Strawberry Tattoo (8 page)

“When doesn’t she? You’re in a hurry,” Laurence observed, watching me pull my gloves on as fast as if I were practising it as an Olympic sport.

“Coffee will only take a girl so far,” I explained. “Now I need some vodka. And do they have any bar snacks at this place we’re going to?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said to me apologetically as we settled into the booth. “Maybe we should’ve taken you somewhere more hip than here. It’s a real dive.”

“Oh, no,” I assured her. “I like it. It’s cosy and I’m shattered. Anything too designer tonight would have given me hives.”

“Well, if you’re sure…. We always come here. I don’t know why.”

“’Cause it’s not posey and the drinks are cheap?” Laurence suggested.

It was a little bar on Bleecker Street, only a five-minute walk from the gallery. I found this area much more congenial, or perhaps it would be fairer to say familiar, than my lofty perch on the Upper West Side; SoHo was generally constructed on a more human scale. The buildings were lower, the streets closer together, and we had passed a shop with the best array of fluorescent wigs I’d ever seen, music spilling out from the wide-open door in a slow insistent rhythm. It was like Camden with money.

This place was simple and basic: wooden floors, wooden booths, a glowing bar at the far end and surprisingly low lighting for six in the evening, when it was only just starting to get dark. Soon I would learn that this was one of the factors that made New York bars so fabulous. They were so dark you couldn’t see how much you were drinking, they served cocktails as a matter of course, and they stayed open till very, very late. It was paradise, really.

“Oh, by the way,” Kate said to me, “Carol asked you to come in tomorrow and she’ll take you to lunch. She said about twelve-thirty.”

“Come in earlier if you like and I’ll show you some of the stock,” Laurence offered. “We’ve got some weird and wonderful stuff.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” I said. “Get myself out of bed and onto New York time.”

“About eleven-thirty,” he suggested. “I find that after more than an hour of looking at art, one’s eyes glaze over.”

“It’s a date.”

“What can I get you?” the waitress said, coming up to our table.

New York bars even had table service. You didn’t have to move if you didn’t want to.

Kate ordered a margarita. I immediately seconded that.

“They have margaritas here,” I said dreamily as the waitress left us. “I like it already.”

“They have margaritas everywhere in the city,” said Laurence pityingly. “I didn’t realise you Brits were so starved of culture.”

“Yeah, right. Like there’s centuries of history in America,” I retorted.

Suzanne laughed. Laurence rounded on her at once.

“Suzanne, you’re from
Belgium.
You can’t talk.
I
know,” he went on gleefully, “let’s play Ten Famous Belgians! We haven’t done that in at least two weeks.”

“Shit,” said Kate, “I was going to write them down last time so I could reel it right off next time we played.”

“It’s a game we invented a while back,” Laurence explained to me. “To taunt Suzanne for being a snotty European. First one to name ten famous Belgians gets a free drink.”

“Surely she always wins?” I said, looking at Suzanne, who was lighting a cigarette. She rolled her eyes at me, but didn’t comment.

“Oh, Suzanne’s banned from playing, of course,” Laurence said airily.

“That’s not very fair.”

“Oh, we get her a drink too. We’re not total bastards.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Suzanne witheringly. But she seemed to take the
teasing with a good enough grace. And when you’re tall, blonde and built along the lines of a ship’s figurehead, it’s easy to convey that you consider petty mockery beneath your notice.

Our margaritas arrived in big ribbed half-pint glasses, studded with ice and a hefty straw.

“God, this is good,” I said, downing half in one slurp and beaming round the table.

“So how do you like it here?” Java said.

“Do you mean here in the bar or here in New York?”

“Well, either, really. But I meant the city.”

Everyone pricked up their ears. They genuinely wanted to know. I thought this was quite sweet. Londoners wouldn’t have asked the question, not giving a damn about the answer; our attitude would be that if New Yorkers didn’t like it in London, they could sod off and die. And the first part was optional.

“I’ve only been here about ten seconds,” I said, drinking some more margarita, “but so far it seems great. The gallery is a wonderful space. I’m really looking forward to planning out my installation. Ugh, that sounded so naff and gushing,” I apologised. “I’m usually much nastier than this.”

“We’ll make allowances for the jet lag,” Kate said kindly.

“I need to know where to go shopping,” I said with decision, as my eyes fell on her extremely nice bead choker. “I should get started as soon as possible. I’ve only got a month.”

“Clothes?” she said.

“What else is there?”

“OK, I’ll give you some places. Kinda downtown, funky stuff, right?”

“Where are you staying?” Laurence asked.

“I’ve got a sub-let on the Upper West Side.”

“Where exactly?”

I gave the address, which was on West End Avenue in the lower seventies.

“Great! We’re practically neighbours!” he said cheerfully. “I’m in the lower eighties.”

“Don’t you guys need oxygen masks that far uptown?” Kate said sarcastically.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Kate, it’s not as if I lived in the
upper hundreds,”
Laurence retorted. “And I don’t have to pay through the nose for a skanky little East Village dump.”

“Could we cut out the eternal uptown/downtown debate?” Suzanne said a trifle wearily. “I’m sure Sam isn’t that interested.”

“I would be if I knew what it was about.” I finished my margarita. “Shall I get in another round?” I waved at the waitress.

“My God,” Laurence said, temporarily distracted, “I’ve always heard the English drank like fish, and it’s so true.”

I looked round the table. Everyone else was, at most, halfway down their drinks.

“Shit,” I said. “And I was going slowly because of the jet lag.”

“Is it true you guys all drink till you fall over?” Java wanted to know. “I heard it’s a Saturday night thing over there.”

“Not fall over,” I corrected. “Stagger, perhaps. Another margarita, please,” I said to the waitress. “OK, you were saying?”

“Uptown versus downtown,” Suzanne said. “I’ll do this”—she held up her hands to ward off Kate and Laurence, who were both trying to speak. “Being a snotty European, I can see both sides of the question. Uptown has the park, river walks, the museums, bigger apartments, especially the higher you go. But there’s not that much going on and everything shuts pretty early. Downtown is much more hip. But it’s grungier and it costs much more so everyone lives in shoeboxes.”

She looked around the table. “That was pretty fair, right?”

A round of nods answered her.

“Where do you live, Suzanne?”

“Midtown,” she said cheerfully. “You must come around. I have a great place.”

“Talk about spending a fortune, though,” Laurence said. “A thousand bucks a month just for the marble in the lobby.”

“I don’t spend a fortune,” Suzanne said tranquilly. “My flatmate does. He’s a banker,” she explained to me.

“One of Suze’s many rich would-be boyfriends,” Kate said. “He thought giving her somewhere fabulous to live practically rent free would win her heart.”

“And has it?” I asked.

Suzanne gave me a beautiful smile. “It certainly didn’t hurt. But I don’t believe in making decisions in a hurry.” She put one hand up to check that her hair, drawn back into a bun at the nape of her neck, was still in place.

“She’s holding out for the richest Belgian in New York,” Kate said affectionately.

“Does he have to be Belgian?” I wanted to know.

“Tradition matters,” Suzanne said seriously, an effect that was rather undercut by being simultaneously carolled by Laurence and Kate. Clearly it was a familiar saying of hers.

“I should be going,” Kate said, looking at her watch.

“Meeting someone?” Java asked.

“Yeah.”

The way she said this, her voice flattening out as if she didn’t really want to answer, made my ears prick up. Kate had been so ebullient up till now that this change of tone was instantly obvious. Suzanne picked up on it immediately.

“Oh shit,” she said, leaning across the table to look at Kate more closely. “Kate, it’s not Leo?”

Kate shrugged. It wasn’t a confirmation or a denial, it was an evasive, don’t-push-me kind of shrug. But Suzanne rode right over the signal.

“Kate! You said it was over!” she said, unable to help her rising intonation. Whoever Leo was, he had Suzanne more than worried.

“It
is
over,” Kate said. “Relax, OK? Oh, look who’s come in.” She waved at Don, who had just shambled through the door, accompanied by another guy. He raised his hand in greeting and went over to the bar.

“That was a bad attempt to distract me,” Suzanne said sternly. “You never say hi to Don normally.”

“Yes, I do. I’m not that rude. Look, I really have to go.” She chucked a five-dollar bill on the table and stood up. “Get them to tell you about the
Don thing,” she said to me, pulling on her jacket. “It’s a good story. Are you coming in tomorrow?”

I nodded.

“OK. So when I see you I’ll give you the shopping rundown. Bye, everyone.”

She waved and was gone. Suzanne stared after her.

“Something’s not right,” she said crossly. “If she’s seeing Leo again …”

“Old boyfriend?” I said.

“Bad news,” Java informed me.

“Kate tends to like them with problems,” Suzanne said, drawing on another cigarette. “But Leo …”

“Leo was overdoing it, even by her standards,” Laurence said.

A pall of seriousness hung for a moment over the table. Though I was curious about the nameless sins of the absent Leo, I was definitely not in the mood for
Sturm und Drang
this evening. I wanted everything to be light and bubbly and fun so it would keep me awake until at least eleven o’clock. I sensed that as soon as things got heavy my head would hit the table and stay there, snoring.

“Tell me the Don story,” I pleaded as winsomely as possible. “Kate said it would be funny. I need funny right now.”

“Well,”
Suzanne and Laurence said simultaneously. They paused and looked at each other.

“Go ahead,” said Laurence. “You’re the girl. It’s a girl story.”

“This is
so funny,”
Java promised me.

“Well,”
Suzanne said again, her eyes gleaming with amusement. “This happened about a year and a half ago, just after Don joined the gallery. He’s pretty much Kate’s type—she likes them kind of butch.”

“Does he have problems?” I inquired.

“Just
wait,”
Suzanne said. “But yeah, he’s got kind of a druggie past, I think.”

“And it’s not like his ‘art’ is going anywhere fast,” chimed in Laurence cattily.

“Oh, he’s an artist?”

Laurence burst into a fake coughing fit.
“Please
don’t make me laugh! My asthma!” he pleaded through the simulated wheezes.

“Carol lets him use a room downstairs as his studio,” Java explained to me. “It’s kinda derivative, though. His work.”

“Could I just tell the story? Would that be OK with you guys?” Suzanne said pointedly. “So we all go out for a few drinks after work, and one by one we all peel off, but Kate and Don are stuck to each other like glue by that time. I mean, it’s pretty obvious. They’ve been sitting on the same sofa for the last hours, thighs clamped together, and she’s actually been pretending she can understand what he says
and
thinks it’s funny. So they go back to hers and start making out, things are getting hot and heavy, and finally they decide to go for it. Only neither of them have any condoms. Things get more and more frustrating“—she waved her hand in a large embracing circle—”and at last Don says right, that’s it, he’s going out to get some. There’s a twenty-four-hour drugstore on the next block. So he puts on his things, goes out, and”—she paused for effect—
“never comes back.”

“No!”

“Oh
yes,” said Suzanne, who was enjoying this tremendously. “Just disappeared.”

Java was shaking her head in a pantomime of disbelief.

“What a wimp!” I said incredulously. “Performance anxiety, right?”

“That’s what I think,” Suzanne said. “Scared he wouldn’t be up to it. And apparently he tells the guys that he’s this real stud. Hah!”

“Or it’s about the size of a cocktail weenie and he didn’t want her to know,” Java suggested.

“Also possible. So he’s all mouth and no trousers,” I said thoughtfully, looking over at Don, who was still at the bar.

“What?” said Laurence, leaning over towards me.

“All mouth and no trousers,” I repeated. “It means you talk a lot about how good you are in bed, but never follow through. In Don’s case, of course, it would be ‘all mouth and no dungarees.’”

“Excellent,” Laurence said, a contemplative smile on his face. “I like these British expressions.”