When the old man asks to see Nick’s paintings, I get out the transparencies and show them to him.
“What do you think?” I say, finally.
“I think he’s a lucky man to have found you,” he says slowly.
The man looks at the paintings again.
“There’s a ruthlessness in his work. A kind of cruelty,” he says.
I look at Nick’s paintings again. I feel uneasy for a second. As if the images are trying to tell me something.
“I know there’s darkness in his paintings,” I say, finally. “But he isn’t at all cruel in real life. He’s absolutely lovely. Only he doesn’t show it. He’s terrified of being rejected, you see. So he does everything he can to stop anyone knowing how soft he is. He’s a terribly kind man really.”
He shakes his head. “No artist can hide his true nature. It’s always in the work.” Then the man turns toward me and I see his face full on for the first time. Tall, strong, old, and gray, he makes me think of a hawk that has flown over the entire world and seen everything.
Then he smiles and says, “You have come a long way, my dear. And the work is certainly interesting. Let’s try and get someone out here to help you.”
Then he stands up and walks slowly toward the reception desk and rings the bell.
A round woman with glasses and her hair tied back in a tight bun comes out from behind a glass door. She looks flustered as soon as she sees my new friend.
“Oh, Mr. Souk, I’m so sorry, I had no idea you were here.”
She rushes around the reception desk and holds out her hands to take his jacket.
And I realize that the man I’ve been chattering away to is James Souk. Of the Souk Gallery. I feel like an idiot.
“Pam,” Mr. Souk says, “please take Ms. Dunn and her transparencies to the back room. She has something to show you.” Then he turns to me and says, “Ms. Dunn, if you’ll agree to exhibit both series of Devang paintings at the Souk Gallery, we would be delighted to give Mr. Devang his first exhibition. Will Nick Devang’s agent step into my office and negotiate terms?”
“Yes,” I say, beaming. “She’d be delighted.”
“I knew you could do it!” Nick says, calling me from a restaurant in Tokyo, thrilled by the news. “The exhibition must be a rip-roaring success.”
“It will be.”
“My loveliest girl, we are both destined to reach the top of our chosen fields. We must promise never to permit anything but the very best possible work from each other.”
“We must.”
Like Billie and Walt, before things went wrong for them, we will take New York by storm.
Chapter Forty-nine
THE LINEUPfor the cable talent show consists of the Keenan Cowboys, a rap artist, a magician wearing an electric blue suit with silver stars on it, and me. I’m going to sing my “Rock-and-Roll Redneck” song while playing the piano. Only this time I’ll have a live band, who I’ve been rehearsing with all afternoon. The song sounds great, except the drummer hasn’t shown up. This matters, because there’s a drum solo, during which I am to leave the piano stool and do a leaping, redneckish sort of dance.
With no drummer in sight, the director decides to cut my dance in the middle of the song. I’m devastated. I’ve been practicing it for days and have a really great moment where I reach behind the piano and put on sideburns. With the dance I’ve got a chance of winning. Without the dance there’s no way.
I’m feeling horribly disappointed when Jack arrives with the rest of the audience and sits down at my table. I’m about to explain the situation when one of the band members shouts out Jack’s name and starts clambering toward us, through television cameras, over cable wires, through the already drinking crowd.
“Jack Cain!” The man’s almost shouting.
“Billy J?!” Jack says, standing up and laughing. The two men are slapping each other on the back like old friends, which leads me to conclude that they are old friends.
“Hey,” Billy shouts to the guys in the band, “it’s Jack Cain.”
“You still playing, man?” Billy J. says.
“No,” Jack says. “I quit a few years ago. It’s been a long time.” Jack’s eyes are alight.
“Can you help us out? Our drummer hasn’t shown up.”
“Well I dunno…”
“You were adrummer ?” I say, turning toward Jack.
“Come on, Jack. We’re playing this great new song by this cute new British chick.” Billy’s winking at me now.
Jack throws his head back and laughs and laughs.
“Oh man, Pippa, you got a drum solo in this now?”
I’m beaming. “Yes!”
“How long we got?”
“About fifteen minutes. And we’re going up live.”
“Hey! Brian! Ben! Richie! Jimmy! Look who’s here! It’s Jack Cain.”
Suddenly the table is surrounded by men in their late thirties with long hair who drag Jack up onto the stage and sit him down behind the drums. Jack picks up the drumsticks.
“I know the song,” he says. “It’ll be fine.”
The men go to their positions onstage and start playing the show’s theme tune. When it’s time for me to go on, I’m excited. And alive. And on edge. And I know it’s going to be a good set. And it is.
When its time for the drum solo, I jump off the piano stool and reach behind the piano, where I have hidden my special sideburns. I’ve got special glue stuck to the side of my face, so the sideburns will stick on at a touch. With my hat on, I suddenly transform into a real redneck. Billie, Walt, and the pain that accompanies me everywhere are forgotten. As I jump and whoop and leap in a redneckish way across the stage, Jack plays the drums like a wild man.
The drumsticks have become a part of his body and they move together to the frenzied rhythm he’s creating throughout the room. It’s hot under the lights. Half the buttons on his shirt have come undone and Jack’s hair is plastered against his face.
At the end of the song, the whole crowd jumps to its feet.
Now we’re offstage. A woman I’ve not seen before has put her arms around Jack’s neck.
“Jack! I haven’t seen you since you broke up with Lisa!”
“How is she?” Jack says.
“Good—great! Got kids now, you know.”
“Hey!” I say, shouting across the room. “Hey! I thought you were gay!” The words come out without my thinking about them. And when I realize what I’ve said, it’s too late to take them back.
Jack stops kissing the woman’s cheek and is looking at me.
“You thoughtwhat ?”
I walk quickly over to where Jack is standing.
“So, you’re not?” I say.
I try to take my eyes away from Jack’s, but I can’t. He is looking into mine with an expression I can’t quite read. He’s covered in sweat, and very, very sexy.
“You had a girlfriend?”
The woman is saying something, but neither Jack nor I hear her. “Yes,” he says.
“But I thought you were gay.” Oh God, Pip, shut up.
Jack looks perplexed.
“You thought I was gay.”
“Well, yes.”
“Why?”
“Well, you iron your sheets. And you work at The Gold Room. And then there’s the Harvey Fierstein quote on your fridge.”
“What?”
“‘Never be bullied into silence.’ The Harvey Fierstein quote.”
“I tore that out for you, Pippa.”
“You tore that out for me?”
“Whatever—or whoever—has been stopping you singing about what was really going on, well, that felt like bullying to me.”
“Oh.”
We’re still looking at each other. The rest of the room isn’t there.
“So, you’re not gay?”
“No,” he says. Still now. “No. I’m not. Never have been. Not going to start now.”
The moment is broken by the emcee, who comes over t
o hand me my check.
“You should have some of this money, Jack,” I say. “I wouldn’t have won without the drum dance.”
“No,” he says, his eyes still on me. “Use it to move into the city.”
I write a letter to Billie and send it to her in Georgia, where she is spending the rest of the summer.
July 20
Dearest Billie,
I will never be able to thank you enough for welcoming me so fully into your life. And I want you to know that I will always deeply appreciate everything you have done for me, from your generous, loving action in giving me up when I was a baby to really being there for me when I needed you most.
Right now, though, I am in very real need of some time to absorb everything that has happened and have decided to move into New York City. Even though I know it will be hard for you, I would be so grateful if you would respect my very real need for “space.” I promise to call you as soon as I can.
It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I think it has something to do with my need to figure out a way to integrate everything I’ve learned into my new identity.
Please try to understand.
I’ll leave you my phone number and address of course. I promise there will never be another day of your life when you do not know where I am.
With all my love, Pippa
Jack rents a truck, drives it out to Adler, and helps me lift my garage-sale couch and my suitcase onto the back of it. I follow in Earl Grey. And as I do so, the tightness in my chest begins to loosen, and I start to feel like myself again.
Chapter Fifty
ELFRIDA’S APARTMENTis on the second floor above a restaurant on Union Square West, right next to the farmer’s market, with a marble bathtub so tall you have to climb into it, like a Roman.
My windowless bedroom has a loft bed, under which Elfrida has put some curtains, to create a dressing room that doubles as a closet. For the first time since I arrived in America, I have my own space, somewhere that has nothing whatsoever to do with Billie. I start having moments in my day when I do not think about Billie or even Walt, who I haven’t heard from at all.
The feelings I have for them have become a brown muddy thing that I keep in a box on a mantelpiece. When I’m feeling strong enough, I take them down and feel a bit more of the pain that I do not understand. Then, when it becomes overwhelming again, I put it back in the box on the mantelpiece, next to the silver cuckoo clock and the yellow ceramic pig Charlotte gave me on my thirteenth birthday.
Like every genuinely gorgeous American woman I’ve ever met, Elfrida thinks she’s ugly and is obsessed by how much she weighs. She wants to fall in love, but her Norwegian boyfriend went back to Norway, her day-job boss is married, and the guy she likes in her theater group hasn’t made a move yet. She thinks he might be gay. I think she might be right. But then again, I’m not exactly batting a hundred in that department.
I solve Elfrida’s imaginary weight issue by eating most of her chocolate, which she keeps in the freezer, under her bed, and in glass jars behind the kitchen sink.
As far as men are concerned, I keep trying to sell her on our mutual friend Jack.
“He’s a really good man,” I say. “He’d treat you beautifully. And he’s funny and kind, not to mention cute. And he cooks and he irons and he cries whenever he remembers his dead dog, so you know he’d be a wonderful father. And he’s calm and he’s someone you know you could trust with the really important things. He’s sexy, too—and absolutely not the kind of guy to cheat on his wife. He’d be perfect for you.”
“He’d be perfect for you,” Elfrida says. “If you weren’t in love with the infamous Nick.”
I can’t pretend I haven’t thought about what it would be like to be with Jack. But I’ve come too far to settle for a man just because he makes me feel safe.
“It’s not just Nick,” I say, pouring dinner into large red plastic cups. We recently discovered Carnation chocolate meal-in-a-drink. It only has a hundred and fifty calories and contains all the nutrients you need for a well-balanced dinner.
“I’ve had tea with the Governor of Hong Kong. Jack’s never been out of the United States. He would never fit into my world.”
“Pippa, you don’t fit into your world.”
“But I can. Therein lies the difference. You should see me at Henley. I can blend in with the best of them.”
“What’s Henley?”
“It’s a town by a famous river in England where people in fancy hats go to watch people race boats, while they sit on the side of the river on a grassy bank drinking Pimm’s.”
“You’re into rowing and Pimm’s?”
“Not at all. But that’s not the point. What I’m trying to say is that Nick and I—we come from the same world. We want the same kind of things. Nick wants to go down the Amazon, and so do I. He’s traveled all around the world, and so have I. He reads Rudyard Kipling, and he knows what I’m talking about when I refer to Blue Peter. Actually he probably doesn’t, scrap that. But he’s—well, we’re adventurers, Nick and I. We’re not the type to settle.”
Now Elfrida and I are ready for the garlic cloves we roasted in the new convection oven that she ordered from the Home Shopping Network.
“I like Mozart. Jack likes rock and roll.”
“But youwrite rock and roll. Yousing rock and roll.”
“True.”
We spread the garlic clove on two Carr’s water biscuits and bite into them.
“Deeelicious,” we say, in unison.
“You’re out of your mind,” Elfrida says.
“And so’s Nick. And that’s why he’s right for me.”
“No matter,” Elfrida says, when we’re done with dinner. “Jack’s a lost cause anyway.”
“But he said he wasn’t gay.”
“It’s not that. He’s been in love with someone else for a while now.”
It would be supremely unfair to allow any feelings of jealousy. And so I don’t.
“Really? Who is she?”
“He won’t tell anyone. And you can’t probe Jack.”
“True,” I say. And then, “So, you’re not interested in Jack?”
“Not in that way,” Elfrida says. “It would be like dating my brother.”
“Okay,” I say, curiously relieved. And I’m pleased for Jack. Really. He’s met someone. Good. Good, good, good, good, good. Jack and I can stay friends. Because we’re both in love with other people. It’s good to have got this sorted.
So now I know that Jack is helping Elfrida paint her bedroom walls from maroon to cream because he’s her friend, not because he wants to date her. Soon he’s going to start working on her ceiling. So he’ll be around a lot.
Chapter Fifty-one
JAMESSOUKencourages me to generate all the preshow publicity I can for the exhibition—“An artist only gets one chance to make a first impression,” he says—and Nick and I are in contact almost every day.
“I’m inviting all the bankers,” I tell him. “And the Brits. According to the embassy there are one hundred and fifty thousand of them in the New York area.”
Nick can’t make it to New York before the exhibition, which is scheduled for October, but we’re thinking of rewarding ourselves with a trip to Rome, perhaps, in November. If the exhibition goes well, we might go to Athens too.
I have days when I am almost happy.
I have moments of lightness. Sometimes I have moments of hilarity. Like the moment Elfrida and I discover that what we thought was a mouse under the stove is actually a dirty sock.
And then the phone rings. And it’s Billie. In an instant the pain is back and the joy has gone.
“I know what this is all about. You’re testing me, honey. Well, I’m not going anywhere without you,” Billie is saying. “Without you I carry around an empty space inside me. Just talking to you helps a little, but seeing you would put cupfuls of joy back into me. I’d feel full again. You said you were going to call!”
By the time
I put the phone down my hand is shaking.
“Hey,” Elfrida says, on her way back up from the laundry room to which she has delivered the dirty sock. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say.
I’mnot going to burden my friends with this.
It’s bad, but not as bad as it was. I’m not in Billie’s house anymore. I’m no longer alone. I have Elfrida, and Jack, and, of course, my Nick.
DATE: August 5
TO: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
Released from your prison you reached out and released me from mine, and I adore you for it. One of the things that’s stopped me painting in the past has been the sense of isolation that painting brings. Knowing that you have been there, encouraging me, doing everything you can to bring my art into the world, has somehow made it all possible. I adore you. And I want you. In every way.
Love, Nick
I’m getting paid five hundred dollars a gig on Saturday nights now. I have to perform outside Manhattan to get that kind of money, but Earl Grey drives me safely out to Brooklyn and New Jersey, getting me home by one or two in the morning.
Whether I collapse on the couch or in my bed, at eight o’clock on Sunday mornings, the phone rings. And it’s always Billie.
“When are you going to call me?”
“I just need some time.”
“How much more time to you need? You’ve had six weeks!”
If I give in to her, and go and see her, she’ll start pulling me to her again. I won’t be able to resist. I’ll lose the tentative grip I have on becoming Pippa again. A different Pippa from the Pippa I was before, but Pippa nonetheless. I’ll be drowning in the mud again, with no way out.
I tell Billie I have a lot to think about and ask her to please give me some time. She says she understands and promises to wait for me to call her.
But then, as I’m padding across the floor to the bathroom to brush my teeth the following morning, the phone rings. And it’s Billie again. And I’m plunged back into the bog.
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