But how can you go back? You have only just gotten here.
Now, as Lucy toured the dismal bathroom (a ring of mold circumnavigating the toilet), the two-burner stove (“Busted since May,” said Jamie), the bars on the windows (But why, when they were so many flights up?), her throat got caught in itself. What had she imagined? A picturesque painter’s loft with huge squares of light coming in? A shiny mug of coffee on a white desk? A professional pleated skirt? A set of high heels in the corner of a huge room, sitting pretty beside a stack of very interesting books? No, that was not her New York. Her New York was one hundred square feet of hell and dust.
She suddenly felt the deep urge to create a feeling of okay for herself.
“Jamie?”
“Yes, Idaho?”
“Where can I get some paint?”
The paint store: in Ketchum she would have had to drive there. Here: right down the busy block. Six or ten guys working. New Yorkers to the bone, but Lucy didn’t know about them yet.
“What can we get fo’ yah, sweethawt?” one said, his buzz cut buzzing.
“Yellow,” she said. “I’m looking for yellow.”
“We’ve got Sunshine and we’ve got Scotch,” the paint man said. “And those ah the best.”
She studied the charming swatches. In Ketchum she would have chosen Sunshine. But Scotch, she decided (a decision whose equivalent she would make again and again in her new New York life), pointing to the darker yellow, the one that almost looked orange. She’d be here for only a year or so, anyway; the color didn’t have to matter.
“Absahlootly, no prablem; absahlootly, no prablem,” said the paint man as he rallied a paint mixer into its dramatic whir. “No prablem at ahl.”
No problem. She could do this. Paint the walls and feel brighter. Buy coffee from the deli downstairs. Listen to Jamie’s loud, chaotic music through the walls, let her heart boom with its energy. She would make a tiny orange sun of a room and she would be fine. The painting would fill her day. The sun would fall. She would get through her very first day in the Big City without any problems… until she was so exhausted that her eyelids were falling and realized — she’d laugh about this to herself later, but right then it was tragic — that she had no bed.
The tip of Jamie’s cigarette appeared in the doorway just as she had this thought.
“Come on, Ida,” Jamie said. “We’re going out.”
“I’m sort of exhausted,” Lucy said. She looked down at herself: white shirt and bad jeans, all flecked with scotch-colored paint.
“This is New York. Everyone’s exhausted,” Jamie said. “Come on, put some shoes on. We’re going to the Paradise.”
Reluctantly Lucy got up, unzipped and flopped open her suitcase.
“I don’t really have anything to…,” she said, looking back at Jamie.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jamie said, blowing smoke. “Now I have to dress you? Come on.”
Jamie outfitted Lucy in a tight, cropped shirt with plastic geometric shapes sewn onto the fabric and a pair of faded black jeans whose waist reached well above her belly button. The outfit seemed absurd to Lucy, but she figured it was what people wore to Paradise, and so she went with it, accepting as well a smear of cotton-candy-colored lipstick — another of Jamie’s signature hues. Jamie threw a lot of exotically womanly items — more lipsticks; hard, red candies; condoms; cigarettes — into a little sparkly white bag that made an extra-satisfying click when it closed, and Lucy wondered if she should have a little bag like this, too, but she did not, so she stuffed a few five-dollar bills in her pocket and followed Jamie down the stairs and out the door and all the way across the city — which was crackling with the noises of a young, hot night — to the Paradise Garage; the sign boasted a neon muscle man.
This is a girl on her first night in New York. A girl in someone else’s clothes. A girl who can feel the slice of her stomach showing, between someone else’s shirt and someone else’s jeans. A girl who is being handed a drink involving gin, that tastes like poison and sunshine at once. A girl in a room full of other girls just like her, who have come here to tunnel down into their own dark parts and find the light. A girl who is being swept out into the middle of a crash of dancing bodies, who lets her own body writhe among them, who lets the fire of the gin heat her already hot stomach, who begins to wiggle her extremities, who lets two beautiful boys who are dancing together pull her between them, who laughs while they gyrate against her, who lets the beautiful red and purple lights spin around and inside of her, thinking:
This is it, this is it, this is it.
Lucy woke up the next morning, in Jamie’s bed, to a feeling of extreme hollowness. Where was she? What had last night meant? Where had that feeling — the energy of newness, the blissful tug of communal movement, the absence of any worry—gone, and how could she get it back? Now she was all headache and smeared makeup and fear. Jamie’s slender back was turned to her: the back of someone she did not know at all, on the other side of an unfamiliar bed. A witchy tapestry hung above them; on it sperm-like shapes spawned and multiplied around some Indian goddess. There was a torn Blondie poster on the wall to her left, and a line of nails strung with Jamie’s bounteous necklaces. A tube of deodorant on the dresser. A box of Tampax and a lipstick kiss on the mirror. These things comforted her only slightly: this was the stuff of girls everywhere. But the panic returned when she thought about what she would do now, awake and alone in the city that was supposed to be her home. She thought she might wait for Jamie to wake up — maybe they would make breakfast? — but she also had the feeling that it might be hours before Jamie woke up, and that someone like Jamie probably didn’t make or eat breakfast at all. Plus, the broken stove.
She quietly slid out of the bed, gathered herself, splashed water on her face from the pink, rusty sink. Before she went downstairs and out into the world, she crept back into Jamie’s room to grab her little white purse from the night before. She emptied it and filled it with her own things: her stupid green wallet and her cherry ChapStick and then, for good measure, one of Jamie’s cigarettes, which she pulled from the pack on the dresser: a tiny, precious scroll. Just borrowing, she told herself. Borrowing from her new friend.
Outside, New York was being New York. The hot asphalt was steaming, the little dogs were being toted or followed by their eccentrically dressed masters, the clothes were bright and skimpy, the smell was sewer and candied nuts, the newspapers were cracking open at the café tables, the sunglasses were enormous, the scrawls on the walls seemed to vibrate. Lucy wandered down the avenue, in search of nothing and everything.
What she found: fire escapes zigzagging like lightning bolts on the sides of every building, painted over so many times that their surfaces resembled blistering human skin; a group of men in the park wearing orange and white singing the same low song, over and over; a burping black suitcase on Avenue A, revealing a bright red bra; a car radio blasting Mexican horns, its owner flicking his tongue out to reveal gold-covered teeth; sidewalk grates opening and slamming like the lids of boxes, offering glimpses of a whole other dark world below this whole dark world; a spiky, spray-painted crown on a red wall; an abandoned lot, home to a rusted tricycle, a large bird, a sleeping man wearing a ripped plaid jumpsuit, and miraculously, a swatch of morning glories that had just now yawned open.