Strawberry Tattoo

by Lauren Henderson

  “It’s a date.”

  “What can I get you?” the waitress said, coming up to our table.

  New York bars even had table service. You didn’t have to move if you didn’t want to.

  Kate ordered a margarita. I immediately seconded that.

  “They have margaritas here,” I said dreamily as the waitress left us. “I like it already.”

  “They have margaritas everywhere in the city,” said Laurence pityingly. “I didn’t realise you Brits were so starved of culture.”

  “Yeah, right. Like there’s centuries of history in America,” I retorted.

  Suzanne laughed. Laurence rounded on her at once.

  “Suzanne, you’re from Belgium. You can’t talk. I know,” he went on gleefully, “let’s play Ten Famous Belgians! We haven’t done that in at least two weeks.”

  “Shit,” said Kate, “I was going to write them down last time so I could reel it right off next time we played.”

  “It’s a game we invented a while back,” Laurence explained to me. “To taunt Suzanne for being a snotty European. First one to name ten famous Belgians gets a free drink.”

  “Surely she always wins?” I said, looking at Suzanne, who was lighting a cigarette. She rolled her eyes at me, but didn’t comment.

  “Oh, Suzanne’s banned from playing, of course,” Laurence said airily.

  “That’s not very fair.”

  “Oh, we get her a drink too. We’re not total bastards.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Suzanne witheringly. But she seemed to take the teasing with a good enough grace. And when you’re tall, blonde and built along the lines of a ship’s figurehead, it’s easy to convey that you consider petty mockery beneath your notice.

  Our margaritas arrived in big ribbed half-pint glasses, studded with ice and a hefty straw.

  “God, this is good,” I said, downing half in one slurp and beaming round the table.

  “So how do you like it here?” Java said.

  “Do you mean here in the bar or here in New York?”

  “Well, either, really. But I meant the city.”

  Everyone pricked up their ears. They genuinely wanted to know. I thought this was quite sweet. Londoners wouldn’t have asked the question, not giving a damn about the answer; our attitude would be that if New Yorkers didn’t like it in London, they could sod off and die. And the first part was optional.

  “I’ve only been here about ten seconds,” I said, drinking some more margarita, “but so far it seems great. The gallery is a wonderful space. I’m really looking forward to planning out my installation. Ugh, that sounded so naff and gushing,” I apologised. “I’m usually much nastier than this.”

  “We’ll make allowances for the jet lag,” Kate said kindly.

  “I need to know where to go shopping,” I said with decision, as my eyes fell on her extremely nice bead choker. “I should get started as soon as possible. I’ve only got a month.”

  “Clothes?” she said.

  “What else is there?”

  “OK, I’ll give you some places. Kinda downtown, funky stuff, right?”

  “Where are you staying?” Laurence asked.

  “I’ve got a sub-let on the Upper West Side.”

  “Where exactly?”

  I gave the address, which was on West End Avenue in the lower seventies.

  “Great! We’re practically neighbours!” he said cheerfully. “I’m in the lower eighties.”

  “Don’t you guys need oxygen masks that far uptown?” Kate said sarcastically.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Kate, it’s not as if I lived in the upper hundreds,” Laurence retorted. “And I don’t have to pay through the nose for a skanky little East Village dump.”

  “Could we cut out the eternal uptown/downtown debate?” Suzanne said a trifle wearily. “I’m sure Sam isn’t that interested.”

  “I would be if I knew what it was about.” I finished my margarita. “Shall I get in another round?” I waved at the waitress.

  “My God,” Laurence said, temporarily distracted, “I’ve always heard the English drank like fish, and it’s so true.”

  I looked round the table. Everyone else was, at most, halfway down their drinks.

  “Shit,” I said. “And I was going slowly because of the jet lag.”

  “Is it true you guys all drink till you fall over?” Java wanted to know. “I heard it’s a Saturday night thing over there.”

  “Not fall over,” I corrected. “Stagger, perhaps. Another margarita, please,” I said to the waitress. “OK, you were saying?”

  “Uptown versus downtown,” Suzanne said. “I’ll do this”—she held up her hands to ward off Kate and Laurence, who were both trying to speak. “Being a snotty European, I can see both sides of the question. Uptown has the park, river walks, the museums, bigger apartments, especially the higher you go. But there’s not that much going on and everything shuts pretty early. Downtown is much more hip. But it’s grungier and it costs much more so everyone lives in shoeboxes.”

  She looked around the table. “That was pretty fair, right?”

  A round of nods answered her.

  “Where do you live, Suzanne?”

  “Midtown,” she said cheerfully. “You must come around. I have a great place.”

  “Talk about spending a fortune, though,” Laurence said. “A thousand bucks a month just for the marble in the lobby.”

  “I don’t spend a fortune,” Suzanne said tranquilly. “My flatmate does. He’s a banker,” she explained to me.

  “One of Suze’s many rich would-be boyfriends,” Kate said. “He thought giving her somewhere fabulous to live practically rent free would win her heart.”

  “And has it?” I asked.

  Suzanne gave me a beautiful smile. “It certainly didn’t hurt. But I don’t believe in making decisions in a hurry.” She put one hand up to check that her hair, drawn back into a bun at the nape of her neck, was still in place.

  “She’s holding out for the richest Belgian in New York,” Kate said affectionately.

  “Does he have to be Belgian?” I wanted to know.

  “Tradition matters,” Suzanne said seriously, an effect that was rather undercut by being simultaneously carolled by Laurence and Kate. Clearly it was a familiar saying of hers.

  “I should be going,” Kate said, looking at her watch.

  “Meeting someone?” Java asked.

  “Yeah.”

  The way she said this, her voice flattening out as if she didn’t really want to answer, made my ears prick up. Kate had been so ebullient up till now that this change of tone was instantly obvious. Suzanne picked up on it immediately.

  “Oh shit,” she said, leaning across the table to look at Kate more closely. “Kate, it’s not Leo?”

  Kate shrugged. It wasn’t a confirmation or a denial, it was an evasive, don’t-push-me kind of shrug. But Suzanne rode right over the signal.

  “Kate! You said it was over!” she said, unable to help her rising intonation. Whoever Leo was, he had Suzanne more than worried.

  “It is over,” Kate said. “Relax, OK? Oh, look who’s come in.” She waved at Don, who had just shambled through the door, accompanied by another guy. He raised his hand in greeting and went over to the bar.

  “That was a bad attempt to distract me,” Suzanne said sternly. “You never say hi to Don normally.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m not that rude. Look, I really have to go.” She chucked a five-dollar bill on the table and stood up. “Get them to tell you about the Don thing,” she said to me, pulling on her jacket. “It’s a good story. Are you coming in tomorrow?”

  I nodded.

  “OK. So when I see you I’ll give you the shopping rundown. Bye, everyone.”

  She waved and was gone. Suzanne stared after her.

  “Something’s not right,” she said crossly. “If she’s seeing Leo again …”

  “Old boyfriend?” I said.

  “Bad news,” Java informed me
.

  “Kate tends to like them with problems,” Suzanne said, drawing on another cigarette. “But Leo …”

  “Leo was overdoing it, even by her standards,” Laurence said.

  A pall of seriousness hung for a moment over the table. Though I was curious about the nameless sins of the absent Leo, I was definitely not in the mood for Sturm und Drang this evening. I wanted everything to be light and bubbly and fun so it would keep me awake until at least eleven o’clock. I sensed that as soon as things got heavy my head would hit the table and stay there, snoring.

  “Tell me the Don story,” I pleaded as winsomely as possible. “Kate said it would be funny. I need funny right now.”

  “Well,” Suzanne and Laurence said simultaneously. They paused and looked at each other.

  “Go ahead,” said Laurence. “You’re the girl. It’s a girl story.”

  “This is so funny,” Java promised me.

  “Well,” Suzanne said again, her eyes gleaming with amusement. “This happened about a year and a half ago, just after Don joined the gallery. He’s pretty much Kate’s type—she likes them kind of butch.”

  “Does he have problems?” I inquired.

  “Just wait,” Suzanne said. “But yeah, he’s got kind of a druggie past, I think.”

  “And it’s not like his ‘art’ is going anywhere fast,” chimed in Laurence cattily.

  “Oh, he’s an artist?”

  Laurence burst into a fake coughing fit. “Please don’t make me laugh! My asthma!” he pleaded through the simulated wheezes.

  “Carol lets him use a room downstairs as his studio,” Java explained to me. “It’s kinda derivative, though. His work.”

  “Could I just tell the story? Would that be OK with you guys?” Suzanne said pointedly. “So we all go out for a few drinks after work, and one by one we all peel off, but Kate and Don are stuck to each other like glue by that time. I mean, it’s pretty obvious. They’ve been sitting on the same sofa for the last hours, thighs clamped together, and she’s actually been pretending she can understand what he says and thinks it’s funny. So they go back to hers and start making out, things are getting hot and heavy, and finally they decide to go for it. Only neither of them have any condoms. Things get more and more frustrating“—she waved her hand in a large embracing circle—”and at last Don says right, that’s it, he’s going out to get some. There’s a twenty-four-hour drugstore on the next block. So he puts on his things, goes out, and”—she paused for effect—“never comes back.”

  “No!”

  “Oh yes,” said Suzanne, who was enjoying this tremendously. “Just disappeared.”

  Java was shaking her head in a pantomime of disbelief.

  “What a wimp!” I said incredulously. “Performance anxiety, right?”

  “That’s what I think,” Suzanne said. “Scared he wouldn’t be up to it. And apparently he tells the guys that he’s this real stud. Hah!”

  “Or it’s about the size of a cocktail weenie and he didn’t want her to know,” Java suggested.

  “Also possible. So he’s all mouth and no trousers,” I said thoughtfully, looking over at Don, who was still at the bar.

  “What?” said Laurence, leaning over towards me.

  “All mouth and no trousers,” I repeated. “It means you talk a lot about how good you are in bed, but never follow through. In Don’s case, of course, it would be ‘all mouth and no dungarees.’”

  “Excellent,” Laurence said, a contemplative smile on his face. “I like these British expressions.”

  “This friend of mine thought he was pretty hot,” Java added, “until I told her that story. Now she wouldn’t go near him if you paid her. I mean, who wants to be left with your engine running and nowhere to go?”

  I had a big flash of missing Hugo, who would inevitably have pointed out that the latter part of the analogy wasn’t exact, and that she would have done better to say “and no one to disengage your clutch.” Or possibly “slip it into third.” But I mustn’t get maudlin about Hugo. I wasn’t half drunk enough for it to be allowable.

  “Did Kate ever confront him about it?” I asked instead. “She looks like the type who would.”

  “Sure,” Suzanne said, giving this a wonderfully sarcastic spin. “She went up to him the very next day and said, ‘Well, what happened to you?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, I forgot I had to ring my brother down in Virginia. It was real important.’”

  “What a loser,” Laurence said smugly. “That just adds the final touch of patheticness to an already unconvincing—Oh, hi, Don!”

  Don loomed up over us, the other guy hovering by his side. Laurence, whose face was temporarily hidden from Don, grimaced at me horribly.

  “Did he hear?.” he mouthed.

  I raised my shoulders helplessly.

  “Hey, Kevin,” Suzanne said, “you haven’t met Sam, have you? Sam Jones. She’s one of the English artists. Sam, this is Kevin. He’s one of the gallery assistants. We were bringing her up to speed about work stuff.”

  I admired the girl’s aplomb. She might look like an ice queen but she was a good operator in a sticky situation. If I were in a tight place it would be Suzanne I’d pick to watch my back. In contrast Java, sitting next to me, was stricken with embarrassment and consequently as useless in a tight spot as a would-be ladykiller with performance anxiety.

  “Hi, Kevin,” I said, determined to rival Suzanne’s cool. “This lot have just been filling me in about who’s who at the gallery. But they didn’t get to you yet, you’ll be glad to hear. Do you guys want to sit down?”

  “Uh, OK,” said Kevin, sliding in next to me. He was blond and very good-looking in such a blank, unreflecting way that the gaze passed straight over him and settled straight away on something more interesting, if less regular.

  “You splitting, big guy?” he said to Don.

  Maybe Kevin had information we didn’t; but his choice of adjective, after Java’s hypothesis a few moments before, sent Laurence’s eyes wide in an effort to stop laughing and caused Suzanne to reach hurriedly for a cigarette before realising that she had one already smouldering in the ashtray.

  “Yeah, I’m off,” Don mumbled, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his donkey jacket. “Got to haul ass.” He nodded a goodbye to our cosy little group and was gone, shouldering the door open.

  “Did dungarees come back in while I wasn’t looking?” I wondered. “They have to be the most unflattering garment ever designed.”

  “Bubble skirts,” countered Suzanne.

  “Boob tubes,” Java added.

  “Oh, come on, Java, you’d look great in a boob tube,” Suzanne said firmly.

  Java shook her head. “They make me look like I haven’t got anything up here at all,” she said, mournfully tapping her chest. “The stretchy ones just flatten you out completely.”

  “It’s the look,” I said unsympathetically. “You’re lucky you can wear it. It’d take a steamroller to flatten me out.”

  “Well, I don’t like having no boobs,” Java said stubbornly. “Even if it is the look.”

  “I didn’t know you hung out with Don, Kevin,” Laurence was saying.

  “Oh, well, you know.” Kevin ducked his head. “He’s a great guy. Some of the stories he tells—he’s really been around, man. It’s pretty impressive.”

  Laurence looked distinctly underawed. I could understand his basic dislike of Don; with his sharp intellect and skinny physique he might well resent a guy who, just by mumbling a few disconnected phrases and resembling a brick shithouse, managed to pull easily enough. Even if he couldn’t follow through on it. But I was beginning to wonder whether Laurence had a thing for Kate, and resented Don’s success with her—such as it was. It would explain why he seemed unable to let the Don-baiting go.

  Oh?” he said, overdoing the casually interested bit. “What kind of stories? Do tell!”

  “Laurence, I’ve got another British expression for you,” I interrupted. “Key merchant. It mea
ns someone”—I mimed putting a key in Java’s back and turning it—“who likes to wind people up.”

  “I get the gist,” Laurence said aloofly. “Thank you so much for that, Sam.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to look at your material yet,” Kevin said to me. It was strange how his undoubted handsomeness cancelled itself out; the more you looked at him, the more bored you were with the even, perfect features, unanimated by any saving flicker of personality. He was like a doctor in a daytime soap. “I’ve been really busy with Barbara’s show. But we’re all looking forward to yours.”

  “When does hers come down exactly?” I asked.

  “End of next week,” Kevin said, and there was a slight flatness in his tone echoed by the studiedly neutral expressions of everyone else around the table.

  “Is it not doing too well?” I probed, inquisitive as always.

  Kevin shrugged.

  “Barbara’s work always moves slowly,” he said. “But, I don’t know, the timing of the opening wasn’t so great. There were a lot of really big shows opening that week, and the reviews weren’t so hot, which didn’t exactly help. We’re doing what we can.”

  “I heard she’s not too happy,” said Suzanne.

  “Well, would you be?” Kevin said. “She didn’t like it that the Vallorani retrospective opened the same day as hers did. But what can we do? I mean, we have to plan nine months ahead! How can we know about something like that?” He gestured in what was clearly a rhetorical plea; everyone else knew the schedule as well as he did.

  “Why was she cross about the Vallorani retrospective in particular?” I asked. “I mean, there must be lots of stuff going on right now.” Autumn was always the busiest season for art dealers.

  Kevin pulled a face. “She thinks they’re very similar in style,” he said. This was obviously a direct quote.

  “Boy, that’s some nerve she’s got,” Laurence said.

  “What d’you want? Artists, right?” Kevin caught my eye. “Oh, Shit. Sorry.”

  “No offence taken,” I said.

  “Can I get you a drink?” he said, still embarrassed.

  “Duh!” I said, flashing him a big smile.

  “I’m sorry?” Kevin said nervously.