That had won her over, grudgingly. A downstairs darkness purring with the sound of unwavering AC units. A drastic change of temperature. Delicious darkness, calibrated with artificial cool. Plus a massive Diet Coke, packed with ice, sibilant with effervescence.
“Why are there no brown people in this film?” she whispered in Dana’s ear, right into the shell of it, and it elicited a fierce shush from the woman who spun around in the seat in front of them. And then, to Inez’s irritation, there were black characters, including the heroine’s love interest. The heroine was an underweight brunette who pulled a lot of faces and was a sex therapist who’d never achieved orgasm. “Achieved”! As if you got a certificate. This was the movie’s central joke. The promo poster had testified to it being “the feel-good favorite of the summer,” and Inez’s hatred was now fortified by the remembered conviction that “feel-good” always filled her with hate.
Here’s one thing her dad had taught her: walk out. When you think it’s bullshit, just leave. You can leave. They’d done that with a Disney film once. Nine-year-old her, small girl sandwiched tidily between her parents in velvety seats, scowling at a twirling and lash-fluttering princess, then whispering, in her dad’s ear, “This is stupid,” expecting to be scolded, or at least hushed, but instead he’d whispered back, “Yes. It is. Let’s go!” and, to Inez’s incredulity, and later her guilt, he’d taken her hand and they’d left her mom there. Afterward, she’d watched out the window of a Starbucks as her parents argued on the street, her mother’s eyes wet with rage, her father limp and shrugging, his fingers dangling, the shoal of pedestrians moving around and past them, paying an arguing couple no heed.
Right now she was on the aisle seat; to leave would be the easiest thing in the world. The fake sex therapist and her two perky sidekicks grated harder with every frame.
She leaned toward Dana again.
“Dude,” she whispered, but an actual whisper this time. “I can’t watch this.”
Dana’s response was to set her mouth, a tiny tightening, eyes fixed on the screen. Inez paused, considering her friend’s face in profile, wondering where it came from, this grim resolution to be entertained by garbage. She flicked her on the arm and Dana winced away. Inez stood, walked up the smooth artificial incline of the aisle, through the double doors, and leaped up the escalator in a few strides, giant cup of Diet Coke in hand.
As she stepped onto the street the heat greeted her like some giant shaggy dog determined to fell her with the weight of its body. Her phone said 105º, and she took a screenshot, relishing the fake camera-shutter noise as she did so. An outrageous temperature. But the heat was real, at least. You still couldn’t air-condition New York City streets. You could build taller towers, shinier and sharper, but the heat would always stay unassailable. It turned the air yellow with the stink of sweltering garbage, it melted candy bars in their wrappers into formless goo, and it made all the heavy, waiting bodies on subway platforms drip with sweat. She loved this. She loved, too, that it blurred the skyline to mirage, enshrined “stay cool” as a valediction between strangers, and, best of all, made these streets less crowded. Everyone who could afford to be was catatonic in air-conditioned spaces, cowed by the extremity of the day. Here was some “feel-good” then: the heat, in its badness. It felt good to know the heat was bigger and badder than you. To know there was nothing that you could do about it.
The ice in her cup was water now and she ripped the lid off, downed the remaining diluted Diet Coke inside, and lobbed it toward a trash can that was lavish with its own overflow. Flies were so drunk and listless around it that they looked like they might faint and fall.
In Tompkins Square Park she found the bench where she’d first smoked weed, and as she lit up now—removing a natty little spliff sequestered between her cigarettes—her eye was caught by an old guy on the other side of the plaza. Other than she, and a homeless man passed out on a bench, he was the only soul here. He was bent over, all in white, engaged in some task. Inez squinted through the heat haze. He looked familiar somehow. It seemed as though he was tipping out cat food tins on the ground, working slowly, ritualistically, making little piles of them as if in accordance with some kind of map or sign. She watched him. No cats came. Maybe they were all dead from the heat. And yet he kept going. Once every tin had been emptied he straightened up slowly, saw her, and waved, blithe as a kid on a beach.
She remembered now: he’d come to the apartment once, she thought, a year ago, maybe, with a cat in a bag. He’d kept saying to her dad, “Don’t let the cat out the bag, Willie!” like this was the funniest joke of all time. She’d been shocked then at how old he was, enough to be her grandfather. And here he was now, feeding nonexistent cats. Another singular freak of the park. She loved them all with a kind of dispassionate decisiveness: Barbie the boxer, forever sparring in pink; Junior the ninety-five-year-old sorcerer with steel-colored dreadlocks; the gender-indeterminate young person who dressed as an angel, cheekbones smeared with glitter, enormous wings of different colors to match each outfit.
As Inez inhaled now, a wave of heat made its way through her. It felt like a vertical worming, like the striated waviness of the screen effect in kids’ shows that denotes entering or leaving a dream. And then, coming toward her, crossing the park, another familiar person. The snaggletooth, the braid.
She stood up, weirdly pleased.
He was just steps away now, and from his vacant gaze, even before she saw the earphones, she could tell he was in some far-off auditory world.
She raised a hand. “Hey!” she said. “Martin!”
He looked up and faltered. He had to; she was standing right in his path, and they were facing each other, body to body. She found in his eyes nothing she understood. There was a fright in them. A pause. And then a quick blackening, like a blind drawn with a cord. He went on past her, arcing a wide berth, toward that basement apartment and the familiar closet, and did not look back to see her staring, mouth hanging open a little at his receding back and ratty braid.
She sensed her dad’s mad friend with his piles of cat food, watching. He gave her another wave, slower this time, and she looked away, furious.
6
Bill turned onto Broadway, thronged and garish. It was a thoroughly stupid place to live, the main artery of the center of this city that thought itself the center of the world. He and Cara had bought the loft when the neighborhood had been a lovely scabrous wasteland of lawlessness and postapocalyptic potential, when being an artist and a scavenger and an addict were all the same thing. With inevitable sadomasochism, his mind formed a phrase: “A quarter of a century ago.” He repeated it, slowly, like fingers tightening around a wrist.
A heavy young woman, maybe she was even a teenager, barreled toward him wearing an oversized T-shirt, fluoro-yellow, which shouted, in black letters ten inches tall, NU YORK MUTHAFUCKEN CITY. He let out an unintended “ugh,” the kind of sound his daughter unleashed every time he attempted to dispense parental wisdom. This girl heard, and shouted, “Fuck you, old dude!”
These days, on Broadway, he’d find himself thinking of the kind of time-phased shot that seemed to feature in a lot of music videos from the nineties: in the center of the frame, intransigent, there’s a stationary figure on a crowded sidewalk and then, in dehumanized streaks of color put in motion, everyone else goes past—time contracted, segmented, and stitched. Except the figure in the center was never quite still; you’d notice fractional shivers, a stop-motion effect. Even if you stood still, time would fuck with you, rattle you.
Home, finally, and he heard female laughter sounding from Inez’s room. Hers was one side of the loft, his the other, and as he made his way through the space to the kitchen the laughter burst out louder as her door swung open. There in the doorway was a tall black girl, broad shouldered, who saw him, yelped “Shit!” and slammed the door. She’d been wearing nothing but sky-blue underwear.
“Sorry, sorry!” he shouted, slamming one hand over his eyes, raising the other in apology, even though