22
THE NEXT MORNING, I wake up and briefly convince myself that sending the resignation email was a dream. I check my sent folder. It was not a dream. Marco has not replied yet. Oh god. I have quit my job. It feels surreal, almost funny. A problem for Australian Anna but I’m still in the safe zone, I’m still American Anna. I can bask in the relief of having finally quit, of being free , without yet worrying about rent and bills. There’s nothing to be done but to focus on the here and now. I have more sightseeing to do. More food to eat. More money to spend. (No, don’t think about money.)
Mac arrives, and we walk along the High Line together, chatting and admiring the surrounding buildings, and then we buy lunch from the markets in Chelsea. We go to another gallery, and then he takes me to the Strand Bookstore. I don’t mention quitting my job to him, mostly because I am choosing to engage in magical thinking, whereby if I ignore it, maybe it will resolve itself. My email might have gone to Marco’s junk. Or someone from LinkedIn will have fortuitously messaged me with an amazing job offer. Something like that.
‘You should introduce yourself,’ Mac says earnestly in the Strand, and I laugh.
‘No!’
‘Just say, “Hello, I’m an author.”’
‘My book isn’t available in the US, for a start.’
‘Say, “Hello, I’m a writer from the other side of the world.” Australians are very popular here, trust me.’
‘No way.’ I don’t want to be an author today. I just want to be a tourist.
I do take lots of photos to show Bobbi their various in-store displays. I tell myself I am only allowed to buy one book, because I have to carry it around all day, and I’m going to visit more bookstores in Brooklyn tomorrow. I buy a fancy special hardback edition of Heartburn by Nora Ephron because I’ve always wanted to buy a copy of Nora in New York. And a tote bag to carry it in, even though I already own more than twenty book-themed tote bags.
The next day, Mac takes me to Brooklyn. We go to his favourite cafe, then browse several cute vintage stores and indie bookshops, and then we find a chocolate shop where we share a Christmas-themed peppermint brownie sundae that is so rich we have to goad each other into taking bites. Afterwards, we walk back into Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s cold but sunny, perfect walking weather, and we get back to my hotel mid-afternoon. Mac has his play tonight. He performs it Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, and he needs to start getting ready at the theatre several hours beforehand. I offer him a glass of water and use of our bathroom before he leaves, and he comes up to the room, even though both are available in the lobby.
‘Are you nervous?’ I ask. ‘For tonight?’
‘Not especially. I’ve done it so many times, and we only have a few weeks left.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Well, actually, I am a tiny bit nervous,’ he says. ‘For tonight’s show in particular.’
‘Why?’ I say.
‘You’ll be there. And I want to impress you.’
I smile at him, not sure what to make of this. ‘I’m already impressed,’ I say.
He hesitates and, I swear, he’s about to kiss me, but he doesn’t. He says, ‘Goodbye,’ and leaves.
Hayley and I get dressed up and catch the subway to the theatre.
The play is a comedy about a son (played by Mac) who has to move home with his father and the series of small but escalating dramas they become involved in with their neighbours.
I am worried how I will feel watching Mac on stage. Maybe I’ll lose my attraction for him. Which would be good, in a way. I am anxious, too, in the way it is anxiety-provoking to see someone you know go on stage when you don’t know how good they are yet, whether they can manage it, pull it off, if they’ll capture the crowd, make people laugh.
But from the second Mac walks on stage, I relax. He knows what he’s doing. He has it, like the magician, but even better. He is the character on stage, but he’s Mac, the actor, too, and he’s also Mac, the guy, and maybe he’s Cormac the survivor as well. And unfortunately it doesn’t extinguish my crush in any capacity—it only makes it more intense. I can hardly breathe, I can hardly move. His timing is perfect. He is the straight man to the father’s more over-the-top character, but he gets a lot of the big laughs for his panicked reactions, his helpless pleading, his trying to keep things under control. I could hug him, I could protect him with my life, I could eat him up with a spoon.
At the end, during the applause, Hayley cheers loudly, and I join her, and Mac looks at us and grins.
There are a few people waiting at the stage door with us, and we let them go ahead and get his signature on the show playbill and talk to him. One young woman is definitely flirting, and I feel ridiculous, suddenly, because of course, he gets this every night. Fawning women. He has other actors, he has backstage crew, he has a whole little family here at the theatre, and he has fans, he has dedicated fans, women throwing themselves at him after every show. And now I feel like one of them, a desperate clawing fan. Me, me. Pick me.
I hold out my playbill to be signed.
He smiles with crinkly eyes, and signs his name. He signs it as Cormac, I note, which he didn’t do for other women. He signed Mac for them, Mac is the name listed in the playbill. He is full of adrenaline, from the show, the audience, the night, I can tell, and it’s contagious. He invites us out to the bar where the cast and crew go afterwards, and Hayley and I are thrilled.
‘We’re real New Yorkers now,’ she says.
‘Don’t say that out loud,’ I shush her, laughing. ‘A real New Yorker will hear and have us sent home.’
We follow the real New Yorkers into the bar, and Mac introduces us to everyone as his friends from home. Hayley sits down and becomes instant friends with the dresser. I’m seated next to Mac, and his leg keeps bumping mine, and then we need to move along the couch to fit someone else in, and our bodies are fully pressed together, and it feels like too much. Too much, but also not enough.
After a few hours of drinking, talking and laughing, Hayley begs off, exhausted. She has a big day planned for us tomorrow. We say our goodbyes.
‘Mac, come over here and hug us, we might not see you again before we go,’ Hayley says. And it hits me, that it’s true, Hayley and I have tickets to a Broadway show tomorrow night, and our itinerary for the next two days is nonstop, and Mac has shows to do, his own life to live. Mac’s face looks like I feel. It’s like the goodbye at the wedding brunch, but so much worse. We three stand together, off to the side of the group.
‘Goodbye,’ Hayley says, hugging him. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to hang out much but you and Anna seem to have had a great time.’
‘We have,’ he says, ‘had a great time.’ His eyes meet mine.
He leans over to hug me, and this time there aren’t any big coats between us, and I feel his whole body. He’s hugging me tight, and I’m hugging him, and I can feel a volcano of emotion in my chest. I need to get out of here. I’m going to need therapy to get over what this man triggers in me.
‘Thank you so much,’ I say. ‘For the full New York Christmas experience.’
‘Can I tell you something?’ he says.
‘What?’
‘I actually hate Christmas.’
‘What? But your Christmas jumper!’
‘That was a joke gift from someone. I had never worn it before.’
‘I made you do so many Christmassy things, I’m sorry! Well, really, you made me do them. But I made you think of them.’
‘No, I wanted to say thank you, because I had fun. This is the first time in a long time I’ve felt okay about Christmas. All because of you,’ he says, smiling.
‘It’s like a real-life Hallmark movie. I’m the small-town girl who showed you the true meaning of Christmas.’
I wish I hadn’t said that, because I feel like I’m implying romance, but he smiles at me.
‘It is,’ he says. ‘You did.’
I let him go and step back, feeling flustered.
‘So. Goodbye, then,’ I say.
‘Bye,’ he says, and Hayley and I walk out of the bar.
At the door, I stop and look back, and he’s watching us. I wave and he lifts his hand in return, and then I step outside. Hayley has flagged a cab and is getting in, and I am hesitating, because I want to run back to him. It feels impossible I won’t see him again.
And then suddenly he’s there beside me, no jacket, and it’s freezing, and he is a little wild-eyed.
‘Just. Wait. Wait,’ he says, grabbing my arm. ‘Come over.’
‘Come over where?’
‘To my apartment. Tonight. Stay over.’
‘Stay over—?’ Does he mean…? What does he mean? I don’t know and I don’t know if he knows.
Hayley is hanging her head out of the cab.
‘What’s happening? Did I leave something behind?’ She’s shouting to be heard over the traffic and the wind.
‘No, no, it’s okay,’ I yell back.
‘Okay,’ I say, turning to Mac.
Does he want to have sex, does he want to talk, does he just want to hang out? I don’t care, I’ll take any option.
He is looking at me.
‘Really?’ I say, touching his arm.
‘Yes,’ he says, his eyes warm.
‘Just me.’
‘Yes.’
Hayley is hanging out of the cab again.
‘The driver is threatening to drive off. What is going on?’
I walk over to her. I don’t even know what to say.
‘You go.’
‘Where are you going?’ She looks totally confused.
‘I’m going to go back to Mac’s. For a while.’ I can’t bring myself to say all night.
‘You’re what ? What the fuck ? Are you guys sleeping together?’ She is screeching, almost.
‘No. I mean, maybe. I don’t know. He asked me to come back to his place.’
‘What? When? Have you kissed?’ The car is starting to roll a little bit.
‘No. Yes. Kind of. No.’
Hayley is almost falling out of the cab window trying to process this.
How to say we sort of have, but not on this trip. It’s too much to say with the wind blowing and the cab moving.
Hayley slithers back inside the cab and has turned away to argue with the driver.
‘He says he has to go,’ Hayley says. ‘He doesn’t like English tourists.’
‘You’re not English.’
‘He thinks I am.’
‘Go back to the hotel. I’ll call you.’
‘Are you coming back later or what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I need to know so I can go to sleep or wait up for you.’
‘I’ll message you. I’ll let you know.’
‘You don’t have any of your stuff.’
‘True. So I probably will come back.’
The cab starts moving.
‘Anna! Goodbye!!!!’ Hayley leans out the window, looking distraught and confused, like we’re never going to see each other again, like a woman waving a handkerchief from a train window in an old-time war movie.
I laugh. I turn to Mac, who has flagged another cab.
‘Hold this cab while I get my jacket,’ he says, running back into the bar. I smile at the cab driver and slide into the backseat, nervously, half thinking Mac will get caught up in there and not come back and then what will I do, just get the cab back to our hotel and slink in a few minutes after Hayley? But there he is, jogging over the slippery ground with ease and then getting into the back of the cab and leaning forward and telling the driver his address.
He pulls on his jacket, shivering, pushing his hair back. The cab pulls out down the street, and we both lean back on the seats and look at each other.
‘What are we doing?’ I say.
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
‘This is your idea.’
‘Well I just—’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t want to say goodbye.’
‘Me neither,’ I say. ‘But—’
He looks at me and waits.
‘But nothing,’ I say, because I can’t quite bring myself to say, ‘But what’s going to happen, sexually, when we get there?’
‘Remember when you were little and you would make friends really quickly and beg your parents for a sleepover?’ I say instead.
‘I didn’t really have that many sleepovers.’
‘Maybe it was just me. I’m an only child. I always wanted my friends to sleep over. It felt like the most exciting thing in the world. Another child in the house.’
‘Well then, yes, it’s like that. Will you come and have a sleepover at my place tonight?’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say.
I regret this because now it feels like I have put us in the box of friendship. Even worse, childhood friendship.
He’s in a walk-up apartment, and I climb the stairs behind him. He turns to wait for me on the landing, and I smile up at him, trying not to show how hard I am breathing after five flights. My calves would be exquisite if I lived here.
‘The apartment is not big or impressive,’ he says. ‘I should warn you.’
‘I live in Hayley and Luke’s spare room. So my bar is low.’
‘Well, push it a bit lower,’ he says, standing at his door, hesitating. ‘It’s small.’
‘Wait. Okay, I’m ready. Expectations are as low as they can be, but the baseline is the fact you live in New York.’
I hope he has a bedframe and not just a mattress on the floor. I hope he has sheets. I hope he has toilet paper. These are my three wishes to the dating genie.
He opens the door, and the apartment is definitely small, just three rooms, or two and a half, the largest part being a nice, open lounge/bedroom space, with a small adjoining kitchen and a tiny bathroom. I was expecting sparse, dingy, maybe grotty, but it’s cosy and lived in and full of things. Lovely things. It’s full of character . There’s a nice bed with a wooden frame, and sheets. A rug on the floor. A big, round mirror. He has a desk covered in piles of papers, a hanging rack for clothes—there’s no wardrobe—and two bookcases full of books, with more stacked in a couple of piles on the floor. There’s a couch, and his laptop set up on a coffee table in front of it. There are lots of homey touches, like a cosy throw rug and green cushions on the couch that match a green lamp and a set of checkerboard-patterned mugs hanging from hooks. One wall is covered in framed movie posters.
‘See, it’s not much,’ he says.
‘I love it,’ I say. ‘It’s gorgeous.’
‘I lived in the worst places for years in LA, just absolute hellholes, and when I finally started making a bit of money, I vowed I would make my place feel like somewhere I actually wanted to be. Well, actually, my sister told me I had to after visiting me, but I agreed with her.’
I think back to when I had the studio apartment, in my darkest days after the breakup, and how this was how I wanted to fix it up. I couldn’t pinpoint at the time what I wanted, but now I know it was this. This feeling of a place very specifically belonging to someone. A home.
I look at the movie posters. La Dolce Vita , Toto the Hero , The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover , The Last Picture Show , The Man From Snowy River , Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , Sullivan’s Travels , Parasite , That Thing You Do , Chungking Express , Rear Window , Inside Llewyn Davis, Past Lives , Ikuru , The Babadook , When Harry Met Sally, Raising Arizona , Jerry McGuire.
‘I find bare walls depressing,’ he says, watching me. ‘I’ve had the posters for years. I finally decided to get them framed.’
‘I like it.’
‘I grew up on movies. I’m the youngest: my sisters would go out and Mum and I would have movie night together on the couch.’
‘That sounds so nice.’
He grew up in a household of women. It doesn’t make sense why my mother and Bobbi seem to make him uncomfortable. Or maybe it does. He’s been out of that household for a while now. He’s been alone, motherless, for a long time.
‘ Jerry Maguire ?’ I say.
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It doesn’t fit with the others.’
‘Excuse me. It’s Tom Cruise’s best performance. A Cameron Crowe classic.’
‘I’ve never actually seen it.’
‘That’s outrageous.’
I turn to his bookcase.
‘Wait. That’s not fair. Don’t judge anything there.’
‘I don’t judge other people’s books.’
This is not entirely true.
‘Good.’
There are novels—a bunch by women, thankfully—and nonfiction and books on film and acting. I see my book there, and I try not to think about what that might mean. He brought it home. He kept it. I swallow, tuck that thought away for later, and move on, scanning further along the shelf. It’s exposing, letting someone into your space. It feels wonderfully intimate, to have all of his things around me. I want to look at everything, dig into it all, touch it and turn it all over in my hands.
He moves closer to me.
I look up at him from my spot kneeling on the floor. Should we listen to music, put on a movie, sit on the couch? I pick up a random book, then put it back on the bookshelf.
‘Anna,’ he says.
‘Yes?’ I stand up.
‘I—’
He moves closer. Very close. He’s giving me the same look he gave me in the restaurant hallway at the wedding-rehearsal dinner after I kissed him. On impulse, I hold my hand out, press it against his chest. I can feel his heart beating.
‘Show me what you were going to do. Last time,’ I say.
He looks at my hand on his chest for a minute, then picks it up and kisses each of my knuckles one by one very gently. He turns my hand over and runs his lips over the inside of my wrist.
My skin tingles all the way up my arms.
He pulls me closer to him and softly tucks my hair behind my ears. Then he leans down and kisses my neck, lingering there, his tongue warm against my skin. I make a noise in my throat.
He lifts his head, looking into my eyes for a moment, taking my face in his hands. And then he kisses me. I expect it to be gentle, but it’s fierce, hungry, like it was at the restaurant. His tongue is in my mouth, his hands slide into my hair. After a moment, he tugs off my jumper, then his own top. I step backwards, until I’m on his bed, and he is on top of me, kissing me frantically, like I’m about to run away, and I can hardly catch my breath, and nothing has ever felt so good in my life as his body pressing down on mine. We stay like that for what might be five minutes, or might be twenty. I’m losing all track of time.
He kisses across my collarbone, unhooks my bra and kisses across my breasts, down my stomach. Then he looks up at me.
‘I read your book three times,’ he says.
I don’t know why he says this. It makes me laugh for a second, but then he’s kissing me again, further down my stomach, unbuttoning my pants and sliding them off, sliding off my underwear, and putting his mouth on me.