The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me (22 page)

I had a boyfriend. A proper one I was mad about. Who made me laugh, who looked after me and whom I wanted to look after. A man I was proud to be out and about with, or in with, or frankly anywhere with. A man I was
in love with
!

Julian Bell. Julian Bell. Sometimes when I wasn’t with him I just whispered his name, like a stalker from a horror film, then squeaked things like ‘RAH!’ and ‘BEEP!’ because there was no stalking and no horror film going on here. Just a gorgeous, sparkly New York Romance.

With him, I felt like the funniest woman on earth, which I really was not, and in him I felt like I’d met the funniest man on earth, which probably wasn’t true either. But we spent hours – days – laughing. We didn’t sit talking about philosophy until the early hours, which is how I thought proper relationships began. In fact, we often talked a load of bollocks and laughed until we hurt.

I knew it was love because it was easy to talk about a load of bollocks and laugh until we hurt.

I thought Julian Bell was the most perfect-looking man I’d ever seen and he told me I was beautiful. I’d often catch him watching me with a lovely half-smile and I’d think,
Everything about your face is AMAZING
. When I asked him what he was thinking, he replied, simply, ‘That I love you.’

I knew it was love because I believed him.

The first time I saw him in his own apartment – in the middle of his books, his non-matching wine glasses, his worn jumpers and his rolled-down packets of biscuits with elastic bands round them – I fell even more in love with him. I adored all the little details of this man. We ate imported Somerset Cheddar and had some bonks and sang and danced to ‘Eye of the Tiger’.

I knew it was love because here was a man who imported English cheese and owned ‘Eye of the Tiger’.

I had been enjoying my life until this point. Really enjoying it, at times. But Fiona had been right: I’d never really pushed my boundaries, which had been fine until now. Pre-New York, the size of my life had been just right for me. But I was in Act Three now and things were expanding. I felt as if the Sally I’d left behind in London had been on an empty stage with a few dim spotlights here and there, but now this steady, beautiful Julian Bell character was illuminating every corner. He saw every part of me and seemed to love the complex mess that was Sally Howlett. He helped me see a bigger life for myself, not in terms of wealth or success but in terms of bravery. Being visible. Being me.

In fact, he saw things that even I’d failed to notice.

‘Right. I’ve been polite and waited a bit,’ he announced
one day. We were eating tacos at La Superior. ‘But enough. Sally, what the HELL is going on with you and opera?’

I hastily shoved down a prawn taco in case I lost my appetite, and Julian laughed. He had remembered to wear his glasses tonight and he looked clever and gorgeous and a bit mad because they were still held together with gaffer tape. ‘What do you mean, what’s going on with me and opera?’

‘I mean, you cry like a child whenever you see an opera, you work in opera and, most importantly …’ there was an unsettlingly dramatic pause ‘… most importantly, Sally, you’re clearly an opera singer.’

I choked.

‘Don’t deny it! I heard you sing Mimi the night we met! And don’t choke. You’re not allowed to choke.’

I stopped choking and shoved down another mouthful, waiting for my appetite to evaporate and my body to freeze.

They didn’t.

Slowly, stunningly, I realized that I wasn’t actually that bothered.
Dear God
, my head said dazedly.
You’re going to tell him! Aren’t you?
Dear God! I replied. Yes! I bloody well am!

‘Um, well. I’m not an opera singer. That’s the truth. I’m a wardrobe mistress. But I’ve been singing since I was seven. In private.’

‘What exactly does that mean?’

‘It means I sang in my wardrobe. And I still do.’

Julian sat back, folding his arms. Wonder and something I hoped was affection worked its way across his face. ‘You sing in your wardrobe?’ He spoke slowly. With complete amazement.

‘Correct.’

‘Because you didn’t want your parents to hear you,’ he said, almost to himself. I nodded. I didn’t need to explain any more because he’d got it already. My family. The crazy fear of being noticed. The shame when we were.

‘Dear God,’ he murmured. ‘You learned to sing like that in a wardrobe?’

‘I’m not that good!’ I took another taco, a pork one. This was great. Julian had stopped eating, I hadn’t died of a heart attack and I was getting all the tacos.

‘You’re
seriously
good. On a technical level you’re really quite excellent,’ he said. (It didn’t occur to me to ask him how he knew. A year later I would remember this moment and smack myself around the head, wondering how I could have missed it.)

‘Ah, not really,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been buying masterclasses for years so I’ve learned some stuff through them.’

Julian came to his senses again, sequestering three tacos in case I ate them all. ‘Back off,’ he ordered. ‘So can I just be certain. You have never had a lesson? Never sung for anyone?
In your life?
’

I began to flush. ‘I was supposed to sing at the school concert when I was in primary school,’ I said, ‘and I was so terrified that I wet myself. And then I never tried in public again until the poetry slam. And I blame it on you because you put some sort of a spell on me and I ended up singing in front of
everyone
. And while we’re at it, how come YOU were so good?’

Julian batted me off. ‘Oh, I had singing lessons when I was younger. Did a few things.’ He sipped his Modelo,
then reached over the table for my hand. ‘I’m so sorry you weed yourself,’ he said gravely. ‘It must have been awful.’

‘I’m sorry too,’ I said cheerfully. ‘It was.’ And, out of nowhere, I was laughing. I laughed and laughed and laughed. I laughed so hard that a bit of shredded lettuce flew out of my mouth and splatted on the side of Julian’s beer bottle and I didn’t even care. I laughed about that awful, deadening experience because suddenly I could, and eventually Julian laughed too and trendy Williamsburg people looked at us as if we were dicks, which we were. Julian didn’t push me any further. It had only been a few weeks but he knew my limits.

Had I mentioned that he was amazing?

But, for all the love and laughter, these were not halcyon days. My cousin – my sister, my best friend – was going completely off the rails. That she was on drugs was now indisputable. She had stopped drinking, because of the calories, but was distressingly wired most of the time. Mostly she was argumentative and overbearing, paranoid and noisily present, but other times she seemed almost comatose. Her appearance was going to pot and so was the flimsy thread of dependability she’d once possessed.

She would not eat, whatever I tried. Her diet was no longer something she had any control over: the only deviation she could take from her morning egg white, her lunchtime peas and her dinnertime salad was to eat nothing at all. Her eyes had begun to look bug-like and her body more obviously hairy. The disintegration, so sudden and brutal, caused me physical pain. Julian’s warm arm
would curl around me, as I lay watching the shadows shift across the ceiling, and I’d wonder how it would end.

I spent as much time with her as I could. I was frantic with worry.

What surprised me was that Julian seemed to want to spend so much time with her too. It was as if she had become a project, although he appeared to have no interest in trying to stop her taking drugs. He just seemed to want to hang out with her. A lot.

More than once I got back from the Met to find them sitting on the sofa, Bea or Barry watching warily from the other side of the room. Fiona was a lot more animated around Julian than she was with the rest of us. The second time I found them together on the sofa she was laughing uncontrollably at some video clip he was showing her on his phone. She grabbed his arm as gales of laughter rent her tiny, frail body.

‘Hello!’ I said, grateful for the sound of happiness.

‘Hi, baby,’ Julian said, reaching for my hand. Momentarily, it irked me that he didn’t get up to kiss me. Fiona took the phone off him without acknowledging me, so she could carry on watching the clip. Her eyes were slightly bloodshot.

‘Hello.’ I leaned down and kissed Julian, telling my head to be quiet. He didn’t need to get off the sofa to show me that he was in love with me. He’d told me last night, about a hundred times, as we’d lain around my bedroom counting each other’s moles and discussing types of fart.

‘Hi, Freckle,’ I said.

Fiona looked up for a second. ‘Oh, hi, Sally. Sorry, I’m watching this …’

Julian, seeing my face, winked kindly at me. As if to say,
Leave her be
.

I wandered off to the kitchen where Bea and her Brazilian masseur were making something complicated involving kale and flageolet beans. ‘How long has Julian been here?’ I asked Bea.

She raised her eyes to heaven. ‘Hours. He must be determined to sort Fiona out,’ she whispered.

‘I keep thinking that. But do you ever hear him telling her to stop taking drugs? To eat some food? To start behaving like a reasonable human being? Because I don’t.’

‘Well, no, but he must be saying these things when we are not here.’

‘I’m not sure he is, you know. He’d tell me if he had any important conversations. They just seem to be …
hanging out
.’

Bea looked up from the kale she was chopping. ‘Darling, are you jealous?’

‘No.’

I wasn’t, actually. It was more just … confusion. Those two had separated off in recent days, forming a little club, which, while it didn’t threaten me, didn’t make sense. What was their connection? Why was Julian so happy to spend all this time with her? And why was Fiona happy to talk to him when she’d all but stopped talking to the rest of us?

If I could somehow understand what the bond was between them, I’d feel a lot more comfortable. I knew Julian wasn’t on drugs. And I didn’t think for a second he was after Fiona, or even she him.

Then why? What were they doing?

Bea ordered me to get some wine out of the fridge. ‘It is time for a drink,’ she announced. ‘Maybe you are upset because Fiona is going to move in with Julian for a few months.’

I stopped in my tracks. ‘She is?’

Bea tutted. ‘Ah. Well, yes,
preziosa
, but you already knew this, no? I am sure it is nothing bad.’

‘I knew it was a possibility,’ I said glumly. ‘But I didn’t know it had been decided on.’

I stared off into the distance as Bea filled my glass with pale cold wine. I couldn’t imagine not seeing Fiona for as much as a day. How would she cope with nobody to look after her?

‘Hi there,’ Julian said, coming into the kitchen behind me. ‘I came to find you so I could snog you hard and then feel you up a bit. Bea, please leave,’ he ordered, which she did amid much hooting. Julian had written
I luv Sally & Céline Dion
on his hand. He kissed me all over my face and told me I was a chipmunk. Then he gave me a long, lovely hug. ‘She’s not been too bad today,’ he said into my hair. ‘So you can relax tonight. Enjoy this kale extravaganza of Bea’s and kill me with flageolet-bean trumps later on.’

I relaxed. If Fiona really did want to stay here, she was in good hands. Julian Bell lit up every room he walked into.

‘I don’t think I want to leave New York,’ I announced. ‘What shall we do?’ It was the day after Bea’s kale supper (ruined by Fiona and Bea having a loud screaming argument in Fiona’s bedroom) and I’d realized I had only five days left.

‘Mm? Hang on …’

Julian was sitting on his bedroom floor with his laptop on his legs, editing someone’s article for his magazine. He had pushed his sleeves up to his elbows but one had slid back down again, a limp concertina of dark blue hanging from his wrist. I smiled at him, absorbing every detail of his face, his hair, his long, surprisingly elegant fingers. I wanted to slide my hand up inside his sleeve.

He doesn’t touch-type
, I realized to my surprise. I knew he’d started the
Brooklyn Beaver
three years ago, but because I’d not wanted to pry about his wife I was a bit hazy on the chronology of his life before that.

But that was the nice thing about what had grown between us. I was in no hurry to know everything: I trusted that it would all unfold as and when it was meant to.

‘Sorry, Sally, I won’t be a minute.’ Julian looked up briefly, smiling over his glasses, and I felt something warm glow in my chest. I went over to the window while I waited for him.

Julian lived in a relatively modern apartment in East Williamsburg, just off Graham Avenue, and had the back of a brownstone terrace and a tangle of overhead electrical cables for a view. It lacked the scale and magnificence of Raúl’s but I found it just as fascinating: here, after all, was real life, packed into small apartments, framed by peeling windows and lit by tattered lampshades and fairy lights. A small Hispanic woman sat for hours in the window of the house directly behind Julian’s; she made – with ceaseless momentum – bead necklaces, which she hung on a hook coming out of the window frame. Above her there was a young couple who spent more time on their phones than talking to each other, and to their right a
tired, faded room through which an old man occasionally shuffled.

Julian’s apartment was on the ground floor – or the first floor, as Americans called it – and it had a small garden, which his bedroom opened on to. His room was the corridor through which Pam, his housemate’s dog, travelled to her favourite spot under a mulberry tree: she burst in whenever she fancied. Which had been a bit embarrassing on more than one occasion.

‘Hello, Pam,’ I said, going outside to sit with her. Julian’s bedroom door had one of those proper American screens that snapped shut to keep the insects out.

‘Sorry,’ he called, hearing it close behind me. ‘I’m on the last paragraph.’

‘Don’t worry. Me and Pam are hanging out.’

I sat on the bench by Pam. She thumped her tail enthusiastically in the dust, then went back to sleep. I thought how cool Julian’s housemate was, calling her dog Pam. Her name was Carmen and she worked nights in a homeless shelter. Because Julian almost always stayed at mine, I’d only met Carmen twice but she’d struck me as being extraordinarily chilled. I struggled to imagine Fiona taking her place.