Two months after we had moved, separately, to New York, I finally had managed to secure a meeting with Lucy. Between the Four Seasons and a neighbouring office tower was a corporate courtyard lavishly planted and flawlessly maintained. Two office workers stood up and vacated a bench by the fountain. Lucy perched on it and folded her arms. I sat down on it. The fountain murmured and generated medium strength privacy.
“I can’t make Saturday afternoon cos of tennis,” she said. “And I’m out Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Friday is tricky. Wednesday afternoon normally would be perfect because my boss takes a half day. But for the next few weeks she’s in. Alejo’s having a party on Friday evening, actually. You won’t want to come I am sure. Why did you want to meet me today Jamie?”
“Where do I fit in?” I spluttered. I had meant to lead up to it. It was a question which was torturing me. If I just knew how important I was to her, then, I would know how much to persist. She immediately knew what I meant.
“You remember that discovery you made last December reading Engels? ‘At a certain point, a certain quantity transforms quality’? Suddenly ‘love’, you told me, emerges out of ‘like’? Well, I don’t know Jamie. I don’t know what this is. But time will tell. We’ve spent months together at the edge of twenty-three. It’s an important moment in our lives, but just that; a moment in our lives.”
Lucy was right – I didn’t want to go to Alejo’s party. But where else would I get to see Lucy again so soon? I abased myself. I called over to Fifth. The doorman rang ahead and brought me up silently in the elevator. Inside, I found it was only the three of them – Sylv, Lucy and the man himself. Some focking party. They didn’t seem surprised to see me. We took some coke. At some point, I wandered out alone onto the roof terrace and looked across the park. When I tried to go back in I found that the sliding door was locked.
“That’s funny,” I thought.
I heard muffled laughter from inside. I decided not to try the door again. So I wandered over the terrace and I tried another door. Inside was only a small room with one way glass, a glass roof and a bed. There might be a way through to the flat. I entered and saw Lucy’s slippers under the made up bed and her luggage in the corner. On her bed was her laptop. On. I just couldn’t resist. She hadn’t even changed her password. Her diary was open on the screen. I stuck my pen drive in. I saved her diary. I couldn’t leave it at that. I wanted to read what she had just been working on.
“…He actually asked: “where do I fit in?” Where do you fit in, Jamie? Well, actually, yes, you do fit in, but not the way you think. Yes. The twenty-five year old Porsche wielding advertiser. Yes. That Eurotrash City lawyer who charmed my faux-sophistique seventeen-year-old palate with restaurants Daddy had spoken of. Yes, that handsome insipid merchant-banker. My Paulinas rite of passage… And yes, our trip in a private plane to Venice. Told poor Daddy: “Dorset with Katie”.
“And then, yes, yes, my hard-riding Byronic country boy. Yes, our odd encounter in the queue to join the yoga soc at Kelsey Kerridge. Freshers’ week. Yes. My hair wet. I could not speak. He said: hold on tight. And down we went. We were hardly apart again for three years. Yes. All of our vacations away together – his family hunting lodge on forty-five-thousand-acres near Mull; riding lost on the Norfolk broads; the extraordinary castle belonging to his cousin, the Arch Duke, above Porto Fino; full-power psy trance parties for days on end in Goa when he would never let me out of his delicious sight; the waterfall hotel with oranges you could pick almost from the bed beyond the Atlas mountains at Immousin-les-bains; the near-deadly rickshaw in Laos when one of his hands stopped me falling; watching the rains moving silently across the Altiplano at dusk as we slowly, endlessly fucked… And then… Yes, then… So certainly, so very politely, suddenly, he broke my heart on King’s Backs just after our finals. The morning after the Trinity Ball, last year: “Let’s see what happens after you come back from Washington, hadn’t we?” And, all that time, the ambitious Caius girl from outside the Ring whom he’s marrying, I’m now told, was hovering around us… Earnest and maddeningly confused Jamie on the rebound, with his highbrow Marxist ways… My mysterious Mexican. That’s where you fit in, darling Jamie. Mein Irisch kind. You might have had my heart, but you blew it. Yes. I’m not sorry. I can’t give you more. It’s no longer mine to give or yours to take…”
I was stunned. Everything about my situation… Being in her room… Getting my just desserts for snooping… For torturing myself over something that was dead… For hoping… For being stuck on the focking terrace, while they laughed… For being in that bastard’s apartment… And in, in New York… For just being… Everything started collapsing… For a moment… But I gathered myself in another moment. I could indulge in this misery later, when I was safe. I did not feel safe. Was this a trap? I left the room quickly. I tried the door back into the apartment again. It was still locked but Alejo came to unlock it, just as I was turning away, convinced I was being entrapped and caught up in some crazy, suspicious game.
“What happened there? Don’t you want to come in, Jamie?”
“It was locked.”
“Lucy, the door was locked. What happened there? You should have knocked harder Jamie.”
“I didn’t knock,” I replied quietly.
“What happened there?”
“I’m not feeling good. I’d best be off.”
“There anything wrong, Jamie? Have another line.”
“No thank you.”
And, as I left the building and emerged onto Fifth Avenue, I crossed over to the steps of the Met and sat down looking upwards to where I had been and remembered a line from a book I had read at school, long forgotten, never understood: ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun.’