Page 107 of Still Me
“Sweetheart, we barely make rent or we’d have you here like a shot.” Lydia blew a sympathetic smoke ring at the ceiling and looked to her sister, who batted it away.
“You’ll make the clothes stink. Look, we’ll ask around,” Angelica said. She said it in a way that made me think I was not the first person who had asked.
I trudged out of the shop feeling despondent. I didn’t know what to do with myself. There was nowhere quiet where I could just sit for a while, nowhere that offered space where I could work out what to do next. If you didn’t have money in New York, you were a refugee, unwelcome anywhere for too long. Perhaps, I mused, it was time to admit defeat and buy that plane ticket.
And then it hit me.
I took the subway up to Washington Heights and got off a short walk from the library. It felt, for the first time in days, like I was somewhere familiar, somewhere that welcomed me. This would be my refuge, my springboard to a new future. I headed up the stone steps. On the first floor I found an unoccupied computer terminal. I sat down heavily, took a breath, and, for the first time since the Gopnik debacle, I closed my eyes and just let my thoughts settle.
I felt some long-held tension ease away from my shoulders and let myself float on the low murmur of people around me, a world away from the chaos and bustle of outside. I don’t know if it was just the joy of being surrounded by books, and quiet, but I felt like an equal here,inconspicuous, a brain, a keyboard, just another person searching for information.
And there, for the first time, I found myself asking what the hell had just happened anyway. Agnes had betrayed me. My months with the Gopniks suddenly felt like a fever dream, time out of time, a strange, compacted blur of limousines and gilded interiors, a world onto which a curtain had been briefly drawn back, then abruptly closed again.
This, in contrast, was real. This, I told myself, was where I could come each day until I had worked out my strategy. Here I would find the steps to forge a new route upward.
Knowledge is power, Clark.
“Ma’am.”
I opened my eyes to find a security guard in front of me. He stooped so that he was looking directly into my face. “You can’t sleep in here.”
“What?”
“You can’t sleep in here.”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” I said indignantly. “I was thinking.”
“Maybe think with your eyes open then, huh? Or you got to leave.” He turned away, murmuring something into a walkie-talkie. It took me a moment to register what he had really been saying to me. Two people at a nearby table looked up at me and then away. My face flushed. I saw the awkward glances of other library users around me. I looked down at my clothes, at my denim dungarees with the fleece-lined workman’s boots and my woolen hat. Not quite Bergdorf Goodman but hardly Vagrant City.
“Hey! I’m not homeless!” I called out at his departing back. “I have protested on behalf of this place! Mister! I AM NOT HOMELESS!” Two women looked up from their quiet conversation, one raising an eyebrow.
And then it occurred to me: I was.
22
Dear Ma,
Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve been in contact. We’re working round the clock on this Chinese deal here, and I’m often up all night coping with different time zones. If I sound a bit jaded, it’s because I feel it. I got the bonus, which was nice (am sending Georgina a chunk so she can buy that car she wants), but over the last few weeks I’ve realized ultimately I’m not really feeling it here anymore.
It’s not that I don’t like the lifestyle—and you know I’ve never been afraid of hard work. I just miss so many things about England. I miss the humor. I miss Sunday lunch. I miss hearing English accents, at least the non-phoney kind (you would not believe how many people end up plummier than Her Maj). I like being able to pop across for weekends in Paris or Barcelona or Rome. And the expat thing is pretty tedious. In the goldfish bowl of finance here you just end up running into the same faces whether you’re in Nantucket or Manhattan. I know you think I have a type, but here it’s almost comical: blond hair, size zero, identikit wardrobes, off to the same Pilates classes...
So here’s the thing: do you remember Rupe? My old friend from Churchill’s? He says there’s an opening at his firm. His boss is flying out in a couple of weeks and wants to meet me. If all goes well I might be back in England sooner than you think.
I’ve loved New York. But everything has its time, and I think I’ve had mine.
Love, Will x
Over the next few days I rang up about numerous jobs on Craigslist, but the nice-sounding woman with the nanny job put the phone down on me when she heard I had no references, and the food-server jobs were already gone by the time I called. The shoe-shop assistant position was still available but the man I spoke to told me the wage would be two dollars an hour lower than advertised because of my lack of relevant retail experience, and I calculated that would barely leave me enough for travel. I spent my mornings in the diner, my afternoons in the library at Washington Heights, which was quiet and warm and, apart from that one security guard, nobody eyed me like they were waiting for me to start singing drunkenly or pee in a corner.
I would meet Josh for lunch in the noodle bar by his office every couple of days, update him on my job-hunting activities and try to ignore that, next to his immaculately dressed, go-getting presence, I felt increasingly like a grubby, sofa-hopping loser. “You’re going to be fine, Louisa. Just hang in there,” he would say, and kiss me as he left, like somehow we had already agreed to be boyfriend and girlfriend. I couldn’t think about the significance of this along with everything else I had to think about so I just figured that it was not actually abadthing, like so much in my life was, and could therefore be parked for now. Besides, he always tasted pleasingly minty.
I couldn’t stay in Nathan’s room much longer. The previous morning I had woken with his big arm slung over me and something hard pressing into the small of my back. The cushion wall had apparently gone awry, migrating to a chaotic heap at our feet. I froze, attempted to wriggle discreetly out of his sleeping grasp and he had opened his eyes, looked at me, then leaped out of bed as if he had been stung, a pillow clutched in front of his groin. “Mate. I didn’t mean—I wasn’t trying to—”
“No idea what you’re talking about!” I insisted, pulling a sweatshirt over my head. I couldn’t look at him in case it—
He hopped from foot to foot. “I was just—I didn’t realize I... Ah, mate. Ah, Jeez.”
“It’s fine! I needed to get up anyway!” I bolted and hid in the tinybathroom for ten minutes, my cheeks burning, while I listened to him crashing around and getting dressed. He was gone before I came out.
