Night settles over Addie as she crosses the Brooklyn Bridge.
The promise of spring has retreated like a tide, replaced again by a damp winter chill, and she pulls her jacket close, breath fogging as she starts the long stretch up the length of Manhattan.
It would be easy enough to take the subway, but Addie has never liked being underground, where the air is close and stale, the tunnels too much like tombs. Being trapped, buried alive, these are the things that scare you when you cannot die. Besides, she doesn’t mind walking, knows the strength of her own limbs, relishes the kind of tired she used to dread.
Still, it’s late, and her cheeks are numb, her legs weary, by the time she reaches the Baxter on Fifty-sixth.
A man in a trim gray coat holds the door, and her skin tingles at the sudden flush of central heat as she steps into the Baxter’s marble lobby. She is already dreaming of a hot shower and a soft bed, already moving toward the open elevator, when the man behind the desk rises from his seat.
“Good evening,” he says. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see James,” she says, without slowing. “Twenty-third floor.” The man frowns. “He isn’t in.”
“Even better,” she says, stepping into the elevator.
“Ma’am,” he calls, starting after her, “you can’t just—” but the doors are already closing. He knows he will not make it, is already turning back toward the desk, reaching for the phone to call security, and that is the last thing she sees before the doors slide shut between them. Perhaps he will get the phone to his ear, even begin to dial before the thought slips from his mind, and then he will look down at the receiver in his hand and wonder
what he was thinking, apologize profusely to the voice on the line before sinking back into his seat.
 |
The apartment belongs to James St. Clair.
They had met at a coffee shop downtown a couple months ago. The seats were all taken when he came over, wisps of blond escaping the hem of a winter hat, glasses fogging from the cold. That day Addie was Rebecca, and before he’d even introduced himself, James had asked if he could share her table, saw that she was reading Colette’s Chéri, and managed a few lines of broken, blushing French. He sat, and soon easy smiles gave way to easy conversation. Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it’s home.
James was like that, instantly likable.
When he asked, she said that she was a poet (an easy lie, as no one ever asked for proof), and he told her he was between jobs, and she nursed her coffee for as long as she could, but eventually her cup was empty, and so was his, and new customers were circling, buzzard-like, in search of chairs, but when he began to rise, she’d felt that old familiar sadness. And then James asked if she liked ice cream, and even though it was January, the ground outside slicked with ice and paving salt, Addie said she did, and this time when they stood, they stood together.
Now she types the six-digit code into the keypad on his door and steps inside.
The lights come on, revealing pale wood floors, and clean marble counters, lush curtains and furniture that still looks unused. A high-backed chair. A cream sofa. A table neatly stacked with books.
She unzips her boots, steps out of them beside the door, and pads barefoot through the apartment, tossing her jacket over the arm of a chair. In the kitchen, she pours herself a glass of merlot, finds a block of Gruyère in a fridge drawer and a box of gourmet crackers in the cupboard, carries her makeshift picnic into the living room, the city unfolding beyond the floor- to-ceiling windows.
Addie sifts through his records, puts on a pressing of Billie Holiday, and retreats to the cream sofa, knees tucked up beneath her as she eats.
She would love a place like this. A place of her own. A bed molded to her body. A wardrobe full of clothes. A home, decorated with markers of the life she’s lived, the material evidence of memory. But she cannot seem to hold on to anything for long.
It is not as though she hasn’t tried.
Over the years, she’s collected books, hoarded art, hidden fine dresses away in chests and locked them there. But no matter what she does, things always go missing. They vanish, one by one, or all at once, stolen by some strange circumstance, or simply time. Only in New Orleans did she have a home, and even that was not hers, but theirs, and it is gone.
The only thing she cannot seem to rid herself of is the ring.
There was a time when she couldn’t bear to part with it again. A time when she mourned its loss. A time when her heart soared to hold it, so many decades later.
Now, she cannot stand the sight of it. It is an unwelcome weight in her pocket, an unwanted reminder of another loss. And every time her fingers skim the wood, she feels the darkness kissing her knuckle as he slides the band back on.
See? Now we are even.
Addie shudders, upsetting her glass, and drops of red wine splash over the rim, landing like blood on the cream sofa. She does not curse, does not spring to her feet to fetch club soda and a towel. She simply watches as the stain soaks in, and through, and disappears. As if it was never there.
As if she was never there.
Addie rises, and goes to run herself a bath, soaks away the city grime with scented oil, scrubs herself clean with hundred-dollar soap.
When everything slips through your fingers, you learn to savor the feel of nice things against your palm.
She settles back into the tub, and sighs, breathing in a mist of lavender and mint.
They went for ice cream that day, she and James, ate it inside the shop, heads bowed together as they stole toppings from each other’s cups. His hat sat discarded on the table, his blond curls on full display, and he was striking, yes, but it still took her a while to notice the looks.
Addie was used to passing glances—her features are sharp, but feminine, her eyes bright above the constellation of freckles on her cheeks, a kind of
timeless beauty, she’s been told—but this was different. Heads were turning. Gazes lingered. And when she wondered why, he looked at her with such cheerful surprise, and confessed that he was, in fact, an actor—in a show that was currently quite popular. He blushed when he said it, looked away, then back to study her face, as if braced for some fundamental change. But Addie has never seen his work, and even if she had, she is not one to blush at fame. She has lived too long, and known too many artists. And even still, or perhaps more to the point, Addie prefers the ones who aren’t yet finished, the ones still looking for their shape.
And so James and Addie carried on.
She teased him about his loafers, his sweater, his wire-frame glasses. He told her he was born in the wrong decade.
She told him she was born in the wrong century.
He laughed, and she didn’t, but there was something old-fashioned in his manner. Only twenty-six, but when he talked, he had the easy cadence, the slow precision, of a man who knew the weight of his own voice, belonged to the class of young men who dressed like their fathers, the charade of those too eager to grow old.
Hollywood had seen it, too. He kept getting cast in period pieces. “I’ve got a face for sepia,” he joked.
Addie smiled. “Better than a face for radio.”
It was a lovely face, but there was something wrong, the too-steady smile of a man with a secret. They made it through the ice cream before he came undone. That easy joy of his flickered, and went out, and he dropped the plastic spoon down into the cup and closed his eyes, and said, “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” she asked, and he flung himself back in his seat, and ran his fingers through his hair. To the strangers on the street it might have looked like such a careless gesture, a feline stretch, but she could see the anguish in his face as he said it.
“You are so beautiful, and kind, and fun.” “But?” she pressed, sensing the turn. “I’m gay.”
The word, like a hitch in his throat, as he explained that there was so much pressure, that he hated the gaze of the media and all its demands. That
people were beginning to whisper, to wonder, and he wasn’t ready for them to know.
Addie realized, then, that they were on a stage. Propped before the plate- glass windows of the ice-cream shop, for everyone to see, and James was still apologizing, saying that he shouldn’t have flirted, shouldn’t have used her in this way, but she wasn’t really listening. His blue eyes went somewhat glassy as he spoke, and she wondered if this was what he called on when the script ordered tears. If this was the place he went. Addie has secrets, too, of course, though she cannot help but keep them.
Still, she knows what it’s like, to have a truth erased. “I understand,” he was saying, “if you want to go.”
But Addie didn’t stand up, didn’t reach for her coat. She simply leaned in, and stole a blueberry from the edge of his bowl.
“I don’t know about you,” she said lightly, “but I’m having a lovely day.”
James let out a shaky breath, blinking away tears, and smiled. “So am I,” he said, and things were better after that.
It is so much easier to share a secret than to keep one, and when they stepped outside again, hand in hand, they were conspirators, made giddy by their private knowledge. She was not worried about being noticed, being seen, knew that if there were photos, they would never turn out.
(There were photos, but her face was always conveniently in motion or obscured, and she remained a mystery girl in the tabloids for the next week, until the headlines inevitably moved on to juicier fare.)
They had come back here, to his apartment at the Baxter, for a drink. His tables were covered in a flurry of books and papers, all relating to the Second World War. He was preparing for a role, he told her, reading every firsthand account he could find. He showed them to her, these printed reproductions, and Addie said that she’d been fascinated by the war, that she knew a few stories, told them as if they were someone else’s, a stranger’s experience instead of her own. James listened, folded into the corner of the cream sofa, his eyes pressed shut and a glass of whisky balanced on his chest as she spoke.
They fell asleep side by side in the king-sized bed, in the shadow of each other’s warmth, and the next morning, Addie woke before dawn and slipped away, sparing them both the discomfort of a good-bye.
She has the sense that they would have been friends. If he’d remembered. She tries not to think about that—she swears sometimes her memory runs forward as well as back, unspooling to show the roads she’ll never get to travel. But that way lies madness, and she has learned not to follow.
Now she is back here, but he is not.
Addie wraps herself in one of James’s plush terry robes, and throws open the French doors, stepping out onto the bedroom balcony. The wind is up, the cold stinging the soles of her bare feet. The city sprawls around her like a low night sky, full of artificial stars, and she shoves her hands into the pockets of the robe, and feels it, resting on the bottom of the empty fold.
A small circle of smooth wood.
She sighs, closes her hand around the ring, and draws it out, leans her elbows on the balcony, and forces herself to look at the band in her open palm, to study it, as if she has not already memorized every warp and whorl. She traces the curve with her free hand, resists the urge to slip the band onto her finger. She has thought of it, of course, in darker moments, tired moments, but she will not be the one to break.
She tips her hand, and lets the ring fall over the edge of the balcony, down, down, into the dark.
Back inside, Addie pours herself another glass of wine and climbs into the magnificent bed, folds herself beneath the down duvet and between the Egyptian sheets, and wishes she’d gone into the Alloway, wishes that she’d sat at the bar and waited for Toby, with his messy curls and shy smile. Toby, who smells of honey, and plays bodies like instruments, and takes up so much space in bed.
