The Shining Girls

Harper ^{1 DECEMBER 1951}

They swan into the lobby of the Congress past the non-functioning escalators that have been covered like corpses under burial cloth. No-one spares the pair a second glance. The hotel is renovating. The soldiers must have taken their toll on the rooms during the war, Harper imagines. All that drinking and smoking and whoring.

The rotary dial above the gold elevator doors adorned with ivy wreaths and griffons lights up the floor numbers, counting down to them. The minutes she has left. Harper clasps his hands in front of his pants to hide his excitement. This is the most brazen he has been. He fingers the white plastic disk of Julia Madrigal’s pill packet in his pocket. There is no undoing it. Everything is as it is meant to be. As he determines it.

They step out onto the third floor and he pushes the heavy double doors open wide enough to guide her through into the Gold Room. He fumbles for the lights. It hasn’t changed so much as a fitting since he drank spiked lemonade here with Etta a week ago, twenty years ago, although the tables and chairs are stacked now and the heavy curtains over the balconies are drawn shut. Renaissance arches with naked figures amid carved greenery stretch out to each other across the room. Classically romantic, Harper supposes, although to him they look tortured, reaching for a comfort denied them, lost without the music.

‘What is this?’ Alice gasps.

‘The banquet room. One of them.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she says. ‘But there’s no one else here.’

‘I don’t want to share you,’ he says, swinging her round, to defray that note of doubt in her voice. He starts humming, a song he has heard that hasn’t been written yet, and moves her across the floor. Not quite a waltz, but something like it. He learned the steps the way he does everything, watching other people and constructing a semblance.

‘Did you bring me here to seduce me?’ Alice asks.

‘Would you let me?’

‘No!’ she says, but she means yes, he can tell. She looks away, flustered, and glances up at him sidelong, her cheeks still pink from the cold. It makes him angry and confused because maybe he does want to seduce her. Etta has left him feeling wretched.

‘I have something for you,’ he says, fighting through it. He takes the velvet jewelry box out of his pocket and pops it to reveal the charm bracelet. It glitters sullenly in the light. Hers all along. It was a mistake to give it to Etta.

‘Thank you,’ she says, a little shocked.

‘Put it on.’ He is too aggressive. He grabs her wrist, too tightly, he sees, by the way she winces. Something in her shifts. She is aware, now, of being in a deserted ballroom with a stranger from a decade ago.

‘I don’t think I want to,’ she says carefully. ‘It’s been lovely to see you again… Oh God, I don’t even know your name.’

‘It’s Harper. Harper Curtis. But never mind that. I have something to show you, Alice.’

‘No, really–’ She twists her hand out of his grip and when he lunges for her, she pulls one of the chair stacks down in front of him. While he fights his way through the tangle of furniture, she runs for the side door.

Harper goes after her, shoving the door open to reveal a dim maintenance corridor with wiring dangling from a scaffolding of pipes above. He unfolds the knife.

‘Alice,’ he calls, his voice full of friendly cheer. ‘Come back, darling.’ He walks slowly, unthreateningly down the corridor, his hand tucked slightly behind his back. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

He rounds the corner. There is a quilted mattress with a brownish stain propped up against the wall. If she was clever, she might have hidden behind it, waited for him to go past.

‘I was too eager, I know. It’s been so long. Waiting for you.’

Further along, there is a storage room, the door ajar to show more stacks of chairs. She could be hiding in there, crouched between them, peeking out between the legs.

‘You remember what I said to you? You shine, sweetheart. I could see you in the dark.’ In a way, that’s true. It is the light that gives her away – and the shadow it casts on the stairs leading up to the roof.

‘If you didn’t like the bracelet, you only had to say.’ He feints right as if he is going to walk away, deeper into the bowels of the building, and then darts up the rickety wooden stairs, three at a time, to where she’s hiding.

The neon light is naked and unflattering. It makes her look even more afraid. He lashes out with the knife, but only catches the arm of her jacket, drawing a long graze along the sleeve as she shouts in terror, and flees further up, past the clanking boiler with its copper taps and the soot stains on the walls.

She yanks at the heavy door to the roof and bursts out into blinding daylight. He is a second behind her, but she slams the door on his left hand. He shrieks and snatches it away. ‘Bitch!’

He emerges quinting into the sunlight, his injured hand tucked under his armpit. Only bruised, not broken, but it hurts like a bitch. He no longer bothers to try to hide the knife.

She is standing by the little lip of the wall at the edge between a row of round air vents, their fans spinning lazily. She has her fist clenched around a piece of brick.

‘Come here.’ He motions with the knife.

‘No.’

‘You want to make this hard, sweetheart? You want to die badly?’

She lobs the brick at him. It goes skeltering across the pitched tar, missing him by a mile.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘All right. I won’t hurt you. It’s a game. Come here. Please.’ He holds out his hands and gives her his most guileless smile. ‘I love you.’

She smiles back, brilliantly. ‘I wish that was true,’ Alice says. And then she turns and leaps off the edge of the roof. He is too shocked to even yell after her.

Pigeons burst into the air from somewhere below. And then it’s just him and the empty rooftop. A woman screams from the street. Over and over, like a siren.

This is not the way it is supposed to be. He takes the contraceptive packet out of his pocket and stares at it, as if the circle of colored pills marked by the days of the week might be an omen he could read. But it tells him nothing. It is only a dull, dead object.

He squeezes it so tightly that the plastic cracks. Then he throws it after her in disgust. It drifts down, twirling like a child’s toy.