She told me that Mr. Ellis was resting upstairs and Rachel was asleep in the guest bedroom because she’d been out clubbing until six that morning. She led me to the living room, where Del was sitting on the couch smoking a cigarette and watching a football game. Leigh sat down next to him, so I sat next to her and stared at the television, thinking that the penthouse didn’t feel the same. It seemed empty and boring and grim without Blake.
He came home an hour later and I rushed to the foyer. There was a stack of spiral-bound documents in his hands and a dusting of snow on his coat, which I brushed off.
“Look,” I said, raising my index finger to show him a snowflake. “They say no two are alike. Isn’t it amazing?”
He didn’t say anything, just smiled a half smile, as if it wasn’t amazing and he pitied me for thinking it was. “I guess Leigh invited you,” he said, and this gave me a chill because I’d convinced myself that he wanted me there.
“Of course I did,” Leigh said from behind me. “I figured you forgot to do it yourself. A guy wants to spend New Year’s Day with his girlfriend unless he’s made a resolution to become a total bastard.”
So Blake hadn’t wanted me there. And Leigh had definitely forgiven me—she was looking out for me even though I’d pushed her aside. We sat back down on the couch, where Del and Leigh paid attention to the game and Blake didn’t pay attention to me.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said into his ear, because I was sure he was in a bad mood from being an errand boy all morning and I could cheer him up.
“Upstairs?” he said. “But my whole family’s here. It wouldn’t look nice.”
Nice, nice, nice, I didn’t care about nice. And I doubted that anyone would notice. Rachel was still asleep and Mr. Ellis’s bedroom door was shut, and Leigh and Del were arguing about whether a penalty on the Jets was deserved. So I pouted and whined until Blake brought me to his room, where he acted like his old self again. He kissed me and I kissed him back, then he was on top of me on the bed and I started to undo his belt because I craved him so much that I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Don’t,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “We’ll be quiet. Nobody will know.”
He shook his head, sat up, and rubbed his temples as if he had one of my migraines. I sat next to him and asked if something was wrong, because he’d been acting so funny lately.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I think we should cool things off for a while.”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was touching his knee, scratching a bleach stain on his jeans as if scratching would do any good. What he said felt like a thousand bee stings all over my body. Then he said something about falling off the dean’s list last semester and about law school, and when I reminded him that he didn’t want to go to law school, he reminded me that his father needed him and he couldn’t let him down, especially now that he was sick and stress could make him sicker.
I wished that Mr. Ellis would get sicker. I wished that he’d have another heart attack and not make it to St. Vincent’s in time, and I didn’t care if that was a sinful thing to wish because he was ruining everything.
“I’m sorry,” Blake said, looking at me with a tired face. “I didn’t want to tell you until after the holidays. It’s just that I’m not sure what I’m going to end up doing, so it’s better for me to be alone for a while to figure things out. And I can’t keep lying to my father.”
“I lie,” I said. “I lie to my mother all the time. I’ve told her so many lies about us that I can’t even remember them anymore. And you shouldn’t be so eager to please your father—he’s not as perfect as you think.”
There was a flash of anger in his eyes and he broke his Watch your language around a lady rule again. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
It means that he threatened me, I thought. It means that he tried to bribe me and he did the same thing to Jessica. She didn’t disappear on her own, you know. Stanford Ellis made that happen so he could have you all to himself. But I didn’t say anything because I could barely talk. Blake had never raised his voice to me before, and his tone brought tears and an aura to my eyes.
“Nothing,” I answered, and my voice cracked.
He noticed and it softened him. He reached out and ran his knuckles across my cheek, and I gripped his wrist to keep his hand where it was. “Don’t be upset,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you, Ari. We’ll just see what happens, okay?”
I nodded, trying not to cry, wanting him to put his arms around me so I could bury my face in his chest, but he didn’t. He led me downstairs, where Leigh and Del were getting into their coats. They said that Leigh wanted to go back to her hotel and Del had work to do at the club, and a car was waiting for them outside.
“Take Ari with you,” Blake said. “She needs to go home.”
Now it was much harder to keep myself from crying, but I managed somehow. I stepped into the elevator with Leigh and Del while Blake stood in the foyer with his face as blank as a soldier’s. He didn’t kiss me goodbye. Then the doors slammed shut and he was gone.
Downstairs in the lobby, the doorman ushered us into a miserable day. The snow had turned to rain, and our driver must have had the flu because he kept sniffing and coughing. His cough was so deep I felt it in my chest.
“Are you all right?” Leigh asked in her raspy voice. She was sitting between me and Del, and I guessed she was asking because I hadn’t said a single word in the last fifteen minutes. She didn’t know it was because I was afraid I’d break into a fit of sobs if I dared to open my mouth. So I nodded and she kept looking at me, studying my face with her hazel eyes, and she said that Blake had been acting weird since Christmas. “He’s all mixed up in his head, Ari,” she said quietly, so Del couldn’t hear. “He’ll get over it.”
I nodded again, hoping she was right. The sedan parked at her hotel, and as she got out she said that she and Rachel would be back in New York next month. Del told the driver that the next stop was West Twenty-third and we were off again, riding over slick streets, past mountains of filthy gray snow that I wished would melt because they were depressingly ugly.
“I’m not contagious, you know,” Del said.
At first I thought he was referring to the syphilis. But of course he wasn’t. He’d been cured, and he didn’t even know that I knew about it. He just meant that I was sticking to the opposite side of the car. I was still afraid to talk, so I forced a smile and slid a few inches toward him on the seat. He asked if it would bother me if he had a cigarette. I shook my head and he rolled down the window to blow smoke into the rain. We were both quiet and I kept glancing at his hands because they came from the exact same mold as Blake’s.
When we reached Cielo, Del tossed his cigarette into the gutter. Then he leaned across the seat to put his hand on the curve in my back and to kiss my cheek, wishing me a happy new year. A raw gust of wind blew into my face as he opened the car door and I had a sinking feeling this wasn’t going to be a happy year.
twenty-one
January was awful. I went back to Hollister, where I had nobody to talk to or to sit with during lunch. Just about every day I tossed Mom’s homemade sandwiches and her Hostess cupcakes in the trash because the sight of food was sickening. I knew this was a disgraceful thing to do, especially since people were starving in Ethiopia, but I couldn’t help it.
I kept thinking of the Ethiopians, sitting in the merciless African sun with flies crawling into their eyes and up their nostrils. It wasn’t fair that they had to suffer so much, but of course nothing was fair. I guessed that compared to them, my problems weren’t important. People without food didn’t lose sleep over a boyfriend who had stopped calling.
Blake’s silence drove me to start making deals in my head, deals like He’ll call if I wear his mother’s necklace every day and If I get an A on the Calculus II exam, he’ll send me a birthday card that says he can’t live without me. But nothing worked, and the mailman brought only my dre
aded SAT scores on the morning I turned eighteen.
Mom tore the envelope open before I could get near it. She was in the foyer when I was coming down the stairs, and she stood on an area rug in her slippers and apron, shock on her face. I wanted to tiptoe backward and pretend I hadn’t seen her, but she caught my eye before I could move. Her expression changed to anger—her eyes narrowing and her mouth tightening—and I knew I was about to get chewed out.
“Very nice, Ariadne,” she said, shoving the score report at me. I looked at it and my results were so low, so pathetic, I almost cried. “I can’t believe that a girl as smart as you,” Mom went on in her husky voice, “could do so badly on a test this important that you spent months studying for. This is your future we’re talking about.”
I had known she’d say cutting things. I turned around and started up the stairs to escape, but she followed me.
“That’s what happens,” she said, “when you make stupid decisions … when you run around Manhattan right before a test and dance at a club all night with a damn boy.”
I wasn’t dancing, I thought. I was sleeping with that damn boy, and he doesn’t seem to want me anymore. I sniffed, holding back tears, and headed to my room. Mom trailed behind me the whole way.
“What do you have to say?” she asked when we reached my door. “Don’t you have anything to say?”
I turned to face her. A tear slipped out of my eye and I wiped it away. “What do you want, Mom? I’m sorry. I know I’ve ruined everything.”
Another tear rolled down my cheek and I dried it with my sleeve. I guessed she remembered that I was sensitive, because her face softened and so did her voice. She stopped talking like a teacher.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay. It’s your birthday … I shouldn’t yell at you.”
I didn’t care about my birthday. I just wanted to go back to bed.
But Mom kept talking. “I guess it isn’t that bad,” she said, like she was trying to convince herself. “You can just retake the test, that’s all. You’ll study some more and get a good night’s sleep … and I’ll make sure you have a decent breakfast. You’ll do much better next time. Right, Ariadne?”
The thought of taking that horrid test again made me want to hurl myself down the steps. But Mom looked hopeful and she was trying to be encouraging, so I couldn’t tell her the truth.
“Right, Mom,” I said, walking into my room. I closed the door behind me, leaving her alone in the hall.
That night, Patrick and Evelyn drove to Brooklyn with the boys. Mom didn’t mention the SAT again. She pretended that everything was fine. She cooked dinner and ordered a cake from the bakery, and Kieran gave me a picture frame made of bottle caps. Everyone kept telling me how pretty I looked and there were big phony smiles on their faces, the same kind people use when they’re trying to cheer up somebody with a terminal illness.
They meant well, so I went along with the act. I forced cake down my throat and played a board game with Kieran. He’d brought the game in a schoolbag filled with other stuff, like Play-Doh and an Etch A Sketch. Then he pulled out the autographed Red Sox baseball that Blake had given him, and my head started to pound. I excused myself and pretended I was going upstairs to take my migraine pills, when I was actually planning to lie facedown on my bed until tomorrow.
Patrick came out of the bathroom as I hit the top step. His hair swept across his forehead and he looked handsome, but not as good as Blake.
“Are you okay?” he asked, and I nodded unconvincingly. Then he got back into the Let’s cheer up Ari routine by reminding me that I was eighteen now and could get my driver’s license, which made me feel worse.
“Blake offered to teach me how to drive,” I said. My voice broke on the last word, and that wasn’t lost on Patrick.
“I’ll teach you how to drive,” he said.
He was such a good guy. But I couldn’t think about driving. All I wanted to do was vegetate in my room, which I did for an hour before Mom and Evelyn crept in and surrounded me on the bed.
It seemed as if they were a team suddenly, a more unlikely match than the Nancy Mitchell–Patrick Cagney pairing. It got me wondering if they had secret conversations about what was best for me. And I didn’t bother to lift my face from my pillow when Mom made pleasant suggestions. She said that the three of us should go shopping next weekend, maybe in the city, and it would be a “girls’ day out.”
I thought I must be really bad off if Mom was proposing a shopping trip to Manhattan. It didn’t sound like fun to me—nothing did anymore—so I just mumbled an excuse into my pillow. Then Mom mentioned Blake.
“Is that what’s been bothering you lately?” she asked. “Is it all because Blake dropped you?”
Now I looked at her. “He didn’t drop me. We’re just taking a break for a while.”
That was what I’d been telling myself. In my mind, the proof was that he hadn’t asked for his mother’s necklace back. I brought this up as evidence, but I didn’t convince anyone.
“Ari,” Evelyn said. She grabbed an elastic band from my night table and used it to knot her hair into a bun. “You have to snap out of this. Don’t let that jerk upset you.”
“He’s not a jerk,” I insisted. “I thought you liked him. You said he was good-looking. Fetching, you said.”
She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Any guy who doesn’t treat my sister right is a jerk. And you know what? Guys are no different from buses. If one drives past, you just wait for the next and hop right on. So if Blake wants to be a prick, then he can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned. You don’t need him.”
I knew she was trying to make me feel better, but it didn’t work. Mom had been right—Evelyn wouldn’t bat an eyelash over this. And Mom had been right about me, too. I wasn’t like my sister and I didn’t want to hop on another bus.
I never expected I’d lose interest in drawing, but that was exactly what happened. Not once since New Year’s Day had I even thought of walking into my studio.
I’d be lucky if I earned a C+ in art this semester. I’d be lucky if I earned a C+ in any of my classes because I had stopped striving for good grades. What did they matter, anyway? Everybody knew that the second half of senior year made no difference. The college-acceptance letters were practically in the mail.
I even took the SAT again like Mom wanted. I went to bed early the night before, I ate her blueberry waffles for breakfast, and I forced myself to try, only because she’d go nuts if I didn’t. But my mind was foggy so I couldn’t remember definitions and formulas, and there were more of those impossible logic questions that made me choose answer C over and over again. When in doubt, choose C—that was what everybody at school always said—but it was bad advice. When my scores came back, they were only slightly higher than last time.
I was starting to wonder if Mom and my teachers were wrong about me. Maybe I wasn’t so bright, maybe I wasn’t a good student, and maybe I’d somehow managed to fake it throughout my entire academic career. The look on Mom’s face when she saw my results made me think she was wondering the same thing.
College-acceptance letters were supposed to arrive by the end of February, and I hoped for a miracle. I hoped that Mr. Ellis had put in a good word for me at Parsons. Or maybe he’d put in a bad word for me, or maybe he hadn’t said anything and I’d get in on my twelve years of good grades alone. Or maybe I wouldn’t get in and I’d have nobody to blame but myself.
I put the whole sickening mess out of my mind on a cold Tuesday afternoon toward the middle of February, while I sat in the library at Hollister and pretended to study. I couldn’t study for real; basic addition and subtraction had become impossible and there was no point in trying to remember historical facts and all that meaningless drivel. Information just poured in and flowed out of my brain like it was a strainer.
I couldn’t go home, either. Home was where Mom tiptoed around me as if I was a soufflé in danger of falling. She was trying so hard to make me feel better, it was exha
usting to watch.
Unfortunately, the library closed at four on Tuesdays. A librarian wearing sensible shoes reminded me of that in an unfriendly way when I was still there at four-fifteen. So I gathered my books and went outside. I stood by the iron gates, trying to come up with a destination. I couldn’t go back to Brooklyn and I didn’t want to go to Queens—but Blake’s penthouse wasn’t far away. Maybe I could take a stroll past his building. Maybe he’d be on his way home from NYU and we’d cross paths on the sidewalk, and he’d tell me that he missed me and that we should go upstairs and make love in his bedroom like we used to.
This idea seemed ingenious until I actually got to the Upper East Side and saw Tina’s van parked at the curb. Summer had graduated early, according to her plan, and I assumed that she was working with her mother. She was probably at the penthouse flirting with Blake—and with Mr. Ellis, if he was feeling better.
Summer was welcome at the penthouse and I wasn’t. Even if she was just an employee, the thought of her up there made me want to scream or cry or both, yet I couldn’t do either. I just stared at the building and the van until I heard a car door slam and felt a tap on my shoulder. I smelled cigarettes and I turned to find Del behind me.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Did you and Blake get back together?”
So he really had dropped me. We weren’t just cooling things off for a while and I was a fool. “No,” I said, and the word came out so faintly that Del got the picture and seemed sorry for opening his mouth. “I have to go,” I told him. “I have to go home.”
“How are you getting there?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. My mind was so sluggish lately.
A scarf hung from my shoulders and he wrapped it gently around my neck. “You have to think of these things, Ari. It’s freezing out here.”
He offered to drive me home. I got in the Porsche, where Del tried to make conversation as we headed to Brooklyn. All he got in return were one-word answers because I didn’t have the strength for anything more.
Other Words for Love Page 22
