Blue Rose In Chelsea Page 19

  “But the television series,” I begin.

  “It was cancelled.”

  “The show was cancelled? So soon? I don’t understand.”

  “The show was cancelled. It didn’t get good ratings. Then Wanda fired Evan. He’s pretty low. Evan is not the kind of person you worry about, but I’m worried now.”

  “I would never hurt Evan. I would die first.”

  “Haley, I’ve known you since we were kids. I think of you as my little sister, well, when I’m not thinking unholy thoughts about you. I never would have thought you were capable of something like this. I would defend you in a New York minute, but that whole night was so weird. It’s as if it wasn’t you, like you were a different person or something. First the dancing fruits in the suits to make Evan jealous, and then your boyfriend insults Evan, and then you have Sinclair give that story to Wanda. It’s as if you had it in for him that night.”

  “None of that was planned! None of that was my doing. I swear it! I have to talk to Evan.” I circle about, tamping down snow in my pink boots, not sure which way to turn, or where or how to begin to make restitution with Evan.

  “Leave him alone, Haley. He’s gone away.”

  “Gone away?” I say weakly. “Where?” The city, without Evan, feels like a heaven without angels.

  “Just leave him alone.”

  Brandon stands and stubs out his cigarette. He surrenders the borrowed novel to me as if he can’t bear the thought of contact with anything of mine. I watch him walk away, hands plunged into his pockets, red wool beret bent into the wind, as he turns the corner of Columbus. I look down at the book. The spine is broken.

  ~~~~~

  There’s a message on my answering machine from Wanda, demanding that I meet her at Cooper’s Café at two p.m. prompt. I deduce two things from her cryptic message; she lives in my neighborhood, and she is in the habit of telling people where and when to show up. I feel suddenly light-headed, and sit on the bed near the open window, fanning myself with a postcard from the Three Lives bookstore. It’s a watercolor rendering of the exterior of the bookshop, with the words a novel is a garden carried in the pocket. Across the way, the mysterious saxophone player blows elegiac notes, like bubbles, into my bedroom.

  “You better show, or she’s likely to come here and get us.” Sinclair’s eyes rake the room as if a machete-wielding Wanda may spring any moment from the shadows. “She frightens me, frankly. She’s one of those balls-on-the-chopping-block, take no prisoners, New York broads.”

  Sinclair has made a rare appearance at his apartment. Wanda’s lunch date-on-demand has distracted him from the snow stains on the Gigi gown.

  “What do you think she wants?” I settle onto a small cherry-red silk stool, surrounded by yards of silver shantung and velvet the color of grape jelly. A pink lampshade throws a soft light over the balmy February afternoon. The vanilla cupcake candles smell mouth-watering as they melt into bumpy clumps on the mantelpiece.

  “She wants a face-to-face confrontation with the other woman.”

  “Forget it!”

  Sinclair insists he will protect me by keeping guard outside Coopers. “If she throws a punch, I’ll alert the authorities.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  Sinclair rummages through his dress racks and retrieves a mohair coat in a brilliant red, with a matching cloche hat, and holds it up until I succumb to squeezing into it. “The wistful ingénue, Libby, won’t do for today’s task, Viv. Today you must be Madeline!” he proclaims in reference to Vivien Leigh’s role as a French spy in the movie Dark Journey. “If Madeline Goddard could single-handedly take on the German High Command, you can take on Wanda Evil-heart Tiffy Turpentine,” he spits, scrambling her surnames in his distress.

  The bold red of my ensemble stokes my courage. I’m hoping to possibly smooth things over with Wanda, and, in that way, make my amends to Evan.

  “Deny everything, Madeline!” he insists, shoving me into the hallway.

  Wanda Everhart Teely-Turpin occupies a window table at Cooper’s Café, smoking a Marlboro cigarette and drinking a steaming glass mug of coffee. She dismisses smoke through her pronounced lips, and seems to review some paperwork before her. I arrange my curls about the cloche hat for courage, smooth the mohair coat over my black knit dress, and spy a run in my tights, which seems to foreshadow defeat.

  I sink slowly into the chair opposite her, and confess, with feeling, that I never meant to give her that story, or any of my stories for that matter, that it was all a misunderstanding, an error of circumstances.

  “A comedy of errors,” Wanda states without emotion, stubbing out her cigarette as if she hopes to dislodge hidden treasure from its rolled paper, but she’s not laughing. Her hair has a fashionable blonde flip, like a lethal Veronica Lake.

  That’s when I spy Sinclair strolling past—or what seems to be Sinclair—wearing Ray Ban sunglasses and a fedora hat with a yellow feather. He’s walking or, rather, being walked, by a massive poodle with a purple gemstone collar. It’s all I can do to keep from gaping at the parade of Sinclair, scooping up poop into a paper bag, as the dog relieves itself at the bustling curb of Columbus.

  “Do you know why I’m the best agent in the city?” Wanda leans forward across the table toward me, perhaps to call attention back to her person; or, perhaps, in an attempt at one-upping me, by displaying her ample cleavage.

  Because you sleep with your clients? comes to mind, but I only wag my head No, as I yank off the cloche hat.

  “Because I’m not afraid of the truth. The truth always comes out; it always wiggles up to the surface, as it should. No, I don’t fear the truth, and neither should you. I fancy myself a truth detector. Are you in love with him?” the Truth Detector asks.

  I hesitate, but she injects me with her truth serum of a gaze. “I—Don’t—Know. Probably. Yes,” I admit to the human polygraph.

  Through the window I see Sinclair holding the offending poop bag at arm’s length, before ducking out of view.

  “The way that you write about him—you seem to see him as surrounded with an aureole of light. But I guess that would come with the love. Funny, I don’t see him that way. Don’t get me wrong. He’s better than most people.”

  There it is, the ‘most people’ phrase. I’m wondering if she picked up the saying from Evan, or if he annexed it from her. Then it hits me—the reason that Evan has always held back from me--the explanation for why he has kept this opaque distance between us all these months-- is sitting right before me. They’ve been together from the beginning, long before I stepped over the threshold of his Chelsea apartment that sunny September day in my bargain basement shoes.

  “He’s just a guy, like any other guy. He sleeps too late. He doesn’t pick up his crap. He leaves his socks hanging on the little rungs of the coffee table. He gets terrible gas from eating oysters.” She shakes back a nuisance of a diamond bracelet, with each suck of her cigarette.

  I giggle at this, my guard momentarily dropped, and Wanda comes in for the kill. “But we women will put up with anything for fabulous sex, now, won’t we? When you’re my age—not that you’re that far from the mark,“ she says with a tone that makes me shake my curls defiantly as if to display my youthfulness, “I recommend you get yourself a man under the age of twenty-five. They’re insatiable, although they take a definite nose dive after the age of twenty-eight, and by thirty-five, well, you need a crane to get them off the couch.”

  “I feel terrible that you dumped him as a client, because of me.”

  “No, you don’t. If you’re sorry to see his association with me end, then you can’t be very much in love.”

  There is truth in this, and so I say nothing. I’m thankful for the distraction of the waiter setting my tea before me. I could swear that I see a yellow feather entangled in the traffic of Columbus Avenue. I pray Sinclair hasn’t taken a tumble over the pushy poodle and onto his bad knee.

  “I dropped him as a client because he did a lousy job on th
e television series. I don’t think I could find him work again, based on that performance. What did you think of it?”

  “I didn’t watch it,” I say softly.

  Wanda grins like the Cheshire Cat, and nods. “Ah, you are very much in love.”

  I’m not sure if I buy her reasons for dumping Evan. Wanda snaps open a makeup compact and touches up her bulletproof lipstick, blotting the shine from her cheeks with a sheet of rice paper. I study the pillowed lips, and try to distract myself from the thought of Evan’s pressed against them.

  Wanda astounds me with the news that she has shown Blue Rose In Chelsea to an editor friend at a major publishing house who would be interested in publishing it, if I can expand it into a novel. If that weren’t earth-shattering enough, she dangles this bait: there is the possibility of it being excerpted in The New Yorker. Wanda rattles off a list of successful books that began as short stories, The Outsiders, or ones penned in record time like Jay McInerney’s quintessential New York novel, Bright Lights, Big City.

  “I hadn’t considered that,” I manage weakly.

  Wanda wants to know how long it would take me to flesh it out into a full-length book.

  “Three months,” I say, though it comes off sounding like a question. I’m so relieved for the change of subject that it doesn’t register yet what Wanda is offering.

  “Jay did it in six weeks.”

  “Eight weeks, if I had no distractions.”

  She informs me that publication of the book is practically guaranteed, if I can maintain the particular magic of the short version. Vogue magazine is planning a spread of the new young literary set, and with my good looks and style, I’d be perfect, she says; publicity like that could catapult sales. It’s not enough to be a good writer these days, she informs me, but a bit of glamour is required as well. She glances at the red hat and coat, as if it gave testimony to my selling potential. I cross my leg beneath the table, to attempt to hide the run in my tights.

  “It’s a very New York story, with all the references to the pace and places in the city, and yet it’s very universal in that you’ve captured how it feels to want someone you cannot have. I think every woman, any woman anywhere, will relate to that.”

  “I find it hard to believe that you’d be familiar with that emotion.” This elicits a belly laugh from her.

  “Hard to believe, yes, but there was once someone I wanted very much, my second husband. No matter what I did, no matter how many hoops I jumped through, I couldn’t make him happy, although I think his unhappiness bubbled up from some toxic spring buried deep inside him. Sometimes you just can’t save someone. It’s a terrible thing to have to say goodbye to someone you love. I don’t mean the big goodbye, the wrenching final farewell—sometimes that is a relief. I mean the small, excruciating goodbyes, when you know you are losing your hold on someone slowly, as you watch their interest dwindling bit by bit by bit.” She drips out the last words.

  I almost feel something like human emotion emitting from Wanda, but she shakes off any vestige of vulnerability, and resumes her business persona. “Your descriptions are striking, yet crisp and to the point. I like that, too. I like when people get to the point, plus it makes for a fast read.” Wanda is nothing, if not fast; she has gone through two coffees and six cigarettes.

  “I get that from my father. He always says he skips over the long descriptions in books, but I was determined that he wouldn’t skip over mine, so to keep his attention I learned how to distill my impressions to one vivid image.”

  “Interesting.” Wanda stubs out her cigarette, looking thoroughly uninterested.

  “It’s a wonderful offer,” I say, and my tone alerts Wanda.

  “But?” she inquires. “Don’t tell me you’d pass it up for him. Well, that’s a first. Most people would sell their firstborn for representation with me. Do you understand what I’m offering you? I could have you launched with a year’s time. You would be set. There’s no one else in this city who could do for you what I am able to do.” Despite this passionate spiel, Wanda keeps her cool. Does she ever lose her perennial cool? Perhaps during the fabulous sex, or the seafood flatulence?

  Her blue eyes are like lasers, seeking to burn off any reservations or doubts on my part.

  “I don’t know if I can do that to Evan.” I see myself ascending a glistering gold stairway, each step composed of Evan. Brandon’s words haunt me. I’m worried now.

  “Why not? He’d do it to you. He already has, hasn’t he?”

  I may as well have been hit by a two-by-four. At that moment Sinclair trots past. The black poodle has heeled him, rather than the other way around. The dog drools yellow feathers from its mouth.

  “What a blow to him, and so soon after his brother,” I murmur, as if thinking aloud.

  “Brother? Evan has no brother.” Wanda slaps a fresh pack of cigarettes against her wrist, commandeering the tobacco to get in step.

  “I meant sister,” I fib. This one whopper miraculously slips past the Truth Detector.

  “Ah, yes, his sister’s impending nuptials in Boston. Trust me, Evan has socked away enough cash, courtesy of my hard work in landing him jobs, to help her with any expenses.”

  It’s as if Wanda has sunk underwater, her words sound garbled and cease to register. For all the knowledge that Wanda Everhart Teely-Turpin may have garnered of Evan, he has not told her about his twin brother. That secret, that deeply poignant part of him, was, alone, entrusted to me.

  I sit for a time in Coopers, long after Wanda departs in a cloud of Opium perfume, my velvet bag of stories deposited on her chair. I’ve switched from tea to red wine, which suits me fine; soon I’m warmed into a nice numb haze. I stare out the window, trying to determine if it’s snowing. I swear that I see fine white flakes, and then I’m convinced that I don’t, and then I think I do. I try to blot out the disturbing and recurring image of Evan in flagrante with Wanda and her double Ds, while simultaneously entertaining grandiose visions of myself as a novelist with a spread in Vogue—perhaps I’d wear velvet? I finger Wanda’s beetling business card, but I know in my gut that I’ll never make that call. There will be other offers, I try to console myself, but will there ever be another Evan?

  ~ 17 ~

  Bright Lights, Big Scallops

  I wait for Sinclair to ditch the dog. As the air grows dim, and the day fades, I remember that it’s Sinclair’s birthday, and that I’ve been invited for an intimate dinner at The Joseph’s Murray Hill digs.

  “I’m going to skip dinner if you don’t mind,” I slur to Sinclair when he eventually shows up. The wine has left me contented to live out my days uneventfully and without consequence in my corner of Coopers.

  “Don’t let Wanda Stab-Your-Heart Steely Turpitude ruin your appetite. Madeline would not have missed a meal over the machinations of the German High Command. Besides, you cannot back out,” Sinclair protests, in a whisper of panic. “Joseph takes his dinner parties very seriously. He set the table two days ago.”

  This bombshell leaves me no choice but to catch a cab with Sinclair in the snowy twilight.

  The Joseph has set a table of palest yellow linen with colorful china plates of café scenes in primary colors. The dinner napkins perfectly compliment the stunning arrangement of lavender orchids in the center of the table. He’s prepared appetizers of crab cakes with avocado mousse and blue cheese polenta canapés, with caramelized onions and toasted pecans.

  They are like eager parents, awaiting my report of my first day at school. I tell them about Wanda’s offer of a book deal, and a Vogue layout.

  “It’s a deal with the devil.” The Joseph spoons little green gobs onto my crabcake. “I would know, I made one myself years ago.”

  I tell them that she claims she terminated Evan as a client because of his lousy acting on the series.

  “Oh, I thought he was quite good,” TJ says in sympathy. This is high praise, coming from the fastidious theatre critic, Joseph. Sinclair agrees. They dissect Evan’s p
erformance, scene by scene, with a recall that impresses me. Did they tape his shows and study them?

  “Though if the sex was as earth-shattering as she claims, I find it hard to believe she’d dump him for something so meager as lack of acting talent,” TJ determines, with a suggestive prod at his polenta.

  “You must accept her offer!” Sinclair presses, as he observes me blanch white. “This is Vogue, Vivie! I wonder if you’ll get to keep the clothes. I see you in something regal, like red velvet. You are, after all, a Countess, the sister I never had!”

  I glance at TJ, wondering if he’s hip to the Count thing. He appears unfazed, crunching his pecans.

  “She hasn’t offered Haley anything concrete—just the promise of possible publication. You don’t know, once you finish the novel, she could say that the tastes of the public have suddenly changed and it’s no longer saleable, or that it didn’t live up to its original promise. Then she will have you where she wants you. You’ll have thrown over the one you love, and for what? A handful of dust!”

  “Hell hath no fury like a Wanda scorned!” Sinclair declares, the light dawning.

  “This city is full of vipers,” The Joseph summarizes. “I would know. I was one.”

  Sinclair pats TJ’s hand in a gesture that says, all that is in the past.

  I share my astonishment at Wanda grouping me in the same sentence as authors S. E. Hinton, and Jay McInerney. TJ serves a roasted beet salad with goat cheese and mixed greens.

  “Loved Bright Lights, loved it,” TJ rhapsodizes. He and Sinclair trade favorite lines from the book.

  They weigh in on The Outsiders, which, Wanda has informed me, has had records sales since its inception, at times outselling the Bible. TJ spoons pan-seared scallops, Sinclair’s favorite, onto our plates.

  “Ponyboy was hot.” Sinclair fishes out a scallop swimming in butter.

  “Your brother looks like that character in the movie, what was his name?”