Geography (18 page)

‘I think this is where I say fuck
you
.'

‘You guys,' Anna was getting used to it. ‘Though Finn did tell me you changed teams once. Even Americans understand that that is bad behaviour.'

‘Do I know you well enough to say, “Fuck you too”?'

‘I'd feel honoured,' Anna smirked. ‘Like part of the family.'

Finn traipsed behind us while Anna took me to her favourite bookshop, which was full of beautiful art books, and then showed me a vintage clothing store that had been there for twenty years. We'd planned to go for a coffee, but it was so cold we went to a bar and had a whisky instead.

By the time we walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge it was even colder. Our faces hurt where the breeze hit them. I had never seen the city so clear. Manhattan sparkled.

‘Could that be clear ice on the buildings that's making them catch the light like that?' I asked. ‘Does it get that cold?'

‘It does,' Finn said, ‘but I've never seen the city looking like this.'

‘It's like a city of ice crystals,' Anna says. ‘The snow cave out of
The Faerie Queene
.'

The next morning I woke to blizzard warnings on the television. I was in the kitchen making a coffee when Finn wandered in, half asleep. ‘You'd better get going early,' he said. ‘If you don't get on a plane this morning you'll be snowed in for days and miss LA and all your connecting flights to Australia.' I threw my stuff in my bag. ‘I love you,' I said to Finn as I hugged him goodbye.

The snow began to fall as my cab pulled up; by the time I got to the airport there was pandemonium, people everywhere jostling in queues trying to get onto earlier flights. I managed to get one and joined the line at the gate lounge. But as I looked out through the window, out on the snow swirling so thick everything was turning to white, I knew I had missed my chance. Just before we were due to board, the airport called everything to a halt. Neither I nor anyone else was getting any plane anywhere.

‘It is not possible to board flight QF 001, flight JAP 900 and flight BA7,' the announcement went. ‘It is not possible to return to Manhattan because of the dangerous weather conditions. Please be advised that all airport hotels are full. Due to the nature of the emergency and the numbers of people involved, there will be no food vouchers.'

It was three p.m. and already an eerie dark had fallen. Backpackers started putting tents up in the waiting areas, preparing to sleep it out.

‘It'll be okay tomorrow,' said the woman in front of a queue I was standing in for some reason I can no longer recall.

I knew she was wrong, this was going to last for days. The thought of spending a week on an airport floor made me feel like a caged animal, the thought of being away from Michael for any longer seemed even worse.

‘What will I do?' I called him in a panic.

‘There is nothing you can do,' he said.

‘I won't see you tonight,' I said. ‘I may not get the chance to see you again.' Trying not to cry.

‘There's no need to be melodramatic,' he sounded remote. ‘Things will sort themselves out.'

After I had hung up, I went outside into the snow waving a handful of cash at the stranded cabs. The lead driver beckoned me over with a jerk of the head. He didn't much like the idea of being snowed in away from home either, he told me as we gingerly pulled out of the taxi rank—his wife was due to give birth to their first child any day now. And that was all I learned about Robert, apart from his name. Navigating the worsening snowstorm took all his concentration. The windscreen wipers moved slowly, dumping the snowflakes from one side of the windscreen to the other, opening a slowly blinking eyelid through which the road could intermittently and indistinctly be seen. The traffic stretched for miles.

I thought of footage I'd seen of whiteouts in Europe where people had been trapped in their cars for days and frozen to death. I was furious that I'd put myself in such a dangerous situation because of my desperation to get back to Los Angeles—and furiously embarrassed that I'd rung Michael from the airport because I wasn't going to make it back to him. As I sat and fumed, the traffic thinned. My fellow commuters were either home with a stiff drink by now, or they had thrown in the towel and abandoned their cars by the road.

It was five hours before I got back to Manhattan. It was empty, as if a bomb had dropped leaving all the buildings intact. The taxi slid down Third Avenue, literally the only car on the road. With nothing to grip, it was gliding in wild arcs, first to the left, then to the right down the middle of the road. Close to Grand Central Station, Robert gave up.

‘Sorry, ma'am, I'm going to have to leave you here,' he said and I found myself standing on the corner of 3rd and 46th, surrounded by suitcases in a bank of snow with flakes falling around me. I started to cry but it was too cold for immobility. I quickly gathered myself together and dragged my bags to a phone box to ring Finn, who told me the trains were still running. He met me at the station in SoHo and helped me drag my bags through the snow to his apartment. I started to cry all over again when we got there and Anna hugged me and put a scotch in my hand.

‘I'm sorry you are missing out on LA,' Finn said. ‘But it's fun you are staying. Nothing awful about having to spend a few more days with us.'

‘It's not that,' I said, ‘it's Michael. I only had a couple more days with him and now I mightn't have that.'

‘Change your flight back home. Get to Sydney a few days late. It'll be okay.'

‘I think I'm just getting spooked,' I said. ‘It used to be there was fire when we saw each other. Now it's snow. It's not a good sign. And, to offer a more solid fact, he sounded totally unmoved on the phone when I rang him from the airport.'

Finn rolled his eyes. ‘Think laterally: maybe this is a good sign. Perhaps this huge dump of snow represents the depth of your passion for each other. Perhaps it is about smothering the mundane and the day to day with a soft, delicate—yet potentially dangerous—passion.'

‘Deep,' I paused. ‘Now let's discuss another urgent matter. As we were driving here for five
fucking
hours I was pondering an ethical issue. Have you ever been at a dinner party where you and your friends have discussed whether or not you would eat each other if you were starving to death?'

‘Often,' said Finn.

‘Never,' said Anna, simultaneously.

‘Well I started to ponder this very question earlier tonight when I thought me and Robert were going to be trapped in the snow.'

‘So, could you have eaten him?'

‘That's the point. I don't think I could've,' I said. ‘He was a nice guy. And very skinny.'

‘Wimp,' Finn said. ‘He would've eaten you in a flash. You've gotta toughen up; this is New York.'

After another scotch I went to bed and slept heavily for a few hours. I woke to find Finn and Anna hanging out the window gazing at the snow that had built up through the night. All the cars were covered and the doorways snowed in. The snow glowed under the street lamps, intensifying what little light there was so it was like a strange twilight, even though sunrise was more than an hour away. More remarkable than the glow was the silence that had enveloped this largest, this noisiest of cities. The snow on the roads had stopped the traffic and muffled all other sounds as well. There was only the occasional echo of voices as the sun rose and people fought their way out into the snow to dig out their cars or bikes and the kids who lived in Finn's apartment block all raced outside to make snowmen.

That morning Manhattan took on a carnival atmosphere. People got out toboggans and snowboards. They went skiing down Fifth Avenue. There was no logic to which shops opened and which didn't. The Swedish lipstick shop opposite Finn's flat was open, but you couldn't get groceries or papers. I went with the flow, and bought several lipsticks—black, dark brown, bright red. When the snowfall had eased enough, we walked around the streets, arms linked.

‘When snowflakes bond together they can be as strong as concrete,' Finn told us. ‘No two are the same.'

‘I know that,' I said, but as we walked along I found myself picking up a handful of snow to examine it, as if I had a chance of seeing an individual flake.

‘So admit it,' Finn said. ‘You do think I say interesting things.' And, as I began to mould the snow into a snowball to throw at him, I confessed that once in a while I did.

We walked home, through the gentle flurry of snow that was still falling, and I put out my tongue, feeling the prick of cold as the flakes landed. ‘If snowflakes are so strong,' I said to Finn, ‘how come I can melt them away with my tongue? How come I can disappear them with the heat of my palm?'

‘Ah,' Finn said, ‘the way to kill a snowflake is to isolate it. Separate it from the pack and pick it off,' before pausing to build up to the bad punchline I could see from a mile off. ‘Or perhaps it is just that you have a very strong tongue.'

We hung around the house with the heating up high, reading and ignoring each other. We watched the weather channel. The blizzard had been dubbed The Blizzard of '96 and every snowflake was being reported on a minute-by-minute basis.

‘I love it,' I said. ‘You would think it was World War Two.'

‘This is what you get when there are dozens of cable channels, with one dedicated to weather. This is a content opportunity like they haven't had in years,' said Finn.

Regular bulletins would report the death count. ‘I'm not sure,' said Finn, ‘that guys in their fifties having heart attacks while trying to clear snow drifts can count as death by blizzard. I'd have thought it should be classified as death by unfitness.'

‘And I notice,' continued Anna, ‘that there's no talk of the homeless people that must have died under snow or been knifed in overcrowded shelters.'

‘Already finishing each other's sentences,' I say. ‘That's a good sign.'

Two nights after the blizzard we watched ‘Letterman', which, for the first time in its history had almost no studio audience. People watching the show on television saw a window of opportunity and snowboarded through the streets at ten at night, figuring this was their chance to get into the audience. Most of the show was taken up with shots of people running into studio seats and whooping.

Despite the wonderful strangeness of these days I spent far too long in phone queues trying to get a plane ticket out, as if a day or so made a difference. I rang Michael each day and each day he sounded more distant.

‘I'm not sure,' I said, ‘if I've a ticket out for tomorrow or the day after.'

‘Don't stress,' Michael said. ‘You'll sort it, I'm sure. But if it takes until the weekend I mightn't be around—I'm thinking of going away with friends.'

‘Right,' I said, feeling defeated, not sure what I should expect. Wanting to scream: but aren't you missing me? Do you care? ‘Well, I'll let you know.'

‘Fine,' he said. ‘Ben's over, I'd better go.'

‘You two sound very formal with each other,' commented Anna. ‘You sounded more relaxed when you talked to your boss and told her you'd miss a couple of days' work.'

‘Michael blows hot and cold,' I said. ‘Says he's busy or has a friend around so he can't chat. It makes me nervous.'

‘I don't have much experience with men,' said Finn. ‘In fact I have none. But if he cared about you he wouldn't be doing that. You'd be able to be yourself.'

Finn was right. I realised Michael and I had not been talking as directly to each other in person or on the phone as we had in our emails when we were thousands of miles apart. I found myself on the phone to Marion, pretending to tell her about the blizzard and asking what Max was up to, pretending to be interested in the irony that Melbourne was sweltering with temperatures over thirty degrees while we were sinking deep into snow. But really I was just trying to make sense of things with Michael.

‘It's confusing. He was very gentle with me when I first arrived, but something's not quite right. We had lots of great sex…'

‘I wondered how long it would be before you got stuck on this,' Marion interrupted.

‘Let me finish,' I interrupted back. ‘What I was going to say is that after we have the sex it is like my brain stops working. It sounds like I'm making a joke, I know, but it's actually quite extreme. I become really passive, like I'm stoned. I feel unable to be direct. When I was staying there he went out quite a few times and didn't ask me to come along. Every day he said he had to work on some paper or other and was at his desk for hours—even on Christmas night. I felt as if I was in the way—but it's him who asked me here.'

‘Sweetheart,' Marion said, ‘this stuff is not new. I can't believe we're having this conversation again. He's not good for you. I suspect he's not good for himself. Will you please look after yourself? Please?'

‘I will,' I placated. ‘I promise.' But after I hung up the phone I realised I didn't really know what this meant: to look after myself. I did not know how to stop the sense that Michael was inside me. Under my skin.

Four days after the blizzard I arrived back in Los Angeles. It was late at night and I caught a cab. I was buoyed up by the drama of the blizzard and the uncomplicated, loving company of my brother and Anna. Michael seemed pleased to see me and smiled broadly as he opened the door. He took my bag then started kissing me hard and quick all over my face, running his hands down my tight leather jacket and nudging me onto the couch. We barely said a word, just smiled and murmured at each other as we removed our clothes.

‘What flight are you leaving on?' was the first coherent thing he asked, when we lay in bed the next morning.

‘My flight out is in three days,' I said, ‘like it would have been if I came back on January 2.'