She’d hung on too long to chase an opportunity that had actually been an illusion and ignored the warning signs about a man with whom she had been playing a very dangerous game. Now she was going to have to be clever—very, very clever—to extricate herself from Nicola Accardi, who was not used to being told “no” by anyone. She felt something gnawing the pit of her stomach and realized it was . . . fear.
He wouldn’t give her up without a fight. Perhaps a very bloody one.
I have to get back to England, she thought. Just for a little while.
She walked into the Barbizon lobby twenty-five minutes later and headed straight for the desk. “Any messages?” she asked, silently screaming for a reply telegram from Mum in the box behind Metzger.
“Sorry,” Metzger replied, briefly looking up before turning to retrieve some papers. “Nothing today, either.”
SIXTEEN
Laura pushed open the door to MacDougal Books & Letters and prayed that no one else was in the shop. Of course, it was rare to find many people in the shop anytime she visited, which both pleased her—more room to browse, more time to talk with Connie—and concerned her. How did you keep a bookshop open if no one ever bought anything?
Not that she was any better. Connie was constantly lending her books, which she took and gobbled voraciously. She assuaged her guilt at accepting his generosity by telling herself her subsequent visits and discussions with him about the works gave him a psychic payment he seemed to thoroughly enjoy. She knew she certainly did. And she had bought a copy of Auntie Mame for Vivian.
Connie was sitting at the counter, spectacles on the bridge of his bulbous nose, poring over the latest issue of The New Yorker. Or perhaps a ten-year-old copy of The New Yorker. With Connie you never knew. “Ah,” he said, smiling, “My favorite literary critic.”
Laura smiled and he toddled away from the counter to the back of the shop, no doubt to retrieve two icy bottles of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator. He wasn’t supposed to drink it—the doctor had warned it would aggravate his gout—but he convinced himself that drinking a soda pop in the presence of a young protégée somehow didn’t count. Laura wandered through the tiny shop and saw that it was reasonably crowded for a weeknight; there must have been a dozen people flipping pages and thumbing through spines. A young couple, clearly in the throes of early, sugary love, sat on the floor in a corner, lazily leafing through a copy of The Great Gatsby.
In total the shop couldn’t have been more than six hundred square feet, and yet its worn wooden floors, incandescent schoolhouse lighting, and weathered bookshelves came together to create the coziest, happiest sanctuary Laura had discovered in her three and a half months in New York.
Connie walked back around the counter, slid a Coke over to her. “So, what did you think? Tell me, tell me.”
Laura extracted the copy of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit from her bag and placed it on the counter. “I thought it was really well written,” she said, “though if I’m being truthful, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I thought I would.”
“Really? Why?”
“The plot is about a very unhappily married couple in suburban Connecticut.” She laughed. “I think perhaps it hit a little too close to home.”
“Or perhaps you were distracted while you were reading it.”
Connie did this now and then. He had the ability to see right through you, as if you were made of wax paper. Laura shook her head. “You’re uncanny.”
“No. I’m just an old man who’s grown to be very observant. What’s the trouble?”
Where to start? It appeared her problem with dating two men at the same time had solved itself. Laura had left Marmy sitting in the coffee shop to prepare for her date with Pete, where she had hoped to explain the situation and her confusion in it. But she’d never gotten the chance. He’d left a terse message with the front desk canceling, and her subsequent messages, left at the bar, had gone unreturned. She’d dropped a note in his apartment mailbox. No reply. Clearly Marmy wasn’t the only one who read the New York Daily News.
“Pete,” she blurted out, because, well, why not? Isn’t that what she had really come here for, to talk about Pete? “Our friendly bartender at the San Remo. Also another member of your lending library, as I recall. I don’t know whether you were aware we had been seeing one another.”
“Yes,” he said. She searched his face for a clue, something. Nothing.
“Well, then, I am sure you also know that there was an item in a gossip column about me and another guy I’ve been seeing. A guy Pete didn’t know anything about. I mean, it isn’t like we had ever talked about dating exclusively or anything. But . . .” She trailed off. “I just know he’s hurt. And I can’t bear that I hurt him.”
“I’m sure. Well. Yes, that is a difficult situation.”
“He’s been in here, hasn’t he? He’s talked to you about this.”
For the first time, Connie’s face showed discomfort. “I wouldn’t betray any friend’s confidence, including yours, my dear. I can only tell you this: If you have something to say to the young man, you should do so.”
“I’d like to. But he won’t return any of my messages, and he ignored my letter.”
“He works down the street.”
“I don’t know his schedule.”
“I do. He’s working tonight.” Connie glanced at his pocket watch. “Right now, in fact.”
Laura took an unladylike swig of the Coke, suddenly wishing it was something stronger. She stepped aside to allow two people buying books to check out.
There was no excuse not to go. He was a block away, for God’s sake. But Laura had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, that somehow she’d be able to stockpile all of the evidence of her good intentions—the calls, the note, the visit to Connie inquiring about his welfare—and then be able to walk away, say, “Well, I tried.”
But she wasn’t trying.
And was she really sure she wanted to walk away?
“I can see that you’re conflicted,” Connie was saying as his customers brushed by her and out the door. A light rain had started falling, whooshing a musty, damp air into the shop as the door opened.
“I don’t know what to do,” Laura confessed. “Tell me what to do.”
“Follow your heart.”
“Oh God, Connie. Is that truly the best you’ve got? ‘Follow your heart’?”
“Perhaps I have more faith in your heart than you do.”
“I think that’s apparent.”
“To faith,” he said, raising his bottle of Coke.
Laura folded the umbrella she’d borrowed from Connie—he had insisted she take it, in large measure, she guessed, so that she would have one less excuse not to go to the San Remo—and tentatively pushed her way into the bar. Rather than act as a deterrent, the rain had acted as an incentive; the place was crowded with patrons who’d run in to escape the downpour and warm themselves with cheap whiskey and cheaper beer. The rain had also mixed the crowd considerably, the artsy writers and angry polemicists augmented by your standard-issue working Manhattanites and the random bewildered tourist.
Pete was down at the other end, thrusting four glasses of beer at a time, swiping cash off the bar, and punching charges into the old rusted cash register. He had a dishrag flung carelessly over one shoulder, and the fabric under the armpits of his blue-gray oxford was stained with sweat. The muggy rain had turned the interior of the bar soupy.
In short order, another bartender slid behind the long oak to assist, but it took Pete a good ten minutes to make his way down toward her end. When he spotted her, his expression, while not quite as inscrutable as Connie’s, was nonetheless cryptic in its own way, a mix of subtle surprise, disdain, excitement (or maybe she was inventing the excitement part), and caution, which all too quickly vanished into a hardened look of utter detachment. His hair was in his eyes, making him look raw and sexy in a way she wouldn’t have imagined he could.
He slid a coaster in front, l
ooked at her impassively. “What’ll it be?”
This is going to be worse than I thought.
“How about a hello?”
His short, derisive laugh scolded her for her gall. “I’m busy here, as you can see. Would you like to order something or not?”
“White wine, please.”
He poured her a glass of something that smelled like dirty socks—wine was not what one ordered at the San Remo—and promptly disappeared, never even bothering to collect her money on the bar. She stayed and sipped and people-watched for half an hour, until she lost track of his whereabouts and it became apparent her visit had been pointless. She picked up the damp umbrella and left.
She walked out to find the rain dissipating. It was now a fine, swirling mist, the kind that came so often in Connecticut but for some reason seemed uncommon in New York.
“Cutting your losses?” came the voice behind her.
She startled. Pete was leaning against the building, foot against the wall, smoking. She’d allowed him his anger. But now she felt defiance coursing through her chest. She’d come to apologize and had been met with only sneering derision. It was her turn to be angry.
“I’m going home,” she said. “By the way,” she added as she turned and began walking up Bleecker Street, “your wine stinks.”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure the wine list is much, much better at ‘21,’” he yelled after her. “Or the Harwyn. Or the Drake Room. Or anywhere else Box Barnes takes his—” He stopped himself.
She whirled around. “His what, Pete? Don’t stop now. You have something to say, then say it. His what, his ‘harem’? Is that what you were going to say? Or was it something more guttural? His ‘sluts’? Maybe that’s it. Are you shocked, that a girl like me would use a word like that? But that’s what writers do, right, Pete? We use the proper words. And we both know that’s exactly what you’re thinking.”
He bolted from the shadows onto the sidewalk. “Thinking? You want to know what I’m thinking, Laura? Well, let me save you the guessing game: I’m thinking I am a complete and total chump. Because all this time, while I have been dating a girl I thought was real and honest and open and funny, she’s been playing me. The whole time. She’s been slumming it with me while she laughed behind my back with her rich boyfriend uptown. Did you tell him, Laura? Huh? Was it all a big game? ‘Oh, Box, my darling Box, you should see this bartender down in the Village with all of his moony poetry and silly jokes. It’s hilarious!’ And then the two of you drank more champagne in the back of his limo? I’m sure it was a great time.”
Her fury was consuming, bubbling like molten lava, ready to spew. But then, standing there in the orange glow of a streetlight, she got a good look at him. Really looked at him. Her fury collapsed in on itself and disappeared. He was right: not about her playing him, or about her laughing at him, but certainly about her carelessness, about her casual disregard for how he would feel if he found out, and about the stunning lack of depth it exposed in her character. In the movies it was always the man who was the cad, the unfeeling, selfish brute who cavorted at will and never looked back on the dreams he’d dashed in his wake. It had been she who had been cavalier, who had allowed feelings on both sides to grow—between her and Pete, between her and Box—with little more than airy thought to the fact that at some point a choice would have to be made and that there would be consequences. This could have happened just as easily in the inverse. What would Box have done if he’d come upon her with Pete in a rolling chair on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City or sitting in the window of a coffeehouse on Thompson Street, playfully arguing over Kafka?
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out. She wanted to say more, but the words wouldn’t come. She felt the burning of tears, lowered her eyes toward the sidewalk.
They stood in silence for a while. She was starting to shiver from the mist.
“Does he know? About me?”
She shook her head.
“Were there others?”
Her eyes shot up to meet his. “Of course not.”
“Why, Laura? I swore I wasn’t going to ask, but now I have to know.”
“You might not believe this,” she said, summoning the courage to continue to meet his stare, “but I do, really, honestly care about you. The truth is I met you both at the same time and it just seemed okay at first—”
“Yeah, you see, that’s the key phrase: At first. I didn’t expect you weren’t seeing other guys when we met, Laura. You’re a pretty girl. But my God. After that date in Atlantic City? We spent almost an entire twenty-four hours together. And then all the other days and nights over the last few months? And you watched me falling in love with you and never thought it might be worth mentioning that you also happened to be dating the city’s most well-known bachelor?”
She heard nothing after You watched me falling in love with you. She began crying, big, gulping sobs that choked in her chest and heaved from her lips in jerking bursts, as if she were grieving at a hospital bedside. Her voice cracked like an adolescent boy’s. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
It was awful, rote, magnificently inadequate. But it was all she could manage.
He went to say something but stopped, and instead simply turned away, slowly walking back toward the bar.
SEVENTEEN
The tea was hot and delicious and served in tiny individual pots of delicate porcelain that matched the teacups and saucers, a decidedly feminine pattern of curlicues and flowers swirling around the edges of each. Laura, Dolly, and Vivian sat in the dining room of the Barbizon—“imbued with Old Charleston atmosphere,” as the brochures declared, a bit optimistically—each making polite conversation in spectacularly unsuccessful fashion.
This had been Laura’s idea, and she knew it had been a mistake even before the tier of tea sandwiches and the perfectly shaped mounds of clotted cream had been placed on the table. She was still worried about Vivian, who seemed increasingly distant, devoid of any of the jaunty joie de vivre she’d exhibited ever since she’d barreled into their room looking for cover from Metzger. So Laura had convinced Dolly that they should take Vivian to a proper British tea, which was served several afternoons right inside the cavernous dining room. She had hoped that perhaps the gesture would lift her own spirits, too. Now, looking at Dolly’s similarly pained expression, it appeared all three of them were in desperate need of a boost. And not likely to get it from the other two.
Dolly leaned back in her chair. “Well, ain’t this the cat’s pajamas,” she said, breaking through the falsity. “Three girls all dressed up for tea, and nothing but Gloomy Guses in the lot.”
“Not everyone,” Vivian said, nodding quietly over to a table in the corner. Two of the Women sat, chatting amiably. They were archetypal: dowdy, eschewing makeup or fashionable hairstyles, in nondescript, shapeless dresses with little adornment. The one with her back to them sat with a single long-stemmed rose by her place setting. But the one whose face they could see seemed decidedly content, even occasionally smiling, which was not common for that demographic. At one point she reached across the table and gently laid her hand over the other woman’s, whispering something. The gesture lasted only seconds but spoke volumes.
“Are they . . . I mean, do you think they . . . ,” Dolly whispered.
“Yes, I do,” Laura answered.
“Oh my!” Dolly said. “I mean, I’d heard rumors of that sort of thing among the older ones, but out in public? In the dining room? I’m speechless!”
“Well, that would be a first,” Vivian replied, and for the first time today the three of them laughed. Vivian delicately balanced the strainer over her teacup and began pouring, still stealing the occasional glance over at the far table. “And don’t be so hasty to dismiss Sapphic attachment, darling. I’m beginning to appreciate its merits more and more every day.”
Dolly giggled, less from the comment but more from the way Vivian pronounced appreciate: appree-see-ate. She loved how the English talked. Everything always sounded bett
er. She’d decided that if she was ever declared terminally ill, she wanted Vivian to be the one to deliver the news.
Laura quickly felt the cloud of melancholy descending over the table once again and opted for a preemptive strike. “Okay,” she said, grabbing her teaspoon and gently tapping it a few times against her teacup. “Who’s going to go first?”
“Pardon?” Vivian asked.
“Dolly’s right. We look like we’re at a funeral. We’re friends, and friends confide in one another. So let’s have it. Dolly? You first.”
“Wh . . . Why do I have to go first? Your problems are probably a lot more interesting than mine. You go first. Or the House of Windsor over here.” Vivian said nothing. She took a sip of her tea, gingerly placed the cup down onto the saucer.
“Fine, then, I’ll go,” Laura said. And go she did: with the story of the horrors of the past few weeks, how after standing up to Marmy she’d gone to see Pete, and everything that happened afterward. A week after his blistering indictment of her on the rainy street in the Village, she’d written him a letter and left it at the bookstore with Connie but again had received no reply. When she reached the part about Pete confessing he’d fallen in love with her, Dolly openly gasped. Even Vivian raised an eyebrow. “Oh dear,” she said, returning to her milky tea.
Laura sank back into her own chair. “I should have just gone back to Smith.”
“Why on earth would you say that?” Dolly interjected. “You were dating two good guys. One of them broke it off with you because he didn’t know about the other. But keep something in mind, dearie—you’ve still got the other. That’s a lot more than most of the girls can say in this place. And not just any other, either: Box Barnes. You make it sound like if you had been forced to choose, you would have picked the bartender. Don’t you love Box?”
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