In the Age of Love and Chocolate (3 page)

“Vanilla,” I noted, looking at the sliced cake. “Not chocolate.”

“We can’t have you brought down by minor indiscretions,” he said. “You’re an adult now. The next time you’re in trouble, it’s off to Rikers. I’m headed home. Jane and I have plans. Promise me you’ll settle on a name before tomorrow. We have to start getting the word out.”

Naming the club had proven difficult. I couldn’t use
my
name because that would have associated the business with organized crime.
Cacao
or
chocolate
couldn’t be in it, though it was necessary for people to know that they could get chocolate here. The name needed to sound fun and exciting, but not illegal in any way. I still clung to the probably foolish idea that it should evoke good health.

“Honestly, I’m not even close,” I said.

“That won’t do.” He looked at his watch. “I still have a little time before Jane will murder me.” He sat back down. “Let’s have your top five then.”

“Number one, Theobroma’s.”

“No. Hard to pronounce. Hard to spell. Ridiculous.”

“Number two, Prohibition.”

He shook his head. “Nobody wants a history lesson. Plus, it seems political. We don’t want to seem explicitly political.”

“Three, the Medicinal Cacao Company.”

“These are getting worse. I’ve already told you, you cannot have
medicinal
in the name of a nightclub. Sounds like sick people and hospitals and bacterial outbreaks.” He shuddered.

“If you’re going to shoot down everything, I don’t know why I should go on.”

“Because you have to. Something has to be painted on the sign, Anya.”

“Fine. Four, Hearts of Darkness.”

“Is that a reference? It’s a bit pretentious. But I like ‘dark’—‘dark’ is better.”

“Five, Nibs.”

“Nibs. Are you kidding?”

“That’s what they process the cacao into,” I explained.

“It sounds dirty and weird. Trust me. No one will ever go to a club called Nibs.”

“That’s what I’ve got, Mr. Delacroix.”

“Anya, I think we can go by our given names now.”

“I’m used to Mr. Delacroix,” I said. “Frankly, I think it’s rather presumptuous of you to call me Anya.”

“You want I should call you Ms. Balanchine?”

“Or ma’am. Either one. I’m your boss, aren’t I?” After what he had put me through in 2083 (prison, poison), I felt entitled to josh.

“Partner, I’d say. Or legal counsel to
unnamed
Manhattan club.” He paused. “Mrs. Cobrawick was a formidable woman. When you were at Liberty didn’t she teach you anything about respecting your elders?”

“No.”

“That institution is a waste of the land it sits on. Returning to the discussion at hand. How about the Dark Room?”

I considered it. “Could be worse.”

“There’s the unavoidable photography reference of course. But it’s a little bit evil. It references what we’re selling. And, at this point, we have to choose a name. Don’t you know how publicity works, Anya? You repeat the same message over and over again in as loud a voice as possible. To do this, though, we need to have something to say.”

“The Dark Room,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

“Good. I’m off for the night, then. Happy Birthday,
ma’am
. Big plans for later?”

“I’m going to a play with my best friend, Scarlet, and Noriko.” Noriko was my brother’s wife and she was also working as my assistant.

“What are you seeing?”

“Scarlet bought the tickets. A comedy, I hope. I hate crying in public.”

“It’s a good policy. I try never to do it myself,” he said.

“Unless it served your interests somehow, I imagine. How’s your son?” I asked casually. We never talked about Win. It was a tiny present to myself to even ask the question.

“Yes, him. Change of plans. The boy has decided to go to college in Boston,” Mr. Delacroix reported.

“He mentioned that.” I’d boxed up his possessions, but I still hadn’t managed to bring them to work.

“He’ll be back for holidays and summers, I imagine,” Mr. Delacroix said. “Jane and I will miss him, of course, but Boston isn’t very far.”

“Well, give him my regards, will you?”

“You could always come give them yourself. His father won’t object.”

“I think that’s done, Mr. Delacroix,” I said. “He doesn’t understand about the business.”

Mr. Delacroix nodded. “No, I can’t imagine that he would. He’s prideful and he’s been too sheltered.”

I wanted to know if Win ever asked about me, but the question was too humiliating. “Relationships aren’t always meant to last forever,” I said, trying to sound wise. If I said this enough times, maybe I would start to believe it. “Isn’t that what you’ve always told me?”

“Life is not easy for the ambitious, Anya.”

“I’m not ambitious,” I said.

“Sure you are.” His mouth was amused, but his eyes were annoyingly certain. “I should know.”

“Thanks for the cake,” I said.

He held out his hand for me to shake. “Happy birthday.”

Not long after Mr. Delacroix departed, I took a bus back to my apartment.

The truth was, I did not miss that boy.

Maybe I missed the idea of that boy.

*   *   *

(NB: No, it wasn’t just the idea. It was
him
. I missed that stupid boy, but what was the point of that? I had no right to miss him. I’d made my choice. Forgive me the honeyed lies I told myself—I was still so young. And when we are young, we don’t even know completely what we are giving up.)

*   *   *

(NB: What I mean to say is that you can make a choice, be reasonably satisfied with it, and still regret that which you did not choose. Maybe it’s like ordering dessert. You have it narrowed down to either a warm peanut butter torte or strawberries jubilee. You choose the torte, and it’s delicious. But you still wonder about those strawberries…)

*   *   *

(NB: So yes, from time to time, I thought about the strawberries.)

*   *   *

Noriko and I had been waiting outside the theater for a half hour. “Should we go inside without her?” Noriko’s English had improved a remarkable amount since she’d arrived in America four and a half months ago.

“I’ll go call her from the pay phone,” I said. I hadn’t had time to procure my, as of today, perfectly legal cell phone.

Scarlet picked up on the fifth ring. “Where are you?” I asked.

“Gable was supposed to watch Felix, but he never showed up. I can’t make it. You guys should go to the play without me. I’m really sorry, Annie,” Scarlet said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“I am worried about it. It’s your birthday, and I wanted to see the play. Can I come meet you later? We’ll dance or have drinks.”

“Honestly, I’ve been working since six in the morning. I’ll probably go home and go to bed.”

“Happy birthday, my love,” Scarlet said.

The play Scarlet had chosen was about an old man and a young woman who switch bodies with each other at a wedding. The young woman’s husband has to learn to love the young woman, even though she’s in the old man’s body. And in the end, everyone learns a lot of lessons about love and acceptance and how it doesn’t matter what body you’re in. It was romantic, and I was not in the mood for a romance, which you’d think Scarlet could have guessed.

When the actors took their bows, they were given a standing ovation, but I stayed in my seat. Romance was a lie. It was so much of a lie that it made me angry. Romance was hormones and fiction. “Boo,” I whispered. “Boo to this whole stupid play.” No one heard me. There was too much applause. I could boo all I wanted and I found this liberating.

And the worst part was I didn’t even like the theater. Scarlet liked the theater and she hadn’t bothered to show up. And it wasn’t the first time she’d missed an appointment with me either. I honestly didn’t know why I bothered making plans with her anymore. “Boo to Scarlet. Boo to the theater.”

Noriko was weeping and clapping like a crazy person. “I miss Leo,” she said. “I miss Leo so much.”

Maybe Noriko did miss Leo, but in that moment, I was skeptical. They barely spoke the same language. They had known each other a little over a month when they decided to marry. And we were talking about my brother. He was a nice person, but … I’d been working with Noriko the whole summer. She was smart and, not to be mean, Leo was not.

*   *   *

I defrosted some peas and was about to close the chapter on my unmemorable eighteenth birthday when the phone rang.

“Anya, this is Miss Bellevoir.” Kathleen Bellevoir was Natty’s math teacher at Holy Trinity, but in the summer she worked at genius camp. “There’s some trouble with Natty up here, and I wanted to let you know that she’s going to be home tomorrow.”

I put my hand over my heart. “What’s wrong? Is she sick?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. But there has been an incident. Several incidents, I should say. Everyone on staff has decided that it’s best if she comes home early. The purpose of my call is to ensure you’ll be there when she arrives.”

“What kind of incidents?” I asked.

All the Things Natty Had Done

1. Failed to participate in science and math labs

2. Generally disrespected staff and other campers

3. Was caught with chocolate on the campus

4. Was caught in a boy’s room after hours

5. Snuck out of camp, stole the camp’s van, and drove it into a ditch

The last and latest incident had marked the official end of genius camp’s patience.

“Is she hurt?” I asked.

“Bumps and bruises. The van made out less well. I love your sister, and she had such a success here last summer that everyone, myself included, tried to ignore it when she started having trouble. I probably should have called you sooner.”

I wanted to yell at Miss Bellevoir for not watching Natty closely enough, but I knew this wasn’t rational. I bit my lip, which was chapped and began to bleed.

*   *   *

Natty arrived at the apartment at six the next night, which was a Sunday. My sister was pretty banged up. She had bruises on her cheek and forehead and a deep cut on her chin. “Oh, Natty,” I said.

She opened her arms as if to hug me, but then her face morphed into a snarl. “For God’s sake, Annie, don’t look at me that way. You’re not my mother.” She stalked to her bedroom and slammed the door.

I gave her ten minutes before I knocked.

“Go away!”

I turned the knob, which was locked. “Natty, we need to talk about what happened.”

“Since when do you want to talk? Aren’t you Miss Stiff Upper Lip? Miss Keep Everything Inside?”

I picked the lock on Natty’s door with the nail we kept over Leo’s (now Noriko’s) room.

“Go away! Can’t you please leave me alone?”

“I can’t,” I said.

She pulled the blanket over her head.

“What happened this summer?”

She didn’t answer.

I had not gone into her room for a while. It was like two people lived there: a child and a young woman. There were bras and dolls, perfume and crayons. One of Win’s hats, a gray fedora, hung from a hook on the wall. She had always liked his hats. Next to the mirror was a periodic table, and I noticed that she had circled some of the elements.

“What do the circles mean?” I asked.

“They’re my favorite ones.”

“How do you choose?”

She emerged from under the covers. “Hydrogen and oxygen are pretty obvious. They make water, which is the source of life, if you care about that kind of thing. I like Na, sodium, and Ba, barium, because those are my initials.” She pointed to Ar, which wasn’t circled. “Argon is totally inert. Nothing affects it, and it has a hard time forming chemical compounds, i.e., having relationships. It’s a loner. It doesn’t ask for anything from anybody. It reminds me of you.”

“Natty, that isn’t true. Things affect me. I’m upset right now.”

“Are you? It’s hard to tell, Argon,” Natty said.

“Maybe the point is, it doesn’t matter what happened to you at camp. Summer is summer. Summer is never real life anyway.”

“It isn’t?”

I shook my head. “You had a bad summer. That’s all. School starts in a couple weeks. It’s your junior year, and I think it’s going to be a great one for you.”

“Okay,” she said after a while.

“I’ve got to go to the club, but I’ll be back later,” I said.

“Can I come?”

“Some other time,” I said. “I think you should rest up tonight. You look terrible, by the way.”

“I think I look tough.”

“Troubled maybe.”

“Criminal. A real Balanchine.”

I kissed Natty on the forehead. I had never been good with words. On the path from my heart to my brain to my mouth, phrases became twisted and hopelessly convoluted. The intent—what I meant to say—never quite made it out. My heart thought,
I love you.
My brain warned,
How embarrassing. How foolish. How dangerous
. My mouth said,
Please go away
, or worse, it made some senseless joke. I knew I needed to do better for Natty in this moment. “No, you’re nothing like that,” I said. “You’re the smartest, best girl in the world.”

*   *   *

Instead of taking the bus, I walked to the club. It was after dark and a bit late to be walking alone, but even Argon the Seemingly Unaffected sometimes needed to clear her head. I was halfway there, almost to Columbus Circle, when it began to rain. My hair frizzed, but I didn’t care. I loved New York City in the rain. The rotten smells faded, and the sidewalks looked almost clean. Colorful umbrellas sprouted like upside-down tulips, and the windows of the empty skyscrapers shone, if only for the night. In the rain, it did not seem possible that we might run out of water, or that anyone you loved could truly be gone forever. I believed in the rain.

As I walked, I thought of Natty and whether I had said and done the right things this evening. I had been miserable at that age. My parents were dead, and Nana’s condition had been getting worse every day. At school, my only friend was Scarlet. I had been obsessed with the idea that everyone was insulting me, and maybe some of them were. I got in and picked fights constantly. (In retrospect, it is amazing I was not tossed out of Holy Trinity years earlier.) At fourteen, I was not at the height of physical attractiveness either—I was a big head of hair and a too-round face and breasts that were still in the process of figuring out how to be breasts. By the time I was fifteen, I had improved looks-wise, and that was the year I started dating Gable Arsley, who had been my first real boyfriend and the first boy to say I was pretty. See, the rain was so clever it could even trick me into having a nice memory about Gable.