But when you live 3,500 miles from your handsome, kind, sexy paramedic boyfriend and he has a new partner who sounds and looks like Pussy Galore – a woman who spends at least twelve hours a day in close proximity to the man you love, a man who has confessed already to how hard he is finding the physical separation – then the rational part of you gets firmly squashed by the gigantic, squatting toad that is your irrational self.
It didn’t matter what I did, I couldn’t scrub that image of the two of them from my mind. It lodged itself, a white on black negative, somewhere behind my eyes and haunted me: her lightly tanned arm tight around his waist, her fingers resting lightly on the waistband of his uniform. Were they side by side at a late bar, her nudging him at some shared joke? Was she the kind of touchy-feely woman who would reach over and pat his arm for emphasis? Did she smell good, so that when he left her each day he would feel, in some indefinable way, he was missing something?
I knew this was the way to madness yet I couldn’t stop myself. I thought about calling him, but nothing says stalky, insecure girlfriend like someone who calls at four a.m. My thoughts whirred and tumbled and fell in a great toxic cloud. And I hated myself for them. And they whirred and fell some more.
‘Oh, why couldn’t you just have been partnered with a nice middle-aged man?’ I murmured to the ceiling. And some time in the small hours I finally fell asleep.
On Monday we ran (I stopped only once), then went shopping in Macy’s and bought a bunch of children’s clothes for Agnes’s niece. I sent them off to Kraków from the FedEx office, this time confident of the contents.
Over lunch she spoke to me about her sister, how she had been married too young, to the manager of a local brewery, who treated her with little respect, and how she now felt so downtrodden and worthless that Agnes could not persuade her to leave. ‘She cries to my mother every day because of what he says to her. She’s fat or she’s ugly or he could have done better. That stinking dickhead piece of chickenshit. A dog would not piss on his leg if it had drunk a hundred buckets of water.’
Her ultimate aim, she confided, over her chard and beetroot salad, was to bring her sister to New York, away from that man. ‘I think I can get Leonard to give her a job. Maybe as secretary in his office. Or, better, housekeeper in our apartment! Then we could get rid of Ilaria! My sister is very good, you know. Very conscientious. But she doesn’t want to leave Kraków.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t want to disrupt her daughter’s education. My sister was very nervous about moving Thom to London,’ I said.
‘Mm,’ said Agnes. But I could tell she didn’t really think that was an obstacle. I wondered if rich people just didn’t see obstacles to anything.
We had barely been back half an hour before she glanced at her phone and announced we were going to East Williamsburg.
‘The artist? But I thought –’
‘Steven is teaching me to draw. Drawing lessons.’
I blinked. ‘Okay.’
‘Is surprise for Leonard so you must not say anything.’
She didn’t look at me for the whole journey.
‘You’re late,’ said Nathan, when I arrived home. He was heading off to play basketball with some friends from his gym, his kit-bag slung over his shoulder and a hoodie over his hair.
‘Yeah.’ I dropped my bag and filled the kettle. I had a carton of noodles in a plastic bag and put them on the counter.
‘Been anywhere nice?’
I hesitated. ‘Just … here and there. You know what she’s like.’ I switched on the kettle.
‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine.’
I could feel his gaze on me until I turned and forced a smile. Then he clapped me on the back and turned to head out. ‘Some days, eh?’
Some days, indeed. I stared at the kitchen worktop. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know how to explain the two and a half hours Garry and I had waited in the car for her, my eyes flicking repeatedly up to the light at the obscured window and back to my phone. After an hour Garry, bored of his language tapes, had texted Agnes to say he was being moved on by a parking attendant and she should text him as soon as she needed to go, but she didn’t respond. We drove around the block and he filled the car with fuel, then suggested we get a coffee. ‘She didn’t say how long she’d be. That usually means she’ll be a coupla hours at least.’
‘This has happened before?’
‘Mrs G does as she pleases.’
He bought me a coffee in a near-empty diner, where the laminated menu showed poorly lit photographs of every single dish, and we sat in near-silence, each monitoring our phones, in case she called, and watching the Williamsburg dusk turn gradually to a neon-lit night. I had moved to the most exciting city on earth, yet some days I felt my life had shrunk: limo to apartment; apartment back to limo.
‘So have you worked for the Gopniks for long?’
Garry slowly stirred two sugars into his coffee, screwing up the wrappers in a fat fist. ‘Year and a half.’
‘Who did you work for before?’
‘Someone else.’
I took a sip of my coffee, which was surprisingly good. ‘You never mind it?’
He looked up at me from under heavy brows.
‘All the hanging around?’ I clarified. ‘I mean – does she do this often?’
He kept stirring his coffee, his eyes back on his mug. ‘Kid,’ he said, after a minute. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. But I can see you ain’t been in this business long, and you’ll last a whole lot longer if you don’t ask questions.’ He sat back in his chair, his bulk spreading gently across his lap. ‘I’m the driver. I’m there when they need me. I speak when I’m spoken to. I see nothing, hear nothing, forget everything. That’s why I’ve stayed in this game thirty-two years, and how I’ve put two ungrateful kids through college. In two and a half years, I take early retirement and move to my beach property in Costa Rica. That’s how you do it.’ He wiped his nose with a paper napkin, making his jowls judder. ‘You get me?’
‘See nothing, hear nothing …’
‘… forget everything. You got it. You want a doughnut? They do good doughnuts here. Make ’em fresh throughout the day.’ He got up and moved heavily over to the counter. When he came back he said nothing more to me, just nodded, satisfied, when I told him that, yes, the doughnuts were very good indeed.
Agnes said nothing when she rejoined us. After a few minutes, she asked, ‘Did Leonard call? I accidentally turn my phone off.’
‘No.’
‘He must be at the office. I will call him.’ She straightened her hair, then settled back in her seat. ‘That was very good lesson. I really feel like I’m learning many things. Steven is very good artist,’ she announced.
It took me until we were halfway home to notice she wasn’t carrying any drawings.
11
Dear Thom,
I’m sending you a baseball cap because Nathan and I went to a real-life baseball game yesterday and all the players wore them (actually, they wore helmets but this is the traditional version). I got one for you and one for someone else I know. Get your mum to take a picture of you in it and I can put it on my wall!
No, I’m afraid there aren’t any cowboys in this part of America sadly – but today I am going to a country club so I will keep an eye out in case one rides by.