Someone Else's Shoes(5)

“You want Michel’s special white-truffle omelet? Or the seared tuna?”

“Sure. That will be lovely.”

Nisha swallows. She tries to keep her voice level. “What time would you like it?”

Carl pauses and she hears the muffled sound of him talking to someone else in the room. Her heart has started to pound.

“Midday would be wonderful. But take your time. I don’t want to rush you.”

“Of course,” says Nisha. “Love you.”

“You too, darling,” says Carl, and the line goes dead.

Nisha stands very still, her blood pumping in her ears in a way that has nothing to do with running. She thinks briefly that her head may actually explode. She takes two deep breaths. Then she punches another number into the phone. It goes straight to voicemail. She curses the time difference with New York.

“Magda?” she says, her hand raking through her sweaty hair. “It’s Mrs. Cantor. You need to get on to your man, NOW.”

When she looks up, a gym attendant, in a polo shirt and cheap shorts, has appeared. “Ma’am, you cannot use a phone in here, I’m afraid. It’s against—”

“Just back off,” says Nisha. “Go clean a floor or something. This place is a goddamn petri dish.” She pushes past him toward the changing room, snatching a towel from another attendant as she goes.



* * *



? ? ?

The changing rooms are packed, but she sees nobody. She is running through the telephone conversation in her head, over and over, her heart thumping. So this is it. She needs to clear her head, to be ready to respond, but her body has gone into a weird stasis and nothing is working as it should. She sits down on the bench briefly, staring blankly in front of her. I can do this, she tells herself, gazing at her trembling hands. I have survived worse. She presses her face into the towel, breathing in until she’s sure she’s got the shakes under control, and straightens, pushing her shoulders back.

Finally she stands and opens her locker, pulling out her Marc Jacobs gym bag. Someone has placed their bag on the bench beside her locker and she shoves it onto the floor, putting her own in its place. Shower. She must shower before she does anything. Appearances are everything. And then her phone rings again. A couple of women look over but she ignores them and picks it up from the bench beside her. Raymond.

“Mom? Did you see the picture of my eyebrows?”

“What, darling?”

“My eyebrows. I sent a picture. Did you look?”

Nisha holds out her phone and flicks through her messages until she finds the picture he has sent. “You have beautiful eyebrows, sweetheart,” she says reassuringly, putting the phone back to her ear.

“They’re terrible. I just feel really down. I saw this program on, like, the dolphin trade and there were all these dolphins just being made to do tricks and stuff and I felt so guilty because we went to that place and swam with them in Mexico, remember? I felt so bad I couldn’t leave my room and then I thought I’d tidy up my eyebrows and it was a disaster because now I look like mid-nineties Madonna.”

A woman has started drying her hair nearby and Nisha briefly considers wrenching the hairdryer out of her hand and clubbing her to death with it. “Sweetheart, I can’t hear you in here. Hold on.”

She walks out into the corridor. Takes a deep breath. “They look perfect,” she says, into the muffled silence. “Gorgeous. And mid-nineties Madonna is a totally hot look.”

She can picture him, cross-legged on his bed back in Westchester, the way he has sat since he was tiny.

“They don’t look gorgeous, Mom. It’s a disaster.”

A woman comes out of the changing area and passes her, her feet slopping in flip-flops, her head down as she hurries past in her cheap jacket. Why don’t women stand up straight? The woman’s shoulders are slumped, her head dipped into her neck like a turtle’s, and Nisha is immediately irritated. If you look like a victim, why are you surprised when people treat you badly? “Then we’ll get them microbladed when you come home.”

“So they do look terrible.”

“No! No, you look gorgeous. But, sweetheart, I really need to go. I’m right in the middle of something. I’ll call you.”

“Not until three my time, earliest. I have to sleep and then we have self-care. It’s so dumb. They make you do all this mindfulness stuff like it wasn’t being stuck in my head that got me here in the first place.”

“I know, darling. I’ll call you after that. I love you.”

Nisha ends the call and dials again. “Magda? Magda? Did you get my message? Call me as soon as you get this. Okay?”

She is ending the call when the door opens. A gym attendant walks in and spies her holding her phone.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry but—”

“Don’t. Even,” she snarls, and he closes his mouth over the words. There are some advantages to being an American woman over forty who no longer has any fucks left on the shelf, and he can see it. It is the first thing she has felt glad about all week.



* * *



? ? ?

Nisha showers, moisturizes her limbs with the gym’s inferior products (she will smell like an Amtrak restroom all day), ties her wet hair into a knot and then, her feet safely on a towel (changing-room floors make her nauseated—the skin cells! The verrucas!), checks her phone for the eighteenth time to see if Magda has responded.