by Jaime Clarke
“It was Camouflage,” Charlie said, smiling.
Ailish slapped the bar towel at him. “I told you it wasn’t fucking Camouflage,” she said. “It’s Real Life.” She put her arms up over her head in victory.
“Yeah,” Charlie said. “Real Life covering Camouflage.”
“Oh, give it up,” she said.
“I think you owe me a drink, then.”
“How is it you got the answer wrong and I owe you a drink?” She acted incredulous, and it was one of the things Charlie loved about her, how any small thing could become a good time.
“How about if I buy me one and then you buy me one?” he offered.
“That’s a much better deal,” she laughed, and poured him a pint of Bass, which was how it always started.
By eleven o’clock, Charlie had lost sight of Ailish, not knowing it would be the last time he ever saw her, that a death in her family would call her back to Dublin. He looked at the apartment building across the street. All the windows were dark. Everyone was out somewhere, having a good time, or having a shitty time, he thought. Living their lives, regardless. Derwin had gone out of town for the weekend to visit his brother in Baltimore. Charlie didn’t want to be the only soul in the building, which was how he ended up in a cab with two girls who were afraid to take the subway from Brooklyn late at night. He asked them their names twice as the cab sped over the Williamsburg Bridge, and then the girls ignored him, sorry they’d offered him a ride (he had just stepped out for some air, but the way he looked at the cab made them think he wanted to share it). Charlie got out at Houston and Broadway and handed the girls a five-dollar bill. “Nice to meet you, Becky and Julie,” he said. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Sandy and Emily,” one of them said as Charlie slammed the cab door.
Charlie parted the black curtain under a neon sign on the Lower East Side, and his eyes dilated in the dark bar. Two girls dressed in identical pink plastic dresses looked up from the sofa by the door, their faces obscured in darkness. Charlie waved as if he knew them, and they looked back at each other and continued their conversation.
An uneasy feeling came over him as he battled for space at the bar. Finally he planted himself on the long couch in the back room. He would trade every good thing in his future if only Olivia would appear, kiss him on the cheek, rest her head on his shoulder. His heart contracted and he gasped for breath, sure that he was about to die. Two short breaths and he exhaled deeply, the weight he’d felt lifting right as the waitress poked her head in.
“Vodka tonic, please,” Charlie said. “Stoli.”
A song that had been popular when Charlie lived in Santa Fe played loudly overhead, and by the time it was finished, two empty glasses were keeping each other company on the table near the couch as he recounted for Lynette—a girl who had come in looking for her friends, for a birthday party—the different meanings the song had held for him at different points in his life. Charlie was making a very moving point about his childhood when Lynette interrupted him to ask the difference between a Sea Breeze and a Bay Breeze. Charlie couldn’t guess and said so. He put his head on Lynette’s bare shoulder and she didn’t seem to mind. He felt her body vibrate when she told the waitress, “Sea Breeze, please,” and he started humming the song that had just ended. By the time he was in the cab with Lynette, headed to an Albanian nightclub Lynette knew about somewhere in the Bronx, Charlie was humming the tune for the cabdriver, asking if the cabbie knew the name of the song, or who sang it.
“I have to get up early,” Lynette said to no one in particular. A mole on her neck would be unsightly once Lynette was older—she’d likely have it removed—but Charlie thought it was so sexy he wanted to lean in and kiss it.
“Where do you work?” Charlie asked, but he didn’t listen to the answer.
The cab flew up Madison Avenue, the streets desolate except for the occasional couple strolling in front of backlit windows, peering in at chicly dressed mannequins wearing frozen expressions.
“Take us to Fifty-fifth and Fifth,” Lynette yelled, leaning through the plastic divider. Charlie glimpsed a second beauty mark on her breast that mirrored the one on her neck, and he yearned to trace an arc between the two.
“Is that where you live?” Charlie asked.
“There’s a cool bar,” Lynette said, her thoughts drifting. “I went there once with my father.”
The cab stopped on Fifth Avenue and Charlie paid the driver, then tipped the doorman at the Peninsula Hotel. Lynette pressed the button for the elevator, and Charlie slipped into the men’s room, vomiting in a stall, bracing himself against the cold steel walls. He fixed his hair in the mirror, and the elevator rang as the men’s room door closed behind him.
The bar on the roof of the Peninsula was unoccupied, and Charlie looked at his watch: 3:30. A light breeze swooped down and made him shiver.
“What are you drinking?” Lynette asked.
Charlie ordered a vodka and cranberry from the tuxedo-clad bartender. “We’re closed after this,” the bartender said, and brushed his crew cut.
“So are we,” Charlie said, but no one laughed.
The cranberry juice tasted like food to Charlie as he slowly tilted his head back. He opened his eyes and spied the moon peeking through a jumble of clouds. He thought he could feel the light coming off the moon, not heat but a soothing coolness, like the water in the pool Lynette spotted on their way to the elevator, her dress already poolside by the time Charlie splashed down. Floating on his back, he was unsure if they’d paid for their drinks. He closed his tired eyes and put his hands at his sides and began to sink toward the bottom.
The doorman nodded at Charlie as he whisked through the lobby of Summit Terrace. He reflected on the progression of faces the doorman must log during the course of the day and felt pleasure at being recognized. Several of the faces passing through Summit Terrace were likely famous, too, a fact that astonished him when he thought of how amiable Vernon was with the famous and unheralded alike. To believe the papers was to believe Vernon was a celebrity hound, but Charlie never heard him mention other celebrities and was simultaneously impressed and jealous at how easily commoners like himself were integrated into Vernon’s life.
The woman who answered Vernon’s door startled him.
“I’m Jessica,” she said. “You must be Charlie.” Her quick smile indicated that she’d grown used to people like Charlie in Vernon’s life. A tattoo of one of the Powerpuff Girls—he didn’t know which—peeked over the waist of her jeans as she sprinted for the whistling teakettle. “Would you like some?” Her brunette bob flounced as she reached for a box of tea.
Charlie declined as Vernon burst through the front door, led by a panting white pug on a leash. Vernon dropped the leash and the pug snuffled against Charlie’s leg. “I see you’ve met,” he said, indicating Jessica, who was ladling sugar into her teacup. “Oscar, stop.”
“We’re old lovers, actually,” Jessica said.
Charlie demurred, picking up on the vibe between Jessica and Vernon. Instead, he laughed and handed Vernon the envelope with the typed interview. “A first draft,” he said.
“Great, thanks,” Vernon said. “I’ll take it with me.” He dropped the envelope on the kitchen counter. “Did you make an extra key for Charlie?” he asked Jessica.
She replaced the teakettle and scowled. “I thought that’s what you were doing.”
“I was walking the damn dog,” Vernon said, exasperated. He unhooked the leash and Oscar bolted for the metal bowl in the kitchen.
“Why didn’t you walk him to the locksmith’s?” Jessica asked evenly.
Vernon exhaled. “Because I thought you’d already done it.”
“I got the mail,” Jessica said, her counterpunch landing squarely with Vernon, who dropped the issue of the extra key and took up his mail.
“I’ll have to get the key to you another time,” Vernon said to Charlie as he opened an envelope from Camden College. For a moment, Charlie worried
that the letter was about him. A warning perhaps. The irrational thought passed when Vernon said, “Camden wants my archives.” He laughed and flung the letter onto the counter.
“That’s an honor, right?” Charlie asked, affecting a false naïveté in case there was something unstated about giving your archives to your alma mater that he didn’t apprehend.
Vernon shrugged. “I guess.”
“You could get a lot of that junk out of the apartment,” Jessica chimed in.
Oscar’s bowl skated across the hardwood floor as he dug his face into it, crashing into Jessica’s foot. She nonchalantly guided it back to the corner.
“You have to organize it all,” Vernon snapped. “You can’t just send them a truck full of stuff.”
More out of instinct to interrupt the fight than anything else, Charlie said casually, “I can organize stuff if you want.”
“An apartment sitter, dog walker, and archivist,” Jessica said. “Very handy.” She smiled playfully at him.
“Oscar is staying with you,” Vernon said. “We discussed that.”
“We discussed it,” Jessica said, “but I didn’t agree. I don’t want him slobbering all over my place. Plus, my roommate hates dogs.”
Vernon sighed.
“It’s no problem,” Charlie said. His purpose in this scene was apparently to agree to everything. The ease with which he adopted the guise of a sycophant was disturbing to him, but he was powerless to stifle the instinct.
“Do or don’t,” Vernon said.
“You’ll get used to ‘do or don’t,’” Jessica laughed.
Charlie took the phrase to mean he was fully initiated into Vernon’s inner circle, regardless of Jessica’s sarcasm.
A buzzer sounded and Vernon picked up the receiver mounted on the wall. “Send him up,” he said. “Sorry,” he said to Charlie, “can you come by tomorrow and we’ll go over everything?”
“I’ll bet it’s no problem,” Jessica mocked, half smiling.
Charlie couldn’t discern if the retort was targeted at him or Vernon, and he shrugged it off as Vernon walked him to the door. “Come by early, before I leave,” he said. He opened the door and to Charlie’s surprise John F. Kennedy Jr. stood in the entranceway, dressed in cargo shorts and a loose green T-shirt, poised to knock. His nearness to JFK Jr. was breathtaking, and an involuntary hitch in his step almost caused him to stumble. He lingered, with a burning desire for acknowledgment and the expectation that Vernon would introduce him. He knew Vernon wouldn’t reveal him as the true author of the George magazine piece, but a handshake with the famous son of a president would be a treasured memento. He settled for a startled “hello” from JFK Jr.
“See you Friday, then,” Vernon said, and waved JFK Jr. into his loft.
Charlie could hear JFK Jr. greet Jessica before the door clicked shut on Oscar’s barking. In the perpetual retelling of the encounter, Charlie and JFK Jr. shook hands. Possibly exchanged words. In future tellings, the story would likely be that JFK Jr. complimented him on the ghostwritten piece, and Charlie would come to believe it. With so few witnesses, veracity would be lost in the fog of time.
He punched the button for the lobby and the elevator descended, opening on the second floor. Charlie half expected the woman who smelled so strongly of vanilla to appear, a replication of his previous experience, so it was startling to see the words SMELLY VAGINA spray-painted across the woman’s door in blood red. A maintenance guy and an albino in a suit one size too big entered the elevator and spoke in hushed tones.
“How did he get into the building, is my question,” the maintenance guy said.
“It’s the doorman’s responsibility, ultimately,” the albino said. “Union will bitch, but this is cause for dismissal.”
As the elevator closed, Charlie observed the distinctive V, the same flatness at the fulcrum as in Vernon’s signature, which he’d practiced over and over since first seeing it in the inscription Vernon wrote to Olivia.
Jogging down Broadway—he was late for an event that had been on his calendar for at least a month, a reading at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble by Robert Holanda, his creative writing teacher at Glendale Community College—he doubted Vernon had graffitied the door. His brain was still swirling from his late-night escapades, and his synapses clearly weren’t firing correctly. Vernon Downs, a famous author, vandalizing his own building. It was too fantastic.
The tiny theater of metal chairs assembled at the top of the escalator on the second floor were mostly unoccupied save for half a dozen people or so. Charlie marveled at the giant poster of the cover of Holanda’s new novel, imagining a poster of his own first novel, his name as large as the title. A stench permeated his surroundings and he sourced it to a homeless woman clinging to her tattered plastic bags full of who knew what. He guiltily moved a few rows forward, closer to the podium. From his new vantage point, he could make out the details of the cover image, a blurred Ferris wheel exploding with yellow and red and blue fireworks.
An overweight woman wearing Barnes & Noble green and a lanyard with a badge strolled up to the microphone with a brave face. The loudspeaker annoyed a man in a suit sitting near the front, and he took the book he was flipping through to a quieter corner. As the woman introduced Holanda, mispronouncing his surname, a group of young women paraded in and took seats in the front row, whispering, the distraction compelling the B&N employee to repeat a sentence from her carefully crafted introduction. Charlie recollected two of the women as talentless classmates from Glendale Community College. Their presence in the Astor Place Barnes & Noble was unnerving, and for a breathless moment Charlie wondered if Olivia would be in the crowd, possibly with Shelleyan in tow. The ludicrous was sometimes made possible, as Charlie knew. At the first appearance of Olivia’s long, flaxen hair, or the silhouette of her small features, he would retreat into the rows of magazines. He could still hear the transformation in her otherwise sweet voice as she breathed matter-of-factly into the phone, “I just wanted to have a fling with an American,” as if answering a question from a stranger. Always able to see all the avenues, he estimated that she had been coerced by her parents. She’d been planning to leave her parents and her homeland behind for good, and somewhere in the house her parents were lurking, listening. He’d nodded solemnly at the click that ended the transatlantic call, adrift in the mystery of what exactly could activate the pulley that would bring her, hand over hand, back to him.
Vernon Downs immediately came to mind. All memories of Olivia not involving her love of Vernon Downs fell away so that when he thought of her, he thought of Vernon Downs, and vice versa.
Holanda appeared from behind a door next to the podium sporting a blue plaid beret, a hat Charlie didn’t recollect Holanda wearing at GCC, and smiled at his former students lined up like bowling pins in the front row. Charlie scowled condescendingly at the backs of their heads, their attendance a painful reminder of recent, happier times. Holanda boomed into the microphone as if speaking to a packed hall. Charlie couldn’t follow the story, lost in thoughts of how Olivia had been one of Holanda’s favorite students, Holanda encouraging her before the rest of the class, which caused some hard feelings among the other aspiring writers, including those currently ensconced up front. It was hard to know if any of them had any real talent—Charlie included—so encouragement had become the foundation of the reward system they all lived by.
After the reading and the short Q&A—and after his classmates had exited the space, tittering about the plans for the rest of their vacation in New York—Charlie approached Holanda, who was signing stock at a table near the podium.
“Charles,” Holanda said, standing. “Were you lurking, as usual?”
Charlie smiled and they embraced. “Congratulations on your book. It sounds terrific.”
“Can I sign one to you?” Holanda asked.
Charlie knew the hardcover purchase would dent his dwindling credit, but he’d walked into the trap unawares and agreed enthusiastically. The Barne
s & Noble employee waited patiently while Holanda scribbled a note on the title page and handed it to Charlie.
“And how is our Olivia?” he asked, returning to the job of signing stock.
Charlie wondered if his desire to attend the reading was actually about this moment. He must’ve known Holanda would inquire about Olivia, though he’d failed to prepare the pat answer that would rescue him. He hardly suspected himself of a masochistic streak, but as Holanda’s question hung between them, he stood mute, his flesh searing. He couldn’t answer.
“Oh,” Holanda said. “Well, that happens.” He continued signing the mountain of books B&N had ordered for the reading, the B&N employee expertly handing over the books open to the title page. “What are you doing in New York?”
Charlie regained his faculties in the face of the question he’d anticipated. “I’m spending a lot of time with Vernon Downs,” he said. “He’s become somewhat of a mentor to me.”
Holanda arched an eyebrow. The B&N employee fixed on him with sudden interest. “I didn’t realize you were a fan of his work.”
“I came to it late,” Charlie said truthfully.
“I find his stuff to be a little … light,” Holanda said.
“He’s the nicest person in the world,” Charlie said. He hadn’t anticipated defending Downs to his former teacher. The opposite, really: He had expected Holanda would be impressed, perhaps asking Charlie to introduce him while he was in town.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Holanda said. He finished signing and stood up, stretching. The B&N employee thanked him and carted off the signed books, deserting them in the empty arena. “I didn’t want to say this in front of her,” Holanda said, nodding toward the retreating bookseller, “but Downs is really a terrible writer. I’m speaking not as a teacher, but as a reader. His books are just gimmicky diatribes contrived to draw attention to himself.”
“Have you read his new collection, The Book of Hurts?” Charlie asked. He speculated Holanda had only read The Vegetable King because of all the press attention—Minus Numbers didn’t seem like the sort of book readers of Holanda’s generation would read—and he’d probably been put out, perhaps even jealous, at all the ink spent excoriating or defending the book.