Breaking the Bank (31 page)

Lloyd made the introductions. Mia forced herself to extend her hand; the hand Suim extended in return was no bigger than Eden's. Eden was momentarily shy in the presence of her father's diminutive girlfriend, but she quickly recovered. Of course, it didn't hurt that Lloyd was pouring on the charm as if it were maple syrup over a short stack. Mia tried to focus on the menu so she could avoid looking into his sneaky, conniving eyes. She quickly decided on the grilled chicken over
wilted lettuce, and then set the menu aside. It was noisy, making conversation difficult, which was fine with her. She had nothing to say to anyone anyway; though for Eden's sake, she tried to look interested and even offered a comment or two. But mostly she looked around at the gilt-framed mirrors, the heavy chandeliers, the pattern of maroon-and-white honeycomb tiles on the floor, the rosy-colored marble bar at the far end of the room. Balthazar was one of those places modeled after a nineteenth-century French brasserie, and while Mia had to admit the simulation was good, at the same time, there was something precious about it. Precious and pretentious, too. Just Lloyd's kind of place.

Right now, he was studying the menu, asking the waitress all sorts of questions that, coming from anyone else, would have seemed obnoxious but which he somehow fashioned into a kind of seduction. It was the voice, Mia decided, as she watched the waitress flutter and flush in response to Lloyd's queries. The voice and the eye contact, the little gestures with the head and hands. Was the salmon wild or farm-raised? Were the nuts in the salad chopped or whole? And when he started to tackle the whole topic of wine, Mia was ready to take her fork and stab him in the thigh. Had he always been like this and she had just failed to notice? Or had she been so in love that she hadn't cared? Finally, the order was placed. Mia asked for her grilled chicken, and Eden ordered ratatouille. At least Lloyd had offered to treat them; her entrée cost twenty-three dollars; Eden's, eighteen.

“Good choice,” Lloyd said to Eden, like he was giving her a grade. Eden beamed. Then he ordered a salad and the scallops for himself, and salmon for Suim, who had not yet uttered a single word to anyone beyond the “Hello, it's nice to meet you,” which Mia knew to be a bald-faced lie anyway. The waitress, still giddy from Lloyd's verbal foreplay, toddled off to reapply her lip gloss and perhaps convey their choices to the kitchen.

Suim helped herself to a slice of baguette. She started to butter it, but Lloyd gently took the knife from her tiny hand.

“In Paris, they don't butter their bread at dinner,” he said, stopping her small hand with his huge one.

What if she doesn't care what they do in Paris?
Mia fumed. But she was not here to quarrel, so she kept quiet. This, however, set the tone of the meal. Lloyd took a stance on everything: how the chicken should have been grilled, which variety of potatoes made the best side dish, exactly how much fresh pepper should be ground on the salmon, when to take the next bite, when to make the next swallow. Suim ducked and bobbed her sleek, dark head in acquiescence, not seeming to mind. Nor did Eden, who gobbled her food and took Lloyd's every word as gospel.

Mia, however, was beside herself, and she moved from annoyance to rage to finally, amazingly, something like relief. How had she put up with Lloyd for all those years? And more important, why? Realization came like a flood.

This is what life with Lloyd had always been like. He was forever directing, managing, fine-tuning. There was no subject on which he did not have an opinion and no opinion he failed to share. Maybe it was her fledgling romance with laid-back Fred, or maybe it was the night in jail, but somehow, Mia felt pushed into some new place, one that allowed her to reevaluate all the relationships in her life. For the first time, she felt
relieved
to be done with Lloyd. It was a strange, almost giddy sensation, as if she had been filled with helium, or bouncing weightlessly on the moon. By the time she tucked into her berry-strewn Pavlova—of course Lloyd had to explain the derivation of the dessert's name—she was actually smiling. Smiling! When she said good night to Suim, she thought,
You've got him, you can keep him. Oh and by the way—good luck!
She felt drunk, the happy, bouncy kind of drunk, though this was clearly not the case. She had accepted only a single glass of wine, and, not wanting to give Lloyd any further ammunition against her, she hadn't even finished it. She knew, of course, that this feeling wouldn't last. She was not about to get over Lloyd in the time it took to order
and eat dinner at a phony French brasserie. But if she could feel this way for one night, then surely there would be other such nights—and days—that followed.

T
HE REALLY HARD
moment was saying good-bye to Eden, whom she wanted to kiss about a hundred times. Since the no-touch rule was back in effect, she had to content herself with a quick peck and a hug. “Have a good time, baby. See you next year,” she said. Lloyd grasped the suitcase by its nearly ruined handle, Eden waved frantically, and Suim nodded politely a final time. Then they turned a corner and were gone.

Mia was not prepared for the hollowness she suddenly felt inside— gutted, like a fish—and she stood there for several minutes staring at the place on the sidewalk where they had stood. People streamed by her, but she didn't yield until a fat guy in a tight, shiny baseball jacket bumped her shoulder hard. He scowled like it was her fault. She said nothing but slowly started walking back to the subway train. The next morning she felt no better. The prospect of being without Eden until the beginning of January seemed to demolish her. January seemed so far off it might as well have been June.

Mia remained in bed, not sleeping, not reading, just staring up at the ceiling, whose pattern of cracks she turned into pictures—a long, knobby flamingo here, a unicorn there—the way you would with clouds. But doing it inside, and alone, was less than satisfying, and she forced herself to get up and face the Eden-less day ahead. She drank a cup of coffee and spooned down some granola while flipping through yesterday's paper, and then devoted the rest of the morning to the sort of penitential, obsessive cleaning that she had not undertaken since Lloyd's last visit. With an old toothbrush, she attacked the hinges that held the toilet seat in place, poured a small lake of bleach on the bathroom floor and let it sit for an hour, attached a soft cloth to the broom handle and swabbed under the stove and fridge. The sound of the
phone interrupted her manic activity. Mia dropped the rag she'd been using and tripped over the mop. Could it be Eden? No. It was Julie. But Mia didn't answer and didn't even listen to the message. She wasn't ready to speak to Julie yet.

There was, however, only so much cleaning she could tolerate, and at around one, she decided to resurrect her abandoned shopping excursion. She still had money in the shoe box, and she extracted two hundred-dollar bills for holiday gifts. She was in no mood to brave the Manhattan crowds today, the last Saturday before Christmas, so she decided to keep her shopping local. That would have pleased the author of
All That Trash,
whose recent phone call she needed to return.

There was a flea market in the school yard of P.S. 321 every weekend, and Mia found a woman with an impressive selection of used books. Wouldn't Stu's horse-crazy daughter love a gorgeously illustrated copy of
Black Beauty
? For Stuart, she bought a cloth-bound edition of Auden's collected works—he had been an Auden lover since college—and, for her mother, a gardening tome devoted entirely to the propagation of cacti. Just because Mia privately suspected the plants were flesh-eating was no reason not to purchase the book.

The rest of what she bought was entirely consumable. Bars of oat-meal and carrot soap, jars of locally produced jam and honey. Orange-scented body butter for Eden, who would, she knew, be tempted to eat it. When she was through, she could barely carry it all, and she decided to buy a shiny black shopping cart at the hardware store to wheel everything back home. It would come in handy for schlepping the laundry, too.

It was dark by the time she got back to her apartment, the winter night filling rapidly with swollen, sooty-gray clouds. Mia's brief good mood disappeared with the light. She stowed the shopping cart in the kitchen and dumped everything else in the middle of the living room floor, intending to deal with it all tomorrow. But then she noticed the
cache of upscale chocolate bars—infused with exotic flavors like green tea and chili pepper—that she'd bought for Fred, who happened to mention that he ate chocolate three times a day. Fred was not speaking to her at the moment, but what if she were to deliver these chocolate bars, all six of them, to him personally? It was Saturday, and he would be at Juicy.

Suddenly, this seemed like a very good idea. But first, she would take a long, hot shower. Wash her hair. Slather body butter—okay, she bought some for herself, too—all over. Curl her eyelashes. Swipe on some blush.

It was not like she didn't know what she was doing; she was on to herself. The question was whether it would work. She had been thinking about Fred steadily over the last few days. Regretting that she hadn't taken him more seriously. And hoping she could mend things between them. Of course he didn't buy her story about the cash machine; who would? But it was the truth, and somehow, she had to get him to believe her.

Mia stood in front of her minuscule closet, wrestling with hangers to yank out clothes, and then stuffing them back inside. No to the stretchy black velvet dress—it was sexy, but it was trying too hard. No to the black cords, black jeans, countless black sweaters and shirts. None of them struck just the right note, the one that chimed festive yet abashed, casual but caring. Briefly, she considered a plum mohair miniskirt that belonged to Julie, but she decided that the shaggy wool made her look like a llama. A closet full of clothes, and nothing, but nothing, to wear.

Nothing to wear. Wear nothing? Now
that
would get his attention. It would also get her arrested. Or pneumonia. Maybe both. But what if she were to pull one of those crazy stunts, the kind she had seen touted in women's magazines about how to rev up your sex life? She wouldn't actually wear nothing, but close to it. How about a push-up leopard-printed bra and matching panties—another good-bye-to-Lloyd present
she'd bought herself—and a coat over it? Eagerly, she pawed through her closet again, unearthing a bona fide Burberry trench, replete with epaulets, plaid lining, and preppy charm. It was a castoff from Gail, who had the annoyingly patronizing habit of giving Mia her old clothes, as if she were the cleaning lady. Actually, Mia happened to know that Gail gave her cleaning lady her better rejects, such as a pair of worn-not-at-all Manolo Blahnik raw-silk mules and a Jil Sander jacket with the price tag still on it. Mia was given the second-tier stuff. But the coat, the Burberry coat, all buttoned to the neck and belted around the waist, worn over the animal-print underwear might, just might, do the trick.

Mia stepped into the panties, fastened the bra, and started hunting for appropriate footwear. She found a pair of thigh-high brown suede boots, also from Julie (just because they weren't speaking was no reason to forgo her footwear), that would surely add that je ne sais quoi to Mia's happy-hooker ensemble. For it was a hooker look; Mia knew that. But tonight, she would be a hooker with a heart of gold. Or at least, of chocolate. She gave her hair a volume-enhancing tousle and anointed her wrists with a few drops of perfume; those sample bottles she got at Barneys were still going strong. Then, after stuffing the chocolate into her purse, she was off.

It was cold, with the wind whistling up her coat; there must have been goose flesh aplenty on her thighs and her butt. But as she walked— no, strode—she began to generate her own body heat. A regular little furnace, that was what she was. Hot and filled with glowing coals.

Juicy was jammed. There were people crammed three deep at the bar, and more little clusters spilling off from that central crush. Strings of white twinkling lights ran along the walls and the window; a three-foot wreath decorated with silver ornaments hung over the bar. It was Christmas, all right. Christmas with a vengeance.

It took Mia a few minutes to make her way through the crowd. By the time she had, she wished she could take off her coat—the press
of bodies was making the room uncomfortably warm. But taking off the coat was not an option. Fred was down at one end of the bar. He didn't see her right away, but when he did, he smiled, then frowned. It was the smile she chose to honor. The smile and the sky-blue shirt that he was wearing, the one that turned his eyes into two tiny lagoons. He finished with the drink he was making before walking over to Mia.

“Hi, Fred,” she said. She was really warm now; her cheeks were red and her neck was slightly damp.

“Hi,” he said. And nothing more. “You're still mad at me.” The noise was so loud she had to raise her voice to be heard.

“I guess I am, but this isn't the time to talk about it.” Someone called his name, and he turned.

“I know. I just wanted to give you something. A little present.”

“You bought me a present?” Fred turned back and studied her face. “Why?”

“It's Christmas, right? Or it will be in a few days.”

“I don't get you, Mia. I don't get you at all.”

“Yo, Fred!” Now someone else was hailing him, demanding his time, his attention, his expertise in pouring libations.

“Can you come outside with me? Just for a minute?” Mia wheedled. “What for? You have another crazy story for me? How about a taxi with wings? That'd be a good one.”

“Please?” she asked. She was not begging, no, not her.

He ignored her for a second and then called out, “Hey, Chuck, cover for me, will you?” And to Mia: “I'm giving you five minutes. Come this way.” He gestured for her to walk behind the bar, and they went through the kitchen—she waved to Emilio, who was standing at the sink—and outside. The cold air felt good on her hot face. She remembered now that there was a little garden, with slate paving stones and lilac or wisteria all along the wall at the far end. Back in the spring,
it had been lovely; a fragrant, verdant surprise where she would have least expected it.