“I know. So tell me, I can take it.”
“Pay the rent, it’s overdue.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“But I thought…”
“The bill is in the closet with all the other mail. I’m sorry; I know you don’t want to open any of it, but just find that one. Don’t lose our apartment. Be a hero, baby.”
24
Anna, where are you?” It was Rachel.
“Work.”
“It’s ten past eight on a Friday night! It’s your first week back, you should be building up slowly.”
“I know, but I’ve so much to do and it’s taking me forever to do it.”
Spending half the previous night watching Knight Rider, instead of being asleep, hadn’t helped. I’d been wiped all day—exhausted and slow-witted. Lauryn was piling stuff on me, Franklin was on at me to get my hair cut, and to add to my woes, a small, determined gang of EarthSource girls thought I was an alcoholic.
One of them—Koo? Aroon? Some silly earthy name, anyway—came right up to my desk on Friday morning and invited me to a lunchtime meeting—that’s AA meeting, by the way—with some of the other “McArthur recovery babes.”
My heart sank to the soles of my glittery, wedge-heeled sneakers. The weariness! “Thank you,” I managed. “That’s very nice of you…” I wanted to say her name, but wasn’t sure what it was, so had to make do with a mumbly, all-purpose “ooo” sound. “But I’m not an alcoholic.”
“Still in denial?” A sad shake of her middle-parted, lank-haired head. “Surrender to win, Anna, surrender to win.”
“Okay.” It was just easier to agree.
“It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it. If you want to drink it’s your business, but if you wanna stop, it’s ours.”
“Thank you. You’re lovely.” Now please piss off before Lauryn comes over.
Rachel said, “Some of the Real Men are calling round to play Scrabble. It might be an easy way for you to start meeting people again. Could you face it?”
Could I? I didn’t want to be alone. Mind you, I didn’t really want to be with anyone else either. Paradox as that was, it made sense: I simply wanted to be with Aidan.
In the four days I’d been back in New York, I’d never had so many invitations in my life. Everyone had been fantastic, but, as yet, the only people I’d been up for were Jacqui and Rachel (who came as a job lot with Luke). There were loads of people I still had to get back to: Leon and Dana; Ornesto, our Jolly Boy upstairs neighbor; Aidan’s mother. Anyway, all in good time…
I switched off my PC and jumped in a cab on Fifty-eighth Street—it was getting slightly easier to be in them. En route I called Jacqui and invited her along.
“Scrabble with the Real Men? I’d rather set myself on fire, but thanks for asking.”
Apart from Luke, Jacqui had no time for the Real Men.
Luke let me in. Although his rocker-type hair was a lot shorter now than when he’d first met Rachel, he still wore his jeans just that smidgen too tight. My eyes were always drawn inexorably to his crotch. I had no control over it. It was a bit like the way everyone had started addressing all conversation to my scar instead of to me.
“Come on in,” he invited my scar. “Rachel’s just having a quick shower.”
“Grand,” I said, to his crotch.
Rachel and Luke’s apartment was a rent-controlled place in the East Village. It was massive by New York standards, which meant you could stand in the middle of the living room and not be able to touch all four walls. They’d lived there for a long time, nearly five years, and it was very cozy and comfortable and full of stuff with meaning: patchwork quilts and cushions which had been embroidered by addicts Rachel had helped, shells Luke had brought back from the the picnic celebrating Rachel’s fourth clean-and-sober birthday—that sort of thing. Lamps cast pools of soft light, and the air smelled of the cut flowers in a bowl on the coffee table.
“Beer, wine, water?” Luke asked.
“Water,” I told his crotch. I was afraid that if I started drinking I would never stop.
The buzzer went. “It’s Joey,” Luke said. Joey was his best friend. “You sure you’ll be okay around him?”
I tried to tell Luke’s face, I really did, but my eyes just slid down his chest and fastened onto his bulge. “No problem.”
Seconds later, Joey strode in, closed the door behind him with some fancy foot rotation, grabbed a straight-backed chair, twirled it round, pulled it to him, and planted himself in it, facing into the chair back, all without splitting his jeans or squashing his goolies. Very gracefully done.
“Hey, Anna, sorry about your…you know…it’s rough.” He was one person who wouldn’t be killing me with kindness. Suited me.
He gave my scar a long, brazen stare, then produced a packet of cigarettes and hit the box in some fashion, and a cigarette somersaulted upward and into his mouth. In a fluid arc, he scratched a match along the red-brick wall, and just as he was about to light the cigarette, Rachel’s disembodied voice, from another room, said, “Joey, put it out.”
He froze in surprise, the lit match in his hand, and mumbled through the cigarette in his mouth, “I didn’t know she was home yet.”
“Oh, I’m home all right. Out, Joey. Now.”
“Fuck,” he said, shaking the match out as it started burning his fingers. Slowly he returned the cigarette to its box, then sat—there’s no other word for it—brooding.
But it was nothing to do with Rachel not letting him smoke. Joey was always like that.
His habitual humor was one of dissatisfaction with the world. Lots of people, after meeting him for the first time, would say, with sudden venom, “What the fuck was up with that Joey bloke?”
He could be actively and gratuitously obnoxious. Like, if someone got a radical new haircut and everyone else would be oohing and aahing, Joey would be more likely to say, “Sue. You’d get millions.”
Other times he said nothing at all. Just sat in a group of people watching everyone with narrowed eyes, his mouth set in a grim line, while something—a muscle? a vein?—jumped in his jaw. As a result of this, a lot of women found him attractive. I always knew that they had crossed the line from thinking he was a grumpy fucker to fancying him when they said, “I’ve never noticed it before, but Joey looks a bit like Jon Bon Jovi, doesn’t he?”