Star-Crossed

by Minnie Darke

  “Well, Leo?” she whispered. “What should I do?”

  She breathed in, and flicked the magazine open to the stars.

  Aquarius: “All we have to decide,” wrote Tolkien, “is what to do with the time that is given us.” Not even you, Aquarians—the ultimate free spirit of the zodiac, born to the unconstrained element of air—are immune to the seductive pleasures of earthly things and visible successes. But ask yourself, today, on what you truly desire to spend the hours that are given into your care.

  In the silence of Dorothy’s held breath, the ticking of a small clock grew louder and louder and louder. It was a ceramic Charles and Diana clock, made by Denby. 2:35 p.m. 5:35 a.m. Two hours, twenty-five minutes to go. Tick tock, tick tock. Yesterday, Rupert had worn an orange cravat patterned with slate blue hexagons. He’d told her about how he’d taken Flossie to the vet to have her teeth cleaned, how he’d beaten Nigel at darts for the first time in five years, and how he was thinking about getting the lounge chairs re-covered. And then unexpectedly he’d said: “Come, just come. Come be with me and be my love.” Dorothy, stunned, had demurred.

  Tick tock, tick tock. Tick, tick, tick. Her life’s seconds numbering. And she would spend them on what? On eBay? On commemorative Charles and Di king-sized Royal Worcester egg coddlers? On things? Dorothy looked from one teetering, packed dresser to the other. From every shelf, Charles looked down his long nose at her. Diana, demure and lovely, smiled up from under her floppy blonde fringe. And where was Diana now? Dead as a duchess. And one day Dorothy would be, too.

  “Oh, Leo,” she murmured.

  He was right. Tolkien was right. And Dorothy already knew what she must do. She must cast away every plate, cup, vase, trivet and candle snuffer. Every last thimble. And the dressers, too. And all her furniture. And her jewelry, clothes, handbags. She would sell the house.

  “Morning, Dorothy,” Rupert would say, in two hours and twenty minutes.

  “Evening, Rupert,” Dorothy would say.

  And then, no longer doing anything to prevent those lovely clipped British tones from sneaking into her voice, she’d say: “Well, Rupert, I’ve made a decision…”

  * * *

  Blessed Jones—Cancer, celebrated singer-songwriter, clandestine devotee of early Dolly Parton and sucker for the twang of a banjo, owner of a twice-mended and now thrice-broken heart—sat at the dim end of the broad timber bar of the Strumpet and Pickle and silently cursed Margie McGee.

  Unlike most of Senator Dave Gregson’s other female colleagues, Margie had been safe. Not just because she was older, but because she was too bloody principled. Oh, why had Margie had to go and quit her job? If she hadn’t, then that auburn-haired nymphette would never have ended up in the employ of Senator Dave Gregson. And neither, presumably, would she have ended up in the bed that should actually have been shared by Dave Gregson and Blessed Jones herself.

  Blessed was subconsciously convinced that the darkness of her sunglasses could in some way prevent everyone else in the pub from observing that it was, indeed, Blessed Jones sitting there with a pint glass of cider before her. The cuffs of her cardigan sleeves were misshapen with crumpled tissues—used ones in the left, clean in the right. At her feet lay a curvaceous guitar case.

  From out the sides of her sunglasses, Blessed observed that this Monday night’s patrons were hardly the gorgeous, nose-pierced, hand-holding, tongue-kissing young groovers that filled the joint Thursday through Saturday. The tiny tables that on a Friday would be ringed with laughing, Ned Kelly–bearded hipsters were on this night nothing more than beer coasters for the solitary businessmen who perched on the undersized furniture like lonely giants. Monday night at the Strumpet and Pickle, Blessed realized, was for people who’d finished their day’s work but had no place else to hurry off to. And, of course, for the pub’s resident conspiracy theorist, who this night had buttonholed some poor bastard over by the fireplace. In healthier times, he’d apparently written a polemical book about the imminent end of the world, but now he was reduced to ranting at open mic nights and making incoherent speeches about asteroid collisions and volcanic ash.

  Blessed drew a tissue out of her right sleeve and blew her nose. Then took a slug of her cider. She felt the cold wash of it up behind her forehead and along her cheekbones, but the cider wasn’t strong enough to erase the images that kept repeating on the screen of her mind. The big heavy door to the apartment opening. The girl, naked by fridge-light. Maybe that could be the title of a song. Naked by fridge-light, now nothing is all right, his Fahrenheit appetite, it’s relationship dynamite.

  So many times before, Blessed had forgiven Dave. She’d forgiven him the uptight academic who wore black asymmetrical everything, including hair, then a slash of yellow lipstick across her mouth. She’d forgiven him the patchouli-smelling aid worker who’d spent some time advising him and his staff on East Timor. She’d forgiven him the tattoo-covered eighteen-year-old who’d babysat his eight-year-old son, the only child of a marriage that had broken down under the weight of Dave’s infidelity.

  After each episode, Blessed would ask him: What did you want? What were you looking for? Why aren’t I enough? But he’d only shrug. Talking to Dave in the aftermath of an affair was like trying to dig through the bottom of a swimming pool, smacking stroke after stroke into ceramic tiles with the edge of a spade. And this time, she didn’t have the faith even to try. There was nothing underneath.

  “You’re a man,” she said to the man sitting alone, two stools away from her at the bar, carefully wedging a plastic card back into its slot in his wallet. He was a medical something, in a blue shirt with a logo. Appealing, Blessed decided. Floppy dark hair over one eyebrow and the rim of his glasses. Tasteful glasses. Carnal lips, large teeth. Safely dangerous. Blessed thought: well-mannered wolf.

  He made a surprised face and pointed at himself. Me?

  “Yeah, you,” she said, and stuffed the tissue up her left sleeve along with all the others. Maybe some meaningless sex would be good on a lonely Monday night.

  “Simon,” he said.

  “Bronwyn,” she said, and although he raised an eyebrow, he said nothing.

  “You’re a man,” she repeated, moving one stool closer to him. “Explain men to me.”

  On the bar in front of him was a sleek golden laptop. She leaned on an elbow, shamelessly looking at his screen. He had a banking site open. Blessed, squinting in for a better look, caught two words before the man folded his laptop closed. Tansy. Brinklow. Blessed remembered the rhythm of that name. Tansy Brinklow, Tansy Brinklow. Bansy Trinklow. There had been two chardonnays prior to the cider.

  Simon Pierce—Scorpio, midwife and technology geek, hopeless chocoholic, art-house-cinema hound, Vespa driver and owner of a heart every bit as freshly broken as that of Blessed Jones—knew perfectly well who she was, this petite woman sitting beside him, her nose slightly red and her speech just faintly slurred. Further, he knew that the guitar at her diminutive feet was none other than Gypsy Black: a gleaming, buxom acoustic with twin tortoiseshell pick guards and an ornate mother-of-pearl rose inlaid in the headstock. Blessed was pictured with Gypsy Black on the cover of every one of her CDs, every one of which Simon Pierce owned.

  He poured Blessed a glass of water from the jug on the bar. And also produced a single-shot Berocca from the man bag that was slung over the seat of his stool.

  Oh, thought Blessed, both disappointed and relieved. No meaningless sex there, then. Tansy Brinklow, Tansy Brinklow, Tansy Brinklow.

  Fuck, thought Blessed, as she found the place in her mind that the name occupied. Tansy Brinklow had been her father’s oncologist.

  Eyes suddenly wide, she put a hand on Simon’s arm. “Are you dying?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Dying,” she said.

  “No! What? I mean”—Simon was bewildered—“no more than the average person.”<
br />
  “Oh. Well, that’s good,” Blessed said. “A relief, I suppose. No cancer then?”

  “Cancer? No.”

  “Throat, lung, bowel? What’s that thing you men have? Not prostrate. Prostate. Oh God, you don’t want to tell me about your nads. I mean, I am a Cancer,” Blessed babbled. “Homebody. Sensitive. Easily hurt. What about you?”

  “I think I’m a Scorpio.”

  “Ha!” Blessed burst out. “Isn’t that just code for ‘Hey, babe, I’m a great fuck’?”

  Simon drew back a little, his smile tightening. Blessed reached for her cider. Silence hung around them like a fart.

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” Blessed said, then added, “Simon.”

  “I forgive you,” he said, then added, “Blessed.”

  Blessed winced.

  “What made you think I was dying?”

  “Tansy Brinklow,” Blessed said, waving a hand at his closed laptop. “You were paying Tansy Brinklow. Are you in remission or something?”

  Simon gave a rueful laugh. “No.”

  “Then what were you buying?”

  He thought for a moment. “Integrity, I think.”

  Blessed put an elbow on the bar and looked keenly at Simon.

  “Go on,” she invited.

  Two hours passed, then, in which Simon told Blessed about how he had been engaged to Tansy Brinklow and how right they had seemed together and how it had landed on him like a falling building when she ended it because he had suggested she buy an Alfa Romeo, or perhaps only because she was afraid, but in the end the shame of her friends thinking she’d been taken in had been more painful than the love and the leather-gloved sex had been pleasurable and so she had called him a gold digger and sent him an invoice for some money she had loaned to him, but also for some other things, too: restaurant meals, and a weekend at a swank out-of-town resort.

  Also in those two hours, Blessed went to the ladies’ twice and finished her third pint of cider and Simon refused to buy her a fourth, ordering two hot chocolates instead. And while Blessed spooned the froth off the top in tiny increments, she told Simon about Dave and his policy on renewables, which although it was supposed to be a Green thing she now suspected was just another way of saying that there would always be another girl along in a minute, and how the latest one had fire-red hair and pale breasts that could sink a small Pacific nation and how Blessed had come home early and seen her standing naked by the fridge.

  Then Simon told Blessed how he was paying Tansy back, every cent, in installments, and how it would take him a year or more, and how he still had to see her in the corridors of the hospital, and how accustomed he was becoming to the gut-twist of shame, and all because money—to him—was just something that you used when you had it, and lived without when you didn’t, while money—to her—was safety, security, success, family, power, armor and, finally, the whole point.

  “I thought we’d spend the rest of our lives exploring each other’s hidden depths,” Simon said. “But she didn’t have any. She only had hidden shallows. My mistake.”

  Blessed sat upright on her stool, her expression suddenly urgent. “Say that again.”

  “What?”

  “Just say it again.”

  “My mistake.”

  “No, no,” Blessed said, waving her small hands. “Before that.”

  “She had only hidden shallows?”

  Blessed’s posture relaxed.

  “Hidden shallows,” she repeated softly. “Hi-i-dden shallows,” she said again, letting the words develop a melody. Then she reached down and snapped open the clasps of her guitar case, lifted and nestled the pretty black guitar into her lap. Gypsy Black was beautiful, and Simon Pierce watched as Blessed began to pluck a halting cascade of bittersweet minor thirds. She closed her eyes and resequenced the chords, beginning softly to hum.

  “I turned thirty-five last week, you know,” Blessed said, without opening her eyes. “Thirty-five!”

  And Simon was about to say Happy birthday for last week. But she wasn’t with him any longer. He’d been a midwife long enough to know that look—the one women had when they rolled their eyes away from the outside world and inward to the business of birth.

  The song spun itself out of her fingers’ movements on the brassy strings and before long she was singing, her voice like finest sandpaper and broken birdsong.

  I looked for your depths, but all I found were your lies

  Learned I could just wade, never swim, in your eyes

  You’re a skit, not a drama, a bare diorama

  A beautiful charmer, no Trench Mariana

  I searched but never found in you

  Dived but never drowned in you

  Now I’m aground on you

  You and your hidden shallows

  She sang the words once through, then let Gypsy Black loose to sing a verse in fluid fingerpicking shot through with harmonics that seemed to Simon Pierce to be made of mother-of-pearl turned sound. Blessed sang the words again, louder and more plaintive this time, then let the song die on a lingering chord. When she opened her eyes, she had the attention of every soul in the Strumpet and Pickle, even the asteroid guy at the fireplace.

  Leo

  JULY 23–AUGUST 22

  Her vestal livery is but sick and green, and none but fools do wear it,” recited Nick, and as he delivered his line, he paced the short length of his balcony: four strides in one direction, four in the other. “Cast it off. It is my love; O, it is my lady! O that she knew she were.”

  “Nope,” Justine said across the gap.

  It was a Saturday morning in late July, and Justine had taken a dining chair out onto her own balcony and was now sitting cross-legged upon it—the Arden Romeo and Juliet open on one knee and a three-quarters-empty box of Maltesers balanced on the other. She wore a thick cable-knit jumper and a beanie, for although it was approaching noon, a thin film of frost still clung to the concrete lip of the balcony, and also to the railing.

  “What do you mean ‘nope’?”

  “You got them the wrong way around. It should be, ‘It is my lady; O, it is my love.’ ”

  “Fuckety, fuck, fuck,” Nick said, striding his balcony. Over a pair of dark denim jeans that made his legs look a bit too skinny, he was wearing the jumper Justine had come to think of as the sandalwood jumper.

  “Again,” Justine instructed, and popped another Malteser into her mouth.

  “All right. It is my lady; O, it is my love. It is my lady; O, it is my love. Hey, can I have one of those?”

  “Nope,” Justine said.

  “Just one little ball of malt and chocolate yumminess?” he wheedled.

  “Absolutely not. Chocolate must be earned, my friend. You’ll need to get through the monologue. Without a single mistake. Twice.”

  “That’s just cruel.”

  “One must suffer for one’s art. Okay. From the top. Enter Juliet, above.”

  “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief that thou art more fair than she.”

  “Neeeeeeeert,” Justine bleeped.

  “What?”

  “That thou her maid art far more fair than she,” Justine said.

  “That thou her maid art more fair than she.”

  “Uh-uh. Feel the rhythm of the line. That thou her maid art far more fair than she.”

  “My God, you are such a pedant!” Nick said, though not unpleasantly. “Do you have your moon in Virgo? Or are you Virgo rising?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Well, what time were you born?”

  “Two o’clock in the morning,” Justine said. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Wait, wait,” Nick said. He tap
ped and scrolled on his phone. “Two o’clock in the morning, on November twenty-fourth, in the year of our birth, means that you are…ha! I knew it! Virgo rising.”

  “What are you looking at?” Justine demanded, laughing.

  “It’s a site that lets you calculate your rising sign, based on exactly when, and where, you were born.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Is that so? Is it? Listen here: Virgo rising people are highly sensitive to irregularities in their immediate environment, and will instantly recognize when something is off-key or out of place. They will expend a great deal of energy in restoring rightness to their surroundings. In other words, they are precisely the sort of people who keep a special pen in their handbags for the express purpose of ridding the world of ‘advocados.’ ”

  “Well, pedants have their uses,” Justine said. “You said yourself that Verdi is already off-book and word-perfect. You want to be shown up by a fifteen-year-old?”

  Nick sighed. “You’re right. She’d be insufferable.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But I don’t think I can go on without chocolate. Please? Just one.”

  “Oh, fine,” Justine said. She got up and dropped a Malteser into their lighthouse keeper’s basket, and Nick operated the string line to bring it over to his side.

  Since its rigging, the basket had enabled a good deal of neighborliness. Though it had not yet conveyed the quintessential cup of sugar, it had carried the DVD of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (from Justine to Nick), a Blessed Jones CD (from Nick to Justine), a Band-Aid (from Justine to Nick) and a helping of microwave popcorn (from Nick to Justine).

  Now, Nick fished the chocolate bauble out of the basket. “Why, thank you, kind and generous mistress.”

  “Okay, but no more until the job’s done,” Justine said. “Enter Juliet, above.”

  “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun…”

  It took half an hour for him to be word-perfect, and Justine had needed to seriously slow her Malteser intake to be sure there would be a few chocolates left for Nick’s reward.