Addie makes her way uptown, reading The Odyssey by streetlight. It’s been a while since she read anything in Greek, but the poetic cadence of the epic poem draws her back into the stride of the old language, and by the time the Baxter comes into sight, she is half-lost in the image of the ship at sea, looking forward to a glass of wine and a hot bath.
And destined for neither.
Her timing is either very good, or very bad, depending on how you look at it, because Addie rounds the corner onto Fifty-sixth just as a black sedan pulls up in front of the Baxter and James St. Clair steps out onto the curb. He’s back from his filming, tan and seemingly happy, wearing a pair of sunglasses despite the fact it’s after dark. Addie slows, and stops, hovers across the street as the doorman helps him unload and carry his bags inside. “Shit,” she mutters under her breath as her night dissolves. No bubble
baths, no bottles of merlot.
She sighs and retreats to the intersection, trying to decide what to do next.
To her left, Central Park unravels like a dark green cloth in the center of the city.
To her right, Manhattan rises in jagged lines, block after block of crowded buildings from Midtown down to the Financial District.
She goes right, making her way down toward the East Village.
Her stomach begins to growl, and on Second, she catches sight of dinner. A young man on a bicycle dismounts on the curb, unpacks an order from the zippered case behind the seat, and jogs the plastic bag up to the building. Addie drifts up to the bike and reaches in. It’s Chinese, she
guesses, going by the size and shape of the containers, the paper edges folded and bound with thin metal handles. She plucks out a carton, and a pair of disposable chopsticks, and slips away before the man at the door has even paid.
There was a time she felt guilty about stealing.
But the guilt, like so many things, has worn away, and even though the hunger can’t kill her, it still hurts as though it will.
Addie makes her way toward Avenue C, scooping lo mein into her mouth as her legs carry her through the Village to a brick building with a green door. She dumps the empty carton in a trash can on the corner and reaches the building entrance just as a man is coming out. She smiles at him, and he smiles back and holds the door.
Inside, she climbs four flights of narrow steps to a steel door at the top, reaches up, and feels along the dusty frame for the small silver key, discovered last fall, when she and a lover stumbled home, the two a tangle of limbs on the stairs. Sam’s lips pressed beneath her jaw, paint-streaked fingers sliding beneath the waistband of her jeans.
It was, for Sam, a rare impulsive moment.
It was, for Addie, the second month of an affair.
A passionate affair, to be sure, but only because time is a luxury she can’t afford. Sure, she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with the knowing. There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. Not for them. So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.
Her fingers close around the key, the metal scraping softly as she drags it from its hiding spot. It takes three tries in the rusted old lock, just like it did that first night, but then the door swings open, and she steps out onto the building’s roof. A breeze kicks up, and she shoves her hands in the pocket of her leather jacket as she crosses the roof.
It’s empty, save for a trio of lawn chairs, each of them imperfect in its own way—seats warped, stuck in different poses of recline, one arm hanging at a broken angle. A stained cooler sits nearby, and a string of fairy lights hangs between laundry posts, transforming the roof into a shabby, weather-worn oasis.
It’s quiet up here—not silent, that is a thing she’s yet to find in a city, a thing she is beginning to think lost amid the weeds of the old world—but as quiet as it gets in this part of Manhattan. And yet, it is not the same kind of quiet that stifled her at James’s place, not the empty, internal quiet of places too big for one. It is a living quiet, full of distant shouts and car horns and stereo bass reduced to an ambient static.
A low brick wall surrounds the roof, and Addie lets herself lean forward against it, resting her elbows and looking out until the building falls away, and all she can see is the lights of Manhattan, tracing patterns against the vast and starless sky.
Addie misses stars.
She met a boy, back in ’65, and when she told him that, he drove her an hour outside of L.A., just to see them. The way his face glowed with pride when he pulled over in the dark and pointed up. Addie had craned her head and looked at the meager offering, the spare string of lights across the sky, and felt something in her sag. A heavy sadness, like loss. And for the first time in a century, she longed for Villon. For home. For a place where the stars were so bright they formed a river, a stream of silver and purple light against the dark.
She looks up now, over the rooftops, and wonders if, after all this time, the darkness is still watching. Even though it has been so long. Even though he told her once that he doesn’t keep track of every life, pointed out that the world was big and full of souls, and he had far more to occupy himself than thoughts of her.
The rooftop door crashes open behind her, and a handful of people stumble out.
Two guys. Two girls. And Sam.
Wrapped in a white sweater and pale gray jeans, her body like a brushstroke, long and lean and bright against the backdrop of the darkened roof. Her hair is longer now, wild blond curls escaping a messy bun. Streaks of red paint dab her forearms where the sleeves are pushed up, and Addie wonders, almost absently, what she’s working on. She is a painter. Abstracts, mostly. Her place, already small, made smaller by the stacks of canvas propped against the walls. Her name, crisp and easy, only Samantha
on her finished work, or when traced across a spine in the middle of the night.
The other four move in a huddle of noise across the roof, one of the guys in the middle of a story, but Sam lags behind a step, head tipped back to savor the crisp night air, and Addie wishes she had something else to stare at. An anchor to keep her from falling into the easy gravity of the other girl’s orbit.
She does, of course.
The Odyssey.
Addie is about to bury her gaze in the book, when Sam’s blue eyes dip down from the sky and find her own. The painter smiles, and for an instant, it is August again, and they are laughing over beers on a bar patio, Addie lifting the hair off her neck to calm the flush of summer heat. Sam leaning in to blow on her skin. It is September, and they are in her unmade bed, their fingers tangled in the sheets and with each other as Addie’s mouth traces the dark warmth between Sam’s legs.
Addie’s heart slams in her chest as the girl peels away from her group and casually wanders over. “Sorry for crashing your peace.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” says Addie, forcing her gaze out, as if studying the city, even though Sam always made her feel like a sunflower, unconsciously angling toward the other girl’s light.
“These days, everyone’s looking down,” muses Sam. “It’s nice to see someone looking up.”
Time slides. It’s the same thing Sam said the first time they met. And the sixth. And the tenth. But it’s not just a line. Sam has an artist’s eye, present, searching, the kind that studies their subject and sees something more than shapes.
Addie turns away, waits for the sound of retreating steps, but instead, she hears the snap of a lighter, and then Sam is beside her, a white-blond curl dancing at the edge of her sight. She gives in, glances over.
“Could I steal one of those?” she asks, nodding at the cigarette.
Sam smiles. “You could. But you don’t need to.” She draws another from the box and hands it over, along with a neon blue lighter. Addie takes them, tucks the cigarette between her lips and drags her thumb along the starter. Luckily the breeze is up, and she has an excuse, watching the flame as it goes out.
Goes out. Goes out. Goes out. “Here.”
Sam steps closer, her shoulder brushing Addie’s as she steps in to block the wind. She smells like the chocolate-chip cookies that her neighbor bakes whenever he’s stressed, like the lavender soap she uses to scrub paint from her fingers, the coconut conditioner she leaves in her curls at night.
Addie has never loved the taste of tobacco, but the smoke warms her chest, and it gives her something to do with her hands, a thing to focus on besides Sam. They are so close, breaths fogging the same bit of air, and then Sam reaches out and touches one of the freckles on Addie’s right cheek, the way she did the first time they met, a gesture so simple and still so intimate.
“You have stars,” she says, and Addie’s chest tightens, twists again.
Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vecu.
She has to fight the urge to close the gap, to run her palm along the long slope of Sam’s neck, to let it rest against the nape, where Addie knows it fits so well. They stand in silence, blowing out clouds of pale smoke, the other four laughing and shouting at their backs, until one of the guys—Eric? Aaron?—calls Sam over, and just like that, she is slipping away, back across the roof. Addie fights the urge to tighten her grip, instead of letting go—again.
But she does.
Leans against the low brick wall and listens to them talk, about life, about getting old, about bucket lists and bad decisions, and then one of the girls says, “Shit, we’re gonna be late.” And just like that, beers get finished, cigarettes put out, and the group of them drifts back toward the rooftop door, all five retreating like a tide.
Sam is the last to go.
She slows, glances over her shoulder, flashing a last smile at Addie before she ducks inside, and Addie knows she could catch her if she runs, could beat the closing door.
She doesn’t move. The metal bangs shut.
Addie sags against the brick wall.
Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be
remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods.
If no one heard it, did it happen?
If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
Addie stubs the cigarette out on the brick ledge, and turns her back on the skyline, makes her way to the broken chairs and the cooler wedged between them. She finds a single beer floating amid the half-frozen melt and twists off the cap, sinking onto the least-damaged lawn chair.
It is not so cold tonight, and she is too tired to go looking for another bed.
The glow of the fairy lights is just enough to see by, and Addie stretches out in the lawn chair, and opens The Odyssey, and reads of strange lands, and monsters, and men who can’t ever go home, until the cold lulls her to sleep.
