Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (15 page)

Claudia wandered slowly into the bedroom, pretending to be drawn in by the paintings stacked around its walls. Paul followed her in. “This place needs a chair, I'm afraid,” he said, lowering himself down.

“That's cool,” said Claudia, joining Paul at the edge of the bed as he lay back and folded his arms behind his head.

“I guess I paint because, somehow, I
have
to,” Paul explained, a warm drift of Grey Flannel, mixed with Right Guard and laundry starch, rising from his collar. Claudia propped herself so that she was looking down on him, realizing they were already on to plan B, that Paul wasn't going to push her up against the wall with a hand cupping her breast and his mouth lunging toward hers in a muscular crush, like Ruben Hyacinth would. Neither of them glanced to the radiator when it moaned, jarringly. The dizzying yellow circles on Paul's tie, it turned out, were owls. The strand of hair that Claudia had tucked earlier now fell loose.

“Bronwyn reports that you won a writing prize. At school.” Paul reached up and touched the strand. His thumb grazed Claudia's cheek, but his fingers were too thick to tuck it, and it bobbed back into frame. Their breathing had become synchronized. Claudia was gratified that he touched her first.

“I won three, actually,” she whispered.

“You see that?” His voice was husky.

“But I don't write the way you paint,” Claudia said. “I mean, not because I
have
to.”

“No?”

“I do everything else because I have to.” She laid her hand against his jaw. Finally, he pulled her to him. The kiss was so tender, dry at first, but sure. They were in a dorm room.

They were away for the weekend.

They were at the edge of a private meadow, sheltered by blossoming boughs.

Right now everything Claudia had in this world was her mouth against Paul's.

The room tumbled as Paul rolled her onto her back.

Testing the waters, she lifted her hips to press herself against his thigh.

When Paul groaned, the roof blew off the building.

Claudia saw a jaunty little plane hurrying to Teterboro, and an escape balloon.

Then she closed her eyes.

 

Robbie never said hello. His silence, along with his sunglasses, his silver rings, his tattoos, and his shit-kickers were costume elements. Narrowing his eyes, Robbie surveyed the scene.

“Jesus,” he complained, tossing his parka on the futon. “You two at it again?”

“Only moments ago it seemed I was minding my own business,” Edith said, her head still in her hands.

Robbie opened the fridge and stared inside. “You got to show up and upset your mother?” he accused Phoebe.

“She shows up when she wants something,” Edith remarked. “This has been established.”

“You got coffee?” Robbie asked.

“Tea,” said Edith, surveying Robbie with blatant desire.

Phoebe was pretty sure Robbie wouldn't know what to actually
do
with one of his hand axes if an intruder lay at his feet, bared his throat, and
begged
for it. Edith smoothed her hair and rearranged a hairpin. Robbie found a can of Coke.

“I can make coffee,” Edith offered.

“Congratulations,” said Robbie. He filled a cranberry-glass goblet with soda, selected a Hostess lemon pie from his drawer, and took his seat at a carved Victorian throne.

“Tell him what you told me,” Edith instructed Phoebe.

“I didn't tell you anything,” Phoebe said. “I
asked
you.”

Robbie opened his lemon pie. “Can I get you a plate for that?” Edith asked.

“This suspense is fucking killing me,” said Robbie.

Edith pushed her own empty plate before Robbie. “She asked me to register her for prostitution.”

“And here you was,” he said, pushing the plate back, “worried she wasn't going to make nothing of herself.”

“
Say
something to her,” Edith insisted.

Robbie took a swallow of Coke. Finally, he stared at Phoebe. She stared back. “The fuck you bustin' your mother's balls for?”

“I have a chance to sign with a modeling agency,” Phoebe explained plainly, “but I need my mom to sign working papers.”

Robbie considered Phoebe, clearly weighing his response. “You get what you give,” he said. “You familiar with that one?” He crumbled up his pie wrapper, lobbed it at the sink, and missed. “You got my prescription?” he asked Edith.

“It's downstairs.”

“Hey,
Sanford and Son.
I can never find shit down there. You know this.” Phoebe watched Robbie and her mother exchange a knowing look. It was almost entertaining, how they thought they were slick like that.

“I'll get it,” Edith declared, leaving Robbie and Phoebe alone. Phoebe had promised herself she would never be alone with Robbie again. She'd learned that Edith being nearby didn't make a difference.

Robbie pulled his Pall Mall box from the snap front pocket of his corduroy shirt. He held a cigarette in his teeth and produced his Confederate flag Zippo. “I got an idea,” he said, touching the flame to the tobacco. He took a deep inhale, crossed his legs, and exhaled a plume at the yellowed ceiling. “You want something from your mother? You want your papers signed or what have you?” He pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead. The small, pale eyes were always a surprise. “I'm asking you a question.”

“I guess.”

“You guess, huh.” Robbie picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue with a long pinkie nail. “There is one way we can play this,” he said, focused on Phoebe as he tapped a plug of ash onto the glazed rind of his lemon pie.

“Okay.”

“You move back home. Where you should be, anyhow, by the way. You come back here where we can keep an eye on you.” Robbie exhaled another plume and moved his hand to rest high on his thigh. “And in return for that, you get to try your little cockamamie modeling crap.” Phoebe wondered if he was going to start playing with his thing outside of his jeans as she'd seen him do before.

“Would you like your sweatpants?” Edith called up from the basement.

“You think about it,” Robbie said to Phoebe. But Phoebe already had. By the time Robbie had descended the basement stairs and deposited a loud slap across Edith's ass, Phoebe yanked open the stiff apartment door. Its ancient, floor-mounted police lock, comprised of a steel bar wedged between the door and the floor, provided dual service as an acoustic alarm. It clattered loudly as Phoebe bolted.

Out on the stoop, Mrs. Parker was arriving home from a temp job, trudging up to her own front door with her Met Foods shopping bag and her headphones. She gave Phoebe a tired, distant smile. Phoebe pictured the bear hug that Darleen would offer. She could see Mrs. Parker at the Crock-Pot, ladling out stew studded with soft carrots and sprinkling the steaming bowls with oyster crackers. Phoebe opened her mouth to speak when she heard movement inside her mother's apartment. She leapt Edith's stoop in a single bound as Mrs. Parker disappeared into her own home. At the curb, Phoebe fought the urge to sprint. She reminded herself that she'd just escaped—again. The point now was what to do with it. With the utter determination required to slow the fuck down, Phoebe unfolded one long leg after another and, with her signature lope, made her way to Smith Street.

 

At suppertime, Claudia returned to the apartment she shared with Bronwyn to find that the door had once again been left unlocked. In their two-year stint as roommates they'd debated this habit numerous times. Bronwyn held the optimistic view that an unlocked door promised “I'm home, all is well.” Claudia considered it an open invitation for homicide.

Tonight, stunned by her afternoon with Paul, Claudia found the door resting on its latch and quietly entered, as a criminal might.

Adrenaline thrummed her veins, burning body fat and lengthening her throat so that its ring of pudge, noticeable in photos, melted away with the passing seconds. Simultaneously, Claudia was no longer occupying her body. She would be bobbing against the ceiling, looking down on her life with a giddy remove, were it not for the new, droning weight that held her to the surface of the earth.

Bronwyn was blasting
Hey Ladeez,
the mixed tape featuring romantic chanteuses that Claudia had made for her twenty-first birthday. Doris Day, bubbly and knowing, floated down the airless entrance hallway from the brightly lit living room to greet her, along with a waft of something hot and delicious. Claudia considered tiptoeing the length of the hall, but under the unwieldy circumstances it would be cruel to surprise Bronwyn. In Manhattan, Paul Tate was merely somebody else's husband. But here, he was something both rare and permanent. He was Bronwyn's
father.

“I'm home!” Claudia called.

“Hooray!” Bronwyn called back, from far down the hall. Bronwyn's puttering had a distinct physical rhythm, and Claudia could picture her shuffling about the kitchen in her rag-wool slipper socks, an apron from Balducci's triple tied around her lean waist, taking an occasional gulp from a Mexican-glass tumbler of decent pinot noir. Claudia paused at her darkened bedroom, tossing her bomber jacket and fur hat to the futon bed and turning on the desk lamp. She scanned her wall of flea-market purses and the curtain made from a vintage lace tablecloth that prettied the dire view of the air shaft.

Claudia agreed that money creates taste, and briefly wondered how hers might differ if she had any.

A messy stack of Phoebe's school notebooks and papers had spread across Claudia's sawhorse desk. “Feebs?” Claudia hollered.

“Not here!” Bronwyn called from the kitchen. A particular sheet of Phoebe's crumpled schoolwork, scrawled in red ballpoint, now caught Claudia's eye.
Phoebe,
the note from the concerned teacher said,
let's talk. Please make an appointment to see me during lunch.
And the grade, D-plus. And the title of the paper:
Water Imagery in Huckleberry Finn, by Phoebe Goldberg.
Claudia seemed to have remembered writing one of these, before she got sprung from gen pop and placed on the AP track, but she'd always favored cheeky essay titles, and would have gone for something more like
H2 Oh No, Twain's Watery Ambivalence.
Her first sentence would not have been: “There is quite a bit of water imagery in
Huckleberry Finn.
” She would not have written her essay in faded magenta Magic Marker. But a D-plus? It was strangely shocking. More so, even, than the sight of Paul's snowy boxers peeling from his muscular thighs.

She had no job. She had no business. She had Paul Tate's fingerprints on her.
The roof, the roof, the roof was on fire—

“I have a lasagna béchamel from Cucina and those cookies you like, the pink leaves with the chocolate filling,” Bronwyn announced happily, appearing in the doorway. She grabbed Claudia's wrist and pulled her down the hallway. “And I made a wilted-spinach salad,” Bronwyn was saying, “and I have all sorts of cheese—”

Strung liberally with winking Christmas lights shaped like hot peppers, the living room had recently been tidied. Bronwyn had contained most of Phoebe's sprawl in the cubbies Claudia had fashioned from a pair of wooden wine crates. On the coffee table, a stunning florist's bouquet of white and pale blue hydrangea, the gift card emerging from the blooms, towered over bowls of glossy purple olives and toffee cashews.

“Nobody told me we're hosting the varsity crew dinner tonight,” Claudia quipped. She was grateful for her ability to act normal, and poised to put air quotes around her entire life.

“I have
news!
” Bronwyn cried, doing a quick bouncy dance of anticipation. She handed Claudia a Parmesan straw and skated into the kitchen on her slipper socks. Claudia kept her eyes on the flowers. Their tailored freshness exuded respectable festivity, rather than romance.

Claudia waited until Bronwyn was out of sight, then plucked the gift card from the bouquet. “You're pregnant?” she called out, nonchalantly.

“No! Jesus!” There was an unseen clatter of ceramic and stainless. “It's
good
news!”

“Bruce Springsteen invited you onstage to dance in his music video?” Claudia called, reading quickly.
Congratulations, Darling! We're so proud of you! With love from Mother and Dad.

Claudia heard a celebratory pop as she swiftly returned the gift card to its envelope, her heart pounding as a bolt of anguished jealousy thrummed her veins. “Stop guessing, I beg of you!” Bronwyn begged, emerging from the kitchen with a monogrammed Lucite bucket she'd nicked from Annie's pantry and a pair of champagne flutes. A bottle of Veuve was plunged into the ice.

“Daddy sent champagne,
already.
Isn't his bionic timing ridiculous?” Bronwyn rhapsodized. Claudia, whose long-absent father had still not sent an IOU, had to agree. “He is why I don't have a boyfriend, by the way,” said Bronwyn. Claudia smiled thinly, feeling gypped. Bronwyn raised her glass. “To the newest addition to the
Moxy
team, Associate Photo Editor, Bronwyn Margaret Montgomery Tate, aka yours truly.” She clinked her glass to Claudia's, tilted her chin, and sipped with refined zeal, as Claudia dispensed with her bubbly like a Hoover. “I got it!” Bronwyn squealed. “I got the job!” Claudia set down her glass and the friends embraced. “I start on Monday.”

“Mazel tov,” Claudia said, elevating slightly to rest her chin on Bronwyn's sharp shoulder. Bronwyn wore old-lady fragrances, thick with gardenia, and a plain leather choker that Claudia coveted, knowing it would make her own throat resemble a bratwurst. The pudge, apparently, was back.

“I'm finally going to
have
something, Claudia,” Bronwyn said. “For the first time in my life, I really know that. I mean . . . Martha and her old, married boyfriend. Agnes and her terminal . . . personality. Sometimes I look at my sisters and I think there has
got
to be more to life than the quest for
attention.
D'you know what I mean?”