Instant Love (25 page)

“Not like that,” said Carter.

“Sure,” said Sarah.

“I’m not that way.”

“Whatever you say, Carter.”

“Sarah, I’ve made love to you a hundred times. You know that I’m a deeply feeling heterosexual man.” He reached out toward her breasts. “Come here, let me feel you.”

She let him feel her.

AT 10:30 AM
Sarah buzzes Morris. Even though he kept hours from 10:00 to 11:00
AM
, he really didn’t want to see people until 10:30, and even then not till 10:45
AM
. Fifteen minutes was just about all he could tolerate in the morning, but if he must, he must. You must, thinks Sarah. I need some money.

On the stairs, past orange walls and up to a skylight that welcomed sun up and down the interior, she finally lands in front of Morris’s door. She knocks, and he opens the door slightly, just a wedge, peeks through, then, grudgingly, allows her in.

She tries not to take it personally. She understands the need for control. She tries to keep her mind at room temperature at all times.

He waves her in, a kiss on the cheek, and then a pinch on the other.

“I saw Carter the other day. He was asking about you. You should return his calls, I think. Don’t be a silly girl.”

Sarah hasn’t been talking to him for weeks. She thinks she’s mad at him, but she’s not sure why. She thinks she might even hate him.

“Anyway, dear, enough of that. I asked you to stop by because I realized”—he says that last word as if he had made some great scientific discovery, a cure for cancer perhaps—“that I hadn’t given you any sort of bonus for the work you did for me this holiday season. So I wanted you to have one of my scarves.” He walks into his studio and returns with three scarves still in their plastic wrapping. “I think you need one of the fringed serapes. These colors—” He splays them on the table in front of her: the first red with orange stripes, the next orange with brown stripes, and the third plum with pink stripes. “These colors will suit you.”

Sarah Lee mentally calculates how much she might be able to get for the serape on eBay. A couple hundred at least.

“I like the plum for you, but you could do orange, too. Orange is such a happy color, and the plum, it might pull you down. It’s up to you.”

Well, it would be the plum, of course. Plum, somber but pretty plum. She moves her hand to the package, pulls it closer to her. But she’s going to sell it anyway. She doesn’t need a new scarf. It was frivolous. No one needs a silk scarf when you can buy a perfectly nice fleece one on St. Mark’s for seven bucks, which is what Sarah had done. There was a time she might have coveted the scarves, but these days she just wanted to eat something beyond those rice and beans. She wanted steak, even if she wasn’t dressed for it.

“Try it on, let me see it on you.”

I bet I could get more for it if it’s still in the packaging, thinks Sarah, but how could she insult him? It was a generous gift, more than she probably deserved for answering a few phones and ringing up credit-card charges. She rips open the plastic with her fingers and slips the scarf around her shoulders. And it was heaven. Of course. Her shoulders felt a warm pressure from the weight of the scarf, and when she rubbed her cheek against it, it was soft and comforting like the sound of someone’s voice, a crooner singing a love song. She rises, walks to the mirror near the front door—the colors suit her perfectly, particularly the mood she’s in today. There’s the wine tint to her cheeks, as if someone had just pinched them, the gray in her green eyes, the auburn highlights in her hair, all swirling around next to this beautiful plum scarf. Her whole body is so warm now, everything about her feels more beautiful and spectacular.

She hears Morris in the background saying, “You should do nice things for yourself. You should take care of yourself. Little things. Like this.”

No way in hell is this scarf going on eBay. She has to keep it. She is in love with this scarf.

     6.     

AFTER SHE
leaves Morris, she walks up to Houston and hangs a right, then a left onto Avenue C, which will always feel like no man’s land, no matter how many new condos they install. Years ago, when she still lived in Boston, people would tell her to stay away from Avenue C whenever she visited New York. She would visit with her high-school boyfriend, the one who got her pregnant, then weeks later ended up in jail for dealing drugs (Last she’d heard, he’d high-tailed it to Maine to avoid two separate sets of child support payments. A heartbreaker from start to finish). At the time, though, he was just a normal, totally fun stoner dude, and they would drive down on the weekends and stay with an aunt of his. She lived on the top floor of a town house in Chelsea with two gay men (“We’re the sitcom of the future, you wait and see,” one of the roommates said), and welcomed the youth of today with wide open arms and a glorious décolletage in full bloom. Sarah Lee loved to press up against her, what a joy it was. It made her boyfriend a little uncomfortable when he hugged his aunt, Sarah Lee could tell by the seriousness of his lips, straight and narrow and tight, but she was free to enjoy the embrace. She had read somewhere that people should get ten hugs a day, so she would take them when she could get them.

“That’s your first problem right there,” her boyfriend had said. “Reading articles. And your second problem is believing them.” But he had hugged her all the time anyway, and secretly liked that Sarah Lee tried to understand the world around her in a different way than he did, which was usually through a cloud of pot smoke.

His aunt took club drugs in great quantities but never shared. However, she did tell them what part of the park to go to for dime bags if they had shown up empty-handed, and which bars were unlikely to card (all of them), and what parts of the city were safe. Avenue C wasn’t on the list, neither was Avenue B for that matter, and Avenue A, barely.

“You two stay away from that park after dark,” his aunt had said.

Today Avenue C had French restaurants, shops and galleries, and, near the north end of it, one narrow storefront shop, Liberation, a legendary space (Carter used to see bands play there, swear to god, he told her. “How did they fit?” “They just did”) that sold Sarah Lee’s handmade Christmas cards, along with work from a handful of designers, the kind of stuff Sarah Lee sometimes thought of as art, and sometimes as useless crap: T-shirts screen-printed with outlines of birds or the faces of dictators, zines of poems or snapshots or personal tales of hard times on the road all hand-stapled or sometimes bound by a single extra-thick rubber band, and self-produced CDs made by noise bands from places like Portland and Chapel Hill and Chicago. (Sarah had picked up one of these once and discovered she had slept with the drummer from one of the bands and, blushing and horrified, had immediately shoved it to the bottom of the stack, as if that would prevent anyone from knowing the deep dark secret in her head.)

The owner of Liberation was a man named Travis James Crenshaw, but everyone just called him Doc because he was good with his hands. That’s what he said anyway. It may have also had something to do with his stint as a prescription-drug dealer in the mid-’90s, but he went with the line that was more likely to make the ladies blush. He’d had the store for ten years, and had forty years left on his lease. Rent was five hundred dollars a month, and he slept in a cozy setup in the back of the store, about two hundred square feet, enough for a twin bed and small kitchen. So as long as he sold at least thirty dollars a day (minus what he paid to the artist, always fifty-fifty, that was his motto), and cooked all his own meals, Doc could keep up Liberation forever, or at least for the next forty years.

Plus he drank for free (or on the cheap anyway) at every East Village dive bar, so oftentimes he drank his dinner. The female bartenders in particular liked him because he was still handsome, with his dark eyes that flashed as if warning that he could cause trouble at any moment, balanced by a slender and crafted nose that made him seem important, a decision-maker, a leader. And he was gallant and polite, with a nice, warm southern voice he earned from eighteen years in Savannah, Georgia, as a youth. He would drag himself from bar to bar, around Tompkins Square Park, south of it mainly, Doc making the women smile, working the room. Sometimes Carter would join him—he liked making the rounds of lady bartenders as much as the next guy.

Sarah Lee went out with Doc once, right after the first time she met him. “It’s a business meeting,” he claimed. He was interested in selling some of her work in his store. But Sarah knew most business meetings don’t happen at 9:00
PM
on a Thursday, even if this was New York.

They went to a dive bar on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue B—“What’s this place called?” “7B.” “Right, of course.”—and he proceeded to launch into a tirade about his ex-wife for the next hour. He used all kinds of awful words, obscenities flowed through his speech like champagne on New Year’s Eve, only there was nothing to celebrate, just things to mourn, things to kick and stomp on, things to beat into the ground. His wife had left him for the man who owned the other gallery on Avenue C, the one that made more money, the one that got covered in
Art Forum
and the
New York Times,
the one that the man closed quietly, opening a larger space in Chelsea, taking Doc’s wife with him. Chelsea is not that far away from the East Village, but Chelsea is a million miles away from Avenue C.

Put it to rest already, thought Sarah.

“I don’t know why I’m talking this way,” he said, and when he apologized later, it was clear he really didn’t. But she was just sitting there so quietly, and she was new, she hadn’t heard these stories before. It happened to her a lot. She was silent but seemed welcoming, warm, and she was attracted to the kind of people who needed to fill empty spaces with words; or perhaps, they were the kind of people who were attracted to her; or both, of course, both.

But the cursing, it just went on for far too long, and it made her feel that he might have that much venom for the next woman. She could be the next woman. But she didn’t want to be next. She wanted to be last.

Eventually she simply got up and left—it was when he said “cunt”; she had no patience for that talk—and he walked outside after her, stopping to pat the door guy on the shoulder, no trouble here, mate, and then called her name; she was halfway down the block, walking toward Houston, she was always walking toward Houston, it seemed, when she was in the city, and she stopped.

He apologized again and again. “I’m just crazy,” he said. “Please. Come back inside.”

She declined.

“Then come by the store tomorrow. So I know that we’re going to be friends.”

And she did, because she woke up the next morning, thought it through, his heartbreak and his anger, and she wished that she could articulate it the way he did, not with the cursing, but the way he told the story in a straight line, the way each emotion was so real and vibrant to him. Maybe there was something to be learned from him, she didn’t know what. She decided to be his friend.

So she brought the cards that she hadn’t had a chance to show him the night before, and he spread them out before him on his desk and smiled at each one as he read them. Then she talked to him about a line of her own greeting cards; it wasn’t high art, she knew, but people seemed to like her cards a lot when she sent them. She had done invitations for parties, too, baby showers and bachelorette parties, and everyone had always said, “You should have your own line,” and that stuck with her, that she could have something of her own, because right now she didn’t have very much of anything at all. But she had to be careful about where she put her work, she was protective of it at times, and she couldn’t see her cards sitting in any old Hallmark store. They’d gather dust in the back if she wasn’t careful.

A week later Doc sat for her for a sketch in his store, at a wide wooden table, animal claws for feet, and nicks on the top of it from a wild party where ladies danced on top of it in spiked heels—“You should have seen those girls dance.” Doc took phone calls and rang up forty-five dollars’ worth of sales and had something to say to practically everyone who walked in the door, knew them by first name, what they did, where they lived.

It was that first brisk fall day, and the wind had stung Sarah Lee’s cheeks, surprising her, and people would just walk into the store to warm up for a while.