Cherries In The Snow (11 page)

‘Mnnppp, mmmm, uh-huh-uh.' I stifle sobs.

‘I want to help you. I can't help you because I can't understand you. If you tell me what's wrong, I'll help.'

I let my reaction sobs, which are like reaction shots, subside.
‘My wees hurt and I want to talk to my dad and my land line's been cut off and I don't have long distance on my cell.'

‘Your wees hurt?'

‘I have cystitis. You have given me cystitis.'

‘I have given you what?'

‘A urinary tract infection. From fucking.'

‘Oh, no. Oh, don't say that.'

‘It's true. It hurts.'

‘Oh, my God. I feel horrible.'

‘You don't need to,' I scream from the floor as I clutch my stomach.

‘Okay, here's the phone. Maybe after that we should take you to the doctor.' He passes it to me. I feel a little baffled and dial the number somewhat testily.

‘Papa?' As soon as I hear his voice I want to go back to baby tears, but Marley is standing over my shoulder. ‘My wees hurt.'

‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?'

‘Feel sorry for me.'

‘I feel very sorry for you.'

‘But it hurts.'

‘I'm sure that it does.'

‘I think I have an infection. What shall I do?'

‘Go to the doctor. I have to get back to work.'

Handing back the phone, I repeat my father's instruction. ‘He says go to the doctor.'

‘I already said that.' Marley shrugs, stroking my stomach.

‘I wanted to hear my papa say it.'

‘I'm somebody's papa.' He kisses my stomach as I groan. ‘Do you have insurance?' he asks.

‘I forgot to pay the bill. It hasn't kicked in from work yet.'

‘We'll figure it out.' He zips up his raincoat: punctuation at the end of his promise.

In the waiting room he holds his credit card between his fingers and keeps flipping it over and over like a gangster flipping a coin in a film noir. With his other hand he holds my fingers. Of course the second we walk into the waiting room I start to feel a bit better. I look at a magazine as the minutes tick by. I see that Minnie Driver is a proponent of a new kind of yoga.

‘Some spastic invented Cool Yoga. You do it in freezing temperatures. How retarded is that?'

‘That was Montana's mother,' says Marley softly.

‘What?'

‘Montana's mother, Jolene, is the one who created Cool Yoga. I'd like to take some of the credit, but she was already plotting it before she even met me.'

‘Is she rich?'

‘Extremely. You haven't seen her exercise videos?'

‘Noooo.'

I try to change the subject. He tries harder.

‘She's also experimenting with a line of bath products. Bubble baths and soaps that feel icy against your body.'

‘Nice.' I start flicking through the magazine even harder as though it is a workout. I'm going to pitch the foot-in-mouth workout. I find it sheds pounds quickly. You get too embarrassed to eat. We sit in silence for some time, he stroking my stomach now.

‘
Spastic
is not a nice word. I'm sorry.'

‘It isn't a nice word. But no worries.'

I slow my flicking down and actually begin to look at the photos. ‘Ooh, cute.' I can't help myself, wowed by the power of Scarlett Johansson attending a premiere in a yellow Christian Dior dress.

‘You think so?'

‘You don't think so?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Is she cute?' He shrugs his shoulders. I flick the page and point at Demi Moore. ‘You like older women. Is she cute?'

‘Too much makeup. Too skinny.'

Then he stops me before I can turn the next page. ‘Jennifer Connelly has beautiful eyes.'

‘She does not.' I scowl. ‘She's got dead eyes. And I hate her nose. She has a pig's nose. Brunettes are supposed to be warm, not cold. They just found someone to fill the intelligence gap.'

I start to panic. ‘You love her. You want to marry her. You were thinking about Jennifer Connelly in bed.' I tug at my curls. ‘She has
straight
hair.' I sob. The sick patients turn to stare at me. I hope none of them is about to hear that she is dying or pregnant or I will color her good/bad news forever. One lady pats her pregnant stomach anxiously.

‘All I said was she had pretty eyes.'

‘Beautiful, you said beautiful.' Like a prosecutor. I stand up and pace around his chair, clutching my abdomen in agony.

‘Do you want me to go away?'

‘NO! Don't leave me!'

The doctor sees me, prescribes an over-the-counter medication, which Marley immediately collects, and then we go home and he tucks me into bed. My eyes are puffy.

‘I don't know what that was about, that was really, really weird, freak-out, bad behavior,' I say as I knock back my medicine. Then, most unlike me, ‘Sorry.'

‘That's okay. Look. It's nerve-racking being in love.'

‘Who's in love?'

‘You're in love with me.'

I gasp.

‘And,' he adds in the clear voice of Sidney Poitier accepting an award, ‘I'm in love with you.'

I am flabbergasted.

‘So we're equal.'

‘We're equal?' I don't know what to say, so I roll over and put my head away from him on the pillow.

He strokes my ear. ‘Sleep awhile. I'll leave you my phone in case you need it.'

When he creeps out, I call my dad.

‘I did something bad.'

‘Uh-oh.'

‘Well, let me just preface this by saying that Jennifer Connelly has a nose like a pig.'

‘Now, Sadie, you say that a lot about actresses, but let's try to think what a pig actually looks like. It sort of has a wide round nose that appears flat from the front but from the sides sticks out and up. So that isn't really accurate. Jennifer Connelly has a nose more like Pinocchio, wouldn't you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘Don't you think this is a bit silly? Marley sounds like a nice guy.'

‘He does?'

‘He waited for you at the doctor's after you threw a fit? Sounds like a keeper to me.'

‘Thanks, papa.'

I fall asleep.

Sidney Katz paws me awake. When I pad into the living room, I find my medicine has been laid out for me, with a pile of magazines next to it. Flicking through them, I see that, before leaving, Marley has defaced every single photo of Jennifer Connelly with a beard or a mustache. It is such an oddly tender gesture that it makes my knees wobble. Love love love. He comes back in the evening.

‘Now, let's get some soup on,' he says, moving toward my gas stove.

‘No!' I leap up like a teenage boy about to have his drawer full of porn discovered. ‘It's never been switched on.'

‘How long have you lived here?'

‘Four years.'

‘And you never turned it on?'

‘I just told you that.'

‘And I didn't quite believe it. Ah, well, let's turn it on.'

‘No!'

‘No?'

‘I'm superstitious. Maybe something will
happen
if you turn it on.'

‘Yeah, something will happen. You'll get hot soup.'

He turns it on as I put my fingers in my ears. The smell of chicken soup seeps into the living room like a hit single.

‘Eat this.'

‘I don't want to.'

‘Eat it.'

‘Mmmm, yummy.' It is really good.

‘Like I'd give you something yucky.'

‘You wouldn't?'

‘No.'

And then, having seen me at my worst and having offered defaced photos of an Oscar-winning actress, we are together. We lie on the daybed, arms and legs entwined.

‘How's your hoo hoo?'

‘Pretty perky, actually.'

He pats it through my dressing gown.

‘So this love thing you mentioned …'

‘Yeah. It's not very convenient. I have a child.'

‘I am a child.'

‘You are. Great. What am I thinking?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Me either. Oh, well.'

Picking me up from work, Marley hails a cab to go to his place, and as soon as we get in I memorize the number of the cabdriver just in case he kills us. It's not because he's Arab that I think he might have something sinister in mind; it's because he's listening to Billy Joel. I really don't want to die, but if I do die, I want someone to get in trouble. Not vengeful, vigilante trouble, more the kind of trouble that stops banks from giving you a mortgage. ‘M987,' I say to myself as I snuggle up beside Marley. I touch his hand, then his thigh, then I nuzzle his neck, then I tilt my head up to kiss him.

‘No,' he says softly, in the kind of voice you use to say ‘yes.'

‘What?'

‘I can't do that. Making out in cabs. I feel like it's disrespectful to the driver.'

‘Oh. I'm sorry.' There're times I can't help but feel he's reprimanding me. That's what you get for dating a dad. I look up at the license and see that M987 is actually Osama Mohammed. He hung his taxi license upside down, poor bastard.

‘It's okay,' Marley says, and gives my thigh a little squeeze. I squish myself away from him and lean my head against the window. I watch the Lower East Side speed by, a blur of bodegas and graffiti, the scent of Chinese cabbage accompanying it like a soundtrack. Osama is going too fast, but I'm
enjoying it. At least someone in the taxi isn't hung up on taking their time. Is that fair? Yes, Marley's gotta take his time: he has a kid, he has a complicated romantic history, and the last big impulsive thing he did made him a junkie. And yet I can't help thinking … love
is
the drug. It is addiction, it is irrational, it is madness, the best kind of destruction, a kind of self-destruction that, after it implodes, reforms itself as something better. At least that's the way it always seemed from listening to Bruce Springsteen. I sigh. And instantly, in one of those magical moments when you get to be DJ and listener at the same time, Billy Joel fades out and ‘Born to Run' comes on the radio.

‘Hey!' I turn back to Marley in shock, but he merely looks at me because he doesn't realize that I just played mystic jukebox. I know this song by heart, like a poem. Because, in fact, I once learned it by heart for a school poetry recital. Dad helped me break it down into chunks. He wrote it down on little flashcards for me and had me say it back to him. He waited out in the school auditorium to watch me triumph, which I surely would have done if I had not been disqualified for choosing a song instead of a poem. Dad took it well. We spoke-sang it together in the car on the way home. Now I sit in a yellow taxi on another continent from my papa, with a young man who looks like he might be related to him. And I say:

‘ “In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.” '

And I am actually in America. And I am actually with someone I could run away with. And, actually, at the speed upside-down Osama is going, we kind of are runaways.

‘ “At night we ride through mansions of glory and suicide machines!” ' I sing, in a voice so soft that, to my surprise, I am in tune. Marley leans his forehead against his window and starts to sing too.

‘ “Tramps like us, baby we were born to run,” ' he sings and I answer,

‘C'mon, Wendy…'

I hope he doesn't mind that I call him Wendy. I guess it's okay because he steals a glance at me, then leans in and whispers, ‘Your breasts are bouncing.' I can't think of an answer, so I keep singing and soon enough Marley is kissing my neck. As we pull onto the Brooklyn Bridge, he cups my face in his hands and starts to kiss me, hard and loose like a kissing version of Bruce racing up and down the ramp at Wembley stadium with a guitar on his back so the whole audience, even those in the cheapest of cheap seats, can see him. I glance up at Osama, who looks stonily ahead.

‘Marley, you are a man of principle.'

I'm thinking of Bruce on an eight-track and my father at the wheel when I say it. But once it's been said, I'm thinking of Marley too. Although, to the best of my knowledge, he has met neither my dad nor Bruce Springsteen, by the time we pass the Welcome to Montana sign and drift over the Brooklyn Bridge in dream time, they're all drinkin' it up together backstage at the Stone Pony.

Upside-down Osama is driving a cab in America as it ought to be. It has been a good ride. I am surprised to note when I see him in the rearview mirror, that Osama looks cross.

When we get out, I make a point of tipping him five dollars on a fifteen-dollar fare, to compensate for the horrors he has seen. The UTI has gone. I left it somewhere in Chinatown, among the red cabbages. Before Marley so much as undoes the first button on his jeans, he makes me promise that I am completely healed, and I do such a good job of convincing him that I am, it isn't until we're making love that I realize it's the truth.

I go to the bathroom to touch up my makeup, my crotch already tingling with the first fizz of the relapsed urinary tract infection. Although I can see the next five days of cranberry juice, live yogurt, and milk baths panning out before me like the regimen of a health spa for whores, I still feel happy.

I check in the mirror and see mascara running down my face. Ugh. To be so intimate with someone and not know your cheeks are inked with black. He knows what your insides feel like, but you don't know how your own face looks. But that's the risk of sweaty sex. You don't get to look pretty. This is Holly's dream ad campaign right here, looking back at me in the mirror. I wipe the mascara off as best I can. I can't imagine how many times I have had uninhibited sex to make a man like me, probably no more than I made myself try to get a man to like me. And I look so ugly either way, face all twisted and red. How do people with mirrors on their ceilings ever reach orgasm?