Just Friends (27 page)

Freya frowned. “We’re not on speaking terms.”

“That’s too bad. I thought you were such good friends. Jack’s told me all about you—how you came to New York without any money and put yourself through art school, and did all those awful jobs, and how you discovered that famous artist, and how you two lived in the same rooming house and always went to the movies together.”

“My goodness, Candace, are you planning to write my biography?” Freya didn’t know whether to be annoyed or flattered by the extent of Jack’s revelations.

“I was jealous,” Candace confessed. “Crazy, isn’t it? But I kept pestering him, until he explained why he could never feel about you that way.”

“Ditto,” agreed Freya crisply.

“You two should make up. Everyone needs friends in this world.”

“Fine with me.”

“Let me talk to him. He could at least be grateful that you’re buying all this stuff for the apartment.”

“Well, it’s not exactly—”

But Candace had spied the magazine rack and darted away. She rejoined Freya at the checkout and even tossed in twenty dollars toward the bill. They walked back together, arms wrapped around big brown bags, sunglasses slipping in the heat.

“They say it could get up to ninety today,” said Candace. “I’m, like, totally smothered in sunblock.”

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” said Freya, daydreaming about Brett and tonight. Her new dress was short and strappy, in a shade of aquamarine she knew suited her, made of a strange, stretchy fabric that glistened like fish scales. She wondered if she should buy some of that fake-tanning stuff to warm up her pale skin. Should she put it on all over, or only on the bits that showed? What if she turned orange? She sneaked a glance at Candace’s skin for comparison, lavishly exposed by a scarlet minidress with bows tied at the shoulders, and a generous impulse slipped past her guard.

“I think I should warn you: Jack’s father is in town, and he’s invited you and Jack for drinks tomorrow evening. At the St. Regis.”

“The St. Regis!” squeaked Candace. “The one with all the marble and a little brass house for the doorman?”

“Jack’s father has a special suite.”

Freya watched the implications sink in. After a pause Candace asked, “Are the Madisons—I mean, are they an
old
family?”

“God, no! Arrivistes of the 1930s, I should think, but stinking rich. You’re an American, you know how these things work: Madison Street, the Madison Foundation, Madison Civic Center, the Madison playground for disadvantaged children—all that crap. Mind you, Jack’s dad must be slashing his way through the family fortune with all his alimony payments; he gets divorced on a regular basis. With luck, Jack won’t inherit a penny.”

Candace was silent—probably nervous, poor thing.

“Don’t worry.” Freya gave Candace an encouraging smile. “I’ve spoken to Mr. Madison on the phone, and he sounds delightful.”

“I think I’ll wear my black.”

“Perfect. I’m sure he’ll love you.”

Back in the apartment they deposited their groceries on the kitchen floor with grunts of relief. There was no sign of Jack; his bedroom door was still shut.

“I told him I’d be here by noon.” There was an edge of exasperation in Candace’s voice.

“No doubt you can find a way to wake him up,” said Freya, thinking of the tongue stud.

But Candace had other ideas. She went into the living room and reappeared shortly with a music tape in her hand, which she held up for Freya’s inspection.

“How about this?”

Freya grinned. “Yep, that should do it.”

Within five minutes Jack appeared in the doorway, sketchily dressed in jeans and T-shirt, aghast to find the apartment rocking with music, the kitchen floor strewn with bulging shopping bags, and Candace and Freya reading aloud to each other from a women’s magazine.

“What’s going on?” he growled.

“Hello, Jack.” Candace flashed him a smile, then turned back to Freya. “Okay, next question. ‘You’re at a club with your date, when a gorgeous hunk cuts in and asks you to accompany him to Paris for a weekend of passion. Do you
(a)
tell him to get lost;
(b)
collect your passport and go; or
(c)
say, “Great! Let’s make it a threesome”?’ ”

“Definitely
c
,” answered Freya, in high spirits. “It’s a quiz,” she told Jack. “ ‘How sexy are you?’ I think I’m winning.”

“Dumb-belles of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains.” Jack exuded masculine scorn. “How can anyone be expected to write the Great American Novel when they’re swamped by trivia?”

“Were you writing? We thought you were asleep.” Candace caught Freya’s eye and giggled at her own boldness. “Still, now that you’re here, you can help us put away all these wonderful groceries Freya’s bought for you.”

“What?”

Candace stood up from the table, pulled something at random from one of the bags—a package of rice—and dumped it into Jack’s arms. “Food,” she explained. “For you. All you have to do is put it away.”

“But I don’t even know where—”

“In here,” said Freya, who had stationed herself by a cupboard on the far side of the kitchen. “Come on, chuck it over.”

“And I’ll stash the cold things,” Candace volunteered. She pulled open the fridge door and stood beside it, hand on hip, smiling expectantly at Jack.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, still holding the rice as gingerly as if it were a newborn baby.

But at that moment the track of
Saturday Night Fever
pounded out of the stereo, and a sudden madness overtook them all. Candace started it by waggling her hips to the music and beckoning to Jack like a siren. Infected by the beat, Freya copied her. She’d scored forty-six out of fifty in the quiz, which put her in the “red-hot” category. Thinking of Brett and tonight and how she’d look in the aquamarine dress, she laughed into Jack’s outraged eyes and undulated her long body.

With a sudden God-help-me grin, Jack capitulated. In a flash he had tossed Freya the rice, bent to one of the grocery bags, armed himself with a banana and a cucumber, and was stabbing the air, northeast and southwest, John Travolta–style. Candace whooped with delight. Encouraged, he spun around and treated them to the sight of his thrusting backside as he stabbed again, this time northwest and southeast. After that, there was no holding him. He did a kind of limbo dance with a strawberry before snapping it in two with his teeth. He shook packets of dry pasta like maracas. He clashed tins, juggled grapefruit, spun frozen pizza on one finger, and tangoed with Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix. Candace laughed so hard she dropped the eggs. Jack stubbed his bare toe on a table leg. Freya lobbed things higgledy-piggledy into the cupboard with a huge grin on her face. She’d almost forgotten that Jack could be like this. And he did have a great bum.

When the track finished they collapsed at the table, laughing and out of breath. Two eggs were cracked, several apples bruised, and the pita bread that Jack had frisbeed across the kitchen had failed to survive the trip, but everyone was in a good mood. Candace put coffee on the stove, Jack squeezed fresh orange juice, Freya sacrificed Brett’s putative muffins to the general good, and the three of them breakfasted together, talking companionably of nothing in particular.

“So what are we doing tonight?” Candace asked Jack.

“Whatever you want. See a movie. Grab something to eat. Why, do you have something special in mind?”

“Yes, I do.” Candace straightened in her chair, important as a pouter pigeon. “I think it would be a lovely idea if we invited Freya to join us.”

“What?”
Jack and Freya pounced as one.

“Look how friendly you two can be if you only make an effort. Socializing improves relationships: it’s a known fact.”

“Thanks, but I have plans,” Freya said coolly.

“Why, what are you doing?”

Freya gritted her teeth. “I am going out, Candace. With a man.”

“Oh, yes, so you are!” said Jack, with that hearty bonhomie Freya had learned to distrust. “Freya has a new boyfriend,” he stage-whispered to Candace.

Freya felt herself start to blush, and gabbled on to hide her embarrassment. “We’re taking the train out to Coney Island, as a matter of fact. Very tacky, Candace. Not your scene at all.”

“But I adore Coney Island!” Jack protested. “I haven’t been there for—well, probably not since I went with you, Freya. Was that the time Larry lost his hot dog on the Wonder Wheel?”

“I’ve always wanted to go to Coney Island,” Candace announced, clasping her little hamster hands. “It sounds like so much fun.”

“No,” said Freya, feeling trapped.

“A double date!” Jack enthused. “Very retro. Very Travolta. Heck, where’d I put my white suit?”

“No,” she repeated.

“I think it could be a really, like, bonding experience.”

“I said no! And that’s final.”

CHAPTER 19

“... He was a left-hander, of course—tall guy, graceful as an acrobat—and he hit that ball clear over the lights in right field. You should have seen it, Brett.”

“Sounds like a cool game, Jack. There’s something about left-handers that gives them that extra edge. Do you remember when the Tigers? ...”

The two men moseyed on down the boardwalk, beer cans in hand, shirtsleeves flapping in the offshore breeze—oblivious of the last shreds of purple twilight and brightening stars, blind to the gaudy fun-fair delights around them, and totally ignoring the two women who trailed at their heels—like a couple of housewives from the ‘burbs, Freya thought savagely. She had told Jack to “be nice” to Brett, not to turn the evening into a symposium on bloody baseball.

“The cuticle’s the really important part.” Candace twittered at her shoulder. “My manicurist swears that—”

“How can you call it the
World
Series when no other nation even plays baseball?” Freya yelled at the men’s backs.

At the sound of her voice, Brett and Jack turned politely, finished what they were saying, and gave her identical, preoccupied smiles.

“Hmm—?”

“What’s that, Freya?”

She toned down her glare. “I was just wondering: are we going to do something, or what?”

A split-second glance of understanding passed between the two men. Brett came over and took her hand. “Of course.” He smiled at her. “What do you want to do?”

“I dunno,” she murmured, swinging his hand.

She wanted him to tell her she looked beautiful. She wanted to put her lips to that boyish groove at the back of his neck, where a soft ducktail of black hair met tanned skin. She wanted to laugh and be silly. She wanted to fall in love. Or something.

So they went to a shooting gallery. Candace let Jack show her how to line up the gun, wriggling and giggling in the circle of his arms so that she missed every time. Freya meanwhile armed herself with her own rifle and hit three targets with three shots.

“Ten in a row, and you get a prize. Come on Brett: your turn.”

Cheered on by Freya, he got another three points; then passed the gun on to Jack, who won three more. That was nine: one to go.

“Here, Brett, you take the last shot,” Jack offered courteously.

“It’s okay.”

“No, go ahead.”

“No, really—”

“What about me?” Freya demanded.

“It’s Brett’s job,” Jack insisted.

Poor Brett, nervous under the intent stare of three pairs of eyes, missed.

“Too bad.” Jack gave him a hearty clap on the shoulder, smiling genially down from his superior height.

Freya linked her arm protectively with Brett’s. “Never mind,” she told him. “What shall we do next?”

Brett gazed about him vaguely. “Whatever you want.”

“We don’t have to stay with the others, you know.”

“That’s okay. They seem really nice.”

“Do they? Well, all right. But no more talking about sport.”

“Yes, boss.”

The four of them strolled on through the amusement park, washed this way and that by the crowd. Colored lights flashed as the fairground machines swooped and spun. Music thumped. Loudspeakers touted prizes and trinkets in nasal accents. Salt hung in the humid air and clung to the skin. Freya had suggested Coney Island to Brett because it was cheap and different, and because that’s where she’d often gone to have fun when she was twenty-six. Its glory days as the “World’s Largest Playground” were long gone: by day it was a junkyard of clapped-out equipment and hot dog stands, with grim tenement blocks on one side and a strip of trampled beach on the other. But at night, when when darkness hid the litter and peeling paint, the combination of bright lights and the slow lap of the ocean gave it a kind of magic. Freya showed Brett her favorite landmarks—the sea-serpent humps of the old wooden roller-coaster; the famous stall that had sold frankfurters and fabulously greasy crinkle-cut chips for almost a century; the lights of Rockaway Point across the inlet, with the black ocean beyond, rolling its way to Europe.