Still Me

  "Oh, ask the wretched girl. She started it." Mrs. De Witt scooped Dean Martin up in her thin arms again, then wagged a finger at Mr. Gopnik. "And don't you dare lecture me on noise in this building, young man! Your apartment is a veritable Vegas casino with the amount of to-ings and fro-ings. I'm amazed nobody has complained to Mr. Ovitz." With her head high, she turned and shut the door.

  Mr. Gopnik blinked twice, looked at me, then back at the closed door. There was a short silence. And then, unexpectedly, he began to laugh. "'Young man'! Well," he said, shaking his head, "it's a long time since anyone called me that." He turned to Nathan behind him. "You must be doing something right."

  From somewhere inside the apartment a muffled voice lifted in response: "Don't flatter yourself, Gopnik!"

  --

  Mr. Gopnik sent me in the car with Garry to get a tetanus shot from his personal physician. I sat in a waiting room that resembled the lounge of a luxury hotel, and was seen by a middle-aged Iranian doctor, who was possibly the most solicitous person I had ever met. When I glanced at the bill, to be paid by Mr. Gopnik's secretary, I forgot the bite and thought I might pass out instead.

  Agnes had already heard the story by the time I got back. I was apparently the talk of the building. "You must sue!" she said cheerfully. "She is awful, troublemaking old woman. And that dog is plainly dangerous. I am not sure is safe for us to live in same building. Do you need time off? If you need time off maybe I can sue her for lost services."

  I said nothing, nursing my dark feelings toward Mrs. De Witt and Dean Martin. "No good deed goes unpunished, eh?" Nathan said, when I bumped into him in the kitchen. He held up my hand, checking out the bandage. "Jeez. That little dog is ropeable."

  But even as I felt quietly furious with her, I kept remembering what Mrs. De Witt had said when she had first come to my door. He's all I have.

  --

  Although Tabitha moved back to her apartment that week, the mood in the building remained fractious, muted, and marked with occasional explosions. Mr. Gopnik continued to spend long hours at work while Agnes filled much of our time together on the phone to her mother in Polish. I got the feeling there was some kind of family crisis going on. Ilaria burned one of Agnes's favorite shirts--a genuine accident, I believed, as she had been complaining about the temperature controls on the new iron for weeks--and when Agnes screamed at her that she was disloyal, a traitor, a suka in her house, and hurled the damaged shirt at her, Ilaria finally erupted and told Mr. Gopnik that she could not work here anymore, it was impossible, nobody could have worked harder and for less reward over these years. She could no longer stand it and was handing in her notice. Mr. Gopnik, with soft words and an empathetic head-tilt, persuaded her to change her mind (he might also have offered hard cash), and this apparent act of betrayal caused Agnes to slam her door hard enough to topple the second little Chinese vase from the hall table with a musical crash, and for her to spend an entire evening weeping in her dressing room.

  When I appeared the next morning Agnes was seated beside her husband at the breakfast table, her head resting on his shoulder as he murmured into her ear, their fingers entwined. She apologized formally to Ilaria as he watched, smiling, and when he left for work she swore furiously, in Polish, for the whole time it took us to jog around Central Park.

  That evening she announced she was going to Poland for a long weekend, to see her family, and I felt a faint relief when I gathered she did not want me to come too. Sometimes being in that apartment, enormous as it was, with Agnes's ever-changing moods and the swinging tensions between her and Mr. Gopnik, Ilaria, and his family felt impossibly claustrophobic. The thought of being alone for a few days felt like a little oasis.

  "What would you like me to do while you're gone?" I said.

  "Have some days off!" she said, smiling. "You are my friend, Louisa! I think you must have a nice time while I am away. Oh, I am so excited to see my family. So excited." She clapped her hands. "Just to Poland! No stupid charity things to go to! I am so happy."

  I remembered how reluctant she had been to leave her husband even for a night when I had arrived. And pushed the thought away.

  When I walked back into the kitchen, still pondering this change, Ilaria was crossing herself.

  "Are you okay, Ilaria?"

  "I'm praying," she said, not looking up from her pan.

  "Is everything all right?"

  "Is fine. I'm praying that that puta doesn't come back again."

  --

  I e-mailed Sam, the germ of an idea flooding me with excitement. I would have rung him, but he had been silent since our phone call and I was afraid he was still annoyed with me. I told him I had been given an unexpected three-day weekend, had looked up flights, and thought I might splurge on an unexpected trip home. So how about it? What else were wages for? I signed it with a smiley face, an airplane emoji, some hearts and kisses.

  The answer came back within an hour.

  Sorry. I'm working flat out and Saturday night I promised to take Jake to the O2 to see some band. It's a nice idea but this isn't a great weekend. S x

  I stared at the e-mail and tried not to feel chilled. It's a nice idea. As if I'd suggested a casual stroll around the park.

  "Is he cooling on me?"

  Nathan read it twice. "No. He's telling you he's busy and this isn't a great time for you to come home unexpectedly."

  "He's cooling on me. There's nothing in that e-mail. No love, no . . . desire."

  "Or he might have been on his way to work when he wrote it. Or on the john. Or talking to his boss. He's just being a bloke."

  I didn't buy it. I knew Sam. I stared at those two lines again and again, trying to dissect their tone, their hidden intent. I went on Facebook, hating myself for doing so, and checked to see whether Katie Ingram had announced that she was doing something special that weekend. (Annoyingly, she hadn't posted anything at all. Which was exactly what you would do if you were planning to seduce someone else's hot paramedic boyfriend.) And then I took a breath and wrote him a response. Well, several responses, but this was the only one I didn't delete.

  --No problem. It was a long shot! Hope you have a lovely time with Jake. Lx

  And then I pressed "send," marveling at how far the words of an e-mail could deviate from what you actually felt.

  --

  Agnes left on the Thursday evening, laden with gifts. I waved her off with big smiles and collapsed in front of the television.

  On Friday morning I went to an exhibition of Chinese opera costumes at the Met Costume Institute and spent an hour admiring the intricately embroidered, brightly colored robes, the mirrored sheen of the silks. From there, inspired, I traveled to West Thirty-seventh to visit some fabric and haberdashery stores I had looked up the previous week. The October day was cool and crisp, heralding the onset of winter. I took the subway, and enjoyed its grubby, fuggy warmth. I spent an hour scanning the shelves, losing myself among the bolts of patterned fabric. I had decided to put together my own mood board for Agnes for when she returned, covering the little chaise longue and the cushions with bright, cheerful colors--jade greens and pinks, gorgeous prints with parrots and pineapples, far from the muted damasks and drapes that the expensive interior decorators kept offering her. Those were all First Mrs. Gopnik colors. Agnes needed to put her own stamp on the apartment--something bold and lively and beautiful. I explained what I was doing, and the woman at the desk told me about another shop, in the East Village--a secondhand clothes outfit where they kept bolts of vintage fabric at the back.

  It was an unpromising storefront--a grubby 1970s exterior that promised a "Vintage Clothes Emporium, all decades, all styles, low prices." But I walked in and stopped in my tracks. The shop was a warehouse, set with carousels of clothes in distinct sections under homemade signs that said "1940s," "1960s," "Clothes That Dreams Are Made Of," and "Bargain Corner: No Shame In A Ripped Seam." The air smelled musky, of decades-old perfume, moth-eaten fur, and long-forgotten evenings
out. I gulped in the scent like oxygen, feeling as if I had somehow recovered a part of myself I had barely known I was missing. I trailed around the store, trying on armfuls of clothes by designers I had never heard of, their names a whispered echo of some long-forgotten age--Tailored by Michel, Fonseca of New Jersey, Miss Aramis--running my fingers over invisible stitching, placing Chinese silks and chiffon against my cheek. I could have bought a dozen things, but I finally settled on a teal blue fitted cocktail dress with huge fur cuffs and a scoop neck (I told myself fur didn't count if it dated from sixty years ago), a pair of vintage denim railroad dungarees, and a checked shirt that made me want to chop down a tree or maybe ride a horse with a swishy tail. I could have stayed there all day.

  "I've had my eye on that dress for soooo long," said the girl at the checkout desk, as I placed it on the counter. She was heavily tattooed, her dyed black hair swept up in a huge chignon and her eyes lined with dark kohl. "But I couldn't get my tush into it. You looked cute." Her voice was raspy, thickened by cigarettes and impossibly cool.

  "I have no idea when I'll wear it, but I have to have it."

  "That's how I feel about clothes all the time. They talk to you, right? That dress has been screaming at me: Buy me you idiot! And maybe lay off the potato chips!" She stroked it. "Bye-bye, little blue friend. I'm sorry I let you down."

  "Your store is amazing."

  "Oh, we're hanging in here. Buffeted by the cruel winds of rent rises and Manhattanites who would rather go to TJ Maxx than buy something original and beautiful. Look at that quality." She held up the lining of the dress, pointing to the tiny stitches. "How are you going to get work like that out of some sweat shop in Indonesia? Nobody in the whole of New York state has a dress like this." She raised her eyebrows. "Except you, British lady. Where is that beauty from?"

  I was wearing a green military greatcoat that my dad joked smelled like it had been in the Crimean War, and a red beanie. Underneath I had my turquoise Dr. Martens boots, a pair of tweed shorts, and tights.

  "I'm loving that look. You ever wanna offload that coat, I could sell it like that." She snapped her fingers so loudly that my head shot backward. "Military coats. Never get tired. I have a red infantry coat that my grandma swears she stole from a guardsman at Buckingham Palace. I cut the back off and turned it into a bum-freezer. You know what a bum-freezer is, right? You wanna see a picture?"

  I did. We bonded over that short jacket the way other people bond over pictures of babies. Her name was Lydia and she lived in Brooklyn. She and her sister, Angelica, had inherited the store from their parents seven years previously. They had a small but loyal clientele, and were mostly kept afloat by visits from TV and film costume designers who would buy things to rip apart and re-tailor. Most of their clothes, she said, came from estate sales. "Florida is the best. You have these grandmas with huge air-conditioned closets stuffed full of cocktail dresses from the 1950s that they never got rid of. We fly down every couple of months and mostly restock from grieving relatives. But it's getting harder. There's so much competition these days." She gave me a card with their website and e-mail. "You ever have anything you want to sell, you just give me a call."

  "Lydia," I said, when she had packed my clothes with tissue and placed them in a bag, "I think I'm a buyer more than a seller. But thank you. Your store is the greatest. You're the greatest. I feel like . . . I feel like I'm at home."

  "You are adorable." She said this with no change in her facial expression whatsoever. She held up a finger, then stooped below the counter. She came up bearing a pair of vintage sunglasses, dark with pale blue plastic frames.

  "Someone left these here months ago. I was going to put them up for sale but it just occurred to me they would look fabulous on you, especially in that dress."

  "I probably shouldn't," I began. "I've already spent so--"

  "Shh! A gift. So you're now indebted to us and have to come back. There. How cute do you look in those?" She held up a mirror.

  I had to admit, I did look cute. I adjusted the shades on my nose. "Well, this is officially my best day in New York. Lydia, I'll see you next week. And basically spend all my money in here from now on."

  "Cool! This is how we emotionally blackmail our customers into keeping us afloat!" She lit a Sobranie and waved me off.

  --

  I spent the afternoon putting together the mood board and trying on my new clothes, and suddenly it was six o'clock and I was sitting on my bed tapping my fingers on my knees. I had been thrilled with the idea of having time to myself, but now the evening stretched in front of me like a bleak, featureless landscape. I texted Nathan, who was still with Mr. Gopnik, to see if he wanted to go out for a bite to eat after work, but he had a date, and said so nicely, but in the way that people do when they really don't need a fifth wheel tagging along.

  I thought about calling Sam again, but I no longer had faith that our phone calls were going to happen in real life the way they happened in my head, and although I kept staring at the phone my fingers never quite made it to the digits. I thought about Josh, and wondered whether if I called him up and asked to meet him for a drink he would think It Meant Something. And then I wondered if the fact that I wanted to meet him for a drink did Actually Mean Something. I checked Katie Ingram's Facebook page, but she still hadn't posted. And then I headed into the kitchen before I could do anything else that stupid and asked Ilaria if she wanted any help making supper, which caused her to rock on her black-slippered heel and stare at me suspiciously for a full ten seconds. "You want to help me make supper?"

  "Yes," I said, and smiled.

  "No," she said, and turned away.

  --

  Until that evening I hadn't realized quite how few people I knew in New York. I had been so busy since I'd arrived and my life had been so comprehensively based around Agnes, her schedule and needs, that it hadn't occurred to me that I hadn't made any friends of my own. But there was something about a Friday night in the city with no plans that made you feel like . . . well, like a bit of a loser.

  I walked to the good sushi place and bought miso soup and some sashimi I hadn't had before and tried not to think, Eel! I'm actually eating eel! and drank a beer, then lay on my bed, flicked through the channels, and pushed away thoughts of other things, such as what Sam was doing. I told myself I was in New York, the center of the universe. So what if I was having a Friday night in? I was simply resting after a week of my demanding New York job. I could go out any night of the week, if I really wanted to. I told myself this several times. And then my phone pinged.

  --You out exploring New York's finest bars again?

  I knew who it was without looking. Something inside me lurched. I hesitated a moment before responding.

  --Just having a night in, actually.

  --Fancy a friendly beer with an exhausted corporate wage slave? If nothing else, you could make sure I don't go home with an unsuitable woman.

  I started to smile. And then I typed: What makes you think I'm any kind of defense?

  --Are you saying we look like we could never be together? Oh, that's harsh.

  --I meant what makes you think I'd stop you going home with someone else?

  --The fact that you're even responding to my messages? (He added a smiley face to this.)

  I stopped typing, feeling suddenly disloyal. I stared at my phone, watching the cursor wink impatiently. In the end he typed, Did I blow it? I just blew it, didn't I? Damn, Louisa Clark. I just wanted a beer with a pretty girl on a Friday night and I was prepared to overlook the feeling of vague dejection that comes with knowing she's in love with someone else. That's how much I enjoy your company. Come for a beer? One beer?

  I lay back on the pillow, thinking. I closed my eyes and groaned. And then I sat up and typed, I'm really sorry, Josh. I can't. x

  He didn't respond. I had offended him. I would never hear from him again.

  And then my phone pinged. Okay. Well, if I get myself in trouble I'm texting you first thi
ng tomorrow morning to come get me and pretend to be my crazy jealous girlfriend. Be prepared to hit hard. Deal?

  I found I was laughing. The least I can do. Have a good night. X

  --You too. Not too good, though. The only thing keeping me going right now is the thought of you secretly regretting not coming out with me. X

  I did regret it a little. Of course I did. There are only so many episodes of The Big Bang Theory a girl can watch. I turned off the television and I stared at the ceiling and I thought about my boyfriend on the other side of the world and I thought about an American who looked like Will Traynor and actually wanted to spend time with me, not a girl with wild blond hair who looked like she wore sequined G-strings under her uniform. I thought about ringing my sister but I didn't want to disturb Thom.

  For the first time since I had arrived in America I had an almost physical sense of being in the wrong place, as if I were being tugged by invisible cords to somewhere a million miles away. At one point I felt so bad that when I walked into my bathroom and saw a large chestnut-colored cockroach on the sink I didn't scream, like I had previously, but briefly considered making it a pet, like a character in a children's novel. And then I realized that I was now officially thinking like a madwoman and sprayed it with Raid instead.

  At ten, irritable and restless, I walked to the kitchen and stole two of Nathan's beers, leaving an apologetic note under his door, and drank them, one after the other, gulping so fast that I had to suppress a huge belch. I felt bad about that damned cockroach. What was he doing after all? Just going about his cockroachy business. Maybe he'd been lonely. Maybe he'd wanted to make friends with me. I went and peered under the basin where I'd kicked him but he was definitely dead. This made me irrationally angry. I'd thought you weren't meant to be able to kill cockroaches. I'd been lied to about cockroaches. I added this to my list of things to feel furious about.