Blue Rose In Chelsea Page 8

  “I don’t know that it’s the most powerful,” he snarls, though with his accent, everything he says sounds somehow eloquent.

  “Look, you guys no longer rule the world. The sun does set on the British Empire, so just get over it!” I’ve had these very same tiresome conversations with British friends back at school.

  We arrive at a fuming standoff, facing one another like two outlaws at the O.K. corral. Then, as if remembering we are civilized beings, we both turn and continue to walk, neither one speaking for some time. We walk an astonishing distance in silence, David occasionally flicking glances my way.

  “Well, you can run from the past, but you can’t erase the past,” he returns to the former point, not willing to let it drop, or perhaps incapable of cutting his losses.

  “Well, actually, you can erase the past, if you choose to. If you really love someone, you could make a conscious effort to forget his or her past, which is the same thing.”

  “But that isn’t realistic, that is just denial. You wouldn’t really be forgetting. For Blanche, it was just inevitable, that the truth should come to light, as it always does, in the end.”

  “So, if you could step inside the play, and change it all around, you wouldn’t alter it so that Blanche could be happy with Mitch? You prefer the sad ending?”

  “Well, that’s a silly question. It is what it is. I didn’t write the play!”

  “But if you had the power to change the ending, to deliver Blanche to a happier fate, would you?” I have learned, from my Ivy League days, that for all their brilliance, many of these intellectuals lack heart.

  “It was reality! You can’t deny reality!” He snaps open the umbrella, as a light rain falls.

  “Why, when speaking of depressing things, do people always call it reality? But anything happy or magical is always labeled an aberration from reality.”

  “That’s very American,” he says, bemused. He attempts to get me under the brollie, but I’m keeping a safe distance. “The forced cheerfulness.”

  I halt in my tracks, and regard him as if he were an extra-terrestrial. I’m outside the shelter of the now-open brollie, but he doesn’t take notice. “What makes you think it’s forced?”

  “Because it’s impossible to be as happy as you Americans always appear to be.”

  “Oh, all these people are just faking it!” I gesture to the colorful waves of personalities that crash past us on all sides. “Give it up, people! You may be architects of your own destiny, but we all know in reality you’re just fooling yourselves!” I call to the oblivious crowds, waving my arms wildly like a crazed ringmaster. “Maybe we have more to be happy about. After all, we founded a country on the concept, the pursuit of happiness.” I resume my pace, which is suddenly adopting the cadence of a patriotic march.

  “What is this ‘have a nice day’ slogan that you all constantly banter about? It’s not as if any of you mean it.”

  “Oh, well, quick, book me a ticket to Britain, that bastion of sincerity!” I shuffle closer to the storefronts, to garner more reliable shelter from the overhang of awnings.

  He guffaws, seeming to delight in the debate. “You see, in the Old World, we accept our fate. You Americans are constantly battling yours.”

  “In America we make our own fate.” I hug the Dreamcoat about me, wondering where Careen got the notion that he was whimsical.

  “Ah, there it is again. Very American.” He grins.

  “What?” I am irritated that he views my thoughts as not being my own, but rather part of some cultural group-think.

  “You Americans are all so cheerful, so optimistic, you think you can change the world.”

  “We do change the world. You’d be speaking German if it wasn’t for us.”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose the Battle of Britain was all just smoke and mirrors!”

  He laughs interminably at his own joke, as if there was no end to the amusement he can squeeze out of his comeback. The city swirls around us, a cyclone of color and movement. I’m driven to some comfort food. I stop for a salted pretzel at a vendor. The pretzel has annexed the scent of its sister-food, roasted chestnuts, and I inhale the salty creation like smelling salts. Warm dough is apparently beneath David, as he wrinkles his nose when I break off a piece and offer it to him.

  “We look at it a bit differently. The English like to think we did all the difficult work, and America showed up at the end to claim the glory.” He seems to have toned down his opinions, perhaps because I’ve taken to trying to outdistance him, as if he were a stalker.

  “The Battle of Britain was impressive. I’ll give you that,” I call over my shoulder, crunching salt.

  “Thank you. I believe the Queen would agree,” he says, with a mischievous smirk and spin of his brollie.

  For some inexplicable reason, he seems to want to extend the date, and so we head downtown. Despite his prim clothing—navy slacks and black leather shoes that are so worn one wonders if he was born with them welded to his feet, and his tweed blazer with the dark patches over the elbows—he has a certain boyish awkwardness that is refreshing, and a laugh like a snorting horse that is a welcome reprieve from his serious nature.

  “Are you going to show me the sights?”

  “The sights?” I say wearily. “Which sights?”

  He ticks off names of The Statue of Liberty, The Empire State Building, The Museum of Natural History.

  “Those are the sort of places New Yorkers visit on school trips when they are ten years old, and then never visit again.”

  “Unless, of course, they have good cause?”

  “I’m not a tour guide. Get yourself a Fodor’s.” I add a softer, “we’ll see.”

  David remarks that the city is not at all what he expected, that in Europe they imagine it to be some Emerald City, the streets paved with gold, the buildings cast in silver. No one in his family has ever been to The States. This distinguishes him from among them as a bit of an adventurer, a role he relishes, though never envisioned. David secures a promise from me that I will accompany him to the top of the Empire State Building one day. He harps on the subject of my fear of elevators, which only brings Evan to mind, and his easy acceptance of my fears.

  “It all looks so temporary, as if everything could be torn down at any moment,” he remarks of some of the slipshod storefronts.

  “We’re a young country.” I sigh. Defending my culture is becoming tedious. I ask him about his work. He attempts to explain the difference between a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist.

  “So, you think up the ideas, and the experimental physicists are stuck with the plebian task of having to implement a lot of nebulous imaginings. Clearly, your types are the clever ones.”

  “Well, I’m glad you saved me from having to say it myself,” he chuckles.

  “So, the theorists are like the Lords of the Manor, and the experimentalists are the serfs.”

  “I thought America didn’t view the world in terms of class,” he taunts, grinning.

  “Being in the company of someone from The Mother Country calls to mind our early days of oppression,” I return, with a wicked gleam in my eye.

  “Ah,” he says, opening his brollie to shield me from a sudden new misting of rain. We’ve walked so many blocks that my feet ache. The English are great walkers, he informs me. The country prides itself on its walking paths.

  “Well, Bilbo Baggins and company sure covered a lot of ground.”

  “Ah,” he says, with a wearily disappointed sigh, because I know my Tolkien but not my D. H. Lawrence.

  “You sleep until noon, dream up a few theories of how the universe works—which no one can prove or disprove—and then you meet friends for dinner, and for that you get paid, how much?” I summarize his day.

  “Not enough to afford these prices.” He frowns, when we stop to read a menu hung in a restaurant window. We resume our stroll, searching for a suitable place.

  “Well, perhaps soon you’ll hit upon the the
ory that usurps all others, and you’ll be lauded with fame and rewarded with riches.”

  He laughs uproariously at this. “That’s very American. To think that some grand future lies right around the corner!” He gestures rather abruptly—one might even call it flailing—as if not usually given to emotional outbursts.

  We turn a corner then, and stumble upon a glittering street festival. The air is thick with the intoxicating smell of Italian sausage and sugary funnel cakes.

  “Well, look at that,” I sass, “a grand future awaiting us just around the corner.”

  Then I see it—a poster slathered onto the side of a brick building. It’s clearly him, in a chewing gum ad. A beautiful model is perched beside him on a white porch swing in some pastoral setting. They have been photographed smiling at one another flirtatiously.

  “Have I offended you?” he asks, because I’ve fallen silent.

  “Yes, at least a dozen times, but it’s very American to rebound quickly,” I answer robotically, bewitched by the poster. Evan’s smile recalls to mind his laughter, which seems to tinkle in my memory like wind chimes. There is no more beautiful face in all of The Milky Way. David’s eyes follow mine.

  “Why would anyone want to do that?” he asks.

  “What, chew gum?”

  He snorts with laughter. “Well, that as well. But why would someone want to do that for a living, promoting products?”

  I feel a pang of protectiveness for Evan. I always feel a pang of protectiveness for anyone at the receiving end of Ivy League condescension, but a second look at the stunning model beside Evan in the poster quickly kills the feeling. “I don’t know. Other than the fact that a print ad could pay your rent for a year.”

  “Ah, there it is, the money factor,” he says, all smug.

  “You left your country to come here, for that very purpose, to make money because your own economy is in the clunker!” I snap. “I’ll give you a little tip; Americans don’t warm to people who come here for the sole purpose of availing themselves of the thriving American economy, and then accuse Americans of being obsessed with money.”

  “Well, I came for many reasons, and I’m glad I did.” He seems worried that he’s crossed some line with me. His demeanor softens. The kaleidoscope of colors and scents of the festival suddenly lifts my spirits. Street festivals remind me of childhood, when a snow cone or stuffed animal won in an arcade was evidence of the infinite bounty of the universe.

  “Win me that tiger and all is forgiven,” I propose, of the little stuffed creature with spots on its feet. Pitching balls into baskets is not David’s forte. I imagine Evan, the former Little League pitcher, lobbing them with the ease in which Evan finesses everything.

  “So, when a scientist says, oh two particles can exist in two places at once, and there are X number of galaxies fourteen billion miles away, how can they know for sure?”

  “We don’t. We make it up as we go along,” he says.

  “You have a way of answering questions that isn’t really answering them.” I smile in spite of myself.

  “Ah, that’s very English,” he says, steering me into a café with caramel cakes in the window.

  ~ 10 ~

  Wings & Rings

  “I threw away a half a cup of cold tea and he called me a wasteful American,” I report the next day to Careen over the phone. I’m engaging in what Careen likes to refer to as “rotting,” which involves lounging about in my old soft-as-lamb’s-ears Flashdance sweatshirt, a pair of Dylan’s flannel pajama bottoms that I confiscated years ago, and black slipper socks with stringy treads on the bottom that keep me from slipping on Dylan’s frosty ceramic tile. I tend to stick like flypaper to Dylan’s leather couch, so I’ve insulated myself, like a fruit crepe, in a fleecy throw. Two empty teacups and muffin crumbs surround me. Dating requires so much energy and effort, that the day after I always feel wrung out, incapable of the slightest effort at anything.

  “Oh, dreary me, he’s a bit stodgy for one so young. The English think we Americans are obsessed with money, but they are the ones who can’t stop thinking about it because they haven’t got any,” Careen says with a wistful sigh. “He’s clearly over the moon for you.”

  With her distinguished English accent, I have to continually remind myself that my cousin, Careen, is American.

  “I think he wants to send me to the moon. He kept baiting me into debates, and then declaring that everything I said was ‘very American’ as if I was some kind of sociological study! I felt like some bug pinned under glass in a laboratory.”

  “My dear, he’s a man. Men are never happy unless they are railing against something or someone. Of course we don’t mean you, Mr. Palmer. You set the standard for civility!” she calls to her husband, who must be within earshot.

  “He had no sympathy whatsoever for Blanche DuBois. He almost seemed happy when she went mad!” The memory of it sends me stomping into the kitchen for another muffin.

  “The English themselves are half mad. At least he took you out on a respectable date and brought you roses and took you to a Broadway show.”

  This is meant in contrast to Evan, and I feel as if I’ve been slapped.

  “He wants to take me to Wagner’s Ring Series at the Metropolitan Opera. Wagner cheated on his wife and never paid his debts!” This is my little dig back at her, as Careen’s ex-husband cheated on her and never paid his debts. I glance out the window. Someone is raking leaves across the way. The scrape of the rake feels somehow reassuring that there are people in the world content to do simple things; not everyone is on a quest to be legendary.

  “Dreary me, where is the whimsy?” she manages. I sense some of the wind knocked from her sails, and I feel a pang—not a large one—of guilt.

  “He does have a goofy laugh.” I have a go at imitating the snorting laughter. I must frighten Careen because I swear I hear the phone drop. “I actually kind of like the laugh.”

  “Buy a horse and you can hear it every day,” she volleys back at me, adjusting the cradle.

  “He says Americans are too cheerful.” I’ve opted for another muffin, and now it’s stuck in Dylan’s ancient toaster, although the smell of charred corn muffin is not unpleasant.

  “My dear, it’s the lack of sunlight over there. All those gray skies make for gray thoughts. Trot him out into the sunlight, and give him a second look.”

  Careen suggests the foreign film Wings of Desire, which is playing at a theatre near Lincoln Center. Apparently even Mr. Palmer—who has an aversion to subtitles and sepia-toned films—enjoyed it. An angel, Damien, falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist named Marion, and sacrifices his wings, and immortality, for an earthly existence with her.

  “Oh, I’m just holding my breath to hear David’s analysis of that love story,” I gripe. “He’s pushing for the Ring series.”

  “Tell him to hell with Mephistopheles! You want to see angels!”

  ~~~~~

  “Tell him to stick Beelzebub up his butt,” is Sinclair’s take on the Ring series. “He’s not good enough for my Viv.”

  Sinclair has taken to calling me Vivien; ever since I bought the bowler hat he insists that I resemble Vivien Leigh in St. Martin’s Lane, and David has been dubbed, The Popsicle. I stumbled upon Sinclair sitting in his signature black attire, on his brown stoop, smoking a gold cigarette and listening to the strains of the neighbor’s saxophone, but now he’s dragged me up to Central Park West, which is cordoned off because a movie is being filmed there.

  “He challenges everything I say. It’s exhausting.” I twirl before a window front, admiring my Dreamcoat in the reflection. “It’s Princeton all over again, an occupational hazard of the Ivy League. I think these academic types are wired for debates; it comes of years of always trying to prove to their peers that they are the smartest person in the room. Ugh.”

  Sinclair is not sure what the movie is, or which celebrity we should be trying to sight. He manages to nab two powdered sugar donuts for us from the cr
ew’s refreshment table.

  “It’s flattering in a way. It means he takes my opinions seriously enough to argue with me.”

  “Oh, pooh. The English are insufferable,” the Scottish count sniffles. The film crew continually scolds us to duck down or stretch taller, so that we aren’t in the shots. “It was much pleasanter at home when one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller and being ordered about by mice and rabbits.” Sinclair quotes Alice’s Adventures Underground.

  In fairness to David, I point out some of his gallantry: the roses, his genuine interest in meeting Dylan, the deferring to my choice of restaurant, offering to get tickets to American Ballet Theatre’s performance of Don Quixote.

  “Don Q? That changes everything.” Sinclair sashays back and forth, trying to finagle a glimpse of the mystery celebrity.

  “You said he was out like dizzy trout, not good enough for your Viv!”

  “We’re talking Don Q! Who’s dancing Dulcinea?”

  “Susan Jaffe.”

  “Ah, that removes the Obstacle to The Popsicle. He gets another chance,” he decrees.

  In all fairness, the evening with David wasn’t as bad as I’ve portrayed it to my friends. There was something intensely pleasurable about being with someone who appeared panicked at the thought that he might not see me again. David walked ever so slowly, and proposed all sorts of diversions, as if he was desperate to prolong the date. I almost felt pity for him, realizing that’s me, when I’m with Evan. It was like looking at myself. I wonder if Evan can feel my desperation whenever we part.

  I tell Sinclair about how we turned a corner, only to see Evan’s magnetic presence in a poster plastered over a building in Little Italy.

  “He’s famous now, hobnobbing with models. Soon he’ll be forever out of my reach!”

  “He’s hawking chewing gum. He’s not Alexander the Great conquering Europe.”

  I gobble my sugar donut, energized by Sinclair’s assessment. I quickly pad my face like a cat, trying to get confectionary sugar off my nose and cheeks as Sinclair gallops off suddenly, convinced he’s spied Meryl Streep.