Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  “Oh god!” Kate said, and she was going red, of course, palm over her face to hide it, or to emphasize it. It was still so easy to embarrass her. But here she went, shedding those horrible plastic flip-flops and dutifully maneuvering her way into the shoes, buckling their tiny straps. When she stood up, unsteadily, she was six inches taller. Holding her arms out, she began to revolve, awkwardly, for Inez’s appraisal.

  “Hot,” Inez said. She lit another cigarette. When Kate had dismounted, removed them, and carefully rewrapped them in their tissue paper, unease arrived in her face, as if there might be something awful in the juxtaposition of these two cardboard boxes on a bench—one grease-stained and strewn with crusts greebled with cheese shrapnel, the other holding designer shoes worth a hundred large pepperoni pies.

  Well, deal with it, Inez thought. This is how it is.

  “Thanks, Inez,” Kate said. “They’re amazing.”

  Inez kept smoking. This whole exchange, somehow, had irritated her.

  “I’m thinking about getting a new tattoo,” she said. “Basquiat.”

  “Cool,” Kate murmured, and Inez could tell she was straining to sound encouraging, or impressed, or approving.

  “Stick ’n’ poke.”

  “What?”

  Inez made a jabbing motion at Kate. “Like that. Stick ’n’ poke. My friend does them. The pain’s the best bit. You ever stubbed out a cigarette on yourself?”

  A beat.

  “Inez,” Kate said heavily. “What do you think?”

  She couldn’t help laughing at that.

  “I used to do it all the time when I was like thirteen,” Inez said. “I loved it.”

  A tart shiver of pleasure ran through her at the memory. The dare, the doing it, the mark it made.

  “Why?”

  “And then my mom saw it and freaked the living fuck out and sent me to a self-harm specialist. Self-harm. Fucking insulting! Like I was some emo loser writing her Live Journal and dyeing purple streaks in her hair.”

  “So it wasn’t self-harm?”

  “No!” She realized she was almost shouting. “I was having the time of my life. It was . . . fuck, I can’t explain. It was like . . .”

  “A turn-on?” Kate said.

  Inez smoked some more. “Whatever. Maybe. You’re smart. And a perv.”

  “You liked it because the pain reminded you that you were a body? And the body was yours and you had the power to burn it or do whatever you—”

  “I’m going to give you another present.” Inez lifted her cigarette hand. She felt like a dancer, in the way a great one can make the body emit meaning before he or she even moves. She took a quick drag, and then, in a manner that felt both tender and procedural, seized Kate’s pale arm, turned it over, and smoothly introduced the cigarette’s glowing end to the skin. A tiny hiss, a sweet soft sound, and Inez felt the voltage jolt, heard Kate’s guttural intake of air, and gripped the arm harder as it happened. Kate’s eyes were wide with tears.

  “Feels good, right?”

  No, Kate mouthed, no sound . . . And then, her voice high and keening: “No, it hurts like fuck. You crazy, crazy fucking bitch.”

  “You’re mine now,” Inez said. “I left my mark on you.”

  And when Kate just stared at her, blinking and heaving air in and out of her mouth, Inez grabbed her hand: “Come on, you need a drink.”

  She flicked the butt across the path as they walked. Then shots of mezcal in the bar on the corner of the park. Kate kept staring at the mark on her arm, could not leave it alone.

  “Here,” Inez said, setting an ice cube on the flesh. “Keep it there.”

  24

  Seventeen minutes now. Three more and he would have to go. He didn’t want to, but there was such a thing as dignity, and waiting twenty minutes on a sweltering stoop had no place in his concept of it. He unfolded The New York Review of Books, shook it stiff, and glared at the print, willing it to seize him.

  Here was the thing, though: Kate was never late. She was chronically punctual, in fact. Had never, he suspected, stood anyone up in her life. And so now a new sensation: alarm. Might something have happened to her? Anything could happen to a person, after all. Struck by lightning, struck by a truck, struck by freak sudden illness. Things struck people. And, oh god, how awful it would be, to have to present himself to some nurse in an ER, be cast in the role of doting older boyfriend. Horror. To have to sit by a bedside, being appropriately grief-stricken. He put the magazine down, looked along the street at all its pedestrians who were not her, picked it up again, turned the page, and began reading.

  A pair of pale knees had materialized. He sensed they’d been there for some seconds before he’d noticed them.

  “Sorry,” she said, standing before him, shining, gloriously unsorry. He looked at her and at the large parcel under her arm, and she walked past him, up the steps, unlocking the door, while he gathered himself.

  He’d come to think in these last weeks that her sexual boldness had a burlesque quality to it—that semi-stifled smile as she looked up at him before fellatio—an imitation of an imitation of porn? Today, though, there was some authentic black charge in her, and it unsettled him as much as it aroused him. Astride him, claiming him, her palm pushed into the side of his face, she was punitive.

  He rose to it, an animal back at her, and it didn’t seem like her body he wrestled, not her hips that he flipped and then pinned down, her face pressed into the pillow, her fingers clawed on the sheets, but something in him, some element that would overtake who he was if he didn’t fuck it harder than it was fucking him. It was only when he’d collapsed into the sheen of her back, warm and pale and heaving beneath him, that he realized she’d come with him.

  Dazed, he could sense the afterglow of the sound she’d made, a noise he’d been deaf to in the moment. He rolled away, pulling the sheet over him. He was trembling a little, like he’d just got some bad news. The heat, maybe, from sitting on that stoop in the sun for so long.

  He glanced at her. He had a ridiculous, momentary idea that she might be dead. When he saw the red mark now, when it flashed there, livid on her forearm as she rolled away, he went cold with guilt and horror, believing it was his doing. That in his animal state he’d burned her, or bitten her—committed the violence that had left such a lurid mark.

  “Jesus,” he said, propped up on an elbow. He grabbed her forearm and she yanked it away.

  “What the fuck, Kate?”

  They never used names. Her eyes opened.

  “The thing on your arm.”

  “Cigarette,” she muttered.

  “What the fuck. Who did it?”

  Because now there was that icy vertigo of time and place: Inez used to do this. The same spot, the middle of the inner forearm.

  “I did it myself,” she said, and there was a lie in it, he could tell. He waited, just him and his heart, a wet pouch pumping in his ribs. She scooted beneath the sheets, pulling them up over her chest.

  “I’m freaked out,” he said. And then: “You’re freaking me out. My daughter used to do this.”

  “Calm down,” she said quietly. “It was an accident, just a mistake. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “How do you give yourself a cigarette burn by mistake?”

  He could hear how hysterical he sounded; screeching, almost. He stood up, yanked on his jeans, buckled them furiously. He could feel her watching him.

  “Why are you so worked up about it?” she said.

  “Burning holes in one’s own flesh is normal? Yeah, crazy of me to get worked up. Excuse me while I take this lighter and scorch a line into my own face.”

  He picked up the yellow lighter from the nightstand, wielded it weakly, and then flung it across the room without conviction. It skidded into a corner. Kate stared at it. He knew how much she hated losing things, knew s
he’d be bothered—wanting it, no doubt, back in its proper place. But she didn’t move, stayed motionless. There was some melodrama of female vulnerability to her in that sheet, something almost Victorian about the sight.

  He sat back down on the bed.

  “Why did you come to that reading?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Why did you seek me out? After that shitty fucking dinner where you just blushed and mumbled things into your kale? Why would you pursue me after that?”

  “‘Pursue’!” she said. “You make me sound so predatory!”

  “Never mind.” But of course, he did. “I suppose I just have no idea why you would want to see me after that. Why you’d come see me.”

  “Well, why did you ask me for a drink afterward, then? If you weren’t happy to see me?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t ‘happy to see you.’”

  He winced at the phrase. Words that had no dignity after being so double entendred. Is that a gun in your pocket or . . .

  “This has all gotten really weird.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said, pointedly, as in, and it’s your fault.

  He brought his hands to his eyes, then let his hands fall, and had a sense, now, of finally pulling over, stopping the car, and switching the engine off. So that they were just here, trip terminated, on the hard shoulder.

  “Are you a tourist here?” he said, in a small way.

  “A tourist?”

  With some difficulty he willed some air into his body. “I mean, a tourist for me.”

  She said nothing. He could feel her listening as a kind of susurration.

  “What I mean is: I’m old. Middle-aged. I live here. I’ve always lived here.”

  These were statements and yet they sounded like pleas. He shouldn’t have to feel this, he thought, let alone have to say it.

  “You’re twenty-five. I don’t know why you’re here. Whether you’re on vacation here or what. Or what you want. I don’t know what you want. What do you want? I wrote a book people gave a shit about for whatever reason and then it was a movie and the movie star died. That’s it, you know? There’s nothing else. I’ve done nothing else. And people don’t change.”

  People my age, he thought. Because yes, she had changed. That, in fact, was the fucked-up thing about all this, the way she’d been a series of slightly different people each time they met.

  Earlier, moments ago: the palm of her hand spread on his face with force, no affection.

  She said something and he didn’t hear.

  “I said I don’t know what I’m doing here.” She was miserably hunched, her tone both peevish and full of pity. “I told you that when we first . . . I told you I’m just here.”

  “You can’t just be here,” he snapped. Then, more gently: “You know, it’s okay to want things.”

  He saw an odd ingenuousness in her expression now, as if something important had just occurred to her.

  “I wanted an expensive lipstick,” she said flatly.

  He stared at her. She must have known, have seen how incredibly weird he found her in this moment.

  “And I bought it,” she went on. “It has a stupid name.”

  He realized he needed to swallow, and doing so proved to be a bit of a challenge.

  Cautiously: “What’s it called?”

  She said nothing as she got up, shuffling off in her absurd bedsheet toga. She still didn’t speak as she returned and uncapped the lipstick. Slowly, she drew a bright red line down the length of his arm, while he looked on, saying nothing at all.

  25

  September came and still the afternoons swelled to split with heat. Slow days turning purple, the charge building, until Kate felt she could strike a match on the air itself and the city might explode. When the sky broke, the sound and smell of rain was accompanied by shrill, ecstatic shrieks rising up from women below the windows, and she loved to watch them holding jackets over their heads and running in heels for cabs or doorways, a tottering that delighted in itself, happily hobbled by glamour. The red mark had scabbed and she’d had to fight the urge to pick at it. She’d replayed the way in which the underside of her forearm, translucent, blue veins beneath, had seemed to no longer belong to her when Inez held it. The second in which Inez grabbed tighter, when her arm was a piece of flesh in the vise of longer, stronger, younger fingers. Bill taking her calves in his hand in the rooftop pool, pulling her in with him.

  One night he’d said, incredulous, “You’ve never seen Do the Right Thing?”

  She’d refused to corroborate her own ignorance. After he showed her the scene on YouTube, she smacked her laptop shut, went to the icebox, and returned with one ice cube in her mouth and three in her fist.

  Today, the sky above the air conditioner was darkening—another dramatic flush of violent indigo.

  “It’s coming,” she said to him.

  Bill had his back to her, inspecting a miniature Tibetan singing bowl. He turned, held it up, unlit cigarette in his other hand.

  “Who the fuck is this lady, again?” he said mildly, inspecting its bottom.

  “There’s a thunderstorm coming,” she said.

  He put the bowl back.

  “She has so much . . . stuff.”

  “Don’t you have stuff?” she said.

  He stood there and did that trick of his with bar matches, the bending back and snap that made one flare. She looked away. What a little performance. And then as he walked about the room, smoking, she thought maybe it hadn’t been a performance after all.

  “I guess by ‘stuff,’” he said, grinning, “I mean hippie-dippie middle-aged-lady crap.”

  “Rude.”

  He looked out the window, smoking.

  “It’s going to storm,” he said.

  It was always at her place, not his, and she’d never questioned this. At first, she’d understood that there would be some kind of transgression, mutually unwelcome, in setting foot in his family home, toys on the floor. But now the request left her mouth like some bird out of a magician’s hat: “Tell me about your daughter.” She could hear the panicky flap of its wings, the trite surprise of it in the air.

  He turned from the window and it seemed to Kate as if he were staring at the question, not at her—as if he and her inquiry had entered into some silent showdown. He smoked, looked away, arms folded, and spoke. When he used the phrase “very beautiful” the imagined toys evaporated.

  “I mean, I know every idiot thinks so,” he muttered on, drily, “but this is just objective. Model scouts run after her on the street. It’s that.”

  The gloom and weight in his voice made her disinclined to ask him anything else, but now she had to, because she knew the answer already. How it did and did not matter. It was why she’d seen something familiar in his eyes at that gallery. The manic flare of his dread at her cigarette burn. My daughter used to do this. It was just a shadow on her skin now, that burn. You’d have to know it was there to see it.

  “What’s her name?” she said.

  

  It felt good, she told herself, to get out of Manhattan, to leave the high reek of hot garbage and take the L to Bushwick. As she stepped into the street to cross, two young men on skateboards swept past her, and she jumped back. They sped down the middle of the road, flying, yelling happily to each other, chased by their own slender shadows, which stretched twice their height behind them. During these weeks, Inez would tell her to come meet her on the roof—peremptory, misspelt texts—and Kate would obey, because she always did. Today, despite summoning her, Inez seemed irritated by her presence. It had been something about the shoes, Kate thought. It had been weird since the shoes. Had she not expressed enough gratitude? It had been weeks ago now; Inez should be over it. As a gift, they had confounded Kate. As an object, in fact—as shoes themselves—they confounded her. Wh
o could walk in them, for one thing? Then she’d looked them up on eBay and the cost had made her actually gasp.

  Inez, cross-legged, rolled a joint, hair hanging in her face.

  “Did you ever find the right Kate?” Kate said.

  “Huh?”

  Inez sounded stupid when she said that, dumbly American. Every “huh?” made her beautiful face look vacant, begging for a slap. How could you forget the way you met someone? Maybe the main difference between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five came down to the velocity of time, not its overall accounting. For Kate, each accelerating year upon the next made her clutch flotsam like this—a moment of meeting—as a talisman against her disappearing youth.

  Kate said, “You know when I met you, in the park, in Washington Square.” She was impatient. She’d just wanted some small moment of nostalgia, and felt shamed now for wanting it, for trying to orchestrate sentimentality. “You were waiting for a Kate.”

  “How the fuck,” Inez said, “do you remember that?” She passed the joint, which Kate took silently.

  “Everyone’s being kicked out, by the way,” Inez said, hoarse.

  “What?”

  “Of here! Redevelopment. Condos. It’s over.”

  The doom in Inez’s voice cast “it” as an all-

  obliterating melodrama: the building, the party, the summer, Bushwick, Brooklyn itself. All of it.

  “I’m sorry. What are you . . . What’s everyone doing?”

  “They’ve all got plans,” Inez said, a snarl of bitterness. “Gabe’s fucking off to Berlin to play techno to idiots. Dana’s going to be a teacher. Kim landed some fancy fashion PR job.”

  “Good for her?” Kate ventured.

  Inez took a savage gulp of her beer. “You’re probably fucking off back home, too, right?”

  Kate found no answer, only a craven kind of dodge. “But what will you do?”

  “Jesus fuck, why is everyone asking me that?”

  “College?” Kate suggested thinly. “You mentioned college.”

  “My dad is obsessed with that. Which is fucking hypocritical, since he never went.”