A different view of the city entirely.
Then it was May’s turn to press the Stop Requested strip, feeling like a pro commuter. The driver stopped, obligingly, and she stepped off, admiring the beautifully maintained yellow brick apartments, taking in the people strolling about holding cups of coffee and copies of the New York Times, and walking their dogs. For all its luxury and promise and excitement, HUSH receded as the fantasy it was. This was part of the real New York, a glimpse of people living regular lives. The city felt so different from this perspective. Energizing, not deadening, manageable, not overwhelming. She could see why her mother had come and why she’d stayed.
And why had she gone back?
May stopped on the sidewalk, staring at Washington Square Park ahead of her, at the triumphal arch, which defined the park. Her own life in Wisconsin would be a huge comedown after this trip; it was only starting to sink in how tough the transition would be, even apart from leaving Beck and whatever they were starting. Yes, also something of a relief—day after day of new experiences was draining—but for the first time, May could see the weeks and years of her life back home stretching ahead of her, without feeling the old feelings of safety and contentment. More like the claustrophobia she felt when she first arrived here.
Her hand went to the place on her chest where Dan’s grandmother’s locket used to lie. Was this low-level panic what Dan had felt? This resistance to forced confinement in the box of the always-expected? Was it really May that had bored him, or just the rut they’d gotten into as a couple? Was she wrong to have thought life couldn’t be more exciting than the one she’d planned for them for so long? That it couldn’t at least involve thrills now and then greater than rearranging her furniture?
Beck seemed to think it could. And she’d certainly experienced more thrills at his hands than any others she’d ever encountered, figuratively and literally. Maybe this was all happening for a reason. Maybe she was evolving somehow, maybe this trip was changing her, so she could go back to Wisconsin and drum up a little more excitement. Maybe even get Dan back…
Her cheeks started hurting and she tuned into the giant scowl on her face, forced it to relax and kept walking until she reached Waverly Place. Even assuming Dan’s fling would be over soon, could she go back to him now? After what she’d been through here? After what she’d felt for Beck in such a short time? Would she always wonder how far these feelings could have gone? Would that wondering about Beck poison any chance of her and Dan picking up where they’d left off and impede their ability to move forward?
Last night she’d stayed at Exhibit A long enough to make her departure not obviously hasty. She’d both dreaded an invitation to Beck’s room and been desperately hoping for one, so when none came, she managed to contort herself emotionally into feeling relieved and miserable at the same time. That was May. Never waste an opportunity to cram as much angst as possible into any given situation. Maybe this was why she liked her life calm and smooth; she seemed to freak at every ripple.
She’d avoided her room today; Beck would have to work for one thing, and she wanted to enjoy herself, not sit scared he’d call and scared he wouldn’t. But when she went back to her room to change for tea, she’d found a message from him, asking to meet her that night. She hadn’t answered yet; there would be time when she got back.
Quite honestly, she hadn’t made up her mind whether to go or how to handle herself if she did. Her feelings were too tangled, her heart too vulnerable and confused to risk it…and yet, his pull was undeniable. Which was why this peaceful time with Clarissa this afternoon would be a godsend.
She reached the entrance to Clarissa’s apartment, entered the spotless chandeliered lobby and gave her name to the doorman, who called up and announced her to “Mrs. Armstrong.”
“4B.” He directed her to the elevator, down a carpeted cream corridor hung with impressionist prints. She pressed the appropriate button and rode the creaky antique up to the fourth floor, where the door to Clarissa’s apartment stood open and an enticing smell of cinnamon beckoned.
“Hello, May. I’m so glad you came.” Clarissa welcomed her into a spotless foyer, lined cheeks pink, blue eyes warm, lemon-yellow dress blooming with honeysuckle and ivy. “How pretty you look. I like your makeup lighter like that.”
“Thank you.” May smiled, thinking of Beck, wondering if he’d like her more natural look or wish she was still Veronica’d up.
“Come in.”
Clarissa’s apartment was large, sunny and high-ceilinged, which May gathered in New York meant serious dollars worth of real estate, and decorated exquisitely—a clawfoot dark wood coffee table, a glass-doored bookshelf with a carved likeness of William Shakespeare on top, African masks, Balinese dragon statues, goddesses from Thailand, and plants everywhere. African violets, ficus trees, bonsai, cyclamen…
“What a beautiful apartment.”
“Thank you. Jim and I traveled quite a bit and bought what we liked where we found it. Can’t say there’s much of an official decorating scheme. Maybe as you like it.”
“I do like it.”
“Come sit down, I’ve just put the tea in to steep, it will be ready in a minute.”
“Thank you.” May sat on a dainty-looking chair that felt sturdy and comfortable under her. Clarissa bustled back and forth from what must be the kitchen, bringing out more food than May could eat in a day. Tea sandwiches and cookies, salted almonds and strawberries, scones and jams and honey and a bowl of what looked like clotted cream.
“Clarissa, this is heaven on earth, you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.”
“Oh, I didn’t. Truly. There’s the most wonderful bakery and sandwich shop around the corner. I did bake the scones, but even they came from a mix. In New York there’s never any excuse to eat poorly, and always an excuse to stay out of the kitchen if you want to.”
May thought of the assorted fast-food chains littering the commercial street nearest her in Oshkosh and felt a pang of envy.
Finally, Clarissa brought out the tea service, white china with tiny red roses rambling on leafy green vines, around the teapot and the rims of the cups and saucers.
“You’ve brought your sketches, thank you.” Clarissa lifted the lid of the teapot and stirred. “May I see?”
May nodded and took her drawings out of the bag, wishing she’d left them at home. In a house like this, with art probably worth millions of dollars, her silly amateur scribbling would be an embarrassment, though doubtless Clarissa would gush and exclaim as if May were a genius.
“One minute.” Clarissa retrieved a pair of reading glasses from a cherry writing desk and returned to her seat on the deep rose-colored Queen Anne sofa. “Now.”
She held the sketches at arm’s length, studying them carefully, from the hurried slashing pencil sketch of the garden on May’s first day, to the more carefully drawn color study with the hawk she’d finished that morning.
“Well.” Clarissa stacked the sketches, tapped them on her knee to align them and handed them back. “Those look to me like the sketches of a young woman on her way to falling in love.”
Startled, May had to remind herself not to crush the papers between her fingers. Yes, Clarissa seemed to have a sixth sense, but how the heck could she see May’s developing feelings for Beck in drawings of a roof garden? “What do you mean?”
“The first sketches are angular, jagged, emphasizing cement, concrete and claustrophobia. Those later ones…” She gestured gracefully toward the stack in May’s grasp. “They’re softer, colorful. They show a greater understanding of and appreciation for your surroundings. I had a feeling you’d fall eventually.”
“But I barely know him.” The words tumbled out over a panicky tightness in her chest. “Three days. It’s not long enough.”
Even to her ears the protest sounded overwrought. Like the last pleadings of a condemned prisoner, more frightened than sincere.
“Well.” Clarissa gazed at May over the tops o
f her glasses. Then she took them off and folded them methodically. “I was talking about you falling in love with New York.”
Crap.
May ducked her head to stare at the pictures in her lap, her face hot and undoubtedly matching the lovely red flowers in her dress.
Double crap.
“Tea?”
She peeked up to see Clarissa holding the pot questioningly. “Yes please.”
“It’s Darjeeling. I get the leaves from a wonderful shop in the Village on Christopher Street. They have excellent coffee, too.”
May nodded. To her horror, tears were threatening to complete her humiliation.
“I’m a very good listener, you know. And for all my love of gossip, I can keep a secret.”
A tear left the safety of May’s right eye, braved the journey down her cheek to her chin and leaped into her teacup where it landed with a plop, and was absorbed by the excellent Darjeeling from Christopher Street. “I’m sorry. It’s all a little confusing.”
“Love is always confusing, dear. It’s powerful, mysterious, and often a giant pain in the ass. Have a cookie.”
May laughed, brushed away the tear remnants, and took a cookie, buttery and half-dipped in chocolate. “I’m not the woman he thinks I am. All this week I’ve been pretending to be worldly and sophisticated and experienced, and I’m not any of those things.”
“Ah, I see.” Clarissa sipped her tea and bit into a finger sandwich. “Well I am worldly and sophisticated and experienced, and therefore I can tell you with utter confidence that you can’t possibly pretend to be something you’re not.”
“But I’ve never done anything, gone anywhere. I’ve never even tried to be this way before.” Except when she was a terribly shy girl…
“Now you have. And if he’s still coming around, you must have done very well, my dear. If you’re attempting something truly outside your comfort level or contrary to your inner nature, it’s not going to work for either of you.”
“But I’m not—”
“Did you get the present from Trevor this morning?”
She grimaced. “Fur-trimmed? Orange?”
“Bingo.” Clarissa crunched a few nuts as if she wished they were Trevor’s. “Planning to model it for Beck tonight?”
“God, no.”
“Exactly. Because it’s not you, no matter how you look at it. Or not look at it, which is infinitely preferable. If you’ll pardon me for being a horrendous buttinsky, I think you’re uncovering part of yourself you never let out to taste the air until now. How many dull contented-with-next-to-nothing people do you know who’d accept a week in a place like Hush in the first place?”
“I…” May frowned. “…don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“But that was because my boyfriend of six years broke up with me and I went a little nuts. This was way out of character for me.”
“Not at all. That’s my point. The only thing that amazes me is how you could have suppressed your true nature for so long. I’m guessing this boyfriend of yours was the culprit?”
“Dan?” May laughed, not really amused and surprised how hastily she was rushing to defend him. “He was hardly the oppressive type. But he was—is—a very magnetic and dynamic person, and I…”
She was going to say, “am not” but something in Clarissa’s eyes turned sharp, as if she’d throw hot tea in May’s face if she put herself down any more. And come to think of it, why was she so desperate to paint herself exactly as dull as Dan had informed her she was, when she didn’t even agree with him and hadn’t acted that way since she met Trevor?
A faint glow started in a too-long unexplored dark corner of her brain. Or had her transformation started sooner? Right after she and Dan broke up?
“What I want to know, dear, is why you are desperately trying to hang on to the old image of yourself rather than embracing the new when you wear it so well?”
May put her cookie down on the saucer, thinking of the night before at Exhibit A, of how hard she’d tried to be the way she saw herself in Wisconsin, and how dismally she’d failed, and how much trouble she’d taken to beat herself up for it all evening.
Oh, my goodness.
“I have a proposition for you.”
May picked up her cookie again and popped it into her mouth, because not even the most profound self-exploration should stand in the way of butter and chocolate. “What’s that?”
“I’m finding it harder to do my job with the same enthusiasm I used to. I’d like more time to enjoy the city, maybe do a little more traveling in the years ahead while I’m still healthy and strong. Why don’t you stay in New York, I’ll take you on as an assistant, and you can see what happens with Beck.”
May picked up her teacup, took a sip of tea, put her teacup carefully back on its saucer and helped herself to a sandwich. Because salmon and watercress should definitely get in the way of her brain trying to wrap itself around what Clarissa had just proposed. This was all way too much to take in at once.
And yet…she didn’t seem to be rushing to say no. Did she….
“Even if…I mean…well for one thing…there’s no way I can afford it.”
“You could stay with me at first, there’s plenty of room. Hush pays quite well, you’d do fine.”
The sandwich was delicious, fine-crumbed bread, salmon, dill and cream cheese, and the tart peppery contrast of watercress to cut through the richness. May tried to concentrate on the flavors, on chewing, on swallowing, and instead, drifted off into a fantasy of herself commuting amid a crowd of New Yorkers, blissfully tending the roof garden at HUSH, even more blissfully spending the occasional—or frequent—night rolling in the sheets with Beck.
Mmm.
The salmon went down the wrong pipe and she had to swig tea to avoid choking. Abrupt end of daydream.
Was that a sign? It had to be. This was all a nice dream, but she had a job back home, she still hadn’t managed to kill off the vision of a life with Dan—maybe a retooled life, maybe reinvented with this new knowledge of herself to give him the excitement he wanted. Those things were real.
She put her hand to her chest and cleared her throat, grateful to the tea for rescuing her from a coughing fit. “The thing is, my mother followed thrills, and she discovered thrills weren’t what they were cracked up to be. I did the same with Trevor, and look how that turned out. The week with Beck has been amazing, but Hush Hotel is not exactly reality. Life is life, wherever you live it. Same problems here that there were in Oshkosh, only more expensive.”
“Ah, yes, your mother who wanted to be a Rockette and went back to Wisconsin with your father.” Clarissa smiled and leaned forward, eyes very wide and very blue. “There is a lesson to be learned from that story, but if you’ll forgive me, I think you learned the wrong one.”
May held the last bite of sandwich suspended between her saucer and her mouth. “I don’t see how.”
“Try looking at it this way. Maybe your mother left to follow the thrill not when she came to New York to be a Rockette.” Clarissa leaned forward and tapped May’s knee with a long slender finger. “But when she left New York…to be with your father.”
BECK SHOVED his chair back from the desk in his room. Chapter Seven glowed on his laptop, the cursor blinking in the same spot he’d left it two hours ago. Hell, the whole day had been like this.
He was blocked. In all his years of writing—over seven—this had never happened to him. Not even close. Mack had inhabited his brain night and day, plots and images and characters had arrived without fail. Whenever Beck sat down to work, the words and scenes had burst out like bulls from a rodeo chute. Or okay, some days like slugs out of a starting gate. But something had always made it onto the page.
Last night he’d come back from the date with May at Exhibit A and again written like a man possessed. Mack’s scene with not-Susie—Beck still couldn’t name her to his satisfaction—poured out onto the page, with Mack confident, in control, the sex th
rilling and physically satisfying. Then out of the blue his heroine had locked her lips onto Mack’s and Mack had been lost. Whatever emotional distance Beck’s hero had been able to maintain vanished along with his sexual control.
The words and images had been strong, masculine and infinitely tender; they’d come to Beck effortlessly, the same way they had after May had pleasured herself in his room. No question May was a powerful muse, tuning him in to feelings his hero needed to feel.
He’d faxed the pages to Alex, and in a phone call this morning, she’d practically orgasmed herself.
Today, the opposite. Today Beck wanted to write a scene where Mack started admitting to himself and to Whatsername, that he was getting in deep. And…nothing. Not a word worth keeping. Everything sounded clichéd, contrived or like a high school freshman creative-writing assignment. A bad one. By an untalented student. With the flu.
At this rate, Mack wouldn’t be falling in love and Beck would never reach the end of these revisions. His amazing beginning would fizzle out in an unconvincing scene where Mack would blurt out, “I…I…I love you,” and readers the world over would groan and want to hurl.
The worst part? The words were in him to describe this thing, to do it right, the words and the emotions. He knew it. Just out of his reach, what he wanted to say sat like an eager puppy barking to be let out of his locked crate. Why the damn door was locked in the first place and how to get the key—well if he knew that, he wouldn’t be blocked.
Frankly, it was scaring the crap out of him.
He dragged himself to the window and looked out at the sunshine, feeling like a convict allowed one last glimpse of freedom.
As if all that weren’t enough, during the unending agony of this mental meltdown, he couldn’t stop thinking about May.
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