Enthusiasm (19 page)

Samantha came by the next day with an armful of flowers. I recognized them from her parents’ greenhouse. She made Zach drive her in the famous Saab, but she wouldn’t let him get out of the car. “Happy birthday,” she said. “These are from my idiot brother. I’m delivering them personally to make sure the message comes through loud and clear. They’re not romantic flowers. They’re happy-birthday, I’m-sorry-I-molested-you, will-you-ever-forgive-me-or-does-my-sister-have-to-kill-me flowers.”

“I wanted to get you roses, but Sam wouldn’t let me,” called Zach from the car.

“Shut up!” said Sam, and hit him through the window.

For Christmas, Ashleigh’s parents gave her a pair of tickets to see
Fascination!
on Broadway, and she invited me. We rode down on the Metro-North train and stayed overnight with my aunt Ruth and uncle John. We spent the afternoon before the show eating dumplings in Chinatown, browsing through the giant used bookstore in the Village, and trying on false moustaches at a theatrical supply shop.

The best part of the show was the songs. Ashleigh couldn’t get over the voices and the orchestration, and I thought the lyrics were almost as clever as Parr’s. When the curtain fell, we clapped until our hands went numb.

We slept in Aunt Ruth and Uncle John’s living room, Ashleigh on the couch and me on an inflatable mattress. I sank slowly through my dreams and woke up in the morning flat on the floor, with a crick in my back. “Oh, dear,” said Aunt Ruth. “Looks like the bed needs a patch. Sorry about that.”

We spent the morning at the Frick Museum, the former Fifth Avenue mansion of a nineteenth-century steel magnate that houses his art collection. We enjoyed ourselves arguing about which of the portraits matched which of the people we knew. Ashleigh was easy: she could have been the model for George Romney’s portrait of Lady Hamilton, a pretty young woman in a red dress with abundant dark hair and a lively little dog under her arm. It was harder to find a picture of me, though. Ashleigh pointed to a graceful Gainsborough lady in an elaborate blue dress, but I felt more like a severe Whistler girl in black.

After lunch Ashleigh said, “Hey, doesn’t Grandison Parr live in this neighborhood? Let’s go check out his house. Maybe Ned will be there too.”

“I don’t know, Ash,” I said. I felt the familiar dread of public embarrassment. “What will we say if they see us? And why would Ned be there, anyway?”

“We’ll say we were in the neighborhood, which is true. And Ned told me he’d be spending some of the vacation with the Parrs. Come on.” She pulled my arm over her shoulder with both her hands and used it to tug me down the street.

“Okay, okay, let go,” I said. Recovering my arm, I followed her with a sigh.

Parr turned out to live in a tall, narrow town house that looked as if it had been built around the same time as the Frick Museum, a century or so ago. It had a limestone stoop leading up to a shiny red door. My heart fluttered to think that I was looking at his home, where he read, showered, slept, dreamed.

My heart fluttered even more—in a very bad way—when Ashleigh started up the stairs to ring the doorbell. I hauled her back. “No. Absolutely not. People don’t just ring each other’s doorbells around here.” She protested, but I refused to let go. “If you do, I’m leaving without you. I’ll catch the early train back. I’m serious, Ashleigh.”

“Oh, all right,” she said. She leaned against a tree on the sidewalk in front and looked up. “Which window do you think is his? Do you think Ned is staying in the guest room? Which window do you think is the guest room?”

The thought that Parr might be standing behind one of those windows—might look out and see us—sent scared thrills buzzing in my wrists. “I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve seen where he lives, okay? Can we go now?”

“Just hang on a minute—maybe they’ll come out.”

“If they do, I’ll die of embarrassment. Come on, let’s go. It’s cold out here. I feel like an idiot.”

“Well, if you let me ring the doorbell, we could go in and get warm,” said Ashleigh.

“Good-bye, I’m leaving now, see you back in Byzantium,” I said.

“Okay, okay, okay! Just wait a little. Maybe they’ll come out.”

Fortunately, they didn’t.

A tall blonde girl walked by slowly, looking at the windows. “Do you think that’s that girlfriend of Parr’s?” I whispered.

“What girlfriend?”

“That Sam’s friend was talking about—remember, in the e-mail?”

“Could be. I’ll go ask her—maybe she knows where they are,” said Ashleigh.

“Ashleigh, you’re nuts! Don’t you dare,” I hissed, holding her arm as tightly as I could. The girl walked away down the block.

After half an hour of stamping in the cold, even Ashleigh admitted her feet were getting numb. We caught the 2:25 north from Grand Central.

The weather turned bitter after New Year’s. Drafts slashed through my attic. They were more painful than usual because my mother and I had decided to keep the thermostat low, to save on heating oil. I piled every available blanket on the bed and took to sleeping in my warmest, ugliest pajamas, the ones with fried eggs on them. I even wore a cap to bed.

Snow fell: not enough to shut the schools, alas, but enough to add half an hour of shoveling to our mornings. Our tree grew damp and awkward, liable to dump snow down our necks. Ashleigh and I suspended our arboreal crossings until kinder weather.

School started again. In history, the French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille. In English, we began reading
Pride and Prejudice
, to my dismay—I worried the Nettle would ruin my favorite book. Ashleigh and Yolanda did their best by raising their hands nonstop and talking as long as possible whenever she called on them. For once, though, Seth’s class participation fell. He’s one of those boys who consider Jane Austen silly and trivial. He did have a few nice things to say about Elizabeth’s father, Mr. Bennet, whom he found witty, in contrast to the “repellent” Mr. Darcy.

The Forefielders returned to their palace on the hill. Ashleigh got e-mail from Ned saying they were back. He had indeed spent his vacation with the Parrs, but on Bermuda, not in Manhattan, so I had wasted all my anxiety on East 74th Street.
Insomnia
rehearsals didn’t start up yet, however—the boys had their finals after their vacation, poor things, and extracurriculars were suspended so they could study.

“Did you hear anything last night, Julie?” asked Ashleigh one morning as we waited for the school bus.

“What kind of anything?”

“Sort of thrashing. I thought it was a bear, or a deer eating the tree, but when I looked in the morning, I saw footprints in the snow. People feet, not deer hoofs. Unless the deer was wearing boots.”

“Do you think it was a person eating the tree?”

“People don’t usually like bark, do they?”

“Not unless it’s almond bark.”

We paused for a moment of nostalgia, remembering the many delicious pounds of almond bark we had made during Ashleigh’s candy-making period.

“Funny, I wonder who it was,” said Ashleigh.

There were no more footprints when we checked for the next couple of days, but three days later—a Saturday—we found the snowdrift beneath our tree kicked and dented. Not only that, but pinned to the tree with a red thumbtack was a sonnet, its edges curling from the damp. Fortunately, it had been written in ballpoint, so the ink hadn’t run.

This is what it said:

Just let me wait a little while longer
Under your window in the quiet snow.
Let me stand here and shiver. I’ll be stronger
If I can see your light before I go.
All through the weeks I’ve tried to keep my balance.
Leaves fell, then rain, then shadows. I fell, too.
Easy restraint is not among my talents;
Fall turned to winter and I came to you.
Kissed by the snow, I contemplate your face.
O do not hide it in your pillow yet!
Warm rooms would never lure me from this place
If only I could see your silhouette.
Turn on your light, my sun, my summer love.
Zero degrees down here: July above.

“Wow!” said Ashleigh. “Somebody likes you!”

“Why me? It could just as easily be you.”

“He tacked it to your side of the tree.”

“That’s the easiest side to reach.”

“But it’s obviously about you, Julie! He even uses your name. Look, ‘July above.’ Not quite Julie, but close enough. And he says, ‘Easy restraint is not among my talents.’ If that’s not Ned describing himself, I don’t know what it is. He’s so sincere—so spontaneous—so unrestrained!”

“I disagree—it doesn’t sound like Ned to me,” I said. “That’s not how he writes. He misspells like crazy, and he doesn’t use punctuation—at least, in e-mail he doesn’t. If I were going to guess, I’d say it’s Parr. We know he likes to rhyme. Doesn’t
pillow yet/silhouette
sound like some of the
Insomnia
lyrics? And
balance/talents
?”

“Parr? I guess that’s possible. Does
Parr
like you too? Ned
and
Parr? Well, I don’t blame them a bit!”

Parr! Writing love poems to
me
? Could it be possible? And was there pain in Ashleigh’s voice as she suggested it? I hastened to reassure her. “No, no, Ash, he’s clearly talking about you,” I said. “Listen: ‘My sun, my summer love.’ That’s got to be you, you’re much sunnier than me.”

“No, silly, that’s you, you’re the sunny one—I’m dark and curly. Could it be Seth? He writes for that literary magazine of yours, and we know for a fact that he likes you.”

“Oh, I hope not! I don’t think so, though. He thinks he’s Emerson, not Shakespeare.”

We debated for a while longer without resolving the question. Ashleigh, generous girl—stubborn girl—insisted that I take the sonnet home with me. I pinned it on my bulletin board beside the other mysterious note, the one from the chocolate turkey. I studied them, trying to decide whether the same person had written them both. The turkey note was cramped and messier, possibly because the writer had to fit his message on the side of a small box, but the letters seemed not dissimilar. I decided I needed a larger handwriting sample from the turkey giver before I could say for sure.

Chapter 17

A Limited Junior License
~
A disastrous Mocharetto
~
Mint Sauce
~
My father and stepmother Approve.

S
eth Young stopped me as I was leaving school with Ashleigh and the Gerards that Tuesday. “Oh, Julie, Ms. Nettleton says the printer called,” he said. “The bound copies of
Sailing
are ready. Eleanor asked me to pick them up. Can you come help? It’s over in North Byz.”

It seemed impossible to refuse without being rude. “All right—how are we getting there? Is Ms. Nettleton driving us?”

“No,” he said proudly, “I am. I got my license last week.”

“Don’t you need an adult in the car till you’re eighteen?”