Sweet (22 page)

*

The next afternoon, ‘Trice came barreling into the kitchen, waving a paper cup over her head.

“Emergency!” she yelled, running for the bathroom and slamming herself inside. Jules heard the bolt latch firmly. Through the plywood door, she shouted, “Pee break! You man the front of the store!”

After a brief pause, during which Jules sighed heavily and closed the ledger book in which he’d been scribbling doodles, she shouted again through the door, “When I say
man the store,
I mean that metaphorically, Necker-Chief! Obviously,
manning
anything is a stretch for you! You’re more like—“

Jules thunked his pencil onto the desk. “All right! Going! Can it!” he yelled, slamming out the kitchen doors.

Teddy stood at the counter; he waved awkwardly when Jules stepped behind it and looked at him without saying a word.

“Uh, hi,” Teddy stammered. “I’m coming in to see you.”

“Okay,” Jules said. He tried to be cold, he really did, but warmth crept into his voice despite his efforts.

“
‘Trice said the apartment is empty now,” Teddy said and waited. Jules simply looked at him, so he stammered again. “I mean, ‘Trice told me you told her to tell me you needed to talk, and that the apartment is empty now, and I’m pretty sure I know what that means, but I thought I would come in to talk, since you said you wanted to.” He petered out helplessly and shrugged. “If you want.”

Jules tried his best, but he couldn’t sustain an icy manner—Teddy had only left because the situation with Andy had become impossible. There wasn’t much reason to be cold aside from pride, which, Jules
decided, was overrated compared to sex anyway.

“The apartment’s empty,” he confirmed. “Tea? Scone?”

“Well,” Teddy said. “It’s not like I have to rush to work anymore, is it? Yeah, please, tea.”

Jules steeped him a cup of chamomile tea with a little lavender in it and handed him a pretty little scone with currants and orange zest.

“Fruity,” Teddy said, lifting an eyebrow.

“If the shoe fits,” ‘Trice shouted from the kitchen.

“We’re not going to be able to talk privately here,” Jules whispered.

“No, it’s okay, I’m not listening!” ‘Trice yelled from the kitchen. Jules heard a worrisome clanging of pots. “I’ve got better things to do than listen to the gossip of
Siegfried and his gayest tiger, anyway!” ‘Trice made a whip-cracking sound, and Teddy’s eyes widened in Jules’s direction.

“I’m
the gay tiger?”
he mouthed at Jules. Jules shook his head.

“I’m the flaming circus performer who wears sequined jumpsuits,” he whispered. “Wanna trade?”

Jules followed Teddy
to the table by the front window and slid onto the stool across from him as he dunked his scone.

“Will you please come home now?” Jules whispered. “It’s all clear, and it’s not like we can talk here, with the human satellite dish homing in on our every word. She’s judging. I can feel it.”

“Home,” Teddy said, smiling at his scone.

“Please come home,” Jules said again. He pushed a set of keys across the table at Teddy.

“Those are my lost keys!” Teddy exclaimed. He grabbed the set of keys from the table, though he had neither the apartment nor the bike lock to which they belonged. Still, the Hope Key glinted from the ring like a winking eye.

“Then it’s a sign for sure,” Jules said. “I added the apartment
key, too.”

*

That afternoon, Teddy shoved his clothes, his razor, his comb and his toothbrush into the bag he’d brought to ‘Trice’s house. Just as quickly, she removed the items. Each time he repacked, she unpacked just as quickly.

“I can do this for hours, Tweedledee,” she said, tossing a balled-up pair of socks onto the couch behind them.

Teddy turned to grab the socks and put them back into the bag. “I am healthier and happier than you and have more stamina,” he said. “Besides, ‘Tweedledee,’ seriously? Does that make Jules Tweedledum?”

“It would fit, but he’s totally the evil Queen of Hearts,” she said, grabbing the socks again. “That ridiculous yappy dog is Tweedledum. And you may
not
move back in with the Queen yet. You guys haven’t even talked! This is horrible idea number one!”

“I’m going back so we
can
talk,” Teddy said. “I’m just anticipating that I’ll be staying. Besides, you should be dying to get me off your couch.”

“Touché, but not really. Because, though you may not be used to it, I actually
care
what happens to you.”

She pulled a stack of pants out of the bag and tossed them unceremoniously onto the floor. “Besides, if the Queen is miserable, so will I be. So will be all the peasants in the land.” She paused a moment, then added, “The land is the bakery.”

“I
know
,” Teddy said. “I just think you’re wrong.”

“Croissants never lie,” she said seriously.

***

According to the rules of every story ever written, this is the point at which everything wraps together neatly for a
happily ever after,
and all the untied strings magically fade into a tawny swell of sunset and music. Teddy must walk into the bakery and find Jules, and they will fall together with gratitude and joy. Andy-the-man will cease to be, will dissipate faster than memory. ‘Trice has served her purpose; her story need not continue at all, unless she is made to meet the woman of her dreams and, finally, settle down into domestic bliss.

But this is not to be that perfectly symmetrical story; there will be no neat wrapping up, no fairy tale sunset into which everyone might ride. We warned you at the beginning of this story. ‘Trice will stay, though she might be difficult at times; Andy-the-man will not disappear for our lovers; there will be no fade out into sunset and bliss.

Because you have been reading this story all this time, though, you will demand that it end the way it should. We will do our best to give you that much, without falling too deeply into the cliché of senseless happiness. We will do our best for symmetry, too, and for the gentle miracles that love might be enough to bring about.

Teddy left ‘Trice’s apartment with his bags once again slung over his shoulder and banging his hip with every step. He moved faster this time, and with more purpose, and the bags banged out a more joyous rhythm as he went:
pass it by, pass it by, pass it by,
the bags seemed to s
ing, and
go home to get home, hurry, go home to get home.

That afternoon, he’d written an apologetic letter of rejection to Sturm, all the while thinking he was making both the best and worst decision of his life.
A sure thing,
his father had told him over and over in his youth,
is the best thing. Some people struggle their whole lives and never find a sure thing.
But Teddy knew a sure thing was a lifeless thing, too.

He let himself into the little apartment on Jane Street with the recovered keys. He tossed his bags onto the bedroom floor, put his hands around Andy-the-dog’s muzzle, stuck his nose into the fur behind his ears and inhaled deeply, relishing the familiar smell of the little dog
.

Afterward, after he had opened all the drawers and replaced his clothing in the closet, after he had pet the dog and brushed his teeth in the bathroom—
his bathroom
—and after he had spent long minutes standing at the open window in the living room, listening to the wind buffet the curtains, he slipped the keys into his hip pocket and left for the bakery.

Once he arrived, he pushed his way behind the counter, ignoring ‘Trice’s call, and slipped into the kitchen, where Jules stood at the prep table, stirring batter and humming to himself.

“I’ve left ‘Trice’s house,” Teddy announced, and Jules, for once, didn’t ask for clarification, but dropped the whisk and the bowl, wiped his hands on a damp tea towel, and pressed Teddy against the edge of his desk to kiss and to kiss.

‘Trice soon left for the afternoon, slamming and shouting her way out the front door, and Teddy and Jules were left alone in the kitchen to talk in low voices that barely reached over the hum of music from the radio. It was a small, quiet evening.

“I got a job offer today,” Teddy said.

“You what? You what?” Jules hurled himself around the metal prep table to fling his arms around Teddy’s neck.

“I turned it down,” Teddy said, and explained about Sturm, the ties and the prestige and money and big gray block of a building into which he could not imagine creeping every morning, from the gray street to the taupe interiors, and back out again in the evenings. The prospect was entirely too colorless to bear.

*

We are certain you can see, as clearly as we do, the solution: Teddy should help to run the bakery, set up shop at the messy desk in the kitchen or, better yet, learn to bake alongside Jules, with the smell of citrus rising up around him on the early morning air and the deeply colored jewels shaking on their strings and spattering the shop front with the light of indigo and garnet and topaz.

We can tell you that he does this for a short while, leaning against Jules in the gray dawn light of the kitchen, and he is blissfully happy to be with this man, moving around him in a fine dance of familiarity and routine and frictionless ease
; but it somehow will not be enough. It is not enough to be in love like this, to be held so completely in the light-spattered little bakery. It is safe and beautiful and steady, but it is not enough.

And so, though it may disappoint you, Teddy will leave. Not entirely, no, because he will still love Jules, and the two will still make a home together and a small, quiet happiness, but that will only come with a bit of distance, a bit of difference, perhaps even a little dissonance.

In the darkness of early mornings, Jules will creep to the bakery and leave Teddy to sleep on his own for a few hours. Those few hours will mean everything to them both; those few hours are when they will each build themselves into something new for the other to love. Teddy will rise much later, stumble to the desk in the hall and work for most of the day on the books for his clients—the strangest and most wonderful mix of bodegas and dollar stores and freelancers and music teachers.

He will, of course, offer to do the books for Buttermilk. Jules will, of course, turn him down.

*

But this is all in the near future; in the meantime, Teddy has found Jules again, has walked back into the bakery and, in the space without ‘Trice, Jules and Teddy have quietly remade their togetherness.

And when they left that evening, Teddy and Jules stood for a long time at the front door while Jules fumbled with his keys at the lock. Teddy, for his part, impatiently flipped his own set of keys over his fingers in jangly rotations.

“Stop it,” Jules said, putting his hand over the keys, “or I will truly go murdering-crazy.”

“Sorry,” Teddy said, and dropped the keys back into his pocket.

And as he kissed Jules’s cheek lightly, Teddy could have sworn he saw all the hanging jewels inside the bakery shake, shifting the streetlight into golds and reds and greens all over the little store.

Andy-the-man would not reappear for many days and only came back to the bakery to smile at Jules and nod, approvingly, when it became clear that Teddy was to stay for good. He showed himself less and less frequently, until one day became the last day he appeared, and he did not come again, but lingered silent and invisible in the empty kitchen at night.

***

This is the way the story ends: on this night when Teddy and Jules shared a small, happy kiss at the door of the bakery, while the rest of the city went its darkening, evening way. Lights began to shimmer up in the house windows across the street, and the cars grew numerous and slowed, puttering and honking and cursing their way out of the neighborhood.

It would be several days until Jules showed Teddy the slender gold Hope Key on Teddy’s recovered keychain, which, Teddy would find, fit the bakery door perfectly. But
that
moment matters less, in the scheme of things, than their
first night together again (though perhaps you may find it to mean more, metaphorically, that Teddy’s Hope Key will unlock the door to Jules’s bakery. But maybe the coincidence of Jules losing the key which Teddy would eventually find, then lose, only for Jules to find it again, is too perfectly symmetrical to bear telling). For tonight, that key would hide in Teddy’s hip pocket as they walked home to the snug apartment on Jane Street. For tonight, Jules would let them inside, and Andy-the-dog would greet them with his excessive snuffling and wiggling, and they would eat a dinner of cold fruit cut over the sink with a paring knife, and leave the lights off and let their home be lit by the bright gold of the streetlight pushing through the curtains; and they would sit in recovered and imperfect joy and feel grateful for the streetlamp and the paltry breeze, the broken blue lamp and Andy’s wheezing snore, the whirling curtains and the breeze that took them up, the fruit, the knife, their hands and the inky dark that twined them together and hid them, for once, from everything else.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Candy, Annie
and Lex for your intelligent and unwavering support, your kindness, your belief and your help and advice. And thanks to everyone who offered inspiration, motivation and friendship as I wrote. Most of all, Lex, you are missed; this book will always remind me of you.