Manhattan Nocturne by Colin Harrison Page B

took a sandwich. “Ratlike journalists.”
    â€œYes, exactly.”
    â€œHow did you and Simon meet?”
    â€œBy accident.” She separated each section of the orange, then laid them out in a line, eight pieces. “At the time, I was—I’d been around, if you know what I mean. I’d been here a few years …” She paused, and in the gesture I was given to understand that there was a story that preceded her arrival to New York, but she seemed to push it away in order to concentrate on what she was telling me. “I was living a sort of tired, pretty-girl New York life, you know? I had almost
no money and I was … there were always regular guys sort of around, but I was tired, I’d been to a lot of parties and everything … I’d been out in California, but I’d come to New York just to see it, see something different, you know.”
    I nodded my vague understanding. Only later would it be clear to me that Caroline was offering an absurdly simplified, barely truthful version of why she had come to New York City; only later would I see that the reasons for her change of venue ran deep into her past and that the effects ran up to that very moment. But now, watching her fiddle with her orange peels, I knew only that she seemed distracted by anxiety.
    â€œI guess I had been in the city long enough that I knew I had to get serious about something,” she was saying. “I mean, this is a hard place. You have to know why you’re here. If you don’t know that—”
    â€œYou’re in big trouble.”
    â€œYes, you’re in big trouble, because you’ll get pushed into something or just eaten up somehow. That happened to a girlfriend of mine. She started smoking crack and I just never saw her anymore, and then she showed up and was really thin and sick, and we had to send her back to Texas on a bus.” Caroline pushed an orange section between her teeth. “So at the time I didn’t have work, and I went to an agency and got a job answering phones at a law firm, at the front desk, and I could sort of scrape along on that. I’d been there about three days when one of the attorneys, one of the older ones, asked me if I would join him for a drink after work. He was very important and everything, but he was just some kind of regular guy—he wouldn’t have understood anything about me … I wasn’t even looking for anybody, I had dressed very conservatively and hadn’t put on too much makeup. I just didn’t want to be noticed, I wanted some stability, and anyway, he asked me out, and there he was in his suit and gray hair and everything, maybe forty-five, and he looked sort of pleased with himself, like he had just made a million dollars or something, and for all I know he had, and actually he was sort of attractive, but … well, I had seen some people in California
who were pretty unusual … I said that was very nice but I couldn’t do it. So, he was a lawyer, after all, so he wanted a rationale, and he asked me if it was a matter of availability or a matter of preference. That was how he put it. I was sort of angry, and I said preference.” Caroline bit a piece of orange. “The next day, the lady who was the head of personnel fired me when I came back from lunch. She said it just wasn’t going to—”
    â€œHe’d told her to do it.”
    â€œOf course. I just got up and left, and I walked south from Midtown, just walked and walked, at least an hour—you know how that can feel good on a cold day—and I was just walking along and went into a crummy bar down on Bleecker Street. It was warm inside. I decided to sit and think and then Simon came in—he was easy to recognize, he didn’t look like anybody else. I’d seen his films. In fact, I’d seen Mr. Lu twice. He was alone, and he saw me sitting there and came over and asked me if he could buy me