Cherries In The Snow (12 page)

I splash my face with water and then, turning my back to the mirror, lean against the sink to try to catch my breath. I realize I have been sitting there, breathy and blank-brained, for a while, and suddenly I feel too embarrassed to return to the bedroom. That fifteen minutes seem like a two-week period of noncommunication and I can't work up the courage to pick up the phone. It is doubly neurotic since I know
Marley is passed out cold. Realizing that I have some leeway, but still afraid to return to the bed, I scoop myself up off the sink and go to look at Marley's house. We did it in the kitchen, which is surprisingly roomy and well stocked for a bachelor boy. The living room is large and ill lit, hung with eerie, childish artwork that looks like the prison work of a serial killer, that naive stuff Marilyn Manson sells to Johnny Depp. But on closer inspection each is signed Montana. Of course. The prepubescent white elephant in the room, framed neatly and hung lovingly. The centerpiece is a coffee table/Scrabble board Marley told me he had made himself on his last birthday.

I know, of course, the bedroom, clean and light like a room at a B and B, two dog-eared
New Yorkers
on the bedside table contributing to the illusion that this is a weekend getaway. And, truth to tell, it feels like a weekend getaway and that's what's making me nervous. I want to meet the kid. I don't want to be the weekend getaway. As much as I dreamed of finding someone to be a Springsteenian runaway with, I don't want to be a getaway at all. I want to be home. I want to be the place he's thinking of if he ever has to click his heels together three times and say ‘There's no place like home.'

And I figure the only way to be that is to meet his daughter. The only way to be his true love is to befriend the one woman he will always love more than me, and always should love more than me, no matter what.

Montana's name is written on her door in the same bubble script as on the billboard. She is only eight years old, but already she has her own logo. I touch my hand to it and whisper, ‘Please like me. Please please like me. I like your daddy so much.' I kiss my fingers and place them on her doorknob like it's a mezuzah and I'm just about to turn it and take a peek when I think: She should be the one to show me
her room, when she feels like showing it to me. I remember how crazy it used to make me when my mum would take harmless flicks through my harmless little diary. Even the most loved and pampered eight-year-old feels like she has nothing that is truly hers, and I remember feeling that my mother being in my room without me was a huge transgression. I edge away from the door before I can change my mind and wander back up the hall to Marley's room. The door is closed and for a moment, moving my fingers to the knob, my hand looks tiny in front of me, the knob way too high to reach without standing on tiptoes. I stretch up, clad in a winceyette bunny-print nightie, and when I get to the other side, it has transformed back into a big girl's black lace underwear.

As I climb into bed, Marley pulls me on top of him.

‘I saw your daughter's room.'

He kisses me and says, ‘Don't look so frightened. She isn't here.'

I climb off him and back between the sheets. ‘That's why I'm here, huh?'

He nods breezily, but I feel like I am about to be sacrificed.

‘Yes,' he says, ‘that's why you're here. She gets here tomorrow since you mention it.'

‘How long will she be here?'

‘Well, I've been meaning to talk to you. A while. Back and forth. I'll be looking after her a couple of nights a week.'

‘How come?'

‘Because I'm her father. And because her mother is launching her line of Cool Yoga bath products here. She's going to be working overtime. So I won't get to see you quite the way we have been. I'm excited to have her with me, but I feel bad about this, like I'm betraying her or being a shitty dad: I really feel pissed that I can't spend all my time with you. It's been so delicious.'

‘Why can't you do both?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Why can't I be here when she's here?'

‘It's pretty early on to meet her, don't you think?'

‘No, I don't! You've already told me that you love me.'

‘And as soon as I told you that I loved you every fiber of my being screamed no no no! Retreat! Retreat!'

‘What am I, Iraq?'

‘I'm sorry, but it's the truth: I got that sick feeling I think I last had when I ate steak after being vegetarian for ten years.'

‘What am I, meat?'

He sighs. ‘I think what I'm trying to say is coming out wrong.'

‘I think so, maybe. You wanna try again?'

I feel bad 'cuz I sound a little harsh. Then I see in a flash that besides all his other talents, Marley has the coveted gift of being able to make you feel bad for telling him when he makes you feel bad. That's real girl skill, that one. Vicki works on it nonstop. But her face isn't half as sweet as Marley's, the daddy with the baby face.

‘Oh, man. Look.' He shrugs, his cheeks flushing pink. ‘I never date girls your age because they always, without fail, cheated on me. I was so good to them and I was always left with egg on my face.'

‘I'm sorry.' At the same time I feel a terrible urge to punch those girls from the past. I know, in my future, that there is no telling I won't do the same thing as they did. Marley, his eyes glassy, is still leafing through their datebook, opening the car door to find them with another guy, sitting behind his gal as she's necking with another guy in the movie theater.

‘They weren't even being malicious. Not at all. Girls in their early twenties are just finding themselves. Older women know their sexuality, they're done with experimenting.'

I've done enough experimenting to last me a lifetime, but I don't tell him that. Besides, I'm not going to interrupt him. He's on a roll now.

‘I want to find a woman who won't walk out, because she'd be walking out on me
and
Montana. I want to find someone I can grow old with, be sick with. I can't imagine anything more romantic than cleaning shit off your dying lover's ass.' The shine comes back to his brown eyes. ‘It would be like making love.'

‘Gross!' I holler, unable to contain myself.

‘I have a baby. I know fluids can be beautiful. I made a chart for Montana's poos and wees. That's how you know everything's functioning right. Her poos were an occasion for celebration. “Gold!” I'd call them. “We have gold!” '

‘Gross.'

‘You've said that twice now.'

‘I know, and I usually only say it once or twice a year.'

He seems really offended by this.

‘Don't you get it? It's beautiful.'

‘I'm trying to get it. It's just that I'm twenty-four. And I don't have a child. I'm trying to get it. I just think if you'd let me meet your kid, it would be easier for me to understand. Don't you think?'

He ignores me. ‘It's okay, Sadie. It's hard to get. But I suppose I thought you, with all your mess and cat hair, would get it.'

‘I don't have cat hair. My cat looks after it for me.'

I look down at my T-shirt. It is coated. Every time I pet Sidney Katz he sheds an entire sweater. ‘Okay, so I'm covered in cat hair and my apartment's a pigsty. But I love the mess. It helps me feel free.' Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit that I want to get on my hands and knees and shovel up and burrow under the earth.

‘Jolene loves cleaning up. Loves it. Neat freak. She spent two thousand dollars on a vacuum cleaner.'

That he is comparing us already … Is that good or bad?

‘That sucks.'

‘No, it's wonderful. I can't tell you how great it is to be around.'

I look over at my pile of clothes in the corner, which have somehow crept into a new corner, now at two bases. I'm cornered. I am about to give up, leave, when he kisses me. Just leans forward at the end of his sentence and plants one on my mouth for no reason.

Goddammit. Why has no one kissed me like this before? Twenty-four years old and everyone has been joking with me all these years? What a ripoff. I want my money back. I want to go to each of their houses and stand outside until they give me my kisses back. I'll melt them down, sanitize them, and regenerate them in the shape of this: the real thing.

And yet … and yet … the real thing can't be really real until I meet Montana. And he doesn't want me to. Which means he doesn't mean it when he says he loves me. Okay, slow down, Sadie, take a breath, not a hop, skip, and a jump. Don't put two and two together and get insecurity.

I search for my next sentence out the window. The sky is slushy gray like the bathtub ring from dyed blond hair. I am so glad I'm not a blonde anymore. That ring used to drive me crazy. The blond was never neat enough and never slutty enough. I was neither Grace Kelly nor Debbie Harry. I was just a mess. He has great hair, Marley, thick, dark, wavy. Movie-star hair.

I look back at him; his face has clouded over. ‘What are you thinking, Marley?'

‘I was just thinking about making love to you. And you coming. And me coming. I just think what we have is so
exceptional. I would be so devastated if …' He can't finish the sentence, so I finish it for him.

‘… If I thought it was rubbish?'

He nods sadly and I see that he has taken his own hop, skip, jump, resulting in a cavalcade of suspicion beneath those lashes and under that heart. I take his hand, which, cut, chewed-nailed, and paint-stained, hides nothing.

‘Marley, I really do want to meet Montana. And I want to meet her not as her father's girlfriend but as her father's friend. I should be genderless.'

He holds my hand tight and laughs. ‘With that rack? Good luck!'

‘And we can't show affection in front of her, none, not even holding hands.'

He turns serious. ‘I don't know if I can cope with not touching you.'

‘Well, you're going to have to. We have to think long-term.'

Immediately I regret saying it. Long and term. Conjures up images of Margaret Thatcher clinging to power until her approval rating went so low that even her own party couldn't stop the freefall. I imagine myself in a two-piece suit, one of her frilly affronts to femininity round my neck, orange bouffant of hair, soupy glances from Ronald Reagan.

Marley changes the subject. ‘Don't you have to write? I thought it was so gorgeous the way you got rid of me that first morning so you could work on your novel.'

‘You did?'

‘Oh, my God, I went home and jerked off.'

‘Disgusting.'

‘Don't worry. I don't do it anymore. I can't do it without you.'

I mime blushing behind an eighteenth-century fan.

‘You're too kind.' I stay behind my imaginary fan an extra beat and try to figure it out. ‘Wait, so is that a yes? Am I meeting the little darling? Do I get to shake hands with my jury, my archnemesis, my celestial soul mate, my future?'

I look out from my fake fan to check that I didn't say any of that out loud. From the way Marley is dreamily masturbating, I take it that's a no. Breath of relief. My indoor voice has started to kick in. First sign of the apocalypse. Perhaps I'm growing up.

Gorky's, open from 6 A.M. to midnight, is the best cafe in the Village to write in. Sometimes I have a bash at my novel; more often I bang out names for Grrrl. At the front left window table is the seat where I came up with ‘The Have-Lots.' It was, in a single morning, the cosmetics equivalent of the five-year period when Prince released
Love Sexy, Purple Rain
and
Sign of the Times
. The music at Gorky's is great and at precisely the right volume: nostalgia rock – you know it so well you can hear it without listening and it doesn't distract from your own words. Often
The White Album
. Sometimes Donovan's greatest hits (and they are great); occasionally Sheryl Crow. The amazing thing about the Beatles is that they always sound of the times. That's how you know they're the most important band in the history of rock.

There are a couple of group tables and several coveted desks in the recessed dark corners and the full-length front-facing windows. At night the clientele seems to be teachers marking homework, during the day aspiring screenwriters gossiping about who got their short into Sundance between slurps of coffee. The waitresses call out exotic names: ‘Paloma,' ‘Tatiana,' as they bring unexotic food to the inspirées.

Today I sit across from an actor memorizing lines for an audition. ‘But don't come back,' he hisses between sips of tomato soup, and ‘Oh, you want a cigarette?' He makes little
Al Pacino tics. His lines in the script are circled. I see him staring into the air and psyching himself up. He is not going to get the part. He sings along to Donovan.

At the table across the way there is a twenty-something guy I think I recognize from a UPN sitcom I once saw, and he's staring at pretty girls, of whom there are a number. One says, ‘How you doing?'

‘Pretty good. Doin' some work.' He looks away. I know they have never had more than a conversation and they don't even know each other's name, but he is acting like he didn't call her after sex. I am so happy to be in a relationship. He should be so lucky. The politics of coffeeshop chat screw with my concentration and I close my laptop without writing a line.

That night, when he is peeing into my toilet, I knock on the door and ask Marley, ‘Am I your girlfriend?'

He stops peeing, kicks the door ajar, kisses me, and answers, ‘You're my special friend.' He sees my face fall and adds, ‘My very special friend.'

Hmm. I climb back into bed and start reading the
National Enquirer
.

‘I wish you wouldn't read that shit.'

‘That's what you wish? That you waste your wishes on?'