Then
Ethan’s head juddered on the cold windowpane as the bus rumbled through the Holland Tunnel. He wiped a clear circle in the fogged glass and peered through, hoping to catch a final glimpse of Ruby, but she was already lost in the crowd. The man in the seat next to him, resplendent in a ‘Yankees Suck’ T-shirt tucked into elasticated sweatpants, pulled a jumbo-sized bag of Cool Ranch Doritos out of his rucksack and tore into them. The smell wafted over to Ethan, who sighed and closed his eyes. They felt gritty beneath their lids, and sore. The bus belched out exhaust fumes as the driver squawked into his cell phone and made a sharp turn onto the highway. Ethan’s head hit the windowpane again, harder this time, and a dull headache bloomed between his eyebrows.
The weekend in New York was over.
If Ethan had been living in a 1950s Technicolor musical, he would have described it as a whirlwind. But he was not Gene Kelly, and New York was real rather than a studio sound set, so in truth the weekend had been more like a grueling endurance test. One he was pretty sure he had failed.
When Ruby had met him at the bus station, his heart had actually soared. The moment he locked eyes on her – windblown and harried and hair slipping into her eyes – he had been Gene Kelly and, if asked, he probably could have done that little skip-click with his heels. She had taken his breath away. All he’d wanted to do was bundle her into a taxi, lead her into bed, peel off her clothes and just steep himself in her. He had wanted to shut out everyone else – all of the huddled masses of New York – and just exist in a space outside of everyone. Just the two of them.
But, like so many dreams, it didn’t quite work out as he’d envisioned.
First, there was the restaurant she had dragged them to on Friday – a Thai/Cuban place where they served drinks out of the husks of fruit and the dishes were created with the sole purpose of searing off your taste buds. They had been seated at a table next to the bathroom – the bitch’s table, he knew from experience, so apparently whatever favor Jess had called in hadn’t been all that valuable – and spent the next three hours shouting incoherently at each other over the too-loud samba music and trying not to cry as they speared chili after raw, explosive chili into their mouths. When they’d paid the bill – another opportunity for him to hold back tears – he’d wanted to head back to the apartment, but she insisted they take a taxi to a bar in Williamsburg. It looked like a fried chicken shop from the outside, but once inside Ruby had mumbled a password at the kid behind the counter and he had led them through the door of the deep freezer, down a narrow flight of stairs and into a damp, dimly lit basement bar filled with achingly hip people who looked like they were having a miserable time. ‘Isn’t this cool?’ Ruby said, and Ethan had nodded wordlessly and proceeded to order the strongest drink on the menu. He’d slipped the bartender a twenty and asked him to be generous with the spirits, which, judging from the difficulty with which he’d ascended the narrow stairs a few hours later, he had been. When they finally got back to the apartment, they were both too drunk and too exhausted to do anything other than collapse wordlessly next to each other and let sleep pull them under.
When they woke the next morning, the rain pounding mercilessly on the barred window in Ruby’s airless room, he’d hoped that they would finally be able to relax into each other.
‘Morning!’ Ruby said, bouncing out of bed and pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. ‘Did you sleep okay? I’m going to run out and get some coffee – do you want some coffee? You haven’t lived until you’ve had New York coffee.’
‘Come back to bed,’ he’d croaked, but she was already out the door, keys jangling in her hand. He sat up gingerly and checked his head – it was sore, but he’d live. He pulled on his boxer shorts and padded into the bathroom, where he necked the three Advil he found in the medicine cabinet and took a long, meditative piss.
‘Ruby, is that you?’ He heard the sound of a somewhat throaty female voice cut through the silent flat as he walked back to the bedroom. ‘Can you get me a glass of water? I’m fucking dying in here!’
‘Uh, Ruby’s just gone out to get some coffee!’ he called back. ‘She’ll be back in a second!’ He was suddenly aware of the sounds he’d been making in the bathroom and was deeply embarrassed.
‘Ethan? Holy shit, I totally forgot you were coming! Hang on, I’m coming out there!’
He heard the sound of scrabbling, like a dog trying to get traction on a slippery floor, and then a crash. ‘You okay?’ he called.
‘Yep!’ A girl he presumed was Jess emerged in a whirl of limbs and teeth, peroxide-blonde hair poking up at strange angles from her head, and threw herself at Ethan. ‘I can’t believe I’m finally meeting you!’ she cried. ‘I’ve heard so much about you!’
‘All good, I hope,’ he said, delicately extracting himself from her embrace. It felt strange to be hugging Ruby’s best friend – who appeared to be wearing an oversized football jersey and little else – particularly when Ruby wasn’t there to sanction it.
‘Totally,’ Jess beamed. She walked into the kitchen and poured herself a mug of tap water, which she drank down in one breathless gulp before going for a refill. ‘I am so completely fucked right now,’ she said, and judging from her pink-rimmed, wide-pupiled eyes, she wasn’t exaggerating.
‘What’d you do last night?’
‘The real question is, what didn’t I do?’ She star-fished on the sofa and blinked up at him. ‘Did you guys go to Hothouse last night?’
‘You mean the fusion place? Yeah, we did. Thanks for getting us the table – Ruby said you’d pulled some strings.’
Jess shrugged. ‘No biggie. Did you love it?’
Ethan wondered how he could phrase his opinion democratically. ‘It was . . . interesting, that’s for sure.’
‘Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s kind of douche-y there, and the food is so spicy I was revisiting it for days. I was surprised when Ruby said she wanted to go. It’s not really her thing.’
Relief flooded through him. ‘I thought it was a weird choice.’ He scratched the back of his neck, hesitating over what he was about to say. ‘Hey, do you think . . . I mean, does Ruby seem okay to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s just – I know work’s been really busy, and I know she’s out with you every night, which is cool, you know, new city and all, of course she should be hitting up all the bars and going to parties and everything, but it’s just –’
Jess sat up straight and folded her legs underneath her. ‘She’s definitely not out with me every night,’ she said. ‘I keep trying to get her to –’
They both froze at the sound of Ruby’s keys in the door.
‘Look,’ Jess said in a hurried whisper. ‘Don’t worry, okay? I’m keeping an eye on her.’
‘An eye on her for what?’
‘Hey, guys!’ Ruby burst through the door, balancing a cardboard tray of coffees in one hand and a paper bag full of still-warm bagels in the other. Her hair was wet and she was shivering slightly in her sweatshirt. Ethan was overcome with the urge to gather her up and swaddle her in blankets, but he could tell by her eyes – which were flashing slightly manically – that it would be like trying to bundle up a nervous cat. ‘I caught Bagel World just as they came out of the oven – can you believe it? Ethan, wait until you have one of these – nothing in the world beats a New York bagel. Morning, Jess! What did you get up to? Thanks so much for getting us into Hothouse, by the way. It was so cool. Wasn’t it cool?’ She looked at Ethan expectantly and a little breathlessly.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it was cool.’
She beamed at him as she handed him a coffee and a bagel laden down with cream cheese. ‘You are going to love this,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to toast it because it’s still hot.’
Ethan didn’t have the heart to tell her that he hated cream cheese. ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking a cautious nibble at the edge.
‘So, what are you two up to today?’ Jess asked. She had helped herself to a coffee and was busy scraping the excess cream cheese from her bagel. ‘They always put way too much on,’ she said when she caught Ethan watching. He smiled and quickly followed her lead, sliding a slab of cream cheese off the bagel and onto the plate.
‘I thought we’d just hang out around here,’ he said, taking another, more enthusiastic bite. Ruby had been right: the bagel was delicious. ‘Maybe watch a movie or something.’
‘No way,’ Ruby said, shaking her head. ‘We have all of New York to see! I thought we’d start out at the Met and wander through Central Park down to Rockefeller Plaza.’
‘Why do you want to go to Midtown on a Saturday?’ Jess asked. ‘Ethan’s right, you’re better off staying around here, especially in this weather.’ She nodded towards the window, which looked out onto a gray, rainy morning. Ethan could tell that she was trying to be helpful, but Ruby’s eyes narrowed as she spoke and they both realized that she wasn’t about to be dissuaded from her plan.
‘He’s only here for a day and a half,’ she said pointedly. ‘We can’t just sit around here and watch movies all day. That would be lame.’
‘I honestly wouldn’t mind –’
‘No!’ Ruby cut him off. ‘I want to show you the city.’ She glanced up at the kitchen clock: 11:13. ‘I can’t believe how late it is! We need to hurry.’ She took a single bite of her bagel before abandoning it on the kitchen counter and dashing towards the bathroom. ‘I’m going to hop in the shower!’ she called. ‘And then we should get going!’
The bathroom door shut behind her and Jess and Ethan were left staring at each other. ‘What the hell was that?’ Ethan asked.
Jess shrugged. ‘I don’t know what’s up with her today, but I hope you brought a pair of comfortable shoes, because it looks like you’re going to be walking the length of Manhattan.’ She glanced out of the window again. ‘And maybe a parka.’
She wasn’t wrong. Now, as the bus rattled through Connecticut, Ethan wondered if he and Ruby had managed to have a single meaningful conversation all weekend. He’d kept trying to talk to her about how she was doing: at the top of the Empire State Building, crowded next to groups of tourists snapping away at the gray, fog-obscured view of Manhattan below, in the dingy dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, their elbows knocking together as they hunched over the counter, as they waited in the endless line to be seated for brunch in SoHo the following day. But each time, Ruby would dodge and deflect his questions, slipping past them and into safer waters. He’d learned a lot of unnecessary facts about New York, but not a lot about his girlfriend’s current state of mind.
Finally, he’d given up trying. They had spent the last few hours of the visit in relative silence, her nervously pulling him through the shops of SoHo, pointing out things he could buy if he’d had the money or inclination. He hadn’t even told her about applying to schools: he’d been saving the news until he saw her in person, but the time had never seemed right, and eventually he decided to keep it from her entirely, maybe as retaliation for her own evasiveness, or maybe because, in the face of all the grandeur and excess of New York, the idea of junior college felt suddenly small.
And sex . . . well, that had been another thing that had been conspicuously lacking. Every time he tried to touch her she’d dart away from him like a startled goldfish. They’d had sex just once, in the early hours of Sunday morning, when they were both still gauzed with sleep and found each other in the half-darkness, a tangle of fumbling limbs and warm-breathed kisses. Afterwards, he’d pulled her towards him and run his fingers over the gentle slopes and dips of her body, but she had shifted away and wrapped the sheet tightly around her.
She was shy now, self-conscious in a way she hadn’t been a few months before, when she would sit naked on top of his bed, peeling an orange and eating its segments slowly, the rind sticking to the sheets, the juice dribbling down her chin, laughing as he bent over to lick it clean. He could see that she’d gained a little weight, but he liked it: it had filled out her angles, made her pillowy and soft. He loved the new curve of her stomach, but she guarded it with a protective arm, and any move he made to touch it was rebuffed with a flick of the wrist and a quick, apologetic smile.
‘The bus will be stopping for a short break,’ the driver announced through the garbled intercom. ‘If you want to eat food, you can get food. Bus leaves in fifteen minutes. Late people will be left behind!’
Ethan glanced out of the window and saw that they had pulled into a small service station with an Arby’s attached. He wasn’t hungry – the brunch, when it had finally arrived, had been huge, and besides, no one was ever hungry for Arby’s – but he needed to stretch his legs, so he climbed down from the bus. He could hear the steady thrum of traffic from the nearby highway and the air was perfumed with exhaust fumes and frying meat. He lit a cigarette and inhaled. He tried to picture what Ruby was doing right now, but all he could imagine was her leading a group of Chinese tourists on a tour of Ellis Island, or spinning around in the middle of Times Square while tossing her hat in the air. He ground the cigarette out beneath his heel and headed back to the bus. Two more hours and he’d be home. And, he couldn’t help but think, further away from Ruby than ever.