Kissing in Manhattan (24 page)

“Here’s the thing, Branchman.” Facing James, Patrick sat with his back to the cab door, as if he were in a limo. “We need to discuss something. A young woman.”

James caught his breath. He knows, thought James.

“We need to discuss this chick, Freida.”

“Freida? Candy-cane Freida? With the weird hair?” James swooped his fingers over his eye, demonstrating.

Patrick whinnied and nodded.

“What about her?”

“She’s totally into you.” Patrick had his arms folded. His eyes were green cuts of attention.

James frowned. “She’s—she’s never said two words to me.”

“Listen, Branchman. Freida’s the lead singer in an all-female band. How much do you know about lead singers in all-female bands?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, I would describe them as highly fuckable individuals.”

James licked his lips. He was confused.

“What?” he said.

“You know, lead singer chicks are all sensitive and empathetic deep down, because they’re the songwriters for the band, usually. But they’re also the front women, so they have to be brassy and sexy too. Add it all up, and you get a highly fuckable individual named Freida Wheeler who wants you to drop the hammer on her.”

James blinked at Patrick. “The hammer?”

“The hammer. The mojo. She wants you in bed.”

The cab stopped at a traffic light near Lincoln Center. Out the window, just ten feet away, stood Morality John, playing his guitar. The window was open a crack and James could hear through it.

“It’s getting harder,”
sang Morality John,
“making lovers out of strangers.”

The light changed, and the cab drove on.

“Patrick,” said James, “what are you talking about?”

Patrick smiled. “Don’t ask questions, Branch. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Let’s just say I had a little conversation with Freida recently, and she spilled the info. The goods.” Patrick snickered.

James gazed at his housemate, at his slick, wolfish grin. Something seemed contrived in Patrick’s voice tonight, as if he were a TV showman, speaking with warm, sincere insolence to a contestant.

“Just wait and see, Branchman,” said Patrick. “She’ll come right up and talk to you. Just wait and see.”

When James and Patrick arrived, Cherrywood’s was already filled with the Spree elite. By now acquaintances had been struck, running jokes established, and secrets revealed. Everyone knew that Hannah Glorybrook walked to work barefoot in the summer, that Crispin had once taken a bath in a tub filled with vodka, that Liza McMannus, when she was seventeen, had slept with Orlando Fisk, the Hollywood muscleman. Laughter reigned, and Walter Glorybrook and Henry Shaker were inseparable chums, and everybody except James wore casual clothes.

Cherrywood’s had a tradition of live storytelling, and on a small wooden stage between two bookcases stood an upholstered chair with a small microphone attached to it. What Patrick wanted was for his guests to take the microphone one at a time and tell the room a story. It had to be either very sweet or very terrible, Patrick said, and those who couldn’t dream something up were required to say what they considered the worst or most wonderful thing that happened in the twentieth century. All in all, it was the kind of game that fails in most crowds, leaving the host embarrassed. But Patrick Rigg was not a man to be disappointed. He moved among his guests, and when he patted a man’s shoulder or whispered in a woman’s ear, that person fixed his hair or smoothed her dress, then took the stage and spoke.

Checkers went first.

“The most wonderful thing,” he said, “that happened in the twentieth century is my woman, Donna Reichard. Period.”

The crowd applauded, the women sighed, and Donna blushed. Next onstage were Kettle and Fife. They squished into the chair together, held hands, and sang a long, eerie song in their native tongue. After that Douglas Kerchek said the name of his favorite book, and Jeremy Jax told a joke that, to Jeremy’s surprise and almost tearful delight, got laughs.

Throughout all these performances James sat at the bar, nursing a Coca-Cola to settle his stomach. He was embarrassed to be in a tuxedo, and afraid to be called to the stage, to be forced to speak. He also couldn’t see Rally anywhere. Making him most nervous of all, though, was Freida Wheeler, who, as Patrick promised, had sought James out as soon as he’d entered the room. She stood next to James now, very close to him, leaning back against the bar, flaring her chest out. Half of her face was hidden behind her sickle of hair, but her one visible eye, which disdained most men, was staring exclusively at James.

“So,” she chatted, “you know how people say the sun gives you vitamin E?”

“Um,” said James, “no.”

“Seriously. Apparently, according to scientists and whomever, just standing outside in sunlight fills your skin with vitamin E. It fortifies the human epidermis.”

James surveyed the room. He was trying not to look at Freida, because her eye was intense and because her shirt revealed a creamy slice of her belly.

“Oh,” he said.

“Listen, buddy. I’m very intelligent. I read a great deal.”

“Okay.” James tried focusing on the stage, where the two Iranians were arguing into the microphone.

Freida took James’s chin in her hand, steered it toward herself. “What I’m saying is, how much sense does that make? The sun being able to fill us up with vitamins? I mean, vitamins coming from food, no problem. You eat a steak, you get vitamins. You take a pill, you get vitamins.”

“I understand,” said James desperately.

“Vitamins come out of objects in your stomach and pass to your bloodstream. No problem. But sunlight? I’m sorry.” Freida tossed back her sickle. “Unless there’s some, like, photosynthesis that goes on in our skin. Which would be freaky. Do you need a drink?”

“Yes, please,” said James. He still couldn’t see Rally anywhere.

Freida ordered two whiskeys. Patrick Rigg took the stage, the microphone.

“My parents met on a blind date,” said Patrick. “They were set up by my father’s fraternity brother, Emilio Snodgrass.”

Patrick’s voice boomed. The guests turned toward it, and the room fell silent.

“According to my mom, my dad was a nervous jerk the first time they went out.” Patrick grinned. “He hardly said two words to her, and he took her to see
Night of the Living Dead,
which completely creeped her out. Also, my dad was in love with a different woman, a beautiful blond girl, who was involved with another man.” Patrick glanced at James. “My dad even discussed this blond girl with my mom, right there on their first date. But my mom, who has dark hair, by the way, she stuck it out. She watched the zombies, and listened to my dad’s whining, and at the end of the night, when my dad brought her home, my mom gave him a kiss that made him forget all about that blonde.”

The dark-haired women in Cherrywood’s whooped.

“My parents got married three months later.” Patrick raised his glass. “And so. A toast to Emilio Snodgrass.”

Everyone laughed and clinked glasses, except James, who stared at his drink. He felt sure that he’d just heard a fable. He felt sure that any couple named Snodgrass would not name their son Emilio.

Freida bumped James with her hip. “Cute story.”

James watched the women in the lounge. He watched how, no matter where they stood or with whichever men they were flirting, their eyes checked on Patrick every little while. They were sly little checks, but they were there.

“Hey,” said Freida, “let’s get out of here.”

James came to attention. “What?”

Freida leaned close. “You look scared,” she whispered, “like maybe you don’t want to talk in front of all these people.”

James breathed in and out. It was true, he was scared. He had nothing to say to the crowd, and Freida was wearing a sexy perfume that James seemed to remember smelling when he stood beside Rally at Duranigan’s. But Rally wasn’t beside him tonight, and James had little experience turning women away, and Freida was pushing her hip insistently into James’s thigh.

“If we bolt now,” she whispered, “we can skip our turns onstage.”

James scanned the crowd one last time.

Be here, he begged. But Rally wasn’t there, and Freida tugged James out the door. She hustled him into a cab, escorted him to the Village, fed him beers at Chumley’s. Two hours later she had James in her apartment, a den with pink shag carpets, black walls, and strobe lights. She gave him more beer, then sat him on her bed, grabbed her guitar, and sang him a song called “Fuck the Buffalo.” When she finished, Freida kissed James wildly on the mouth.

“Wait a minute,” protested James. He was dizzy with beer, but he moved away from Freida on the bed.

“What’s the matter?” whispered Freida. She trailed her fingers down James’s arm.

“I—” James breathed carefully, fought down his stutter, which came back sometimes when he drank.

“I want to know what’s going on,” he said.

Freida nibbled James’s ear. “Me and you, that’s what.”

James pulled free again. The air pulsed with strobe light.

“I—I mean it. Why do you like me, all of a sudden?”

“Do I need a reason?”

“Why?”
James stood up.

Freida curled her legs beneath her on the bed. She shrugged.

“It’s the millennium,” she said. “You’re cute.”

James’s legs were trembling. He felt trapped.

“Do you know Rally McWilliams?” he blurted.

Freida patted the bed. “Come on,” she said. “Get in. I’ll fortify your epidermis.”

James swallowed. He stared at Freida’s chest, at her black stretch pants, at the inviting leer on her face. This was supposed to be easy. He was horny, and Freida was lovely, but his being there had been orchestrated. James was unwilling to pass Freida off as a slut, but, as crazy as it sounded, Patrick had somehow convinced this girl to seduce him. James was sure of it.

“I have to go,” he stammered.

Freida ran her hands down her figure. “Are you nuts? Look at me.”

James grabbed his coat. He needed Otis.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You can’t be serious. Hey. Buddy? Hey!”

James was out the door and gone.

That night, in the elevator, James didn’t do a lot of talking. He rocked and rocked, with his eyes closed, and he thought of nothing. He sat, and breathed, and felt the way his limbs and muscles came together to make him who he was. After a while three peaceful images swam into his mind. The first was of his mother, lying on the couch in the living room, reading the sports section. The second was of Kettle and Fife, sharing their seat at Cherrywood’s, singing their Inuit song. After finishing they’d explained that it was a creation song, a tribal myth about how the world came to be. James thought he’d seen Kettle wipe moisture from her eye as she spoke about this myth.

The last peaceful thing that James thought of was the shape of Rally’s skull. There was a funny, sloping lump to it just behind her ear, he remembered, an extra grade of bone that wouldn’t have been visible when she’d had her hair long. The lump was symmetrically present on both sides of her head, so James knew it wasn’t something cancerous or harmful. It was just her.

James searched for Rally at the remaining Spree events. On the nights when his and Patrick’s apartment filled with guests, James surveyed the hairstyles in the room, hoping for Rally’s clipped, honey-colored head. He talked toys with Henry Shaker, got to know Douglas Kerchek, even endured Freida’s hawkish flirting. During the group’s outing to
Fizzle,
the Lucas Theater’s millennial revue, James laughed and applauded with Patrick’s cronies. Each night James reported to Otis his lack of a Rally sighting.

“She might be away, Otis,” pondered James. “She might be off on some end-of-the-century assignment in Europe or Asia.”

What James wouldn’t articulate to Otis, or even to himself, was his deeper suspicion, his fear that Patrick had banned Rally from the Spree, simply because she’d socialized with James. James knew that his housemate had handfuls of women in his thrall, but it unnerved him that Patrick might hold enough sway over these girls to puppet them about, ceasing one’s access to James entirely, forcing another to throw herself at him.What exactly, James wondered, did Patrick offer these women that gave him authority over them? And what pleasure did Patrick get in return? James pictured Freida bound naked to Patrick’s bedposts the way he’d found Rally. He pictured Liza McMannus that way, and Eva, and Crispin, and Sarah Wolf and Hannah Glorybrook, all of whom he’d seen slip out of Patrick’s bedroom on various nights over the last year. James had first written all of this traffic off as hedonism, plain and simple, but now, during the Spree, he thought otherwise. James watched the way Patrick spoke intimately in a corner with Crispin, the way he held hands with Eva at the
Fizzle
performance. It was clear that Patrick followed some loopy, chivalric personal code, that he cared intensely for and wanted to protect each woman he befriended.

But James didn’t want to think about or get to know all of Patrick’s women. He only wanted Rally, and it was the first time his adult heart had ever lurched so hard toward one woman. So he needed to see her, to speak to her, to find out if the clutch in his stomach would ever stand down while she was beside him. What frightened James was the thought, the diabolical possibility, that Patrick had sniffed all of this out, that he would push a random, sexy distraction like Freida at James just to keep him from pursuing something wonderful, maybe even honorable, with Rally.

“Is he jealous, Otis?” said James.

The darkness said nothing.

“He must be jealous,” whispered James.

There was a new order in James’s blood. He rocked inside Otis, and caught himself holding his breath. He realized that he’d rather be impaled on the Chrysler Building spire than think about Rally ever returning to her naked, bound place in Patrick’s bedroom.

Jesus, thought James. Am I in love?

New Year’s Eve answered the question. James showed up, black ticket in hand, at Minotaur’s Nightclub in the meat-packing district. He’d never been to a rave before, and he’d never been to Minotaur’s, but he remembered Rally sayingshe hung out there, so he risked it. He wasn’t prepared forthe club’s dark indulgences, its maze of cubby rooms, its barswith steel counters and bright blue lights behind the bottles. In one room stood an authentic iron maiden, its door thrown open, while in another room the furniture set of a 1950s American kitchen—stove, refrigerator, table, and chairs—had been nailed upside-down to the ceiling. In the Forum, Minotaur’s cavernous main hall, Freida Wheeler and her band, The Great Unwashed, cavorted onstage, thumping their instruments, moaning lyrics. Kettle and Fife and Hannah Glorybrook were goths on the dance floor. They all three wore black cloak dresses with plunging necklines and they sportedthick black eye-shadow and silver cross studs in their tongues.