Читать книгу Love Slave - Jennifer Spiegel - Страница 9

Friday, January 20, 1995

The Fedora is under a trendy restaurant called Without Delay on Lafayette. Without Delay is gold, black, aquamarine— possibly Turkish, Mediterranean, Moroccan, something Greek. The floors are mosaic; the salads are big, the people pretty.

I've never actually eaten there, but I've been to the Fedora a number of times.

In contrast to the nouveau riche Delay, the Fedora is swanky. Narrow tables clutter a charcoal-gray nightclub. As one leaves WD to enter the Fedora via a dark staircase, a girl in a very tight t-shirt stands poised to stamp hands. The Fedora serves drinks and finger food. I fantasize regularly about the stuffed potato skins and fried mozzarella. Up front, there's a stage: inelegant, unglamorous, made for the music.

The place is packed. Madeline and I sit down at a narrow table in the middle of the club.

"I'm excited." She wears a silver top, loose and shimmery, with what looks like black silk pajama bottoms.

"Don't do anything weird when we talk to him. If we talk to him." I'm in my going-out Gap dress. Dramatic, the color of charcoal, tight. I'm okay with "tight" tonight, because I've barely eaten all day. Disturbing things are appetizing to me about now. Goose liver. Beets.

"Of course we'll talk to him. Your name was at the door, wasn't it? He didn't forget, did he?" A waitress squeezes by. "I'll have a gin and tonic," Madeline says to her.

"Diet Coke for me." I scan the room with a fake smile on my face, my elbows on the table. By the stairs, a skinny guy sells Glass Half Empty's one and only CD, which both Madeline and I already own. The skinny guy is always around, always selling CDs. If our eyes meet at shows, I turn away in embarrassment. I feel caught; I feel like a groupie. I hate that feeling, because while it denotes repetition and belonging, it also suggests patheticness and nowhere-else-to-go-ness. I'm thankful that he hardly pays attention to me. Tonight I try looking warm, comfortable, and sophisticated, but it's hard, because I think I'm supposed to do something special with my hands. "What should I do? Should I be doing something? Am I supposed to go backstage and look for him?"

"Go up to that guy over there." Madeline tosses her head back quickly in the direction of the bouncer standing by the stage. He's bald, tough, and tattooed; he looks like a pirate. "Say, I'm with the band. Ask him if you can go backstage. See what he says."

I try it out. "I'm with the band."

"Try again," she says. "Deeper, more confidence."

"I'm with the band," I repeat an octave lower. When I see a blank expression from Madeline, I add, "Damn it."

In that secret, sudden way that men have when they approach girls in bars, Rob joins us, sitting down at my side. "You made it!" He smiles hugely. We're like long-lost friends. I have this inexplicable desire to embrace him passionately and plant a wet one on his lips.

He thrusts his hand out toward Madeline. "You must be Madeline."

She doesn't shake, but rather places her fingertips into his palm as if this were a Merchant Ivory film. "Charmed, I'm sure."

Yikes! Is Madeline trying to put on the sex appeal with Rob Shachtley, whose wife died only seven years ago?

"Likewise." He kisses her where the Fedora girl left a glow-in-the-dark stamp.

Sexual tension?

He turns to me. "I have to go, but do you two want to hook up after the show? Coffee? A drink? Truth or Dare?"

"Yeah, let's," I say as Madeline lights a cigarette.

"It'll take me a while to get out of here, so I'll meet you." He stands. "I'll sing you a song. What do you want me to sing for you, Sybil Weatherfield?"

I know there's something I should be doing with my hands. " 'Sister Golden Hair'? 'Rhinestone Cowboy'?" I hesitate, staring at the ceiling. "I got it. 'Rhiannon.' "

"Let me think." He puts his index finger to his lips and closes his eyes. He opens them. "Uh, no. When I sing a Beatles song, it's for you." When he smiles, I blush. Second time he's made me blush.

Madeline drags on her cigarette while we agree, over loud music, to meet at Café Michelangelo on Bleecker.

"Listen for the Beatles," he tells me, leaving. "That'll be for you."

Before he gets out of earshot, I call after him, "Hey, Rob?"

"Yeah?" He turns his body around. The girls nearby watch him walk. The music seems to blare.

The girls stare at him. He doesn't seem to notice. He must notice. "Who's the skinny guy who always sells CDs at the shows?" I ask, pointing to the stairs. It's just an excuse to talk to him. Realizing this, I feel silly and self-conscious. I tell myself I have a boyfriend. I tell myself Madeline doesn't detect anything out of the ordinary. I tell myself I'm really interested in the mysterious identity of the skinny guy by the stairs.

Rob, looking past the audience, checks out the skinny guy. "Oh, Greg. Sound engineer/manager/record producer extraordinaire." He lowers his eyes to mine. "Dave's wife's little brother. He comes in from Boston a couple times a month." He pauses. "He does the flyers."

"They're great flyers," I say.

The machinations of rock 'n' roll. When he turns away and I find myself looking at him like the other girls, I blush again. I check out Madeline.

She watches him too. "He's fatter up close."

"You think? I don't think so. Maybe a little." Now I'm so red that I probably look like I'm about to die from a rash.

Glass Half Empty takes the stage: Rob Shachtley in a pink suit with a guitar and Dave Stomps in a black suit at drums. They look like an overturned box of Good & Plenty.

Listening to rock 'n' roll is like scratching a bug bite till it bleeds. Just when Madeline and I master blasé, he breaks into "Love Me Do." I remember in the Laundromat how he said I didn't want to be his love slave. That's what he said.

Am I being pursued? What does he want from me? I don't want to be just another groupie, just another girl.

I listen, trying to look unmoved. My cheeks can't redden. No standing on my chair. It's a rock 'n' roll moment, and anyone who's ever had one knows it's precious: a flash, a split second, like a Korean launderer, a nonfat berry muffin. It's like a memory of picking apples in an orchard or putting your cat in a stroller when you're three. A rock 'n' roll moment is about being there and not somewhere else, missing it.

The show ends when Rob summons up images of a wraith-like woman sipping from the Fountain of Youth at gunpoint.

The lights come on, Madeline places money under a glass, and we walk through the Fedora to exit. People press in and smile at someone visible just over our shoulders. It's easy to be claustrophobic now. I've lost whatever it was I had, and now there's an odd sensation that, in the midst of my efforts to get out of the Fedora with Madeline Blue— who will always be cooler than I, even in pajama bottoms— I'm somehow off.

"Good set," Madeline says on the street.

Fedoraphobic, I draw my jacket tightly around me. "It's freezing."

We walk west. "What do you know about Dave?" she asks.

"Nothing. Only what you know."

As we pass Washington Square Park, about ten homeless guys create a gauntlet for us to walk through. "Smoke? Smoke? Smoke?" We keep going.

Café Michelangelo is muted and dim, the colors of peacock feathers and the Italian Renaissance. Furnished in antiques, it's a torrent of curled iron chair legs, round marble tables, and stained wooden fixtures spread beneath mirrors, long and thin, short and stout, beveled, opaque, and crystal-clear. A veritable house of mirrors on Mona Lisa muted-color walls, Sistine Chapel ceilings. The dessert case is bright with cheesecakes lit up like a lost ark, chocolate layer cakes unsliced behind translucence. Just sitting on a hard-backed chair with a red velvet cushion makes me want to sip espresso and talk about Plato.

Rob arrives twenty minutes after us. "Dave's doing the dirty work." He hangs his coat on the back of his chair. "Kissing girls, speaking to Entertainment Tonight. John Tesh is full of questions this evening."

Our waiter has an Italian accent. Madeline haggles with him over the ingredients of a caffé Americano, which isn't on the menu. "I'm desperate for one," she whines. "It's only espresso and water." When he leaves, having agreed to try his best to make one, she expels air from her lungs. "He's gorgeous. God, is he gorgeous." She puts her chin in her hands and whines, "I don't know what I'm going to do."

Rob and I don't comment. When the waiter returns for our orders, Rob says, "German chocolate cheesecake."

I study the menu. My stomach growls, but I doubt anyone hears.

"What do you want, Sybil?" Madeline puts her menu on top of Rob's.

I feel her staring. "Probably just a drink."

"What have you eaten today?" She glares at me with hot eyes.

The waiter freezes over his pad of paper. Rob doesn't move either.

"I don't remember." Okay, so I had one cup of dried cereal, a few slurps of skim milk, alfalfa sprouts with a splash of balsamic vinegar, and an orange. Quartered.

"Get a salad," says Madeline. "Sybil's like Kafka's 'hunger artist.' "

"I'm broke—"

"We'll split one—"

"I don't have any money."

Rob breaks in, apparently sensing discord. He picks up a menu, opens it, and scans. "You like goat cheese?" He peeks out from behind the menu. "Goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes?"

"Yes, but— I just want coffee." I shake my head decisively.

Rob points to something on the menu, showing our poor waiter. To me, he says, "I'm buying."

"You didn't have to do that," I say when the waiter walks away.

"I'm a rock star." He raises his eyebrows and leans forward. "I've got the money."

Madeline, deadpan but delighted, says, "She starves herself all day." She smiles in my direction and adds, "You need the protein."

" Thank you for sharing with our new friend." I'm mortified.

Rob leans back. "Let's get it all out on the table so we can be done with it."

The waiter brings us iced water. "I'll be right back with your caffé Americano," he tells Madeline. She winks. We watch him go.

"Who wants to start?" asks Rob happily; he's downright cheery.

"Madeline wants to know about Dave Stomps," I say. "Tell us if he's happily married."

Rob, looking resigned, as if he gets this often, eyes Madeline, who may be doing her own blushing now. "I have very little to say. He is happily married, and they have a nine-month-old daughter."

Madeline definitely blushes. "Okay," she says. The waiter puts down her caffé Americano. "Okay." She tosses that ironed hair over her shoulder.

Rob looks around the table. "Favorite book? Favorite movie?"

"Hemingway's A Moveable Feast." Madeline examines her drink for accuracy. "I always wanted to be an expatriate."

"You are an expatriate," I say.

Books and movies are mentioned ( Crime and Punishment, The Graduate), hometowns are acknowledged (only Rob is from nearby with Providence, Rhode Island). A nod to God, a political stance (some kind of amalgam of multiculturalism, democracy, and moral relativism), a sexual preference (heterosexual!). All of us have seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but none of us cares. Madeline has done acid, Rob's been married, and I've taken ice-skating lessons. Two of us have seen Stomp, and all three of us have seen Blue Man Group. We can all sing the theme to The Love Boat. My first concert was Captain and Tennille, Madeline's was David Lee Roth, but Rob's was the Moody Blues.

We are the freakin' world.

Our long-suffering waiter presents my salad, which is huge. Madeline steals a bite of my baguette. "And we were all English majors," I say, going for the salad. With great deliberation, I have to eat as if I'm not overly anxious, as if I haven't been thinking about sun-dried tomatoes and goat cheese all day. I have to tell myself to put my fork down occasionally, take little breaks, act carefree as opposed to behaving like a stray dog hovering over leftovers in an alley behind a grocery store. It's like having a Beatles song sung to you by the lead singer of a small rock 'n' roll band. These things happen. No need to gobble down the greens. No need to color wildly.

Rob sighs. "If we're really going to be friends— if this isn't just a one-night thing— we shouldn't spend too much time on character sketches, on histories." He sips his drink. "It's way too easy and sad and self-indulgent to get mired in the past. We'll become sentimental."

Madeline bristles. "Rob, we're sentimental girls. You must know that."

"It'll weigh you down." He looks solemn. "The eighties are over. You can't celebrate them for the rest of your lives. Sentimentality is evil. Nostalgia is forgetful. Reagan was president when Wham! made it big."

Still bristling, Madeline leans in. "Excuse me, but aren't you the one wearing your wedding ring after seven years of being a widower?"

I quickly say, "I have a BA from UCLA. I'm from San Diego—"

Rob covers his ring finger with his right hand. "I know people talk."

Madeline's voice returns to a normal pitch. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

"Yeah, I still wear the ring." His eyes dash between us.

I reach out and touch his arm. I remove my hand, embarrassed by the gesture.

"So I'm sentimental too." He regains some lost composure and scolds us with his finger. "But it's fucked in the head— it's no way to live."

Madeline straightens. "I went to Berkeley, I'm from D.C., and I believe in a higher being." She isn't religious, but she expects to become so later, when she has kids.

"It sounds like you're trying to be P.C. about God." I pop a tomato into my mouth.

"I am," she admits.

Rob puts his napkin on the table. He adjusts his Roy Orbison glasses on the bridge of his nose. "Your borough? Your 'hood?"

"I live five minutes from here, off Greenwich Ave., near Benji's Quesadillas." I throw my thumb over my shoulder. Then I return to spreading goat cheese on a baguette. My Beautiful Baguette.

Madeline crosses her arms in front of her chest. "Brooklyn. Fort Green, but I say Park Slope. With a girl who doesn't look anyone in the eye. I think she has A.D.D."

Rob turns east. "I live above Bombay Café on Sixth between First and Second."

"We like Indian a lot, Rob." Madeline drains her water and looks for the waiter.

Rob asks, "What's something you want to do but probably never will?"

Madeline and I are dumbfounded. There are so many things. It's part of being sentimental. One romanticizes a bittersweet past while craving an unrealizable future. "You go first," I tell him.

"I'd like to play Madison Square Garden," he says.

"It's not out of the question." Madeline tilts her head.

"I'm upset about missing Woodstock. Even Live Aid," he adds. "I missed them all."

"What was it you said about nostalgia?" Madeline cocks her head.

I fold my arms on top of the table. "I'd like something really, truly, completely unique to happen to me— something utterly unexpected—"

Madeline stretches her hand out and quickly grabs Rob's wrist. "Get ready."

Rob eyes the twisted fabric of his sleeve clasped between her fingers. "For what?"

As if I weren't even there, Madeline whispers, "Sybil's grandeur riff—"

I roll my eyes. "Not fair. Not fair at all."

Madeline lets go of his wrist. " After a well-articulated discourse on the need for grandeur, we will be treated to a soliloquy on why Sybil Weatherfield will soon be leaving New York City for greener, grander pastures."

I look around, putting my fork down because I genuinely want to stop eating now. "Madeline is misrepresenting me." I melodramatically twist my body around in her direction. "Why are you misrepresenting me?"

"Sybil," she begins, "he said he wants to get it all on the table."

Rob flips both hands over, his palms up, his fingers moving as if to say bring it on. "Give me the riff. I wanna hear the riff."

A theatrical silence hangs over our Michelangelo table of or

nate iron and cool marble. Quite lovely for a monologue on grandeur, really. Both of them stare at me. I stare at them. Okay, I'll do it. "I just want the extraordinary," I say to Rob, appealing to Rob, elucidating for Rob. "I mean, here I am. I'll never know what it was like to be a flapper. I'll never live in New Orleans in the French Quarter. I'll never walk around my French Quarter hotel room in a slip, fanning myself in front of an old fan with those metal blades spinning like an ancient propeller on a rusty plane. I'll never do those things. I just want something grand to happen." My face heats up. "You know?"

Rob, the rock 'n' roll prophet who first appeared in a Burger Christ t-shirt, spouting off knowing words about love slaves, says, "That sentimentality really will kill you." He speaks with his mouth full of cheesecake. " Maybe something grand is happening right now."

I look at the mushed-up cheesecake in his mouth. "But maybe it isn't," I say.

He looks at me intently. "I'm the one in a band called Glass Half Empty, Sybil Weatherfield."

"Madeline hasn't told us her unrealizable dreams yet." I turn to her, sweating.

"And you didn't give us the I' m– leaving– New York follow-up." She chomps on an ice cube. "I don't think I'll ever hike the Appalachian Trail, though."

I swing around to face her. "I never knew you wanted to."

"Well, I do," she says. "Preferably with a man I love who owns a two-man sleeping bag and good raingear."

"And a dog," I say. "You forgot the dog. A golden retriever?"

Rob, who barely even knows me, says, "I doubt you'll ever leave Manhattan, Sybil." It's after two in the morning, and Rob rips his paper napkin into tiny pieces. For a while, we're quiet. Rob fixes his eyes on me. "Do you love your boyfriend?"

Straight out, just like that.

"Do I love my boyfriend?" I repeat.

"Yes, do you love your boyfriend?"

"Jeff 's a good man."

"We've probably heard enough clichés for one night," he says.

Madeline, at this very moment, makes herself known. She loudly puts down her empty caffé Americano cup, and it vibrates in its saucer, china moving against china. She tries to stop it with her fingers. "Sorry."

I blink. "We each bring our own expertise to the table, Jeff and I. I don't know if it's really about love." Madeline gazes into her water glass, Rob stares intently, and I pontificate. "It's like we're each solving for x. That's exactly how it is. We're solving for x."

Rob lets out a huge sigh. "I've always hated math."

"That's sex without love, though, isn't it?" Madeline chimes in. "It definitely doesn't fit into your grandeur plan, your longing for the extraordinary —"

"Thanks, girlfriend." I look at my watch. "It's been lovely, folks." I reach for my bag. "I have to give Jeff credit. He's decent. He's decent to me." I pull out a ten. "He's a decent man. We act like we're in love." I finish my water. "It's nice to have someone treat you so decently. He never approaches me as if he were just solving for x. I really appreciate the decency."

Madeline pulls out a cigarette for the street. "Snuffy and Sybil enjoy the pretense of a committed, decent relationship. What's love got to do with it? Huh, Sybil?"

I flutter my eyelids in her direction. "Touché."

Madeline provides a wry viewing of her pearly whites.

Rob grabs the check, pushing away my ten. "I'll treat for Indian tomorrow."

"Rain check, babe." Madeline bats her lashes. " Platonic-male-friend plans."

Rob looks at me.

"You mean gay-male-friend plans," I say with a touch of mean.

Why would I go for dinner with him after this deluge of the personal? I don't know, but I say, "I'd like that very much."

On the sidewalk, we exchange kisses on cheeks like we're Europeans and not sad kids on a wintry Manhattan night. Madeline and I walk off together, heading to my Village basement, content with the combative quality of our conversation. "Six o'clock tomorrow at Bombay Café, then?" Rob calls after us.

"Six o'clock," I say.