Bono

Chapter Six

SEX, DRUGS, AND JUNK FOOD

Palace or drain—a cat can live anywhere.

Aroar of industrial strength drilling jolted me awake. I sprang out of bed and pulled the curtains open. Lydia was quickly at my side. It was dark outside, but across the street an insomniac demolition crew was already at work. With our walls and windows vibrating, trying to get back to sleep was pointless. Besides, I wanted to introduce Lydia to her first diner.

“You want what?!” the world-weary waitress shouted.

“Two lattes, please.”

She shoved her pencil in her pocket and slouched back to the kitchen. A pasty-face waiter trudged toward us and asked us to repeat our order.

“We don’t do no lattes,” he said.

“How about cappuccinos?”

Exasperated, he threw up his hands.

“No fancy espresso machine here, lady!”

The waitress returned to fill our cups with fluid that could have been diverted from a nearby drain.

“Don’t worry,” I said to Lydia. “This stuff will taste like nectar after we’ve been here a few days.”

Lydia smiled down at her pancakes spread like a pair of tropical islands over her plate. She trickled a swirl of maple syrup over the top. I was momentarily embarrassed when my mountain of scrambled eggs and grilled potatoes arrived gasping for breath under a pile of bright pink bacon. A quick glance at other tables assured me the waitress hadn’t put the kitchen on giantess alert. The man next to us was working through three porterhouse steaks and an Everest of french fries.

We sluiced down glasses of neon orange juice with iced water. No matter how frigid the weather, every self-respecting diner serves water clinking with ice cubes.

The waitress slapped a couple of plates of buttered toast on the table in case we were still feeling peckish. I could tell Lydia was beginning to warm to New York.

“Is this normal?” she whispered across the table.

“Totally.”

“How come I’ve seen so many skinny people?”

“There’s room for every quirk in this town,” I said. “If we had a thing for collecting Icelandic moose dung, there’d be at least twenty other people on Manhattan with the same obsession.”

“You mean there’s a moose dung society?”

“Probably. Heaps of people go to downtown diners, but on the Upper East Side thousands survive on nothing but air and quinoa.”

Lydia hadn’t touched her second pancake. I couldn’t look at my potatoes. We shoved the plates aside and headed out into the street.

In my best Sex and the City imitation, I raised an arm, but the cabs buzzed past like hornets on a mission. The mature woman’s invisibility cloak at work again. After about twenty minutes, Lydia spotted a cab with its light on. She raised her arm and lunged forward, leaving the driver a choice of running her over and spending months in court, or hitting the brakes and letting us climb in.

Sitting in the backseat, keys safely tucked in my pocket, I squeezed her hand as we swerved past Central Park toward our new home. She was proving herself a natural New Yorker. Locals talk down the fact they live in a mega metropolis. They say it’s just a string of villages called neighborhoods. Everyone raves about their neighborhood. I couldn’t wait to see ours. With it being so close to the UN, I imagined it awash with Daniel Craig lookalikes carrying poison dart umbrellas.

When the cab pulled up outside a world-worn pizza joint near the corner of East 44th Street, I was taken aback. The one-way thoroughfare that carved a short, businesslike line from the East River wasn’t quite the blossom-lined boulevard I’d pictured.

We dumped our bags on the sidewalk. A North African man wearing an ankle-length caftan and traditional cap was selling handbags from a stand near the corner. When we approached and asked directions, he pointed at a modest redbrick building sandwiched between two tall gray ones. Roughly six stories high and close to a century old, it gazed onto the street through unadorned windows, like an old lady who couldn’t remember how she’d ended up in such frenetic surroundings.

A set of worn, narrow steps ran up to a front door painted a raucous scarlet. I climbed the steps, fumbled for the keys in my handbag, and issued a silent prayer to the God of Airbnb. (Even if Ted doesn’t exist and this whole thing is a scam, please let us in and give us a roof over our heads tonight.)

Though the brass lock was scratched, it was shaped like a heart. It was the building’s way of telling us that no matter how tired it looked from the outside, it still had soul. When the key turned smoothly and the door glided open, I felt weak with gratitude.

The front door creaked open to reveal a tiny hallway leading to a flight of steep, paint-spattered stairs. Dust particles drifted in beams of watery light. A background odor implied things had been living and dying between these walls for a very long time.

Our apartment was on the fourth floor, meaning we’d have to climb “only” three sets of stairs, which I’d decided would be kill-or-cure therapy for my knee. The first challenge was going to be getting my coffin-sized suitcase up to our eyrie. Lydia offered to help haul my luggage up, but I didn’t want her thinking she’d been invited along as a geriatric nurse. The suitcase was outrageously heavy. After two flights of stairs, my lungs were stinging. I paused to catch my breath while pretending to admire the doors arranged in a horseshoe around the stairwell. They were all shades of dark brown and firmly shut, as if whoever lived behind them had no intention of letting the world in. Meanwhile, the ambient aroma had intensified to eau de rotting vegetables mixed with blue cheese and unwashed feet.

I beckoned to Lydia to go ahead and, once I’d decided the danger of heart attack had subsided, heaved the suitcase up the final set of stairs.

“I think this is it,” she said, her face overcast with confusion.

The stench, which was now overpowering, was emanating from the partially opened door in front of her. A cacophony of banging and clattering was coming from inside. The apartment—our apartment—was occupied by an incontinent poltergeist.

“Hellooo?” I called in the tentative tone my aunt used when dropping in on unsuspecting relatives.

There was a brief silence, followed by shuffling and a morose sigh. My instinct was to shove Lydia forward to find out what was going on. Even ancient warlords knew confrontations tend to unfold with less tension when initiated by a fresh-faced page.

But pleasantries would take time. I was desperate to get my boots off and lay down somewhere—no matter how smelly. Besides, whoever was in there needed to know we’d paid a month’s rent in advance.

I stepped tentatively over the threshold to face a postapocalyptic scene. Floorboards were littered with discarded food wrappers, polystyrene cartons, plastic bags, and empty water bottles. Next to the fireplace, a trash can lay on its side vomiting a tangle of half-eaten noodles. Under the window, an unmade bed spilled an eruption of sheets and blankets onto the floor.

The apartment was unrecognizable from the stylish photos we’d seen online. The only items that looked familiar were the purple curtains and a glass-topped coffee table. A black vinyl bench (“comfortable sofa bed”) was buried under what appeared to be a pile of tattered and well-worn undergarments.

Away from the window at the other end of the room, and bent over a kitchen sink was the most worn-out, unhappiest African American woman I’d ever seen. When I approached and asked what was going on, she rolled her eyes and said, “Some people are just plain animals.”

Well, it was a pet-friendly apartment—actually, going by the dimensions it was more of a room. Whoever had taken the photos we’d seen online must’ve been using the biggest fish eye since Moby Dick. I checked for evidence of cats and dogs, but this was a mess only feral humans could make. I’m not fussy, and I’ve seen some wild student apartments in my time, but this was a cesspool worthy of a medieval village. Forcing the window open, I tried to imagine how our predecessors had spent their time holed up in here for a month—sex, drugs, junk food, repeat.

The cleaning woman said she’d been working since 6 a.m. and was desperate to get back to her family to cook them an Easter Sunday meal. My annoyance melted to sympathy. I started to feel responsible for the previous tenants who’d left the place a garbage dump on the assumption someone who had no choice would clean up after them.

Lydia and I nudged our bags against a wall and unbuttoned our coats. I grabbed a broom and swished it around. Lydia gathered up a couple of bulging garbage bags and carried them to bins downstairs.

“What were they doing in here?” I said, approaching the rank-smelling bed. At a minimum, the sheets would have to be stripped off and taken to a laundry.

“Don’t touch that!” the cleaning person shouted across the room.

“Really?” I said, lifting a corner of the quilt.

“No!” she said. “You don’t want to look in there. Believe me.”

Grateful as she seemed for our help, the cleaning person said she’d get through the job faster on her own. She told us to go for a walk for a couple of hours. We needed to buy bath towels and a blanket for Lydia, anyway. The sofa bed was equipped with sheets only. I was tempted to pick up fresh linen for us both, but the woman said not to bother. She’d make our beds up with clean sheets.

I negotiated her bucket and peered through the bathroom door. It was tiny, with fittings circa 1970, but serviceable. The hem of the shower curtain was caked in green mold.

Feeling useless and relieved not to be needed at the same time, I pulled on my coat and ski cap, gave the cleaning person what I hoped was a generous tip, and scampered downstairs with Lydia.

“That place is the perfect size—for a cat,” I said, tugging my ski cap over my ears and trudging in what I imagined was the direction of Bloomingdale’s.

I waited for Lydia to tell me that she’d come around to thinking the cat fostering idea was stupid. She’d suggest I call Michaela and Vida in the morning to explain the situation. They would understand, and cancel our appointment with the animal shelter. But she galloped ahead down the street.

“Hurry!” she called over her shoulder. “There’s a Holi festival!”

“A what?”

“It’s a Hindu thing,” she shouted. “They’re celebrating the triumph of good over evil.”

In most relationships, there’s a grown-up and a child. With Lydia and me, the chronological roles are reversed. She thinks before she says anything, whereas I blurt out opinions to regret later at leisure. When we’re together, I rely on her to rein in my more outlandish behavior. If her eyes glaze and she becomes quieter than usual, it’s a sign I’ve pushed the boundaries too far. Partly because of this dynamic, I hadn’t witnessed her letting herself go since she was about three years old.

I accelerated into a clumsy jog, but then stopped in my tracks. I could hardly believe it. Piercing the sky barely two blocks away was the most exquisite piece of architecture in the entire world. The Chrysler Building with its glittering tiara symbolizes everything I adore about New York. I called out to introduce her to the delights of this needle-like confection rising from the intersection of 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue. It had been the tallest building in the world for eleven months until the Empire State Building eclipsed it in 1931. But my voice dissolved in a thrum of traffic.

When I caught up with her, she was standing at the entrance to a small park. Drums thumped to the strains of Indian music, bodies twirled, arms waved. Faces were happy—and every one of them, from babies to grandparents, was spattered with neon powder paint.

I took her elbow and suggested we leave them to it, but she was entranced. Ignoring me, she slipped out of my grasp and into the crowd. Alarmed, I lost sight of her. A few minutes later, I caught a glimpse of her, head thrown back and laughing, her right cheek vibrant blue. I dived in to rescue her—only to have my ski cap bombed bright yellow. The first hit felt like an assault; the second, a green blob on my forehead, was more like a kiss.

As the music drew us into a hypnotic spiral, we were soon putting ourselves in the firing lines of reds, purples, and oranges—begging to be hit.

Dancing around with crazy, paint-bombing Indians in the middle of New York was like being drunk without touching a drop of vodka. Outsiders in this giant city, we’d been accepted and daubed by a group of other outsiders, who somehow embraced me with joyous feelings of belonging. Laughing under a shower of orange, I forgot about the prospect of inhabiting a rat hole for the next month or two. Weariness dissolved, and my feet were pleasantly painless.

Miraculously, my knee wasn’t hurting, either. Western medicine has a long way to go, I thought, gyrating my hips Bollywood style. I didn’t have a meniscus tear, just a lack of Indian dancing. As I shook my hands in the air, my list of perpetual anxieties began to fade. Wallet and passport stolen—so what? Mugged and thrown in the Hudson—well, I’d had a good life.

Lydia spread her arms in the air and laughed. I’d never seen her so uninhibited. Maybe we were more alike than I’d thought. The city was having a strange effect on us both. I could see my husband’s face at the sight of me covered in splotches like a Jackson Pollock painting. The stuff didn’t seem to rub off, either. If I could ever persuade him to move here there’d be compromises, of course. We’d have to find a neighborhood where they don’t throw paint.

“We’d better get to the shops before they close,” Lydia said, appearing at my side. She was back to her sensible self—apart from the fact she was bright blue and green.

Two blocks along, the atmosphere changed radically. Almost every face was white and conservatively dressed. Horns stopped honking and there were no more vividly speckled soul mates to wave at. We seemed to have moved out of the paint-throwing neighborhood to a part of town where people had never even heard of the Holi festival. My red ski cap and I were now largely yellow. I caught my reflection in a shop window to see a hallucinogenic Big Bird.

We stumbled across a housewares store, where the young staff members looked too tired to jump to conclusions. As we paid for our towels (blue), Lydia’s blanket (fake fur), and a shower curtain (red and yellow stripes), the cashier didn’t seem to notice his customers resembled a pair of brightly colored parrots. If he did, he wasn’t saying anything. This is New York, after all.