“Not interested,” Inez said to the panting woman, as she reached them.
“Sorry?” said the woman, still breathless. “I’m a model scout and I . . .”
“Yeah, I know what you are and I’m not interested,” Inez said.
The woman, still panting a little, stood on the spot in her gold platform sneakers. Bill watched a slide of sweat at her temple.
“I . . .” she began. “I just, okay, you have an extraordinary look and—”
“All right, let me break it down for you,” Inez said, growing expansive. “Modeling is fucking dumb. I’m not standing around in someone else’s faggy, overpriced bullshit that they call art and pouting and making my shoulders look even bonier while some douchebag photographer gets a hard-on and asks me to, like, try a few with my tongue out and my top off. And I’m not turning into some fucking professional anorexic Instagram-addict narcissist taking pictures with my squad just so I can sell three-thousand-dollar dresses to rich, miserable uptown bitches whose hedge-fund husbands are off boning escorts. And if I want hot pictures of myself I’ll just take a fucking selfie, okay?”
The woman blinked. The three of them stood there, Bill feeling himself beaming, Inez trying not to look pleased with this speech, making bored eyes, even as those slight twitches at the corners of her mouth betrayed her satisfaction.
The young woman swallowed, shifted her iPad under her arm.
“We’re a very reputable agency,” she said, a bit affronted, but perhaps mostly astonished. “And we take the health and well-being of our girls really seriously.”
“Have you met my dad?” Inez said.
The woman faltered, looked up at him.
“I don’t think my daughter’s interested,” Bill said to her.
He tried to make his voice kindly. He felt bad for her. She’d just sprinted at least one block, in midday heat, in these travesties of running shoes, convinced she was about to make the signing of the year.
“Also, my daughter’s nineteen. So really, it’s a little offensive, a little unfeminist”—oh yes, how he relished that, a wicked flourish—“when you refer to her as a girl.”
“I’m all woman,” Inez corroborated, placing one hand on her hip, giving her head a toss like Miss Piggy. “And I’m offended.”
The scout wiped some sweat from her forehead and looked as though she might cry. She began fumbling around in a fanny pack sitting on her hip. Bill hadn’t seen one of those since the nineties. Cara had worn one on holiday in Maine, one of the very last family holidays, and it had seemed to him the absolute signal of her resignation from the world of sexual desirability, an abject flag of surrender. Like some kind of sagging womb, in shriveled black leather, worn outside the body. A thing that made him always think of the word prolapse. And now fashion must have decreed they were Back. Prolapses for all.
“If you give me your card,” said Inez, “I swear all I’m going to do is stick my gum in it. So seriously, save a tree, keep your card.”
Bill made an apologetic smile, a rueful grimace of helplessness, and followed his daughter. He had a sense that the young woman was still rooted to the sidewalk in those ludicrous sneakers, shell-shocked, trying to metabolize her dismay.
“I’m really glad,” he said, slinging an arm around his daughter as they walked away, “that you have no interest in modeling.”
“It’s fucking cheap,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“And lame,” she said.
“Also lame,” he confirmed.
“So fucking lame.”
The brunch place had tables on the street, a green-and-white-striped awning, a patio ringed with wooden planters stuffed with red geraniums. It felt Parisian. She ordered blueberry pancakes, and when they finally arrived she patiently held a tilted jug of maple syrup over them until they were drowned. He paused over his biscuits and gravy, watched her arm remain suspended. The miracle of her.
“Hey, what’s your friend’s name?” she asked, forking a big piece of pancake into her mouth.
“What friend?” he said.
“Weird old guy. Wears white.”
“Casey! . . . Casey?”
“I saw him.”
He was so eager for this, for her telling him something, beginning a conversation, that it took a huge effort to pay attention to the actual content.
“Where did you see him?”
“What’s his deal, anyway?” she said.
Extraordinary, really, her ability to ignore direct questions.
She added: “I like him.”
He hadn’t expected that.
“You do? Well, good.”
The mutual surprise effected an odd levity.
“I like him too,” Bill added.
“So how did you meet him, then?”
“Oh god. I was fifteen.”
“Is this,” she said, her voice fat with pancake, “going to be another one of those stories where you stare into space for five minutes between every sentence?”
“Sorry. We met in Tompkins Square Park. He propositioned me. Half-heartedly.”
Should he even be telling her this?
“A few weeks later, the blackout happens. You know about this?”
“No.”
“The blackout of 1977. All the power went out. Imagine the whole city in total darkness.”
“Sounds wild.”
He knew she was using the word approvingly. Dope or rad or sick.
“Wild was, yeah, exactly what it was. Not in a good way. People went wild. Mad and bad and fucked-up desperate people who . . .”
He didn’t know where to go. Could no longer distinguish between his own memories and accounts of this night in novels, memoirs. The blackout, the blackness, had accreted too much, had been filled with too many stories.
She rolled her eyes. “Cool story, bro.”
So much you could forget—the sequence of your very own life. Maybe humans weren’t meant to live this long, maybe brains couldn’t retain this much life, maybe the natural way of things was to die at thirty, when you could still remember it all, or most of it. And maybe it was right that teenage daughters thought their fathers fools. That was the way of things.
Write a book, lose a wife, raise a daughter.
Casey still being alive, though—that hardly felt like the way of things.
“So many of Casey’s friends died in the eighties,” he said. “Like, almost all of them. They called it the ‘gay plague.’ That cunt—sorry—Reagan . . . I don’t know how Casey survived. I don’t know how he’s still alive. I guess sex was never really his thing. Just the occasional blow job from boys in the park. He liked it better in other people. Liked to talk about it and liked to watch, like the little perv he loved to be.”
She scrunched her nose to express distaste.
“Who’s the prude now?” he said.
Her pancakes were gone, his coffee was drunk. While he was paying and she was in the bathroom, her phone on the table lit up. He had never read her texts, or her e-mails, or snooped on her online. He wasn’t that kind of parent. But here he was, picking the thing up and reading it. It was mildly confusing, for a moment, no more than that.
Only when he read the message again did a sick understanding come, a weight over his body that pushed down on him and kept pushing down, as if it wanted to expel every bit of air. By the time she slumped back down opposite him, with the scent of the bathroom’s expensive soap rising from her hands, he thought he was going to vomit biscuits and gravy all over their table.
“Woah,” she said. “Bill?”
He couldn’t look at her.
“Jesus, are you having a heart attack or something?”
“I’m fine. I think maybe the—the gravy was bad.”
He could hear the lie. No possible way she’d buy
it. But:
“Oh, gross,” she said. “If they poisoned you we should totally get this on the house. At least.”
She was looking around for some poor waiter to berate. He waved away this suggestion. “No, god, no.”
“Well, I’m going to Bushwick, then,” she said, already up, slinging her backpack over her shoulder.
“You are?”
He felt fresh panic.
“Yeah.”
“To the café?”
“Yes!”
“Don’t forget your phone,” he said.
She grabbed it with a wary slowness and then stood there.
“I’m fine, sorry,” he said. “Go, just go.”
“Well. Feel better, okay? Pepto-Bismol.”
And then she was gone.
His hands were sweating and cold.
Maria, his mother’s name. Above the text, the sender’s name, carlosX, had told Bill it was meant for Inez, that the message came from a person saved in her contacts.
Who the fuck was carlosX and what kind of a fuckfaced name was that? And why the fuck was this carlosX telling his firstborn and only child to arrive at four, and to wear the shoes as always, and yes, they could negotiate a pay raise. Why the fuck is this carlosX calling my child by my mother’s name?
He accosted a waiter and ordered, in a voice that didn’t belong to him, a double scotch on the rocks. When it came he steadied himself with a mouthful or two and a new thought came like a bright coin in his palm. He actually almost let out a small cry of relief: the possibility that it was a joke. Yes! Some kind of joke, it had to be. Games teenagers played, silly names for each other: “carlosX” was likely a pseudonym for that skinny kid drinking coffee in his kitchen the other day. And this, quite possibly, surely, was just some innocent kink between them, none of his business. That was the main thing, wasn’t it? That it was none of his business.
Innocent kink. He should never have read it in the first place, and now he chose to believe he hadn’t. He observed his fingers around the tumbler, and tilted the glass in a companionable sort of way, so the drink sloshed gently, the glass slipping a little against the sweat on his skin.
She got home late. He heard the sound of the elevator before the door, the old whir and crank of it, and got himself out of bed and into his dressing gown to go see her. She was already lying on her back on the sofa, legs dangling over its end, holding her phone above her, thumbs weaving in the semidarkness.
“’Sup,” she said, without looking at him. Her phone cast a greenish light on her face. The word sounded a little slurred.
Here was his moment to say it: Who’s Carlos X, then? He sat down beside her.
“What’ve you been doing? What did you do tonight?”
He sounded thin to himself.
She continued to text, or whatever it was she was doing, eyes glazed. He thought, for a moment, that she hadn’t even heard him, but then, still engrossed in whatever was on that tiny fucking screen, she began to talk. A flat voice.
“The usual. Shot heroin with some homeless dudes. Mugged an old lady. Stole a car. Y’know.”
“Okay,” he said, and sat there with his hands in his lap.
Now, finally, she looked at him, cocked an eyebrow, and scrambled up to sit cross-legged.
“Not funny?” she said. “Not laughing?”
His gaze slid to her grubby feet. Blackened soles, pink and clean in the arches.
“Jesus, sweetheart, your feet are filthy.”
19
For a while, Kate heard nothing from Inez, and didn’t care. The night at the warehouse had taken days to recover from. She barely ate for three of them, and marveled at the high of this, indulging the delusion, as she poked at her hip bone in the mirror, that reality was baring its bones. Hours in the bathtub, in its cloudy water. Stretches of time flat on the bed, held in a kind of trance by the drone of the air conditioner, ignoring the cat as it ignored her. It seemed, for a moment, a sort of saintly state that she’d entered. And then, this morning, she ate cereal and checked her e-mail and it was broken. She was just restless and irritable now, willing surprises, invitations, miracles from her in-box. Downloading 5 of 5. One from Lauren. Did she want to eat froyo in Park Slope? How about never replying, how about not a sorry and an excuse, but just a nothing. Somehow this was a quietly breathtaking thought. Then with a surge of guilt the thought faded. To Park Slope she went.
The froyo place was all aspartame and artifice, sweet white turds cradled in paper cups, covered with a chaos of candy, harassed mothers failing to hold conversations with each other over their clambering toddlers.
When Lauren got up for napkins, Kate checked her phone again. Her attention snapped to the name in the subject line. William Marrero in conversation. A reading, in a church in the East Village.
It seemed possible that he wouldn’t even remember that failure of a dinner. There were markers, definite dividing lines, and the night with Inez had been one. It had been a miracle that a pinch of dust had done this, had made the world ten times the size it had been before. There was the before and there was the after, and wouldn’t seeing him now, in this new territory, this after, be a different thing altogether? A self-dare—and already she was playing out some joke in her mind that she could make to him about “froyo,” playing up her British bewilderment, Lauren’s maximalist approach to toppings. And then her phone shuddered in the palm of her hand: Inez.
“This was so lovely!” Kate said as Lauren reclaimed a plastic chair. Hearing this obvious euphemism for goodbye, she looked stricken.
“I’ve got to get to a reading,” Kate explained.
“Oh!” Lauren said. “Who’s reading?”
She told her. Lauren’s eyes shone back a little hungrily.
“Oh, wow! You know, I think he was at that art show we went to!”
“Really?”
“It was so crowded I couldn’t really tell! I think it was him, though. Not as good-looking as his author photo.” She paused for a moment, abashed. “You know that photo?”
“Yes,” said Kate.
Lauren waited expectantly. Kate smiled awkwardly. To make up for this, for the lie of the reading being tonight, for the rudeness of not inviting her, she decided to be emphatically warm in her goodbye words. Lauren’s body felt small when she hugged her at the subway steps; her hair smelled of cucumbers. The hug was all arms, no back, as if they might break each other.
“So lovely to see you.”
“You, too,” said Lauren. Kate caught her eye for only a very small moment, but saw what was there, that flint of knowing that this was it, that there wouldn’t be another froyo or anything-else outing.
The train rose upward with casual confidence, curving around and over the canal and past the Kentile Floors sign, red wrought iron against this wide blue, and toward the roofs and fire escapes of Chinatown. Looking out the window you couldn’t see the tracks below, only the air all around, like flying, and she was abashed with the childishness of her own thought.
And then something was happening here in the carriage. A young black guy was pacing up and down with a vital sense of purpose, as though the very act of walking could do something to the space, clearing it or preparing it in some way. Two other young men—boys, just boys?—were hanging off the rails near the doors, waiting for their cue. And then he clapped and a break beat began, sonic scraps amplified, like a low-res image blown up yards wide. He was bounding now, slapping his palms as he bounced. “WHAT TIME IS IT?” he yelled. His two comrades yelled back, dutifully, smoothly, “SHOWTIME!”
Kate couldn’t believe the lack of response: that people didn’t look up from their screens, screens filled with cartoon candy, a game that seemed to have claimed the attention of a whole population of adult men and women this summer. The main guy, shirtless and bandannaed, the waistb
and of his jeans cutting neatly across buttocks clad in Calvins, lunged at the pole and was horizontal, suspended, one leg bent, the other extended with yogic perfection, as though someone had pressed pause. Then he swung, flipped, looped, made the space his playground. His comrade took the stage, flipped his baseball cap, caught it, spun it, kicked it up, and caught it on his head, all while the beat thudded through the car and the train plowed on. The youngest, eleven or twelve at the most, spun with a fluidity that was almost voluptuous, with a movement that carried a suggestion of sex. Kate wondered if the other passengers could feel it, a slightly dislodged quality to things, the unease at the feminine, sensual thing being described in the air of this crowded train.
Only a few faces looked up and then it was over. The dancers were clapping emphatically, rousing passengers to do the same. When they came past her she put a dollar in the hat and the youngest stuck his tongue out at her, bit it with his top teeth. He grinned, and she grinned back.
20
Today was what? Her third visit to him? Fourth? The heat obliterated any kind of computation. Walking outside was like dragging your body through lava. Inez passed some young women catatonic on a stoop, wearing just shorts, torsos slick with tanning oil, and every man that passed too mired in lassitude to react. It was the summer that girls dyed their hair into murky sea-life shades, and it drew her eye each time, these dirty mauve and turquoise and aqua and green streaks on blond, tugged up into messy knots and ponytails. Trashy mermaid colors, washed-up sirens on Lower East Side steps. They’d taste of Coney Island if you sucked a strand of hair: salty and sweet. Maybe fifteen years from now, heavy and settled, they’d look at old photos: oh my god, d’you remember that summer we all had green and blue hair?
On days like this Inez relished the subway ride not so much for the chill inside the train, the cold orange plastic of seat under thigh, and the grip of cool metal bars, but for the simple disorientation of it. Uptown, the streets were empty.
The doorman recognized her, of course. It was like walking into a marble morgue. This time the guy behind the desk was new and he slipped his eyes at her, slow and sour. Down her white top to her bit of bare belly, browned from weekends on Fort Tilden Beach, her denim cutoffs with the frayed fringes tickling her thighs. The sweat that had been pooling at the base of her back snaked now into her butt crack. She took her sunglasses off, wiped the moisture from her eyes, upper lip, and forehead, and stared at him, this doorman. She felt a white crackle of hostility as she pushed the elevator button. His face puckered with revulsion as the doors finally opened.
Neon in Daylight Page 13