Someone Else's Shoes(45)
“I’m not going to sleep with you, you know,” she says, when he hands her a particularly beautifully cooked steak sandwich.
He regards her steadily, and gives a small smile, as if she has said something amusing. “Okay,” he says, as if the thought hadn’t even occurred to him, and she is both embarrassed and furious at his response.
She lies awake in the horrible hotel room, these thoughts whirling around her head in a toxic black cloud, and when she wakes she is so exhausted it is only bleak fury that propels her back to the Bentley Hotel again. Twice in the small hours between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., when it is just her and the sirens and the sound of the couple fighting in the next room, she has picked up her phone and typed in one of the few numbers she knows by heart: Juliana. And then she stops, gazes at the words, deletes the message and puts down her phone.
She adds up her wages and the money from Ray, and she knows her days at the hotel are numbered. And then it happens: the Tower Primavera tells her she cannot stay another night. She is walking to the breakfast room at six thirty when the receptionist passes her in the hallway. “Oh, Mrs. Cantor. We’re fully booked for a conference for the next two weeks. I’m afraid we’ll need you to check out tomorrow morning.”
“But where am I supposed to go?” she says, and the receptionist looks at her blankly, as if she has never been asked this question.
As Nisha walks to work, she wonders if she will actually end up on the streets, like the formless, gray-faced men in cardboard boxes she walks past every morning. And not one person returns her calls. Not one of the women she has sat beside at society events for the last eighteen years. Not one of the so-called friends. Carl—or Charlotte—will have told them all and she will now be untouchable. She feels the humiliation of their conversations about her from across the Atlantic.
—Well, normally I’d say how awful, but she was such a dreadfully cold person I’m really finding it hard to care.
—Oh, Melissa! You are a hoot!
She strides along the river, trying to work out a plan, and she hates this city. She hates the stationary cars with their foggy passengers behind the windscreen wipers. She hates the blank stares of the fellow commuters as she curses at errant bicycles, hates the four-wheel drives with their tight-lipped mothers who ignore their children, hates the catcalling builders and the sly, assessing groups of the younger men who congregate outside bars. She hates that she is no longer insulated from any of it, just a tiny invisible atom freefalling in a universe of drudgery and chaos. She walks, her collar up against the damp, a decent wool scarf she has not yet managed to take to the hotel’s lost property room wrapped high around her neck, and although she is not a woman prone to introspection, if she had been, Nisha Cantor would have observed that she had never been unhappier in her life.
* * *
? ? ?
“We need to talk.”
Jasmine appears as she finishes her shift. She is in her off-duty uniform of ruby satin padded coat and jogging bottoms, with a chain-link bag crossing her body and her nails have been freshly painted a glittering iridescent blue. “I swear I’ve thought of almost nothing but what happened here on Tuesday.”
Nisha rips her jacket out of the locker and slams the door. “You forcing me to hand back my own things, you mean?”
But Jasmine pulls a face. “Don’t give me that. I’m not the enemy.”
Nisha shoots her a questioning look. But Jasmine is already heading down the corridor.
“Hurry up and put your jacket on,” she says. “You’re coming to mine.”
* * *
? ? ?
They catch the first of two buses, and as it growls and heaves its way through the traffic, Jasmine asks her about her life and what has happened to it.
You were actually living in the penthouse until recently? The actual penthouse?
Hang on, even though you had a house here? You had a house? More than one house? How many bloody houses did you have?
You really just moved around the globe month to month? Well, where was your home? What do you mean all of them?
How come all those clothes were yours? Did he just give you money to spend every week? How much? HOW MUCH? Did you never have a job? That’s not a job . . . Tccchh.
Literally not one of your friends has been in touch? Not even to help? What kind of women are they? (That one stung.)
What does your son think about it all? (That one stung even more.)
Well, when are you going to tell him? Babe, you can’t keep this quiet. Who are you protecting? Your cheating snake-ass husband?
And who the hell is this little witch who’s fucking him anyway? Do you know this woman? Huh. Of course. OF COURSE. What are you going to do about it?
Jasmine asks her questions openly and without embarrassment. She does not hold back on her opinions. Nisha is so taken aback by this way of communicating—so different from the coded conversations she had grown accustomed to among Carl’s friends’ wives, the meaningless smiles and the sliding glances—that the anger she has been carrying begins to dissipate and she finds herself answering honestly, without considering what unwitting nuggets might be harvested from each answer, or later used against her, as she would normally when speaking to another woman.
They have walked ten minutes from the bus stop, still deep in conversation, neither of them apparently conscious of the rain that has started to fall. The housing project they are now walking through—Jasmine calls it an estate—is a huge, sprawling thing traversed by empty walkways and punctuated by the glow of orange streetlights and Nisha stays close, unsure if she lost Jasmine whether she would be able to find her way back out.