Arm Candy

by Jill Kargman

  “Allison is a smart lady,” Chase said, squeezing Eden’s hand. He liked her short dress. He felt the ripple of rebellion in his stomach, knowing his mom would wince. And he dug it. Shit, after all his crazy brothers had done to bend (or even snap and break) the rules, Chase thought if the most insane thing he had done was to love an older woman, well, then screw his family.

  In the glowing light of the auditorium, the Who’s Who of the city’s art patrons scanned the crowd, searching for friends and famous people, eyes almost always landing on Chase and Eden, who held hands and flipped through the evening’s program. Eden reveled in the artistic choreography of the three acts of Jewels. But as the ethereal dancers glided and spun against the glowing scrim, Eden’s thoughts wandered in the darkness to Penelope and her story.

  As the thunderous applause rang out at the end of the act, Chase led Eden outside during the second intermission.

  “It was so stunning, beyond my expectation. Thank you so much.”

  “I’m really glad you liked it,” Chase said, beaming, proud he had taken her. He kissed her cheek as they looked out at the Lincoln Center fountain all lit up. “I enjoyed it more than ever tonight,” he said.

  Just then the glass doors to the outside balcony opened. It was Wills and Liesel, holding hands. The confrontation was unavoidable.

  “Hello, Chase,” Liesel said politely. “Nice to see you. Hello, I’m Liesel,” she said, extending her hand to Eden.

  “And this is Eden Clyde,” Chase replied. “Eden, this is Wills.”

  “Beautiful dress,” Eden said, admiring Liesel’s long, flowing, pale pink J. Mendel gown. She realized she was the only one in a short hem, a fact all of the drooling men and their jealous wives had already noticed.

  “Thanks,” said Liesel.

  The four stood in silence.

  “Well, it’s a bit cold out here,” Liesel shivered. “I think I’m going to go inside and get a glass of wine before the last act.”

  “Nice to see you both,” said Wills with a crisp nod, following his fiancée back inside.

  “She’s really pretty,” Eden said, unfazed. While many girls would dread a run-in with their lover’s ex, particularly one over a decade younger, Eden didn’t bristle. “She looks like your mom. But younger.”

  “I think that’s why my family liked her so much.” Chase smiled.

  “Well, then,” Eden teased, “I am dead meat.”

  After the performance, the crowd streamed to festively adorned tables designed by Antony Todd with floating votives and fragrant gardenias. The room glistened as candlelight reflected off the crystal, and ballroom chairs were pulled out from the silk-cloth-covered tables so the ladies could take their seats with ball gowns fluffed and prepare to demonstrate their own well-honed craft: the art of fake eating. Push the frisée to the left, cut a slice of salmon, take a mock bite, and move garniture off to the side.

  Brooke, the queen of this special talent, approached the table with a tight smile, wearing head-to-toe Oscar. The Family had been sitting separately in the theater (Brooke was with the rest of the Board), and now Chase’s whole family would be dining together at the best table in the vaulted atrium (center table on the dance floor), as tradition had it.

  Eden, while hardly shy or nervous, was the guest of this esteemed family and knew she had to be polite. She stood up as Brooke approached.

  “Hello, Mrs. Lydon,” Eden said. “I’m Eden.”

  “Yes, dear, I know,” she said, forcing a smile.

  “Thank you so much for having me here tonight. It was just amazing!” Eden said.

  “Well, Chase insisted you come along, so I didn’t want to disappoint him,” Brooke replied coldly.

  Eden looked at Chase, who nervously bolted up to introduce Eden to his father, who was scanning the crowd for young hot socialites. Hey, he was married, not dead!

  “Grant, darling,” Brooke summoned him. “We’re starting, please take your seat.”

  Pierce stumbled over, already hammered. “Mom and Dad are fucking shitting bricks. They said you were with some hag, but she is SMOKIN’ hot. For an old chick!” He thought he was whispering but wasn’t.

  “Pierce, please,” Chase harshly whispered. Eden pretended to ignore it as she perused the bread basket.

  “The older ones probably do anything, too, man. Liesel never did anything but missionary, am I right, bro? This one’s got the experience, you can just tell.”

  “Pierce”—Chase leaned in—“shut up. Now.”

  “Whoa, bro, chillax. It’s a compliment! Dazzamn.”

  Chase exhaled, thoroughly mortified by his family’s behavior. For a clan so allegedly refined, they sure were a bunch of boors. It could not get worse. And then, it did.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Price, the eldest Lydon son, said approaching the table, his hand up Raise-Da-Roof style. “Guys, this is Olga.” He presented with pride a tall, striking, twenty-year-old model, his date.

  “Hallo,” Olga said, taking off her fur wrap (a gift from Price). “Nice to meetchu.”

  “Charmed,” said Grant, giving Price a surreptitious wink.

  Even Brooke thawed momentarily. While she was not happy to have her son dating a fashion model from rural Latvia (one step above courtesan, really), her tender age made her an instant improvement over Eden.

  Olga sat one down from Eden, next to Pierce.

  “Hallo, Mees Clyde, I am SUCH huge fan. My grandparents in Riga have two of your portraits.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Eden said.

  “Oh? They’re collectors?” Brooke thawed further, emboldened by Olga’s obvious wealth.

  “Yes, they have many, many peectures. They lof Otto Clyde. Eden, you are beautiful.”

  “Isn’t she?” Chase asked as Eden smiled gratefully.

  “My mudder, Katia, ees your same age—you will be forty soon, no?” Olga asked innocently.

  “Uh.” Eden cracked into laughter at the awkward fact so vociferously highlighted by the doe-eyed girl. “Yes, I am thirty-nine.”

  “My mudder sess you geev her hope dat when she feel old she see you and you luke so bootiful and comFORTable with your age, no surgery. She ees inspired,” she said in a Slavicmeets-British accent (her English tutors were always from London).

  Eden smiled kindly and leaned into Chase. “Gee, that was lemon juice on my wrinkles,” she murmured.

  “I have an idea,” Chase said, leaning in with a whisper. “Wanna get out of here after they serve the main course?”

  “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  As her fellow tablemates conversed about subjects ranging from observations of Wendy Whelan’s unmistakable style (Brooke) to the new hooters on the Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee heiress (Price), Eden quietly pushed her frisée around the plate. Her fork moved like waves, just as her thoughts did. From the din of lipstick-marked greetings and cocktail rings against glass, Eden’s mind swam upward, into a daydream in the vast atrium. She wandered away to her long talk with Penelope, her body politely immersed at the table, but her thoughts up in the sky, doing frothy, dream-like pirouettes.

  53

  Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

  —Oscar Wilde

  Standing by Susan’s side, Penelope wiped a tear from her eye as the soft tulle of Susan’s veil flowed in the Bay breeze. Jonathan stepped on the glass, and the rabbi pronounced them man and wife, and Wes at age four marched happily up the aisle, holding an empty velvet ring pillow in front of the married couple—his beloved godparents. While Penelope was an outside-the-box girl who always had rocked the boat of her parents’ traditions, she felt surprisingly misty over Susan’s white wedding ceremony, the flying pale pink petals, the dance as bride and groom. But most of all, she was emotional when she saw the look in Jonathan’s eye as he watched his new wife glide toward him after a twirl that had taken her all of three feet away. As he pulled her
back into his arms, Penelope knew she was now officially losing her best friend.

  The four of them had been like a family, cooking dinner and setting the table with three wineglasses and a plastic cup. And now their little unit was moving on. Just down the street, but still. Then, a few weeks post-honeymoon down the California coast, Susan and Jonathan came by for dinner.

  They had news.

  After two years of juggling his other (paying) cases, Jonathan had a crack in his search for Wesley. He handed Penelope a small index card with an address in Tennessee and a phone number. She stared at it as she cleared the table and cleaned the dishes. She looked at it as she sewed a patch in Wes’s pants. She folded and unfolded it as she sat alone at the table with a bottle of Merlot Susan had brought. Penelope had a huge glass of wine and dialed the area code on her rotary phone. As the little finger-sized circles spun counterclockwise, her pulse pounded so hard she thought she would register on the Richter scale. She hung up. She calmed herself down and tried again. And again. Finally, a day later, she was able to dial all ten digits. Wes slept on the bed beside her as she heard his father’s voice answer the phone.

  “Hello?”

  She cleared her throat to speak but no sound came out. It was like that bad dream in which the murderer is over your head avec machete but no scream can emerge from your paralyzed larynx.

  “Hello? Is someone there?”

  She struggled to speak but couldn’t.

  Click.

  Shaking, Penelope hung up. She was seized by a surge of panic. That night, she woke up and lay staring at the ceiling, watching the headlights from passing cars move across the beams and white paint. Finally, just as the sun began to rise and Wes rubbed his blue eyes with his little fist, Penelope did something borderline insane: She tossed his T-shirts in a bag, zipped up some toys and dresses and toothbrushes, buckled him in the car, and climbed in the driver’s seat. She unfurled a poorly folded map of the United States and started driving. And driving. And as the twisty colored lines of the map’s roads crisscrossed and swirled like veins, Penelope just pressed the pedal and headed east.

  54

  In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

  —Albert Camus

  Tires of a black sedan screeched Nascar-style the hizzell out of Lincoln Center as Eden and Chase told the driver for the evening to gun it. Rubber burned, along with Eden’s unpleasant memories of an evening laden with heavy gazes, ugly judgments coated with mascara. But as the numbers on the green-and-white street signs declined, so did Chase and Eden’s inhibitions, as they kissed in the backseat, like horny teens after prom.

  Downtown on Grove Street, Eden strode into Marie’s Crisis holding the hand of the guy whom every man in the mostly gay bar would turn away from the piano to scope.

  “Oh. My. God. That’s Eden Clyde and Chase Lydon,” one sexy young crooner whispered to his friend.

  “Love her! So fierce. Her black-and-white Marc Jacobs campaign was on my wall as a teen,” the other said. “But who’s the man candy?”

  “Chase Lydon? You know that family in Wedding Crashers? He’s that.”

  “Great! I can be the little brother who ties him up!”

  The famed haunt was a gem amidst the West Village’s crazed collage of winding streets. Everyone from drunken NYU students to sexily androgynous theater queens to old-timer performers sang their blues away or celebrated living in New York City here.

  Eden loved singing. With pipes usually reserved for the shower, she belted along with the crowd, which had styles ranging from American Idol to Billy Idol.

  “Where are we?” Chase asked, surveying the tiny Christmas lights (a year-round decoration) and the throngs of people singing along happily, while Dexter, the vivacious ivory-tickler at the piano, played and sang.

  “I’ve lived here my entire life and have never even heard of this place,” Chase said.

  “You’re probably the only straight guy here.” Eden smiled. “Everyone is jealous of me tonight.”

  They held hands and stood off to the side, and as Eden sang every lyric out loud, Chase loved how un-self-conscious she was.

  “Hey,” one cute guy said to Chase. “Why’d you bring your mother?”

  By this point many people in the city knew of Chase and Eden’s pairing, and while she was older, she obviously wasn’t his mom.

  “She’s not my mom, she’s my girlfriend,” Chase said politely. Eden didn’t fume or even feel a small sting; she simply sang on. She didn’t give a shit. She had Chase’s hand in hers and music banging from the piano. “Tits and asssss, bought myself a fancy pair, tightened up the derrière . . .”

  She danced as Chase stood behind her, arms around her waist. She loved that he was there to catch her, to hold her as she crooned her lungs out. He even chimed in on occasion.

  “Shake your new maracas and you’ll shiiiiine!!”

  Otto never had time for her affection for musicals and often said she was a gay man trapped inside a woman’s body. The three weekends Penelope and Wesley came to visit, they had splurged and took Eden and Wes to shows on Broadway, igniting a Broadway binge by Eden from Tower Records’s terrific show tunes section. As Wes and Eden sat beside his parents and the lights dimmed and the overture sounded, Eden got a rush like none other. Because of those few heavenly nights out with the Bennetts, Eden took Cole every few months to see a show, just the two of them. It was funny, Eden thought to herself, how people come in and out of your life and leave behind certain little pieces of themselves. Her love of theater only grew because she fostered it with trips to Times Square with Cole, and she realized her son was enriched because of Penelope’s generosity. How strange life was, now that she sang those same songs here, in new times.

  After an hour of requests, a star turn by Maggie the waitress, and a full dividing of the whole bar into Dannys and Sandys for a spirited rendition of “Tell Me More,” Chase was ready to take Eden home.

  “You ready?” he whispered.

  “I’m never ready. I could stay all night.” She then burst into tune. “I could have daaaaanced all night!”

  “A patron by the bar has offered Miss Eden a round,” Maggie said. “What can I getcha?”

  “Tell him thank you,” Eden declined, pointing at Chase. “But he has work in the morning.”

  “Will do, see you both soon, I hope!” Maggie hugged Eden good-bye, and Chase looked back at the warm Christmas lights and pumping piano keys. He never would have been inside this jewel box of joy if it weren’t for Eden.

  “Thank you” he said, kissing her hand. “I think that is the happiest place I have ever been.”

  “More than my bed?”

  “Second happiest.”

  The night was surprisingly mild, and there was not a cab in sight, so they started strolling.

  “Maybe if we start walking east we’ll find one,” Eden suggested.

  The minutes flew by as the duo held hands and navigated the bustling crowds moving through the night on their way to clubs or cafés, performances or parties. Before they knew it, they were by the Bowery and had been walking for almost an hour.

  “So much for going home and crashing,” Chase said, squeezing Eden. “I don’t even care about work anymore. I feel like nothing else matters but spending time together.”

  Eden smiled in response. She then looked across the street and stared. Chase followed the upward trajectory of her mint eyes.

  “What a cool building,” Chase marveled, looking up at the perfect symmetry of the redbrick structure and large-scale grids of clean glass windows.

  “It’s the Bowery Hotel,” Eden replied with an imperceptible beat of sadness.

  “It’s beautiful. Have you been inside?”

  “No, I haven’t. I was invited to go there for a party a few years back when it opened but I couldn’t bring myself to go. I guess it reminded me the neighborhood had officially changed when it opened its doors.”

  “Ye
ah but that’s a good thing!” Chase said. “You said it was heroin junkies around here when you were younger.”

  “That’s true,” Eden dazedly replied, spaced out as she looked at the hotel’s clean stylish façade and packed restaurant Gemma on the corner. Young people buzzed in and out, and through the big windows they could see a huge candelabra with Phantom of the Opera-style dripping candles with a hundred flickering wicks. “I know it’s better now. Of course it’s an improvement. I just . . . sometimes get nostalgic, that’s all. I know it’s silly.”

  What Eden didn’t want to mention to Chase was that once upon a time, on the very site of the gleaming, chic hotel, with its crowded restaurant of fashionistas eating shaved raw artichoke salad with truffle vinaigrette, there stood a shitty little dive where locals and students, young and hopeful—poor on cash but rich with ambition and ideals—could go to get the best burger in town. Where Eden would scrounge together coins from the bottom of her bag to afford hot oatmeal with raisins, and how nothing in her entire life, before or after, ever tasted so delicious.

  55

  You’re not 40, you’re eighteen with 22 years’ experience.

  —Anonymous

  With a creased, unfurled map, empty soda cans, bags of chips, and a sleeping Wes passed out across the backseat, Penelope crossed over the border to Tennessee. A nervous surge moved through her; seeing the Welcome sign made her realize what she was doing. And unlike hanging up a rotary phone after hearing a hello, this time, after two thousand miles, there was no turning back.

  She woke up a bleary-eyed Wes at a greasy spoon where they would stop for lunch. Stretching their legs outside the car for the first time in hours, they staggered Night of the Living Dead-style into the restaurant. In their pleather booth, nervously fidgeting with the sugar packets, Penelope smoothed her hair and straightened her rumpled blouse as Wes drew on the paper menu with broken crayons from the bottom of his mother’s handbag.