Cupcake (2 page)

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***

TWO

True love. I'm starting to suspect the concept is pure illusion, an
insipid brand name manufactured by Hallmark and Disney.

"There, there, Ceece," Danny soothed. "So young to be so jaded. If true love is pure illusion, then what is this the two of us have here?" He sat on the toilet next to the bathtub, a dark shower curtain allowing him to see just his sister's face and her garbage-bag-wrapped-cast leg propped up on the bathtub ledge, rather than a full-on vision of her nakedness. From his side of the curtain he handed me a pitcher of water to rinse out the conditioner in my hair.

"This is just weird, bordering on platonic incest, if such a concept is also available for branding," I answered. I poured the water over my head, then dipped my head under the bathwater for an extra rinse.

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Branding is what Danny oughta do for the cupcake business he started after the café he owned with his former boyfriend went under. This city has gone crazy for cupcakes. They're sold everywhere: in cafés, in bakeries, even in street corner bodegas. The heavenly creations Danny sells to these establishments go way beyond the simple devil's food cake with buttercream frosting formula to include Oreo, Reese's, and Snickers concoctions; genius with marshmallow fluff; and pastel-hued fondant layers with Matisselike confectionary portraits on top. And while I would very much like not to be seduced by anything so fashionable, I can't help myself either. When I came up from under the bathwater, I told the cupcake mastermind, "And I'm gonna be really happy if you tell me you baked the chocolate cupcakes with your signature cappuccino-flavor frosting as a reward later tonight for me making it through this bath experience."

Even if I hadn't known my biological half brother my whole life, I still couldn't think of a single other person now whom I'd want sitting alongside me in the bathroom as I attempted the annoying and painful task of not only stepping into the tub, but also bathing with a cast on my leg that wasn't supposed to get wet. I'd only met my brother baker man for the first time the summer before last, because of that small complication of my conception being the result of my mother's twenty-year-old girl dancer-model affair with Frank, the big boss at the advertising firm, who already

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had a wife and children, namely Danny and our other sister, lisBETH. Yet for all that I've only known Danny for a small fraction of my life, from the instant we met I felt this instant
ka-pow!
connection with him. Maybe a shrink would say the
ka-pow!
was really
ka-phony!,
but that assessment would be wrong, because mostly what I've felt with Frank and lisBETH since getting to know them has been,
We share nothing besides some random DNA, and it's gonna be a long time before--and if--we ever truly bond.

"Then be happy, Dollface," Danny said. "I made you a special cappuccino cupcake batch this very afternoon." He placed a bottle of bubble bath on the ledge, and I couldn't help but pause and (non-incestuously--seriously) admire his nice face before turning my body slightly to run fresh warm water into the bath. Sometimes when I look at Danny's happy face with kind brown eyes shaped and colored as perfect as espresso beans, framed in bushy brown eyebrows and a mop of messy black hair, a chronic grin charming his lips, I think,
How did I get so lucky to discover you?

"Oh, be Thelma Ritter, would you?" I asked him. She's the wisecracking, all-knowing insurance nurse who tends to James Stewart in
Rear Window.
She's kinda my hero.

"You start," Danny said.

Yes!

I mimicked clipped consonant Grace Kelly-speak. "Did you bring me dinner from 21, darling?"

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Danny rolled his eyes like Thelma Ritter and imitated her exasperated, seen-it-all, middle-aged lady nasal tone. "Didn't you heat, Dollface? 21 went out of fashion years ago."

"Darling," I repeated, trying hard at Grace Kelly's cool sophistication, but succeeding mostly with CC's spazification, "are you aware that the swank new restaurant where Aaron took the chef job does home delivery? I bet if we called him now, he'd deliver dinner to us himself!"

Bye-bye, Thelma. It was fun while it lasted. Danny returned to normal voice. "Nope, I'm not playing. I know you love Aaron--we all love Aaron--but if you don't give up the campaign to reunite him and me, I'm going to fess up and tell you that my 'hopeless optimism,' as you call it, is indeed just that. I'm going to tell you that there is no such thing as true love. Also, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? Total fabrications."

I pouted. Danny laughed. Then he announced, "Your punishment!" He ran out of the bathroom long enough to queue up the old stereo turntable in the hallway. He stepped back inside the bathroom to flash me an album cover picturing a fifties-looking, chirpy-happy lady with a bouffant hairdo. "Nanette Fabray!" he said.

Besides cupcakes, my other Danny treat to placate my suffering is the collection of one-dollar old records he buys me from the guy by the West Fourth Street subway stop, who hawks ancient record and book memorabilia laid out on a sidewalk sheet. Danny has

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made it his personal mission to enrich my convalescent time beyond movie-watching and boredom-whining by introducing me to music that does not involve my preferred brand of musical entertainment, which would be beautiful punk emo boys screaming about "The world's ending, but I love you so fucking much!", or any song from
The Sound of Music
soundtrack. So far I admit I indeed have new appreciation for the musical stylings of the Electric Light Orchestra, Minnie Pearl, Liberace, and the Big Bopper. I especially love Danny's selections of wailing blues ladies from the scratchy old turntable days, and in particular I can never hear enough of the Esther Phillips dirty dentist song where she sings about "How you thrill me when you drill me," except the song also makes me homesick because my dentist in SF is so hot and I will never find another dentist like him and why did I have to move to NYC, anyway?

FACT: I miss home
mucho,
and being laid up in a cast completely sucks. But, FACT: It is very enlightening being housebound in the heart of one of the gayest neighborhoods in the universe. I mean, I need not worry that I chose not to go to college.

I am getting such a better education from my brother Danny.

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***

Three

The highlight of being laid up with a cast is all the people who feel

sorry for you. They bring treats. Me hate cast, but me like treats.

Autumn led the procession. She arrived bearing a bag of mini Nestlé Crunch bars, and a postcard from Shrimp.

I wanted to sulk that Shrimp had written to her and not me, but in all fairness, the last negotiated point before he and I went our separate ways was the one called our "clean break." We thought we were so cool--we'd never be like those pathetic former star-crossed lovers who torture each other with clinging cards, letters, phone calls, and whatnot. We were going to start our independent new lives properly. Independently.

Stupidly.

Would Shrimp be tortured to know my new life involved a broken leg that had resulted in my lying on my bed for days on end,

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entertaining truly naughty sex fantasies about him? I mean, places we'd never gone before. Higher ground, so to speak.

As Autumn handed me Shrimp's postcard, I couldn't help but breathe out a small sigh of relief. The postcard was of the generic tourist variety, picturing a pretty New Zealand beach, and was not a postcard Shrimp had drawn himself, like he used to send to me. Shrimp and Autumn had been longtime friends before their almost-fling back when he and I were broken up the first time. Luckily, their almost-fling resulted in her deciding she was gay and his being totally weirded out to be the guy to have made her realize that, so happy ending all around for the Autumn-Shrimp-CC triangle.

Autumn said, "I find it interesting that our Shrimp, who couldn't be bothered to finish high school, should write haikus so nicely yet, perhaps not so surprisingly, he can't spell for shit."

I turned over the postcard to see what he'd written on it, resisting the urge to pass the postcard quickly under my nose in case I could still pick up any of Shrimp's boy scent, even after the postcard's across-the-equator travel. At least I got to see Shrimp's graffiti-squiggle handwriting, and in haiku, no less!

New feelind surf calm

Sea siegns on empty canviss

Pig Appel bites girls?

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"He's miserable without you!" Autumn said. "How great is that? And he's using me to get to you."

"How do you figure?" I bit into the bite-size Nestlé Crunch bar. Newly discovered understanding about starting a new life: You need old friends along to ease the process. College girl Autumn might be all fancy freshperson at Columbia University uptown, but how lucky for me that she could work a MetroCard downtown to deliver her San Francisco friend's favorite old candy bar treat. It never tasted so good.

Autumn flopped on my bed and picked up Gingerbread. I laughed at the image, my old childhood rag doll being held by the girl literally wearing a rag around her head: doll meets doll. Gingerbread's rag style is timeless and unchanged, but Autumn has adopted the arty-sapphic-chic look since moving to NYC. Along with her baggy white carpenter's pants, black leather belt framing her bare waist, and pink gingham cutoff blouse, she wore a white rag wrapped around her head and tied at the front, Rosie the Riveter style, allowing premium view of her melting pot of a Vietnamese-African-Russian-Irish-American model-pretty face.

Autumn held up Gingerbread and spoke to her in teacher voice. "You see, my little one, it's like this. I've known Shrimp since kindergarten, and he's never once in all the years I've known him sent me a postcard. If we want to decode this haiku of a postcard,

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I'd guess he's bored and restless in New Zealand, the art isn't happening for him, and while he makes inquiries as to how the recently transplanted New York contingent of our former Ocean Beach girl crowd is, his use of the plural form 'girls' really refers to one certain girl. And not the one he sent the postcard to."

Gingerbread glanced in my direction, as if to affirm,
Autumn's right, right?

I wasn't having it. I said, "Or it could just mean New Zealand is like this Zen surfer bliss for him and he hopes you're scoring lots of babes in your new life at Columbia."

"Sure, that's what it means. Because Shrimp's so crude like that. Stop projecting." Autumn tossed Gingerbread to me. Gingerbread didn't mind. She's retired now, but she likes the exercise. Gingerbread also wouldn't have minded for Autumn to continue the Shrimp speculation conversation in painstaking detail, but a VROOM VROOM SCREECH CRAAAAAAAASH boom boom boom series of noises cost Shrimp his focus in our conversation. "What the hell was that?" Autumn asked.

"My favorite part of the day! Mystery man is out to play!" I hobbled over to the window next to Autumn and pointed to the courtyard garden below us. Window-gazing has become my favorite form of solitary leg cast entertainment when not watching movies or imagining me and Shrimp trying out the Kama Sutra poses from the book I found hidden at the back of my bedroom closet

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when I first moved in. "Could you hand me my binoculars over there on the desk, please?"

My convalescent time has not been completely without educational value about life in New York. What I've learned: Those privileged enough to be able to walk down a residential street in the Village may see townhouse buildings next to old carriage houses next to tall prewar old buildings alongside short modern apartment buildings, but to look down these streets from the front views, you'd have no idea about the whole other worlds that exist on the other side. From my window view facing the backs of the buildings on the next street, I see the usual brick architecture and wrought iron of fire escape landings, window grills, and balconies, but I also observe wild kingdoms back there: gardens everywhere--on rooftops, on outdoor terraces, in courtyard patios--and animal life too: There's the lady with the ferrets, the couple with the snake collection, and the freak with a livestock of homing pigeons. Oh yes, freaks! They're the highlight of my new rear window life. You see plenty o' freaks when walking the streets of the Village, but the rear window view takes their entertainment value to the next level. These neighbor freaks are often (a) naked, (b) half-naked, or (c) trying to get naked with someone (or some
thing
--yikes!) else.

My favorite freak is the mystery man who occupies the ground floor garden apartment opposite my building. Although mystery man is very ancient, like probably around fifty or sixty, and

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somewhat scary-looking, owing to a perpetual case of creased eyebrows and a downturned-lips frown, I am positive he's not the psycho killer of my backyard view, like the Raymond Burr character in
Rear Window.
Mystery man practically lives in his garden, reclining hour after hour on a hot-pink-painted wooden lounge chair under an upright lamp with a blood-red Chinese lantern lamp shade. He is partial to iced tea, which he brews on his outdoor table in the sun, with fresh lemons floating at the top of the pitcher, and he eats random food throughout the day, like cucumber slices, beef jerky, beets from a can, Sour Patch Kids, and lox chips, but never whole meals. Most times he hangs out with headphones on his ears, composing music on a laptop, but sometimes he forgets to plug in the headphones and I can hear the music on his computer. A sampling of what I've heard wafting up to my window from the laptop's portable speakers (with little pride flags affixed to them like talismans) would be: monkey wails, piano bang noises, bird chirps, ambulance sirens, a playground full of kids squealing, a harsh old-man-voice bellowing "Get outta there,"
meow meow,
and one time Christopher Plummer singing poetic about edelweiss--and right then I suspected I adored mystery man.