Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [80]
And then I remember the unspoken bylaw: Learn how to be an orphan if you’re young; learn how to breed an orphan if you’re of age.
Maybe Caesar’s thinks I’m at that perfect time of life when I can do both at once. Because surely, if they convinced me to marry Uber, they would nudge us to have a child—offering handsome cash incentives, the way they do. We could produce a Super Uber, or in celebrity-magazine parlance, the child of Luber—how horrible would that be? And clearly no one can question my status as an orphan, though I keep thinking Allison is going to pull back the train-car door and drop down in the seat across from me, and start giving me advice on how to talk with Caesar’s.
I lean my head against the window, and see her face streaming across the blurred landscape. She’s the sliver by my side now: the braid of long hair, part of an eyebrow, half an eye, the confused part in her hair. She can’t move fully into the frame anymore or shift completely out of it.
I pull my raincoat up over my head and summon my discipline to be completely still as I cry, not making a sound.
I knew she was unhappy, but I can’t understand why she took her life that night, that particular night. I went out with Uber. I did everything she wanted. Maybe if I could bring myself to read her suicide notes. Someday I’ll be able to do that, I guess.
When I jerk awake there’s too much light pouring in from the windows and I realize we’re twenty minutes outside Penn Station, my raincoat down around the floor. I pack up my things and wash up in the bathroom, where I apply a fine layer of makeup. It’s essential that I make a good impression. I’m not a suit person and I don’t want to go insane here, so I’ve settled on unripped jeans, a clean T-shirt, a short jacket, and my best sandals. I run a hand over the quarter inch of hair on my head and look at the stitches in the back using my hand mirror. Though I appreciate her needlework, I really wish Julie hadn’t gotten carried away.
After the train gets in I decide to walk for a while, worried that someone in the crowd at the Penn taxi line will recognize me despite my sunglasses and hat. When I do flag a cab down, I tell the driver he should go AROUND Times Square, NOT THROUGH IT, but it’s possible he doesn’t hear me over the blaring radio that’s trapped between two stations—maybe it’s Senegalese and the traffic report listing places to avoid like Times Square—and now here we are right in the heart of it, gridlocked in midafternoon.
I pay the driver and pry myself out of the cab. You can’t fight everything—even if you feel stalled out, crushed or pick-pocketed, and inundated with bad souvenirs. So I start to look around at the neon, the videos, and think: okay, my heart belongs to Blade Runner. But when I turn all the way around, I’m looking at a sixteen-story filmic projection of . . . UBER.
His muscles giant-sized, baby smooth, highly moisturized, ready for action. Yet the poor guy looks miserable. He’s a thousand feet tall, looking right at me. And I find myself engaged in a mute conversation with him, listening to the cadence of his voice, listening to my own voice as I apologize for what I’m about to do to him. Because everything has changed, now that Allison’s gone.
I start jostling people and nudging and shoving until I twist my way out of the square. Then, as I brush past a group of young preppy teenagers, they start shooting me with their phones.
They don’t say anything, certainly don’t ask permission, just keep laughing and shooting. Once I turn the corner onto Fifth Avenue, I start running and they start running after me, and they’re still taking my picture, and I can imagine the captions, depending on the rag:
Lyn Flees Marriage