Something Blue

by Ann Hood

  Spencer smiles at her and she thinks that, really, he is almost cute. Almost.

  “Tonight, though,” he says, “I’m taking you out to Mama Rose’s Italian Garden. It’s right in this neighborhood and it’s so fantastic. You’ll love it.”

  Katherine says, “That sounds great.”

  He nods. “First, we’ll watch Taxi. Then we’ll go.”

  “Taxi?”

  “I never miss it,” he says, and flops into the chair under Elvis’s cloak scrap.

  Katherine stands awkwardly for a minute, then settles onto the couch.

  Mama Rose’s Italian Garden is too tacky for words. There are plastic grapes clinging to plastic vines on the walls. There’s a mural too, an ornate map of Italy in clashing colors, all reds and pinks and oranges. And a man roams around the room playing “Santa Lucia” and “O! Solo Mio” slightly off-key on an accordion.

  Katherine cannot tell if Spencer appreciates how awful this place is. He’s too busy talking about his trip to Graceland last summer for her to ask.

  A waiter appears at their table, looking bored. He reminds Katherine of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever—tight pants, a gold chain nestling somewhere in his shirt, pointed shoes.

  Spencer leans toward her. “Let’s get the Mama Rose special,” he says. He counts off on his fingers all the food it includes. “Antipasto,” he says, “minestrone, spaghetti with clam sauce, veal Parmesan, a glass of Chianti, ice cream and coffee.” He smiles proudly as if he is somehow responsible for the menu.

  “That sounds like an awful lot of food,” Katherine says. She tries to push away thoughts about the quiet candlelit restaurant she was supposed to be eating in tonight, of the tall lawyer who was supposed to be beside her. She is beginning to wonder if she will ever make a good decision again.

  The waiter clears his throat.

  Spencer adds, “All that is only thirty-two dollars. For two!”

  On top of everything else, Katherine thinks, he’s cheap too. “Fine,” she says.

  The waiter slides a basket of bread toward her. She looks up at him and he winks one of his droopy blue eyes. Bedroom eyes. Katherine gives him a dirty look, and he slinks off in his tight pants and polyester shirt.

  Already Spencer has started talking again, this time about an Elvis concert he saw. Katherine is having trouble focusing on what he is telling her. All the colors and ornamentation are making her dizzy. She hopes that Ben, her real date, got the confused message she left on his answering machine, breaking the date, blaming work and rain. She hopes he calls her again.

  “They say,” Spencer is saying, “that there are two words known in every country in the world. Everywhere. The Sudan. Australia. Ecuador.” He smiles proudly again. “Coca-Cola,” he says. “And Elvis.”

  “What is this fascination with Elvis Presley?” Katherine says. “I mean, it’s an obsession. It’s crazy.”

  Spencer’s smile does not fade quickly. Instead, it seems to crack and fade like old wallpaper.

  “I’m sorry,” Katherine says. “It’s just too much.”

  He nods. “Everybody has to have something,” he says. His voice is soft and sad. “Some people collect stamps. Or coins. Some people buy shoes. Mine is Elvis. It could just as easily be Abraham Lincoln or Amelia Earhart or Hitler.” He shrugs. “It keeps me busy,” he says. “It keeps me company.”

  The waiter arrives again and gives them each a plate with salami, pepperoncini, one black olive, and some iceberg lettuce on it. The plate and the food are ice cold.

  The sight of it, and the things Spencer has said, become too much for Katherine and she begins, without warning, to sob.

  “Oh, no,” Spencer says. He jumps up and looks around, as if he could find someone to make her stop.

  She keeps saying, “I don’t know why I’m crying like this.”

  “You must know,” Spencer tells her. “People don’t just cry for no reason.”

  She lifts her head. He’s right, she thinks. “Since I moved here I’ve been so busy trying to act like I like it and like I did the right thing, that I’ve been”—she pauses, searching for the right word—“denying everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I hate sleeping in a living room on a pull-out sofa. And I hate my roommates. And sometimes—” she pauses again and swallows hard, “sometimes I miss Andy.”

  Spencer’s frowning face floats in front of her, through her tears, like a watercolor.

  “Who’s Andy?” he asks.

  “My fiancé. I mean my ex-fiancé. For a long time all I could think about was how miserable I was and how rigid and predictable he was and I forgot how once, at a carnival, he won me a big blue stuffed tyrannosaurus.” The memory of that blue dinosaur makes her start crying again. “And,” she says through her sobs, “we used to sit down and draw blueprints of our dream house. Where the kitchen would be. And the den.”

  The waiter removes the uneaten food in one motion, and deposits, just as quickly, two bowls of soup.

  “Andy used to even watch beauty contests with me on TV. Like Miss Universe and Miss America. Not a lot of guys would do that.”

  Spencer says softly, “I watch them sometimes.”

  “You do?”

  He nods.

  She has stopped crying again and is sniffling and wiping at her eyes. “I must have mascara everywhere,” she says.

  “You do,” he tells her. “You look like a raccoon.”

  “You don’t mince words,” she says, “do you?”

  “Why don’t we have a nice dinner now?” Spencer says. “If you want, you can have more than one glass of wine, even though only one is included in the price.”

  Katherine takes a deep breath. “One will be fine,” she says.

  He pats her hand. “You’re going to be okay,” he says with great conviction. “Just you wait and see.”

  The next day, when Katherine walks into her classroom, there is a large bouquet of daisies in a vase on her desk. “Gracie for a lovely evening,” the card says. It is signed with a fancy, curled S. Katherine smiles. She touches the flowers lightly with her fingertips. He’s an odd one, she tells herself. After they left the restaurant, he had simply pointed her in the direction of the subway and waved goodnight, leaving her to find her own way home. Still, he had made her feel better somehow.

  She begins to write new words on the blackboard. CAT. BAT. RAT. She makes each letter big and perfect. Somewhere in the distance she hears a bell ring. In a few minutes, her students will file in, two by two. They will hang their coats, stand by their desks, and greet her with a loud “Good morning, Miss Bedford.” Katherine decides that she will get an Elvis CD for Spencer.

  She hears her class’s footsteps approaching and she wipes the chalk dust from her hands. On her big felt board, Katherine sticks a bright yellow sun in the weather square.

  Katherine goes to Tower Records and buys a CD of Elvis singing Christmas songs. Then she goes to meet Lucy for cappuccino at Bruno’s Bakery. Since Katherine moved out of Lucy’s, they don’t see each other very much. Even though Katherine knows Lucy prefers it this way, she wishes they got together more. Lucy has a pragmatic approach to things that Katherine needs sometimes. Tonight, she will tell Lucy all about Spencer. As she rushes across Bleecker, Katherine knows exactly what she will ask Lucy: Have you ever been attracted to a guy who’s completely wrong for you?

  But when Lucy asks her about her date last night, Katherine hears herself say, “It was awful.” She laughs. “Unless you like Weebles,” she adds. Then, in great detail and with much exaggeration, she describes everything—Mama Rose’s Italian Garden, her trip alone down unfamiliar streets to the subway.

  Lucy laughs throughout the story. She laughs so hard, tears roll down her cheeks.

  Katherine traces the outline of the CD through her bag. She knows she should feel guilty making fun of Spencer this way. But she can’t stop herself. Now she is describing his clothes, his framed scrap of Elvis’s jacket. What sh
e leaves out are the little things that stayed with her too, the sweet things. Spencer, she reminds herself, is all wrong for her. He’s not tall enough, interesting enough, ambitious or handsome enough. She pushes back an impulse to tell Lucy that his hands were nice and manly.

  Instead she thinks that she will go right back to Tower Records and return the CD. She’ll exchange it for something for herself. The new Linda Ronstadt maybe. She’ll call Ben and apologize for breaking their date. She’ll call the man she met last week in the elevator. She’ll call the accountant from New Jersey she went out with once a while back and ask him to dinner.

  “Even the name,” Katherine hears herself say, “Spencer. I mean, really.”

  On

  JULIA MOVES INTO A loft in Tribeca, on North Moore Street. It is spare, with a bright blue fireplace on one wall and multicolored wooden chairs everywhere. There is no couch, which Julia finds disconcerting. She wants to stretch out with a book or magazine, but there is nowhere to do it. The loft is very big. Her voice echoes when she talks.

  Her first night there, after pacing the length of the place for an hour, she goes to a bar around the corner. The neighborhood is recently chic, but this bar seems friendly and old. She hears, immediately, an unfamiliar accent.

  “Australian,” the man tells her when she asks.

  Julia thinks of the redness of Ayers Rock, of kangaroos and koala, of long lonely stretches of nothingness.

  She smiles at the man, who is younger than she, with longish blond hair and a deep tan. He tells her he is traveling around the world. He has already been to Singapore, Fiji, Hawaii, and San Francisco. He stopped in Chicago and Miami.

  “These are places I’ve heard of,” he says. “Places I thought I should see.”

  Julia nods. “And what did you think of them?” she asks him.

  He seems puzzled by this. He frowns and shakes his head. “I thought in Fiji people would walk around naked. That everyone in San Francisco would be a hippie. I thought Chicago would be full of gangsters. And everything in Miami would be pink.”

  Julia nods again. This makes sense to her. She, after all, always lives in an illusion. She says to him, “I apartment-sit for people who are away. I use all of their things. Their phone number, their beds. Even the messages on their answering machines.”

  She isn’t sure he understands the connection but she doesn’t mind.

  He tells her that he is supposed to go to Paris and Greece before he goes home, but he might just stay in New York a while longer. “I can’t take too much more disappointment,” he says, sounding very sad.

  His name is Timothy, and naked he seems still younger. His body is smooth and hairless, tanned without any tan lines. They do not speak when they enter the loft. They haven’t touched yet, but once inside his hands are everywhere. He is rough. He is eager. He has her down on the cold tiled floor and still they have not spoken a word to each other.

  Julia has to fight very hard to not think of On, whom she has left without telling him where to find her. Still, his dark eyes seem to be etched in her mind. It’s as if On is there, watching her. As this man from Sydney pushes into her, hard, she is thinking of On, and she suddenly has an orgasm like she has never had before. She thinks, later, that she blacked out from its intensity.

  But still Timothy does not talk. All night this goes on. He never tires. And she never stops thinking of On. Finally, it’s morning and she stumbles around the unfamiliar apartment searching for a coffeepot, a toaster. She can’t find either, so she returns to the bed, a platform with a thin foam mattress.

  Her voice sounds dry and hoarse. “These people apparently don’t eat breakfast,” she says, standing beside him. She feels aware of her breasts, of their fullness, in a way she never has with her lovers before. She reaches one arm across them. “There’s no toaster or anything,” she adds.

  “I’ll take you out for breakfast,” Timothy says. He stretches like a lion, with his blond mane and muscled legs. “I’ve never seen a bird come like that,” he says, grinning.

  She feels herself blush.

  Timothy lifts his arm, and points to five small new bruises. “You’re a wild thing,” he says.

  Julia kneels on the bed, letting her arm drop, her breasts fall free. She doesn’t want him to touch her again. She wants him to go. But she says, almost desperately, “Tell me about Sydney.”

  “All right,” he says. He describes it in great detail—the Opera House, the beach, the pubs. He tells her that at Christmas, they have Santa’s sleigh pulled by kangaroos. He tells her about a city that is cosmopolitan and modern.

  Julia feels herself grow cold. “No,” she says. “It can’t be that way.”

  “It’s like me and Chicago,” he says, laughing. “I kept looking for Al Capone. You want me to tell you about Crocodile Dundee. Right?”

  She feels like she is upside down. She doesn’t want him to touch her, so she touches him. She wants him to go, so she makes him stay. Nothing makes sense. This time, and all the rest of the day, he talks. He makes up stories for her, about aborigines and kangaroos and Alice Springs. And each time he enters her she tries not to think about On. She makes him talk instead, tries to focus on the foreign sound of his words, on his descriptions of things she does not know.

  That night at acting class, Barry announces that he has a part as a doctor in a soap opera in L.A. The class applauds, but falsely. Julia knows that they are all wishing they had that part instead of Barry. She almost can’t believe it’s true. Dull Barry has won a role on a soap opera.

  “It’s a small part,” he adds with great modesty. “The brother of one of the regulars. But if it works out, they may make me a Vietnam vet who has been impotent and hospitalized until now.”

  Suddenly Julia stands up too and makes an announcement. “I won’t be back either,” she says. “I got a role in an off-Broadway show. As one of the Chiffons.” The Chiffons are a female trio who sing fifties music. The lie surprises even her.

  Natalie, a curly-haired blonde who thinks she looks and acts like Jessica Lange, narrows her eyes at Julia. “Which role?” she asks. Natalie goes on auditions every day. She knows everything that’s casting.

  Julia doesn’t even blink. “As Bunny,” she says.

  “There is no Bunny,” Natalie says.

  Julia shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

  No one knows quite what to do. They look at the floor and shuffle their feet.

  “Come to my place,” Julia tells Barry after class. “We’ll celebrate.”

  His ordinary brown eyes widen. “All right.”

  On the way, they stop for some Great Western champagne. They link arms and sing “We’re Off to See the Wizard.” They start to skip after Canal Street, and skip all the way into her apartment.

  “This is a weird place,” Barry says. His voice echoes too.

  “I’m a minimalist,” Julia tells him.

  “I guess so,” he says.

  She takes his hand and leads him into the bedroom, where the sheets are still rumpled from Timothy. There is a bright white light somewhere outside, and it lights this room sufficiently so they do not need to turn one on inside.

  “Julia,” Barry says, “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”

  Julia lifts her sweater over her head, unclasps her bra. She is thinking that she should do this. That something has changed in her. She no longer can have her strange lovers. Perhaps what she needs is this, someone ordinary and familiar. He is staring wide-eyed at her breasts. She pulls off her boots, her jeans, and now Barry groans, still fully clothed.

  “Listen,” she says, “you’re going off to L.A., to stardom. This way, you’ll never forget me.” She knows she doesn’t really care if Barry forgets her or not.

  Barry reaches out and touches her, but with just his fingertips. She feels her nipples grow hard.

  Julia leans close to him. She stares straight into his eyes. He is a liar, like her. She knows this. She does not even believe that he is going to L.
A.

  “I don’t think we should,” Barry says, although he doesn’t stop touching her.

  She tells him the truth. She says, still staring at him, “I spent all day in this bed with a man from Australia. I pick up strange men from foreign countries. That’s my hobby. That’s what I do for fun.”

  Barry’s hand stops long enough for him to unzip his pants.

  “I don’t tell anyone,” Julia says as she opens a packet of condoms. “I just do it. I take them to whatever apartment I am living in and I have sex with them until I hate them. Or myself. Whichever comes first.”

  His pants are hardly off but she mounts him. On’s face drifts in front of her eyes but she fights it.

  “I’m not with the Chiffons,” she says. Barry is small, only half-hard. But she doesn’t stop. “I just felt like saying that.”

  She expects Barry to confess to her. To tell her he was never fat, that he is not on a soap opera, that he understands. But he just keeps staring at her, wide-eyed, and she keeps talking, telling him everything like a priest.

  Finally, he whispers up at her, “I don’t know what to believe. I feel like you’ve taken me on this incredible journey.”

  He is still soft.

  She says, “Do you want to leave?”

  “I’m just so overwhelmed,” he tells her. He does not seem embarrassed.

  “Do you want to go to Conran’s with me to buy a sofa?”

  “What about this?” he asks her, indicating her nakedness, his own half-nakedness, all with a sweep of his hand.

  “I’d rather buy a couch,” she says.

  “All right,” Barry says.

  Julia’s couch is navy blue, flecked with white. It is the first thing she has ever owned, and she makes Barry move it from place to place, first against the window, then facing out, then facing the fireplace. He does all this good-naturedly, giving her his opinion of where it looks best.

  Finally, they leave it facing the fireplace. Julia imagines adding more things to the room—a bookshelf, knickknacks on the mantel. When she was young, she used to collect things from the ocean. She had brightly colored starfish from a trip to northern California, sea glass from Cape Cod, sand dollars and seashells and bits of coral. She could start, to collect something else now, something new. And she could line the mantel with whatever she chose—cats or angels or tacky salt and pepper shakers.