Cherries In The Snow (9 page)

She selects a mochaccino from the bottom and hands it to me. I put it on carefully and blot.

‘It's not fair! It's not fair!'

‘You sound like a teenager.' She shudders. ‘God, you were a miserable teenager.'

‘I was not! I was cheerful. That's why you liked me.'

‘That is not why I liked you.'

‘Why
were
we friends?'

‘Too young to know better. Please let this be an end to you and older men.'

Getting ready for my date, I apply individual false eyelashes to the very outer edge of each eye, thinking, as the glue dries, that I wasn't so sad back then when I was a teenager, not desperate, but I could feel the sadness beginning to creep in and that my depression was really the equivalent of women getting face-lifts before they need them. I decided my fear of turning twenty-five was preemptive, like women who get Botox before they get wrinkles. I'd like to think I've dealt with everything early so that my happiness won't start to sag too badly for a very long time.

I had spent my teenage years up until the present day worrying about my malaise. I don't imagine there's much time to feel malaise when you have a baby. Maybe that was why Marley seemed so solid.

We were going to the sandwich bar near my office, but then I ask if he feels like going to Balthazar and he makes it happen, which seems to be the way things go with Marley. He's like Santa with a paint smell. The restaurant is hopping. A very pretty black hostess with no bra and a gray tank top greets us, flashing perfect white teeth at my date. I had held a
pencil under my breasts that morning before leaving for work, seeking to further chart their decline. It wouldn't stay, dropping to the floor with a clang. I imagined my breasts following it. The hostess's jiggled unconscionably as she led us to our table. She tucked me into my seat and I felt like I was being put in a high chair by a beautiful nanny my papa was secretly fucking. I know for a fact that my dad never cheated on my mum. I'm not so sure about her. There was a time Engelbert Humperdinck came through town and she got very cagey. I was only five, but I remember it well. She wouldn't tell me a bedtime story any night that week.

Marley is wearing a black wool turtleneck and brown corduroy pants, with stubble. He looks great, and all of New York's beautiful women are gathered in this restaurant. Two Italians weaving past us to the restrooms honk their way through a conversation. They have short skirts and long glossy black hair; you could see the future in that shine, that shampoo scent could turn any man into a pervert, squeezing closer for a smell. I'm so jealous of those women. I have hair envy, table envy, food envy.

I hate feeling like I'm on a date. Correction. Like ‘we' are on a date, since he has to be there too. It took a long time for the music teacher at junior school to explain the word
duet
. I could not understand it. I tried and tried, but each time I glared at the other girl as her voice joined mine, even when we were onstage at the Christmas pageant. ‘The world does not revolve around you,' people say. I look at them politely, like they are slightly mad, and I don't want to antagonize them. Jesus, the videotape my dad took of that Christmas-pageant duet debacle is not fun to watch.

‘Do you videotape Montana?' It sounds creepy.

‘I draw her.' That sounds creepier. ‘I wanted to be an artist. A real artist.' He is embarrassed. ‘I got sidetracked. So I like
to draw her. She draws me too. She draws on me. I save a little from each trip.' He bends his ear and shows me pink marks.

‘But I do have photos somewhere.' He fiddles in his wallet. I notice green and then hate myself for noticing it.

Both of the pictures are old baby shots. In the first, she has wisps of blond hair that someone has coaxed into a bow. She's wearing her long white christening gown, disappearing into its folds, her hands curled into tiny fists like she's going to deck the photographer. In the second, she is toddling toward the photographer, reaching out a chubby arm to touch him. The blond hair has grown into a thick hairdo, bangs starting at the crown of her head and stopping above her eyes, which are the pale blue of killer jellyfish. She's wearing a sailor suit.

‘Now, is she really a sailor,' I ask as I sip my lemonade, ‘or is that just a costume?'

He pauses for a minute, squinting a little. I flutter my semi-false eyelashes and he laughs.

‘Ah, no, that's a costume for her second birthday,' he says. ‘I should have a more up-to-date photo in here. I'll get one, I'll get one soon.'

I dig into the bread and butter.

‘When Jolene got pregnant,' says Marley as he places the photos daintily back in his leather wallet, ‘I worried at first that I would feel I'd lost a part of me. But within forty-five minutes of Montana being born, God, I loved her so much. I just wanted to squeeze her and hold her, and there's only so much you can squeeze a baby. I remember how much I wanted her to be able to understand words. It used to drive me crazy that she couldn't.'

‘I can imagine,' I say, although I can't.

‘Oh, but she learned so fast, it was as if she could see me suffering.'

I try to imagine Marley suffering. I see his brow furrowing, deep lines rippling on his forehead, his tears running from his brown eyes, spilling onto his daughter and making her grow. I close my eyes and imagine myself growing, bigger and bigger like a beanstalk, breaking through the roof of the restaurant.

My mother always used to tell me I was ‘compact' and that I packed a lot into a little space ‘like Linda Ronstadt,' she said, showing me an album from 1979. Linda looked gorgeous in cut-off jeans and a tank top. I discovered the rest of her albums one day when I was at Virgin. I wondered if my mum had stopped buying her records because she thought her music was getting worse or because she thought Linda was getting fat.

‘So you're an only child I'm guessing,' says Marley, interrupting my resentment nostalgia.

‘Correct.'

‘I'm one of six.'

‘Wow.'

‘You can't imagine what it's like to fight for your mother's attention.'

‘Is Montana going to be an only child?'

‘I'm not planning to have another kid. I love this one so much, it already squeezes the rest of my life out.'

‘Did you take that love for your little girl and use it to leave Jolene?'

‘I used my own will to leave Jolene. It took a lot. She raised me. I was with her from the age of eighteen. She could have gone to jail for me in certain states.'

‘But she didn't.'

‘Not for that. She did go to jail though. She was cuffed for protesting the closure of a local abortion clinic. Montana was in her stomach. I've never been more hysterical in my life.'

‘So Montana was born a little criminal.'

‘You could say that.'

‘Good. Then I will.'

Now it's in my head: the little criminal. I envisage her slipping out of her sailor outfit and into a little artful dodger getup, flat cap and ripped blazer with secret pockets to hide stolen wallets.

The menu is presented to us. I like a restaurant where they hand you the menu instead of flinging it. I had always wanted Isaac to bring me here and now I'm glad he hadn't. I want to lose my restaurant-date virginity with Marley. I'm nervous. I need to calm down. I immediately scan to desserts.

‘Ooh, I know what I want for pudding.'

‘What do you want for your main course?'

I look halfheartedly at the entrées.

‘Frisée aux lardons.' I'm not sure what it is but it sounds lazy, like someone with bed head in front of a TV.

‘Salad with bacon and eggs. That's not enough. You need something else. Some more protein. They have really good mussels here apparently.' A dreamy look comes over his face and he murmurs, ‘I love mussels. I love to look at them.'

‘Why?' I ask curiously.

He looks like a little boy as he says with glee, ‘Because they look like cunts!'

The word he says, which I cannot bring myself to repeat, snaps like a castanet, a mussel in a shell. Then he sighs and mimes opening up a shell and peering at it sideways. I turn to see if our fellow diners are looking. They don't seem to have noticed anything, engrossed in being blown out and European. I think about it again. The ‘C' word. There had been no violence to it. The pronunciation was a caress.

It was an extraordinary thing to say on a second date, before you've even slept with the person. It's gross. It's very, very odd. It is, most would agree, social suicide. It makes me love him immediately.

‘Excuse me.'

I go down to the ladies' room and hang out there. There are breath mints, hairspray. The lady is a Chechen. I know because I ask her, stalling for time so I won't have to go back upstairs, to my romantic doom. What a job, hanging out in the restrooms all night, a secret underworld cavern. There's a seat with a mirror, so I sit down.

‘I think I just fell in love.'

‘Congratulations,' she says, accent as thick as my mother's.

‘I don't know.'

I look at myself in the mirror. ‘Fucker! Absolute fucker!'

She turns her head and I see the crucifix hanging around her neck.

‘Excuse me.'

‘What made you fall in love?'

‘Something he said. Something sweet he said. Oh, boy. I'm gone. He has a daughter too.'

‘How old?'

‘Eight.'

‘Lovely age. Is she nice?'

‘I don't know. I don't see why she wouldn't be. How do I look?'

The low-cut polka-dot dress was a big mistake, too much tits rising and falling with every word I uttered like backseat drivers, bores at a cocktail party constantly interrupting. I look at them. ‘Get away from me!'

She tilts her eyebrows.

‘This is too much, no?' I ask.

‘No. I don't think so.'

‘Oy yoy yoy, I think so. Do you have a safety pin?'

She does.

‘Better,' she says.

‘Can I stay down here with you?'

I didn't want to be in love, especially not with a young man, a complicated young man with a young daughter, a man who said the ‘C' word on a second date. The father, not the daughter, although it seemed likely that she was also a foul-mouthed outcast. That's why she had to wear a sailor outfit in photos. The image of his ostracized eight-year-old, unable to make friends because of her odd manners, made me feel so bad for him that I went back up to the table as fast as I could.

‘Are you okay?'

‘Yep.'

‘You weren't having problems?'

‘Not toilet problems.'

This had to be the most vulgar dinner ever to occur in the hallowed halls of Balthazar.

‘What happened to your voluminous bosom?'

‘It was distracting me.'

‘Me too. You look nice.'

‘I am nice.'

I was so grateful when my frisée aux lardons came that I ate it way too fast. I would have looked a damn sight more elegant if I had snorted it.

‘Whoa there, you've got quite an appetite.'

‘Thank you.' I blush.

‘Not quite crimson.' He touches my cheek with his dark hand. I take it in mine and look at it.

‘Not quite mocha. So what are you?'

‘What am I?'

I open my bag and tip out the lipsticks, roll them toward him across the table. He looks at them one by one, at the labels I have stuck on them: ‘Puerto Rican', ‘Sephardic', ‘Native American.' ‘This is what you're calling them?'

‘No, no. I was just … thinking.'

He opens one and twirls it up and down. Then he replaces the lid. ‘All of the above.'

‘Really?'

‘You nailed it. You know me so well.'

‘So your family…'

‘Montana is my family. That's it.'

‘That's enough, huh?'

‘Feels that way.'

‘Wait a minute. Did you do the Welcome to Montana sign at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge?'

‘Yes, I did! The day she was born.'

‘I used to look at that when I was riding the subway. I'm so jealous. Imagine being appreciated by the city like that.'

‘Well, I know it's not a trust fund for college, but it was the best I could do. I was only twenty.'

‘How did you make it all work?'

‘I had to. That's the truest answer I can give.'

‘Are you anti-abortion?'

‘I'm pro going with the flow.'

‘That's a pretty heavy flow you went with there.'

‘You're not wrong.'

I am awash with childishness. Well, if he has enough, why is he taking me out to dinner?

‘You're beautiful.'

‘So I'm told.'

I am being a brat. He laughs.

The mussels come and I try to pretend he hasn't said what he's said as I watch him eat – not watching but looking up sideways.

‘You did that when we kissed. You didn't look at me.'

‘I couldn't. Jesus, I'm fucking freezing.'

He smiles. ‘I love it when someone says Jesus and fuck in the same sentence. My Catholic school upbringing.'

I put on my jacket. ‘Catholic. Ewww. My mum's Catholic.'

‘My mom was Catholic, but she's dead.'

‘My dad's Jewish and he's awesome,' I say.

‘Just goes to show. So you want dessert?'

I really, really do, but we are running late for the movie and I feel gypped, always do, the way other women do when they shave their legs and don't have sex. I put on a pretty dress for this? There is nothing more gorgeous than a girl in a dress eating dessert. Holly told me that. She says it makes her want to come.

‘Let's get it to go,' he says. He insists on paying. I see he has paint on his wrist. He guides me out with his hand on my hip. It feels sharp; all of me feels sharp in his hand. Senses attuned. Everything is noisier, colder than when I walked in. The hostess smiles broadly at me as we walk out, and for some reason I believe she is happy for us and forgive her her beauty.