Chapter 1 #2
Black marble, polished brass, a long basin trough with three faucets, a single low Edison bulb above each, and on a small black shelf an Aesop Resurrection Aromatique pump bottle.
There was a folded stack of cotton hand towels in a brass tray.
No paper towels. There was a small, expensive arrangement of three dahlias the color of dried blood in a glass cylinder on the counter.
I went to the basin.
I turned the cold tap on and put my hands under it. I washed them with the Aesop. I washed them again. The room smelled of bergamot and mandarin. My ears were still ringing very faintly from the bar.
I turned the water off.
I lifted my eyes.
There was a woman in the mirror above the basin, and for a half-second I did not place her.
She was thin. Worried. Her hair, which she had pinned at six o’clock that evening into a low knot at the nape of her neck, had given up a few hours ago and was now coming down in two soft pieces along her jaw.
Her skin in this light was slightly translucent at the temples—I could see a thin blue vein running down toward her brow—and her hazel eyes had the particular tired sheen of a person who had not slept properly in three weeks and had been pretending otherwise.
There was a smear of dark lipstick on her front tooth.
I leaned in. I leaned in close enough that my breath fogged the mirror in a small soft oval.
The smear was on the left incisor, faint but unmistakable, the color of a cabernet rim, and I could trace exactly when it had happened—the dutiful air-kiss thirty minutes ago, the woman in cream in the receiving line by the lectern, darling you came, you are the best, mwah mwah, and I had said of course of course you were brilliant, and I had not noticed the lipstick because I did not look in mirrors when I could help it, and now I had been walking around for half an hour with another woman’s mouth on my tooth.
A woman whose mouth was normally full of my words.
I rubbed it off with my thumb. It came off easily. There was a faint pink ghost of it left behind on the enamel.
I should have looked away then.
For exactly one second I let myself look at my own face.
It was an ugly second. I do not mean that the face was ugly.
I mean that what was on it was ugly. I want.
That was what was on my face. Bare. Undeflected.
No qualifier in front of it. No sort of, no I think, no maybe it‘s just me.
No deferential softening, no apologetic angle of the head, no warm-deflecting laugh.
A want with no manners. A want with no explanation.
A want for—what, exactly. I did not let myself name it.
I did not have to. The face named it for me.
I wanted what she had.
It was the face of a person who had been writing other women’s books for ten years and was not, it turned out, all right.
I closed my eyes.
I kept them closed for a long count.
When I opened them I looked at the dahlias.
I took my phone out of the small black clutch under my arm. I opened the thread at the top of my messages, which was, of course, hers, and I typed:
Headache, slipping out, you were brilliant tonight x
I read it twice. I considered the x. I considered taking it off.
I considered the politics of taking it off—she would notice, she noticed everything, she would text me at eleven asking if I was annoyed about something—and so I left it on.
I pressed send before I could rewrite it.
The little blue bubble went up the screen and turned to delivered.
I put the phone away.
I did not look in the mirror again on my way out.
I did not look back at any reflective surface in the building.
The doorman opened the door for me. He did not, of course, register that I existed. The rain was coming down hard.
Acab to Bushwick on a Tuesday in October in the rain was seventeen dollars before tip, and seventeen dollars before tip was, more or less, Tuesday’s grocery budget for the week.
I worked it out on the curb under the Crosby’s awning while the doorman called a Lincoln for a man in a navy overcoat who was definitely an editor-in-chief.
Seventeen plus three was twenty. Twenty was the rotisserie chicken at the Key Food on Knickerbocker, plus the bag of small potatoes, plus the bunch of dinosaur kale, plus the two cans of chickpeas, plus the carton of eggs, plus the loaf of seeded sourdough that had gone on sale the week before and had become, in some private way, the thing I looked forward to on Wednesday mornings.
I could have the Lincoln. I could have the chicken. I could not have both.
I stepped out from under the awning.
It was real rain—coming down at a slant, finding the gap between collar and neck within half a block.
I had a coat but I had not brought an umbrella because I had not, when I left the apartment at five-thirty, planned for rain.
I crossed Crosby and turned onto Prince, because the J train was at Bowery and Prince led there in eighteen blocks of relatively flat sidewalk, and I had, by then, already decided I would walk.
I walked.
I passed the Apple Store, then the Mercer, then the small expensive children’s clothing shop where a single white linen smock in the window cost two hundred and ten dollars.
I passed the soap shop that smelled, even from the sidewalk, of green fig.
I passed a man under a doorway with a small dog in his coat.
The rain went from a drizzle to a sustained sound.
My blouse, under my coat, was beginning to stick at the shoulder blades.
I should not have stopped at McNally Jackson.
I knew, walking up to it, that I should not. I had not stopped at it on any of the previous three launch nights. I had a rule. The rule had served me well. The rule was: do not stop at bookshop windows on launch nights. The rule was: head down, J train, home, kettle, bed.
I stopped.
The window display had been redone for the week.
There was a long sweep of dove-gray paper laid out across the floor of the window, and along its center, in three neat staggered stacks, twelve copies of the new hardcover.
The cover was the cover I had argued, very gently and via two intermediaries, against—a soft-focus photograph of a half-open door, which had nothing to do with the book—but the cover was beautiful in the way that things you have lost arguments about are sometimes.
The title was in a thin cream serif. The Quiet Hour.
The author’s name was in a slightly larger thin cream serif beneath it.
Above the stack, on a small easel, was a hand-lettered card, the letters formed in the careful loose hand of a bookseller who clearly enjoyed her job.
The year’s most luminous novel, it said.
And then, in smaller letters underneath: —our pick for October.
I stood on the sidewalk in the rain and read the card twice.
In the dark glass of the window, my own reflection had assembled itself over the display like a double exposure.
A thin woman in a wet black coat, hair coming the rest of the way down now in earnest, the knot at her nape giving up by degrees.
Hazel eyes I had not, in any deliberate way, looked into properly in years.
The reflection laid itself precisely over the stack.
My forehead floated above the title. My collarbone floated above the author’s name.
My mouth—which was the part of my own face I had always found least bearable, because it was a mouth that gave away whatever I was actually thinking if I let it—hovered over the words our pick for October.
For one half-second I let my eyes go to my own eyes in the glass.
Then I slid them past.
I walked.
I got to Bowery. I went down the steps of the J train, past the man playing a battered tenor saxophone in the mezzanine, past the smell of urine and warm electrical equipment, past the woman who sold loose cigarettes by the turnstile and gave me, as she always did, a small respectful nod which I returned.
I tapped my MetroCard. I waited four minutes for the M train, then realized it was a J after all, then got on.
The J was almost empty at that hour going outbound. I took a seat by the window on the south side of the car and pressed my forehead to the glass. The cold went into the bone of my forehead and was, for a moment, the most distinct sensation I had had all evening.
I got off at Myrtle-Broadway. I came up out of the station into rain that had not let up.
The four blocks to Suydam Street were partly under standing water at the curbs, the kind of black puddles that turned out to be shin-deep if you misjudged the step.
I misjudged one. My right Mary Jane filled. I kept walking.
I bit the inside of my left cheek the whole way home, and I found the small ridge of scar tissue with my tongue, and I held it there.
The four flights up to my apartment took me longer in wet shoes than they did in dry ones, because the right Mary Jane squelched against the marble of each step in a way I was too tired to find funny.
I let myself in. The apartment was as I had left it at five-thirty.
One room, north-facing, the window over the desk fogged at the corners from the temperature difference between inside and out.
The fiddle leaf fig in the corner—the one I had bought at the bodega on Knickerbocker six years ago for nineteen dollars and had, against every prediction including my own, kept alive—leaned very slightly toward the lamp.
Three towers of books along the eastern wall, alphabetized by author, then within author by year, then within year by my own private affection.
A small kettle on a small two-burner stove.
A bed I had made that morning out of habit even though no one was going to see it.
The desk by the window. The chair pushed in. The drawer.
The drawer.