Neon in Daylight. Hermione Hoby
his fingers cramping, jaw locking, she usually got there. Whereupon he’d kneel back, tugging surreptitiously at his now-flagging dick, waiting until she was sufficiently recovered for fucking her not to feel indecorous. Immediately afterward, she’d retrieve and wriggle back into her underwear and this irritated him, seemed almost rude. She’d make a sort of murmured grunt as she did so, and he understood that this was intended to sound postcoitally soporific, to signal her satisfaction and her need for instant sleep, but to him it sounded like his dismissal. Time for him to retrieve his pants, wincing as the buckle hit the floor, and creep out.
7
A man was towing a grand piano down the street, and the spectacle struck Kate as reason enough to follow. She watched tourists stop, turn, and smile, vague and stupefied, reaching for their cameras as he passed, tugging the enormous thing along doggedly, as if they were both late for an appointment. She kept her distance. She didn’t want him to notice her, she just wanted to follow him. People talked about how perfect Manhattan was for walking. The grid system! they said. Its simplicity! But it was the simplicity that stymied her, the rigid right angles that quashed the art of wandering by demanding of you the exactitude, the confidence and conviction, of knowing when to turn right and when to keep going. Kate did not know where she was going but the man and his piano did. They were heading north up Thompson Street, straight toward the big arch of Washington Square, where the fountain gushed like some permanent pom-pom exalting the feat of the structure beyond it. Right beneath the arch, the man parked and went through a sequence of precise motions that culminated in the snappy assembling of a stool. Then he gave a quick, dapper little hitch to his trousers, sat, raised his hands, and began to play.
It was Rachmaninov, and she felt a silly pulse of triumph for recognizing that. If there were someone here beside her, someone that she knew, she could turn to them and smile and say “Rachmaninov!” and perhaps they’d be impressed.
She found a seat on the edge of the fountain. The stone was hot against her thighs and the air was filled with water and light, small shimmers of both. Kids and not-kids were paddling and splashing one another. Young guys lounged with their feet in the water, headphones on, eyes closed, blissed out, some with their forearms flung over their faces, protecting them from the sun. She watched a toddler in a frilly hat run toward the man and his piano and then stop, stupefied. His mother caught up with him, arms outstretched.
Cigarettes smelled so much better in sunlight, she thought, as she lit up. Something had lifted in her. Now it was okay—good, even—to be sitting somewhere, purposeless, watching some man play a grand piano in a park. He was younger than she’d first thought—a graduate student, maybe, dressed in ugly cargo shorts and a short-sleeved plaid shirt. Reddish hair gelled upright into a series of little spikes. Just a normal guy who’d chosen to drag the most cumbersome of all instruments through the streets of downtown New York on an intensely hot day.
“I love this guy,” said a voice beside her. “He doesn’t give a fuck.”
Kate turned, and the world lurched for a moment. It was the girl from the bodega. The one who’d looked at her on her very first day in New York and said, “Happy Fourth!”
The bodega girl had once again removed her sunglasses and now was sitting, just a few feet away, one knee hitched up under her chin, squinting in the brightness, scratching her ankle.
“Yeah,” Kate said, and she looked back to the pianist as if to confirm his continued state of not giving a fuck. There he was, fingers running up and down the keys, sound tumbling out.
The girl turned to her and smiled and in doing so ratcheted her beauty into something brutal. But then a gust of impatience passed over her face, taking the smile with it, and she said: “So how many, again?”
“What?”
The girl gave her a look.
“How many,” she said. “How many do you want?”
The two of them stared at each other.
“You’re Kate, right?”
Again, the world lost its composure. The Rachmaninov sounded frenzied now, and louder, and she wished it would stop for a moment, that he’d just shut up for a second so she could get her bearings.
“How do know my name?”
“Becauuuuse,” the girl said, very slowly, cautiously, as though Kate were mentally impaired, yet also somehow tilting her tone on that stretched second syllable into something like a warning. “You texted me?”
“No,” Kate said bravely. “I didn’t.”
She sounded feeble, like an accused child who’s so abject in their denial that she only convinces everyone, even herself, of her guilt. Could she have texted her? Could she be suffering some kind of selective amnesia? Maybe this was linked to the not-being-able-to-speak thing. Maybe these were the early signs of some rare neurological disorder. She wouldn’t know for sure until she dropped unconscious one day. And even then she wouldn’t know, because she’d be unconscious.
The girl was still staring but now something was lighting up the edges of her eyes and the corners of her lips.
“Your name is Kate?”
“Yes.” Kate nodded. This was true.
The girl looked at her for a beat.
“But you didn’t message me, yesterday afternoon, about tickets?”
That weird emphasis on the word made Kate feel uneasy.
“No . . .”
The girl kept staring, and then burst into laughter. Freeze-frame, screenshot, sell all the toothpaste in the world. And then she snapped her gaze back to Kate, who wilted, while sweat pooled in what she remembered, uselessly, was called her philtrum.
“So you’re not here to buy Adderall?” she said. “You’re just sitting here, chilling at the fountain, and your name’s Kate?”
Kate nodded, and brushed away the sweat.
“Oh my god. That is so fucked up. Ha. I must have freaked you out. So you’re a Kate. I’m Inez.”
And she put out her hand. It was surprisingly cool. Kate hadn’t expected that, she’d expected hot skin and a hard grasp. Instead, her fingers took Kate’s with a kind of detachment. Kate thought of picking up a pebble on a beach—the smoothness and self-sufficiency of a stone. How different Inez’s hand felt to George’s. How strange that an entire person’s being—or, at least, the illusion of it—was there in the touch of a hand.
She took in Kate’s expression and laughed again. “You looked so freaked out.”
So: she was the wrong Kate. And things came back to themselves, steadied, and the piano music now sounded lighter and more spirited, just some natural and pleasant extension of the fountain’s sound and the movement of water. She remembered to breathe and then, her thoughts catching a spurt of hysteria, she looked at Inez squarely (an audacious act) and said, darkly, “Where’s Kate, then?”
They held each other’s gaze for a beat, just long enough for complicity to kindle there.
Then Inez snorted. “Murdered? Whatever, fuck her—fuck the other Kate.”
And Kate laughed a little, too, repeated it in her mind. Fuck the other Kate.
“Do you want some Adderall, though?” Inez added, fleetly.
“Adderall?”
“Yeah,” she said, with impatience. “I come here to sell Adderall.”
“I don’t—”
“To students. They think it helps them concentrate.”
“I’m not—”
“They take it and then sit at their laptops all night like fucking zombies writing their essays. You want some?”
Kate shook her head. “Sorry.”
Inez.