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years ago. He’d told her that with pride. Kat thinks about sticking a cigarette into the side of her mouth, as in a black-and-white movie of the forties. She thinks about blowing the smoke into his face.
    Her insolence used to excite him, during their arguments. Then there would be a grab of her upper arms, a smouldering, violent kiss. He kisses her as if he thinks someone else is watching him, judging the image they make together. Kissing the latest thing, hard and shiny, purple-mouthed, crop-headed; kissing a girl, a woman, a girl, in a little crotch-hugger skirt and skin-tight leggings. He likes mirrors.
    But he isn’t excited now. And she can’t decoy him into bed; she isn’t ready for that yet, she isn’t healed. He has a drink, which he doesn’t finish, holds her hand as an afterthought, gives her a couple of avuncular pats on the off-white outsized alpaca shoulder, leaves too quickly.
    “Goodbye, Gerald,” she says. She pronounces the name with mockery. It’s a negation of him, an abolishment of him, like ripping a medal off his chest. It’s a warning.
    He’d been Gerald when they first met. It was she who transformed him, first to Gerry, then to Ger. (Rhymed with
flair
, rhymed with
dare
.) She made him get rid of those sucky pursed-mouth ties, told him what shoes to wear, got him to buy a loose-cut Italian suit, redid his hair. A lot of his current tastes – in food, in drink, in recreational drugs, in women’s entertainment underwear – were once hers. In his new phase, with his new, hard, stripped-down name ending on the sharpened note of r, he is her creation.
    As she is her own. During her childhood she was a romanticized Katherine, dressed by her misty-eyed, fussy mother in dresses that looked like ruffled pillowcases. By high school she’d shed the frills and emerged as a bouncy, round-faced Kathy, with gleaming freshly washed hair and enviable teeth, eager to please and no more interesting than a health-food ad. At university she was Kath, blunt and no-bullshit in her Take-Back-the-Night jeans and checked shirt and her bricklayer-style striped-denim peaked hat. When she ran away to England, she sliced herself down to Kat. It was economical, street-feline, and pointed as a nail. It was also unusual. In England you had to do something to get their attention, especially if you weren’t English. Safe in this incarnation, she Ramboed through the eighties.
    It was the name, she still thinks, that got her the interview and then the job. The job with an avant-garde magazine, the kind that was printed on matte stock in black and white, with overexposed close-ups of women with hair blowing over their eyes, one nostril prominent:
the razor’s edge
, it was called. Haircuts as art, some real art, film reviews, a little Stardust, wardrobes of ideas that were clothes and of clothes that were ideas – the metaphysical shoulder pad. She learned her trade well, hands-on. She learned what worked.
    She made her way up the ladder, from layout to design, then to the supervision of whole spreads, and then whole issues. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. She had become a creator; she created total looks. After a while she could walk down the street in Soho or stand in the lobby at openings and witness her handiwork incarnate, strolling around in outfits she’d put together, spouting her warmed-over pronouncements. It was like being God, only God had never got around to off-the-rack lines.
    By that time her face had lost its roundness, though the teeth of course remained: there was something to be said for North American dentistry. She’d shaved off most of her hair, worked on the drop-dead stare, perfected a certain turn of the neck that conveyed an aloof inner authority. What you had to make them believe was that you knew something they didn’t know yet. What you also had to make them believe was that they too could know this thing, this thing that would give them eminence and power and sexual allure, that