Other Words for Love (17 page)

Mr. Ellis stayed in the limo after the rest of us got out on the Upper East Side. He said something about work and a client and the car took him away. Then Blake and Del and Idalis and I were in the elevator and I tried not to watch as Idalis pushed Del into a corner and kissed him like they were alone.

They kept it up at the penthouse. I didn’t think they would, because Del popped a movie into the VCR in the living room and we all sat together on the couch, but they started fooling around again during the opening credits. Blake had enough.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said, clutching my wrist.

Idalis disconnected her lips from Del’s long enough to reach over and grab my arm. “Yeah,” she said. “Why don’t you take a walk upstairs to Blake’s bedroom?”

Upstairs to Blake’s bedroom
. She said it long and slow, in a sultry voice that embarrassed and insulted me. I was sure I knew what she was thinking—that I was a sexless Debby Boone snoozefest and she was an erotic Madonna peep show. Blake pulled me up from the couch and Del rolled his eyes.

“Leave her alone, Idalis,” Del said, and I adored him for it.

Then Blake and I were on the sidewalk. The sky had clouded over and I heard thunder in the distance. Blake was quiet as we walked to Central Park, where people started clearing from the grass after the sky lit up with an ominous spike of bluish white lightning.

Blake led me to a bench and we sat down. He pulled off his tie, took out his wallet, and showed me a yellowing picture of a young woman. She had big blue eyes and long blond hair that was parted straight down the middle, like a Wella Balsam ad from the seventies. Her skin was tan and her bone structure was regal, and she looked as if she was someone who never expected anything bad to happen to her.

“Is this your mother?” I asked.

He nodded and stared at the buildings in the distance before telling me that she had died while Del was playing Little League baseball. Blake and Del and Mr. Ellis had gone to the game and she’d stayed at home. Del had found her on the kitchen floor when they came back.

“Brain aneurysm,” Blake said. “The doctor who did the autopsy said there was nothing anybody could’ve done. But Del thought it was his fault … he said we could’ve saved her if we’d been there. He never wanted to play baseball anymore after that. He was good at it too.”

I wondered if anyone had ever told Del that it wasn’t his fault. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I bet she’d be proud if she could see you now.”

He smiled. Thunder crashed, lightning ripped across the sky, and we stayed on the bench with our arms around each other even though rain fell in heavy drops around us. I didn’t mind getting soaked because it felt as if Blake needed me, and I wanted him to.

It was a Friday in late August when my boss, Julian, admitted that most of his employees quit after less than a week. The place was a downer for them because of the people who went there. They were called students, even though they were in their twenties and thirties, but they were really just being babysat until their parents came to pick them up at night, and they were easily entertained with crayons and finger paints.

One of them was named Adam. He was twenty-two and had cute dimples, and I was sure that he’d been a popular boy in high school until he got rammed in the head during a football game five years ago. Now he was mildly brain-damaged and he stuttered sometimes, and the highlight of his day seemed to be the pictures I sketched for him—pencil drawings of lakes and mountains. That was what he wanted because he used to hike and fish upstate, and I didn’t mind drawing those things over and over if it made him happy.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking that I’d answered the same question six times already, and if he hadn’t gotten into that accident he could have chosen any girlfriend he wanted.

“You’re pretty,” he said. “You look like Snow White.”

I almost cried. I convinced myself that helping Adam with his painting would stimulate his mind and he might get better someday if I just kept trying.

Blake thought that this was a nice thing to do. He told me so that night, when I met him at work. It was six o’clock and we were standing beside a mahogany reception desk with the words
ELLIS & HUMMEL
printed across it in shiny gold letters.

“Leaving already?” we heard a voice say.

We both turned our heads and saw Mr. Ellis, who was holding a stack of papers in his hands and walking toward us.

“I left copies of the cases you wanted on your desk, Daddy,” Blake said.

Mr. Ellis smiled and smacked Blake on the shoulder. A few minutes later, Blake and I were in the Corvette, where he said he wanted to stop at home to change before dinner. He went to his bedroom at the penthouse and I waited on the couch, admiring the skyline. As I was sitting there, I heard the elevator doors open. I looked toward the foyer and saw Del, who told me that he had come by to pick up an earring that Idalis lost the last time she’d been here.

“We broke up,” he said, taking a seat next to me. “I was sick of her shit, anyway.”

I wondered if that was true. I studied his eyes while he talked, thinking that they were much more green than gray tonight. “Oh, well,” I said. “You’re better off, I suppose.”

He smiled. The scar on his lip curled. Then Blake was on the stairs and Del mentioned Ellis & Hummel. “Do you know what your boyfriend does at work?” he asked, and I shook my head. “He helps our father and his partners raid companies so decent people can lose their jobs.”

I glanced over at Blake. He looked tired. “Cut it out, Del,” he said.

Del didn’t listen. “You know what else they do, Ari? They file frivolous medical-malpractice lawsuits. And they win. That’s why health insurance costs so much and people dying of cancer go bankrupt.”

“Enough already,” Blake said, grabbing my arm. The next thing I knew, we were in the Corvette and Blake was saying he didn’t want to stay in Manhattan. “Let’s go to the Hamptons and order in. I’ve had enough of this city.”

I didn’t argue. He was quiet for the entire drive and when we ate a pizza at the kitchen table. Blake drank a beer and stared into space, and I knew what was wrong.

“You don’t have to work there,” I told him.

“I
do
have to work there, Ari. I can’t let my father down.”

I knew how he felt and I wanted to cheer him up. So I suggested that we sit on the lounge chairs by the pool because it was a nice night, but Blake wanted to swim instead.

“I don’t have a bathing suit,” I said, and he told me that Rachel had left one upstairs.

It was a hot pink bikini with a bottom that tied in a bow on the left hip. I found it in a dresser drawer along with T-shirts and sarongs, in one of those bedrooms with the indirect lighting. Then I stood in front of a full-length mirror on the white carpet, examining my thin legs and my narrow waist and my chest. The bikini crowded my breasts together into a small semblance of cleavage, and I didn’t think they were perfect, like Blake said, but they weren’t all that horrible. So I decided to go to the pool wearing only the bikini and leave Rachel’s shirts in the drawer.

I held my breath all the way down the stairs and across the patio, and I didn’t exhale until Blake smiled at me. Then he picked me up and tossed me into the deep end.

“Jerk,” I said, even though I didn’t mean it. I rubbed chlorine out of my eyes as he dove into the pool, and everything was still blurry when he pulled me into a corner and I put my arms around his neck.

“You look much better in that bikini than Rachel does,” he said.

His hair was slicked back. The lights beneath the water were reflected in his eyes, and I remembered lifting my favorite marble to the sun.

“I can’t compete with Rachel. She’s beautiful.”

“
You’re
beautiful,” he said.

Beautiful
sounded so much better than
pretty
. I smiled, fiddling with his arrowhead charm. “You and Leigh have the same necklace.”

“My grandmother gave one to all of us … me and Leigh and Del. He never wears his, though.”

“Have you spoken to Leigh lately?” I asked, thinking of the letter I had sent her at the end of June. I’d spent a half hour at Hallmark searching through
I’m Sorry
cards. The one I chose had a cartoon cat with forlorn-looking eyes and a daisy in its paw. I sat at my desk for a long time that night, writing
I didn’t realize what I was doing
and
I hope you’ll forgive me
and
Please give me a call so we can talk
. But Leigh had never called or written back, so I guessed she still hadn’t forgiven me. I really couldn’t blame her. Maybe she thought the card was stupid too.
I’m Sorry
cards were so sappy.

“Yeah,” Blake said. “She called me the other day. Haven’t you heard from her?”

“Not lately,” I said casually. Then I looked at the tattoo on Blake’s back and changed the subject. “What is this exactly?” I asked, tracing the circle and the cross and the three feathers with my index finger.

We treaded water while he explained. It was called a medicine wheel and it was a sacred Native American thing. It was also supposed to bring good luck. He’d gotten it from some old Shawnee man down in Georgia.

“Don’t mention it to my father,” Blake said. “He knows about the tattoo, but he wasn’t happy when he found out, so I don’t talk about it. He’s been running from Georgia his whole life … he wants to forget that we have any Shawnee blood in us at all.”

I wasn’t surprised. I thought of Ellis & Hummel and the penthouse and Blake’s mother with her aristocratic father. I imagined Mr. Ellis struggling through school and winning lawsuits so that he could afford to live on the Upper East Side and pretend he’d never eaten a collard green or a hummingbird cake.

“But he gave your brother a Native American name,” I said.

“He didn’t want to. That was his father’s name and it was expected. So he did it.” Blake leaned his head into the pool to soak his hair. He raked it back with his fingers and I watched water droplets collect on his cheeks. “Anyway … just don’t mention the tattoo. Jessica has the same one—he didn’t appreciate that very much, either.”

I’d never heard of Jessica before, but I knew who she was when Blake apologized and said that it isn’t nice for a guy to talk about an old girlfriend.

He was right. It wasn’t nice. It made a queasy lump of envy rise from my stomach to my face. I saw blond hair and a trailer with flowerpots and Blake sleeping with Jessica for two whole years.

“What happened with her?” I asked, as if I had no clue.

“I don’t know,” he said. “She stopped returning my calls. I even went down there to see her, but she was just gone. No explanation.”

That was a cruel thing to do and he didn’t deserve it. “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged as if he didn’t care, but he was a bad actor. Then we kissed. The water in the pool was warm and so were Blake’s lips and tongue as they touched mine. He untied my top and slid it off, and then his mouth was on my chest in a way that made me worry about the neighbors. But Mr. Ellis had a lot of property, so I doubted that anyone could see from two acres away.

“We have to stop now,” Blake said suddenly. “Or I won’t be able to stop.”

I hated stopping. It was grating on my nerves. But I came to my senses when my top was back on and we were drying off on the patio. We rested on lounge chairs and Blake read the
New York Post
while I decided that he was smart to stop what we’d been doing in the pool. There were things to consider before I could have what he used to give to Jessica.

“Blake,” I said.

He was reading the sports section:
YANKEES CRUSH KANSAS CITY
. “Yeah?”

“How many girls have you been with?”

There. I did it. I’d been wondering ever since Evelyn had brought it up on Memorial Day and I needed to know, because terrible things could dwell in the most unlikely places.

He rested the newspaper on his lap. “It isn’t nice to talk about that.”

“We have to. These days, people have to talk about it.”

He nodded. Then he held up two fingers.

“Really?” I said. “Jessica and who else?”

“Somebody older. That was the first time.” He rolled his eyes. “I barely knew her … I met her at a bar in the city that Del dragged me to when I was sixteen and it felt like she was going to the bathroom on me. That’s how sex is if you don’t care about each other—it’s no good at all.” He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the lounge chair. “Listen, Ari. I don’t have AIDS or anything else. I’ll get a blood test so you don’t have to worry.”

I wasn’t worried anymore; he didn’t need a blood test. I shook my head but he insisted that he’d see his doctor, and then he checked his watch and said that we should head back to the city.

I went upstairs. The bikini was dry now and I stood in front of the mirror again, studying my body. The door was open, and when I saw Blake’s reflection pass by in the hall, I called his name. He joined me on the carpet and I waved my hand in front of my chest.

“Can you tell?” I asked. “I mean … that I’m uneven?”

He held his fist to my cheek. “You
aren’t
. If you say that one more time, I’ll make you sorry.”

I laughed and we kissed again, even though Blake warned me that it was close to nine and we had a long drive ahead.

So what? Mom wanted me home at
a reasonable hour
and there was still plenty of time before the reasonable hours were gone. I distracted him from the clock by lying on the bed and crooking my finger. Then it was Wednesday afternoon all over again, this time on a white comforter stuffed with feathers that felt as soft as a field of cotton puffs.

“Ari,” Blake said. He was lying on top of me and he still hadn’t put a shirt on. His naked chest, the muscles in his stomach, and the trail of hair that began at his navel and disappeared inside his shorts got me all shivery, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could worry about being
nice
. “I love you.”

I gasped. I wanted to say the same but he wouldn’t give me a chance. He told me not to say it until I was ready and that I shouldn’t say it unless I meant it, and I was about to ask him to shut up because I
was
ready and I
did
mean it. But I couldn’t say a word because he kissed me again, and his hands were on that bow on my hip.