Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (26 page)

“You are the single crabbiest person I’ve ever met.”

He chuckled and buried his nose against her neck. “Yeah, but I’m right, aren’t I? You came on the ferry thinking you were supposed to feel something, and then you didn’t.”

“Sort of.”

“So I’m wrong?”

“Not really.”

May looked at the flowing green gown of the Statue of Liberty. Her proud crown and her sightless eyes. Her raised torch.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door
.

She tried to see what Ben saw. The Lenape Indians and their oysters. The immigrants pouring through the golden door onto the island, an unwashed, undifferentiated collection of foods and folkways and lives. Their mishaps and adventures, triumphs and sorrows.

The ferry going back and forth, day after day, year after year. On one trip, it carried a man with a machete. On another, it gave refugees from the terrorist attacks an escape from the unthinkable.

It wasn’t simple or pretty. Possibly that was his point—that the whole city was dense with history, layered and pulsing with life.

Alive. Real
. The words kept coming back to her.

She thought of herself, lacing on her sneakers for a day of solitary tourism. What had she thought she would find when she left the house, if not the connections, the emotions that were missing inside the confines of Dan’s bedroom?

She’d resented the ferry because she hadn’t been able to walk aboard and block out everything she didn’t like about it—how loud it was, how obviously a spectacle. Ben was right that she hadn’t liked how her heart refused to leap into her throat at the sight of the country’s most famous national symbol.

She’d resented New York because she couldn’t find any way to flatten it to suit her fantasies, just as she hadn’t been able to shoehorn Dan into the dreams she’d moved here to
impose on him.

This city—it wasn’t a simple place, or a familiar one. It wouldn’t change to suit her. But standing here with Ben, she wondered if it was possible that
she
could change. If she was already changing.

I want you, May
.

She wanted him, too. Wanted more than him—she wanted to live in the world the way he did. Even thought it was harder.
Because
it was harder.

Because it was real.

She tucked herself against his body and blinked away tears. His other arm came up, wrapping her tight.

They stayed like that for a long time, caught between the sound of the water and the throaty diesel hum of the engine. Caught between the sky and the painted metal hull of the boat, between the wind at her front and the warmth at her back.

Suspended between the past and the future, May wondered what would happen to her tomorrow.

She wondered if she would find, when it was time to go home, that she didn’t remember how to be the person she’d been before.

Ben spent the rest of the day showing May interesting things.

She didn’t care one way or the other about the fort at Battery Park, but the Irish famine memorial enchanted her. She’d exclaimed over how small and pretty it was, like an Irish hillock transplanted to the city. They’d climbed all over the top of it, studied the quotations along the sides and the information hidden in the tunnel underneath, and inspected the genuine Irish cottage at the top.

Glowing with excitement, May pronounced it the coolest memorial she’d ever seen.

“It’s my favorite,” he told her, and her eyes glistened as though he’d given her a gift of incalculable value.

She didn’t care for Chinatown or the Diamond District, but she pronounced the lighting district marvelously outdated and insisted he buy a lightbulb, just to keep it in business.

He fed her Mexican food and bought her a shot at the three-story tequila bar on Sixth Street.

“Where’s the limes?” she’d asked when her drink came, and he’d told her that this was good tequila, so she had to sip it, like cognac.

Her eyes got big. “I had cognac once,” she said. “It made my tongue numb.”

Then she started telling him a story about an exchange student who’d lived with her family and the trip she’d made to France with Allie at the end of that visit, how they’d stayed with the French family for two weeks and eaten all kinds of mysterious foods, capped with a long meal at a country restaurant that May described course by course until he was salivating.

For the food, for May. For the taste of cognac on her tongue.

They hopped on the subway and took the 6 train to the 7 over to Queens. May talked almost all the way there, telling him rambling stories about her sister and the guy she was about to marry, an old friend of May’s named Matt, as well as someone named Keller who may or may not have been a dog. Mostly he let the words wash over him and watched her face, the pleasure she took in sharing something funny or quirky, the way she leaned closer when she got to a good part, smiling in anticipation of his enjoyment.

They got off on the elevated platform at Court House Square, and May started peppering
him with questions. “Are you looking for apartments here? Because I have to be honest, I’m starting to get worried about the apartment thing. I feel like maybe I’m getting in your way, and what happens if you don’t have one yet when Alec gets home? Do you—”

“May,” he interrupted. While she talked, he’d led her around the back side of a platform piling.

“What?”

“Shut up for a minute.”

He put both hands on her shoulders, holding her still so he could kiss her. She smiled as his face lowered toward hers. When their mouths met, her lips parted immediately, and the kiss bypassed slow and gentle and dropped into darker, hungrier territory.

He’d been staring at her mouth on the train, waiting for this moment. She tasted like smoky tequila, her tongue languid and relaxed. Her hands found their way to the hem of his jacket and inside to his back, her light fingertips exploring the bare skin just above his belt.

He didn’t allow himself to move his hands or grind his body against hers, but he kissed her for as long as he wanted to, which was an indecently long time, until her hands began to stroke higher up and then to clutch and pull him in.

He kissed her cheek, her neck. “We can’t here.”

“I guess not,” she said, her voice husky with arousal and disappointment. “But, man, do I ever want to.”

He dropped his forehead onto her shoulder and laughed. It was either that or cry. “You should’ve mentioned that before I brought you all the way to Queens.”

“I didn’t know we were coming here again! You didn’t say.”

“I thought you needed to go to a museum. It’s part of the tourist experience.”

She made a disgusted face. “I’ve already been to the Met, the Frick, MoMA, the sex museum, the Tenement—”

“This one’s different,” he promised.

Twenty minutes later, she was agreeing with him. “There is a hole,” she said. “There is a hole in the wall.” She squatted down next to it. “It goes all the way through to outside.”

“Yep.”

“Why is there a hole in the wall?”

“It’s an installation. PS1 is all about experimental art.”

“This is art? It’s a hole.”

“I know, but …”

“What’s it called?”

He found the placard. “It’s called
The Hole at PS1
.”

“That’s unhelpful.”

“I know. But the way the light comes through is kind of cool.”

“Like a laser beam.” She held her finger up in front of it, breaking the beam, and then spun around and smiled at him. “Show me something else.”

They strolled through the whole museum, taking in staircase murals, lighted globes with the word
EXIT
painted on them, an eerie stairwell covered in forest plants and black and white tree branches, and a video that was somehow projected into a mouse-size hole in the floor.

“What did she say?” May hunkered down by the hole and peered at the image of a nude woman swimming in what appeared to be lava.

“ ‘I am a worm and you are a flower.’ ”

“This is the weirdest place I have ever been.”

“Good weird or bad weird?”

“The very best weird. My mother would die.”

After they finished at the museum, he took her to the beer garden in Astoria. It was almost four, and he was hungry and thirsty, tired of walking. They split a pitcher of beer and ate sauerkraut and bratwurst. She didn’t blink when he ordered headcheese.

He thought she might actually be the perfect woman.

Had it been like this with Sandy? He tried to remember dates they’d been on. Whole days they’d spent together this way, sharing food, entertaining each other with jokes and wry observations. But all his mental images of Sandy were kitchen images—the restaurant where they’d met, then Sardo. He didn’t have a single memory of Sandy like this. She had never been this
easy
.

May sat next to him with her back to the picnic table, leaning on her elbows and gazing at the late afternoon crowd of revelers. She’d crossed her boots at the ankle, and her top toe bounced gently to the music being piped through the restaurant’s speakers. The sun hit the crown of her head, turning her hair gold-red and making her glow.

He felt the same glow inside his body. A fullness in his chest. A gratitude—that he was
alive, that he was with May. He took a bite of his brat, savoring the pop of his teeth through the casing, the rich, fatty taste of seasoned meat. The world tasted good. Smelled good.

She’d done this to him, somehow.

He hoped that when she left, he could keep this feeling. Maybe he’d figure out what to do with it.

Maybe he’d even figure out what to do with himself.

She must have felt his scrutiny, because she looked sideways and smiled at him over her shoulder.

“This was a good day,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She held a beer stein in one hand, and now she lifted it to her lips and drank deeply. He watched her throat move. She’d taken off her sweater, and beneath it she wore a black T-shirt that hugged her breasts and highlighted the curve of her waist. He thought that if he touched her, her skin would be deliciously warm, the heat amplified by the sun soaking into dark cotton. “I think you were right.”

“About what?”

“I was doing it wrong,” she said. Her voice was low and beer-mellow. “I like New York.”

“What do you like about it?”

The question shouldn’t have felt so fraught. He shouldn’t have been so jittery all of a sudden.

May tipped her head back to look at the sky. “I think I wanted it to be … a destination. The endpoint I’d been trying to force myself to reach with Dan, where we could finally choose to live together, and that would fix everything that was wrong with our relationship. I wanted to move here—or, not here, but to New Jersey—and feel totally triumphant and complete.” She turned to look at him. “Does that make any sense?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s not like that. I mean, the whole Dan thing aside, you could never live here and feel
done
with it, like you know everything there is to know. It’s so stuffed full of people and stories and life, I could never see more than a small part of it. I think … I think it’s like an attic. My attic back home isn’t very big, and I’ve only been in my house a few years, so all I’ve got up there is, like, eight plastic totes full of Christmas decorations and pants that don’t fit me. But
New York is like an attic from the movies, huge and badly lit. You go in, and your clothes get streaked with dust, looking around. Your nose starts to tickle from all the accumulated smells and mess. But there’s so much to
see
. So many stories in that attic, just waiting for you to find them. And they don’t all make sense right away. You open a trunk, and it’s full of … I don’t know, dolls’ heads, or lightbulbs, or dishes you’ve never seen before. But that’s part of the fun. Figuring it out.”

“Discovering the stories.”

“Yeah. And discovering which boxes are meaningless junk to you, and which ones are full of treasures in disguise.”

He thought about that. Whether he’d shown her any treasures. Whether he’d discovered any.

“I haven’t fed you any honey yet,” he said. “Speaking of treasures in disguise.”

“For thirty-five bucks, it better be a treasure.”

“It is.”

The saucy lift of her lips echoed the cocky smile he could feel on his own. “I’ll bet.”

He lifted the pitcher, topped off his glass, and leaned sideways to fill hers. Then he lifted his stein. “To New York,” he said. His smile felt lopsided, but that fit. She’d knocked him off-kilter, and when she smiled back, it only got worse.

“To New York.” She clinked her stein against his. “And to the future. Let’s not fuck it up as badly as we’ve fucked up the past.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

So they did. The afternoon slid away along with the beam of light she sat in, traveling down the bench and then falling to the ground, working its way across the yard. They ate pickles and potato pancakes, finished their pitcher, and swapped stories from back home. The best games they’d seen at Lambeau. Terrible dates. Disastrous proms. He turned around eventually and put his arm over her shoulder, and she leaned into his chest, tipping her head back now and then to meet his eyes.

He kissed her upside down.

“Can I take you home now?”

“Please,” she said. And she smiled.

Tomorrow, she would leave. But tonight, she belonged to him.

His phone rang as they mounted the interminable steps to his apartment. Ben didn’t recognize the number, so he handed it to May. “For you?”

She looked. “Probably.” She answered the call. “Hello?” Then a pause, and she shrieked, “Allie!”

Her sister. Ben nudged past her and hustled up the last flight of stairs so he could have the door open before she reached the top. She was tired. On the subway, she’d looked like she might fall asleep.

She came in behind him as he was dropping his jacket over the arm of the couch. He cracked the window, waved her into a seat, and fixed a couple glasses of ice water, sitting one on the coffee table in front of her as she reassured her sister that she was fine, and she’d sort out her ID quandary tomorrow morning.