my ear, like he was right beside me – ‘Louisa Clark, you are the cutest girl in the whole of New York City.’
Treen, it was like witchcraft. I looked up and he turned around and smiled, and I have no idea how it worked, but he walked across and just took me in his arms and kissed me in front of everyone and someone whistled at us and it was honestly the most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.
So, yes, I’m moving on. And Josh is amazing. It would be nice if you could be pleased for me.
Give Thom a big kiss.
Lx
Weeks passed and New York, as it did with most things, careered into spring at a million miles an hour, with little subtlety and a lot of noise. The traffic grew heavier, the streets were thicker with people, and each day the grid around our block became a cacophony of noise and activity that barely dimmed until the small hours. I stopped wearing a hat and gloves to the library protests. Dean Martin’s padded coat was laundered and went into the cupboard. The park grew green. Nobody suggested I move out.
Margot, in lieu of any kind of helper’s wage, pressed so many items of clothing on me that I had to stop admiring things in front of her because I became afraid she would feel obliged to give me more. Over the weeks, I observed that she might share an address with the Gopniks but that was where the similarity between them ended. She survived, as my mother would have said, on shirt buttons.
‘Between the healthcare bills and the maintenance fees I don’t know where they think I’m meant to find the money to feed myself,’ she remarked, as I handed her another letter hand-delivered by the management company. The envelope said ‘OPEN – LEGAL ACTION PENDING’. She wrinkled her nose and put it neatly in a pile on the sideboard, where it would stay for the next couple of weeks unless I opened it.
She grumbled often about the maintenance fees, which totalled thousands of dollars a month, and seemed to have reached a point at which she had decided to ignore them because there was nothing else she could do.
She told me she had inherited the apartment from her grandfather, an adventurous sort, the only person in her family who didn’t believe that a woman should restrict her sights to husband and children. ‘My father was furious that he had been bypassed. He didn’t talk to me for years. My mother tried to broker an agreement but by then there were the … other issues.’ She sighed.
She bought her groceries from a local convenience store, a tiny supermarket that operated on tourist prices, because it was one of the few places she could walk to. I put a stop to that and twice a week headed over to a Fairway on East 86th Street where I loaded up on basics to the tune of about a third of what she had been spending.
If I didn’t cook, she ate almost nothing sensible herself, but bought good cuts of meat for Dean Martin or poached him white fish in milk ‘because it’s good for his digestion’.
I think she had become accustomed to my company. Plus she was so wobbly that I think we both knew she couldn’t manage alone any more. I wondered how long it took someone of her age to get over the shock of surgery. I also wondered what she would have done if I hadn’t been there.
‘What will you do?’ I said, motioning towards the pile of bills.
‘Oh, I’ll ignore those.’ She waved a hand. ‘I’m leaving this apartment in a box. I have nowhere to go and no one to leave it to, and that crook Ovitz knows it. I think he’s just sitting tight until I die and then he’ll claim the apartment under the non-payment of maintenance fees clause and make a fortune selling it to some dotcom person or awful CEO, like that fool across the corridor.’
‘Maybe I could help? I have some savings from my time with the Gopniks. I mean, just to get you through a couple of months. You’ve been so kind to me.’
She hooted. ‘Dear girl. You couldn’t meet the maintenance fees on my guest bathroom.’
For some reason this made her laugh so heartily that she coughed until she had to sit down. But I sneaked a look at the letter after she went to bed.