by Jane Nin
How could I have thought a man like Jack would be interested in someone like me.
“You alright?” said the boy, putting a hand out to touch my shoulder gently. “You want to check the fire escape? Usually we tell folks to smoke up on the roof.”
“Sure,” I nodded miserably, though I knew Jack wouldn’t be there. He had receded from my life as startlingly as he’d appeared, and his warmth had disappeared with him, and all that was left inside me was cold, and emptiness, and night.
“Come on, then.” I followed the boy back toward the entrance to the flat, and he got down and helped me on with my beloved fur coat.
Now we crossed again, toward the kitchen. Glancing over into the living area I saw Valerie’s punishment had grown more elaborate: she knelt on the table with another man’s cock in her mouth as Harold continued to fuck her from behind. It seemed a cheerful proceeding, and I was envious of the mood—its odd conviviality—even as I felt like I never wanted to fuck another stranger again.
“Here,” said the boy, gesturing toward a partially open window. The fire escape was just beyond, and dark. He lifted the sash so I could climb out. “You’ll be alright?” he asked again. He was genuinely worried about me, I saw. It was sweet, though it hardly mattered.
I climbed out onto the metal grate and looked up and down the side of the building. No sign of Jack. I knew in my heart he had left; there was hardly even any point in searching. On the other hand, I had little desire to go back inside. I suddenly felt lonelier than I ever did in my life—and that was saying something, since I was—had always been—an awfully lonely person.
I took hold of the ladder, and began to climb up the metal stairs. I felt the damp of London on my bare feet; the grate was sharp on my toes. I shivered miserably and continued to climb, feeling the burn in my thighs, holding tight to the cold railing, simply doing my best not to look down to the filthy street below. I’d been mistaken, that morning in the ocean: this was what the world was like.
18.
When I reached the roof and saw that Jack wasn’t there I simply sat down right where I was. I had told myself I wasn’t expecting to find him, but of course, I had been hoping all the same—hoping to be proven wrong in my pessimism.
Instead I was being proven right. So I sat.
It was very late into the night now, and a weeknight, and the streets below were mostly silent. The sky was overcast, low and mud-colored, and in my misery I felt it was a great soggy weight pressing down on me, grinding me into the earth right where I was. It was not a sky of endless possibility, it was the opposite sky, a sky that said there could be no escape, ever, from exactly where and what you were.
I strained to hear sounds from the party below, imagining, perhaps, that I heard laughter, or happy talk. It was impossible to know. Maybe everyone had gone to bed. Would they all have gone to bed without even stopping to wonder where I was? I thought, hurt and indignant. Then, for a moment, I laughed out loud. I was like some sniveling six-year-old hidden in a closet, weeping because the birthday party wasn’t for me and nobody had bothered to come looking.
No, there was laughter—I heard it more distinctly now. And now I heard feet on the metal steps. My heart leapt; I’d been wrong; he was here!
Then I saw a slight, pale hand grip the ladder’s top rung and realized it was not Jack. It was the boy again. He climbed down from the ladder holding a little plate, and walked over to me, and crouched beside me, setting it down. It was cake.
“I thought you might like some dessert,” he said.
My eyes misted over. “Why are you being so nice to me?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Just seems like you need it.”
I picked up the plate and had a bite of cake. It was eggy and soaked in some kind of alcoholic syrup, with thick, cold cream poured over.
“It’s really good, thank you,” I said.
“Val can cook. Never know it to look at her. Don’t know how she learned it, either—she won’t say.”
He was talking to distract me, sweet child. I ate another bite, letting the syrup spread sweetly across my tongue.
“So you work for them?”
“I help out a bit. They let me live here for free, so.”
“You’re a runaway.”
“Eh, dad weren’t so keen on having a queer in the house, you know?”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“No need to be sorry. I’m fine now. It was bad for awhile, but now it isn’t.”
He was so calm. I thought about what I’d planned when I first quit my job. Just to move somewhere, start over from scratch. To become a new version of myself, a little braver, a little more optimistic. I could still do that, I thought. I’d made it thirty-three years without Jack. I didn’t need him.
“Anne said your friend sent a car to take you back to your hotel.”
“Sent a car?” I echoed. So he had left. Now, in place of the pain, came a flash of anger.
I stood, still holding my plate, and walked to the edge of the roof. The boy followed. Indeed, down on the street a black cab idled, its exhaust lazily mingling with the cold, misty air. I took another bite of cake. My first impulse was to let it wait. But then, I didn’t particularly want to stay on the roof for the rest of the night. I stood staring at the car for a very long time, and then I nodded, and the boy and I carefully climbed back down the fire escape and through the window to the party.
Anne met us in the kitchen. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “I’d no idea you were still here. I assumed you and Jack had left together.”
“He didn’t say anything to you?”
She shook her head. “I thought it must be an emergency; he’s never just disappeared in the middle of a party. Then Peter here told me you were up on the roof.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was humiliating, Jack abandoning me here.
Anne seemed to guess my thought, and she hastened to say, “I’m sure there must be a good explanation. He’s one of the most reliable people I know.”
“Yes,” I said flatly, “I guess there probably is.”
“Let’s get you your things.”
We crossed the living room. Valerie was still naked, curled onto her side and napping peacefully in the middle of the dining table. A few guests slept on couches or chairs. Others seemed to have left. The lights had been switched off in the nook where I’d stood, leaving it shadowy and empty.
Anne disappeared into one of the bedrooms and returned with my shoes and bag and the dress I’d arrived in.
“Here,” she said. I shrugged off the coat and slipped the dress over my head as Anne watched me.
“You’re quite beautiful, you know. I’ll send Jack the proofs—you can see for yourself.”
“Thank you,” I said. And then I left, and rode the squeaky old freight elevator down to my cab.
“______ Hotel?” said the driver. I saw that the meter had already racked up a sizeable bill.
“Right,” I said, and he put the car into gear. The streets were empty. The city was silent as we moved through it, except for the hiss of the tires against the fog-dampened pavement. We sailed through roundabouts and bumped along narrow sidestreets and then stopped at a red light, at an empty intersection in the middle of nowhere. London, like most places, was full of nowheres.
What would be waiting for me at the hotel? An empty bed, another plane ticket at breakfast? Some tearful fight? Or worst of all, simply an ending—a polite embrace, some excuses, and everything restored to what it was. Ordinary. Lonely. Just a little bruised, like I’d taken a tumble out the back of a car.
It was wretched to think of, all of it.
“Driver?” I said. “Sir?” The cabbie peered at me in the rear view mirror. He was Sikh, or something, bearded and turbaned.
“I’m sorry, but—do you mind taking me to the airport instead?”
19.
Forty-eight hours later I was standing on a balcony in New Orleans, watching magpies hop through the branches of
an ancient magnolia tree.
“What do you think?” said the realtor, appearing beside me.
“It’s perfect,” I said. It was small, but clean and bright. More than that, it had a newness to it—a feeling of adventure.
An hour after that, she had her money order and I had the keys.
To celebrate my lease-signing, I bought a plastic patio chair from the pharmacy, a pimiento and cheese sandwich, a bottle of cheap champagne and a gorgeous strawberry shortcake that probably could have fed a family of four. All these I carried upstairs, and I set my chair up in the empty living room to begin my feast.
Jack hadn’t called since I’d failed to return to the hotel in London. I still kept my phone with me constantly, checked it constantly, but increasingly I was realizing I probably wouldn’t hear from him. Even as I’d sat in Heathrow waiting for my plane to board, I’d hoped he might suddenly appear. For two hours I fidgeted in my chair. Second-guessing myself. Feeling sick over the cost of the last-minute flight back to the States. But it was he who had made the decision, I told myself, not me: he’d left me alone at the party, after promising he wouldn’t. He’d abandoned me in the middle of a game, after knowing how I needed him there—to care about me, to be the one person in the room who knew or cared for me as a human being.
And yes, some little part of me knew I was a jerk for having left without a word… but I couldn’t help it. I was mad at him. Worse, I was mad at myself, for thinking anything even resembling love—however distortedly—might actually work out.
But. Even if it hadn’t worked out—and how could it, something so sudden, so strange?—during my flight I had resolved to think of it as a good thing that had happened. Jack had given me license to simply be present. To allow my body’s urges—and its pleasures—to consume me completely, and to stop worrying about who I was, or who I was supposed to be. I knew I didn’t want to live like that all the time, but allowing that impersonal, animal version of me to receive satisfaction, safe from judgment… it left me feeling lighter, instead of burdened by the fantasies I’d once had and felt guilty about.
As I washed down bites of my sandwich with champagne, I wondered some more about Jack. What was it he’d said to me when we first met?
You haven’t had the kind of filthy, utterly objectifying sex you’ve fantasized about.
How had he known I had fantasized about that? Or was it just a safe assumption—a daring one, but one he’d learned from experience—and we knew he had that—was generally on the mark?
I spun backwards through the beginning of the conversation. He’d accused me both of being bored of sex and of being in the bar to seek it out. I hadn’t been bored of sex, of course. What I was was tired… of the sex that was only what it was—and frequently a timid version of that—and of the love that never seemed to appear.
He’d guessed that part, too, I remembered. That I’d never had sex with a man who adored me. I’m not offering that, he’d said, I also remembered now, more bitterly. He’d said he wasn’t offering it but then it came to feel like he was, or wanted to.
Except here I was, so obviously not.
I reminded myself that I was making the best of things. He’d startled me out of a whole life that bored me. A life I’d pieced together from scraps, instead of ever asking myself who I wanted to be. He’d suggested I could be anything and I intended to keep that conviction. Love might be out of my control, but the rest—who I was when I woke up every day, what I did, who looked back at me from the mirror… that was up to me.
I’d flown directly into New Orleans without even stopping at my old place. Tomorrow I had to go back to Houston to clear it out. I’d blown a huge chunk of cash on the plane ticket and the deposit on this place, and I’d already decided I was going to leave the moving to the experts, salvaging a handful of things—my computer, some clothes—and letting the rest become garbage or donations. Financially it felt reckless but I’d been sensible for so long—or rather, pessimistic, since I spent cautiously, expecting the worst—that I had at least a little bit of savings. Enough for the move, some carefully chosen furniture, a couple months while I looked for a new job. The new Sylvie would be more deliberate. She was through carting around hand-me-down furniture, used books, old birthday cards. She was finished hanging onto the clothes that she might wear again if she gained weight, or lost it, or if ill-fitting print dresses ever came back in style.
I opened my strawberry shortcake and for a moment I sat, admiring it. Then I realized I didn’t have a fork.
I looked around my empty apartment, shrugged, and simply plunged into it with my hands.
20.
Back in Houston I filled a suitcase with the clothes I liked and stuffed my “important” financial papers into a box. I walked from room to room, trying to decide what to do. The problem was if you started to hang onto some things then it quickly snowballed. Of course I could just put it all into storage, deferring the problem to another day. But I thought about having the old Sylvie’s entire life in storage and it seemed to me it’d be sure to escape—to sneak back up on me, to consume me again…
No. Decisions had to be made.
I packed a few more things into my car. Dishes, a lamp or two, some favorite books. I didn’t know quite who the new Sylvie would be, but I figured she’d still love the things I loved. I handed off my keys to the man I’d hired to handle the rest—a blue-eyed, bearded redhead who I briefly considered fucking. But I was too eager to get the hell out of town to even linger long enough for that.
Naturally, my car broke down after I’d been on the freeway for barely an hour. It was the transmission, I knew immediately, as I’d several times now delayed that repair. I attempted to coast onto the shoulder as I felt it slowing, but the dirt was soft and crumbly, and my tires slipped off the edge and for a terrifying, panicked few seconds the car tipped catastrophically… then turned over, then over again, then finally came to rest at the bottom of a steep-sided ditch.
I unbuckled my seatbelt and climbed out, my every nerve alight with adrenaline. But I seemed to be unhurt. There was a rock nearby and I sat down on it and stared at my car. First I’d have to figure out how to get it dragged out of the ditch. Then, I could have it towed the remaining 300 miles to New Orleans. Or, I supposed, I could have it towed back to Houston—but then I’d have to stick around waiting for the repair.
Up above me, out of sight, the traffic whooshed by. I felt my tide of new courage beginning to ebb. Of course I couldn’t escape myself completely, couldn’t manage to pull off a fresh start without a hitch.
And this was when it hit me.
With my key I opened the trunk and hauled out my suitcase. Then, quickly, I rummaged through the other stuff inside. I found the siphon my dad had insisted I keep in my car in case of emergencies. This, after all, was an emergency.
It turned out it was surprisingly easy to siphon the gasoline directly out of the tank and onto the backseat. When I was sure it was saturated, I rolled my suitcase along the ditch until it was about fifty meters up the way. Then I returned to the car, waiting for a lull in the traffic noise.
Finally it came.
I struck the match and tossed it in, then ran.
With a hissing sound, like a gas stove catching, and then a satisfying whump! the car went up in flames. I ran to where I’d set my suitcase and looked back at it. It was actually a decent-sized fire, black smoke pouring up into the sky.
I covered my mouth with my hands and began to giggle uncontrollably, panic rising in me. What the hell was I doing.
Then, suddenly, someone was dislodging rocks above me, scooting down the steep edge of the ditch. A man in a suit.
It was Jack.
I quieted and stared at him.
“This is so many kinds of illegal I don’t even know where to start. Come on.”
I continued to stare at him. He took my suitcase in one hand, held the other out to me.
“I said, come on.”
21.
/> The driver merged back into traffic immediately, and Jack lifted his phone to his ear.
“I’m calling to report a vehicle on fire.” He gave them our location. “Yeah, I didn’t see the accident, just the smoke—it’s down on the shoulder. Thank you.”
He hung up then. “Hello,” he said.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Pretty straightforward, actually. I hung out at the address where I knew you to be a resident, until you finally showed up.”
“I’m not a resident there anymore.”
“I gathered that.”