Before You Knew My Name (7)

Turning from the window this first lonely morning, closing the blinds against the piles of black rubbish bags and jungle-gym scaffolds and scattering of parked cars on the street below, Ruby concedes that sleep is no longer an option. Instead, she carefully unpacks her suitcases, hangs up her dresses and jackets, lays out her shoes. When this task is done, empty suitcases stored by the door, she compiles a list of things that might make this room, with its clean linen and private bathroom, feel more like home. A glass for her vodka. A candle. Dishes for the microwave in the corner, and a vase for fresh flowers. Little anchors, trinkets to remind her that she lives here now.

Here. Ten thousand miles from Melbourne.

Ten thousand miles from him.

We both had to leave, you see. And maybe Ruby is right with this next thought, pushing through the vodka and jetlag and grey light of early morning:

Maybe the people who appear brave are merely doing the thing they have to do. It’s not a matter of courage, then, to pack up and leave a life. Just a lack of any other option, and the sudden realisation you probably don’t have anything left to lose.

I may be sleeping soundly this next, first morning, as she makes her lists and thinks her delirious thoughts. But make no mistake. Though we came from very different places, Ruby Jones and I might as well be the same person when it comes to how we landed here in New York City.





THREE

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FIRST SEVEN DAYS.

It’s like I’m living inside one of those Sunday afternoon, old movie musicals you don’t mean to keep watching, but it’s all so bright, so joyous, you can’t look away. Even when it rains, which it does a lot, there are no grey skies here, not to me. Sometimes, when I am wandering through Midtown, I stop in the middle of the street, just for a second, to look at the Chrysler Building, glittering skyward from her perch on Lexington Avenue. I think she is beautiful, the way an old-time beauty queen is beautiful, all silver sparkles and sash and crown. I always wave to her, subtly, though I don’t think anyone notices, and then I get going across the street, so I don’t get run over by a cross-town bus or a honking yellow cab.

I know about cross-town now. I know about uptown and downtown, and the way Broadway rambles around like a river. I know about boroughs and blocks, and I know which side of the pavement to stick to. I’m not even afraid of those cellar doors anymore, the ones that lead down to basements filled with flowers and fruits and every other imaginable thing. It’s as if the girl who arrived a week ago has lived a year in this city, that’s how much things make sense already, in a way those small towns from my childhood never did.

There are so many places I have yet to see, whole new maps I am making, but for now it is enough to wave at the Chrysler Building, and walk block after block, taking pictures of every new thing I encounter. I love looking at the city through a camera lens; it changes everything when you are the observer, instead of the observed. This must be something my father understood, and Mr Jackson, too. The calm control you feel when you wind, focus, click. Perhaps things would have been different for my mother—perhaps things would have been different for me—if she’d been on the other side of the camera, too. I do wish, when I let myself think about her, that I could show her what I’ve captured of this city she loved and left too soon.

I don’t know if the pictures I’ve taken are any good, mind you. The old Leica is not like any camera I have used before, and I’m still learning how to hold it, how to move the focus lever with my thumb and keep the small body steady with my other hand. The viewfinder is tiny; at first, I couldn’t see anything through the small window, but after a week, I think I’m getting the hang of it. It’s like learning to see a whole different way. When you adjust the aperture, narrow the opening of the lens, background objects come into focus. Kind of like you’re pulling the world into you, bringing it closer. Nothing seems so far away anymore.

I should thank Noah, mostly. I do thank Noah. Every night before I fall asleep. Because now that my first seven days are up, he’s letting me stay on rent-free at his apartment—a brownstone, I know this term now, too—until I get a job and can pay my own way. That’s how he put it when he made his offer over coffee and fresh bagels, part-way through that first week. I told him right then and there I didn’t want to be a charity case. But I had already fallen in love with my bedroom and the piano and the barrelled bay windows—‘What do you call these windows, anyway?’ I asked him, peering down onto the street—and I knew I would miss the wet leather of Franklin’s nose, the constant press of it against my hand. Besides, it was clear from the beginning that Noah would be easy to live with. He liked my questions about where to go and what to see in the city, and he didn’t ask too many questions of his own, though I did share a little about my life with him over that breakfast.

‘I don’t want to rely on you,’ I said. ‘Not after what I’ve been through. But I would really, really like to stay here.’

This is our solution: we will keep a ledger on the refrigerator door, a tally of my days here. Noah makes a new mark every morning, a quick flick of black ink on a white sheet of paper, so we have a record of what I’ll need to pay him back some day. As the days turn into weeks, those black marks will spread across and down the page, but I never do get around to adding them up. At the beginning of things, I just sort of see them as the sum of my survival.