Bless the Telephone

“What time is it there?”

“Almost 5pm,” he says, voice of glinting ash. I can almost taste it down the phone. Bitter, deep-toned. Outside, brash New York hurtles, clanking towards midnight. 

“It’s late here,” I say, my forehead pressed against the hotel window, my hand crumpled between my shoulder and the receiver.

“How is it?” He asks. “New York at night?”

I hesitate. I am in Manhattan - skyless, clamorous. Below, people tear through the streets, each figure a peal of laughter, obscure and covetous. Sirens blare and lights throb and everyone has somewhere to be, some purpose, some place beneath the city’s skin. It smells of weed and trash and I’m above it all, within and without.

“Relentless,” I say. “I miss the quiet.”

“Sleepy England,” he sighs. “You’re only romanticising it. How did it go today?”

“It was really busy,” I say. “Hundreds of people showed up.”

It was mostly family and friends. And since around twenty of us students were exhibiting, it really was a busy opening. Maybe not hundreds of people. Certainly none for me. My sculptures reclined on a string of waist-height podiums, gnarled and starkly pitiful. The gallery was vast and fluorescent, with one window peering down onto book spine brownstones in white drizzle. As strangers swooped past, casting brief lingers on my work, and occasional smiles, I stood alone and gazed through it.  

“Did you speak to anyone interesting?”

“Yeah, everyone was really nice. There was some amazing artwork.”

“Did they like yours?”

“Yeah,” I say, nibbling a hangnail. “They were nice. It was all a blur, really. I’ll try to speak to more people tomorrow.”

“Oh yeah, the afternoon show,” he says. “Do you have any classes in the morning?”

“Nope.”

“Oh wow,” he beams. “A free morning! What’s the plan?”

His chirpiness irks me. It feels plastic, thin. But it’s the way we have been speaking to one another for weeks now, even before I left. 

“I don’t really know,” I muse. I picture the lambent reds and ambers of Central Park, the twee menagerie on the Delacorte clock swirling in the new-day rain. The balletic seals at the zoo. Then I picture the lustrous marble of the public library, the branch-awned sigh of Bryant park. The scream of the subway, the stately wonder of Grand Central Station. The galleries filled with tourists, sharp-elbowed, jostling for a glimpse of the city’s vanished adolescence. The desperate grin of baristas through windows, eyes large and darting as they gesture for tips. 

“I reckon I’ll just walk around. It’s fun to just watch people here.”

“I can imagine. God, I bet it’s so lively! I wish I could be there with you.” 

There is a pause, now, in our easy chatter. A gleam of real sadness in his transatlantic breath. A rare brush of real feeling. 

“I wish you were here too,” I say. 

But it’s strange, really. I can’t imagine him here. I can’t imagine him etched in, drinking coffee with me in the deli on the corner, its neon sign humming red against the rising subway smoke. Rifling through bookshelves and record boxes in the Village with me, never actually buying anything - not even a memento - as if trying to affirm the impermanence of it all. I can’t picture him beside me at a bar or cinema, or in the thick of bodies teetering on the edge of rush hour crossings. Nor in the heady slope of the Guggenheim, grasping my hand, his calves and heels throbbing. Nor in the sallow expanse of Washington Square Park. And certainly not here, in the hotel room - the white bed clinical, cockroaches scratching at the walls, my art bag untouched by the door. 

“It’s so shit here without you,” he says. 

“Oh sweetheart,” I say. “It won’t be for much longer.”

I don’t want to imagine him here. I want only to imagine things that needn’t be imagined. Our home together - our pot plants in the window, our turntable, our cushions and the coffee stains on the walls up the stairs. 

“Don’t be silly,” he replies. “You should stay for as long as you like. It’s such an amazing place.”

“Yeah,” I murmur. I think of the mock-William Morris pattern on our bedsheets. I think of our cat sleeping on my toes. The pub we go to on Fridays - the rustle of the room’s chatter as we huddle inside. 

“And it’ll be so good for your art,” he continues. I picture the books on my bedside table. Our tiny bath. The cobbles on the street outside, how slippy they get in winter. I picture his face, his arms, his neck. His clothes hung in the wardrobe, jumbled up with mine.

“I do miss you, though,” I say, gazing out at New York’s slatted moonlight.

“I miss you, too,” he says, and the seconds grow long. I clench the receiver so hard my hand starts sweating. 

“I’m not sure,” I begin, my voice small. 

“Not sure?” he says.

“I… I’m not sure if this is good for me,” I say. “If this is going as well as I thought.”

“Of course it is!” he says, chirpy again. “You’re just having a wobble. You’re just a bit homesick, it’s normal.”

“No, I’m serious. I’m not sure if this is what I want. I don’t feel good here. I don’t feel motivated.”

“You just need to give it time,” he insists. 

“I have given it time!” I say. My throat lodges with feeling. “I don’t like it here. I just… I want to come home.”

There is silence for a long while. I sense him fretting down the phone, his breathing fumbling. I regret what I said and then I don’t. It’s out there now, I think. He has the truth now and he will understand. 

“There’s no way I’m going to tell you to come home,” he says at length, soft-voiced. “I’m not going to be that kind of person. I’m not going to be the boyfriend who holds his girlfriend back.” 

The sob rises in my throat again, my face feels hot. The clamour of edifices outside the window - the ludicrous height of it all, the man-made ceiling of other rooms and other lives - intensifies my loneliness. I can’t give up alone, I think. I need some sort of permission. Some sign. 

“I know,” I say, exhaling. The city slides into midnight. Back home, the church near our house will be pealing. I try to conjure the sound. If only he would say it, I think - the grasping, selfish truth. If only he'd cave. 

“I’ll support you no matter what,” he says, definitively. 

“I know." I linger a moment. I want to cry. I want him to cry. I want to hear him say that other people’s dreams don’t need to be my dreams. That my dreams don’t have to be my dreams forever, or at least not right now. That New York will always be there. That our Sunday morning lie-ins and our dozy coffee shop dates and our grimy kitchen and our lopsided picture frames and our knackered old car and all our books and songs and homemade meals are dreamstuff already. That it’s wonderful and important to desire things, but that if you have somehow found real happiness it’s almost more wonderful and important to sit and cherish it for a while. 

But he doesn’t say anything. He goes on missing me, silently, and I him. 

“I love you,” I say. “I should probably go to bed.”

“Okay sweetheart. I love you, too. Sleep well.” 

I put down the receiver and almost lift it again. Then I bundle out of my clothes, into my pyjamas, and go to brush my teeth. My toothbrush sits alone. Dispassionate now, I calculate the weeks I have ahead of me. Then the days. So many days. They’ll all make a great story sometime, I think, years from now. My mind fogs over for a small while, just imagining it.