The Girl Next Door (9 page)

‘On an empty stomach?’

‘So it would seem.’

‘What were the people like?’

‘The men were nice. They’re so polite. Formal, almost. Like Henry James heroes.’

‘Beats most blokes I ever met in London. The women?’

‘Terrifying.’

‘How so?’

‘So… so perfect. Tiny. I mean really, really tiny. Perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect nails. Perfectly huge diamonds. Seriously, Cath. Each one of them had a rock on the size of Gibraltar.’

‘Paste. Bound to be.’

‘Don’t think so. Real.’

‘Okay – so they were perfect. Were they friendly?’

‘Friendly enough. But kind of stiff, too, you know? We’d nothing in common. There wasn’t one of them I felt I really, you know, connected with.’

‘Do you need to? Connect with them, I mean?’

‘No. Not really. That’s not it, though. But who am I going to hang around with? I had high hopes for them. That I’d meet someone, just one woman, even, that I’d feel comfortable with. It’s been ages. And so far my best friends are the doorman and the old lady from downstairs who must be eighty‐odd.’

‘She sounds great.’

‘She is great. But that’s not enough, is it?’

It wasn’t, and Cath knew it as well as she did.

She and Ed had argued, a little, in the cab on the way back uptown, although Eve didn’t tell Cath that part. She had a sneaking suspicion it didn’t show her husband in his best light.

He said she wasn’t trying. She couldn’t believe he could be that mean. She’d been and bought the dress, hadn’t she? Had her hair done?

That didn’t have anything to do with it, Ed had said. It might have helped if he’d noticed when she came in, but he hadn’t. He’d been propping up the bar, and she’d been the first girl to get there (the only one not rushing in from somewhere else, the only one who’d had nothing more pressing to do today than shop for a dress and have her hair done). He’d kissed her, but he hadn’t said anything and she wasn’t entirely sure he’d even be able to tell her what was different about her.

How could he be so stupid? she’d retorted. Could he not see the difference between her and those women?

He’d said the only difference he could see was that they had tried to be friendly, and have a nice time, and that she hadn’t. The remark had snapped out of him irritably, almost shocking her.

She’d turned away from him in the cab, too tired and headachy from smiling through dinner to argue, and watched twenty, thirty, forty city blocks speed by. Even late at night, it was busy. The pavements were thronged with people.

Back in the apartment, she had gone straight to bed, and he’d come later, curled himself against her back, his big arm around her, saying that he was sorry, that what he had said was unforgivable. She’d patted his arm in unspoken pardon, half asleep, and half panicking, her head aching.

He was right.

Early on, when they were still tourists in the city, they’d been walking in Central Park. She was still, weeks and weeks later, exploring the space. Tourists never really went into the top part. They stayed south, wandering around and staring at the maps, at the Wollman Rink, where she could never stray without thinking of
Love Story
– Ali McGraw, facing imminent death so prettily, and Ryan O’Neal, not cold at all in the snow with just a sports jacket on. The Dairy and the Carousel and the Alice in Wonderland sculpture by the Boat Pond. The Zoo, with its huge bird nets and insane polar bears, butting each end of their tiny enclosure as they swam.

They all missed the best parts of the park. If you kept going, once you’d strolled up the Promenade, down the wide steps at the Bethesda Fountain that Mel Gibson had trodden in
Ransom
, and across, past the fountain where George Clooney carried Michelle Pfeiffer in
One Fine Day
, north of the Boathouse, you got to Eve’s favourite parts. Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle, the Great Lawn. The odd tourist wandered in here after a trip to the Met or the Guggenheim, but mostly you just saw New Yorkers, once you got this far. She thought the very best view to be had in the entire city was the one from the north side of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, way up at 96th Street. So long as she stood clear of the runners and power walkers lapping her, Eve could stand for long minutes and watch the skyline of the city from there, and it always excited her. Always amazed her that this place, this extraordinary place, was where she lived now. It was quiet enough, in this green lung, to hear yourself think. She came most days.

She and Ed had eaten a sandwich lunch, right at the beginning, at the Boathouse, one Sunday afternoon. Not in the posh part with white tablecloths and out of work actors waiting tables. In the bar next door, where new arrivals congregated by the doorways waiting to pounce on tables as they came free, glaring at slow eaters and those who dared nurse the last half inch of lager in their glass. She’d noticed a woman two tables down, eating alone, reading the
New York Times
. She looked like Bodicea – she was tall, you could tell, and wide – not fat, but sturdy, and strong. She had a waist‐length silvery white plait of hair that hung across one shoulder, and she was wearing a sort of corset, in leather, that laced up the front. Behind her was one of those giant backpacks that parents buy their kids at the start of their gap years. Old and grubby, this one was stuffed full, and an extraordinary collection of items was attached by strings and chains and ropes to the outside – a small saucepan, two or three days’ worth of newspapers and a David Foster Wallace paperback, a tarpaulin. The woman was clearly homeless, but she didn’t seem dirty or ill fed. She was eating a sandwich. But not as though she was ravenous. What made Eve stare beyond the odd spectacle of a person like her in a place like the Boathouse was her extraordinary carriage. She held herself aloft, dignified, very still and calm. She didn’t appear in the least discomfited by either her situation or by the stares of other diners. She was reading the paper, eating her sandwich, minding her own business, utterly self‐contained.

Afterwards, when they’d left, Eve had mentioned her to Ed. ‘Did you see her?’

‘Yeah. I’ve seen her before, actually.’

‘When?’ New York was strange like that – eight million people here, but you saw random familiar faces almost every day.

‘Out running. I think she lives in the ramble, up there.’ The ramble was the wildest part of the park, just behind the Boathouse, where the paths wandered through trees and scrub. You could get far enough into it to forget you were in the midst of the city. ‘I’ve seen her a few times, actually.’

‘Lives there? Actually, all the time, lives there?’

‘I don’t expect she’s the only one. It almost seems like a bit of a shanty town in there. But yeah, I think so. Did you see the saucepan and stuff? And the newspapers? I think they use them to stuff their clothing at night, make an extra layer against the cold. She had a mat, too. Did you see it?’

Eve nodded. ‘That’s terrible. God – I can’t imagine.’

‘Me neither. I expect we’ll find it even harder in February, when it’s really brass monkeys out here.’

‘And they don’t do anything about it? The city?’

‘What can they do? Someone at work told me that when the temperature drops really low they’re obligated to go out and try and round them up, take them to shelters or something. But they don’t want to go. They hide, apparently.’

‘Christ – how bad must a shelter be, if you would rather be outside in the freezing cold.’ Eve shuddered. ‘How does it happen to them, do you suppose?’

Ed shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I think some of them choose it.’

‘How could you choose to be homeless?’

‘I think we have no idea how bloody lucky we are – I think some people opt out. Can’t cope. They’d rather be in here – relying on themselves, left alone – than coping with the world the rest of us live in.’

‘Do you think she chose it?’

‘She looks pretty content with it.’

The woman had looked exactly that way – content. Like she had everything she needed.

Eve wondered what her story was. ‘I suppose.’ She pushed her arm through Ed’s and leant into him. ‘And I think I get it, in a weird sort of way. Think about how simple life is for her.’

‘Simple? I should think it is unimaginably hard.’

‘Sure, but in a survival, primeval way. Food, water, a place to sleep. She’s not worrying about her tax return, is she? Or whether she’s got the right stuff to wear to dinner? Or whether she’ll get invited to such and such a benefit.’

‘You sound like a Tory.’

‘Well, I’m the age for it, aren’t I?’

‘Still think I’d rather be us.’

‘Still think if I chose to be her, I’d have hitched my way down south. Sleeping rough has got to be easier in Miami than here …’

They’d stopped talking about it then, distracted by something or other. It was a miserable subject anyway. But she hadn’t forgotten about the woman in the Boathouse. She looked for her most days, if she was walking in this part of the park. She’d seen her once or twice, at a distance. She’d been sitting on a park bench, the backpack beside her. Not reading or talking. Just sitting, staring ahead. Eve had approached, wondering if she was brave enough to take a seat beside her – she’d learnt early on that the homeless in the park usually had a bench to themselves. She didn’t know why she was so interested, and when she got close enough to the bench, it turned out she wasn’t brave enough to sit down. But she looked right at the woman, and the woman looked right back. When she was almost past her, the woman nodded. And went back to staring.

Rachael

Rachael Schulman rarely did personal email before ten in the evening. She got home by seven without fail. Everyone at work knew that the Vice‐President in charge of Marketing and PR was going to leave at six thirty, no matter what crisis might rage around her. Bedtime was sacred, and she never, ever missed it. David wasn’t so lucky – his employers were not quite so empathetic, and his work as a litigator took him away quite often – not usually for more than one or two nights at a time, but then he wasn’t the fixed point in the children’s day – that was her. Rachael remembered her own mother, always home from work, always in court heels and a pencil skirt, kneeling beside her own bed every night in a mist of Chanel, to kiss her goodnight. Once the children had been settled – in Mia’s case, settled twice – she had the children’s lives to arrange: paediatrician, dentist, piano teacher, playdates, holiday camps, birthday parties. And their own lives: family occasions – immediate and extended – supper dates with friends, tickets to shows. There were invitations to extend and to reply to.

The house in Connecticut was a job in itself – pool guy and gardener in the summer, snow plough in the winter. She wouldn’t swap the house in Connecticut for anything, though – it was their haven, their sanctuary. They’d bought in the country long before they’d bought in the city, as soon as they had the money for it. Before, actually, they’d had quite enough money for it. Her mother had been astonished she’d chosen the country over the Hamptons. Rachael remembered the day they’d told her. She’d raised one eyebrow quizzically and asked, ‘What on earth will you
do
there?’ She and David had laughed about it afterwards – at the suggestion that beyond the manicured lawns and Atlantic beaches of Long Island there was no meaningful life. Each year, when she went back to her mother’s house, she knew how right she had been to make her family’s base somewhere else. She couldn’t imagine swapping it, as her mother seemed to imply she would, one day, ‘when they could afford it’. She wouldn’t swap any of it. There wasn’t much time to reflect on life, but if she ever did, she felt lucky to have the life she had always wanted. The life she had dreamed of.

But it took a lot of work, this perfect life. So email didn’t happen until late at night. These days, it counted towards her ‘down’ time. She would change into yoga trousers and an old USC sweatshirt, and take the laptop to the deepest sofa in the living room, preferably with a big glass of Pinot Noir, and begin to go through them. Yes, Jacob would love to come play Thursday after school. Sure, she’d volunteer to man a table at the school book fair. She couldn’t make dinner next Tuesday, but how about the following Friday, and yes, it would be great to get together… It was ten thirty before she got as far as Violet’s email about the roof terrace. It contained nothing particularly taxing, but it still made Rachael sigh. David, sitting on the opposite sofa, nursing his own glass, reading the
New Yorker
, heard her.

‘Big sigh?’

‘Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to be loud. I was just reading this note from Violet Wallace, about the “beautifying committee”. She wants us to say when we’re free to work.’

‘I don’t know why you joined in the first place. You’re never free. Especially in the summer – you’ll be up at the house, won’t you?’ Rachael worked a three‐day week in July and August, commuting down early Tuesday mornings, and returning on Thursday evenings. She’d arranged it that way, after Mia was born. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best she could do. David came on Friday nights, and went back by train on Sunday evenings. Milena, the nanny, did the rest.

‘I just thought one of us should join.’

‘Well, I
know
I don’t have time.’

She didn’t know she’d implied that he had, and thus provoked the defensiveness. David did almost none of the ‘home’ work. He never really had. Sometimes, just sometimes, it annoyed her. David had a great job. He was successful, capable, reliable. And there were days when you’d never guess it, watching him at home. He let her do all of that stuff. All of it. And sometimes, just for a moment, she resented it.

‘So you said. I didn’t ask you to do it. None of us does, do we – have time? That’s the nature of modern life. But we’ll benefit, the children will benefit. Anyway, it’s important, being a part of the community. And I’m on the board, and so I feel like we have to step up. And, here’s the kicker – you know I can’t say no to Violet…’ She smiled sideways at him – maybe let him tell her that she was a soft touch.