Power and ice, their similarities. Maybe her edges were melting, maybe she was being subsumed, maybe she should grow up, maybe this is what adulthood was supposed to be like, a glacier toppling into a bath. Why do you need to win everything Kathy, why do you think it’s such a fucking race. She had gone to a very exclusive private school, she was always a little smelly, she was the cleverest girl bar two. Who were twins, imagine, with extremely wealthy blonde hair. The place sucked, the place blew, she wanted to be the absolute best especially since nobody liked her or even talked to her much, but the twins the twins were extraordinarily talented and naturally gifted, also they had that multilingual good manners veneer that only comes with money. Kathy’s family was rich too but in a more chaotic withholding way, like actually her grandmother held the purse-strings and her mother was pretty much a hobo, a Barneys and the Plaza wreck, she went to the sort of stores where French boys would purse their lips and say non, disgusting to the first outfit and aiaiai madame to the second, no matter what it looked like. Her mother bought it, she always bought it, this was the 1980s, she bought it Every Single Time. It’s Alaïa Kathy, it’s Comme Kathy, it’s a white cowl with bat sleeves Kathy, I’m wearing it to lunch. Later Kathy would take it from her closet and wear it to school, chew the sleeves in maths class, get an A but not the best A, consider her future. This wasn’t exactly the future she’d considered, but after the Times Square years she knew it could be a whole lot worse.
What had happened to her mother is that she’d cut her wrists in the bathtub. What had happened to her mother is that she had checked into a slightly rundown once quite exclusive still pretty nice hotel, tipped the bellboy, chatted to the night staff and then OD’d in the bedroom, not paying the bill. Kathy had spent maybe two days maybe two weeks hysterical, calling all the hospitals, trying to track her down before the rest of the family thought to tell her. They were that kind of family, estranged, huge upholstered couches of absolute silence between them. When her grandmother died a few years later, of natural causes, Kathy thought she would inherit a fairly substantial whack; indeed many people thought she had inherited a fairly substantial whack but that was quite wrong. She lived off hustle and her books and she got by, but the days of being wealthy though behind and all about her were not in fact ongoing.
Her husband leant over at that moment and said did you hear those people at breakfast? They said where’s David? David’s in his room looking for his passport and money. Every time he stays in a hotel he hides them in a different secret place and then he can never find them again. I’m putting the tickets at the back of my red notebook, her husband continued. I want you to know that. He’d spent the entire morning at reception, attempting to buy their train tickets to Rome. It had been quite successful in the end, it had necessitated several phone calls in multiple languages, he held the printout proudly.
The afternoon went slightly downhill. They ate and then waited under the hornet tree for their bags to be moved from their third room to their fourth. The third room had been quite ordinary, just a regular apartment, but in the fourth they were restored to the pinnacle of luxury. The room was constructed like a New York loft that had been placed under exposed Tuscan beams and roof tiles. The bathroom was enormous and had a glass door. I confess I was rather unsure about that too her husband said when she pointed it out. Kathy fell asleep and woke to what she thought was thunder but was apparently more bags on the move. She picked up her laptop and leafed through the internet. Almost immediately two things annoyed her. One was an article about a painter she liked by a critic she hated. The other was a profile in an American magazine about a novelist. What especially annoyed her was a comparison between the novelist’s latest book and an oral history of Chernobyl. But her imaginary oral histories are exquisitely attuned to the ways in which humans victimise each other, it said. Kathy’s least favourite word on earth was exquisite. Kathy found nuclear war a considerably more seemly subject than nuclear families. Kathy was avant-garde, middle-class-in-flight, Kathy did not like the bourgeoisie. It was too fucking hot, she had better things to do than read about the window frames in other people’s houses. She lay on her back and stared at the tiles. What, exactly?
Her husband had begun a soliloquy about Oat Krunchies. They were little bits of oats like a pillow with air in the middle so when you bit on them they went crunch and collapsed. They weren’t very nice, not really. Oh go away you stupid thing. Britain indeed. Sorry, it was just pointing at something on Twitter I didn’t like. Well now I have a photo of your extended neck, that’s nice. She loved it when he began to ramble. Sometimes she’d catch him at home doing a complicated task, maybe baking bread or making a sauce and speaking to himself in a low confiding tone, offering exhortation and encouragement, like a small boy only not at all ridiculous. If this was love she’d take it, lying next to him naked, both fiddling with their phones. Earlier, he’d ordered ice cream in an Italian accent and couldn’t believe it when she told him he was speaking English. He could speak Italian, he’d just gone off on the wrong foot.
Everyone had a husband here. She’d never spent much time with heterosexuals, she didn’t know there were so many of them, and all so similar. White people, men older, women younger. She’d met one woman in the bar, made eye contact, possibly said hi and the woman had seized upon her and began to speak unceasingly, as if she was being interviewed for a documentary exclusively about her life and times. She told Kathy about her daughter’s school, her son’s school, she told her about her tiny little house in Sloane Square and her estate in Warwickshire, so nice, she articulated clearly, for the children to have room to run around. She bemoaned parents who hired tutors for their children and then she described her son’s tutor quite a different kind of tutor, who had advised them to let him be exactly as he was. She looked like a little doll, like a little pleased girl with well-brushed hair, it seemed impossible that she might be a mother, but there they were, her children, drifting into disaffected view. Kathy had the same shoes as the daughter but in a different colour, it was embarrassing, it didn’t make a bond. She had so clear a sense of light coming through an oak tree that afterwards she thought the woman had described it, but no, it was just the emoji the visual read her brain pulled up when someone said Warwickshire. The woman’s husband was called Boris, he’d quit his job, sometimes Kathy saw him around on the way to the pool and she’d bob one finger and smile. Rich heterosexuals, landed, entitled, when she said husband she didn’t mean that.
It hadn’t always been like this. In New York in the spring, Kathy had stayed in a railroad apartment in Bushwick. There were no doors between the rooms, and before she went to sleep each night she unknotted two strips of indigo fabric to screen off the bedroom from the kitchen. The light still leaked through, but the real obstacle to sleep was the small grey cat, the apartment’s permanent official resident. It was a street cat with skinny flanks and a bobtail like a rabbit. From the beginning the cat took against her. It expressed its displeasure by crying and smashing glasses, and eating the invitation to the Comme des Garçons press preview at the Met. One night it put its front paws into its water bowl and smashed it repeatedly into the kitchen cupboard. It’s not like Kathy was doing much of anything, except meeting friends and talking feverishly, but she still wanted to sleep at night. This went on for five days. It threw up on the rug, it kicked granules of piss-soaked litter all over the floor and then walked them into her sheets, it covered her clothes and laptop in fur and dust. Was it sick? Its coat had lost its sheen, its flanks were hollow, it woke her at 2 and 2:30 and 3 until she was so tired she walked into walls and trapped her finger bloodily in the shower stall. Everything was dirty, mould in the grout, grease around the cooker, New York dirt, no big deal, just eight generations of people living in the same small rooms. The wardrobe key jammed and Kathy had to take the door off its hinges with a kitchen knife, then the front key snapped off in the lock as she was coming home. Bodies: hers wasn’t feeling good. Everyone was in town for Frieze, she kept running into Matt, she saw Charlie and Rich. She saw people she hadn’t seen in years, London people, art world people like Tom and Nicky. It felt like all the doors were open and she could pass into practically any room, she was so happy and so tired, a crop of spots by her mouth, drinking too much coffee, getting caught in a storm on 1st Avenue, running up the street jumping puddles in rain so hard it took her shoes two days to dry. In the end the owner of the flat arranged for a friend to take care of the cat. All Kathy had to do was deliver it in a cab. She assembled its arsenal of possessions, its litter tray and litter and biscuits and bowls. She tucked a chewed toy mouse in and looked around for the cat. It was sleeping on a shelf. She climbed up on a stool and lifted it down, claws flailing. In the cab it vomited noisily in its carrier and then howled with despair. Crawling across the Williamsburg Bridge in pouring rain, the driver kept talking about his friend’s pitbull while she wanted to weep with misery for the cat’s unhappiness, its soiled state. When she got back she scrubbed the floors and took all the bedding to the laundry and that night she slept on clean sheets like a Kushner, like a king.