Cherries In The Snow (7 page)

Each muscle on his stomach waits for a response. I feel so
bad for not calling that instead I say, ‘I have stretch marks. Look.' I point like a museum guide. ‘Look here. And here. And also here.'

‘Oh,' says Marley, placing his bag on the floor, ‘is that a good thing?'

‘In certain cultures.' Holly laughs.

‘I have trousers,' I add quickly.

The whole office loves it when I slip into a Britishism and they always repeat it back at me in an accent somewhere between Helena Bonham Carter and Dick Van Dyke in
Mary Poppins:

‘I have TROW-sers! I have TROW-sers!' they shriek. Marley looks befuddled.

Then I go to get the trousers. I come back with them on, half-dry, still gray-streaked. Holly, Ivy, and Vicki are back at their desks and Marley is still standing in the middle of the office. As I walk back toward the girls, he calls after me.

‘I like them.'

‘What?' I ask, too embarrassed to turn around and face him.

‘Your stretch marks. Graphically appealing. They're cool. They're pretty gorgeous actually.'

I go back to my desk, blushing. I take a test sample of red lipstick, scratch out ‘Harpo,' and write ‘Humiliation.'

Vicki is peering over my shoulder. Her round face looms before me. ‘Why would anyone want to buy something called that?'

‘They wouldn't,' I snap, and toss it in the garbage can.

‘Hey, those cost money!' barks Holly. So I retrieve it, put it back on my desk, but cover it with a tissue so I won't have to look at it.

‘I'm double-parked. I'll be back, babe,' says Marley, and walks out, the yoga classes rippling through him and toward me like a special effect. I am disappointed he has used a word
as generic as
babe
, but maybe saying it to a lesbian negates that. I look out the window and down to the street, where a 1970s Springsteen muscle car is parked in the slush. I know it's his before he climbs in.

‘What is he doing here?' I ask.

‘What he is doing,' says Holly, mimicking me, her vowels flat, her ass squashy against my desk, ‘is a mural. Remember like in high school the mural in the hallway?'

‘We all went to school in England,' interjects Ivy. ‘There were no murals, remember?'

‘Well, in New York public schools. Which means state school in England,' explains Holly.

‘I get it. I've been here five years, not five minutes.'

‘Coulda fooled me.' She smirks.

‘Oh, anyway, can you tell us why he's here?' Ivy is gobbling her words as she does her daily pizza slice, impatient as Holly offers up the facts in a thin person's morsels.

‘Well,' says Holly, ‘we're gonna have Marley do a mural in our conference room. He's the best. The best graffiti artist out there. Although he isn't out there no more. That kid makes millions.'

‘Is he some kind of design adviser?' asks Ivy.

‘Right, design advisory tomfoolery. But he's coming out of retirement to punk up the conference room. I bumped into him at a party last week. Haven't seen him in a helluva long time.'

‘What party?' says Ivy. The air is thick with what was quickly becoming obvious tension.

Holly ignores her. ‘And he says he's been itching to go back to a full-scale mural. So I said, Hey … have free rein.'

‘I think it's a great idea,' says Vicki.

‘Thanks for telling me' Ivy says huffily.

‘Ah, you'll love it.'

‘Maybe I will, but you should have told me.'

‘I think it's a great idea,' says Vicki again, like she's practicing different intonations.

‘I think it's gre—' I put my hand over Vicki's mouth.

I think up a lot of my best names in that conference room with its empty walls, dead air, lack of sapphic lust, and Vicki's babble. I hope his free rein is not going to interfere with my free thought. But mainly I am pissed at him for being cute and more so at the gals for contaminating my space with cute. I turned him down once already and he comes back and I feel all gooey like I'm in love. I don't need that at work. I don't need that full stop. Or as you Yanks say, ‘period.' Either way, this can only be disruptive. I am trying to think of the name that will be our Cherries in the Snow. That's what I have to concentrate on. Not his eyelashes. Ugh. This goo, it feels like the way I felt over Ryan O'Neal posters when I was thirteen. But this man's real, three-dimensional; I could do something with him. I feel like he likes me back and we could get married and have ten thousand babies and see …

‘So?' says Holly, watching me watch him out the window. ‘He's cute, right?'

‘I dunno, probably. I was looking at his car. Cool car.'

‘He's a cool guy.'

‘He's a boy.'

‘He's twenty-eight!'

‘Right, so like I said, he's a boy. I really only go for older men; come on, you know that. A walker and I'm in.'

‘But he's sooo dreamy,' says Holly, swooning, ‘those glasses, with that body! So Clark Kent.'

‘I thought you were supposed to be gay.'

‘Dude, I could drink pussy from pint glasses, but, oh my God, that man is hot like crack cocaine!'

I sink into my chair, defeated.

‘He's hot.'

‘See!' screams Holly, leaping from foot to foot as though they are hooves and she is a mythical fawn-girl troublemaker. ‘I knew you'd like him!'

‘I didn't say that.'

‘You said it!'

‘Anyway,' I say nonchalantly, ‘it would never work. I saw him buying soy milk at the bodega.'

‘So?'

‘I love coffee.'

‘And?'

‘You know how soy milk sits on the surface of your coffee no matter how much you stir it?'

She stares at me.

‘He's twenty-eight!' I squeal.

‘You're twenty-four!'

‘Girls mature faster than boys.'

‘Yeah. You're really mature.'

‘Can you shut up now, please? He's going to be back in a minute.'

But when he returns to the office, sequestering himself in a corner with Holly, try as I might, I can't help sneaking looks at him. I feel dirty, like a man trying to take a surreptitious peek down a girl's blouse. I notice he is wearing a little blue wooden bracelet with interlocked red hearts, a kiddie thing you buy in toy stores at the counter as you pay for your real purchases. Vicki notices too.

‘Ooh!' she gasps, skipping over, ‘I want that!,' and she grabs for it, but he moves his wrist away. He does not like her and makes it quite obvious. Brownie points for the twenty-eight-year-old.

After twenty minutes or so, he leaves and, I swear, as soon as he does, the room has less oxygen.

‘He's gay, right. Tell me he's gay?'

‘He's gay,' Holly says as she shakes her head.

‘How do you know him?'

‘We go way back. Hung out back in the day.'

‘Back in which day? What are you talking about? Have you slept with him? How could you keep him a secret?'

‘He's pretty secretive. And no, amazingly enough, I haven't slept with him. I tried it on, big time. But strange little boy is into monogamy.'

‘Did you see that little heart bracelet he had on? What was that about?'

‘Oh, that's Montana's.'

I deflate.

‘So he's taken?'

‘In a sense.'

‘What in a sense?'

‘Ask him yourself. He'll be back in a minute.'

‘I will.'

Marley comes back up the stairs with a shiny red apple in his mouth. He looks like a male model being spit-roasted.

‘What's up with your dinky heart bracelet?' I ask before he's even halfway toward me. Holly, Ivy, and Vicki scatter like pins in a game of nihilist bowling.

‘That's my daughter's bracelet.'

‘Oh. You're married?'

‘No. Separated. We were never married actually.'

‘Does she live with you, your kid?'

‘If she did, I wouldn't walk around with my circulation being cut off.'

‘Doesn't she want it back?'

‘She gets to wear it when I get to see her.'

‘When's that?'

‘Once or twice a month, unfortunately. She's in California. Work has me here for now.'

‘Holly says you're a graffiti artist.'

‘Sort of. I used to be. Sold out long ago. Now I advise ad agencies and graphic design companies. I only do pieces very occasionally for special friends. Like Holly.'

‘How do you get inspired to write your graffiti?'

‘Nowadays, supporting my eight-year-old daughter in the manner to which she has become accustomed. Is this an interview?'

‘Sort of. I write too.'

‘You do graffiti?'

‘No. I'm a novelist.'

‘Wow.' He doesn't doubt me. More brownie points for the twenty-eight-year-old. Twenty-eight, half Isaac's age, half my father's age. If I could turn him into numbers and math and science, maybe I won't be so attracted to him. The unscience of lust. But I want to talk to him too. Talk at him.

‘Yeah. And all novelists have to have other jobs. It was either this or academia.'

‘I didn't go to college.'

‘Neither did I. I dropped out.'

‘I couldn't afford it. Now I could afford it and I have such an inclination to learn. But I have a baby.'

‘Oh, so you didn't want her.'

He raises his eyebrows. ‘You're very forward.'

‘It's just that you're so young.'

‘That's why you're forward?'

‘No, I'm always that way.'

‘Oh. I thought I was special.' He feigns feeling wounded and then I see he's not faking it, it's real.

‘Did you name this?' asks Marley, picking up a blue-and-green-swirl eye pencil called Junkie.

‘Yes,' I say proudly.

‘Have you ever known a real junkie?'

‘I'm not sure. Why?'

‘I was one. Funny to see that experience diluted to eye pencil. I'm not criticizing you.'

He writes on the wall with it.

‘Hey, that's a sample … That's our wall …'

‘Sorry.' He is baffled. Of course, a twenty-two-dollar eyeliner does not make sense to a man who buys soy milk.

‘You disapprove of me.'

He doesn't answer. ‘It's the drugs that gave me the courage to climb as high as I did. Got off them when I met the mother of my child, and I never really did anything that good again.'

‘Hey, it looks like your life turned out all right.'

‘Yeah. It did.'

Marley keeps coming and going that day, up and down the stairs carrying bags of spray cans, thin as fat joints, thick as beer cans.

He is there for three days. Doing his thing. The muscles in his upper arms flex beneath his T-shirt like lovers under a duvet. On the second day I peer at him through the window of the closed door. His back is to me and his ass crack is showing.

‘Oh. Hi,' he says warily, when I pass him in the hallway, as though I have caught him trespassing. We are not allowed to look at the mural until it is finished.

‘That's just his old graffiti mindset,' says Holly. ‘You know, he went to jail a bunch of times.'

I go back to my desk, cross out ‘Chico,' and fill in the label: ‘Crush.' I go to the bathroom and put it on, smiling at myself in the mirror. It suits me, a true brick-red. I am starting to feel like my old self again. He doesn't look like an artist. He looks like a carpenter or a plumber, or a 1970s car mechanic, sliding out from under a Chevy on a hot July morning to say hi. I feel ridiculous for having a crush on a guy painting our walls. It feels so porny: ‘I've come to fix things around here.'

‘Oh, thank goodness. Things around here really need to be fixed. Oh, by the way, my friend just came over to use my shower.'

‘He's such an amazing writer. That's what they call graffiti artists,' Holly says, and I think of my laptop at home, not switched on except to e-mail my dad. My head is full of stories, but every time I look at the blank white page offered, like a sacrificial virgin by Microsoft Word, I have to turn it off again.

On the third day, I get braver. I go over to where Marley is working and look through the door's window until he comes out. I kind of stand over him in my short skirt and generally lean on things. I do a backward handstand against one of the walls, hoisting myself up against it. I try to act really casual, like I too am just doing my thing. Ivy sees me and is shocked. She says I should wear a T-shirt that says ‘I'm really good at sex. I'm very bendy.' I explain that I was just trying to communicate yoga style. My knickers flashed; it seems like something Holly would do. Except she would have no knickers on. Mine are white and large. I chose carefully that morning. All has been meticulously planned. It always worked on boys in
the playground. But Marley isn't a boy, he is a man, and when I come down out of the backward handstand, I don't quite know what to say. I stretch my arms above my head, waiting for something brilliant to come to me, but it doesn't, so I race out of the room.

I sit at my desk for the rest of the day, my back aching from the floor show. Holly persuades me that I can't go home with a backache and no date. She keeps egging me on, so at 4 o'clock I go back to the toxic-smelling room and ask him, ‘Would you like coffee? Or a Coke?'

‘I have a thermos,' he says gravely, as though he's saying ‘I have a plan.'

‘Did someone make you the thermos? Someone pack it for you this morning?'

‘I did.'

I am doing little circles on the floor with my toe, waiting for him to ask me out, when he adds, ‘I had a dream I was going to fill the thermos before I woke up. Then I got up and did it. Sometimes I dream I'm going to make toast, and then I get up and make toast. Don't you resent banal dreams?'

I don't have a comeback, so I ask him out. Although he has already asked me out and I never called him. But somehow that has been forgotten. ‘You wanna go to a movie?'