What She Saw... (30 page)
And this time she didn't worry about sounding too aggressive. She felt comfortable around Bo Pierce in ways she didn't always in the company of the opposite sex. Maybe because, for once, he was the actor, and she was the audience.
Maybe because, this time, she'd put her faith in fate.
BUT SHE COULDN'T wait to find out what she already must have known was sure to happen. And so, the very next night, she paid Bo a surprise visit at the Bar With No Name. Sure enough, there was no indicating sign on the awning, just a sapphire-blue glow emanating from over the door. She pulled it open. The space itself was long and dark and narrow and not inelegant. Silk paintings of Border collies hung from exposed brick walls. Colored-glass ashtrays complemented Louis XVIâ style tables with gilded cabriole legs. All the sofas were upholstered in red velvet. All the girls were upholstered in red vinyl. All the guys had Caesar haircuts and wore black leather car coats. Bo stood at the far end of a copper bar shaking martinis. Phoebe pulled up a stool. That's when he looked up and said, “Phoebe!” And his eyes sparkled like little Christmas lights at the sight of her.
And then he walked over to where she sat. “I'm surprising you,” she announced before she kissed him hello on the cheek.
“I'm very surprised,” he assured her. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“How about a glass of champagne?”
“Are you celebrating something?”
It hadn't occurred to her before that she was. “Sort of,” she hedged.
He didn't ask her what.
She wasn't entirely sure herself.
She wasn't entirely sure until the following afternoon.
“ACCORDING TO BUDDHIST theology, this is the difference between heaven and hell,” Bo Pierce was saying. “Heaven is this beautiful feast. And hell is the same beautiful feast, only with boards nailed down over our hands.”
“Now you're talking about temptation,” said Phoebe. “And about how we want the most what we can't have.”
“Or shouldn't have, but sometimes have anyway.”
Then he turned to look at her, to smile leadingly, to find out what she was thinking and if it was the same thing he was thinkingâand what she wanted to do about it. She wanted to ignore it, but she wasn't strong enough. It was nature, it was nurture. It was ten past four in the afternoon, and it was raining lightly, and she and Bo were sitting side by side on his khaki windbreaker spread flat over a patch of grass in the middle of the great lawn. In the distance a black Labrador galloped toward an airborne stick, its master standing in repose nearby. Otherwise, the park was empty. All the responsible people were at work, Phoebe thought to herself as she slid her hand over Bo's.
That's when he turned to her and asked, “Should I kiss you now?”
“There's no script,” she told him.
But she was wrong: they were writing it as they went along. Now he leaned toward her, ran a finger down the side of her cheek. “Do you
want
me to kiss you?” he tried again.
“Yes,” she said. So he sunk his lips into hers. Then he pulled away. “Yes,” she said it again. She said it over and over again until the rhythm traveled, and they came together like two meteors colliding in outer space.
“Someone's coming,” she whispered five minutes into their rapture.
But he whispered back, “I don't care.”
“I don't care, either,” said Phoebe. And in that moment she didn't. She didn't care who she was offending or why. She didn't necessarily even care if she ever saw Bo Pierce again. For all she knew, he was a paranoid delusional whose desiring structure was dependent on triangular situations. She wasn't even convinced he was smart. But even at the tender age of twentyfive, she could see that venery is quickly lost to more noble but arguably less exhilarating pursuits like career and family. “Put your fingers inside me,” she told him.
He did as directed. But it only made things worse. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't see straight. They rolled onto the mud. “Where do you live?” she asked him.
“I think your house is closer than mine,” he croaked. “And my roommateâ”
“Let's go to my house.”
THE WALK BACK to Phoebe's apartment was long and wet enough to have a sobering effect on both of them. By the time they got to her door, they were too embarrassed to look each other in the eye. “This is my house,” she announced like a perfect idiot.
“I know,” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” she mumbled.
They climbed the stairs single-file. She led him straight into the bedroom she and Neil had painted a fashionable shade of lime-green. “Cute,” said Bo, removing his socks, his shoes, his jeans, and his shirt. So he was naked, and even lovelier than she'd imagined, and shaking ever so slightly.
“Let's get under the covers,” said Phoebe, surprised by the show of nerves on display before her. (Here she'd thought Boarding School Brandos' emotional arcs begun and ended with rage-tinged melancholy!)
They climbed under Neil's goose-down comforter and hugged.
Phoebe might have felt guilty.
Instead she felt happy for the first time in a long timeâ happy and warm and free and stupid and young.
Bo seemed to feel the same way. “Phoebe,” he said, pulling her against his boyish chest.
“What?” she said, locking her leg around his own.
“You know the day we met?”
“Yes.”
“I didn't tell you this before because I didn't want you to think I was some kind of stalker, but I recognized you the second you walked in.”
“From where?!”
“It was about a year ago on the F train. I was on my way to acting class. I don't know where you were going, but you were wearing black tights, and you had your hair pulled back . . .”
Phoebe's memory scrolled backward and landed on a fuzzy frame of a mostly forgotten March morning. “Was that you?” she squealed in disbelief.
“That was me,” said Bo.
“But your hair was short!”
“I grew it out.”
“You're lying.”
“I didn't think I'd ever see you again.”
“I didn't think I'd ever see
you
again.”
“And look where we are now,” said Bo, pushing himself against the inside of her thigh.
“Speak for yourself,” said Phoebe, pushing him away.
But she pulled him back in the throes of their laughter. She figured she had the rest of her life to clean up the mess. And she was tired of thinking so much, tired of thinking everything through. And were there really nobler pursuits? Increasingly, it seemed to Phoebe that the rewards on this misery- and humiliation-drenched earth were few and far between.
Later but not that much later in the afternoon, she got out her violin and played Bo Pierce a nude rendition of one of Stinky Mancuso's old anthems, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Somewhere along the way to hellâor was it heaven that awaited her? Who was she to say?âshe'd learned the notes by heart.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to: Dan Menaker and Jeanne Tift, for giving me a chance; Maria Massie, for never losing faith; my loving parents, Peter Rosenfeld and Lucy Davidson Rosenfeld; my inspiring sisters, Sophie and Marina Rosenfeld; and also Christen Kidd, Carri Brown, and Dennis Ambrose; and the many friends who saw me through this book, editorially, existentially, and otherwiseâespecially Ariel Kaminer, Meredith Kahn, Malcolm Gladwell, Larissa MacFarquhuar, John Cassidy, Virginia Heffernan, Nina Siegal, David Kirkpatrick, Elyse Cheney, Matthew Affron, and (above all) Greg Pond.
Lucinda Rosenfeld
WHAT She SAW...
Lucinda Rosenfeld was born in New York City on the last day of the 1960s. She grew up in New Jersey and attended Cornell University. She has written for
The New York Times Magazine
,
Harper's Bazaar
,
Elle
,
Slate
,
Word
, and
Talk
. She was a nightlife columnist of the
New York
Post
from 1996 to 1998. She lives in Brooklyn.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in
What She Saw
. . . is based on an actual person and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2001
Copyright © 2000 by Lucinda Rosenfeld
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition
as follows:
Rosenfeld, Lucinda.
What she saw in Roger Mancuso, Günter Hopstock, Jason Barry Gold,
Spitty Clark, Jack Geezo, Humphrey Fung, Claude Duvet, Bruce Bledstone,
Kevin McFeeley, Arnold Allen, Pablo Miles, Anonymous 1â4, Nobody 5â8,
Neil Schmertz, and Bo Pierce: a novel / Lucinda Rosenfeld.
p. cm.
1. Young womenâFiction. 2. Man-woman relationshipsâFiction. I. Title
PS3568.O814 W47 2000
813'.6âdc21
00-029066
eISBN: 978-0-307-43018-2
v3.0