Blue Rose In Chelsea Read online

  I steel myself for an onslaught of Bono Worship; Dylan and Brandon idolize him.

  “Would you like all the riches in the night?” Evan asks of me, with a delirious mixture of earnestness and mockery that he pulls off with aplomb.

  “Don’t they all? Women are always looking for the BBD, the Bigger Better Deal,” Brandon surmises. Now that Brandon has traded high finance for a bare-bones bohemian existence, his love life is a bear market. “Treasure, diamonds, a ring of gold. Yup, that’s what they’re all looking for.”

  “Haley would like a planet with no one on it. She’s claustrophobic and won’t get on the subway,” Dylan taunts. “Are we going to have to walk a billion blocks to that bookstore? Where is this place exactly?”

  “Gotham Book Mart. Wise men fish here,” I quote their motto, which is hung on a small sign in their window. I offer the coordinates: Forty-Seventh, between Fifth and Sixth.

  “Okay, so, it’s the East Side.” I’m not sure why Dylan says this, other than perhaps to display his knowledge of the city grid.

  “It’s above fifth,” I correct gently.

  “Right, that would be the East Side.”

  “I think that would be the West.”

  “Sixth Avenue divides the east and west side,” he says, slightly defensive and with a tinge of condescension. Why is Dylan challenging me on this?

  “I believe it’s Fifth.” I filter any confrontation from my voice, so as to appear the epitome of benevolence before Evan.

  “Sixth Avenue divides the East and West Side, Sis, Avenue of the Americas.” Dylan says this as if I am somehow embarrassing him in front of these savvy city denizens.

  Evan watches this with deep fascination. He has lived in the city for years; he could easily intercede to end this debate, but he appears spellbound to see where it will lead, and if I will back down.

  “Doesn’t Fifth divide the East and West, Evan-lier?” I turn toward him. I am not sure why I attach part of his last name to his first, but it seems somehow to fit, like a thrilling musical lyric. He seems jarred by it; a crack forms in his unshakeable composure, as if I had indeed placed the fabled Shelley kiss upon his lips.

  “Haley is right.” He addresses Dylan, directly taking on my aggressor, and the sound of my name on Evan’s lips is like a brief but sublime symphony.

  And then Evan does something odd. He abandons his swivel chair to sit beside me on the daybed. He smells like sweet laundry drying in the summer sunshine. He loosens the blue bandanna from his head, smoothes it with his hands, and drapes it playfully across my knee, as if laying claim to something. This gesture is not lost on Dylan, who can no longer follow with full attention Brandon’s babbling. I have somehow had an effect on Evan. He looks unsettled at the prospect of my departure. His veil of impenetrable serenity seems pierced, though he says nothing.

  A great emotion of impending emptiness wells up inside me at the thought of leaving that little sunny studio with the lemony light. It’s as if chords of light connected me to it, and to go requires some painful psychic surgery. The ground seems to split open before me, and I’m faced with the choice to remain in the warmth of Evan’s presence, or to risk stepping into some great cold chasm. Nothing in my life has ever felt so wrong as to walk out that door.

  Evan stands to shake hands with Dylan.

  “No coffee, but how about a kiss on the cheek?” he says softly, leaning in to brush his full lips across my skin, and it feels like the first truly perfect moment of my existence.

  ~3~

  Solidarity & A Salted Pretzel

  On the street, Dylan is lost in his own thoughts. I define my mission: I must find out all he knows about Evan. I could kick myself for not listening to everything Dylan was spilling earlier about Evan, when he was bubbling with information. I lob a few innocuous questions at Dylan to warm him up, batting around for Evan’s age (he’s younger than me), and where he’s from (Dylan thinks Boston). I’m winding up for The Big One, which is Does Evan have a girlfriend?

  “Dylan, are you listening to me?” I demand, when he continually drifts off. Dylan pays for a newspaper at a street vendor. I tuck my purchases from Gotham Book Mart into my duffel bag to free my hand for the warm salted pretzel Dylan buys for me.

  “Look at this.” He folds back the newspaper to show me an article on the Polish government.

  I shrug.

  “This is big, Haley.”

  “Why should I care about what’s happening in Poland?”

  “You know, for somebody with a genius IQ, you can be very shortsighted. You should pay more attention to what’s going on in the world, instead of burying your head in dopey love stories about ancient England.”

  “Regency England!” I snap, as Dylan is making a dig at my obsession with Jane Austen. I’ve read one of her books every year since I was fourteen years old, and since Jane—my kindred soul in shortsightedness—only gave the world six novels, they are in continual rotation on my nightstand.

  He checks his watch, and as we have barely time to burn, he takes the steps two at a time down to Penn Station. I find myself jogging in my funky pink-strap shoes to keep up with him.

  “It’s always bad news,” I say with a weary sigh, an attempt to defend my ignorance of current events.

  “This is very good news. This is huge. It’s the beginning of the end.” Dylan launches into a passionate discourse on the solidarity movement in Poland, and the implications for all of Eastern Europe and the world, but all I can seem to grab hold of in my thoughts is the disarming and penetrating gaze of Evan Candelier, and the overwhelming yearning that has taken hold of me to see him stripped of his clothes. I weave and dart through the crowds to keep pace with Dylan, who rushes because we’ve barely two minutes to spare to catch our train home. There is something about Dylan’s larger-than-life presence that signals people to step out of his way. Not so for me as I find myself jostled and knocked in the shoulders as I struggle to steer through the cattle herds of commuters.

  “We’re going to break the backs of the communists.” At the ticket booth he brandishes his rolled newspaper like a magic scepter to vanquish the Red Enemy.

  “We? Oh, now you’re an agent for the CIA?” I manage through mouthfuls of pretzel dough, although I wouldn’t be surprised. Dylan doesn’t seem to require sleep like the rest of us mere mortals; it’s as if he’s plugged into some cosmic generator. He always has his hand in some project, and he brings every one to fruition with the intensity and focused will of a future mogul.

  He buys our tickets, and taps his big foot as we stand before the board that announces the tracks. “It’s only a matter of time before the Soviet Union implodes. So, you can quit writing all your depressing poems about nuclear annihilation, and find some other topic to milk.”

  “Most of my poems are about love, and the longing for a creative life. If you bothered to read any of them, you would know that! We’re Track Five.” I glance at the board, gnawing the pretzel, like a lion on a fresh kill.

  “I do read them, and half the time I can’t figure out what the hell any of them are about. It’s like reading Morse code. Can’t you write some poems for the common folk?”

  “It’s called metaphor. And the depressing ones, unfortunately, are the easiest to get published, especially in literary circles.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. At least I know you’re motivated by profit, and not in need of electroshock therapy.”

  “I can’t imagine a world without a Cold War. It’s such a bold imagining,” I muse, attempting to divert Dylan.

  “Fortune favors the bold!” Dylan’s words echo in the small stairway rife with the stale smells of sweat and urine, as we descend to the tracks.

  He continues his diatribe, smacking the newspaper with the back of his hand for emphasis, before lurching onto the train, where we settle into a seat facing one another. Dylan doesn’t mind riding backwards—whereas it makes me nauseous—so he faces me, leaving me an entire seat to drape my backpack and
books. I’ve bought paperbacks of Marguerite Duras’s, The Lover, with its haunting cover of a coal-eyed young ingénue; a collection of very short stories called Short Shorts; and the slim but much beloved Bible for young writers, Rilke’s, Letters To A Young Poet. Someday, I’ll have a personal library of exclusively hardcover books.

  “Oh, c’mon. That will never happen. There has always been a Soviet Union. I can’t imagine living in a world without that threat.”

  “There has always been a Soviet Union in our lifetime, but there are some who remember a time when there wasn’t.”

  Dylan is making reference to the President. He has never forgiven me for throwing my vote away in the 1984 elections. The conductor collects our tickets, punching them, and rather than sticking them in the chrome seam of the seat, he returns them directly to Dylan; Dylan’s presence commands that sort of consideration.

  Now that Dylan is on the topic of his hero, President Reagan, there is little chance I will be able to steer him back to a discussion of Evan. All hope for crucial details of the fabulous Evan Candelier tumble from view like the rapidly vanishing scenery beyond the grubby train window. We jettison through a dark tunnel, and then into the blue haze of the sequined light of the surrounding borough. The dizzying and dreary apartments are like subway cars stacked one above the other, blotting out a sky stained with black plumes pumped from distant smoke stacks.

  “The best we can do is contain it,” I say of the Soviet threat, but I am so politically naïve that I am parroting what I have heard from my professors and European intellectual friends at Princeton.

  “Oh cripes, Haley. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea that you left that place. Maybe you do need to live with me for awhile so that I can de-program all that wimpy appeasement crap out of your head.”

  “Does that mean I can stay with you?” I shoot up in my seat like shook seltzer water, all ears for Dylan’s decision, energized with an effervescent pride for the courage of Poles and dissidents everywhere.

  “You have to get a job,” he insists.

  “Done. I will, I promise.”

  “And I don’t want to hear that song, not once.”

  Dylan is referring to Abba’s Super Trooper, which I beat into the ground on my eight track player. Dylan claims it was the sole reason he prematurely moved out of our parents’ home at age seventeen.

  “I’ll smash the tape,” I pledge.

  “And no peanut butter,” he decrees with a smirk, referring to the time when me and Edwina Castlebottom--- my best friend from fourth grade at Holy Family School--snuck into Dylan’s room in the middle of the night and, for kicks, spooned peanut butter into his seventies shag hairdo while he slept.

  “Only on Levi’s bread,” I vow, in deference to Dylan’s strange predilection for PB & J sandwiches on seedless rye. I can barely contain my delight in being firmly ensconced in Dylan’s world and, therefore, in closer proximity to the mysterious Evan.

  ~4~

  The Blue Drink & The Great Thing

  I settle into Dylan’s one bedroom apartment in Kew Gardens. I sleep on his cold leather couch. He begrudgingly surrenders the broom closet for my clothes as if he were bestowing upon me the Hope Diamond. I locate a health food store on the corner, where I buy my fruit and yogurt and vegetarian mock chicken salad stuffed into pitas, which tastes surprisingly like the real thing. The tree-lined street offers a respite from the heat. I spend my days sitting on the stoop, under canopies of breezy green, reading books, but with little comprehension. Nothing seems to emit the celestial brilliance of the fabulous Evan Candelier—not even my beloved books. Where once they held such magic for me, now they seem like a dull substitute for real life.

  Dylan asks me to play a piano solo on one of the tracks he’s recording at the studio in the city, because his keyboardist keeps flubbing it up. Afterward, he informs me that we’re meeting Brandon and Evan for a drink. I am not prepared for the possibility of seeing Evan again. I’m wearing jeans and a wrinkled gauze tunic. My hair has seen better days and my skin shines from the humidity. This is not the breathtaking self I had planned on presenting before Evan for our next meeting, but I can’t pass up the opportunity, as it may not come again for some time. As we walk the hot pavement I spy a dress on a rack at the summer sidewalk markdowns. I buy it, although it’s a size too small and more than I can afford. It’s a passion purple sleeveless dress with a print of pink and white cherries. The cherries appear to have been tossed with abandon into the air, landing intact over the clingy material. The clerk tucks my jeans and shirt into a shiny pink shopping bag bound with a black satin ribbon. Outside, I tie the black ribbon about my waist. My funky black heels with the pink straps compliment it nicely.

  “You look like a box of Good ‘n Plenty,” Dylan observes, knocking the wind from my sails. He stubs out a cigarette on a cellar grate and shakes his head.

  “I had to change the jeans. There was a hole in the crotch,” I fib, feeling I must provide Dylan with an explanation.

  We walk a few more blocks, and then are suddenly ambushed by Brandon and a group of people. It takes me a moment to realize that one is Evan. Without the blue bandanna, or hair flattened by the blue bandanna, he looks different. I find myself enamored with his unearthed tresses. There are two guys with them, and a girl, and I can’t think or speak because my attention is riveted on the girl, searching for clues as to whether she is with Evan. There is a racket of conversation and introductions, but then just as suddenly the three strangers are gone, and we are grouped together in pairs. Dylan and Brandon amble ahead of us, feverishly discussing their new recording project. Evan loops back behind me to offer me the inside of the street, so I’m protected from passing cars and sidewalk grates.

  “Is life just a bowl of cherries?” he asks, and it takes me a moment to realize he means the dress.

  “It is when I’m around,” I bat back.

  “I always think of pink as being for little girls, but it suits you,” he says, with the lopsided smile.

  “I’m no little girl.” I inject this with ten CCs of sultriness. He blinks and inhales sharply. I’ve knocked him off balance, but he has the reflexes of a minx and recovers quickly.

  “That voice,” he marvels, as if it was an entity that wielded power over him, and then, “but you are innocent.”

  “As opposed to guilty?” I am getting the better of him, but he seems to enjoy it.

  “As opposed to jaded.”

  I purse my lips and nod, absorbing his meaning. “Are you jaded?” I can smell some sweet scent coming off him again, the freshly laundered linens drying outdoors on a summer day.

  “Not yet.” His gaze sweeps the tall buildings around us, as if they were the culprits of his almost-jadedness, and then it settles over me. “Maybe you came along just in time.”

  I feel drunk with power, and at a loss for words.

  “You left with my bandanna,” he scolds.

  “Did I?” I try to sound casual, although I’ve treasured that bandanna, like some mystical talisman, ever since, wearing it tied about my wrist, inhaling it like smelling salts, sleeping with it spread on my pillow. It’s right now in the pocket of the jeans in the shopping bag.

  “Did you lose it?” he asks with some measure of alarm.

  “No, I have it. I sleep with it on my pillow every night,” I sing, with a tinge of sarcasm.

  “It has sentimental value. Promise me you’ll never lose it,” he commands gently but firmly.

  “I would promise you anything,” I reply, as if reading from a bad script. He stops, although Dylan and Brandon are waiting for us up ahead, at the entrance to some club.

  “I’m serious,” he says.

  “So am I.” I drop all affectation from my voice and turn to him. There’s something in my hair, a small leaf, and he gently tries to dislodge it from my curls. At such close range he appears even more perfect; I feel his breath on my lips. Is he leaning in for a kiss? I don’t dare breathe.

  “Hey, can you t
wo put a nickel in it?” Dylan shouts. Evan is jolted to reality, and he displays the small red leaf that found its way into my tangle of curls. I realize Evan and I have slowed our gaits like sleepwalkers, as if postponing the inevitable of having to rejoin The Roomies. Evan takes my hand and hurries me along. We slip into the bar, Delta, and make our way back to a table with two chairs and a bench along the wall. Above the table is a print of Sunbeam Bread. “Remember Sunbeam Bread?” Evan asks, and they all have a chuckle over it, sharing memories of their favorite childhood foods.

  “What’s wrong?” Dylan demands, because I suddenly feel like I’ve gone adrift, now that I’m no longer holding Evan’s hand.

  “I’m tense with nostalgic exile,” I joke, to cover up, as I plead no memory of Sunbeam Bread. Dylan launches into a mortifying tale of how I ate cheese sandwiches on Italian bread (one slice of cheese, no mayo)-- every day during our home lunch breaks from parochial school in Brooklyn-- with no variance in my menu for seven years straight.

  I assume a posture of forbearance, as if having Dylan for a brother requires great reserves of strength. On the small stage, the Lavender Lights Gay and Lesbian Gospel Choir perform a piously bluesy tune.

  “Haley knows what she likes,” Evan offers in my defense. He takes the place beside me on the bench, asking Dylan’s permission first.

  I sense that Dylan is gearing up to tell them another story about me, but thankfully Brandon changes the subject to books. Brandon is having trouble getting through the Henry James’ tome, The Portrait Of A Lady, which happens to be one of my favorite novels of all time.

  “Isabel Archer is invited to live with her wealthy aunt in England after her father dies and, while there, Lord Warburton proposes to her,” I instruct him.

  “Oh, here we go.” Dylan sinks into his chair. “The English class system and lords-a-leaping.”

  “But she refuses him,” I continue, because Evan and Brandon seem spellbound, “and her cousin, Ralph Touchett, is astonished that she would turn down such an offer, so Ralph asks her why. And Isabel says that she wants to look around and learn about life. My favorite lines are when Ralph says to Isabel, ‘You want to see life. You have told me the great thing; that the world interests you and you want to throw yourself into it. That is so fine!’”