by Nina Solomon
They played a couple of more rounds with statements ranging from “I’ve never slept with my eye doctor,” to “I’ve never cheated on anyone,” and even, “I’ve never had sex in a department store,” until Grace’s glass was almost empty for the third time. She hadn’t counted on the bartender being such a wild card. It was her turn again. She couldn’t think of anything. Her hair clip had come undone, her hair falling across her face in the style of an Afghan hound. She tossed her head and realized for the first time that she was getting drunk. Her head bobbed like a marionette whose puppeteer was absent, and it took a while for the room to reorient itself.
Grace began to feel warm and took off Laz’s jacket, hanging it on the back of the bar stool next to her. The sight of the jacket casually flung over the back of the stool in just the insouciant manner that Laz would have done gave Grace a start. She half-believed, for an instant, that he had just gone to get gumballs from the dispenser in the men’s room.
“She’s plastered,” she heard Pete comment, the words muffled as if she had cotton in her ears. Grace stared at him through her hair.
“Yup, she’s looped, all right,” Kane agreed.
“Why are you talking about me in the third person?” Grace interjected. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that’s very rude?” Pete and Kane exchanged glances. “Anyway,” Grace continued, “she’s not plastered, she’s just a little bit tipsy, and she needs to go to the ladies’ room.”
“I stand corrected.” Kane brushed her hair from her eyes, tucking the ends behind her ears. “Gracie, maybe it’s time to . . .” Grace looked up at him, and for some reason, reached toward him and ran her hand over his head.
“It’s so bristly,” she said, making an attempt at standing up. She placed her hand on Kane’s shoulder to steady herself. His sweater was so soft, the feel of his shoulder so solid and warm under her hand—she wanted to keep her hand there. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this material before.”
Kane looked at her. “Grace, it’s wool.”
“Oh,” she said, trying to laugh it off. Then she stood up, holding onto the bar. Her legs felt rubbery, like one of those Flatsy dolls she had so coveted as a child. She felt unable to make the journey to the bathroom right then, so she eased herself back onto the stool. She hadn’t thought about Flatsies in years, and had a sudden recollection of a cold, gray day when she’d gone to visit a friend for an afternoon. Grace had once asked her mother for a Flatsy when they were in a toy store, but was steered to the paper dolls, which, in her mother’s view, had more instructional value. While her friend was out of the room, Grace hid her friend’s Flatsy underneath her Danskin shirt. It was a simple task because Flatsies, true to their name, were soft vinyl dolls that looked three-dimensional from the front but which practically disappeared when turned to the side.
She remembered looking at the Flatsy when she got home. The experience of sheer pleasure quickly turned to resentment because she felt too guilty to ever actually play with it but confession was out of the question. She kept the doll in her pocket for days, until her mother washed her pants without checking the pockets—the heat of the drier melting the Flatsy into an indistinguishable marshmallow mass.
As she held on to the bar stool, in a cosmopolitan cloud, Grace wondered which side of herself she’d chosen to neglect. Even under the influence, the question should have been rhetorical.
“I NEED CHANGE for the gumball machine,” Grace announced, reaching into the pocket of Laz’s jacket and rummaging around. She had decided not to bring a purse, placing her keys and some money in the zippered pocket. She felt the empty pocket, then searched the other one, pulling out a roll of Life Savers and a pocket organizer that Laz had been missing. She remembered how frantically he’d been looking for it.
“Here, Grace,” Kane offered, handing her two quarters. Grace shook her head.
“No. My keys,” she said. “They’re not here.”
“Are you sure you didn’t put them in the pockets of your cardigan sweater? I mean, Laz’s cardigan,” Kane asked. Grace was beginning to feel as if she had cotton not just in her ears, but in her mouth as well. She nodded her head.
“Don’t worry, Grace. We’ll find them,” Kane said, in a voice that was immediately soothing in a tell-me-another-story sort of way. She hadn’t remembered his voice ever having had that effect on her before, and she felt as if she were in a trance. Kane removed the jacket from the stool and shook it. Grace heard a jingling sound and let out a huge sigh of relief, her shoulders relaxing. “There’s a hole in the lining, Grace,” Kane said. “Here are your keys and your lipstick as well. Oh, and ticket stubs to Don Giovanni,” he added, which he tossed into the ashtray on the bar.
Grace reached for the lipstick and then drew back her hand. The tube was unfamiliar. Though she tried to disguise her reaction, Kane obviously caught the look of confusion on her face.
“Well, I assume it’s not Laz’s,” he teased. “It’s not his shade.” Grace shot him another look.
“No, it’s mine,” she said quickly, taking the keys and the lipstick from him. “I just didn’t remember it was there. Thanks.”
She looked at the silver tube, turning it over in her hands. She must have bought the lipstick and not remembered it. Or it might be one of the free samples her mother was always giving her. The more she looked at it, the more it did begin to look familiar, until she was certain that it was indeed hers. She examined the tickets. Laz didn’t care for opera, and Grace was positive they’d never gone.
She looked at the date: October 14, seven-thirty P.M. She picked up the keys and the ticket stubs and put them into her back pocket. When she got home, she’d check her calendar. He’d probably mentioned it and she’d just forgotten. Francine was always claiming that blueberries could improve short-term memory. Grace made a mental note to buy some in the morning, although they were out of season and probably imported from somewhere like Chile, costing five dollars for a half pint, but she knew she’d likely forget any way.
Grace stood up, this time more slowly, took the quarters and the lipstick, and excused herself, walking to the ladies’ room with a hypersteady gait as if she had just been asked to walk a straight white line.
THE BATHROOMS WERE demarcated with etchings: the men’s room with a picture of two buoys, for boys; the ladies’ room with gulls. There was a urinal in the ladies’ room for reasons unknown, always a startling sight for Grace. She recalled one post-Thanksgiving night with Kane and Laz when she had mistakenly gone into the men’s room, and seeing no noticeable difference, she had been totally unaware of her error until she exited to a standing ovation from the amused patrons, Laz leading the cheer with, “Gracie thinks she’s one of the buoys.”
Tap A Keg had gone all out for the holiday season with garlands and pumpkin lights hung from the stalls. And in the urinal was a chocolate turkey with a huge red plaid ribbon around its neck.
The bathroom lighting was harsh. After washing her hands and splashing her face with cool water, Grace applied a light layer of lipstick. Turning the lipstick over to read the name, she tried to focus. She squinted, not allowing for the possibility that the reason she couldn’t remember this tube had nothing to do with her lack of phytochemicals. Grace was just able to make out the name—Opal. Of course. How could she have forgotten?
The wind whistled at the window, disturbing a light layer of soot on the sill. The chocolate turkey peered back at her from its ice-packed perch with its off-center candy corn eyes and vacant expression, as if to say stranger things than this had happened here. She had the impulse to flush the urinal in an attempt to send the turkey to an icy end.
She took one of the quarters that Kane had given her and inserted it in the gumball machine, cranking the handle. She waited until she heard the sound of the gumball hitting the metal hatch, then opened it. Pink. She inserted another quarter into the slot—pink again. Just what she had hoped for.
GRACE SAT BACK down at the bar and held the gumballs
in the air as if she’d just landed a sea bass in the gulls’ room. After not getting the reaction she had wanted, she put them in the pocket of Laz’s jacket. She insisted on playing a few more rounds of the drinking game, to Kane’s—and even Pete’s—protests.
“I’ve got one,” Grace announced, after finishing her cosmopolitan. “But I’d like a glass of white wine for this round, please.” Pete placed a glass of wine in front of her, staring at her in what Grace found to be a strange sort of way, and left the bottle uncorked. “I’ve never . . .” Grace began, feeling fortified with an uncommon sense of abandon. Kane was her friend, or so she thought, and she couldn’t help but be angry at him for keeping something of such magnitude from her.
“I’ve never kept something from my best friend in order to protect him,” she said, finally. It hadn’t come out quite the way Grace had imagined it would, having just formulated the words perfectly in her head only seconds before, but it was adequate.
Kane’s expression turned grave and he hung his head slightly as he picked up his glass and chugged. Grace felt awful. She hadn’t intended for him to take this badly. She put her hand on his shoulder to let him know that all was forgiven, and then she realized that she was guilty as well. She reached for the open wine bottle, stuck one of the red-and-white striped straws from Pete’s station into the neck, and began to drink. As soon as Kane realized what she was doing, he turned to her, took the bottle from her hands, and touched her lightly on the chin.
“Come on, Grace, let’s get you home.”
“Not yet, I’m just getting started,” she said, as if possessed. Grace reached out for the bottle once more. Kane took her wrist before she could grab the wine. She braced herself up on both elbows and turned to face him. “I’ve never had a same-sex affair,” she said, finally. Kane was silent. The words bounced back and forth like Ping-Pong balls in her head, but it wasn’t entirely clear to her whether they’d actually left her lips. The only thing she knew for certain was that her head was now in Kane’s lap.
“Time to go, Grace,” Kane said, gently lifting her like a rag doll to an almost-standing position. “And we have to get up for the tree tomorrow.” Grace thought it sweet the way Kane used the collective pronoun. It was just like him to remember that she had the origami in the morning.
On the way out the door, Grace slipped and lost her balance, landing smack on the sidewalk, leaving a well-defined imprint of her bottom in the snow. Kane helped her up, brushed her off, and hailed a taxi. They didn’t speak at all on the ride home. The cold air cleared her head. It was after midnight. She turned to him, wishing she could take back everything she’d said at the bar. For the first time all evening, no words would come.
“You don’t need to say anything,” Kane said finally. And Grace knew everything would be all right.
UPSTAIRS, SHE REMOVED the ticket stubs from her purse and placed them in the silver tulip bowl on the dining room table. Out of habit, she turned on the light switch and watched with horror as another Duro-Lite burned out with a hiss.
As she reached her hand out to turn it off, she caught sight of her reflection in the antique mirror on the far wall. What she saw shocked her. Her lips were the color of orange sherbet—a caricature. No wonder Pete and Kane had looked at her so strangely when she had come out of the ladies’ room. She looked again at the bottom of the tube. Her vision was clear now, the lettering even clearer: Coral. Fish lips. Never in her life would she have even contemplated buying that shade. It was worse than wearing frosted blue eye shadow. She wiped furiously at her mouth and lay down on the couch in the living room, as images of chocolate turkeys with orange lips drinking out of bottles with straws spun in her head.
10
THE UGLY DUCKLING
The next morning, just before dawn, Grace found herself covered with the afghan that her grandmother had crocheted for her when she was in college. Grandma Dolly had stopped crocheting long ago, once arthritis had settled into the joints in her fingers. Now she was in a nursing home, after having suffered her third stroke. Grace rarely used the afghan anymore for fear that the whole thing would unravel in an unfathomable acrylic heap. Her toes were poking through one of the many holes that had recently begun to grow larger, no longer able to be held at bay with a strategically placed knot here or there.
The afghan was a diamond-patterned, multicolored throw made out of that type of variegated yarn that switches from one vibrant rainbow shade to the next without the knitter’s having to deal with the nuisance of continually ending off. It was machine washable, although Grace’s mother had sewn in a label that read DRY CLEAN ONLY. What puzzled Grace now was how she had managed to get it out of the hall closet and cover herself without a flicker of recollection—or falling over a single piece of furniture.
As she pulled her foot out of the hole in the violet-fuchsia section, and watched a loose thread disappear like a sand crab, Grace was slightly tempted to use clear packing tape to mend it. Once, in a rush to get to Laz’s book party, she’d used Krazy Glue to adhere a button on a silk skirt. It had seemed sensible at the time and had actually held quite well during the party until Laz’s editor came up to her and asked, “So, what do you do?” Just as she was about to answer, the button on her skirt popped off. Laz was by her side like a shot, grabbing her by the small of her back, a ploy to hold up her quickly descending skirt.
“We keep each other together,” he said. Then he turned to Grace. “Please try to keep your skirt on,” he whispered.
SHE HAD SLEPT in Laz’s clothes, and as she lay still, gazing at the smooth white ceiling, she was overcome by a sense of peace, as if she had merely dreamt the last few weeks and that Laz was actually just out picking up some scones for breakfast. She could have sworn she smelled coffee. As she began to grow more fully conscious, the reality—along with the events at the bar with Kane—came flooding into her mind, replacing the peace and calm with a dull thumping in her temples. She had definitely overindulged. She wanted to call Kane and reprimand him for neglecting to inform her that her lips had been the color of clementines.
She got up slowly and managed a slow wobble into the kitchen to put the kettle on and to start the coffee for José. For herself, she selected an Earl Grey tea bag. As she opened the paper sleeve, the tea bag tore open. The tea leaves spilled out over the countertop and tiled floor in a mess, only made worse by the application of a damp sponge. The only thing these leaves portended was a difficult morning. She opened another tea bag, thankful that it was still dark out. Even so, the thought of putting on sunglasses crossed her mind. She poured the coffee for José into the cardboard cup, added two spoons of sugar, a splash of hazelnut creamer, and pressed the lid on tightly.
The lobby was deserted when she got downstairs. A stack of newspapers on the floor was the only sign that it would soon be daylight. Grace was surprised to see a cup of coffee already on the concierge desk, along with a cinnamon cruller wrapped loosely in wax paper. Farther down the hall, she saw a man with a bicycle coming out of the bike room, dressed in plain black warm-up pants and a hooded windbreaker. He adjusted the seat of his bicycle and headed toward the door, not looking up. As he passed Grace, she noticed he was wearing shiny black dress shoes with white socks, an anomaly she chalked up to New York quirkiness. She put the cup of coffee she had made next to the other one on José’s desk, grabbed her newspaper from the pile, and went back upstairs.
GRACE SAT DOWN at the dining room table and took a sip of her now tepid tea from her butterfly mug. The white tips of the Don Giovanni ticket stubs poked out from the silver bowl and bore an uncanny resemblance to moth wings. She tried to ignore the tickets for the time being. There was obviously some reasonable explanation, which she was convinced she would discover later when she put her mind to it or deployed her imagination in another dimension.
Suddenly she heard the sound of Laz’s voice, as if in a dream, and she realized that the answering machine had clicked on without her knowing the phone had rung, and she
was listening to Laz’s greeting: You have reached the Brookmans. We’ll call you back later when we get a chance. Grace ran over to the phone. She must have turned the ringer off, although, again, with no recollection of having done so. However, in the state she had been in the previous night, nothing was inconceivable.
Before she could get to the phone, the person had already hung up. Grace convinced herself that it could only have been Laz. She waited for him to call back. When the phone rang again a few seconds later, she realized that her breathing had been tight and uneven until then. She let the phone ring a second time, savoring the sensation of calm, like the first smell of lilacs, then she picked up the receiver.
“Grace. Thank God.” It was her father. “We called you all night and you didn’t answer. We’re calling from our new cell phone. It’s the latest model. Our old one’s like a dinosaur. How’s the reception?” Grace’s parents had been the first of their friends to get a cell phone, but it was of little use as it was usually not charged up, left at home, or locked in the glove compartment by accident.
“Fine,” she answered. “Loud and clear. Are you out?”
“No, we’re home, just testing it out. We were starting to get worried about you. Laz get in all right?”
Grace looked at the message light. Seventeen calls. She’d forgotten to call her father to tell him she had gotten home safely. It was a ritual they still practiced, however outdated.
Laz had thought it quaint at first, but eventually found it a burden, especially during the many fruitless searches for telephones during their travels through uncharted territory. Sometimes, the search itself became the whole purpose of the trip, like their unending hunt through the Judaean hills until, out of nowhere, a telephone booth had appeared as if it were an apparition on the outskirts of a Bedouin village, right beside a Coke machine. Grace’s father had given her a beeper three years ago for her thirtieth birthday, which Laz claimed must have accidentally dropped out of her unclasped backpack into the surf off Grenada during a boating expedition. His explanation put to rest Milton’s suspicions of foul play.