Cupcake (17 page)

Dante advised I should have not been surprised by the lack of good espresso to be found in New York City--it's all about the water. The water here has the necessary purity and flavor to significantly contribute to the quality of the area's outstanding bagels and pizza dough, and to make a decent espresso possible, but the water is reportedly deficient in calcium, which gives body to espresso. If I want to taste perfection, I need to go to Naples, where the volcanic soil from Mount Vesuvius provides the world's most superior water source for espresso.

Dante reeducates as well as lectures.
"Bella,
La Marzocco is not the 'Cadillac of machines.'" It's an excellent machine, agreed-- though it's a Toyota Camry, always reliable and it will last forever, but art? No. The best espresso machines have long unpronounceable Italian names that sound like symphonies when articulated out

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of Dante's mouth. I'd have to go to Italy to see them, because they're surely not going to be found in this land of coffee philistines--and
signorina,
those machines are Lamborghinis.

I am but a mere barista novice, according to Dante. My instincts are good, but I have
molto
to learn. But he sees my
potenziale.
Dante sees Shrimp's potential too--but advises that Shrimp is like him, someone who will be a barista to support the wandering lifestyle, as opposed to Shrimp's
vero amore
(me), who will wander around only until she finds a barista lifestyle to support.

Gurus are so full of themselves with the
spiegazione,
but with espresso that tasty, what do I care? Keep bringing on that enlightenment.

My Shrimp-love-haze-fog streams so thick I don't sweat Dante's superior abilities. I'm young. I'll get better and better. I totally ace Dante's art and science of espresso-making with the pure love I dose in. And I have my own true love--reinstated, if admittedly indeterminate, but who cares? The here and now is good, good, good. What's Dante got? Caffeinated nerves of steel and a passport.

Also, I am a way better polka dancer than Dante.

"You're stepping on my feet!" I said to Dante after the record skipped from our dance-jumping. I slipped out of Dante's arms and added a penny onto the needle arm of the old portable record player borrowed from Max's apartment. The penny addition helped--the

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Lawrence Welk record from Danny's one dollah LP collection mellowed to basic scratches instead of skips.

Last year on New Year's Eve, after a "just friends" period following our first breakup, Shrimp and I reunited and it felt so good. This year, after yet another breakup and reunion, we had no interest in the Times Square ball-dropping or the champagne. Instead we got drunk on caffeine with Johnny and Dante, played Parcheesi with them, and finished up the celebrating with a round of Lawrence Welk polka dancing. The glamour never stops here in Manhattan.

"I am a fantastic dancer!" Dante disputed. "Ask Johnny!"

Johnny shrugged over the sci-fi/fantasy paperback novel gripping his attention. "Dante's pretty good," he mumbled. The poor boy looked spent from our New Year's Eve celebration at LU_CH_ONE_TE, but the hard-core straight-edge punk won't acknowledge he has a hard time staying awake past ten in the evening--which may offer some
spiegazione
as to why none of his bands survive.

"Bella
just wants to save herself for Shrimp's last dance," Dante said.

Vero.
Shrimp felt too far away even from a few feet away. I settled for sigh-staring at his beautiful backside standing at the front window, as Shrimp spray-painted the missing LU_CH_ONE_TE letters with the missing N, E and T, graffiti-style.

The D-Man down in KW was not experiencing the same lover

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bliss as his sister CC. I knew trouble had found Danny in Key West when I saw his name flash on my cell phone just as I was about to polka Shrimp home and ring in the New Year with him properly.

I answered, "Danny boy, you gave up the Village on New Year's Eve, so shouldn't you be acting like the Village People down in Key West and not calling your younger sister at one in the morning?"

"CC," Danny slobbered from his end of the call. "Help me! I'm lost!"

"Where are you? Should I call the police?"

"No, I'm in my hotel room. Perfectly safe."

"Then what's the problem?"

"The empty Veuve Clicquot bottle beside my bed might be part of the problem?"

I so wanted to lay some rules down on my drunken brother, but I decided to go the compassionate route instead. "Regret finally fucking caught up with you?" I asked him.

"YES!" he sputtered, sounding near tears. Then his lips let rip, almost like my caffeinated-polkanated state had roared through the cell phone airwaves and into his inebriated bloodstream. "Ceece, do you understand? Aaron and I got together in high school, we never dated anyone else. I was in a committed relationship from the time I was eighteen. I never got that time of dating other people and finding myself or whatever it is you're supposed to do in your twenties. And then the business went under and everything was a mess

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and I needed change. I needed to experience new things, new people, independent of Aaron. I let him go. But now I'm getting my shit together again and I want him back, and I don't know what to do. I royally fucked up. I don't deserve him, but I want him back anyway. It's not just that I won't ever do better than Aaron--I know I won't, knew that even when I broke up with him. It's that now I'd never want to have anyone other than Aaron again. And this other guy he's seeing is talking moving in together; he's practically ready to register them at Macy's! Aaron
hates
Macy's! Anyone who truly loves him knows that Aaron is partial to Bloomies! Stop laughing, that's not an insignificant detail. Ceece, they're making me physically sick! I can't fake this 'just friends' thing with Aaron any longer. What am I supposed to do, sage little sister?"

"Earn him back," I said. "And call me back when you're sober so I can repeat that advice so's you'll actually remember it."

If Danny could earn Aaron back, surely I could believe that my holiday vacation love haze with Shrimp had the hope for a happy ending rather than the old stalemate.

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***

THIRTY-TWO

Yvette Mimieux has been outed as a diva. Diva fault number one:

She's very ornery about sitting in one place for long periods of time to pose for Shrimp's cereal still-life paintings of her. Diva fault number two: She hates to fly on airplanes.

Max's sentence for Yvette's diva crimes: Yvette should stay home for the month of January instead of accompanying Max for his annual winter visit with his elderly mother in Sun City, Arizona. Her stay at home would be made possible by Shrimp, who should cat-sit while Max is gone, thus giving Shrimp enough time to convince Yvette to sit still long enough for Shrimp to complete a whole series of cereal paintings in her honor.

Max held Yvette on his lap, crouching over to kissy-face her as he told her, "Yvette, you minx, you'd better comply since Shrimp is sparing you the airplane trauma and sparing you a month with my

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mother, who hates you and kicks you when she doesn't think I'm looking. Remember Mommy Dearest, Yvette?" Max turned Yvette so she faced a framed photograph of Max's mother. Yvette
miaule
'd her displeasure and jumped off Max's lap, scurrying to her favorite hiding place underneath the piano.

Shrimp peeked out from behind his easel (belated Christmas present from me), where he sat on Max's piano bench completing the final touches on Yvette's portrait. The artwork consisted of oat and bran cereal glued onto a canvass in cat form, then painted over in Yvette's colors and face, like cerealsy brilliant impressionism as only Shrimp could bring it. Shrimp said, "I don't remember agreeing to this situation?"

Max and I both proclaimed, "Of course you agree!"

The whole situation could be like killing two birds with one Shrimp, which Yvette, who hates birds more than Max's mother hates her, could surely appreciate. The cat-sitting gig would allow Shrimp to stay in NYC longer, once Danny returned home and kept me to my promise that Shrimp would only stay at our apartment while Danny was away for the holidays, and it would give Yvette a reprieve from her annual visit with Mommy Dearest. Everybody would win.

But Shrimp wavered. "I don't know," he said.

"I'll leave you two lovebirds alone for a few minutes to discuss," Max said. He headed to his bedroom, squealing
"Chirp, chirp!"
to us before he slammed the bedroom door closed.

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I sat down on the piano bench next to Shrimp, cozying up to his side and resting my head on his shoulder. "Pretty please?" I pouted. "Don't do that; it's icky," Shrimp said. Honeymoon's over?

I dropped the pout and called it straight. "I want you to stay. Do you want you to stay?"

Last night in the dark we both whispered "yes" to the hovered "Has there been anyone else?" question that finally pushed itself out of the closet. We both answered "no" to the follow-up clean break question--"Does it really make a difference?" I don't know which mattered more--our ease of honesty with each other, or that the honest answer honestly didn't matter. Fair is fair. Trust is trust.

Instead of answering the stay or go question, Shrimp picked pieces of cereal off the canvass. He held up a Cheerio painted ginger, from a spot formerly on Yvette's portrait face. After about a minute of intense Cheerio contemplation, Shrimp announced, "I want to stay." He sealed the deal with a kiss on my neck.

Book us that honeymoon suite, Max!

"What made you decide?" I asked.

"Cereal mandalas."

"Huh?"

"I'm going to take this painting apart and do it over. Like a sand mandala."

"Huh--times two?"

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Shrimp said, "I'm inspired by the sand mandala philosophy right now, want to apply it to the cereal art. Remember when I went out with Dante to the Tibetan Buddhist place near Union Square? Well, some monks had a sand mandala on exhibition there. What happens is, teams of monks use metal funnels to place grains of dyed sand into these incredibly intricate patterns that are formed into geometric designs symbolic of the universe. You have to see it; you'd be awed. Dante said the mandala represents an imaginary palace that is contemplated during meditation. The monks'll spend days creating a single mandala, and then they have like a spiritual ceremony to celebrate it, and then--you can't believe this part--
WHOOSH,
they destroy the masterwork. It's meant to be about the transient nature of existence. Dante said the destruction of the mandala serves to remind one of the impermanence of life. I imagine it's like surfing--wiping out over and over as a metaphor for the meaning of life. Heavy shit. Or sand, as the case may be."

Not bad for a high school dropout, I'd say. To Shrimp I said, "So the fact of me had nothing to do with your decision to stay?"

Shrimp laughed, kinda. "Of course it had to do with you. Everything's about you. Obviously." Says the boy who presented me the sketchbook devoted to Myself. Make up your mind, buddy! "You think I actually understood Dante's sermons on transcendental transience or whatever?"

My mind was made up. My loverboy was as smart and deep as

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he is beautiful. "I totally think you do. I think you're intrigued to know more. I think that's pretty fucking cool."

"I think you know me better than me."

"That's why I'm me who loves you even though everything's obviously all about me." I pinched his side gently, kinda.

"Ow," he muttered.

"Look around this apartment, Shrimp," I said, admiring the movie star magazine photographs, the flags, the art deco furniture, the hot-pink lamps with the velvet tassels hanging down from the lamp shades. Inspiration, everywhere. "You belong here."

Shrimp pulled me closer to him. "No,
you
belong here. But I will make good use of the time here." He pulled a stack of business cards from his pants pocket. "I've got all these people who want to hire me for odd jobs. So when I'm not painting Yvette or hanging with you or going off on some meditational daze, at least I can be building up the cash situation until I figure out the next move."

Thank you, Max, thank you for the month. I know Shrimp and I will figure out the next move by then, and it will be a move in together. I believe!

Max came back into the living room. "Documents have been drawn up and printed on the computer in my bedroom. Now, Cyd Charisse, if you'll just sign here, you're agreeing to take custody of Yvette Mimieux if my plane crashes...."

Assuming Danny's plane home doesn't crash, now all I had to

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do was break it to the Danny diva--the one person who doesn't love Shrimp like everyone loves Dante--that Shrimp would be sticking around longer than expected. Like, maybe permanently without danger of the impermanent nature of transcendental mediation, or meditation, or something.

Bottom line, that's all about me, me, me: This diva win, win, wins!

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***

THIRTY-THREE

Hallelujah. As
predicted, Danny's
vacation was a complete disaster!

What I could not have predicted was how hard-to-get Aaron would play it. Good on him. He's making Danny earn it.

Danny cannot recount the tale to me enough, but I love the story, I don't mind. At six in the morning in Danny's rented kitchen space, I barely had the energy to sit upright at the cupcake decorating preparation table, much less engage Danny in conversation myself.

Even before caffeination Danny could fire into the story full steam ahead and at the same time go about the business of massive cupcake production. "So I got off the phone with you on New Year's Eve and went down to the beach, thinking I'd have a walk or maybe just pass out on the sand. But there was Aaron and what's-his-name, strolling along the surf, hand in hand. Pass me that oven