The Fixer Upper

by Judith Arnold

  “What do you think changed?”

  Mr. Donovan, Reva thought, but she wasn’t sure she ought to tell Kim about her mother’s boyfriend. The whole thing was too new, and it could fall apart any minute. And then her mother might be heartbroken, and in her heartbroken state she might decide that Reva could no longer use the subway. Reva had a window of opportunity today, and she’d take full advantage of it. And she wouldn’t jinx things by discussing her mother’s love life with anyone.

  “I guess she finally figured out I’m not a little kid anymore.” Reva would have loved to flop down on the futon and go back to sleep, but she was too wired. Now that she had permission to use the subway, she wanted to get moving.

  Instead of the brunch she’d lied to her mother about, she and Kim breakfasted on navel oranges, rice cakes with honey spread over them and tea with skim milk in it, which Reva felt very cool drinking, even though it tasted disgusting. Then they returned to Kim’s room to ready Reva for her mission.

  She’d packed her outfit for today—tight jeans, a ribbed turtleneck and sneakers—in the hope that her mother would let her ride down to her father’s place on the subway. Thank God she’d also brought her straightening iron with her, because her hair looked lumpy and mussed and in need of some heavy-duty work. She thought about putting on mascara, but with Kim’s parents lounging around the living room, passing sections of the Sunday Times back and forth, Reva thought it would be best to add the mascara after she’d left the building.

  She departed at about ten-thirty, after thanking Kim’s parents like the polite guest she was. Around the corner from Kim’s apartment, she stopped to apply her mascara, using a window as a mirror. She also dabbed some tinted lip gloss on her mouth. By the time she saw her mother it would be gone. Her father would never notice, and Bony would probably congratulate her for protecting her lips from the elements. Reva didn’t think you could get sunburned lips, but the gloss had an SPF number so she figured she could say she was wearing it for health reasons.

  At the 72nd Street station, she raced through the turnstile and flew down the stairs. Her timing was perfect. Darryl J must have arrived just minutes before her. He was still setting up, not yet playing.

  A bunch of other people stood on the downtown platform, but Darryl J zeroed in on her. His eyes were so warm, the color of fudge. They made Reva’s mouth water. “Hey, Reva,” he greeted her, pausing as he uncoiled the electrical cord for his amp.

  She loved that he knew her—her name, her face, her existence. He treated her like a genuine friend. She’d met him on the platform only once last week, that Monday when she’d found out he was here, because she hadn’t wanted to press her luck with her mother. But Ashleigh had come to see him on Tuesday and had given him Reva’s e-mail address. He’d e-mailed some photos of himself for the Web site, and a rudimentary schedule of when he’d be playing where—mostly in this particular station, although he’d mentioned in an e-mail that he was hoping to play in Grand Central Station sometime in the near future.

  “Have you checked out the Web site yet?” she asked.

  He grinned. “It’s sweet, Reva. Is it gonna make me rich and famous?”

  “I hope so.” She tried not to gawk at him as he resumed his search for an electrical outlet. He had on baggy jeans, a textured sweater and red cloth high-top sneakers that were retro and very cool. She wished she could help him. Imagine holding his guitar…Or she could assemble his mike stand and test the mike by singing her Tommy solo, and he’d be so blown away by her fabulous voice that he’d ask her to perform with him.

  The distant echo of a train in the tunnel brought her back to reality. “The site needs some more stuff, though,” she said. “We could use some kind of biography of you. It doesn’t have to be personal. It doesn’t even have to be true. But fans like to know something about a person’s life.”

  “My life is boring,” Darryl J said with a snort.

  “Yeah, right.” How could someone so talented be boring?

  “I share an apartment in Brooklyn. I sleep on a couch. I serve overpriced drinks at a bar three nights a week. If I don’t turn this sidewalk stuff into a profitable venture by the end of the year, I’ve gotta go home and go to college.”

  “College isn’t such a bad thing,” Reva said, although the prospect of Darryl J going home—she assumed home wasn’t that apartment in Brooklyn where he slept on a couch—made her heart twist. And then there was the possibility that he’d wind up majoring in something totally awful in college, like accounting. “Where’s home?” she asked, praying it was someplace not too far away. Northern Jersey wouldn’t be so bad, or Long Island or even Rockland County. As long as he was within commuting distance of the city.

  “St. Louis,” he said, and her heart twisted again. “Got into Mizzou and deferred for a year to see if I could make the music thing work. That’s the deal I agreed to with my parents. One year. You make this Web site work for me, Reva, and I will worship you forever.”

  Reva nearly staggered under the onslaught of information. Mizzou—that must be some school near St. Louis. He would be a first-year student if he wasn’t doing the music thing, which meant he really was eighteen or nineteen—not too old for her at all. And he would worship her forever if the Web site made him a success. He would worship her forever. Omigod.

  “Well,” she said, struggling to remain poised. “You could invent a biography if you want. You could make it something more dramatic. I could help you. You know, like maybe—” he handed her a coil of cable, and she felt like his roadie, which made her smile “—you could say you were a brilliant scholar, but the call of music was too strong to be denied. How does that sound?”

  “Better than reality,” he said with a laugh.

  “And another thing…” She held the cable while he assembled his mike stand. “You should have a sound clip.”

  “Huh?”

  “A sound clip on the Web site. So people can click on it and hear how good you are.”

  He stopped what he was doing and stared at her. The train she’d heard rumbling down the tunnel finally rattled into the station, making conversation impossible. It squealed to a halt, and the other people waiting on the platform boarded. A few people got off and glanced curiously at Reva and Darryl J. He adjusted the mike stand’s height while he waited for the train to depart.

  Once it did, he said, “How am I gonna get a sound clip? It’s not like I’ve cut a CD or something.”

  “You could record it into a digital recorder, and then we could load it onto the Web site.”

  “Where am I gonna get a digital recorder?”

  Reva thought hard. “I could ask around school. Maybe someone has one I can borrow.”

  “You’re gonna borrow a fancy piece of tech equipment, and then you’re gonna lend it to me? You must have some generous friends.”

  “I do,” Reva said, although she doubted any of her friends were generous enough to let Reva lend their digital recorders to a total stranger. She mulled over her options. “If I could get someone to let me borrow a recorder, maybe you could come to my house and record a song there. How would that be?”

  Darryl J scrutinized her. God, his eyes were so rich. And he’d said he would worship her forever. Until this exact moment, Reva hadn’t understood what love was all about. Now she knew. It altered the way the world appeared, the way it sounded. Everything seemed more vivid: the steel girders, the mysterious puddles on the tracks, the unyielding concrete surface of the platform, the musty scent of the air. Love fine-tuned her senses. The 72nd Street subway platform would be sacred ground to her forevermore.

  “Where do you live?” he asked, and this time when her heart squeezed inside her chest, it didn’t hurt at all. It felt wonderful.

  “When can I see you?” Ned asked. The question had been running circuits through his head ever since he’d kissed Libby goodbye Sunday morning at dawn. She’d crept out of the apartment like a thief, and why not? She’d stolen a piece of his he
art.

  But at least Eric hadn’t staggered out of his bedroom and seen her. That surely would have been the end of the world. The end of Libby’s world, anyway.

  Ned would have spent Sunday with her, doing clean, wholesome family things—or even dirty rehab-the-fireplace things—but he’d promised Eric a visit to the Central Park Zoo before the weather turned too cold. Eric’s buddy Gilbert had tagged along. He hadn’t shoved anyone, and the boys had had a terrific time alternately shouting encouragement at the animals and acting as if they were too mature for zoos.

  Ned had phoned Libby in the evening, and unlike his call after the last time he’d taken Eric and Gilbert on an outing, this time Libby had been happy to hear from him. But their conversation had been cut short by Reva’s arrival home from her weekly visit with her father. Libby hadn’t seen her daughter for more than twenty-four hours, so he’d generously told her to go talk to Reva, and had ended the call.

  Now it was Monday, and he was standing in the middle of Macie Colwyn’s loft, and Macie was suffering throes of rapture because her columns had arrived. Ned hadn’t wanted them delivered just yet, but apparently, Macie had gone behind his back and conferred with Mitch, and Mitch reminded Ned of the importance of keeping customers satisfied. “There’s another way you could satisfy Macie,” Mitch had observed, “but since you won’t do that, you may as well get her some columns.”

  The huge, unpainted cylinders lay in the middle of the framed-in living room, forcing the crew to detour around them. Macie minced back and forth, pacing the length of each column. Occasionally, she bent over and stroked one. Watching her, Ned realized she would have been disappointed with him. Even when he was fully revved and raring to go, he was a hell of a lot smaller than those columns.

  What with the assorted construction noises, the thumping of salsa from the boom box and Macie’s intermittent sighs of ecstasy as she fondled her columns, Ned knew he couldn’t have a calm, civilized conversation with Libby right now. She probably didn’t have time for a lengthy chat, either, swamped as she was with Hudson School applications. But he needed to hear her voice, so he whipped out the cell phone, crossed to the corner of the loft farthest from where the boom box was sitting and the guys were taping the drywall, and punched in her office number.

  “When would you like to see me?” she asked.

  “How about right now?” he suggested. “You could mosey on down and watch me spackle drywall. It’s a thrill you don’t want to miss.”

  She laughed. “How about if you and Eric come over for dinner sometime this week? Pick a day, as long as it’s not today.”

  “Why not today?”

  “If I’m going to make dinner, I’ve got to plan it out.” She paused. “I should warn you, I’m not the world’s greatest cook.”

  “Reva looks healthy enough. And Eric will eat anything.” Ned smiled, picturing the four of them seated around her dining-room table—and then lost his smile at his vision of that table hidden beneath mountains of application papers. Maybe they’d have a picnic on the living-room floor, instead. “We’d love to come for dinner, Libby, but what I had in mind was more in the nature of just you and me, you know. Taking a bike ride, something along those lines.”

  She laughed again. “Now?”

  He felt a pleasant twinge in his groin at the fantasy that they could toss aside their jobs and spend the morning naked and sweaty in each other’s arms. “Now would be great, but I don’t think we can manage it.”

  “When, then?” She sounded thoughtful. “This isn’t going to be easy, Ned. I can’t ship Reva off to her friend’s house for a sleepover every weekend. And then there’s Eric….”

  “We could set the kids up at the computer and then hide in your kitchen. If we close the door and we’re very, very quiet…”

  Her laughter this time sounded sad. “Reva and Eric really complicate things. I don’t know how to do this.”

  He wondered how she’d done it with previous boyfriends. Maybe those men hadn’t had children, and she’d gone to their places but returned to her own bed to sleep. Or maybe she hadn’t had sex with them at all. Ned wasn’t a jealous kind of guy, but he wouldn’t mind terribly if she hadn’t had a bunch of red-hot lovers before him.

  “Do you get time off for lunch?” he asked.

  Silence greeted him, and then, “Do you?”

  “I could grab an hour. I’d have to spend a lot of that time in transit, though. This job is down in the Meatpacking District.”

  Another moment of silence passed before she asked, “What would happen if you grabbed an hour and fifteen minutes?”

  “I’d return to work out of breath but smiling. Where should we meet?”

  They decided to meet at her apartment at twelve-thirty. At noon, when everyone was breaking for lunch, he told the guys he had to run a few errands and might be awhile. They were pros; he didn’t have to micromanage them as they finished taping the nail holes and seams in the drywall. They nodded and made a few sarcastic remarks about getting a gold star for each errand he completed, and he politely laughed and said he’d see them later.

  Then he bolted.

  He’d never been so impatient for a subway to arrive, and so impatient for it to deliver him to his stop. Emerging at 72nd Street, he saw a guy strumming a guitar and singing at the station. The singer actually had some talent, and Ned would have stopped for a minute to listen and toss a dollar into his guitar case if he wasn’t pressed for time.

  He sprinted up the stairs two at a time, practically knocked three people over in his dash for the door and flew the few blocks to Libby’s building. He spotted her approaching from the corner. She was walking, not running. Did that mean she was less eager for this than he was?

  No, it meant she was wearing high heels. He admired her elegant legs as he caught his breath, and smiled when he noticed her accelerating her pace once she saw him. She smiled back, and the sheer force of her joy at being with him was enough to knock the breath right out of him again.

  “This is crazy,” she whispered as he gathered her in a quick hug, then slung his arm around her and hustled her into her building.

  Yeah, it was crazy. Unlike Saturday night, he hadn’t showered or shaved. He was dressed in his work clothes, and while he’d taken a minute to wash his hands and face before he’d left Macie’s loft, his jeans were layered in dust and his shirt had a smear of plaster on the sleeve. In contrast, Libby was impeccably groomed, just as he would expect of someone who’d spent her morning evaluating the offspring of millionaires at a posh private school. Her skirt was neatly tailored, her blouse smooth and silky, a colorful scarf tied around her neck. Her legs—he allowed himself another admiring glance—were sheathed in stockings.

  Real stockings? With a garter belt? Hell, he was lucky she’d agreed to meet him for a quickie. He shouldn’t push his luck.

  The doorman gave them a suspicious look as they sped past him and ducked into the elevator. The instant the door slid shut, Ned had his arms around her and his mouth locked with hers. They both groaned—with relief, with excitement, with everything. Heat flooded him, stoked not just by Libby herself, by her fluffy hair and her soft skin and her dazzling eyes, but by the situation. This was almost illicit. It was hurried. It was like his first time, with Jenny O’Neill. They’d done it in the den of the Sekowskis’ house, where she’d been babysitting. She’d sneaked him in after the kids were asleep, whispered, “Happy birthday,” and handed him a condom. They’d made love and he’d been out the back door within twenty minutes, and while it had hardly been the most satisfying sexual encounter in his life, he’d had nothing to compare it to at that point, and he’d believed it was fantastic.

  He had plenty to compare today with, and he knew just from kissing Libby in the grand paneled elevator of her building that it would be fantastic.

  And it was. On the rug, on the floor in front of her half-finished fireplace. Walking all the way to her bedroom would have taken too long, so they’d done it right
there, Ned chivalrously bearing the brunt of the floor’s hardness by lying under her—as if having Libby on top of him, with her skirt bunched up around her waist and her blouse open, her bra hanging slack below her breasts and her body tight and hot and wet around him, was such a noble sacrifice. Thank God he’d had a condom with him. He’d figured after Saturday night that he ought to be ready at all times with Libby, because they probably wouldn’t be able to predict when the opportunity for sex would present itself.

  As soon as he felt her climax, he let go. No time to hold back, to play her for a second orgasm, to prolong the moment and show her what a restrained, skilled lover he was. Not when he had to be back at the Colwyn loft before too many minutes had elapsed. She sank limply onto him and he stroked her back, smoothing the wrinkles in her blouse and the tangles in her hair.

  “Hey,” he murmured when a minute passed without her moving.

  “That was quick,” she said, then propped herself up and grinned at him. “I’m not complaining.”

  “Good.” He grinned back. “I hate to fornicate and run, but it’s one of those days.”

  “We’ll have to do this again,” she said.

  “Just say the word and I’ll come running. Literally.” As soon as she rolled off him he got busy hauling his jeans back up—they’d spent the past few minutes tethering his ankles—and buttoning his shirt. He’d have to return to work, but he’d be back. Whenever Libby said the word, he’d be back, and he’d be sure to have a condom with him.

  Twenty-One

  “What do you mean, he’s coming over? Who’s coming over? And whoever he is, he can’t come over.” All right, so Libby was babbling. She was allowed to babble. Tonight she would be hosting her dinner party with Ned and Eric, and she was stressed out. She’d prepared Hawaiian chicken, a recipe she’d gotten from Gilda years ago and recalled loving, but she hadn’t made it in ages and the memory could play tricks on a person. Maybe Gilda’s Hawaiian chicken wasn’t as tasty as Libby remembered it. Maybe Eric hated pineapples. Maybe she’d blown the recipe by doing all the prep work last night. Maybe leaving the chicken breasts marinating in the fridge for a full day before sliding them into the oven would cause them to be too chewy or sweet.