Nicola Griffith - Stay

A young Japanese woman stood as three sober-suited Japanese men approached her table. She bowed quickly, a test bow, to which they bowed in fast response, but a fraction more deeply, and now they had each other’s mettle. She held a business card in both hands and bowed again deeply, committed, and they followed suit. Bow, bow deeper, straighten, bow more deeply still, back and forth. Inverse hierarchy: allow me the privilege of abasing myself more than your most illustrious self! The conventioneers laughed loudly in their corner. I wondered how each group would manage in the other’s culture.

The Japanese eventually sorted themselves out, and I judged by the body language that the woman was some lower-level employee pitching something to three superiors. She did not seem to be having much success. Somewhere in the back of the room, someone lit a joint. No one would call the police; the charge wouldn’t be worth the negative publicity. An extra loud burst of raucous laughter rolled over the room from the front, followed by a higher-pitched but longer-lasting version from the back, where the joint was being smoked. It would just get worse. Time for bed.

I woke, slick with sweat, at four in the morning. “Julia?” She had never been gone so long. I sat up. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean it.” But I had, I’d wanted her to shut up, just for a moment, and now it seemed she had shut up forever. “Julia?” I listened, but all I could hear were sirens in the street below, the hum of the fan, and the churning of blood through my veins.

Sitting at the table by the window with my tea and toast the next morning, I found it hard to believe that it was autumn. It seemed more like spring: puffy white clouds scudding by, sunshine, spits of rain. Even shackled by miles of road and pinned by monstrous glass and concrete towers, nature was exuberant. Karp, assuming he was tucked up in his windowless loft, would be missing it.

I finished my breakfast, wiped my mouth, and called him. He picked up after five rings. He sounded annoyed that the caller wouldn’t respond, or maybe by the lack of Caller ID. I folded the phone. Time to hunt.

SoHo’s huge, cast-iron-framed buildings were originally erected in the middle of the nineteenth century to house companies such as Tiffany’s and Lord & Taylor; the lower floors were designed as display windows, perfect for the art galleries and boutiques and upscale stores of today. Across the narrow cobbled street from the building that housed Karp’s loft were two cafés, a gallery, and a bar. Surveillance here would be easy and comfortable. Although Tammy had told me Karp never, ever left before eleven in the morning, I took a window seat in the first café at ten-thirty. The place was empty, and seemed likely to stay that way until lunchtime. I hung my jacket over the back of the chair, ordered mineral water, and opened the paperback I’d bought at the hotel—a best-seller, nothing too engrossing. If the elevator doors across the street opened, I wanted to be able to catch it with my peripheral vision. Good surveillance and good books don’t mix.

It was eleven forty-five and I’d reached page 182 by the time the café began to fill up and the server started asking me every two minutes if I wanted to order anything else. She was new at her job, reluctant to push me, but an older woman at the counter kept punting her back in my direction. There was nothing on the menu that appealed, so I left her a twenty-dollar bill—about a four hundred percent tip—and walked over to the next café. They didn’t have a table by the window, so I moved on to the gallery. Which was a mistake.

Like most galleries, most of the time, it was empty except for the owner in a tiny, glass-walled office that was really no more than a cubicle. He gave me about forty seconds on my own with the installation closest to the window—what looked like a rag doll impaled on a tripod with a nearby video projector beaming a moving face onto its cloth head—before he couldn’t stand it any longer and came beetling over the Swedish finished maple floor, smile glued on, opening his hands and mouth, about to launch into some gushing praise of the art, and I felt reality shudder and stretch, and a stream of alternate worlds purled forth from this one, like soap bubbles when you blow through the filmy circle on the plastic wand. In one bubble world, Julia was still alive, and might be entering this gallery to talk to this man about buying the art on display for some corporate investment team. In another, she had never discovered corporate art investment and was running the place herself, and it was she who stood before me, looking me up and down, trying to judge whether I was good for the outrageous prices she was asking, tilting her head to listen, then tossing it back to swing her hair out of the way, smiling at something I said—because I would say something to make her smile, to see those indigo eyes glow and flicker like night-lights—checking my hand for a wedding ring. In yet another, we walked in together, trading a knowing look, having made a bet on how long the owner of this gallery would give us before rushing over. Then the owner spoke, and the words clapped like quick, vicious hands on every bubble until it was just a second-rate gallery in SoHo, empty of Julia.

I have no idea what that man said to me, or I to him, but eventually he went back to his box and I closed my eyes. Years, Dornan had said. Dear god.

Sometime later, the owner cleared his throat behind me and I realized I’d been standing, eyes closed, for a while. I walked onto the street. Rain spat cold on my face. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes. I fumbled out my phone, hit the redial button, and only had to listen to it ring three times before Karp snapped “Yes!” He must be waking up.

The second café now had a window table vacant. I tripped in the doorway, caught my elbow on the chair sitting down, and when I tried to make sense of the menu, found I was holding it upside down. Once I had it the right way up, I ordered a lamb and leek sandwich with mesclun in balsamic vinaigrette. I tried to breathe evenly, tried to remember to watch Karp’s door, tried to remember why it was important.

But then my sandwich came, and the act of reaching out and picking up the sturdy bread and thick meat, and lifting it to my mouth, all in logical sequence, helped the world make sense again.

I ate the sandwich methodically, followed by every leaf on the plate, then returned to the paperback. It took forty minutes to get through the next hundred pages, forty minutes of ridiculous plot culminating in two wet-behind-the-ears lawyers scooting on skis through snow-paralyzed city streets being shot at while their boss digs with her hands like a dog in the sand at some beach house location. By two o’clock I’d finished it and was leafing through the beginning again, marveling that any editor would countenance such stuff or that so many readers would buy it. Then again, I had.

The elevator doors opened.

Without taking my eyes off the elevator, I put the book and a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and stood.

“Hey, you forgot your book,” my server said. I ignored her.

Tammy had described Karp as tall, about six-two, and the man walking north up West Broadway was six feet at most. But it was Karp. The hair was the same, reddish gold in boyish curls, as was his walk, eager and on his toes, almost bouncy, a walk much younger than his age, which Tammy had told me was late forties. The clothes were younger, too, sharply cut khakis, leather jacket, boots, shirt, saddle-stitched laptop case, the Details magazine look of a twenty-five-year-old making real money for the first time. I kept to the opposite side of the street, about thirty feet behind. We walked along at a brisk pace through streets full of that mix of tourist and resident which, along with the flowers and iron railings and small shops, reminded me of Knightsbridge.