Blue Rose In Chelsea (5 page)

     “No, I have to.  My most treasured possession is in that bag.”  I pivot, in a fog of panic.

     “I thought you said those jeans were split at the crotch.”  Subtlety is not Dylan’s strong point.  “I’ll buy you new jeans,” Dylan offers with the authority of someone with plenty of cash flow to easily replace lost items.

     “No, it’s not the jeans.  It’s something in the pocket of the jeans.  I have to go get it.”  I’ve already turned on my heel and begun the blurry journey back.  The blue drinks have worked their delirious magic on me.  The city is like some wonderland of winking lights and molasses slow movement.  Brandon has caught up with me, chaperoning my drunken sojourn back to the club.  We find the bag in our booth; no one has been seated there since we left.  I rummage through it and feel, with relief, for the holy relic.

     Brandon and I make our way back.  I laugh over-enthusiastically at some story he is telling me, perhaps to make some point to Evan, to show him I’m not really affected by his withdrawal from me.

     “We missed the train, hopefully there’s another local to Kew Gardens,” Dylan groans.  He prefers the train out of Penn, which stops closer to his apartment than the E train subway station.  “So, what was the big life and death object?  Where’s the Holy Grail?”  Dylan makes a swipe for the pink bag, but I feint like a prizefighter.  He turns away, but then swivels with a surprise attack, seizing the bag with his big bear paw.

     “Knock it off, Dylan, give it back!”  Like some defective mechanical toy I toggle about him, trying to reach around his hulking frame.

     “There’s only this ratty bandanna.”  He holds it at arm’s length over an open grate, as if it were hazardous waste.

     “Don’t!” I scream, and Dylan allows me to snatch it from his clutches.  I wind it around my hair, like a cotton tiara, tying it at the crown of my curls.

     Dylan’s attempt to make me look foolish has somehow backfired.  Evan suddenly looks at me in the old way again, as he discovers that my most prized possession is his blue bandanna.  There’s no kiss on the cheek for me tonight when we part.  He remains distant and cautious, but he reaches out and gives a gently affectionate tug to one of my curls, letting it spring back like a silky coil, then, turning a dark corner with Brandon, he is gone.

~ 5 ~

Mr. Palmer Is Very Droll

     “I’d promise you anything, is the one thing you must never say to a man,” my cousin, Careen, scolds me, as she assumes the White Crane position.

     Careen is attempting to teach me Tai Chi.  She has been studying with someone in Queens called Oz Chinmore, who her husband refers to as
Is Chinless
.  We are in the small backyard of her brownstone in Brooklyn.  She has erected a little table with chipped pale blue paint.  The simplicity of it reminds me somehow of our Brooklyn childhoods, back when people didn’t fuss so much with appearances, when things didn’t have to be perfect.  The table is set for tea.

     “You must keep a man on his toes,” she advises, rising onto her own, which are perfectly manicured.

     “I think he’s tired of being on his toes,” I say, in reference to Evan’s defunct ballet career.

     “Perhaps he needs some time on his back, then.”  Careen winks.

     I lift my leg slowly, raising droopy wrists in imitation of Careen’s crane posture.  My old Flashdance-inspired sweatshirt slips off my shoulder.  I remember the summer I visited Careen in England; we desperately wanted to be Jennifer Beals and embarked on a quest for pencil-point jeans, cheap crimson pumps, and gray sweatshirts that we proceeded to snip to pieces.  We worked out hard, to the strains of
Maniac
.  We pedaled our bikes around London, pretending we were just as free and independent as the character, Alex, in the movie.  My mop of unruly dark curls helped me pull off the look beautifully, something that still sticks in Careen’s craw.

     “I can’t help but feel that everything would be different now, if only I had kissed him back.  It would link us together somehow.”

     “He can’t be as cocky as you say, if one rejection would cause him such an upset.”

     “I didn’t say cocky.  I said confident.”  I aim my droopy wrist at her for emphasis.

     “Perhaps it was your sense of esthetics kicking in.  The man tried to kiss you in a toilet!”  She does a little flourishy gesture with her hand, like a game show girl presenting a prize.  I’m not sure if this is part of the form and I should imitate it, or if it’s just Careen punctuating her thoughts.

     “That sounds like something Dylan would say.  It wasn’t in a toilet.  It was in the area just outside the rest rooms.”

     “It was rather brash of him to kiss you at all.  Perhaps this will knock him down a peg or two.”

     I point out that George Emerson spontaneously kissed Lucy Honeychurch in a field of violets in
A Room With A View
, and that kiss changed everything.  It set events in motion that sealed their fate.

     “All your references in life are from books.”

     “That’s exactly why I left Princeton!”  I snap open my palms, in commendation of Careen’s profundity.

     I give up on White Crane and sit cross-legged tearing up blades of grass and gazing in the distance.  The house behind

Careen’s, with its square four stories of lavender shingles, reminds me of my childhood friend, Lilliana.  Lilliana lived directly behind us; she taught me Spanish songs that I can still recite today.

     Careen and I retire to the kitchen for lunch, when her husband appears.  “Stop talking.  I’m coming,” he warns, because we always suspend our girly subjects when he enters a room.  We try to be discreet about it, but our silences are always so abrupt that he’s on to us.  He rummages for something in the cabinet.  Careen sets an arame salad before me.  It looks like something that washed up on the beach.  She places tiny tomatoes beside it.

     “My wife is convinced she can cheat death one tomato at a time,” the meat and potatoes man warns me.  “Okay, give me thirty seconds to get out of earshot, then carry on.”

     “Mr. Palmer, you are very droll!” Careen teases him, a line lifted straight from Jane Austen’s
Sense and Sensibility
.  He earned the nickname from us years ago, due to his affinity for dry and amusing commentary, just like the character in the novel.

     A small posse of bikers assembles outside Careen’s gateway, comrades of Mr. Palmer.  “Why do these middle-aged motorcycle men all dress exactly alike?  Always the leather jacket, sweaty boots, and pathetic ponytail.”  Careen wrinkles her nose in disgust.

     “Actually, every Harley comes with a leather coat and clip-on ponytail,” Mr. Palmer deadpans, as he moves to join his buddies on the street.

     “Ponytails for men ought to be outlawed after age forty!” Careen hisses into my ear.  I point out that the bikers are listening to something classical on their radio, Vivaldi’s
Four
Seasons.
  “Yes, even Britain’s bikers are genteel,” Careen says, with a sigh.

     Careen is a few years older than me.  We grew up together in Brooklyn, although when Careen was twelve, her father, a military man, transferred to a base in England.  Careen spent the greater part of her life on foreign shores, and, thus, in many ways she is more English than American.  She maintains a British accent.  My favorite Jane Austen quotes roll with ease off her tongue.  But despite her British turns of phrase and penchant for cream tea, the Brooklyn girl is still very much alive and well, which is obvious to me when,--after the seaweed soup--she proposes that we sit outside on the stoop and wait for the ice cream truck so as to buy Italian ices, lemon and cherry, our respective favorites.

     There is something about being in the old neighborhood that always unleashes a flood of memories.  Careen and I reminisce about our childhoods—the time Dylan tied Careen to a chair and couldn’t undo the knots and she had to walk home with a chair back strapped to her; the time I won a Mr. Softee sweepstakes and, to Dylan’s horror, chose the cheapest thing on the menu, a vanilla cup that cost a dime.  Dylan pleaded with me to get him the banana split, promising to buy me the ten cent cup himself.

     Careen nods vigorously, but cannot comment due to a mouthful of cherry ice stinging the new fillings in her teeth.

     I’ve told Careen almost everything about Evan, but I’ve left out a few details, like the fact that Evan is an actor.  Careen is not keen on creative types.  Before she married the salt-of-the-earth Mr. Palmer, she was married briefly to a musician/painter/writer, and she is of the opinion that men in the arts are self-absorbed, eternally dissatisfied, and believe the common rules of decency (and employment) don’t apply to them.  She has, at last, found happiness with the strong silent “Mr. Palmer,” a carpenter by trade from the quaint English village of Filkins.

     We watch Mr. Palmer fraternize with his British biker friends.  Careen bombards me with questions about the night at Delta, but much of it I can’t recall with any clarity.

     “Try to remain sober in his presence,” she advises, matter-of-factly.  “If for no other reason than to provide a complete recounting of events to me.”

     It’s difficult to remain sober, or to maintain any balance whatsoever in Evan’s presence.  He is like some cyclone that just blows my skirts and my entire being off kilter.  It feels as if the world is speeding up when he’s near, as if my very life might sprint out from under me if I don’t grab hold of it.

     “Lust,” she concludes, between slurps of cherry ice.  We’re down to the slushy remains, which require a certain skill of squeezing the pleats of the paper cup, and angling it just so.

     Careen tells me about her good friend and co-worker, Hazel, who suspects that her husband is having an affair.  Hazel uncovered a bevy of mysterious calls at ungodly hours on her husband’s business phone, and traced the calls to a woman who owns a coffee shop in the city, and, to boot, the coffee shop is where Hazel and her husband had their first date years ago, a place that holds significant romantic meaning for them.  Careen is already concocting a caper to get to the bottom of it, with a plan to recruit me.

     “She is distraught, on the verge of filing for divorce.  She hasn’t yet confronted him; she is still doing her own research and planning her strategy.  But she’s considering walking away completely, and she wants to tell him to just take everything!  Which is the one thing you must never say to a man, because, of course, they will.”

     Mr. Palmer’s biker friends have roared off in a cloud of exhaust and windblown tails, and he is now engaged in unsticking a window in the bedroom above us.  His head seems to float in the frame.  He tosses a tool out the window, where it clatters onto the studded metal cellar board below.  “Of course, we don’t mean you, Mr. Palmer, you are prodigiously fair in all matters!” Careen calls, before placing the flattened paper cup of ice whole in her mouth, to suck the remaining juices.

     “I told her if it ever comes down to divorce, she must fight for what is rightly hers.   He would not be where he is today if it wasn’t for her urging him on at all times.  Why, if not for Hazel, he’d never have had the balls to start his own business.  I see this kind of thing all the time.  It takes a good woman to get behind a man and give him a kick in the knickers.  They say it was Wordsworth’s sister who came up with the image of the dancing daffodils.  Some say if it wasn’t for Nancy, the President would still be making B movies with chimps, instead of battling the communists.”

     Mr. Palmer can bear it no longer.  “I suppose Hitler invaded Poland because Eva Braun told him to get the hell off the sofa and do something with his life,” he calls, although all we see is the top of his tousled hair, which the wind has coiffed like Mozart’s periwig, at the window.

     “Oh, Mr. Palmer, you are very droll!” we chant together, collapsing into giggles.

~ 6 ~

Bunny In The Big Leagues

     Brandon has a part in a one-act play at a theatre over on Sixty-Seventh and Lexington.  Dylan and his drummer, Joe, and I step out of Unique Studios onto the sunny street.  I’ve completed my piano tracks, although Joe’s drum tracks are going to require another session.

     “You told Evan you were on the brink of greatness,” Dylan announces, like a bolt from the blue.  He lights a cigarette, stubbing it out with a big black loafer.

     “I didn’t say that.  Did I say that?”  I consult Joe, as I recall the brain-altering effects of the blue drink.

     “I’m afraid so.”  Joe pats my hand, as if I were a child in need of comfort.  It must be true if Joe, who wasn’t even there that night, knows about it.  They talk sports while I rerun the events of the evening in my mind.  I vaguely remember telling Evan about an article about a writer who a book reviewer believed to be on the brink of greatness.  Perhaps I scrambled the details?

     “I was talking about a writer in the Times book review, not myself,” I offer abruptly. They freeze with blank expressions, like a video put on pause, then, unfazed, resume their conversation.

     I quickly formulate a plan, which grows exponentially complex with each passing moment, namely, that I must avoid crossing paths with Evan again at all costs, as it would be too humiliating.  Granted, I’ll need the cooperation of Dylan, Brandon, and Joe, which could be tricky.  I imagine instructing the three stooges in the seamless execution of my plan, unveiling elaborate sketches of possible scenarios and routes of escape.