Arm Candy (28 page)

After an hour of requests, a star turn by Maggie the waitress, and a full dividing of the whole bar into Dannys and Sandys for a spirited rendition of “Tell Me More,” Chase was ready to take Eden home.

“You ready?” he whispered.

“I’m never ready. I could stay all night.” She then burst into tune.
“I could have daaaaanced all night!”

“A patron by the bar has offered Miss Eden a round,” Maggie said. “What can I getcha?”

“Tell him thank you,” Eden declined, pointing at Chase. “But he has work in the morning.”

“Will do, see you both soon, I hope!” Maggie hugged Eden good-bye, and Chase looked back at the warm Christmas lights and pumping piano keys. He never would have been inside this jewel box of joy if it weren’t for Eden.

“Thank you” he said, kissing her hand. “I think that is the happiest place I have ever been.”

“More than my bed?”

“Second happiest.”

The night was surprisingly mild, and there was not a cab in sight, so they started strolling.

“Maybe if we start walking east we’ll find one,” Eden suggested.

The minutes flew by as the duo held hands and navigated the bustling crowds moving through the night on their way to clubs or cafés, performances or parties. Before they knew it, they were by the Bowery and had been walking for almost an hour.

“So much for going home and crashing,” Chase said, squeezing Eden. “I don’t even care about work anymore. I feel like nothing else matters but spending time together.”

Eden smiled in response. She then looked across the street and stared. Chase followed the upward trajectory of her mint eyes.

“What a cool building,” Chase marveled, looking up at the perfect symmetry of the redbrick structure and large-scale grids of clean glass windows.

“It’s the Bowery Hotel,” Eden replied with an imperceptible beat of sadness.

“It’s beautiful. Have you been inside?”

“No, I haven’t. I was invited to go there for a party a few years back when it opened but I couldn’t bring myself to go. I guess it reminded me the neighborhood had officially changed when it opened its doors.”

“Yeah but that’s a good thing!” Chase said. “You said it was heroin junkies around here when you were younger.”

“That’s true,” Eden dazedly replied, spaced out as she looked at the hotel’s clean stylish façade and packed restaurant Gemma on the corner. Young people buzzed in and out, and through the big windows they could see a huge candelabra with Phantom of the Opera-style dripping candles with a hundred flickering wicks. “I know it’s better now. Of course it’s an improvement. I just . . . sometimes get nostalgic, that’s all. I know it’s silly.”

What Eden didn’t want to mention to Chase was that once upon a time, on the very site of the gleaming, chic hotel, with its crowded restaurant of fashionistas eating shaved raw artichoke salad with truffle vinaigrette, there stood a shitty little dive where locals and students, young and hopeful—poor on cash but rich with ambition and ideals—could go to get the best burger in town. Where Eden would scrounge together coins from the bottom of her bag to afford hot oatmeal with raisins, and how nothing in her entire life, before or after, ever tasted so delicious.

—Anonymous

 

 

 

W
ith a creased, unfurled map, empty soda cans, bags of chips, and a sleeping Wes passed out across the backseat, Penelope crossed over the border to Tennessee. A nervous surge moved through her; seeing the Welcome sign made her realize what she was doing. And unlike hanging up a rotary phone after hearing a hello, this time, after two thousand miles, there was no turning back.

She woke up a bleary-eyed Wes at a greasy spoon where they would stop for lunch. Stretching their legs outside the car for the first time in hours, they staggered
Night of the Living Dead
-style into the restaurant. In their pleather booth, nervously fidgeting with the sugar packets, Penelope smoothed her hair and straightened her rumpled blouse as Wes drew on the paper menu with broken crayons from the bottom of his mother’s handbag.

“Mommy, what are we doing here?” Wes asked, breaking into a yawn.

“Well, honey,” Penelope started slowly. “We’re here to try to find an old friend of mine. His name is Wesley.”

“Does he live near the restaurant?” he asked.

“I think so,” said Penelope as the waitress placed eggs and pancakes on the table. Wes began to devour them as she stared into her coffee cup.

“I’ll take some more when you get a chance,” she said, lifting her mug.

Caffeinated to the point of quivers, Penelope pulled into a small driveway marked with the address Jonathan had given her. She put the car in park, then sprung Wes from his backseat perch and walked slowly toward the white clapboard house. It had a lovely slate-blue-painted front door and a nice front yard.

Please God, don’t let a wife open the door,
she thought.

She knocked. No answer. She knocked again. Nada.

Hmm . . . it was late afternoon and a gray truck was in the driveway. She took Wes’s hand and went around the back to the yard area.

Oh no
.

A swing set. An inflatable kiddie pool.

This was a huge mistake.

“Hey, a playground!” Wes said, running to the white picket gate.

“No, no, honey, we—we have to go right away. Mommy is sorry. We’re going home.”

“Why?” he whined, frustrated and confused.

“We have to go, sweetheart, let’s get back in the car.”

Penelope took her son’s hand and walked quickly back around the side of the house toward the car. She opened the door to the backseat, sweat pouring from her small feminine brow. She thought she might cry.

She buckled in Wes, then went around to the driver’s side and opened her door.

“Miss?” she heard a warm voice ask. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”

She stopped still, then slowly turned around.

That 180-degree pivot was the longest second of her entire life. But when she put her feet together and faced Wesley, her reddening eyes could hide her emotions no longer. His handsome face was the same, and as they locked eyes, his fingers opened, and the two grocery bags in his hands fell to the dirt below.

—Rudyard Kipling

 

 

 

W
ith thoughts of that little diner on the Bowery flooding her mind, Eden brought Chase back to her apartment, where, awash with memories, she kissed Chase more deeply than ever. He was moved by her unbridled affection and held her tightly as she undressed him and they collapsed on her bed.

He made her want to be outlandish, to be young again, to be unburdened by what anyone (including herself) thought. Maybe she could run away with him to some island and never return. Chase grabbed her back as he moved inside her and Eden very suddenly felt a chill down her spine as her breaths grew staccato, as she slowly let her lids fall shut. And against the dark screen of her closed eyes, hazy like a Super 8 film in her mind, recollections played in quick-flashing cinematic frames.

Sexual fantasies had a bizarre habit of making unannounced appearances, and sure enough, in the throes of passion with Chase, her mental movie projector made a jump cut back to Wes. He was so fresh in her mind from a week of thinking about him; her long afternoon with Penelope had popped a cork and now all the bubbly bliss was flooding back. In recent days, Eden realized, she had been thinking about him more and more. The fact that he would be arriving in New York after so long made her sick and excited. What if she ran into him? What would they do if they saw each other? What could she possibly say?

Though she was intertwined with Chase, in her closed eyes, Eden was back at the little diner on the Bowery. She imagined she was not in a lavish designer bed and Pratesi sheets but on the cheap mattress she and Wes shared on the floor, unmade as their sheets swirled soapy wet in the basement washing machine they never seemed to have the quarters for.

As Chase breathed harder and harder, Eden kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to exit her reverie. She couldn’t help but envision that it was Wes pushing deep inside her. Chase said her name and she flushed the sound out of her head, as she wanted nothing to bring her back to the present; she found herself enjoying what her mind’s eye was offering her so much more. She had a flash of Wes diving onto the mattress as she laughed, an image of him holding a long wooden spoon for her to taste the tomato sauce he had made, how he pressed her against the window, kissing her, running his hands over her. The details flooded back as if the film frames were digitally enhanced in the replay; she saw the large vein in Wes’s wrist as he drew sketches, his fishbone boxers and worn-in white T-shirt. She pictured him taking off his gold glasses before he made love to her on his drafting table. Eden was growing more turned on by the fantasy of Wes in her arms. Each push inside her thrust her back deeper into her past until she could barely breathe—she was holding all the air in her lungs as if 1990 were trapped inside her and she didn’t want to exhale and let it all flow away from her body. She relived Wes’s quickening heartbeat and breaths, imagining he was kissing her neck, and she let out a deep sigh of delirious ecstasy. And when she opened her eyes to see Chase’s flushed, happy young face, she couldn’t believe she had deceived herself so vividly.

Chase, on the other hand, could not have been more in the moment. After exhaling and collapsing into her, he lay holding her, breathing deeply, inhaling the unique fragrance of her apartment. As Eden silently drew little swirls on his back with her finger, Chase finally felt like he had the life people relished. This woman had literally walked into his life and had altered it forever.

“I think this might be my favorite place on earth,” he said.

He looked around the room. This place was Eden, his own version of paradise. Vinyl records played almost constantly. Every surface of her apartment was covered in vases—fresh cut flowers, overflowing plants, everything was in bloom. Eden had imported her very namesake into every place she had ever lived. No matter how cold or rainy it was outside, no matter how bare the branches of the trees were by her window, there was always life within her four walls.

“Thanks, but there’s a whole wide world out there, Chase,” she said. “I promise you, my apartment is not cloud nine.”

“It is to me,” he replied.

The next morning Chase walked down the street, toward Park Avenue, beaming with exhilarated glee. He pondered how strange life was, how random it was that one person could cycle into your orbit and change the way you walk down the street, how you carry yourself, how you think, how you spend free time, how you value the little things. As he walked he was in his own world, in a dream state, in his very own Eden. Chase didn’t even notice that, at the stoplight at Fifty-eighth Street, his father’s town car had pulled up alongside him.

Grant, who was sitting behind Luigi as always on his morning ride to work, suddenly spied his son outside the window. He put down his
Wall Street Journal
and reached for the button to lower his window. But just as he was about to do so, through the thick tinted glass, Grant saw Chase smile to himself. His hand paused above the button as he watched his son. Chase was in his own world, grinning ear to ear. And Grant echoed that smile to himself: His son was happy. Finally.

—Douglas MacArthur

 

 

 

“P
enelope?” Wesley asked slowly, syllable for syllable, as if saying her name in a foreign language. His blue eyes flashed as he walked slowly toward her, vegetables scattered on the ground behind him. “Is it you?”

“It’s me,” Penelope replied, blinking back Fiji-style waterfalls. “I-I-I’m sorry to just show up like this—I was just, um, going to go—”

“I’ve been wondering about you,” he said, stunned. “All the time.”

“Me, too, for four years,” said Penelope.

“Four and a half,” said Wesley, shattering any ice with a huge, all-engulfing hug. As she felt his big arms around her—the only ones that had touched her since Wes’s conception—she crumbled. She thought she would choke on her sobs and tried with all her might to hold them back.

“Sorry,” she said, pulling back, wiping a tear. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why? Do you know I’ve been trying to find you? I’ve thought about you so much, I even went to San Francisco.”

“I saw the swing set—are your kids—”

“No, no kids. Those are for my nieces. I have three, just down the street.”