Cobble Hill

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  “And I’m going to help him,” Roy said, starting toward the bar.

  Monte was crowded now and stuffy. The sound system twanged with feedback. Someone put on the song “She’s Not There” by the Zombies.

  “Well no one told me about her.…”

  Roy bumped shoulders with Stuart Little.

  “Hey man,” Stuart said. “I just texted your daughter to see how it’s going with Ted. She texted back a thumbs-up, so I guess it’s all good.”

  “Mmm,” Roy said, still edging toward the bar. “Would you ex—”

  “I’m actually just coming over to check on our bartender,” Stuart continued. He jutted his chin at Tupper. “He doesn’t look so good.”

  Roy had Stuart marked as a self-absorbed nob, but now he was changing his mind. Besides, rescuing Tupper might be a two-person job. “Too right.” He slipped nervously into over-Britishness again. “I was just having a wee bit of a surreptitious peek at him meself.”

  They reached the bar just as Tupper squeezed his eyes shut, bent over double, and threw up on his shoes.

  “Easy there, tiger.” Stuart dashed around the bar and grabbed Tupper by the elbow, catching him before he fell. “Don’t worry about it. I have a kid. Stuff like this doesn’t bother me.”

  “We’ll get you home,” Roy soothed from behind them. He took off his jacket, thinking he might throw it over the vomit. It was his Burberry one. Wendy would kill him. He put it back on again. “Is there a back door, do you think?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll ask.” Stuart texted Peaches while Tupper swayed and wavered in his puddle of puke. He wasn’t even lucid. He’d passed out standing up.

  Roy tried not to be jealous that Stuart had Peaches’ number plugged into his phone. He held it up so Roy could read Peaches’ reply.

  School nurse on her way!

  “Should we notify his wife?” Roy asked.

  The two men shared a bewildered glance.

  Tupper’s head fell onto Stuart’s shoulder. They were both standing in puke.

  “I’m all right,” Tupper murmured drunkenly.

  “No, you’re not,” Stuart assured him. “But it’s cool.”

  He texted Peaches again.

  Hurry up.

  Shy’s drunk, hairy Latin teacher shimmied up to the bar, his horrible neck tattoo glistening sweatily. “I love your work,” he slurred at Roy. “And your daughter’s da’ bomb,” he added creepily.

  Roy winced and squared his shoulders. “She’s your student, and I’m her father,” he said haughtily.

  The Latin teacher laughed, taking Roy’s bluster for a joke. The smiling orange-and-blue baseball on his neck bobbed up and down. Black chest hairs squiggled out of his V-neck. Wendy was right. He was a pervy git who needed taking down.

  Roy lunged over the bar and growled into the teacher’s face. “You keep your smarmy tattooed mitts away from my daughter.”

  “Hey, sorry man.” The Latin teacher held up his hands and backed up a step. He swallowed nervously.

  “Roy?” Peaches scolded from behind them. “No fighting in the schoolyard, please.”

  Roy whirled around. His face was hot and his armpits were damp. “Right. Sorry,” he mumbled, although he wasn’t sorry at all. He felt quite good actually. He might even have punched the guy. The Latin teacher had retreated. Problem solved.

  “Please don’t bother trying to find her.…” The Zombies song was just wrapping up.

  “Oh wow, my favorite.” Peaches grimaced when she noticed the puke. She held her nose, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and began ripping them off the roll and tossing them at Stuart and Tupper’s feet. “What did he eat for lunch?”

  “Tuna fish,” Tupper slurred, drooling on Stuart’s shoulder.

  Wendy, Mandy, and Manfred began to sing that sad, sultry song “Lovefool” by the Cardigans. Stuart recognized Mandy’s honey-sweet voice right away. He admired her over the sea of heads as they helped Tupper out of the bar. Glittering green eyes, sleek black hair, milky white skin, sexy red mouth. If he wasn’t already married to her he would have hit on her.

  “I better tell Elizabeth.” Peaches threw down more paper towels and searched the crowd for the monolithic blonde. But Elizabeth had disappeared.

  “I’m okay,” Tupper said, his knees sagging.

  Roy and Stuart grasped his elbows. Peaches led the way to the back door, and the three staggering men followed.

  * * *

  The doorway to the Paulsens’ neat brick carriage house was old-fashioned and narrow. Roy had a key. Leaving Peaches and Stuart out on the stoop, he unlocked the door and led Tupper inside. They staggered through the dimly lit living room to the gray linen sofa, where he released his hold on Tupper and watched the man recede into the soft cushions, hands between his knees, head bowed.

  Across the room, Elizabeth was sprawled in an armchair, asleep. The red paint on her overalls looked like blood. The cat was curled tight against her thigh, yellow eyes in slits, obviously ecstatic that she’d come home. A huge jug of maple syrup stood at her feet.

  Tupper’s ginger hair was matted and his neat white shirt had come untucked. Roy wondered if he should remove Tupper’s shoes. He felt nervous leaving him there with Elizabeth. She was almost scarier asleep than awake. And what were they going to do with all that syrup?

  * * *

  Peaches and Stuart perched on the stoop to wait. It was a cool night. Peaches had left her jacket at the bar. She huddled against Stuart, not even thinking about whether or not it was okay.

  “I love how everyone just came out and did their thing tonight.” She looked up at the stars and the sliver of moon and shivered. “Fuck, I’m cold.”

  “We can go back,” Stuart said. He wanted to listen to Mandy sing. And then he wanted to walk her home and pay Shy Clarke for babysitting and get into the queen-size bed in the kitchen with Mandy and kiss her and tell her how good she looked and how glad he was that they were still together after all these years. He started to stand up.

  “Wait.” Peaches tugged on the back of his T-shirt.

  He sat back down.

  “I’m embarrassed.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “But I’ve been wanting to do this forever, so I’m just going to do it.” She turned her head and kissed him.

  Yo, it’s bad, don’t kiss your teachers!

  Lips so sweet they taste like peachers!

  Stuart was surprised and also extremely confused. A moment ago he’d wanted to kiss Mandy. Mandy was his wife. But he liked Peaches. Peaches was pretty. Peaches was smart and funny. She played the drums. She was a badass nurse. And kissing her was weirdly exciting because she wasn’t Mandy. But at the same time, he loved Mandy. Mandy was hot.

  He leaned in and kissed Peaches again, just to check.

  “Blimey,” Roy said, catching them in the act as he came out the front door.

  Of course the rock star got to kiss Peaches. Was it just starting now, or had it been going on for ages? Wasn’t it strange how you could live in such close proximity to people, speak to them every day, and still not know them at all?

  “Ahem.” Roy pretended to cough and pulled up his socks.

  Peaches and Stuart broke apart and looked away into the dark. Then Peaches reached out and squeezed Stuart’s knee. They might never kiss again. She hoped they would. But if they didn’t, it had been a great kiss, maybe the best kiss of her life.

  “Time to collect our trouble and strife and climb the apples and pears, I should think,” Roy announced, so nervous he’d resorted to Cockney rhyming slang. “I need my bed.”

  Peaches’ hand slid off Stuart’s knee as he stood up and descended the steps to the sidewalk.

  “I think I left my skateboard…” he began.

  He’d abandoned Mandy at the bar. That was pretty uncool of him. Plus, Roy’s daughter was at his house, waiting for him to come home and pay her for watching Ted. This night was so confusing.

  “I’m not sure what I’m doing,” Peaches said aloud
. She’d meant to think it, not say it.

  A man wearing noise-canceling headphones over a khaki-colored fishing hat wandered across Henry Street at the far corner and turned up Kane Street, hands tucked into the pockets of his beige fleece vest.

  “That was my husband,” she observed. “Do you think he saw us?”

  PART III ONE WEEK LATER

  Chapter 18

  Mandy was exhausted. She’d been exhausted for an entire week, ever since the karaoke shindig at the bar. It felt odd that the day after that big, busy night was a regular, normal weekday, just as it always was. Ted went to school and Stuart went to work. Then it was the weekend and they did their normal weekend things—cooking, eating, and watching TV. Then it was Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. She googled things about living with MS, watched more anorexia movies, stole her Russian spy neighbors’ food, cooked it, drank their wine, and ate pot cookies. Karaoke night seemed significant enough to have changed everything, but everything was exactly the same.

  It was Thursday now. A whole week had passed. After the boys left, Mandy lay on her back on the bed in the kitchen and considered what to do next. She could tackle the stack of bills under the bed. She could deal with Stu’s fan site. She could find another movie to watch, or try to go back to sleep. Each day she’d been living with the preposterous lie that she had multiple sclerosis, she wondered what to do next. She’d come up with the disease in the first place in order to not feel guilty about staying in bed. Now she felt not guilt but exasperation. She was not a stupid person, but she had done a stupid thing.

  For Mandy, the most significant takeaway from karaoke night was how often people told her how beautiful she was. Even people who didn’t know that she was “sick.” And Stuart seemed more attracted to her now. He could not stop touching her last night. He’d been sending her random flirty texts. Work is boring, i miss ur boobs, or, u r my dream girl, or, u really do wake up pretty, or just, hello beautiful.

  Was she? Was she beautiful?

  She was shallow, clearly. Why did it matter so much to her?

  Wendy Clarke had given her the name and number of some model agent person.

  “My friend Manfred thinks he’d go crazy over you,” Wendy promised. “They said he’s always looking for new faces.”

  “But I’m old and fat and—”

  Manfred—of the perfect eyebrows and incredible legs—stepped in at this point.

  “Stop it. You’re what? Thirty-one? That skin! That hair! There aren’t enough working plus-size models. He is going to die.”

  There was no harm in calling. The worst thing that could happen was he’d say no thank you, and she’d feel embarrassed for five seconds, and then immensely relieved, and then forget it altogether. She reached for her phone and scrolled through the contacts, looking for the agent’s name. Kramer Lamb. What kind of name was that? Todd and Mary Lamb welcome their new baby, Kramer.

  Plus-size model. Plus-size model. Plus-size model. It just sounded so fat. But also maybe kind of cool? Maybe. It wasn’t every day that she met a woman—especially in this not-exactly-edgy Brooklyn neighborhood—who was a plus-size model, or any other kind of model. She wasn’t sure how the other women in the neighborhood occupied themselves, but whatever they did seemed to involve reusable grocery bags, nine-hundred-dollar Canada Goose parkas with real coyote-fur hoods, yoga mats, group walks, skinny jeans and clogs, and fancy Swedish bicycles with enough seating for six children.

  If only she could call someone to discuss the pros and cons of contacting the modeling agency. But the only person she ever conferred with was Stu, and Stu would make fun of her. Or maybe he wouldn’t. It was just so embarrassing.

  Plus-size model. Plus-size model.

  Was she really that fat?

  She could call her mom, but she would definitely be mean about it. Her mom was never kind. Nancy Marzulli weighed ninety pounds, smoked a pack of Salems every day, and ate fruit cocktail straight from the can. At night she drank vodka and Crystal Light lemonade and ate sardines straight from the can. She was a single mom, but she had never taken much interest in Mandy, and Mandy had never taken much interest in her. Maybe one day soon her mom would be at the supermarket buying more fruit cocktail and Crystal Light and she’d see Mandy modeling a bathing suit on the cover of Vogue. Then she’d call—to tell Mandy how fat she was.

  Stu might actually be impressed. To start a new career with MS was pretty brave. She clicked on Kramer Lamb’s name again, and pressed call.

  “Thank you, Madame Jesus,” he said after she’d introduced herself. “Wendy Clarke already sent me a sneaky pic of you in some dark bar. When can you come in? I’ll send a car.”

  Mandy still felt sort of hungover from last week. She’d drunk a lot of wine and eaten a lot of Wendy’s game-night snacks and talked to so many people on top of eating pot cookies every single day before and after. She felt like she was still recovering. But what else did she have to do?

  “I need to take a shower,” she told him.

  “I don’t want you to feel rushed. I don’t want to inconvenience you at all. Why don’t you text me the address and I’ll come to you, take a few nice shots? Don’t blow-dry or put on any makeup or fancy clothes. We need the real deal. How ’bout tomorrow, five o’clock?”

  That would give her time to tell Stu, and time to cancel if she changed her mind.

  “I can do tomorrow.”

  * * *

  “I thought they wanted a view,” Elizabeth commented.

  “I love this view!” the dopey orange-skinned woman crowed. Her hair had been styled for the show so that she looked like a bridesmaid.

  “That is not a view,” Tupper scoffed. “That’s a parking lot, you idiot.”

  “Great double vanity in the master bath,” the woman’s simple-faced husband remarked.

  “Why don’t we have a double vanity?” Elizabeth pretended to complain.

  “Because you hardly ever brush your teeth,” Tupper remarked, which was true.

  Watching HGTV house-hunting shows together had always been one of their favorite rituals. It had been a very long time, and so they’d done it every morning that week. Once again, Tupper made blueberry pancakes, smothered in maple syrup from the two-gallon jug Elizabeth had brought home with her.

  “So, the new project,” Tupper continued the conversation they’d begun during the last commercial. The Macaw—at his studio and at Monte—had caught Elizabeth with full black trash bags. “You ransacked my mannequins.”

  Elizabeth smiled her rare, Elizabethan smile. He knew she disliked discussing the work. And the truth was, she didn’t have a solid plan for a new project yet. She was home to check in on Tupper and receive the MacArthur.

  “You’re not going to explain it to me, are you?”

  Tupper knew her well enough not to push for an answer. The couple on HGTV was looking at the second option now, a square brick box of a house on stilts, built on a hill overlooking a swampy bay.

  “This view is to die for,” the husband said, blinking his dull eyes in the sunshine.

  “Absolutely,” his wife agreed. “Look at that water.”

  “It looks like a place where you’d go to die,” Elizabeth said. “It looks like a place where your wife poisons you and dumps you in the weeds.”

  “That’s what you’d do,” Tupper said.

  “That’s what I’d do,” Elizabeth agreed. “I’d do it in pieces. Like that Staten Island girl they found floating in the harbor.”

  “You always do enjoy a treasure hunt,” Tupper said.

  Elizabeth had not stopped thinking about the torso of that murdered girl and her still-missing parts. Staging her own murder in their bathtub had been an elaboration of sorts, but that was private, for Tupper’s eyes only. She could do better, more.

  A sort of excitement radiated from her. Tupper picked up on it immediately.

  “You could do that. A treasure hunt of mannequins.”

  “To make what point?” Elizabeth snapped,
annoyed at his intrusion. His role as a mate was not to suggest, not even to encourage, but to stand well out of the way while she took her work from idea stage to final execution. Surely she never made suggestions for any of his creations, which were all unfathomably crafty and commercial, but seemed to satisfy his impulse to make things. When he created his skunk salt and pepper shakers, she never said, “Why not badgers instead?”

  The phone rang and she jumped up to get it. At last, the MacArthur Fellowship was calling to offer her its “genius” grant.

  It was the New York City Ballet, offering a discount on tickets for their winter season. Elizabeth hung up the phone in disgust.

  The HGTV couple had decided against the last option, a pink stucco bungalow with a questionable thatched roof. They decided against the brick house on stilts, too, and went for the safe, tired apartment with the “amazing” parking-lot view.

  Elizabeth dunked her thumb in maple syrup and licked it. “I’m not sure how long I’m staying.”

  Tupper felt more nauseous now than he had the morning after karaoke night. Elizabeth’s presence had always done weird things to him, but he’d allowed himself to forget how it felt. He didn’t want her to leave. He wanted her to take off her clothes and get in the bathtub so he could look at her long bones and bring her things. But then there was the constant feeling of impending doom. She was here now, but would eventually leave.

  Of course, this was the game they’d always played. Elizabeth liked the tension, the thrill of things being not quite right. It was the disquiet that excited her. She used the French word for it: frisson.

  “Did you hear about the accident? This morning, before dawn?” Tupper asked because he knew if he didn’t contribute to the frisson, she would leave immediately.

  “What accident?”

  “A guy in his flashy convertible. He overshot the turn off the BQE onto Columbia Street. Half flipped the car. His exposed head hit the guardrail with such an impact it was knocked right off, severed completely.”