Something Blue

by Ann Hood

  But it stopped being funny. It got harder and harder to even go out there and try anymore, to listen to the dancers in his classes talk about jobs they got, to watch his friends shuffle off to Buffalo across a Broadway stage.

  “Come on,” Lucy would say. “Where’s that fire that used to be in your eyes? Let’s rekindle it.”

  But the best he could do lately was a slow pas de deux with her, pushing her awkwardly through the motions.

  “If Katherine doesn’t move in with Meryl King soon,” Lucy tells him, “I’m going to crack up.”

  “But I’ve done all these home improvements,” Jasper says, his arms sweeping across the room. “All for you.”

  Lucy wrinkles her nose.

  He doesn’t bother to respond. Instead, he shows her a lamp he found on the street. It looks exactly like one his parents used to have, an orange stand, loosely shaped like a figure, and a shade with geometric shapes.

  “Can you believe someone was throwing this away?” he says, switching it on and off.

  “Yes,” Lucy says, “I can.”

  She has on her Whirlwind Weekends uniform, and is packing her bag for another trip to London.

  “So,” she asks him, “what will you do this weekend while I’m once again at the very spot where Anne Boleyn lost her head?”

  “The usual,” he says. “Work. You know.”

  “I think I’ll go and see Cats,” Lucy says. “For a change.”

  Jasper hesitates. Then he says, “You’ll never guess what.”

  She is humming a song from the play, slightly off-key.

  “I auditioned for that very play yesterday,” he says. His throat feels dry.

  Lucy looks up. She has the kind of mouth that always seems to be pouting, so he finds it hard sometimes to read her expressions.

  Jasper takes a breath. He shrugs. “I gave it my best shot,” he says. He thinks about all the other potential dancing cats he saw there. They were more like acrobats than dancers, tumbling and cartwheeling across the stage. He doesn’t mention that to Lucy. Or that he felt stiff during his own piece, awkward and clumsy.

  Her voice is eager. “What more can you do?” she is saying. “You can only give it your best and then it’s out of your hands.” She is beside him, putting her arms around his neck, smiling. “I can stand to see Cats another two hundred and fifty times if you’re one of the cats.”

  His throat is burning now. He tries to say something but can’t.

  “You’d look very cute in a cat costume,” she tells him.

  He says, “There were a lot of good dancers there.”

  Even though she turns away from him, he sees her start to frown.

  After he walks her to the subway, Jasper heads right back home. He pretends he isn’t waiting for the phone to ring, for a message about getting at least a callback. Today is the last day to be notified, and even though he knows in his heart that he won’t get another chance, there is something inside him, a flicker that says, Maybe.

  When he turns the corner, he sees fire trucks, a crowd watching, and flames and smoke everywhere. The school across from his apartment is on fire, burning so fast that as he nears it, he can actually hear the flames crackle and sizzle. But he doesn’t stand with the others and watch it burn. He goes inside his building, and into his apartment.

  There are no messages. And the phone doesn’t ring all night. Because it is so dark there, Jasper isn’t sure how late he sits, pretending not to wait. He hears sirens, and more fire trucks arrive. He hears, finally, firemen telling people that the show is over and they can go home now. And he hears the radios come back on, the salsa music filling the streets again.

  After a long while, he takes off his jeans and puts on a black leotard. He stretches, then goes to the barre that takes up one entire wall of the living room. Breathing deeply, he bends in a demi-plié, then another, then a grand plié. He stares straight ahead, using the glow-in-the-dark full moon to keep him centered and balanced in the darkness.

  Love on the doorstep

  IF KATHERINE CLOSES HER eyes real tight at night, she can block out the distant sound of traffic below, and faintly screeching sirens, and pretend that she is back in college and that Lucy is still her best friend. She can pretend that they are in their small boxy room, the walls painted a pale mint green, the walls dotted with cheap prints—a hand holding out flowers, a Matisse cutout, some Norman Rockwell with braided girls. She can still smell the remnants of Emeraude and Charlie perfume they had spritzed on earlier. She can imagine that if she calls to Lucy, her sleepy voice will answer to her from across the room, where late into the night she sits on her bed, drawing by the beam of a small flashlight.

  Katherine tries it.

  She keeps her eyes shut, squeezed together as tight as she can, and says Lucy’s name once.

  Then again, louder. “Lucy?”

  Lucy does not answer.

  Katherine opens her eyes. There are lights in the courtyard six floors below. The lights burn all night on the small trim hedges and patch of grass in the courtyard’s center. The super goes into that courtyard, Lucy has told her, at the turn of each season, and plants appropriate flowers—crocuses and daffodils in spring, lilies in summer, chrysanthemums in autumn, and a small Christmas tree with tiny blue pinpoint lights in winter. It is a park that no one is allowed to enter. From the window in the living room, when Katherine looks down, it seems tiny and forlorn.

  Again Katherine says, “Lucy?”

  There is still no answer. But Katherine thinks she hears Lucy sigh behind the closed bedroom door.

  Julia often appears at Lucy’s doorstep unannounced. She brings shopping bags filled with bargain clothes from Cheap Jack’s or Goodwill. Oversize tuxedo jackets or seersucker blazers. Beaded sweaters, chandelier earrings, Annie Hall hats. Lucy and Julia coo over these things as if they are precious treasure.

  Katherine tries to be as excited as they are, but the musty smell and mysterious stains bother her. Who wore these things? she thinks. What happened to them? She imagines the men who sleep in subway stops, the ones asking for money on street corners.

  “Isn’t this great?” Julia says.

  Katherine quickly puts down the jacket she is holding. “Yes,” she says. “Great.”

  Julia is here again. She appears just as Lucy and Katherine sit down to eat their deli salads. The salads come in plastic containers and are sold by weight. These too seem slightly creepy to Katherine, but she doesn’t want to act overly prim or suspicious. The woman in front of her at the salad bar sniffed everything, holding a stuffed grape leaf, then a spoonful of bean salad, then a tangle of sprouts up to her nose.

  Katherine tried to ignore her. She tried to be as bold as Lucy, scooping things into the container as if they were at a restaurant salad bar. Pretend you’re at the Rusty Scupper, Katherine told herself. Pretend you’re at the brunch buffet at the Marriott.

  Now Lucy is digging into her salad while Katherine tries to get up the courage to take even one bite.

  “Did you notice that woman in front of us?” Katherine is asking just before Julia knocks. “Did you notice the way she manhandled the garbanzos?”

  Lucy stares at Katherine blankly, then gets up to answer the door.

  When Katherine sees that Julia is here, she feels her heart sink. It’s bad enough that she has to spend so much time trying to grasp the meanings of what people are talking about, searching her mind for what Tribeca means, and NoHo and Alphabet City. Her head spins sometimes with what seems like a new language. The Cloisters, Stuyvesant Town, Balducci’s and South Street. And then Julia and Lucy start to talk and the language gets even harder. They throw around people’s names and store names and private references without ever pausing.

  Even now as Katherine thinks this Julia is saying, “You’ll never believe who I saw on line at Tower. That woman Sherry who didn’t have any thumbs. Remember?”

  And Lucy is groaning, “Does she still have that awful perm?”

 
Julia nods and laughs and says, “She was buying the soundtrack to Starlight Express.”

  They both find this incredibly funny, although Katherine can’t figure out why. So she asks, “Isn’t that the play where everybody is on roller skates?”

  But they keep talking. America, they say. Tortilla Flats. Sugar Reef. Great Jones.

  Katherine sighs and stares at her salad. It almost seems alive. She can imagine it squirming, moving. The blob that ate Manhattan. The woman who sniffed everything had on black nail polish. Who wears black nail polish? Katherine thinks. She closes the lid on the container.

  Lucy touches her arm. “Come on,” she says. “We’ll go with Julia to Great Jones for dinner. The salads will keep.”

  “Okay,” Katherine says. She realizes they were discussing restaurants. America, she repeats to herself. Sugar Reef. She repeats them all the way out the door and in the elevator ride downward, as Julia and Lucy start to talk about something else she doesn’t understand, Ross Reports and SAG cards. She repeats them as if she is in junior high again, learning her French vocabulary words.

  Lucy draws Katherine a map of Manhattan. She colors it in with bright crayons. SoHo is lime green. Midtown is violet.

  “I used to think Kansas was yellow,” Lucy tells her. “And California was hot pink. Remember those maps when you were a kid?”

  Katherine nods.

  It is a hot Saturday and they are sitting on the couch in their underwear. They have cotton between each of their toes, waiting for their nails to dry. They have plastic bags on their heads, with special do-it-yourself hot oil treatments on their hair. Their faces are dark green, covered with algae facial treatments. Katherine is happy.

  “I figured if you went to California, everything had a pink glow to it,” Lucy is saying. “Like a haze.”

  The map Lucy has drawn has all the landmarks in metallic colors. The Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, all silver and copper.

  “It’s easy,” Lucy tells her for what seems like the hundredth time. “Think grid.”

  Katherine sighs. “Do you believe that I learned my way around Paris in one day? That I figured out the subway in Rome?”

  Lucy laughs. “No,” she says, “I don’t.”

  “Why can’t Sixth Avenue be just Sixth Avenue? Why does it have to be Avenue of the Americas? And Tribeca,” Katherine says, groaning, “forget Tribeca.”

  She feels like maybe they can become friends again after all. Last night, on the sofa—which isn’t even really a sofa but a thing that resembles a sofa but unfolds into a bed—Katherine remembered visiting Lucy a long time ago at her first apartment on Sullivan Street. The apartment had been the smallest thing Katherine had ever seen. Lucy’s bed was really an old door with a piece of foam on top of it. It was the worst weekend Katherine had ever had. It was hot, and they couldn’t agree on anything. Lucy had looked so different, with her hair cut into a kind of punk haircut and all of her clothes black. Katherine noticed that Lucy walked fast. That’s what had struck her most, the way Lucy walked fast with her head bent. The way she’d stop and sigh and tell Katherine, “Come on already.” Katherine had worn the wrong shoes, new navy blue sandals, and the straps cut into her feet and pinched her toes so she couldn’t keep up with Lucy’s pace no matter how much she wanted to. She’d brought a new outfit too, a Gunne Sax calico skirt and white short-sleeved blouse with a sweetheart neck that she loved. The blouse, she still remembered, had dozens of tiny buttons down the front. But when she’d put it on to go to a play, Lucy told her she looked like she was from Little House on the Prairie or something.

  That was the last time she’d seen Lucy until she’d shown up here. Katherine had softened that memory until last night. She’d gone home and told people Lucy had become really cosmopolitan. She still called Lucy, though less and less as time went on. She sent Lucy postcards when she went on vacation. She pretended they were still good friends.

  But lately, seeing Lucy with Julia, Katherine had to finally admit that she and Lucy were more like strangers than friends. She had to admit, too, that she felt jealous that Lucy had moved here and figured it all out so well—the city and how to get around it and how to make friends and live on her own. That was why, she decided last night looking down at that park no one can walk in, she remembers most how fast Lucy walked during that first and last visit here. Because even then it struck her that Lucy was somehow really passing her by.

  Lucy is tapping Katherine’s cheek. “Hello,” she says. “Anyone in there?”

  Katherine tries to smile but the stuff has hardened and she feels that if she does her face will crack.

  Julia says, “If it were me, I’d want him to show up on my doorstep in the middle of the night with dozens of roses and beg me to come back.”

  Katherine rolls her eyes. “Andy would never do that,” she says.

  “If he really really really wanted you back he would,” Julia insists.

  Katherine cannot tell if it’s Julia who’s bothering her so much, or if it’s this feeling of being a third wheel, of wanting to be Lucy’s best friend herself. She wants Julia to move away or simply disappear. Or at least to stop dropping in like this. Then Katherine gets mad at herself for acting so petty.

  “This is a guy,” Lucy is explaining, “who wears boxer shorts. A guy who is still proud that he was an Eagle Scout. This is not a guy who gets drunk and drives two hundred miles to win someone back.”

  “A lot of interesting men wear boxer shorts,” Julia says. “Lyle wore boxer shorts.”

  Katherine doesn’t even bother to ask who Lyle is. “Andy is not. …” She searches for the word.

  “Passionate?” Lucy offers.

  “Right,” Katherine says, thinking of all that mechanical sex. “Passionate.” Then she adds, “He’s passionate about medicine.”

  “If you want to see him then,” Julia says, “pretend you’re really sick and need immediate medical attention. Then he’ll show up on the doorstep. To save your life.”

  “He’s a dermatologist,” Lucy tells her.

  Julia shrugs. “You could say you have terminal acne.”

  She is definitely driving Katherine crazy. Katherine says in a controlled voice, “We talk on the telephone. He’s made it clear he’s willing to work it out. That’s the way he is. Andy will not show up on the doorstep unannounced.”

  Katherine isn’t sure, but she thinks Julia and Lucy exchange a look right then. Is it because she showed up unannounced? she thinks.

  She says, “I saw a great apartment today over in Chelsea.” This is a lie, but she wants to redeem herself somehow.

  Now she is sure they exchanged a look.

  Julia says, “You’d love Chelsea, Katherine. Maybe you should take it? Or there’s that share with that King person, right?”

  Lucy clears her throat. “So,” she says.

  Katherine reminds herself that before she came here, she had friends. Lots of them. As Lucy and Julia start to talk again about how Andy should win her back, Katherine makes a list in her mind of all the friends she had back home. There was Cindy and Marcy from college. There were some of the women she taught with, Joan and Louise and Ellen. There were her childhood friends, both named Jessica. But then she thinks, if they were such good friends of hers, why couldn’t she tell them how miserable she was? Why doesn’t she call them now? Why did she leave them in their pink lace bridesmaids’ dresses without even a phone call or explanation?

  Julia and Lucy are laughing over something in Spy magazine now. Katherine does not understand what they find so funny in there ever. But they are laughing now, their heads bent close together, like Siamese twins.

  For an instant, Katherine thinks she hears something at the door. She goes to it and opens it. But the hallway is empty and quiet. Still she stands there for a moment, as if she is waiting for someone to appear.

  Something borrowed

  JULIA MEASURES TIME BY the apartments she sublets. The year she lived on Horatio Street, her si
x months on Avenue A, the time she spent in a twelve-room apartment on Riverside Drive. These apartments give order to her life. She will say, “That happened when I lived on John Street.” Or, “When I lived in Chelsea I designed these great earrings from old tires.” Her sublets are the framework of her life.

  Julia owns next to nothing. No furniture, no futon, no coffee maker. She moves into other people’s homes and lives with their things. Once, there was a real Larry Rivers painting on a living room wall. Another time she took care of three poodles. She uses their linens, reads their books, leaves herself notes under their refrigerator magnets.

  Sometimes she peruses the real-estate sections of newspapers, thinking she should make a home for herself somewhere. She reads the descriptions of loft spaces, river views, junior bedrooms. She decorates an apartment in her mind, tries to decide what kind of furniture she will buy, where she will place her bed, her sofa, her bookshelves. But she never does any of it. Instead, when the real tenants return, she moves into someone else’s place, and borrows pieces of their lives for a while.

  Now something strange is happening to Julia. She has been in this art deco apartment for so long, surrounded by all this shiny black furniture, these Erté statues, the hints and accents of turquoise and pink, that these things are starting to feel like they are really hers. When people visit, she shows them books, plays CDs, as if it all belongs to her.

  The people who live there, Darren and Frank, are in Europe. They are professional party consultants. People hire them to plan their weddings and birthday parties, their small dinners and baby showers. Darren and Frank find the perfect place, choose a theme, order flowers and food and music. They write out the invitations. They organize everything. Julia doesn’t know them, but she envies their skills. They have order in their lives, an order they can impose on other people’s parties. She feels like maybe, if she lives in their apartment long enough, some of this will rub off on her too.