“Well, I think you’re too much in your own head,” she said, tapping hers. “Maybe you need to get laid more . . . You know, you never do seem to get laid. I mean: is it my fault? I set you up, don’t I? All the time. You never tell me how it goes.”
Light flooded the car. It came from a huge digital ad for something or other but inside the car it felt delicate and natural, like the break of day. Aimee rubbed her eyes.
“Well, I’ve got projects for you,” she said, “if you want projects. We all know you’re capable of more than you’re doing. At the same time, if you want to jump ship, now would be a good time to do it. I’m serious about this African project—no, don’t roll your eyes at me; we need to iron out details, of course I know that, I’m not a fool—but it’s gonna happen. Judy’s been talking to your mum. I know you don’t want to hear that either, but she has, and your mother is not as full of shit as you seem to think she is. Judy feels that the zone . . . Well, I’m loaded right now and I can’t remember where it is right now, tiny country . . . in the west? But she thinks that might be a really interesting direction for us to go in, it’s got potential. Says Judy. And turns out your honorable member of a mother knows a lot about it. Says Judy. Point is, I’m going to need all hands on deck, and people who want to be here,” she said, indicating her own heart. “Not people who are still wondering why they’re here.”
“I want to be there,” I said, looking at the spot, though under the influence of vodka her little breasts doubled themselves, then crossed, then merged.
“I turn now?” asked Errol hopefully, through a microphone.
Aimee sighed: “You turn now. Well,” she said, returning to me, “you’ve been acting screwy for months, since London. It’s a lot of bad energy. It’s the kind of bad energy that really needs to be grounded otherwise it just keeps passing round the circuit, affecting everybody.”
She made a series of hand gestures here that suggested some previously unknown law of physics.
“Something happen in London?”
Three
By the time I’d finished answering her we’d looped back and reached Union Square, where I looked up and saw the number on that huge ticking board speeding forward, billowing smoke out of the Dantean red hole at its center. It gave me a breathless feeling. A lot of things that happened in those months in London had made me breathless: I’d finally given up my flat, for lack of use, and stood at a crowded hustings waiting all night to watch a man in a blue tie ascend the stage and concede victory to my mother in a red dress. I’d seen a flyer for a nostalgic nineties-hip-hop night, at the Jazz Café, and wanted urgently to go, but could not think of a single friend I might take, I’d simply traveled too much the past few years, was not on any of the usual sites, did not keep up with personal e-mail, partly out of lack of time and partly because Aimee frowned on our “socializing” online, fearing loose talk and leaks. Without really noticing it, I’d let my friendships wither on the vine. So I went alone, got drunk and ended up sleeping with one of the doormen, a huge American, from Philadelphia, who claimed to have once played professional basketball. Like most people in his line of work—like Granger—he had been hired for his height and his color, for the threat considered implicit in their combination. Two minutes of smoking a cigarette with him revealed a gentle soul on good terms with the universe, ill-suited to his role. I had a little pouch of coke on me, given to me by Aimee’s chef, and when my doorman’s break came we went to the bathroom stalls and took a lot of it, off a shiny ledge behind the toilets that seemed specifically designed for the purpose. He told me that he hated his job, the aggression, dreaded laying hands on anyone. We left together after his shift, giggling in a taxi as he massaged my feet. When we got back to my flat, in which everything was packed up in boxes, ready for Aimee’s huge storage facility in Marylebone, he got hold of the aspirational pull-up bar that I’d put up above my bedroom door and never used, attempted a pull-up, and ripped the stupid thing from the wall, and part of the plaster, too. In bed, though, I could hardly feel him inside of me—shriveled up by the coke, maybe. He didn’t seem to mind. Cheerfully he fell asleep on top of me like a big bear and then, with equal cheeriness, at around five a.m., wished me well and let himself out. I woke up in the morning with a nosebleed and the very clear sense that my youth, or at least this version of it, was over. Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning, as Judy and Aimee frenetically texted me about the archiving, in Milan, of a portion of Aimee’s stage wardrobe, years 92?98, I sat, unbeknownst to them both, in the walk-in clinic of the Royal Free Hospital, awaiting the results of an STD and AIDS test, listening to several people, far less lucky than I turned out to be, being taken into side rooms to weep. But I didn’t speak to Aimee of any of this. Instead I was speaking of Tracey. Tracey of all people. The whole history of us, the chronology sliding woozily back and forth in time and vodka, all resentments writ large, pleasures either diminished or destroyed, and the longer I spoke the clearer I saw and understood—as if the truth were a sunken thing rising up through a well of vodka to meet me—that only one thing had happened in London, really: I’d seen Tracey. After so many years of not seeing Tracey I had seen her. None of the rest mattered. It was as if nothing in the period between the last time I saw her and this had happened at all.
“Wait, wait—” said Aimee, too drunk herself to disguise her impatience with another person’s monologue—“This is your oldest girlfriend, right? Yes, I know this. Did I meet her?”
“Never.”
“And she’s a dancer?”
“Yes.”
“Best type of people! Their bodies tell them what to do!”
I had been sitting on the edge of my seat, but now I deflated and lay my head back on its cold corner pillow of blacked-out glass, walnut and leather.
“Well, you can’t make old friends,” announced Aimee, in such a way that you might have assumed the phrase originated with her. “What would I do without my dear old Jude? Since we were fifteen! She fucked the dude I took to the school dance! But she calls me on my shit, yes she does. No one else does that . . .”
I was used to Aimee turning all stories about me into stories about her, usually I simply deferred to it, but the drink had me bold enough to believe, at that moment, that both our lives were in fact of equal weight, equally worthy of discussion, equally worthy of time.
“It was after I had that lunch with my mother,” I explained, slowly. “The night I went out with that Daniel guy? In London? The disaster date.”
Aimee frowned: “Daniel Kramer? I set you up with him. The financial guy? See, you didn’t tell me anything about that!”
“Well, it was a disaster—we went to see a show. And she was in that fucking show.”
“You spoke to her.”
“No! I haven’t spoken to her in eight years. I just told you that. Are you even listening to me?”
Aimee put two fingers to her temples.
“The timeline is confusing,” she murmured. “Plus my head hurts. Look . . . God, I don’t know . . . maybe you should call her! Sounds like you want to. Call her now—fuck it, I’ll talk to her.”
“No!”
She grabbed my phone out of my hand—laughing, scrolling through my contacts—and when I tried to reach for it she held it out of her window.
“Give it to me!”
“Oh, come on—she’ll love it.”
I managed to climb over her, snatch the phone and press it between my thighs.
“You don’t understand. She did a terrible thing to me. We were twenty-two. A terrible thing.”
Aimee raised one of her famously geometric eyebrows and sent up the partition that Errol—wanting to know which entrance to the house we were heading for, front or back—had just sent down.