‘Underwear on,’ the man says, and then turns away so she can undress. When he cracks his knuckles, places his hands on her, the world flashes orange behind her closed eyes. It is not pleasurable, exactly, as this deceptively strong man pushes down, cracks bones, kneads into muscle, but it satisfies something in Ruby, brings her back to herself. She has a body, she is nerve and sinew and gristle, and she is in New York City, and she drinks too much vodka, and makes herself come better than even her best lover can, and she pays too much for dresses, and sometimes she doesn’t get out of bed until noon. Her ponytail has bumps, and her teeth are crooked, and as the small man pushes his elbow into the crevice of her left shoulder blade, causing bright sparks beneath her eye lids, Ruby thinks she might have given ‘perfect’ a little too much weight. There is something about being a work in progress, after all.
When the massage is over, she feels light, spacious, as if the man back in that cramped room has somehow untied all her knots, pushed her out to sea. Is that all it takes, she wonders, slightly embarrassed at her own simplicity. Someone taking care of her for an hour, placing her at the centre of things. She might go back to this man every day, if that’s the case. Just to see how much more he can undo.
Ruby is smiling, imagining herself completely unfettered, when her phone vibrates in her jacket pocket. Someone waking up on the other side of the world, she thinks. Probably Cassie, whose children generally have her up at ungodly hours. Taking the phone out of her pocket, shielding the screen with her palm, it takes three reads before she fully comprehends the message. Even then, sentences fully formed, she struggles to make sense of the arrangement.
Work is sending me to New York in July for a conference. Can you believe that shit? Start finding the best rooftops, babe.
Ash. Following her to New York. Two months before the wedding. Two months before he will marry his perfect girl.
The chain in Ruby’s stomach twists. The rain suddenly feels like a slap.
To think she was this close to floating away.
FIVE
AT DINNER ONE NIGHT, PART WAY THROUGH OUR SECOND week, I ask Noah to tell me about the city. Now that we’re working together, we have taken to sharing meals and stories, too. Where our first conversations were like trading cards, each of us collecting basic information about the other, trying to make a set, now we talk over cereal or sausages about science, and politics, and religion, and all the things that come into my mind that I want to know more about. He says I must have had a pretty poor education, and when I think about all the different small-town schools I went to, and where I ended up, I can’t disagree. I don’t mind so much when Noah tells me the truth, which he does quite often, now that we spend a lot of time together. The idea that truth is hurtful puzzles me. Seems like lying to a person does all the damage.
‘I had to teach myself most things,’ I told him the other day. ‘From library books and TV shows, mostly. Or watching what other people do.’
‘An autodidact, then,’ he answered, and when he explained what that word meant, I said there should probably be a nicer sounding word for something as important as growing yourself up.
‘Indeed,’ he said with a smile, because he seems to like truth from me, too.
When he asks me what it is exactly that I want to know about New York, I shrug and say whatever it is he thinks I should know. Things that might not be so obvious when I look left, right, up.
Here are some interesting things he shares with me over take-out Chinese: there are 472 subway stations operating around the city, transporting five and a half million people from here to there each day. It is in fact important to stand back from the platform like the announcement says, because each year something like a hundred and fifty New Yorkers get struck by the 400-tonne trains whizzing by.
‘How many don’t make it?’ I ask, and Noah says around a third of the people hit by trains are fatally injured, which makes me wonder about the ones who survive.
There are plenty of hospitals to help with that, he assures me. Ambulances are dispatched from city-run and private operators, hurtling toward traffic accidents and fires and all kinds of private disasters a thousand times a day. A person dies every nine minutes in New York City, but two babies are born in that same amount of time, so you never know if that ambulance is speeding toward life or death when you hear it pass by.
‘I’m getting used to the sirens,’ I say, and Noah nods.
‘Best that you do, Baby Joan. Lest they become the only thing you hear.’
When he tells me there are more than six thousand places of worship across the city, we stop to consider all the leaps of faith people make, the deities they pray to. I am feeding the last of my egg roll to Franklin when Noah says that if you could hear all that praying, you’d be listening to eight hundred different languages at once, everything from Yiddish to Urdu to French Creole, and this makes me question how New Yorkers ever understand each other. ‘That’s the magic of living inside a three hundred square mile “melting pot”，’ Noah responds, before telling me at least half the city’s population comes from some other country, or a different part of America.