Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (3 page)

Claudia signed for the delivery and the anonymous little man in the stained white apron scurried away.

“What's for lunch?” Ruben asked, blocking the takeout bags with his saucy pose.

“The usual. Salads for fat girls.”

“Except for you,” Ruben chuckled. “You ordered the dark meat.”

Claudia rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You need some new material,” she said, burning red at the same time. She knew that Ruben was a tragic cartoon, and she wondered why he'd decided to dress himself up as a big black cock and bounce his way toward destiny on his balls. She knew that he lured her by chipping away at her dignity, having forfeited his own. But also, she didn't give a shit, he was
beyond
beyond mad hot—that was the twisted magic of Ruben Hyacinth.

“What you doing tonight?” he asked her, indifferently.

“I don't know.” Claudia pushed Ruben's heavy leather legs out of her way and reached for the takeout bags.

“Playing paper dolls?”

“Yeah,” Claudia replied, “And then I'm going to whip up some killer stumble biscuits with my Easy-Bake oven and start an empire.”

Ruben frowned. “Come see my show.”

“Puppets?” Claudia made one out of her hand and flapped its fingertip gums. “It's the Ruben show!” her hand announced in a squeak as Ruben's grin vanished. “Starring me, Ruben Hyacinth, as Ruben! Special guest star . . . Ruben!” Teasing Ruben frightened Claudia, but she made her puppet hand kiss Ruben's cheek with a
mmmmwWAAH!

Ruben whipped his legs back under the desk in a gesture of disgust. “Shut the fuck up.”

Claudia's heart pounded. “Sorry, Angry,” she said lightly.

“Yeah, well, don't mess with my shit,” Ruben warned.

Claudia raised her right hand in a solemn oath. “I hereby will not mess with your shit,” she intoned. “Where's the show?”

Ruben made a petulant display of rearranging the papers on his clipboard. “It's a JustUs thing,” he said, “at Wetlands.” The Ministry of JustUs, a coalition of black rock musicians, was Ruben Hyacinth's brotherhood of choice, although his fealty to the Ministry was fueled less by cultural politics and more by his desire for a starring role in an MTV music video and sexual release, in that order.

“Well, I'll pass the paper-bag test, that's
fo sho,
” said Claudia.

Ruben narrowed his eyes, provoked. Claudia couldn't tell if Ruben knew what a paper-bag test was or not. “What I'm saying is,” she persisted, “are white girls actually allowed at JustUs events?”

Ruben shrugged. “It's a free country, ain't it?”

“If it was a free country, you wouldn't need a Ministry of JustUs,” Claudia countered. “What the hell kind of revolutionary
are
you?”

Ruben just shook his head. “I'll put you on the list,” he decided.

“Cool,” said Claudia.

Ruben rose from the desk, and Claudia remembered that he was never as tall as he seemed. “Lemme get you an invite,” he said. The heavy ring of building keys jangled loudly as he opened the gate to the service hallway off the lobby. “C'mere.” Claudia glanced guiltily at the lunch bags and followed him.

Ruben closed the gate behind them and jogged up a small flight of stairs, through a shaft of dusty sunlight that poured from a high window, to the coatrack where his jacket hung. He wore a black nylon bomber, lined in quilted orange, just like the one Claudia had recently bought.

Claudia leaned against the wall as Ruben dug in his jacket pockets. He pulled out a stack of invites, a violent font sprawled on fluorescent card stock, and turned. He shoved the invites back in his pocket and came down a step. Slowly, in a gesture evoking both the vaudevillian seduction of a male stripper and the grave ceremony of a religious rite, Ruben pulled his scarf from his neck and arranged it around Claudia's throat. The scarf was cheap, with loose, scratchy metallic threads, a find from a stall on St. Marks or from the closet floor of another conquest, yet a thrilling vapor of vetiver eau de toilette rose from it. Ruben pitched his body forward, letting his tan palms smack against the wall on either side of Claudia's head.

Claudia's body flooded with warmth.

Arousal and triumph. Coupled.

Ruben was a
man.

She knew he felt nothing, but at least he desired the same thing she did.

Claudia could have cared less; she could have bowed down and worshipped. She felt bold, alive, removed. She pictured various people she knew watching this scene in complete horror or crushing envy; she gave them all the finger behind Ruben's broad back. He traced her cheek, her jaw, he grasped the ends of his scarf and drew her to him; he kissed her. His tongue was exquisite, ginger and peppermint, clean, tender, expertly wielded. The skin of his bare, muscled arms was baby soft, pampered, the complete opposite of the hardness he broadcast. There was no ashy dryness on Ruben Hyacinth. With their hands moving in perfect sync, they got her boots and tights off and his leather jeans lowered just enough.

 

When Claudia stepped off the elevator, her tights were twisted and her heart paced wildly inside her rib cage. The lunch bags she clutched contained a wilted sea of romaine. Tamara was waiting at the end of the hall, her hands on her meaty, sweatered hips.

“Hey. Fast & Sloppy,” she demanded. “Where have you been?”

Claudia's voice emerged from her jangled body in a strained falsetto. “I was picking up lunch.”

“It takes you forty minutes to pick up lunch? We were calling and calling the lobby, and Leonard wasn't there. We are beyond starving.”

“Ruben.”

“Whatever, Claudia.” Tamara exhaled loudly and shifted tack as she pulled the bags from Claudia's arms. “Listen to me,” she tried. “You've been a little edgy these days. A little . . . unpredictable. Is everything okay?”

“Your salad's getting cold.” In an attempt to staunch the smell of sex currently snaking from her pores, Claudia folded her arms tightly.

“I'm serious,” Tamara insisted.

“Everything is fine, Tamara.”

“Because this is a small office, and when one of us has a problem,
all
of us have a problem.”

“You mean like when sorority girls get their periods simultaneously?”

“Oh
God,
no,” Tamara replied, her face contorting in a disgusted grimace. Then: “Kim told me you've been dealing with some problems at home. You know, with Mom.”

“Mom?”
Claudia repeated, incredulous. Edith was
Mother,
and always had been. And home was . . . not. She inhaled through her nose to the count of seven, held her breath for four counts, and as she exhaled through her mouth for the count of eight, just like the therapist at the college's Health Services had once taught her, she processed Kim's betrayal.

Tamara's eyes glittered with a different kind of hunger, one with which Claudia was familiar. Tamara wanted to get her mitts on Claudia's fascinating drama so that with it she could recalibrate her own standing in the world and assuage her own uselessness and call it
help.
“Kim says you haven't spoken to Mom in a couple of years.”

Claudia shrugged. “True dat.”

“How old are you exactly, Claudia?”

“Forty.”

“Claudia.”

“Twenty-four.”

“And what about your little sister?”

“Phoebe?”

“Is she still at home with Mom?”

Claudia pictured Tamara's frosted pumpkin head smashing against the pavement, after landing with a satisfying thud, having been launched from the fire escape. Kim would catapult and perish shortly thereafter, Tamara's splayed and broken body serving as an ineffectual crash pad.

Home with Mom.
Was that what they were calling Edith Mendelssohn's house these days?

Oh, the thrill when the brownstone had been purchased: the longed-for promise of respectability.

How wonderful the word
brownstone
had sounded, how Claudia had steered every conversation toward it.

The defeat when the house was first viewed: a metal gate for a front door; the back garden peppered with dead rats, used needles and condoms, and fresh cat shit.

The unfinished basement where she and Phoebe had occupied neighboring twin mattresses underneath a low canopy of exposed pipes and stapled wires, Edith's foam mattress against a nearby concrete wall.

How the clamp-on lights affixed to the pipes and rafters illuminated the view from her bed: empty cardboard boxes, broken umbrellas, rusted ironing boards, expired appliances, garbage bags stuffed with old school assignments, and piles of cracked, curled shoes forming an unsteady mountain range. How she swept her eyes across the space, renovating it in her mind as she had seen other white folks in the neighborhood do in real life, making the unfinished cellar into real rooms, with heat, and doors.

The tempera vines and flowers with which the sisters had gamely decorated the plywood floors.

The exposed-brick wall behind the fireplace on the parlor floor upstairs, which was for Claudia not just a glimmer of the battered house's possibilities, but of their own. A few house-proud square feet, visible at certain angles from the street.

How Claudia had considered finally inviting a friend or two over, or at least letting friends hang around the dining room table on the parlor floor, where, if you squinted, things seemed kind of okay. Real art on the walls, good books on the shelves.

How the beloved exposed-brick wall became the exclusive domain of Edith and Robbie Burns when they turned the front room into a bedroom. This was after Robbie ditched rehab again and moved in with them, the morning after Edith had finally confessed that he existed, after years of pretending to hide their relationship in plain sight.

The John Lennon poster that Robbie hung over the fireplace.

The alarm system that Robbie installed in the foyer of the ground floor: a plastic tub stocked with aluminum baseball bats and hand axes.

The evenings when Edith would brush Robbie's long hair and carefully wrap his braid with a leather thong as he ignored her, chain-smoking Pall Malls, glaring at Claudia as she hurried past, staring at Phoebe.

“Yup,
at home with Mom,
” Claudia told Tamara, punctuating the space between them with air quotes. “And her boyfriend.”

“Have you thought of contacting Mom first? Maybe sending her a card? They have some really great ones at the Open Center.”

The office door flew open, and Faye appeared.

“Hallelujah, let's eat!” Faye cried, snatching the lunch bags from Tamara and disappearing inside.

Tamara cupped Claudia's chin and peered at her closely. Claudia noticed the tiny dark roots at the base of Tamara's feathery mustache: she must have devoted hours a week attempting to keep it blond. “I want you to know that I am here for you, Claudia,” Tamara said. “We all are, okay?”

“Got it, chief,” said Claudia. They went inside.

“Where
were
you?” Kim asked, feeling betrayed herself, despite her free discussion of Claudia's secret troubles.

“I can guess where she was,” Ricky singsonged, emerging from his office. The joint in the breast pocket of his flowing shirt peeked out. He raised his sunglasses and gave Claudia a wink.

“Where? What?” Kim cried, accusingly.

“Trust me, you can't handle the truth, Kim,” said Ricky. He yanked the end of Ruben's long striped scarf. Claudia had forgotten she was still wearing it.

“Oh!” Faye exclaimed, always on the hunt for an in with Ricky, glancing at the scarf as she emerged from the bathroom. “Is that from Daffy's?” Ricky rolled his eyes and headed to the fire escape for a toke.

Claudia now stood alone in the office hall. From the dining room, she heard the plastic snap of salad boxes opening.

A lumbering, backlit shape appeared.

It was Gwen, the first to order, the last to join. She avoided the awkwardness of the narrow hallway and her labored gait by holding back until the rest had been seated. Claudia breathed in Gwen's powdery scent as she approached. “Don't let the turkeys get you down, kid,” Gwen said, as she made her way to the rustle and chatter of family-style lunch at Georgica Films.

 

Later that night, Claudia stuffed her vinyl Adidas flight bag under a bar stool and made her way to the corner of the Wetlands main stage. Of course, she wasn't going to wave, she wasn't even going to nod. But she wanted the residue of her hallway sex with Ruben to be their inside thing. Yet Ruben was fully ignoring her, really putting an effortless effort, it seemed, into confirming what she already knew: that she shouldn't mistake Ruben for anything resembling a boyfriend. And yet, watching him tweak his setup, laugh hard with his bandmate, tear out a thrilling solo during which he jutted his hips, sneered, tossed his head, and earned applause from the growing crowd as the veins in his neck popped, Claudia felt proud. Unable to hold back, she let herself picture them as a couple. Striding up Avenue A in tandem, passing a cigarette back and forth. Attending an opening at the Studio Museum in Harlem. At the baggage claim after a long return flight from Paris, a stunningly gorgeous baby on her hip, possibly named Djuna. Never
ever
lolling around on a Sunday reading the
New York Review of Books
and eating toasted bagels because, fuck it—that shit was played.

Claudia had seen the handful of ancient Kodachromes of her mother and father as newlyweds, a tan pair in tennis sweaters gunning for the Jewish Intellectual Good Life. She'd been raised in the mysterious aftermath of their joint swan dive, and knew that she would never marry well. Marrying well was a strategy instilled in eager daughters by their driven, practical mothers, and Claudia was a confirmed scrapper, not a desirable bride. At best, she would be a charity case for whatever summer associate or MBA candidate she could try for, scrambling for borrowed cocktail dresses.