They had forgone breakfast at the hotel in order to find a café in Little Italy, but when they got there they all seemed to be shut. A skinny blank-faced girl was wiping down a table on Mott Street but when they went to take a seat she had shaken her head and said, Sorry, we’re not open till eleven. It was a curt, dismissive statement and it had given him the shits. They had kept walking and ended up in Starbucks. Their croissants were dry and their coffee bland, and he couldn’t stop complaining.
‘You’re such a snob,’ she laughed.
‘We got rid of Starbucks in Melbourne,’ he reminded her.
‘Bully for Melbourne.’ She laughed again. ‘We’re in New York City — how can you even try to compare it to Melbourne?’ She struggled to find an analogy that would do justice to her feelings. ‘It’s like. . like. . It’s like comparing a village to a metropolis.’
That had put him in a sulk. Then by the time they had reached 23rd and Third Avenue, the back of his shirt was damp with sweat. She seemed not to notice the heat, had not slowed her pace to accommodate it.
‘I think we should take the subway from here,’ he announced.
‘Oh, are you sure?’ She sounded disappointed. ‘I’m so enjoying the walk.’
He hadn’t pushed it. But he quickened his steps, letting her fall behind, so that she had to call out to him to slow down. ‘Walk with me, don’t run ahead.’
He heard it as a whine. ‘Well, stop fucking dawdling.’
She said nothing but at 42nd Street she inexplicably turned right.
‘What are you doing? That’s the wrong way.’ He wanted to consult the map in his back pocket; he was sure they had to head towards Fifth Avenue, but he didn’t want to take out the map and look like a tourist.
‘We’re getting the subway.’
They didn’t speak a word to each other on the train. She motioned for the map and he silently took it out, inching away from her as he did so, turning his back to her as she unfolded it.
A young Hispanic couple, the youth with his arm around the girl’s waist, both of them listening to music through their earphones as they rested their heads against each other, watched her reading the map. The boy lifted the earphone away from the girl’s ear and whispered something to her. Bill blushed and turned his body further away.
At the 77th Street stop she got up and he scrambled to follow her. His right hand was held awkwardly against the front pocket of his jeans; every few minutes he would brush it against the pocket, making sure the wallet was still there.
Back at street level, she handed him the map. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘we are tourists.’
Pissy bitch. He deliberately dawdled, letting her walk ahead, but as they crossed into Fifth Avenue his bad mood vanished. He quickened his step and reached for the bottle of water in the pocket of her backpack. ‘Hey,’ he said, smiling, ‘look up.’
They stopped, looking down the avenue, at block after block of stately nineteenth-century facades that disappeared into Harlem. It was a workday, and grim-faced New Yorkers in business suits jostled past them. A middle-aged woman, svelte in a tight black dress, held out her hand for a cab but it whipped past her. ‘Fuck this,’ she drawled, putting her sunglasses back on in one quick graceful movement.
Trina slid her arm through his. ‘Isn’t it the most fabulous city?’
A previous night, in a bar in SoHo, he had been waiting to catch the eye of the bartender when he overheard a man beside him say, ‘God, I hate Midtown, it’s full of tourists.’ He and Trina had just spent the day at the top of the Empire State Building, listening to the audio tour, gazing down at the astonishing city encircling them, so moved he had found his eyes welling with tears. But at the bar, he cringed. The bartender had cocked an impatient eyebrow at him, waiting for him to order, and Bill had been embarrassed by his own accent. He had to repeat the order, the harsh Australian consonants and chopped vowels sounding grotesque to his own ears.
But now, with the valley of the avenue chopped into alternating geometric shapes of light and shade from the sun straight above them, he realised that he loved Midtown, the fantasy of it, the romance of it, the cinematic sweep of it. They were still arm in arm when they reached the Whitney.
There was a queue. Bill went to the front to read the sign on the glass doors and a stout older woman in a dark blue uniform approached him.
‘You can’t go in there, sir.’ She was shaking her head. ‘We don’t open till one today, sir.’
Bill joined Trina at the end of the line.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘She was such an officious bitch,’ he answered. ‘And I just hate how she kept calling me sir in that rude, supercilious way. It’s so fucking false.’
At a minute to the hour the glass doors were still locked and the stern woman guarding the entrance still had her arms crossed. A woman in the middle of the queue had just sighed loudly, Oh for God’s sake, when the guard, as if taking pity on them, pushed open the doors and gestured for the queue to start moving. Even so, they were ignored by three young staff at the front desk, a man and two women; they were laughing and logging on to their computers, refusing to look up. Then, almost in unison, their smiles disappeared and they turned to face the waiting line. To Bill, the young man appeared particularly irritated, as though the visitors were an unnecessary imposition. He hoped they didn’t get him.
But as they moved forward he was the next attendant free. He was handsome, immaculately dressed in a crisply ironed fawn shirt.
Bill had his wallet open and asked, ‘How much for the two of us?’
And then the little prick rolled his eyes and tapped the notice in front of him.
Bill felt sweaty, was sure that there were damp patches under the arms of his T-shirt. He was all too aware that, unlike the other visitors, New Yorkers in smart summer wear, his and Trina’s T-shirts and shorts, her backpack, marked them out as outsiders. Fumbling with the money, Bill handed forty dollars across the counter.
Trina stepped up beside him. ‘There’s a Hopper on display, isn’t there?’
And then the little fucker did it again, rolled his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he answered her, not hiding the contempt in his voice, ‘but we are a museum of contemporary art.’ He drew out the penultimate word as though Trina might never have heard it before.
Bill felt Trina flinch beside him and when the man handed over the two paper tickets, Bill grabbed them out of his hand. The young man’s distant demeanour wavered for a split second, then he recovered and the sneer returned to his face. ‘The Hopper is on the top floor.’ Then a pause. ‘Sir.’
They walked towards the lift, then as they waited there behind an elderly couple, Bill exploded. ‘What a stuck-up black cunt,’ he hissed at Trina.
The old woman turned around, stunned, looked at him and then quickly turned away, taking a step as though recoiling from him. Trina had also shifted away from him and was looking at the floor. In the lift to the top floor, she stood in the corner opposite him, her eyes fixed on the numbers lighting up above the door.
She waited till everyone else had exited and then she turned to him, her eyes furious. ‘You Neanderthal, how dare you?’ He couldn’t answer her, he couldn’t find the words. She almost ran from him and disappeared around a corner. He knew better than to follow her.
For the first few minutes he wasn’t even aware of the canvases on the white walls, the sculptures or the mobiles. As much as he was hiding from his wife, he was also avoiding the elderly couple from the lift. He couldn’t stand seeing their distaste, their revulsion. And he did feel revolting; the shame that was blinding him to the world in front of his eyes seemed impossible to quell. His body felt lumpy and awkward, misshapen and clumsy, as if the insult he had uttered had physically altered him. He felt unclean.