Blue Rose In Chelsea (23 page)

     “Where would my sister wear this?” he asks, as we watch the cashier wrap it up for him.

     “Well, you’ll just have to take her somewhere when she comes to town.  Be sure to tell her that this is the hat Diana wore to the Tuileries in Paris recently.”

     “Oh, believe me, she probably already knows,” he says, with a roll of his eye.

     Whatever I suggest he agrees to.  It’s as if we’ve crossed a new threshold in our relationship, just the two of us together, kissing openly in the store, laughing and shopping together.  Could it be that we’re finally a couple?  We buy cable knit sweaters for his two younger sisters.

     “Women shop, men buy.  Check out this guy,” he whispers, nodding toward a man waiting in line with six versions of the same shirt in different colors.  “He finds a shirt that he likes, so he buys one in every color.  It’s pure genius.  He’s set for the winter.”

     “While a woman, on the other hand, will spend five hours and scan six city blocks searching for the perfect sweater, only to come home empty-handed,” I joke.

     “Exactly!” he says with feigned exhaustion, as if he’d sojourned the six city blocks himself on the sweater quest.

     “Well, you must often be in the company of women, to be such an expert on their habits.”

     “No, I just have three sisters who love to come to New York to break my balls and drag me on all day shopping trips.”

     “Do you need assistance with any other female gifts?” I ask leadingly, thinking of The Gum Goddess.

     “Nope, just my sisters and mom.  We’ve got everyone covered,” he says with a barely concealed grin.

     Evan carries the shopping bags, and I steal glances as we make our way through the shoppers clogging up the aisles that are trimmed in pink tinsel trees strung with white lights.  His tousled hair is the rich chocolate color of the truffles tucked away in the shopping bag.

     “Oh, I think I left my credit card with the cashier.”  He halts abruptly.  “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

     “Let me hold the packages for you,” I offer, moving to empty his arms of them.

     “No, no, I’ll take them.  Wait here,” he insists, and vanishes like Houdini.  I wait by the cosmetics counter, circling the hot pink display, dabbing on raspberry lip-gloss and sniffing perfume samples, spritzing myself with Calvin Klein’s Obsession.  I rub my wrists on my coat, hoping I haven’t overdone it.  The cosmetic ladies in white smocks solicit my business; the perfume sprayers are nothing if not persistent.  I view myself in a hand mirror; my hair isn’t looking so bad; the wind has fluffed it up with the same effect I usually aim for when I flip my hair over and blow-dry it from underneath.

     Shoppers are everywhere, flowing in a steady stream past the pretty Christmas displays of wreaths tied with gold ribbons that go on forever, like some enchanted evergreen tunnel.  “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” plays on the piped-in music over the loudspeaker.  I find myself singing along with it, to ease my anxiety because Evan is nowhere to be seen.   It’s strange that Evan wouldn’t leave the packages with me.   The lyrics sing of dread and fear and a drought in Africa that has caused famine to spread.  Dread and fear fill me as I entertain the thought that perhaps I have been ditched.  The store is smothering and warm.  Sweat gathers on my temples.  My limbs feel stuck in quicksand, as if I’ve been sucked into some vortex and can’t move.  Standing there alone, in the midst of so much merriment, and with such a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I can’t help but begin to cry.  My tears are hot and splash down my cheeks.

     “What’s wrong?” he says, his face full of concern, as he is suddenly beside me.

     “It’s this song,” I fib, stunned and overjoyed at the same time to see him.  “I always get choked up when they sing, ‘do they know it’s Christmas time at all?’”  I hum along, wide-eyed, trying to sound convincing.  I brush away the tears with my furry coat sleeve.

     “Don’t worry,” he says with concern.  “They raised millions to feed those people.”

     He motions for me to swivel through the revolving doors.  Soon we are hurrying down the avenue.  His brown suede jacket flaps open.  Dylan never buttons his jackets either.

     When Evan catches me looking at him, I cover with, “Why don’t men zip their jackets?”

     “Why do women ask so many questions?”  When the light changes to green, he gives me a nudge at the crosswalk, his arms full of packages because his code of chivalry won’t allow that I carry any.  My hair has been blown into big messy ringlets that I constantly push back from my face.

     “The point of wearing a jacket is to keep the chest area warm,” I persist, when he catches me again side-longing glances at him.  It’s just my favorite thing in the whole world to do: to look at Evan.

     He gives me a look that warns that a racy response is forthcoming, but instead he says, “My heart is so warm in your presence, Sylvia, that I don’t need anything else.”

     We locate Sinclair in a window seat of a coffee shop, his head buried in Page Six of The New York Post, the shopping bag of stew filling in for my absence in the facing chair.  I tap on the glass, and he shuffles out to join us.

     “I’ve got to go.  I’ve got a late flight tonight,” Evan informs us.  “I’m going home for Christmas, and then back to Vancouver for looping on the series.”

     Sinclair inquires about the series, and it’s exact date of airing, and assures Evan that we will watch every episode, and even tape it on our VCRs.  He shakes Sinclair’s hand, and I expect Evan to kiss me goodbye, but he rummages about in his shopping bag distractedly, and pulls out a small box wrapped in silver cellophane paper and tied with a pink velvet bow.

     “Merry Christmas, Sylvia.  That’s what took so long.  I had them wrap it.  Look, sparkly particles.”  He points to the paper.  It’s embossed with silver dots.  He slips a kiss on my cheek as I take the package, stunned.  So that’s what he went back to the cashier for.

     Then he’s gone, swallowed up in the crowds gushing down Fifth Avenue.  Time slams to a halt, like a car that has jammed its brakes and skidded into a snow bank with a dull thud.  The herd of shoppers looks so cold and anonymous.  Yet somewhere in its midst burns a little ball of light, the heat of fire that is Evan.

     Sinclair impatiently paws the package, as I’m too dumbfounded to open it.  I carefully unwrap it, and part the white tissue paper, to find a pair of earmuffs covered in a brown fur that is exactly a match for my hijacked coat.  The fur is so otherworldly soft that I can’t resist rubbing it against my cheek.

     “I hope a real animal wasn’t killed for these.  These better be fake!”

     “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, would you prefer he had bought you the cheap acrylic ones?  The man is a Texan!  Put them on before the wind wreaks havoc with your chi!”  Sinclair plants them over my ears.  Immediately the cold is cut off, the noise of crowds and traffic muffled.  I feel delivered into some warmer, gentler world where my balance is restored.  Sinclair, ever the stylist, fluffs out my dark curls, and pivots me so that I may have a look at myself in my reflection in the window of the coffee shop.

     “The prince has fled the ball, but he has left behind a tiara for the princess,” Sinclair says, with an expressive sigh.

     I tell Sinclair how I began to cry at the thought that Evan had ditched me at the cosmetic counter, and how I covered it up.

     “You told him you were weeping for starving Africans?”  He looks at me as if I’ve kicked a kitten.

     “So much for being without guile.”  It dawns on me that since the day I laid eyes on Evan my life has dissolved into one diabolical plot to be in his presence.

     “Let’s pray you’re not assaulted by animal activists.”  Sinclair welcomes the falling snow that is swiftly camouflaging my furry figure.  When I look frightened, he assures, “Never fear, my dear.  If the PETA people try to hurt my Viv, I’ll sprint to the nearest phone and alert the authorities.”

     “Gee, thanks,” I say.  The snow, as if in cahoots with us, crumbles from the clouds with ferocity, costuming us in its thick, wet flakes.

~ 15 ~

She Is Not Thinking Of Me

     I’ve not seen Evan since the kiss at Bergdorfs, nearly two months ago.  We have all been invited to a charity event on Valentine’s Day, where The Joseph will be crooning songs from the movie,
Gigi
, to the accompaniment of an orchestra.  The Joseph has snagged us all free tickets.  It’s a black tie event, and Sinclair—through his growing sphere of influential connections in the design world—has arranged for free borrowed tuxedos for Dylan, Brandon, and Evan.

     Sinclair and The Joseph resume their relationship as if the fourteen- year separation was no more than a dream remembered.  It was no accident that The Joseph ran into Sinclair at the skating rink.  He’d been trying to muster the nerve to contact Sinclair for nearly a year, and having heard (through their mutual friend and frequenter of Balduccis) that Sinclair would be skating that day, The Joseph shored up his courage with some cognac, scheduled a manicure and a mustache-trim, donned his best Ralph Lauren casual wear, and seized the day.  The Joseph and his wife had divorced six months earlier.  When his wife admitted to an affair with her interior decorator, The Joseph saw his opportunity to not only set himself free, but to twist the situation to his advantage in order to maintain his considerable financial empire by placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of his wife, and playing, to the hilt, the part of the injured cuckold.  He nearly pulled it off, but for one minor glitch: he knew that he could never again face the honorable Sinclair, knowing he’d done something so dishonorable.  And so, in the end, he confessed the truth to his wife, absolving her of all blame, and settled upon her both the Hamptons house and the penthouse on Central Park West, and happily ensconced himself in modest digs in Murray Hill, where he began to hatch out his plan on how best to approach Sinclair.  The good-hearted and forgiving Sinclair faced one of two choices: to refuse The Joseph and forever feel vindicated and superior, or to accept him and be, simply, happy.

     The night before the black tie gala, Sinclair taps on my apartment door to break the news to me that he believes that Evan is sleeping with his agent—the quintessential New York cougar, thrice-married,  most feared and formidable agent in the city: Wanda Everhart Teely-Turpin.

     “That’s a mouthful of a moniker to shout out during a fit of passion,” Sinclair jokes in poor taste.  Sinclair and The Joseph met Wanda when they dropped off the tuxedos at Evan’s Chelsea apartment.  It was The Joseph who picked up on some subtle body language between them.

     “You went to Evan’s apartment?  You’re crossing the line!  I don’t like that you know more about him than me!”

     Yet it seems, at times, that everyone knows more about Evan than me.

     Sinclair informs me that Evan and Wanda were on their way uptown to Wanda’s place, and she asked him if he had packed his toothbrush.

     “A toothbrush?  That is the most damnable evidence you’ve got against him?  That she asked him if he packed his toothbrush?”

     “Clearly, bringing one’s toothbrush along signifies spending the night,” Sinclair informs me sadly.

     “Maybe his plumbing is broken, and he had to shower or brush his teeth there,” I flounder.

     “She was eyeing him like a cat on a sparrow, a clear indication that nothing is wrong with his plumbing.”  Sinclair sighs, woefully.

     Sinclair wages a campaign to convince me to bring David to the charity event as a backup.  He makes such a brilliant case, that he wears me down.

     It’s easy enough to secure David’s promise to accompany me.  He seems lately almost humble, and certainly repentant for his past sins.  He doesn’t even balk at having to rent a tuxedo, but seems eager for any crumbs I’m willing to sprinkle along his path.

     Sinclair’s eyes are full of approval when he sees me glide into the restaurant wearing the white silk gown he has sewn for me, a near replica of the gown Gigi wore for her first night on the town as Gaston’s courtesan.  My hair is upswept, with curls cascading down my neck.  I wear white satin heels with ankle straps.  I carry a big black velvet drawstring bag, which Sinclair later scolds me is not dainty enough and ruins the symmetry of the ensemble.   I only realized, at the eleventh hour, that I didn’t have a handbag, and so I dug the velvet bag from my closet where it had been serving its purpose as a portfolio of sorts for my short stories.

     Evan is sitting beside Wanda, his arm looped around the back of her chair.  At the sight of me, he extends both arms above his head as if stretching, and brings them to rest on the table in front of him, pulling himself up taller.  His eyes drink me in, and then shift quickly to David and remain there, sizing up his rival.

     Wanda Everhart Teely-Turpin is not beautiful, but, like Dylan, she exudes the aura of being a personage of importance.  She fits the main requirement for Evan’s lovers: she is at least a decade or more older than Evan.  She is short, with large exaggerated features that match her larger-than-life reputation—a prominent nose and full lips and blue eyes rimmed in coats of expertly applied mascara, and hair that may or may not be authentically blonde.  Ample cleavage blooms above her aqua taffeta gown, although she does not move about freely in the gown, as if she is not accustomed to ornamentation.  She’s not prettier than me, which is a relief so enormous that it elevates my mood like a drug.  Her eyes rake over me with an expression that I can’t read: either she’s impressed by my style, or she thinks I am absurdly overdressed for the occasion.