Blue Rose In Chelsea (2 page)

     “Haley,” I say weakly, when he introduces himself as Evan Candelier.

     I sink back on the daybed, Evan to my left, Dylan and Brandon to my right where the stretchy curtains act as a sort of cheesecloth straining the watery sunlight.  The windows, nearly level with the floor, are wide enough and tall enough to jump through with ease, perhaps making the black jailer bars necessary.  Brandon dumps his jar of pennies to count his bounty.

     “Nice shoes,” Evan addresses me.  “Are they new?”

     I bought them at the mall, but I find myself inventing an exotic origin for them to impress the cosmopolitan creature in the blue bandanna.

     “I bought them at Balduccis,” I say, with what I hope sounds like nonchalance.

     “Don’t they sell food?”

     “I mean Botticellis,” I amend, blushing to the tips of my fibbing toes.  But with my legs crossed one over the other it occurs to me that I may not have removed the large red Payless clearance stickers on the soles of the shoes, which Evan, no doubt, can view clearly from his vantage point.

     I listen to the chatter of The Roomies, while Evan observes me with anticipation, as if I am about to do something interesting and strictly for his amusement.  His presence extends in all directions; he is a dancer used to swallowing up space, or as dancers like to say, “eating up the floor.”  I danced two seasons with the Princeton Ballet, and I have a bit of that ability—to own and shimmer in the space I occupy—and he perceives this quickly, and surrenders to me some of the space between us by sitting up slightly, his legs retracting almost imperceptibly.

     The Roomies tell Evan a bawdy tale of their drummer and an accommodating groupie at their last gig.  They laugh uproariously, and Evan’s perfect mouth melts into a grin, but he steals glances at me as if he is the only one who senses this may be an inappropriate story to tell with a woman present.

     The Roomies are debating a new name for their alternative rock band.  I suggest “The Gippies” because Dylan is a devotee of our fortieth President.  Brandon is game, but Dylan dismisses it as sounding too early eighties.  Brandon, the former financier, is trying to expand his cultural horizons into more refined channels by studying the literary giants, and suggests the name “Ozymandias,” although he mistakenly attributes the poem to Lord Byron.

     “None of our fans will get the reference, much less be able to pronounce it,” Dylan says dismissively.

     “Mask of Anarchy?” Brandon offers, another Shelley reference, which affords me the graceful opportunity to correct him without actually correcting him by gushing, “I love Shelley!”  Brandon, having saved face, takes the bait, and we bat back Shelley phrases.

     “Pavilion of Heaven?”

     “Heaven’s Blue Dome?”

     “Enchanter fleeing?”

     “Heirs of Glory?” he one-ups, mispronouncing heirs.

     “Hairs of glory?  Hairs are fleeing is more like it.”  Dylan tosses in his two cents, in reference to Brandon’s receding locks.

     “
Nothing in the world is single/all things by a law divine/in one spirit meet and mingle/why not I with thine
?” Brandon recites, hoping to recover from his phonetic
faux pas
.

     Dylan folds his arms across his
Rattle and Hum
T-shirt and snaps his gum like frantic fireworks.  He is not happy with Brandon’s newfound literary bent.

     “
And the sunlight clasp the earth/and the moonbeams kiss the sea/what is all this sweet work worth/if thou kiss not me?
”  As I recite the last five words, slowly, and with a teasing articulation, I glance at Evan, as if laying down a direct challenge.  He looks charmed, stifling his lopsided smile when he sees Dylan eyeing him with suspicion.

     “My sister is obsessed with suicidal poets.  I’m considering putting a twenty-four hour watch on her.”

     “Shelley didn’t commit suicide.  He drowned in a boating accident,” I inform my brother.

     “Oh, I stand corrected.”  Dylan rolls his eyes.

     “His lover committed suicide,” I clarify.

     “Can you blame her, having to listen to that crap all day?” he returns.

     “He broke her heart when he left her for another girl.  He believed in free love.”

     “Do you believe in free love?” Evan Candelier inquires, and despite his deadpan delivery, I sense he is genuinely fishing for some insight into me.

     “I believe in one great love,” I proclaim.

     Evan leans into his hand; his gaze floats over me, as if reading words superimposed across my silk blouse.

     “And lots of mediocre loves in the meantime,” Dylan adds.  “My sister’s got a little black book.  Oh, I stand corrected; it’s actually pink with little cartoon cats on it.”  Dylan has now single-handedly squelched any headway I may have made in passing myself off as an urban sophisticate.

     “They were not loves.  They are called dates.  Remember that concept?  Coffee and a kiss on the cheek,” I stammer, feeling myself blush because I don’t want Evan to get the wrong impression of me.

     “Coffee and a kiss on the cheek?  What is this 1950?”  Brandon looks as if someone has sprayed perfume in his face.

     “Coffee and a kiss on the cheek will suffice when it’s my sister.”  Dylan adopts a militant tone, as if issuing a general warning.

     “So, you’re a man-eater?” Evan persists with his silky voice.

     “She’s a tofu eater,” Dylan answers for me.  “And I’m just warning you in advance; I am not in the mood for the Bleeker Street Bolsheviks, so can we just skip the Tutti Fruitti Tiger today, and pick up some Ray’s pizza before we catch the train?”

     “Best pizza in the city.”  Brandon clicks his tongue, crooking his fingers like a gun to shoot his point across the room.

     “
The Tempting Tiger
, and hey those budding socialists serve the best baba ganoush in the city,” I return playfully.  I don’t bother to waste my breath telling Dylan that he is confusing the sprout Mecca downtown with a café in Princeton.  Dylan hates all of my vegetarian haunts, although he’s become partial to hummus wraps, something he would rather die than admit to.

    
Rattle and Hum
is playing on Brandon’s tape player.  While Dylan rattles on, Brandon hums along to U2s, “All I Want Is You.”

      Brandon croons the lyrics about a river and riches and a highway with nobody on it.  “That is just as much poetry as anything Byron wrote.”

     I steel myself for an onslaught of Bono Worship; Dylan and Brandon idolize him.

     “Would you like all the riches in the night?” Evan asks of me, with a delirious mixture of earnestness and mockery that he pulls off with aplomb.

     “Don’t they all?  Women are always looking for the BBD, the Bigger Better Deal,” Brandon surmises.  Now that Brandon has traded high finance for a bare-bones bohemian existence, his love life is a bear market.  “Treasure, diamonds, a ring of gold.  Yup, that’s what they’re all looking for.”

     “Haley would like a planet with no one on it.  She’s claustrophobic and won’t get on the subway,” Dylan taunts.  “Are we going to have to walk a billion blocks to that bookstore?  Where is this place exactly?”

     “Gotham Book Mart. 
Wise men fish here
,” I quote their motto, which is hung on a small sign in their window.  I offer the coordinates: Forty-Seventh, between Fifth and Sixth.

     “Okay, so, it’s the East Side.”  I’m not sure why Dylan says this, other than perhaps to display his knowledge of the city grid.

     “It’s above fifth,” I correct gently.

     “Right, that would be the East Side.”

     “I think that would be the West.”
     “Sixth Avenue divides the east and west side,” he says, slightly defensive and with a tinge of condescension.  Why is Dylan challenging me on this?

     “I believe it’s Fifth.”  I filter any confrontation from my voice, so as to appear the epitome of benevolence before Evan.

     “Sixth Avenue divides the East and West Side, Sis, Avenue of the Americas.”  Dylan says this as if I am somehow embarrassing him in front of these savvy city denizens.

     Evan watches this with deep fascination.  He has lived in the city for years; he could easily intercede to end this debate, but he appears spellbound to see where it will lead, and if I will back down.

     “Doesn’t Fifth divide the East and West, Evan-lier?”  I turn toward him.  I am not sure why I attach part of his last name to his first, but it seems somehow to fit, like a thrilling musical lyric.  He seems jarred by it; a crack forms in his unshakeable composure, as if I had indeed placed the fabled Shelley kiss upon his lips.

     “Haley is right.”  He addresses Dylan, directly taking on my aggressor, and the sound of my name on Evan’s lips is like a brief but sublime symphony.

     And then Evan does something odd. He abandons his swivel chair to sit beside me on the daybed.  He smells like sweet laundry drying in the summer sunshine.  He loosens the blue bandanna from his head, smoothes it with his hands, and drapes it playfully across my knee, as if laying claim to something.  This gesture is not lost on Dylan, who can no longer follow with full attention Brandon’s babbling.  I have somehow had an effect on Evan.  He looks unsettled at the prospect of my departure.  His veil of impenetrable serenity seems pierced, though he says nothing.

     A great emotion of impending emptiness wells up inside me at the thought of leaving that little sunny studio with the lemony light.  It’s as if chords of light connected me to it, and to go requires some painful psychic surgery.  The ground seems to split open before me, and I’m faced with the choice to remain in the warmth of Evan’s presence, or to risk stepping into some great cold chasm.  Nothing in my life has ever felt so wrong as to walk out that door.

     Evan stands to shake hands with Dylan.

     “No coffee, but how about a kiss on the cheek?” he says softly, leaning in to brush his full lips across my skin, and it feels like the first truly perfect moment of my existence. 

~3~

Solidarity & A Salted Pretzel

     On the street, Dylan is lost in his own thoughts.  I define my mission:  I must find out all he knows about Evan.  I could kick myself for not listening to everything Dylan was spilling earlier about Evan, when he was bubbling with information.  I lob a few innocuous questions at Dylan to warm him up, batting around for Evan’s age (he’s younger than me), and where he’s from (Dylan thinks Boston).  I’m winding up for The Big One, which is
Does Evan have a girlfriend?

     “Dylan, are you listening to me?” I demand, when he continually drifts off.  Dylan pays for a newspaper at a street vendor.  I tuck my purchases from Gotham Book Mart into my duffel bag to free my hand for the warm salted pretzel Dylan buys for me.

     “Look at this.”  He folds back the newspaper to show me an article on the Polish government.

     I shrug.

     “This is big, Haley.”

     “Why should I care about what’s happening in Poland?”

     “You know, for somebody with a genius IQ, you can be very shortsighted.  You should pay more attention to what’s going on in the world, instead of burying your head in dopey love stories about ancient England.”

     “Regency England!” I snap, as Dylan is making a dig at my obsession with Jane Austen.  I’ve read one of her books every year since I was fourteen years old, and since Jane—my kindred soul in shortsightedness—only gave the world six novels, they are in continual rotation on my nightstand.

     He checks his watch, and as we have barely time to burn, he takes the steps two at a time down to Penn Station.  I find myself jogging in my funky pink-strap shoes to keep up with him.

     “It’s always bad news,” I say with a weary sigh, an attempt to defend my ignorance of current events.

     “This is very good news.  This is huge.  It’s the beginning of the end.”  Dylan launches into a passionate discourse on the solidarity movement in Poland, and the implications for all of Eastern Europe and the world, but all I can seem to grab hold of in my thoughts is the disarming and penetrating gaze of Evan Candelier, and the overwhelming yearning that has taken hold of me to see him stripped of his clothes.  I weave and dart through the crowds to keep pace with Dylan, who rushes because we’ve barely two minutes to spare to catch our train home.  There is something about Dylan’s larger-than-life presence that signals people to step out of his way.  Not so for me as I find myself jostled and knocked in the shoulders as I struggle to steer through the cattle herds of commuters.

     “We’re going to break the backs of the communists.”  At the ticket booth he brandishes his rolled newspaper like a magic scepter to vanquish the Red Enemy.

     “We?  Oh, now you’re an agent for the CIA?” I manage through mouthfuls of pretzel dough, although I wouldn’t be surprised.  Dylan doesn’t seem to require sleep like the rest of us mere mortals; it’s as if he’s plugged into some cosmic generator.  He always has his hand in some project, and he brings every one to fruition with the intensity and focused will of a future mogul.