Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  Shaking—why was she shaking?—she stepped inside and willed them to close fast. The floor seemed to rise faster than usual, and then they opened again, onto the familiar bland expanse of his home, and this time the ping they made was like a warning note of arrival that seemed to fade as soon as it sounded. The sweat had gone sickly cold on her skin.

  When she saw the coat, that cheap-looking, fusty thing, it sent a surge of rage through her. She grabbed it and threw it. It landed slumped against the wall with its sleeves outspread, slayed, in an attitude of supplication or victimhood. No mercy.

  The heels, though. She put them on. She clacked into his bedroom faster and louder than she’d done before. It felt like drugs, this unexpected fury.

  There he was, as always, a hunch of him on the floor.

  “There you are, you piece of shit!”

  She bellowed this with a kind of joy, and as he looked up, she saw alarm pass through his eyes in a shiver.

  “Yeah, you fucking should be frightened!” she shouted. “You should fear me! I’d fucking fear me if I was you. And you know what? I’m really fucking glad I’m not, Carlos! Does your mommy know you do this?”

  And then his look hardened: too far. He made as if to get up.

  “No, you stay the fuck down!”

  She stopped pacing. Her chest, she noticed, was heaving.

  He looked at her a moment longer and then, very slowly, bent his head again, returned to that fetal position. She listened to her own panting, to the blood moving inside her, and stared at the sweat stain on his back, an hourglass of indigo on the pale blue fabric of his shirt. It was spreading. Disgust galvanized her.

  “I’ve got something to tell you, Carlos,” she said, astounded to hear her own tone. “Not a fucking script! Not your corny fucking clichés. I truly think you’re fucking pathetic. And I think your stupid little men in their cunty little hats downstairs are fucking pathetic. I think your whole fucking life, your men’s mag apartment and your too-tight shirts and your too-much money that you have no fucking idea what to do with and these stupid obvious fucking whore shoes, is all fucking pathetic.”

  He put his hands over his head, as steady and obvious as a pantomime. The phrase is “losing it”; people say they lost it, but to her it felt more like being found and hit by and raised up by a force, so that she was no longer herself. She couldn’t have stopped if she’d wanted to.

  “Oh, your hands on your head, yeah? Yeah? Hands on the head equals ‘Shut up, bitch’? I’m not shutting up, Carlos. I’m shouting for free right now ’cause I just think you’re a fucking tragic sight.”

  And then, just as quickly, she was losing steam.

  “Fucking tragic there, on the floor, with your hands on your head . . .” Her voice faltered. She sounded pathetic.

  And now this. The way in which he lifted his hands above his head and placed them—one, two—flat on the ground. This was something she’d never shake.

  A muscle was clenching and unclenching on one side of his oily neck. The smell of him seemed to have intensified into something sharper and more animal. She took a step back. There was the length of a body between them and he was almost two feet taller than her. Nausea began curdling in her stomach. She moved her eyes away from him, looked past him to the windows, where the park—deserted in this heat—was an unreal green, a mirage, as if, unpeopled, it had begun to doubt itself and dissolve.

  “Fucking leave,” he said. “Right now.”

  She removed one shoe, then the next, hobbling, shaking. She crouched to align them so that they were flush and neat, toes toward him. She straighened up and it was his bare feet she stared at. The scraggly black hairs on the tops of his toes. He took a step toward her and she could smell his breath, coffee stale.

  “Fuck you,” she said, a faint, hoarse noise.

  There in his lips—an ugly twitch, a tightening, the opposite of a pout, and it came with a stinging smack to the side of her face. She reeled, her left palm pressed to the pain.

  Several full and heavy seconds passed before she understood what had just happened, what he’d just done. There was a lightness to her amazement.

  “Get the fuck out of my apartment,” he said.

  After the detonation of the slap, these words seemed to express nothing more than irritation. A piece of trash lobbed at a can, who cares if it misses. He muttered, more to himself than her: “Stupid little bitch, playing games.”

  He was already walking away. The slap had knocked the speech out of her, the thoughts out of her, everything.

  It was only when she was in the elevator, its doors closing, that she realized she’d left her own shoes behind. That they were still sitting there, her dirty, fucked-up sneakers, beside the slung coat. Two pairs: the whore shoes, primly pointed, and her own battered sneakers, gray with dirt, ripe with a summer of sweat.

  In the elevator she primed her body to run. Told her legs that this was what they had to do when she got to the ground. That the opening of the doors was the starting pistol. And then she was sprinting through the lobby, outside into the monstrous day, naked soles slapping the sidewalk, hot against bare skin.

  By the time she reached the subway her feet were black and pink, dirty and scalded, small bits of grit lodged into her heels, and she was snatching drags of breath. She touched her face, marveled at it still hurting, and longed for a big mirror to see if there was a mark. On the subway platform a fat white woman, seated on a bench in a fuchsia T-shirt, holding a tiny cheap fan to her fuchsia face, turned and stared at Inez as she hopped from one foot to the other, craning down the tunnel to see the lights of the train as it made its gradual approach. People whined about how the city was too fast, but as passengers waddled on around her, it seemed everyone and everything was screamingly slow.

  She sat and cradled a dirty foot in her hand, staring at it, only half-hearing that firm and familiar voice, disembodied and genial, advising, always, to stand clear of the closing doors, please.

  21

  Bill sat with an ankle crossed over a knee, gazing into the audience. The two Xanax he’d swallowed ten minutes ago had dimmed the world into an inoffensive haze, so that when, for example, he observed that the place was packed, the observation caused him neither surprise nor pleasure, only the knowledge that some combination of the two was probably the correct response.

  His conversational partner, a critic in her early forties, author of two respectable but pop books on motherhood, was tripling her chin to squint down at the little black mic affixed to her shirt. He realized he didn’t care either way if his own mic worked, didn’t mind whether he was heard. Let it be someone else’s problem. He had nothing more to say anyway.

  Today was the book’s anniversary. Anniversary. As though it were a marriage, or a war. They were reissuing it, a fancy copy, with four mini-essays of introduction from people his editor had referred to, without shame, as “boldface names.” He’d refused a tour, citing fear of flying, which was true, and no one had fought him on it. He, in turn, fought no one on the “boldface names.” It was money, it was attention, it was a dubious efflorescence of online articles larded with the term millennials.

  As that word left a greasy trail through his skull, he saw her. The name was absent for a moment, just the arrest of her sharp pale face and its white-blond hair. Staring straight out, very still, erect and attentive while the people either side of and behind her were bustling and gossiping, fanning themselves, swigging from water bottles, leaning across one another.

  There seemed to be eye contact, a click of it, but at this distance you couldn’t really be sure. He waited a beat, then reached for his phone and sent “Kate from gallery” two words: save me. It was a joke as he wrote it, just casual flippancy, but then, as his finger sanctioned send, it went with some kernel of no-joke. He watched it land, watched her dip her head to read it and glance up and go pink. A little conspira
cy, from up here to over there. She was texting something. He waited.

  from what

  Oh, take your pick. Alcoholism, he thought. Paternal failure. Dissolution. Indolence and oblivion and irrelevance. Better, yes, to stick in the here and now. The manageable short term. With the uncanny quiet that sometimes comes over a crowd, conversations all over the room fell away. People looked amused and surprised at themselves. He watched Kate stash her phone. The critic, startled, began making movements of mannered readiness, as though trying to catch the eye of some stage manager in back. He wondered what her first question might be. He did not wonder very hard.

  “Well!” said the critic. She glanced down at her notebook and adjusted her seat and gave him a quick professional smile.

  His mind was a synthetic sky: blue, blank, cloudless.

  “So, William, here we are, in this historic venue, celebrating the reissue of a book that’s also in its own way historic . . .”

  Oh, she was nervous. He could sense that some current in the crowd had found its way into her speech.

  “. . . and so I suppose the first thing I want to ask you is just what it’s like to revisit this book and how it is to look back on what it was then and what it is now, in our culture, in this city.”

  He inhaled in a small way, opened his mouth, and began.

  This answer, and the next, came on autopilot, with a dissociation not just from voice but from body, too. As if he were floating somewhere above or beside himself, an immaterial wisp overhearing this fleshy lump talking, the familiar cadences of urbane self-deprecation, the well-hewn remarks, while half-wondering who the hell they were—this lump, this voice, saying the same things they had said for decades. How long had he been talking? Were they still all there, those listening bodies who’d come to hear this? He granted himself a drift of a look and saw faces, rows and rows of them, unmoving and watching. There was something very unnatural, really, something plain hideous and frightening about so many human eyes trained on one spot, and the spot was him.

  “Well,” said the critic in brightening conclusion, and, oh god, had he made it, was this the end? He’d no idea if it had been five minutes or fifty. “Now I think we’re just going to open it up to some audience questions.”

  A hand, quickest off the draw, shot up in front of Kate and obscured part of her face. As people wheeled to look at the person about to ask the question, Bill saw the scarlet flash down one side of her bare neck, a quite gorgeous spill of it. Oh, Kate. To be stared at, when you hadn’t raised your hand. What a poignant unfairness.

  “Yeah, hi,” the young man said, taking the mic that was hurried to him, standing up, slinging his weight into one hip in a way that conveyed both his absolute assurance and the fact that what he was about to say would take some time. “So this is less of a question and more of an observation,” he began.

  Bill shut his eyes for one moment and experienced the feeling of falling in slow motion, seated, arms and legs akimbo, into a well of oblivion. He opened his eyes but every time the young man said “Hegelian” he plunged a fathom deeper. As the grad student kept talking, as the minutes passed—entire, fully formed, interminable minutes!—as the crowd shifted awkwardly, with huffs and sighs, and the critic, head erect, kept opening and closing her mouth in a weak effort to interrupt, Bill began to feel something like joy.

  “. . . and so ultimately, yeah, I was seeking your thoughts on that and whether, in the dialectical sense at least, you’d agree that that is in fact the key antinomy of what I think we can unequivocally call the contemporary discourse with regard to this?”

  And then, bald miracle, he stopped. The room was a single gelid entity. Bill didn’t move; he remained staring at the student. The critic bit her lower lip and looked at Bill, terrified, while a collective breath held, strained and ready to split. He savored it for the smallest moment more.

  “I’m sorry,” he said evenly. “I didn’t catch that: could you repeat the question?”

  One beat, alarm in the boy’s eyes, and then: an absolute eruption from the audience, a roar of it! Like he’d cracked them open, snapped down the middle, one milligram, a tiny sky-blue pill. The whole crowd laughing, a flood of relief, and then laughing more at the sound of themselves laughing. Bill twisted the top off a water bottle and took a sip.

  Sometimes, when you truly and fully didn’t give a fuck, when you were psychologically and pharmaceutically incapable of giving a fuck, you could find a pure sort of exaltation in the not-caring, you could let yourself be carried off by it to a place approaching sublimity.

  The grad student’s legs seemed to buckle beneath him for a moment, as if the command to sit were coming from his body rather than from the brain of which he was so proud. Who dared follow that, Bill thought, but they did, of course, because now the atmosphere was ir-

  reverent, lawless. He had them. The questions were loose and funny. One young woman, shiny and drunk and sloppy in a sweet way, took the mic and asked if it was true that he had once joined Debbie Harry on stage to sing “One Way or Another.” Sort of, yes, but he didn’t say that, he just laughed. Everyone else laughed, too.

  “Sing it for us!” the girl pleaded.

  “You sing it!” he said.

  And she did! My god. A few lines of it, and when she did a victory twirl by way of a finale and collapsed back into her seat, hiding her face in her hysterical friend’s shoulder, everyone whooped and cheered and a hero had been

  made, a karaoke queen of the hour. Bill plucked a carnation from the crappy vase on the table and threw it to the girl.

  By the time the critic shouted that there was no more time for questions, and even before everyone mobbed the table of cheap chardonnay, it was essentially a fucking party. He saw, in his peripheral vision, that a cluster of bodies had already formed at the foot of the stage steps, awaiting him. The critic opened her mouth to thank him, or shake his hand, but before she could speak, he took her elbow quickly and said, just shading it with something conspiratorial, “Hey, did we get kicked out of Elaine’s once?”

  Goddamn, he felt like George fucking Clooney. It could have been her, couldn’t it? The two of them kissing in the corner booth until the grand dame patron herself, Elaine the Eponymous, had decided enough was enough and wielded her weapon of choice.

  “What?” she said.

  He let go of her elbow. “Elaine’s? Fly swat? Was that you?”

  One quick shake of her head and she hardened with wariness.

  “I don’t know an Elaine,” she said, gathering up her things, wedding band flashing. He smiled.

  Down in the crowd, so many young faces. They wanted to take selfies with him, and he duly angled his face up at their outstretched phones and tried to look a bit quizzical, yet tolerant, likable. He couldn’t see Kate and had a sense she might leave before he had a chance to grab her. It took a while; he actually had to prize people’s hands off him, pat them off, and fight his way over there.

  She was leaning against a pillar, cup of wine in one hand, looking deep into her phone.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” he said, with a sort of fervor.

  “Hi,” she blurted. “Tell me what?”

  “About young men. That they’re the worst.”

  “Hegel guy,” she said. He saw her face shine briefly with relief, and then regret. “I think he actually was the worst.”

  “He’s behind you.”

  “Shit!”

  “I’m teasing,” he said. “He’s probably gone to jerk off into The Phenomenology of Spirit.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Hegel.”

  She smiled slightly. He was being too much—he could feel it. Calm down.

  “That was quite . . .” she ventured.

  “I know.”

  “Are your readings usually that . . .”


  “Yeah, no,” he said. “Anyway. I’m really happy you came.”

  “I worried you might think it was weird,” she said. “I mean, just showing up after . . .”

  “That dinner,” he said. “Wow, that dinner. That was amazingly bad. Didn’t I ask you if you liked coffee?”

  “No,” she said. She was laughing now, so he decided to laugh too. “You just announced, out of nowhere, that you were ‘really into’ coffee.”

  “Know what else I’m into?” he said.

  She recoiled, as if there were some inappropriate threat in the question.

  “Wine,” he said quickly. “Wine. So here’s an idea. You and I leave right now and go drink a bottle of stony cold white in a vigorously air-conditioned bar.”

  She seemed to falter. He’d completely misread this. Got carried away.

  But then: “Okay,” she said. And he watched, pleased, as she knocked back the cheap chardonnay, wiped her mouth, and, with a deft little show of sass, slung the crushed cup to the floor.

  Outside, it was baking, all the windows and doors of the bars wide open to the evening, drinks and music spilling out onto the streets, as if there were no more borders, boundaries.

  22

  In some unlit and unplumbed place, a viscid pit-of-the-gut place, Kate understood that they weren’t drinking to get drunk. That they had, instead, agreed upon a mutual seduction. They were drinking to the certainty of fucking.

  The marble-topped bar was cool under her forearms, and a barman, with the steady flourish of a magician brandishing cards, dealt them two long menus. Bill ordered, without consultation, a many-syllabled wine.