“You know, you’ve been saying that for ages but I can never figure out what on Earth you mean by it. What do you mean by it, Belle?”
For an almost imperceptible flash, Belle looked panicked. Rarely, if ever, did I challenge her. I was always forgiving her, condoning her, protecting her because of the longevity of our friendship and the scale of the personal loss she had endured—fearing that if I didn’t handle her with kid gloves and took too harsh or cold a tack, she would crack in half before my eyes like a walnut struck by a sledgehammer.
“Why, don’t get all worked up about it, M.! It’s just a silly expression of mine!”
“Just the same, could you stop using it?” As long as I’d know her, I’d never heard her say it to anyone else.
“Sheesh! Whatever you say. You know, you seem totally overwrought. Are they working you all to the bone again?”
“It’s always busy this time of year, Belle,” I remarked, wearily. “But that has nothing to do with anything.”
“I disagree! It has something to do with everything. And it’s not good. Not in the least. When I see Jeremy later I had better ask him to keep a closer eye on you, M.” She held her demitasse to her lips. The cup disguised most of her mouth but I was sure I could see a rouged sliver of her smile curving up behind it. “We can’t have you turning into one of those dreadful pantsuited broads, angry at the world and padding around the office in bunny slippers at two in the morning.”
It was high time to warm up for my match so on that dissonant note our postmortem was over. A Warhol exhibition was on at MoMA and Belle breathlessly revealed that they would be screening his black-and-white silent film Kiss from the mid-1960s, as though I would suddenly abandon my match and rearrange my afternoon around it. Belle was heading there next to fashion a new La Belle Vie entry she was calling “Pop Goes Love! (Love Through the Eyes of Pop Artists).” I would walk with her down to Fifty-Third then journey on to The Vanderbilt to change into my whites. Belle steered Cupid’s Arrow along the avenue with two slices of Serafina’s torta di cioccolato stashed safely in its straw basket. She said she thought Jeremy could use some bulking up so had ordered their signature Nutella dolci wrapped in a takeaway bag to surprise him with later.
“Listen.” She stopped me just as I was ready to turn left and leave her on Madison. “I’m sorry about earlier. I was short with you and it wasn’t kind.” I wasn’t wrong in thinking Belle was generally in control, knowing exactly what she was saying and doing, contrary to the beliefs of many. “It’s just your bringing up Chase dragged me back into all of that gloomy stuff and took the bloom off my fresh start with Jeremy. Can’t you just let a girl savor that wonderful first glow a bit?”
That wonderful first glow. The image of her and Jeremy’s first kiss at the Bender, his hand holding her swooning form so capably, burned vividly in my mind, singed with a pitch-black outline. Try as I might I couldn’t erase that dark border. She hadn’t mentioned another kiss in her recap over brunch, but with their first kiss already publicly documented history, it was a certainty the second would have followed naturally. And she was seeing him again for a second consecutive evening, an almost unheard-of practice on the urban dating scene—and in the love life of Belle Bailey.
“I shouldn’t have mentioned Chase,” I apologized with a shake of my head. “I need to put up with the beast at the office all week without having to muddy a Saturday brunch with him. I didn’t realize it was all said and done with you two. I’m happy for you, Belle.”
“You’re sure you won’t come with me?” She smiled, tilting her blond head toward the museum, still confident she could persuade me. I knew it was her way of accepting my apology.
“I really can’t,” I repeated. “This match means a lot to me.”
With a sigh, she rustled around in her bag, handing me a glossy pamphlet advertising the exhibition and featuring a characteristically stunned photograph of Andy Warhol, his shock of white hair a visual punch to my face. I had never been able to stand that man and his art.
“Please go, whenever you have a moment. Or see another show—it doesn’t matter. Just step away from your everyday and take a look at the world from someone else’s perspective.”
I took the pamphlet and promised her I’d do my best.
“I think maybe he was wrong,” she whispered, gazing down at the pamphlet in my hands.
“Who?”
“Warhol.”
“Wrong about what?”
“About everything.”
“Everything?”
“About Love—that covers most things, doesn’t it?”
“Well, now you’ve lost me completely. Do you want your pamphlet back?” I glanced at my watch, feeling the old urge to sprint away to the safe haven of The Vanderbilt and the familiar motions of my prematch warm-up. She grabbed my wrist and I sensed an unusually brusque urgency in her—a need for me to stop everything, forget the time and the squash match and The Vanderbilt and The Brothers and listen and for God’s sake understand.
“He once said that we always end up with the wrong person.…” She gestured in the air with a long, tapered arm as though translating a passage of elaborate foreign verse for my benefit. “We end up kissing the wrong person.” Her eyes searched mine, the flash of green sweeping back and forth like a persistent bulb burning atop the tower of an emerald lighthouse. There was no denying it—her conviction had always been captivating. And I found myself absorbing it, nodding my head gently in agreement. “But maybe it can be different. Don’t you see? Maybe we don’t always need to end up kissing the wrong person good night.”
BLUE MOONS AND RED VELVETS
Spring skipped into the city, blanketing its dingiest gray corners with bucketfuls of brightening blooms and glossing parks and pedestrians with a fresh, green primer that renewed their leases on life. On one particularly hopeful morning, Jeremy arrived in the office later than usual, slightly out of breath, hauling in a gigantic cardboard crate. Leezel leaned out from behind her cubicle wall with brioche in hand, mouth sloping downward at both powdered corners, and eyed the struggling Jeremy with mild disgust. I scrambled up from my chair to help him ease the brown box down beside his desk.
“Thanks a million, M.,” he breathed, gratefully, pulling a handkerchief out to mop his beading brow.
“Your latest installment from the Public Library, Kirby?” Chase asked, drowsily, clocking Jeremy’s arrival but keeping his eyes trained on his patchwork of screens. He had uttered even less than usual to Jeremy since the episode at the December Bender and seemed sufficiently caught up with Milana and other equally leggy female specimens to not take much notice. I knew he was aware that Belle and Jeremy had become inseparable and I can’t say it surprised me that he showed no sign of fighting to keep her or win her back.
“Ah, Chase,” Jeremy answered, face lighting up in mock delight as he stashed his handkerchief. “Prunella the librarian said she left her cardigan at your loft last weekend.”
Jeremy kept his box stowed until later that morning when the coast was clear—Leezel was raiding a pastry tray on the other side of the floor and Chase had retreated down to The Brothers’s campus gym to spend a solid half hour with a speed bag. (Many claimed he was unable to make it past noon without beating the life out of something and I could confirm they weren’t far off the mark.)
“Say, M., I want to show you something,” Jeremy called over to me from the end of our row. He took a penknife from his pocket and handily sliced open the large square box. Pulling back several layers of bubble wrap, he revealed an immaculately preserved, green-horned Victrola. I guessed the gramophone must have been close to a hundred years old.
“She’ll love it, won’t she?” he beamed. There was no question who he meant.
“She certainly will, Jeremy,” I breathed, stopping my chair in midspin to properly take the thing in. “It’s incredible.”
I wasn’t drawn to outdated things but it was extraordinary to see such an artful piece of mac
hinery sitting beneath our drab fluorescent lights, atop our recycled carpet whose anemic color might as well have been named Soulless Sandstone or Profit-Making Pewter. A few green first-year analysts caught sight of the gramophone on their way to the pantry and buzzed around us like waggle-dancing honeybees in search of nectar.
“Is it an original Hoot-n-holler?” one asked in slack-jawed amazement.
“Stay back, kids,” I warned, spinning toward them in my chair and sticking a palm out in their direction. “One of our clients is a collector.” That sent them scurrying to all corners of the floor in a chatter of speculation.
“Where did you find it?” I asked Jeremy when we were alone again.
“My granddad,” he said, resting a hand gently on the curved neck of the horn. “He kept her up in his old cabin in the Adirondacks that was boarded up years ago. I think everyone had forgotten about her until he was gone and the cabin was cleared out. He gave her to me in his will.”
“Does it still work?”
“She didn’t, but I had her restored with a new engine and spring and needle. And I gave her one heck of a polish. She can only play 78-rpm records but now she can play them like it’s 1925 again.”
“She?” I smiled. “Are gramophones always female, like boats?”
“With those looks, how could she not be a lady?” he asked, gazing down at the gramophone, fondly. “She looks like a Violetta, don’t you think?”
He was right—the horn was unabashedly feminine, a giant emerald flower peering out at us, inquisitively. Its mere presence cast some kind of spell. I had the sudden urge to swan-dive inside it, abandoning the forty soul-crippling cold calls Piggelo was expecting me to make to prospective clients before noon, and hide out for the rest of the day in elegant safety.
“You should come over this weekend, M.,” Jeremy suggested, reboxing the gramophone with care. “I’ll have Violetta here wound up and running. We can crank up some old standards and dance the Continental on the furniture.”
It was a visual plucked straight from the closing montage of a Fred and Ginger film—in other words, a typical weekend for Jeremy and Belle. By “coming over,” I knew Jeremy meant to Belle’s apartment on the corner of Bleecker and Charles Streets in the West Village with its universally white décor, gallery walls of vintage prints, and unending collections of decoupage and coral and ginger jars. Her BB insignia was everywhere, from monogrammed matchbooks and cocktail napkins to accent pillows and engraved decanter tags. She wanted to leave her mark, quite literally, and had stenciled and painted her foyer herself in a looping pattern resembling a gently swaying sea of self-promoting letter Bs. Jeremy and Belle spent most of their time there and I wondered if she had ever even seen the threadbare nook of his studio apartment. With a creaking Murphy bed swinging down from the wall to commandeer the room, and a single stove burner spinning out of a shallow closet on a rickety set of wheels, it was more of a bolt-hole than a home. It sat at the heart of that East Thirties network of ramps and roundabouts leading in and out of the dusty mouth of the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, with passing freight trucks rattling the foundation of the building at all hours of the night. He wouldn’t throw more rent dollars down a black hole than he needed to, preserving the lion’s share of each paycheck to send home to his parents.
Jeremy had put his ballooning on hold and pursued a job in finance because the starting salaries were good and that would give him the chance to keep his family afloat. Going off to college he promised his mother Jean he would help them—he would make things right so she could worry less. Until that point, worried had been Jean’s default state. Her husband Jack’s addiction to miscellaneous get-rich-quick schemes had bankrupted the family when Jeremy was a teenager. This one, Jer, this one will be it—I know you’ve heard me say it a million times before but THIS—this is the real deal! It was his standard whoop whenever the next too-good-to-be-true opportunity lobbed into their lives from outer space. And the good news is, if you have any of your summer job savings left, there’s still time for you to get in on the ground floor! All I need is your check and a copy of a government-issued piece of identification. From engine lubricants to miracle youth tonics, in Jack Kirby’s eyes the world danced with opportunities to make a jackpot overnight.
Working at a bank for as long as necessary was a practical way for Jeremy to deal with this. As a result, he considered his time in New York—the section of his youth he was knifing off and handing over to The Brothers—to be temporary. Like millions before him, he viewed his tenure in the city as a rite of passage—a necessary in-and-out job to earn enough cash then skedaddle. It’s only a two-year analyst track. It’s only a two-year graduate program. You could manage the great metropolis in reasonable, two-year chunks that replicated themselves over and over again to suddenly add up to two decades. And all the while the city stealthily programmed a sense of obligation in its residents; even if you resented it for what it did to other people and never did to you, it would find a way to convince you that you’d be fooling yourself to think you wanted to leave it. Jeremy seemed to be an exception, though, and his bolt-hole was a daily reminder of that.
Belle’s on Bleecker Street was another world altogether. Shining, quaint, impossibly charming, and all so white, it was a side of the city he had scarcely imagined existing. I viewed my own apartment, an easy two blocks from The Vanderbilt, in more utilitarian, less artistic terms. It was fitted with the identical neutral three-seat sofa and ottoman and self-assembly bookcases that 95 percent of recent graduates purchase for their first real apartments. There were a few stamps of personality—my framed Dartmouth Class of 2006 felt banner and a Hitchcock Dial M for Murder movie poster. Though it wouldn’t be winning any interior design accolades, I still cherished it as another simple and comfortable safe haven in my life—orderly space that was all mine and no one else’s—that I retreated to during office and Club after-hours.
Belle never came by mine but from time to time invited me to hers for more leisurely catch-ups without looming waiters shooing us onward to make room for their next sitting. The weekend after meeting Violetta the gramophone, I went over to spend the afternoon with her before we’d join Jeremy for drinks and dinner in her neighborhood. She tore open the door to greet me, looking as though a shower of circular confetti had recently rained down on her from some mystery trapdoor in the ceiling.
“I’m embracing the polka dot!” Belle declared, in a tone and manner used by leading ladies in musical theater productions on the brink of bursting into a crowd-pleasing show tune. I blinked down at her dotted sweater and capri pants and stooped to shelter myself from the possibility of a second passing shower. “As a life metaphor, I mean. I realized this week that they’re perfectly organized chaos.”
“And that’s always been your forte,” I cracked, ducking past her across the threshold. Once inside, I surveyed her living room in wonder. “Did you just do a La Belle Vie feature on a florist?” With arrangements positioned on every available surface, it looked like a nineteenth-century hothouse signaling the dawn of a great new botanical era.
“Golly, you would have thought!” she piped, excitedly. “I went down for my morning coffee and the papers and came back to find Jeremy had deposited half the contents of Ovando in my apartment.” She approached a silver julep cup and hovered a hand just above a two-toned cloud of peonies, billowing folds of magenta and white. “He gets a bit carried away sometimes.”
My eyes wandered over to the gramophone resting elegantly in a corner, presiding over the room with quiet authority. Giving it to her must have thrilled him. And it did fit seamlessly in her apartment and her world. If Jeremy and Belle had an official mascot as a couple it would have been Violetta the Victrola. The gramophone stood for so much of what bound them, providing the visual and the soundtrack for their best attempts to recapture a bygone brand of Courtship and Romance. As much as I admired the machine, I had a sinking feeling that this was only the beginning of the selfless things he would do fo
r her—the deeply personal things he’d relinquish to her. It was all too easy to picture his modest studio stripped bare, nails and scuffed floorboards exposed, his worldly possessions handed over to his sweetheart like a frantic pedestrian who had emptied all pockets in the hopes of placating a pistol-toting mugger.
“All for your sake,” I added. “Unless, after all this time, I’ve somehow missed the fact that Jeremy is a tulip man.” I looked behind the sofa at vases of tulips facing us in tones so pale they could only have been tinted by a single eyedropper’s worth of color.
“He humors me, I think,” she continued, warmly. “Not just with flowers. He doesn’t mind losing hours in secondhand bookshops or cycling instead of hopping in a cab.” I knew that taxicabs had always been canary-yellow luxuries zipping to and fro outside the solid white double line of Jeremy’s constrained budget. And I also knew that he had in fact become a keen cyclist. She had surprised him a month earlier with his own masculine equivalent (sans basket) of Cupid’s Arrow that she named Lucky Strike though Jeremy had never been a smoker. The name had nothing to do with cigarettes. It was an ode to the notion of happenstance—the cornerstone of Jeremy’s belief system—and the stroke of luck that had enabled their first meeting, which Belle never realized had in point of fact been their second. He still subwayed to the office but would cycle most other places, a fixture beside Belle as they wheeled side by side, their mutually reinforced excitement buoying them a good foot or two above the gritty pavement of Manhattan. “He gives me new story ideas all the time. He drew up that wonderful little map of prime picnic spots in the city, complete with a recommended reading list. And he practically introduced me to the hot dog!”
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