Still. My heart is in my throat when I knock, as if the gesture is pulling all my courage up out of me. I am sweating slightly after being buzzed in from the street, a set of narrow stairs climbed, the Leica pressing against me. Rows of doors remain closed to me, and then the one I have been looking for is right there in front of me.
Own bed, shared bathroom. $300 P/W—all included …
Yes, I’ll be paying cash …
No, I’m not allergic to dogs …
Here is the full address, if you’re taking the train the closest stop is 96th and Broadway …
I’ll be coming by bus, I should arrive by 9 …
As you will.
As you will. A strange sign off, I thought at the time. But I appreciated this Noah’s efficiency throughout the process. Deal done inside a few text messages, hardly any questions asked. No unnecessary niceties or chit-chat. I don’t even know what his voice sounds like, I realise now, as my knock echoes on the wood between us. The door to Noah’s apartment creaks open and I see one blue eye first, then the peak of a dark blue cap. A polished black shoe. And then something cold and wet brushes against my hand. Before I have time to pull back, a large, brown dog pushes through the half-open door and lunges at me.
‘Franklin!’
Noah appears in flashes between paws and chocolate fur, pulling at the dog’s collar, and the three of us stumble through the door together, a laugh bubbling up out of me from a source I never knew existed. It has an immediate effect, like cool water on a hot day. Any tension I felt slackens, like the strap of my bag as I let it fall to the floor. For a second, Noah and the dog disappear, and it’s just me, standing in the most beautiful room I have ever seen. The polished wood under my feet gleams, and tall, wide windows above thick-cushioned seats give way to walls of books and couches big enough to lie flat on. I can see small, brightly coloured toys, bones and rubber chickens and tennis balls, all scattered across the floor and—my mouth drops open—a shiny black piano sits on the other side of the room. Above the piano is a huge, glittering chandelier, something I have never, ever seen in real life. Each piece of dangling crystal is so delicate, so perfectly formed, that I think immediately of raindrops. Or tears.
A strange thought comes to me, lands on my shoulder like a feather. How much sorrow has this room seen?
And now I am aware of Noah holding the collar of the dog, both of them watching me. With my eyes and mouth wide open like a fish in the sand, I know that I have just given myself away. I might as well have pulled out the six hundred dollars cash I have in my purse and admitted this is all I have in the world. I am not, and this must be perfectly obvious, even to the big old dog, someone who is accustomed to nice things. I turn to look, really look, at the man who lives here, the owner of the piano and the chandelier and the books and the dog. He is staring just as hard back at me, a half-smile pulling up the left corner of his mouth. I see now that he is old. Like grandfather old, maybe sixty-five or seventy, and shorter than me, just. He’s wearing one of those fancy polo sweaters, the ones where you can see a neat shirt collar poking out from underneath, and it looks like he has no hair left under his Yankees cap. Tufts of eyebrow, pale blue eyes. That half-smile of his, and long, fine fingers reaching for mine.
‘Hello,’ he says, ‘Alice Lee. It’s very nice to meet you. Franklin’—Noah gestures to the big, brown dog now straining toward me—‘obviously concurs.’
Later, when I look back at all the beginnings that turned me, inch by inch, toward the river, I will see this was the gentlest of them. Shaking the soft, warm hand of an old man, and then a tour of his apartment, with a large, brown dog leading the way. Fresh towels on the dresser in the bedroom and a closet of empty hangers, ‘Should you wish to hang up your things.’ The offer of a late-night coffee—‘Yes, please’—and the shaking of heads—‘No, don’t worry about that now’—when I offer to pay upfront for my week-long stay.
‘Plenty of time for that, Alice.’
Noah says this over his shoulder as he leaves to make me that coffee, and I sit down hard on the edge of my new bed, Franklin at my feet. Seven nights. Half my money gone. Yet that same laugh bubbles up out of me again. The one that feels like cool water on a hot day.
‘You’re going to be all right, Alice Lee,’ I say out loud to the towels and the hangers and the chocolate-coloured dog. And it’s nice, in this moment, to believe it.
Ruby Jones is not all right.
For a start, her body and the clocks say different things. She has been in New York City a few hours, but she feels so disoriented, it could be days or mere minutes. When she opened the door to her studio apartment, she wanted nothing more than to crawl straight under the covers of the wide, low bed, which sat barely a stride from the door frame. But it was still early, so she put on a thick coat and ventured one block over to Broadway, hoping to stretch out her aching legs. Exhausted to have travelled so far, Ruby struggled to see the endless scaffolding and stores and sidewalk cracks, the people walking too fast, talking too loud, as anything other than props, extras, on a movie set. Caught somewhere between reality and delirium, she wandered up and down the street, aimless and cold, before buying a slice of cheese pizza for $1.27 and a $59 bottle of Grey Goose to wash it down. Taking this first New York supper back to her room, she was soon sitting cross-legged in the middle of that low bed, licking grease from her fingers and drinking vodka straight from the bottle.