Something Blue

by Ann Hood

  Julia watches her unlock the door.

  “Hey!” Julia calls to Lucy. When Lucy turns around, Julia says, “You know, there are things that seem worse when you say them out loud. So you keep them to yourself and hope that maybe they’ll go away.”

  The doorman is peering over his New York Post at them. He always lets Julia up without buzzing Lucy first. He winks at her, and calls her “amiga,” slapping her palms when she comes in. But tonight he is pretending he doesn’t know her. Tonight he is just glancing up through his heavy dark eyes.

  “I told you about Italy,” Lucy says.

  Julia looks at Miguel nervously. He drops his eyes.

  “Not at first,” she says.

  “I told you,” Lucy insists. Her keys dangle from a key chain shaped like the stub of a theater ticket. From where she is standing, Julia can make out the word Cats on it.

  “I never told anybody before,” Julia says. She can feel Miguel watching again, but she keeps staring at that key chain, at the writing on it. Cats. “Even in school when all the kids toted around Vicky Valentine books and read them during homeroom and study period, I never said a word.”

  Julia has a heavy feeling in her chest, and she thinks that maybe it is the weight of her other secret, of all those men she takes home with her. She is afraid she might start to cry, to sit down right here on the sidewalk and cry.

  “Call me tomorrow?” she manages to say.

  Lucy seems to be deciding something. She nods in a way that makes Julia know that she won’t call her in the morning, then she waves goodnight, and disappears inside.

  Julia stands there, staring at the door, for a while longer. She does not really expect Lucy to come back out, but she waits anyway. She has an urge to follow her upstairs. To tell her everything—about why she lied, about the dark apartment in Brooklyn, even about her lovers. But she does nothing. She feels all exhausted and empty inside. She finally walks the rest of the way home. When she gets there, On is sitting on the stoop, waiting for her.

  He starts to kiss her right there, while she fumbles for her keys. She whispers to him but he does not hear her. “I’m afraid,” she tells him again.

  He pulls away from her. “Of what?”

  She tries to say it, to put it in words.

  “Of me,” she says at last. “Of me.”

  Katherine tries to adjust her body to the thin mattress on the pull-out bed. She tells herself she has to get to sleep, she tries to will sleep on herself, but all she can do is toss. When she first came to New York, she slept solidly, long dreamless sleeps. Lately though, she has trouble falling asleep and when she finally does, her dreams are vivid and frightening.

  An all-night talk radio show is on in Bianca’s room. Katherine hears the callers’ screechy voices, pleading. She sighs and puts on the light. It is after four o’clock. She picks up the phone and stretches its cord so she can take it back to bed with her. Then she dials Andy’s number in Boston. It rings and rings. After twenty she stops counting and just listens for a while. Then she hangs up.

  Jasper calls Lucy.

  “I know it’s really late,” he says, “but can I come over and spend the night?”

  She doesn’t want him there but she says yes.

  Later, after he has come in slightly drunk and made clumsy love to her, after he is asleep, she starts to cry. She cannot remember the last time she felt this lonely. She doesn’t have Jasper anymore, she doesn’t have Julia. She lies there in bed thinking of all the people in the city, millions and millions of them. She tries to give them faces, feelings, to connect with even one of them. But all she does is feel more alone.

  Jasper stirs. He moans and rubs his eyes. “I drank too much tonight,” he says. Then he sees she is crying. “Lucy,” he says, putting his arm around her.

  He smells like old booze. This makes her cry even harder.

  “You don’t love me anymore,” he says. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know,” she tells him.

  He gasps slightly. An intake of breath that sounds like it hurts.

  “If I got a job dancing,” he says, “would you love me again?”

  “I don’t know,” she says again.

  He is hugging her hard now. He says, “You want me to talk about things. But I don’t know what to say. My whole life, all I wanted to do was dance. Be onstage.”

  “Your life isn’t over,” she says. “Is it?”

  But he doesn’t answer.

  Best friends 4 ever

  “I KEEP THINKING ABOUT Carrie Campbell,” Lucy tells Jasper.

  “Carrie Campbell,” he repeats.

  She sees him searching to put a face with the name.

  “You don’t know her,” she says. “She was my best friend in seventh grade.”

  Jasper groans. “First it’s this Harriet kid, now Carrie Campbell.”

  “This,” Lucy tells him, “is completely different.”

  They are at the Corner Bistro, eating hamburgers and drinking Sangria, watching the Mets beat the Cubs on television. In one hour, Jasper will go to work at the Blue Painted Door and Lucy will start to meander through the Village and SoHo alone. She will try on dozens of pairs of jeans and not buy any. She will go to a late movie. She will browse in bookstores and card stores. She will do anything not to call Julia.

  Lucy sighs. “This is worse than almost anything.”

  Jasper is watching the game. It is eleven to three in the bottom of the seventh. She is sure he cannot be that interested at this point. But when she points that out to him, he says, “It ain’t over till—”

  “Spare me,” Lucy says.

  During the commercial she asks him, “How could she not tell me something that important?”

  Jasper crumples his napkin and leans back. “I don’t know a lot of things about a lot of my friends,” he says. “If I found out one of them was in the CIA, I wouldn’t care.”

  Lucy doesn’t answer him. She feels as if she is twelve years old again and Carrie Campbell has stopped being her best friend. There is that same sense of having lost something important, not by being careless, but by fate itself. She cannot even stand to watch Regis and Kathie Lee. She cannot bear to talk to Katherine, to admit that this has happened.

  “We used to sign yearbooks AFA,” Lucy says. “A friend always.”

  Jasper says, “Why don’t you just call her? Have a big knock-down-drag-out fight?”

  “She should call me,” Lucy says.

  The game is ending. The final score is twelve-eleven, Cubs.

  Carrie Campbell was one of the first girls in school to develop breasts and wear a bra. Her parents both worked the late shift in factories, so she and Lucy would spend every afternoon alone together in the Campbells’ house. It was not a new house, like Lucy’s. It was old and tilted, with linoleum that was worn in spots and a constant smell of fried foods. Carrie’s older brother, Hank, spent every afternoon upstairs in his bedroom with his girlfriend. They had both dropped out of high school and worked the graveyard shift at the factory.

  Lucy and Carrie used to sit in the small hallway outside Hank’s room and listen. Lucy was never sure what it was they were listening for, but every now and then there would be a creak or a grunt and Carrie would smile at her, triumphant. Sometimes, Hank would hear them out there and he would come into the hall in his underwear and socks and kick Carrie. Sometimes, Carrie and Lucy would go into his room after Hank and the girlfriend had left and search his bed for pubic hairs and hard Kleenex.

  But mostly, Lucy and Carrie talked about what it would be like to go somewhere exotic. Carrie had a pen pal in Scotland and she was sure she would go and visit her there someday. “I’ll fall in love with a man named Angus and we’ll pick heather and drink Dewar’s.” Lucy used to be amazed by the specificity of this fantasy. And so she believed in it completely. Her own plans were more vague. She cut pictures out of the travel sections of magazines and pasted them in a notebook that she and Carrie always studied. Thai women in go
ld headdresses, lovers strolling by the Seine, the Aztec ruins of Mexico. “And you’ll come and visit me and Angus in Edinburgh. Right?” Carrie would ask. “Angus and me,” Lucy would tell her. “Not me and Angus.”

  It amazes Lucy now how much she remembers all the details of that friendship. She can smell the Campbell house, see the brother’s dingy underwear, her own scrapbook of faraway places. She even remembers Carrie’s pen pal’s name. Mary.

  She remembers, too, how for weeks Carrie made excuses about seeing her. How in the corridors at school, Lucy would pass her hanging around the radiator with a group of other girls. How those girls would giggle when Lucy passed by. The last day of school, signing yearbooks, Lucy saw that in Franny Cook’s, Carrie had written, “Your best friend 4 ever!!!! AFA, Carrie (CC).”

  Even thinking of that all these years later, Lucy feels sick to her stomach. It is as clear as if she is looking at it right now. Carrie’s left-handed writing. The purple ink. The realization that she did not have a best friend anymore.

  She calls her mother and asks her if Carrie Campbell still lives in town.

  “Three kids,” her mother says. “And none of them with the same father.”

  “I used to like going over her house after school,” she tells her mother. She doesn’t mention the search for pubic hair and hardened Kleenex.

  “I was much happier when you started to hang around with Jilly and Nancy,” her mother says. “They weren’t as wild as that Campbell girl.”

  Jasper says, “Call her already.”

  But Lucy refuses.

  She keeps wandering the streets alone. She lies to Katherine and tells her Julia is away for a while. She goes to bookstores and reads the backs of Vicky Valentine books, as if they hold some secret information. VICKY HELPS FIND A SERUM FOR A DEADLY DISEASE! VICKY HELPS STOP SECRET INFORMATION FROM REACHING THE RUSSIANS! VICKY GOES UNDERCOVER AT AN ICE CREAM SHOPPE TO HELP FIND A KIDNAPPER!

  There is danger and intrigue and happy endings, but nothing more.

  “Call her already,” Jasper insists.

  And then one night, while he is asleep, Lucy goes into the kitchen and dials the telephone. But it isn’t Julia that she calls. It’s Carrie Campbell.

  Even though it is almost one in the morning, Carrie sounds wide-awake. She has a smoker’s voice, but still Lucy recognizes it immediately.

  “Carrie?” Lucy says. “This is Lucy Wilcox. I don’t know if you remember—”

  “Lucy? How are you?” She does not sound surprised, even though they have not really spoken for almost twenty years.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately. I know that must sound odd, but—”

  “The funny thing is, your name just came up the other day. Hank—remember my brother Hank?”

  “Yes.” Lucy wonders if Carrie remembers them searching his sheets, listening at his door.

  “He said just the other day that he heard you had this job where you go to all these exotic places. I said, that sounds like Lucy.”

  “You did?” Lucy asks.

  “Sure. You used to have that book full of magazine pictures.”

  Lucy is smiling. “Yes,” she says again.

  “Now me,” Carrie says, “I got three rug rats. One nastier than the other. Plus I got Hank’s girl and her twins living here—”

  “Hank’s girlfriend?”

  Carrie laughs. “His daughter. Tiffany.” She lowers her voice. “Sixteen years old with twins. What a mess.”

  “Well,” Lucy says.

  “I suspect you don’t have any,” Carrie is saying

  “Any?”

  “Kids,” Carrie says, laughing again.

  “Oh,” Lucy says. “No. I’m not even married.”

  Carrie laughs even harder.

  Lucy feels herself blush. She stammers, “I was wondering,” she begins. Then, “This may seem very odd but I was thinking about you and how we used to spend all that time at your house and, well …whatever happened?”

  Carrie says, “When?”

  “Why did we stop being friends?” Lucy blurts.

  “I don’t know. Seems like you started to hang around with that Jilly and Nancy. Going to parties at the lake and getting a charm bracelet and things like that.”

  “Me?” Lucy says. “You and Franny used to laugh at me when I walked past you.”

  Carrie sighs. “I remember it the other way around. But I did always like you. I still have a picture you drew me. A starry sky, all big swirls and great colors.”

  Lucy is blushing again. She had copied Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and given it to Carrie for her thirteenth birthday.

  “I saw that and I thought, that Lucy’s going somewhere,” Carrie says.

  Lucy tells Jasper that she called Carrie Campbell.

  “No,” he says. “You called someone you haven’t talked to all these years, since you were a kid, and you won’t call Julia?”

  “I know,” Lucy says. “It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  The next morning, during Regis and Kathie Lee’s opening, the phone rings.

  When Lucy answers, Julia says, “I can’t believe the way she rubs her stomach on national TV. It’s disgusting.”

  Lucy watches as Regis locates Omaha on a map of the United States.

  “I miss you,” Julia says.

  “I thought we were friends,” Lucy tells her. “And now I feel like I don’t even know you.”

  Julia says, “I’ve been so sad.”

  “Me too.”

  “You don’t forgive me yet, do you?” she asks Lucy.

  “Not exactly,” Lucy says.

  She hears Julia take several deep breaths.

  Then Julia says, “There are things I hide even from myself. I’m a hider. When I was a kid, I hid behind fat. Now I hide behind costumes. Funny hats and weird makeup.”

  Lucy doesn’t say anything.

  “How can I show you what I can’t even show myself?” Julia says softly.

  “I know,” Lucy says.

  Then, quiet again, Julia asks, “Do you hate me?”

  “No,” Lucy says.

  “Can we go steady again? You can wear my high school ring?”

  Lucy laughs. “It’s nine-thirty,” she says. “Can you make it here in half an hour?”

  “I’ll bring the bagels.”

  “Good. Sally Jessy Raphael is going to have on women whose brothers-in-law are the real fathers of their children.”

  Julia says, “I’ll be right there.”

  After she hangs up, Lucy doesn’t get out of bed to dress. Her hair is in a loose, ponytail. She is wearing her glasses. And she has on a T-shirt that turned pink in the wash. But Julia will not mind. Lucy smiles and watches as Paul Prudhomme teaches Regis how to eat crawfish. For the first time in weeks, even though she still feels mad at Julia, Lucy feels centered again.

  When she hears Julia knock on the door, Lucy calls, “Come in.”

  One wheelbarrow

  NATHANIEL JONES IS FAMOUS. He is a genius, the boy wonder of children’s book publishing. He rules from a townhouse on Beacon Hill in Boston. At thirty-three years old, Nathaniel Jones has won every award, traveled to every continent, dated every beautiful woman. In pictures, he looks a little like Don Johnson on Miami Vice—unshaven, sexy smile, casual pale pink linen suit. His face is in magazines and subway posters selling Scotch and T-shirts.

  Nathaniel Jones is all of these things, and he has summoned Lucy to Boston for a meeting. On the telephone, he sounded like a Hollywood producer. He called her babe. He said he’d send a car to meet her at Logan Airport. In the background, Lucy heard phones ringing and a song playing, over and over, about the wonderful world of children. The song reminded Lucy of the ride at Disney World where you float through canals and dancing dolls sing, in wooden shoes, kimonos, grass skirts, the same song, nonstop.

  That is the song, “It’s a Small World,” that plays in Lucy’s mind all the way to La Guardia to catch her flight to Boston. When she got ou
t of bed this morning, Jasper had clung to her. “Don’t run off with this guy,” he said, pretending to joke.

  Now, at the ticket counter, she pushes away images of doing that very thing. Perhaps this is fate, she thinks. Nathaniel Jones sees the drawings for My Dolly and falls in love with the artist. “I must have this woman!” he decides. He calls, pretending to have a new project for her. He talks her into coming to Boston, where he will sweep her off her feet.

  Lucy starts to laugh at her own imagination. Nathaniel Jones needs an illustrator, she tells herself. Not a girlfriend. She fights back thoughts of Jasper’s face as he watched her getting dressed this morning. She tries to keep her chest from aching so much. She worries, standing there in her black miniskirt and tuxedo jacket, that she is staying with Jasper because the alternative—being alone—is even worse.

  She has thought of herself as independent, as self-assured, as brave. Didn’t she move to New York City all alone, knowing no one here? Hasn’t she hustled for these illustrating jobs? Once, she went mountain climbing. She has scuba dived. Can she really be afraid of life without a man? The thought frightens her. It is what she suspects is true of Katherine, who bravely left Andy and moved to Manhattan but desperately hands out her telephone number to any man who seems even remotely normal. Lucy still finds messages on her answering machine for Katherine: “Hi, I was sitting next to you on the A train. You said I should call.” “My name is Don. I bumped into you on Broadway. Literally. Remember? You dropped all those Magic Markers?” “Katherine, this is Vance from the bank machine. The one at Chem Bank? On University?” Lucy is suddenly worried that she is no farther along than Katherine. That she is clinging to someone she no longer loves just to avoid being alone. Just to avoid handing out her phone number to strangers, hoping they will rescue her.

  The reservationist says “Next” in a way that lets Lucy know she has called her already.

  “Sorry,” Lucy says, stepping up to the counter.

  She is afraid that there will be no ticket waiting for her. That Nathaniel Jones decided he wasn’t interested in her, as an illustrator or a lover.

  She says, “There’s supposed to be a ticket here for me.” She rolls her eyes, as if the idea is ridiculous.