“Romeo in black jeans!” Careen calls, lifting the edge of her fuchsia silk scarf that Mr. Palmer bought for her birthday. She waves its fringe like a beacon to direct us to the subway station.
“Must we take the subway?” I groan, as we catch up with them.
“Yes, my dear, it’s a bit like descending into the bowels of the earth, but it has its merits, one of which is being bulleted to one’s destination at the speed of sound. Ah, the pervading smell of pee; it just makes one want to snog.” Careen wiggles her eyebrows as she trots down the smelly steps in her white Capezios spotted with rain.
“You don’t like elevators, and you don’t like subways,” Evan observes without judgment.
“Claustrophobic, fear of small spaces,” Careen clarifies in a whispery tone as we gather on the platform. “A presence as large as our dear Sylvia’s is justified in feeling terror at being confined.”
“It’s a fear of being trapped with no escape,” Dylan interjects. “Subways, elevators, scholarships, relationships.” Mercifully, a pretty blonde battling to collapse her umbrella captures Dylan’s attention. He lights a cigarette--always my cue that Dylan’s trying to look cool--and exhales with a James Dean-like glance in the girl’s direction.
The train roars past, blowing back our hair and grinding to a halt, spitting out crowds of commuters. Dylan and Careen board, and Evan and I follow. I step onto the train, spy the crush of crowds inside, and leap backward onto the platform. Only Evan, the ex-ballet dancer, is nimble enough to follow my retreat. When the subway doors squeeze shut, we are alone on the platform.
“Sorry,” I say.
“It’s twenty blocks away. You shouldn’t be afraid of so many things.” The moment he says this I feel humiliated, and then, steely with determination. I pull myself up taller and button my sweater against the draft to give me some distraction. I cross my arms, only to notice that his eyes rest there because I’ve buttoned the sweater incorrectly, like a four year old.
He seizes upon this opportunity to touch me, re-buttoning the sweater for me, and I’m torn between desire at his intimate touch and devastation that he thinks I’m cowardly.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” I say feebly, and when I see that a pair of doors remains open at the end car, I forge ahead of him onto it.
“My brother didn’t like subways either,” he says with an intensity that makes me fear he’s angry, as he takes hold of the subway strap above him. I am too embarrassed to look at him. “Hmmph,” I say, with a glib shrug of my shoulders. I look away at the full-sized silver vodka ad on the wall, only to lose my footing when the subway lurches forward. I watch the people on the platform disintegrate into a soupy darkness, as the little capsule of subway car is shot forward into the belly of the city. At the next stop I stumble again, flushing red, as I seem to lack proper subway skills even though I’ve got an entire shiny silver pole to hang onto, and years of ballet training. I can balance the entire weight of my body on my big toe, but I can’t seem to remain vertical on this train. I marvel at my fellow passengers ease at remaining firm in their footing, like surfers sailing whitecaps; clearly this is an acquired skill. I’m facing away from him, but feel his arm loop gently around my waist, drawing me near, and steadying me against his body.
I’m grateful that the misty rain has made my Magie Noire perfume stronger, and that I didn’t eat Enrico’s pizza, and so still have the taste of spearmint gum on my breath, and that I’ve used a strawberry-scented shampoo because I can feel his breath on my hair. As more passengers board at each stop we are condensed closer to one another. The car seems filled to capacity, but at each stop more people pile on, until I begin to feel the wave of panic growing deep within. We are packed in so tightly there are no escape routes, no room to even lift my arms, nowhere to turn then but to Evan.
“They can’t seriously think they are getting on this train,” I say in desperation, as we stop to pick up another batch of commuters.
“Oh, trust me, they’re getting on,” he says, with irony.
This new shift pushes their way in, so that now we’re practically vacuum-packed. We fly into a tunnel, into inky blackness, with just the occasional flash of light, like a struck match or bolt of blue lightning, on the outer tracks. I lean into Evan as a frightened child, and suddenly feel his lips find mine, and then I return his kisses with a hunger. All fear melts away, and I am stunned that I feel so utterly at home, so blissful, in what otherwise would be my worst nightmare scenario—this dark, cramped, stale compartment of an overcrowded subway car. His arm tightens around my waist and draws me nearer, and nothing is left to the imagination as I feel every part of him pressed against me through his clothing. When we jettison into the light, it is whirling and terrifying and the last thing I remember is his grip tightening on me as I have the sensation of sinking under water.
I awaken to find myself lying on a bench on the subway platform. Careen twists the cap off a soda bottle and shoves it toward me.
“What happened?” I ask weakly.
“My poor dear girl, you fainted from the heat of the packed train.”
“Yes, the heat was off the charts,” Evan reports from the edge of the bench, chin in hand, brushing away his damp hair, as he avoids my gaze. I feel a thrill of satisfaction that I’ve made the imperturbable Evan Candelier sweat.
“I don’t drink soda.” I push away the bottle that Careen aims at my lips. “That stuff is like battery acid.”
“Dylan has gone to get you water.”
“I need to eat something. Get me a candy bar from the vendor, please. I could use a jolt of sugar.”
This is not really what I need. What I need is to be alone with Evan. When Careen lopes away, I long for him to slide up next to me on the bench and wrap his arms around me, but he bites at his knuckles and stares vaguely at the empty tracks. When he speaks, it’s to say, “You might be happier in Texas, where there’s lots of open space.”
This seems an unforgivably trite thing to say in light of what has just passed between us. How could he even suggest that I move elsewhere, away from him? I have the urge to shake the soda and douse his deliriously handsome figure with it.
“Yes, a rugged, down-to-earth cowboy would be a welcome change from these pampered erudite urbanites,” I say coldly, grappling for words that I hope he won’t know the definition of, so as to double the blow.
He looks at me as if I’ve just testified against him in court. My heart pounds with fear at having gone too far.
Careen returns and insists that Dylan and Evan go on ahead to the coffee shop and get the plan underway. Evan seems almost relieved to be dismissed from my presence.
~ 9 ~
Sinclair’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
“Most people don’t know what they think.” Sinclair savors the statement, rolling it around on his tongue like fine wine. “Well, I don’t know what I think of that pronouncement so, yes, the man is a prophet!”
I’ve met Sinclair at his favorite haunt, Coopers Café, on Eighty-Third and Columbus. Sinclair lives four doors down, in an apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone. We sit at a sidewalk table and watch the colorful parade of shoppers along Columbus Avenue. It’s unseasonably warm, though windy, for late September. Little girls wear pastel sundresses. “The dogs are in sweaters and the people are in shorts,” Sinclair observes. Sinclair informs me that he is a Scottish count in exile. His family never approved of his sexual orientation, and so he’s lived the past twenty years in the Mecca Of Acceptance, New York City. When his elderly mother passes on, he will inherit a country estate and sheep station, complete with a castle and moat.
“I adore a moat,” I say with affectation. “That’s what Isabel says to Lord Warburton when she turns down his marriage proposal in The Portrait of A Lady.”
“Perhaps I should marry you. You could be my beard, and then we’d get the moat sooner.” He rubs his hands together conspiratorially, as the waiter sets before us a melon, granola and vanilla
yogurt salad, Sinclair’s favorite.
He inspects my thrift-store purchases from Reminiscence.
“I shopped to the tune of Magilla Gorilla.” I dump my purchases onto the table, humming the theme song which was playing in the store, and is still echoing in my head.
“Apparently you’ve gone ape,” he says in response to my choices. There is a pink mohair skirt, which gets a thumbs-up, some denim skirts that get a tepid reception, and a black bowler hat, which he regards skeptically. He places the hat on my head, arranges my dark curls, and declares, “Ah, yes, very Vivien Leigh. Libby in St. Martin’s Lane.”
I leave the hat on, because the wind, though warm, is relentless. “Too much wind in my ears always makes me ill, like it blows everything inside me out of order.”
“It unsettles your chi,” is Sinclair’s diagnosis. “You’re an air sign, Gemini, and you need grounding for balance. The wind is too airy.” Sinclair is the first person that hasn’t looked at me askance when I claim the wind can make me ill.
“You get me,” I say, with a grateful sigh.
He asks me to demonstrate the face Evan made when I asked him if he missed the ballet.
“Yes, that’s disgust. Or constipation,” he determines.
“Well, he’s not gay, because he’s taking the girl from the coffee shop out on a second date tonight. Oh, and get this, he took her to see the ballet Romeo and Juliet!” I report, wielding my fork and accidentally stabbing the waiter in the arm.
“Oh, honey, don’t kill the melonner,” Sinclair advises.
“My best friend is responsible for the man I love going on a date with another woman!” These words sprinkle onto the other diners, due to the close proximity of the tables. Some women glance at me in empathy. “You are my new best friend. I pass the torch to you.” I spear a slice of honeydew and bestow it upon him.
“Well, she didn’t mean for it to happen. It’s Dylan’s fault for passing the buck, really; he was Careen’s original choice for Secret Agent Man,” Sinclair consoles.
“Well, there go all the theories of why he won’t ask me out. Obviously, he’s not broke, because he can afford to take this woman to a ballet at Lincoln Center! He’s not afraid of Dylan, because Dylan and his latest Twinkie met them afterward for drinks. So, there go all the theories!” I hurl these words like little grenades into the air. Seeing I’ve abandoned my salad, Sinclair makes a stab for it.
“Pardon my ploy for your melons,” he begs.
“You know, I’m beginning to think this was some plot between Dylan and Careen to get Evan hooked up with someone else, and get me safely out of his orbit.”
“A conspiracy of cousins!” Sinclair warms to the sound of it. “Did Chekov write that?”
Sinclair points out the positive aspect, which is that Evan has unearthed the joyous news that all the secretive phone calls were actually negotiations on the part of Hazel’s husband to buy the coffee shop. The owner had decided to sell the coffee shop, and Hazel’s husband was seeking to purchase it. It was the place where he first met his wife, and it represented to him everything that is sweet and romantic in life, and he couldn’t bear to see it sold and turned into something prosaic like a bagel shop or video store.
“That is desperately romantic.” Sinclair sighs deeply, as he distributes his granola over my hijacked honeydew. “Evan would not have discovered this vital information—which perhaps has saved your friend’s marriage—had he not taken the woman to dinner.”
“We would have found out the truth at some point, with or without Evan.”
“Yes, but perhaps not before there’d been a felony committed.” Sinclair cites hair-raising tales of Upper West Side crimes of passion, including a Porsche driven straight through a Tiffany window into a bedroom, piloted by a jealous lover.
“Fine, but why is he taking her out again for a second date? He kissed me on that subway train like I’ve never been kissed before. What happened between the kiss and now, that made him pull away from me?”
“Perhaps you’re not old enough for Evan.” Sinclair points out that I’m only four years older, but the coffee shop gal is perhaps a decade older. “Perhaps he likes Sugar Mamas. Older women who will pay a young man’s way in return for certain favors,” Sinclair elaborates, when I wrinkle my brow. Although casting Evan as a gigolo does ease my misery some of losing him.
“Well, that decides it. I am going to accept a date with The Whimsical Popsicle. He arrives in town this week.”
“Splendid! Then this gift has not been sewn in vain.” Sinclair pulls from a mauve shopping bag a big blue hatbox which harbors a long black velveteen coat. It is surprisingly lightweight and sewn with a white silk lining, no buttons.
“It’s very Elizabeth Bennett,” he assures, referring to the nineteenth century heroine of my favorite Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice. “Except for the squiggles,” I note, because the dark coat has been stitched with bright shapes in striking shades of the color spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
“Those are quarks and leptons and other elementary particles. Stardust! I designed this to be your very own Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat to bring you magical powers when you see Evan.” Despite my broken heart, I smile broadly. Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat has been playing on Broadway, with the heartthrob of my teen years, David Cassidy, cast in the lead. “But like any classic fashion accessory, it can easily transition to your next season, or man, as it may be.” Sinclair motions as if to say viola! “Someday velvet will make a comeback, and when it does, we’ll be ready,” Sinclair foretells of his favorite fabric.
“I love this!” I leap to my feet to try it on. “Maybe when I wear it, it will magically wipe Evan from my memory.” I model it there on the sidewalk, in the limited space between tables. “Please take this tape, and do not give it back to me, not even under penalty of death.” I dig my Cowboy Junkies cassette tape from my pocket, which has the song that reminds me of Evan, “Misguided Angel.”
“If I play that song one more time, Dylan is going to throw me out of the apartment. I’ve been wallowing.”
“Wallowing makes one’s melons wilt,” he scolds, with a last stab at my salad. “Think whimsy!”
~~~~~
Careen is thrilled that I’ve agreed to the date. David has a temporary visa; he is doing post-doctorate work at some lab where they smash atoms around in a superconductor in an attempt to recreate conditions of The Big Bang. I wear a black knit dress, blue tights with a diamond pattern and baby-doll pumps the same assaulting ruby red as my lip-gloss. David eyes my quirky ensemble and Technicolor Dreamcoat, but does not comment.
He’s gotten us tickets to the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He shows up on my doorstep and is exceedingly polite to Dylan, who greets him with a mixture of curiosity and paternal scrutiny. David arrives with a bouquet of roses, and for the moment Evan is blotted from memory, as hope springs eternal that, yes, there are still gallant men in the world willing to meet one’s family before a first date, to bring flowers, to court a woman in the old-fashioned tradition.
“Is this the English lord?” Dylan whispers in my ear before I depart down the rain-soaked stoop to David’s waiting Cadillac. I ask him why he needs such a big car for just one person, and he tells me that in England all the cars are compact, that the first thing he planned on acquiring when he arrived in The States was a big car. The blue rugs are a bit moldy, and there’s a bronze pin-striping of rust along the door, but David is thrilled with his new purchase, as he eases into the womb that is the Midtown Tunnel before we are delivered via a snowy burst of light into the city. The honk of horns, the rush of crowds in the crosswalks, the smell of rain on sidewalks, all these things rush at my senses as I stare at beautiful ice-blue dresses hung on pale mannequins that pose above us on their department store displays as we crawl along the avenue in the Caddy.
After the show, he wants to stroll about the theatre district, but I warn him that it’s not
safe territory after a certain hour; after the last show lets out and the theatre crowds disperse, the pimps and prostitutes take over. By midnight even the cops will be gone, having hauled so many perpetrators to the precincts that these streets will be left unguarded. David stubbornly slogs along, despite my efforts to get him to pick up the pace, and when I spy, in peripheral vision, some shady character following us, I nab David’s umbrella as a potential weapon to defend us. This delights David to no end, as if it were all some sort of game, or an overreaction on my part. Once our stalker is aware that I am aware of him, he gives up and hovers in a doorway, awaiting some unsuspecting passerby.
David and I head downtown. The pavement is spotted with rain. I return to him his elegant black umbrella-or brollie as he calls it—that he scrapes against the pavement in a nimble and rhythmic manner, his eyes downcast. He wears a thin smile that does not wane as he listens with amusement to my observations on life, literature, and theatre.
“I always find myself hoping that it will end differently,” I say, of the tragic play. “That Mitch won’t discover Blanche’s past and he will sweep her away to a new life.”
“Ah, to be swept off one’s feet by a man. Is that still every woman’s fantasy, even the modern American woman?”
“No, to be swept away by love.” I feel a pang of annoyance.
“Must one be swept away? It seems to me that love ought to be based on something quieter, such as mutual interests and genuine affection.”
“Do you fear unbridled passion, of being swept away by your feelings? Of losing control?” I know how to go for the jugular of these academic types, just lead them into unfamiliar territory, like the land of emotions.
He ignores my question. “I don’t think it was passion for Mitch that motivated Blanche. She was attempting to escape her past, which simply isn’t possible,” he says, pompously.
“This nation—the most powerful in the world,” I throw in for effect, borrowing a favorite phrase of Dylan’s, “was built by people who successfully escaped their pasts and reinvented themselves.”
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