Was I? I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma.
“If you’d rather have company? Perhaps if I build a fire in the other room? Tell me what you want.”
At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair—for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too.
“We’re only in the next room if you need us—that is to say, I’ll be leaving soon for work but someone will be here.…” His pale gaze darted around the room, and then returned to me. “Perhaps it’s incorrect of me, but in the circumstances I wouldn’t see the harm in pouring you what my father used to call a minor nip. If you should happen to want such a thing. Which of course you don’t,” he added hastily, noting my confusion. “Quite unsuitable. Never mind.”
He stepped closer, and for an uncomfortable moment I thought he might touch me, or hug me. But instead he clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “In any case. We’re perfectly happy to have you and I hope you’ll make yourself as comfortable as you can. You’ll speak right up if you need anything, won’t you?”
He had hardly stepped out when there was whispering outside the door. Then a knock. “Someone here to see you,” Mrs. Barbour said, and withdrew.
And in plodded Andy: blinking, fumbling with his glasses. It was clear that they had woken him up and hauled him out of bed. With a noisy creak of bedsprings, he sat beside me on the edge of Platt’s bed, looking not at me but at the wall opposite.
He cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. There followed a long silence. Urgently the radiator clanked and hissed. Both his parents had gotten out of there so fast it was like they’d heard the fire alarm.
“Wow,” he said, after some moments, in his eerie flat voice. “Disturbing.”
“Yeah,” I said. And together we sat in silence, side by side, staring at the dark green walls of Platt’s room and the taped squares where his posters had once been. What else was there to say?
iii.
EVEN NOW, TO REMEMBER that time fills me with a choking, hopeless sensation. Everything was terrible. People offered me cold drinks, extra sweaters, food I couldn’t eat: bananas, cupcakes, club sandwiches, ice cream. I said yes and no when I was spoken to, and spent a lot of time staring at the carpet so people wouldn’t see I’d been crying.
Though the Barbours’ apartment was enormous by New York standards, it was on a low floor and practically lightless, even on the Park Avenue side. Though it was never quite night there, or exactly day, still the glow of lamplight against burnished oak gave off an air of conviviality and safety like a private club. Friends of Platt’s called it “the creepatorium” and my father, who’d come there once or twice to pick me up after sleepovers, had referred to it as “Frank E. Campbell’s” after the funeral home. But I found a solace in the massive, opulent, pre-war gloom, which was easy to retreat into if you didn’t feel like talking or being stared at.
People stopped by to see me—my social workers of course, and a pro-bono psychiatrist who’d been sent to me by the city, but also people from my mother’s work (some of whom, like Mathilde, I’d been expert at imitating in order to make her laugh), and loads of friends from NYU and her fashion days. A semi-famous actor named Jed, who sometimes spent Thanksgiving with us (“Your mother was the Queen of the Universe, as far as I was concerned”), and a slightly punked-out woman in an orange coat, named Kika, who told me how she and my mother—dead broke in the East Village—had thrown a wildly successful dinner party for twelve people for less than twenty dollars (featuring, among other things, cream and sugar packets lifted from a coffee bar, and herbs picked surreptitiously from a neighbor’s windowbox). Annette—a fireman’s widow, in her seventies, my mother’s former neighbor down on the Lower East Side—showed up with a box of cookies from the Italian bakery around where she and my mother used to live, the same butter cookies with pine nuts she always brought us when she visited at Sutton Place. Then there was Cinzia, our old housekeeper, who burst into tears when she saw me, and asked me for a picture of my mother to keep in her wallet.
Mrs. Barbour broke up these visits if they dragged on too long, on the grounds that I got tired easily, but also—I suspect—because she couldn’t handle people like Cinzia and Kika monopolizing her living room for indefinite periods of time. After forty-five minutes or so she would come and stand quietly in the door. And if they didn’t take the hint, she would speak up and thank them for coming—perfectly polite, but in such a way that people realized that the time was getting on and rose to their feet. (Her voice, like Andy’s, was hollow and infinitely far away; even when she was standing right next to you she sounded as if she were relaying transmissions from Alpha Centauri.)