Before You Knew My Name (6)
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.
Catching sight of herself in the floor-length mirror opposite the bed, Ruby could not help but laugh a little, her hand pressed up against her mouth to catch the sound. The woman in that mirror had hair almost as greasy as the pizza slice, ruddy red cheeks, lips that were starting to chap. What an ignoble start to her adventure, she acknowledged, pulling at the loose, purple-black skin concertinaed under her eyes, taking full stock of her tiredness, before returning the vodka bottle to her mouth.
This is so exciting Ruby! What an awesome thing to do! Omigod, you’re so brave!
After she announced her plan to move to New York for six months, it seemed everyone spoke to her in exclamations. There was something about what she was doing—quitting her day job, giving away most of her furniture and clothes, compacting her life into two metallic blue suitcases—that seemed to inspire people, her news triggering faraway looks and hushed confessions everywhere she went. I always wanted to … I wish I could have … Maybe one day I’ll …
For a while there, Ruby was privy to a whole world of secret desires, shared without invite by both strangers and friends. Now, vodka at her lips, the room rocking slightly, she finds it odd to think of all these people living ahead of her, somewhere in the tomorrow of Melbourne. From her new time zone, she will perpetually live behind them, chasing hours long ticked over in Australia, even though people back home assume she is the one out in front. Taking a self-appointed sabbatical to live in New York City, just because she can. She might as well have told people she was heading to the moon.
‘Am I brave or just crazy?’ she asks the vodka bottle and the room and her hazy reflection, none of which offer a satisfactory answer before she capsizes into sleep.
And now it’s 2 a.m. this next, first morning in New York, and she’s wide awake. The bed sheets are soaked through with sweat, and when Ruby stands up to go to the bathroom, she feels like she is pitching forward, as if her body wants to be somewhere else. Somewhere else. When she is already as somewhere else as she’s ever been. Here in this city of—what is it now? Eight million? Nine? No matter, given she knows exactly two people out of that number, a couple of former colleagues who have made it clear they would love to catch up, Sometime soon, Ruby. When you’ve settled in.
Well, she thinks. Here I am! All settled in. And not feeling very brave at all.
What would those friends and strangers back in Melbourne think of this admission?
Returning from the bathroom, still unsteady, Ruby sits down on the edge of her bed just as a siren starts up outside her window. It is a familiar sound in the dark, yet somehow different to the ambulance calls she is used to hearing back home. More melancholy, perhaps. Or—she moves to the window now, peers down onto the empty street—this New York siren seems resigned, somehow. Weary from overuse, as if the worst tragedies have already happened. It is another delirium-induced musing, this prescription of poetry to an ordinary thing, but something else, too. The beginnings of a new kind of loneliness, where Ruby will soon find herself talking to objects as if they are people, holding conversations with her hairbrush, and her vodka bottles, and the pillows on her bed, just to say anything at all. In these first, early hours, it is as if Ruby senses this impending isolation, the days ahead where she will barely speak to anyone unless she’s reciting her breakfast order or saying thank you to strangers for holding the door.