All that week I devoted myself to the care of a boggle-eyed, suspicious, cranky, six-year-old pug. We walked four times a day, I grated Parmesan onto his breakfast, and several days in, he ceased his habit of standing in any room I was in and staring at me with his brow furrowed, as if waiting for me to do something unmentionable, and simply lay down a few feet away, panting gently. I was still a little wary of him but I felt sorry for him too – the only person he loved had vanished abruptly and there was nothing I could do to reassure him that she would be coming home again.
And, besides, it was kind of nice to be in the building without feeling like a criminal. Ashok, who had been away for a few days, listened to my description of this turn of events with shock, outrage, then delight. ‘Man, it’s lucky you found him! He could have just wandered off and then nobody would have known she was even on the floor!’ He shuddered theatrically. ‘When she’s back I’m gonna start checking in on her every day, making sure she’s okay.’
We looked at each other.
‘Nothing would make her more furious,’ I said.
‘Yup, she’d hate it,’ he said, and went back to work.
Nathan pretended to be sad that he had his room back to himself, and brought my stuff over with almost unseemly haste to ‘save me a journey’ of approximately six yards. I think he just wanted to be sure I was really going. He dropped my bags and peered around the apartment, gazing in amazement at the walls of clothes. ‘What a load of junk!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s like the world’s biggest Oxfam shop. Boy, I’d hate to be the house-clearance company having to go through this lot when the old lady pops her clogs.’ I kept my smile fixed and level.
He told Ilaria, who knocked on my door the next day for news of Mrs De Witt, then asked me to take her some muffins she had baked. ‘The food in these hospitals would make you sick,’ she said, patted my arm, and left at a brisk trot before Dean Martin could bite her.
I heard Agnes playing the piano from across the hall, once a beautiful piece that sounded relaxed and melancholy, once something impassioned and anguished. I thought of the many times Mrs De Witt had hobbled across and furiously demanded an end to the noise. This time the music ended abruptly without her intervention, Agnes seemingly slamming her hands down on the keys. Occasionally I would hear raised voices, and it took me a few days to convince my body that my own adrenalin didn’t need to rise with them, that they no longer had anything to do with me.
I passed Mr Gopnik just once, in the main lobby. He didn’t see me, then performed a double-take, apparently primed to object to my presence there. I lifted my chin and held up the end of Dean Martin’s lead. ‘I’m helping Mrs De Witt with her dog,’ I said, with as much dignity as I could manage. He glanced down at Dean Martin, set his jaw, then turned away as if he hadn’t heard me. Michael, at his side, glanced at me, then turned back to his mobile phone.
Josh came on Friday night after work, bringing takeout and a bottle of wine. He was still in his suit – working late all week, he said. He and a colleague were competing for a promotion so he was there for fourteen hours a day, and planned to go in on Saturday too. He peered around the apartment, raising his eyebrows at the décor. ‘Well, dog-sitting was one job opening I certainly hadn’t considered,’ he observed, as Dean Martin trailed suspiciously at his heels. He walked around the living room slowly, picking up the onyx ashtray and the sinuous African-woman sculpture, putting them down, peering intently at the gilded artwork on the walls.
‘It wasn’t top of my list either.’ I laid a trail of doggy treats to the main bedroom and shut the little dog in until he’d calmed down. ‘But I’m really okay with it.’
‘So how you doing?’
‘Better!’ I said, heading to the kitchen. I had wanted to show Josh I was more than the scruffy, intermittently drunk jobseeker he had been meeting the past week so I had dressed up in my black Chanel-style dress with the white collar and cuffs and my emerald fake-crocodile Mary Janes, my hair sleek and blow-dried into a neat bob.
‘Well, you look cute,’ he said, following me. He put his bottle and bag on the side in the kitchen, then walked over to me, standing just a couple of inches away, so that his face filled my vision. ‘And, you know, not homeless. Which is always a good look.’
‘Temporarily, anyway.’
‘So does this mean you’ll be sticking around a little longer?’
‘Who knows?’
He was mere inches from me. I had a sudden sensory memory of burying my face in his neck a week previously.
‘You’re going pink, Louisa Clark.’
‘That’s because you’re extremely close to me.’
‘I do that to you?’ His voice dropped, his eyebrow lifted. He took a step closer, then put his hands on the worktop, at either side of my hips.
‘Apparently,’ I said, but it came out as almost a cough. And then he dropped his lips to mine and kissed me. He kissed me and I leant back against the kitchen units and closed my eyes, absorbing the mint taste of his mouth, the slightly strange feel of his body against mine, the unfamiliar hands closing over my own. I wondered if this was what it would have been like to kiss Will before his accident. And then I thought that I would never kiss Sam again. And then I thought that it was probably quite bad form to think about kissing other men when you had a perfectly nice one kissing you at that very moment. And I pulled my head back a little, and he stopped and looked into my eyes, trying to gauge what it meant.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s – it’s just all kind of soon. I really like you but –’
‘But you only just broke up with the other guy.’
‘Sam.’
‘Who is clearly an idiot. And not good enough for you.’
‘Josh …’
He let his forehead tip forward so that it rested against mine. I didn’t let go of his hand.
‘It just all feels a bit complicated still. I’m sorry.’
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. ‘Would you tell me if I was wasting my time?’ he said.
‘You’re not wasting your time. It’s just … it was barely two weeks ago.’
‘There’s a lot that’s happened in those two weeks.’
‘Well, then, who knows where we’ll be in another two weeks?’
‘You said “we”.’
‘I suppose I did.’
He nodded, as if this were a satisfactory answer. ‘You know,’ he said, almost to himself, ‘I have a feeling about us, Louisa Clark. And I’m never wrong about these things.’
And then, before I could respond, he let go of my hand and walked over to the cupboards, opening and closing them in search of plates. When he turned round, his smile was brilliant. ‘Shall we eat?’
I learnt a lot about Josh that evening. I learnt about his Boston upbringing, the baseball career his half-Irish businessman father had made him give up because he felt that sport would not secure a long-lasting income. His mother, unusually among her peers, was an attorney who had held on to her job throughout his childhood and, in their retirement years, both his parents were adjusting to being in the house together. It was, apparently, driving them completely nuts. ‘We’re a family of doers, you know? So Dad has already taken on some executive role at the golf club and Mom is mentoring kids at the local high school. Anything so they don’t have to sit there looking at each other.’ He had two brothers, both older, one who ran a Mercedes dealership just outside Weymouth, Massachusetts, and another who was an accountant, like my sister. They were a close family, and competitive, and he had hated his brothers with the impotent fury of a tortured youngest sibling until they left home, after which he found he missed them with a gnawing and unexpected pain. ‘Mom says it was because I lost my yardstick, the thing I judged everything by.’
Both brothers were now married and settled with two kids apiece. The family converged for holidays and every summer rented the same house in Nantucket. In his teens he had resented it, but now it was a week he looked forward to more each year.
‘It’s great. The kids and the hanging out and the boat … You should come,’ he said, casually helping himself to more char siu bau. He talked without self-consciousness, a man used to things working out the way he wanted them to.
‘To a family thing? I thought men in New York were all about casual dating.’