by J D Ventura
Claire turned again to stare at the office building again. The business woman was now clicking through a PowerPoint. A chart with an ascending axis line caused three of the men to stand and clap.
“They sent me to an undisclosed location, way outside of the city.”
“For how long,” Claire said, grabbing the handrail of the balcony to steady her through a sudden sense of vertigo. Her own voice sounded distant and unfamiliar.
“Two weeks,” he said. “There is a chance I could come back sooner, but-”
“Sam, you’re supposed to be on medical leave. Last time I saw you, you were crying. You said you were having problems remembering things. I don’t even think you should be working right now and-”
“Claire, I am checking in with a military doctor here and they prescribed me some medication that’s been helping me focus. Try not to worry about me. I’m more worried about you. Is everything okay at home?”
After the discussion with Jessica she made the decision not to indulge in what she was now convinced was paranoia brought on by too much wine and way too many pills and her difficulty in being left to adjust to the Village’s suburban quirkiness without Sam. Tell him everything is fine, Claire, because it is!
“No, you’re not there,” she said glumly.
“Claire…”
“Sam, everything is fine. I just miss you and I can’t wait for the day when your work is done and we can focus on what’s next and enjoy the time we have, you know, the time we have left, without all this secrecy and undisclosed location bullshit. I want us to be together. No more secrets.”
“Me, too, babe. And we will…soon enough.”
She looked down at her ratty blue tennis shoes and followed a single tear as it disappeared into a jumble of dirty, knotted laces. She didn’t respond because she knew if she opened her mouth at this moment, there would be no stopping the geyser of raw emotion trapped in her throat.
“I love you, babe,” he said.
“I love you, too,” she managed before the connection dropped. Dammit, you didn’t ask him about why he wrote that note on your arm! No, no. Not on the phone, Claire, do it in person. She turned to look at the window across the street, but the conference room was now empty and dark. She saw only the reflection of a disheveled woman, in a dirty window, alone and crying on a balcony.
After she told Jessica of Sam’s extended absence, Jessica was determined they “hit the town” and “fuck all the negative juju” Claire was “dragging around with her.” Despite Claire’s protests – I’d really rather just Netflix a movie – she endured an hour and a half of dress-up, during which Jessica had her try on various outfits until she found “the hottest” one for her house guest. The fourth look won the vote: a little black lace dress, with sheer sleeves and a leather belt that lent a naughty degree of toughness to the ensemble. Claire silently thanked God she hadn’t given up running when she saw the garment’s hemline, which stopped far too north of Claire’s knees to even come close to age-appropriate. “Jess, I can’t pull this off,” she complained, finishing a third glass of “get-ready wine.” “I look like a middle-aged hooker! Jesus!”
Jessica was leaning over the vanity in the master bathroom, peering into the mirror and applying purple, sparkly eye shadow to her left eye lid. “The point is to make other people want to pull it off! And with those legs, damn lady, mission accomplished. Chica caliente!”
“Um, I’m married, remember?” Claire said, trying on a pair of black high heels with satin ribbons attached to them. “What do you do with these ribbons?”
Jessica adjusted the bath towel wrapped around her breasts and scampered playfully into the bedroom. “Oh, this is so cute,” she squealed, kneeling in front of Claire. “Allow me.” With a quick motion of her hands, Jessica wound the black ribbons around Claire’s porcelain white ankles before tying them into perfectly symmetrical bows.
“Dear God, I look like I’ve been gift-wrapped for some Japanese businessman with a foot fetish,” said Claire, despite acknowledging they were genuinely sexy and adorable. “Where are we going, by the way?”
“Oh, you are in for a treat, my sweet, old friend,” Jessica said, upright now and shimmying into a red dress. “It’s a new restaurant, and I know you. You’re going to love it. It’s a trip, to say the least.”
Pushing boundaries had always been Jessica’s thing. When they first met, living in New York City in their twenties, Jessica had literally shoved “E” down Claire’s throat and taken her to a loft party in Brooklyn, hosted by this Iranian guy she was fucking. “Is he from Iran?” Claire asked, as the ecstasy forced her butt cheeks to neurologically clench.
“Iran?” asked Jessica. “I don’t think so. He said he was Persian.”
“Like the rugs,” said Claire, her hot cheek on the icy cab window. “He’s Iranian.”
“What?”
“Never mind,” Claire had said, as the euphoria left her awestruck. She had turned to Jessica then and put her nose against hers. “I love you like a sister.”
The proclamation sucked the oxygen from the back of the cab like some shitty selfish betrayal of familial loyalty. Sorry, Jenny, I miss you but I need to move on.
“High praise, old friend,” Jessica had said, hugging Claire tightly, her lips now resting an inch from Claire’s right ear. “But I can’t replace her, you know that.”
Claire did know that. Her “sisterhood” with Jessica was hopelessly polluted by her memories of Jen. What would this experience have been like with Jenny? What would it have been like to go to college with my older sister? Who would she have become as an adult? Would she have offered comfort now, in Claire’s time of need? Yes. But none of that mattered.
Jenny was long since dead.
Chapter 12
“Claire!” Jessica implored. “Get in, you space cadet!” Claire was still holding a white wine glass full of South African Sauvignon Blanc. Her high heels had sunk into a gooey patch of tar serving as a semi-adequate pothole patch in front of Jessica’s brownstone.
The ride to the restaurant left her a bit light-headed and woozy, like when she and Jessica got really stoned their senior year of high school at Rocky Shoals amusement park. Jessica insisted she get high before they rode the Thunderclap rollercoaster, a whitewashed, rickety structure eventually torn down to make way for far-less thrilling mixed-use condominiums. For a moment, she wondered if her dizziness now had something to do with her alleged pregnancy. She cast the thought aside as quickly as it came. Not tonight. Tomorrow. Not tonight. Tomorrow.
From the backseat window, D.C.’s streets all shared a blurry sameness. And, as a city without any discernable skyscrapers – no buildings could be taller than the 555-foot high Washington Monument – the nation’s capital lacked a visual compass. Jessica must have been thinking the exact same thing, because she suddenly declared, “Nothing can be taller than the monument. It’s such bullshit,” she said, heartily shaking the Uber driver’s shoulder. “You can’t even see the monument from anywhere in the city, so that rule is horseshit.”
“Total shit of horses,” Malik, the Uber driver said, giving Jessica a wink in the rearview mirror.
Claire felt her phone vibrate in the matching black-sequined clutch Jessica had lent her for the evening. It was Stephanie calling. She thought about hitting ignore, but then thought differently. Stop, Claire, there is a logical explanation for all that has happened, even the conversation you overheard between Stephanie and Marc. She accepted the call.
“Hey,” said Claire, trying to sound relaxed and aloof.
“Claire, Sam called looking for you. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Case. I’m in D.C. with my friend Jessica and she’s taking me to some hot new restaurant.” She was loosely aware of the fact she was slurring her words. “What’s the name of the place we are going, Jess?”
“Manifest,” sai
d Jessica, rolling her window halfway down and holding a cigarette up for Malik to approve of through the rearview mirror. He nodded, held up his own pack, and grinned in amused solidarity.
“We’re going to a hot new hot spot called Manifest,” Claire sputtered, rolling down her window halfway and taking the lit cigarette from Jessica and then a long and satisfying drag. If you are pregnant, Claire, you are going to hell. Straight. To. Hell.
“Well,” said Stephanie. “That sounds pretty…‘hot.’ You sound like you’re having a blast. I’ll let you go. Come find me when you get back.”
“I will,” said Claire.
“Claire, as soon as you get back,” Stephanie said, slowly, with a hinting emphasis that cut through Claire’s buzz.
Before Claire could respond, the call dropped.
Jessica spent most of the 20-minute Uber ride talking on her cell phone to someone back at the law firm where she worked. There was apparently something “going south” on some big environmental case and Jessica was speaking nearly indecipherable legalese with a hapless paralegal named Trish. And because most of what Jess was saying made little sense, it was easy to ignore.
Instead, Claire rested her forehead on her window and took in the city. It was a weeknight but that didn’t stop people from going out in the District. The sidewalks bustled with buzz and blur, a colorful, electric panorama of people. K Street millennials were loosening their ties and ducking into bars with names like Filibusters and Cloture. Hardened congressional chiefs of staff dropped into the Republican and Democratic clubs, downing Scotch and sodas before heading home to the tony suburbs or northern Virginia, or Montgomery County, Maryland. Bike couriers flipped off limo drivers. Meter maids argued with parking scofflaws. Gay men walked purposely to yoga, mats in hand. Tourist families searched the skyline in vain for the Washington Monument, attempting to orientate themselves while their children assisted with Google Maps. Claire missed it all: the politics, the potholes and every pushy, smelly asshole on the Metro. Shit, how did I ever let him convince me that we should leave all of this?
Malik drove down H Street into the NE quadrant, behind Union Station. For years, the neighborhood had struggled economically, and much of it still did. But as Northwest D.C. real estate prices super-heated, young, risk-taking urbanites with decent jobs and dual incomes had started scooping up flimsy new condos and old row homes along H Street. Everyone, except the neighborhood’s displaced lower-income renters, saw it as a positive development. Claire thought of the boys being thrown out of the Village. The memory was a disturbing flash and she consciously banned it from her mind.
“Here we are,” said Malik. “There is something like this where I am from. In Jordan.”
Jessica was still on the phone and, without responding to Malik’s observation, whispered a “thank you” to him and got out of the car, leaving the door open for Claire.
“What is this place Malik?” Claire asked, looking up at the structure through the Nissan’s windshield.
“It is a restaurant of the cars on a train,” said Malik, with a laugh. “Good idea, no?”
“Weird, but cool,” said Claire, as she handed the driver cash. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Malik, and sorry for my friend. She just thinks she’s important.”
“She is a nice lady compared to what I see driving this car, this you and God should trust me about,” he said, laughing good-naturedly. “Have a nice time tonight, miss. Cheers to you.”
As they exited the Uber, the front of Manifest was frenetic and showy. The restaurant boasted five-foot long gas lanterns on either side of the main door, spewing blue fire into the night sky. Women in audacious and indisputably expensive cocktail dresses smoked flavored European cigarettes on the sidewalk with their pushy and well-heeled lovers. These were presumably powerful men and women of great means. More pedestrians walked by with $7 salted caramel gelatos or café Americanos from the nearby coffee shop. And, directly across the street from the restaurant, a man sat in a black sedan, intently reading a magazine.
As Malik had said, the two-story building was built around actual train cars. The face of the structure revealed four of them, two box and two passenger. The box cars, one bright orange and the other a navy blue, were at the ground level, and their large sliding doors were open, revealing a cluster of small, candlelit tables and a bar running almost the entire length of the car. The tables closest to the open doors were level to the sidewalk and the couples who had reserved them enjoyed what must have felt like an al fresco dining experience.
Jessica was finally off the phone and had turned to motion with a waving hand for Claire to catch up. “You like it? Isn’t it fun?”
“Are we sitting in the open-air box cars?” Claire asked eagerly, as a well-dressed couple in their forties valeted a white Porsche Cayenne with Virginia plates.
“No, no,” said Jessica, as if Claire asked if they had reservations at Arby’s. “I have something way more special planned. Follow me, Alice, the rabbit hole is this way!” She had heard that before.
They entered the restaurant’s black steel front doors and found themselves facing an iron hostess station, in front of a wall of polished coal. “Welcome to Manifest,” said a young, exceptionally tall, twenty-something woman who, Claire mentally noted, could easily be a runway model. “Do you have a reservation?”
“Collins. Jessica Collins. I called Bruce.”
“Ah, yes, Miss. Collins,” the hostess said. “Of course. Welcome. Your table is ready upstairs in the Pullman car. Follow me.”
The hostess, dressed in a black baby-doll fringe dress and shin-high black Doc Martens, walked into a hallway behind the coal wall and into a gray freight elevator. The lift had a single red lightbulb on the ceiling. The hostess pulled a rope near the gap in the floor and the two halves of the steel door, top and bottom, came together simultaneously, like a closing mouth. She then pulled a wire mesh gate from the left and, when she latched it in place, pushed a green button on the wall, near which someone had written “Up” in black sharpie. The floor vibrated beneath Claire’s heels and, growling like a tired, prodded circus animal, the contraption begrudgingly ascended.
As they exited the elevator, they entered a dimly lit hallway, the walls of which were covered by steel railroad spikes, wrapped in a cat’s cradle of red string lights. In the center of the design was black spray-painted graffiti: below the word “Queen” an arrow pointed to the right and below the word “Pullman” an arrow pointed to the left.
“As I said, you ladies will be dining in the Pullman car this evening. Please follow me.”
Claire’s eyes adjusted to the hallway’s dim lighting and she could now see the passageway dead-ended into the metallic side of an actual dining car. A young woman glanced at her through a parted curtain, the candle on her table illuminating her bare shoulders. A man leaned across the flame and kissed her.
“Please watch your step,” the hostess advised, as they cautiously navigated their high heels onto the car’s retractable metal staircase. She turned left and they followed. Clair’s eyes widened when she rounded the corner. The interior of the car was enchanting! Small dining booths, upholstered in red leather tacked with brass, lined each side of the cabin. Waiters dressed as conductors glided past them with trays of food and cocktails, depositing steaming game hens or a fussy, splashy pair of martinis onto crisp white linen tablecloths. Ambient, downtempo music floated down from the upholstered ceiling, each note just grazing Claire’s ears, like tiny auditory snowflakes. The hostess brought them to two generously stuffed red leather wingback chairs, facing each other across a large coffee table made of a spoked locomotive wheel topped with thick, frosted glass.
“I’m Zara. Please say goodbye when you leave and let me know if everything was to your liking. In the meantime, Dylan will take great care of you. Enjoy the Pullman.” She floated away, quickly disappearing into the glittery dimness.
“I think she said her name is Zara.”
“Like with a ‘Z’?”
“Yes,” Jessica replied.
“That makes perfect sense, actually,” Claire said, running her hand along the table between them. “Um, this place is incredible. Is it hard to get reservations?”
“Impossible, but I’m screwing one of my clients, and he knows the chef,” Jessica said matter-of-factly. “I know, I know, some things never change.”
“I find that rather comforting right now, honestly,” said Claire.
“What? That I’m still a slut maintains some sort of world order for you?”
Claire laughed. “No, but the fact you and I can pick up like this, you know, and it still feels the same. I have had my fair share of change lately and anything familiar is very welcome right now.”
The waiter didn’t so much approach as appear. He was under six feet, but not by much. His gold and blue conductor’s cap made him look tall enough to tip over. His thick, wavy hair could have been blond, but gelled back in the soft lighting, it looked brown to Claire. His face was dusted in copper stubble, with flecks of silver, despite probably being only in his early thirties. If “Sara with a Z” and him were a couple, Claire thought, their entrance into any room would turn heads.
“Good evening ladies,” he purred. “I’m Dylan and I’ll be your server this evening. Can I start either one of you off with a beverage?”
“I’ll have a Manhattan,” Jessica purred back, rounding her shoulder toward her chest so the strap of her blouse threatened to fall. Now there is the Jessica I know and love.
“And for you, miss?”
“A gin gimlet, straight up with a twist,” said Claire.
“Very good,” Dylan said, and lifting his heels once in cheery acknowledgement, he backed away, maintaining eye contact before spinning around and getting in lockstep with another passing server.