Allen was like my drug, and I needed that shot.
He winked. “I’d be very careful taking it in and out. Mint condition and all.”
Somehow we always managed to slip into the double entendres and dirty talk, as smoothly as we used to pass love notes to each other in high school. The memories time-lapsed through my brain before pausing on our last night together, in the Lake Shore Hotel.
“Is there somewhere private we can go here?” he asked. “To talk?”
I could tell Allen had fast-forwarded to the exact same memory moment. It hung there over us, the image burning into the plasma. Pushing play would take us down two divergent paths that I didn’t really want to think, or talk, about.
We were on my turf now, in this moment. Why did we need to rewind back to the regret and the pain of the past?
“I’m not really supposed to leave the table unattended . . . and besides, you shouldn’t be out there,” I warned, gesturing into the sea of spectators.
The Venn diagram of rabid comic fans and music fans was known to overlap a bit too fervently at times. I once saw a throne, as in an “all hail the king” type of throne, being carried into a convention for Rob Zombie, where he was scheduled to do a signing. A musician of Allen’s caliber would be jumped on as quickly as a hot girl wearing skintight cosplay around here.
Allen chuckled. “That’s what these are for.” He tapped the shades resting on his head. As if a mere pair of darkened glasses could mask the entire rock star essence that was oozing from his every pore.
We ducked behind the booth, on the other side of the black pipe and drape. Allen gently pulled on the artist’s badge lanyard hanging from my neck, luring me into his arms and meeting my lips in a kiss so tender that it almost felt like dreaming. My hands ran up the smooth leather covering his chest and over his chiseled shoulders, squeezing as if to make sure he was indeed real. His hand clenched my ass as if to confirm that yes, he was very real.
“I’m so proud of you, Laney Jane,” he murmured. “And I’m so sorry for being such a dick to you after the reunion.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I sputtered. “I needed to be pushed out of that nest.”
Allen had given me more than just two purple lines on a pee stick that night at the Lake Shore Hotel two years before. He had given me back my courage and my drive. Yes, the anger, hurt, and betrayal had brought me pretty much to rock bottom. But woven with his words, they had fueled my strength to stand up to Vera Hudson.
“You’ll be the death of me, Laney!” my mother had raged, shaking the drugstore receipt in her hand. She had gone into my room “on a hunch” while I was out. “Pregnant? By that . . . that deviant? For heaven’s sake, you’re not a fifteen-year-old dum-dum. A baby?”
When I was fifteen, she had broken the binding on my diary and my teenage trust based on one of her “hunches.” After the Lake Shore Hotel incident, she tried breaking my spirit and my heart by railing against my lack of foresight, my unrealistic expectations, and the two people who had ever truly believed in me: my dad and Allen.
That day she came up with her two worst Veraisms ever: “Absent fathers make for promiscuous daughters!” and “Are you happy, Laney? You’ve tethered yourself to that loser for life!”
Finally, after she had sighed and said, “We’ll just have to take care of it,” I had the tiniest glimmer of hope that, for once in my life, my mother had my back, supporting me, accepting my choices. Until she picked up the phone to call the clinic and I realized what she really meant. It was the same day I told her to go to hell. I was quitting the job, moving into the city . . . and I was keeping the baby.
“I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard, that was mean. But I was in a bad place,” Allen said, stroking back my hair.
I tried not to think of the photo of him, playfully pulling the bikini string of a supermodel whose hands rested intimately on his bare body in an Australian paradise. It looked like a far better place than the “bad place” he had been in with me.
“If you hadn’t pushed me, I would still be on Long Island, juggling that meaningless job and living in my mother’s basement.”
Mother-daughter apartments were a common feature in our suburban neighborhood, and if my mother the martyr had had her way, I’d still be in hers. I tried to picture being there, a single mother myself. Three generations trapped under a single roof. Forever in debt to my mother and her priceless advice.
“Laney Hudson!”
Allen and I both froze.
My mother had grilled me over the phone the previous night about my exact coordinates within the Javits Center, down to the row and aisle number, but I thought she was just being her usual nosy self.
“Hello! Where are you?” my mother trilled, crashing back through the pipe and drape separating us from the crowd.
I was equally horrified and touched that she had bothered to come see my “little show,” as she referred to it. And a bit mortified, as she had brought a cookie bouquet and a big Mylar balloon that said Way to Go! on it.
“Mrs. Hudson,” Allen said formally.
He was still holding my lanyard, but at least he wasn’t holding my ass any longer.
Her eyes reduced to slits. “Allen Burnside, you are dead to me.” And turning on me, she wailed, “Laney, how could you? After what he did to this family! I’d rather sterilize you like a deer with a salt lick than go through that heartbreak again!”
Her heartbreak?
I was the one who had lost the baby, four months in. Incompetent cervix, my doctor told me. Giving my mother a new adjective to throw in my face, along with irresponsible.
It had been Dani who had nursed me back from the devastation, shielding me from my mother’s big, fat “I told you so” and “Must be God’s way of telling you something.” And Dani who had hacked us through the snare of our high school friends, using a machete of words to cut down their tangled grapevine of gossip about Allen and his newfound, A-list love life.
“Laney?” I heard a waver of that fifteen-year-old kid in his voice, but the haunted look on his face aged him more than his twenty-five years. “You told me it was a safe time . . . What—”
“Please,” I pleaded, “not here.”
I didn’t want to discuss my ovulation cycle, my state of mind, or my miscarriage in the middle of the Javits Center. Not in the middle of Artists’ Alley. This was supposed to be my turf. My safe haven.
“You didn’t even tell him? Laney, that is rich!” My mother slammed the cookie bouquet down so hard that the cookies came off their stems. The balloon tethered to the box bobbed violently overhead. When I brought my eyes back down to focus, Allen was gone.
New score: Laney, 2. Allen, 1.
Way to go!
Later that evening, I brought myself to knock on door number 1603 of the Meridien Hotel, with Allen’s forgotten Batman clock tucked under my own arm like a peace offering.
He took it from me silently over the threshold and didn’t invite me in.
“It’s not what you think,” I stammered.
Because it really wasn’t.
“Who’s at the door, baby?”
Allen. Baby. Someone else.
It was my worst nightmare.
Geska was more horrifyingly beautiful in real life than in her photos.
Allen had said she was “around,” but I was thinking he meant in the vague, “somewhere” sense. Not in the way she wrapped her hairless, poreless, perfectly toned arms around his waist and peered over his shoulder at me. Her long legs, bare from beneath the hem of Allen’s black western button-down shirt, didn’t need boots to be va-va-voom.
I tore my eyes from her and met Allen’s steely gaze.
“She’s nobody,” he said pointedly.
Allen had evened the score.
He slammed the door, leaving me to consider exactl
y just who was the real monster lurking around room 1603.
Match point.
• • •
“Do you know what the spire on the Empire State Building was originally built for?”
“I hope that’s not your newest pickup line,” I joked lamely, as Noah slid onto the stool next to me with a fresh drink.
He had changed into a dry tee and thrown his dress shirt back on, but it was unbuttoned and the sleeves were rolled up. I wondered how long he had been in the bar, watching me. I probably hadn’t looked all that approachable, hunched over my sketchbook with a death grip on my pencil.
“It was designed to serve as a mooring mast for dirigibles. You know, zeppelins?”
“Frightening. And fantastical.”
“Can I buy you a drink?” Noah asked, as if we were meeting for the first time. And in a way, we kind of were.
“Sure. My usual.” I laughed. Funny how you could know that about a person in just one day. Alcohol was the greatest bonding tool since the peace pipe. “Hi, I’m Laney. And I don’t take rejection well.”
“Noah.” He shook my hand and grinned. “And I’m really good at sticking my foot in my mouth.”
I clicked my glass to his and put one final detail on my drawing: a tiny Way to Go! balloon wafting toward the heavens.
“Okay, I get the kaiju in the dress,” Noah said, contemplating my picture. “But why is King Kong wearing a bra?”
I looked down at my Manhattan skyline. Bridezilla, in Badgley Mischka and kitten heels, was thirty stories tall and storming up the West Side Highway. The Javits Center was crushed, accordion style, like a tin can underfoot. She had a cookie clenched in one of her tiny theropod fists. In the background, hanging from the Empire State Building, was Geska the billboard bra bitch.
“Just a few of my foes.” I had depicted Allen’s Danish ex as the damn dirty ape, but instead of the usual airplane or damsel in her fist, she held a tiny replica of Allen’s Batman clock. “You know that old saying, ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’? Well, if I can’t beat them, I draw them.”
I gave him the rundown on Geska, whose billboard still taunted me every time I walked through Times Square. “I mean, seriously, what’s the shelf life on a girl like that? Skinny as a rail, with lips like a hemorrhoid doughnut and a chest like Silicon Valley?”
Actually, I knew exactly what her shelf life was, as far as Allen was concerned. It was around the time that Dani let it slip to Gloria Boyner, biggest mouth of the North Shore, that I had miscarried. That was the one time the high school grapevine came in handy for me.
“You’re gonna get him back,” Dani had promised. “And he’s gonna marry you. Just like Dorothea Hurley and Jon Bon Jovi. They were high school sweethearts.”
What I did get, about a week later in the mail at Marvel, was a CD. All You Had to Do was written on it with a Sharpie in Allen’s handwriting, nothing else. No return address, nothing. It contained one song, written and sung by him, accompanied by Bryan on guitar. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
Allen Burnside was the forgiving sort.
Noah held up the drawing to the light.
“I hope you defeated Queen Kong by dipping her in hot wax. Her cleavage could use a good depilatory.”
“That’s a big word. For a guy,” I teased.
But seriously, Noah was like no guy I had ever met. He knew things, and said things, that surprised me every time he opened his mouth.
“Sixteen points on the Scrabble board. Unless you landed on a triple-triple and got the fifty-point bonus for using all your tiles, in that case it would be something like one hundred and ninety-four.”
“‘Something like,’ huh? You’ve got a photographic memory, haven’t you?”
“For some things.” Noah stabbed at the ice in his Jack and Coke with the stirrer. “My fiancée certainly doesn’t. Or she just doesn’t care.”
“About what?” I set down my pencil and studied him.
“How’s this for a start? She changed our wedding date on a whim, without consulting me.” He threw back half his Jack and Coke before continuing. “To the anniversary of my father’s death.”
“Are you serious?”
Noah nodded grimly. “And when I asked her, ‘You know that’s the day my dad died, right?’ she never answered yes or no, she just began to list her reasons why the fifty-one other Saturdays in the year just weren’t for her. Especially if they put her flowers out of season. And didn’t jibe with her favorite photographer’s schedule. And then she told me to take the lemon”—he plucked the garnish from his drink and tossed it over the bar, making a perfect rim shot into the garbage pail—“and make lemonade.”
“What a . . .” I trailed off. Would it be socially acceptable to call your fake fiancé’s actual bride-to-be a colossal cooze?
“She’s been doing these . . . these enhancements, too, that I’m not really on board with. Maybe that makes me sound shallow or controlling, but I like the natural look,” Noah confessed.
Ha, yes! Take that, billboard bra bitches of the world!
“Not shallow at all,” I murmured.
“Most brides would be happy if their grooms got a fresh haircut and a hot shave before their wedding. Mine suggested a chin implant to balance out my somewhat ‘ethnic’ nose.” He smirked and rubbed his already strong, square jaw.
God, was she delusional? Noah was the easiest guy on the eyes that I had ever had the pleasure of meeting.
“It’s all about Remy Georges and his ‘fine-art photojournalism’ for the big day,” he continued.
The name sounded familiar. “Isn’t he that street photographer, the one being called the Banksy of the camera world?”
“Yeah. He does those Manhattan truisms. Gum on the sidewalk and all that.” Noah laughed. “We went to see a retrospective of his work on our first date. So she thought it would be meaningful to have him shoot the wedding.”
“Huh. Romantic enough, I suppose.”
I tried not to imagine Noah and this beautiful creature in their wedding attire, smiling for the camera. They’d be the couple whose photo comes inside the frame when you buy it. Making you feel lame for throwing it away to replace it with your own watered-down substitute.
“So, is she aspiring to be a model?” For all the joking I made about Allen’s day-old frosted Danish, I really didn’t know how much was genetics, how much was Photoshop, and how much was surgery. But I had to assume that some cosmetic upkeep was a necessary evil in that profession. “Why else would anyone in their right mind want to willingly go under the knife repeatedly?”
Noah made a face. “She’s not aspiring to be much of anything beyond a totally pampered wife, like her mother. Well, she does carry a business card around. It says she’s a Tastemaker.”
“Tastemaker . . . is that a club, like Toastmasters?”
Noah laughed. “No. It’s a person who decides or influences what is or will become fashionable in a given sphere of interests.” He gave me that sheepish smile I was beginning to quickly become addicted to. “Except her interests are somewhat limited.”
“Sounds like pretty much to a party of one.” I snorted.
Noah gave a sad smile. “You probably think I’m nuts for putting a ring on her finger in the first place, don’t you?”
Actually, I was thinking he should go find some hobbits to throw that ring into the fiery pit of Mordor. It sounded like pure evil.
“There’s just a lot riding on this,” he finished softly.
It sounded like something my father would say, back when he’d hole himself up in the bedroom to watch the Big Game or the Pretty Pony, or to call his bookie. “There’s a lot on the line here,” he’d say, covering the mouthpiece of the phone to address me if I were to interrupt him.
“Besides your future happiness?” I mumbled.
&
nbsp; I didn’t add for the rest of your life because I supposed marriage was a gamble, after all. Experts would say a fifty-fifty shot. Was it the intermittent reward system that kept Noah coming back for more, like the psychology behind playing the slot machines?
Aside from the Naughty Sleepover Q&A, which had been mainly for flirty fun, Noah had been a closed book to me. I remembered the first image I had of him, all buttoned up in his suit and uptight. Perfectly groomed and put together. Sitting next to me now was an entirely different guy. Beneath all the PowerPoints and calm control there was a passion and vulnerability that I craved to know more about.
“Sloane makes her”—he tapped my gowned Godzilla—“look like a gecko. She was a Bridezilla before we even got engaged.”
Noah
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU
Sloane’s name hung stubbornly in the air of the bar, like cigarette smoke used to before all the smoking bans took effect. Laney tapped her pencil against her sketchbook thoughtfully.
I couldn’t believe I was discussing this with her. What on earth did I have to gain by opening up to Laney? I wasn’t going for sympathy, and I wasn’t trying to get laid. I just wanted . . . the connection.
If I complained to my friends, they’d rip on me for being whipped and joke about the first-world problems of falling in love with a rich bitch. To confide in my mother would heap heartbreak on top of what she already had. She had put up a brave front for so long, first as a military wife, then as a widow. The simple reward of a doting daughter-in-law and abundant grandchildren was all she wanted.
But if I told Laney, she would understand. Something told me that she would. Still, I felt a tiny tug of guilt . . . a betrayal, perhaps.
The Bidwells, Sloane included, were WASPy, close-to-the-vest types when it came to airing the family’s laundry. Although I had grown up with a hot-blooded Italian mother who talked with her hands and loved with her fierce hugs, I had acclimated myself to the closed-door policy that came with marrying into old money.
Dictatorship of the Dress (9780698168305) Page 13
