Bono

At 28, the poor girl had an entire youth to catch up on. Over the next ten days I planned to immerse her in everything she had turned her back on through five years of religious devotion—theater, galleries, and shopping for clothes other than sandals and robes. There would be plenty of time for book promoting after she had returned to Australia. Who knows what I’d get up to after she had left?

She had spent so long meditating in Asian temples, I was nervous she might disapprove of my infatuation with a place where Western culture reaches its logical conclusion. As we rattled into Manhattan, I took her silence for awe. Not even a nun could turn up her nose at a city exuding so much glitz.

It seemed an opportune moment to tell her about Michaela’s ice dancing party. I somehow hadn’t found the right moment to mention it before.

“Her what?” Lydia turned to face me.

“You know,” I said, faking confidence. “Ice dancing party. New Yorkers have them all the time. I didn’t think you’d be interested.”

“Michaela takes ice?”

“Of course not. It’s ice skating . . . I think.”

“Does that mean we have to dance on ice, too?”

I didn’t think so.

“We’ll be pretty tired,” I said, thinking whatever people did at an ice dancing party, it would be throwing her in the deep end. “You don’t have to come along if you don’t want to.”

To my surprise, she said she did.

* * *

Our Airbnb host, Ted, had told us our apartment wasn’t going to be ready till the next day, so we’d booked a place to stay overnight near Times Square. Darkness had fallen by the time the cab turned onto a narrow street and glided to a halt outside a shabby, dimly lit building. I scanned the entrance for a sign indicating it was an actual hotel.

“Is this it?” I asked.

“It sure as hell ain’t that!” the driver said, shrugging at a skeleton of scaffolding propping up a building on the other side of the street.

Nothing goes wrong when I travel with Philip. I trail after him like a child through airports and hotel lobbies. Tickets and passports appear in a flash from the plastic wallet he carries inside his breast pocket. Suitcases disappear off conveyor belts to manifest mysteriously at my side. And hotels always look like hotels. I checked my phone. My latest text about taxicabs smelling the same all over the world had gone unanswered. He was probably on his way to work.

Night air sliced the back of my throat as Lydia and I scrambled out of the cab. New York’s spring felt like the depths of an Australian winter. We grabbed our bags and ventured into what turned out to be a lobby. A rickety elevator carried us to the seventh floor, where I shunted the plastic key in the lock of room 74. The door drifted open to reveal a compact double bed encased in a 1980s style floral quilt.

Stale air tickled my nostrils, but Lydia was unperturbed. She assured me that compared to sleeping on the monastery floor, sharing a bed with me would be luxury. Besides, she added, people who are really tired sleep anywhere. I had a vision of shivering in a sleeping bag next to Philip in a tent perched on the edge of a precipice in New Zealand’s high country. (It was early in our courtship when I was trying to convince him I loved camping as much as he did.) After a day trudging through wet bush I was exhausted, but sleep was impossible due to the presence of a large, furry animal snorting at the tent flap.

I picked up the avocado green phone from the bedside table. A weary voice at the other end of the line said the hotel was fully booked. There was no possibility of us moving to a room with two single beds, ma’am.

The receptionist said “ma’am” in a tone that implied it wasn’t a compliment.

Lydia disappeared into the bathroom. Going by my watch (which was still on Australian time) it would still be morning back in Melbourne. If Philip wasn’t out jogging, he’d be feeding Jonah the first of the 124 bags of diced chicken I’d left in a mosaic pattern in the bottom of the freezer. With luck, he would have remembered to transfer one of the little bags to the main part of the fridge to defrost overnight. More likely, he was dropping lumps of frozen chicken in Jonah’s bowl, leaving the cat to fight it out with the ants while it was defrosting.

I dug the phone out of my handbag and punched Arrived safely. Love you xxx. His text flashed back seconds later. The man was steady as a heartbeat.

I pulled my boots off and flopped on the bed. The mattress wobbled resentfully. It was a relief to stretch out on a soft horizontal surface that wasn’t hurtling through the air at unfathomable speed. As I dropped into a deep and welcome sleep, it occurred to me if I could order my own death, one like this would be acceptable. Painless, profound, peaceful. . .

A gentle hand shook my shoulder.

“Aren’t we going to the ice party?” Lydia asked.

Jerking awake, I rolled off the bed and bolted for the shower. Lydia passed me a towel through the door and asked if I knew where we were meeting Michaela.