We are drunk. Or I am. Three Manhattans in a row, poured from a crystal decanter, sat on top of the piano. I have saved every cherry, and now I bite into one, dark red juice trickling from the side of my mouth. It tastes sweet and bitter on my tongue and I understand this is a different drunk to anything I have experienced before. I am languid—I think that’s the right word. Heavy. But not stuck. Clutched in my left hand is a cheque, made out to that little photography school around the corner.
‘Enrolment fees,’ Noah explained when I opened the envelope he gave me, the thin piece of paper falling into my lap. ‘I can’t have you hanging around the house forever, Baby Joan.’
The cheque feels like a key to a brand-new door. I see myself in the summer, walking up the front steps of the school, see myself entering the building each day, ready for class. I imagine myself growing more and more familiar with this world as the days pass, and if I squint just so, I can even see that future me eating lunch with her friends, using the darkroom to complete her latest assignment, showing newer students how to find classroom B.
‘Noah …’ I want to tell him about this older me. I want to express how strange and wonderful the idea of a future is. I want to thank him for making it possible, making her possible. I want him to know that, before, offers only ever came with strings. Conditions. I was always counting down to the end of something, to when it would be taken away. And I want to tell him that I still don’t understand why he would do all of this for me. A girl he met just weeks ago.
‘Noah. Who were you before?’
Aren’t all the answers found in the past?
‘Before you?’ he clarifies, putting his own Manhattan down.
‘Well, yes, before me. But I don’t mean that exactly. I mean what was your life when you were young. When you were eighteen, like me.’
Noah tells me he was born across the river. In Hoboken, a name that sounds to me like a candy bar, something soft, with a hard crunch in the middle.
‘Baby Joan, you may have just perfectly described my adolescence,’ he says, smiling into the past, seeing his life in reverse, so that his mouth changes on the journey, falters at the corners until I can no longer tell if he is amused or sad.
‘I wanted to escape. Much like you did. Only I had a smaller journey to make. I spent my whole youth looking across the river; Manhattan was my north star. I lived, until I arrived here, always wanting to be somewhere else.’
‘Tell me about New York back then,’ I say, because I want him to keep talking, and I have learned he often shares pieces of himself inside other truths. Somewhere in the Manhattan of his youth, I will find the man he is now, and why he has chosen to help me.
‘Back then, New York was still an idea. The best idea this country ever had. Now, it’s more like a crass reality show. The streets have been cleaned up, the tourists come and come and come, there are half-empty apartment buildings right there in Midtown, whole blocks of concrete owned by people who will never live here, keeping their multi-million dollar condos just in case they visit sometime. In the seventies, you didn’t visit New York. You lived here. You escaped whatever life your parents had made for you, and you landed in a place asking only that you live in it, make of it for yourself.’
I could listen to Noah talk like this for a year.
‘I lived in the Village. Dirty beds, dirty bars, while my parents tried to wash things clean back home. It was dangerous and thrilling and a whole world in and of itself, a city perpetually in motion, and always outdoing itself. I watched those towers go up, they were monstrosities really, but I never minded them, because they reminded me of two giant fingers giving the up to everyone. I lived like that myself at the time, sure of myself and a little crass. I had a lot of friends, and then I didn’t, because the eighties came, and people around me started to die. Lovers, friends, the boy genius who lived in the next apartment. They died, and the city lived, and it changed, because surviving changes everything.’
（This, I know.）
‘The city kept moving. I kept moving. New York is made for second chances, Alice. I eventually met someone who knew someone who knew someone, and they introduced me to money. I made a lot of it. Sent it back across the river to my parents. Bought this place cheap from a man who recognised me from my life before. Even when I didn’t recognise myself.’
‘And the girl I remind you of?’ I ask into the silence that follows, feeling we are coming closer to the story now. This night, the Manhattans, have loosened something.