by Ann Hood
It’s Katherine who asks the real question. “How are things without Jasper?” she says.
Lucy smiles falsely. “Just fine.”
“Liar,” Julia says.
“No,” Katherine says quickly. “It’s like Andy and me. When it’s time to break up, you know.”
Lucy shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I am lying. It’s awful. And he hasn’t called or anything.”
“Andy calls me all the time,” Katherine says. “I wish he wouldn’t.”
“Why don’t you call him?” Julia asks Lucy.
But Lucy shakes her head again.
Katherine says, in her best schoolteacher’s voice, “Let’s pretend we can have any man in the world. Who would you choose?”
Lucy groans. “You and your sorority games.” She turns toward Julia, who is cracking walnuts. “This is what we did in college. Night after night. We talked about men. Their penises. Their smells. Every word they said. It was so unhealthy.”
“You did it too,” Katherine says. Her face has crumpled slightly with hurt.
“But I hated it,” Lucy says.
Katherine focuses on the hard shell of a hazelnut. Somewhere in the building, someone is playing “Heart and Soul,” slow and clumsy, on the piano.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy says, although there is not even a hint of apology in her voice. “That’s how I feel.”
Katherine looks up. “You used to draw that comic strip for the school paper. Lucinda Luckinbill.”
“Who?” Julia says.
“Lucinda Luckinbill,” Katherine repeats. Her face has relaxed again.
Julia notices for the first time that Katherine’s smile is a little lopsided. It makes her seem more real, that smile.
She’s saying, “She was sort of like ‘Cathy.’ Someone everybody could relate to. I remember this one, right before finals, Lucinda Luckinbill is like falling asleep at her desk. And she’s saying stuff like, ‘I must finish this paper. I must.’ And she’s slapping herself in the face. Then she goes for a cup of coffee and spends all night gabbing with her girlfriends wide-awake.”
“My claim to fame,” Lucy says. She is smiling now too.
“Lucinda Luckinbill was great,” Katherine says, still remembering.
Lucy thinks a minute and says, “I’d choose Jasper. My old Jasper.”
“I thought you’d choose Nathaniel Jones,” Julia says.
“Ugh,” Lucy says. But she blushes as she says it.
“I think you’re hiding something from me,” Julia tells her.
Katherine is caught up in the game already. “I would choose someone I haven’t met yet. He’s handsome and kind and funny and exciting.”
“He rides a white horse and wears shining armor too, I bet,” Julia says.
“No,” Lucy says. “He’s make-believe. He goes out with people like Cinderella and Snow White.”
Katherine stiffens. “Ha-ha.”
For a while they go back to Lucy’s pictures and she tells them more about her trip.
But then Julia says, “What else are you hiding from me?”
“What do you mean?” Lucy says. She avoids Julia’s eyes.
“I think something happened between you and Mr. Jones.”
Katherine wrinkles her nose. “Isn’t he really creepy though?”
“He’s not creepy,” Lucy says, gathering up the postcards. “And nothing happened.”
“Uh-huh,” Julia says.
Katherine gets excited. “Ooooh,” she says. “This is like Truth or Dare.”
“Please,” Lucy groans.
Katherine turns her attention on Julia. “In Truth or Dare, we get to each ask a question and the person has to tell the truth or take a dare.”
Lucy stands up as if she might leave. “It is a stupid game. ‘How many times did you have sex with that Phi Sigma Kappa?’ ‘Have you ever given a blow job?’ And if you won’t answer, you have to run outside in your underwear or eat cat food or something.”
“It’s fun,” Katherine insists.
Julia pulls Lucy back onto the couch. “Truth or Dare,” she says. “Did you have sex with Nathaniel Jones?”
“The man has never even touched me,” Lucy says.
Katherine looks at Lucy and says, “My turn. Why don’t you like me anymore?”
“I like you.”
But Katherine shakes her head.
“This is ridiculous,” Lucy says.
“We used to be so close, though,” Katherine adds softly.
Lucy stands again. “This is not how I want to spend my evening.”
“It’s a fair question,” Katherine mutters.
“How’s this?” Lucy says. “You don’t know me. That’s all. I hate that my whole life I always pretended to be someone else just to have friends. I’m embarrassed by that. And it wasn’t until I moved here and made new friends and had my own life that I realized how embarrassed I was. Then you show up with your cookies and cakes and false sisterly love and I don’t want it. Are you happy now?”
Katherine is staring, wide-eyed. “No,” she says.
Lucy pulls her coat on roughly. “And you want to play this game so bad, Miss Vicky Valentine, why don’t you start telling the truth?”
Julia has moved toward her friend, to stop her from leaving, but now she stops. “I told you the truth about that,” she says.
Katherine says, “Lucy, where are you going?”
“Home. So I don’t have to run around Tribeca in my underwear.”
“Running around,” Julia says. “It’s more like running away.”
Katherine nods. “Here I go,” she says, holding up three fingers like a Girl Scout about to take an oath. “The truth. I’m afraid what I really want, more than anything, is to be a doctor’s wife and live in Newton, Massachusetts. To drive a Volvo and have four children and a golden retriever. But I’m afraid that I shouldn’t want that. That it’s wrong somehow to want that.”
Lucy laughs. “I don’t want to bare my soul here, guys. Sorry.”
It is Julia who takes Lucy’s arm, feels her stiffen under her touch. “I know you miss Jasper.”
But Lucy shakes her head. “Aren’t I supposed to end up with a successful guy?”
“Like Nathaniel Jones?” Julia says. “Ha!”
Again Lucy says, “I don’t want to do this.”
The three of them stand in an awkward silence, Julia still gripping Lucy’s arm, as if to hold her there in place.
When Katherine speaks, her voice sounds very small. “God,” she says. “Do you really feel about me the same way I feel about Meryl? Tell me I’m not that bad.”
Julia feels Lucy relax finally.
“You’re not that bad,” Lucy says.
The entire apartment seems to sigh in relief.
Julia says, “What do you say we go out dancing? Celebrate the holidays right.”
Katherine looks down at her wool skirt, her cable-knit sweater, and wrinkles her nose. “I’m not dressed for a club.”
“Sure you are,” Julia says, laughing. “You’re dressed like a suburban housewife.”
“Where to?” Lucy asks her, as Julia wraps a leopard-pattern scarf around her neck.
“The truth?” Julia says. “This guy I like is playing in a band tonight in the Village.”
“Barry?” Lucy says, surprised.
“No.”
Katherine narrows her eyes. She buttons her camel hair coat slowly, ties her red plaid scarf. “Let me look into your future,” she says. “This man is exotic. He is handsome. I see him riding. No! Pedaling a bicycle.”
Julia doesn’t say anything at first. She thinks over what Katherine says, can make no sense of her guess about On. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter. “Not bad,” she says.
She holds the door open for Lucy and Katherine to pass.
“You like a man on a bike?” Lucy is saying. “What is he? A messenger?”
Julia slips the keys into the locks. “He’s a musician,” she says. “Primari
ly.”
She feels Katherine still watching her, waiting.
“Since I don’t want to run around in my underwear either,” Julia says, “he also works for his uncle. Delivering Chinese food.” She hesitates, then adds, “And I’m absolutely nuts about him.”
The nightclub is smoky, filled mostly with NYU students drinking neon blue drinks in tall glasses. Julia chooses a table in the back, unsure if she really wants to have On see her. His band is already playing a set of songs by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and couples fill the dance floor, shaking and doing the twist.
“Which one?” Lucy whispers.
“The drummer,” Julia tells her. She keeps her eyes on him. There isn’t the usual disappointment that comes after not seeing someone for a while. He hasn’t turned more handsome in her imagination. Instead, here in the flesh, he is exactly as she remembers him. All the nights she felt him with her, all the time with Timothy that she felt On watching, he is just the same here in front of her.
“Cute,” Lucy whispers.
Julia nods.
Katherine is smiling at her, saying how much she loves these old songs. “This is great,” she says.
Something in Julia tells her to leave before On spots her. It is the thing that always enables her to walk away. Her foreign lovers, she knows, are just another way to keep herself from getting too involved. It is, Julia decides, easier to leave strangers, and odd apartments, than to face things, to put herself on the line.
That thing inside her is saying, “Leave. Leave.” She imagines walking out of here and going to a bar somewhere to find a man who cannot understand her. A man from someplace very far away. A man whose eyes will not haunt her.
She halfway stands, as if to go. The band starts a slow song. It is something Julia imagines teenagers at a high school prom might slow-dance to. She can’t place the song, but it keeps her there, holding the sticky edge of the table. Underneath her fingertips she feels initials someone has carved there. The song, the rough letters, all make her strangely blue. They make her feel that she has lost something. Something she can’t identify.
On the dance floor, couples are swaying, their arms around each other’s waists and necks. Suddenly Julia remembers the song that’s playing. It’s “Color My World.” At Friday night school dances it was always the last song played, the one where couples danced too close, holding on to each other for dear life. The song that Julia always heard from the ladies’ room down the hall, where she hid until the last dance was over and everyone started to leave. Now without her noticing, Katherine has asked someone to dance. She is out there, smiling up at a stranger in a gray pin-striped suit.
Lucy is saying, “Does this guy know what he’s in for? Two point five children. A woman who likes to bake.”
Julia thinks about hiding in the ladies’ room now, but she knows she will stay right here instead. That after this set, she will approach the band, and call to On. Later, she will tell him the truth. She will tell him that she has never even been to L.A., ever. She will tell him that she is afraid of things like love, and secrets told.
Now she swallows hard as the song draws to a close. She feels both frightened and daring. Julia sits back down, slowly, but she doesn’t let go of the table. Instead, her fingers clutch the letters she cannot see, and her heart beats hard and fast against her ribs.
Bedford and barrow
“THAT GUY SPENCER IS so weird,” Katherine tells Lucy over leftover Christmas cookies and eggnog in Meryl King’s apartment. That is how Katherine still thinks of the place where she lives—Meryl’s apartment.
“Why do you keep hanging around with him then?” Lucy says.
“I don’t know,” Katherine says. “He tries so hard.”
The cookies are shortbread ones, cut into the shape of stars. Lucy breaks off each of the five points before she eats one.
“Anyway,” Katherine says, “for the holiday talent show, what do you think he did?”
Lucy shrugs.
“Imitated Elvis,” Katherine says, laughing. “What else?”
Lucy laughs too. “Is he for real?”
“He lip-synched ‘Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog,’” she continues. “Complete with rotating hips.” Katherine jumps to her feet and imitates Spencer imitating Elvis.
Lucy is laughing hard now. “Stop,” she says.
“It’s like he’s possessed by Elvis’s spirit or something. I swear, he would name his son Elvis.”
Lucy groans. “What was your talent?”
Katherine hesitates. In college, she had been a Ramette, part of a synchronized dance team that wore short skirts and go-go boots and danced on the football field at halftime. Lucy used to make fun of her uniform, of all the practicing it took to learn the steps and choreograph new ones.
As if she has read Katherine’s mind, Lucy says, “Don’t tell me.”
“I didn’t pull out the uniform,” Katherine says. She wants to be able to laugh at herself. But she had loved being a Ramette. She used to love the way the cold autumn air felt on her bare legs as she danced, the way the sparkling blue fringe on the vest swayed when she moved. She liked being a part of something.
When she danced to the theme from Rocky for the school talent show, remembering all the right steps and doing it again had made her feel good. It had made her think back to the way she used to search the stands for Andy and his friends. It used to seem that his face might burst when he watched her, his pride was that evident.
Lucy is gentler with her than Katherine expects. “Well,” she says, “if that’s your talent.”
Katherine frowns, unsure if Lucy has meant to put her down again. “Remember how nervous I was when I tried out?” she asks her.
But Lucy waves off the question. “Not more nostalgia for the good old days. Please.”
“They weren’t that bad, were they?” Katherine asks, really hoping for Lucy to say something good about their time together then.
But Lucy doesn’t. “I like the present a lot better,” she says.
Katherine wonders how her memories can be so much warmer, so much better than her friend’s. She looks at Lucy, carefully breaking apart another star, and wonders what it is she sees when she remembers.
These are the things that Katherine used to know: that she loved Andy more than anything in the world; that she would teach first-graders the wonders of spelling their names, of opening a book and recognizing what was written there, of knowing that 1 + 1 = 2; that the world—her world—was a safe and good one; that she could make a perfect soufflé, coq au vin, vegetarian lasagna; that she would have children and a house with quilts on the beds and fireplaces and shelves of good books.
Now, Katherine knew none of these things any longer. She is thirty years old and sleeps on a pull-out sofabed in someone else’s apartment. She dates men who don’t know her, who don’t even take the time to know her, who talk about investment banking and the price of co-ops and summer shares in the Hamptons until she gets dizzy and asks to go home. Her six-year-old students give her subway information, tell her she should carry an extra twenty dollars to give to a mugger if she gets held up, and ask her for detailed descriptions of lambs, bats, and cows.
She feels she knows nothing. At night, she talks to Andy on the telephone, his voice sounding unreasonably close, like he is on the couch beside her. He tells her about his patients, the ones with gangrene, with AIDS, with burns. He tells her he took another resident to the hospital Christmas party, a woman named Shelly from Long Island who is an ophthalmologist. He doesn’t tell Katherine he loves her anymore. He has stopped asking her to come home.
“Do you like this woman?” Katherine asks him. “This Shelly?”
“Sure,” he says casually. “I like her.”
“Good,” Katherine lies. “That’s good.”
More and more, her reasons for being here are blurring. She tries to recall those months of sleepless nights but they seem small and distant. She tries to remember why she lay o
n her back like Michelangelo and wrote all those lyrics on her bedroom ceiling. But that too seems insignificant. Instead, she remembers Andy’s face at football games when she danced. She thinks of the way he hid her engagement ring at the bottom of a champagne glass to surprise her. She relives their long drives on back roads in Vermont, buying old tables and chairs and bureaus to refinish and put in their home someday.
“Where is our furniture?” she asks Andy one night.
“What furniture?”
“Our antiques,” she says. “All the things we collected together.”
He pauses. “Shelly’s helping me fix them up. She’s real good at design.”
Katherine feels a lump swell in her throat. She is afraid she will not be able to get the words out. “Design?” she says in a choked voice. “What’s there to design? They just need to be stripped and refinished.”
Andy pauses again. “Shelly thought—”
“Those are my chairs!” Katherine says, nearly shouting. “I picked out that table with the funny legs.”
Meryl sticks her head into the living room. She is wearing a flannel nightgown littered with yellow rosettes. Her face is shiny from a night moisturizer and there are smears of mascara under her eyes. She has orange juice cans in her hair. She uses them as curlers.
“You all right?” she asks Katherine.
Katherine nods at her. When Meryl disappears into her bedroom again, Katherine says in a hushed voice, “I’m the one who loved that old rocking chair. The one we got in Maine.”
Andy sighs. “I know,” he says.
“When I get my own apartment, I’ll want some of those things, you know. I’ll want you to send them to me.”
“I know,” he says again.
Spencer says, “This is a big surprise.”
Katherine smiles weakly. She tries to get up some enthusiasm for her post-Christmas date with Spencer. But all she can think about is how silly he looked imitating Elvis.
“I can’t wait,” she tells him.
They walk downtown from school toward the Village. Spencer is so excited that he is bouncing slightly as he walks, like a stuck jack-in-the-box.