“Just to be clear,” Simon replied with a bemused smile, “you realize that I’m your boss’s boss, right? You might want to fake a modicum of enthusiasm for the work we’re paying you to do.”
Florence smiled back. “Something tells me you’re not going to be telling anyone about this encounter, least of all Agatha.”
“Christ, I forgot you work for Agatha Hale. No, she would not be amused by this encounter. That woman’s moral compass is in dire need of some WD-40.”
A guilty laugh erupted from the side of Florence’s mouth. To hear someone casually mock a woman who ranked above her on every measure of power—both personal and professional—gave her a giddy feeling of vertigo.
“Alright, settled,” said Simon, bringing his palm down lightly on the table. “Tonight will stay between us. Since you insist.”
“To anonymity,” said Florence, raising her glass.
Under the table, Simon answered by putting his hand on her thigh. Florence did not react. He started moving his fingers upward very, very slowly. They sat looking into each other’s eyes without speaking as Simon stroked her with his thumb. No one noticed. Most of the crowd was huddled around a wall-mounted television, watching football.
“Let’s go somewhere,” Simon said hoarsely. Florence nodded. They left their still-full glasses on the table, and he led her out of the bar by her hand. Outside, she yelped as a cold gust swept past them. Simon took off his scarf and wrapped it around her neck twice, finishing it with a tight knot.
“Better?” he asked.
She nodded.
They half-walked, half-ran, heads bent into the wind, a few blocks north to the Bowery Hotel, where a doorman was sprinkling salt from a large plastic jug onto the sidewalk. A homeless man leaned against the building, rattling coins in a cup. It sounded like a child’s cough. Florence tried to make out what he was mumbling. “They say men don’t cry; men cry, men cry.”
Inside, the desk attendant casually swiped Simon’s credit card as if it were two in the afternoon. So this is how it’s done, Florence thought. She’d always assumed that getting a hotel room for just a few hours would involve dark glasses and false names, a bed that shook when you added quarters to it. But it seemed that four hundred dollars a night was an effective bulwark against such seediness.
They rode the elevator with another guest, a middle-aged man swaying lightly. Simon smiled at Florence in conspiracy. He reached for her. She smiled back but shook her head.
Their room was dark, lit only by a pair of brass sconces next to the bed. Florence walked across it to look out of the large windows that dominated two of the walls. “Casement windows,” she said, running her fingertips across the cold surface. They left four beaded wakes in the condensation.
“Come here,” Simon said, and she did.
4.
Florence woke the next morning animated by a sense of anticipation, as if the night were ahead of her rather than behind. She was alone. Simon had left the hotel at 4 a.m. She had watched from the bed as he’d gathered his belongings from around the room. His charcoal-gray suit, which he’d hung up in the armoire. His wallet, phone, and keys from an orderly stack on the bedside table.
While buttoning his shirt, Simon had drawn his hand sharply to his neck and said, “Shit. I’ve lost a collar stay.”
She’d asked him what a collar stay was, and he’d cocked his head with almost paternal bemusement. “You’re adorable,” he said, without explaining anything.
Florence had expected some awkwardness, but there was none. He chatted amiably as he dressed, then kissed her lightly on the forehead and went home to his wife. Florence didn’t think of herself as someone who would sleep with a married man, and she prodded herself to feel some guilt. But, like the awkwardness, it was curiously absent.
She stretched expansively in the large bed. It was Saturday, checkout was at noon, and she had nowhere to be. The room was flooded with bright, yellow sunlight—light that belonged to a different season or a different city. Rome, maybe.
She got up and went into the bathroom. Her makeup was smeared around her eyes, and her curls sprang from her head as if electrified. After showering, she dried off the miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner to take home with her.
Simon had told her to order breakfast, but when she called downstairs, she was informed that the room bill had already been settled and she’d have to pay by credit card. “Never mind,” she said and hung up roughly. She dressed and sat on the bed. There was nothing else for her to do. She didn’t even have a book. She walked to the door and put her hand on the knob. Then she quickly stepped back into the bathroom and pocketed the sewing kit.
*
Back in Astoria, Florence shut the apartment door and stood still, listening for her roommates. She hoped they were out. She’d found Brianna and Sarah on Craigslist a few months earlier and knew them hardly better now than she had when she’d moved in.
She opened the fridge and took out a nonfat yogurt marked “BRIANNA!!!” in Sharpie. In her room, she settled onto the bed and pulled her laptop toward her. She Googled “collar stay.”
A collar stay is a smooth, rigid strip of metal, horn, baleen, mother of pearl, or plastic that one inserts into a specially made pocket on the underside of a shirt collar to stabilize the collar’s point.
Florence thought about tiny pockets on the undersides of shirt collars. She thought about men like Simon who worried about the stability of their collar’s point. The men Florence usually slept with—bartenders and low-level office drones she met on Tinder—were all transplants to New York who seemed as lost as she was. The only guy she’d gone on more than two dates with since she’d arrived had asked to borrow fifty dollars on their third and last. She doubted he knew what a collar stay was either.
There was a world beyond her world, Florence knew, that was entirely foreign to her. Every once in a while, someone took this other world in their hands and rattled it, dislodging a small piece that fell at her feet with a plink. She gathered up these fragments like an entomologist gathers rare bugs to pin to a board. They were clues that would one day cohere into something larger, she didn’t know yet what. A disguise; an answer; a life.
She looked up Simon’s wife next. Ingrid Thorne starred mainly in independent films with the occasional foray onto Broadway. She wasn’t the type of actress whose picture appeared in People or InTouch—most of their readers wouldn’t know who she was—but she had been on the cover of Paper magazine, as Florence discovered. The grande dame of avant-garde cinema, the interviewer had called her.
Ingrid’s background was an unlikely incubator for avant-garde anything. She’d grown up in a small, wealthy town in Connecticut, the child of a successful lawyer and a homemaker. “Connecticult,” she called it in the Paper interview: “They worship at the twin altars of gin and chintz.” She and Simon now lived on the Upper East Side and sent their children to a prestigious private school, but somehow she managed to make those choices seem radical.
Ingrid was no longer young, and she wasn’t classically beautiful, but her features had a fascinating complexity to them. She had a face you wanted to look at for a long time, which is precisely what Florence was doing when her phone buzzed beside her. She glanced at the screen and watched the phone shimmy on the quilt for a moment before picking it up.