by Robyn Sisman
Candace scurried away with her precious juice, boobs bouncing, leaving Freya to flick her hair in irritation. The idea of playing piggy-in-the-middle with Jack and Candace all weekend made the blood thrum in her ears. She would make her escape, but not before she’d had a little word with Jack—if he ever got out of bed. Freya decided that now would be a good moment to reorganize the saucepan cupboard.
Earlier, from her vantage point at the sink, Freya had noticed that someone had set out some tatty deck chairs in the backyard. It was a sparkling day, the sky washed to a clear cerulean blue by last night’s rain. Fetching the newspaper and a pile of envelopes from the hall floor, she carried them outside and settled herself in the hot sunshine. She leafed through the post, mostly dull-looking brown jobs apart from a thick, cream envelope addressed to Jack. She turned it over and idly rubbed a thumb across the embossed flap, which proclaimed the sender to be Jack’s father. With any luck, he had decided to disinherit his useless son.
There was one item for her, a large padded envelope redirected from Michael’s address, franked by a London PR firm whose name she recognized. Freya’s face tightened. Tash had never written to her once in all the years she’d lived in New York. If she was doing so now, it would hardly be out of sisterly affection. Freya ripped the envelope open and pulled out a glossy magazine. Good grief!—Country Life. She flipped through the pages depicting clipped yew hedges, prize bulls, and luscious English country houses until she found a compliments slip covered in huge scrawly writing: Daddy said I should send this to you. See p. 51.—T.
Freya pursed her lips and turned to the relevant spot, where she found a full-page color photograph of Tash on the girls-in-pearls page. Country Life had always featured a portrait like this—the English middle-class equivalent of a Playboy centerfold—which advertised the charms of a well-born or aspirant young lovely, usually on the occasion of her engagement or marriage. No wonder Tash was thrilled. But surely the girls used to wear high-necked frilly blouses and Alice bands, and were snapped in midembrace of a labrador or a cherry tree in blossom, not sprawled half-naked across a red velvet chaise longue. Country Life had certainly changed. Freya smoothed the page flat and stared stonily at Tash’s flawless young skin, her greeny-hazel eyes innocently wide, the showy ring oh-so-casually prominent on one perfectly manicured hand. Underneath the portrait was the usual formulaic caption. Miss Natasha Penrose, 25, only daughter of the late Mr. John Huffington and Mrs. Guy Penrose of Trewennack, Cornwall, is to be married to Roland Swindon-Smythe, only son of Mr. and Mrs. Barry Swindon-Smythe of The Shrubberies, Totteridge Common, Essex.
Reading the announcement in black and white made Freya catch her breath in panic. The wedding was exactly two weeks away, and she had nobody to go with. What was she going to do? She slammed the magazine to the ground upside down and picked up today’s newspaper instead, hoping to distract her thoughts.
She was trying to concentrate on a lament for the demise of the formal dining room when Jack stumbled out from the kitchen. He slumped in a chair and put his head in his hands. “Urghh,” he said.
Freya read her paper in icy silence.
“I think I might be dead. No flowers, please.”
Freya ignored him—the cheap, slobbish, cruel, selfish bastard.
He stretched noisily and let out an uninhibited yawn. The silence ticked by. Freya waited. Finally he asked, in a carefully casual voice, “How was your evening?”
“Sensational, thank you.”
“Really?” Jack’s eyes widened in surprise.
“Pure poetry. There’s nothing like a man who worships the ground you walk on—particularly if it’s his own body. Excuse me, his own hairy body. Though those handcuffs need some new padding, that I will say.”
Jack was looking at her in alarm. “You’re kidding.”
“Of course, I’m kidding!” Freya jumped to her feet and began thwacking him about the head with her newspaper. “How dare you set me up with a pervert?”
“I didn’t—ow!—set you up. You answered the ad yourself. It was your choice. Stop that!” With mortifying ease, Jack relieved her of the paper and held her at arm’s length. “I don’t get it, Freya. Can’t you even last a week without a man?”
“Look who’s talking!” Freya twisted out of his grasp. “You can’t let even a day pass without picking up some woman—however feeble-minded.”
Jack bared his teeth in a taunting smile. “Maybe it’s not their minds that interest me.”
“Where’s the maybe in that? No wonder you can’t write anymore, Jack. You’re about as intellectually challenged as a piece of plankton.”
His eyes flickered. “At least I don’t need to scour the lonely-hearts ads.”
They glared at each other.
“I almost forgot.” Freya reached into her shorts pocket. “Last week’s rent. Thank you so much for the privilege.” She tossed a wad of dollar bills in his general direction. The notes separated and fluttered onto the rough grass.
After a pointed pause, Jack bent to pick them up and folded them with exaggerated care. He sagged back in his chair and considered her through eyes narrowed against the sun. “You’re really not going to like yourself when you read my novel,” he told her.
“You can’t put me in your novel. That’s libel.”
Jack’s face clouded over. “Speaking of libel, I had a long talk with Michael yesterday. Someone mutilated his wardrobe. He’s thinking of suing.”
“He wouldn’t dare.”
“Gives the word lawsuit a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?”
“Hi, everybody,” chirruped a voice. “I’ve made us all some lemonade.”
Candace tripped out to them with a tray, fully dressed and restored to bandbox perfection—lips glossed, hair smoothed, and no doubt manicured, waxed, depilated, and hygienically sprayed in all problem areas. Freya looked down at her bare legs and scuffed trainers. Time to leave.
“Thank you, Candace.” She took a glass and drained it. “You don’t mind if I borrow Rosinante, do you, Jack?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Rosie who?” Candace frowned suspiciously.
“Rosinante is Jack’s pet bicycle,” said Freya, “and after you, Candace, the thing he loves most in the world. It’s named after Don Quixote’s horse.”
“Oh, right. He was in The Waltons, wasn’t he?”
“Come on, Jack.” Freya kicked him, none too gently, on the leg. “It’s in your interest: I’m going to check out some apartments.”
He looked up sharply. “You’re moving out?”
“Are you begging me to stay?”
“Let me know when I can crack open the champagne.”
“Is this your sister?” interrupted Candace. She had picked up the magazine that Freya had stupidly left lying open on the grass.
“Stepsister,” Freya agreed shortly.
“Let’s see.” Jack held out his hand. Obediently, Candace gave him the magazine and draped herself over the back of his chair, her cheek next to his, so that they could read it together.
Jack examined the photograph, and whistled. “I thought you said she was a schoolgirl, Freya.”
“She was. She grew up.”
“I’ll say.”
“Look, Jack!” Candace pointed excitedly. “It says she’s getting married! Isn’t that amazing?”
“An event of truly world-shattering significance.” Freya snatched the magazine out of Jack’s grasp and slapped it shut. “You do have your own post, Jack.” She bent down and scooped up the small pile. “There’s one here from your father. Shall I read it aloud?”
Jack looked at her with dislike. “Take the bike,” he said.
“What?”
“I said, take the goddamned bike!”
Freya hesitated for a moment, then tossed the letters at his feet. “Fine,” she said.
Bicycling forty-odd blocks from Chelsea to Central Park on a hot Saturday was madness; to do so on Jack’s clanking, three-speed antique, amid crazy traffic and d
eath-jets of pollution, was the kind of suicide mission Freya was determined to enjoy. I can do this, she told herself, pedaling across intersections just as the lights turned red, banging on the roofs of cars that crowded her space. Back in the old days she had bicycled everywhere—but that was because she was penniless, not because she was some poseur “artist” like Jack, who thought a battered bike enhanced his boyish, bookish charm, and who could always grab a cab if it looked like rain. When she thought of all the cruddy jobs she had taken just to stay alive in this city—sandwich-deliverer, telephone sex-line receptionist, rollerskating waitress (in obligatory pigtails), human guinea pig in hospital drug trials, the kind of maid employed to clean up other people’s vomit after parties, tour guide in “colonial” costume (complete with a stupid bonnet she called her “Dutch cap”)—Jack’s fecklessness enraged her. He thought he was a hero because he’d survived in New York one whole year before his daddy relented and put him back on an allowance. He’d never missed a meal to pay tuition fees, as she had, or spent a winter sleeping on a strip of foam with a charity-shop fur coat as a blanket. Even now, her bank balance regularly tipped into minus; since the pink dress and poker disaster, she hadn’t dared open a statement. And if Michael seriously intended to sue her . . . Freya groaned. She’d call Cat this afternoon and unleash her on the case.
Freya rose in the saddle as she pumped steadily northward on an incline invisible to the eye but palpable to the calves. One by one, she counted off the landmarks: the National Debt Clock, Macy’s, the Town Hall, the RCA building with its enchanting slim spire, the sinister black glass cube of the CBS building, plonked down on the corner of Fifty-third like a gigantic blank television screen. She had lied when she told Jack she was going to look at apartments. She was going to the park for some privacy, so she could plot her revenge for Jack’s prank.
Sweaty and breathless Freya at last crossed into the park. The whole place seethed with bikers, joggers, lovers, men with babies, women with dogs, children licking ice-cream cones. Slowing her pace, she slipped gratefully onto the tree-shaded cycle track and rode one-handed toward the Ramble in search of an unoccupied spot amid its supposedly “wild” tangle of streams, woodland, and artfully placed boulders. Dismounting faithful Rosinante, Freya wheeled her through the bushes and laid her against a tree. She sat down on a shaded patch of worn grass and took a deep, cooling swig of water from the bottle she’d brought, then reached for the rucksack she had carried in the bicycle basket. From it she drew a pen and notepaper. For a long while she chewed her pen thoughtfully, then she began to write.
After several efforts, she had the letter as she wanted it. She took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote, in erratically capitalized lettering:
You think your such a big shot, but be warNed—the FORCES OF DARKNESS are gathering. I know what’s going on with you and Her. If she gets an A and I don’t, you will be Punished for GROSS moral turpatude and SEXUAL favours. Nobody can be aloud to stand in the way of my GENIUS. So watch your step. Or else.
“A Friend”
Freya reread the letter and smiled with satisfaction. Everybody knew that people attracted to creative writing courses were by definition paranoid and deluded; Freya liked to think of Jack torturing himself by trying to identify the perpetrator out of so many suspects. She folded the letter in two, slid it into an envelope, and wrote out Jack’s name and address in the same misshapen print. Then she took a stamp from her wallet, licked it, and stuck it on at a deranged angle. That should fix him. Suddenly exhausted, Freya lay back against the tree trunk and closed her eyes. The park was extraordinarily unpeaceful. Dogs barked, children whooped, music blared, lovers giggled in the dusty bushes. She endured it until a mountain biker burst sweatily from the undergrowth and ran over her foot. Serenity was what she wanted; she knew the perfect place.
The room was cool and silent. High above her head was an elegantly corniced ceiling; a faint smell of polish rose from the wooden floor with its square of green carpet. The paintings that surrounded her—by Gainsborough, Romney, Reynolds, Hogarth—exuded English eighteenth-century confidence and calm. Freya was standing in one room of the Frick Collection, a museum on the Upper East Side. It had been an easy ride across the park; on the way she had passed a mailbox and deposited the letter to Jack. There was something about museums that made her feel safe, perhaps because she had spent so many hours in them as a child, her hand snug in her father’s. The Frick never changed, though occasionally items were moved around; the paintings were old friends. Wandering alone, and at her own pace, through these graceful rooms she felt simultaneously soothed and refreshed.
Normally she bypassed the Fragonard Room, with its rococo furnishings and chocolate-boxy depictions of young lovers, all rosebuds and flouncy dresses. But for some reason, today she stepped inside and found her attention caught by the series of four large paintings known as the Progress of Love. It told a familiar story. First, The Pursuit: a young man proffering a rose to an alarmed young girl, caught unawares in a flowery garden. Two cupids observe the encounter from their position on a phallus-shaped fountainhead, gushing water. Next, The Meeting, in which the young man, dressed in the red of passion, scales a wall to encounter his still-hesitant quarry. By the third painting, she has yielded; complacently she allows him to nuzzle her neck, while a small dog, symbol of fidelity, lies at her feet. Finally, in The Lover Crowned, he is in full, triumphant possession under a limitless sky; the happy couple smile out of a canvas awash with symbols of fertility and happiness.
And that was it: “The End”—just like old movies, where the two words actually came up on screen after the final kiss. Freya folded her arms and pursed her lips consideringly. It didn’t seem that simple nowadays. Fragonard depicted love as a game for the young and innocent, in which both parties knew the rules. But there were no rules anymore. No one was innocent; they were guarded and cynical, anxious to keep their options open, wary of being trapped yet terrified of missing out.
What was the secret of true love between a man and a woman, she wondered? Sex, certainly; romance, ideally; domestic stability, probably. Anything else? She shrugged: whatever it was, she hadn’t found it yet. Freya rubbed her upper arms, suddenly cold in the air-conditioning. Could it be that the fault lay with her, that she was unworthy of love. Everyone abandoned her, in the end. Her heart welled with self-pity.
A German couple entered the room, arguing about which of them had forgotten the camera, and interrupted her thoughts. Freya shook off her melancholy mood, and moved toward the door. Her eyes swept over the paintings again as she passed, taking in the girl’s blushing cheeks and plump bosom. Though scorning Fragonard’s prettification of love, she couldn’t help feeling a wistful pang for the sheer optimism and energy of youth. There was a smile on her face as she stepped out onto Seventieth Street, only to discover that Rosinante’s rear tire was flat.
This was not a likely area for a repair shop. After stopping to ask several passersby, Freya learned that there was some kind of a bike place several blocks north, and made her way there, hoping it really existed and had not yet closed. She was in luck. In a junky street off Second Avenue she found a big old garage smelling of rubber, with a row of bicycles parked on the sidewalk and a throng of muscled youth inside, clinking spanners, hefting saddlebags, conferring over spinning wheels. As she took her place in the line for the counter, her fingers slipped on the handlebars and Rosinante lurched sideways, ramming the person in front.
“I’m so sorry,” said Freya.
“ ’s okay.” It was a young man with a friendly smile. “I was just trying to persuade myself I needed a Tour de France water bottle, but I’m already way deep in accessory overload. What’s the problem with your bike?”
“Puncture.” Freya sighed with self-pity.
He looked at her in puzzlement.
“Flat tire,” she translated.
“Is that all? Why don’t you fix it?”
“Well. I, er, don’t have the equipment. It�
��s not my bike.”
“Sure you do.” He showed her a pouch thing strapped behind the bicycle seat.
“I thought that was a first aid kit,” Freya admitted.
He laughed as if she’d cracked a terrific joke, revealing perfectly straight, dazzling white teeth. Freya realized that he was extremely good-looking.
“Listen,” he said. “Let’s go back outside, and I’ll fix it for you. They’ll charge you crazy money to do it here. Come on.”
Freya followed him outside and watched him lean his own machine tenderly against the wall. Then he came over and took the bike from her hands. He was exactly the same height as she. Straight dark hair sprang from his forehead. He was wearing a tight black T-shirt and stone-colored shorts cut high on his thighs.
“Let’s get her on her back first,” he said commandingly. “No, out of the way. I’ll do this.”
Freya watched him flip the bike upside down. He certainly seemed very fit.