“So why didn’t you say no?”
“I tried to.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Well, that was true, actually. She didn’t. In her head she was trying to say no. But in truth, she had just done as she was told.
“You’ve been on TV before,” Scarlett said. “You did that telethon.”
“When I was
nine.
”
This was a stupid conversation to be having, especially in the sleek black hallway of Rockefeller Center, in full view of people from the show and the other Powerkids. It was stupid under any circumstances.
“I have to meet my guest for lunch,” she said. “So I have to take you right back.”
“I’m supposed to have lunch with
them.
”
“I don’t have any choice, Marlene. It’s my job. Let me take you home…”
“I’m coming,” Marlene said. She was just doing it to be difficult—and frankly, her technique was working. But Mrs. Amberson was going to have to meet Marlene sooner or later.
More to the point…Marlene was going to have to meet Mrs. Amberson. And that, frankly, was kind of an amusing prospect.
The Algonquin Hotel was one of the most pedigreed establishments in the entire city, famous for its literary connections in the twenties and thirties. Mrs. Amberson was settled on a small sofa in its dark paneled and richly appointed lobby. Where the Hopewell had sparkle (or used to have sparkle), the Algonquin had a deep, cultivated charm. And…guests.
“It’s this or a short hospital stay,” she said, greeting Scarlett with a raised glass of a deep red liquid with a celery stalk sticking out of the top. “Bloody Marys are one of the truly medicinal cocktails. The only way I can beat this jet lag is by staying up all day, and this is going to keep me alive. And who is this?”
This was directed at Marlene, who was stalking along behind Scarlett like a wet cat.
“My sister Marlene. We were at an event this morning for her group.”
Marlene dropped into a plush chair at the farthest end of the little table.
“Group?” Mrs. Amberson said, pulling out the celery and taking a big bite out of the stalk.
“Powerkids,” Scarlett said, sitting down a little closer. “It’s a cancer survivor thing.”
This was usually the place where people would go into a long, “You had cancer? What a brave little girl you are! How terrible, at your age. You know, they say that children who have been ill…” Blah, blah, blah. It was always the same, and Marlene never listened to a word of it. Mrs. Amberson, however, didn’t say a thing. She just cocked an eyebrow at Marlene and jabbed her celery stick back into the glass. It was a strangely satisfying reaction for Scarlett, who was equally sick of hearing the speech.
“I’m hungry,” Marlene said.
Mrs. Amberson smiled lightly and passed Marlene the menu.
“Help yourself,” she said.
This, Scarlett had not expected. The Alonguin was a nice place, which meant it was also an expensive place.
“I…um…I only have eight dollars on me,” Scarlett said. That was half of her current fortune.
“It’s on me,” Mrs. Amberson said. “Get what you like, Marlene. You, too, O’Hara.”
The menu was surprisingly heavy, bound in very thick pieces of leather. The food on it was fairly normal—just some sandwiches and snacks—all stupidly expensive, as she had figured. This was odd…being taken out to a place like this for lunch, by a guest, no less. She was supposed to be doing things for Mrs. Amberson, not the other way around. She quickly picked the cheapest thing and said water was fine. Marlene had no such compunctions. She ordered a plate of the house special miniburgers and a nonalcoholic pina colada with extra cherries.
“A girl who knows what she wants,” Mrs. Amberson said.
“Can I go make a call while it’s coming?” she asked.
Oh, yes. The fifteen-year-old rule did not apply to Marlene. She’d had her cell phone for years. The excuse was that she needed it to call home when she was in the hospital, which was a pretty good excuse, but still.
“Go right ahead,” Mrs. Amberson said. “I have some things to discuss with your sister.”
Marlene skulked over to an empty sofa on the other side of the room, far from them.
“I’m sorry,” Scarlett said. “She’s just a little…”
“You are an interesting bunch,” Mrs. Amberson cut in. “And you don’t have to apologize. I hope you don’t mind that we’re meeting at another hotel. No offense to yours, but this one has a pedigree and a fabulous bar.”
“You said this was your first time in New York in a while?” Scarlett asked, out of a sense of obligation.
Mrs. Amberson smiled wryly. She reached for her cigarette case, then seemed to remember that she wasn’t permitted to smoke inside. She dropped it back into her purse with disappointment.
“I used to live here,” she said, “some time ago. Back during the glam and the disco and the punk. But I was mostly a Broadway girl.”
“Broadway?” Scarlett repeated. “You should talk to my brother. He’s an actor. He’s trying to get on Broadway.”
“Sweetheart,” Mrs. Amberson said, “a quarter of the people in this town are trying to get on Broadway, another quarter have been.”
It wasn’t really clear what Scarlett was supposed to take from that
remark—if it was meant to be reassuring, or insulting, or purely informational. Mrs. Amberson had a very disconcerting habit of making everything sound semi-insulting.
“School’s out, right? So, what do you do? Do you have some kind of…
camp
or something?”
“No,” Scarlett said. “Just work.”
“Work?” she laughed. “Your family owns a hotel. And you’re wearing a Dior dress, I might point out.”
“The dress is my sister’s,” Scarlett said, unable to hide her annoyance. “It was a gift. We are the opposite of rich.”
As soon as she said it, Scarlett bit her lip. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea to advertise to the new guest that they weren’t exactly the most successful family in the city. But Mrs. Amberson looked intrigued. She sat back and stirred her Bloody Mary until her celery cracked in half where she had chomped into it.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Does the dress have anything to do with the owner of that car I saw you getting into this morning?”
“It’s from my sister’s boyfriend,” Scarlett said. “That was his car.”
“Ah.” She stirred the Bloody Mary for a moment, looking very pleased with herself. “The opposite of rich is the best thing to be, anyway. There’s nothing like working for what you want. It’s the only way.”
This seemed odd coming from a woman who was clearly of the rich persuasion. But maybe she had worked for it. Mrs. Amberson drummed her nails on her lap for a moment and gazed at Scarlett.
“So,” she said, “what do you do with your time?”
That was a good question, one for which Scarlett didn’t really have an answer. So she went with her most recent idea.
“I write.”
“Write?” Mrs. Amberson said. “Very ambitious. I like it. And you’re certainly in the right place. Why, this hotel…do you know what it’s famous for?”
“The Algonquin Round Table,” Scarlett said. “The group of writers who used to meet here.”
To be fair, hotel lore was somewhat of a specialty in the Martin family, but Scarlett would have known that anyway.
“A reader,” she said, impressed. “And who said the book is dead?”
Then she seemed to lose interest in the whole matter with a massive yawn. She fished around in her purse for a pen and a notebook, and spent a few minutes scrawling. Then she fished around some more, producing some strange multicolored bills.
“Baht, baht, baht…here we are.”
Dollars followed. She pushed them toward Scarlett.
“Here’s money for the check, and for that tea, when you get the chance. Keep the rest—I’ll be sending you out on errands, I’m sure. That will cover them for a while. I’m going to yoga. See you later.”
Mrs. Amberson downed the rest of her Bloody Mary and demolished the rest of her celery stick. Then she picked up a sleek little gym bag by her feet and was gone without another word.
Scarlett looked down and saw that she was holding what had to be about five hundred dollars.
“What was that all about?” she asked herself.
She was still sitting there holding the wad of cash when the waiter showed up with the massive plates, the water, and the decked-out fake pina colada, thick with a dozen cherries.
“Where did she go?” Marlene asked, coming back and snatching up the glass.
“To yoga.”
Marlene seemed satisfied by this turn of events and gobbled down her miniburgers. She ordered a second colada. Scarlett nibbled at the snack plate she had gotten. It was a relief when her phone rang and Spencer’s name appeared on the screen.
“I need you,” he said when she answered.
“Stop it, Orlando. Stop calling me. If we get married, my name will be Scarlett Bloom, and that sounds like a rash.”
“You can’t see me right now,” Spencer said, “but I actually just
peed
myself laughing. My shorts are soaked.”
“You say that like it’s uncommon.”
“And the laughs keep coming. If you’re done…”
“I am,” Scarlett said.
“I actually do need you. It’s
incredibly
important.”
“Did you get the part?” Scarlett asked, sitting up and taking notice.
“You will only know the story if you come and meet me in the park at four. By the Mad Hatter statue.”
For a day that started off with no real prospects, this was turning into a whirlwind.
First, there was a subway ride uptown to the hotel, dragging Marlene all the way. She rattled off the prearranged “I just ran into them on the street” story to her dad, which was accepted without comment. Marlene looked murderous, but she didn’t contradict it. Scarlett changed her clothes and sailed through her chores—washing sheets, sweeping the lobby, breaking down the grocery delivery boxes for the recycling, wiping down the brass fixtures in the elevator, vacuuming the second floor hallway. She made it back into Lola’s dress and to the park just in time.
A few minutes later, Spencer came barreling along, illegally cutting across some grass, on his scrappy, duct-taped-covered bike. He was glistening with sweat when he stepped off and dropped it on the lawn.
“Did you get it?” she asked.
He couldn’t answer for a minute, because he had grabbed the water bottle off his bike and guzzled half of it back with such force that the other half ended up running over his chin.
“I just rode all the way up from the East Village in about ten minutes,” he said, putting his head back and taking a deep breath. Then he wrapped her in a huge, sweaty hug, dripping water on her from his chin. This was answer enough.
“Where were you when I called?” he asked. “And why are you wearing that dress?”
“Lola lent it to me. And I was just having lunch at the Algonquin Hotel.”
“Of course you were,” Spencer said, releasing her and sinking to the ground. “I must have forgotten your normal Tuesday schedule. The other guy, my scene partner, is on his way up. I have to be off book in
two days.
You’re going to help me learn my lines, right?”
“Don’t I always?” she said.
“Yeah, but it’s been a while. I thought maybe you changed your policy or something.”
Spencer pulled out a copy of
Hamlet
from his messenger bag and started leafing through it.
“Take you me for a sponge, my lord?” he asked.
Scarlett turned.
“Take
you
me
for a sponge
, my lord?” he asked again.
“No,” Scarlett said.
“That’s one of Rosencrantz’s lines. I don’t know what this means. Maybe it makes sense if you read the play. Maybe he turns into a sponge.”
“I think that’s what
Hamlet
’s about,” she said. “People who turn into sponges. Oh…I have a guest. In my room.”
“You met him? Her? It? Them?”
“Her. She took me out to lunch. She gave me this to run her errands.”
She flashed the cash quickly.
“Someone is actually using the family policy for good,” he said approvingly. “See. Exciting things always happen to you. The best I ever got was that woman who kept having me come up to fix her TV. There was a lot of bending involved. I felt used and dirty.”
“It’s the price you pay for being one of those weedy but good-looking types,” Scarlett said.
“Weedy? You hurt me. I prefer tall and scrawny. Unlike my partner, who’s right behind you.”
Scarlett turned. There were a lot of people wandering around…people with massive baby strollers, joggers, the lost, the tourists, the assorted insane. Cutting through them and walking directly for Scarlett and Spencer was a guy that Scarlett felt like she knew. He was just a hair shorter than Spencer, but fuller and more muscular where Spencer was, as she had just commented, weedy. He had sandy hair, loosely cut and slightly overgrown in a very appealing way. There was something almost uneven about his face—one side of his mouth kept creeping up in a smile where the other stayed flat. His clothes were nondescript, just a black T-shirt and a pair of green cargo shorts. He managed to look ordinary, but it was the most engrossing kind of ordinary that Scarlett had ever seen. Ordinary plus.
“Sorry,” he said as he approached. “I had to take the subway. My scooter wouldn’t start. Have you learned all your lines?”
His voice was deep and full, with a very slight Southern drawl softening the end of every word.
“I learned the whole play,” Spencer said. “Backward. Meet my sister. She’s here to help. Eric, this is Scarlett. Scarlett, this is Eric.”
Eric smiled at her like he had known her forever. And it still felt that way. She had seen him. She knew him. He was pointing at her like he knew her as well.
“I
saw
you,” Eric said. “Just recently. Today.”
“Was it on TV?” Scarlett asked, feeling her face flush.
“Yes! When I was at the gym. You were on some morning show.”
Spencer’s head whipped in her direction. She held up her hands.
“It was an accident,” she said. “I took Marlene to a taping. I was supposed to be in the audience, and I ended up making these…quesadillas.”
“Oh,” Spencer said with a nod. That wasn’t like
really
being on TV. It wasn’t like she had gotten a recurring role on a sitcom. He relaxed.
“I feel like I’ve seen you, too,” she said.
Eric nodded.
“Was I doing this?” he asked.
He pulled off his backpack and took a running dive and rolled across the ground, doing three summersaults in a row, all the while clapping at himself like he was on fire.
Amazingly, this did ring a bell.
“It was the commercial,” he explained, dusting himself off and walking back. “It got stuck in a lot of people’s heads, but no one can really remember where they saw me.”
“That’s it!” Scarlett said. He had played a guy who accidentally set himself on fire cooking dinner, and then ended up getting a pizza delivered while he was still smoking slightly. It had been on constantly around Christmas.
“We’re both TV stars,” he said.
Scarlett felt her chin go a little weak, like it was about to drip off her face.
“Let me see that again,” Spencer said.
“What, the roll?”
Spencer nodded. Eric did it again, running and diving onto the ground, rolling three times, clapping feverishly. Spencer watched carefully, cocking his head to the side. Then he set his script down and recreated it perfectly, adding an extra roll.
“That was good,” Eric said. “When I first tried it, they wanted me to do it like this…”
And then it really began—a showdown the likes of which Scarlett had never seen. She was used to Spencer doing this on his own, to entertain her, or whoever was around, or just for his own personal amusement. She wasn’t aware that other people spent their time doing the same things, especially people like Eric.
Spencer started by fake-punching himself in the face, complete with an authentic punching noise and reaction (called the “nap,” Scarlett had been told). He knocked himself completely to the ground. Eric was duly impressed by this, and did the same thing to himself, but in the stomach, throwing himself back very far. Spencer countered by pretending to trip and throwing himself over two separate benches—the second one, backward. Eric couldn’t top that. They exchanged fake blows for a while, comparing the noises they made. Then, there were backflips.
After about an hour, it came down to the issue of who could walk on their hands the longest. In this, Spencer was slightly at a loss. He was fairly strong, but Eric had much bigger, stronger arms. Spencer went a lot of steps quickly before rolling over. Eric was slower, but
unquestionably more powerful. He kept going for a full minute after Spencer.
“What did you think?” he asked, as he gracefully let himself down. He was out of breath and his face was deeply red. “Who wins?”
Spencer was back on his hands, trying again.
“You’re good,” she said.
“Yeah, but he’s
really
good. He’s got skills. Serious skills. He has to show me how to do that fall.”
Spencer wandered off on his hands, mumbling his lines. He disappeared around the statue.
“But you won,” she said. “Definitely. You stayed up longer.”
He smiled that uneven smile.
“I’m
going
to do that fall,” he said. “You watch. Give me a few days. You’ll be around for a few days, right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess. If you guys need help.”
“We need help,” he said. “And I need a witness.”
Even as it was happening, Scarlett knew she would remember this moment for a long time—this first exchange with Eric, the way he was looking down at her, tousled, slightly sweaty. Perfect.
Spencer reappeared, now on his feet. Then he collapsed on the grass.
“I’m done,” he said. “Time to start with the lines.”
Spencer had only mastered a few lines in the hour or so he had the part, but he gamely tried to go though their scenes without the script, having Scarlett feed him the lines. Eric was incredibly patient, repeating his lines endlessly to give Spencer the chance to catch up. He had an amazing voice—serious and actory. With every word he said, Scarlett felt herself falling deeper into a soupy trance, which
was barely broken when Spencer threw down his book and made an announcement.
“We gotta go,” he said. “It’s family night at the Hopewell.”
Scarlett looked at her watch. They had been there for two and a half hours. It felt like ten minutes.
“What’s the Hopewell?” Eric asked, packing his things away.
“We live in a hotel,” Spencer explained. “It’s called the Hopewell. Our family owns it.”
This startled Eric.
“Wow. You
own
a
hotel.
You guys must be loaded…”
He shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “That just came out. That was really rude.”
“It’s okay,” Scarlett said quickly. “We get it all the time. And we’re not. Really not.”
“Really not,” Spencer said with a deep nod. “Really,
really
not.”
They walked east out of the park, crossing through the boutiques of Madison Avenue, the towering apartment buildings of Park Avenue. Eric walked with them toward the subway. He was very talkative and open. She learned he was eighteen and from a small town outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
“Getting that commercial…that was a fluke,” he said, jumping back as a cab cut in front of them. He clearly didn’t quite know how to walk the streets yet. “My acting teacher in high school set up a weekend trip for some of us who seemed serious about performing. You know—get the New York experience for a day or two, go to some shows, look at the big buildings. They had us do a one-day audition workshop, and it just happened that the guy casting the commercial was there and thought I was funny.”
“I can’t
believe
that,” Spencer said. “I live here! I go to auditions all the time. That’s never happened to me.”
“Just dumb luck,” Eric said. “They would have taken you if you were there that day. You’re a lot better than me.”
Eric’s generosity, his praise of Spencer’s talent…these were very endearing qualities. Scarlett tried to tell herself that this was what she liked about him, and that it wasn’t just his almost disturbing physical perfection.
“Anyway,” he went on, “once I got that, I decided to make the big jump. I was going to go to state university, but I got enough cash from the job to go to NYU instead. I’m starting in September, but I decided to move up a little early and get used to living here. You go to school, Spence?”
“Not at the moment,” Spencer replied. “Hopefully that will continue.”
Eric looked at the regal buildings that lined the park along Fifth Avenue—the embassies, institutes, clubs. Scarlett could see that New York was still making a very big impression on him at every turn. Things she paid no attention to at all probably shocked and awed him. It made her feel very worldly, which was a new sensation.
“Well,” Eric said, as they reached the subway. “It was good meeting you. Have a good dinner. Family night sounds nice. I kind of miss my folks.”
And then…Scarlett heard herself speaking.
“Come with us,” she said. “Have dinner.”
Out of politeness, Spencer didn’t make any weird faces or sudden moves, but he did slip a look in Scarlett’s direction. Family night was not a “bring everyone you know over” kind of a thing. People had
come in the past—Marlene occasionally dragged along a Powerkid, and Spencer had brought one or two of his high school girlfriends—but that was back when they had a cook.
“It’s just one more person,” Scarlett said. “There’s always lots of food. Tons.”
When he didn’t reply for a moment, Scarlett thought he was trying to think of a polite way of backing out of this sudden invitation. But then he looked to them both, smiling broadly.
“I’m always up for free food,” Eric said. “And I actually like going to family stuff. If it’s okay…”
“Sure,” Spencer said quickly. “Definitely. I warn you though…if you like food that tastes good, this may come as a bit of a shock. But there should be plenty of it.”
“Lots is my favorite kind,” Eric said. “Lead the way.”