At J. Sheekey, a fancy old fish restaurant where they systematically ask whether you’re trying to make it to a theater engagement before you sit down, she orders expertly, white wine and tiny fried fishes and other things I’m squeamish about eating, but when they come they are purely delicious, like butter or syrup. My face is getting warm, and I may already be sharing too much. I’m supposed to have drinks with friends in an hour, but she begs me to cancel and come back to her house. “It’s an unusual place and I want you to meet everyone and everyone wants to meet you.”
In the cab to her house, we talk. About why we write, what its purpose is when, she says, “the world is full of so much shit we can’t fix.”
“And in our work, we create a better or clearer universe,” I tell her breathlessly. “Or at least one that makes more sense.”
“A place we’d want to live, or can at least understand.” She nods, satisfied. “You’re really smart.”
I realize I’ve never talked to anyone else about this, much less a woman my own age. I’ve never talked to anyone my own age about anything beyond ambition. Technique, passion, philosophy, we don’t touch any of that.
She asks me my worst quality, and I say I can be very self-involved. She says hers is that she gets lost in the world of her work and can’t find her way back out again.
The city is changing, from bustling metropolis to tree-lined streets and grand houses with only a few lights on. (Google “British lawns” if you want to know what I’m talking about.) When we reach her house we step out into the wet night. The cobblestones are hard to navigate in heels, and I cling to Nellie’s arm. I am sure I’ve never been any place like this. It has the grandeur of a fairy tale and the grit of a Mike Leigh movie. I breathe in, wet street and distant smoke. I guess she paid for the cab.
She opens the door into a library that looks like a set from an episode of Masterpiece Theatre, aged books scattered everywhere. They even spill out of a fireplace.
“Hello!?” she calls out. A deranged French bulldog bounds down the grand staircase, baring her teeth. “Oh, come on, Robbie.”
A girl wearing animal ears hops out from a secret door. She greets me with a hug, and I follow them to a living room where four or five roommates congregate over a bottle of red wine. Each is introduced to me as an actor or a literature student or both. Her sister, another imp with impossibly well-thought-out hair, has a funny phlegmy laugh.
I know I shouldn’t drink anymore, or should at least temper it with a few handfuls of the crisps they are passing around. No one can explain how they came to live here. Nellie hops up, discarding her coat while announcing that it’s freezing. “Let me show you round,” she says.
I take in every detail of the house like I’m six again and reading a picture book, scanning the illustrations carefully. Next to a marble fireplace lies an issue of Elle, a torn thigh-high stocking, an empty pack of Marlboros, a half-eaten pudding cup. And each room leads to another, like one of those New York real-estate dreams where you open a hidden door and discover massive rooms you didn’t even know you had. I spill some of my wine down the front of my dress.
Nellie’s bedroom contains a freestanding claw-foot tub, and I eye all her books and clippings with a pathetic level of interest. Nellie says she spent all of yesterday in bed with an off-limits woman, recovering from a night that undid her. I tell her again how much I love her work, which I really do. She works with themes, memes, metaphors. Uses formal tricks beyond my grasp.
“Nobody our age writes like you,” I tell her.
“Thank you, thank you,” she says.
Back in the living room they’ve started blasting old-school rap, and my glass has been refilled. I can’t sit without my skirt riding up. Jenna, a pretty girl known for playing Anne Frank on the West End, gives Nellie a fat kiss on the mouth and says, “Hello, I’m home.” I feel most warmly toward Aidan, a former child actor of ambiguous sexuality who has the soft delivery of a boy working in a flower shop.
They are teaching me all sorts of new British terms—such as lairy, which means “rowdy” or “drunkenly mischievous,” and they use it in all sorts of contexts for me: “I got pretty lairy after a few drinks and next thing I know I was hanging from the chandelier.”
They refill my glass and then refill it again. We are laughing, laughing at faces and sounds and objects, then suddenly everything goes in waves, and my vision narrows in a way that can only mean vomit.
As soon as I announce it, it’s happening. A torrent released on their heretofore intact cream carpet. I feel the hot, acidic remains of my dinner running down my chin and hitting the floor, and I’m too sick to be self-conscious. It’s too much of a relief to care that every English treat I have eaten that day, along with glass upon glass of red wine, is now decorating their floor. Nellie pets my head, cooing endearments. I rear up, look around. Everyone is just where I left them except Aidan, who reappears with a broom and dustpan that he uses to sweep up my barf like it’s packing peanuts or hair trimmings. He insists he does this all the time. I’m still not embarrassed.
Nellie moves in close to me.
“You have such a beautiful face,” she tells me. “Such amazing eyes. You’re so fit.”