“I prefer that only the dancers carry these up,” Sinclair the Schemer announces with great solemnity. “Only a dancer knows best how to properly carry a tutu,” he babbles. No one seems to be buying this bit of nonsense, but no one challenges him either.
Sinclair hurries on ahead of us. Evan and I follow with a costume in each hand. It’s four floors up to Sinclair’s apartment. Evan keeps his eyes latched onto Sinclair’s Kenneth Cole shoes, which trot a full flight of steps ahead of us on the grand wooden stairwell. Evan refuses to look at me, perhaps fearing my reprimand.
Sinclair’s apartment consists of a small bedroom, a bathroom, and what seems like a workspace/kitchen, with a blender, microwave, coffee pot and toaster oven, each arranged, like works of art, on cherry wood end tables. There is a shelf of packaged goods and a net of fresh fruit, while the remainder of the room is cluttered with fabric designs and dress busts. The wallpaper is a silvery-blue script, though the wording is unintelligible. There is a floor lamp with long pink fringe, and a stunning violet gown in the process of being sewn with pale blue organza flower petals. The room smells pleasantly of baking, and I spy a spray of melted cupcake candles along the window ledge.
“You do amazing work. These costumes are better than the ones we had at ABT. I could hook you up with someone at my old company, if you’re interested.” Evan finds his voice, which is composed.
“What, work for one of the greatest ballet companies in the world, and leave all this behind?” Sinclair gestures irreverently over his humble abode.
Evan jots down a name and number for Sinclair to call, while Sinclair shoots me an eyebrow wiggle of approval over Evan’s head.
“Now, if I move on to fame and riches, you must come with me, Viv, and dump the Englishman,” Sinclair says suddenly and inexplicably. Evan looks up quickly from where he’s jotting on a small piece of paper.
“Lord Warburton?” he says to me, and I’m struck that he remembers that long-ago conversation over blue Margaritas at Delta regarding the Henry James novel.
“Count Wellington,” Sinclair corrects him, thinking Evan is speaking of him.
When we exit Sinclair’s apartment, I glide my hand along the smooth wooden banister, taking the steps slowly in my silvery heels.
“Count Wellington?” he repeats to me, skeptically.
I take the cue from him. We won’t address what happened in the car.
“Sinclair is a Scottish Count. His family didn’t approve of his lifestyle and so he emigrated here, but he stands to inherit the family castle when his imperious mother passes on.”
“And you believe that?” he says, smiling.
“He’s never given me reason not to believe him.”
Evan nods. “You’ve got some strange friends.”
“You’re my friend. Are you strange?”
“I’m not your friend.” This is dripping with such sexual innuendo that it sends a shock wave through my body.
“What are you then?” I want to ask, but he speaks first.
“Are you going to marry Lord Warburton?” he asks.
“He’s someone that Careen set me up with,” I manage weakly.
“She likes matching people up.”
“Yes, apparently she made you a good match.”
“Three dates is hardly a match.”
“Three? That many?” I struggle to sound nonchalant. “I was under the impression that it was two.”
“I was on assignment, remember? So, technically, they weren’t dates at all, but undercover missions,” he says with a smirk.
“And yet you gathered all pertinent information on the first date. Mission accomplished.”
“It would have been rude to dump her after one date. She didn’t deserve that,” he says, with a gallantry that is irresistible.
“Three faux dates?” I muse, biting my lip, and looking up at the cathedral ceiling as if trying to discern the music of the spheres. “So, that’s how you operate? You lure unsuspecting women into your lair, and then dump them after the third date. I’ll make note of that. Not that I’ll ever get a first date, although perhaps that’s a blessing in disguise.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had a lair. If you’re trying to ask me if I slept with her, the answer is no. And dates are for getting to know people. I don’t need to get to know you.”
“Perhaps I should just kick you down this remaining flight.” I inject an edge into my voice, and give a flick to my silver heel.
“What I mean is that I’ve known you from the moment I first saw you.” This statement is fertile with meaning, but before I can question him further, he asks, “What does the Englishman do?”
“He’s a physicist.” I feel suddenly empowered by Evan’s interest in his rival. “You needn’t worry about him, he’s engaged.” The moment I say it, I regret it, because the hint of desperation flickering under Evan’s flawless complexion suddenly vanishes, and the old confidence flames again. For one brief shining moment I had the upper hand.
“Engaged? So, your friends would rather see you with an engaged scientist than with a lowly actor?”
“They would rather see me back at school, with my head in my books.” I take a risk. “Whose idea was it to see Romeo and Juliet?”
“If I said mine, would you be impressed?”
“No, I would hate you until the day I die, for having taken some other girl on the world’s most romantic date!” I surrender my guard and my grip on the banister. Evan offers his hand in lieu of the banister, but I refuse it.
“Okay, then no,” he says, chuckling. “And what’s romantic about Romeo and Juliet? They both die in the end, and they die young. Better to live and grow old and get sick of each other.”
“Oh yes, your alternate ending is so much more romantic. Don’t you think it’s better to die young, at the height of passion, than to watch it slowly fizzle out over the years?”
“It’s always better to live, Haley,” he says, with an intensity that knocks any witty rebuttal out of my head. “And who says it has to fizzle?” The look he levels at me weakens my knees.
We stand in the vestibule. Evan pushes open the door, letting the moonlight pour in, and we step into a night sequined with stars. Dylan is making his way toward us, carrying a costume that was apparently left behind in the car. He holds it at arm’s length, as if it was offensive, and ups his swagger as if to compensate for having to carry a pink tutu.
“And here comes Tybalt,” I say, which makes Evan laugh. I can always make Evan laugh.
I run the tutu up to Sinclair, but when I return Evan is gone. Dylan explains that he had to see a friend up on Central Park West. Only by feigning disinterest will I get more information from Dylan, who then volunteers the information that the friend is, in fact, Evan’s agent, who apparently lives in my neighborhood.
“Oh, and he had some message for you, but I can’t remember it.”
My heart pounds. With a swift kick I could send Dylan down the stone stoop onto his smug ass, but I have to keep a cool head and outsmart him.
“Evan hooked Sinclair up with a possible job at his old ballet company. Evan knows a lot of people. He was supposed to give me some information on a job, too,” I fib. “You don’t remember what he said?”
Now I’ve got Dylan where I want him. If he refuses to give me the message, I can forever hold him responsible for thwarting my shot at gainful employment.
“No, it wasn’t about a job. Are you two collaborating on a story? He said something like, ‘tell Haley to write a better ending for us than that.’”
“Yes,” I say, because Dylan is watching me closely. “We were brainstorming an idea for a story about a ballet company.”
But it’s as if a swarm of butterflies is released in my stomach, as I descend the steps behind my brother.
~ 12 ~
The Devil Made Me Do It
Fall arrives, and Evan leaves the city, as do the summer birds, and all that is green. The leaves on Dylan’s tree-lined street ar
e carpeted so thick I can kick through them.
Sinclair follows up on Evan’s reference, and secures a gig designing costumes for a ballet that the Joffrey is premiering, as well as a plum gig designing the Christmas window at Bergdorfs.
I meet Sinclair most nights at Cooper’s Café, where it’s no longer warm enough to sit at our sidewalk table. After perusing the shelves at Endicott Books on Columbus, I pick up a copy of Turgenev’s A Month In The Country, mainly because of the impressionist painting on the cover, a woman in a white dress immersed in a field of flowers. Sinclair quizzes the clerk on exactly how Turgenev’s name ought to be pronounced, while he buys books on window design. It’s the first time I see Sinclair flirting.
“Did you get his phone number?” I tease, as we trot out to the sidewalk. Sinclair is giddy.
He waves away the question, and I am suddenly curious about Sinclair’s love life, which he never speaks about. We stroll up to Central Park, and settle onto a bench, watching children on the playground. I try to persuade Sinclair to go on the swings with me. “I’m not a swinging kind of guy,” he says dryly. Sinclair deflects my personal questions by bringing up Evan.
“The Wall of Crinoline was a stroke of genius on my part!” he declares, of the tutus dividing Evan and I from Dylan in the backseat of Careen’s Dodge Chrysler.
I tell him about Evan having three dates with the coffee shop girl.
“Alexander the Great has a chivalrous side, which doesn’t quite gel with the groping.”
“It wasn’t groping!” I am defensive.
“Of course not,” Sinclair says, without missing a beat, shooting guarded looks at the gathering clouds above.
“He took that girl to see Romeo and Juliet, and all I got was a groping in the back seat of a Chevy!” I spit this with such fervor that it startles Sinclair; while crossing one leg over the other he nearly tumbles off the bench.
“Ah, bigger things lie ahead for you and Alexander the Great!” Sinclair sucks his root beer soda as if it might infuse him with visions of this charmed future. “What’s some dodgy performance of some dead playwright? What you’ve got with Evan is passion!”
I smile skeptically and fan through the pages of A Month In The Country.
Evan has been gone for three weeks of filming in Vancouver. All I’ve managed to squeeze out of Dylan is that Evan saw the Cowboy Junkies in concert, and that he went for a few beers with one of his cast mates, who is dating some beautiful actress.
“What about the nuclear physicist?” Sinclair frowns at my white socks showing above the backs of my black faux-leather slingbacks.
“He’s a theoretical particle physicist.”
“With a theoretical fiancee.”
David has returned to the States, along with his childhood friend, and possible future wife, Jane. Jane has come for a two-week holiday. Careen says Jane is rather bitter toward The States because her visa was denied, and she’d hoped to attend Julliard. Careen managed to snap a photo of Jane for me when they visited her.
Sinclair studies it, then tosses it with sudden levity into my lap. “I suspected as much.”
“What?”
“Viv, she can’t hold a candle to you.”
“She’s pretty,” I say tepidly, lifting the photo to look at it again.
“Perhaps you need these.” He surrenders his tortoiseshell frame glasses to me. “No wonder he is drooling over you.”
“He claims their relationship is strictly platonic now. Apparently she had some sort of recent religious conversion, and she won’t sleep with him anymore unless they get married.”
“That’s not a conversion, that’s an ultimatum,” he retorts. “Ah,” he stretches this word like string cheese across the chilly autumn air.
“What does that mean?” I drop the book in my lap, and hug the Dreamcoat closer to me.
Sinclair shrugs, but I persist. “That ‘ah’ was full of portent!”
“Mistress of the Physicist!” Sinclair sings, warming to the sound of it. “Did Turgenev write that?” he asks the air.
“So, you think that’s what he has in mind with me? He plans on making me his little dessert on the side? Well, the joke’s on him, because I’ve never even so much as kissed him!”
“If you’re dessert, you’re Crème Brulee, and that puddin’ don’t come cheap. Oh Viv, you can’t help it if you inspire throbbing animal lust in every man you meet. You should work it.”
Sinclair wants to discuss our plan for the Halloween costume party that Brandon is throwing. The party is a month overdue; it’s almost Thanksgiving, but they held off on it until Evan could attend. Evan is coming home for two days; it’s sort of a combination belated Halloween party and welcome home for him. Sinclair has the exalted task of designing my costume, which must be an inspired creation that will burnish my image into Evan’s brain with a white hot intensity which won’t cool for the remaining month of his filming schedule when he returns to Vancouver.
I envision myself in chiffon and rhinestones—a Flapper perhaps, or fishnets and feathers—a Can Can girl, or a character from a Jane Austen novel—aloof, alluring, aristocratic, and utterly literary all at once, but Sinclair insists on a French maid, which I vehemently object to.
“Think skimpy,” Sinclair implores. “Viv, this is your one shot at parading around in practically your underwear in front of Evan and doing so with the utmost respectability. You’ve got legs as long as the Nile. We’ll pad you up in all the right places. It will drive him to utter distraction.”
I consider his argument, as the first drops of rain plink down upon us. We have to look skyward to be sure we haven’t imagined it.
“I like it,” I say, just before the downpour.
~~~~~
True to his word, Sinclair creates a costume for me, a satin black dress that looks like it’s made for a child, it’s that small. It’s shirred at the waist, with a sweetheart neckline and flair skirt supported with a white crinoline underlining, because, as Sinclair puts it, “Crinoline arouses Evan.” There’s a white lace apron, and, in lieu of a tiara, a round pillbox hat with black netting, very 1940s. There are lace cuffs for my wrists, sewn with seed pearls. He even supplies the fishnet stockings, but leaves the choice of shoes to me, with the stipulation that the heels must be a height of three inches minimum.
Sinclair is working in midtown, so I meet him in the lobby of the Penta Hotel, the Technicolor Dreamcoat wrapped around me, and my stilettos in a paper bag. We walk to Brandon’s loft, and I change into the heels in the elevator. Sinclair pins the charming little hat into my crush of curls, cocking it seductively to one side, and lowering the mesh to touch my cheekbones. Sinclair is dressed as the Devil. Two glittering horns jut from his jelled hair. He wears red spandex pants and a red satin blouse that looks like a throwback to the days of disco. There’s a regal velvet red cape fit for a Count, with a plush satin lining, and black piping along the edging that zigzags like flames, and, of course, his trademark black Kenneth Cole shoes.
“Nice pants.”
“Yes, I pinched them off my friend’s heavy metal head-banger nephew.” He pulls at them, letting them snap back like rubber bands to show just how confining they are. He has painted his face red, and created a spectacularly devilish effect with kohl eyeliner.
The loft is packed when we arrive. Brandon meets us at the door, with his latest girlfriend riding piggyback. She’s dressed as the Statue of Liberty, in the green patina of pennies left too long in the rain, her torch dangerously close to poking Brandon’s eye out, as she struggles to keep her grip on him.
“Evan!” Brandon calls when he lays eyes on me, and I’m struck that his first reaction upon seeing me is to summon Evan. I quickly introduce Sinclair to Lady Liberty, who changes her torch to her left hand so as to shake my right.
“Are you the boyfriend?” she asks.
“No, I’m the gay sidekick.” Sinclair switches his pitchfork to his left hand so as to be free to shake with his right.
Evan is in the kitchen, surrounded by a group of people.
“Sylvia! Wow, everyone’s here now,” he says, but then someone diverts his attention. There is something odd about Evan. He seems foggy, and I realize he’s been drinking.
Sinclair pokes me in the butt with his pitchfork, to urge me toward Evan, who has turned away to reply to someone on his left. Then I spy her, standing just to Evan’s right. I quickly pivot out of the kitchen.
“Take off your coat, my dear, and strut your stuff,” Sinclair whispers to me.
“Did you see the girl beside him? That’s the girl from the chewing gum print ad.”
“There’s a Doublemint twin in the house?” Sinclair looks delighted.
“No, it wasn’t Doublemint gum. I forget what gum it was, and does it really matter?” I grouse. I suddenly feel horribly self-conscious in my choice of costume. The Gum Girl is dressed as a Greek goddess, perhaps Aphrodite. She wears a cream-colored chiffon dress draped demurely over one shoulder, and fitted at the waist with a gold leaf belt, a crown of fresh stephanotis flowers perched on her short Dorothy Hamill hair, and silk ballet slippers with gold lame rosettes on her feet. Her womanly curves show through the clinging chiffon, unlike my manufactured curves, courtesy of Sinclair’s rather lumpy padding.
I begin to sweat. Sinclair insists that I take off the Dreamcoat and mingle. We manage to move among the crowds. I introduce him to some of Dylan’s band members, and we make the acquaintance of others in the hot and faintly-lit loft, which has a surreal pink glow to it tonight. I am so relieved that I invited Sinclair. He has a graceful quality in social situations, and can find common ground in mixing with anyone. I stand back and marvel at his ability to get people to open up and talk about themselves, their professions, their hopes and dreams, their foibles and triumphs, even their annoying relatives.
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