Blue Rose In Chelsea (10 page)

     I’ve met Sinclair at his favorite haunt, Coopers Café, on Eighty-Third and Columbus.  Sinclair lives four doors down, in an apartment on the fourth floor of a brownstone.  We sit at a sidewalk table and watch the colorful parade of shoppers along Columbus Avenue.  It’s unseasonably warm, though windy, for late September.  Little girls wear pastel sundresses.  “The dogs are in sweaters and the people are in shorts,” Sinclair observes.  Sinclair informs me that he is a Scottish count in exile.  His family never approved of his sexual orientation, and so he’s lived the past twenty years in the Mecca Of Acceptance, New York City.  When his elderly mother passes on, he will inherit a country estate and sheep station, complete with a castle and moat.

     “I adore a moat,” I say with affectation.  “That’s what Isabel says to Lord Warburton when she turns down his marriage proposal in
The Portrait of A Lady
.”

     “Perhaps I should marry you.  You could be my beard, and then we’d get the moat sooner.”  He rubs his hands together conspiratorially, as the waiter sets before us a melon, granola and vanilla yogurt salad, Sinclair’s favorite.

     He inspects my thrift-store purchases from Reminiscence.

     “I shopped to the tune of Magilla Gorilla.”  I dump my purchases onto the table, humming the theme song which was playing in the store, and is still echoing in my head.

     “Apparently you’ve gone ape,” he says in response to my choices.  There is a pink mohair skirt, which gets a thumbs-up, some denim skirts that get a tepid reception, and a black bowler hat, which he regards skeptically.  He places the hat on my head, arranges my dark curls, and declares, “Ah, yes, very Vivien Leigh.  Libby in
St. Martin’s Lane
.”

     I leave the hat on, because the wind, though warm, is relentless.  “Too much wind in my ears always makes me ill, like it blows everything inside me out of order.”

     “It unsettles your chi,” is Sinclair’s diagnosis.  “You’re an air sign, Gemini, and you need grounding for balance.  The wind is too airy.”  Sinclair is the first person that hasn’t looked at me askance when I claim the wind can make me ill.

     “You get me,” I say, with a grateful sigh.

     He asks me to demonstrate the face Evan made when I asked him if he missed the ballet.

     “Yes, that’s disgust.  Or constipation,” he determines.

     “Well, he’s not gay, because he’s taking the girl from the coffee shop out on a second date tonight.  Oh, and get this, he took her to see the ballet Romeo and Juliet!” I report, wielding my fork and accidentally stabbing the waiter in the arm.

     “Oh, honey, don’t kill the melonner,” Sinclair advises.

     “My best friend is responsible for the man I love going on a date with another woman!”  These words sprinkle onto the other diners, due to the close proximity of the tables.  Some women glance at me in empathy.  “You are my new best friend.  I pass the torch to you.”  I spear a slice of honeydew and bestow it upon him.

     “Well, she didn’t mean for it to happen.  It’s Dylan’s fault for passing the buck, really; he was Careen’s original choice for Secret Agent Man,” Sinclair consoles.

     “Well, there go all the theories of why he won’t ask me out.  Obviously, he’s not broke, because he can afford to take this woman to a ballet at Lincoln Center!  He’s not afraid of Dylan, because Dylan and his latest Twinkie met them afterward for drinks.  So, there go all the theories!”  I hurl these words like little grenades into the air.  Seeing I’ve abandoned my salad, Sinclair makes a stab for it.

     “Pardon my ploy for your melons,” he begs.

     “You know, I’m beginning to think this was some plot between Dylan and Careen to get Evan hooked up with someone else, and get me safely out of his orbit.”

     “A conspiracy of cousins!”  Sinclair warms to the sound of it.  “Did Chekov write that?”
     Sinclair points out the positive aspect, which is that Evan has unearthed the joyous news that all the secretive phone calls were actually negotiations on the part of Hazel’s husband to buy the coffee shop.  The owner had decided to sell the coffee shop, and Hazel’s husband was seeking to purchase it.  It was the place where he first met his wife, and it represented to him everything that is sweet and romantic in life, and he couldn’t bear to see it sold and turned into something prosaic like a bagel shop or video store.

     “That is desperately romantic.”  Sinclair sighs deeply, as he distributes his granola over my hijacked honeydew.  “Evan would not have discovered this vital information—which perhaps has saved your friend’s marriage—had he not taken the woman to dinner.”

     “We would have found out the truth at some point, with or without Evan.”

     “Yes, but perhaps not before there’d been a felony committed.”  Sinclair cites hair-raising tales of Upper West Side crimes of passion, including a Porsche driven straight through a Tiffany window into a bedroom, piloted by a jealous lover.

     “Fine, but why is he taking her out again for a second date?  He kissed me on that subway train like I’ve never been kissed before.  What happened between the kiss and now, that made him pull away from me?”

     “Perhaps you’re not old enough for Evan.”  Sinclair points out that I’m only four years older, but the coffee shop gal is perhaps a decade older.  “Perhaps he likes Sugar Mamas.  Older women who will pay a young man’s way in return for certain favors,” Sinclair elaborates, when I wrinkle my brow.  Although casting Evan as a gigolo does ease my misery some of losing him.

     “Well, that decides it.  I am going to accept a date with The Whimsical Popsicle.  He arrives in town this week.”

     “Splendid!  Then this gift has not been sewn in vain.”  Sinclair pulls from a mauve shopping bag a big blue hatbox which harbors a long black velveteen coat.  It is surprisingly lightweight and sewn with a white silk lining, no buttons.

     “It’s very Elizabeth Bennett,” he assures, referring to the nineteenth century heroine of my favorite Jane Austen novel,
Pride
and Prejudice
.  “Except for the squiggles,” I note, because the dark coat has been stitched with bright shapes in striking shades of the color spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

     “Those are quarks and leptons and other elementary particles.  Stardust!  I designed this to be your very own Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat to bring you magical powers when you see Evan.”  Despite my broken heart, I smile broadly. 
Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
has been playing on Broadway, with the heartthrob of my teen years, David Cassidy, cast in the lead.  “But like any classic fashion accessory, it can easily transition to your next season, or man, as it may be.”  Sinclair motions as if to say
viola
!  “Someday velvet will make a comeback, and when it does, we’ll be ready,” Sinclair foretells of his favorite fabric.

      “I love this!”  I leap to my feet to try it on.  “Maybe when I wear it, it will magically wipe Evan from my memory.”  I model it there on the sidewalk, in the limited space between tables.  “Please take this tape, and do not give it back to me, not even under penalty of death.”  I dig my Cowboy Junkies cassette tape from my pocket, which has the song that reminds me of Evan, “Misguided Angel.” 

     “If I play that song one more time, Dylan is going to throw me out of the apartment.  I’ve been wallowing.”

     “Wallowing makes one’s melons wilt,” he scolds, with a last stab at my salad.  “Think whimsy!”

~~~~~

     Careen is thrilled that I’ve agreed to the date.  David has a temporary visa; he is doing post-doctorate work at some lab where they smash atoms around in a superconductor in an attempt to recreate conditions of The Big Bang.  I wear a black knit dress, blue tights with a diamond pattern and baby-doll pumps the same assaulting ruby red as my lip-gloss.  David eyes my quirky ensemble and Technicolor Dreamcoat, but does not comment.

     He’s gotten us tickets to the Broadway production of
A Streetcar Named Desire.
He shows up on my doorstep and is exceedingly polite to Dylan, who greets him with a mixture of curiosity and paternal scrutiny.  David arrives with a bouquet of roses, and for the moment Evan is blotted from memory, as hope springs eternal that, yes, there are still gallant men in the world willing to meet one’s family before a first date, to bring flowers, to court a woman in the old-fashioned tradition.

     “Is this the English lord?” Dylan whispers in my ear before I depart down the rain-soaked stoop to David’s waiting Cadillac.  I ask him why he needs such a big car for just one person, and he tells me that in England all the cars are compact, that the first thing he planned on acquiring when he arrived in The States was a big car.  The blue rugs are a bit moldy, and there’s a bronze pin-striping of rust along the door, but David is thrilled with his new purchase, as he eases into the womb that is the Midtown Tunnel before we are delivered via a snowy burst of light into the city.  The honk of horns, the rush of crowds in the crosswalks, the smell of rain on sidewalks, all these things rush at my senses as I stare at beautiful ice-blue dresses hung on pale mannequins that pose above us on their department store displays as we crawl along the avenue in the Caddy.

     After the show, he wants to stroll about the theatre district, but I warn him that it’s not safe territory after a certain hour; after the last show lets out and the theatre crowds disperse, the pimps and prostitutes take over.  By midnight even the cops will be gone, having hauled so many perpetrators to the precincts that these streets will be left unguarded.  David stubbornly slogs along, despite my efforts to get him to pick up the pace, and when I spy, in peripheral vision, some shady character following us, I nab David’s umbrella as a potential weapon to defend us.  This delights David to no end, as if it were all some sort of game, or an overreaction on my part.  Once our stalker is aware that I am aware of him, he gives up and hovers in a doorway, awaiting some unsuspecting passerby.

     David and I head downtown.  The pavement is spotted with rain. I return to him his elegant black umbrella-or brollie as he calls it—that he scrapes against the pavement in a nimble and rhythmic manner, his eyes downcast.  He wears a thin smile that does not wane as he listens with amusement to my observations on life, literature, and theatre.

     “I always find myself hoping that it will end differently,” I say, of the tragic play.  “That Mitch won’t discover Blanche’s past and he will sweep her away to a new life.”

     “Ah, to be swept off one’s feet by a man.  Is that still every woman’s fantasy, even the modern American woman?”
     “No, to be swept away by love.”  I feel a pang of annoyance.

     “Must one be swept away?  It seems to me that love ought to be based on something quieter, such as mutual interests and genuine affection.”

     “Do you fear unbridled passion, of being swept away by your feelings?  Of losing control?”  I know how to go for the jugular of these academic types, just lead them into unfamiliar territory, like the land of emotions.

     He ignores my question.  “I don’t think it was passion for Mitch that motivated Blanche.  She was attempting to escape her past, which simply isn’t possible,” he says, pompously.

     “This nation—the most powerful in the world,” I throw in for effect, borrowing a favorite phrase of Dylan’s, “was built by people who successfully escaped their pasts and reinvented themselves.”

     “I don’t know that it’s the most powerful,” he snarls, though with his accent, everything he says sounds somehow eloquent.

     “Look, you guys no longer rule the world.  The sun
does
set on the British Empire, so just get over it!”  I’ve had these very same tiresome conversations with British friends back at school.

     We arrive at a fuming standoff, facing one another like two outlaws at the O.K. corral.  Then, as if remembering we are civilized beings, we both turn and continue to walk, neither one speaking for some time.  We walk an astonishing distance in silence, David occasionally flicking glances my way.

     “Well, you can run from the past, but you can’t erase the past,” he returns to the former point, not willing to let it drop, or perhaps incapable of cutting his losses.

     “Well, actually, you can erase the past, if you choose to.  If you really love someone, you could make a conscious effort to forget his or her past, which is the same thing.”

     “But that isn’t realistic, that is just denial.  You wouldn’t really be forgetting.  For Blanche, it was just inevitable, that the truth should come to light, as it always does, in the end.”

     “So, if you could step inside the play, and change it all around, you wouldn’t alter it so that Blanche could be happy with Mitch?  You prefer the sad ending?”

     “Well, that’s a silly question.  It is what it is.  I didn’t write the play!”

     “But if you had the power to change the ending, to deliver Blanche to a happier fate, would you?”  I have learned, from my Ivy League days, that for all their brilliance, many of these intellectuals lack heart.

     “It was reality!  You can’t deny reality!”  He snaps open the umbrella, as a light rain falls.

     “Why, when speaking of depressing things, do people always call it reality?  But anything happy or magical is always labeled an aberration from reality.”