Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

There are so many places I have yet to see, whole new maps I am making, but for now it is enough to wave at the Chrysler Building, and walk block after block, taking pictures of every new thing I encounter. I love looking at the city through a camera lens; it changes everything when you are the observer, instead of the observed. This must be something my father understood, and Mr Jackson, too. The calm control you feel when you wind, focus, click. Perhaps things would have been different for my mother—perhaps things would have been different for me—if she’d been on the other side of the camera, too. I do wish, when I let myself think about her, that I could show her what I’ve captured of this city she loved and left too soon.

I don’t know if the pictures I’ve taken are any good, mind you. The old Leica is not like any camera I have used before, and I’m still learning how to hold it, how to move the focus lever with my thumb and keep the small body steady with my other hand. The viewfinder is tiny; at first, I couldn’t see anything through the small window, but after a week, I think I’m getting the hang of it. It’s like learning to see a whole different way. When you adjust the aperture, narrow the opening of the lens, background objects come into focus. Kind of like you’re pulling the world into you, bringing it closer. Nothing seems so far away anymore.

I should thank Noah, mostly. I do thank Noah. Every night before I fall asleep. Because now that my first seven days are up, he’s letting me stay on rent-free at his apartment—a brownstone, I know this term now, too—until I get a job and can pay my own way. That’s how he put it when he made his offer over coffee and fresh bagels, part-way through that first week. I told him right then and there I didn’t want to be a charity case. But I had already fallen in love with my bedroom and the piano and the barrelled bay windows—‘What do you call these windows, anyway?’ I asked him, peering down onto the street—and I knew I would miss the wet leather of Franklin’s nose, the constant press of it against my hand. Besides, it was clear from the beginning that Noah would be easy to live with. He liked my questions about where to go and what to see in the city, and he didn’t ask too many questions of his own, though I did share a little about my life with him over that breakfast.

‘I don’t want to rely on you,’ I said. ‘Not after what I’ve been through. But I would really, really like to stay here.’

This is our solution: we will keep a ledger on the refrigerator door, a tally of my days here. Noah makes a new mark every morning, a quick flick of black ink on a white sheet of paper, so we have a record of what I’ll need to pay him back some day. As the days turn into weeks, those black marks will spread across and down the page, but I never do get around to adding them up. At the beginning of things, I just sort of see them as the sum of my survival.

If I can make it there …

You know how many songs there are about New York? When you live here, it’s like the streets serenade you. Remember when I said I would not squander my independence? If you knew what came before. Not even the stuff I told Noah, but the stuff before, and before, and before that. Well, you’d understand why it’s a place, not a person, I have given my heart to this time around.

I mean, can you imagine? That a place can feel like a person? That a place can comfort you and sing to you and surprise you. A place where simply stepping up out of the subway onto the street can give you that fizzing under the skin sensation you get right before you kiss someone? When I told Noah about this, when I said it was almost as if I had fallen in love with New York, he smiled funny, and called me Baby Joan, and I still don’t know what that means.

(Truthfully, he says lots of things I don’t understand.)

The point for now is this: I am happy. Whenever my worried feelings creep back in, I just head outside, no matter the hour, and I roam the streets and avenues and river paths until I shake the worry off. And this! Noah bought me a pair of sneakers. I came home from a long walk on Day Five, and there they were in a box on the bed, the price scratched off, so only the .97c part of the sticker remained. Purple, thick-soled, smelling of rubber and dye, and so much newness. It was like sliding my feet into the future. Into all the possibility ahead of me. That’s what I felt, and I may have cried a little, but I didn’t tell Noah that, or say thank you out loud, because I can already tell he wouldn’t like this kind of thing. I just wrote out an IOU from the post-it pad in the kitchen, sticking the word Sneakers on the refrigerator door, next to our ledger of days.

It is strange to think that only a week ago, everything I had was counting down to nothing, from my depleting cash, to the single roll of black and white film in my Leica, to my thin-soled shoes. My life was about subtraction and holding on to whatever was left over. Now the calculation has changed, life has spun me around, filled me up, and I am dizzy with happiness. I’m living in a stranger’s apartment, in