Bertrand Court

by Michelle Brafman

  Heidi, reeking of equal parts Camel Lights, Altoids, and Clinique Elixir, laugh-hacks as she wheels her chair closer to Georgia.

  “Heidi, personal space.”

  “No problem.” Because Heidi respects bitchiness, she moves to the producer’s chair without argument.

  Heidi flits in and out of the edit suite for the duration of the morning and brings Georgia a bowl of lentil soup and a warm slice of bread from the Greek deli for lunch. At five o’clock, her cell phone and Georgia’s line ring simultaneously. Georgia does not own a cell phone. What would be the point? She’s only received a dozen phone calls since she began working here, mostly short ones from Phil on Wednesdays during the early evening, while he walks to Chief Ike’s for his weekly beer and pool game with his soundman, Eric Solonsky. Everyone loves Eric. He delivers the cleanest sound around. He’s also Nikki’s favorite neighbor. Small world.

  “Hey there,” Phil croons in a playful tone.

  “Hi.” Georgia puts her finger over her free ear to drown out Heidi’s raspy laugh.

  “Would anyone object to us having dinner tonight?” He shifts to his fake debonair persona.

  Dinner? “What’s up?” She shuttles through footage of Sheila enduring a bikini wax.

  “Can’t a guy take his girl for a meal?”

  His girl? Phil’s use of this pronoun gives her a start. It’s the dead-endedness of her relationship with him, not his dimpled smile or compassion, that appeals to Georgia. But what the hell, it’s just dinner. She agrees to meet him in half an hour and hangs up.

  “I’m taking off early,” Georgia announces to Heidi, who raises an eyebrow, removes her glasses, and folds her hands on her lap.

  “Dinner plans.”

  “But there’s more, ma chérie. Do tell.” She does her best Catherine Deneuve.

  Georgia considers telling Heidi about Phil; she doesn’t have many girlfriends. Nikki meets her for dinner periodically, inhaling her meal without chewing, pretending that there’s space in her life for more than raising her twins and helping Tad resuscitate his dead political career. Heidi is actually an articulate listener, which is why she’s such a good interviewer. But confiding in Heidi, like polishing off a row of Thin Mints, would feel great while she’s doing it and rotten immediately afterwards.

  “I’ll be in at eight tomorrow,” she says and shuts down her computer.

  Georgia follows a leggy hostess to an empty table at the Basil Café and downs two glasses of Merlot while waiting for Phil to arrive. A man in a leather jacket, spiky red hair, and a strong jawline glides past the hostess with a wink; he looks like Ed Norton. Phil.

  “So sorry I’m late.” He extends his hand, and when Georgia tries to shake it, he scratches his head. “Gotcha.” And then he points his finger at her like he’s shooting her and gives her arm a squeeze.

  Why would anyone think it feels good to have the flesh of one’s triceps pulled from the bone?

  “Whatcha drinkin’?” He points to the wine glasses.

  “I don’t know, but it’s good.” She glances to the end of the bar, at a handsome young man wearing a carefully coiffed ponytail and clogs.

  “He sent you these?” Phil looks toward the man with interest.

  “Gotcha.” She fake shoots him back.

  “That’s good. Very good.” His eyes twinkle as he motions to the waitress and orders a glass of port for himself. They eat penne out of bowls the size of Frisbees while Phil describes some footage he’s just shot of a baby for a film about fetal alcohol syndrome. His passion charms Georgia, making her ache to ditch Heidi and the lucratively boring side gigs for the chance to work on a real film again. She wants to ask why they’re drinking too much wine in this Italian bistro on a Monday night, just one day after their routine date, but she doesn’t. Georgia is good at waiting.

  The air is balmy for a Washington winter night. Phil grabs Georgia’s hand as they walk from the restaurant to his English basement apartment in Adams Morgan; she can’t remember the last time a man grabbed her hand. It feels good. His place smells like the clove cigarettes he smokes on occasion and less like cat pee than she had anticipated. She shrugs her sweater off, aware that he’s watching her.

  “They’re nice.” He points at her breasts.

  She can’t wipe the goofy smile off her face. He lights a candle and plays an old Joni Mitchell record. She likes Joni Mitchell.

  Georgia looks around the apartmeßnt. “Where’s Mandu?”

  “She’s shy.” He disappears into his bedroom and returns with a ginger tabby under his arm. “Hewwo, kitty cat. This is Georgia.”

  Beneath the baby talk, his voice is gentle. That uncomfortable feeling from the day before returns, but she wants to stay more than she wants to flee. She reaches for the silky fur beneath Mandu’s chin and rubs the sweet spot until she purrs.

  Phil nods. “She only likes special people.”

  Special people? How many women have met this cat? A pang of something like ownership surprises Georgia.

  “Can I get you something to drink? A glass of vino maybe?”

  “Sure.” While he fusses with the corkscrew, she examines a framed black-and-white photo, Henri Cartier-Bresson–like in composition and feel. A little boy with a dirty nose and torn jeans stands amid a sea of broken glass and cigarette butts. He’s holding a balloon. The lighting is perfection, and Phil’s captured both the raw hope and flatness in the child’s eyes. The image, like many of those she’d seen when editing Phil’s reel, puts a lump in her throat.

  “This is beautiful.” Georgia points to the picture.

  He looks at her like a puppy who’s just received a biscuit. “Thanks.”

  He retrieves a wine glass from a cupboard, and she studies another photo hanging on the wall, a badly composed snapshot of a younger, goateed Phil with his arm slung around the shoulders of an older woman with enough freckles to suggest that her hair was once red like his. Must be his mother. “You two look alike,” Georgia comments.

  “She passed away five years ago.”

  Before Georgia can respond, he comes up behind her and kisses her neck, leaving the slightest bit of moisture on her skin. He kneads her shoulders until the tension dissolves from her body. And a full hour later, when he asks her if she has “gone,” she answers him truthfully with a yes. She drifts off with Phil’s fingers resting on her wrist and Mandu’s heat curling around her toes.

  When Georgia wakes up the next morning, Phil is shaving in the bathroom, wearing a pair of boxers that she recognizes from doing his laundry.

  “How’d you sleep, Georgia girl?” His voice is full of mischief. “You were something last night.”

  She buries her head under the covers, embarrassed by all her thrashing and thrusting.

  He laughs. “Hey, listen, remember that shoot in Toronto I told you about last night?” He rinses thin lines of shaving cream from his cheeks. “Do you think you could take care of Mandu while I’m gone?”

  “Yes.” While stroking Mandu’s stomach, she imagines leisurely Sunday mornings with Phil, reading the paper, sipping hot vanilla-flavored coffee, wiping butter and jam from the sides of each other’s mouths. Or maybe they’d be like one of those freshly showered couples she endures when she breakfasts at Café Luna with her Sunday New York Times, the ones who laugh too hard at each other’s jokes over their pancakes and eggs. Think, Georgia, think. What are you doing? Remember the stale jokes and the Metallica CD you spotted on his bookshelf. And don’t forget last night, when the mushroom detritus on his chin made the waitress he’d been flirting with look away.

  He finishes dressing and sits down next to her on his bed. “You’re the sweetest. Sleep as long as you like, tiger.” He cups her chin. “Roar.”

  She smiles. “Bye.”

  “You should do that more.” He runs his finger over her lips. “Pretty.”

  She couldn’t stop if she wanted to.

  A vague sense of recognition orbits around her head as she tries to name the fe
eling that’s taking hold of her. Holy shit. Flippage. She doesn’t flip. She won’t flip, like her mother and her sister, always waiting for some husband (seldom their own) to phone and say that he’d be ten minutes, twenty minutes, two hours late. Don’t wait up for me, babe — the sure warning sign that he’d had his fill. Georgia has done an excellent job of insulating herself from this by dating men she doesn’t really like, and she certainly isn’t going to let anyone, even someone with a cat as fine as Mandu, come along and turn her into a heap of goo. No thanks.

  She dials Heidi’s cell phone to tell her that she’ll be in late.

  “Phil Scott?” Heidi teases. “He shot for me once.” She whistles. “He’s H-O-T, hot.”

  Georgia hates caller ID. “Just feeding a friend’s cat, Heidi.”

  “You know that cute promotion producer, the Sheryl Crow look-alike? She had a huge, and I mean like rabbit-in-the-pot, stalker-huge thing for that guy.”

  “I’m just feeding his cat.”

  Phil offers no reason for extending his trip by ten days. While he’s away, Georgia thinks about him on days other than Wednesday and Sunday, perhaps because she stops by his house every evening to play with Mandu. She visits her favorite pet store, buys organic catnip and a furry toy possum attached to a fishing pole, and runs around the living room dangling the possum, with Mandu in hot pursuit. She brushes Mandu’s fur and strokes her while she drinks Phil’s coffee and reads. She smiles for no reason and edits meandering scenes of special moments between Sheila and her husband. Heidi complains that she’s lost her edge, that her sequences have become maudlin. She covers her gray with an auburn rinse, picks up a brochure for Lasik eye surgery on her way out of her optometrist’s office, and buys a pair of pointy black shoes, the kind Heidi wears. She calls her sister and listens with interest while she describes her new boyfriend, Ned, who is so much more “present” than her last husband, Steve.

  Phil is scheduled to return home on a Monday night. On Sunday afternoon, wearing her hip new shoes, Georgia visits her vendor with the bushy eyebrows. She buys eight beautiful pears; she’ll bake Phil a tart. It’s a cold winter day, and the air cuts through her coat and sweatshirt, hardening her nipples. Nice. She blushes, remembering Phil’s comment about her breasts. During the cab ride to his apartment, she replays that night over in her head a million times.

  She lets herself inside and stands in the entryway ready for Mandu to greet her, a ritual that has become the best part of her day. She listens for her meow, kneeling down, fingers poised for the touch of her smooth fur.

  The phone rings. Georgia watches the little red light on the answering machine blink. “Hey, it’s Eric. Not sure if you’re back from Toronto. Let me know if you want to play on Wednesday.” She’s pleased that the voice does not belong to a woman. But why wouldn’t he have taken Eric on the shoot? Eric always does his sound. It’s probably a low-budget project. “Sorry again I couldn’t help out with your cat. Hope that woman who does your laundry came through for you. Call me.”

  Blood rushes through Georgia’s body, right through to the tips of her fingers. She sits down on Phil’s couch dumbly. Mandu climbs on her lap and looks up at her with those steely gray eyes, as if she knows what an asshole her owner is, as if to say, “Thanks for the gourmet grub, but didn’t I try to warn you?”

  How could she have been so stupid? Flippage, schlippage. What a dunce. This is her punishment for ridiculing poor Wife Sheila and everyone else who has ever been naïve enough to participate in her slimy television show. Why did she have to tinker with her arrangement with Phil? Think that it could ever be more than it was? That a guy who could attract some Sheryl Crow look-alike would really be interested in her? That she could ever be more than the woman who does his laundry?

  God, she’s tired. She closes her eyes for a second, and she recognizes herself as the hungry, desperate little boy in the photo that so endeared Phil to her on that fateful night.

  Forty-five minutes later, Mandu is licking her cheek. She reaches to stroke Mandu’s arched back. What a cliché, a fortysomething spinster with a fierce attachment to a cat, whoring out her one real talent so she can store a few more pennies for her twilight years. Those golden years when her contemporaries will retire and travel cross-country in Winnebagos, or live off of their spouse’s life insurance policies and Social Security checks. There will be no children to visit her in a nursing home when she’s lost her teeth and hair and the wits to pee in a toilet.

  It’s dusk when she ventures outside for some air. The temperature has dropped, and her shirt, dampened from sleep, sticks to her body. She walks until the back of her heel grows hot with the promise of a blister. Her eyes burn, but she doesn’t cry. Her limbs feel like rubber, but she doesn’t slow down. She enters a gourmet deli and sees her crazed look reflected in the storekeeper’s eyes; he quickly rings up a pound of hot-pink pistachio nuts.

  She walks back to Phil’s apartment and opens a bottle of his wine, hoping he was saving it for a special occasion. She’s never been much of a smoker, but she lights up one of his cloves, coughing as the smoke moves down her throat. She sits on the couch and cracks the nuts open. She stuffs the meat into a baggie — she hates the taste of pistachios — leaving a mound of splintered shells on Phil’s black carpet. She enters his bedroom, and with her stained fingers pinches his dirty polyester sheets into a pink tie-dyed pattern. “Come here, Mandu.” She picks up the cat to say goodbye, truly her intention, but just as she leaves, just as she should release Mandu back into the empty apartment, she breaks into that goofy flippage smile as she shuts Phil’s door behind her. She walks past the Basil Café and the darkened gourmet deli and her vendor’s empty fruit stand. The hard leather of her shoe zests a layer of skin from her heel, but she ignores the warm blood trickling toward the sole of her foot. She just keeps moving. Her arms cradle Mandu to her breasts, shielding her against the cold breath of winter.

  THE #42

  Amy Solonsky, January 13, 2005

  I’m pregnant, not crippled,” Amy says, refusing Leon’s offer to ferry her from her office to her acupuncture appointment in Adams Morgan, her old neighborhood. She takes a swig of bottled water and shuts down her computer. She hears Leon’s other line ring and hopes he’ll pick up, but he doesn’t. “I’ll take the bus.”

  “Why?” Leon inquires. Unlike Amy, Leon has never lived in Washington, D.C., even when he was single. He prefers the accoutrements of their suburban life, the drive-through Starbucks and minty clean strip malls.

  “I want someone to offer me a seat.” She grins. “You know.” She points to her swollen belly even though they’re talking on the phone and he can’t see her.

  “You wanted to eat ice cream and pickles, too, and both made you sick,” he reminds her.

  “Guess I had to discover that for myself.” Her tone is sharper than she intends.

  Leon persists. “Honey, you’re being ridiculous. I’ll pick you up, and we can have an early dinner at that Italian hole in the wall you like.”

  Amy flinches. Installing the car seat, assembling the crib, taking an infant CPR class, these are activities they can do together. But Adams Morgan? No way. It belongs to another part of her life. It belongs to her.

  “Okay, you’re not backing down on this one.” He laughs warmly. “It’s actually kind of cute.”

  Oh, please. The fatter she gets, the cuter she becomes to Leon. “I’ll see you at home at seven.”

  It’s been so many years since Amy’s taken the #42 that she doesn’t even remember the price of a ticket. She drops three dollars in quarters into the fare box and surveys the crowded bus for a place to sit. With a shy smile, she wonders who will offer her a seat, but she’s not the kind of pregnant woman who carries her baby like a neat little soccer ball glued to her pelvis; she just looks hefty. Not one passenger budges.

  She grabs a pole for balance, trying to ignore the gummy substance that in turn sticks to her fingers. Some kind of hair gel, she guesses from the sme
ll. She distracts herself with fantasies of spinach empanadas and plump cinnamon scones from Tryst. Maybe she’ll treat herself to a nice cup of tea at Avignon Frères, her old hangover spot.

  Two teenage girls wearing low-rise jeans and pointy shoes swap beefs about their mothers. “Like, she told me she could see my crack when I bent down, so she made me change my jeans before I left for school,” the one with the nose ring groans. Amy recalls her sister’s battles with their mother over piercing her ears. Hannah lost.

  A woman with a long silver braid points to Amy’s stomach and rises, gesturing to the empty seat she’s vacated, “Please.” A burning pain shoots down the back of Amy’s thigh, so she nods in gratitude and takes the seat. She’ll return to Adams Morgan every week if sticking needles in her body can offer some relief from this sciatica, yet another gestational malady.

  Amy unbuttons Leon’s pea coat and loosens her scarf. Why is she the only one sweating? She opens her compact and smothers a pimple with cover-up stick. Like, I’m thirteen again, she thinks. Someone is wearing Obsession; the sweet fragrance practically coats her tongue. She’s turned into a bloodhound.

  She feels guilty that she doesn’t love being pregnant, like she’s pissing on her good fortune, as her father would have said. She’s been trying not to complain to Leon, who has waited years to start a family. The bus jerks to a stop, and she zips her compact into her purse.

  It seems as though it’s taking forever to get off the bus. The teenage girls are in front of Amy, complaining about their curfews now. Move it or lose it, she wants to say, I’m famished. And then, with no warning, her impatience balloons into anger: If you only knew how much it sucked to carry you guys, you’d grab a pen and write your mothers a thank-you card. Right now.

  A waft of fresh air tempers her mood. Did they move Avignon Frères? Leaning closer to the window for a better view of Columbia Road, she doesn’t see the abandoned algebra textbook at the top of the bus stairs until it’s too late. “Jesus!” she bellows as she falls on her rear end and bounces down two steps with her legs sticking straight out, like a child taking a ride down a banister. By the time she reaches the bottom, her skirt is gathered around her thighs, revealing the intersection of black knee-highs and unshaven white flesh. Her hands fly to her belly out of instinct, but when she replays her fall, she can’t remember if her first concern was for the health of her baby or whether anyone had witnessed her tumble.