by Ann Hood
Julia hears a soft pop. When she turns, Barry is standing with the champagne opened, bubbles flowing from it like a mini-volcano.
“We never chilled it,” he says.
“Maybe we should have broken the bottle over the couch,” she tells him. “The way they christen ships.”
Barry has had better luck finding things than she has. He sits beside her and hands her a fluted glass filled with champagne.
She starts to take a sip, but he stops her. “We have to have a toast,” he says.
“To the couch!” Julia says.
Barry seems disappointed but clinks his glass against hers anyway.
“Boy,” he says, “you know how to tell a good story.”
“What do you mean?’
He shrugs. “You know. Back there.” He nods his head toward the bedroom.
Julia hesitates. Then she says, “It’s an erotic tool. I read it a long time ago in Sensuous Woman. She also says it’s very sexy to wrap yourself in Saran Wrap.”
“Only if the guy likes sandwiches,” Barry says.
Barry leaves after one glass of champagne. At the door, she shakes his hand and wishes him luck in Los Angeles. He sticks to his story, but Julia still does not believe him. When he is gone, she stretches out on her new couch, and pours herself another glass of warm champagne.
In her mind, she adds a rug to the large room, a rocking chair, a museum poster.
Still, On seems to be there, following her, watching her. So Julia picks up the phone and calls him.
He sounds relieved to hear her voice.
“I didn’t know what to think,” he tells her.
“I know,” Julia says. “Everything happened so fast.”
“What happened so fast?”
She runs her fingers across the fabric of the couch. The white flecks look almost like birds in flight.
“I got a small role,” she says, “on a soap opera.”
“Wow. That’s great.”
“It’s in L.A., though,” Julia says. “That’s where I am now. It all happened so fast.”
There is a brief silence, then On says, “Well, you had to go. It’s such an opportunity.”
“Yes,” Julia says. She feels she may start to cry, so she adds quickly, “This isn’t my phone, so I’d better go. I’ll call you when I’m settled.”
As she hangs up, she hears his voice, sounding very faraway. “I miss you,” he is saying.
Six snowflakes
IT IS THE FIRST DECEMBER 6 in four years that Lucy and Jasper do not spend together. It is the date that they use to celebrate their anniversary, the day when they met on that flight. It is the day they fell madly, love-at-first-sight, in love.
This year, Lucy pretends it’s just a day like any other day. She pretends that she did not, two weeks earlier, break up with Jasper. Instead, she calls Julia and watches Regis and Kathie Lee, on the telephone. She buys a New York Times and reads it from cover to cover. She reads every article. She reads the classifieds. She does the crossword puzzle. Then she takes herself out for lunch at a place she usually avoids because it’s too expensive.
When she gets off the elevator back on her floor, she notices that two apartments have already hung wreaths on their doors. She pauses in the hallway, staring at those wreaths and wishing that, as if by surprise, or magic, Jasper has returned in his old incarnation—alive and full of hope. As if there really will be a turkey roasting in her oven, wine chilling, a vase full of flowers on the table.
Lucy sighs. It is hard to pretend that December 6 is an ordinary day, or that today isn’t really December 6, when there are fresh evergreen wreaths with red velvet bows, when the halls smell like Christmas and the air outside smells like snow. Lucy continues down the hall and into her apartment. At first she is struck by how empty it feels there. She remembers the way Jasper used to fill it somehow.
Her answering machine is blinking green. A message. She lets herself think that it could be him. As it rewinds, she tries, unsuccessfully, to conjure his voice. Somewhere, Lucy has read that faces linger in the mind, but voices are the first thing to be forgotten, the hardest to re-create.
She pushes the button marked PLAY and holds her breath.
It’s Nathaniel Jones.
“Babe,” his voice says, “these snowflakes look like doilies. Call me and let’s rethink this.”
Now Lucy lets disappointment flood her. She has found these past few weeks that it’s easier to put her emotions on something else instead of her life without Jasper, to blame crying on an AT&T commercial instead of on a broken heart, to blame sleeplessness on jet lag instead of on the empty half of her bed.
And now, to blame disappointment on six snowflakes. She has worked hard on these snowflakes. She made them pure white against a midnight-blue sky, drifting, almost dancing downward to a blanket of white fallen snow. Each of her snowflakes is unique, six-pointed, delicate and lacy. They are like the ones Katherine has her first-graders cut from a folded piece of construction paper, full of curves and alleys and points like a Russian church.
It will be good to work on this all day, she tells herself, as she begins to dial the 617 of Nathaniel’s phone number.
His secretary puts her on hold, and while she waits, she wonders what Jasper is doing today, right now. Could she, by sheer willpower, force him into changing back? Into talking to her the way he used to? Into a dancer leaping across a Broadway stage?
“Babe, babe,” Nathaniel’s voice shouts into her ear, freezing Jasper mid-jet.
“Those snowflakes are beautiful,” Lucy says.
“All business,” he laughs. “Not even a how are you?”
Lucy closes her eyes. As graceful as snow, she imagines Jasper completing his jump, landing on pointe, getting applause.
He didn’t talk when she broke up with him either. He just stood there, nodding, in his satin jacket that said A Chorus Line across the back in Japanese while Lucy cried and screamed at him for ruining what they had.
“And you have to make some decisions,” she told him. “What are you doing with your life? You’re a dancer, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
He stopped nodding then, and stared past her, at a blank spot on the wall, as if it held a greater fascination than what she was saying.
“I need time alone,” she told him, calmer then. “I need time to think.”
He said, “I understand.”
And then he had started to leave. At the door, he turned to her.
“Lucy?”
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t answer.
“I love you,” he said.
She hadn’t stopped crying all that night. Long after she’d heard the elevator arrive and take him away from her, she kept on crying.
That next day, she left on a special Whirlwind Week, three cities in three days. Paris, London, and Dublin. She wished she could stay gone forever, that she could disappear down one of Dublin’s cobblestoned streets, or into the Paris night, and transform into someone new. Someone who didn’t ache inside.
In a way, after that first week, she felt renewed. When she walked into her apartment, she didn’t have a sense of dread, of wondering what she could say or how she could help. It seemed lighter, airier, as if Jasper’s dark mood had closed in the walls somehow. It was then that Lucy worked on her snowflakes. Hours by the window, mixing paint and thinking about nothing except snow.
She spent more time with Julia. And Katherine. She developed a one-line answer to why she broke up with Jasper. “He was a great boyfriend but he’d make a lousy husband.” That seemed to say it all—he was a bartender without hopes of being a dancer. He was fun but not serious. He was immature. He was wonderful, but just for a while.
None of that was quite true, but Lucy couldn’t bring herself to say what was stuck in her heart like a rock. That she had imagined, had known really, that they would be married, that no matter what, they would be together. She couldn’t believe she had been so wrong about them.
Every day, she found small bundles from Katherine at her mailbox. Oatmeal cookies and Toll House cookies and brownies, all neatly wrapped in plastic wrap and tied with bright ribbon. Her freezer was lined with Katherine’s baked goods, in neat colorful rows. Katherine still believed cookies and milk could cure anything.
Lucy signed up for a special Christmas Whirlwind Week to Bethlehem and Jerusalem. She signed up for tap dancing classes. She bought two hundred dollars’ worth of books. She did everything not to call him. Not to remember how his voice had sounded, what he’d told her, as he’d left that last time.
She drew her six beautiful snowflakes, and pretended everything was exactly as it should be.
“Babe,” Nathaniel Jones says, “they look like they belong over the arms of a couch in an old lady’s house.”
“Snowflakes,” Lucy tells him, “are all unique. They have six points and—”
“Hon,” he cuts in, “this isn’t about science. This isn’t about meteorology. It’s about a mood. Catching the right mood for this book.”
Lucy doesn’t reply. She stares out the window, at the gray day, the low-hanging clouds that seem about to drop on the city.
“You know the eight elephants you did?” Nathaniel says. “I love those elephants.”
She is drawing the pictures out of numerical sequence. She is drawing them, instead, by inspiration. As much inspiration as she can get for the subjects. She drew one red wheelbarrow, as stark and real as an Edward Hopper painting. She drew eight elephants in a huddle, trunks resting on heads and ears wide and alert. They are like a big happy elephant family.
Nathaniel is saying, “Now you know and I know that elephants are mammals. They have hair, right? But you didn’t draw a bunch of stiff black elephant hair. Did you?”
“No.”
“You didn’t need to. You drew beautiful elephants.”
“I drew beautiful snowflakes,” Lucy says.
“The snowflakes are all wrong,” he says. “Tell you what. I’m coming to New York next week. We’ll have dinner and you’ll bring me some new snowflakes.”
Lucy agrees, although she can’t imagine there is another way to draw a damn snowflake.
“And maybe you’ll have another drawing too?” Nathaniel says. “The thistles or something?”
“I’ll have something,” she says.
“Babe,” Nathaniel tells her. “You’re great. You are. Fawn can be difficult. Just remember, I’m on your side.”
It is like Jasper vanished. Like he never even existed. Lucy finds herself walking past the Blue Painted Door, peering in for just a glimpse of him, but there is always someone else behind the bar. She runs errands in his neighborhood, expecting that he too, as if by mental telepathy, will be buying produce on his corner, or wine at Astor Wines. She stops short of actually calling him. She doesn’t know what it is she wants to say to him. Or what she wants to hear him say. So she goes for cappuccino at Veniero’s, sitting by the window to watch passersby. She goes to Pete’s Spice and buys basmati rice and whole cloves and currants, lingering, watching everyone who walks in or walks by. But Jasper never appears.
She spends too much money on a new dress for her dinner with Nathaniel Jones. She buys a strapless black velvet minidress, a rope of fake pearls. She sits at her drawing table, hour after hour, trying to imagine snowflakes that catch a mood. But they all look like doilies to her now.
And then, one day the grayness changes, and it starts to snow. Small frenzied flurries chase each other to the ground. Lucy stands by her window and watches them. They are blurred and frantic, these snowflakes. When she finally draws, the night before her dinner with Nathaniel, she draws just the tops of buildings, a grayish white background, a blur of snow. And then, she chooses six spots, and paints them silver. A silver that glistens, that stands out against her sky.
Nathaniel Jones knows everyone even here in New York. He can hardly get through the crowded restaurant there are so many people shaking his hand, wanting to say hello. Lucy follows behind him, in her new dress, clutching her snowflake drawing, until finally they are at their table, on a small balcony that hangs over the restaurant.
“I feel like Juliet,” Lucy says, peering down at the crowd.
“Let me tell you something,” Nathaniel says. He leans way back in his chair. “You’re a knockout.”
Lucy feels her heart speed up.
“I mean, you are a knockout,” he says.
She mumbles thanks.
Nathaniel slaps his hands together. “So we’ll order some champagne. And you’ve got to have the grilled tuna. Done very nouveau with ginger and plums. And we’ll need oysters.”
She starts to smile. There is something about Nathaniel that she knows should offend her, but instead she likes it. She likes having him decide everything. Now she sits back in her chair, and lets him do all the talking.
Lucy knows she should not, cannot, go to bed with Nathaniel Jones. She works for him. He’s a playboy. He’s a male chauvinist.
So, at the door to her apartment, when he places the key in its lock, she says, “Thanks for a lovely evening. I’m glad you like my new snowflakes.”
She even extends her hand for him to shake.
But Nathaniel just walks right in, gropes for the light, and flicks it on.
“I’m always amazed at how small apartments in this city can be,” he says, looking around and shaking his head.
“Tomorrow,” Lucy says, still standing by the door, “I have to leave for a week. To Israel.”
“One of these Whirlwind things?” he says.
“Yes, it’s—”
He turns to her. “You have any cognac?”
She studies him. He looks very out of place here in her apartment. Clumsy and big when really he isn’t big at all. He’s much shorter than Jasper. Yet he seems to cover so much more space. Lucy is convinced that Nathaniel is one of the sexiest men she has ever met. Not handsome. Not cute. Sexy. She wants him out of here before it’s too late.
“Listen,” she says, still not moving away from the door, “I think you should go.”
Nathaniel looks amused. “You do,” he says.
“I mean, we have a working relationship and I think it should stay that way.”
His amusement seems to grow. “Absolutely,” he says.
“Why is that funny?”
“I only asked for some cognac,” he tells her.
“That’s all you said,” Lucy says, “but I feel these vibes coming from you—”
“Sex vibes.”
She feels her face getting red. “Sexual. Yes.”
He takes a step toward her. “Well, you’re very perceptive.”
She holds up both hands, as if to ward him off, and he laughs.
“No,” he says. “I’m going to leave.”
Lucy frowns. She reminds herself it’s for the best. That he should go as fast as possible. “Good,” she says a little too enthusiastically.
Nathaniel laughs again. His eyes crinkle nicely when he laughs.
“And thanks again,” Lucy says. She sounds as if she’s at the end of a Whirlwind Weekend.
“Have fun in Italy,” he says.
He walks past her without touching her at all. Still, goosebumps rise up her arms.
“Israel,” she says.
“Israel.” He doesn’t even pause. He just walks right down the hall and into the elevator.
But Lucy stands there, frozen, for a long time.
Truth or dare
JULIA HAS FILLED THE loft with new things. At first she feels guilty for spending so much of her Vicky Valentine royalties on decorating an apartment that isn’t even hers. But the more she buys, the more right it feels. She has bought and hung prints—Warhol’s “Marilyn,” a chubby Botero orchestra, a Georgia O’Keeffe flower. She has added a coffee table, a desk, bookshelves. Every day she goes out shopping for something else. She goes to flea markets and buys odd pieces of Fiesta Ware—platters, cups, bowls. When she returns to the apartme
nt, she is always amazed. She walks around it, touching each item.
The bed has blue and pink striped sheets and a quilt of the Manhattan skyline. She has a Krups coffee maker, a toaster oven, a juicer, all lined up on the counter. She put a round, boldfaced clock on the kitchen wall. She has throw rugs scattered across the tiled floor—geometric designs and fat red roses.
Julia invites Katherine and Lucy over for a post-Christmas get-together. She buys forged iron candlesticks and twisted red and green candles, striped like candy canes. She buys coasters and a coatrack and a lazy Susan. On the big windows, she stencils stars and a slice of a moon in gold.
When they come in, they gasp. Her home is that beautiful.
Katherine is holding a loaf of cranberry bread. Her nose is very red from the cold, her hair shiny with snow.
“This is great,” Katherine says, looking around.
“Who lives here anyway?” Lucy says.
Julia laughs. “I do,” she says. “Who do you think? Santa Claus?” She takes their coats and hangs them on the new coatrack, letting her fingers pause to rub the smooth wood.
“No,” Lucy says, “I mean who really lives here?”
Although she knows it shouldn’t, the question jars her. Julia says, “I … I don’t know.”
Lucy is watching her face too carefully.
“Well,” Katherine says, smoothing the pleats of her forest green wool skirt, “whoever they are, they have good taste.”
Julia smiles weakly. “Yeah,” she says.
It is Lucy who changes the subject. She has just been to Bethlehem and Jerusalem and she has brought postcards in lieu of pictures to show them. “A Whirlwind Week is the worst,” she tells them.
Julia brings out her new hammered silver ice bucket and a bottle of wine. She has filled the lazy Susan with nuts and bought antique nutcrackers and nutpicks.
Katherine says, “Everything looks so nice, Julia.”
Again, she is aware of Lucy watching her closely, so she shrugs off the compliment and starts to ask questions about the trip.