Wish Upon a Star (7 page)

But after a brief pause, he wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. She remained silent because she couldn’t make a sound. He took a step back and she could see that for a moment doubt rearranged his face. ‘I’d certainly understand if you thought that was inappropriate of me…’ He seemed to stumble for a moment, ‘…or if you feel it’s politically incorrect. Or even harassment. Please don’t. I mean we don’t actually work together. Just in the same place.’

Claire still couldn’t speak. By chance, her silence had allowed her to see a moment of Michael Wainwright’s uncertainty, a rare bit of, well, insecurity, or something that looked like it. Somehow it made him more alive, more accessible. Her eyes actually clouded. She had to blink.

‘Okay. Sorry. It just occurred to me that we might enjoy it. But whatever.’

Claire held onto the photocopy machine and tried to remember how to make her tongue capable of speech and her eyes capable of focusing. She was looking at Mr. Wonderful, but she was having trouble seeing him. Still, what she was most afraid of was that she wasn’t hearing him properly.

He had turned and was going to leave. Do something, she told herself. But where had this invitation come from? Why her? She remembered the conversation at lunch, the one she had tried not to listen to, and realized he had most likely run out of women available at short notice. ‘Wait,’ Claire heard herself say. He turned. ‘I’d really like to go,’ she told him.

‘Are you out of your friggin’ mind?’ Tina asked Claire the next morning, her voice shrill enough to be heard above the engine of the ferry and not only by Claire but by another dozen people sitting nearby.

Claire moved the yarn from the back of the needle to the front so that she could knit the next three stitches, then slipped them off her cable holder and onto the main needle. She knit those stitches to finish the back twist of the cable while calmly shaking her head at Tina. She would wear this lovely sweater in London.

‘For god’s sake, Claire. You don’t even know him.’ Tina crossed her arms in front of her chest. ‘And it’s not as if you don’t know what he’s like with women. If Katherine Rensselaer couldn’t handle him, how do you expect…’

Claire carefully put the knitting into her bag. Even Katherine Rensselaer couldn’t have a cashmere sweater this lovely, this fine. ‘I don’t expect anything,’ she admitted calmly.

‘Well
he
will! You think he’ll just take you across the Atlantic because he wants a roommate?’ Tina shook her head and it occurred to Claire that she was more angry than concerned. ‘You think this is the start of some love affair? Sometimes you’re like a kid.’

‘No, I’m not!’ Claire protested. ‘I’m planning to sleep with him. I want to. But I don’t expect anything else.’

Tina laughed but it was one of her sarcastic ones. ‘Yeah, right. I know you. Claire, I’m warning you. You think you’ll come back and start going around New York with Michael Wainwright and you can fagetaboutit.’

‘I don’t have to forget about it because I’m not even thinking of it,’ Claire told Tina. Then, to her relief, the ferry gently bumped against the pilings and the motor reversed. Soon they’d be off.

But there was no respite. ‘So what
are
you thinkin’ of?’ Tina asked, putting her hand on the damp rail of the ferry and tossing her hair back. ‘You thinkin’ about how to make yourself more miserable? You thinkin’ about how you can become the laughin’ stock of the office?’

And all at once Claire realized she didn’t like Tina’s attitude or tone. And that she didn’t have to listen to it. She stood up. ‘I’m thinking that I’ve never been further away from Staten Island than to Boston. That I’ve read about London since
Mary Poppins
and I’ve never been there. That no man ever invited me anywhere.’ She paused and reined in her temper. She looked Tina directly in the eye. ‘I’m also thinking that I don’t need any more advice.’

Tina’s face tightened. Then she shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ she said and they didn’t speak on the walk to the office.

‘Do you have a good suitcase?’ Marie Two asked. ‘You can’t travel with a backpack, you know.’ Claire hadn’t thought about it. The news of her trip had, via Tina, moved through the human circuits faster than e-mail on electronic ones. She’d already received everything from a high-five from Marie One to a congratulatory note from Michelle, passed surreptitiously to her folded up like a note passed in study hall. It seemed to Claire as if the working class had risen up and were proud; as if their team had scored some kind of touchdown. The irony was that while Claire knew she wasn’t patrician, she had never felt at one with the ‘girls’. Perhaps that was why she didn’t react to Joan’s fish-eye response. In fact the odd thing was that Claire realized that she didn’t care about what the others might think. A sea-change had taken place in her own emotional landscape since Michael Wainwright’s invitation. She simultaneously felt more a part of the business harem while more detached. Now, over the lunch table, where even Marie Three had joined them, her trip was the major topic of discussion yet Claire didn’t feel the slightest bit self-conscious.

‘And you aren’t goin’ to use one of those little wheelie things? Dufus bags,’ Marie Two continued. ‘These guys fly First Class. The hotel porters will sneer if you don’t have decent luggage.’

‘Oh, fuck the porters,’ Marie One said. ‘It isn’t about the luggage. I mean, what’s going to happen at the hotel?’

‘I think we all know the answer to that,’ Joan said.

No one responded to her judgmental tone. ‘What hotel?’ Michelle asked.

‘He’s booked a suite at the Berkeley,’ Tina announced. She’d been angry all morning and still didn’t look at Claire. ‘Ya know. It’s not like he isn’t a gentleman. He is. And the suite’s got three rooms. The sofa in the living room is right there, waiting for her, if Claire doesn’t like what’s goin’ down in the bedroom.’

‘Goin’ down?’ Marie Three said being her usual obnoxious self. Claire, for once, didn’t blush and no one laughed.

‘She’s got a round-trip ticket,’ Tina added. ‘If she can afford the taxi fare she can come back whenevah she wants to.’

‘I’d never come back,’ Marie One said.

‘What about Vic?’ Marie Three asked.

‘Screw Vic. Then I wouldn’t have to,’ Marie One said and they all laughed.

‘Look, ya don’t hafta do anything ya don’t wanna do,’ Marie Two reminded Claire. ‘And what goes on in the bedroom is none of our business,’ she told the rest of the table, though Claire knew Marie Two was always eager to listen to stories of sexual dysfunction, romps and betrayals.

The truth was, Claire was just as curious to find out what might go on in the bedroom as she was to see London. The idea of Michael Wainwright choosing her, actually wanting her, even if only by default, was astonishing as well as exciting. She could hardly believe she was going to get on an airplane with a man she’d only been kissed by once, fly to London and sleep with him. She thought again of his hand on hers and had to close her eyes for a moment to contain the thrill. If such a small gesture, such minimal contact, had that effect on her how would she react to his body on hers? Claire shivered.

‘What will you take to wear?’ Michelle asked. ‘Do they wear hats, like Princess Di used to?’ She sighed. ‘I loved her hats.’

‘Forget hats and bags,’ Tina said. ‘Claire, do you even have a passport? You can’t go to Europe without one.’

For the first time since she’d made her decision Claire felt her optimism and hope begin to disappear as slowly but surely as the Cheshire Cat did—but leaving no smile behind. In fact, her vision got blurry with tears. She didn’t have a passport and—worse—she didn’t even know how to get one. She looked at Tina, trying to keep the panic out of her eyes. ‘I can get one.’

‘Ha! You’re screwed,’ said Joan. ‘And not in a good way. I’ve been to the passport office. Forget it. You hafta get your birth certificate and photos and go to the post office, fill in a form and wait six weeks.’

Claire felt the walls suddenly contract, as if she was on the morning’s elevator ride. She should have realized that escape, that a real adventure, couldn’t happen to her. She wasn’t the kind of person who had a passport sitting in her top bureau drawer. No. She had knitting needles. She wouldn’t be able to go. She clenched her fist hard, so that the physical pain of her nails biting into her soft palm distracted her from the other agony she was experiencing.

‘Six weeks?’ Michelle asked. ‘Always?’

‘Always,’ Joan said.

‘Nonsense.’ They all turned to see Abigail Samuels in the doorway. She ignored everyone but Claire. ‘You can get it in a few hours. You just bring your birth certificate, your application and a letter on our letterhead saying you must go for business.’ Abigail smiled at Claire. ‘And bring your ticket. Or do what our executives do. For fifty dollars an expediting service will take care of it all. And in two hours. You should know that, Tina.’ They all turned to Tina, who said nothing.

‘Thank you,’ Claire told Abigail Samuels, her voice shaky.

‘You’re welcome.’ She smiled at Claire again, her small, even teeth as white as her hair. Then her mouth snapped into a thin, straight line. She looked at Joan but continued speaking to Claire. ‘If you have any difficulty getting a letter from the firm, come to me and I’ll give you one signed by Mr. Crayden, Senior.’ She eyed them all, then turned to go. But before she moved down the hall she looked at Claire. ‘And if you need to borrow a trunk, I’d be happy to lend you one of mine.’

The table was silent for at least a moment after Abigail Samuels left. Then ‘Holy shit!’ Marie One whispered.

‘She family?’ Marie Three asked.

‘Fagetabout family,’ Marie Two said. ‘Has she got this table bugged? Because if she does, we’re all in deep yogurt.’

Tina looked over at Claire. ‘You tell her?’ she asked. ‘Because if word gets out among the executives about this…I mean they might not like it.’

Claire shook her head. Before the day Abigail Samuels had specifically requested her help, Claire had never spoken to the woman. And in helping her she hadn’t spoken much either. There was a social order at Crayden Smithers that was as unbreachable as Fort Sumter had been. Secretaries, administrative assistants, analysts, bookkeepers and all the so-called ‘support staff’ were working-class people. They lived in farflown suburbs—never in Manhattan. They all said ‘the city’ when they meant Manhattan, even if they lived in Queens or Brooklyn or Staten Island—all a part of the city. They wore clothes from discount stores, cheap chains and factory outlets. Their hair never looked right, not the way hair looked in fashion magazines or on the heads of women professionals. And the inside of their heads had been educated in public schools, never the tony private ones. If they’d gone to college they hadn’t graduated, or if they’d graduated it had been from a junior college or a state school, never from the Ivy Leagues. They were an underclass and, though none of them would admit it, they either resented the elite professionals (as Joan did) or—worse to Claire’s way of thinking—basked in the reflected glory of the professional they worked for.

The one exception was Abigail Samuels. She’d probably been a secretary for fifty years. She’d gone to the best schools, dressed in the best conservative clothes and looked like a wife of one of the elderly partners. But Abigail Samuels had ‘gone to business’ back in the days when secretaries wore hats and gloves and women didn’t even think of law or business school. Her class separated her from the secretaries and her job separated her from the professional staff. Claire had always thought she must be the loneliest person at Crayden Smithers.

Claire had no idea how Abigail knew about the trip. She was also surprised that, knowing, she didn’t seem to disapprove. The thought that Abigail Samuels would be interested in anything that Claire did—besides photocopying—was as surprising to Claire as it was to the rest of the table. That Abigail knew about her trip, that she’d volunteered not only the information about the passport expeditor but actually threatened Joan on Claire’s behalf and then offered to lend Claire a bag was…

‘Fuckin’ amazin’,’ said Marie One.

Claire saw all the faces turn to her, and recognized the faint tinge of suspicion on each face. In this hen house, when anyone changed the pecking order feathers were ruffled.

‘She must like you,’ Marie Two said.

Curious and curiouser, Claire thought, but was wise enough not to quote Lewis Carroll at that table.

After work on Friday, Claire decided she’d better go get money for her trip. She had a little over nine hundred dollars in her account. A pathetic amount to travel with, but it was highly unlikely that her mother would be paying back her ‘loans’ anytime soon. She carefully counted the bills, then put them in an envelope and hid the envelope inside a beach bag in the bottom drawer of her bureau. And what exactly could Claire say to her mother as an excuse for going away? It was too early for a bachelorette party for Tina and it certainly wouldn’t require that many days. Claire would just come up with a plan at the last minute. Now she had more important things to worry about.

She began to sort through her closet. In less than half an hour she had a big pile of garments on her bed. Way too much stuff. It was only four days, she reminded herself sternly, but somehow it felt as if she needed everything she had and yet none of it was right. She was a little thinner than usual—not much—so while the size twelve tops fit, size fourteen slacks and skirts were a little looser than usual. But not loose enough. She sighed. Perhaps her problem wasn’t that her butt was too big, but that her tits were too small. She wondered if there was a scientific ratio to determine that. She thought of Katherine Rensselaer and her perfect body in her perfectly cut clothes. Claire’s best jacket came from Ann Taylor. Katherine Rensselaer had probably never been in there, just as Claire had never been in Prada. She would definitely have to shop, not that she had the money for that. She looked at the pile of clothes on the bed, shrugged and then smiled. She might have fat thighs and second-rate clothes, but it was she, not Katherine Rensselaer, who was going to London with Mr. Wonderful.