Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (2 page)

“If you say so,” Claudia managed to get out.

“You can stay in our guest room. We'll help you figure it out.”

Claudia clung to Bronwyn. “Thank you,” she eventually said.

“I love you, Claudia. You're my best friend.” There was not a tissue in sight. Bronwyn offered Claudia the hem of her Indian print tunic. “Do you want to blow your nose?”

“Oh
hell
no,” Claudia replied, finding her ability to chuckle.

“Do you want to go with me and my dad to Corner Bistro?” Bronwyn asked. Bronwyn's dad was Paul Tate. He was what a father was supposed to be. Handsome and powerful, with a taste for both problem solving and fun, and a large collection of witty cuff links. “He's down in the Village,” Bronwyn continued, “and I'm sure he'd love to see you.”

“Even under dreadful fucking circumstances?” Claudia shuddered, the last of her sobs moving through her.

“Are you kidding?” said Bronwyn, rising fluidly to her feet and offering Claudia her hand, “he eats dreadful fucking circumstances for breakfast.”

It was midafternoon and midweek, but Paul Tate, a senior partner at a white-shoe law firm in midtown, was able to get away and spring for burgers, beers, and advice. He would have quarters for the jukebox, favoring Stan Getz and “Box of Rain.” He was a man who would
be
there. For his kids, for his kids' friends, even for his friends' kids. He was sane, and he was buying.

“Yes,” said Claudia, as Bronwyn took her hand and pulled her up to standing. “Please. Totally.”

 

That May night at the Corner Bistro had been almost two years ago, and Claudia and Bronwyn had since become roommates. They now shared a first-floor apartment in Brooklyn, on the south side of Park Slope. During the summer, their place had been sweltering, with plastic box fans in every room. But now that it was November, a chilly draft swept in and the old windows rattled. In the last two years, Claudia had started what was apparently her adult life, complete with taxes, credit cards, birthdays, Pap smears, snowstorms, clumsy accidents involving avocados and paring knives and requiring a few stitches, and other milestones and phenomena on which, she noticed, Bronwyn regularly consulted Annie and Paul Tate.

In these two years, Claudia had not heard a single word from Edith, who lived four subway stops away.

Edith had always expected her eldest to recite poetry, write charming thank-you notes, rise when an adult came into the room, eat her pizza with a fork and knife, deftly analyze major works of art and literature, assuage her depression and counsel her heartbreaks, and otherwise promote the aristocratic values of her rightful home, a Europe that no longer existed. Claudia had been a cowed, entertaining child, aware of the chaotic sea that rose up on all sides around her mother, an atoll. But these same skills had come in terrifically handy over the last two years, during which Claudia had become an expert on soliciting temporary rescue from other people's parents, the Tates chief among them. Performing for them, projecting a confidence that belied her fear, dining for weeks on the leftovers from their Thanksgiving tables, belonging nowhere. Surviving.

Bronwyn Tate received a monthly allowance of four hundred dollars and brought her laundry home once a month for Annie's cleaning lady's loving regimen of bleach, softener, and sharp folds. With the paychecks she earned as an assistant producer on a syndicated morning talk show hosted by a former Miss USA whose girl-on-girl photos had cost her her crown but landed the front page of the
Post,
Bronwyn paid her share of the rent and utilities and put ten percent in savings. With her allowance she bought steak frites, theater tickets, first editions, and shirts from Steven Alan. When her allowance ran short, she met Paul for lunch in the partners' dining room and left with a check.

But in Claudia's case, “no money” really did mean
no money,
especially toward the end of the month. Accordingly, she had become an expert on free things in Manhattan: the exact timing of subway-to-bus transfers, the Thai tofu cubes, baked falafel, and other after-work samples at Healthy Pleasures that would do for dinner, and the listening booths at Tower Records, where she'd lose herself in Lisa Stansfield for forty seconds at a time. In the evenings, at the dive bars, Mexican restaurants, and dance clubs that she frequented, Claudia paid for shots, beers, and margaritas with the generous allowance always on offer from her new credit card. Weaving slightly in her cowboy boots, Claudia would scan the free promotional postcards that had recently popped up in display racks at her favorite haunts. The postcards boasted cheeky graphics that often referenced sadomasochistic sex and usually celebrated hard liquor. Claudia combed them for G-rated images, and sent off innocuous, Edith-proof messages to her sister, Phoebe, who had been fourteen the last time they'd seen each other. Claudia's estrangement from Edith had ushered a storybook frost into the triangular kingdom, with Snow White and Rose Red encased in separate blocks of blue ice at its center. Claudia was prepared to play all roles in the tale: the dastardly villain, the chilblained victim coughing spottily into an embroidered handkerchief—shit, she'd even be her own handsome prince.

“Darling Feebz,”
a typical note would read,
“Today I saw a white guy with locks at Smith/9th Street reading CATCH A FIRE and I thought of you. Say hi to Barkella. I miss you and love you. Claude.”
Barkella was Phoebe's beloved terry-cloth dog, whose irises had long ago been rubbed from her plastic eyes. For all Claudia knew, Phoebe might have already relegated Barkella to a cardboard box.

At fifty-two, Edith Mendelssohn's beauty had taken on a voracious quality as it defended itself. She was anxiously fixated on Phoebe's lanky form, with its willowy limbs, her loose mane of sandy waves, and her large, sexual mouth. Phoebe's captivating appearance only fueled Edith's quiet doubts about her child's intelligence. As Edith piled and twisted her own lush, silvering mane in the mottled mirror of her tiny bathroom's medicine cabinet and grimly considered that her own refugee parents had been unable to afford braces for her teeth, she reaffirmed her belief that beauty and brilliance were mutually exclusive. Brilliant women used their minds to seduce, and as they accumulated and discarded suitors, their brilliance tended to harden, diamondlike. Beautiful women, on the other hand, had no choice but to quickly tether themselves to dull men with paunches and briefcases, and then face a lifetime of constant pregnancies and pristine living rooms devoid of a single real book.

Had Claudia brought home anything shy of an A-minus, Edith's response would have been baffled and withering. But to the simplest of Phoebe's achievements—a painting of a Thanksgiving turkey fashioned from a handprint, a B-minus on a social studies quiz—Edith responded with an overwrought gasp. The fact that this dramatic praise was actually relief was not lost on Phoebe. It made her want to fail.

Phoebe was a junior in high school now. She probably wasn't a virgin; she probably did drugs, and which ones and with whom and how often and where, Claudia knew full well, would chart her future as powerfully as what college she would attend—with the defining question of what drugs to do in college looming powerfully on a rapidly approaching horizon.

Of course, Phoebe never wrote back.

She would have needed Claudia's address to do that.

 

Every day at noon, it went something like this.

A loaded silence would choke the sunny, stifling, open-plan work space at Georgica Films as Claudia headed for the menu drawer.

Everybody lived for lunch. Everybody was worried that Claudia was going to forget about it. Everybody bragged to their cubicle-dwelling friends about the homey, civilized rituals of Georgica Films. Everybody was worried about the restaurant choice. Everybody was starving, struggling with a bottomless hunger that had been stuffed every which way. Everybody was wondering if they would go to the gym that night and if so, how that would inform the sandwich-versus-salad dilemma. Everybody loathed one another, wishing to God they could just eat at their desks or duck out for a goddamned slice like the rest of New York City.

Claudia grabbed a handful of menus. Her bosses' ears were satellite dishes scanning the universe for anything resembling a side order of fruit. She'd return to the work space and take her customary place at its center, as the daily debate would commence.

On this November day it went exactly like this.

“So where are we ordering?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Faye sighed, thrusting her arm toward Claudia and wriggling her fingers and thumbs, stacked with silver and turquoise rings, in an excited bid for a menu. A nobody from nowhere, as Edith would say, Faye was Georgica Films' senior producer, Ricky's second in command. In a bid for eternal youth, Faye colored her hair a rich shade of eggplant and wore matching lip liner, unaware that these choices broadcast her spot as the oldest woman in the room. Ricky, a Jewish American Prince from Great Neck who admired and scorned the artistic life, grudgingly appreciated that Faye's collection of squash-blossom necklaces and conch belts complemented his design scheme.

“Where did we order yesterday?” Faye inquired.

“Around the Clock diner,” Claudia reminded.

“Right. Grilled chicken caesar,” Faye reminisced, cupping her chin.

“Dressing and Parmesan toasts on the side,” Claudia elaborated.

“Mm.” Faye nodded contemplatively, deflated by the memory.

Kim put her call to a Miami production designer on hold. She was the only
married
-married woman at Georgica Films, and emphasized her status by facing the framed, drunken candid from her wedding night into the room. “Sushi?” she offered hopefully, having perfected the art of milking her job for expensive perks.

Nearby, Tamara pushed a wall of angry air through her wide nostrils. “Hello, parasites?” she threatened rhetorically. She was a tall, curvaceous woman with fluffy, multicolored hair. In her daily costume of leggings, cowl-necked knit tunics, and floppy, jewel-toned Arche boots, she still managed to swagger.

Kim cupped her fingers toward the ceiling and, with a wink to Claudia, ever so subtly flipped Tamara the bird. “How about Thai,” Tamara suggested.

“How about I get a tattoo that says
I'm allergic to peanuts,
” countered Kim.

“I'm good with Around the Clock,” came a timid voice from another corner, belonging to Gwen, the morbidly obese production accountant, who commuted from Staten Island and who had just signed the contract on a new townhome in which she'd continue to live with her mother and Fabio, her adored cat. Gwen was actually raising her hand.

Claudia looked around the room. “Going once, going twice, sold,” she determined, calling on Gwen as the other women quickly absorbed their respective disappointment and returned to their phones. “Yes, Gwen.”

“I'll have a grilled chicken caesar,” said Gwen. “Dressing and Parmesan toasts on the side.”

“Me, too,” said Kim.

“Me three,” sang Faye.

“Me four,” whined Ricky, his nasal voice floating over the glass-brick walls that encased his office, where he was hunched over on a bark-cloth couch, rolling a joint on a book of Bruce Weber photographs, well aware that someone had been dipping into his stash again.

Tamara snapped her fingers at Claudia. “Let me see the menu.”

While she waited for lunch to arrive, Claudia tidied up the mess of stems and leaves left from Ricky's flower arranging and set the table with Fiestaware and thick cotton napkins. She made visits to the bathroom mirror, where she pushed her bangs this way and that way across her forehead and fidgeted with the thick ropes of ceramic African beads that formed a tangled breastplate over her vintage cardigan.

Her whole body was prickling hot and cold.

She was not thinking about lunch.

The house phone by the loft's front door rang and she dove on it.

She tried to make herself sound distracted and offhand. “Georgica,” she said.

“Hey, girl,” said a voice like gravel and velour. It was Ruben Hyacinth, the rock-and-roll doorman. Claudia leaned against the wall. “Eat or be eaten,” Ruben growled, then exploded in laughter. Claudia hung up and caught her breath, remembering exactly how she came to know that Ruben had pierced nipples. Tamara was staring at her from behind her desk.

“Getting lunch, be right back,” she chirped, breaking a strict office rule as she let the heavy door slam behind her.

In the elevator, Claudia pulled up her textured tights, tucked her T-shirt into the denim skirt she'd made from a pair of jeans, and jittered the pointy toe of her black cowboy boot. As the elevator doors opened, she pushed the sleeves of her cardigan up above her elbows, jammed her hands in her pockets, sucked in her stomach, and casually ambled toward the front desk, behind which Ruben sat. He unfolded his legs and propped them on his desk, his large hands clasped behind his shaved brown head. The better to watch Claudia with.

“What's up?” Claudia offered coolly.

“Not much, little girl,” Ruben replied, grinning. He was part peacock, part pit bull, with gorgeous teeth, real choppers, framed by full, bow-shaped lips that shone coppery behind their veil of Carmex, inside a handsome face that was ravaged, despite a clear complexion. Ruben had about nine hundred silver earrings piercing each of his ears, tiny hoops where the cartilage neared the skull, growing larger as they marched toward the lobes, which were embedded with thick silver thorns. He had Chinese characters tattooed along each forearm, the dark navy of the designs camouflaged against his skin. He wore a P. Funk T-shirt stretched taut, leather jeans, motorcycle boots, and smelled expensively of Guerlain. He had a very long, very skinny scarf, black and silver stripes, looped once around his neck, its fringes trailing his thighs. Claudia had no idea how she was managing to walk toward him. What she wanted to do was surrender, to let him see the truth—that Ruben put her in a depraved state. She should be crawling toward him across the marble of the lobby.