Amy Inspired (24 page)

He turned toward me slowly, careful not to upset the curling iron hot near his cheek, and informed me he wasn’t washing his until I washed mine. I said that was fine with me, because I didn’t believe him for a minute.

When I saw him at The Brewery the next morning taking orders and serving coffee, his hair still wound in loose but persistent curls, I laughed loud enough to turn heads. Everett was at the bar working his way through a stack of books and a bottomless mug. He looked from my hair to Eli’s.

“What is this?” he asked, exasperated. “Performance art?”

From the other end of the counter, Eli winked.

That night I washed my hair. I Googled
Pre-Raphaelite
.

The Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood comprised a group of nineteenth century English poets, painters, and critics who believed the art of their day was polluted by academic standards. There was mention of the compositions of Raphael, the purposeful mimicry of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. But I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand the essays I’d found. I took, like Eli, to studying the pictures.

I recognized
The Lady of Shalott
from a print framed and hanging in my aunt’s living room, but the other images were only familiar inasmuch as they alluded to classical stories and mythology. My favorite was
Proserpine
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the painting, a tall woman wearing pale green robes stands before a square shaft of blurred light. Her dark hair falls in heavy plaits down her back.There’s an almost masculine strength to her brow. Or maybe it’s her stern gaze, shaded with mourning, that lends her face the appearance of a man’s hardened features. She looks down and into the distance. In one hand she holds a pomegranate. Her other hand clasps the wrist of the first, as if she is torn between taking a second bite of the fruit or leaving it to drop to the ground. In her indecision, she reminded me of Eve, sorrowfully cradling the remnants of a forbidden fruit.

According to one source on classical mythology, Proserpine was the daughter of Zeus, king of the gods, and Ceres, goddess of agriculture. Struck by Cupid’s arrow, Hades fell in love with Proserpine and carried her to the underworld to be his wife. When Ceres learned that Zeus had conspired to marry his daughter to Hades, she stopped the growth of all crops. She searched for her daughter, leaving deserts as footprints. Finally, Zeus intervened. He and Hades reached an agreement: Proserpine was free to go providing she had not eaten during her captivity, for those who ate the food of the dead cannot return to the land of the living. Unfortunately for Proserpine, she had eaten the nectar of four pomegranate seeds. Abiding by the terms of the bargain, she was condemned to the underworld four months of every year, to serve as the wife of Hades. The painting portrayed a period of her captivity.

More interesting: According to historians, Rossetti was in love with his model, Jane Morris, who was already married to a fellow artist. It was left for debate, then, whether he’d painted Proserpine’s sorrow or his own.

As a character, the woman in the painting was the beautiful daughter of a powerful goddess; as a model, she was merely a pretty, married woman. In both, a marriage held her captive.

12

It snowed the night of the Happy Birthday Publication Party. We piled coats by the doorway until they formed a formidable barricade on the stairs. People arrived pink from the cold, then flushed red in the warmth. The air was heady from the singed oil of jalapeños and the breathing of wine. Zoë had outdone herself in the kitchen. We had spicy pot stickers and vegetable kabobs and pitas spread with fresh hummus. Everett brought music. A very pregnant Valerie brought cake.

Amber and Lynn, Jillian’s housemates, brought a pervading sense of Jillian’s presence.

“You remember Amber?” Eli asked. She had been to the apartment to see him several times so it was more than a little unnecessary that I set down the drink I was pouring to offer a handshake.

She accepted, quickly looking me up and down. Her appraisal made me self-conscious of the efforts I’d taken that night. I was wearing blush and had carefully chosen a tighter than usual sweater. I’d taken similar care in not touching my hair. It billowed on my shoulders in haphazard curls. Amber’s hair was neatly gelled in place, a shiny implacable helmet.

Eli took her coat—a formidable ankle-length red velvet—but she remained planted at my side.

“You know you don’t look at all thirty,” was the first thing she said to me. “You don’t have a light, do you?” was the second.

I gestured to the matches we kept in a jam jar beside the stove. She kept her cigarettes in a hot pink handbag. I didn’t have the courage to tell her not to light one in the apartment.

“So you guys are pretty good to let Eli stay here like this.” She cupped the palm of her hand around the flame, waiting for the cigarette to light.

“We don’t mind having him around.”

“I know, right.” She was watching him. “He’s adorable.”

Amber wore a black dress with cobweb-patterned lace sleeves. While she told me at length about Jillian and Eli and the minutiae of their seemingly complicated love life, I wondered if her arms didn’t itch terribly. In the seventh grade I’d been accosted every morning on the school bus by a Larissa Spregg, who invited herself to sit with me and then spent the fifteen-minute ride to school detailing how she’d spent the previous night debating whether or not to kill herself. She knew I was a Christian and confessed to me in the hopes I would entertain her by attempting to witness. I spent all of junior high and high school desperately uncomfortable around people who dressed Goth.

“Do you think they’re pretty serious?” I asked when she stopped talking long enough to light a second cigarette.

“Jillian doesn’t do relationships that aren’t serious. She’s one of those woman who was just born for serial monogamy.”

I turned the oxymoron
serial monogamy
over in my mind, adding it to the brief list of things I knew about Jillian.

“Unfortunately for her, she’s like a magnet for the desperate and the loser,” Amber said. “Eli’s the first guy she’s had in a while who treats her right. She’s been in relationships—serious ones—since she was in like the sixth grade, but she never realizes how much it weighs on her, the problems, the resolutions, the constant need to give and take. It’s existential for her; she gets like really large with it when it’s actually really—” she tapped the ash of her cigarette into a plastic cup left on the counter—“micro,” she finished with satisfaction.

Jillian deserved a good man. She had issues with men, mostly with her father, issues that had spawned new problems, bulimia for one. She and Eli both planned to move to New York when she returned.

My head ached. I found it difficult to focus on a thing Amber was saying. In the living room someone accidentally broke a glass on the hardwood floor. At the sound of the splintering glass, I gratefully begged off to help clean up the mess. I did my best to avoid Amber the rest of the night, but she kept appearing within arm’s reach, her conversations bleeding into mine. Or maybe it was the unchecked volume of her voice, the fact that I could hear her across the entire apartment that made her seem omnipresent.

Late in the evening a copy of Zoë’s story finally began to circulate. People sat on the couch in a tight-wedged row to read the magazine over each other’s shoulders. Zoë couldn’t hide her pleasure at the attention. I worried I would be as unable to hide my jealousy. I took myself out to sit on the roof, just to be on the safe side.

Down below, Valerie and Everett were sitting side by side on the old picnic table that sank a little more into the lawn each month. At least Everett had the decency to smoke outside. They were arguing good-naturedly about constellations. Valerie’s husband was too softspoken and passive for argument. She liked to disagree with Everett once in a while to get the fight out of her system.

“There’s no Orion’s Oxen,” Valerie said.

“It’s right there. By his belt.”

“I don’t see it.”

He leaned over until his head was aligned with hers and pointed with the burning butt of his cigarette. “Follow the left star there, over five degrees, and you’re at the tip of the horn of the giant water buffalo, otherwise known as Orion’s Oxen. Why would he have that belt if not to whip his beast of labor into submission?”

Valerie asked if he was on crack.

I sat on one of the lawn chairs scattered on the porch and leaned back to consider the stars. I closed my eyes, rubbed them vigorously until constellations of red blossomed on the backs of my eyelids. I should take an Advil for the headache. I felt irritable and tired. Maybe I just felt thirty.

“Forget something?” Eli handed me my coat.

“Thanks.”

“You all right?”

I sat up. “I’m fine. Why?”

“You’ve been quiet all night.”

“I just need some air. It’s so crowded and loud. I guess I got a little claustrophobic.”

Below us, Valerie was laughing. No one could make her laugh like Everett. For a moment I entertained the idea that Eli and I could be comfortable with each other like that. There wasn’t anything wrong with his having a friend outside of Jillian. I had to tell myself this quite often.

“Amber’s talkative,” I said.

“She’s something.” He pulled up a lawn chair, unfolded it, examined its torn and frayed underside, and set it aside in exchange for another. “I shouldn’t have left you alone with her. Sorry about that.” He sat down with a quiet, contented sigh. “Jillian’s girlfriends are very
vocal
.”

“She was worried about Jillian.”

“Amber doesn’t worry about anybody. She likes drama; it makes parties more interesting.”

“She doesn’t have to open her mouth to make things more interesting—she could just walk in a room.”

“I’m glad I caught you alone,” he said to change the subject. “I haven’t had a chance to wish you an official happy birthday yet.” He reached in his pocket and produced a small gift wrapped in baby blue paper, tied neatly with a delicate white bow.

“You’re not supposed to get me a gift.”

“It’s not much, but when I saw it I thought of you.”

Inside the blue wrapping paper was a jewelry box, and inside the jewelry box, on a bed of cotton, lay a pair of glass earrings shaped like flowers. The pit of each had been made of tiny, golden beads that together resembled a sunflower’s eye.

“Kevin’s ex makes jewelry,” he explained. “Do you like them?”

“They’re gorgeous. But they’re almost too pretty. I usually don’t wear things like this.”

“Put them on.”

The earrings were heavy. I tilted my head to model. The way he looked at my hair, eyes following a ring of curls from my brow to the nape of my neck to my chest, it was as though he’d reached across and touched me ever so gently.

I hurried to take the earrings off.

“Thank you,” I said. “These are the nicest thing anyone’s given me in a long time.”

The screen door flew open. Amber shouted, “Eli
Morretti
, what are you
doing
! We are bored to death in here without you!”

“So come out here.” He folded the blue wrapping paper and hid it in his pocket.

Amber came and sat right in Eli’s lap. He allowed it, but kept his hands on the armrests of his chair.

“Lynn and I have been having a little discussion,” Amber said. “And we’ve come to the conclusion that in light of your work and ambitions and the very length of your body, you are in need of a larger bedroom.”

“Or a bedroom at all,” Lynn volunteered.

“So … maybe—if it’s okay with Amy—you could come live with us!”

“And make us cappuccinos!”

“And T-shirts!”

“But there’s one condition.” Amber raised her finger and waited for Eli to focus his eyes on it. “Under no circumstances are you to fall in love with us.”

I excused myself. In the kitchen I opened the freezer door and stuck my face inside. The heat sloughed off my cheeks in waves.

Zoë’s manager from The Brewery was leaning against the counter, reading Zoë’s
UrbanStyle
article. She slapped the magazine against my hip playfully.

“It was good of you to let her write about this,” she said.