A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [4]
There was a rap on the door, a man’s voice: “Any luck?”
Sasha and Alex left the hotel and stepped into desolate, windy Tribeca. She’d suggested the Lassimo out of habit; it was near Sow’s Ear Records, where she’d worked for twelve years as Bennie Salazar’s assistant. But she hated the neighborhood at night without the World Trade Center, whose blazing freeways of light had always filled her with hope. She was tired of Alex. In a mere twenty minutes, they’d blown past the desired point of meaningful-connection-through-shared-experience into the less appealing state of knowing-each-other-too-well. Alex wore a knit cap pulled over his forehead. His eyelashes were long and black. “That was weird,” he said finally.
“Yeah,” Sasha said. Then, after a pause, “You mean, finding it?”
“The whole thing. But yeah.” He turned to her. “Was it, like, concealed from view?”
“It was lying on the floor. In the corner. Kind of behind a planter.” The utterance of this lie caused pinpricks of sweat to emerge on Sasha’s Xanax-soothed skull. She considered saying, Actually, there was no planter, but managed not to.
“It’s almost like she did it on purpose,” Alex said. “For attention or something.”
“She didn’t seem like that type.”
“You can’t tell. That’s something I’m learning, here in N.Y.C.: you have no fucking idea what people are really like. They’re not even two-faced—they’re, like, multiple personalities.”
“She wasn’t from New York,” Sasha said, irked by his obliviousness even as she strove to preserve it. “Remember? She was getting on a plane?”
“True,” Alex said. He paused and cocked his head, regarding Sasha across the ill-lit sidewalk. “But you know what I’m talking about? That thing about people?”
“I do know,” she said carefully. “But I think you get used to it.”
“I’d rather just go somewhere else.”
It took Sasha a moment to understand. “There is nowhere else,” she said.
Alex turned to her, startled. Then he grinned. Sasha grinned back—not the yes/no smile, but related.
“That’s ridiculous,” Alex said.
They took a cab and climbed the four flights to Sasha’s Lower East Side walk-up. She’d lived there six years. The place smelled of scented candles, and there was a velvet throw cloth on her sofa bed and lots of pillows, and an old color TV with a very good picture, and an array of souvenirs from her travels lining the windowsills: a white seashell, a pair of red dice, a small canister of Tiger Balm from China, now dried to the texture of rubber, a tiny bonsai tree that she watered faithfully.
“Look at this,” Alex said. “You’ve got a tub in the kitchen! I’ve heard of that—I mean I’ve read about it, but I wasn’t sure there were any left. The shower thing is new, right? This is a bathtub-in-the-kitchen apartment, right?”
“Yup,” Sasha said. “But I almost never use it. I shower at the gym.”
The tub was covered with a fitted board where Sasha stacked her plates. Alex ran his hands under the rim of the bath and examined its clawed feet. Sasha lit her candles, took a bottle of grappa from the kitchen cupboard and filled two small glasses.
“I love this place,” Alex said. “It feels like old New York. You know this stuff is around, but how do you find it?”
Sasha leaned against the tub beside him and took a tiny sip of grappa. It tasted like Xanax. She was trying to remember Alex’s age on his profile. Twenty-eight, she thought, but he seemed younger than that, maybe a lot younger. She saw her apartment as he must see it—a bit of local color that would fade almost instantly into the tumble of adventures that everyone has on first coming to New York. It jarred Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now: Where was that place with the bathtub? Who was that girl?
He left the tub to explore the rest of the apartment. To one side of the kitchen was Sasha’s bedroom. On the other side, facing the street, was her living room–den–office, which contained two upholstered chairs and the desk she reserved for projects