Just after midnight, Leonie came round again. I’d spent the day cycling along 14th Street, through the East Village, over to Washington Square. I was disturbed. Everything was slightly off. It wasn’t as if the city had changed, exactly. Perhaps my memory was at fault. Leonie was in party clothes, all hair and heels and bag. Her hands were a blur of motion as she opened the fridge and made herself a drink. She knew the whole thing had been a mistake, she said. What had she been thinking? Her friends had insisted, but it was such a bad idea. It was hard to follow her train of thought. I gathered that she’d been to an opening.
—The asshole gallerist went to the bathroom and obviously he Googled me. I mean what would it cost him to be nice, to acknowledge my work, the fact that I make work, but he comes back and all of a sudden he wants to sell me a picture. He’s talking about how legacies get made early and touching my arm and I want to say I sent you slides, remember, only last month, why don’t you talk to me about my slides, and then I flash on Carter lying there with a fucking tube in his mouth, tubes all in his arms. He’s up there in the ICU and I’m making nice to this asshole for what? For my career? How sick of a person am I? Then, well, I just couldn’t anymore. I wasn’t dramatic. I didn’t raise my voice or throw things around. I just told him I thought he was a dick. And still everyone behaved like I took a dump on the floor.
She fought back a sob, swallowed it with a slug of vodka soda. I was bold enough to put my arms around her for a moment, a friend to Leonie Wallace, a confidant. She plucked distractedly at the collar of my shirt and looked up at me with genuine warmth, her eye makeup running in black streaks down her cheeks. For a brief instant we were lit up by romance, like a couple in an old movie.
—Let’s go in to his room, she said, a husky note in her voice. We sat down in our usual places on the bed and she told me the news. None of it was good. Low scores on the Glasgow Coma Scale. Elevated intracranial pressure. I held her again. Her head lay on my chest, her breath moistening the shirt fabric over my collarbone. I could not grasp what was happening. I was holding Leonie with such tenderness. Carter was in a coma.
—I think he’s going to die, she said.
She sat up. I tried to compose myself. Then we made more drinks and listened to Carter’s records and made more drinks again until she swung her legs down off the bed and sat slumped forward for a moment, her hair falling over her knees like a damp towel on the head of a defeated boxer. The covers were a mess of cracker crumbs and spilled tequila. I checked the records in case there was something I’d forgotten to re-sleeve or return to the box.
—Gotta piss.
She left the door open. I could hear her urine hitting the toilet bowl. It’s cliché—the idealistic suitor who can’t believe his lady love is a human with a body—but I can’t pretend I wasn’t shocked. Again I felt the mixture of insult and arousal that came from her physical unselfconsciousness in my presence. I pulled myself off Carter’s bed, then took my own turn in the bathroom, with the door shut. When I came out, she was on the phone. I had the feeling that I sometimes had with Carter, a sort of giddy wonder at being around her in conditions of such intimacy.
—I’ve decided I want to look at it, she said. You’re coming with me.
—Coming where?
—Where they attacked him. Hunts Point.
—Why do we need to do that? There’s nothing there. If you want to see it I can show it to you on StreetView.
—Are you his friend?
—Of course I’m his friend.
—Then you should want to face it. To look at it, where it happened.
I didn’t really grasp her logic, but she seemed determined and I was too drunk to argue. A pattern was emerging in our communication, a kind of premature ease. I was falling into being for her what I had been for Carter, the sister a substitute for the brother. I could tell she was feeling it too, an unearned intimacy. I would follow where she led, that was already understood. Her phone rang.
—Car’s downstairs.
We got into the elevator, slumping against the walls as it lurched down.
The driver did not like the idea of going to Hunts Point.
—Why you want? Is no good there.
We gave him a dummy address to put into his GPS, a taquería near the intersection where Carter had been attacked.
—You get food somewhere else, plenty other places.
Leonie leaned into the gap between the front seats and flashed him a smile.
—Come on, man. We aren’t going to rob you.
The driver looked angry.
—Maybe you get out my car.
—I got a deal for you. You go off the clock. Just say you rejected the fare. I’ll give you two hundred cash to take us up there and just drive around. Two hundred dollars.
—I’m a working man, you know.
—We aren’t going to give you any trouble. Look at us.
—I not say anything, but—
He made an “alcohol” sign, putting a thumb up to his mouth and drinking.
—It’s cool. We’re cool. I know what you’re thinking. I see how your mind is working. We won’t throw up in your car. Look, I’ll pay a hundred up front. OK, I see now I don’t actually have cash, but we can stop at an ATM.
—A hundred now.
—Just drive us to an ATM. Then another hundred after. All we want you to do is take us up there, drive us around and take us back again.
—Sure. OK, miss. Sure.
Once the money was in his pocket, we traveled at speed up the FDR, past the UN and the stacked lights of the projects on Roosevelt Island, then slalomed through a tangle of bridges which ejected us into the Bronx, where I had never once been during my years in New York. Manhattan, cross-river patches of Brooklyn and Queens: I had the same reduced geography as all my friends. Hunts Point was entirely off our map. It was as if Carter had chosen it deliberately for its remoteness from our white world, a way to force a confrontation. There is always more to New York. More than you’ve seen or care to see.
—Sir, is it OK to smoke in your car?
—No.
—Sure. I respect that. That’s fine.
Leonie dropped her cigarettes back into her bag.
—I feel like puking anyway. Ask you a question, Seth? Carter had been good lately, right?
—Yeah.
—You know what I mean, don’t you? You see him every day.
—Good?
—Chill. Not too hyper.
—He’s been kind of preoccupied.
—About what?
—About a song. I don’t know if you remember, but he played it to you in the car on the way to Corny’s party.