Blue Rose In Chelsea (13 page)

     I’m welcome to join them for meals, as part of my salary, but when five o’clock hits I can’t wait to be out of there, and I always beg off with some excuse, like I have a dance class to attend.  Felix is sweet, and remarkably self-contained; he can amuse himself for hours with his toys and imaginings, in the same way Mom often describes me as having been as a child.  He is surprisingly affectionate—given the detachment of his parents—climbing into my lap to be read to, or attempting to share his favorite treats with me.

     Dylan wants to inspect my new digs.  It’s nothing to write home about, a small bedroom with a hallway where I keep a tiny refrigerator, hot plate, and toaster oven on the surface of an old copying machine, and an even smaller bathroom, and another room that serves as an office for my employer.

     “Why is this guy’s office in your apartment?”

     “He said he’s going to move his stuff out.  He says he only uses it while the nanny is working, never when I’d be in here.”

     Dylan is clearly the son of a cop, his suspicions immediately aroused.  I placate him by agreeing to hold Randolph to his promise to move his things out before the month’s end.  Dylan asks that I not wander about the city, alone, too late at night.

     “Where would I go?  I don’t have any friends in the city but Sinclair, who lives right next door to me.”

     Dylan gives me Brandon’s new phone number.  He’s officially ensconced at the iguana loft.  If I have any problems, and I can’t reach Dylan in Queens, I’m to call Brandon.

     Dylan jots another number for me—Evan’s.  I can barely believe it.  I have to smother my glee with my best poker face.

     “Evan is always home.  He’s a homebody.”

     “He’s not out gallivanting with the coffee shop girl?”

     “Nothing came of that.  Any problems, and you can’t reach either me or Brandon, then call Evan.  But only in case of emergency,” he says, with a smirk.

~~~~~

     We drive uptown toward Lincoln Center.  I commend David on his finesse of city traffic.  He doesn’t hesitate to cut off a cabby or clog up a crosswalk, when occasion calls for it.  He says the traffic in Manhattan pales in comparison to London’s spider web of congested streets.

     The rain retreats, and we stroll the plaza.  David fishes for coins in his pockets, and delivers a penny into my hand for wishing in the fountain at Lincoln Center.

     “You Brits are so wasteful, tossing away perfectly good coins,” I taunt.

     He snorts with delight at this, and waits for me to make my wish.  “Ah, still holding the teacup comment against me,” he sighs, and then tenderly, “What will you wish for?”

     “Well, I can’t tell you, then it won’t come true.”

     “Oh, is that the rule?”

     “Must you question everything I say?  It can be exhausting.”  I feign weariness, palming the copper coin in my hand.  I cock back my black bowler hat so that I may take in the full view of the splashing fountain.

     “Well, I must not exhaust you, we’ve only just arrived.”  He gives a flick to his hair, which I discover he’s parted off to the side today, rather than down the middle.

     “What’s with the side part?”  I squint at him in the arresting sunlight.

     “You noticed!”  He seems genuinely touched.

     “That part starts in Jersey.”  He howls with laughter at this.

     “Ah,” he says, and lays his coin on his thumb and with a flick sends it dropping into the bubbling waters.  I send mine soaring too, dismayed to find myself thinking suddenly of Evan.  It is as if Evan and the city have become inexplicably entwined in my mind, like coils of colorful DNA.  I fling my bright penny into the clear water.  I wish for a published story in a magazine of some renown, something that will capture Evan’s attention.

     Waves of people ebb and flow past us, bundled into wool and cashmere, some heading for the Metropolitan Opera House.  A fuchsia banner announces the performance of Don Quixote by American Ballet Theatre.  David was unable to get us tickets.

     “We ought to see the Ring Series, there are plenty of tickets left for that,” he reports as we stroll the plaza.

     “Gee, I wonder why.”  I hug my Technicolor Dreamcoat about me, which is not warm enough for the sudden cold front, but David seems oblivious to my shivering.

     David wears a gray wool coat that bears the same worn look of all his clothes, as if he hasn’t bought anything new in ages, as if he couldn’t be bothered with something so trivial as outfitting himself.  He wears corduroys today—a hopeful development in an otherwise drab wardrobe, except for the mustard color—although they are too high on his waist and bunched with a clunky belt.  He wears the scuffed black leather shoes, molded to a comfortable soft cast about his large feet.

     “You ought to invest in a pair of jeans,” I suggest.

     “Americans are so deliberately casual,” he observes.

     “Deliberately casual?  As opposed to accidentally casual?”  I try to wrap my mind around that one.

     “Have you given any more thought to the opera?”

     “I’ve only seen one opera.  Madame Butterfly.  I cried and cried,” I reflect, hugging the Dreamcoat about me, and checking to make sure the rain has not injured the quarks.

     “Wagner would be a baptism of fire of sorts.  It’s five hours long.”

     “Five hours?”  I halt in my tracks before the long drop of stairs leading to the street level.  “Remind me to bring my Sony Walkman with my Springsteen tapes.”

     He cringes, as if my lack of enthusiasm for high culture is painful to him.  “Ah, yes, Americans like their entertainment exceptionally light.”

     “And the English like theirs exceptionally dull.”

     We cross the street toward the movie theatre that is showing
Wings of Desire
, the foreign film about gentle angels in trench coats who listen, unseen, to the troubles of mankind.  It is a beautiful and moving film.  It varies between black and white, and color.  In the end, one angel, Damien, falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist named Marion, and he gives up his wings to live a brief but blissful existence with her.

     “Would you give up your wings for me?” I ask, as we exit the theatre two hours later and meander about for a bite to eat.  My feet are beginning to hurt in my black suede shoes with the two-inch heels and double ankle strap secured with pink polka-dot buttons.  The streets have been washed clean with rain, and there is the feeling in the air that everyone has suddenly come outside, now that the weather has lifted.  I wear black nylon tights, and a short pink dress the color of cotton candy.

     “I haven’t got any to give up for you,” he says playfully.

     “But if you did,” I press.

     “Well, that seems rather unfair.  You won’t agree to give up one evening to accompany me to the opera, yet I’m to give up my heavenly wings for you?”

     “Yes, that’s right.  Would you?”

     We stroll, stopping to read menus taped to windows, not sure what we are hungry for.  David defers to my choice.  I find a pretty diner with pink and blue neon lights, and a black and white checkerboard floor, and David shoots it a skeptical look but gives in to settling down at a table near the window on the upper level where we can people-watch.  We are handed two menus, and I insist that David skip his usual tea, in lieu of a Brooklyn egg cream.  I make him use a straw.

     “Straws are for children,” he says, with a pinched look.

     “Don’t you ever tire of being so serious?”

     “Every man dreads the day when he will find himself bewitched by some woman and be forced to give up his wings,” he says gravely, proving my point about the seriousness.

     “Funny, we women see it the other way.  That no matter what we achieve or what barriers we surmount—that we are the ones destined to have to give up everything for some man.”

     “So, the battle of the sexes rages on, even in liberated America?”

     “Are you less liberated on the other side of the Atlantic?”  I nibble my order of fries, and offer him some, which he refuses.  He orders a fish entrée, which arrives with a side of fried bananas.

     “Unfortunately, yes.”

     “How so?”

     “Well, my family hopes that I’ll marry a girl there, a friend I grew up with.”

     I am stunned.

     “So, you’re engaged?” I accuse.  Suddenly Evan’s image looms before me, like the Statue of Liberty, a beacon of freedom in a blue bandana.  Evan: with his beautiful skin and hair the color of caramels, and deliberately casual clothing.  For all his ambiguities and perplexities and maddening mystery, at least Evan is not engaged!

     “Not exactly.”

     “In America, we make our own marriages.”

     “Yes, and the results are rather dismal, or so I hear.”

     “Isn’t it a bit archaic to be arranging marriages, in this day and age?”

     “Well, it isn’t arranged.  It’s more…expected.”

     “So, you ran away to America, like all those poor stiffs before you from past centuries, seeking freedom from tyranny?”  Evan is gaining height exponentially in my estimation, while David is plummeting faster than a penny dropped from a skyscraper.  This is not the way it was supposed to be.  David is supposed to help me forget Evan, not frame Evan in a better light.

     He grins.  “Yes, I suppose I have.  In any case, I wanted to experience another culture.  I suppose it’s an experiment of sorts, to see if I can break free from the bonds of my own.”

     “Am I part of the experiment?”  I dab my fries forcibly in a blob of ketchup, as if stubbing out cigarettes.  Careen is going to pay for setting me up with an engaged guy.

     “Perhaps you are the unexpected discovery in the experiment—the path that opens up and leads to some quantum leap.”

     “I hope you’re good at leaping, because I may just push you out this window.”  I gaze down at the crowded sidewalk below our window.

     “Are you upset?” he questions earnestly.

     “I don’t know how it works in your country, but in America a man who courts one woman while engaged to another is considered a cad.”

     “I’m not engaged.  It’s simply something my family hopes for, or, rather, expects of me.  No formal arrangements have been made.”

     “Well, I’m delighted to hear that they’re not sewing the bridal train while you gulp your telapia.”  I slurp the rest of my egg cream.  Slurping grates on David’s nerves, and so I give it a good last go.  “Well, you ought to go back and marry your childhood friend,” I say flippantly, and he looks generally wounded by this.

     “Why do you say that?”

     “Because if you’ve led her on, then it’s the honorable thing to do.”

     “Ah, that’s very American.”  He sighs.

~ 11 ~

Bluebird

     Our ballet company is performing
The Sleeping Beauty
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  I wear the bejeweled pale blue bodice and a deeper blue tutu that is two-toned; Sinclair has pulled out all the stops for my costume.  Dylan comes to see me, bringing along my parents, and, of course, Careen and Mr. Palmer.  It is a gray, wet day, and the dancers leap over the pavement puddles, filing into the theatre with costumes zipped up tightly into garment bags and hair arranged in stiff buns at the nape of the neck.  There is a problem with the stage; someone has mistakenly waxed the wooden floor thinking this would be helpful.  One of the dancers takes matters into his own hands and sprinkles flat Coca Cola over the slick surface.

     We dress and stretch, and scant conversation is made backstage.  Each dancer has his or her own individual routines executed before performing, whether a series of stretches, or silent meditations.  For me, it’s rose petals from my first performance at age sixteen.  I’ve sewn them into a tiny square of white satin, and I pin them just inside the bodice, for luck.  I perform my stretches and plies.  My partner, Benoit, nineteen years old, and a visiting guest artist from France, sips soda and lies languidly on the floor staring into the wings.  I try to entice him to practice with me, but for him this is bad luck.

     Careen appears backstage, and her frenetic energy is almost too much for me.  I need these quiet moments before going onstage for concentration, and I’m still miffed at her for the coffee shop fiasco.

     “My dear, you look positively otherworldly!” she gushes, darting about on all sides of me, like a hen pecking the air, to get a good look.  “Who did your makeup?”

     “Sinclair helped me with it.”  I glance in the mirror at the exaggerated eyeliner and false eyelashes that are necessary to keep one from looking washed-out under the intense stage lights.  Sinclair added a silvery-blue glitter eye shadow that gives me a doe-eyed look.

     “The costume is lovely.  Like a summer day and a summer’s eve rolled into one,” she says of the two striking shades of blue.  “What sort of bird are you?”

     “A blue one.”  My tone is flat.  I’m hoping to quell further conversation.  Careen senses my mood.  I generally find Careen’s effervescence energizing, except before a performance when I need to go inward and focus for the task ahead.