“Do you think he’d sell me his cat?”
The question both startled and bugged me. Eli might be dying, and all she could think about was keeping his cat.
“I’m going to try to find him at the hospital, but I’m not sure where they took him,” I said, tamping down my annoyance. “The cat . . . Well, from the way Eli looked, I don’t know if he’s ever coming back. Let’s just cross that bridge when we come to it.”
She nodded. Her face had darkened when I alluded to Eli’s possible death.
We moved to the desk and she touched what looked like fresh pages of writing in the schoolgirl handwriting I’d become so familiar with.
“Wow,” I said. “Can I read it?”
“Not yet,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t need you today, really. You go find your friend.”
Chapter 14
Turning on my Southern charm didn’t get me far at St. Vincent’s Hospital. The face of the woman on duty at Patient Information looked pinched, as if she’d been out late the night before and was barely holding it together on Saturday afternoon. She was clearly in no mood for a visitor who claimed to be a “family friend” but struggled with the patient’s last name.
“Pruitt. P-R-U-I-T—” I hesitated. “T?”
She scanned the P’s. “There’s no Eli Pruitt here.”
“Are you sure? Admitted this afternoon?” I paused, unsure how much information to give. “He might be an AIDS patient.”
Her face softened a little, and she checked the patient roster again. “Nope.”
“Maybe I’m spelling his name wrong. Is there another way to spell Pruitt, maybe with just one T . . .” I glanced at her name tag. “. . . Miss Eckhart?”
Her finger ran down the page again. “I’m telling you, there’s nothing.” She cut me off just as I was about to ask about variants on Eli, like Elijah or Elias. “Nothing even resembling it. Seriously, how close friends can you be if you aren’t even sure how to spell his name?”
I slumped against her desk. “Look, we are friends, but I haven’t known him very long. He asked me to take care of his cat. I don’t know how to find him or when he’s coming back. I’m worried about him. He looked really bad, and if something happens to him, I don’t know what to do about his cat.”
“If I were you?” she said, her eyes shooting behind me where a small line had queued up. “I’d stock up on cat food.”
“But where else would they take him?” I protested, my voice rising. “He lives on Milligan Place. Wouldn’t the ambulance bring him here?”
Miss Eckhart sighed. “Hard to say. Call Downtown Hospital. Or Beth-Israel. Maybe his family uses another hospital. He could be anywhere.”
I was just about to protest that he was from Massachusetts, so was unlikely to have a family hospital in New York, when she called “Next, please!” to the person behind me in line.
• • •
The sounds of Ferron singing reached me from the landing of my floor, which meant Barb was home. But I heard another voice, too, a slightly higher-pitched one, and I realized as I approached the apartment that Barb was singing along with “Ain’t Life a Brook”—one of the most wistful breakup songs ever. I’d played it again and again one evening when I was alone, thinking about Hallie and intent on wallowing.
“For wasn’t it fine?” Barb sang as I clicked my key in the lock. She was on the futon couch, her eyes closed, a pint of Wild Turkey open in front of her, and she was holding her Bugs Bunny glass of bourbon so tightly it looked like she wanted to crush it.
“Hey,” I said, and her eyes popped open, red and strained.
“Oh, hi,” she said, lifting the needle from the record and sniffling away her tears.
“Don’t turn it off on my account. I love that song. I almost wore it out one day when I was blue.”
“Okay,” she said, returning the arm to the record.
The less I knew about her love life, the better, because then I wouldn’t have to lie to Gerri. But Barb’s sadness spilled right out into the room before I could make it to my own space and close the door.
“Women,” she said. “I don’t know why I bother.”
I nodded, as if in my limited experience I knew anything at all about women.
“I guess you need the eggs.”
She tilted her head at me in that way she had, then smiled when she caught the reference to Annie Hall.
“Take my advice, Carolina. Never date two women at once. I thought I could handle it, but it’s a bitch. Three is a more manageable number— spread yourself thinner.”
Her logic made no sense, but I nodded again and inched toward my bedroom door.
“Want a shot?”
I did. The search for Eli had led me to the other two hospitals Miss Eckhart had mentioned, with no luck. He’d been to so many memorials, I wondered if there was anyone left from his circle to visit him— wherever he was.
As we sat together on the futon, Ferron crooned, “But life don’t clickety clack down a straight-line track...”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I said.
“You too?”
I told her about combing downtown Manhattan for Eli, but the story made no impression.
“I never heard you even mention him.”
“We were just getting to know each other,” I explained. “The whole thing rattles me. AIDS. If that’s what he has. I hope not.” I examined the liquid in my Foghorn Leghorn glass. “You know anyone who’s got it?”
She shook her head, gulped back her shot, and poured another. “I don’t hang with the boys. I had two brothers, and that was plenty of men for one lifetime.”
I pondered that pronouncement, wondering how you could completely cut off men— unless you lived in a separatist colony.
“It’s so sad if he’s sick sick,” I continued. “I mean, he designed the set for Christopher and Wystan!”
“Who did?”
“Eli.” She looked confused, like she’d already forgotten his name. “My friend.”
She sniffed derisively. “Jenny actually spent money to see that. It sounded like the usual gay-boy crap to me. Not a single woman character, just a bunch of pretty boys strutting around the stage. But of course, that’s what gets produced.”
The topic must have bored her, because she sang along with Ferron for a few lines. Then she switched the subject to elaborate on her pain. “I had two fights in two days— can you believe it? Yesterday with Jill, and today with Renee. Jill said we’re done. After four months! No more sharing for her. She wants to be somebody’s one and only.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Looks like I’ll be around here more. You’ve had the place pretty much to yourself.” She swigged her shot. “You know, four months seems to be my record for relationships. What’s up with four months?”
I shrugged. “Maybe it’s when things start to get real.”
“Maybe. Anyway, something about me drives ’em away at that point.” Her hand shot out in front of her, mimicking a car zooming off down the road, and her words sounded slurry. “What do you think it is, Carolina?”
“Hey, don’t ask me. My record’s less than a year, and we were more off than on.” Along the way, I’d lost count of how many times Hallie had said, “I can’t do this anymore,” only to change her mind days later.
Barb refilled our drinks, even though one was plenty for me before dinner. Loosened up, I asked, “So . . . what happened with Renee?”
“Well, that was fucked. She started talking about Thanksgiving and maybe we should go to her folks in fucking Chappaqua, and, well, that whole parent thing is just not me. She kept saying her folks were cool and all, but, I mean, we barely know each other and I’d be there using the same toilet as her kid brother. We had this monster fight about it, and she said she needed space. Space! Already!”
It did seem incredibly fast, no more than a month by my calculation, but then they’d been practically living together. “You know, she was with Gerri for
eight years,” I noted. “Maybe it was just too fast. Getting together like that.”
I expected Barb to balk, but she nodded and kept drinking. “She and Gerri used to see each other’s families and shit. She’s on a first-name basis with Gerri’s mom. I don’t get it. Like they’re trying to mimic straight couples or something. Girls like that even talk about ‘marriage’ after a while.”
“You mean a commitment ceremony?”
“Yeah, that.” Although her tone was laced with disdain, there was something like regret in her eyes, almost like she wished she could be more into the stuff other couples gravitated to.
“Maybe you two are just not a good fit,” I offered, already thinking maybe I could run out to a phone booth and call Gerri, give her the promising update.
“Oh, no, we fit. Believe me. I give this needing space thing a week. She’ll miss me too much.” Her face lit with a lascivious grin that told me more than I wanted to know about their sex life. When Barb resumed singing, I realized her melancholy must be for Jill. “I sold the furniture/put away the photographs . . . But wasn’t it fine?”
• • •
I picked up enough food to last Remington for a month and a toy mouse stuffed with catnip. On Clio’s floor, Eli’s door was slightly ajar, and I knocked three times before peeking inside. A young woman who was a carbon copy of Eli, with a halo of curly brown hair and a sizable diamond ring on her left hand, was packing his possessions into boxes. She didn’t hear me come in, and when I said, “Excuse me,” she let out a high-pitched squeal.
“I am so sorry!” I said. “The door was open, so—”
“Oh, my God! I can’t believe I left the door open. Total ditz, right?”
“Nah. A lot of these old buildings have funny locks. Maybe you thought you closed it, and it popped open again.”
“That’s kind. No, I’m a ditz.” She seemed to realize then that there was a stranger standing in her space. “I’m Melissa, Eli’s sister. And you’re—?”
“Livvie. A friend. He asked me to watch his cat when he went to the hospital.”
With that, she exploded in sobs. “Remmie! Oh, thank God! I couldn’t find him! I thought he got out somehow. I’m so—” She broke off abruptly and sank onto the floor next to the box she was packing, leaving me to fill in the missing emotion.
“Is Eli moving out?” I asked slowly.
“He’s going to live with me for a while,” she explained. “He’s pretty fragile, and there’s nobody else to take care of him. I’ll just try to keep him comfortable for a while, like he did for Curt.”
The words “for a while” and “like he did for Curt” suggested such finality, they hit me like a swift jab. “I’m so sorry,” I said, but the sentiment rang pathetically hollow. “What can I do to help?”
“I don’t even know what to do myself. I was supposed to get married in January and move in with my fiancé. I can’t do that now.” She motioned toward the boxes. “Then there’s all Eli’s stuff. There’s no room for it at my place. Most of it was Curt’s, and his family wrote him off when he got sick. Would Goodwill take it, you think?”
As she rambled, I picked up some flat boxes and assembled them for her. She told me her apartment was on the Upper East Side, close to where Eli and Curt had lived. It turned out Eli was at Lenox Hill Hospital, which explained why I couldn’t find him.
“You know,” I said, “if you don’t have room for Remmie, I’d be happy to keep him for Eli.”
Her face glowed like I’d given her the best present ever. “Would you, really? He’s a cute cat, but I’m allergic. Plus, the fur wouldn’t be good for Eli. Thank you, thank you, Libby.”
I didn’t bother to correct her.
When I saw Melissa again at the end of the week, Eli’s place was nearly empty. Her fiancé had taken charge and gotten Goodwill to haul his furniture and kitchen items away. “I can’t thank you enough for Remington,” she said. “I really thought I was going to have to live in misery with a cat!”
“Um, what are you doing about the apartment?” I tried to sound casual, but she was a New Yorker, too, and would probably guess my ulterior motive.
“Subletting,” she said. “Eli doesn’t want to let go of a rent-stabilized place.”
“I know someone who’d love to sublet,” I said. “She’s super responsible. I can vouch for her. What’s the rent?” Gerri was actively looking, but had run into the same problems I had a few months back— rising rents, ridiculously small shares, too many New Yorkers willing to grease someone’s palm to go to the head of the line of potential renters.
“I’ll talk to Joe. Eli’s got no income now, so we’ll have to consider that.” That was another problem Gerri had encountered— lease-holders who subsidized their income by subletting at several times the actual rent.
It turned out Melissa and Joe weren’t greedy, although the six hundred they were asking was probably a markup. It sounded exorbitant to me, since my share at Barb’s was just under two hundred. But Gerri said it was doable if she watched her restaurant and bar budget and didn’t buy any new jeans, sneakers, or albums . . . ever.
Thea, Vern, and I helped her move in right before Thanksgiving. Vern did most of the furniture lifting with ease, and Thea took the stairs nimbly, but I puffed and panted up the three flights with Gerri’s seemingly endless boxes of books.
The convenience of having a friend move in right across the hall from Clio appealed to me. I looked forward to being able to knock on Gerri’s door and hang out whenever I finished up my Clio responsibilities for the day.
“You could have kept this place for yourself,” Thea said while the two of us took a soda break. “Anybody would have understood that. It’s really cute.”
“Ah, Gerri needs it more than me,” I replied. “I may not like Barb that much, but my living situation is okay.”
The truth was, I still carried the guilt of not being upfront with Gerri about Barb and Renee; I’d succumbed to the peculiar indifference of New York. The new apartment served as reparations for something neither Gerri nor Thea knew I’d done.
“You’re a good friend,” Thea said, squeezing my forearm and letting her hand rest there for a moment.
The word “friend” felt like a segue into the subject of Diane. “You know, speaking of friends, I met Diane. Your Diane.”
“She’s not my Diane.” She polished off her Coke quickly. “At the office?”
“Yeah, she came in to meet with Bea, and I got to sit in for a while.” I swigged at my own soda. “She’s kind of a diva.”
Thea laughed out loud. “Kind of?”
“She actually wanted me to find the bathroom key for her and be her attendant.”
Her face scrunched up.
“When she heard I knew you, she kept asking me what you told me about the breakup, like she was the focus of everyone’s gossip. You hadn’t told me much, so it felt weird.” I bit my lip, wondering how much to divulge, like my suspicion that Diane had cried in the restroom. “She’s pretty and all, and a good writer, but honestly? You deserve better, Thea.” I rarely said her name out loud, and I liked the way it rolled off my tongue.
Thea cast her eyes down in a bashful way. Where the conversation would have gone after that was anyone’s guess, but we didn’t get to find out. Vern arrived, sweating like a dock worker as she lugged in Gerri’s new futon mattress all by herself.
“You two ever plan to work?” she asked, dropping the mattress in the middle of all the boxes. Vern gave me a look that said she didn’t believe for a minute there wasn’t something going on between me and “the Professor.”
“We’re on it,” Thea said, heading back down to the U-Haul for another box.
Chapter 15
With Thanksgiving creeping up, I faced a hard decision: Was twenty-three old enough to spend a holiday away from my family? If I decided it was, would I regret it on the day, when I had nowhere to go? On the one hand, I hated missing my mother’s dinner, the expectant, hungry looks
at the table as we passed bowls of cornbread stuffing and candied yams. On the other, I dreaded having to dodge everyone’s questions and feeling the yawning loneliness of keeping secrets.
In the end, New York won out, a choice that brought sniffles from my mother and crisp coolness from Sue.
“Oh, that’s just sad,” my sister said. “Like you’re some kind of derelict with no home.” How could I tell her that home wasn’t really a comfort?
A quiet day on my own awaited me. Barb had caved and agreed to dinner in Chappaqua after she and Renee reconciled (within a week, as she predicted), so once again I had the apartment to myself. My plan was to pick up a rotisserie chicken on Wednesday, then enjoy a holiday of sleeping late, wandering over to the Macy’s parade, reading On Strike Against God for the next salon, and bringing a plate of food to Clio.
But at the last minute before Ramona cut out early on Wednesday, she poked her head into my office, surprising me with a friendly question: “Hey, Liv, what are you doing tomorrow?”
I outlined my agenda, which made her fall back into her snooty mode. “Nobody who lives in Manhattan ever goes to the parade,” she said. “Just like nobody who lives here goes to Times Square for New Year’s. It’s all tourists and BATS.”
“Brats?” I said, picturing gangs of small children.
“Bridge and Tunnel Set,” she said, sighing at my naiveté. “New Jersey-ites, Long Islanders.”
“My sister is pissed at me for not coming home, so I thought I’d send her pictures of the floats. She loves the Macy’s parade.”
“So just go to West Seventy-Ninth tonight. They inflate the balloons up there.”
“Wow, thanks.” A behind-the-scenes look seemed like something that would really tickle Sue.
Ramona dropped a card onto my desk. “And . . . if you’re interested.” It was an open-house invitation, the kind you might buy at Hallmark, with a cascade of colorful fall leaves down the side. I hadn’t known till then that she lived in a prime block of Gramercy, just across the park from where I’d roomed at the Parkside.
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