Still Me

‘Fuck them.’ His voice was uncharacteristically harsh. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about it. You can prove you didn’t do what they said you did – right? So you should sue them for unfair dismissal and loss of reputation and hurt feelings and –’

I shook my head.

‘Seriously. Gopnik trades on this reputation of being a decent, old-fashioned good guy in business and he’s always doing stuff for charity, but he fired you for nothing, Louisa. You lost your job and your home with no warning and no compensation.’

‘He thought I was stealing.’

‘Yeah, but he must know there was something not quite right about what he was doing or he would have called the cops. Given who he is, I’d bet there’s some lawyer who would take this on a no-win-no-fee basis.’

‘Really. I’m fine. Lawsuits aren’t my style.’

‘Yeah, well. You’re too nice. You’re being English about it.’

The doorbell rang. Josh held up a finger, as if to say we would continue this conversation. He disappeared into the narrow hallway and I heard him paying the delivery boy while I finished laying the little table.

‘And you know what?’ he said, bringing the bag into the kitchen. ‘Even if you didn’t have evidence I’d bet Gopnik would pay a lump sum just to stop the whole thing getting into the papers. Think what that could do for you. I mean, a couple of weeks ago you were sleeping on someone’s floor.’ (I hadn’t told him about sharing Nathan’s bed.)

‘This could get you a decent deposit on a rental. Hell, you get a good enough lawyer, this could buy you an apartment. You know how much money Gopnik has? Like, he is famously rich. In a city of seriously rich people.’

‘Josh, I know you mean well but I just want to forget it.’

‘Louisa, you –’

‘No.’ I put my hands down on the table. ‘I’m not suing anybody.’

He waited for a minute, perhaps frustrated by his inability to push me further, and then he shrugged and smiled. ‘Okay – well, dinner time! You don’t have any allergies, right? Have some chicken. Here – you like eggplant? They do this eggplant chilli dish that’s just the greatest.’

I slept with Josh that night. I wasn’t drunk and I wasn’t vulnerable and I wasn’t breathless with need for him. I think I just wanted my life to feel normal again. We had eaten and drunk and talked and laughed until late into the night, and he had pulled the drapes and turned down the lights and it seemed like a natural progression, or at least I could think of no reason not to. He was so beautiful. He had skin without a blemish and cheekbones you could actually see, and his hair was soft and chestnut-coloured and tinged with tiny flecks of gold, even after the long winter. We kissed on his sofa, first sweetly and then with increasing fervour, and he lost his shirt and then I lost mine and I made myself focus on this gorgeous, attentive man, this prince of New York, and not on all the rambling things my imagination tended to focus on, and I felt need grow in me, like a distant, reassuring friend, until I was able to block out everything but the sensations of him against me, and then, some time later, inside me.

Afterwards he kissed me tenderly and asked me if I was happy, then murmured that he had to get some sleep and I lay there and tried to ignore the tears that inexplicably trickled from the corners of my eyes into my ears.

What was it Will had told me? You had to seize the day. You had to embrace opportunities as they came. You had to be the kind of person who said yes. If I had turned Josh away, wouldn’t I have regretted it for ever?

I turned silently in the unfamiliar bed and studied his profile as he slept, the perfect straight nose and the mouth that looked like Will’s. I thought of all the ways Will would have approved of him. I could even picture them together, laughing with each other, a competitive edge to their jokes. They might have been friends. Or enemies. They were almost too similar.

Perhaps I was meant to be with this man, I thought, albeit via a strange, unsettling route. Perhaps this was Will, come back to me. And with this thought I wiped my eyes and fell into a brief, disjointed sleep.

24

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Dear Treen,

I know you think it’s too soon. But what did Will teach me? You only get one life, right? And you’re happy with Eddie? So why can’t I be happy? You’ll get it when you meet him, I promise.

So this is the kind of man Josh is: yesterday he took me to the best bookshop in Brooklyn and bought me a bunch of paperbacks he thought I might like, then at lunchtime he took me to a posh Mexican restaurant on East 46th and made me try fish tacos – don’t pull a face, they were absolutely delicious. Then he told me he wanted to show me something (no, not that). We walked to the Grand Central Terminal and it was packed, as usual, and I was thinking, Okay, bit weird – are we going on a trip? then he told me to stand with my head in the corner of this archway, just by this Oyster Bar. I laughed at him. I thought he was joking. But he insisted, told me to trust him.

So there I am, standing with my head in the corner of this huge masonry archway, with all the commuters coming and going around me, trying not to feel like a complete eejit, and when I look round he’s walking away from me. But then he stops diagonally across from me, maybe fifty feet away, and he puts his own face in the corner and suddenly, above all the noise and chaos and rumbling trains, I hear – murmured into my ear, like he was right beside me – ‘Louisa Clark, you are the cutest girl in the whole of New York City.’

Treen, it was like witchcraft. I looked up and he turned around and smiled, and I have no idea how it worked, but he walked across and just took me in his arms and kissed me in front of everyone and someone whistled at us and it was honestly the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.

So, yes, I’m moving on. And Josh is amazing. It would be nice if you could be pleased for me.

Give Thom a big kiss.

Lx

Weeks passed and New York, as it did with most things, careered into spring at a million miles an hour, with little subtlety and a lot of noise. The traffic grew heavier, the streets were thicker with people, and each day the grid around our block became a cacophony of noise and activity that barely dimmed until the small hours. I stopped wearing a hat and gloves to the library protests. Dean Martin’s padded coat was laundered and went into the cupboard. The park grew green. Nobody suggested I move out.

Margot, in lieu of any kind of helper’s wage, pressed so many items of clothing on me that I had to stop admiring things in front of her because I became afraid she would feel obliged to give me more. Over the weeks, I observed that she might share an address with the Gopniks but that was where the similarity between them ended. She survived, as my mother would have said, on shirt buttons.

‘Between the healthcare bills and the maintenance fees I don’t know where they think I’m meant to find the money to feed myself,’ she remarked, as I handed her another letter hand-delivered by the management company. The envelope said ‘OPEN – LEGAL ACTION PENDING’. She wrinkled her nose and put it neatly in a pile on the sideboard, where it would stay for the next couple of weeks unless I opened it.

She grumbled often about the maintenance fees, which totalled thousands of dollars a month, and seemed to have reached a point at which she had decided to ignore them because there was nothing else she could do.