Miss Match

by Leslie Carroll

  Both men looked over in the direction of the bar. “Ian’s making out like a fiend, though. Tuesday night tips are bollocks.” Mick waved his hand toward the bartender and indicated that he should zip over another round of drinks to Barnaby’s table.

  “Yeh, but I’ve got Kate tonight, and that’s better than bloody tips.” Barnaby flashed a smile and his dark eyes glittered in the candlelight. With the day or two of stubble on his chin, he looked like a really sexy thug, and Kathryn tried to forget that she couldn’t hear anything he said.

  Mick appraised Kathryn, making her feel like a prime filet. The drinks arrived and she tackled her second gin and tonic, practically guzzling it. Since conversation was clearly not an option, she decided to focus on her drinks as her primary source of entertainment. By this time, she was beginning to feel pretty good, despite the din, and the current song, which seemed to go something like:

  Suck it, dammit, suck it!

  Don’t make me have to make you,

  But I can take you out back and show you who’s boss

  If you won’t kneel for me.

  Just like the Queen,

  I can be mean and make your life hell.

  So love me.

  Love me tonight.

  Give me head in the Tower of London.

  So much power in the Tower of London.

  Beheaded babies in the Tower of London.

  Barnaby was talking animatedly with Mick. Because The Torykillers were wailing away in Kathryn’s ears about fellatio and decapitated children, it was like watching a silent movie in a foreign language without the benefit of subtitles.

  “Kate seems great. Really great, mate,” Mick nodded, “but you’re going to be needing the dosh for nasty little things like rent.”

  “Jax has been paying me under the table. Why should I pay taxes to the bloody U.S. government when I don’t get anything from them?”

  “How did it go with the immigration lawyer?” Mick asked, waving to Ian for a third round, as Barnaby tossed back the remains of his second drink. Since Kathryn couldn’t hear what Mick and Barnaby were discussing anyway she turned her chair around to face the stage, pretending to look fascinated by getting a better look at the band.

  Barnaby frowned. “My visa expires in December. He said there are enough rockers in this country as it is, and I probably wouldn’t be granted one of those, y’know, genius visas, or whatever the immigrants get who are irreplaceable, or something. It was a real bummer, y’know, to hear him actually say, right to my face, that I’m nothing special. One of a million underemployed musicians. I mean, I almost had a record deal for The Lust Machine, but they pulled out at the last minute. So the lawyer advised me to get married if I want to stay in the country. It’s my surest bet.”

  The drinks arrived and The Torykillers finally took a much-appreciated break; and for a few seconds before the stereo was cranked up, there was a deafening silence in which Kathryn heard Barnaby’s last comment. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at her date. She wasn’t soused enough to miss the meaning of what she had just heard; yet she was mellow enough not to let it truly sink in. She slurped her third gin and tonic, and was sure that she was levitating slightly. “Can I have another, please?” she asked Barnaby.

  The sexy rock and roller semaphored Ian. “I’ll pick ’em up myself after I pick up my mail,” he called to the bartender, as he slid his chair away from the table and ambled in the direction of the men’s room.

  Well, it would make sense—if an immigration lawyer advised Barnaby aka Merton Street to find himself an American wife if he hoped to stay in the country—that he would register with a dating service, where he could have his pick of eligible women who were all looking to get married. It was possible that she was being too hard on him, and that he didn’t want to go that route to stay in the United States regardless of the attorney’s advice. Maybe he thought that was an unfair way to achieve what he wanted. On the other hand, she didn’t know Barnaby from Adam, and maybe that was what he was looking for after all. She wanted a man to love and cherish, and who would do the same for her for all the rest of their days. He wanted a green card. There were women who would willingly enter into that kind of arrangement, but Kathryn wasn’t one of them.

  Barnaby returned to the table with their drinks. Kathryn consumed her fourth gin and tonic as though it were lemonade. The Torykillers started their next set, and were playing a song about masturbation, called “Arrested Development.”

  “Can we go, now?” Kathryn asked her date.

  Barnaby flashed his lethal smile. “Sure, love. Any time you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready now.”

  The British rocker rose and pulled out Kathryn’s chair for her. His motives may not have been pure, but his manners were impeccable. They left Hades without paying. “It’s one of the perks of being a bartender here,” he whispered in her ear, as he steered her toward the door. Good thing his hand was on her back, because she was feeling a little wobbly.

  “I was hoping we could have gotten something to eat in there,” she told him, when they hit the sidewalk. “No wonder Cerberus over there looks so hungry. I feel for you, kiddo,” she slurred, looking at the hellhound.

  “We can stop for a burger or something if you like.”

  As much as she was really hungry, Kathryn started wondering what she was going to talk to this man about. She had learned enough in Hades to realize that she didn’t want to go on a second date with Barnaby Street, so there was no point in prolonging the inevitable. “It’s all right, Barnaby. Just take me home, please. It’s been great. Really great.” She realized she was still mimicking him and his friend, Mick the walking tattoo.

  They boarded Barnaby’s bike. Kathryn was too looped to feel as apprehensive as she normally would about riding back across town with a man who’d matched her drink for drink. Barnaby revved the engine and they shot up First Avenue.

  A few blocks north, Barnaby pulled over to the curb.

  “What’s the matter?” Kathryn asked.

  “D’ya mind if we take a little detour, Kate?” her date asked.

  “I was sort of anxious to get home, but . . .”

  “It won’t take long. I want to take you to this fab T and P parlor on St. Marks.”

  “T and P?”

  “Tattoo and piercing. You’re really great, Kate,” Barnaby said drunkenly. “I want something to remember this night.”

  “This place is brill,” he pronounced, as they pulled up in front of the House of Pain on East Eighth Street. “I mean, they’re open twenty-four hours!”

  Kathryn followed the rocker into the tattoo and piercing parlor. “Nipples pierced while you wait,” she said, reading a sign on the wall to herself. What do they expect you to do? Leave them here while you catch a quick bite at Dallas BBQ? She looked at the range of tattoo samples that lined the fluorescently lit walls.

  “So, what do ya think, Kate? Tattoo or piercing?”

  “Well . . . I think it’s very . . . gracious of you to ask my opinion, but it’s kind of a personal decision, don’t you think?” The effects of the alcohol were beginning to make her nauseous, and she grabbed the back of an orange, molded plastic, waiting-room-style chair for support.

  “Naw, Kate. You decide. After all, you might have to live with it.”

  “Well . . . tattoos are more colorful,” Kathryn suggested.

  “Right, then! Tattoo it is, Fluffy.”

  A huge Hell’s Angel with a full red beard raised his bulk to his feet. “Where do you want this one, Barnaby?”

  Barnaby stripped off his leather jacket and pulled his skintight T-shirt over his head. “Right over the heart, mate.”

  “Who’s Emily?” Kathryn asked, feeling oddly proprietary when she saw another woman’s name stenciled in bright blue on Barnaby’s right pec.

  “Emily? Oh, right! Yeh, she’s an ex-girlfriend, but it’s more painful to get her name erased than to think about her every time I take off my shirt.” Barnaby looked
down at the right side of his chest. “Besides, I sort of like the idea of the symmetry thing, now that I’m getting one over here.” He pointed to his left breast, just over the nipple.

  “What do you want there?” Fluffy asked his client.

  “It’s a wee bit bourgeois, but I think a rose and a sword—no, maybe a heart and a sword. And just one word this time: Kate.”

  “What?” Kathryn asked, working overtime not to slur her speech.

  “I said I wanted something to remember our date, Kate. Remember?”

  Kathryn winced as Fluffy took out the tools of the trade. “But couldn’t you have considered something . . . well, less . . . permanent ?”

  Barnaby, under the needle, looked at her like she was hopelessly middle class.

  It was all Kathryn could do to keep all four gin and tonics down during the ride back to the West Village. At that late hour, the streets were deserted; and so Barnaby demonstrated the bike’s engine capacity and used the narrow, curving avenues like the kind of test courses demonstrated in German automobile commercials, stopping only when the light was red. If there was nothing coming at them north or south, he only slowed down through the light. Lucky for them, no cops were in sight for the duration of the journey. He pulled up in front of her building and revved the engine one more time, in a display of testosterone poisoning.

  “Hey, you! Shut up!” a voice called down from a fivefloor walk-up across the street.

  They both alit from the bike and Kathryn returned her helmet, which Barnaby attached, along with his own, to the sissy bar.

  “Oh, you don’t need to take off your helmet,” Kathryn said drunkenly.

  “I’ve heard of people doing it with their boots on, but if you want me to keep the helmet on . . .” He reached for it. “Kinky. I like it.”

  Kathryn put out her hand to stop him. “No, Barnaby. That wasn’t what I meant. I’ve had . . . a good time tonight . . .”

  “Super. So did I, Kate. It was really super.” He touched his chest where his new artwork had been installed.

  “But I don’t think we’re really right for each other.”

  Barnaby looked crushed and confused. For a moment, Kathryn felt sorry for him. He was incredibly good-looking, but head-banging rock and all-night tattoo parlors were not her style, nor did she want to date a man who barely made ends meet by working off the books at a downtown club.

  “I’m a Royalist,” she said simply, and shrugged.

  Barnaby looked at her, his hands on his hips. “So, let me get this straight . . . you don’t want to go out with me again. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “In a nutshell, I’m afraid, Barnaby.”

  “But—” He pointed to his left breast. “I just got your name tattooed over my heart, for fuck’s sake!”

  “I’m sorry,” Kathryn replied. “It wasn’t my idea, remember?”

  “Talk about painful memories! You’re a ball buster, Kate. And I thought you were top bollocks!”

  Since her date was starting to bring out the big guns, Kathryn realized she would have to sink to his level to retaliate. “And I thought you were interested in a redhead, not a Green Card! Thanks for the date, Barnaby.”

  She turned and went inside her apartment building, thinking of something Eleanor had once said about someone as drunk as Kathryn was now: “He couldn’t even walk a straight curve.” She heard the Honda’s engine rev again, followed by the sound of Barnaby flooring the gas and heading down the block. She sank down onto one of the Naugahyde benches in the lobby.

  “Are you okay, chiquita?” Carlos asked. “Qué pasa?”

  “I’m just a little dizzy, that’s all.”

  “I’m not supposed to leave the front desk, but if you need help getting upstairs, I can take you,” the doorman said, wiping some Snapple from his mustache.

  “No, thanks, Carlos. I’m all right. Just a little woozy. Four gin and tonics on an empty stomach.”

  Carlos looked sympathetic, then shook his head. “Drink rum,” he said sagely. “Much better for you. Cuba libre, Bacardi, no problems.”

  “Yeah, right.” Rum hangovers were just as bad. Maybe not for Carlos.

  Kathryn made it to her bathroom just in time to collapse in front of the toilet. The room was spinning, and she could still hear the politically incorrect, sado-masochistic racket of The Torykillers in her head. She rid herself of the alcohol, then lay down on the cold tile floor, which felt good against her temples. She ran some cold water from the tap and drenched a lavender terry washcloth, putting it over her brow as she lay on the floor, feeling like the last time she had been given nitrous oxide at the dentist, except this time she was in more pain. She felt as though she were the size of a Lilliputian and had been splayed out on a record turntable, going around and around at about 45 rpm. If she’d had a “B” side, the song would be called “Don’t Ever Do That Again.”

  What a waste the black net teddy from La Perla had been. When the room stopped spinning, Kathryn tugged off her boots and leggings, unsnapped her bodysuit, and carefully removed the Very Expensive Lingerie. It was so pretty and delicate—hand-embroidered tiny pink rosettes with green leaves against the black background. More like a leotard than a teddy because it hugged her hips instead of flaring out. One day, she vowed, someone would appreciate it. And her. It was the last thing she remembered before everything went as dark as Hades.

  Chapter 6

  “It wasn’t the date from hell; it was the date to hell,” Kathryn explained as she and Eleanor swung Johanna across the bridle path in Central Park. “One, two, three . . .”

  “Whoops!” Johanna cried, finishing their cheer. “Again.”

  “We’ll do it again on the way back home, okay,” the toddler’s mother consoled.

  “Can we see the water, Aunt Kittycat?”

  “Sure, jujube. Let’s go see if anyone is sailing boats on the lake at Seventy-fourth Street.” Kathryn turned to her sister. “Hey, speaking of sailing toy boats on that lake, have you read her Stuart Little , yet?”

  “I think she’s still a little young for the book. Dan and I bought the video though, but we have to prescreen it first. Hold it—what do you mean, date to hell?”

  “Barnaby took me to an East Village rock club called Hades. With a drooling, snarling black rottweiler out front, I swear. My ears are still ringing.”

  “Did you do the orange juice and aspirin thing?”

  “There isn’t enough orange juice in Florida or aspirin at Mt. Sinai to cure this.” Kathryn touched her head as though it were an eggshell. “I wore sunglasses to bed last night—I mean this morning—because the light hurt my eyes. Poor Carlos. He almost had to bodily deposit me on my doorstep, but I refused his kind offer of assistance.”

  “Carlos? I thought your date was named Barnaby.” Eleanor looked puzzled. “I know my synapses were intact when I woke up, but I swear I missed something.”

  “Carlos is the night doorman. You know him. The one with the graying mustache who always says ‘qué linda’ every time you come in and out of the building. He thinks you’re hot.”

  “Oh, him.” Eleanor blushed a little. “He’s the one who always helps me with the stroller. So what happened with Barnaby?”

  Kathryn gave Eleanor a play-by-play of the entire date, ending with her biggest regret of the evening. “The La Perla black net teddy seems to have been a casualty of the evening.”

  Eleanor’s eyes widened—partly in shock and partly in angry disbelief. “I understand that he may have sounded like Michael Caine, but do you mean to tell me that after the evening you spent, you brought that man upstairs and allowed him to rip a three-hundred dollar piece of lingerie to shreds? Even the Cro-Magnon types should learn the finer points of undressing women.”

  “Barnaby didn’t even make it as far as the lobby when he dropped me off. The only thing that got ripped off was my motorcycle helmet. No, I just sort of . . . well . . . passed out this morning. I vaguely remember getting undressed first; then I
did laundry when I got up—because everything smelled like gin or worse—and I can’t find the teddy. It’s not in the apartment. I don’t think it got in with the laundry, because believe me, I would handwash a three-hundred dollar piece of net in Woolite; but I went down to the laundry room anyway and looked, and it wasn’t there. So I went back upstairs and had a good cry, which magnified my hangover.”

  Eleanor put a consoling arm around her sister. “These things have a way of turning up. It’s probably under the bed. Maybe in your drunken stupor you actually put it away in a drawer.”

  Kathryn leaned her head on her younger sister’s shoulder. “Thanks, ‘Mom.’ I just feel so guilty about losing it. One night I had it, and the next morning, there wasn’t a trace of it.”

  Supermom lifted Kathryn’s head and looked her in the eye. “We’re talking about a piece of underwear here— not your virginity, for God’s sake. Are you sniffling?”

  Kathryn nodded.

  Eleanor sighed. “You are so emotional.”

  “It’s the way I’m built. I have a lot of Cancer in my chart . . . my moon and my rising sign. We cry at everything.”

  “Well, when you get back to the apartment and you still can’t find it after a thorough search, if you’re willing to submit to the mortification of letting people know what you wear under all that velvet, you could post some signs at the mailboxes and in the laundry room.”

  “How did you get to be the practical one?” Kathryn asked her.

  “It was ever thus,” Eleanor laughed. “Someone’s got to do it. Capricorn Sun, Taurus Moon. I’m romantic, but I’m a grown-up.”

  “Is that supposed to imply that I’m not? By the way, how did the Brownie Points come out?”

  “Crummy. In more ways than one. I think I have to develop a conical pan. Spraying Pam on the water cooler cups soaks them through and if you don’t grease them, you can’t get the Brownie Points out in one piece. So, it’s back to the drawing board. It gives me a mission, though, which I am sorely lacking these days.”

  “So, you’re living vicariously through mine?” Kathryn smiled.

  “Something like that,” Eleanor responded, looking guiltily at her two-year-old daughter.