“I can’t believe you’re really coming,” Chloe had said, her tone almost giddy.
“At this time tomorrow I’ll be in Manhattan. I’m not sure I can believe it, either. It’s really all right, my staying with you until I can find a place?”
“For the ’leventy ’leventh time, yes, it’s okay. You can stay as long as you like. I’d love the company, actually. This place is so big I think my voice actually echoes.”
“You’re sure you don’t need anything? I can—”
“Stop right now,” Chloe said, interrupting the flow of Jenna’s words. “I don’t need stuff, I don’t need my own space, I don’t need anything. I want you here and that’s that.”
Jenna knew that she’d said the same things over and over but she needed to be really, really sure it was okay.
“Let it go, Jen. It’s a done deal. Just show up tomorrow.”
“Okay, if you’re sure.”
“I’m hanging up now. See you tomorrow.”
Jenna replayed the conversation as she watched the familiar skyline slide past the taxi window. This was the right thing to do. She pictured Marcy seated at the tidy desk in her room, poring over her day runner, organizing her tasks for the following week. She saw Glen’s hopeful face as he proposed. She’d spotted him in the halls of AAJ twice since that awful evening, but she’d ducked into a side corridor before he’d seen her. He’d called several times during the past two weeks but she’d refused to talk to him. Maybe she was a coward, but it seemed kinder that way, both to him and to herself.
She’d called Marcy from the airport to tell her that she’d arrived safely and the two women promised to call several times during the following week. This would be their first extended separation and, although it was her choice, Jenna was still choked up. Now she was here, she thought, as the taxi arrived at the address she’d given the driver.
She opened the taxi door and stepped out. The brownstone was four stories tall, with two steps leading to a small stoop. She tipped the driver as he set her suitcase beside the front door, and watched him drive away. She was really here. She’d done it. This was day one of the rest of her life. That phrase might be a cliché but it was as true for her as it could be.
She inhaled deeply. She was here, where she belonged. She was startled at the thought but somehow it was true. Manhattan felt like home. Seneca Falls was a small, touristy town, pleasantly nicknamed the Gateway to the Finger Lakes and she’d spent a good deal of time in Syracuse on business. Large as Syracuse was, it was nothing like this. Manhattan hummed with life and action. Sounds of cars, trucks, taxi horns, and garbage cans clanging, interspersed with sirens, pounded the air. The city smelled of pavement, the bagel cart on the corner, and the Pakistani restaurant in the middle of the block. She raised her face to the brilliant blue sky, only a narrow strip of it visible between the buildings, and she couldn’t keep from grinning. She was really here. She took a deep gulp of city air and let it out slowly, then pressed the doorbell.
Almost immediately the door flew open and, with an almost childlike squeal, Chloe propelled herself out and threw her arms around her friend. “You made it,” she said.
Jenna leaned down and embraced her. “I did. The flight was uneventful, just the way I like a flight to be.”
Chloe backed up and gazed at her, taking in her bright red Minnie Mouse tee shirt and denim vest over her jeans and sneakers. “You look just terrific,” she said. “It’s hard to believe it’s been more than nine years since Albany.”
Jenna hugged her again. Chloe’s lush figure was barely contained in a pair of navy blue short shorts, a white tank top covered with a sheer, kelly green overshirt, tied beneath her breasts. Her auburn hair was seemingly uncombed, a riot of curls all over her head. Her feet were bare and Jenna could see that her manicured toenails were the same shade of shocking coral as her fingernails. “Closer to eleven, but who’s counting. Anyway, Chloe, we’ve seen each other lots of times since then. Every time I’ve been in New York, actually.”
“Right, all three times. I’m just glad you’re here.”
“I’m glad you’re glad,” Jenna said, shaking her head in wonder. “You haven’t changed, you know. You still look about sixteen years old.” She knew that, like she and her sister, Chloe was in her early thirties.
Chloe shook her head sadly. “I still get proofed at most of the places I go. It’s the bane of my existence.”
“Most people would love that. I always envied you. All the guys in school wanted to cuddle and cosset you, but you kept it all under control. Me? All they wanted to do was get help with their assignments.”
“They still want to cuddle and cosset me, and more,” Chloe said, then grabbed Jenna’s arm and pulled. “Come inside and let’s really catch up.”
Jenna walked through a small entryway with black and white checkerboard tile and a small chandelier. Chloe led her past a spacious living room, furnished with homey pieces that made you want to sit down and curl up. Two large, gray upholstered chairs, a leather lounger, and an overstuffed sofa upholstered in a rose and gray tweed and covered with a dozen pillows in various shades and patterns, all in black and white. A fifty-two-inch TV set stood in the corner, and when Jenna admired it, Chloe said that she had a friend who loved sports and had bought it for her so they could watch together. As Jenna took a breath to ask about the friend, Chloe said, “Come on back to the kitchen. I’ll show you around in a little while, but let’s take some time to catch up first.”
As she walked through, Jenna fell in love with the house. Warmth and charm seemed to radiate from the very walls. The kitchen was small but contained all the necessary appliances, including a microwave with more controls than a small jet plane and something Chloe called a convection oven. “I don’t cook much, but when I do leftovers and TV dinners, those are the best and fastest.” The pièce de résistance was the small garden in the back of the building, accessed by a door covered by a wrought-iron trellis which, Jenna imagined, was both protective as well as decorative. “I love what I’ve seen so far, especially this backyard.” Jenna pointed to the door that led out the back. “May I?”
“Sure. The key’s on the hook.” Jenna dropped her suitcase on a kitchen chair and grabbed the key. She quickly unlocked the backdoor and stepped outside. “This is amazing,” she said as Chloe followed her into the miniature garden, surrounded by a seven-foot-tall fence of classically weathered wood. The late spring air was thick with the smell of roses from several climbing vines that snaked their way up the brick wall, almost covering the kitchen window. “I have to keep cutting them or I wouldn’t be able to see out at all,” Chloe said, following Jenna’s gaze.
A small patch of earth was filled with red and white impatiens and petunias. There was a tall wrought-iron pole with a bird feeder hanging from each of its curved arms. “I can’t get over it.” Off to one side was a small fish pond with several large goldfish and a tiny rock-strewn waterfall. “I would never have expected this in the middle of Manhattan.”
“I know. It’s a lot of work but I just love it. I still remember when Aunt Elise and I sat out here as adults and equals for the first time.” There was a melancholy smile on Chloe’s face.
“I’m sorry about her death.”
“Yeah, me too. She was quite a lady,” she hesitated, “and quite a pisser too. Wait until I tell you about her.”
Jenna said, “From the little you’ve told me I’m sorry I never met her.”
“Me too. You’d have liked her.”
“I want to put my things away but let’s sit out here for a while first and catch up. I’m just blown away by this garden.”
A few minutes later the two women were stretched out on a pair of white wrought-iron lounge chairs covered with thickly stuffed red and white striped cushions, tall glasses of sweetened iced tea in their hands. “Tell me all about you,” Chloe said and, slowly at first, then more definitively, Jenna told Chloe about Glen and her feelings about him and about herself.
“He sounds like a keeper. What could be wrong with a good-looking attorney? Wasn’t he any good in bed?”
Jenna blushed slightly. In college, the last time they had spent any real time together, Chloe had been quiet and demure but, in the time since, her friend had become surprisingly outspoken.
“He was fine in bed,” Jenna said, finding it strangely easy to talk about it. “Actually, fine is a good word. It was very okay and not much more.”
“No spark? No earth moving or sky rockets?”
“Sadly, no. I think I could have dealt with the rest if I hadn’t felt so,” she hesitated, then blurted out, “bored in bed.”
“The death knell of any relationship.”
“I felt like such a shit telling him no as he sat there with a ring in his hand. But Chloe, there was more to my leaving than Glen. His proposal made me focus on where I was headed and how I was living. I’ve never been just me, alone. When he asked me to marry him, I suddenly felt, well, almost claustrophobic. It was like the walls were closing in. I couldn’t breathe.” She slumped.
“I know exactly what you mean and that’s why I’m so glad you’re here,” Chloe said. “I’ve no intention of settling down right now, either. Frankly, I’m having too much fun. I’m less into finding Mr. Right as I am into Mr. Right Now.”
Jenna smiled at Chloe’s candor. Suddenly she felt she had to get it all off of her chest. “It’s Marcy too. We’ve always been so close that the thought of going from such a close relationship with her to another intimate one was strangling me. I want some aloneness, if that word has any meaning. I need to be me!”
“I realized that you two were trying to make separate friends. Maybe that was why she and I never got close in school.”
“We really did try to be separate but once we were back in Seneca Falls, it all fell back into the same old pattern, and I didn’t really mind for a while. Actually, I think Marcy would have been content to have us go on living in the same neighborhood, doing things together with our respective husbands.”
“She’s married?”
“No, but when she does, it will probably be to Mr. Seneca Falls and they’ll have two-point-three children.” Jenna stopped herself. “Sorry. That’s not fair of me at all. Marcy’s wonderful and my best friend. It’s just that we’re too close. I had to get away.”
“Of course you did,” Chloe said, sipping her iced tea.
“You understand?” Jenna said, a bit nonplused. Her friends in Seneca Falls had looked at her blankly, and then told her she was crazy. A few sympathized, but most were small-town people at heart and viewed New York City as some kind of Sodom and Gomorrah, a center for terrorism, robberies, and rapes.
“Don’t look so surprised. I can’t really relate to what goes on between you and Marcy,” Chloe said, “being an only child and all, but I can understand what you’re saying about being yourself. I’ve become a different person since I moved in here, so maybe the space will help you to get everything back into proportion.”
“You do seem more alive than when we were in school. You were always so, I don’t know, closed sort of. Now you’ve blossomed.”
“Thanks for that,” Chloe said with a grin. “Actually, when I came back home after I graduated, I got a job on Wall Street and became a staid, boring stockbroker. Business-casual clothes, business-casual lunches, business-casual friends, and a business-casual life. It was okay, but just okay.”
“You seem anything but ‘just okay’ now. What changed besides you not being a boring stockbroker any more?”
“Aunt Elise changed me,” Chloe said. “Let me get some more tea, and then I’ll tell you about her. Want some?”
Jenna sensed the pain in Chloe’s voice when she talked about her aunt. The two had obviously been very close. Jenna looked at her glass and said, “Sure. Let me give you a hand.”
“Not necessary. Right back.” As Jenna started to rise, Chloe grabbed the glass and motioned, “Sit, sit. I’ll just be a moment. This is the last time I wait on you, however. From now on, you live here and you’re on your own.”
Settling back into her chair, Jenna thought about Chloe. The two women had had rooms close together in the dorm during their freshman year and had become closer and closer as their college years passed. By the end of their senior year they had been the best of friends, and the wrench she’d felt when Chloe had gone back to the city had been difficult. The two women had kept in touch in the intervening years, keeping each other up to date on their business lives. Socially they hadn’t shared much, until now.
Jenna was jerked from her reverie by the sound of the backdoor slamming. Chloe handed Jenna the refilled glass and settled back on the lounge chair. She sipped, then said, “Okay. As I wrote you, Aunt Elise died about six months ago.”
“I’m sorry about her death. You seemed so devastated. You didn’t talk much about her back when we knew each other.”
“We got much closer after my folks died. She was the only one left of either of my parents’ families. It was a tough year. First, my dad went from cancer; then my mom just sort of wasted away. During all that time Aunt Elise was there for everyone, giving as much of herself as anyone needed. I hadn’t known her very well before that, but for all those months she was our rock. At first I loved her for helping, then I just loved her. She was a wonderful, classy, alive woman and she pulled me out of the depression I fell in after my folks were gone.” Chloe sipped her tea, pain radiating from her body. “I’m sorry. It seems so silly for me to still be upset. After all, it’s been more than six months since she died.”
“Stop apologizing. We all grieve in our own way and get over it at our own speed.”
“I know, and Aunt Elise wouldn’t want this. Exactly the opposite. She was the one who made me realize that we only go around once in this life and we should do things that give us joy.”
“She sounds like someone I’d have liked.”
“Oh, you would have hit it off with her and she’d have loved you too.” Chloe gazed off into space, then said, “She was almost seventy when she got sick. We looked alike, you know. She was tiny, like me, with soft, curly, brown hair and striking blue eyes.” Chloe smiled. “Her auburn hair probably came out of a bottle.
“So after my folks were gone, Aunt Elise and I got really close. We spent a lot of time together. She called me her alter ego. She was the kind of free spirit that I had always wanted to be but never thought I could, especially where her love life was concerned. She still had several men friends when she got sick.”
“I’m so sorry. Her death must have been difficult for you, especially after living through it with your parents.”
“It was.” Jenna watched Chloe take a deep breath. “Her last years weren’t easy. She was diagnosed with cancer about three years ago and died last November.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jenna said. Two and a half years. Jenna’s parents had died suddenly in an auto accident when the two girls were in their final year of graduate school. The shock had been devastating, but now that she thought about it, how difficult must it be for someone to have to deal with it for two and a half years.
“Me too,” Chloe said. “Before that, she was the most active, interested and interesting woman I ever met. We took vacations together, went to the theater and movies, and just enjoyed life. We spent so much time together and I began to change, to be like her. It became more and more important for me to do things that gave me pleasure. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to discover that I hated being a stockbroker, and we talked at great length about what I wanted to do. She convinced me to go back to school to study art, not the fine arts stuff but graphic design. She helped me with the cost of my courses and gave me a party when I finally got up the nerve to quit my Wall Street job. As you know, I’m still working at the same advertising agency I started with back then. It’s not nearly as much money as Wall Street, but I really love what I do.”
“She sounds like a very generous lady.” Jenna and Mar
cy had had to work part-time throughout school to supplement their scholarships, Jenna waiting tables in the local watering hole and Marcy writing short stories for a magazine and articles for the local paper.
“Yes, she was. At the time it seemed okay to let her help and I agreed to pay her back when I could but, after a while, I realized that although she spent like she had lots of money, things were getting tight for her. Then she was diagnosed with cancer. It sucked, long and messy. She was in and out of the hospital and, during those final months despite insurance, the out-of-pocket for her medical care was astronomical. She went through everything. When I show you around, you’ll see that the downstairs and my bedroom are pretty much the only parts of the house that are still furnished.”
“Why didn’t she sell the building? It seems that something like this,” she gazed around the brownstone, “in the middle of Manhattan, must be worth quite a bit.”
“I tried to get her to sell but she was incredibly stubborn. She loved this house as much as I do now and wanted me to have it after her death. I argued but she wouldn’t change her mind, obstinate old darling. So I helped with whatever I could. I emptied my meager savings account, secretly paying part of the costs of almost everything so she could have the illusion that she could afford it all. At the end, she had hospice care and passed away right here in this house. She wanted that very much.” Chloe sniffled and Jenna pulled a Kleenex from her purse and handed it to her. “I was holding her hand when she died.”
“I’m so sorry. It must have been very difficult for you.”
She sniffled, then brightened and said, “That’s in the past now, but I love this building so I’m here, and I’m going to stay here for as long as I can manage. The tax payments are tough and that’s where your rent money will help a lot.”
“Of course. This should work out just great, and give me time to figure out my life.”
“There’s one more thing that we need to talk about. I lead a pretty active social life and I hope we won’t get in each other’s way.”
“We won’t. I don’t think I’m going to be doing much dating, at least until I get my head together.” She didn’t want to get into a relationship and have to tell another guy no the way she had with Glen.
Club Fantasy Page 3
