This week, I bring you another piece of fiction for a Monday. This was a tricky one to write and perhaps not my best, but I owe a lot of thanks to Grant Shellhouse, who poked and prodded this into a better draft than it began.
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“June in New York”
It was June in New York.
They had gone to hear Diana Krall sing at Carnegie Hall and then had taken a taxi down to the Village—or was it Soho?—to a luxury bar that was notorious for ignoring the city’s ban on smoking.
Bohemian royalty. Three men and two women, young, enjoying the first part of the season home from Ivy Leagues, too early to go to the Hamptons and too late for Martha’s Vineyard.
They drank Tanqueray gimlets. They smoked Parliament Kings. They ordered too much food and picked at each other’s plates. They laughed loudly and often. Two gimlets in, one of the women began to cry quietly. No one seemed to notice, but they did switch to wine.
“I dreamt that I died last night.” She giggled. She straightened herself in her chair and tried to look serious. Every time she focused on one of them, her eyes began to drift to the left.
“Clarissa, what an awful thing to say!” Charles was suddenly serious, setting down his wineglass with defiance on the table. They had been having a good time until that.
“But I did!” the woman persisted. “I dreamed that I was dead.” She smiled, wistfully, and her cheeks turned rosy rouge like the skin of a white peach.
“How did it happen?” James took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled slowly across the table toward Clarissa, who inhaled the smoke gently and seemed to find it a comfort. “How did you die?”
Regina nudged James with her elbow. She was hot and annoyed. It had taken too long for the food to come, then they had made the gimlets wrong. They used vodka, which she hated, and had to wait for them to come back with the right amount of gin. The first round had been too sour and tasted like it was made from bottled lime. The whole evening was teetering on the brink of ruin and the ice hadn’t even melted in the second gimlet’s glass. “Don’t encourage her. She’s already had too much to drink.” She fiddled with something on her left hand, agitated. It was too hot. It was too hot for the city, for any of them, to be real.
“I killed myself!” Clarissa triumphantly raised her glass in the air and laughed hysterically, which caused Regina to lean back in her chair with a grimace. Clarissa was always like this and it had only gotten worse over the years. James took another drag on his cigarette. It was amusing, at least. The bar didn’t have any music that night and no one had said anything interesting the entire evening. Charles shook his head in dismay, settling his eyes on Regina. Somewhere from the core of his decaying being, Christopher laughed darkly.
Christopher hadn’t spoken all evening.
James flicked his ashes onto the remnant of the cheese plate in front of him and continued his cold questioning. “How? Razor blade? Pills?”
“James!” Regina snapped. She had a headache. She wanted another gimlet.
“No, nothing like that,” Clarissa giggled and gulped down some more wine. She set her glass down, empty. She gestured for the waiter to bring another bottle. “I killed myself. You see, I did it. I was in a car going somewhere. I don’t remember where I was going, but it stopped at the Met.” She tried to stifle a laugh, which turned into a yawn, then back into a laugh. “I yelled at the driver because I wasn’t supposed to go to the Met but he had stopped at the Met. But he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t even look at me. So I got out of the car to call for another car to take me where I was supposed to go—“
“Does she even know where this story is supposed to go?” Regina muttered and Charles smiled at her across the table. Why did he have to smile? She hated him more than the heat.
Clarissa noticed the exchange and scowled. She straightened herself in her chair again, then slumped forward slightly. Her earrings suddenly seemed to weigh her whole head down. She wondered what it would be like to be ugly. She would have to wear larger earrings. Then what? Charles would never notice her again. He would keep looking at Regina forever and forget all about her. Being ugly would be an awful thing. Indignant, she continued. “But when I got out of the car, I was standing in front of me. Can you believe it?”
Charles rolled his eyes. “Like a reflection, you mean.” It was getting boring, the whole evening, and he had no intention of suffering it much longer.
“No. She means another her.” James focused his eyes intently on Clarissa, the way her mouth was sagging at one side and how she kept slurring her ls. He found her suddenly attractive. There was something about her he understood, deeper than he had ever understood someone before.
Regina clicked her tongue. It was remarkable how quickly it always seemed to happen. Should she be surprised that this time it happened right in front of her eyes? Of course not. And why should she be? She deserved that much, she had to admit. It was the way things were supposed to go. She looked at James from the corner of her eye, noting the way he watched the woman across from him, like he had stumbled upon a treasure. Staggered upon her. He kept flicking his cigarette even after there was nothing left but the butt.
“Yes!” Clarissa exclaimed, triumphantly. She was only talking to James now. “Another me. Another me entirely. And I, that is, the other me, took out a gun and shot me, as in the me sitting here, right in the chest.” She fell back in her chair and laughed with a breathy, high-pitched sense of blithe. “Isn’t that wild?”
There was silence for a moment. Regina set down her empty glass and complained, “They still haven’t brought us more wine.” She was looking at James as she said it, but it was meant for Charles.
“It’s almost tomorrow, anyway,” James put out his cigarette in one of the empty gimlet glasses. It hissed as it struck the ice. “Another tomorrow. Isn’t that what she said once? Something about tomorrow meaning something, if you could only get to it?”
“I think that was Jung.” Regina murmured, moving her eyes to Clarissa. She suddenly had a desire to vomit.
James had barely heard her. “Maybe she was quoting. She did that. She liked to quote people. Dead people. She loved dead people.” He straightened in his chair.
Christopher laughed again. Quieter this time. Charles looked at him with a sense of drunken concern, but was pulled from it when Clarissa grabbed his arm and pulled him to face her. She suddenly wanted him desperately.
“Tell me!” she implored him. “Tell me what the dream means! You used to do it all the time for us. Do you remember? We would get high at your parents’ summer house and then tell you all our dreams and you would go on and on about what they mean.” She laughed into his face and he remembered the first time he had kissed her. She had tasted of lilac and rum. She gasped, “And all of them, all your interpretations, were sexual in the end. Every single one. Marvelously sexual. So tell me, darling,” she laughed into his face once more and Charles looked at her with a sadness too suffocating to speak out loud, but Regina, watching him, heard it. “Tell me what my dream means.”
Charles winced. “Someone should take her home.” He turned and looked at Regina. But Clarissa saw the exchange, grabbed her empty glass from the table and threw it at Regina, who didn’t move, the glass spinning over her shoulder and shattering on the floor. She wish the glass had hit her. She deserved it after all.
It was too hot.
“No!” Clarissa bellowed. “No! You can’t have him anymore. He’s mine. He wanted me. He chose me.” She broke into a sob and buried her face into her hands. “You mustn’t take everything from me, Regina. You always take everything.”
A waiter began to sweep up the glass. Someone at a neighboring table said something about the decline of today’s youth. The maître-d’ was waved away by James’s black AmEx.
Regina gently leaned forward and looked calmly at Clarissa. Her eyes spoke of secrets and promises and danced with the fire of gin. “You have to stop doing this to yourself, bubby, you just have to. You torture yourself with all your anxiety. Every day it’s something new. It’s time to let go. If someone did to you what you do to yourself, they’d be arrested.”
“Sondheim.” James spoke to the ceiling. “She liked him too.”
Clarissa lowered her hands and dried her eyes, a look of stoic reserve washing over her. “Don’t be silly, Regina,” she spat. She straightened herself in her chair, though her head was beginning to spin and she couldn’t quite focus on the other woman. “My nerves have nothing to do with this. I just don’t need you to baby me anymore. Tell me the truth. Or don’t. What would it matter? I don’t care about either of you or this day or if it ever will be tomorrow.” She rose, nearly toppling, but Charles rose swiftly and caught her.
The tenderness with which he held her caused Regina to play with her hands frantically under the table. It was too hot. They hadn’t brought the right drinks. The food had taken too long.
Clarissa swore into Charles’s chest as he cradled her and she began to quietly cry again. “All of it ends,” she whimpered, like a child whose hand has come under the wrath of a misguided hammer. “All of it ends.”
Charles placed his hand on Clarissa’s head. He patted it gently, while he let his eyes move to Regina. In their final look, the word passed between them which made all clear.
James lit another cigarette, pulled it from his mouth, and studied it in his hand. “Time for you two to go.” He flicked the small collection of ash onto the table and wondered if the tablecloth would ignite.
Charles and Clarissa wordlessly left the table.
He would take a car and have her back to her building before dawn. She would ask him more than once if the sun was going to rise that day, and he would answer her, every time, that he hoped so. Then she would fall asleep. He would carry her up, lay her on her bed, undress her, put her in her nightgown, and then leave her wrapped in the safety of her own blankets upon her own altar in the midst of the world.
He wouldn’t call her again. But they would see each other from time to time and talk as if nothing had ever happened. It was how things were done.
Regina hadn’t taken her eyes from the empty wineglass in front of her as Charles and Clarissa had exited. She was thinking about Amelia. How could anyone not be thinking of Amelia? It had happened so suddenly and so quickly.
So quickly that there had been no point in changing their plans.
It was June in New York. They had gone to hear Diana Krall sing at Carnegie Hall and then had taken a taxi down to the Village—or was it Soho?—to a luxury bar that was notorious for ignoring the city’s ban on smoking.
The food had taken too long and they had made the drinks wrong. They had made a scene in the bar when their drunk friend threw a wineglass across the table. She had been escorted away for her safety. An affair had ended as quickly as it had begun. It was another evening in another city just like any other.
Regina played with her hands under the table, wrung them in frustration, and then placed her right hand on the edge of the table, drumming her fingers atop it making agitated clicks on its surface. She stared at the two empty chairs in front of her. She wondered if she would ever hear from Charles again. She would hear from Clarissa. She always heard from Clarissa.
James was paying the check. It was too much, of course, but they had broken a wineglass. Caused a scene.
Christopher stared at the two of them with vacant and dethatched accusation, as Regina tried to find within herself words that seemed appropriate for the occasion. All she could think of were greeting cards. It was an awful thing that the card shops had been arranged with sympathy neighboring welcome. Goodbye saddling hello. But it was her fault, she had insisted on picking it out herself even though James had told her to just call the florist and have them arrange it. It was the way things were done. Someone else would take care of it. That’s what they were there for.
She wanted more wine. “It was a beautiful eulogy.”
Christopher stared at her. The haunted expression of certain grief flickered for a moment. He stood up and turned to go. Before he made it out of the bar, he stopped and turned back, studied Regina for a moment, saw James put his cigarette out in one of the empty wine bottles, watched the thin wisp of smoke emerge from it, then continued out the bar.
“Let him go,” James said, sighing with agitation. “He’s going to be no fun after this. None of them will be any fun after this.”
“Fun?” Regina asked. It was unbelieving. “Fun?” Two drops of dampness appeared on the tablecloth before her. They were dark navy. She realized suddenly that she had been crying. Her mascara was running down her cheeks. She wondered when it had started.
Regina thought she heard a firecracker pop in the distance. James sighed.
“I don’t want to do this anymore. These parties. Not with them.” He gestured to the empty chairs at the empty table.
“I don’t want to be married anymore.” Regina lifted up her left and hand from under the table and deposited the ring in front of James. She rose, and left him at the table. She was tempted to look back, but the concerned and curious faces of the other patrons in the bar were enough to keep her from tarrying. She wanted to run far away and to forget the language of gimlets and Manhattan.
He said nothing, but addressed the silence with an austere sense of defiance. He slammed his fist on the table, which toppled Regina’s empty wineglass, causing it to crack. A waiter noticed and came over to add the charge to the bill. “Bill it all!” he sneered, “Bill it all!” He began to laugh violently, until he could no longer breathe.
Outside, Regina walked into the early morning heat. It had been a strangely hot start of the season. And it was already coming to an end. All things came to an end.
A homeless woman was yelling into a payphone that she had heard a gunshot and saw a man’s body a few blocks away. She wanted to know if she could collect a reward for reporting it. Regina crossed over to her and held out a wad of cash from the recesses of the small purse she carried on her wrist for formal occasions. The homeless woman seized it eagerly, then studied Regina with a sense of knowing.
“You and I,” she smiled, showing three teeth, “We know how things are done around here. I used to be pretty like you. Bet they all want a piece. All of them want a piece.” She laughed darkly and moved into the shadows of the night, the 911 operator barking questions through the dangling phone.
Regina hung the phone up.
She could call a car, but there was no point. She could walk for blocks and drive for miles, but tomorrow only came when it would come.
A car drove past slowly and lowered a window. “You looking for a ride?” The voice was gruff. She blinked for a moment, stupidly, then she understood.
“I’m not a whore,” she declared to the man cloaked in the darkness of the car. “And I’m not cheap.”
“I pay good money,” came the reply. But she didn’t move, so he swore at her, rolled up the window, and sped off.
Regina watched him go.
It was June in New York.
© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.
