Strawberry Tattoo (21 page)

“I feel buffeted by life,” I said to Laurence. He had taken me a couple of streets along from the gallery, to a little coffee shop where we perched on high stools at a bar running along the window, watching a series of eccentrically dressed people go by. I was working my way through a mini banana cheesecake which was one of the best things I had eaten in my life, accompanied by a hot cider toddy which was just as good. Laurence seemed to consider this place nothing out of the ordinary. New Yorkers were as spoiled as trustafarians when it came to eating out.

“Me too,” he agreed dourly. Every so often he would take off his glasses and rub his eyes violently with the backs of his hands till they were red and sore. It wasn’t the best method for releasing tension. “What did you say a couple of days ago? It’s like being on a rollercoaster. Just as I’m feeling really down, Stanley or someone’ll come out with a blasting piece of idiocy. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“Yesterday,” I corrected. “It was yesterday I said that.” “Sweet Jesus. Is that all? It feels like a lifetime. The phones won’t stop ringing, Carol’s going nuts trying to cope with everything—and she’s had to go off to DC today. …”

“Should you be here?”

“No way,” he said frankly. “But I needed a break.”

He sighed. I liked Laurence a lot.

“You must think you’ve stumbled into a barrel of nutcases,” he said. “I guess I could have put that better, but I’m too tired to think straight. And don’t worry about Suzanne. Of course you’re asking questions. I mean, Jesus, I’d probably be suing by now for mental distress.”

I shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m used to nutcases,” I said lightly.

“I haven’t been sleeping,” he said in parentheses. “And now this tattoo thing! Talk about terrible coincidences! Or maybe it isn’t. I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse. Well, no, it’s obviously worse, because that means it was someone who knew Kate instead of a random maniac—or is that better? I mean, which would she have preferred?”

“Laurence, if you keep rubbing your eyes like that they’re going to come out the back of your head,” I informed him.

He looked at me blearily through the knuckles crammed into his eye sockets.

“They’re pretty sore,” he conceded, lowering his hands reluctantly.

“Shit, I’m not surprised. You should see how bloodshot they are. You look like an Alsatian with a stinking hangover.”

Laurence grimaced, picking up his glasses. “I’m blind without these,” he said, pushing them back on his nose. “Mind you, it’s kind of nice not to be able to see anything right now. Everything’s this big fuzzy cloud.”

“Is that what your antidepressants do? Put you on a big fuzzy cloud?”

“No, I couldn’t work if they did that. Actually they kind of sharpen everything up, but you don’t care about it so much.”

“Nice one,” I said rather ironically.

“Yeah, it’s pretty good,” he agreed. My sarcasm had gone right over his head; proof, if any were needed, of how exhausted he was. “Let’s not talk about the gallery right now, OK?” he said unexpectedly. “I could do with some distracting.”

“Just don’t say ‘Tell me about yourself,’” I requested. “I hate that like the plague.”

He smiled. It was a weak effort, but we were moving in the right direction.

“I know!” I said suddenly. “You were going to tell me about the difference between seeing someone and dating.”

“I was?”

“Well, is there a difference?”

“Sure,” Laurence said easily. “Seeing someone means it’s not exclusive. Dating is more serious.”

I blinked. “Could you run that by me again?”

“God, you Brits,” Laurence said, baffled. “Don’t you know anything?”

“Obviously not.”

“OK.” Laurence pushed his glasses back up again, moving them up the bridge of his nose with one bony finger. All around us, thronging the coffee shop, hurrying past on the streets outside, black-clad SoHoites pushed and clamoured, overheard snatches of conversation alien and yet flooding past my head. One of those washes of disconnection swept over me, where people are speaking the same language and yet have such a different set of values they might as well have come from a parallel universe.

“Seeing someone isn’t too serious, OK?” he said as seriously as if he were giving a lecture on Jane Austen’s subtextual critique of social mores. “Like, say I meet this girl and she’s seeing someone, I could still ask her out. I mean, I would consider her single, for all intents and purposes.”

“But she’s seeing someone!” I was baffled. “I mean, obviously she isn’t single.”

“Uh-uh. If she’s seeing someone, she can see other people too. But if she tells me she’s dating someone, then I would back off. Look, I know it seems crazy. When I came back to college in the States I kept fucking up, OK? It took me two years to work it out. Everyone else knew it already from high school.”

“Work
what
out?”

“The dating rules,” he explained impatiently. “There are all these rules you have to follow. Otherwise the dating machine spits you out like a faulty piece of crap. So, OK. Let’s imagine I’m seeing someone.”

“Which means you can see other people too? I mean, it works both ways?”

“Oh sure. Absolutely.”

“But do you know the other person is seeing someone else?”

“No way!” Laurence was shocked. “That would never happen! You never, never talk about what you’ve been doing in too much detail at first. It’s basically don’t ask, don’t tell.”

He sighed. “It’s really hard to make people understand. And you know what? Americans don’t talk about this. I don’t know whether they’re embarrassed at how stupid it is, or they take it for granted, or what. But when I came back from Paris, I tell you, I was drowning. And no one helped. The first girl I was dating here—I really liked her, she was very tough and together, which is what I go for—” He looked momentarily wistful. “So we meet up to go see a movie—on Saturday night, right, this is good—and I asked her casually as I was buying the tickets what she’d been doing the night before. She nearly bit my head off. How dare I ask her what she’d been doing, was I trying to snoop around her private life, etc. etc.”

I stared at him, the last bite of banana cheesecake frozen halfway to my mouth.

“Laurence,” I said, “can I ask, how, um, intimate were you with this chick? I mean, had you, you know, shagged or what?”

Laurence rolled his eyes. “And over here we have this image of the English as refined and beautifully spoken…. No, we hadn’t got it on, but we’d done plenty and I thought I was in with a pretty sure chance that evening, OK? So I get all confused, and I blurt out in the middle of the cinema, ‘But I thought you were seeing me! I mean, I didn’t think you were seeing anyone else!’ And she says, ‘Hey, buddy, we haven’t had that conversation yet.’”

“My God. What conversation?” I finished the cheesecake.

“The conversation,” Laurence said, adjusting his glasses, “where after you’ve been seeing each other for a while you decide together that you’re going to take it to the next stage. That is, you’re going to see each other exclusively. But you know,” he said with great seriousness, “the whole
thing is really about power. It’s all codified. It’s a big topic of conversation here—how long it should take you to ring someone, how many days you wait after the first date before getting in touch again. I know guys who swear by a week at least. The aim is to make the point that the other person likes you more than you like them. And there’s always this high tension because no one wants to put all their eggs in one basket, it isn’t safe. This city eats up relationships and spits them out. People play major head games,” he said rather sadly. “That’s why I’m single right now. I’m always too keen. If I like someone I don’t want to fool around. Which really fucks you up in New York. You show them you like them and they walk all over you.

I clicked my tongue in sympathy. “It’s not so complicated in London,” I said. “I mean, we have all the usual neuroses, but once you’re seeing someone you’re seeing them. Then if you cheat on them you’re a bitch. I mean, I couldn’t turn round and use the excuse that we’d never said we were going to be exclusive.”

“How did you meet your boyfriend?” Laurence asked wistfully.

I winced at the word. “Urn, he was in this play I did some mobiles for. Actually I thought he was gay at first. He’s pretty camp. He likes to present himself as a sort of effeminate Oscar Wilde type.”

“And you find that attractive,” Laurence said blankly.

I grinned. “Yeah.”

I saw no reason to add that Hugo’s effeminacy went only so far and no further; it pleased me to be thought eccentric. Besides, if I told people how good he was in bed everyone would want a piece. As they said over here.

Suddenly I remembered that I ought to be ringing Kim. I looked around me for a payphone.

“What is it?” Laurence inquired. “You’re jittering as if you had DTs.”

“Oi, keep your tongue off my alcohol consumption, Prozac Boy,” I retorted. It was nice to see Laurence back to his normal bantering self. “I was looking for a phone. I need to ring a friend.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realise I was boring you that much,” Laurence said courteously. “There’s one on the corner.”

“OK.” I fixed my gaze on him meditatively. It had occurred to me that this might be a good opportunity to score some Barbara ‘n’ Jon gossip, were there any going. “Guess what? Do you remember that I used to know Jon Tallboy from London? He was the father of my best friend.”

“Still is, presumably. And of course. How couldn’t I recall such a touching reconciliation scene? Poor Stanley went into a catalepsy. ‘On a happier note …’” Laurence said reminiscently. “And Barbara shooting more arrows at you than they let off at Saint Sebastian. You must have been picking them out for the rest of the day.”

“That’s exactly the point. Jon had to make up an excuse and sneak away from her to give me Kim’s number. I think he was frightened I’d ask for it in front of her and provoke a major quarrel.”

“The Bilders ought to have one of those medieval mottos, like ‘What I Have I Hold,’ or ‘Touch Us Not Lest We Cut Your Hand Off At The Wrist,’” Laurence said. “It would fit Barbara perfectly. She’s pretty hot on property rights.”

“And Jon’s her property?”

He shrugged. “She bought him, didn’t she? Paid for him and shipped him over here? No one had ever heard of him till Barbara married him, and suddenly he was this big art critic. She’s got a lot of strings. And she’s a great puppeteer. God knows if he had any idea of the kind of Faustian pact he was making …sell his soul to Barbara in return for being set up in a nice little berth, a couple of consultant editorships on magazines, she’s even wangled him a part-time job editing art books…and now that the merchandise has some independent value, thanks to her careful investments, she’s keeping an eye out that no one poaches it from her.”

“Would anyone try?” I said blankly.

“Well,” Laurence said with the profound cynicism which I liked so much in him, “she hasn’t made the mistake of getting him a teaching gig. Students are the big danger. Plenty of young, fresh meat sitting in the front row, crossing its legs and flicking its hair and purring ‘Oh, Professor Tallboy, I just
luurve
that British accent!’ No, Barbara’s too sensible for that. Still, you never know. There’s supposed to be this big shortage of attractive
single straight men in Manhattan. Though frankly, I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m still available.”

I grinned at him. “But she’s even jealous of his daughter,” I said, refusing to be distracted. “It’s crazy.”

“Some people who buy property want to feel that not only do they have the full title,” Laurence said, “but that they’re the first ones to set foot in it. They want virgin territory. They rip out everything the previous owners did and start again from scratch. Then they boast to all their friends about what a wreck the place was when they bought it and how you wouldn’t recognise it now. The last thing they’d want would be someone showing photos of what it looked like before.”

“Let alone its children popping up.”

“Yes, my metaphor takes us only so far,” Laurence agreed. “But still, you see what I mean?”

I nodded. Laurence was quite right. Barbara Bilder’s attitude to Jon could only be described as proprietorial. I saw the Bilder family crest in a more country-and-western vein, however. Hands Off My Man. Don’t You Go Messin’ With What’s Mine. You Can Look But You Cain’t Touch (You Slut).

I got up and went to phone Kim. I was starting to get stupid. The only thing for it was a change of scene.

I found the Ludlow without difficulty; it was barely ten minutes’ walk away, straight down West Houston. With the aid of my trusty subway and bus maps I was navigating smoothly around New York, or I would have been if there hadn’t been so many distracting shops on the way. I even went into Warehouse. It seemed ridiculous to cross the Atlantic simply to shop at Warehouse, but everyone had told me how much lower the prices were over here and I thought I might as well check out whether there was any truth in that. There was. The only thing that kept me under any sort of control was the knowledge that I was heading out for the evening and didn’t want to be lugging seventeen bulky carrier bags around with me during an East Village bar crawl. I made the rule that I could only buy what would fit in my rucksack.