Chapter 15
For two weeks, James swims in his story. He writes all night, and when he is out to eat with Nelle and Jessie, or walking through a park, or in line for coffee, he is thinking about writing. The story—these characters—consumes him.
Fingers cramping, he finishes typing a sentence and stretches his arms behind his head.
Outside, the city buzzes. On the bed, Nelle curls like a question mark with her back into the pillows.
She goes to sleep hours before he does. Hours before Jessie, too.
Some nights, James tiptoes into the kitchen to find his cousin at the island, hunched over a bowl of spicy ramen, huddled in a duvet cocoon, watching trashy reality TV.
James has been writing for Nelle for weeks, but now he has rediscovered how much he loves to write for himself. That red typewriter unlocked the floodgates. And the words have yet to stop rushing in. He drinks three more cups of tea and finishes typing another seventy pages before the sun rises.
Nelle stirs awake, her face cute and puffy. “Did you sleep?”
James’s fingers freeze on the clacking keys. “No, ma’am.”
“You wrote all night?”
“I’ve only stopped to pee. And to get more tea.” His eyes are so dry and tired, he can barely keep them open. But more adrenaline pumps with every word he types. “It’s like something’s fueling me, but the fuel isn’t running out. I think it’s being here, in this place.”
Or it’s you, he thinks.
“This apartment?” Nelle asks.
“No, New York.” He spins toward her in the desk chair. “I’ve never been this inspired in my life.”
“What time is it?” Nelle grumbles.
James glances at the wall clock. “Half past six.”
Nelle’s head hits her pillow, and soon a new line of drool dribbles out of the corner of her mouth.
James stands in line with bloodshot eyes for fifteen minutes at an artsy coffee shop on Seventh Avenue, rereading the pages he wrote the night before.
He stapled them together to carry around, and they are already riddled with wrinkles, coffee stains, and red ink.
He orders an iced latte and a cortado and carries them back into the morning sun, down the street and around the block.
With full autonomy throughout Jessie’s apartment, Nelle gave James the permission to leave her there under the stipulation that he come back with coffee for her.
He doesn’t bother being quiet when he comes in.
Jessie works afternoons in a bookshop sometimes, interns part-time at a personal-injury law firm, and spends her other days with a group of artists in Brooklyn, often not returning until well past two in the morning, also often stoned out of her mind.
Last night, she went across the river and has yet to come home.
James carries the drinks down the hall into his and Nelle’s room and sits on the bed beside her sleeping body.
“Nelle,” he coos. “It’s not half past six anymore.”
Nothing.
He clears his throat. “I have coffee.”
Miraculously, she stirs, stretches out a lazy arm, and takes the cup from him. She plunges the straw into her mouth like it’s her life support.
“Thank you,” she says when she finally detaches herself.
“I thought you might need a little energy after the weekend.”
On Friday and Saturday, they visited all the touristy places they wanted to see.
Rode the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building.
Took a ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty.
Spent the evening at a Broadway production of Wicked in the nicest clothes they could find, James in a rented tuxedo and Nelle in a green satin gown.
After that they joined Jessie at a bar in the East Village where they got so drunk, James could barely walk home.
Seeing the city’s tourist attractions so late was an unspoken way of putting off leaving the city.
Now that they’ve experienced New York as visitors, he knows that Nelle wants to move on.
Only a couple of weeks until school starts, anyway. But James isn’t ready.
Her sleepiness fades as she hungrily drinks her latte. “Where do we go next? Paris? Tokyo?”
Can she read my mind? “Why don’t we stay here a little longer?”
“Why?” She sits up. “We’ve seen New York. I want to see the world, don’t you?”
“We can see the world, but . . .” How can he put his feelings into words?
“We’ve been here over two weeks,” she says. “And when August ends, you’ll be back at school.”
He doesn’t want to think about returning to his premed classes, his lonely one-bedroom apartment, his college town, full of football games and frat guys playing beer pong on their front lawns. He reaches out, but Nelle retracts her hand. The rejection twists his heart.
“I like New York,” he says. “Being here makes me happy.”
Nelle sets her empty cup on the nightstand. “I like it here, too, and we can come back when we’re done.”
James’s face burns. This is what he feared.
She wouldn’t love New York, he would love it so much that he would go back on his promise to show her the world.
Maybe it’s the same fear that made him stop their kiss, weeks ago.
Even though he wanted to kiss her. Even though her lips are all he can think about at night, every night, when he finally pulls away from his manuscript.
“Will you ever be done, though?” he asks, voicing his fear aloud, hoping for reassurance.
Nelle glares at him, which is fair. Silence rings through the apartment until a couple of angry cars honk at each other and normality resumes.
“I’m sorry,” James says. “I’m being selfish, I know. A few more days? That’s all I ask.”
Nelle picks a book off the nightstand and stares at the page. “A few more days.”
“Are you mad?”
She looks up. “I just don’t want you to forget why we took off in the first place.”
He hasn’t. His manuscript has consumed him. He’ll admit that. Since he started it, he has been a lousy friend. Nelle deserves more attention than what he has given her.
The typewriter whispers to him, but James perks up and asks, “How about we explore today?”
Nelle dog-ears her page. “We’ve explored enough here. Write if you’re inspired, James.”
“Tonight, then? Dinner, just me and you.”
“I’m going to ask Jessie if I can go to her studio.”
James lights up. “How long’s it been since you painted?”
“Years.” She shakes her head. “I don’t even know if I remember how—”
The apartment door swings open with a bang, and Jessie enters, rambling about some insanely sexist joke one of her colleagues made. James slides down the hall in his socks. When Jessie doesn’t return from her studio until daylight, she always has a good story to tell.
“I hate that you don’t have a phone anymore,” she says.
“I was halfway home, stopping at the takeout place, on my third attempt at calling you, when I remembered you chucked your phone into the ocean. So I hope you don’t have a problem with Charlie’s Kickin’ Chicken, chow mein, and egg rolls, because that’s what we’re eating, you primitive idiot. ”
“You do realize it’s nine a.m.?” James says.
“And I’m coming off an all-nighter, so for me, this is dinner.” Jessie drops the takeout on the coffee table and storms down the hall.
Nelle creeps into the living room, glancing back at Jessie’s door. “Is she okay?”
“She’s always exploding. When she was in fifth grade, I was in kindergarten, and we had recess at the same time. There was this kid in her grade that started to pick on me, and when Jessie found out, she destroyed him.”
Nelle’s brows fly up.
James shrugs. “No one bullied me after that.”
Jessie pokes her head out of her room. “I’m hopping in the shower, but I’m not shaving, so it’ll take five minutes flat! Put on a show for us, and don’t touch the food, or I’ll cut your fingers off.”
She ducks back inside, and James peels open the plastic bag, ready to sneak an egg roll so his growling stomach will shut up.
“Don’t,” Nelle says. “If she cuts my fingers off, I’ll bleed ink, and how will we explain that?”
James laughs and takes the egg roll anyway.
Nelle sniffs one of the takeout containers. “Huh. What exactly is in Charlie’s Kickin’ Chicken?”
“This is the studio.” Jessie jiggles her key in the metal door and kicks it twice with her boot before it gives. Flakes of rust fall onto the threshold of the moonlit loft.
Nelle needs a moment to compose herself after she steps inside.
The farthest wall is all floor-to-ceiling windows exposed to the East River and the glittering Manhattan skyline.
Another wall of windows faces south, so light can spill in during the day.
The walls and floor are covered in scattered artwork: watercolors, pottery, acrylics, sculptures made out of cans and baby doll heads and light bulbs, pencils, charcoal, paper, glue.
The expressions of many artists all mixed together.
“This is my latest piece.” Jessie bounces over to a surrealist painting of a blue woman with an ass the size of a glacier and a head the size of a grape. “It’s a self-portrait.”
Nelle spots a stack of blank canvases, and her throat closes up. She is back in her bedroom in Lincoln, choking on the thick dust accumulated on her easel, her canvases, her favorite brushes. Crying to the fireplace while her best painting blackens and curls.
“You good?” Jessie asks.
“Yeah, sorry.” Nelle blinks back her tears. “It’s been a while since I painted.”
Jessie chews her lip. “Wait here.” She disappears into an adjoining room.
Nelle watches the street below. A cat bounds down the sidewalk, claws stretching toward a fluttering pigeon. Jessie returns a minute later with a cup of steaming coffee and flips a switch by the door. Twelve hanging lights, all hand blown and shaped like fishbowls, flicker on.
Nelle accepts the coffee, hints of cinnamon and vanilla pooling on her tongue. “Thanks.”