Someone Else's Shoes(49)
“Oh, this is just word games.” Phil gets up. “I’ve got to go.”
Dr. Kovitz doesn’t protest. He doesn’t say anything. He just waits while Phil puts on his jacket and then, as he walks to the door, calls: “I’ll see you next week, Phil.”
* * *
? ? ?
Nisha has spent three nights at Jasmine’s flat. Two of those days she rode the buses to work with Jasmine, familiarizing herself with the routes. They do the morning journey in silence, both half asleep from the 5:30 a.m. start and bracing themselves with flasks of coffee for what the day ahead holds. In the evening they sit together in the packed bus and chat companionably about who got the best tips that day, the latest bizarre guest behavior, what they will eat that night. Nisha is not generally one for small-talk but she knows it is the price for Jasmine’s hospitality and does her best not to appear visibly exhausted by it.
They collect Grace from Jasmine’s mother and bring her back—she doesn’t like being in the flat by herself since it was broken into eighteen months ago (“They took my christening bracelet and Grace’s laptop. It took me six months to pay off that thing.”), so on any night that Grace’s father cannot pick her up, the evenings contain a long diversion to get her. Jasmine works in the evenings after supper, the apartment filled with the whoosh and hiss of the steam iron and the occasional whirr of her electric sewing machine. Nisha washes the dishes and clears up after dinner, so that Jasmine has one less thing to do.
The most reluctant of hosts, Grace speaks to Nisha when she has to, but it’s clear that Nisha’s presence in her room bugs the crap out of her. She avoids her eye, sighs heavily when Nisha gets down from the top bunk, and puts her earphones in ostentatiously whenever she is in the little bedroom. Nisha cannot blame her. She very quickly finds living in the tiny apartment with Jasmine and Grace exhausting. There is no room to move. No place to put her things, if she had any. No place to escape to. She cannot even sit in the bathroom without one of them banging on the door and demanding immediate access to hair products, toothbrushes or the loo. There is constant noise: the television, Grace’s music, the radio in the kitchen, the washing-machine on spin (it never seems to stop), the doorbell ringing day and night as people come to collect laundry or drop it off. This way of living—the relentless grind, the lack of peace—is clearly normal to them.
And yet she knows she must be grateful. It is still, somehow, so much better than the awful hotel room. It is better, frankly, than anything else she can manage while she waits to work out her plan. And she finds herself in awe of Jasmine, who seems able to raise a smile for almost any occasion, who curses misfortune with a sailor’s filthy mouth, then tells herself things could be worse and finds something to laugh about. Jasmine would like to open her own dressmaking business, but she enjoys her job at the Bentley, and is worried she’d get lonely working by herself full-time. “Really I’d just like more space. A little shop maybe that I could put all this stuff in”—she gestures around the apartment—“so me and Gracie could have a bit more room to ourselves.” Yes, she would like a boyfriend, but she has zero spare time, is “picky as hell,” “and me and Gracie come as a package, you know? Anyone who likes me needs to get the Gracie seal of approval first.” (Grace had raised her eyebrows like that was unlikely to happen any time soon.) A couple of times Jasmine has begun joking about something—usually men, or sex—and Nisha has unwittingly found herself laughing along with her, once till the tears streamed down her face. For the first time in her life, she glimpses the solidarity of women, and likes it.
* * *
? ? ?
Until she sees that Charlotte Willis is wearing her coat. Her $6,700 pale tan and cream only-one-in-her-size Chloé shearling coat. Nisha sees the coat coming toward her down the main corridor as she pushes the cleaning trolley and feels a jolt of recognition before she notices who is wearing it. When she sees Charlotte, her face wreathed in that vaguely conspiratorial smug smile, turning to say something to the young woman beside her, she thinks she might faint with rage. She stops abruptly, so that Jasmine crashes into the back of her, and when Jasmine realizes what she is looking at, she swings Nisha back round by the elbow and steers her briskly down the corridor toward the concession shop, leaving the trolley stranded where it stopped.
“That her?” she says.
“My coat,” says Nisha, who may be hyperventilating. “She’s wearing my coat. Jesus motherfucking Christ. What am I seeing? What am I seeing?” They pause by the service elevator and Nisha glances over, turns back to Jasmine, straightens up and shrugs, as if there is no alternative. “Well, now I have to kill her.”
Jasmine lets out a bark of laughter, then straightens her face and gives her the kind of look she probably gives Grace. “No, Nish. You are not going to kill anyone.”
“It’s my coat.”
Nisha has had enough. Some things are too much to be borne. It’s Chloé, for God’s sake.
“Let her go,” Jasmine says firmly. And then, when Nisha protests, “Let. Her. Go. Nish. Listen to me. Play the long game.”
“What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Nisha’s voice lifts and Jasmine pushes her back into a doorway, her face fixed with a smile at passing guests as if this is all some glorious joke among the happy staff. “Long game? I don’t have a long game.”