Greyglass, Tanith Lee [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

was offended, nothing showed. (It was only years after Susan learned that two-looed bathrooms were not the U.S. norm.)

The bath in the big bathroom was also big. When full, you could put your head on an air pillow and float about in it.

Wizz drove them to a restaurant. “They call New York Pig’s Paradise,” said Wizz. “You can get any food here. Anything in the world – French, Italian, Thai, Hawaiian, Sudanese, Jewish, Japanese. And I gotta take you to Chinatown.”

The restaurant was overwhelming. It seemed full of black light, with spotlit tables, tall white lilies, impeccable, automatic waiters. Susan propped her eyes open. They seared with tiredness. She felt fluey.

Wizz and Anne drank and drank.

“Don’t give her any more wine, please, Wizz. She’ll have a hangover.”

Susan didn’t want any more wine. Or any dinner. She already felt sick from the need to be asleep.

Everyone else in the restaurant was smart and beautiful, wide awake, and sometimes loud with confidence. Susan grew smaller, but not in the correct way. She knew she was too fat, her skin pebbled, her hair not right, her clothes all wrong – how had immigration let her in?

In the morning, she was still exhausted after eight hours sleep. But they had to be up and out by ten, because Wizz wanted to take them ‘around’.

The days became a kaleidoscope crush of events, food, places, moving figures, information: of a terrifying elevator ascent of the Empire State Building, the zoo in Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge strung with pearls of lamps, subway rides. Cops with their guns in their belts. And they seemed always to be eating, too. The coffee shops and restaurants Wizz chose were high-class, with menus like novels. Even the dim burrow under the red banners of a smoking Chinatown, was select.

They stood and gazed up and up, at Wizz’s instruction, to the tapering reflecting heights of glass mountains, while below humanity rushed through the canyon, and the yellow taxis zipped like angry bees.

And there were the dress stores, Wizz waiting to pounce with his American Express Card, where the assistants said to Anne, “That is just gorgeous on you,” and to Susan, “I guess the bigger size is in order.” And the dresses sticking like toffee to her shame-and-heat tacky back, and never quite fitting, regardless.

Height on height, slight on slight, humiliation on humiliation.

She was overweight in the country of physical perfection, and sixteen. And – it went on and on.

“Come on, wake up. You got just half an hour to shower and get ready. Put on the white dress Wizz bought you.”

“It doesn’t fit. I’m tired.”

“No. Come on, Susan. We’re driving out to Penn today, have you forgotten?”

What did she afterwards remember of Pennsylvania? The hours-long drive. Fields. A bridge over a river. City night; skyscrapers, and a forgotten movie in an air-conditioned cinema so cold she shivered. They stayed in a hotel. Susan’s room was pink. Across the hall, Wizz and Anne made love.

Susan dreamed of driving, or being driven, forward, onward, endlessly.

Back in New York they went to the Cloisters and the Met. Inexorably, Wizz escorted them. The Met had an exhibition, what was it? Great suits of Eastern armour, perfumes wafting on electric breezes. Girls slender as pencils.

“We could drive out to Washington DC, if you like. Take a look at the ol’ White House.”

The Statue of Liberty swirled in a greenish miasma of fog and jet-lag.

“You can’t have jet lag still. We’ve been here over a week. And I didn’t have it at all. Buck up, Susan. You’re being a drag.”

“I didn’t want to come,” Susan said, humbly.

“Yes, I know that. And now you’re intent on cutting off your nose to spite your face, aren’t you.”

Then Wizz had to be at work, in something called the Anchor Building on Broadway, the New York branch of the firm. He took Anne with him, wanting to show her off. Susan was also meant to go. That morning her period started, early and painful.

She imagined Anne telling Wizz why Susan couldn’t go with them.

Yes, she had told him. He winked at her as they went out. “You poor messed-up women,” the wink said, “I can guess what you go through. Lucky me to be a man.”

Susan thought how the male Jews thanked God every day for not making them female.

She thought of thanking God for not making her Wizz.

In the afternoon she felt much better. She felt she could breathe, even in Wizz’s loft.

Alone, she played the juke-box, leaned from the window and watched the streets below She began to think about America, what she had seen of it, to acknowledge the excitement of it from a distance. If only she could have been here without Wizz being here. If only without the threat of Wizz, and, the future with Wizz, hanging over her – but with whom? With Anne? Alone? Yes, perhaps alone…

Sitting on the four-seater white couch, Susan thought about Anne saying, “How can you stay behind in England, Susan, if I go to live overseas? Tell me that. I don’t care if you are sharing with this Jo. You’re sixteen and a minor. I’m legally responsible for you.”

“I could lie about my age,” Susan had said. She did not add, Like I lied all the times you were out at night and I had to pretend you were next door.

Anne had concluded, “Don’t be stupid.”

The American afternoon went quickly.

Anne had declared she and Wizz would be back by four from the Anchor Building. They were catching a show that night. However, when the elevator clanked to a halt by the doors at four fifteen, only Wizz walked in, in his sharp light suit.

“Where’s Anne?”

“Oh, Wilde made a big hit. She and Eve Frenowsky just clicked. Gone off to Maceys. She’ll be back in a while, calm down.”

Wizz went to the Coca-Cola machine that stood by the water dispenser, and got two ice-cold cans.

He drank both of these, walking slowly around the main room of the loft.

Susan grew