Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (18 page)

Their afternoons all led to Jane Street, where new gloves and wit and wisdom were shed with urgency. There wasn't
time
to think between the hours of noon and three on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There wasn't
room
for guilt in the bright little studio, not when Paul's considerable power, channeled directly into their union, banished all reason.

Picturing Bronwyn, or Annie, while Paul was in the midst of showing Claudia things she hadn't known would have been, somehow, sacrilege.

In the last two and a half weeks of Claudia and Paul's . . . arrangement . . . she had been told that she was beautiful more times than in the two decades prior.

But right now, at 12:46 on a Friday morning, Paul seemed impossibly far away, to the point of full disappearance. The digital clock on Claudia's nightstand mocked her, and the portable phone, resting regally in the center of a nearby pillow like a black plastic glass slipper, was decidedly not ringing.

She reached for the phone and pressed
REDIAL
.
“You have reached the offices of Golden Fenwick Tate Stein and Lowe,”
the dulcet recording repeated for the fuckteenth time.
“If you know the person's extension, please press it now.”
She did.
“You have reached the offices of Paul Tate, Senior Partner, Real Estate—”
Frustrated by this conspiracy of robots, by Paul's relentless work schedule, by the closing he had tonight when he should have been with her, Claudia hung up and smothered the phone violently with her pillow. She threw back her duvet and stood in the middle of her bedroom.

I use this place when I'm pulling an all-nighter on a closing,
Paul had said.
It's a place to catnap and shower.

Claudia found her bra among the pile of clothes on her desk chair and slipped halfway out of her tie-dyed long johns to put it on. She pulled her jean skirt on over the long johns and added an argyle vest, and over that, a long cardigan, and over that, a belt. She liked the idea of Paul unwrapping her. Claudia padded into the living room, where Phoebe was sleeping. Phoebe's feet stuck out at the end of the futon; one of her mismatched sweat socks had sagged down, leaving her heel exposed. Even asleep, her features slack and her lips parted, Phoebe's expression was watchful. Claudia arranged the patchwork quilt over Phoebe's long body and tucked Barkella, her stuffed dog with the rubbed-out plastic eyes, inside. Phoebe sighed in her sleep and snatched at her worn friend.

What demanded guts, Claudia realized as she stared down at her sleeping sister, was futile devotion. Futile devotion was the human force that engineered prison breaks and chastity vows, and nothing threatened it like daily contact. Watching Phoebe clutch Barkella, Claudia feared that in order to preserve her relationship with Paul she must never see him again.

Back in her room, Claudia perched at the side of her bed with a yellow legal pad in her lap. It was 1:11
A.M.
—time to make a wish. Claudia closed her eyes and pictured an old rowboat arranged in the Chilmark sand, filled with ice and stocked with cold beers and novelty sodas in vintage glass bottles for the kids, at her Martha's Vineyard wedding to Paul. Before she could conjure other positive steps toward an entirely new life, it was 1:13. She reached for her desk lamp and blinked as it threw her little room into light and shadow.

There on her crowded sawhorse desk, Phoebe's crumpled D-minus paper on
Huckleberry Finn
had been smoothed out and stacked more neatly. As she'd promised herself she'd do, Claudia had arranged an appointment for the two of them to sit down with Phoebe's teacher, Ms. Krinsky, and discuss it. The more time she spent with Paul, the better she felt she was able to perform her duties as guardian. And the better her employment outlook, too. It had been rescheduled twice, but tomorrow's interview at
Hope Valley
had been set, or so the production office had claimed, in stone.

Claudia reached for the hardcover journal that had once, in the ancient past, been her stalwart café companion. The first third of the book bulged with bulky collage work and impassioned verse; the rest lay tight, white, and dormant in its binding. A gust of wind found its way down the air shaft and rattled the old window behind her—it sounded cold outside. She tore out a blank page.

Peeps,
she wrote,
can't sleep. Meeting the muse at Purity Diner.

The diner down the avenue would be awake at this hour, and glad to serve as her alibi.

Be back when the sun comes up, sort of like a vampire with a concentration in creative writing.

Claudia signed with
x
's and
o
's. She affixed the note to the refrigerator with an Adam Ant magnet she'd been carrying through her life since the seventh grade.

The dark end of the hallway was even darker at this hour. At the front door, Claudia slipped into the thrift-store army parka that made her look like a freezer chest. She strung her messenger bag across her shoulders and dug for her change purse. Inside it were two subway tokens, a package of rolling papers, a single, disheveled stick of blue Trident gum, and a folded slip of paper torn from a little pocket notebook. She unfolded it.
“Garth,”
the note said in ballpoint, with Garth Kahn's phone number jotted underneath. Disgusted, Claudia crushed the paper in her fist and hurled it into her wastepaper basket. She remembered her journal and shoved it into her bag. She opened her wallet and counted and recounted the three bucks a few times. Was she really going to take the F train at this hour? If she was robbed and raped on the platform, the cops would call Edith. She'd bring Robbie with her to the emergency room while half pretending not to know him.

Claudia wished she had Paul's driver's pager number.

It seemed the least Paul could do was to send his driver out to Brooklyn on freezing nights like this one to deliver Claudia in safety and comfort.

She would ask him about that.

Claudia headed for Bronwyn's bedroom.

She knew where Bronwyn kept her wallet. It was an Il Bisonti number, eggplant in color, buffed by time to a rich patina. Carefully, she opened Bronwyn's bedroom door. Bronwyn seemed to be fast asleep on her loft bed, tucked under the ceiling strewn with postcards, with barely enough room to sit up. A long drafting table ran the length of the loft, bearing a large lacquered tray on which the wallet sat, along with Bronwyn's rings, a few books of bistro matches, a leather barrette, Beacon Theatre ticket stubs, and Bronwyn's collection of silver shells. Claudia lifted the wallet. It was heavy and chubby, and she half expected it to animate in her palm and protest, so she gripped the leather flap to muffle the snap as she entered. Sixty-two dollars. She slipped a twenty from the pile and quietly returned the wallet to its tray. Silently, she made her way to the front door and the desperate pleasures that lay beyond it—

“Claudia?”

Bronwyn, inexplicably, had appeared at the mouth of the living room, knotting her old flannel robe. Claudia froze. Bronwyn whispered hoarsely, so as not to wake Phoebe. “Did you just take money out of my wallet?” she asked.

“What?” Claudia whispered back.

“Did you just take money from me?”

If the living room was a space station, pumped with fresh oxygen, the hallway was an air lock. Beyond the front door lay the icy soup of deep space, into which Claudia's corpse, frozen in spread-eagle, would plunge forever. “What?” she repeated, stalling.

Bronwyn took a few steps closer, her head cocked to the side. She was groggy and alert. Sure, and not sure she wanted to be. “I heard you in there,” she said. “You woke me up.”

“Oh,” said Claudia. Moving slowly, she backed away a few steps, ever closer to the front door, brushing against the sleeves of their coatrack, a peewee version of the sprawling display in the Tates' Anselmo hallway. She'd always loved the moment in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
when Lucy first discovers the cold, fresh night air of Narnia where a wall is supposed to be. Suddenly, she landed on her epitaph.
Here lies
Fast & Sloppy,
it would read.
Get me out of here.

“What's the deal?” Bronwyn pressed.

“I . . . I couldn't sleep.”

“And where does my wallet come in, exactly?”

“No. I . . . I was going to the Purity to write,” Claudia replied uncertainly, “and I didn't have any cash, so—”

How else could Claudia explain what came over her again and again? To confess that something beyond her control had placed a brick on the accelerator, that it was operating the gears from behind her eyes with grim determination, that she was still
in
there, Claudia would have had to separate herself from the impulse. From Paul.

“So there's something called an ATM,” said Bronwyn.

“I know. But my card has been acting weird, so just in case, I thought I'd borrow a few bucks and then see if I could get the cash on the way back to pay you ba—”

“In that case,” Bronwyn pressed, “when I ask you if you just took money from me, the answer is
yes.
”

“I . . . I know. It's just . . . ‘take,' you know? That's like . . . wow. Because, you know. I was borrowing,” Claudia faltered. “
Jesus,
Bronwyn.”

Bronwyn folded her arms tightly and took a few more steps. “Claudia,” she said, “I want to help you. But you have to ask me. If you ask me for help, it's one thing. If you go in my wallet, it's something else that's really fucked up.”

Really fucked up.
That sounded about right. “You're right.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” said Claudia. Could she ask Bronwyn for help? Right now, if she told Bronwyn where she was headed with Bronwyn's own money, would there be a chance, unlikely but still in the realm of possibility, that eventually things would all work out? “Jesus,” Claudia said. “Of course.” She dug in her messenger bag for her own wallet. “Here.” She would hand the twenty back, even though she had just earned it in pure mortification.

“No,” Bronwyn said. “You keep it. Pay me back when you can. Just, please, don't ever go in my stuff like that again, okay?”

“Yes,” Claudia said. “Okay.”

“I love you, Claudia.”

“Thanks,” she muttered, disappearing into the building's chilly foyer.

 

“Right here,” Claudia said to the Black Pearl Car Service driver, as they pulled up in front of the Powell. It was odd to consider the lives behind the other lit windows at this hour of the night.

Claudia rode up in the tiny elevator. She breathed deeply, anticipating Paul's greeting. Because he had told her long ago, when all this began, that they should always speak first before meeting, there would be a brief pause of surprise, but then a release as he pulled her inside, a surrender to something inexorable that was working to realign the entire world and place the two beloveds at its center. Even the apartment door was breathing, in and out with her own breath. She could feel new life, hopeful, pushing up from a crack in the sidewalk. It was behind that gentle door.

Claudia knocked. She felt a presence approach as the lock's cylinder slid from its case. Claudia let her lips play into a smile. She pulled in her belly and fastened it to the invisible hook she'd installed at the base of her spine, willing it to stay latched.

The door opened.

Inside Paul's pied-à-terre, the lights were on, and WBGO played softly. The easel had been arranged in the center of the room on a splattered drop cloth. Painting supplies were placed about, and on the canvas a haunting, tender image had begun to appear.

But the painter, who stood in the doorway in Harvard sweatpants, old leather sandals, and a frayed oxford shirt of Paul's, who had a streak of burnt sienna along the temple, but had not had the heart, for some time, to work with paint, was not Paul.

Confusion now raced over the threshold in an unruly swell.

Claudia's balance toppled. She reached for the door frame to steady herself. Her mind sped ahead, but could not outpace the roar of the wave.

“Claudia?” Annie Tate asked. “What are you doing here?”

Claudia held herself very still on the threshold, noticing her own hand, in its beautiful new glove, braced against the door frame. Annie Tate's old duffle coat, tossed across Paul's tweed sofa bed with a paisley shawl peeking out, her pony-hair boots, askew on the rug, her picked-at takeout, coagulating on the little café table by the windows—and, of course, Annie herself, staring back, frozen—were all abominations. How had this woman dared help herself to Claudia's honeymoon suite? Her mind continued to race itself. Annie was clearly to blame, but for what exactly Claudia wasn't yet sure.

As for Annie, she wondered exactly
how
Claudia Silver even knew about her West Village retreat, when Bronwyn had sworn to help her keep the place a
secret.
Neither of the older sisters knew it existed, nor that Annie spent nights here sometimes, with the simple, low bed to herself and the tender promise she'd made not to fix herself a drink. Annie glanced at her father's old Rolex. It was two-twenty-something.

Twenty-something,
she thought, looking at the girl.
Ha.

Claudia removed her gloved hand from the door frame and found that she remained standing.

“Claudia,” Annie asked her gently, tucking her paintbrush into her hair and putting all that aside, “what's going on? Is everything all right?” Because, after all, she was a
mother.

“I'm going to go with apparently not,” Claudia said, stepping, somehow, into the apartment.

Annie, who usually realized what she'd wished she'd said long after the incident had passed, envied her surprise guest's quick response time. She stepped past Claudia to close the apartment door. The bedroom radiator moaned.