I turned the water off.
I lifted my eyes.
There was a woman in the mirror above the basin, and for a half-second I did not place her.
She was thin. Worried. Her hair, which she had pinned at six o’clock that evening into a low knot at the nape of her neck, had given up a few hours ago and was now coming down in two soft pieces along her jaw. Her skin in this light was slightly translucent at the temples—I could see a thin blue vein running down toward her brow—and her hazel eyes had the particular tired sheen of a person who had not slept properly in three weeks and had been pretending otherwise.
There was a smear of dark lipstick on her front tooth.
I leaned in. I leaned in close enough that my breath fogged the mirror in a small soft oval. The smear was on the left incisor, faint but unmistakable, the color of a cabernet rim, and I could trace exactly when it had happened—the dutiful air-kiss thirty minutes ago, the woman in cream in the receiving line by the lectern,darling you came, you are the best, mwah mwah,andI had saidof course of course you were brilliant,and I had not noticed the lipstick because I did not look in mirrors when I could help it, and now I had been walking around for half an hour with another woman’s mouth on my tooth.
A woman whose mouth was normally full of my words.
I rubbed it off with my thumb. It came off easily. There was a faint pink ghost of it left behind on the enamel.
I should have looked away then.
For exactly one second I let myself look at my own face.
It was an ugly second. I do not mean that the face was ugly. I mean that what was on it was ugly.I want.That was what was on my face. Bare. Undeflected. No qualifier in front of it. Nosort of,noI think,nomaybe it‘s just me.No deferential softening, no apologetic angle of the head, no warm-deflecting laugh. A want with no manners. A want with no explanation. A want for—what, exactly. I did not let myself name it. I did not have to. The face named it for me.
I wanted what she had.
It was the face of a person who had been writing other women’s books for ten years and was not, it turned out, all right.
I closed my eyes.
I kept them closed for a long count.
When I opened them I looked at the dahlias.
I took my phone out of the small black clutch under my arm. I opened the thread at the top of my messages, which was, of course, hers, and I typed:
Headache, slipping out, you were brilliant tonight x
I read it twice. I considered thex.I considered taking it off. I considered the politics of taking it off—she would notice, she noticed everything, she would text me at eleven asking if I was annoyed about something—and so I left it on. I pressed send before I could rewrite it. The little blue bubble went up the screen and turned todelivered.
I put the phone away.
I did not look in the mirror again on my way out.
I did not look back at any reflective surface in the building.
The doorman opened the door for me. He did not, of course, register that I existed. The rain was coming down hard.
AcabtoBushwickona Tuesday in October in the rain was seventeen dollars before tip, and seventeen dollars before tip was, more or less, Tuesday’s grocery budget for the week.
I worked it out on the curb under the Crosby’s awning while the doorman called a Lincoln for a man in a navy overcoat who was definitely an editor-in-chief. Seventeen plus three was twenty. Twenty was the rotisserie chicken at the Key Food on Knickerbocker, plus the bag of small potatoes, plus the bunch of dinosaur kale, plus the two cans of chickpeas, plus the carton of eggs, plus the loaf of seeded sourdough that had gone on sale the week before and had become, in some private way, the thing I looked forward to on Wednesday mornings. I could have the Lincoln. I could have the chicken. I could not have both.
I stepped out from under the awning.
It was real rain—coming down at a slant, finding the gap between collar and neck within half a block. I had a coat but I had not brought an umbrella because I had not, when I left the apartment at five-thirty, planned for rain. I crossed Crosby and turned onto Prince, because the J train was at Bowery and Prince led there in eighteen blocks of relatively flat sidewalk, and I had, by then, already decided I would walk.
I walked.
I passed the Apple Store, then the Mercer, then the small expensive children’s clothing shop where a single white linensmock in the window cost two hundred and ten dollars. I passed the soap shop that smelled, even from the sidewalk, of green fig. I passed a man under a doorway with a small dog in his coat. The rain went from a drizzle to a sustained sound. My blouse, under my coat, was beginning to stick at the shoulder blades.
I should not have stopped at McNally Jackson.
