by Ann Hood
The woman’s fingers hover over the computer keyboard. “Name,” she says. Her lipstick is magenta, her eyeshadow violet.
Lucy’s eyes settle on the woman’s ring finger, where a diamond ring and a wedding band sit nestled together.
“Name,” the woman says again, sighing.
“Lucy Wilcox.” Lucy forces a smile. “It’s probably not even there,” she says.
The computer starts clicking and printing, and the woman holds a ticket out to Lucy.
Lucy says to herself, “Nathaniel Jones has really sent for me.” Then, because the woman is bothering her somehow, Lucy says it out loud. “Nathaniel Jones has sent for me.”
The woman looks up, right through Lucy. “Next,” she says.
In person, Nathaniel Jones is smaller, heavier, more like a man in the garment business than Don Johnson. Lucy is disappointed. Then she reminds herself why she is here. For a job.
The writer is also there. Her name is Fawn MacIntyre. She is tall and cool, with alabaster skin and flaming red hair pulled back in a ponytail and tied with a shimmery plaid ribbon. Fawn MacIntyre manages to be both hot and cold at once. When she turns her blue eyes on Lucy, she is an iceberg. But they melt when they gaze at Nathaniel. Gaze adoringly, Lucy adds to herself. She decides Fawn MacIntyre is having an affair with Nathaniel Jones.
“Fawn,” Nathaniel says. “Fawn. Tell Lucy your great idea. Your brainstorm.”
Fawn’s voice could chill a corpse. “I believe,” she says, “that children’s books often talk down to children. A is for apple. B is for boy. That sort of thing.”
Nathaniel is too impatient to wait for Fawn to finish. Telephones are ringing all through the townhouse. That song is playing repeatedly. Lucy hears people running, doors slamming, harried voices.
Nathaniel says, “It’s a counting book. With bigger words in it than the basic books have.” He starts shuffling through some papers on his desk. “Like, One wheelbarrow. Two tutus.” He looks up and smiles at Fawn. “I like that one.”
Fawn says, “Lucy, may I hear a concept for one of those from you?”
“Right now?” Lucy says. Her head is spinning from the noise here.
“Well, if you can’t come up with something now,” Fawn says. She shakes her head, opens her hands. Her fingers are long, the kind of fingers that play the piano.
“Two tutus,” Lucy says. “Maybe something like two little ballerinas, pirouetting. But really fast so they’re basically a blur. But we see the tutus, all sparkly and pretty, very clearly.”
Nathaniel Jones leans closer to her. Now his face has settled somewhere between the magazine photos of him and Lucy’s initial reaction to it. He is all-right looking. He is even a little sexy.
“I love it,” he says. He pronounces each word like it’s its own sentence. I. Love. It.
Fawn does not warm any. She says, in her icy voice, “Not bad.”
Nathaniel starts talking about a contract. He thrusts papers at Lucy. The top one says:
One Wheelbarrow
Two Tutus
Three Thistles
Four Friends
Five Fireworks
Six Snowflakes
Seven Seashells
Eight Elephants
Nine Nutcrackers
Ten Tornadoes
Lucy thinks, This woman is a genius?
“Number ten is up for debate,” Nathaniel says.
“No,” Fawn says. “I like the image of destruction and chaos.”
“What do you think, Lucy?” he asks. “I was leaning toward tomatoes myself.”
“Tomatoes are good,” she hears herself saying. She wants to burst out laughing. She wants to know what is so complex about four friends? Or seven seashells?
“We’ll let you know,” Nathaniel says. He is putting on a pale pink linen blazer. He is not wearing socks. Around his middle there is the very beginning of a paunch.
He says, “So let’s grab some lunch and get you back to New York.” He points at Fawn, who is smoking a cigarette. “You can’t join us, right?”
She flicks her ashes into a gray marble ashtray. “Right,” she says. She looks directly at Lucy, like she’s warning her.
Lucy says, “Gee, my boyfriend will be happy I’m getting home so early.” She can’t believe she has just said “Gee.” But there’s something about Fawn that makes Lucy feel very young and unsophisticated.
“That’s sweet,” Fawn says.
“All right, all right, all right,” Nathaniel is saying. “Let’s hustle.”
Everyone at the restaurant knows Nathaniel Jones. It’s like being out with a movie star. Or the president. He waves and smiles, moves from table to table easily. He introduces Lucy as a fabulous new artist. It’s all she can do not to jump up and down with excitement. It’s all she can do not to run away from this scene.
Finally, they take their seats in a cracked red banquette. The restaurant is very old, comfortably elegant, with stiff linens and gas lamps overhead. Lucy feels like she’s in a Henry James novel. She tries to memorize every detail to tell Julia later.
Nathaniel Jones is saying, “This is a restaurant. I am so sick and tired of pasta with nuts in it. Of arugula. Of blackened food.”
Lucy finds herself nodding, agreeing with him even though she really disagrees. She likes arugula. She likes Cajun food. She and Jasper go to the Great Jones Cafe for blackened redfish once a week. Yet she keeps nodding and agreeing as Nathaniel goes on and on about all that’s wrong with food like that.
When a waiter in a red jacket and bow tie approaches, Nathaniel asks her if she likes beer.
“As a matter of fact I love beer,” she says. She doesn’t tell him that she hasn’t had any since college, when she could drink an entire pitcher of Narragansett by herself along with shots of peppermint schnapps.
“All right, John,” Nathaniel tells the waiter. “Here’s what we want. Two Sam Adams. Two chowders. And the pork roast.”
Lucy feels like she’s in an old movie, having a man order for her. Something tells her she should be offended but a bigger part leans back against the banquette and relaxes.
“Very good,” John the waiter says.
And Lucy imagines that he clicks his heels before he walks away.
“Where was I?” Nathaniel says. He rubs his temples, as if his fingertips can read information inside.
“Cajun food,” Lucy says.
“It sucks,” Nathaniel tells her. “Let’s talk about this book.”
And then, over beer and chowder and pork roast and real strawberry shortcake and coffee he does just that. He talks about this book and his other projects while Lucy sits and nods and smiles the entire time. She thinks that by the end of lunch she has said twenty words. Tops. And after months of Jasper’s hard silence, these two hours seem wonderful. She barely tastes the food. Instead, she settles into Nathaniel Jones’s words and lets herself be wrapped up in them.
There is a limousine waiting outside the restaurant and Nathaniel puts her in it. “I always walk back from here,” he explains. “It’s going to be fun working together.” He closes the door and the car pulls away and Lucy feels like she has been on a date instead of a job interview. On the plane back to New York, she tries to study the book. One wheelbarrow. Two tutus. Three thistles. But she can’t concentrate. She can’t wipe away the gauzy feeling of her lunch with Nathaniel Jones. Even after she’s back home, settled on her own couch with a cup of coffee, hoping the caffeine will snap her out of this dreamlike state.
On the phone later she tells Julia everything. She describes Fawn MacIntyre. She reads the ten items in the book to her. She repeats all she can remember about the lunch.
When Lucy finishes Julia groans, “He sounds awful.”
“Awful?” Lucy says.
“Like a real pig. Like a sexist. I mean, he ordered your food? He ordered pork roast?”
Lucy hesitates. She knows she should feel more offended. If today really had been a date, she would thin
k he was all wrong for her. So why is she feeling the opposite?
“He sounds obnoxious,” Julia says.
“You’re right,” Lucy says. “He does sound that way. But he wasn’t at all.”
“Look,” Julia laughs, “you’re not Doris Day. This is not 1950. Women just aren’t treated that way anymore.”
“You’re right,” Lucy says again. She thinks, It didn’t feel so bad. It felt good. It felt like a relief.
“And another thing,” Julia is saying, “what the hell is a thistle?”
“I think it’s like a flower,” Lucy says. “A long purple flower.”
“He is definitely sleeping with Bambi.”
“Fawn.”
“Whatever.”
Lucy laughs. She doesn’t want him to be sleeping with Fawn. Suddenly, she isn’t sure of anything. “Why do I feel so mixed-up?” she says out loud.
From across town, Julia says, “Who doesn’t?”
“Nine Noriegas,” Jasper whispers. “Ten Tiananmen Squares.”
“Very funny,” Lucy says.
They are in bed, not touching. Jasper has brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate her new assignment. But all it has done is make her feel cranky.
“I want you to go on auditions again,” Lucy says into the darkness.
“You do,” Jasper says.
“I want you to get a job dancing.”
This time he doesn’t answer.
“I mean,” she continues, “that’s what’s wrong, isn’t it? That’s what’s making you so sullen.”
“Am I sullen?” he says. Then, as if to prove her wrong, he croons, “Am I blue?”
Lucy sighs. “You’re something,” she says. “You just won’t tell me what it is.”
She waits. But Jasper still doesn’t answer, and she is left alone in the quiet darkness.
Something new
EVERY DAY KATHERINE STAYS at school late. She breaks dates. She skips dinner. Lucy tells her she has a classic case of depression, but she cannot figure out its source. She asks herself if she would rather have married Andy, moved to Boston, and hosted dinner parties every weekend. The answer is always the same—no.
Katherine reminds herself that soon she will have enough money to get a little studio apartment here in Chelsea where she teaches. She tells herself she has dates lined up for almost every night, that one of those men could be IT, Mr. Right, her knight in shining armor. Still, she feels the same. The bulletin board outside her classroom is the best in the school because she spends every afternoon working on it. Her classroom is the neatest one, her papers graded and starred and hung at right angles on one wall. The desks are in perfect rows, the erasers are dust-free, her plan book up-to-date.
Yet here she is again, at four o’clock, standing in the nearly empty school, trying to think of one more thing to do so she won’t have to leave this room. She has a date with a man named Ben whom she met at the bakery around the corner last week. They had stood, pressed close together in the small bakery, each waiting their turn in line. Katherine could tell he was wearing Polo, he was that close. She had felt the cool air on his trench coat. And so she had smiled up at him, and rolled her eyes in fake exasperation at the crowd. “All this for an oat bran muffin,” she’d said. He had a nice laugh, she’d thought. He’s a lawyer, tall and not bad looking. But she is thinking about canceling their dinner at the Chelsea Trattoria.
Spencer Barrow, the fifth-grade teacher, pokes his head in the doorway.
“Still here?” he asks.
Spencer, Katherine thinks, looks like a Weeble, one of those children’s toys that wobble about without falling down. He is the kind of man that mothers and old ladies love, all round baby face and boy-next-door personality. She can picture him as a Boy Scout, in green shorts and knee socks, helping the elderly cross streets. To Katherine he is too friendly, too helpful, always offering her a ride home or advice on the school’s staff.
He lives somewhere in Queens, which bothers her for a reason she can’t identify. And, worse, he idolizes Elvis Presley. So much so that his own hair is cut into a ducktail in the back and he wears, on occasion, blue suede shoes. He has told her he wears them only when he feels especially happy.
“Want a lift home?” Spencer says, all cheery and full of a toothy smile.
“No thanks,” Katherine tells him. “I like to walk.” She wonders how many times she will have to tell him that before he gets the message.
“Even in this?” Spencer says, pointing toward the window.
Katherine follows his finger. Without her realizing it, it has started to rain. A real downpour. Now that she is aware of it, the rain seems to pick up speed and bang noisily against the windows.
“Shit,” she says.
Spencer giggles.
“I have this date tonight,” Katherine says, frowning. She notices Spencer is wearing brown pants with black socks. “I still have to go home and change and then come back here.” She leans against her squeaky-clean blackboards that she has just finished wiping down. “What’s the point?”
“Tell you what,” he says. “Let me take care of you. Put yourself in my hands.” He opens his palms toward her.
She is surprised by what nice hands he has. No, she corrects herself, she is surprised how rugged they seem, large and masculine. This gesture, the sweetness of it, makes her smile. Maybe Spencer himself is full of surprises, too.
“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,” she says. “I’m clinically depressed.”
“You are? How so?”
Katherine shrugs. “I don’t know. However one is clinically depressed, that’s how I am.”
She squirms slightly. She has let Lucy and Julia talk her into buying some new clothes. She spent a lot of money on them and she hates everything she bought. Black stirrup pants, a tapestry vest, ugly clunky black shoes, a Betsey Johnson floral bodysuit. It’s that bodysuit she has on now, with a skirt that makes her hips look too big, and she feels uncomfortable suddenly.
“I hate what I’m wearing,” she tells Spencer.
He nods. “It’s pretty ugly.”
Spencer is like that. He says exactly what comes into his mind. “There’s a direct path,” he has told Katherine. He tapped his head, then drew a straight line to his mouth. “From here, to here. No editing.” Sometimes, the things he comes out with make Katherine shudder. She finds herself wondering where he is from, who raised him. But this afternoon, he makes her laugh.
“You know what?” she says. “I’ll take you up on that offer.”
He looks surprised. “Really?”
“I’m yours,” she says.
At least, she thinks as she gathers her things, he makes her smile.
Katherine is surprised by Spencer’s neighborhood. His street is a quiet suburban one, lined with large leafy trees and two-family houses. The leaves are vivid reds and yellows. They make her think of New England, and make her a little homesick.
There is something both sweet and repulsive about Spencer, and Katherine decides that she should try to focus on the sweet part as much as possible. This is sometimes difficult. His manners are terrible—he splashes through puddles and sends sprays of water on her, he doesn’t hold the door open for her, and when they arrive upstairs at his apartment he disappears, leaving her alone in the living room. Katherine decides he isn’t rude exactly; he’s naive, socially ignorant. He needs a date with Miss Manners, she thinks. For an instant, she even imagines herself as his teacher. Spencer playing Eliza Doolittle to her Henry Higgins.
There is a scrap of fabric in a glass case on another wall. That is what Katherine is studying when Spencer reappears.
“Las Vegas,” Spencer says.
She turns toward him. He is drinking something and has changed into jeans and a flannel shirt, both of which look brand-new, all stiff and bright. She sees that he has put on his blue suede shoes.
“I ripped it from a jacket Elvis threw in the audience,” Spencer is saying. “A woman
next to me caught it and let me tear off that little piece there.” His voice is almost reverential.
“How fascinating,” Katherine says, not even trying to hide the sarcasm.
Spencer seems not to notice. “I figured the glass would keep it from fading,” he says.
He goes over to the television and turns it on.
“You get cable?” he asks her.
She is very aware that the repulsive side of him is dominating right now. Katherine thinks again of My Fair Lady, of a triumphant Eliza and a smug Professor Higgins. “The rain in Spain,” Katherine repeats to herself, “stays mainly in the plain.”
“You know,” she tells him, “maybe I would like something to drink, too.”
He looks puzzled.
“I mean,” she says, “you should have offered me something.”
“This is a Coke,” he says. “You want one?”
“No, thank you.”
Spencer laughs shyly. “I’m not a big ladies’ man. I’ve had three girlfriends, each for two years. That’s about it. No dates in between to speak of. No one-night stands.” He laughs and blushes. “I admit it,” he says, “I’m a mensch. But I’m loyal. I’m a nice guy. I like dogs. I like old ladies. Babies. Roses. George Gershwin. The works.”
Katherine feels herself warming to him again. “’S wonderful,” she says.
Spencer blushes even more. “’S marvelous.” Quickly, he looks into his glass of soda. “I broke up with my last girlfriend, Gloria, about a year ago. She moved to Denver. That was a tough one.” Suddenly he looks up, right at Katherine. “I don’t entertain much, you know? In fact, you’re the first girl I’ve had here since Gloria left.”
“That’s all right,” Katherine tells him.
He smiles. “Yeah?”
She nods.
His confidence is back. He tilts his head. “Hey,” he says, “I’m a great cook. You’ll see. I have all the teachers over for a Christmas party every year and I do all the cooking myself. I even make homemade eggnog and Christmas cookies. Little bells and stars with those silver candy balls.”
“I love those,” Katherine says.