I Love the 80s (10 page)

Of course he knows
, she thought then.
It’s his job to know
.

She saw all of those magazine covers in her head, all of those poses, all the shots in all the seductive positions, and what had she thought? That the photographer had come across Tommy Seer that day and he’d
happened
to be gazing hungrily at the camera, in soaking wet pants and no shirt?

This is part of the job to him.

He’d all but announced it earlier, when he’d asked if she’d been with Duncan Paradis.

‘I don’t want to
seal the deal
, or whatever you called it,’ Jenna gritted out, shocked by the emotion in her voice, by the dark currents that swept through her, over her, threatening to send her tumbling along with them. Her knees felt close to giving out again. He only arched those dark brows of his, and waited. ‘That’s disgusting! I’m not like that!’

‘If you say so,’ he said, and while his voice was mild, non-committal, his gaze was so cynical it bordered on bleak.

Jenna backed further away from him, her head spinning, humiliation and shame swirling through her, fighting for prominence.

He thought she was just another groupie.

He thought
she
was a
groupie
– and if that were not heinous enough, she knew she had behaved like one. She had thrown herself at a complete stranger because, what? She thought it was at all likely that an international rock star would have fallen head over heels in love with her the moment he saw her? How often did
that
happen? Even in dreams?

She felt herself flush, and a deep red washed over her.

But she would not let herself run. She gathered whatever dignity she could manage, which mostly consisted of keeping her spine straight and her head high, despite the hectic colour she could feel heating her cheeks and neck. She did not say a word, and he only stood there, gazing back at her, unknowable – a face she knew too well concealing a person she could not, did not, know at all.

So she did the only thing she could. She turned on the sharp heel of her ankle boot and walked away from him, before she burst into tears or collapsed to the floor and made an even bigger fool of herself than she already had.

Outside, the afternoon sun was giving way to the long summer evening. Shadows stretched across the street as Jenna stumbled down the front steps of the town house, not that she noticed. She looked around wildly, blindly, and then walked off in the vague direction of the nearest corner – wanting to get that town house and everything that had happened there as far behind her as possible before she stopped and got her bearings.

She wanted to go home, curl up in a ball, and die. Or at the very least, pretend none of this had ever happened. She knew she was good at
that
, at least. Jenna sucked back something that felt like a sob. She couldn’t get that awful, bored expression Tommy had worn out of her mind, and she couldn’t breathe, either. She was flushed and sweaty and she knew she couldn’t blame that on the August humidity, much as she’d like to.

On the corner of Barrow and Bleecker Street, she started to head uptown, her head already way out in front of her.
She could visualize sinking with pleasure into the comfort of her one-bedroom in Hell’s Kitchen, where she had great plans to disappear into her sofa cushions and comfort-eat at least six pints of Ben & Jerry’s Oatmeal Cookie Chunk and New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream. Six of each. And then, she vowed, she would eat an entire emergency pizza. She deserved it.

It was not until she’d made it to the V of Eighth Avenue and Hudson that Jenna recollected herself. The ageing hippies and leather boys she’d passed along Bleecker Street hadn’t intruded on her brooding, but in retrospect, she should have realized that the fancy hipster mafia was notably absent and the Village was significantly more quaint all around her than she knew it to be. It was not the place she’d loved so much in her college days, either, when she and Aimee had spent endless hours sitting in a café on MacDougal Street planning the ways they’d take over the world. Everything was off. Different. Grimy and wrong.

1987 strikes again
, Jenna thought, feeling incredibly sorry for herself. And maybe a little bit scared, too. She kept walking, too weirded out to stop.
None of this is the Manhattan I know.

There would be no welcoming apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, an area Jenna wouldn’t dare enter if this was really the late Eighties. Even if she did muster up the courage to go there, in defiance of everything she’d ever heard about the urban blight that had taken over back then, she was pretty sure she would find her apartment
building occupied by the crackheads and prostitutes who had helped give the neighbourhood its bad reputation in the first place. There probably wasn’t any Ben & Jerry’s either, at least not on offer in the corner deli, which struck her as just about as awful as her sudden homelessness. She decided she would go to the office, where she was more than happy to sleep – and then remembered that she no longer had a private office to hide in. No private office, and no convenient four seasons’ worth of extra wardrobe inside that private office. How would she explain herself to Ken Dollimore if he was still there?

Not to mention she had no desire to discuss her interaction with Tommy Seer. Not with Ken Dollimore, or anyone else. Not even with herself. Not ever.

Which meant she had nowhere to go.

Jenna removed herself from the flow of pedestrian traffic, put her back to the nearest wall, and took a moment to try to catch her breath. She was perilously close to breaking down into tears, though she cautioned herself sternly that nothing productive was likely to come from sobbing on a street corner. She’d learned that lesson repeatedly back in her NYU days. She blinked back the heat in her eyes that threatened to spill over, and forced herself to look around instead.

The first thing she noticed was the drag queen in full regalia, complaining into the payphone on the corner. A glance up and down the street confirmed that there were payphones everywhere and, stranger by far to her eyes, no cellphones. The people who walked by talked to their
companions or not at all, unless they were noticeably and probably certifiably insane. The walk/don’t walk signs at the crosswalks were lettered, not flashing electric. The streets were filled with cars as always, but they were all passenger cars, with not a single SUV to be seen. Everyone smoked. Even inside the restaurants, customers waved lit cigarettes in the air to make their points and blew out clouds of smoke directly into their food. Station wagons, some with that awful wood panelling, careened through the intersection. A kid carrying an actual boom box on his shoulder, resplendent in a tracksuit and gold chains, strolled by with Run DMC blaring from his speakers. Phil Collins blasted out of a car window at a stoplight, and Jenna half smiled to hear that it was ‘Take Me Home’. How appropriate.

The smile faded, however, as she took in the state of the city around her. It was a much dirtier, more unpleasant New York than the one she knew. There were vials strewn in the grimy corners near the alleyways, and homeless men who looked almost demonic in the summer-evening shadows. Women marched down the street with their purse straps across their bodies and grim looks about the mouth. There were junkies nodding out in boarded-up doorways, and buskers on the corners.

This was the ‘edgy’ Manhattan everyone bemoaned the loss of. They called it that because time had dulled their memories, and they’d obviously forgotten what it felt like as darkness neared. Just as her terror was hitting a fever pitch, and Jenna was trying to figure out how she was
going to survive a night on the original mean streets with predators thick on the ground, she remembered the driver’s licence in the purse she clutched in front of her like a shield.

Jennifer Jenkins
, she thought as relief rushed through her. She fumbled inside the neon blue depths, her mind racing. What if Jennifer Jenkins, like Jenna, had moved to New York City from somewhere else and never updated her information? What if her licence had an old address from some other state?

But her fears were groundless, because Jennifer Jenkins was clearly the organized type. Organized and living at 457 East 83rd Street. The question was, in a world without a handy Apple store with access to Google Maps,
where
on 83rd Street was that?

A dim memory of her freshman orientation programme at NYU surfaced then, and Jenna scanned the street for the nearest empty phone booth. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d used a phone booth, and was slightly afraid that her karma would be such that it wouldn’t provide her with what she needed, as payback for belonging to a cellular world. But karma refrained from kicking her while she was down. This time.

Jenna pulled the phone book on its chain up to the little metal shelf, and slapped it over a SILENCE=DEATH sticker someone had plastered there. There, in the front of the phone book, was the Manhattan street-number formula she’d vaguely remembered hearing about. According to this, 457 East 83rd Street was located between
First Avenue and York Avenue. Jenna closed the phone book and let it fall back down, feeling inordinately pleased with herself.

She was practically jubilant as she walked up to 14th Street and headed east, along a street that in her time sported fancy hotels and designer stores. There was none of that tonight. No high-rises. No trendy Meatpacking District restaurants – in fact, she thought she could smell the blood from, presumably, actual meatpacking. Gross. She trudged past the brick building on the corner of Ninth that she knew all too well, because of a spate of bad dates she’d suffered through at an Italian restaurant that had been there. More than once, she’d been forced to shove so-so pizza into her mouth and try to stay awake while her date blathered on about himself. None of the men she’d met there had showed even a smidgen of interest in the fact that the building had also contained Glenn Close’s apartment in
Fatal Attraction
– a moot point tonight, Jenna thought with a sigh, since that movie came out in September of 1987 and it was still, as far as she knew, August. Married men could continue to cheat merrily and without fear of boiled bunnies for at least a few more weeks.

Jenna continued along 14th Street all the way to Union Square – a grim-looking Union Square, not the gentrified place with the Farmers’ Market she loved, but a disgusting area with a seemingly abandoned warehouse where the Virgin Megastore should be – and went down into the subway in search of the 6 train to the Upper East Side.

The subway station was another shock. Once again, Jenna was aware of a sense of menace all around, perfuming the air along with the ever-present smell of ripe garbage and unwashed humans in the summer heat. She fumbled for her Metrocard, and it was not until her fingers encountered a token in the bottom of the blue purse that she remembered the existence of tokens. She weighed it in her hand, brass with the silver plug in the centre, then inserted it into the appropriate slot and pushed her way through the rickety turnstile.

The subway platform was even dirtier than the sidewalk, and was approximately six hundred degrees hotter than the outside world. Jenna kept her attention focused on the track. She did not look at the potentially dangerous pack of young men to her right, with that undercurrent of meanness in their laughter. She did not want to know what slithered out of sight in the dark down on the track itself, because she had a strong suspicion it was a rat. Possibly in the plural.

The subway car, when it arrived, was not much better. There was graffiti all over the walls, grey plastic benches, and a battered linoleum floor. Jenna missed the new subway cars. She missed air conditioning. Yet when the conductor made his completely incomprehensible announcement, she felt immediately more at home. Happily, some things never changed, and the unintelligible jabber of New York City subway conductors was, apparently, one of them.

Yet other things were completely different, Jenna
thought later, as she made the long trek from the subway towards Jennifer Jenkins’s place. No Starbucks. No ATM machines. Just a long walk, practically into the East river. By the time Jenna made it to the address listed on the licence in her bag, which was at least on the block it was supposed to be on, she was dragging. She was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and the truth was, for all the trivia she’d been immersed in all day, she thought she’d finally had enough of 1987 Manhattan.

Jenna was ready to wake up. She was even ready to join the real world Aimee was always going on about. She could admit it – she’d hidden away in a little cocoon after Adam had left her. But she was ready to leave it behind. She would even approach the endless series of blind dates with more enthusiasm, if she had to – just as long as she could escape the Eighties.

First, however, she had to fight her way into Jennifer Jenkins’s apartment building through a series of heavy security doors using a selection of keys from the enormous key chain in the inside pocket of the neon blue purse, and then haul herself up five floors to the very top. Jennifer Jenkins’s apartment was the highest, furthest apartment possible in the building, Jenna thought sourly as she limped, overheated and panting, to the door of #15. She had to try each key in each of the three locks on the door, but eventually she made it inside, and closed the door with a satisfying
thump
on the city.

For a moment she simply stood there, her back against the door, breathing.

There was a fan blowing from one of the two windows in front of her, in the area that comprised most of the living space in the studio apartment. Jenna hated studio apartments, on principle. She took a few moments to investigate the one she found herself in, which she accomplished by pivoting around on her heels. It was tiny. A bathroom to the left and a kitchen to the right, and one big room to live in. It should have felt like a cell – the way her own studio apartment had felt those three dire years she’d lived in one – but this apartment didn’t feel cell-like at all. It took Jenna a moment to figure out why.