Still Me, Page 32

  He had brought me flowers, a delicious mix of hyacinths and freesias. "What are these for?" I said.

  He shrugged as he shepherded me in. "I just saw them on the way home from work and thought you might like them."

  "Wow. Thank you." I inhaled deeply. "This is the nicest thing that's happened to me in ages."

  "The flowers? Or me?" He raised an eyebrow.

  "Well, I suppose you are quite nice."

  His face fell.

  "You're amazing. And I love them."

  He smiled broadly then and kissed me. "Well, you're the nicest thing that's happened to me in ages," he said softly when he pulled back. "Feels like I waited a long time for you, Louisa."

  "We only met in October."

  "Ah. But we live in an age of instant gratification. And we're in the city where anything you want you get yesterday."

  There was a strange potency to being wanted as much as Josh seemed to want me. I wasn't quite sure what I'd done to deserve it. I wanted to ask him what he saw in me but I suspected it would sound oddly needy to say it aloud so I tried to work it out in other ways.

  "Tell me about the other women you've dated," I said from the sofa, as he moved around the little kitchenette, pulling out plates and cutlery and glasses. "What were they like?"

  "Aside from Tinder hookups? Smart, pretty, usually successful . . ." He stooped to pull a bottle of fish sauce from the back of a cupboard. "But honestly? Like self-obsessed," he said. "Like they couldn't be seen without perfect makeup, or they would have a total meltdown if their hair wasn't right, and everything had to be Instagrammed or photographed or reported on social media and presented in the best light. Including dates with me. Like they could never drop their guard."

  He straightened up, holding bottles. "You want chili sauce? Or soy? I dated one girl who used to check what time I was getting up each day and set her alarm for half an hour before just so she could fix her hair and makeup. Just so I would never see her not looking perfect. Even if it meant getting up at, like, four thirty."

  "Okay. I'm going to warn you now, I'm not that girl."

  "I know that, Louisa. I've put you to bed."

  I kicked off my shoes and folded my legs under me. "I suppose it's kind of impressive that they put in so much effort."

  "Yeah. But it can be a little exhausting. And you never feel quite like . . . like you know what's really underneath. With you, I have to say, it's all pretty much out there. You are who you are."

  "Should I take that as a compliment?"

  "Sure. You're like the girls I grew up with. You're honest."

  "The Gopniks don't think so."

  "Fuck them." His voice was uncharacteristically harsh. "You know, I've been thinking about it. You can prove you didn't do what they said you did--right? So you should sue them for unfair dismissal and loss of reputation and hurt feelings and--"

  I shook my head.

  "Seriously. Gopnik trades on this reputation of being a decent, old-fashioned, good guy in business and he's always doing stuff for charity, but he fired you for nothing, Louisa. You lost your job and your home with no warning and no compensation."

  "He thought I was stealing."

  "Yeah, but he must know there was something not quite right about what he was doing or he would have called the cops. Given who he is, I'd bet there's some lawyer who would take this on a no-win-no-fee basis."

  "Really. I'm fine. Lawsuits aren't my style."

  "Yeah, well. You're too nice. You're being English about it."

  The doorbell rang. Josh held up a finger, as if to say we would continue this conversation. He disappeared into the narrow hallway and I heard him paying the delivery boy while I finished laying the little table.

  "And you know what?" he said, bringing the bag into the kitchen. "Even if you didn't have evidence I'd bet Gopnik would pay a lump sum just to stop the whole thing getting into the papers. Think what that could do for you. I mean, a couple of weeks ago you were sleeping on someone's floor." (I hadn't told him about sharing Nathan's bed.)

  "This could get you a decent deposit on a rental. Hell, you get a good enough lawyer, this could buy you an apartment. You know how much money Gopnik has? Like, he is famously rich. In a city of seriously rich people."

  "Josh, I know you mean well but I just want to forget it."

  "Louisa, you--"

  "No." I put my hands down on the table. "I'm not suing anybody."

  He waited for a minute, perhaps frustrated by his inability to push me further, and then he shrugged and smiled. "Okay--well, dinner time! You don't have any allergies, right? Have some chicken. Here--you like eggplant? They do this eggplant chili dish that's just the greatest."

  --

  I slept with Josh that night. I wasn't drunk and I wasn't vulnerable and I wasn't breathless with need for him. I think I just wanted my life to feel normal again, and we had eaten and drunk and talked and laughed until late into the night, and he had pulled the drapes and turned down the lights and it seemed like a natural progression, or at least I could think of no reason not to. He was so beautiful. He had skin without a blemish and cheekbones you could actually see, and his hair was soft and chestnut colored and tinged with tiny flecks of gold, even after the long winter. We kissed on his sofa, first sweetly and then with increasing fervor, and he lost his shirt and then I lost mine and I made myself focus on this gorgeous, attentive man, this prince of New York, and not on all the rambling things my imagination tended to focus on, and I felt need grow in me, like a distant, reassuring friend, until I was able to block out everything but the sensations of him against me, and then, sometime later, inside me.

  Afterward he kissed me tenderly and asked me if I was happy, then murmured that he had to get some sleep and I lay there and tried to ignore the tears that inexplicably trickled from the corners of my eyes into my ears.

  What was it Will had told me? You had to seize the day. You had to embrace opportunities as they came. You had to be the kind of person who said yes. If I had turned Josh away, wouldn't I have regretted it forever?

  I turned silently in the unfamiliar bed and studied his profile as he slept, the perfect straight nose and the mouth that looked like Will's. I thought of all the ways Will would have approved of him. I could even picture them together, joking with each other, a competitive edge to their jokes. They might have been friends. Or enemies. They were almost too similar.

  Perhaps I was meant to be with this man, I thought, albeit via a strange, unsettling route. Perhaps this was Will, come back to me. And with this thought I wiped my eyes and fell into a brief, disjointed sleep.

  24

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Dear Treen,

  I know you think it's too soon. But what did Will teach me? You only get one life, right? And you're happy with Eddie? So why can't I be happy? You'll get it when you meet him, I promise.

  So this is the kind of man Josh is: yesterday he took me to the best bookshop in Brooklyn and bought me a bunch of paperbacks he thought I might like, then at lunchtime he took me to a posh Mexican restaurant on East 46th and made me try fish tacos--don't pull a face, they were absolutely delicious. Then he told me he wanted to show me something (no, not that). We walked to the Grand Central Terminal and it was packed, as usual, and I was thinking, Okay, bit weird--are we going on a trip?, then he told me to stand with my head in the corner of this archway, just by the Oyster Bar. I laughed at him. I thought he was joking. But he insisted, told me to trust him.

  So there I am, standing with my head in the corner of this huge masonry archway, with all the commuters coming and going around me, trying not to feel like a complete eejit, and when I look round he's walking away from me. But then he stops diagonally across from me, maybe fifty feet away, and he puts his own face in the corner and suddenly, above all the noise and chaos and rumbling trains, I hear--murmured into my ear, like he was right beside me--"Louisa Clark, you are the cutest girl in the w
hole of New York City."

  Treen, it was like witchcraft. I looked up and he turned around and smiled, and I have no idea how it worked, but he walked across and just took me in his arms and kissed me in front of everyone and someone whistled at us and it was honestly the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.

  So, yes, I'm moving on. And Josh is amazing. It would be nice if you could be pleased for me.

  Give Thom a big kiss.

  Lx

  Weeks passed and New York, as it did with most things, careered into spring at a million miles an hour, with little subtlety and a lot of noise. The traffic grew heavier, the streets were thicker with people, and each day the grid around our block became a cacophony of noise and activity that barely dimmed until the small hours. I stopped wearing a hat and gloves to the library protests. Dean Martin's padded coat was laundered and went into the cupboard. The park grew green. Nobody suggested I move out.

  Margot, in lieu of any kind of helper's wage, pressed so many items of clothing on me that I had to stop admiring things in front of her because I became afraid she would feel obliged to give me more. Over the weeks, I observed that she might share an address with the Gopniks but that was where the similarity between them ended. She survived, as my mother would have said, on shirt buttons.

  "Between the health-care bills and the maintenance fees I don't know where they think I'm meant to find the money to feed myself," she remarked, as I handed her another letter hand-delivered by the management company. The envelope said "OPEN--LEGAL ACTION PENDING." She wrinkled her nose and put it neatly in a pile on the sideboard, where it would stay for the next couple of weeks unless I opened it.

  She grumbled often about the maintenance fees, which totaled thousands of dollars a month, and seemed to have reached a point at which she had decided to ignore them because there was nothing else she could do.

  She told me she had inherited the apartment from her grandfather, an adventurous sort, the only person in her family who didn't believe that a woman should restrict her sights to husband and children. "My father was furious that he had been bypassed. He didn't talk to me for years. My mother tried to broker an agreement but by then there were the . . . other issues." She sighed.

  She bought her groceries from a local convenience store, a tiny supermarket that operated on tourist prices, because it was one of the few places she could walk to. I put a stop to that and twice a week headed over to a Fairway on East Eighty-sixth Street, where I loaded up on basics to the tune of about a third of what she had been spending.

  If I didn't cook, she ate almost nothing sensible herself, but bought good cuts of meat for Dean Martin or poached him whitefish in milk "because it's good for his digestion."

  I think she had become accustomed to my company. Plus she was so wobbly that I think we both knew she couldn't manage alone anymore. I wondered how long it took someone of her age to get over the shock of surgery. I also wondered what she would have done if I hadn't been there.

  "What will you do?" I said, motioning toward the pile of bills.

  "Oh, I'll ignore those." She waved a hand. "I'm leaving this apartment in a box. I have nowhere to go and no one to leave it to, and that crook Ovitz knows it. I think he's just sitting tight until I die and then he'll claim the apartment under the nonpayment of maintenance fees clause and make a fortune selling it to some dotcom person or awful CEO, like that fool across the corridor."

  "Maybe I could help? I have some savings from my time with the Gopniks. I mean, just to get you through a couple of months. You've been so kind to me."

  She hooted. "Dear girl. You couldn't meet the maintenance fees on my guest bathroom."

  For some reason this made her laugh so heartily that she coughed until she had to sit down. But I sneaked a look at the letter after she went to bed. Its "late payment charges," its "direct contravention of the terms of your lease," and "threat of compulsory eviction" made me think that Mr. Ovitz might not be as beneficent--or patient--as she seemed to think.

  --

  I was still walking Dean Martin four times a day, and during those trips to the park I tried to think what could be done for Margot. The thought of her being evicted was appalling. Surely the managing agent wouldn't do that to a convalescent elderly woman. Surely the other residents would object. Then I remembered how swiftly Mr. Gopnik had evicted me, and how insulated the inhabitants of each apartment were from each other's lives. I wasn't entirely sure they'd even notice.

  I was standing on Sixth Avenue peering at a wholesale underwear store when it hit me. The girls at the Emporium might not sell Chanel and Yves St. Laurent but they would if they could get it--or would know some dress agency that could. Margot had innumerable designer labels in her collection, things I was sure that collectors would pay serious money for. There were handbags alone that must be worth thousands of dollars.

  I took Margot to meet them under the guise of an outing. I told her it was a beautiful day and that we should go farther than usual and build up her strength with fresh air. She told me not to be so ridiculous and nobody had breathed fresh air in Manhattan since 1937, but she climbed into the taxi without too much complaint and, Dean Martin on her lap, we made our way to the East Village, where she frowned up at the concrete storefront as if somebody had asked her to enter a slaughterhouse for fun.

  "What have you done to your arms?" Margot paused at the checkout and gazed at Lydia's skin. Lydia was wearing an emerald green puffed-sleeve shirt, and her arms displayed three neatly traced Japanese koi carp in orange, jade, and blue.

  "Oh, my tatts. You like 'em?" Lydia put her cigarette in her other hand and raised her arm toward the light.

  "If I wanted to look like a navvy."

  I began to shepherd Margot to a different part of the shop. "Here, Margot. See, they have all their vintage clothes in different areas--if you have clothes from the 1960s they go here, and over there the 1950s. It's a little like your apartment."

  "It's nothing like my apartment."

  "I just mean they trade in outfits like yours. It's quite a successful line of business these days."

  Margot pulled at the sleeve of a nylon blouse, then peered at the label over the top of her spectacles. "Amy Armistead is an awful line. Never could stand the woman. Or Les Grandes Folies. Their buttons always fell off. Cheap on thread."

  "There are some really special dresses back here, under plastic." I walked over to the cocktail-gown section, where the best of the women's pieces were displayed. I pulled out a Saks Fifth Avenue dress in turquoise, trimmed with sequins and beads at the hem and cuffs, and held it up against myself, smiling.

  Margot peered at it, then turned the price tag in her hand. She pulled a face at the figure. "Who on earth would pay this?"

  "People who love good clothes," said Lydia, who had appeared behind us. She was chewing noisily on a piece of gum and I could see Margot's eyes flicker slightly every time her jaws met.

  "There's an actual market for them?"

  "A good market," I said. "Especially for things in immaculate condition, like yours. All Margot's outfits have been kept in plastic and air conditioning. She has things that date back to the 1940s."

  "Those aren't mine. Those are my mother's," she said stiffly.

  "Seriously? Whaddaya got?" said Lydia, giving Margot's coat a visible up and down. Margot was in a Jaeger three-quarter-length wool coat and a black fur hat the shape of a large Victoria sponge. Even though the weather was almost balmy, she still appeared to feel the cold.

  "What do I have? Nothing I want to send here, thank you."

  "But, Margot, you have some really fine suits--the Chanels and the Givenchys that no longer fit you. And you have scarves, bags--you could sell those to specialist dealers. Auction houses, even."

  "Chanel makes serious money," said Lydia sagely. "Especially purses. If it's not too shabby, a decent Chanel double flap in caviar leather will make two and a half to four thousand. A new one's not going to cost you much more, you
know what I'm saying? Python, woah, the sky's the limit."

  "You have more than one Chanel handbag, Margot," I pointed out.

  Margot tucked her Hermes alligator bag more tightly under her arm.

  "You got more like that? We can sell 'em for you, Mrs. De Witt. We got a waiting list for the good stuff. I got a lady in Asbury Park will pay up to five thousand for a decent Hermes." Lydia reached out to run a finger down the side of it and Margot pulled away as if she'd assaulted her.

  "It's not stuff," she said. "I don't own 'stuff.'"

  "I just think it might be worth considering. There seems to be quite a bit you don't use any longer. You could sell it, pay the maintenance fees, and then you could, you know, relax."

  "I am relaxed," she snapped. "And I'll thank you not to discuss my financial affairs in public, as if I'm not even here. Oh, I don't like this place. It smells of old people. Come on, Dean Martin. I need some fresh air."

  I followed her out, mouthing an apology at Lydia, who shrugged, unconcerned. I suspected that even the faint possibility of Margot's wardrobe coming her way had softened any natural tendency toward combativeness.

  We caught a taxi back in silence. I was annoyed with myself for my lack of diplomacy and simultaneously irritated with Margot for her out-and-out rejection of what I had thought was quite a sensible plan. She refused to look at me during the whole journey. I sat beside her, Dean Martin panting between us, and rehearsed arguments in my head until her silence became unnerving. I glanced sideways and saw an old woman, who had just come out of hospital. I had no right to pressure her into anything.

  "I didn't mean to upset you, Margot," I said, as I helped her out in front of her building. "I just thought it might be a way forward. You know, with the debts and everything. I just don't want you to lose your home."

  Margot straightened up and adjusted her fur hat with a brittle hand. Her voice was querulous, almost tearful, and I realized she had also been rehearsing an argument in her head for the entire fifty or so blocks. "You don't understand, Louisa. These are my things, my babies. They may be old clothes, potential financial assets, to you, but they are precious to me. They are my history, beautiful, prized remnants of my life."