Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (14 page)

“All right, Benjamin,” Edith agreed. “Help yourself to the broom.”

“Yes ma'am,” Benny Crackers replied, excitedly. Phoebe could picture his little scarecrow dance, and his unsteady descent to the steep lower stairwell.

“This is all I have today, I'm afraid,” Edith was saying.

“Three bucks lookin' real good to a workin' man.”

It was then that Phoebe found herself inexplicably rocketing from her seat to snatch an ancient bag of Chinese ginger candies from a chipped ceramic jar on Edith's kitchen counter. In a flash, she wrapped the bag into a tight cylinder and shoved the entire thing down the sleeve of her peacoat.

“I've got my younger daughter over for tea,” Edith was saying to Benny, “so I'll see you next time.”

“Yes, ma'am.” The rhythmic scrape of Benny's sweeping had begun.

Phoebe dropped into a dining room chair and wondered why the fuck she hadn't a) asked for the bag of prehistoric candies if she wanted them that much or b) shoved them in her knapsack, where they would be far less likely to make noise and cause a scene.

“From each according to his ability and et cetera,” Edith remarked as she returned.

“Word,” said Phoebe, trying not to move.

“So,” Edith began, placing a little delft pitcher filled with skim milk on the table, “do you have a toothbrush?”

“Excuse me?”

“A molded implement, fashioned from nylon and plastic. With which you clean your teeth. At your current address.” It was always impossible for Phoebe to tell what Edith really meant. Was everything Edith said always sort of joking? Edith knew exactly where Phoebe was staying, because Phoebe had told her. Unless Edith hadn't gotten the message, because Robbie hadn't relayed it, in which case wouldn't Edith have been happier to see her?
Relieved?
Was Claudia dead to her?

“Oh,” Phoebe replied. “Yeah. It's pink.”

Making several more trips between the table and the kitchenette, Edith set out Jacob's Cream Crackers, farmer cheese, dates, sesame cookies, radish roses, and cold ratatouille in an old blue Pyrex mixing bowl, stuck with a scalloped silver spoon, a survivor from her own mother's trousseau.

“And do you continue to grace school with your presence?” Edith asked, placing a lone radish and two crackers on a flowered saucer and settling in her chair.

“Affirmative.”

“And having arrived at school, are you staying there?” Edith placed the whole radish rose between the two crackers, and steered the unwieldy, rolling sandwich toward her mouth.

“Yeah.”

A shower of broken cracker plunged to the saucer, the radish bouncing down after it. Edith frowned in surprise and brushed the crumbs into her hand. “And are you doing drugs, including malt liquor and cigarettes?”

Phoebe sighed.

The fact was, Phoebe had neither confirmed nor denied whether she drank malt liquor and smoked blunts like every other red-blooded American girl in the 718. Instead, she'd always responded to her mother's occasional inquiries with a studied, long-suffering patience that was partially true. Yes, Phoebe had done everything, just about, nothing with needles but whatever you could smoke or drink and plenty of what you could swallow, and also no, she wasn't really
motivated
by that shit at all. Phoebe was Wile E. Motherfucking Coyote, zooming along a desert road with a repeating backdrop of stone monuments. She was gaining speed, churning. She'd always known she couldn't live in Claudia and Bronwyn's living room forever, and now it was clear that Claudia couldn't afford to keep her for probably one more minute. Soon she would find herself in midair, a disintegrating, wedge-shaped dead end behind her. To land, she'd have to launch herself. Really put her back into it. That's what Phoebe cared about. At some point, coming down, not too hard.

“I need to ask you something,” Phoebe began, buying herself another minute as she sugared her tea.

“Spit it out, child.”

“I need you to sign my working papers.”

Edith, whose shoulders were perpetually braced for an accusation, relaxed imperceptibly. “Working papers?” she repeated.

“So I can get a job.”

“What kind of job requires papers? Will you be a guard at the Canadian border?” Edith scooped ratatouille.

“Nah.”

“I am asking you for reasonable details, Phoebe,” Edith said messily, her mouth full.

“I . . . I met this guy. Uptown.”

Edith lifted her faded Kliban Cats mug. Phoebe heard the rattle of ice cubes, and marveled once again that her mother was some kind of Jesus, turning tea into whiskey right under your nose. “How I wish this tale had a more propitious beginning,” Edith lamented.

“No, he's cool,” Phoebe hedged. “He's an agent. He represents models.” As Edith sipped, Phoebe grew quickly aware of her mother's creeping unhappiness. “No, seriously,” she insisted. “He's, like, totally legit.”

Edith set down her mug and removed her glasses. They dropped on their tortoiseshell chain. “This phrase you use,” she said, pressing her fingertips to her closed eyelids and holding them there. “This ‘totally legit.' As in legitimate, yes?” She dropped her hands from her eyes and glared at Phoebe. “So this would suggest you've done a complete and thorough check on this individual's profile with the Better Business Bureau.”

“It . . . it would?”

“You are able to confirm, without a shadow of a doubt, that this individual is a licensed representative of a
legitimate business enterprise.
That he holds no criminal record. That he faces no outstanding litigation for charges of statutory rape.” Two spots of high color had appeared on Edith's cheeks.

“His company's called Image Model Management. They're in the Flower District, near F.I.T.—”

“Ah, the Flower District. How appropriate a milieu for fresh blooms, swept into the gutter when no longer a prized commodity to be replaced by a fresh crop.”

“ . 
.
 . What?”
It was perfectly obvious to Phoebe that this shit was going south. It was perfectly
wack
that Edith cared so much about virginal bullshit while having a skank boyfriend like Robbie Burns. Phoebe pressed her back against the chair, steadying herself.

“It's prostitution,” Edith declared flatly, taking a deep swallow.

“No,” Phoebe said. “It's like
Seventeen
magazine.”

“It's
prostitution,
” Edith repeated, her voice growing louder, “and while I assure you I've learned over the years to adjust my expectations according to your apparent devotion to the lowest common denominator, I certainly held out hope that at some point you'd consider a trade, a vocation.”

“You mean like air-conditioning and refrigeration?”

“I mean
not
the oldest goddamn profession, is what I mean!” Edith cried. And then suddenly—
SMASH
!—Edith's fist hammered the table. The silverware jumped, the pale blue milk quivered. “Goddamnit!” Edith cried again, at the edge of a raw scream. A delicate garland of saliva hung between her bicuspids.
SMASH
!
SMASH
! The fist came down. “Shame!
Shameful!
”

Edith plunged her head into her hands.

The room thrummed with a ringing silence.

There was nothing for Phoebe to do, she knew from experience, except hold very still. Only suckers got jacked by their mother's rages, especially since there'd been warning in the slow boil of Edith's curlicue questioning punctuated by the spots of color on her cheeks. But somehow, Phoebe was, once again, a sucker. The trick was to sit still now and
act
not surprised. To sip tea. To leave the building in your mind, to pretend Edith was a stranger, just a crazy lady on the F train, to switch cars, to get adopted, or maybe married. To concentrate on the tea, on the steam, settling upward on her face as it rose, maybe cleaning out her pores. You couldn't know, Phoebe knew, what was going to happen next. Maybe Edith was done, or maybe this was the pregame warm-up. If Edith kept going, Phoebe decided, she would get up and walk out. She would go next door and ask Mrs. Parker to come with her to Image Model Management in the morning and be her mother for half an hour. She could have a black mother for thirty fucking minutes. She had the mouth and no father, right? Phoebe thought Mrs. Parker would do it, too. There was love lost all up and down Hoyt Street, but none of it was between Edith and Mrs. Parker.

Edith sighed loudly and pressed the heels of her hands into her closed eyes, digging at her hairline with her fingertips.

Slowly, Phoebe began to rise in her seat.

She was backing away and getting gone.

That's when the police lock scraped and her mother's front door shuddered open.

Suddenly, Phoebe found herself flash frozen.

With a stamp, and a rattling cough, with the jangle of keys and change, on a cloud of cold city air, and without a friendly whistle or a
honey I'm home,
Robbie Burns had returned.

 

For several blocks they'd walked along the charming streets of the far-west Village in a parallel silence—comfortable for Paul Tate, uncertain for Claudia Silver—and now stopped in front of a proud but tired apartment building. A scalloped green awning declared its name,
The Powell,
in faded gold cursive. “This stuff with your mom,” said Paul. “It's a lot of information to digest. Do you have any questions?”

Claudia looked up at Paul, cocked her head, and tucked a strand of her chestnut hair behind her ear, wishing she'd reapplied her matte lipstick somewhere between Garth's bitch-slap and here. She followed Paul's pale breath, visible in the cold air, and willed it toward her mouth so that she could draw it in, shotgun-style.
Let's see. Any questions. What if Phoebe stays, and what if Phoebe goes? What if Edith reappears, and what if she disappears? What if
Hope Valley
requests an interview, and what if I end up homeless?

What if I kiss you?

Right now?

Claudia shook herself into the matter at hand. “I guess I'm slightly hung up on the self-supporting thing,” was what she came up with.

“You don't think your mom will sign working papers?”

“It's the conversation that happens right
before
that one,” Claudia explained. “Eating glass comes to mind as a pleasant alternative.”

“How about I talk to her?”

Paul began to speak, then paused. And in this brief moment, something came over Jane Street. Everything suspended and shimmered around the edges as Paul deposited a dry cough into his glove.

The cough was so
fake.
Which confirmed the essential thing.

Paul was nervous.

He shape-shifted before Claudia's eyes into the gangly youth pounding beers by the Christmas tree.

“D'you want to come up to my studio?” Paul indicated the Powell with a glance.

So there it was.

There was Claudia's former life, B.P., Before Paul, when Bronwyn had been merely her best friend, the buffer between the guest bed and the curb, and Paul Tate had been the father of them all. There was what would happen next. And this moment was the portal between the two. The only way through it was to push, hard and determined, to shut the toy chest of the college years without looking at its sentimental contents too closely, refusing to succumb to Bronwyn's imagined stare as the lid closed. Starting now, things would be different. They would be dangerous and delicious.
Adult.
She considered the building, strung with a lone fire escape and studded with ancient air-conditioner units. She made her voice amused and controlled. “Are you actually asking me to see your etchings?”

“Not exactly,” Paul confessed shyly. “I . . . paint.”

“As in
Dogs Playing Poker
?”

“Something like that.”

Claudia grinned.

Moments later, in a creaking elevator the size of a powder room, a reverent silence descended upon Claudia and Paul. Dutifully, they faced forward, as in a lineup facing a one-way mirror. Their heels clicked down a linoleum hallway, yellowed like an old tooth. “Place smells like rent control, unfortunately,” Paul apologized, pulling the keys from his pocket without fumbling. “I've held on to it since my second year at law school.”

The inside of the little one-bedroom, however, was bright and blond, from the renovated floorboards to the tweed sofa bed, with the distinct stillness left by a recently departed cleaning lady. Near a triptych of windows, in an ideal spot for a wintry landscape to emerge against a backdrop of New Jersey, an easel stood. But the pencil sketch in progress, waiting to join stacks of finished canvasses propped against the walls, suggested a hunched human form. The paintings were pale washes of gouache highlighted with telling details. The despairing drape of a loose hand had been rendered with only a slash or two of black oil pastel. Claudia assessed the pictures and found them to be actually pretty good.

“So,” she asked, “being a fancy-pants lawyer. That's like your day job, while you wait for the call from Mary Boone?”

Paul stood before the windows, staring out at the steely river. “I don't think Mary Boone's going to track me down any time soon,” he replied. “Not that my work is any good.” Here, he paused. Before Claudia could sort out how on earth to compliment this man's artwork, he continued. “The painting is my little secret.”

“Only the one?” Claudia asked. Paul turned to face her, but said nothing. “Do you come here every day?”

“I wish,” Paul replied. “More often I use this place when I'm pulling an all-nighter on a closing. It's a place to catnap and shower. And, you know. Express myself.” Paul could have nodded at his oeuvre for emphasis, but instead he kept his eyes on Claudia. She felt a tremor as she glanced into the bedroom doorway. The room was spare, anchored by a platform bed. She drew closer for a better look, Paul's eyes pulling taut the space between them. “Once you make partner,” he said, “You get to stop sleeping on the floor under your desk.”