Jill walked down the stairs and along the front hall of 4400 North. The light was on in 1W. Okay, just do this. Just knock on his door. What do those ads say, “It’s only lunch?” Well, this is only coffee. This was so not like her. She couldn’t believe how fast her heart was racing.
Jill beat her knuckles on the door and waited, committed now. No answer. She waited, almost walked away, then knocked a little harder—too hard. The door latch clicked and the door swung open of its own accord, revealing the naked back of a woman, seated on top of his model’s platform. Her legs were spread wide, and pockets of cellulite rippled in the back of her thighs each time he thrust into her.
Marc looked up and the model turned to look over her right shoulder when Jill gasped.
Neither of them seemed terribly embarrassed about the interruption. Marc had even put forth a couple of perfunctory thrusts as he looked up at Jill, as though he’d been going at it so fast he needed a few seconds to spool himself down.
“Sorry!” Jill closed the door so quickly it was almost a slam. Okay. So definitely not gay. She cupped her hand over her mouth as she hurried out the front door of the building and down the sidewalk, trying to muffle the horrified laughs that were burbling out of her cheeks, pressing against the palm of her hand. Halfway down the block she let them free, cracking up by herself like a lunatic, one of those crazy people you see walking down the street. Some wish-come-true this was.
Jill tried to regain her composure. What had come over her, anyway, running away, giggling, acting like such a kid? She was behaving like Mara. And why was she laughing? She sure hadn’t felt happy or thought it was funny. What a weird, nervous reaction. Especially for her. Jill wasn’t used to laughing much at anything.
She took a deep breath and kept walking down the block toward Sally’s. As she pulled her gloves out of her pockets and put them on, the picture of Marc and his model burned in her mind’s eye: the waves of her long black hair cascading down her back, her face in profile, his serene expression as he stared bare-chested over her white shoulder. She was almost at Sally’s when she had an interesting thought: What a nice portrait they would have made.
“So, um, I guess I could come back tomorrow—you know, if you need me.”
Gail held the phone to her ear, fighting the urge to pull it away and check the caller ID again. This was her babysitter, Ellen, on the phone—wasn’t it? Saying she’d be able to return to work—sooner?
Ellen worked for Gail three mornings a week. That was, up until three weeks ago, when Ellen had dropped a stapler on her big toe and broken it. Only Ellen could find a way to break her toe with a stapler—well no, actually, Claudia probably could too, but only Ellen would turn it into an opportunity to get so much time off work. “Six weeks minimum is, like, what the doctor’s saying.”
Gail and the kids had gone to visit her, and the cast went all the way up to her knee. Gail wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it for herself. The whole odd situation sounded like the kind of story Gail might have concocted in order to get some time off of work, adding that one bizarre detail—a stapler—to make it sound like a story you couldn’t possibly make up.
“Sooner?” Gail asked.
“Yeah. The doctor says it’s healing well and I don’t have to stay off my feet so much anymore, so, you know, I could work, like, maybe one day to try it out and then, if that was okay, then do, like, one day a week—or something.”
“How soon can you get here?”
How awesome was this? Unexpected free time. What was she going to do? She had tons of errands to run—she really needed to take the minivan in. No. Wait. She should stop that line of thinking. This was a bonus. A free gift. She shouldn’t squander something like this on need to’s and have to’s. She should enjoy the day tomorrow. Do something fun—just for her—
The wish. Is that what this was? Was this her wish from Wish Club?
Gail had had something more substantial in mind than just one day when she’d made her wish. But this single day could turn into more, like, you know, if everything went okay. Guiltily, secretly, Gail had just recently allowed herself to start thinking about maybe going back to work. About writing the next big jingle. Well, so what if her wish wasn’t going to give her the big chunks of time she’d envisioned. Maybe it was just one day—but she’d take it. And tomorrow she would spend the day at a coffee shop with a book, or maybe the newspaper, maybe looking at want ads, just for fun.
Someone tapped on the door to Jill’s studio. “Door’s open,” she called.
“Hey.”
“Well, if it isn’t Marc with a ‘c.’” Jill tried to remain calm, keep her cool exterior cool. She smiled at him. He smiled back. Ooof. She could feel the effect in her solar plexus.
He continued smiling, being coy, his hands jammed into his front pockets, seemingly trying to use his smile to say all the things it would be hard to use words to say about what had happened two days earlier when she’d seen him with his model.
Employing his boyish mannerisms, he looked even younger than she remembered. Still cute, though. Very.
“I haven’t heard you up here in a couple of days.” Marc ran a finger down his thin goatee. “Thought maybe someone was breakin’ in or something. Decided I’d better have a look-see.”
Jill hadn’t been at the studio since Wednesday; she’d been avoiding him. She tried to get the picture of him in action out of her head. “Nope, it’s just me up here rattling around, trying to get the creative juices flowing.”
He nodded his head and flashed her an understanding look, as if to say I know the feeling. He looked around the studio. “Wow, I like this one. Is it new?”
“Yeah.” Jill hated that one; the colors were off. She’d just decided it wouldn’t make the show.
His eyes continued to scan her studio, checking it out. He was wearing a pookah-shell necklace. Kids, Jill thought. She wondered if he’d ever heard of David Cassidy.
Marc looked back at her, gave her a penetrating smile. It seemed clear his smile was something he was used to falling back on when words failed him.
Cute, and knows it, too. But what, really, is the harm in that?
“Well, just wanted to make sure everything was kosh up here.” He smiled at her again, stuffed his hands back into the pockets of his jeans.
Had he intended for it to be a double entendre? No hard feelings between us, no one up here breaking in? Probably not. He looked nervous, like he was struggling.
“Everything’s kosh,” Jill said, then, uncharacteristically, decided to show him some mercy. “Say, I’m up for a break. You want to go grab some coffee or something?”
Marc locked his eyes on hers, giving her a sly smile when she said, “or something,” and she could tell he’d almost said something naughty but had decided better of it. “Sure, that’d be great,” he said. “We can go to my place.”
“Your place?”
“Yeah, Sally’s—the coffee shop under the El. Not many people know about it—the sign’s mostly hidden under the tracks.”
“Right.”
Sally’s was up breakfast and lunch and closed at two in the afternoon. It hadn’t been redecorated since sometime in the 1970s, and it featured a décor with lots of brown, gold, and orange. No lattes here. Sally’s served plain old Superior Coffee, roasted and packaged down on Elston Avenue. When the wind was right, the Superior Coffee factory could make the whole north side smell like Colombian roast.
Marc opened the door to Sally’s and stood aside to let Jill pass through in front of him. He did it naturally, without ceremony, as if he were used to being polite. He paid for both their coffees. Jill thought that was sweet, too, the way he’d insisted, with a gentle wave of his hand as he pulled out his money, especially since Jill had been the one to suggest they go get coffee.
“So why portraits?” Jill asked him after they’d sat down at their booth.
“Portraits let me get inside people’s heads.” He looked away from her, h
is eyes roving through Sally’s, as if maybe he were scouting for subjects, heads to get inside of. “You know how when you paint something, you know it.” He fixed his eyes on her now. “I mean you really, really know it. It’s like that with people, too. Maybe even more so. A series of portraits on one person and, BAM, you’re inside their head.” He slammed his hand down on the table, Emeril-like, when he said “bam,” and Jill jumped. The coffee quivered in her mug.
Marc continued, not noticing that he’d startled her. “People walk around their whole lives and they never let you in. They’re closed-off, shut down, isolated. I hate that. I like to get inside, take a peek.” His eyes had been wandering again, and now he turned back to Jill, holding them on hers. “After I do someone’s portrait, it’s like I’ve been inside their head for so long…It’s like I really know them, maybe even better than they wanted me to. I love that—I live for that. The portraits I do—well, they’re not usually the interpretation people expect, that’s for sure. But that’s why portraits.” He smiled his smile. “With most people, the experience is pretty cool.” He paused. “Sometimes…” He shrugged. His smile turned wicked, finishing his thought…it isn’t.
People’s heads weren’t the only thing he got inside of when he did their portraits, Jill thought.
“Maybe you’d let me paint you sometime.” That smile again. Damn he is beautiful.
“Maybe I would.”
Claudia sat in one of the stuffed chairs in the faculty break room, wading her way through a stack of essays on The Old Man and the Sea, even though she hadn’t gone in there to grade them. She had wanted to call Gail, to find out if her wish was coming true the way everyone else’s appeared to be, but people kept wandering in and out, putting lunches in the fridge, getting a cup of coffee, grabbing a doughnut left over from the morning.
It was against school policy to use cellular phones inside the school, except in the common area at the main entrance—and she couldn’t talk openly there. Teachers were expected to abide by school policy, so Claudia bided her time in the break room, waiting for it to clear out, annoyed because it was usually so deserted at this hour.
Finally the room emptied and Claudia had Gail’s phone ringing before the door had shut.
“C’mon, c’mon, pick up,” she whispered. Claudia knew that at 1:45 p.m. Gail ought to be home alone with Emily. Finally, Gail answered.
“Hi, it’s me,” Claudia said. “Did Mara call you?”
“Yeah. Can you make it on Monday?”
“Yeah, I can but—Mara says everybody’s wishes are starting to come true but I…”
“Oh aargh.” Gail sounded completely exasperated, pissed off.
Crap. I shouldn’t have called.
“Emily!”
Oh, Claudia thought. She’s mad at Emily.
“She just pulled all the clothes off the hangers in her closet. Are you sure you want to have kids?”
“That’s why I—”
“This is going to take me an hour. Emily, honey, we don’t pull clothes off the hangers. It makes a mess.” Gail had this sweet-mommy voice she used when she talked to her kids—it almost always took Claudia by surprise.
“You are not going to believe this,” Gail’s voice had grown a little fainter and Claudia could envision the phone tucked under her chin as she, presumably, put little pink outfits back on little pink hangers, “but Ellen called and she was able to come back early. Emily, I said no. The clothes have to stay on the hangers. She was here yesterday and she said if her foot wasn’t bothering her too much today she could start up again one day a week. Emily, do not do that. No!”
Emily’s tantrum was starting to mount in the background and it grated on Claudia’s nerves.
Gail continued, seemingly oblivious to it. “So will you be there on Monday?”
“Well, I’m planning on it but—”
Claudia heard a whummphf from Gail’s end of the line.
Marion Chutterman, the school nurse, walked into the break room and started fixing herself some coffee.
“Oh man,” Gail whined. “She pulled the whole shelf down—John is going to…”
Emily started to cry. “You’re all right honey. You’re okay. Claudia, I gotta go.”
Claudia could hear Gail say, “Emily Anne—” in her sweet-mommy voice, before she hung up.
Claudia frowned as she turned off her phone, staring at it in the palm of her hand for a while. She probably should have known better than to try to call Gail in the middle of the day.
“Everything okay on the home front?” Marion asked her, always on the alert for some gossip. Her Minnesota accent stretched and rounded out her Os.
“Oh,” Claudia said, unintentionally imitating her. “Everything is fine. Actually, that wa—”
“Oh, I know what it’s like sometimes,” Marion interrupted. “Everyone gets so busy they just don’t take the time for one another, but when you’re in a relationship, time together is the most important thing. It’ll be even more important when you start your family.” Marion bobbed her head on the word family, a presumptuous, get-going kind of gesture. It couldn’t have been more rude if she’d tapped her finger on her watch.
Claudia wanted to jump over the table and wrap her hands around Marion’s neck. She gave Marion a fake smile instead, as if to thank her for her unsolicited advice.
“I need to get back in time for class.” Claudia shuffled her still ungraded Old Man and the Sea essays into a pile. April Sibley was going to have another hissy fit. Claudia stopped at the side table and filled her mug, eyeing the Dunkin’ Donut munchkins still sitting out. She grabbed one and popped it in her mouth.
“Oh, I envy you young ladies,” Marion started in again. “You can eat whatever you like and it never stays with you. I used to be like that myself, but once you hit thirty-five, well, then the free ride is over and the doughnuts just stick to your thighs like dried oatmeal to a bowl.”
Claudia gave her another weak smile, her cheeks full of chocolate munchkin—which she could no longer enjoy, thanks to an uninvited visual of Marion Chutterman’s oatmealy thighs.
She gave Marion a stilted good-bye wave with the free fingers she had on the handle of her coffee mug while she juggled with her papers and the handle to the door. Her parting gesture went unnoticed; Marion was already preoccupied with ripping open a packet of artificial sweetener. Claudia’s wiggling fingers jostled her full cup of coffee, splashing some on the Old Man and the Sea essays, the indoor-outdoor carpeting in the hallway, and the toe of her gray suede boot.
Chapter Twelve
Mara lugged groceries up the salt-encrusted front steps to her framed northwest-side bungalow. “Saint Ben’s” is what they’d always called their neighborhood, but as more and more yuppies and dinks started moving in, she’d noticed a slow transition to the trendier “North Center” label. If only their tax increases had made such a slow transition.
She tried to lift her keys to the lock on the front door but the grocery bags were too heavy and she didn’t have the arm strength, so she ended up setting everything down on the salt, exactly what she’d been trying to avoid.
Once the groceries were in the kitchen, she walked back across the hardwood floor, which she would now have to mop again, to close the front door.
Tippy had his nose sticking out and around the partially opened screen door, which never closed completely without some brute force. He darted back in when he heard her footsteps getting close, his body low to the ground as he hurried away.
“No Hills Science Diet or radiators out there,” Mara said to his backside. “The life of an alley cat is not what it’s cracked up to be.”
Tippy ran into the kitchen and sat by the grocery bags on the floor, his tail wrapped around him where he sat. He flipped the tip of it onto the linoleum as if he were a woman tapping a manicured nail on a countertop. His green eyes stared at Mara.
“Oh, sure.” Mara started putting the groceries away. “Sure, it sounds all glamorous—th
e freedom, the grass between your toes, the tomcatting around. But, I tell you what, getting your dinner out of a garbage can every night like a common gray squirrel, well, that is a fate much too undignified for my precious Tippy.”
With everything that needed to be put in the refrigerator safely inside, she left the rest of the groceries where they were and scooped Tippy up on her way to the living room. He squirmed in her arms, then gave her a low meow, as if he were trying to protest yet another assault on his dignity. “Oh, hush now. You’ve got nothing to complain about.” Mara sat down in the armchair by the window.
She was hosting an impromptu meeting of Book Club tonight. It had only been two weeks since the last meeting, and it was all happening very last minute—but Mara didn’t mind. Everyone was having such good luck with their wishes that they all wanted to make more right away, and Mara was certainly in favor of that.
At Dr. Seeley’s office this morning, she’d been staring at the sailboat print that hung on the wall opposite her desk when she’d decided to take the afternoon off work, burn up half of a personal day. Sail away. When she’d asked Dr. Seeley, he’d of course acted displeased that an employee of his would have to attend to anything “personal,” but he’d agreed to it, “Fine, fine. If you feel you must.” And he’d seemed to be waiting for an explanation, which Mara gleefully hadn’t given. Let him stew on this one.
Mara knew Seeley would hate it if she spent her time idly, which was why she thought right now, the right thing to do was to take a little personal time and relax. She sat in Henry’s La-Z-Boy by the window, petted her cat, and enjoyed the afternoon sun. Tippy circled her lap several times before curling up in it. The sun warmed her face and when she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was someplace tropical; something worth wishing for in Chicago in February, when it was cold and snowy and the sun was making its first appearance in nearly a week. But then, there were so many things to wish for.
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