaps this wasn’t completely doomed.

  A waiter set down menus.

  “So,” Bill said.

  “Hi,” she said, and turned a furious red.

  “The rarebit’s really good, apparently. But it’s a bit hot for rarebit.”

  “Oh, I’m vegetarian, actually.”

  He chuckled but then looked up at her face. Her slightly startled face.

  “Rarebit. Not rabbit. A sort of grilled cheese thing.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Dish of your countrymen,” he add
ed.

  What a dick-move of evolution, to render faces more conspicuous at the moment they most longed to be effaced. But as her face blasted heat, he too seemed to warm up. The booth was so small; there was less than an inch between their knees under the table. He caught himself thinking of how pale her skin was, what her nipples might look like, whether they’d rush with color like her face. She seemed, already, to have lost control in some way, and this excited him. This was just so different from how it normally was: women who defined themselves as having their shit together. Their blowouts and analysts and green juices and Fitbits.

  She ordered a beer, he a glass of sauvignon blanc, and the waiter returned to set the wine in front of her, the beer in front of Bill. They both stared for a moment at these misdirected drinks. Then, unavoidably, at each other.

  “Your beer, sir,” Bill said, pushing the glass toward her.

  She gave a small, tense laugh and pushed the wine toward him. As she took a first mouthful he asked, “Why are you in New York, then?”

  She looked stricken for a moment, as if the question had been an affront.

  “My aunt,” she began. “Well, she’s not my actual aunt. She’s my mother’s best friend. She was. She lives here. Only, she just got divorced and is off on this six-month around-the-world adventure.”

  “Eat, pray, love?”

  “More drink, rant, shag, I think, but yeah. She’s in Thailand right now.”

  “Shag,” he repeated.

  “That’s how English people say ‘fuck,’” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, exasperated.

  “Oh. Anyway. So. I’m house-sitting. Cat-sitting. Because she approves of young women having adventures, you know? So I’ve left my Ph.D. in England, with my boyfriend.”

  There was self-consciousness, he saw, in the word.

  “Permanently?”

  “Which?”

  “Either.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He nodded. “Ph.D.s are made to be abandoned,” he said.

  “And boyfriends?” she said quickly. Another large mouthful of beer.

  “A harder call. Men your age are the worst, though.”

  “What?” she said, with another nervous laugh, perhaps to cover the shock.