by Sarah Laing
‘What’s wrong? Pharmaceuticals saved my life — they’re good.’
‘Are they? Did you know how many lobbyists they have in Washington? They spend more on marketing than on drug development. But not interesting marketing, just clichéd images of healthy smiling people.’
‘Think of the money, Toby. And the conspiracy stories you’ll be able to tell people when you get home.’
‘I’ll come home bitching and moaning every night. I’ll drive you up the wall.’
‘If they make you a serious offer, you’ve got to consider it. It’ll be a stepping stone.’
‘Or a millstone.’
‘Come on, Toby, you’ve got to make a few concessions. We’re in New York.’
‘My point exactly.’
I wish he’d drop the London thing. Half of me wants to tell him to get over it, just take the money, enjoy the city; the other half reminds me that I am exploiting him for my own selfish ends and I should have been the one to follow him. Theoretically, I can compose music anywhere.
The Fifth Ave bar is black and rickety, the schedule for upcoming indie bands chalked on the wall. From the outside it looks like a dive; inside it reminds me of Bar Bodega, and I suddenly feel nostalgic, even though I don’t miss Wellington as a rule. I remember all the bands I saw there, HDU and Chris Knox, the Jews Brothers and Mink. Bodega had a loose-tooth feel about it, anticipating a highway that might wrench it out of its socket. The same people came night after night, alternative alcoholics, emptying the pie warmer before closing time.
‘What do you want, white or red?’ Toby asks me.
‘Pinot grigio,’ I say. Not Pinot gris; they’ve chosen Italian over French here. Bacci over petanque. I watch him walk to the bar, his step too boyish, too springy to be cool. It’s strange looking at him. He’s part of me, and he’s entirely separate. Even though I know this, I feel self-consciousness on his behalf. His legs are a bit skinny. I like his funny inquisitive face. I’m not sure about his colouring — sometimes he reminds me too much of Tintin. He’s not the dreamboat I had visualised for myself, yet he’s cute in his own way, when we lie together I’m the slice of peach in his spoon, and there’s no one whose company I enjoy more. Despite his antipathy to the place, he looks like he belongs here: not an interloper or a tourist.
That’s what’s struck me about New York. I’d expected every one to be movie-extra beautiful because I recognised the set. I assumed that the unstylish would have been put onto buses and shipped to the suburbs along with the homeless. But there are so many ordinary people living here. People with plain faces and unflattering clothes. People who aren’t the most brilliant and talented in the world. And yet the ordinary people who live here believe they’re extraordinary because of an act of geography.
Like the girl I had met at a party Wendy took us to last weekend. The apartment was amazing; a spacious penthouse overlooking Prospect Park. The petite hostess, long hair reined into a ponytail, proudly announced that she’d grown up in Queens, and was a native New Yorker. I asked her whether she’d lived elsewhere, and she shrugged. ‘Why should I leave New York? We’ve got everything here. We got a Chinatown, we got little India in Jackson Heights, we got Korea town, we got Little Italy, we got Harlem. The whole world is in this city.’
I smiled, but I thought she was naïve. It was true there were people from every country here, but they weren’t their true selves — they were trying to become Americans. And if they were holding tight to their culture, then they weren’t inviting this woman round for tea to share it with them. What did she find out about New Zealand by talking to me? That we said ‘Yes’ as though it had four vowels in it? Already I’d started amputating my diphthongs so to be better understood. You could only approximate your own culture here, buying fish and chips from the English who made them in a different way — where was the shark? — and sold them for four times the price. And what about the other cultures, Spanish voices in the lifts, Mexican men delivering takeout on bicycles?
Although I found the hostess irritating, I was also jealous. She was a local, she truly belonged. If things didn’t work out in Manhattan, say she lost her job or hated her room-mate, she could move back in with her Italian American parents and commute. Although New York was welcoming of us foreigners, integral to the buzz, washing the city’s dishes, cooking its jerk chicken and Vietnamese frog, we didn’t have a safety net.
‘Here you go,’ says Toby, putting the pinot grigio in front of me. He sinks into the cushiony seat, and sips his beer. ‘This one’s a pilsner from Chicago. I love these micro-breweries.’
‘See, you do like being here.’
‘There’s definitely some advantages.’
‘Do you think people are better-looking here than they are at home?’
‘They were in the lift I got into this morning. It was weird. They seemed too cool for school. They had sunglasses with green-tinted lenses they weren’t taking off inside and even the guys were real skinny, with fringes that hung in their eyes and lips as big as the girls’. Then they climbed out at the fifth floor, and I saw the “Casting Agency” sign on the wall. Maybe for a Diesel ad or something. Can I try your drink?’
I exchange my wine for his beer. ‘Isn’t it amazing to think that the people going to casting agents here might end up as billboards on bus shelters the world over? And just think, if you get to design American websites, how many hits you’ll get.’
‘Yeah, the potential for audience is so much greater here.’
‘God, I hope so. I’d really like to be heard by more than thirty people for once.’
‘It’ll happen. If that Bach dude can get a gig, you can for sure. You’re way better than him.’
‘He was a bit rough.’ Last week, we went to see a man at CBGB’s. He was playing the solo cello concertos, and I was excited by the juxtaposition of classical against the legacy of Blondie and the Ramones.
The man played with emotion, but his intonation was off. Then he began to talk. ‘Y’know, America’s a great place. I packed my cello into the trunk of my car and I drove around, playing everywhere. It’s the land of the free. D’ya think you could do that anywhere else? I don’t think so.’
After I bombed out of music school, I busked around France, reluctant to head home and admit my defeat. I met a guy who’d played the streets of Italy and Greece for a year, perfecting the art of bafflement in the face of permit-seekers. I’d busked in tiled atriums on Lambton Quay, in Manners Mall, to raise money for my airfares. Why did America think it had cornered freedom?
‘Should we look for a place of our own?’ I say. ‘I don’t think I can stand living with Wendy much longer. All that disclosure.’
‘Yeah, I really didn’t need to hear about her yeast infection. But do we want to shift before I know for sure whether I have a job? Besides, I think we’re stuck with sharing until we can get together all that guff landlords seem to want — social security numbers and credit history, references from God knows who.’
‘I’m so over sharing. I want my own space. I’m too old and set in my ways to accommodate other people,’ I say. Toby mostly excepted, it seems like everything everyone else does is irritating. It would be the case whoever I was sharing with, even the Mother Theresa of flatmates. If they did all the dishes and cooked us three-course dinners, indulged in intellectual after-dinner conversation and never left pubes in the bath, I would think they were phony or imagine Toby falling in love with them. Or I would fall in love with them and find Toby inadequate in comparison. Flats exacerbate my passive-aggressive qualities, provoking murderous thoughts about the ‘Keep Off’ labels on the blocks of cheese.
‘Come on, you’re twenty-seven. I don’t think that counts as old,’ says Toby.
‘It was nice when we had our little workman’s cottage in Wellington. Remember our broccoli? They were much tastier than shop-bought ones. Sweet.’
‘So now you want a garden apartment on your own? It ain’t gonna happen, sugar.’
&nbs
p; ‘Maybe we could manufacture some references. You could fake some letterhead, and we could see if they could transfer our New Zealand credit rating to here,’ I say.
‘Ivan mentioned that he was looking at setting up a place. Says he’s sick of living with Americans.’
‘Mmm. If we’re going to live with other people, we should at least meet the locals.’ Ivan is another web designer who hangs with a crowd of cool kid New Zealand designers. They wear scruffy clothes and ride on skateboards, and roll their r’s like Americans. It’s disconcerting to listen to them: there is a familiar accent, but the rhythm has changed, modulated so that Americans can understand them. Then, if I call New Zealand, the accent sounds so pungent I have to hold the phone away from my ear.
‘He wants to live in Williamsburg. Says he’s over Manhattan,’ says Toby.
‘That’s where all the trust fund kids live, right?’ I’m gathering up information, but there’s a lot I don’t know. I have to ask Wendy, who’s happy to be a guru, an expert on homeware stores and fleamarkets. Maybe I need to stay with her. It’s like she’s my relocation social worker. Besides, Ivan comes with baggage.
‘Ivan thinks that Williamsburg is edgy: it’s the real New York. And you can get great Polish food there, pierogis, blini, sausages, because that’s where the Poles live.’
‘But can you get decent coffee?’
‘I think you know the answer, Beck.’
So I do miss Wellington. Flat whites. The dense cap of foam, the frill of caramel against white thanks to a flick of the wrist. Not the watery, made-too-long-ago filter coffee they’re so keen on. And I miss muffins with butter on them. Why don’t they realise how dry naked muffins are?
‘Does Ivan have a girlfriend at the moment?’ I ask.
‘There’s someone at work, I think. He’s never alone for long,’ says Toby.
Ivan’s twin brother Sean got killed in a car accident. That’s how Toby knows him. Sean and Toby used to be on the VJ circuit together, projecting pixels onto the rough plastered walls of another makeshift club. Toby was the last person to talk to Sean. He’d helped him jam his records, computer and video projector into the back of his Bambina that night. It was late, six in the morning, when they finished up. They’d had something to help them stay awake, but they thought he’d be fine to drive. Maybe he had more vodka than he thought; that’s what the post-mortem suggested. Toby never drinks and drives, clamming up when people say, ‘One an hour, you’ll be fine, mate.’
Toby became friends with Ivan after Sean died. They’d met before, but Ivan had always kept his distance. He still does: a lifelong habit of not wishing to blur into his brother. And Toby is always making that mistake: assuming that because Ivan looks like Sean, he thinks like Sean. But he doesn’t.
It’s not that Ivan looks sad, it’s that I imagine he must be. What would it be like to have your mirror break and the shards wrapped in newspaper? I brim with compassion around him. I wonder whether I should mention his brother but I never do. I’m too scared that he will be angry. He’ll discern that I’m mentioning Sean because I think I ought to, not because I cared for him. He’ll know that I have a sick fascination with his situation, that I’m voyeuristic. Toby sometimes brings up Sean, but he’s met with a stiffening. And so the reason for their friendship is never discussed, even though they both miss him. But because Ivan’s loss is so palpable, Toby’s seems insignificant. Whenever we meet for a drink, Ivan is always looking over our shoulder, waiting for someone else to turn up.
‘He’s filling the twin-void. He can’t bear to be alone,’ I say.
‘This one’s nice. Nice-looking, anyway.’
‘Of course, good-looking people stick together.’
‘Like you and me, right?’
I look at Toby, and wonder whether I’m an acquired taste too. I heard on the radio that people like people who look familiar, following some pattern. Maybe Toby looks like my first doctor, whose face I’ve forgotten but is imprinted on my subconscious. But I like the way that Toby maintains I’m beautiful, even though I think he’s deluded. Maybe my face matches his kindly Sunday school teacher. ‘You’re the best-looking woman in the room,’ he will whisper to me, even if it’s patently untrue.
‘You know what I mean,’ I say. ‘If there’s a gorgeous guy going out with a so-so woman, you think, what’s that about? Is he gay? Is she filthy rich? Did someone botch his circumcision? If it’s the other way round, that’s more acceptable. People just assume that she’s a gold-digger. Or some kind of trophy.’
‘My dad would say that’s the evolutionary imperative. They’re just seeking to improve their genetic material.’
‘Your dad would say don’t date the diabetic,’ I say.
‘True. But he likes you all the same.’
He does seem to like me. He’s a bit of an eccentric, making shortwave radios in the shed, showing me the archaeology tools that he uses to go dinosaur bone hunting with other amateur paleontologists. He found a jawbone once and now the newspaper clipping is laminated and hung on the back of the toilet door. He’s always hospitable when we visit, cranking up the heater, piling up extra blankets, slipping a mustard-jerseyed hottie into my bed to counter the Dunedin cold, and yet he wears walk shorts and socks all through winter.
The waitress interrupts. She is amazon-tall, her hair sculpted into a shiny bob. She smiles to reveal a bathroom wall of teeth, even the canines squared off. ‘How are you going on your drinks?’
‘I could really go another wine,’ I say.
‘Ah, Beck,’ Toby says, opening up his wallet to reveal what looks like a stack of cash. No, they’re one-dollar bills. ‘We’re okay, thanks,’ he smiles at the waitress. She turns away; we are no longer worth bothering with. ‘Shall we head back?’
‘I don’t think I can face Wendy and Marcella so soon. They’ll both be crying now. Or fighting.’
‘Well then, should I call Ivan? Or I’ve got a better idea, why don’t you try calling your great-aunt again? She might be on death’s door and have no heir-apparent to inherit her beautiful Upper West Side apartment.’
‘That would be brilliant, wouldn’t it.’ I have called, once, but she wasn’t there, and truth be told, I was relieved. I’m scared of having to confront her about the cello; I wish Dad had just told me to meet her for family’s sake. He’s so dogged and principled, it’s crippling.
‘Come on, you have to get in touch with her. She’s family, and you’re always going on about how you want to know more about Klara. You don’t have to mention the cello, you know. You hid it from your parents for a couple of years. You could just tell them that your Aunt Esther sold it and be done with it.’
‘Well, maybe the cello’s important to me too.’ The grieving twin. I wonder whether it can sense its fissured counterpart.
‘Well then, stop being a chicken. Get it over and done with.’
‘Okay, okay, all right already,’ I say, adopting a Brooklyn accent, thinking about Toby’s reluctance to call his own runaway mother, who now lives in Auckland, her husband erecting volcanic-rock fortresses around small suburban homes. Toby has a half-sister, twelve or thirteen years old, that he’s met only a few times. Last Christmas I bought her a handful of cheap jewellery and she sent us a thank you letter, the i’s dotted with hearts. Periodically I suggest he send her a postcard, and he agrees that it is a good idea, and never gets round to it. But I will call Esther. Tomorrow.
Esther still won’t answer the phone. Maybe she’s died already; she would be in her seventies now. Everyone else in her generation is gone, my Alzheimer-addled grandfather choking to death on his steak when I was in London. My other grandparents may as well be dead; they moved to Queensland. I try one more time, and get someone unexpected, a young woman perhaps.
‘Aunt Esther?’ she says. ‘She’s out taking the dogs for a walk. Should I take a message?’
But I’m too scared to leave one, I need to be in the right space before I can talk to her, and besides, who is this ni
ece? Has my great-aunt married and acquired a family after all? Does that make this woman my cousin?
Because our fantasy plan has fallen through, Toby sets up an apartment-hunting date with Ivan. ‘I’m not saying we should move in with him,’ he says, as we ride the subway into Manhattan, and then out to Williamsburg, which seems crazy since we’re both on the same strip of land. ‘I just think we need a few escape hatches lined up if Wendy gets too heavy.’
Ivan waits for us beside the iron railings of the Bedford Street L, wearing a coat that looks like a sleeping bag with arms. Toby gives him a disparaging single raised eyebrow, slipping into the diss-mode he has with other New Zealand blokes.
‘You should get one of these. I know it’s ugly, but it’s filled with down. You’ll learn, by the time you get through a New York winter,’ says Ivan.
I pull my heavy wool bouclé coat around me. I think it must have belonged to a short, stout woman, because it is very roomy, and the cuffs don’t reach my wrists. I imagine she had a pill-box hat to match, and a pug dog and Cuban high-heeled brogues and lived somewhere in the Upper East Side. Maybe in Brooklyn Heights. I don’t want to buy a sleeping bag coat, even though it seems that everyone else has.
‘Let’s cruise around a bit,’ says Ivan. ‘Check out this funny mall.’
Already I’m noticing that people are younger than in Park Slope, their hair weirder. On a street corner, a punk sells recycled skateboards, their bellies canvases for his psychedelic paintings.
The mall is cool. I want to gather up all these ideas and colonise Wellington with them. There is a second-hand record store and vintage clothing in one shop, and metal crafts in another: badly made dolls and beads fashioned from spit balls. In the recycled home boutique, there are chandeliers made of soft drink bottles. And then there is the vegan and gluten-free bakery, filled with gooey oily cakes. The vegans sit up on bar stools, skinny legs sinkered by canvas sneakers. Ivan stops and gets a coffee from a stand. ‘This hits the spot,’ he says, but obviously he has accepted the American way, because the one I buy is weak. It’s hot, though, warming me and my not-quite-adequate coat.