Cherries In The Snow (20 page)

I decide to find the fan club address but then become worried she may no longer have a fan club.

When I wake up, I mistake the cocktail hats on my wall for African masks and feel very frightened. I pull the blankets over my head and overheat and shake until I am able to think rational thoughts and remember about my hats. When I look again, I congratulate myself on my newfound ability to reason with my imagination.

Proud, I decide to continue my adventures in adulthood and arrange for an accountant to come over the next day. It is time to knock my ten-grand tax bill on the head. Knock it and bite it and kill it. Like cleaning for the cleaner, I go through my financial records as best I can. I have saved the receipt for every hamburger, hotel, and high heel of the last three years. This is the main reason my apartment is such a mess. Shoe boxes bursting with little yellow slips of paper, a thousand different numbers printed on these slivers of consumerism, but the same name signed over and over again. Mainly I now use them to blot my lipstick. Finding the shoe boxes hugely pregnant, several giving sloppy birth, I have stuffed fistfuls of besmirched receipts into the silverware drawer, my underwear drawer, the cat food cupboard. Receipts fill the pots and pans I don't use to cook the food I never open. Packages of pasta and bottles of sauce, unopened, next to unopened bills.

I generally pay bills when the creditors call for them. I take the checkbook from my underwear drawer and clear my good
name. Most take my checking-account details and hang up. One nice lady from American Express said, on successfully clearing check 34, ‘Ma'am, may I ask why it was that you didn't pay until now?' I answered cheerily, ‘Oh, I'm a novelist. We're very spacey, you know.' Then I got off the phone and into bed, stared at the ceiling, and dreamed about slitting my wrists because my life would never be in order. One day my parents will die and I will be alone with my debt and I will go to prison and, hopefully, at least I will be able to keep my cell tidy. I thought long and hard about it, but I couldn't bring myself to slit my wrists, so I drew red lines on them with a felt-tip pen instead.

The unopened demands have somehow, in my attempt to ready myself for the accountant, migrated to the bottom tier of the cat tree. Sidney Katz helpfully sits on them.

‘Good. Stay there. I don't want to look at them.'

I have come to loathe the moment when, withdrawing money from a machine, you are asked in green digital letters whether or not you want your receipt. ‘No!' I yell at the ATM. ‘Don't tell me!'

Why I prefer to find out what my available balance is by having my card declined, I don't know. Yes, I do: Fear, fear, and more fear. Fear like the dimly lit door in a horror film, the door you should never open. And so I don't. Final reminders remain sealed for months. I become afraid, as I try to organize, that there might be living breathing things inside those sealed reminders, baby animals that I've let suffocate slow painful deaths by not releasing them from envelopes stamped with red, tiny, tiny kittens and puppies that MasterCard has sent me as a gift. Prying them open, my eyes popping, waves of relief wash over me to see that all they contain are final cutoff warnings.

My dad is fuck all help when I called him on his lunch break.

‘Um, I think I have to fill in a bunch of B-52's. Does that sound right?'

‘I dunno,' he says, and smackingly chews gum.

He hates talking about work, especially with me. Dejected, I ring off and get on my hands and knees, moving piles of receipts into subpiles. The numbers are unreadable to me.

Soon enough I have such a bad headache that I have to knock myself out with migraine medicine. When the accountant turns up, I am wasted. He is like an accountant from central casting, not like my dad at all. He has mousy blond hair and glasses and a suit. If he had a twistedness to him he could be James Spader, but he doesn't, so he is just a blond man in a suit. Pulling his face into focus, I see his expression of horror and, looking around me, remember that there are lipstick stains on every single receipt and the receipts are in piles on the kitchen floor being held down with an array of forks. Electricity, phone, rent, and AMEX: lipsticked and cutleryed.

I've seen my dad do this since I was little. Not with lipstick stains but with mess. Everywhere. Food spread around him. Sandwiches made with crushed salt and vinegar chips and mayonnaise. We'd crush the chips together. I hated them, but he liked them, so I liked them. Then I'd put my head on his stomach and listen to him digest. I thought it was the most fun in the world. Sometimes he'd let me look in his ears with a flashlight at the hair and wax, and that was also a great joy. I wanted to know how he worked, what he was made out of, what produced those glorious intestinal gurgling noises, not to mention the rapturous farts and burps.

‘I need to get my finances in order,' I tell untwisted James Spader.

On his knees poring through my defaced receipts, he looks up curiously. ‘What finances?'

I sit down at the kitchen table, deflated. ‘Good point.'

His voice is high and makes me feel higher. ‘Two years ago your account shows you had a balance of thirty thousand dollars. Now you're in overdraft to the tune of ten grand. What, if I may ask, did you spend it on?'

‘Um … chewing gum? Bits of string? Gym membership,' I say triumphantly.

‘How was it?'

‘I don't know. I haven't been.'

‘You've spent five thousand dollars on clothes this year.'

‘Wow. I wonder where they are.' I desperately rack my brain, as last time I looked there was not a single thing in my closet I could wear. ‘Bras! I have lots and lots of bras!' I pull aside the sleeve of my T-shirt as though to explain through sign language what a bra is. Sounds like ‘car.'

‘Well, good for you,' he says, looking away.

He is blushing, or I would offer to show some of the more expensive ones to him: the really beautiful Moschino one with the pink lace trim, the Aubade demicup in butter yellow.

He changes the subject. ‘You're earning again, I see. Quite nicely for a girl your age. You're going to need to put money aside if we're to do anything about this tax bill. I want you to take whatever you have left in your checking account and open a certificate of deposit. Today.'

Untwisted James Spader leaves my apartment and heads back to his midtown office, possibly pausing to have sex in the back of a burned-out car, but probably not. My high continues on the subway and ends as soon as I walk through the doors of Citibank.

My teller is a very pretty Spanish girl with pale green eyes and her hair pulled back in a ponytail and parted to the side. I
know men probably jostle other customers to be seen by her. She is a ray of sunlight in the funeral head office. Ines Rivera.

‘Hi. I have money?' I add the question mark at the end of a sentence that was not a question. I wait for Ines to answer, but she just looks at me. ‘Can you please move everything I have in my checking account into a certificate of deposit. Please,' I add again.

‘Swipe your card and type in your PIN.' She has the same Long Island whine as Mariah Carey, but none of the instability. Boy, I would like to have this woman around if I ever spilled red wine on a carpet. She'd know what to do. What a great quality: to exude an ability to cope with a crisis major or minor.

I swipe my card and, on the third try, get my PIN number right.

‘You don't have enough to open a certificate of deposit. You have ninety-eight dollars.'

She looks at me for an answer, but there is really no response to ninety-eight dollars, so I leave. It is a disaster. I feel like shit; really, the most depressed I have been in a long time. As soon as I get home, I call Marley and say, ‘I just had the greatest day. I had a great meeting with an accountant and the people at the bank were so helpful. I'm so glad you told me to do this. It's so easy.'

‘That's fantastic! I just got back from the airport. Do you want me to cook you dinner?'

So I choose a dress and lipstick, but I get rained on, and when I get to Brooklyn, I have to go straight to the bathroom and wash it off.

‘I love seeing you without makeup,' he says, gasping. ‘You look so beautiful.'

That's always a warning sign. When men say they prefer women without makeup. No, they don't. They prefer women
who look like they haven't got any on, but those women use concealer, brown mascara, eye bag diffuser, tinted lip balm, peach blusher, and eyebrow gel. It's like when men say they love women who eat a lot. Those same women starve themselves when they're not out at dinner with a guy. I work at a makeup company and Marley prefers me without makeup? I love makeup. It's my favorite form of procrastination, and now I get paid to help other women procrastinate, freeze them in the aisles with my mascara stun gun. But something in his voice seems sincere. He kisses me and I feel my clitoris blush.

‘I'll get you something to change into.'

Coming back downstairs with an oversize T-shirt and a towel, he dries my hair and wraps it expertly in a chignon. He is a macho man who knows all the most useful gay things.

‘Now watch this.'

And I do watch, as he debones fish and steams broccoli and it is so wonderful to watch, but no way am I eating it, and I guess I should have said that I don't like fish or broccoli in the first place. He looks at it, untouched on the white plate in front of me. I am scared he will be mad. He goes to the kitchen and as time passes I fear he might be crying. Then he comes back with a smile, along with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a glass of milk. And he eats my dinner. The peanut butter is almond butter, the bread wheat free, and the milk soy, but it is a nice gesture. He is one big, nicely toned nice gesture and I can't understand how someone so nice can be so muscular. Isaac was so mean and so weedy. He once made me carry a champagne bottle for him. He couldn't do it himself. I look at Marley and feel so lucky. Luck. Rhymes with
fuck
. So we do.

‘Everyone's happy,' he whispers, slumped in a chair as I lie breathless on the kitchen table. I climb onto his lap and we sit there for a while just looking at each other. I remember that
Andy Warhol once said that if you have beauty flaws you should point them out at the beginning of a relationship so they don't get held against you later on. I pause and say: ‘I was born with bags under my eyes.'

‘I see them.'

‘Once when I was seventeen I was bored, so I plucked the hair around my mouth and it grew back thicker. Now I have to wax.'

‘Okay, I get it, because sometimes it's bald and sometimes there are little hairs.' He strokes the little hairs, and had it been any other man I would have died and then killed myself and then thrown up. But with him it's okay.

He pets my hair and smells it. ‘You smell of something.'

‘Karma.'

‘What?'

‘Nothing. Grapefruit.'

‘It's nice. But I prefer your real smell.'

‘Be inside me,' I say in the tiniest little-girl voice, so lusty and enticing, and he blanches until I realize he thought I had said ‘Pee inside me.' We figure things out and make love again, and as usual it is amazing. When I am amazed, I go quiet, so I am quiet with Marley a lot. My volume control swings wildly pre- and postfucking. Before I have no muffler. Afterward I am speechless, without speech, without defense. I hated it at first, but now I love it. It is relief. After sex with Isaac I would talk and talk and talk, even when he turned away from me, even when he turned onto me and crushed me into his chest. I couldn't really breathe, but I'd keep talking.

We are lying in bed when I ask the question I have been wondering about since I saw her photo. ‘Why is your baby blond? Are you sure it's your baby?' I catch myself. ‘That's a very rude question, isn't it?'

‘Pretty rude, but I would expect nothing less of you. I like your rude.'

‘My rude?'

‘Yes.' He pulls me close.

‘But she is yours?'

‘Yes. Her mother's very blond.'

‘Oh. Do you like blondes?'

‘I like women. I told you that. What's with the blond?'

‘You're blond when you're a kid.'

‘I never was.'

We laugh.

‘Maybe we were never young.'

‘Born old.'

‘You were. Sort of. I look at you and I see too young and too old.'

‘Two toos. That can't be good.'

‘It shouldn't be. But somehow it is.'

He holds my face in his paint-stained hands. ‘I've tried to talk myself out of you. My life is complicated. I don't need this. I've tried and tried to talk myself into being a
loner. That's what I want. I remember hanging up over bridges, painting, alone. My friends would be on look out, but really it was just me. I loved the lonerness of heroin. That was my favorite part. But I can't talk myself out of you.

‘Hey, Guess what? I've taken up knitting.' A half-finished scarf sits on the bedside table. ‘Do you want me to knit you something?'

‘No thanks. Makes me think of my mother. Itchy things. She tried to knit to prove she could be a domestic housewife if she felt like it. But she couldn't. They were all misshapen and scratchy. Come to think of it, so were her chocolate chip cookies.'

‘Oh no, I only use merino wool. Here, feel.'

He rubs it on my cheek.

‘It feels good,' I admit.

‘What do you want?'

You you you. You alone. No one else. No one else to take your focus from me. No one else to knit for.

‘Knickers. Knit me some knickers.'

On the subway home, I read over the shoulder of a fellow straphanger the latest column by Isaac Bennett. It is about the iconicism in American pop culture of younger women with older men.

‘As beautiful and talented as she undoubtedly is, we would rather have a younger version of Kim Basinger than have Kim Basinger. Right or wrong, this is the male instinct. While men age like fine wine, women seem to wilt. You can tell a man who is seeing a younger woman by the vibrancy in his step. Older women for companionship is all well and good, but for inspiration it's a young girl every time. Great minds require this.'