“You smoke in here?”
She shrugged.
“Everyone does.”
He watched her exhale twin streams of smoke from her nostrils. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice you at Santiago’s,” he said.
“I came late. I … It’s stupid, but I couldn’t decide what to wear. It’s a kind of social anxiety, I think. If I’m nervous about going to something, I change like a hundred times. It gets later and later, which of course only makes me more anxious. Usually, I end up hyperventilating over a pile of clothes on my floor. It sounds silly, but it’s actually quite terrible.”
Frank nodded sympathetically. “So what did you end up wearing?”
“Tonight? Oh, just this thing I made.”
“Can I see?”
Cleo raised an eyebrow. She pressed the cigarette between her lips and stood to unbutton the wooden toggles of her sheepskin. What she was wearing was not so much a dress as a net made of shimmering gold threads. It was woven just loosely enough to give a suggestion of the body within. He could see, very faintly beneath the shining lattice, the outline of her nipples and belly button. She was like a smooth, lithe fish caught in a glistening net.
“Let me come upstairs,” he said.
“No,” she said, sitting back down. “My roommates might be home. And”—she exhaled smoke seriously—“we’ll have sex.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I’m leaving in a few months.”
“I think we can finish before then.”
Cleo suppressed a smile. “I just don’t want to attach,” she said.
She looked down between her knees. Frank crouched in front of her. “I’m afraid it might be too late for that.”
“You think?”
“I attached the moment I heard you say aluminum.”
Cleo looked up at him from beneath her winged eyelids.
“Al-um-in-ium,” she said softly.
Frank clutched his heart. “See? I’m screwed.”
“No, I’m screwed,” she said. “I’m the one who has to leave.”
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. I heard Bali’s cool.”
She did not feel as casual about this as she sounded.
“Not back home to England?”
“England’s not my home.”
Cleo ground her cigarette out on the metal stair tread. He sensed there was more to the story there, but he didn’t pry. She checked her watch to avoid further questioning.
“It’s past midnight!”
“This isn’t right,” said Frank.
“Seriously,” she said. “We’ve been talking for like—”
“No, I mean, this. New Year’s Eve isn’t meant to be this good.”
“It’s meant to be bad?”
“It’s meant to be fine. You know? Just fine. It has never, not once in my life, exceeded my expectations.”
“You know, in Denmark they jump off a chair to signify jumping into the new year.”
“Are you Scandinavian?”
“Why? Because I’m blond?” Cleo rolled her eyes. “No, Frank. I just know some things.”
“That you do.” Frank stood up and dusted off his pant legs theatrically. “Okay, let’s do it.”
“Jump? But we don’t have a chair.”
“A stair is as good as a chair.”
Cleo looked up at the stairwell behind them.
“But let’s go all the way from the top,” she said. “Start the year with a bang.”
They climbed to the first landing. They had to clear roughly ten steps to land on the ground floor below. It was the kind of game children played, daring themselves to climb higher and higher. He took her hand. She squeezed it back. They both jumped.
CHAPTER TWO
June
Cleo didn’t want to wear white, but she had hoped for a wedding cake. She could have ordered it herself from one of the Italian bakeries on the Lower East Side, the kind of place where every surface was covered in either powdered sugar or dust, but she’d left the planning of the meal to Santiago, who was known for his ecstatic and orgiastic dinner parties. Santiago thought they should forgo a traditional cake, and since nothing else about her marriage to Frank was proving to be traditional, she did not insist otherwise.
In fact, Cleo didn’t insist on anything about the wedding. She did buy a dress for the occasion, but the one she picked was blue. It was late June, too hot for anything elaborate, and the idea of wearing white had always seemed ridiculous to her. She hadn’t been a virgin since she was fourteen. She’d let Frank slip his hands inside her underwear in her stairwell the first night they met. It had felt like he was tracing the alphabet on her clit. L, M, N, O … POW! No, there was no reason at all to wear white.