He stood up. He wasn’t much taller than she was, but he was older, a man, and his voice held authority. “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
He led her upstairs and down a hallway into a part of the concourse that was under construction, where the shops hadn’t yet been opened, the area empty and dark. She was still wondering what it was he’d show her — drugs, she hoped, wanting to try something new — when suddenly his mouth was on hers and his hand was under her shirt scratching the cuts and adding new ones, the other one pressing her shoulders against the wall. Then he pulled down her tights and unbuckled his pants and suddenly he was inside her.
He never covered her mouth, nor did she call out for help. She wasn’t sure, later, if she had even said no. It all happened so fast. She was a girl who did her homework, who pleased her parents, who wrote thank-you notes. She had no practice in refusal.
He groaned into her shoulder and it was over. Without looking at her, he buckled his pants and walked away. Her tights were still around her knees, and her legs wobbled as she pulled them up. After he was gone, she realized he hadn’t even given her the cigarette.
She never told anyone, wanting the secret to be contained and buried. Later, she did tell her therapist she was pregnant. A quiet, brown-haired woman with circles under her eyes, Grace wore earth-toned sweaters and simple silver jewelry, and Anne found it impossible to imagine that she had ever had sex, or done anything bad, in her entire life. As soon as Anne told her, she regretted it. Her eyes turning moony with sympathy and concern, the therapist wanted to understand and to help. Sixteen years old, shaking with hate, trapped at home with her hopelessly unhappy parents, Anne knew that nothing Grace said could help her. In some respects, her life since then had been a repudiation of the whole idea of help, a big fuck-you to it.
Anne now thought of that time and the incident at the Faubourg without anger. It was years ago, and whatever injuries she’d suffered had long since healed over. It wasn’t an excuse for the person she’d become, just another memory; but it was the first time she had learned to walk away.
Being in New York made her L.A. life feel made up, unreal, and now that she was here, she felt no loyalty to California. She spent the day walking around her old neighborhood, looking in store windows, people-watching. The Midtown hotel seemed like a bad mirage, nothing that had anything to do with her. She was eating egg rolls at Panda Kitchen when she finally checked her cell phone. There were seventeen new messages, all from various people she hadn’t attended to, about the events and appointments she had blown off. Five were from Adam, asking her to call him as soon as she could. She deleted these without even listening all the way through, and cutting him off mid-sentence gave her no small amount of satisfaction. The last was from Julia, confirming their dinner tonight. Anne texted her that she wouldn’t be able to make it.
She licked the salty residue of the egg rolls off her fingers. She had a photo shoot in the morning and knew she’d get in trouble; too much salt made her lids puffy and gave her skin a creped quality. But maybe she wouldn’t do the photo shoot. Maybe, she thought with a smile, she wouldn’t go back at all.
She didn’t return to the hotel until midnight, and she threw a blanket over the blinking red voice-mail button on the phone and went to sleep. In the morning, she took a cab down to Tribeca for her photo shoot, where her late arrival earned her a cursory, halfhearted scolding from the publicist. They were used to this kind of thing. They dressed her up in a variety of outfits — a spy, an executive, a nurse, and the president of the United States, if the president were very young and a little bit slutty.
The lights beat hot on her face and people were yelling instructions and a woman kept oiling her cleavage, then dusting it with sparkly powder.
Amid the hubbub she became aware, after a while, that Adam was standing in the back, watching with a lazy, proprietary interest. An hour later, he came up as she was removing the many layers of makeup. Her fake eyelashes felt exoskeletal, and she peered at him through their spiky, bristled edges. Outside of L.A. his posturing looked even more ridiculous, his tan incongruous, his teeth strangely uniform, plastic.
“That was hot,” he said. “You’re going to do fine.”
“Why are you here?”
“The show’s going off the air,” he said. “It underperformed.”
He had arranged his features into an expression not of concern or reassurance, or even of a readiness to listen and explain, but of complete neutrality. Don’t blame me, it said. You’re on your own.
“So that’s it?” she said.
He put a hand on her bare shoulder. “I should’ve canceled the shoot, but there’s this little fucker at the magazine that I’ve been waiting to get back at for years. So now they’ll have to eat the cost. I’m glad you showed up. I thought maybe you were on a bender or something.”
“I don’t do that,” Anne said mechanically. She was out of her pinstriped miniskirt now and slipping on her jeans.
“No, you’re a wholesome girl,” Adam said. “Good luck.”
She cabbed it back to the hotel, where her room had been tidied, her clothes folded, the toiletries replaced. She took a long bath, her skin pruning. When she got out, her cell phone was beeping. There were two messages: the first from Julia, who almost sounded like she was crying. She was sorry about the news, she said, but while she understood that Anne might be upset, the time to get back on the horse was now. It was the most sympathy Anne had ever heard from her, and she was surprised. The second message was from Hilary — there was no doubting the tears in her voice — begging for Anne to call back.
She deleted Julia’s message and listened to Hilary’s again. The baby was making noises in the background, and she thought about the baby she’d seen on the street outside her apartment, staring back at her, curious and unafraid. But Hilary’s baby was in a small town that Anne couldn’t picture and would never see.
Suddenly she was crying too, the short, dry sobs shaking her all over, her body shivering involuntarily. There was no one to go to or run away from. What had Neal said — that if you have nothing to mourn, then nothing in your life’s worth anything?
She was dangling at the end of her particular tether.
She spent an hour like that in the dark, sterile room, and she felt dismantled. Ended.
Okay, she finally thought. Okay.
So everything was over, the short wild ride. She called her landlord in L.A., broke her lease, and told him to sell whatever was left, which wasn’t much. She decided that today she would do one good thing. She rooted around in her purse and wrote out a check to Hilary for the entire amount she’d earned from the TV show, more money than she’d made in her entire life and far more, she was sure, than Hilary had ever imagined. She put the check in an envelope, added the address in Utica, and left it with the concierge to mail.
When she checked out, she was carrying a single bag that was no bigger than the one she had had when she first got to New York. Rinsed of all her trappings, she felt lighthearted and at ease. For years she had been escaping into one life after another, and this wasn’t the time to stop. People like Hilary and Alan were only temporary runaways. They would always go home; they belonged to the place they came from. Other people were destined to keep leaving, over and over again.
ELEVEN
