“Young men. The worst. They are. I know. I was one.”
“How do you know he’s my age?” She said this and then instantly waved it away, reneging on the parry. “No. He is my age.”
“I’m sure he’s an exception,” Bill said. “I, however, was an abysm of a human.”
“In what way?”
“The usual ways,” he said. “Knowing nothing, believing I knew everything. Believing the world owed me my own greatness. When I was eighteen I read everything Faulkner ever wrote and thought that made me smart. Smarter than everyone else. And then a few years later I wrote a dumb novel and thought that made me a genius.”
He stared at his hand on the wineglass, then at the bar. Two guys, dishcloths flung over their shoulders, were leaning against each other as one showed the other something on his phone. They both laughed. One doubled over with it, as if in pure pain, like he’d taken a golf ball to the groin.
“No one under forty should write a novel,” he said to the table. “Don’t write a novel.”
She flinched.
“Shit. Are you writing a novel? Jesus. Fuck, I’m sorry.”
“No!” she said. “No. I’m not writing a novel.”
“That makes two of us.”
“I’m not writing a novel and I’m not writing my Ph.D. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I’ve sort of lost the ability to think or write,” she added.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“No, what I mean is I can’t even write a sentence. I don’t mean a good one, I just mean any one.”
“Well,” he said. “We could just sit here sentenceless if you like?”
She made a graceless nod and shrug of assent. He watched her take more beer, letting it swell into her cheeks before she swallowed, as though she were willing herself to look ugly, or coarse. And there they were, back in strained silence. The food arrived, two plates landing in the middle of their wordlessness. He felt the waiter privately take it in, this thick awkwardness between them.
At the subway he kissed her on the cheek and then watched her dart down the steps into the dark. He paused for a moment and then, as he began walking the few blocks to Maxine’s, these four words of platitude came to his mind: “Well, that’s that, then.” With them came a seeping, comfortable misery. He yielded to it. It could have been worse, he thought. He could have knocked over a ketchup bottle with his elbow, setting in motion a whole cataclysmic Rube Goldberg machine of an accident across their tabletop, ending in some outrageous ejaculation of condiment all over her. But that would have been better, really; so tangibly disastrous that they would have been forced to bond over it forever.
Inside the bar, all the TVs were screaming the artificial green of Astroturf pitches and the modulated thrum of sportscaster cadences. The place was empty except for Donna, who’d served herself a saucer of maraschino cherries and was eating them, one by one, jabbing them with a toothpick. He took a stool right in front of her and she ignored him.
“Five a day, eh?” he said, eyeing the dish. The cherries looked like bloody eyeballs. Or glands.
She looked up, chewing, and finally swallowed.
“Vodka on the rocks,” she said, barely a question.
He nodded and said, “And a Maker’s for you.”
The skin over her skull seemed to twitch in assent. It was as close as she ever came to thanks. As she set the drink down he looked around him, at the emptiness.
“Where’s Marty?”
She didn’t look at him as she replied, just calmly speared the last cherry. “Dead,” she said. “Heart attack. Last week.”
“What?” he said. “Fuck.”
There seemed to be nothing more to say.
13
Kate woke up to indifferent darkness, the shock of its quiet after the noise of her dreams, and her phone told her it was five a.m. She was on the sofa, curled up and curdled with dejection, in the same position she’d slung herself into seconds after walking through the door. Her mouth was like cotton wool. She still had her shoes on.
When she woke up the second time she was in bed and undressed, morning light outside, and the flavor of everything was different. She reached for her phone and googled him, scrolled straight to “Personal Life” on the Wikipedia page. Just two arid lines: Marrero was married to {{citation needed}}. They have one daughter.
He hadn’t mentioned a daughter. She thumbed “Marrero + writer + daughter” into her browser’s search bar, watching its innocent cursor blinking, and awaited a little girl’s face. What came up was mostly rubbish, search-term flotsam. A local news story from seven years ago about a Florida woman, last name Marrero, and her daughter, caught shoplifting. A tweet by some other Marrero that told her nothing. Then an interview, finally, that also told her nothing. She trawled it impatiently, finding the words, his words, “My daughter needs a college fund!” She closed out and put her phone down at a decisive distance from her body.
The attraction, she decided, wasn’t in having dinner with him, it was in having had dinner with him. As with losing her virginity, all her focus had been on the situation’s pluperfect. The act had been awkward, painful, odd, and anticlimactic, but who cared, because afterward came the plain, dull thrill of having done it, of it having been done. And now there was this new fact, that she was a person who had had dinner with William Marrero. It had happened. She didn’t want to consider the event itself. She tried to forget, for example, the two beers she’d drunk standing up in the kitchen before she left the apartment, a heavy blanket thrown over the cage of nerves, consumed with the same practical patience with which you’d swallow a couple of aspirin. They had made her stupider. Rarebit.
Every time she’d said the words my boyfriend last night she’d had a distinct sensation of lying. It was as though she’d made him up. It was a confused guilt—guilt toward George, for her failure to grasp his reality; guilt toward this man, for lying to him about her boyfriend, about whom she wasn’t actually lying. She wondered if he, Bill, had felt it too, this sense of falsification. Perhaps he’d suspected her of fabricating a boyfriend as a kind of guard against him. She replayed moments. There was the one when she’d said she had lost the ability to write, and he’d said “Tell me about it”—a rote expression of weariness. It was a thing people said when they meant I, too, have experienced this thing, so there is no need to explain, because I, too, feel your despond and exhaustion, right now, talking to you. But from Bill’s mouth Kate had heard how the phrase was stale and exhausted, and how he knew this, too, and so used it hopelessly. Every second of silence had been like wet cement, hardening. She’d had a desire for something ugly, an ugly thing that she could pick up while he watched—something that would ooze out between her fingers and stink. When he’d kissed her on the cheek at the subway his smell of sandalwood had stopped her for a moment with something like terror and she’d sprinted down the steps with unnatural speed. A ridiculous exit.
Today, right now, it being done, it having happened, she just wanted to get a look at him. Wanted to be outside, on the streets, where encounters happened.
She looked for him and saw him everywhere. She walked past him coming up the steps of the subway. She saw him reading a newspaper on the train that pulled away as she swiped through the gates. At Delancey and Essex it was the back of his head making its way down the stairs. She even did a double take on a bus poster. It was a famous comedian who looked nothing like him, but the image of the man’s face, in its confidence, had winked at her with resemblance. She’d seen it for a second, an uncanny flash as the fixed grinning face glided away on the bus.
As she walked, she imagined him coming toward her, saw the way she’d smile but not say anything for a moment, as though occurrences like this had ceased to astonish her, as though the world were always delivering gifts of serendipity just like this. And they’d stop in the m
iddle of the sidewalk and, still saying nothing, laugh at the absurdity of this, because what do you do with a coincidence? It’s a kind of joke of meaningfulness, meaning nothing.
In one crowded café a guy started sketching her portrait, looking up at her with fake-humble smiles. She left and began walking fast to Union Square, a node into which so many of the city’s currents ran and fused. There was a huge cosmetics store at its northern edge, and some part of her actually believed she might find a middle-aged and unkempt man idling through the aisles of eighty-dollar face creams. It wasn’t impossible.
She walked in, crossing from hot to cool, into glossy black surfaces and arrays of color. Young and smiling women welcomed her and offered boxy little shopping baskets, which she declined. The air seemed full of vaporized alcohol, and she breathed it in as Top 40 pop pumped through the sound system, boys’ voices straining to tell you that you were so beautiful just the way you were. There was something antiseptic about the quality of the sound, as if it had been evaporated, powdered, reconstituted. She found herself walking toward one big plane of cosmetics, felt herself reaching for a lipstick, and her reach was the hand of a small girl drawn to a bright sweet treat.
She handled the object, a matte-black capsule. De-
capped it. The coy way the thing rose as you slid its base was so smoothly supreme in its own confidence, saturated with its own fat color. On the minuscule silver sticker covering the lipstick’s base, she read hot luster. Whose job was it to make up names for lipstick shades? How did this person see herself and how had she risen to such a position of authority? Did she take long walks around the city, waiting for the name to suddenly blaze at her with its own conviction, so dazzling that she’d stop in a current of yellow cabs, eyes shining, rapt, deaf to the honking of horns as she heard her own voice-over say, “And then it came to me”?
Kate kept Hot Luster in her palm as she picked up another lipstick, then another, and turned each one over to read the name. The campy idiom of 1980s soap opera rendezvous: Meet Me at Midnight; Silk Sheets; After Hours; Mistress. A teenage girl’s imagined universe of sexual rebellion: No Panties; Hot Mess; Morning After; Back of the Cab; Sext; Booty Call. And the forced frisson of shameful things: Bruise; Binge; Strike; Bitch.
Each stand was flanked with lit side mirrors, and she leaned in to face her own face in one of these and brought Hot Luster to her mouth, slicking it on slowly. The color was as deliberate as a crayon and the application obvious as pantomime. She gummed a blotting tissue between her lips to print a kiss then stared at herself, a newly emboldened, hot lustered face. The thing in her hand was $29.95, an outrageous amount for a lipstick, for a thing the size of her thumb. She was queasy as she paid for it, lightheaded as she left the store, and blinded as she stepped into the glare of a midday Union Square.
The farmers’ market was in full effect: heaps of glowing apples, stands of wildflowers, hand-labeled pots of honey. A black woman in a long white dress walked past her, smooth as a sailboat, carrying an enormous armful of lavender, cradling it tenderly. Kate’s eyes went with her, to the crossed straps across her back and then, sidelong, to shop windows and their reflections, wanting to see herself, to catch the red lipstick, but not wanting to be seen wanting to see.
A stocky man, glowering, muttered “gorgeous” as he stalked past, and it sounded like a threat. She stiffened, let him see her wince, but some small pleased part of her throbbed the same color as that thirty-dollar lipstick.
Her mother’s friend Clara always wore crimson lipstick, the same shade as her nails. It was reassuring, the constancy of it. Every time she came around to drink wine with Sally in the kitchen, every time Kate saw her, there were her red lips, her red nails, coloring her in, defining her. Once, Kate had joined them at the cramped kitchen table for a glass of chardonnay, recoiling at the chirpy noises of novelty the two of them made at the idea of an “all girls together.” She’d stared at the lipstick mark on the wineglass, its fading iterations, while her mother and Clara became looser and louder. As the color of the woman’s lips faded, Kate realized she was yearning for the moment when Clara would draw her lipstick out of her purse and reapply it. When it happened, she did so without a mirror, still talking, and a deep satisfaction flooded Kate as the color once again saturated Clara’s mouth. She’d practice that, Kate thought, reapplying lipstick without a mirror.
When her phone gave an indecent shudder in her pocket, she started with something like guilt. A Facebook message from Inez, barely legible in the midday sun, artless with typos: were having drinks tonight, friends roof in bushwick you should come if you want. ill be there from 6. lmk and ill send yuo address. no other kates lol.
The hot air seemed to be beaten into thickness by the bucket drummers at the southern end of the square, the bells and chants of the Hare Krishnas, and the contrapuntal chorus of a dozen different barks from the dog run. She was sweating. A channel of it on her upper lip threatened to make a hot mess of her Hot Luster.
In the apartment, she stood under a cold shower for ten minutes, then dressed, still wet, in underwear. The water had ruined her mascara but the lipstick remained. She was absorbed in making faces of desperation at herself when her phone made its little chirrup on the bed.
This time, a text from George: facetime?
Thirty dollars seemed to buy you indelibility. Hot Luster didn’t let go. In the bathroom, scouring her red lips with disintegrating tissue, some of the stain remained. She licked around the edges of her lips and rubbed harder with her finger. When George’s face appeared on her screen he looked like a stranger, and her own face, in its tiny corresponding window, seemed to her incorrectly configured. She was, somehow, askew.
“Grem,” she said, giving a smile to him, but the name didn’t work this time. She felt like a tourist mispronouncing a word.
“Hi,” he said, with a shy, confused frown. “Are you wearing lipstick?”
“No!” she said, bringing her hand to her mouth. “Why? Does it look like I am?”
“A bit.”
“Weird,” she said. “What time is it there?”
She knew what time it was.
“Nine,” he said. And added: “Plus five hours.”
“Plus five, I know.”
“You asked,” he said.
“I know. I just. I was just asking.”
His expression hadn’t changed.
“I made a friend in the park,” she said.
It sounded infantile. He cocked an eyebrow. There was a time when she had found this Brideshead-ish expression sweet.
“She mistook me for someone else but we got talking,” Kate said. “And she invited me to have some drinks on a roof. Like, now.”
“Wait, who is this person?”
Kate didn’t want to say her name. George had a habit, lately, of making her feel policed.
“Just this girl I met in the park. She’s cool.”
“Oh well, as long as she’s cool.”
She ignored this. “What are you doing tonight?” she said.
“Annabelle’s having a birthday thing at a bar in Clapham.”
“Annabelle?” she said, trying to find a person for the name, and struggling to affix any sort of reality to the word Clapham. It seemed impossible that this part of London still existed when she was here, with yellow cabs honking on the streets outside, and the Chrysler Building pointing up at a sky bigger than any she’d ever seen before.
“Yeah,” he said. “She was at that dinner party.”
He didn’t say “the one where you spilled the red wine all over that white cloth” or “the one where you suggested some women might like to be fucked like animals,” but he couldn’t keep a little darkness out of the words.
14
The night was starting up across all these rooftops, soundchecks stuttering, barbecues firing, forties being cracked open
, a summertime phenomenon of this second stratum of the city. Inez started her second beer and eyed Dana’s. They were sitting in the shade of the roof’s water tower, and from here Manhattan was a cutout version of itself, both fake and familiar, unreal in the shimmering heat. Beside the tower, as if carried and then dumped there by a mythic flood, was a large single-story house with neat square windows on all sides, the sort of house you’d draw in kindergarten. And below that, one floor of studios, then six stories of dereliction. The elevator couldn’t be summoned from the street, only sent from above. Probably a good thing, Inez thought, what with the sketchy legality of the place—a Bushwick dorm, basically, for young adults.
Inez knew this: that a teenage girl saying “nobody understands me” is a cliché. But she also knew this: that no one understood. Not her dopey, drunk dad whose main activity right now seemed to be buying and sampling imported coffee crapped out by wild cats. Certainly not the tyrant her mother had become, hard and humorless beside the personality void that was the banker nonentity she had, unbelievably, married. Not Dana, either, not really. Her friend since twelve years old. And yet here they were, she and she, cold Coronas between them.
Lately, Dana seemed to veer between two modes. One moment she’d be in soft-eyed, belly-up submissiveness, buttery in her passivity, a laughing audience to Inez’s outrageousness. And then the next she was all stiff and weird and resentful, strange edges sprung from nowhere.
Inez was bored of all of them, though, not just Dana. Kids from small towns where their weirdness seemed singular, here in New York to find their kin. They were all a little older than Inez and yet afforded her a certain reverence because she’d grown up here. She was aware of this, enjoyed it, and also found it embarrassing. Embarrassing for their sake.
“To the Five Boroughs,” her friend Tom had exhaled, awestruck and somber, when it somehow came up that her first show had been the Beastie Boys at Madison Square Garden when she was eleven. It was a mission kept secret from her other parent, which of course had enhanced the whole thing hugely. Don’t tell your mom: the sweetest words an eleven-year-old could hear.
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