by Liz Newman
“Oh, you know I never cook at my own dinner parties.” Carolyn turned and pinched a server’s shirt by the shoulder.
“Lupe. Por favor, ahorita traege me un baso de…” she turned to Skye. “What are you drinking?”
“Orange juice.”
“Un Tequila con naranja. Y mi favorito.”
“Si, Senora Chase.” The servant half-bowed, half-curtsied, and strolled down the long, wide hall.
“You said you needed help, so I’m here early,” Skye repeated.
“I want to spend some time with my daughter.” Carolyn nudged Skye into the grand salon and shut the door. The brightly lit lamps reflected their light off the magnificent crystal finery gracing shelves and tables. “Now, tell me more about this business with Alfred and your show.”
Skye sank into a plush high-backed armchair. “Have you watched it recently?”
“Just last night. The blonde. What’s her name?”
“Denny Moss. Apparently, she’s pregnant and—”
“I know all about that,” Carolyn waved Skye’s words away. “So like Alfred to have his head lost in his South Pole. Although quite a passionate young man, he was. Terrible kisser, though. Like a lizard.”
“Mother, please,” Skye shifted uncomfortably. Her seventy-year-old mother, with her face pulled taut from a recent lift and her hair dyed jet black, looked quite formidable for her age, but the thought of her French kissing anyone made Skye want to throw up.
“What?” her mother laughed. “Right before I met your father, we had a liaison, a tryst, whatever you want to call it. We were two adults living in the time of the Sexual Revolution. I remember the night he put this bearskin rug over his shoulders and chased me around the room with two of those big Velcro rollers stuck in his—”
“Please stop!” Skye held up her hand to ward off the disturbing imagery.
“All right! My god, I never knew you were such a prude. Who is this young man you are seeing?”
“More good news from Alfred. Charlie Meyer, son of financial giant Bartholomew Meyer. Perhaps former financial giant, depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist about the economy.”
“Of course, I know all about that from Alfred. He delivered me all of the details, without the whipped cream.” Her mother laughed. “The worse off the economy, the better the ratings. I spoke to Alfred on your behalf—”
“No!” Skye cried. “We agreed a long time ago you would never, ever interfere with my career, even if trying to help. You promised.”
Her mother flailed both of her stark white, elegant hands in the air. “So, I failed you again, I know,” she said with a sardonic smile. She folded her arms and paced the room, her mood darkening. The light bulbs seemed to flicker with the sudden change. “No one ever batted for me,” Carolyn muttered. “A daughter of Chinese immigrants. The kids in my class made fun of me when I talked, but I mastered the English language and became one of the most eloquent speakers ever to grace the screen. My own father told me the best job I’d ever find would be as a secretary. And who is one of the most renowned broadcasters, a household name? Me!” Carolyn’s eyes blazed. She pulled her mink shrug tighter, her red lips pursed. Her shoulders relaxed, and she sat down facing her daughter, her long red nails clacking on the arm of the chair. “Tell me more about the Meyer boy.”
“I’m not quite sure how serious we are. I haven’t really thought about it.”
“If you haven’t really thought about it, then you aren’t. Your career is everything. Excuse me a moment.” Carolyn threw open the double doors and screamed, “Lupe! Las bebidas ahorita!”
Lupe rushed into the salon, a tall crystal juice glass and a highball glass bouncing on a silver tray. Carolyn chastised her as she placed each glass on the coffee table with a black cocktail napkin underneath.
Lupe lumbered out at a snail’s pace, her thick shoulders sagging like a beast of burden. “It’s a wonder I keep her in my employ. As I’ve always said…” She stirred an olive around, the ice in the glass clinking. “All else comes and goes, people and houses and family dogs. They don’t last, but you will always have your work. Just like me, when your father decided he didn’t want a family anymore.”
Skye’s ears burned at the sound of the words, which echoed in the hollow, empty chasm of her soul. She heard herself saying, “The work did…fill me enough, but now I long for something better. I want a family.”
“Considering a family with a ne’er-do-well son is, at best, grasping at straws.” Carolyn gave her a pointed look. “A woman has but two loves, the one who breaks her heart and the one she spends the rest of her life with.”
“Gibbs accounts for the first,” Skye sighed.
“A post-mortem heartbreak doesn’t count.” Carolyn peered out a tall window capped with a tiered valance. “The time has expired for your motherly advice. The guests are arriving. Look at that young man, coming out of the gray Mercedes. He’s your date for the evening.”
She peeked out the window at Blaine Pffeifer, partner at Grandclemente and Ross. “Date? That’s not a date, that’s an appliance,” Skye mumbled.
***
“You know each other?” Carolyn asked, looking like a petulant child at a spoiled surprise party.
Carolyn pulled Skye away from Blaine and guided her toward a little man with a long, graying beard.
“Let me introduce you to the director of the play everyone says is going to sweep the Tonys,” Carolyn murmured to the Captain Nemo lookalike.
As Skye walked away she felt his eyes boring into her back. When she turned, she caught him staring at her rear. Bad Santa, she thought.
Lupe hovered with appetizers on a tray, her lips painted into a bright red smile so much like Carolyn’s it appeared she might have borrowed her lipstick on the sly. She smiled and nodded at Skye, a small streak of red on the enamel of her front tooth. Skye felt at ease around the quiet and elegant behavior of her mother’s friends. She silently prayed her mother would be kept busy by her company. Carolyn floated back, bringing over friend after friend after friend, and a barrage of introductions and pleasantries were exchanged, as Skye smiled and nodded.
“Mr. Bradenburg. How are you? Of course, I’ll call you Jack. Your wife, Lauren? You look so lovely. Sarah, how are the children? Gordon, it’s been so long.” Gordon hugged her so hard her eyes almost popped out of her head.
After cocktail hour, the guests were seated at the table as servants in white coats offered various libations. The first course was tiger shrimp on a bed of couscous with a light tomato basil sauce; Carolyn sang the praises of her butler Louis, who had graciously prepared his specialty dish for her guests. Louis gave a slight wink to Carolyn when he thought no one was looking, and Carolyn maneuvered her body slightly, her mink wrap falling below one shoulder. Blaine and Skye made casual small talk, but Blaine’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“When Carolyn told me the amazing Skye Evans would be here tonight, I just had to show up,” Blaine said.
“Sounds like the modern Don Juan approach. Embellished yet uninterested affectation. Let’s peek behind the smokescreen, shall we? You really don’t believe that approach will work.” Skye pushed the tomato basil sauce into little streamers with her fork. “Let’s talk about you, Blaine Pfeiffer.”
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Where all good stories start. The present. Your status?”
“Dumped. Cut loose. Sunk with the ship. Put out by the trash. How about yourself?”
“Hanging on for dear life to a ship that’s sinking. Sitting in the mud and waiting for someone to take me to the magical corn field,” Skye mused.
“For in the depths below may lie the gold. Not likely.”
Blaine and Skye raised their glasses and toasted, and Carolyn, engrossed in conversation with Bad Santa and Lauren, gave them a sideways glance and nodded to her friends as if to say I told you so.
“Jackie and I were doomed from the start,” Blaine began. “Jackie worked
out for hours every Sunday morning, I like watching football. She ate a vegan diet, I love barbeque and all-meat pizza. She practiced Catholicism, I’m a Jew. Doomed. We had no business being together. The diet thing killed us. I jogged with her every day but Sunday, attended services in the Catholic church where my mother wore a tichel and damn near passed out during the ceremony, but kept eating meat whenever I could.”
“Not a crime,” Skye comforted, warmed by his broad smile and candid demeanor.
“My feelings exactly. Jackie locked herself into a perpetual stage of bombardment with the reinforcement of her professionally acquired knowledge that the grave sense of injustice in the world permeated her sacred reality.” He smiled wryly. “She internalized it all.”
“She’s a journalist.”
“A reporter for the Times. That’s how I met your mother. Carolyn consulted her on one of her articles, the one about the effects of genetically modified foods. Jackie’s doctors prescribed her Paxil, then Xanax, then Prozac and Lithium. She joined animal rights organizations, and other groups that sought to cease scientific testing on lab rats and fight the breeding of dogs meant for human consumption in South Korea. All noble causes. Then one day she tells me I’m forbidden to eat meat. If I loved her, I would never touch it again. To me, there isn’t a finer meal than a big juicy steak.”
“Eating’s good,” Skye said. “I’ve tried to convince myself of that, in between abusive workouts and starvation diets. Let me know if you have any luck.” She gave him a wry smile as she sipped champagne.
“I hate saying it, but Jackie grew to love absolutely nothing. Not even me. How’s this for a story…” Blaine recounted one evening when he returned from the office with a full rack of ribs and some cold cuts from a local deli, secretively wrapped in a produce bag. He realized he forgot some documents he needed to peruse before work the next morning. He tossed the cold cuts in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and the warm box of ribs wrapped in aluminum foil into the oven, went back to work and picked up the documents, and made his way home, his stomach growling and the thought of the succulent ribs making his mouth water. He crept back into the apartment and found Jackie asleep on the bed.
He crept into the kitchen and opened the oven. A pamphlet rested on the rack, with a picture of slaughtered pigs hanging from hooks in a warehouse with a caption underneath that read Some Are Still Alive. He threw open the refrigerator door, rummaging through the drawers and finding the ribs gone. A note in their place read Your cruelty-free dinner is on the table with a big smiley face.
A bowl of boiled rice and dal sat on his end of the table, with some chopped onions in a plate beside it. Blaine stifled his anger and spooned the vegetarian gruel into his mouth and couldn’t discern whether the tears that moistened his eyes were from the pungent, foul dish, or the sorrowful disappearance of the highly anticipated cuts of meat. “Mung,” he bleated in disgust. “She made mung for dinner.”
Blaine said Jackie’s cat, Hector, turned up his nose at his feeding bowl, once overflowing with oily, moist cat food, and now replaced by a dry kibble consisting of corn and soy meal. “This cat used to watch me with those big green eyes,” Blaine continued, “like a cobra hypnotizing me. Bring home burgers, bring home burgers.”
Skye laughed, giddily as she spooned flourless chocolate cake into her mouth, knowing at least one tooth was blackened from the moist chocolate. Blaine lamented that one weekend, Jackie flew to Seattle to pick up her parents and bring them back to New York for the rehearsal dinner. Blaine and Hector ate a full-fledged meat fest. Blaine brought home turkey, steaks, deli meats, and invited friends over for a barbeque on the patio while Hector sat on his shoulder and Blaine fed him cut after cut of grilled chicken. Jackie surprised him by coming home early.
As the door slammed, Blaine felt like a teenager caught watching a dirty movie with his friends. Jackie sniffed around and as his friends shuffled out, even Hector made a move toward the door. Jackie scooped him up and brought him back inside, and as she scrubbed out Hector’s bowl and heaved a cup of vegetarian kibble into it, she gave Blaine an earful.
“I can’t live like this!” Blaine protested.
“I’ve changed everything for you. Can’t you just let me eat meat?” At that moment, after Hector took a bite of kibble, he threw up all over the kitchen floor.
“Do you know how many animals died so our cat could do that? Throw up their innards all over our floor?” Jackie shouted.
“That’s the corn meal you feed him. He can’t stand it, either. Cats are carnivores.”
“Not my cat,” Jackie said. “Our wedding is next week. Either you give up your malevolent eating habits, or don’t bother to show up.”
Skye and Blaine swung on a porch swing on Carolyn’s back patio after dinner. The party reached a comfortable lull, and guests warmed themselves around the fire pit and took small sips of their aperitifs. Smoke from fine cigars wafted in the air. The ghost of Gibbs entered Skye’s thoughts and she shivered.
“What happened?” she asked Blaine.
“We got married. Then one of Jackie’s best friends got drunk one night and told me she hired a stripper for Jackie’s bachelorette party and Jackie went wild. We met for coffee and she explained that her stripper friend headed up The Animal Avengers, a radical group that held moshing parties to release tension, and that she was leaving me.
“‘He understands my needs,’” she said. “‘The intense physical attraction is a benefit.’ All those months of eating wheat germ just to make her happy, when it simply wasn’t me who could make her happy. Like that old saying, eating crow. Only worse, because I couldn’t eat the damn crow.”
While cradling her second warmed aperitif, Skye shared her own relationship woes about Charlie. “I’m intoxicated by our physical relationship, but I find his personality revolting. At some point it needs to run its course. After that, will I be so jaded on love to never find that attraction and emotion gel ever again? I feel like it will never happen for me. When you share your bed with someone you hate, it causes you to hate yourself as well. And if you hate yourself, you can’t ever truly love anyone, can you?”
“I think you’re right about that,” replied Blaine. “How does he feel about you?”
“He loves me,” Skye replied with her eyes stinging, “the way a gigolo loves his favorite whore.”
“I’d leave that one behind if I were you. Venture into the unknown.” Blaine waved his glass toward the stars. The Milky Way curled around the constellations in the night sky.
“Maybe love isn’t meant for women like me. I long for it, but after September Eleventh I find that…I feel too much. I can’t stand tragedy. Great love and great tragedy go hand in hand, don’t they?”
“They don’t have to, but I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Blaine chuckled. “Got time for another story? I think there’s a gem of wisdom in there, just for you. This might make sense of your relationship for a very good reason.”
“What’s that?”
“The reason is,” Blaine wavered, “because we’re drunk.” His arms flailed about as he continued. “Picture this; bottom of the ninth in the final series against Yale. It’s pouring rain and I’m the last up to bat. Pow! The ball flies up in the air, to the farthest corner of the outfield, and I’m running. Touch the first base, second, then third, crowd’s cheering. I can see the ball flying toward the home baseman out of my left eye. I slide into home a split second before the ball crashes into the catcher’s mitt and crack!” He slapped his hands together for effect. “My leg breaks. Shattered in six places. My baseball career is over.”
“Did you say this story had something to do with me?”
“Yes!” Blaine exclaimed. “Had I thought, in that split second, that my knee would shatter I might have dived. If I’d have dived instead of slid, I would’ve lost the championship. It takes longer to set the body up for a dive. An entire lifetime of playing baseball, from Little League to Junior League to High School and on
scholarship to college, and it all would have ended with me letting the team down. Not because I broke something which would later heal. I’d break it all over again. I’d go through every day of lying still and feeling that blood pooling in my calf, my leg feeling like a splintered stump, the screams of pain, the itchiness and what felt like a thousand needles in my body. I’d go through it all again, to win.”
Chapter Seven
Drab clouds hung over the sky, providing a gloomy but picturesque backdrop to the tall green hedges surrounding the outdoor patio of a posh Tribeca restaurant. Tabitha placed her hand on Jonas’ chest, and as usual they canoodled in their own little world, cooing to each other in such oblivion Skye felt she was seated next to an unknown couple at banquet function. Her spine so straight it seemed like her upper body was fastened to an iron pole, Skye grumbled Teleworld and Denny Moss to Blaine, the only set of listening ears present.
Tabitha eyed the glazed crumpet on her plate with disgust and sipped her mimosa, her white pinky finger curled delicately away from the glass. She beckoned to a waiter bedecked in white with her forefinger. “I said no bread. Atkins appropriate, please.” She looked at Skye. “I’m getting married in a week, and the whole world is conspiring to keep me from fitting into my dress.” The waiter attempted to remove her fruit and mimosa from the table. “Put that back!” She turned to Skye again. “Honestly,” she said, and slathered butter onto a fried egg.
“You’re doing a combination of the South Beach and Atkins diet. Atkins doesn’t allow fruit,” Skye said. Tabitha bit into a forkful of the greasy egg, looking sideways at Skye and then fixing her eyes on Jonas.
Jonas cleared his throat. “I watched the segment last week on the Palestinian and Israeli conflict,” he said to Skye. “Best reporting I’ve seen in months.”
“Thank you,” said Skye as she stirred a café latte. “I try to present the facts, not just the pieces of the story that get the emotions stirring. Ratings push journalists to wag the dog, so to speak, but I am of an old-fashioned mind when it comes to my show.”
