The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  So what? Who cared? She’d seen Darryl J. He’d seen her. Even better, he’d remembered her. She’d had to remind him of her name, but he knew who she was. “Right. Reva,” he’d said, giving her a smile so big it made the underground station seem as bright as Central Park at noon.

  But it wasn’t Central Park. “What are you doing down here?” she’d asked. “Why aren’t you playing in the park?”

  “It’s too cold out there. My fingers don’t work when they’re cold.” He’d run his left hand up and down the neck of his guitar, tapping his fingertips against the strings so quickly they produced fluttery notes. “The acoustics are fine down here, as long as no train is rumbling through. Money’s good, too. I had to audition to get this spot, ’cause the money’s so good. Everyone wants to play in the subway.”

  “Yeah, but…” But Reva had had to pay a fare just to go downstairs to see him. Not that he wasn’t worth every penny she’d spent on the fare card. “I didn’t know where you were. You have fans, and if you change locations, people can’t find you.”

  “Fans?” He’d tossed back his head and laughed, and all his little braids had vibrated as if they were laughing, too.

  “Yeah. Like me. And my friends. And lots of others, I bet.” She’d been sort of amazed that she could talk to him this way, as if they were buddies, so close she could give him advice and he’d take it. “What you need to do is find a way to alert your fans to where you are.”

  “You think?” He’d strummed his guitar, and the entire station resounded, all the steel and concrete surfaces bouncing his chords through the air. “How do I do that?”

  “Flyers? You could post them around the neighborhood.” She’d design them for him and attach them to every vertical surface in the city. She’d run rows of them on the construction walls lining sidewalks, and on bus shelters, and in store windows. She could be his assistant, and he’d fall in love with her because she did such a fabulous job of publicizing him.

  “They’d get torn down. Or ruined in the rain.”

  “Can you run an ad? Like, in Gotham magazine or the New York Times or something.”

  He’d laughed again. His laughter was as musical as his singing. “Reva, Reva, Reva,” he’d crooned. Then he’d begun a song, which, she realized after a moment, he’d made up on the spot. “Reva…I could never leave her…I could not deceive her….”

  Reva had thought she’d die, right there, on the downtown IRT platform. No one had ever sung a song to her like that. No one had ever made up a song, just about her—unless you counted her mother’s silly lullabies when Reva had been a baby, when instead of singing “Hush, little baby,” she’d sung, “Hush, little Reva.”

  But Darryl J wasn’t her mother. He was the man she loved, the man she would someday sing with, and marry. “I’ll figure something out,” she’d promised him. “I’ll make you famous.”

  Now, thanks to Eric Donovan, she’d figured something out.

  “So, who’s this singer?” Eric asked. “Does he do hip-hop? I like hip-hop.”

  Reva curled her lip. “Hip-hop sucks. You need to listen to good music. Like Darryl J’s. That’s his name—Darryl J.”

  Eric hit a few keys to clear the screen. Another few keys, and a grid appeared, different rectangles outlined in dotted lines. He typed DARRYL JAY in one of the boxes.

  “No. It’s just the letter—J. Without a period,” Reva informed him. “I guess it’s an initial or something, but I don’t know what it stands for.”

  Eric accepted that with a faint “Humph.” He deleted the AY and hit the enter key. “I can play with fonts and stuff, colors, whatever. You probably need some artwork, though, like a picture of this guy or something.”

  “I’ll have to get that.” Just seeing Darryl J’s name on the monitor and imagining an entire Web site about him excited her.

  “So, what else are you going to want on this?”

  “His picture, of course—” because he was so cute and that would attract fans “—and a list of where and when he’s performing. Like a concert schedule.”

  Nodding, Eric moved the cursor to another box and typed Concert Schedule. “You know, this isn’t going to show up on the net or anything.”

  Reva’s excitement transformed into uneasiness. “Why not?”

  “You have to pay for Web space and register a domain name.”

  “I have Web space,” Reva told him. “We get some space free with our ISP.”

  “Oh. That’s good. You still need a domain name, though. DarrylJ.com or something.”

  “How do we get one of those?” Reva asked.

  Eric glanced at her. Maybe he was reacting to her use of the word we. But she saw them as partners in her mission to make Darryl J successful. Eric was the tech and she was the creative. She was also the marketing and the management, and maybe someday she’d be the missus, too, although she couldn’t imagine ever using that title, even if she got married. She’d always be Ms. Reva Kimmelman. She hoped Darryl J wouldn’t mind.

  “You have to go to a service, reserve the name and pay for it,” Eric explained.

  “Pay for it?” Shit. How was she going to do that? She didn’t have a checking account or a credit card. She had some savings in her bank account, but she could only withdraw that in cash, and couldn’t very well mail cash to whoever was in charge of the domain names.

  Eric doodled on the computer for a while, saying nothing, letting her stew. She watched as he opened a second window, scrolled through a list of items and clicked on guitar. The picture of a folk guitar appeared in the window, and he click-dragged it onto the Web page.

  “That’s the wrong kind of guitar,” Reva muttered. She felt the way she had years ago, when her father and Bony had taken her to the Hamptons and every time she’d built a sand castle it had collapsed. Her Darryl J Web site sand castle was collapsing now.

  “Um,” Eric suddenly said. “I might be able to use my dad’s credit card, but you’d have to pay him back.”

  “Your dad would let you do that?” Mr. Donovan had to be the coolest father in the world. Reva hoped he’d keep seeing her mother. Maybe some of his coolness would rub off on her.

  “I don’t know if he’d let me. I did it before and he didn’t kill me. It’s just a possibility.”

  “If we could do that…Omigod, it would be perfect. As long as my mom didn’t find out about it.”

  “Why? She doesn’t want you to do this?”

  “She doesn’t want me to do anything,” Reva complained.

  “Is she…” Eric glanced at her again. His sweatshirt looked a little small on him, his wrists sticking out. She wondered if he would wind up as tall as his father once he was done growing. “Is your mom in love with my dad or something?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” Reva said. “I’m not even sure if she and your father are dating. She used to tell me stuff, but she doesn’t anymore.”

  “It’s not that I mind or anything,” Eric said solemnly. “I would just want to know.”

  “So would I.” Reva sighed. “Are your parents divorced, too?”

  “No. My mom died,” Eric told her. “That was back in Vermont. I think my dad wants a girlfriend.”

  Reva felt a pang of sorrow for Eric, but she did her best not to reveal her emotions. As much as she hated her mother right now, and her father, too—and she’d never been crazy about Bony—she was so lucky both her parents were alive. Death was awful. Especially the death of someone young. Great-grandparents you expected to die, but not a kid’s mother.

  “Well,” Reva said, “if your dad wants a girlfriend, he shouldn’t have picked my mom. She never dates.”

  “Never?”

  “She’s had a few boyfriends,” Reva conceded. “But no one serious. I wouldn’t count on her falling in love with your father. She doesn’t do that kind of thing.”

  “Okay.” Eric deleted the picture of the guitar from the Web page, went back to the list and clicked on another item. A curving musical s
taff appeared, with a graceful treble clef at the left end and little notes dancing along the ribbon of lines. Eric click-dragged it to the Web page. Reva liked the guitar better, but she didn’t want to criticize him. His mother was dead, after all.

  “I’m going to get a photo of Darryl J,” she said. “Maybe a couple. We could have one on the home page and one on a link that lists his performance schedule, and maybe another on a third page that has his biography. Does that sound good?”

  “I guess.” Eric didn’t seem totally convinced. But then, he liked hip-hop. Reva would be wise not to depend too much on his aesthetic judgment.

  She’d have to get photos of Darryl J. Kim had a digital camera. They could use it to shoot pictures of him, if he didn’t already have some photos he wanted them to use. Reva also had to get his performance schedule. He’d have to update it regularly, which meant he’d have to stay in touch with her.

  “So, you’ll buy this domain name we need?” she asked, just to make sure.

  He glanced at her, then turned his attention back to the screen. He still had a baby nose, small and soft. Reva had noticed that most guys didn’t start getting their real noses until middle school. “Yeah, I’ll take care of that—but you’ve got to pay me back.”

  “Of course.” Reva hoped it wouldn’t cost, like, hundreds of dollars. In less than two months she’d be getting more money—Hanukkah gelt from both sets of grandparents and from her father, too. He gave her presents, but he also always gave her some money. Bony would lecture her about how she should spend it on something of quality, not trash, but once the money was Reva’s, she could do whatever she wanted with it. And this Web site wouldn’t be trashy. Darryl J was a quality musician, and his Web site would reflect that.

  “I need your phone number,” Reva said, pulling a sheet of paper from the printer and a pen from the drawer in the computer desk. “My mom probably has it, but I don’t want to have to ask her for it.” Reva didn’t want to ask her for anything. These days, whatever she asked her mother, the answer was no.

  Eric wrote down his phone number and his e-mail address. Reva folded the paper four times and stuffed the thick rectangle into her hip pocket. “Thanks,” she said. “This’ll be cool. We can work on it while your dad and my mom do whatever they’re doing.” Eric seemed on the verge of asking her what she meant, and he was too young, really, for her to go into all the implications, so she added, “The whole fireplace thing. God knows why they’re so excited about a stupid fireplace that we never use anyway.”

  “My dad’s a fixer upper,” Eric told her. “He’ll make it beautiful.”

  “Well, okay, then.”

  “Eric?” Mr. Donovan called into the den. “It’s getting late. School night.”

  “It’s not that late,” Eric said to Reva, but he dutifully closed the Web site window and pulled his CD out of the computer. “So, I guess I’ll see you,” he said kind of shyly.

  Reva realized he probably didn’t hang out with many older girls like her. He was, what, a fourth grader? Most eighth-grade girls wouldn’t acknowledge his existence. She hoped he didn’t think there was anything too special going on here. They were just kids of parents who were…well, making the fireplace beautiful. There was a cute euphemism, Reva thought cynically.

  Still, if his father and her mother were going to beautify the fireplace, Reva might as well get along with Eric for as long as the beautification lasted. They could be friends, even if he was way younger than her. Especially now that they were partners in the creation of Darryl J’s Web site, they could wind up being really good friends.

  Not long after Ned and Eric left, Reva said good-night to Libby and disappeared into her bedroom. Libby knew her daughter hadn’t gone to bed; she considered herself much too mature to retire for the night at nine-forty-five. She was just freezing Libby out.

  Reva’s icy detachment wasn’t necessary. The open living-room window was freezing Libby quite effectively.

  She slid the window shut. It stuck in its tracks, and she had to exert herself to get it completely closed. Once she owned the apartment, sticky windows were going to be her responsibility. But they would be her sticky windows, and this would be her fireplace, which she hoped would eventually look better than it did now, streaked with stripes of paint and semidiluted paint and marble more gray than green. Ned had only worked on one side of the hearth so far. He hadn’t even started on the mantel shelf.

  But it was her fireplace.

  The hell with it. She flopped onto the sofa and grinned. The hell with the fireplace, the sticky window, her bitchy daughter and her loans.

  Ned desired her.

  She tried to remember the last time she’d felt so utterly desirable. The few relationships she’d had over the years had always been stable and sweet and…well, not exactly passionate. She’d been seeking safety, a man who wouldn’t walk out on her and Reva the way Harry had, a man who considered a hardworking single mother in an unglamorous job perfectly acceptable.

  And indeed, she’d felt acceptable. But not desirable.

  What a fabulous word that was. She rolled it over her tongue, then experimented with the word sexy. No, she didn’t quite feel sexy. Her tush was too spongy to qualify as sexy, and her hair was too ripply—not stylishly wavy but lumpy and unkempt, no matter how carefully she brushed and styled it. She dressed in unsexy clothes and spent most of her days asking five-year-olds what their favorite letter of the alphabet was, and she came home tired and cooked utilitarian meals and struggled with her daughter. There was nothing sexy in that description.

  In spite of all that, Ned desired her. She reveled in the knowledge.

  She would see him Saturday. Friday she’d be too frazzled, after a day at Hudson, to give her all to anything resembling a date. Saturday she’d be better rested. They’d make a plan, just the two of them, something more substantial than a drink at a neighborhood pub and a stolen kiss in the alcove of a shoe boutique. They’d talk about their favorite movies and books, and she’d ask him about his childhood, and they’d argue politics. Or maybe not. Maybe they’d just spend the whole evening gazing at each other, and she would read his desire for her in his eyes.

  Not that she’d let him follow up on that desire. Not yet. She was still much too new at this.

  But it felt good. After too many days filled with anger, anxiety and guilt, Libby lounged on her old sofa, inhaled the cool air, which still carried the slightest scent of solvent, studied her splotchy, smeared fireplace and smiled. Tomorrow she’d get back to suffering from guilt again, but right now…

  Right now, she was desirable, and it felt good.

  Eighteen

  Saturday morning found Libby entering Congregation Beth Shalom with Vivienne. Her life seemed so bewildering at the moment, she figured a dose of religion might help her regain her bearings.

  The only problem was, she wasn’t sure she wanted to regain them.

  She’d agreed to attend services with Vivienne on a whim. Also, she didn’t have any fresh bagels, and she figured that on her way home she could stop in at Bloom’s and stock up. Before she’d left the apartment, she’d given Reva permission to invite Kim over, but insisted that they would have to stay in the apartment—a semigrounding.

  Maybe by allowing Reva to socialize with her best friend when she was under house arrest, Libby was spoiling her. Maybe if Libby regained her bearings, she would feel bad about that. Maybe spending a couple of hours at Congregation Beth Shalom would clear her mind and teach her the importance of being a strict disciplinarian, especially when one was a single mother and one’s daughter was plunging headlong into adolescence.

  “So this thing with the Irish guy, it’s serious?” Vivienne asked in a hushed voice as they wove through the crowds milling in the vestibule of the old limestone building. Vivienne had on a hot-pink sweater with a fringed collar. The color was blinding in contrast to the more sedate apparel of most members of the congregation. Beth Shalom was a conservative synagogue, and the
majority of the people schmoozing their way toward the sanctuary were dressed soberly. No one except Vivienne dared to wear neon-pink. The color alone would keep Libby awake if the service made her drowsy.

  Libby had worn a simple wool below-the-knee skirt and a demure sweater. Although her parents had had a love-hate relationship with organized religion, her mother had indoctrinated her to groom herself properly for temple. Libby might have defied her mother in all other fashion circumstances, but she’d understood the importance of dressing correctly for God.

  “Because if it’s not serious,” Vivienne continued, still in a near whisper, “I could introduce you to Harvey Golub. And there’s a very nice young man, maybe a little younger than you, but why not, you know? His parents have been in the congregation for years, and now he’s attending services with them while he looks for a new job.”

  “He’s living with his parents?” Libby asked. “How young is he?”

  Vivienne poked her arm. “He has a PhD. How young can he be?”

  Wonderful, Libby thought with a barely suppressed snort. An unemployed PhD living with his parents. Just what she wanted.

  In fact, just what she wanted was Ned Donovan. He’d come to the apartment yesterday evening to continue working on her fireplace. He’d brought Eric along again, which was fine with Libby, since Reva seemed willing to treat Eric civilly, for some reason. The two of them had huddled at the computer, whispering and giggling and ignoring Ned as he scraped and scrubbed and filled the living room with the chemical scent of solvent and the nippy evening air.