“SIRI, WHAT TIME IS IT?” she croaked.
“It’s 9:14 a.m.,” said Siri. Oh fuck. She couldn’t be late twice in one week.
Cat felt a hand squeezing her butt. The handsome bartender was draped over her body, his breath a rancid cloud. She shimmied out from under him and leaned against the plywood headboard mounted on the wall, tucking the sheet around herself. It was cold—she’d left the air conditioner running on high again, too fucked up to remember to shut it off.
“Let’s go back to sleep,” he mumbled, pawing idly at an itch on his sculpted chest while his other hand groped the bed to find her body.
“You can go back to sleep, but you need to do it at home—I have to go to work.” Her head was pounding. Her brain had constricted in size and was pulling away from the sides of her skull.
She reached for the two plastic bottles next to her bed, one covered in black gaffer tape and the other in cream-colored masking tape, and popped out two ibuprofen and two acetaminophen. Her tongue was dry and swollen. She wiped the sleep crust off her lips and searched around for her water bottle, but found only a half-empty can of beer. Ugggh.
James looked up at her with his big green eyes, looking extra young and extra pouty. “Can’t I just sleep here?”
Cat was unable to mask her annoyance as she hopped out of bed. “No, I have a million things to do today, sorry,” she snapped, shoving a commemorative plastic cup from a Mets game under the kitchen sink’s shoddy aluminum tap.
“I’m going to take a shower, okay? Here”—she paused and downed her pills—“drink the rest of this water. It’ll help.” She passed him the Mets cup and ran into the bathroom.
Cat sat on the floor of the shower for ten minutes, the water as hot as she could stand. She washed her hair twice, scrubbed the smoke and beer out of her skin with a stiff agave-fiber brush, and combed through a leave-in conditioner. A pile of fresh towels—Cat’s only concession to cleanliness was the laundry service that picked up her clothes and linens once a week—sat in a basket opposite the peeling cast-iron tub she used as a shower. She wrapped one around her body, the other around her head, and stepped back out into the loft with her toothbrush in her mouth.
James slipped past her into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned the fan on. Double ugh. Whatever, she was finished in there anyway. She towel-dried her hair and body, sprayed herself down with the sea water bottle, then applied a heavy coat of children’s SPF 50+ sunblock.
She turned on the light in her closet and searched for the easiest thing she owned, a black silk T-shirt dress from Reformation that everyone constantly mistook for Dries Van Noten. It always looked good, no matter how wrecked she was in the face, and it was appropriate for any situation. Cat moved like a robot in high gear, automatically pulling on her dress, smearing a heavy-coverage cream from Korea all over her skin before lightly applying a swipe of mascara, a coat of clear lip balm, and braiding her hair in an inside-out Mohawk plait. She tried on a resin bead necklace, but the weight suffocated her. No necklaces today, she decided. No bracelets. She turned to a shelf of ceramic ring pyramids, pulled off a dozen gold bands of different sizes, and layered them on between the joints on all her fingers. Good enough.
For eyeglasses she chose a pair of thick, square tortoiseshell Tom Ford frames to distract from her face, applying Visine drops to the redness in her eyes. She found her bag hanging neatly on a hook near her front door. It was 9:50. James was still in the bathroom. She called out to him.
“James, I have to go to work.”
His voice was easy to hear through the bathroom’s cheap hollow-core door. “Okay, one minute,” he said awkwardly.
She checked her phone. Still no text back from Hutton. Cat shut down the air-conditioning, and the air in the loft grew still. The sunbeams coming through the lead-cased windowpanes cast a tic-tac-toe grid onto her floor. She pictured ghost versions of the nine drinks she’d had the night before popping up in the sunbeam grid, like Hollywood Squares. The nine beers and shots sang to the tune of the Golden Girls theme song: Thank you for being a friend, we traveled down your throat and back again, your liver is true, it’s a pal and a confidante. Little bags of cocaine sprinkled their fine-grain snow on top.
“Cigarettes, phone, wallet, metro card, keys,” she said aloud, gathering the items from the apartment. The toilet flushed as she pulled her driver’s license out of last night’s jeans pocket. Finally.
James opened the bathroom door and sauntered proudly out into the loft. He wrapped his arms around Cat’s body. She gave him a friendly pat on the back, her torso rigid. “Okay, babe,” she chided. “Where’s your shirt? I’m so fucking late.”
“Oh shit, you really are dressed,” he said, frowning, strolling back to the bed and slowly rolling his T-shirt back on. He tried to wrap her in a hug again, but she was already holding the door. She ran down the graffitied cement stairwell and out the front door onto Moore Street. He followed her and grabbed her hands, attempting to pull her into a kiss. Cat pecked him on the cheek and squirmed out of his embrace. As she flew down the block toward the L train, she yelled, “I’ll call you later!”
They both knew she was lying. James sighed and shrugged his shoulders, then ambled toward the coffee shop on the corner to see who was around. After all: it was still technically his after-hours.
Whig Beaton Molton-Mauve Lucas stood on the wooden dock at the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin, sipping her morning coffee and waving good-bye to her daughters. As the pair of towheaded girls hung precariously off the back of their father’s catamaran, Lou prayed that their life jackets would keep them safe all the way to Montauk. They’d be there for three whole weeks, during which time Lou planned to completely throw herself into work. She hoped they wouldn’t be lonely—she knew logically that they wouldn’t be, but she always worried about them anyway, perhaps never more acutely than when she watched them disappear with their father into the world’s vast oceans.
The girls faded into little pink specks. When she was certain they could no longer make her out, Lou stopped waving and turned to climb back up the hill into Riverside Park.
The sun was already beating down on her legs, bare and tanned beneath a pair of slightly oversized ivory crepe Bermuda shorts. By the time she scooted into the driver’s seat of her customized electric Porsche Panamera, she had forgotten her worries, and she sped recklessly down Broadway, narrowly dodging pedestrians as she hit green after green. When she pulled into the service entrance of Cooper House and threw the car into park, an attendant opened her door and helped her out. Lou never parked her own car; it was too stressful.