Inside (5 page)

“Not at all,” she said. “It was exactly what I needed.” What she needed was the bruise and crash of another body against her own, a collision that made her feel real. She’d wanted to be manhandled, not listened to, or cared for, or even seen.

“You pretty women are such goddamn nightmares,” a drunk told her one night in a dim bar on Fiftieth Street, where she’d stopped by after a day of temping. She had let him buy her a drink, then turned him down for dinner because she didn’t like the smell of his cologne, and now he was mad. “You’re all the same. Hollow at the core.”

“I’m not hollow,” she said, smiling sweetly. Her core was molten,
radioactive. She knew that beneath the surface she was diseased, rotten, incinerating herself from the inside. But that wasn’t the same thing as being hollow. Not the same thing at all.

Toward the end of February, she got back to her building around six in the afternoon. She had been cast, through the intervention of the Irish poet, in a play about the potato famine. In rehearsals she had to roll around moaning in hunger in a chilly basement, and after every session she was exhausted and aching and, indeed, starving.

There was a bad smell inside the front door. The landlord, wanting to make life unpleasant for those in the rent-stabilized apartments, had suspended superintendent services. Nothing was cleaned, there were no functioning lightbulbs in the stairwell, there was no one to call in case of an emergency. In the corner, just below the mailboxes, was a pile of what Anne took to be discarded clothes until she realized, with a start, that it was a person.

Whoever it was shifted slightly beneath a brown wool blanket and a green army coat that were somehow twisted together in a kind of shelter. Outside it was damp and blustery, the kind of freezing cold that slips through zippers and buttons to get at your skin, even into your muscles. She let him be.

The next day, though, he was still there. The grandmothers in the building—almost all the apartments were rented by little old ladies—had clustered anxiously on the landings, whispering. Of course the super wouldn’t answer his phone or buzzer, so one of the old ladies had called the police. “They laughed in my face, those rat bastards,” she said. “Said they had more important things to do.” Other tenants, probably nervous about their own status in the building or the country, slipped past without so much as a glance.

Anne, theoretically, should have done the same thing. She was living in an illegal sublet with no proof that she belonged there, and only Larry’s fear of confrontation kept him from kicking her out. But she could handle him. She jumped right into the conversation.

Soon the intruder in the lobby had drawn the residents together, like survivors of a storm. For the next two days, as Anne went into
and out of the building, she would meet her neighbors’ eyes with a shrug and a smile, and they’d shrug and smile back.

In all this time the guy beneath the blanket didn’t show his face, though the smell of urine started wafting up the stairwell. When the tenants met now, they scrunched their noses in distaste and hurried into their apartments as quickly as possible, disgusted and afraid.

Finally, Mrs. Bondarchuk, the one who had called the police, clutched Anne’s arm outside her door and drew her into the kitchen. “You’ve got to do something.”

“Me? What about the super? Or the cops?”

Mrs. Bondarchuk shot her a scornful look. “You don’t think they have other things to do?”

“Sure, but what am I supposed to do?”

Mrs. Bondarchuk was a tiny Ukrainian lady, barely five feet tall, but her wrinkled face was powerfully insistent. Her short hair was dyed a lurid, unconvincing red. Until recently, she had refused to acknowledge Anne’s presence, but her new friendliness came at a price. “You go talk to them,” she said firmly. “You’re a young person.” The logic of this was self-evident to her. “
You
go talk.”

“All right,” Anne said. “Fine.”

She went downstairs and stood next to the pile without any idea what sort of creature was hidden beneath it. “Excuse me,” she finally said.

There was neither answer nor movement in the pile, and the smell was rank. It had been four days.

“I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here. You have to leave.”

No answer. Was he asleep? Passed out on drugs?

“I know it’s cold out,” she said. “But there are places, right? I mean, shelters. They’ll feed you, and give you a shower and stuff. You have options.”

As she said it, she remembered someone speaking those last three words to her,
You have options
, when she was very young, and the way a voice had risen up inside her, silent but stubborn, that said,
No, I don’t
.

The pile, however, said nothing. Defeated, she turned on her heel and went back to her apartment.

What put the situation over the edge was the shit. She left for rehearsal and when she came back, three hours later, a few pages of the
New York Times
Arts section were neatly folded into quarters in the opposite corner of the entryway. The smell was unmistakable.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Are you kidding me?”

Taking a deep breath and holding it, she grabbed one edge of the wool blanket and pulled. Whoever was underneath—both underneath and inside and twisted around, it seemed—pulled back, and for a minute it was like a tug of war. Anne wanted to give up, because holding this filthy blanket was grossing her out, but then the other person gave in and she reeled backward, almost stumbling flat on her ass, and when the blanket dropped from her hand, she saw to her shock that it was a girl. Blond, teenage, stocky, her round cheeks constellated with pimples.

“I need some food,” the girl said, then burrowed into the green army coat and pulled her knees up to her chin, wrapping her arm around them. It was as if she were anchoring herself to the floor, folding herself into a packet as neat and small as the newspaper. She smelled like mold and garbage, like something discarded and left to rot.

“I’m hungry,” the girl insisted. Then, as if reading Anne’s mind, she added, “And I stink. Can I use your shower? I feel kind of disgusting.”

She was so matter-of-fact, so unapologetic, that Anne was speechless. She had been picturing a man, older, maybe a vet, somewhat or completely out of his mind, homeless for a long time. A teenage runaway—a girl who could shit in a building and then curl up asleep next to it—had never occurred to her.

“If I bring you upstairs and let you shower,” she said, “will you go to one of the shelters? I’ll help you get there.”

The girl gazed at her, the expression in her eyes impossible to read. “I’m starving,” she said.

“I have some food,” Anne said. “Okay?”

The girl struggled heavily to her feet, gathering her coat around her. She looked sleepy, and willing, if not happy, to follow her upstairs. As they passed Mrs. Bondarchuk’s door, Anne knocked lightly to let her
know what was happening—though she didn’t doubt that the old lady was already peering through the keyhole. You owe me one, she thought.

The girl stepped into the apartment as if it were hers. She was wearing dirty jeans, sneakers, and a blue sweater, and Anne had only a moment to guess at her age—fifteen, maybe sixteen?—before she went into the bathroom and closed the door, without asking directions or permission. After a minute, Anne heard the shower running.

“Okay,” she said out loud. She went into the kitchen and set out bread and peanut butter and jelly. Not caring much about food herself, she hardly ever cooked, and her cupboards held little beyond takeout menus and leftover packets of soy sauce. In the other apartments in the building, the little old ladies spent their days simmering soups and boiling potatoes, wanting to have something on hand in case their families stopped by (though they rarely did), always smelling up the hallways with their traditionally prepared recipes. Probably the girl wished one of them had taken her in.

Anne started to make a sandwich, then realized the girl would need clean clothes when she got out of the shower. She rummaged through her dresser for some rarely worn sweatpants and oversized T-shirts—the girl was much heavier than Anne. Then she went into the bathroom and said, “I’m putting some clothes on the toilet,” but she got no response from the shadow behind the shower curtain. Back in the living room, she waited. All these actions were unaccustomed. She never had houseguests; when men came over, she gave them what they wanted—time with her in bed—and never thought about whether they were hungry, or thirsty, or uncomfortable. If they needed a drink of water, they could get it themselves. If the girl was planning to steal from her, too bad, since Anne didn’t have anything worth stealing. There were advantages to living an unbuilt life.

A few minutes after the water stopped, the girl came out wearing the sweatpants and several T-shirts layered one over the other. Anne couldn’t help noticing that her breasts were enormous, pendulous, beneath the shirts. Her body looked like a woman’s, but her face was chubby, childlike, round. Eyeing the peanut butter, the girl sat down
on the kitchen stool. She made herself a sandwich, ate it, then made herself another. Halfway through this one she said, “Milk?”

Anne shook her head, regret washing over her. Why had she let this person—this
animal
—into her apartment?

While the girl kept eating, Anne went into the bathroom and stuffed the reeking clothes into a plastic garbage bag, wincing when she saw that her shampoo, conditioner, exfoliating scrub, and lotion were all uncapped and messy. Those products were expensive, an investment in her looks.

“I’m going downstairs to put your stuff in the laundry,” she said. When she got back upstairs, the girl was fast asleep in her bed.

She slept poorly on her uncomfortable couch. She had never been one for good deeds. She wasn’t selfish—just self-contained. She liked to stay within her own borders. Yet in the morning, for some reason, she dragged herself to the deli and came back with orange juice and donuts. The girl looked like a donut eater. She sat sipping black coffee on the couch until the girl woke up around ten and wandered into the living room, apparently surprised to see Anne there.

“Don’t you have to go to work?” she said. She had a slight accent, not quite midwestern but broad, the consonants slurry and soft, like she was from the country.

“Not today.” Anne studied the girl’s slow, lumbering slide down onto the stool, noting how her face, creased from sleep, remained inert, as if frozen during a boring dream. The closest thing to an expression Anne had yet seen washed over the girl’s face at the sight of the donuts. She pulled the box toward her and started chewing on one, powdered sugar smudging the tip of her nose.

“What’s your name?”

Without a word, the girl picked up a second donut.

Anne stood up, snatched the donut out of her hand, and threw it, along with the rest of the box, into the garbage, then stood there with her arms folded, playing the disapproving mother.

The girl chewed, swallowed.

Get out, Anne thought.

“Hilary.”

If, at this point, the girl had said nothing more, Anne would have pinched her ear and marched her to the door, or called the police, anything to get her out of the apartment and her life.

But she said, “Are you an actress or model or something? You’re, like, gorgeous.”

Even while recognizing this as flattery, Anne found herself pleased. “I’m in the theater,” she said.

The girl grimaced. “I could never do that,” she said. “Too fat, too ugly.”

“You’re not,” Anne said mechanically. She had this conversation with other actresses almost every day,
I’m so fat
leading to
No you’re not, you’re emaciated, I’m so ugly
to
No you’re not, you’re gorgeous
. It was a call-and-response pattern, rhythmic and codified, like birdsong.

The girl accepted this insincerity and moved on. “Are you in a play right now?”

“In rehearsals. I play an Irish peasant woman during the potato famine. You know about the potato famine? I wind up prostituting myself in exchange for food for my family.”

“Prostituting yourself?” Hilary said, putting her elbows on the kitchen counter. Her large breasts rested on the counter like lumps of bread dough.

Anne nodded. In fact the prostitution was more implied than seen; she only had a few lines, but to make things interesting she had embroidered the character’s backstory. She’d spent so much time on this that she now felt the character had the tragic richness of a starring role. She was the center of the play, its crucial beating heart, but she was the only one who knew it. “Actually, if you wanted to be helpful, you could run some lines with me,” she said, feeling generous. “Then we can figure out the shelter situation.”

While she fished the script out of her bag, Hilary retrieved the donuts from the trash. She inhaled another one, drank some orange juice, then held out her hand for the pages. “Ready,” she said.

Hilary had a surprisingly clear voice and didn’t seem to tire of reading the lines over and over again. Once they started, Anne lowered herself into the character as if into a swimming pool: the water was cold at first, uncomfortable but bracing; then gradually, as the
muscles warmed, the temperature turned out to be perfect, and the laps went by in strong, sure strokes, the body now fully engaged. She forgot everything else. It was only in these moments of concentration and release that she felt she could shed her own skin and slip free.

Suddenly it was noon.

“Shit,” Anne said, “I have to go. I’m supposed to meet the costume designer in fifteen minutes. Listen, Hilary.” It was the first time she’d called the girl by her name, but the effect was nil, the round face as inert as ever.

Then Hilary suddenly said, “The bathroom’s disgusting.”

“What?”

“I can clean it, while you’re at your meeting. The toilet, the bathtub, the floor. I can do all that.” Her voice was urgent and quick. She would neither plead nor act desperate, Anne could tell, but she would bargain.

In the days and months to come, she’d question her decision again and again. She couldn’t even remember what was going through her mind: it was as if she had blacked out and come to after the choice had been made. But the fact that she couldn’t explain it to herself was maybe as good a reason to do something as she’d ever had. Sometimes you needed to surprise yourself with randomness, to prove you have depths that even you can’t understand.