by Sarah Laing
‘Klara, I’d love to, but I can’t leave the children. They all have temperatures and Douglas is absolutely hopeless with them.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Let me know if I can help.’
Another cry came from the bedroom. ‘Mama, it’s ruined!’
Klara hung up and headed towards the noise. She would have to play the solo Bach.
CHAPTER 19
New York, 2003
Bruno is coming today. He’s flying into JFK. I told him to hop in a cab, but he refuses, he wants to take the subway. That’s fine by me. I’m terrified. I can’t wait to see him and yet I want to put the meeting off as long as possible.
I concealed my nerves from Toby when I kissed him goodbye this morning. Toby’s still reserved around me, acting as if I’m not who he thought I was. I haven’t yet accepted the wedding proposal. I told him that it’s traditional for a girl to take her time, but he is wary, alternately distancing himself or else wanting vigorous tongue kisses at odd moments. Maybe he’s trying to show me what I’m like.
Toby likes his new job, eagerly packing his bag (magazine, apple, tamari almonds, sketchbook), running for the subway. They think about websites in a different way here; he might learn something after all. He says the milk-expressing thing is freaking him out: every few hours Marissa, the creative director, slips into a room and there’s a strange mechanical pumping sound. She brought him in a bracelet her older daughter had made for him: TOBY spelt out in alphabet beads, threaded onto a brown pipe cleaner. He wore it home on his second day, delighting in its craftiness, and now it’s sitting on our bedside table.
I broke the news about Bruno last week.
‘Your ex-boyfriend is coming to stay? That’s good timing.’
‘He needs a place to crash, he doesn’t mean anything to me now.’
‘Is he the one you told me about, when we first got together?’
‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’
Those early days, spent mostly in bed. We revealed our first crushes, our first transgressions to each other. I fell in love with Toby as he related how, at ten, he’d stolen a dinghy and rowed around Port Chalmers. He’d nicked one of his dad’s walkie-talkies too; that was what saved him when the wind picked up. It wasn’t such a good idea for me to mention Bruno, although I only sketched the outlines. I know Toby’s account of Brita the library student drove me crazy. She sounded so much more ethereal and smarter than me; I’m still jealous thinking about her even though Toby says she was lacklustre.
‘How long’s he going to be here for?’
‘Just for a few days. He doesn’t know anyone else in New York, and you know how expensive hotels are.’
‘Where’s he going to sleep?’
‘On the sofa, maybe. Or in with us.’
‘He won’t fit. There’s not enough floor space.’
‘I’ll figure something out with Wendy.’
I haven’t talked to Bruno in person for nine years, and when he called yesterday to confirm his arrival time, his voice caused the erotic jolt I experienced as a seventeen-year-old.
Just as I suspected, Wendy doesn’t want Bruno on the sofa; her solution is to sublet her room again. She needs the extra cash, now that Marcella has gone back to Pittsburgh to ‘tidy up her thesis’, which may be publishable after all. She could have finished it here, since her documentary still hasn’t started, but she and Wendy have fallen out. After Marcella cried yet again about bad sex with the man-breasted producer, Wendy snapped, telling her that she was spineless and should see a therapist rather than bitching to her. Marcella said Wendy was selfish and self-obsessed, in fact, that’s how her brother had described her, and Wendy said if that was the case, she’d have the other half of her bed back please. Wendy’s looked a little forlorn ever since, but she’s also adamant that Marcella is worse than her, and is forever telling us why. Marcella can’t come back unless she apologises.
I don’t know how we will fit into Wendy’s room, because although it’s twice the size of ours, Wendy has filled it with the things she’s salvaged, which are waiting to be bought. Finding a whole pile of birdcages outside a pet store, she strung them together, dragged them home, and scrubbed off the bird shit, which had eaten little grey florettes into the gilt. She hung them at different heights from the curtain rail in the bay window. She thinks she should fill them with taxidermied birds, but so far she has only sourced a pheasant, which looks all wrong in its cage, its tail feathers bursting beyond the threshold. She found a trundle bed that she got Toby to help drag up the stairs, and she has washed its cover and set off a flea bomb in her room. It’s in good nick, and the wheels roll smoothly across the hardwood floors. I wouldn’t have wanted to touch anything so intimate as an abandoned bed — how much sex, blood and skin cells have been absorbed by that mattress? — but I won’t tell Bruno about its origins. Although the birdcages haven’t sold as quickly as Wendy hoped, she has picked up an interior decorating job. A woman from the Upper West Side has commissioned her to refit her apartment. She loves the vintage style but doesn’t have time to trawl. Wendy will find her the furniture and deliver it, de-cockroached. You have to pour boiling water over them. If you squash them, their eggs will burst and hatch into baby roaches.
Another one of Wendy’s finds is a mirror, its edges bevelled and its back slightly scratched. Wendy thinks it’s only a matter of repainting it. I don’t have a mirror in my room, and I haven’t looked at myself from the chin down for a while. Have I changed much since Bruno and I first met? Will he look at me and think, She’s got fatter. She’s got older. What did I ever see in her in the first place? There are probably more lines since I was seventeen, my eyes and mouth crosshatched. My hair is no longer in an assymmetrical razor-cut, but pulled back into a ponytail, the split ends tucked up in a band. I’m not so thin, my clavicle no longer rises like opposing cliff faces, but Toby says the extra weight suits me, lending me hips, filling out my bust to a B-cup. I frown into the mirror; there are hairs between my eyebrows. I don’t have any tweezers so I try to pull them out with my fingernails, but they slip through, and my brow is beginning to look angry and red. I rummage around in Wendy’s make-up basket. I don’t own much of my own, but Wendy has lots from when she was a Manhattan design director. Putting on some of her lipstick, I rub it off with the back of my hand because it’s too bright on my face, too much like I am trying to impress, rather than hanging out at home, working on my composition.
He should be here by now. I can’t stand this waiting.
Moving into the kitchen, I put away Wendy’s dishes. I fluff up the cushions on the sofa, I sit and look at my manuscript and the melody I wrote, which now seems stupid, naïve, one-dimensional, already done. I really have to get that laptop. In the store they were playing Laurie Anderson, and I remembered she used to be a classical musician. Funnelling her voice through the computer, she climbed to number two on the British charts. Did she figure out how to do it herself, or did she have a collaborator? A Lennon to her McCartney? A Marr to her Morrissey?
Buzz.
I jump up, running to the intercom. ‘Hello?’ I say.
‘Hey, it’s Bruno. Let me in.’
I stand at the door, hand on the lock, eye pressed against the peephole. Everything is fish-lensed. Here he comes, up the stairs, cap on his head, a pack on his back.
Bruno looks tanned, even though he has come out of a UK winter. He reaches forward, knocks on the door. I wonder whether he can sense me watching him. I count to three, then turn the lock.
‘Hi, Beck,’ he says.
‘Hey.’ I hold the door open, he walks in. He shakes off his bag, his knees creaking slightly. It whulumphs onto the floor. He holds out his hands, moving towards me.
I’m petrified. Is he going to hug me? His arms squeeze me; I can feel the bone through the thick coat. I smell the oiled waterproofing, not Bruno. I am glad of this insulation. He pulls away from me so we can take each other in.
He too has become more crinkled, and h
is hair hangs past his ears in greasy locks. He looks tired: there are dark smudges beneath his eyes. He smiles, and his teeth are white. ‘It’s hot in here,’ he says, unbuttoning his jacket, throwing it over the back of the chair. Underneath he wears a V-necked jersey over a T-shirt. His chest has thickened, not with fat, although his ribs are not as protuberant as they were when he was twenty. He has become more solid, growing outward like a tree, and if you were to cut him in half, he would have more rings. And still, there is the shock, goose pimples rising to meet him. For a while he was mine, and I almost reach out to push a curl from his cheek.
‘Would you like a cup of tea? Or coffee?’
‘Tea would be great.’
I get down my pot, the one that I bought from the tea specialist down the road. It came with a little Union Jack sticker on it. So far it seems true; Americans don’t know how to make tea. They always leave their tea bags in the cup, which seems to me like trying to drink round a tampon.
‘How was your flight?’
‘Long. Filled with drunk English louts determined to harass the air hostesses. You know they come over here for shopping? It’s cheaper than in the UK.’
‘So why did you come?’ For you, Beck, the soap opera in my head says. I’ve come to claim what’s mine.
‘I’ve always wanted to go to New York. But I haven’t known anyone I could stay with up until now.’
What does that mean? Is he being opportunistic? I wonder where I stand in his ex collection. He’d slept with a few girls before me. I still have his love letters, in a shoebox in the wardrobe of my childhood room. My mother keeps threatening to throw my boxes away; she wants the space for her scrapbooking, but I’ve told her she can’t touch my things.
Spooning tea leaves into the pot, I wait for the jug to boil. When it does, I listen for every last bubble to pop before pouring it in. Bruno forwarded me an email a few years back: George Orwell’s instructions on making tea. You can’t pour boiling water on tea leaves, you’ll burn them. Boiling water is for killing cockroaches.
‘How’s it going in Brighton?’
‘Good, Brighton’s great. I’m working for another NGO now. Trying to prevent Aids in Botswana.’
‘I hear it’s a real problem there.’
‘Yeah, some men believe that you can cure Aids by sleeping with a young virgin. So we’ve got a lot of work to do, educating them otherwise.’
‘Do you go to Africa much?’
‘I have to fly there every couple of months. Go talk to people, distribute condoms, organise billboards — that kind of thing. It’s disconcerting, like I’m a colonist converting the natives all over again.’
I have a pang of inadequacy — mucking about with music when there are so many more pressing things to do. Toby’s not much better, feeding the capitalist machine with his websites. And I’ve encouraged him to compromise even more, so that I can indulge my fantasies. ‘Do you take milk?’ I ask. Bruno nods.
‘Sugar?’
I’d forgotten that about him: I get the sugar bowl, breaking its crust with a spoon. He stirs two spoonfuls into the tea.
‘What about you? What are you doing these days? Have you managed to break into the New York music scene?’
‘I’ve gone to some great gigs.’
‘But you’re here to perform your own stuff, aren’t you?’
‘That’s the plan. In the meantime I’m playing in a string quartet for weddings. It pays well.’
‘Well, make sure you don’t get sidetracked again. Mum still goes on about what a pity it was you gave up classical. I think it’d be a shame if you gave up pop.’
‘I feel bad about your mum.’ Although I haven’t seen Bruno since I left Wellington for the first time, I used to bump into Lydia every now and then, at the bookstore, at Nikau café. She would talk to me, but there was always something she held back. We didn’t mention our shared past, but concentrated on the present: the beautiful Portuguese recipe book in her hand, the kedgeree she was eating. I’d been her success story, and then I blew it.
‘Don’t feel too bad. She didn’t exactly make the big time either,’ says Bruno.
‘It’s so often the way. It amazes me, how many people they accept into music school, and how few end up with a decent career. The Broadway orchestra pits are stacked with Juillard grads, and the subs at the New York Philharmonic end up with arthritis before they get a permanent position.’
‘So why haven’t you formed a band yet?’
I flinch. ‘I’m still figuring out simple things, like where to buy new socks. But I’m working on a series of songs based on my grandmother. Only problem is I know hardly anything about her. My dad is uncommunicative — probably fucked up about her dying young. I don’t know whether I should just make stuff up, or whether I can grill my great-aunt for more details. She’s not very forthcoming. And there’s the computer: I need to buy one to take my music to the next level, but we’re broke. We’re still waiting for Toby’s first pay. I don’t know, maybe I’m stalling. I’m scared of failing here like I did in London.’
‘Forget the computer, go rock and roll. Far more real, less alienating.’
‘You know what, I need a computer and a band. But I’m short on money and friends at the moment. God, it’s so hard. In New Zealand, I could call in a few favours, borrow a drummer and rent a crowd to come along to the gig. My nearest and dearest would act like they’d loved it, even if I was crap. Here I might have a show and no one would come.’
‘Back home they’d talk behind your back about how they didn’t really like it but they didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Or if they did like it they wouldn’t say because they wouldn’t want you to become too vain.’
‘True. That’s what I like about New York. People are so refreshingly direct.’
‘I thought they were meant to be rude.’
‘They have clear personal boundaries. Anyway, what do you want to do while you’re here?’
‘The usual. Empire State Building, downtown, maybe one of those Harlem walking tours. I might go meet up with some of the NGOs here to scope them out. And of course I want to meet Toby. Where is he?’
Bruno sounds sincere and unjealous; maybe I’m a hazy memory to him. Maybe I was just practice until True Love turned up, on which he could demonstrate his sexual prowess. This is how you go down on a woman, with little flicks of the tongue.
‘He’s at work.’ What if they hate each other? What if Toby seems like the lesser man in comparison? ‘We should put your pack in our room. Wendy will be back soon, and she freaks out if we make too much of an impression on the communal space.’
‘Okay,’ says Bruno, finishing his tea and standing up, strikingly tall. He hoists his pack on one shoulder. ‘Which way?’
‘Through there.’ I point to Wendy’s room.
‘Nice,’ he says, dropping the pack on the floor. ‘Although a bit like a junk shop.’ He pushes past the birdcages. ‘What’s that?’
‘Catholic school. The bells ring at nine.’
‘So where am I going to sleep?’
‘Here.’ I get down on my hands and knees, lifting the duvet to dust balls like tumbleweed. I push back Wendy’s shoes, all heels and pointy toes that I’ve never seen her in. I pull out the trundle bed, wanting to roll it underneath the window, but there isn’t room. Bruno will have to sleep on my side of the bed, nearest the door.
‘This is great, it’s so much how I thought it would be.’ Bruno drops a few coins into a homeless person’s cup, saying, ‘How’s it going? Cold day, isn’t it?’ The homeless man, jaws of his shoes dropping, dressed in two coats, a sawn-off sleeve for a beanie, shuffles forward.
‘You ain’t from around here, are you? What, you from Pennsylvania?’
‘New Zealand,’ I say, and the homeless man looks incredulous.
Bruno pushes the door open at my favourite kebab place. ‘A’salaam aleykum,’ he says to the people behind the counter.
‘Wa’aleykum salam,’ they say, look
ing at each other and smiling. And then he starts chatting to them, asking where they’re from, telling them he has spent some time in Egypt, talking about all the little side alleys in Cairo. They’re loading extra falafel into his pita bread, and some into mine as well, it’s fatter than I’ve had before, and Bruno leans over and tells a joke that I can’t quite hear, and the man behind the counter farts his yoghurt sauce over my order in time to his laughing. He comes out from behind the counter and holds the door open for Bruno, clapping him on the back as we leave. ‘Go well, my brother,’ he says.
‘In sh’allah.’
‘How do you do that?’ I say as we walk towards the park, holding our falafels.
‘What?’
‘Make friends everywhere you go.’
Bruno shrugs. ‘Did I? I was just chatting.’
‘He’s never held the door open for me.’
‘You’re just too much of a New Yorker already. Vacuum-sealed.’
‘I was like this in New Zealand too.’ I envy his ease, his charisma. Sometimes I think I’ll never make it because I’m too awkward and incapable of connecting with people. I’m one of those people who make others feel edgy.
We walk up President Street towards the park, crossing 7th Avenue. ‘Wendy said she saw John Turturro sweeping the snow off the steps of one of these brownstones. He had a string of snot hanging from his nose to his waist.’
‘You’re gross.’ Bruno smiles at me, as though he wants to hear more.
‘We should go see the cherry blossom. It’s in flower at the moment — it’s beautiful. Spring is amazing here in the northern hemisphere. Not like in Wellington, where it’s always green and the leaves are always being blown off the trees. Here it’s really dramatic.’
‘Is that true? Around where Mum lives you can tell what season it is by what the birds are feeding on. It goes crazy in the middle of winter, when all the berries are ripe. You’re woken at five in the morning by the tuis.’