Queen Takes King

by Gigi Levangie Grazer

  The right thing to do.

  WHAT Harry had been noticing about his boss lately, and don’t think he liked it, was that his boss was…nicer. Maybe even, shall you say, sweet.

  Oh, he didn’t like this new Mr. Jacks.

  Just the other day, let me tell you, was funny story if it didn’t happen to you. Just the other day, Tuesday, yes, Mr. Jacks, he get out of the car, he’s home, after dinner, Elio’s.

  Harry was waiting, yes. He was dropping off Mr. Jacks, get out, get door, as per the usual, you know. And Mr. Jacks, he got out and—give Harry a hug. A hug. Harry stood with his arms straight out. Where to put his arms? Very confusing. And when it was clear Mr. Jackson wasn’t letting go—well, Harry hugged him back.

  Harry was one strong man, but hugging his boss took all his power, like that Superman hugging kryptonite.

  “Thanks, Harry,” Jacks said. “Great job.”

  Beat. “You, too, Mr. Jacks,” Harry had said. Okay, not good answer. His wife told him later. Not good. Then she spent all night worrying that Harry would lose his job and then what would they do—that’s why she needs a job, she says, that’s why—starting Number 143 of their ongoing arguments that were now the knots that held the string of their marriage together. She said she was unhappy.

  None of this would have happened in the old country. They would have been unhappy, yes, but they would have been unhappy together. Here, in America, they were unhappy, separate and alone.

  Maybe Jacks was onto something with this “nice”?

  He would approach her differently tonight.

  ADRIAN observed the crowd gathering in front of the huge steel doors, the darkened twelve-foot windows lining the Greer/Nockus Gallery. The men wore slick, lean suits. No ties. Colorful shirts. Outgroomed the women by about a mile.

  The ladies—all over the place. A few to-the-floor gowns, shimmering like fish in an aquarium. Others, perhaps artists themselves, on the deliberately unkempt side—I have no time for appearances, these women challenged the viewer, I only have time for my art.

  A few models. Didn’t really matter what they wore or even if they showered in the last week. And they knew it.

  Finally Adrian flicked the remains of his cigarette to the street and merged with the cool, the crazy, and the overconfident into the pop purple lighting of the gallery.

  First off, it was impossible to see. The room was huge and cavernous and barely lit. Adrian’s eyes focused and discovered that moving shapes were people, lots of them. Every one with a cocktail in their hands. Tables were set up past a series of murals that were constructed especially for the occasion. On every panel was a couple—one man, one woman, two men, two women—engaged in a sexual position. Even though it was hard to tell with the lighting, Adrian was pretty sure he could see dick.

  Adrian hid part of his face and ordered his drink from the bartender he’d recognized as a former coworker. The reverse wasn’t true. An added bit of interest, this. A taste of something dangerous. Adrian liked it.

  A heavyset man with hair popping out of his open-collared shirt like a party favor leaned into Adrian.

  “I know you,” he said. “I know your face.”

  “You can see my face in this light?” Adrian said. “Congratulations.”

  “I’ll place it,” the man said, waving a chubby finger at his nose. He was already hammered and the party had started only twenty minutes ago. A woman stepped up behind him, black leotard, pink streaked black beehive. File under “deliberate.”

  “Stop it,” she said to the big guy, then turned to Adrian. “Is he bothering you?” Accusing the both of them simultaneously.

  “To the contrary,” Adrian said. “We’re just trying to figure out how we know each other. Maybe school?”

  “You went to Yale?” she asked.

  “Calhoun, ’99.”

  Adrian could have hit himself over the head. He hadn’t recognized Beehive from his research, but should have. He watched her walk away.

  “She used to paint me,” the chubby man said. “When I was, you know, in better shape.”

  Adrian listened. Unbearable, the shattering of a heart.

  “We met at Yale, like everyone else here.” He laughed too loud. “She loved my face, my body, she would have me pose for hours.”

  Like bones breaking.

  “I’m kind of famous, you know, because of her portraits of me. But she’s in the stratosphere…she’s so good…I was good, I mean, competent.”

  Did he just finish another drink?

  “Then we—she had a baby.”

  “Congratulations,” Adrian said. He said it small, kept it small. Is it possible to watch someone die and not want to save him?

  No.

  “I offered to pose for her new series. Erotique-A.”

  Adrian stared at the panels. None of the participants resembled the artist’s husband. Sadness, he thought, has a shape and a smell and a sound. He looked back as the man zigzagged like a drowsy reptile into the deep purple crowd, leaving his receptacle of grief behind. Adrian had a job to do.

  Guests walked into the vast dining area as though they were in a tug-of-war with their appointed tables. Adrian checked out the terrain and surreptitiously moved his name card so he would be sitting next to the name scripted in calligraphy: “Cynthia Hunsaker Power.”

  Already seated at the table was the slim, effete editor of ArtFocus, a famous designer who smiled dimly from across the table, and a scattered few who seemed famous but for reasons unknown. A countess gallantly feigned interest in his musings as a young, stinking-of-new-money collector. Adrian trotted out his newly acquired knowledge of all things postmodern well into dinner, waiting for Cynthia to take her empty seat. Where was she?

  Finally, during a movie about the making of the latest issue of ArtFocus, he heard a rustling and scraping as a woman took the seat beside him.

  Not Cynthia. It was a much younger woman with a Medusa’s cap of wild strawberry blond curls and full lips from which no apology for tardiness seemed imminent. Artist? Adrian wondered, as he assessed his new tablemate. She was tall, wore cowboy boots, a long skirt, a shawl that covered her large, proud chest. On her left wrist was a row of shiny, delicate bracelets. Gypsy artist? Who wears cowboy boots? Someone with cojones.

  She attempted to shrug her shawl off her shoulders. He motioned to help her, but she didn’t welcome the gesture. Then she breached the bread basket, the first such movement at the table. Maybe the first at the entire dinner.

  “I’m starving,” she said, reaching over him for the butter dish.

  He handed it to her.

  Now two fleshy women on the large screen writhed as paint splotches accented their limbs. The painter’s voice droned a narration as though reading a medical brochure.

  Adrian peered carefully at the woman. She was frozen, staring at the screen. The roll was still in her hand, the butter knife held aloft, contemplating not hunger, but murder. On the screen a head disappeared between blossoming thighs.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  The woman drove the knife into the roll.

  Adrian leaned over. “Thinking of someone specific?”

  “It’s nothing.” She gripped each word.

  “I know everything about nothing,” he said. There was the slightest movement, a mere fluttering in his peripheral eyeline. If he hadn’t leaned in, if he hadn’t said those words to this woman, this wounded bird, he wouldn’t have received the signal:

  Morse Code: Tracy Bing is seated five tables away from you and she has seen you but you have not yet seen her and she is about to gather her things and her Wall Street boyfriend and leave.

  Their eyes didn’t meet across the crowded room, like the song, like the movie; they didn’t have to. Adrian saw the pale of her cheek, the arch of her eyebrow, her soft shoulder. Were there still imprints of his lips on that shoulder?

  “My lover left me today.” The woman looked at him. “At about three A.M., so that’s today, right?”
r />   He sized her up quickly. Her eyes were blue, but so intense they might as well have been black. He could draw constellations in the freckles across her nose and the tops of her full cheeks.

  Intelligence was here; resentment over there; rebellion rested in her full chest; fear was well hidden.

  “Your lover—was he a good kisser?” One eye remained on that shoulder, continents away. He could see a bracelet (shiny, throwing light), a delicate hand tightening on an evening clutch.

  “Why would you assume my lover was a he?” They were speaking in low whispers now.

  “Ah,” he said. “Well, was she a good kisser?”

  Her hand found her lips.

  “Question answered,” he said. “When was the last time you kissed a man?” Nothing good, it seemed, could come of the Greer/Nockus Gallery.

  “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “You don’t have to answer,” he said, “I’m just curious as to who’s better.”

  “Women,” she said. “In fact, I’d say any woman is better than any man.”

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “So, you’re going to tell me I haven’t met the right man.”

  “I can kiss you better than any woman. Or any man.”

  She looked at him. “You’re out of your league.”

  “I think you want to prove it to yourself right now.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re thinking about it, that’s all I’m saying.”

  He leaned in. Their shoulders met. The gaze of the violet eyes of Miss Tracy Bing was tightening around his neck. His voice became a mantra. “You’re thinking. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.” The video continued to barrage the audience with pornographic images, two men going at each other’s junk. “I don’t really remember, you’re telling yourself, forget the first in high school, the one with the heavy tongue, remember the one in college, he was pretty good, he had a way with the tip of his tongue, gentle, soft as he was tall.”

  The woman focused hard on the screen. But she was listening. He could tell. Adrian leaned in closer.

  “Way taller than me, that’s different, that’s what you thought, and he took his time and sometimes you wonder whatever happened to him.”

  The woman put her bread down, released the knife.

  “Whatever happened to that boy?” Then his hands were on her face, his lips on her mouth, and they held that kiss as the movie ended and lights came on and because his hearing had become acute in the way of a blind man, he could hear the delicate turn of the ankle, the sound of stars falling as Miss Tracy Bing headed out the door.

  “What’s your name?” she asked as they released each other and returned to the people they were before they had met.

  And yet, not quite. Not quite.

  “Adrian West,” he said, deciding, in that moment, on the truth. He held out his hand. “Bartender.” Fuck it, no one else at the table was paying any attention to them anyway.

  She shook it, her grip firm and professional, her curls bouncing with the movement of her arm. He liked the way all of her could be in motion at once.

  “Who’s Robert Jordan?” She was looking at the place card in front of him.

  “A real douchebag,” he replied. “And you are?”

  “Vivienne Power,” she told him. “Lesbian.” She gave him a sweet smile.

  Vivienne Power, Adrian thought. Motherfuck.

  “The kiss was good,” she said.

  Get it together, A. “Well, thank you,” Adrian managed.

  “But not better than a woman.” Still with the smile.

  Oh, that’s a nice smile, Adrian thought.

  “Well,” he finally replied. “You’ve given me something to shoot for, Miss Vivienne Power.”

  PART THREE

  38

  UNSEALED MOVES

  CYNTHIA COULDN’T remember a less auspicious beginning to a ballet season—even ABT’s 1990s “Nightmare Years,” when the company, beset by financial and legal woes, almost went bankrupt.

  Cynthia had taken to listing calamities on her NYBT calendar above her desk.

  Calamity Number One: Lead ballerina Martina Blatsoryinka had been hit by a taxi while crossing the street on her way to rehearsal. Her pelvis had been broken. Young Martina would be out for the entire fall and winter seasons.

  Calamity Number Two: Fred Plotzicki had maneuvered around the board like the youthful Baryshnikov performing the Prince in The Nutcracker, pirouetting around ethics, grand jetéing over common sense. Cynthia was losing ground in the battle of the board. How the hell was he keeping his day job?

  Calamity Number Three: The NYBT had lost a main sponsor. Margaret Lord Foster had rescinded her support, a move akin to the Detroit automakers pulling advertising from the Super Bowl telecast. The NYBT endowment (one-tenth of the City Ballet’s) would take a million-dollar hit; Cynthia might have to cancel the fall gala.

  Cynthia should have seen the writing on the padded silk walls when Margaret forwarded the “invitation” to tea in her suite at the Carlyle the morning after the Times Arts and Leisure section had devoted a cover story to the series of setbacks and misadventures that had afflicted the NYBT under the leadership of one Cynthia Hunsaker Power. Cynthia was sure the silent hand behind this missive was none other than Fred Plotzicki.

  Calamity Number Four: Morris Stegler had left his wife. Why should this have any bearing on Cynthia’s role as head of the board? Because—he’d left his beloved Millie, who’d stood by his side through decades of incessant clicking, for none other than…Screwzenka.

  Calamity Number Five? Cynthia was still going through the most high-profile divorce in the city. Every morning, with only the teeniest guilt for the hex she might be putting on their marriages, she’d pray to see the over-lit faces of another “power couple” under a headline that declared the marriage kaput. MELANIA TO TRUMP: HAIR-RAISING SPLIT, GIULIANI READIES FOR WIFE #4, DIANE TO MIKE: I SAWYER MISTRESS!, KELLY TO MARK: YOU RIPA’D MY HEART APART!

  “You’re starting to depress me,” Dr. Gold said as Cynthia relayed her miseries. “I’m going to need therapy!”

  “The board wants me out there drumming up business, but how can I when I’m putting out fires fifteen hours a day? I can’t keep turning down invitations or sending Vivi out like a placeholder. Oh, have I mentioned that my daughter the lesbian has broken up with her girlfriend?” Cynthia whipped out a Gitane. There was a place in this city where one could still smoke: Dr. Gold’s office.

  “Mercy!” he cried, shaking his hands at the ceiling from his prone position on the floor. He looked like a bearded knoll; spread a checkered tablecloth on his belly, and you could enjoy a picnic lunch.

  “And I still haven’t, you know, ‘gotten laid’ yet.”

  Dr. Gold sprang to his feet.

  “First things first,” he said. “Number one: you’ve got to take control of the board. You are letting Fred make decisions for you. I suggest taking him to lunch,” Dr. Gold continued. “Which reminds me, you owe me a pastrami.”

  “I’m trying not to kill you.”

  “You’ll go before I will, lady, don’t kid yourself.”

  Then he stood and opened his arms for his traditional borderline-unethical but sweet end-of-session embrace.

  “And for God’s sake,” Goldie said, looking Cynthia in the eye, “the next time you’re in here, I want to hear that you slept with somebody, anybody, older, younger, inappropriate, your daughter’s ex, your doorman, the dog, anybody! In all of New York, I’m the only psychoanalyst saddled with a patient who’s not fucking around!”

  Cynthia smiled at him, but Goldie gave her a serious look. “Don’t waste it, Cynthia. Think Anthony Quinn—think Zorba. Cut the string!”

  “Zorba. Don’t the villagers kill the widow? What would they do to a divorcée?” she asked, knowing this would get a reaction. She picked up her purse. “I’ll see you next week, Goldie.”

  “Not next week, I have a thing next week.” Goldie glanced away. “I d
idn’t want to use up time in the session. I’m out for two weeks. They found something in my prostate.”

  Cynthia stared at him.

  “It’s small, tiny, ridiculous, but the doctors, they want to get it before it kills me in twenty years. Cancer is the new black, I’ve heard.” He offered her a small smile.

  “They can’t let it go?”

  “They’re after my cute ass, I’m thinking.”

  Cynthia paused. “But I’ll see you in two weeks?”

  “Two weeks,” he said. He reached out to her and pinched her cheek. “Go get ’em, tiger,” he said.

  CYNTHIA was shuffling through the pile of paperwork in her office that she’d ignored or been too busy or too sad to address, when a business card caught her eye, followed quickly by a vision: Dr. Gold asking if he should make an appointment for her at the nearest convent.

  Cynthia dialed the number on the card before the brain cells in her reasoning center realigned themselves into cease-and-desist formation.

  “Jordan,” he answered. He sounded different—younger, less secure. Maybe, beneath that Teflon surface, there was the beating of a heart. But Cynthia’s mission wasn’t about his heart. There were other parts of his anatomy she was more concerned with.

  “Robert,” Cynthia said, “do you still have a girlfriend?”

  A hesitation. “No,” he said. “We broke up. It was mutual.”

  “Good. Are you busy tomorrow night?”

  “I have no plans after work,” Robert said.

  “I’d like to discuss your possible role on the board.” Why not? Isn’t this what men did? Make up stories to seduce women? Why couldn’t Cynthia have her own casting couch?

  “Sure. Eight o’clock?”

  “Eight-thirty,” she replied.

  “I’ll make reservations at Le Bernadin,” Adrian said. The notecard said Le Bernadin was Cynthia’s favorite French restaurant; its escargot trumped Tour D’Argent’s.