Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) (4 page)

A posse of gorgeous young women with big gold hoops and kohl-rimmed eyes threw daggers at Claudia. They'd probably been Tri Delts at Spelman, but were lately emboldened by their kente-cloth head wraps, motorcycle jackets, and the sustained, empowered rush that comes from getting one's law school applications in early. Still, Claudia shrank herself from the fray, moving further away from the bright stage until it became the size of a shoe box, then a Hershey bar, and finally, a Pink Pearl eraser. She returned to the bar and took her place among the three other anonymous white girls, assuming a casual pose with good posture that would telegraph a kind of badass dignity, as opposed to loneliness.

Claudia glanced at the door and considered her options. Past the mountainous bouncer who loomed in the vestibule of the club, she caught a glimpse of the dark, windswept Tribeca street. Ruben had her address and phone number, and Claudia wanted more than anything in the world to expect him. At the same time, she wanted to leave, to feel the rush of cold air off the Hudson, to stalk to the subway and make eye contact with the first hot guy with a knit beanie and headphones who landed across the aisle. But she didn't want Ruben to go home with somebody else, and if he did, Claudia wasn't sure which would be worse, Anonymous White Girl Number Two or Kente-Cloth Bitch-Rag, Esquire, so she had better stay lest he forget she existed—

No, fuck it,
she decided, reaching under the bar for her flight bag, hung on the purse hook.
I'm out.
But her hand felt only hook. Ducking her head to examine the dark space where her bag should have been, she continued to grope around at nothing. Her bag was gone. Snatched. Jacked.
Fuck me dead,
she reflected, dropping her head into her hands to mourn her wallet, her keys, her Filofax, her makeup, and, as long as her head was bowed in misery, the possibility of ever actually having anybody. When she glanced up, she spotted the bag, darting in a flash through the dim club toward the door, in the grip of a fast-moving, skinny black girl with scrawny braids bouncing out from under a striped, pom-pommed acrylic ski hat.

“Here we go,” Claudia muttered as she slid from her bar stool and hurried to the little thief's side. “Excuse you, Miss Thing,” she declared, grabbing the strap of the stolen bag before the girl had reached the illuminated exit. “I think you have something of mine.”

The girl, who had drawn both peace and anarchy signs on her green army pants in Sharpie marker, and wore pink cat's-eye glasses and white shell toes with fat laces, turned, eyes flashing. “Excuse
you,
” she replied, snatching the bag closer to her side. Then: “Claudia?”

Startled, Claudia scanned the girl's face, and was shocked by its familiarity. “Ramona Parker?” she asked, incredulous, relaxing her grip on the bag strap long enough to allow the girl to yank it back. “What are you doing here?”

The Parkers had been Claudia and Phoebe's neighbors, in the days when they'd lived together, with Edith. Mrs. Parker had earned her masters at Yale Drama, but in the absence of any game-changing roles had accepted an extended run as temp, with the occasional non-union commercial and off-off-off-Broadway play. Like Edith, Mrs. Parker had two kids from two dads, but rather than add yet another sticker to her doorbell, she'd given them all her maiden name. Darleen, a tough former girls' varsity basketball player, was a grade ahead of Claudia, but the girls had never hung out in school. Instead, they'd acknowledged each other in the halls with a taciturn mutual respect born on the block, knowing better than to jeopardize their official social positions. Claudia felt a clutch of homesickness for the intimate universe of the Parkers' front stoop, Darleen shooting hoops with the boys in the lot across the street, Ramona letting Phoebe brush the turquoise hair of her My Little Pony.

“I'm writing an article for the school paper on the Ministry of JustUs,” Ramona explained, unsnapping the magnetic closure of her bag and displaying its contents to Claudia: a stapled yellow paper bag from Tower Records, a thick key chain strung with squeezy-armed koala bears, a rolled up
Seventeen
magazine, a green package of Nature Valley granola bars with one bar eaten, and a pair of Guatemalan fingerless gloves. “And
this,
” she added, plainly, “is my bag.” Ramona nodded at Claudia's abandoned bar stool.

Claudia's own Adidas bag was right where she'd left it, not on the purse hook under the bar, but wedged behind the metal legs of her stool. It might have been an unfamiliar sensation, the jolt of dismay, on the heels of an emphatic reaction, fueled by a low thrum of suggested violence, to something that hadn't actually happened. But it wasn't. As a result, Claudia was adept at shifting gears and saving face. “Great bag, isn't it?” she remarked lightly, turning back to Ramona with a miserable smile and a mortified shrug. “Durable vinyl. Dirt wipes clean like
that
.”

“I guess,” Ramona said, edging toward the door.

“Did you get yours on Canal Street, too?” Claudia inquired gamely, as the younger girl fled.

Later that night, Claudia lay in bed in the pale light that somehow made its way from the air shaft outside her bedroom window and wondered if she was waiting for Ruben. Claudia pushed the button on her Indiglo alarm clock: it was twenty minutes past two in the morning. She sighed, folded her hands behind her head, and recapped the day's events. She had gone to work in the morning, and fucked Ruben Hyacinth at lunch in a stairwell, and written yet another postcard to Phoebe, and gone to Ruben's gig. She'd mistakenly almost mugged a young girl from the old neighborhood, and now, maybe, she and Ruben were going to fuck again.

She certainly was living her life to its fullest.

And yet, she had missed a crucial opportunity, the realization of which made her restless with regret. She slid from her futon bed and padded into the kitchen. She pulled the Brooklyn white pages down from the shelf on which it slumped next to her crumbling paperback
Joy of Cooking,
and thumbed through it, looking for the Parkers' phone number. There were about four million Parkers in Brooklyn. And she should have asked one Miss Ramona Parker if she'd seen Phoebe recently, and if so, how Phoebe was doing.

Just then, the buzzer rang. It was a terrible noise, a rusty, disturbed shriek. Claudia looked up from the phone book, stuck a chopstick in her place, and slammed it shut. Bronwyn appeared in her bedroom doorway, weaving on her long, skinny legs, gangly in a tie-dyed union suit, her dishwater-blond hair in two messy braids. “It's for me,” Claudia quickly assured her.

“Oh, really?” Bronwyn grunted sarcastically before disappearing into her room.

The building's foyer smelled like yesterday's fried potatoes and onions. Ruben waited on the other side of the glass, at the top of the stoop, his guitar in its black case strapped across his leather jacket, a knit cap pulled over his head, and the hood of his sweatshirt pulled over that, his breath pouring from his nostrils in the cold predawn air. He was a sexy thug, the kind of man that preppy mothers in plaid coats, clutching their children's mittened hands, crossed the streets to avoid. Claudia imagined the kiss they were about to have, how Ruben's cheeks would feel cold and how one rough hand would slide into the henley placket of the long-underwear shirt she had seductively unbuttoned for the occasion as the other dove into her boxer shorts, and what his tongue would be like. But Ruben brushed past her in the vestibule and stamped the dirty slush from his feet before scrubbing at his nose. “I need to use the phone, baby girl,” he growled. “Long distance.”

Claudia was not about to tell Ruben that she and Bronwyn didn't
have
long-distance service, because as part of her postcollegiate Brooklyn experiment Bronwyn had determined she would split expenses with Claudia and thusly live, officially, at least, according to Claudia's resources. Claudia was not about to tell Ruben that the phone call Ruben needed to make, to his mother, no doubt, or an elderly auntie, would take Claudia weeks of paltry paychecks to pay off. Instead, she reveled in the sound that Ruben's shit-kickers made in the long, dark hallway of her apartment, and from her Bad Batz Maru address book she extracted the charge code with which Gwen from Georgica Films had entrusted her. Now she gave the charge code to Ruben, and she pointed Ruben toward her bedroom, and she followed him until he closed the door in her face.

Claudia went into the living room and fell asleep on the couch. She awoke when Ruben nudged her shoulder. Groggy, she followed him back to her room. Ruben told Claudia to take off her clothes, and she did, and he told her to turn around, and she did, and he fucked her, and it was different from their stairwell tryst. This time, while Claudia felt the coarse hairs of Ruben's lower belly scraping against her ass, and felt him enter her, she had the vague sense that Ruben was angry. She kept herself asleep enough to avoid igniting whatever was roiling inside of him, but awake enough to conjure the passionate hope that she would see him again.

 

A few Saturdays later, Claudia and Bronwyn strolled the Seventh Avenue flea market, held in the concrete yard of the highly rated public elementary school that Claudia and Ruben's improbable children would never attend. Claudia was looking for vintage purses for her collection. Bronwyn sipped a Diet Coke and trawled for first-edition children's books.

“So are you and Ruben going out tonight?” Bronwyn asked lightly.

Ruben had arrived at Claudia's building every night since that first one. So the affair, which Claudia felt at this point she was entitled to describe as such—
The Affair!
—had been carrying on for close to two weeks. Claudia would go to bed at her regular time and wake after midnight to the shrieking buzzer. Ruben's fierce masculinity consumed the little apartment. His leather clothes creaked with cold, his guitar scraped the walls of the narrow hallway, a fresh, warm cloud of vetiver rose from his body. He unwound his scarf and flung his knit hat on Claudia's crowded desk.

Claudia shuffled to the living room and dozed on the couch while Ruben used the phone in her bedroom. She'd wake with a start when he poked her, once, on the sole of her foot, and she followed him back to her bedroom. Ruben sat, muscled and taut, at the edge of her bed to remove his shit-kickers. Only once had Claudia made the mistake of climbing behind him and kneading his shoulders as he went about the business of disrobing. Ruben shot her such a look of flaring irritation that she recoiled as though he might bite. She crept under her duvet and waited for him to slide in and mount her.

Last night, Ruben had flung Claudia up against the wall, hoisted her leg, and as her lower back slammed repeatedly into one of the vintage evening bags hung on her bedroom wall, fucked her with a driving rhythm that brought to mind a football scrimmage. Now, amid the bright bustle of the flea market, Claudia stopped in front of a sprawling display of eight-track tapes, crumbling paperbacks, and matted stuffed animals. “We don't go out,” Claudia replied. “We stay in.”

“Yes, I know,” said Bronwyn. “Loudly.”

“Oh, can you hear us?” Claudia was unable to keep the delight from her voice. Bronwyn herself was a murmurer: she murmured to the boys she dated as she welcomed them back from volunteer stints with the teen mothers of the Ute nation. She murmured into their corduroy shoulders as they strolled, arms linked, to and from the Film Forum, she murmured as she handed them an enduring copy of
Harold and the Purple
Crayon,
she murmured in her loft bed, wrapping her long, thin arms around their prominent shoulder blades and contemplating, wide-eyed, the collage of black and white postcards, iconic images of Paris, mostly, that she'd plastered to the ceiling.

“I haven't heard you, exactly,” Bronwyn explained, “Just lots of crashing around.”

“Yeah—Ruben's kind of a natural athlete.”

“Aren't you afraid of getting hurt?”

Claudia turned her back to Bronwyn. “Look,” she said, lifting the knit waistband of her jacket and the merino turtleneck under it to display the navy-blue bruise, crescent shaped and tinged with yellow, hanging low over her kidneys.

“Oh my God,” Bronwyn gasped. “Why is it shaped like that?”

“Bakelite handle,” Claudia explained, nonchalantly proceeding to a rack of belted leather jackets before turning to enjoy the reflection of her sex badge on her friend's face. Claudia selected a forest-green number and cocked her head, considering it for Bronwyn. “Very you,” she said. “Very Ali MacGraw in
Love Story
.”

Bronwyn snatched the jacket and returned it to the rack with an impatient clatter. “Ruben's a menace. He's going to kill you and I'm going to have to find your body and it's going to be completely disgusting.” Claudia raised a clear Lucite bangle bracelet and cocked an eyebrow. “Are you being racist right now?”

“Racist?!”
Bronwyn cried. “Oh my God. You're on crack.”

“I've been thinking of trying it,” Claudia taunted.

“Just because I don't like your boyfriend doesn't make me a racist.”

“You're scared of him,” Claudia accused, as she excavated two marvelous bracelets from the box.

“Not because he's African American.”

“African American,”
Claudia repeated, giving a little snort. “I love that. You realize black folks don't call themselves that, right?”

“Excuse
me,
Angela Davis,” said Bronwyn, as they strolled on, “but what I am
trying
to say is that the reason Ruben is creepy has nothing to do with the melanin content of his
skin.
He's creepy because he's using you, because he's mean, and because he's old.”

“He's thirty-five! Baldy MD was forty-two!” “Baldy MD” was the name they'd given to the recently separated investment banker, a managing director in Mergers & Acquisitions, with whom Bronwyn had gone on exactly two dates. Bronwyn had met Baldy MD at a benefit for the Children's Aid Society. He had taken her to dinner at Indochine, and, the following weekend, received from Bronwyn a mortifyingly brief hand job in the front seat of the Sebring he'd hired for their antiquing junket to Connecticut.