Bleeding Hearts (43 page)

“America is a place where
e
verybody is supposed to get a second chance.”

—Housewife,

USA Today

I
T WAS NINE O’CLOCK
on the night of Monday, December 6, and all across the New Haven Green the bums were getting ready for the weather. It was bad weather to have to get ready for. All last week, the new weatherman on WTNH had been predicting a serious winter storm. Now the storm was here, piled up in black clouds that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, hidden in the dark of a moonless night. There were little needles of rain turning to ice coming down everywhere. The three tall Protestant churches that always seemed to be just empty in the daytime had begun to look haunted. Over in the Old College at Yale, all the freshmen with rooms that faced into the quadrangle had their lamps on. On the steps of the old New Haven Library building, a bag lady searched through a bright red Saks Fifth Avenue tote to find a scarf to wrap around her mouth and nose. It was that kind of cold. The bums were in trouble. The ones who had newspapers could pretend they had some kind of protection. The ones who didn’t drank a little harder, if they could afford it, and got themselves a little more dead.

For Frannie Jay, standing on the corner of Church and Chapel streets with her duffel bag at her feet, the scene was like something out of a science fiction movie Stanley Kubrick might have been making about her life. Stanley Kubrick was dead, but Frannie knew what she meant. She had been born and brought up in New Haven. She had gone to high school at Saint Mary’s out on Orange Street. She had spent every afternoon of her teenage life in a booth at Clark’s Dairy, arguing the existence of God and the merits of affirmative action with a girl who eventually went on to become a nun. Frannie’s mother had said something, the last time they talked, about Saint Mary’s being closed and New Haven being changed—but Frannie hadn’t expected anything like this. Her mother was always talking about how things had changed. She lived out in West Haven now, in a triple-decker house with her sister, Frannie’s Aunt Irene, and neither one of them went for a walk on their own, even just down the block to the candy store.

The wind was picking up. The rain-turning-to-ice was getting harder. Frannie nudged her duffel bag with the toes of her lace-up boots and stuck her bare hands into the pockets of her pea coat. She was a tall young woman, thin but strong, and she was getting nervous. Her pale blond hair was folded into one long braid and wrapped into a chignon at the nape of her neck. Her ears were cold. This scene was eerie and she didn’t like it. Macy’s and Malley’s both seemed to be closed, and one of them—Frannie was never sure which was which—was boarded up. The little arcade mall that now stood across the street from the Green near the old bus stop looked vacant. There was dirt and garbage everywhere, on the sidewalks, in the gutters. There were almost no cars on the road. What had happened to this place? Every once in a while, somebody seemed to be whispering in her ear. Frannie. could hear the music of words in her ears and the heat of breath on her neck. Somebody was dancing just out of sight behind her. Someone was creeping up to her while she strained her eyes to see farther up the road. It was dark and getting darker. Frannie wanted to grab her duffel bag and run.

You’re getting spooked, Frannie told herself severely, picking up her duffel bag all the same. There was the sound of a car coming in from somewhere. When Frannie finally caught sight of it, it was the wrong shape and the wrong color and going in the wrong direction.

A car came by that she did recognize, a silver-gray Mercedes sedan. A boy stuck his head out of the front passenger-seat window as it passed and screamed at her. “Great tits,” he yelled, making Frannie rock back and forth on her heels, but the car didn’t slow up or stop. In a moment, it was gone. Frannie was sure the boy couldn’t have seen her breasts, not under the pea coat and the sweater and the turtleneck she was wearing. Frannie was sure, but she buttoned the top button of her coat anyway, and wound her scarf more tightly around her throat.

I don’t know enough about New Haven any more to know if I’m safe or not, Frannie thought. That’s the problem. When Frannie was growing up here, New Haven was almost a country place. There was a slum, but nobody ever went there. There was crime, but it was the kind of crime that held very little interest for the media. Once, when Frannie was small, there was a corruption scandal in city government. Once, when she was in high school, a boy killed his girlfriend and left her body near the tracks behind the New Haven Railroad station. It all happened to people she didn’t know, who had nothing to do with her. Frannie and her mother lived in a big old Victorian house on Prospect Street. Frannie went back and forth across town on city buses, always in a crowd of girls in Saint Mary’s uniforms, always dreaming what she would do when she finally Got Out. Getting Out was the only real ambition of Frannie’s adolescent life, and now, back on the corner of Church and Chapel, she couldn’t even say whether she had ever achieved it.

There were car sounds in the distance again, coming from the right direction this time, Frannie was sure of it. She turned to look up the road, toward Yale. The streetlights seemed too dim to her, straining to shine through filthy glass globes. Something like rain was coming down on her head and stinging her ears. She was colder than she could ever remember being before in her life.

That’s what comes of spending twenty years in California, Frannie told herself, and then she saw it, the little blue station wagon, stopped for a light two blocks up. Frannie readjusted her duffel bag on her shoulders and leaned out into the road. The lights changed and the little blue station wagon came toward her, moving very slowly. The station wagon’s headlights looked like they were straining to shine through filthy glass globes, too. Maybe it was something in the air. Maybe, instead of being the place to come for good libraries and good museums and interesting theater, New Haven was now the place to come to collect free-floating dirt.

As the little blue station wagon reached Frannie’s corner, it pulled into the curb and rolled to a stop. Frannie took a deep breath. There was a man in the car, blonder than she was and very young and muscular. He could be the man she was waiting for, or he could be some jerk looking for a little action. Frannie had run into jerks looking for action before.

The driver’s side window came sliding down. The young man stuck his head out into the cold and asked, “Frances Jakumbowski? Is that you? Frances—”

“Frannie Jay,” Frannie said. “I don’t use the Jakumbowski. Nobody can spell it.”

“Right,” the young blond man said.

He fiddled with something inside the car, and Frannie heard a sharp click. It took her a moment to realize that the car’s doors were now unlocked. Back in California, a woman Frannie worked for had an entire apartment rigged up like that. Push a button near the front door, and every door and window in the place locked up. Frannie got a more comfortable grip on her duffel bag and went around to the car’s passenger side, out into the street. There were no other cars coming anyway. Frannie opened the back door on the passenger side and threw her duffel bag in. Then she opened the front door on that side and got in herself. At the last minute, she realized that the front door had letters painted on it in gold, nearly impossible to see in this bad light.

“The Fountain of Youth Work-Out,” the gold letters on the door read. Then, when Frannie was safely inside, she found more gold letters on the dashboard. These were printed on a plaque that had been fixed to the glove compartment door. They said, “Bring Your Body to the Fountain of Youth.” Frannie closed her eyes.

“It’s weird out here,” Frannie told the blond man, as the car pulled out into the street again. “Doesn’t New Haven celebrate Christmas anymore?”

“Of course New Haven celebrates Christmas,” the blond man said. “It’s weeks before Christmas.”

“Every other town in America has had its Christmas decorations up since the day after Thanksgiving. Why aren’t there any Christmas decorations here?”

“There are Christmas decorations here. You just didn’t notice them.”

Frannie peered through the windshield. There were no Christmas decorations that she could see. There were no people, either.

“It’s so deserted here,” she said. “When I was growing up, New Haven was always full of people. Even at night. Especially this close to Christmas.”

“When you were growing up here, there probably wasn’t this much crime. I come from Massachusetts myself. I hate this place. I want to go out to California, but there never seems to be a place. Not with Fountain of Youth. Maybe I should just take off.”

“Maybe you should.”

“My name is Tim Bradbury, by the way. I do the weight training out here. Magda said you were going to be the new step aerobics specialist. We need a step aerobics specialist out here. We haven’t had one since Debbie North left, and people are always asking for it. It’s the big thing this year. I guess they can get anybody they need out in California. I guess that’s why they never need a weight trainer when I want to go.”

Frannie closed her eyes again. The street seemed to be full of potholes. All the streets seemed to be full of potholes. They were going around the Green in a big circle. Frannie tried to remember what Magda Hale had told her about the location of the Fountain of Youth Work-Out Studio, but all she came up with was something about its being “up past Albertus on Prospect,” which told her everything and nothing. It told her everything, because that was her old stomping ground, the part of town where her mother’s house had been, the part of town she had once known better than any other. It told her nothing, because with the way things had changed, the neighborhood might easily be unrecognizable.

The car made a turn and another turn. Tim Bradbury pushed a few buttons on the dashboard and music began coming out of the tape deck. It was surprisingly soft stuff, old Joni Mitchell, and not the driving heavy metal Frannie would have expected.

“Listen,” Tim Bradbury said, “are you really hyped on Christmas? Is Christmas your thing?”

“Is it my thing? I don’t know. I like it. Why? Don’t we celebrate Christmas at Fountain of Youth on the East Coast?”

“Oh, we celebrate it,” Tim said. He made another turn, onto a well-lit block this time. The houses were bigger here and more neatly kept. “The thing is, we’re not making a big deal about it this year. I mean, not as big a deal as we used to. It wasn’t working out.”

“What wasn’t working out?”

“The promotions. Magda said it was too much like vacuum cleaners. You know, women don’t like their husbands to give them vacuum cleaners for Christmas. It’s kind of an insult. Like the husbands see the wives as just maids.”

“Oh.”

“Magda said it was the same way with the work-out memberships,” Tim went on. “It was like the husbands were telling the wives they had big butts and better do something about them. It was a kind of insult.”

“Oh,” Frannie said again.

“So we’re not doing Christmas this year,” Tim said. “We’re doing New Year’s instead. We had a whole campaign made up at an advertising agency in New York. ‘A New You for the New Year,’ Simon says it’s going to be the key to taking us really national. What do you think?”

What Frannie thought was that maybe she shouldn’t have come back here. Maybe she should have stayed out in California and let her life fall apart. “A New You for the New Year.” As a slogan, it had a lot to be said for it. Frannie could certainly use a new Frannie, for the New Year or any other time. She could use a whole new universe, with none of the people she already knew left in it.

“That’s Prospect Street up there, isn’t it?” she asked Tim Bradbury, and when he nodded, she settled down a little. Prospect didn’t look all that much different from the way she remembered it. More of it seemed to belong to Yale, but the Yale it belonged to was being very good about Christmas decorations. A building with a sign out in front of it that identified it as the Charles A. Hamilton Anthropological Laboratory had a pine tree in its front yard decked out in hundreds of colored lights. Frannie didn’t know if the Charles A. Hamilton Anthropological Laboratory belonged to Yale or not.

“The thing about New Year’s,” Tim said, as they drove up the steep hill toward Albertus Magnus College, “is that it’s the perfect holiday for a work-out studio. Everybody’s always making New Year’s resolutions. Everybody’s always trying to change their life. Simon says there aren’t a dozen people in any hundred thousand who really like the way they are. Do you know Simon?”

“I know who Simon is,” Frannie replied.

“Everybody is going to know who Simon is pretty soon,” Tim said. “They’re doing a profile on him in
Forbes
magazine. ‘The Selling of a Way of Life,’ it’s called. We’ve got an advance copy up at the house. It’s the only thing that makes me feel okay about not being able to get out to California. I mean, everything that’s really happening for the studio is happening out here.”

“It sounds like it,” Frannie said.

“I like the whole concept anyway,” Tim said. “Changing your life. Changing yourself. So many people are stuck in really destructive patterns. It’s nice to know you can always have a second chance if you want to do a little work for it.”

“Mmm,” Frannie said, and then she noticed that Albertus, being a Catholic college, was really done up for Christmas. There were colored lights everywhere. There was a life-size crèche on the grass at the front just inside the gate, with a life-size Mary and Joseph inside it.

Sometimes, Frannie thought, you don’t get a second chance. Some things come without second chances built into them. The way the world worked, these were always the things you most wanted to be able to take back and do over again.

Out on the street, the asphalt was wet and shiny under streetlights whose globes were grease free and clear. The houses were getting larger and more elaborately gingerbread. College girls were walking in groups, dressed from head to toe out of J. Crew and L.L. Bean catalogs.