Magic & Mayhem

by Susan Conley

  This was, indeed, a neighborhood. If pushed, she would grudgingly admit that it was rather pretty. The buildings were lower, the trees were taller, the combination allowed the light to filter down in a soothing green — very natural, she mused. The storefronts were homey and well kept, and the predominantly Italian flavor to the place gave it an old world, old New York vibe, and, she could maybe, perhaps, see the charm in living in a place like this. Well, it really was darling, wasn’t it. How nice for Anna.

  But for Lorna — no. The mental leap required to cross a body of water every day to get into the city did not register as doable. She couldn’t conceive of it. Crossing bodies of water meant a journey, not a commute. She was perfectly happy in the West Village. Who wouldn’t be, really. Downtown, convenient, leafy, as leafy as this, in all honesty — if you stood on her toilet you could see the Hudson. Anything anywhere on the island of Manhattan, just a raised arm away. The idea of having to take the subway everywhere, sitting there, rocking and bumping around with the hordes — not only that but the time involved, walking to the subway, waiting on the platform, sitting on the train, getting into town, transferring, for God’s sake.

  Had the neighborhood glanced back at the tall, willowy woman standing as still as a statue on the curb, it would have taken in the platinum blonde locks that fell, sheet-like, down her back, noticed the flawless ivory skin, the impeccable maquillage, the tasteful ensemble, and perhaps, perhaps, it would have shivered just a little bit. Lorna would graciously accept the conclusion of cool, as she cultivated coolness — but only her friends would know, in her heart of hearts, that she would clutch at the verdict of cold. And that’s why they were her friends, the best friends in the world.

  As her handheld hovered between question and answer — My God, not even a decent connection out here — Lorna reached for her smokes. Extracting a pack of Gitanes from the pocket of her oyster grey Anne Klein car coat, she flicked the lighter (also located in said pocket), and stepped gracefully out of the way of a mob of mothers wheeling their progeny down the sidewalk.

  Families. Lorna shuddered mildly. Screaming kids, disgruntled dads, washed-out moms. Surrounded. No wonder Anna was so distraught about that idiot Willy. Lorna allowed herself the ghost of a smirk. How he loathed that. How he loathed her. Mister Other People’s Money Humorless Bloody Wilson.

  Ah, but poor Anna. Poor, poor dear. It had been ages since she’d dated anybody that was even as passable as ol’ Wils. Such a big heart, a big romantic heart that took anybody on board and gave them a shot. Good Lord, that wrestler guy. Always had an A&P bag full of vitamins and powdered drinks on hand so he could bulk up at will and in all situations. And that string of actors, useless bastards, who used up all her mousse and stole her CDs. The yearly crush, the annual all-consuming fixation on some guy at work, or the donut vendor, or God knew.

  How could anybody be that receptive all the time? Anna walked around like an open flower — not like she was a flake, or a Moonie, but you could see it in her face, especially since she got heavily involved in that witchy business. We’d all been relieved when she started dating ol’ Wilson, thought Lorna, giving her phone an impatient shake. Well, he was entirely too pretentious, but he was steadily employed, had his own apartment, and spoke in complete, intelligible sentences. So what had happened?

  It didn’t seem like Maria Grazia had much of a clue what was going on, which was truly strange, because she, of the nonexistent boundaries, was always the first to know. Mind you, she had been present almost immediately after The Dumping, but as far as circumstances were concerned, MG was as clueless as Lorna was. It was a bit mysterious, not at all like Anna to hold out, or neglect to ‘share’. Especially when she was running around trying to read people’s fortunes, or giving her friends little wish boxes on Valentine’s Day.

  Lorna used hers to hold her condoms. Unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this was by no means a permanent collection. In her youth, those wild and crazy days, fruit flavors would have been top of the pile, but now she was into a sophisticated brand of French ticklers, ordered through the mail from an exclusive Tunisian import-export. Only for connoisseurs of top-of-the-line, adventurous, blistering sex. And no indeed, you wouldn’t know it to look at me.

  She shook the iPhone once more. No love for her, thanks. She vaguely remembered having been there, in that doughy, semi-conscious state of absorption and symbiosis, and she’d rather be forced to wear sneakers with her vintage Chanel suit for thirty days in a row than revisit that maudlin, cloying swamp of a place.

  She really ought to get on with it. ‘Get on with it’. Like it was a chore. It wasn’t that, at all: Lorna would do anything for darling Anna … but the truth was she really wasn’t the comforting type … Was it too early for cocktails? Going on a bender — Lorna was excellent company for that. She glanced at the page her phone had deigned to load. Oh. She was right there — practically in front of Anna’s building. She quickly searched ‘liquor stores Court Street’ and, feeling daring, walked toward those — admittedly charming — storefronts.

  • • •

  Lorna made entrances. Annabelle could hear her heels clacking briskly down the hall, and as she opened the door, Lorna swanned in without a hitch in her stride, having fully expected the door to be opened. Indeed, it never occurred to her that it wouldn’t, and if it hadn’t, she would have been shocked down to her French pedicured toes.

  She stopped short in the middle of the ‘living room’, spun, kissed Annabelle on both cheeks, and plunked the plastic shopping bags down on the counter. She looked around, nodded, “Very sweet,” and threw herself onto the loveseat.

  “Please tell me that you have matches. My lighter died.”

  “Yeah. Been smoking my brains out.”

  “Poor Anna.”

  Annabelle got a book of matches from the big jar on top of the fridge, matches from all the restaurants she’d ever been to in New York. It was terribly sentimental, and she knew it, which was why she started using them … and then snipping off the covers and throwing them into a box, maybe she’d decoupage them onto a chair or something.

  She looked at the chosen matchbook, and practically threw them at Lorna.

  “Easy, darling.”

  “They’re from Nobu. Our first date.”

  Lorna lit up a fortifying Gitane, exhaled, and tried to stay patient. She really wasn’t any good at this. “Easy, darling. Honestly. All right, now, how long have you been holed up in here?”

  “Three days.”

  “Good God,” Lorna averted her eyes from Anna’s disheveled state. “And does it … seem like it’s … passing?”

  “This is going to take a while. I can feel it. I don’t know why, but it will.”

  Lorna got up and started taking things out of the bags. She sat Annabelle down at the table, and, after rinsing them in the sink, handed her some strawberries.

  “First things first. Daiquiris.”

  “I don’t want to get drunk, Lorna — ”

  “Just a little tipsy, maybe slightly soused, nothing to write home about, just take the edge off. Something to accompany all those cigarettes.” Lorna began poking around in the cupboards.

  “Do you have a blender? Thank God. I couldn’t imagine where I would get a blender around here. Not that this isn’t a lovely part of town. Quite charming.

  “I must admit I’m un peu dérange. I don’t know what happened, how it happened, even exactly when it happened. So. I am here and all I want to do is help you along the road to recovery, get you back up on that horse, etc., etc. Tell.”

  Annabelle watched as Lorna simultaneously chopped ice, poured rum, chain-smoked, and carved out identically dainty wedges of lime. The whirr of the blender cut in before Annabelle could speak, and it was just as well. Lorna was fabulous, but not exactly the most comforting type of friend. But Lorna was exactly what she need
ed today: smoking, lightly cursing en Français, and maybe, after all, drinking.

  “I should put on Adele,” Annabelle offered, leaving the berries for the stereo. “Or maybe Billy Holliday.”

  “No, darling, that’s my brand. Slightly out of your league.”

  “Thought your heart couldn’t be broken.”

  “It’s for breaking the hearts of others, not for repairing my own. Sit.” Lorna resumed her lounging position on the couch, and Annabelle, preferring the floor, sat cross-legged on a big cushion. Lorna ran cynical eyes around the altar space, lit up another smoke, and handed Annabelle a cocktail.

  “Tell.”

  Annabelle took a sip of the daiquiri, and told.

  Chapter Three

  She was in the bathroom repotting her fern when the door opened. After three years and nine months, she and Wilson had keys to each other’s places, although naturally she spent more time at his than at hers, he living conveniently on the Upper West side, even though it took them both just as long to get to mid-Manhattan from his place as from hers. She stuck her head out of the doorway, and looked up, cheerful, she hoped, hopeful at worst, trying not to look as afraid as she felt.

  He stood in the doorway, Barney’s trench coat belted at his waist, the correct length of pinstriped trouser on view, trousers whose cuffs draped the precisely correct amount atop polished Pradas. He was buttoned up against what she assumed was the spring chill, but could also have been against whatever strange strain of virus that he presumed was breeding out in the Brooklyn hinterlands. His dark brown hair was slicked back as usual, and his hand-made, hand-tooled leather briefcase was gripped in his right hand, left hand free for retrieving his cell phone in case the office should call. The office always called. He was clean-shaven, his boyish face unable to support a ’stache without him looking like a Halloween hobo. His sweet, boyish face — expressionless. Tension around the eyes, but otherwise remote.

  This didn’t bode well.

  Hands covered in dirt, Annabelle went to him, stopped herself, and washed her hands in the sink.

  “Have you seen Fern? She’s growing like gangbusters. Who would have guessed. Although I guess your run-of-the-mill forest floor gets only slightly less light than my ‘living room’ does, so there you go. Doesn’t she look great?” Annabelle charged out of the bathroom and put Fern back in place, fussing a bit with her fronds before turning to face Wilson. They stood in silence.

  Silence being a relative term: Annabelle could hear her heart beating in her ears.

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” Was that her voice? That thready little squeak?

  “I. I don’t know.” He leaned forward and put his copy of her keys on the ‘dining room’ table, and then retreated a few more inches.

  “What’s. Going. On. Please.” She was choking.

  “Annie. I. I can’t — I’m not in love with you anymore. I don’t — I think you love me more than I love you. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s me.”

  “Have you met somebody new?”

  “Annie. Let’s stay calm — ”

  “What about the trip to Ireland in June?”

  From the front pocket of his briefcase he extracted a manila envelope.

  “Your ticket is in here, along with a few letter-sized envelopes of your share of receipts from the last two years. You may need them for tax purposes. Also the journal that you used when you stayed at the apartment — which I didn’t inspect, needless to say, and a few pictures that I thought you’d prefer to dispose of as you wished.”

  Frickin’ banker. She could feel an enormous rage beginning to boil, a feeling that was going to be bigger than her, bigger than him, bigger than Brooklyn if she opened her mouth. Whatever it was, whatever this dark whirling mass of emotion was, there was no way it was going to make it past the lump in her throat. She could say nothing. She could do nothing. She was barely there at all.

  He continued to stand, holding out the envelope. She couldn’t look him in the eye, and so looked at it. How could her whole relationship with him fit in an 81⁄2 by 11 container?

  He put the envelope down on the table. “I’d like your set of my keys, please.”

  In a daze, she went into her bedroom, and dug through her purse. Her purse was as supremely ordered as the rest of her life, yet she couldn’t seem to focus on finding … oh, that’s where the nail clippers had gone. She had brought them to the gym with her when she went to the sauna last week, and had forgotten to put them back in the medicine chest. She’d go do that now.

  She stopped short in the doorway, and felt she didn’t recognize her own front room. There was a man standing there, a man who last night on the phone had told her he loved her. Now he was telling her he did not. One statement was true, one was a lie. One was a lie for only these past few minutes, one was a lie for a much longer time.

  Keys.

  She went back to her bag, rummaged, found them. Looking out the window, trying to breathe, she saw Maria Grazia trying to hide behind one of the impossibly thin trees that lined Union Street. Thank God. MG was here.

  She floated somewhere outside herself as she handed Wilson the key ring with the small clay heart that dangled from the chain. Shifting his briefcase under his arm, he removed the keys from the ring, and put the heart on the table. Whoever said he had no sense of the symbolic? No flair for the dramatic?

  “I hope that we can still be friends.”

  Annabelle’s spirit snapped back to attention and a laugh — strangled, but still a laugh — squeezed out of her throat.

  “I doubt it.”

  They stood and looked at each other. Or rather, Annabelle looked at him, this sudden stranger, and Wilson looked for his permission to leave. Annabelle turned away, he turned the knob, and the door snapped shut.

  She stood, numb, the silence in her head shattered by the sound of the shutting door, the ringing in her ears growing into an insistent buzz, a buzz that was actually the doorbell, being rung not by Wilson who had immediately changed his mind, but by Maria Grazia rushing in to help sweep up.

  • • •

  “I just feel — I just feel — like, gutted. You know? Empty. It really hurts. It really hurts, Lor, I mean, nothing — remember Ted? Remember how bad that was — I remember the Labor Day weekend after he finally said he didn’t really love me, I remember lying around in my nightgown for the entire weekend, just lying on the couch, eating these little bonbon ice cream things and crying and watching this crappy little black and white TV … A repeat of Twin Peaks was on. The original movie. God, that was amazing. The script was flawless, I mean, without a flaw, I always meant to get my hands on the screenplay, back when I was writing screenplays, I mean — ”

  When was the last time she and Annabelle had gone on a bender? Was she always this maudlin? Unfair, Lorna, unfair. Having been taken through the whole event, but without much going on in the back-story department, Lorna could understand the shock to Anna’s system. Selfish bastard. Not news to her. She didn’t think men were universally stupid, or from Mars, or wherever, but she did think the majority of them wholly uncivilized and thoughtless. And here was yet another case study proving her point.

  Time, perhaps, for another pitcher.

  “No, Lorna, for crying out loud, are you trying to kill me? I hate this, I hate this, I already feel totally out of control — ”

  Lorna sat back down.

  “No more drinks, please.”

  “Smoke?” Lorna offered her the second pack of the day.

  “Yeah. Tell me a story. Tell me a story about work.”

  “Hmm. You know that new fellow, the oddly straight male who has decided public relations is his metiér? Well, it is not, so he’s decided he’s going to sleep his way to the top. Via me. Really. Except, Mr. Ruthless Ambition is sending me flowers and chocolates, if you don�
�t mind. I mean, do get it over with, if you take my meaning. This is not so much a story as an anecdote.” Lorna laughed lightly into her drink.

  “And how’s The Star?”

  “Impossible since Entertainment Weekly put her on the cover. We got a memo requesting additional services for her bichon frise, including manicure, or claw-icure or whatever, and a massage. A massage for a bloody dog! You cannot make this up. Did I tell you about the mineral water outrage? No? Sure you didn’t hear all about it on Fox? Well — ”

  Annabelle watched Lorna speak. Watched more than listened, not that she didn’t want to listen, she was a good listener, but she couldn’t really hear. She was stinkin’ drunk. It hadn’t gotten so bad that Lorna was multiplying before her eyes, but focus wasn’t her strong point at the moment. She watched Lorna gesticulate, her usual pristine manicure sparkling in the diffused sunlight, she watched Lorna’s long, white blonde locks shiver, watched her earrings slap furiously against the side of her face. Oh — they were the agate and amethyst stones that Annabelle had given her for her birthday —

  “Hey. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeey. You’re wearing the earrings. I didn’t think you would.”

  “They go with the Narciso. I do love them.”

  “Do you feel any change in the frequency of your migraines? The combination of the crystals ought to have a healing effect — ”

  “Anna.”

  “Okay, okay. Go on.”

  Lorna recommenced her detailed and detachedly hilarious account of the high jinks of one of her highest profile clients. Annabelle wondered yet again how the self-possessed Lorna Bates, the avowedly not warm-and-cuddly Lorna Bates, could make such a success out of working in as touchy-and-feely a business as public relations. That, she supposed, was it exactly: Lorna’s self-possession — intimidating on a good day, something akin to nuclear fission on a bad one — could get her and her clients anything they wanted, through sheer force of resolute will.