Still Me, Page 30

  "There you go! Enjoy!"

  He stared at me, his bulbous eyes sullen and mutinous, forehead rippling with wrinkles of concern.

  "Food! Yum!"

  Still he stared.

  "Not hungry yet, huh?" I said. I edged my way out of the kitchen. I needed to work out where I was going to sleep.

  Mrs. De Witt's apartment was approximately half the square footage of the Gopniks', but that wasn't to say it was small. It comprised a vast living room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park, its interior decorated in bronze and smoked glass, as if it had last been done sometime around the days of Studio 54. There was a more traditional dining room, packed with antiques sporting a layer of dust, which suggested it hadn't been used in generations, a melamine and Formica kitchen, a utility room, and four bedrooms, including the main bedroom, which had a bathroom and a sizable dressing room leading off it. The bathrooms were even older than the Gopniks' and let loose unpredictable torrents of spluttering water. I walked round the apartment with the peculiar silent reverence that comes with being in the uninhabited house of a person you don't know very well.

  When I reached the main bedroom, I drew a breath. It was filled, three and a half walls of it, with clothes neatly stacked on racks, hanging in plastic from cushioned hangers. The dressing room was a riot of color and fabric, punctuated above and below by shelves with piles of handbags, boxed hats, and matching shoes. I walked slowly around the perimeter, running my fingertips along the materials, pausing occasionally to tug gently at a sleeve or push back a hanger to see each outfit better.

  And it wasn't just these two rooms. As the little pug trotted suspiciously after me, I walked through two of the other bedrooms and found more--row upon row of dresses, trouser suits, coats, and boas, in long, air-conditioned cupboards. There were labels from Givenchy, Biba, Harrods, and Macy's, shoes from Saks Fifth Avenue and Chanel. There were labels I had never heard--French, Italian, even Russian--clothes from multiple eras: neat little Kennedy-esque boxy suits, flowing kaftans, sharp-shouldered jackets. I peered into boxes and found pillbox hats and turbans, huge jade-framed sunglasses and delicate strings of pearls. They were not arranged in any particular order so I simply dived in, pulling things out at random, unfolding tissue paper, feeling the cloth, the weight, the musty scent of old perfume, lifting them out to admire cut and pattern.

  On what wall space was still visible above the shelves I could just make out framed clothes designs, magazine covers from the fifties and sixties with beaming, angular models in psychedelic shift dresses, or impossibly trim shirtwaisters. I must have been there an hour before I realized I hadn't located another bed. But in the fourth bedroom there it was, covered with discarded items of clothing--a narrow single, possibly dating back to the fifties, with an ornate walnut headboard, a matching wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. And there were four more racks, of the more basic kind you would find in a changing room, and alongside them, boxes and boxes of accessories--costume jewelry, belts, and scarves. I moved some carefully from the bed and lay down, feeling the mattress give immediately as exhausted mattresses do, but I didn't care. I would basically be sleeping in a wardrobe. For the first time in days I forgot to be depressed.

  For one night at least, I was in Wonderland.

  --

  The following morning I fed and walked Dean Martin, trying not to be offended by the way he traveled the whole way down Fifth Avenue at an angle, one eye permanently trained on me as if waiting for some transgression, and then I left for the hospital, keen to reassure Mrs. De Witt that her baby was fine, if permanently braced for savagery. I decided I probably wouldn't tell her that the only way I'd been able to persuade him to eat was to grate Parmigiano-Reggiano onto his breakfast.

  When I arrived at the hospital I was relieved to find her a more human pink, although oddly unformed without her familiar makeup and set hair. She had indeed fractured her wrist and was scheduled for surgery, after which she would be in the hospital for another week, due to what they called "complicating factors." When I revealed that I wasn't a member of her family they declined to say more.

  "Can you look after Dean Martin?" she said, her face creased with anxiety. He had plainly been her main concern in the hours I had been gone. "Perhaps they could let you pop in and out to see him in the day? Do you think Ashok could take him for walks? He'll be terribly lonely. He's not used to being without me."

  I had wondered whether it was wise to tell her the truth. But truth had been in short supply in our building lately and I wanted everything out in the open.

  "Mrs. De Witt," I began, "I have to tell you something. I--I don't work for the Gopniks anymore. They fired me."

  Her head moved back against her pillow a little. She mouthed the word as if it were unfamiliar. "Fired?"

  I swallowed. "They thought I had stolen money from them. All I can tell you is that I didn't. But I feel it's only right to tell you because you may decide that you don't want my help."

  "Well," she said weakly. And again. "Well."

  We sat there in silence for a while.

  Then she narrowed her eyes. "But you didn't do it."

  "No, ma'am."

  "Do you have another job?"

  "No, ma'am. I'm trying to find one."

  She shook her head. "Gopnik is a fool. Where are you living?"

  I looked sideways. "Uh . . . I'm . . . well, I'm actually staying in Nathan's room for now. But it's not ideal. We're not--you know--romantically involved. And obviously the Gopniks don't exactly know . . ."

  "Well, it sounds like an arrangement that might suit us both rather well. Would you look after my dog? And perhaps conduct your job-hunting from my side of the corridor? Just till I come home?"

  "Mrs. De Witt, I'd be delighted." I couldn't hide my smile.

  "You'll have to look after him better than you did before, of course. I'm going to give you notes. I'm sure he's terribly unsettled."

  "I'll do whatever you say."

  "And I'll need you to come here daily to let me know how he is. That's very important."

  "Of course."

  With that decided, she seemed to subside a little with relief. She closed her eyes. "No fool like an old fool," she murmured. I wasn't sure if she was talking about Mr. Gopnik, herself, or someone else entirely, so I waited until she had fallen asleep, then headed back to her apartment.

  --

  All that week I devoted myself to the care of a boggle-eyed, suspicious, cranky, six-year-old pug. We walked four times a day, I grated Parmesan onto his breakfast, and several days in, he ceased his habit of standing in any room I was in and staring at me with his brow furrowed, as if waiting for me to do something unmentionable, and simply lay down a few feet away, panting gently. I was still a little wary of him but I felt sorry for him too--the only person he loved had vanished abruptly and there was nothing I could do to reassure him that she would be coming home again.

  And, besides, it was kind of nice to be in the building without feeling like a criminal. Ashok, who had been away for a few days, listened to my description of this turn of events with shock, outrage, then delight. "Man, it's lucky you found him! He could have just wandered off and then nobody would have known she was even on the floor!" He shuddered theatrically. "When she's back I'm gonna start checking in on her every day, making sure she's okay."

  We looked at each other.

  "Nothing would make her more furious," I said.

  "Yup, she'd hate it," he said, and went back to work.

  Nathan pretended to be sad that he had his room back to himself, and brought my stuff over with almost unseemly haste to "save me a journey" of approximately six yards. I think he just wanted to be sure I was really going. He dropped my bags and peered around the apartment, gazing in amazement at the walls of clothes. "What a load of junk!" he exclaimed. "It's like the world's biggest Oxfam shop. Boy, I'd hate to be the house-clearance company having to go through this lot when the old lady pops her clogs." I kept my smi
le fixed and level.

  He told Ilaria, who knocked on my door the next day for news of Mrs. De Witt, then asked me to take her some muffins she had baked. "The food in these hospitals would make you sick," she said, patted my arm, and left at a brisk trot before Dean Martin could bite her.

  I heard Agnes playing the piano from across the hall, once a beautiful piece that sounded relaxed and melancholy, once something impassioned and anguished. I thought of the many times Mrs. De Witt had hobbled across and furiously demanded an end to the noise. This time the music ended abruptly without her intervention, Agnes seemingly slamming her hands down on the keys. Occasionally I would hear raised voices, and it took me a few days to convince my body that my own adrenaline didn't need to rise with them, that they no longer had anything to do with me.

  I passed Mr. Gopnik just once, in the main lobby. He didn't see me, then performed a double take, apparently primed to object to my presence there. I lifted my chin and held up the end of Dean Martin's lead. "I'm helping Mrs. De Witt with her dog," I said, with as much dignity as I could manage. He glanced down at Dean Martin, set his jaw, then turned away as if he hadn't heard me. Michael, at his side, glanced at me, then turned back to his cell phone.

  --

  Josh came on Friday night after work, bringing takeout and a bottle of wine. He was still in his suit--working late all week, he said. He and a colleague were competing for a promotion so he was there for fourteen hours a day, and planned to go in on Saturday too. He peered around the apartment, raising his eyebrows at the decor. "Well, dog-sitting was one job opening I certainly hadn't considered," he observed, as Dean Martin trailed suspiciously at his heels. He walked around the living room slowly, picking up the onyx ashtray and the sinuous African-woman sculpture, putting them down, peering intently at the gilded artwork on the walls.

  "It wasn't top of my list either." I laid a trail of doggy treats to the main bedroom and shut the little dog in until he'd calmed down. "But I'm really okay with it."

  "So how you doing?"

  "Better!" I said, heading to the kitchen. I had wanted to show Josh I was more than the scruffy, intermittently drunk jobseeker he had been meeting the past week, so I had dressed up in my black Chanel-style dress with the white collar and cuffs and my emerald fake crocodile Mary Janes, my hair sleek and blow-dried into a neat bob.

  "Well, you look cute," he said, following me. He put his bottle and bag on the side in the kitchen, then walked over to me, standing just a couple of inches away, so that his face filled my vision. "And, you know, not homeless. Which is always a good look."

  "Temporarily, anyway."

  "So does this mean you'll be sticking around a little longer?"

  "Who knows?"

  He was mere inches from me. I had a sudden sensory memory of burying my face in his neck a week previously.

  "You're going pink, Louisa Clark."

  "That's because you're extremely close to me."

  "I do that to you?" His voice dropped, his eyebrow lifted. He took a step closer, then put his hands on the worktop, at either side of my hips.

  "Apparently," I said, but it came out as almost a cough. And then he dropped his lips to mine and kissed me. He kissed me and I leaned back against the kitchen units and closed my eyes, absorbing the mint taste of his mouth, the slightly strange feel of his body against mine, the unfamiliar hands closing over my own. I wondered if this was what it would have been like to kiss Will before his accident. And then I thought that I would never kiss Sam again. And then I thought that it was probably quite bad form to think about kissing other men when you had a perfectly nice one kissing you at that very moment. And I pulled my head back a little, and he stopped and looked into my eyes, trying to gauge what it meant.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "It's--it's just all kind of soon. I really like you but--"

  "But you only just broke up with the other guy."

  "Sam."

  "Who is clearly an idiot. And not good enough for you."

  "Josh . . ."

  He let his forehead tip forward so that it rested against mine. I didn't let go of his hand.

  "It just all feels a bit complicated still. I'm sorry."

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. "Would you tell me if I was wasting my time?" he said.

  "You're not wasting your time. It's just . . . it was barely two weeks ago."

  "There's a lot that's happened in that two weeks."

  "Well, then, who knows where we'll be in another two weeks?"

  "You said 'we.'"

  "I suppose I did."

  He nodded, as if this were a satisfactory answer. "You know," he said, almost to himself, "I have a feeling about us, Louisa Clark. And I'm never wrong about these things."

  And then, before I could respond, he let go of my hand and walked over to the cupboards, opening and closing them in search of plates. When he turned round, his smile was brilliant. "Shall we eat?"

  --

  I learned a lot about Josh that evening. I learned about his Boston upbringing, the baseball career his half-Irish businessman father had made him give up because he felt that sport would not secure a long-lasting income. His mother, unusually among her peers, was an attorney who had held on to her job throughout his childhood and, in their retirement years, both his parents were adjusting to being in the house together. It was, apparently, driving them completely nuts. "We're a family of doers, you know? So Dad has already taken on some executive role at the golf club and Mom is mentoring kids at the local high school. Anything so they don't have to sit there looking at each other." He had two brothers, both older, one who ran a Mercedes dealership just outside Weymouth, Massachusetts, and another who was an accountant, like my sister. They were a close family, and competitive, and he had hated his brothers with the impotent fury of a tortured youngest sibling until they left home, after which he found he missed them with a gnawing and unexpected pain. "Mom says it was because I lost my yardstick, the thing I judged everything by."

  Both brothers were now married and settled with two kids apiece. The family converged for holidays and every summer rented the same house in Nantucket. In his teens he had resented it, but now it was a week he looked forward to more each year.

  "It's great. The kids and the hanging out and the boat . . . You should come," he said, casually helping himself to more char siu bao. He talked without self-consciousness, a man used to things working out the way he wanted them to.

  "To a family thing? I thought men in New York were all about casual dating."

  "Yeah, well, I've done all that. And, besides, I'm not from New York."

  He was a man who seemingly threw himself at everything. He worked a million hours a week, was hungry for promotion, and went to the gym before six a.m. He played baseball with the office team, and was thinking about volunteering to mentor at a local high school, like his mother did, but was worried that his work schedule meant he couldn't commit to a regular time. He was shot through with the American dream--you worked hard, you succeeded, and then you gave back. I tried not to keep drawing comparisons with Will. I listened to him and felt half admiring, half exhausted.

  He drew a picture of his future in the air between us--an apartment in the Village, maybe a weekend place in the Hamptons if he could get his bonuses to the right level. He wanted a boat. He wanted kids. He wanted to retire early. He wanted to make a million dollars before he was thirty. He punctuated much of this talk with the waving of chopsticks and the phrase "You should come!" or "You'd love it!" and I was partly flattered, but mostly grateful that this implied he wasn't offended by my earlier reticence.

  He left at ten thirty, since he planned to get up at five, and we stood in the hallway by the front door, with Dean Martin on guard a few feet away.

  "So, are we going to be able to squeeze in lunch? What with the whole dog-and-hospital thing?"

  "We could perhaps see each other one evening?"

  "'We could perhaps see each other one evening
,'" he mimicked softly. "I love your English accent."

  "I haven't got an accent," I said. "You have."

  "And you make me laugh. Not many girls make me laugh."

  "Ah. Then you've just not met the right girls."

  "Oh, I think I have." He stopped talking then, and looked up at the heavens, as if he were trying to prevent himself doing something. And then he smiled, as if acknowledging the slight ridiculousness of two adults nearing their thirties trying not to kiss in a doorway. And it was the smile that did it for me.

  I reached up and touched the back of his neck, very lightly. And then I went up on tiptoe and kissed him. I told myself there was no point in dwelling on something that was gone. I told myself two weeks was certainly long enough to make a decision, especially when you had barely seen that other person for months beforehand and had pretty much been single anyway. I told myself I had to move on.

  Josh didn't hesitate. He kissed me back, his hands sliding slowly up my spine, maneuvering me against the wall, so that I was pinned, pleasurably, against him. He kissed me and I made myself stop thinking and just give in to sensation, his unfamiliar body, narrower and slightly harder than the one I had known, the intensity of his mouth on mine. This handsome American. We were both a little dazed when we came up for air.

  "If I don't go now . . ." he said, stepping back, and blinked hard, raising his hand to the back of his neck.

  I grinned. I suspected my lipstick was halfway across my face. "You have an early start. I'll speak to you tomorrow." I opened the door and, with a last kiss on my cheek, he stepped out into the main corridor.

  When I closed it, Dean Martin was still staring at me. "What?" I said. "What? I'm single."

  He lowered his head in disgust, turned, and pottered toward the kitchen.

  23

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Hi Mum,

  Lovely to hear that you and Maria had such a nice tea at Fortnum & Mason on Maria's birthday. Although, yes, I agree, that is a LOT for a packet of biscuits and I'm sure both you and Maria could do better scones at home. Yours are very light. And, no, the toilet thing in the theater was not good. I'm sure as an attendant herself she has a very keen eye for things like that. I'm glad someone is looking out for all your . . . hygiene needs.