Another escalator. ‘You should bring your roommate, it’ll be fun.’
‘Sounds good,’ I replied. Another escalator. ‘I don’t think she’s doing anything.’ I had no idea what she was doing, but as far as I was concerned, she was now coming to Alex’s gig. ‘Are we actually going to get off the escalators or is this some sort of new performance art I should know about?’ I asked as we finally stepped onto solid ground.
‘There’s something I really want to show you.’ Alex walked around the corner, to a painting hanging just inside the corridor, more or less on its own. ‘This is my favourite picture in the entire world,’ he said, standing a respectful distance back from the painting.
It was small, showing the back of a girl staring at a wooden farmhouse in the near distance. Even from behind, I felt as though I could see she was crying, unable to escape her situation. Unable to tear herself away, even though she wanted to. Needed to. There was nowhere else for her to go.
‘Christina’s World, Andrew Wyeth,’ I read out quietly. The fifth floor was almost empty and the silence was eerie. I clutched at Alex’s hand, still gazing at the painting. I wanted look away but I couldn’t. Before I knew what was happening, tears were streaming down my cheeks.
‘It’s …’ I started, not knowing where to go. I dropped Alex’s hand and took a half-step closer. ‘It’s just …’
‘I know,’ he said, putting his hands on my shoulders. ‘When I feel trapped or confused or I just forget myself I come here and remind myself. I’m sorry, I thought you would like it. The woman in the painting is paralysed and crawling back to the house but I don’t know. Always seems to me like she’s wanting to get away from the house rather than back to it.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t know what she wants,’ I said, staring through the girl into the farmhouse. ‘Running to, running from, same difference.’
We stood looking at the picture together for what felt like for ever. Eventually, and only when I’d committed every inch of it to memory, we walked away in silence and wandered around the rest of the gallery.
It took me a while to loosen up, but Alex was the perfect art buddy. He knew so much about the place I was sure he must actually live in the basement and the museum happily swallowed up our afternoon without even a whisper of a ticking clock. We saw everything there was to see, Monet, Pollock, Picasso, Gaugin, Van Gogh. It was like the whole New York experience encapsulated in one space. By the time I realized how long we’d been aimlessly ambling, I was dying of thirst.
‘Want to get a drink?’ I asked, pulling Alex out of his reverie in front of a collection of design classics.
‘Shit, what time is it?’ he asked, himself rather than me. ‘We have to go or we’re going to miss it!’
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, allowing myself to be dragged mercilessly down Sixth Avenue, trying not to run into meandering tourists or the weaving and dodging commuters. ‘Seriously, I really need a drink, just, can we just stop for a second?’
‘Let’s get in a cab,’ he said, not even listening to me. ‘It’ll probably be quicker in a cab.’ He flagged a taxi down and threw me in as it pulled to a stop.
But the traffic was moving almost as slowly as the people on the street and as we inched along, Alex was getting more and more frustrated.
West 50th, 49th, 48th …
‘Alex,’ I said, not too politely. ‘Will you tell me where we’re bloody going?’
‘Bloody? How cute is that?’ he said, smiling for the first time since we left the museum. ‘Sorry, I wanted to surprise you, but we have to get there before sunset.’
‘It’s only seven-thirty,’ I said, looking at my watch. And it was still broad daylight outside. ‘Why are we rushing?’
‘Because we have to queue,’ he said, sticking his head out of the window to check the traffic.
45th, 44th, 43rd …
‘Queue for what?’ I was trying not to be incredibly irritating but I had a mouth like Ghandi’s flip-flop. ‘Please can we just stop and get a drink?’
‘It’s a surprise,’ he said, squeezing my leg and still looking out of the window as though he could will the traffic to move more quickly. ‘Trust me, I’ll get you a dozen drinks once we’re there.’
37th, 36th, 35th, 34th …
‘Thanks, man,’ Alex tossed some cash at the driver. ‘Just let us out here.’ He pulled me out onto the street and checked his watch. ‘Perfect. Now, you wanted a drink?’
I nodded. This wasn’t quite the princess treatment I’d been getting used to from Tyler. Alex pointed at a cart on the corner, selling pretzels and, thank God, freezing cold cans of Pepsi. I wrestled a dollar out of my jeans pocket, too busy trying to get my sugary caffeine fix to realize where we were.
‘You want to go inside now?’ Alex asked, a bemused look on his face while he watched me neck the entire can in less than a minute. I had to admit, it was more to prove a point than anything else, drinking fizzy stuff that quickly just makes me feel sick. I didn’t care how cute he looked, standing grinning at me with his arms folded, while I guzzled my Pepsi.
‘Inside where?’ I asked, draining the can and giving a dramatic, satisfied sigh.
Alex shook his head and pointed upwards. ‘Honestly, you try and do something romantic …’
I craned my neck up and stared into the skyline. We were at the foot of the tallest building I’d ever seen.
It was the Empire State Building.
I grabbed onto Alex’s arm to stop myself falling over. ‘We’re going up there?’ I asked, breaking into a huge grin.
‘We are,’ he nodded. ‘If you still want to. I know you said you wanted to, but I didn’t know if you’d managed it yet.’
‘No,’ I shook my head and steadied myself for another look up into the cloudless sky, ‘I still haven’t been. And it’s all I’ve wanted to do.’
‘You said.’ He smiled and let me stand staring, even though we were clearly in everyone’s way. I didn’t care, it was amazing. I’d only been in New York for a week and a half and I’d already become oblivious to anything that wasn’t directly in front of me. The city was the opposite of an iceberg. What you saw on the surface, what was right in your face every day, that was only a third of it, the rest was up in the sky.
‘And we have to be up there for sunset,’ Alex said, finally pulling me away from the street corner and towards the entrance.
We queued slowly, moving up and down the lines with hundreds of tourists. It was weird, I really didn’t consider myself to be one. Not while I could feel Alex squeezing my hand every time I went silent to stare out of the windows. And queuing is hardly a chore when you have a super hot man kissing your neck and telling you how gorgeous you are for half an hour. By the time we got up to the top, I was pretty much desperate for some air and had forgotten what I was there for entirely. Alex pulled me straight through the racks and racks of wonderfully crappy souvenirs in the gift shop and out to the south side of the observation deck.
I stopped in the doorway for a second, readying myself to take it all in. And it was genuinely, heart-stoppingly beautiful.
Once I had my breath back and had been pushed and pummelled by half a dozen high-school kids, I spotted Alex. He had squeezed himself into a prime position to watch the sunset spread itself across the skyline, and without words, he pulled me in and moved behind me to rest his chin on my shoulder. I shivered and snuggled backwards into him. I wasn’t dressed for the altitude, but before I could so much as break into a goose bump, Alex was slipping off his beat-up leather jacket and slipping it on my shoulders, wrapping his