Strawberry Tattoo (9 page)

“This friend of mine thought he was pretty hot,” Java added, “until I told her that story. Now she wouldn’t go near him if you paid her. I mean, who wants to be left with your engine running and nowhere to go?”

I had a big flash of missing Hugo, who would inevitably have pointed out that the latter part of the analogy wasn’t exact, and that she would have done better to say “and no one to disengage your clutch.” Or possibly “slip it into third.” But I mustn’t get maudlin about Hugo. I wasn’t half drunk enough for it to be allowable.

“Did Kate ever confront him about it?” I asked instead. “She looks like the type who would.”

“Sure,” Suzanne said, giving this a wonderfully sarcastic spin. “She went up to him the very next day and said, ‘Well, what happened to you?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, I forgot I had to ring my brother down in Virginia. It was real important.’”

“What a loser,” Laurence said smugly. “That just adds the final touch of patheticness to an already unconvincing—Oh, hi, Don!”

Don loomed up over us, the other guy hovering by his side. Laurence, whose face was temporarily hidden from Don, grimaced at me horribly.

“Did he
hear?.”
he mouthed.

I raised my shoulders helplessly.

“Hey, Kevin,” Suzanne said, “you haven’t met Sam, have you? Sam Jones. She’s one of the English artists. Sam, this is Kevin. He’s one of the gallery assistants. We were bringing her up to speed about work stuff.”

I admired the girl’s aplomb. She might look like an ice queen but she was a good operator in a sticky situation. If I were in a tight place it would be Suzanne I’d pick to watch my back. In contrast Java, sitting next to me, was stricken with embarrassment and consequently as useless in a tight spot as a would-be ladykiller with performance anxiety.

“Hi, Kevin,” I said, determined to rival Suzanne’s cool. “This lot have just been filling me in about who’s who at the gallery. But they didn’t get to you yet, you’ll be glad to hear. Do you guys want to sit down?”

“Uh, OK,” said Kevin, sliding in next to me. He was blond and very good-looking in such a blank, unreflecting way that the gaze passed straight over him and settled straight away on something more interesting, if less regular.

“You splitting, big guy?” he said to Don.

Maybe Kevin had information we didn’t; but his choice of adjective, after Java’s hypothesis a few moments before, sent Laurence’s eyes wide in an effort to stop laughing and caused Suzanne to reach hurriedly for a cigarette before realising that she had one already smouldering in the ashtray.

“Yeah, I’m off,” Don mumbled, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his donkey jacket. “Got to haul ass.” He nodded a goodbye to our cosy little group and was gone, shouldering the door open.

“Did dungarees come back in while I wasn’t looking?” I wondered. “They have to be the most unflattering garment ever designed.”

“Bubble skirts,” countered Suzanne.

“Boob tubes,” Java added.

“Oh, come on, Java, you’d look great in a boob tube,” Suzanne said firmly.

Java shook her head. “They make me look like I haven’t got anything up here at all,” she said, mournfully tapping her chest. “The stretchy ones just flatten you out completely.”

“It’s the look,” I said unsympathetically. “You’re lucky you can wear it. It’d take a steamroller to flatten me out.”

“Well, I don’t like having no boobs,” Java said stubbornly. “Even if it is the look.”

“I didn’t know you hung out with Don, Kevin,” Laurence was saying.

“Oh, well, you know.” Kevin ducked his head. “He’s a great guy. Some of the stories he tells—he’s really been around, man. It’s pretty impressive.”

Laurence looked distinctly underawed. I could understand his basic dislike of Don; with his sharp intellect and skinny physique he might well resent a guy who, just by mumbling a few disconnected phrases and resembling
a brick shithouse, managed to pull easily enough. Even if he couldn’t follow through on it. But I was beginning to wonder whether Laurence had a thing for Kate, and resented Don’s success with her—such as it was. It would explain why he seemed unable to let the Don-baiting go.

Oh?” he said, overdoing the casually interested bit. “What kind of stories? Do tell!”

“Laurence, I’ve got another British expression for you,” I interrupted. “Key merchant. It means someone”—I mimed putting a key in Java’s back and turning it—“who likes to wind people up.”

“I get the gist,” Laurence said aloofly. “Thank you so much for that, Sam.”

“I haven’t had a chance to look at your material yet,” Kevin said to me. It was strange how his undoubted handsomeness cancelled itself out; the more you looked at him, the more bored you were with the even, perfect features, unanimated by any saving flicker of personality. He was like a doctor in a daytime soap. “I’ve been really busy with Barbara’s show. But we’re all looking forward to yours.”

“When does hers come down exactly?” I asked.

“End of next week,” Kevin said, and there was a slight flatness in his tone echoed by the studiedly neutral expressions of everyone else around the table.

“Is it not doing too well?” I probed, inquisitive as always.

Kevin shrugged.

“Barbara’s work always moves slowly,” he said. “But, I don’t know, the timing of the opening wasn’t so great. There were a lot of really big shows opening that week, and the reviews weren’t so hot, which didn’t exactly help. We’re doing what we can.”

“I heard she’s not too happy,” said Suzanne.

“Well, would you be?” Kevin said. “She didn’t like it that the Vallorani retrospective opened the same day as hers did. But what can we do? I mean, we have to plan nine months ahead! How can we know about something like that?” He gestured in what was clearly a rhetorical plea; everyone else knew the schedule as well as he did.

“Why was she cross about the Vallorani retrospective in particular?” I asked. “I mean, there must be lots of stuff going on right now.” Autumn was always the busiest season for art dealers.

Kevin pulled a face. “She thinks they’re very similar in style,” he said. This was obviously a direct quote.

“Boy, that’s some nerve she’s got,” Laurence said.

“What d’you want? Artists, right?” Kevin caught my eye. “Oh, Shit. Sorry.”

“No offence taken,” I said.

“Can I get you a drink?” he said, still embarrassed.

“Duh!” I said, flashing him a big smile.

“I’m sorry?” Kevin said nervously.

“I thought that was American for ‘Yes, of course, stupid,’” I complained. “So much for my attempts to use the local idiom.”

Laurence and I were the last survivors of our merry little band. Kevin had peeled off after about half an hour, as soon as Java had announced her intention of leaving, in fact. He had offered to walk her to the subway.

“He’s a trier, I’ll say that for him,” Suzanne said drily as they left the bar.

“She’s terribly pretty,” I said, being fair. “Anyone would want to have ago.”

“Talking of which, I have to go too,” Suzanne said. “I just didn’t say it before because I didn’t want to get in Kevin’s way.”

“She’s so nice,” Laurence said to me.

“I’m so nice,” she agreed. “Sam, will you be OK for getting home?”

“Don’t go yet!” I pleaded. “It’s only eight-thirty, and I need to stay up till eleven! If I go home now I’ll pass out, and I haven’t had anything to eat yet—.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll look after Little Orphan Annie,” Laurence said to Suzanne.

“You’re so nice,” she said.

“I’m so nice. Do you like Mexican?” he asked me.

“If they look like Antonio Banderas.”

“That’s a really bad joke. And he’s not Mexican, he’s Spanish.”

“Isabel Allende had a fantasy about wrapping him up in a tortilla and eating him,” I countered to confuse the issue.

“She’s Chilean.”

“Well, we’re getting closer to Mexico, aren’t we?” I said unanswerably.

“Bye!” Suzanne was halfway out the door. “See you tomorrow!”

“You have to realise that people here work hard and get up early,” Laurence lectured me once we had moved to a little Mexican hole-in-the-wall on the next block. “You can’t expect to be able to drag important gallery assistants out drinking with you every night till the small hours.”

“It’s not nine yet, and you’re hardly drinking,” I said reproachfully. “Not to mention that you ordered a tofu burrito, which I find pretty sad and not remotely Mexican, frankly.”

“I have asthma and food allergies and lots of neuroses,” Laurence said, unabashed, “which I think make me a fascinating person.”

However, my black bean grilled vegetable burrito with extra sour cream and guacamole was infinitely nicer than his dairy-free, spinach, brown rice and organic pinto bean one, which naturally made me smug. I pointed this out.

“Being a fascinating person doesn’t come easy, you know,” Laurence said. “You have to work at it. Sometimes you even have to suffer for it.”

“Whereas Kevin has completely given up the struggle,” I said bitchily.

“Kevin is a straight, straight arrow.” Laurence sighed. “The kind of guy that says what he means and does what he says and thinks irony is the adjective that goes with the thing you use to press your shirts.”

“Nice to have a couple of those people around,” I commented. “It’s a cheap way of feeling superior.”

We spent the rest of the meal ripping to pieces as many people as we could think of, and by the time we walked out into the night streets we were in near-perfect harmony.

“Hey, TAXI!” Laurence yelled suddenly, breaking into a sprint. If nothing else, it shattered the moment. I stared after him in shock. As we got into the cab, I commented that this was a sign of a real New Yorker; nobody
here, no matter how cool and laid-back their image, had the slightest hesitation or embarrassment about bellowing across the street, fighting for a cab or giving the driver clear and constant instructions about the best way to get where they were going.

“Well, what d’you do in London?” Laurence said blankly. “Just raise your hand a little and go, ‘Oh, cabbie, if you wouldn’t mind stopping it would be awfully nice’?”

I giggled. “Not quite. But if you yelled like you just did in London everyone would turn round to look at you. Here they don’t give a damn.”

“‘Oh, look at that awe-fully vulgar American,’” Laurence said gleefully. ‘“How terribly loud they are, my deah!’ Hey,” he said to the driver, leaning forward, “I said West End first. We want to take a right here, OK?”

The driver executed a squealing turn to put us in our place. As he cut the corner at a precise ninety-degree angle, we ended up being practically on top of each other.

“Whoah, there goes my burrito,” I said, sitting up straight again. “I can feel it all squashed up against my right stomach wall…. There’s something about burritos that makes me think they reassemble back into that shape and size as soon as all the pieces hit your stomach.”

“One great lump of carbo,” Laurence agreed. “Of course us dairy-free mavens have it a tad lighter.”

“Right,” I said a few beats later, when I’d caught up with his meaning. Several margaritas and jet lag didn’t help with Americans using dialect at high speed.

As the taxi shot up Tenth Avenue, braking and accelerating with abandon—sometimes simultaneously—I found myself clasping my stomach with both hands as if to cushion the burrito against the impact. I should have side roll bars installed.

“So, are you seeing someone?” Laurence said casually.

I thought this was a good way of putting it. If he’d asked if I had a boyfriend my toes would have started to curl; but seeing someone seemed pleasantly light and airy.

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“You don’t sound too keen on him.”

“No, I am. It’s just that I’m not used to, um, actually
seeing
someone.”

“So are you guys going steady?”

“Well, we’re seeing each other,” I said cautiously, baffled by this new query. “Does that count?”

“I don’t know,” Laurence said with the air of a professional relationship assessor. “Are you dating him?”

“Laurence, I haven’t the faintest idea what the fuck you’re talking about. Oh, whoops—”

The taxi made a left that sent the burrito dangerously high up my oesophagus. I tried to massage it down again.

“I’m going to have to explain the dating thing to you,” Laurence said. “It’s important and it will take some time. Remind me to set aside an afternoon in the days to come, OK?”

“Sure.”

“Which number West End did you say?”

I fumbled in my pocket and produced the crumpled memo to myself I had prudently made.

“Next block,” he said to the cabbie. “On the right.”

We squealed to a halt. I tried to give Laurence some money but he wouldn’t hear of it.

“First ride is free,” he said. “Welcome to the city.”

“Well, thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow, OK? Thanks for looking after me.”

“Any time.”

The taxi screeched away. I turned towards my building to find the doorman already holding the door open for me. By now all my various New York experiences were blurring together—crazed taxi drivers, the castellated Manhattan skyline, downtown bars. I could hardly remember where I had dumped my bags; this afternoon felt like days ago. The green awning which stretched out grandly from the façade of the apartment block, almost to the street, came as something of a shock. It was so posh. So was the doorman, in his gold-braided uniform and cute little peaked cap. He was smiling at me politely.