And that week there was significant crap. Garry’s daughter dropped out of college, putting him in a foul mood, so that every time Agnes left the car he would rail about ungrateful children who didn’t understand sacrifice or the value of a working man’s dollar. Ilaria was reduced to constant mute fury by Agnes’s more bizarre habits, such as ordering food she subsequently decided she didn’t want to eat, or locking her dressing room when she wasn’t in it, so that Ilaria couldn’t put her clothes away. ‘She wants me to put her underwear in the hallway? She wants her sexytime outfits on full display to the grocery man? What is she hiding in there anyway?’
Michael flitted through the apartment like a ghost, wearing the exhausted, harried expression of a man doing two jobs – and even Nathan lost some of his equanimity and snapped at the Japanese cat lady when she suggested that the unexpected deposit in Nathan’s shoe was the result of his ‘bad energy’. ‘I’ll give her bad ruddy energy,’ he grumbled, as he dropped his running shoes into a bin. Mrs De Witt knocked on our door twice in a week to complain about the piano, and in retaliation Agnes put on a recording of a piece called ‘The Devil’s Staircase’, and turned it up loud just before we went out. ‘Ligeti,’ she sniffed, checking her make-up in her compact as we headed down in the lift, the hammering, atonal notes climbing and receding above us. I quietly texted Ilaria in private and asked her to turn it off once we had gone.
The temperature dropped, the sidewalks became even more congested, and the Christmas displays began to creep into the shopfronts, like a gaudy, glittering rash. I booked my flights home with little anticipation, no longer knowing what kind of welcome I’d be returning to. I called my sister, hoping she wouldn’t ask too many questions. I needn’t have worried. She was as talkative as I had ever known her, chatting about Thom’s school projects, his new friends from the estate, his football prowess. I asked her about her boyfriend and she grew uncharacteristically quiet.
‘Are you going to tell us anything about him? You know it’s driving Mum nuts.’
‘Are you still coming home at Christmas?’
‘Yup.’
‘Then I might introduce you. If you can manage not to be a complete eejit for a couple of hours.’
‘Has he met Thom?’
‘This weekend,’ she said, her voice suddenly a little less confident. ‘I’ve kept them separate till now. What if it doesn’t work? I mean, Eddie loves kids but what if they don’t –’
‘Eddie!’
She sighed. ‘Yes. Eddie.’
‘Eddie. Eddie and Treena. Eddie and Treena sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.’
‘You are such a child.’
It was the first time I had laughed all week. ‘They’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘And once you’ve done that you can take him to meet Mum and Dad. Then you’ll be the one Mum keeps asking about wedding bells and I can take a Maternal Guilt Trip Vacation.’
‘It’s “holiday”. You’re not American. And like that’s ever going to happen. You know she’s worried you’ll be too grand to talk to them at Christmas? She thinks you won’t want to get in Daddy’s van from the airport because you’ve got used to riding in limousines.’
‘It’s true. I have.’
‘Seriously, what’s going on? You’ve said nothing about what’s happening with you.’
‘Loving New York,’ I said, smooth as a mantra. ‘Working hard.’
‘Oh, crap. I’ve got to go. Thom’s woken up.’
‘Let me know how it goes.’
‘I will. Unless it goes badly, in which case I’ll be emigrating without saying a word to anyone ever for the rest of my life.’
‘That’s our family. Always a proportionate response.’
Saturday served itself up cold, with a side order of gales. I hadn’t known quite how brutal the winds could be in New York. It was as if the tall buildings funnelled any breeze, polishing it hard and fast into something icy and fierce and solid. I frequently felt as if I were walking in some kind of sadistic wind tunnel. I kept my head down, my body at an angle of forty-five degrees and, occasionally reaching out to clutch at fire hydrants or lamp posts, I caught the subway to the Vintage Clothes Emporium, stayed for a coffee to thaw out and bought a zebra-print coat at the marked-down bargain price of twelve dollars. In truth, I lingered. I didn’t want to go back to my silent little room, with Ilaria’s news programme burbling down the corridor, its ghostly echoes of Sam and the temptation to check my email every fifteen minutes. I got home when it was already dark and I was cold and weary enough not to be restless or submerged in that persistent New York feeling – that staying in meant I was missing out on something.
I sat and watched TV in my room and thought about writing Sam an email but I was still angry enough not to feel conciliatory and wasn’t sure what I had to say was about to make anything better. I’d borrowed a novel by John Updike from Mr Gopnik’s shelves but it was all about the complexities of modern relationships, and everyone in it seemed unhappy or was lusting madly after someone else, so in the end I turned off the light and slept.
The next morning when I came down Meena was in the lobby. She was minus children this time, but accompanied by Ashok, who was not in his uniform. I startled a little at the sight of him in civvies, rootling under his desk. It occurred to me suddenly how much easier it was for the rich to refuse to know anything about us when we weren’t dressed as individuals.
‘Hey, Miss Louisa,’ he said. ‘Forgot my hat. Had to pop in before we head to the library.’
‘The one they want to close?’
‘Yup,’ Ashok said. ‘You want to come with us?’
‘Come help us save our library, Louisa!’ Meena clapped me on the back with a mitten-clad hand. ‘We need all the help we can get!’
I had been planning to go to the coffee shop, but I had nothing else to do and Sunday stretched ahead of me like a wasteland, so I agreed. They handed me a placard, saying ‘A LIBRARY IS MORE THAN BOOKS’, and checked that I had a hat and gloves. ‘You’re good for an hour or two, but you get really chilled by the third,’ Meena said, as we walked out. She was what my father would have called ballsy – a voluptuous, big-haired sexy New Yorker, who had a smart retort for everything her husband said, and loved to rib him about his hair, his handling of their children, his sexual prowess. She had a huge, throaty laugh and took no crap from anyone. He plainly adored her. They called each other ‘baby’ so often that I occasionally wondered if they had forgotten each other’s names.
We caught the subway north to Washington Heights and talked about how he had taken the job as a temporary measure when Meena first got pregnant, and how when the children were school age he was going to start looking around for something else, something with office hours, so that he could help out more. (‘But the health benefits are good. Makes it hard to leave.’) They had met at college – I was ashamed to admit I had assumed they were an arranged marriage.
When I’d told her, Meena had exploded into laughter. Girl? You think I wouldn’t have made my parents pick me better than him?