Everyone was there, it was a village, it was truly great. Kathy went for eggs with Sarah, Matt came in, they walked together to Abraco to find David. Charlie was at the Standard with Paul, you’re all talking British the other Matt said. Joseph was early, it was his early stage, he kept beating her everywhere. 3pm, he texted. Read it and weep. Is New York different, people kept asking, do you feel like it’s changed. She hadn’t been back for a year, the longest spell she’d ever spent away. It was the week Obamacare was rolled back, everyone was talking about pre-existing conditions. David was wearing a ski jacket zipped to the neck. I don’t even have a body, I’m so fat. David and Kathy had once spent an afternoon discussing how they’d kill themselves in elaborate detail in a borrowed apartment on 46th Street. They were both so unhappy then, it was like a touchstone to know there was a way to stop it. But here they still were. The line of stubble along his jaw was white, he still walked on tippy-toes like a little boy. There were white hairs in Kathy’s bangs too, a white stripe. She cut her own hair in the bathroom, she took out the trash.
She was walking down 1st Avenue when the Comey news broke. 9 May 2017, early evening. Carl texted, Twitter’s ABLAZE gurl. Everyone was saying it was a banana republic, at dinner Jim said what blows my mind is that we’ll be talking about this in years to come, what we were doing, but we’ll know how it panned out. They ate Chicken Zsa Zsa and salad, they ate foie gras, they drank beer and Riesling, they laughed all night, that was the night the President fired the Director of the FBI, they were scared and sick, Jim said he’s taking a giant shit on our nation. It wasn’t quite warm, earlier she’d bought mint ice cream from a bodega and the Chinese guy behind the counter hadn’t understood the word plasters, you mean Band-Aid? Her feet were bleeding from new trainers, new Nikes she’d bought in Barneys that afternoon. The weather was never hot enough, though when Marc lovely Marc said it was the most beautiful spring he’d ever seen she’d agreed, it was, it was so green and excessive, so floral and bosomy and bedecked. Everyone talked about politics all the time but no one knew what was happening. This is what it’s like in dictatorships, Alex said, people only know what’s happening because of gossip. Alex was Russian, his grandfather had been Stalin’s chief bodyguard, he knew what he was talking about Kathy figured. This was 40, she’d thought in her little bed over Ireland, upgraded as previously mentioned, this was the whole fucking trip.
It was their penultimate day in Italy. 5 August 2017. Her husband had been on the terrace, he relayed a conversation with the eminent psychiatrist. I only give second opinions, he’d said. I work on a knife-edge, I have to get it right. The people I see are wealthy, autocratic, psychotic, used to complete control – oh look there’s the lizard. Her husband loved lizards. This one was green, like an elegant crocodile, its legs moved like someone riding a bicycle. Periodically it stopped, lifted its head and sniffed the air. Now it was looking back over its shoulder, exposing a paler belly. Her husband was rapt, he looked bewitched. I just love it he said. Whole minutes of lizard watching are so rare. It’s coming back over here. What’s he doing now, behind the tree trunk? Probably hiding back in the flower bed now, don’t you think?
Kathy had always had unsatisfactory relationships and her current unsatisfactory relationship was with sleep. Sleep was a withholding lover. She lay there and waited for it, hot and itchy and uncertain. Was enough written about sleep. It was so delightful, the bit when you were just toppling over the edge. A butterfly with markings like piano keys came past. She’d been lying face down on her lounger, her cheek jammed into a damp towel. She wanted to drift off but instead she kept remembering troublesome things, like the paedophile who’d been moved into a house on her old road. She was going out with Sébastien at the time, it was him who’d found out about the paedophile and really it was him who’d kept her abreast as the case developed. At first it seemed that something small had been blown out of proportion but later like something big and seriously unpleasant had been hushed up, which is to say that the paedophile was still living happily or not in the same house and riding about Kathy’s own streets on his bike, a little rumpled and sorrowful but very much at large. The last time Kathy had seen Sébastien he’d given her an update, I hadn’t thought about it for weeks he’d said, but I knew I was seeing you so I looked it up. It made Kathy feel uneasy, that they’d been so linked in his mind, but then it had also made her uneasy when Sébastien used to lean against her window giving her larky reports on where he thought the paedophile might be. It occurred to her that she might have bad judgement about people. The problem, she knew, she’d actually written it down, was that she liked liars and evasive people, she liked seeing what they’d say, she liked being continually shocked surprised disappointed by the way they were never where she thought they’d be, it was the same exactly as how she felt watching a lizard vanish into a previously invisible crack or cranny, something in her applauded any instinct for freedom, however personally inconvenient to her. The paedophile however she wanted locked up, she was opposed to prisons in 99% of all cases the exception being this. She was for any expression of sexuality whatsoever, nothing shocked her except an absence of consent, not when there were a million at least people who wanted, who really got hot about acting out no consent, there was no need. Just images, some people she knew had said in the paedophile’s defence, as if the small bodies depicted weren’t real, somewhere, hurt.
She went to the pool and swam hard. There was quite a lot of grit in the corner by the steps. It was possible indeed likely that this was her fault, since she had been continually disobeying the rule about washing feet before entering the water, along with the rule about not swimming before 8 in the morning or after 7 at night. She swam when she liked, and at night she didn’t bother with a swimsuit either. Fuck the rich, she waved her small white bottom like a flag against them.