Wish Club (27 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to…you surprised me, that’s all.”

He didn’t seem surprised at her response; he seemed used to startling people. He asked her for change. Claudia was about to refuse, but then she reached into her wallet and handed him a twenty-dollar bill. He stared at it in disbelief.

“Are you serious?” he said. He didn’t smile. He looked at it as if he was curious, holding it out in two fingers of each filthy hand.

“Take it.” She almost started to tell him she was having a bad day, that it would make her feel better to do something nice, but instead she said, “Just take it. Please. It’ll make me feel better.”

And it did.

Good grief,
she thought as she was walking away; she’d come close to telling someone who slept under viaducts that
she
was having a bad day. Nothing like having a little perspective dropped on your head like an anvil. She looked down her street. It was a nice street. Maybe they didn’t own a condo or a house—but they had a nice place. Her life wasn’t so bad.

She had Dan. She had her friends. And so far, she still had her job. Who knows why things with Elliot hadn’t worked out? Maybe there was a bigger reason behind it that she couldn’t see yet. Maybe it could
still
work out. All the wishes could end up resolving themselves even if they never found a witch to help them.

By the time Claudia got to her front door, she was feeling better, about life, the universe, and everything.

But it wasn’t long after Claudia got home, that this new-found optimism shattered around her.

“He didn’t say what he wanted,” Dan repeated. “He just said he would talk to you on Monday.” Dan sounded frustrated. He’d already explained it to her twice.

“Peterson called here.” Claudia was thinking out loud. “Charles Peterson, Headmaster at the Arthur G. Strawn Academy of Arts and Sciences calls here, to talk to me, in my home, and then doesn’t leave a message?”

“Right.”

“Oh, God, no. I just know it’s the witchcraft thing. Or the Elliot thing. Oh God, whatever it is, it’s not good.” Claudia started to whine, “Oh man oh man oh man, I just know this is bad.”

“Maybe it’s not.” Dan sounded hopeful, as if he was trying to sound like
her.
“Maybe you’re getting a promotion.”

Claudia laughed. “Peterson doesn’t hand out promotions over the phone. He likes to make big productions out of them at staff meetings. Besides, what is he going to promote me to? Assistant Assistant Head of the English Department? C’mon. This is not good. He has never called here before.”

“What happened to my Claudia? The girl for whom the glass is always half full?”

For the first time in her marriage, Claudia wanted to slug him. Her emotions had been wobbling on the edge between anger and melancholy ever since she’d left the hospital. And now this. This was how he was going to make her feel better? By poking fun at her? Next thing she knew, he was gonna snort.

What could Peterson want that is so important he’s calling me at home? Was it the witchcraft thing? Was Jill going around—?
“Shit.” Claudia looked at her watch. “Shit. Jill. I’m supposed to—”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you he called. There’s nothing you can do about it till Monday, and he didn’t leave a number for you to reach him—”

“I have his number. It’s not that, it’s Jill. I’m supposed to be at the gallery. I’m supposed to be with Lindsay and Mara; we were going to talk to Jill.” Claudia started to get up off the couch.

Dan grabbed her hand. “I know you’re upset about Elliot. I’m disappointed, too.” He squeezed her hand. When she looked into his eyes, she could have sworn he looked as if he meant it. She put her weight back down onto the couch.

“He was…I don’t know, a cute kid.” Dan shrugged, then continued. “It would have been fun for us to be a family. And now you’ve got this thing with Peterson, and you promised your friends about the opening…but why don’t you take a break for one night? You’ve been completely stressed out lately. Maybe you should take a night off this once, forget about everyone else and what you
should
be doing and just stay here with me. We’ve hardly seen each other all week. We could order in some food. I could go rent a movie…or, hey, maybe you’d rather go out instead?”

Claudia sighed. It really did sound great. Better than some uptight gallery opening anyway.

“I’m sure we can find something to do that’ll make you feel better.” Dan smiled a wicked smile.

Claudia sniffed, looked up at the ceiling, the beginnings of a smile on her lips.
How was he always able to do that?
“So, you’re saying I should stay home? Just forget about my friends?”

He inhaled a deep breath through his teeth and held it in while he said, “That would be my advice.” He exhaled after the last word, his tone full of a fake bravado that suggested she’d be a fool not to take it.

“Really? And there’s nothing in it for you?”

“In it for me?” Dan smiled, innocent and boyish. A fake Indian accent now, “No, no. All my advice is purely selfless.” He scooched over closer to her on the couch.

“Is that right? And what else does The Great Wise One advise?”

Dan put his hands into prayer position and closed his eyes. After a brief pause, he said, “For you, I think sex. Tantric sex—all weekend long.”

“Hmm. I don’t know, seems a little self-serving to me…maybe I should go to the next mountain over, seek out different counsel…”

“Hey.” Dan grabbed her around the waist.

“—although this guru’s pretty cute.” Claudia let herself dissolve into his arms. She really couldn’t think of a better escape from the tensions of the week.

“All right, Great Wise One,” she said. “I’ll take your advice.” She tilted her head up, threw her arms around his neck and her legs over his. “Let’s order some Indian food and then see what this guru knows about the Kama Sutra.”

And with an uncharacteristic lack of guilt, Claudia blew off her friends.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The
washing machine started its spin cycle with a click, and Mara checked her watch. She knew Jill’s opening lasted until eight, but they’d agreed to meet there at five-thirty. It was almost five, but if the washer finished her pants in the next ten minutes, allowing twenty minutes to dry, she would be less than twenty minutes late—which, if you were an airline, was practically on time.

She knew she really should have planned her outfit earlier, but she couldn’t possibly have predicted that she wouldn’t have
anything
to wear. And this was not the standard pre-social-engagement, female predicament of
I don’t have a thing to wear.
It was the more unusual, yet more prevalent, predicament for her lately, the
I don’t have a thing to wear that fits over my new thighs.
She truly didn’t have a thing she
could
wear.

Mara’s bed and dresser were strewn with cast-off clothes, pants, skirts, and dresses that didn’t fit. There’d been one other pair of pants she had thought she might be able to get away with, if she didn’t button the top button and wore a long sweater over them, but the zipper wouldn’t stay up and they kept falling down. Which left her with the pants she’d worn at work all day, but they had two ketchup spots on the right knee, from the cheeseburger she’d eaten in the car on the way home.

In a moment of hopeless desperation, she’d walked over to Henry’s closet for a look. That’s when she’d started crying.
What is happening to me? I’m so fat.

It was horrible,
horrible,
the way she felt, the way people stared at her now. She could feel them whispering behind her back, their words sinking into her flesh the way sound penetrates through water, the way
whales
communicated. Every time she passed a mirror she felt disgusted and swore she would never eat another bite of food as long as she lived. But every time she passed the refrigerator, she did.

And poor Henry. His whole back and chest were covered with hair. His bald spot had filled in and he was shaving so many times in a day she’d lost track. The hair on his arms and legs was thickening more and more. Dr. Bernstein had been little help. He’d run some hormone tests but they were still waiting for the results. Henry had joked at dinner last night that the boys on the baseball team were teasing him, saying they were worried Coach O’Connor was going to leave his coaching position to take the mascot job for the Strawn Academy Wolverines. He’d rubbed the top of his head when he told her the story and she could tell he loved the feel of hair up there; it was the hair everywhere else that was getting to him.

The washing machine started to wobble out of balance and she had to reach in and even out the load. She checked her watch again. It was after five now; the spin cycle was taking longer than she’d thought. But what was she supposed to do? By the time she’d realized she only had one pair of pants she could wear, it was already too late. She’d put them into the washing machine and watched them disappear under the suds.

Now her slacks spun around and around.
I should call them—but I’ll only be a little bit late, and besides it’s Lindsay and Claudia. They won’t mind if I get there at six.
Mara walked upstairs to the kitchen, to get the phone.
I should call, really. It’s only polite.
But when she got upstairs, she passed up the phone on the counter and headed for the refrigerator instead.

Everyone
was talking, their voices loud and animated. Now and then laughter rose up from a group. Jill’s paintings lined the raw brick walls and several display walls on the interior of the gallery. The track lights beamed down from the ceiling with perfect intensity, illuminating the art and the people and casting a nice glow on the hardwood floors. With wineglasses and canapés in hand, all the guests were mingling happily, and Lindsay had to wonder if she would be tormented forever by the sights and sounds of a successful party.

Her husband, James, had found someone to talk real estate with, and they’d been going on and on about all the loft conversions in the neighborhood while Lindsay sipped her wine and tried to look interested.

Normally, she enjoyed a nice gallery opening, a chance to see and be seen, to shop and chat, and she usually always ran into someone she knew. But tonight she couldn’t help but search the crowd, trying to find Jill, who so far was nowhere to be seen. The same for Claudia and Mara.
Where are those guys?

Lindsay checked her watch. Six-fifteen. The opening only lasted until eight. What could be keeping them?

The front door opened, and Lindsay’s head snapped around as it had the last several times, but it was just a young, twentysomething couple wearing their trendy 1970s clothes.

“I think I’m going to go shopping,” Lindsay said to James. But she wasn’t really interested in buying any art; she wanted another glass of wine, something to help take the edge off.

“Just save us some money for cab fare,” James said before turning back to his loft-condo conversation.

It wasn’t unusual for Claudia to be late. Lindsay didn’t know why it was upsetting her so much. But where was Mara? Lindsay worked her way around the groups of people, looking for anyone she might know. She glanced over Jill’s paintings while taking little sips of her wine, then went to refill her wineglass.

A few sculptures, not Jill’s, were placed here and there, and Lindsay was intrigued by them. The one she’d spotted when she walked in the door had raised her eyebrows. She thought it might be fun, a lesson in psychology, to stake out that “flower” all night, to watch the reactions of those who went by, to see who saw it for what it was—and who didn’t.

“I don’t know where Jill is. I can’t believe she’s missing it,” Lindsay overheard a woman’s voice behind her.

“Maybe she wants to make a dramatic entrance,” a tall, dark-haired man answered, “or maybe she’s not coming at all.”

Lindsay pretended to be admiring another of the glass flower sculptures, walking around it slowly, trying to make it appear that she was more interested in seeing the sculpture from all sides, than in overhearing the conversation going on behind her.

“No way. She’d never missed an opening. She loves the attention. Maybe I should try to call her, to see if she’s okay.”

The man shrugged. “If you must.”

“Oh, Davis, you’re probably right. I’m being silly.” The woman was laughing now. “Jill’s probably just being moody. Her father used to tell me her mother was difficult like that.”

The couple drifted away and Lindsay was tempted to follow them, but that would be
too
obvious.
Is Jill not coming at all? Blowing off her own opening night? What is going on with her?

Lindsay looked back toward the front of the gallery, scanning the crowd for Claudia or Mara.
I am going to kill those two, talking me into showing up here to confront Jill, and then both of them just blow it off without so much as a phone call.
At that thought, Lindsay flipped open the top of her purse to check her cell phone. Nothing.

She continued her wandering and found several small paintings hanging on the back wall. They weren’t abstracts and obviously weren’t part of Jill’s show, which had turned out to be surprisingly small. Lindsay walked slowly past them, contemplating each one absently with a sip of wine.

A narrow hallway led to an office in the back. A solitary artwork hung on the brick wall at the end of it. Lindsay edged closer, turning down into the hallway to get a better look at it, sensing somehow that this area was off limits. It was a painting—and strangely quite a lovely one—of factories. Its palette was gray and black and rust, but there was something in the way the smoke rose from the chimneys and in the color of the sky, with the stars. It was compelling.
I wish I could go there,
Lindsay thought while staring at it, and at the moment she had that thought, much to her surprise, she swore the paint shifted around—almost playfully—making stars twinkle and smoke waft up. She shook her head and looked into her wineglass to see if maybe someone had slipped something in there when she hadn’t been looking. Perhaps she simply had drunk too much.

When she looked back at the painting, the paint was, of course, very still. She stared at it for a while longer, waiting to see if it would happen again, wondering how a painting could make her want to go visit a factory.

“That one’s not for sale,” a woman’s voice said from behind her, and the soothing tone of the words let Lindsay know she wasn’t in too much trouble for being back here.

“Oh. It just caught my eye. I hope you don’t mind. I wanted a closer look.”

“Not at all,” the woman said calmly. “I just wanted you to know, it’s not for sale.”

“It’s very unusual.”

The woman’s expression carried a hint of a smile, as if she
knew
Lindsay had just hallucinated moving paint. “Oh, it is indeed. My mother was the artist. She was an unusual lady,” she paused. “Magical.”

“You know, this is going to sound crazy,” Lindsay decided to confess, the wine loosening up her judgment. Plus it already seemed to her that this lady knew anyway. “But I swear I thought I saw the paint move.”

The woman’s expression was serene. She made no comment and appeared to be waiting for Lindsay to continue.

“There isn’t some special kind of, I don’t know, holographic paint in it, is there?” Lindsay asked, turning back to look at the painting.

“Holograms? No.”

Okay, I guess I won’t be able to come back to this gallery.
Lindsay tried to console herself with the thought that she probably wasn’t the first guest here who’d had one too many Chardonnays at an opening.

“There’s magic in it, though,” the woman said. And when Lindsay turned around to see if she had heard her right, the woman’s serene expression had changed into a smile.