Rainey Royal (18 page)

“She’s not going to ruin your cake because she’s not going to do it,” says Rainey.

Man and buttercream remain in deep communion. Finally he says, “There’s a bit of an art to it. If I wasn’t free, they’d stake the cake and deliver it whole.”

“ ‘Stake the cake’?” says Leah.

“For stability,” he says. “Sharpen a dowel and hammer it down the middle.”

“Hah,” says Tina. “Like killing a vampire.”

The baker’s apprentice blanches. “You haven’t said you like it.”

It’s both effusive and restrained, this wedding cake, strewn with café-au-lait roses. Rainey still wishes she’d managed mice.

“I love it,” says Leah. “You should sign it.”

He looks around her bare-walled studio. “Where’s your wedding?”

“She came to her senses,” says Rainey lightly. “Where’s your cloche?”

He touches his uncovered hair.

“Take it apart first,” he says. “Eat from the bottom, not the top.”

As soon as he leaves, Tina picks up the knife that Leah has set on the windowsill.

“Wait,” says Rainey, touching her wrist.

She watches Leah circle the table, studying the three-story confection as if looking for an angle of attack. Saliva pools in the hollow of Rainey’s tongue. The thing is flawless, extravagant. Maybe, for Leah, it’s too perfect. Maybe she’s afraid her appetites might tarnish it.

“Wait for what?” says Tina coolly. “This is the kind of thing I’m good at, remember?” She looks at Leah and sets the edge of the blade on the top tier.

Back off, thinks Rainey. You don’t have anything to prove.

“Sugar causes adhesions,” says Tina. “That’s when tissue sticks to tissue. You’re going to be a wreck.”

HOW IT SAVED HER

Rainey enters the dark tidal pool between streetlights on a side street. He steps out of a doorway, grabs her jacket at the back of the neck, and twists.

“I have a knife,” he says. Rainey feels a point of pressure above her hip and a prickle of sweat in the April night. “Wallet and rings.
That
ring.”

He must be an actor, rehearsing, right? Her feet seem to lift from the sidewalk. Does everyone float when they’re being mugged? She feels in her bag, finds her wallet, and reaches back with it. The wallet contains three dollars, a library card, tokens. But the diamond ring—that was her grandmother’s. She considers the pressure of the knife through her denim jacket. It could be a pen.

“The ring’s stuck,” she says. This is theoretically true: it’s
barely come off since her mother put it there: not even when her father hoped to sell it.

The mugger jabs. It hurts. It could still be a pen. “Want me to cut it off?” he says.

From a great distance she hears herself say,
Yeah, I think you should slice my finger off, dumbfuck
, and then a man says, “Lucy?”

He comes out of nowhere from behind and circles around to face them. “Lucy, I thought it was you,” he says. But they have never met. She makes out black-rimmed glasses, the kind of bland leather jacket worn by the good guys, an expression both cautious and expectant. “Is this a friend?”

Half behind her, the mugger drapes a proprietary arm around her shoulders and pokes her with the sharp object. So it would not be safe to say no. Instead, she makes a tiny, deliberate noise of distress. “I don’t feel so good,” she says. Then she collapses with some force to the sidewalk and grabs the stranger’s white-socked ankle.

“Help me,” she says, closing her eyes partway and twitching as she imagines epilepsy might look. “I’m having a seizure. Don’t leave me.” From the sidewalk she considers her mugger’s chinos. Didn’t men with knives wear jeans? So graceless to lie twitching on the ground, but she does, gripping the stranger’s ankle and pleading, “Don’t leave me, I’m having a seizure.” She hears her mugger say, “I’ll go for help.” She feels a hand on her arm. She smells lemon verbena.

“Tell me you’re faking.”

She opens one eye fully. Jerks her right leg just in case.

“He’s gone.” The man extends a hand. He wears a school ring. Who loves school that much? “You had to be faking—no one talks in a seizure,” he says.

She pulls herself up by his hand and stands, trembling in every limb though she tries to stop. “He wanted to saw my finger off.”

“I knew something was wrong,” the man says. “The way he was standing behind you, and you handing him something. Are you okay?” She is not okay; her wrists and knees feel like they’re vibrating. “I’m not done rescuing you,” he says. “You get another wish.”

She touches his hand, lightly. “Who
are
you? My guardian angel?” She likes having to stretch to kiss him on the cheek. The lemon verbena must be his soap.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m Clayton, and you are my goddess.”

She flinches. “I’m a starving artist,” she says. “If you’re granting wishes, I’ll take a cheap apartment.” She laughs, though she is shaking worse. She has had it with Damien and Gordy and Radmila worshipping her father and living in
her house
, though she’ll never leave. “Actually,” she says, “just walk me to the subway and give me a token.”

“Actually,” he says.

She needs him to put his arm around her, and suddenly he does. They walk slowly toward the neon promise of a Broadway
RESTAURANT
sign. “Actually what?”

“My brother-in-law manages rent-controlled apartments. You could look at a studio tomorrow.”

She leans into this man. She considers his ankle, how it saved her, how it looked both sturdy and wrong in its scruffy white sock, as if he were receiving flawed signals about how to be in the world and did not care. It makes her feel tender, this ankle. It makes her feel safe.

“Actually,” she says, “I’m okay where I am,” but she lays her head on his shoulder as he signals for a cab.

S
HE WONDERS IF THE
birds can smell orchids and bromeliads from the wholesaler downstairs, and if it reminds them of some distant home. The birds are African gray parrots Clayton breeds in his loft. They are the hue of expensive menswear, with a shot of red at the tail like a bright tie, and they climb up and down the outsides of their cages muttering to themselves. One periodically bursts into the ring of a telephone.

A powdery dust sifts from under the birds’ wings; it shortens Rainey’s breath. Clayton mists them with a plant sprayer, but it barely helps.

He lives in the loft, though it isn’t legal. He makes his own pasta and chocolate truffles in the makeshift kitchen and deals coke from a locked metal cabinet. Rainey wonders how the parrots feel about this life—the cooking smells, especially when small fowl are involved; the coke dust she imagines must hang in the air; the clipped wings.

A few weeks after the mugging Clayton serves her quail wrapped in bacon. The quail are not much bigger than her fists. A parrot could grip one in a chalky claw. Rainey thinks she might faint with pleasure at the stuffing. She has stopped seeing friends, even Tina or Leah; when she isn’t working on a tapestry in her pink room, she’s at the loft, wheezing, chirring at the birds. She goes home, though, every night: a cat returning to its lair.

They eat in silence. Clayton serves sautéed spinach and roasted carrots. “I had to isolate three birds today,” he finally says. “They started feather plucking. They look half naked. It’s so sad.” He names a disease that sounds to Rainey like
citizen
. Citizen feather-and-death disease? Citizen hoof-and-mouth disease? “Or they could just be miserable about something,” he says.

Yeah, she thinks, like smelling quail in the oven. She lifts a miniature drumstick, and meat drops from the bone; she catches it with her tongue. “God, you’re amazing.”

“You’re right,” says Clayton. “I am amazing. It could be the foie gras in the stuffing, though.” He leans forward. “Move in with me.”

But then she’d be like one of the birds. She wants him to desire her, and she wants him to slink away. She gives him a long, sorrowful look.

He reaches for his wine and pushes his chair back. Rainey feels the thrill of something imminent, the air electrically charged. He stands and moves in to kiss her, still holding his
wineglass. She pulls away. Clayton sighs. A sprig of dark hair flops over his forehead.

“Would it help to know that I’m working on a parrot surprise for you?” Clayton looks right at her. Most men look at her chest.

“It sounds like dinner. Parrot Surprise.” Sometimes when Rainey is in Clayton’s loft, she feels like nibbling her own feathers out.

“I’m teaching Perdita to say ‘Come live with me and be my love.’ ”

“I have a home, Clayton.”

“It’s from the sonnet,” he says. “ ‘And we will all the pleasures prove.’ ”

Her father quotes Shakespeare at her, too. She has waited for Howard to notice the hours she spends at Clayton’s loft, but lately he’s been gone by the time she wakes, spending days in some recording studio instead of sleeping. Ridiculously, she stumbles down in her nightgown some mornings and looks for a note. Howard’s attention is like the sun. Too much burns the edges of her leaves, yet the atmosphere is thin without it.

Clayton smooths her long hair behind her ear and touches her cheekbone. He puts his free hand on her breast and leaves it. She smells lemon verbena. She likes it.

“And he can cook, too,” says Clayton.

“If you’re waiting for me to say yes,” says Rainey, more drily than she intends, “stop.” She means: Stop asking,
because I’m not moving in. She means: Stop being a gentleman and for Chrissake ravish me.

But she realizes, as he pulls away, that all he registers is
stop
. It’s a big misunderstanding. It makes Rainey itch. She wonders if he was ever wild enough for that intense ex-wife of his. “Okay,” says Clayton. He takes his seat and goes to work on another quail. “You win, Rainey. Go figure out what you want.”

She takes an enormous swallow of wine. “Wait,” she says, but he shakes his head.

He’ll forgive her. Right? He’s her guardian angel. And he can cook, too.

She blurts the first lie she can think of and is shocked to feel it expand in her heart, spreading wings, becoming truth. “I can’t move in,” she says. “My father needs me.”

FLY OR DIE