Page 116 of Still Me
“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 toignore 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]
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 whole 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 totaledthousands 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.”
