He got up from the sidewalk and grasped her by the shoulders.
“This may be the last time I see you as an actor,” he said. “Also, I’m about to become very, very unclean. I have a bad feeling.”
Lola came up behind them and politely excused herself to get past.
“I’ll meet you upstairs,” she said to both of them. “And good luck.”
“Luck?” Spencer repeated, stepping toward the door. “What’s luck got to do with it? Skill, baby. Nothing but.”
He did the walking into the door trick for good measure, probably just to amuse himself, and then headed off to meet his fate. Unlike Scarlett, who always smiled, the gag only seemed to perplex and sadden Lola.
“Is he ever going to stop doing that?” she asked.
“Hopefully not,” Scarlett said.
It was a long, painful wait in the Orchid Suite.
Lola was on her bed, her foot balanced on a book, carefully removing her toenail polish. Scarlett went to her mirror and took one last look at herself in the dress. Maybe it was the Dior dress that had caused Eric to smile at her, the production staff to pull her down to the stage floor, Mrs. Amberson to invite her to lunch. Maybe that was all it took in life—some really good dresses.
“Sounds like everything went well this morning,” Lola ventured carefully.
“Except for the part where Marlene wanted to kill me,” Scarlett said, sitting up on her bureau. This probably wasn’t a safe move, as it wobbled under her, but it kept her distracted from what was going on a few doors down.
“I think she’s all right. And Mrs. Amberson bought lunch for the two of you. That was nice. She’s very…”
Lola didn’t know how to finish that. Come to think of it, neither did Scarlett.
“Spencer’s friend is very cute,” Lola said, carefully rubbing her toes clean with one of her special wipes. “I don’t think I’ll mind if he does this play if he keeps bringing home friends like that.”
As soon as she thought of Eric, Scarlett was nauseous again. She beat her heels into the dresser handles, then let herself down heavily. She opened up her computer. Several e-mails had come in from her friends. Chloe met a guy she liked. Tabitha had been bitten by a weird spider and her eye was all puffy. Josh sent a single, very drunken line: I KAN SING IN WELSH!
Scarlett didn’t have the energy to reply to anyone, so she tried to write for a bit. She ignored her disjointed notes from the night before and started with a clean page.
Write what comes into your head, she told herself.
What came into her head was a pair of eyes—that stunning marbled blue.
Eric. He was a subject she could get into. She described every part of him she could think of. The soft, low voice. The slight shadow of sandy stubble that framed an angled face. Thumbs casually hooked into pockets. A graceful shuffle from foot to foot as he spoke, his focus up and all around him…
She was absorbed in the task when there was a single knock, the door flew open, and Spencer strode in. Scarlett snapped the computer closed quickly.
“Well,” he said, “it’s done.”
“Done,” Scarlett said, “as in…”
“As in I told them, and they said they would think it over tonight and tell me tomorrow. So I have a whole night of it hanging over my head. Hooray!”
He collapsed to the floor in a dramatic heap. Lola leaned down and looked him in the face.
“What exactly did you say?” she asked.
“I may have said that it was an invitational audition for Juilliard,” he said. “That may have come out of my mouth at some point. I also may have made something up about a possible scholarship to NYU. It’s not that these things are true…but we don’t know that they’re not true, right?”
“If you say so,” Lola said mildly.
Something odd passed between Lola and Spencer, a long moment of silence and staring—Lola from her high ground on the bed, and Spencer from his fainting pose on the floor. His face had become very serious.
“If you have a problem with me, you should just come out and say it.”
“I still think you should consider the scholarship,” Lola said. “But whatever you decide…”
“Thank you.”
“Maybe you can let me make my own decisions, too,” Lola added.
“I always do.”
There was some unknown argument between Lola and Spencer that had hummed along in the background for as long as Scarlett could remember, some residual vibration from their own personal Big Bang. It was never clear what it was about, and it never came to any kind of a head. It simply surfaced now and again as static, unexplained and transient.
“I need to get out of here,” he said, bouncing up and breaking the tension. “It’s too hot to even breathe. I need to burn off some energy. Do you think I would definitely kill myself if I tried to do a fall down the Central Park steps, or just probably kill myself?”
“I’d go with the first one,” Lola said, picking up the nail polish brush again.
“That’s what I thought, too,” Spencer said, disappointedly. “Think I’ll just go curl into a ball.”
“What’s the problem with you two?” Scarlett said, when he was gone.
“There’s no problem,” Lola said. “We have different ways of looking at things. We always have.”
“It’s more than that,” Scarlett said.
Lola replaced the nail polish brush and looked up at Scarlett.
“I’m afraid for him sometimes,” she said.
Lola’s plainspoken sincerity struck a chord. If she was being very truthful with herself, Scarlett was a little afraid, too. She never questioned Spencer’s ability…just their general luck. She worried for them all. Every day something else seemed to chip off this quivering pile that was their lives. It could only be a matter of time before the whole structure came crumbling down. But unlike Lola, she could never say that out loud.
“Whatever the case,” Lola went on, “it’s his problem, Scarlett. It’s good that you care so much, but you have to lead your own life. I mean, you have your own problems. And you have a guest to take care of.”
Lola was right, but the reminder still wasn’t very welcome. She did have problems, like the weeks of nothing that spread out in front of her, the lack of money, of general life. At least Spencer had a goal, even if it was kind of a hard one to reach.
Come to think of it, maybe she did have an unreachable goal of her own.
She opened her computer again, where her imaginary Eric was waiting for her, looking at her again like he had at the table. Something had happened there, something that wasn’t imaginary. And if that had happened…well, anything could.
“Maybe this time,” Scarlett said. “Maybe things will work out.”
“Anything is possible,” Lola replied. “But honestly, it would kind of take a miracle.”
THE SHORT ARM OF THE LAW
The next morning, Mrs. Amberson was dressed in her yoga clothes and smoking on her ledge when Scarlett knocked on the door of the Empire Suite.
“Forget that for now,” she said, as Scarlett set down a pile of fresh sheets and towels on the dressing table. “You and I are going somewhere!”
“We are?” Scarlett said, looking down at her T-shirt and wrinkled shorts.
“I need to get reacquainted with the city,” she said. “It’s been a good twen…while since I’ve lived here. Do you even know what New York was like in the seventies and eighties? This Disneyland that you live in is not the New York I had to deal with. You didn’t ride the subway after ten at night unless you had a deep desire to get mugged at knifepoint. Times Square was porn central. It was a genuinely frightening place.”
She said this with a great deal of affection. She sprang off the sill and over the desk, tossing her lit cigarette over her head, narrowly missing the rail and having it bounce back into her hair.
“We’re going for a walk,” she said. “It’s time for me to rediscover New York.”
“I couldn’t help but overhear you and your brother talking outside last night,” she said. “It sounds like you’re both in a bit of a pickle.”
By “couldn’t help it,” Scarlett assumed that she meant, “I was hanging off my window ledge to make sure I caught every word.”
“It’ll work out,” Scarlett said. “Spencer’s really talented.”
“I like your attitude. But he’s not the only one with a problem, is he?”
She let that statement linger and took a deep drag of her cigarette, exhaling smoke for what seemed like ten minutes, like a machine about to explode.
“I lived in New York during a very important time,” she finally went on. “I thought I came back to New York to revive my acting career, but I’ve realized what I should really be doing is writing my story. You said you were a writer. That’s what made me think of it.”
“You’re going to write a book?” Scarlett asked. “Just like that?”
“That’s right. And it’s going to be amazing! That’s why we’re taking this little walk—to get the creative juices flowing.”
Well, something got flowing, but mostly it was sweat. At least for Scarlett. Though her face glistened a little, Mrs. Amberson didn’t sweat. It was unnatural. They marched down Sixth Avenue, pausing briefly at Radio City Music Hall.
“I was almost a Rockette,” she said. “But I didn’t make the height requirement. I was one inch too tall. One inch. I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. I did eventually, but it took a while.”
She got out another cigarette, struck her match on the building face, and waved Scarlett on. For an hour, Mrs. Amberson pointed out places where her friends had lived, restaurants that were no longer there, former clubs, sites of muggings and random acts of violence.
“Where are we going?” Scarlett finally asked, as they turned on to Ninth Avenue.
“To my roots,” Mrs. Amberson said.
Five more blocks of marching. There were lots of apartment buildings here, but they weren’t as pristine as some of the others they had passed. They finally stopped in front of a narrow gold-brick building, only a few stories high.
“It wasn’t like this,” she said.
“What wasn’t like what?”
“I lived here,” she said. “In 1978. It was the most frightening building you could imagine. I sat up there, on the fire escape, and watched a man run down the street firing a gun. I saw people get mugged, stabbed, beaten. My fire escape was more exciting than the news. I used to have to lock myself in at night with six locks.”
A woman came out of the building walking a tiny dog on a pink leash.
“I’m going to be sick,” Mrs. Amberson said, watching the pair walk off. “What’s happened to this city?”
Mrs. Amberson tried the door, but it was firmly locked. She hit a few random buzzers, but no one answered.
“Come on,” she said, turning back toward Ninth Avenue. “There’s something else I want to see.”
This stretch of Ninth Avenue was a mixture of restaurants and bars of every sort. Thai. Greek. Chinese. Italian. Ethiopian. There was a wine bar, a beer bar, a cupcake shop, a pet boutique, and a store full of upscale paints. In short, a happy little cosmos of urban needs were fulfilled in its short distance. In the middle of it all was a midsized fancy grocery store called Food Paradise, with a large display of exotic fruits, imported cheeses, and fine pastries in the window.
“Well, at least that’s still here, sort of,” she said. “But it wasn’t a paradise.”
She crossed the street midblock, dodging a cab, and went into the store.
“You should have seen the dump that was here in the seventies,” she said, eying the olive bar. “It was truly disgusting. Moldy Wonderbread, roaches. Back then, I used to make ketchup soup.”
She walked up and down every aisle, mumbling about what she saw there. All of the food, so nicely laid out, seemed to make her first sad, then annoyed, and finally, weirdly jubilant. Scarlett just got hungry.
“Let’s go,” Mrs. Amberson said abruptly. “I’ve had enough.”
She took Scarlett’s arm and wheeled to the door. A friendly-faced security guard cleared his throat and stepped in front of them.
“Just a minute, please,” he said. “Please open your bag, miss.”
Scarlett was surprised to find that this remark was addressed to her.
“What?” Scarlett replied. “Why?”
“Just please open it.”
Mrs. Amberson stared up at the ceiling, and Scarlett got a very sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that she couldn’t quite account for.
“Please open your bag, miss,” the man repeated.
Scarlett pulled her bag from her shoulder warily. It was unzipped. It had been zipped before, she was sure of it. She held it open. To her amazement, there were three cans of tuna fish lying on top that had definitely not been there when she left the house.
“Those aren’t mine,” she said.
“I know that,” he said. “All right. Step over to this office with me, please. Let’s make this easy, okay?”
Scarlett felt her legs start to go soft and found herself reaching out to Mrs. Amberson’s arm for support. It was amazingly muscular.
“Scarlett!” Mrs. Amberson said. “I thought we were past this!”
“What?” Scarlett replied, wheeling around.
“We have come way too far for this,” Mrs. Amberson was rambling on.
“What are you talking about?”
Mrs. Amberson angled herself between Scarlett and the man.
“Listen,” she said. “This is totally unacceptable, but please hear me out. I’m a volunteer with Teen Reach New York, which is a group that works with troubled teens.”
The man crossed his arms over his chest. Scarlett’s jaw dropped in shock.
“This is Scarlett,” she continued. “We’re transitioning her out of a very bad home environment. Scarlett used to have to steal to feed her brothers and sisters. I’m her one-on-one counselor—just a volunteer—and I take her out and help her develop new, socially acceptable habits. I’ve been trying to teach her how to buy nutritious meals on a budget. I was supposed to be watching, but she’s fast…She’s a good girl, though.”
By now, other people were watching them. All activity in the three closest checkout lanes had stopped. Mrs. Amberson was shaking a little now, like she had truly been rattled by this whole event.
“Please,” she said. “Arresting her won’t do any good. We’ve done so much work to get her out of that part of the system. I’ll…”
She looked around anxiously, then pointed to a wall of paper balloons, each one marking a one dollar donation to a local food bank.
“I’ll pay for the tuna and I’ll buy a hundred of those balloons,” she said. She got out her wallet and pulled out a handful of twenties. “This is my money, and I will give the food bank a hundred dollars. Other people will benefit, along with Scarlett. And she’ll never come back in the store again. Obviously, the counselors and the doctors have some more work to do. But please. The girl stole tuna fish. This is how she used to have to live. She’s not one of these kids that steals for a thrill.”
The man was clearly struggling with this one. He had what he clearly believed was a shoplifter…and one of them was a shoplifter…yet Mrs. Amberson’s apparent anguish had moved him.
“She doesn’t come back here,” he said. “Ever.”
“Understood,” Mrs. Amberson said, shoving the money into his hand.
“You want to sign the balloons?” he asked.
“No. I think we’d better go. Thank you for your understanding.”
She put her arm around Scarlett’s shoulders and pulled her along, out into the blinding sun. She didn’t stop until they were down t
he block and around the corner, where she threw up her hand for a cab, which she ushered Scarlett into.
“Sixty-ninth and Lexington,” she told the driver. “Mind if I smoke?”
“No,” he answered happily. “I will, too, then. No one ever lets me, you know?”
“Make my day.”
They both lit up. Scarlett sat, still not recovered enough to speak.
“Did you hear that?” Mrs. Amberson said ecstatically. “Did you hear what just came out of my mouth? I haven’t lost a thing. I am going to call my agent and tell him that he has to try to get me some kind of role as a child protection agent or something on Crime and Punishment. Someone who comes on and testifies and looks all shaken up but professional. Trouble is, I think my agent is dead. I guess I need a new one…”
“You stole tuna fish,” Scarlett finally managed. Her voice was loud enough to startle the driver and cause him to slide the panel behind his head shut. “You put it in my bag.”
“What’s even better,” Mrs. Amberson said, “is that he didn’t notice this. You covered so well!”
She reached into the waistband of her pants and pulled out a candy bar.
“I didn’t cover anything,” Scarlett said again, not bothering to lower her voice. “You almost got me arrested!”
Mrs. Amberson turned this time, but looked utterly unperturbed. She gazed at Scarlett through a thin veil of cigarette smoke.
“I would never have let that happen,” she said. “He was only bluffing. Wasn’t that fun?”
“I’m banned from the store! They think I’m a juvie tuna fish thief with a whole team of counselors and doctors!”
“You’ll never go to that store. It’s all the way across town. And they’ll never remember you, I promise. They just say that.”
“That is not the point!”
“You seem upset,” Mrs. Amberson said mildly. “You’re just full of adrenaline right now, and you’re using that adrenaline as panic. Performers constantly go through this, and we turn our head rush into performance. We use it. We enjoy it. Now breathe through your nose and out of your mouth, a nice cleansing flow of air. The store got money to cover what was taken. You didn’t get into any trouble. A very worthy organization got a hundred dollars to buy food for hungry people. Enjoy the moment!”
Suite Scarlett Page 8