That Magic Mischief (3 page)

He stood in the doorway, Barney’s trench coat belted at his waist, the correct length of pinstriped trouser on view, trousers whose cuffs draped the precisely correct amount atop polished Pradas. He was buttoned up against what she assumed was the spring chill, but could also have been against whatever strange strain of virus that he presumed was breeding out in the Brooklyn hinterlands. His dark brown hair was slicked back as usual, and his hand-made, hand-tooled leather briefcase was gripped in his right hand, left hand free for retrieving his cell phone in case the office should call. The office always called. He was clean-shaven, his boyish face unable to support a ’stache without him looking like a Halloween hobo. His sweet, boyish face — expressionless. Tension around the eyes, but otherwise remote.

This didn’t bode well.

Hands covered in dirt, Annabelle went to him, stopped herself, and washed her hands in the sink.

“Have you seen Fern? She’s growing like gangbusters. Who would have guessed. Although I guess your run-of-the-mill forest floor gets only slightly less light than my ‘living room’ does, so there you go. Doesn’t she look great?” Annabelle charged out of the bathroom and put Fern back in place, fussing a bit with her fronds before turning to face Wilson. They stood in silence.

Silence being a relative term: Annabelle could hear her heart beating in her ears.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
Was that her voice? That thready little squeak?

“I. I don’t know.” He leaned forward and put his copy of her keys on the ‘dining room’ table, and then retreated a few more inches.

“What’s. Going. On. Please.” She was choking.

“Annie. I. I can’t — I’m not in love with you anymore. I don’t — I think you love me more than I love you. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s me.”

“Have you met somebody new?”

“Annie. Let’s stay calm — ”

“What about the trip to Ireland in June?”

From the front pocket of his briefcase he extracted a manila envelope.

“Your ticket is in here, along with a few letter-sized envelopes of your share of receipts from the last two years. You may need them for tax purposes. Also the journal that you used when you stayed at the apartment — which I didn’t inspect, needless to say, and a few pictures that I thought you’d prefer to dispose of as you wished.”

Frickin’ banker
. She could feel an enormous rage beginning to boil, a feeling that was going to be bigger than her, bigger than him, bigger than Brooklyn if she opened her mouth. Whatever it was, whatever this dark whirling mass of emotion was, there was no way it was going to make it past the lump in her throat. She could say nothing. She could do nothing. She was barely there at all.

He continued to stand, holding out the envelope. She couldn’t look him in the eye, and so looked at it. How could her whole relationship with him fit in an 8
¹
⁄
₂
by 11 container?

He put the envelope down on the table. “I’d like your set of my keys, please.”

In a daze, she went into her bedroom, and dug through her purse. Her purse was as supremely ordered as the rest of her life, yet she couldn’t seem to focus on finding … oh, that’s where the nail clippers had gone. She had brought them to the gym with her when she went to the sauna last week, and had forgotten to put them back in the medicine chest. She’d go do that now.

She stopped short in the doorway, and felt she didn’t recognize her own front room. There was a man standing there, a man who last night on the phone had told her he loved her. Now he was telling her he did not. One statement was true, one was a lie. One was a lie for only these past few minutes, one was a lie for a much longer time.

Keys.

She went back to her bag, rummaged, found them. Looking out the window, trying to breathe, she saw Maria Grazia trying to hide behind one of the impossibly thin trees that lined Union Street. Thank God. MG was here.

She floated somewhere outside herself as she handed Wilson the key ring with the small clay heart that dangled from the chain. Shifting his briefcase under his arm, he removed the keys from the ring, and put the heart on the table. Whoever said he had no sense of the symbolic? No flair for the dramatic?

“I hope that we can still be friends.”

Annabelle’s spirit snapped back to attention and a laugh — strangled, but still a laugh — squeezed out of her throat.

“I doubt it.”

They stood and looked at each other. Or rather, Annabelle looked at him, this sudden stranger, and Wilson looked for his permission to leave. Annabelle turned away, he turned the knob, and the door snapped shut.

She stood, numb, the silence in her head shattered by the sound of the shutting door, the ringing in her ears growing into an insistent buzz, a buzz that that was actually the doorbell, being rung not by Wilson who had immediately changed his mind, but by Maria Grazia rushing in to help sweep up.

• • •

“I just feel — I just feel — like, gutted. You know? Empty. It really hurts. It really hurts, Lor, I mean, nothing — remember Ted? Remember how bad that was — I remember the Labor Day weekend after he finally said he didn’t really love me, I remember lying around in my nightgown for the entire weekend, just lying on the couch, eating these little bonbon ice cream things and crying and watching this crappy little black and white TV … A repeat of
Twin Peaks
was on. The original movie. God, that was amazing. The script was flawless, I mean, without a
flaw
, I always meant to get my hands on the screenplay, back when I was writing screenplays, I mean — ”

When was the last time she and Annabelle had gone on a bender? Was she always this maudlin?
Unfair, Lorna, unfair.
Having been taken through the whole event, but without much going on in the back-story department, Lorna could understand the shock to Anna’s system. Selfish bastard. Not news to her. She didn’t think men were universally stupid, or from Mars, or wherever, but she did think the majority of them wholly uncivilized and thoughtless. And here was yet another case study proving her point.

Time, perhaps, for another pitcher.

“No, Lorna, for crying out loud, are you trying to kill me? I hate this, I hate this, I already feel totally out of control — ”

Lorna sat back down.

“No more drinks, please.”

“Smoke?” Lorna offered her the second pack of the day.

“Yeah. Tell me a story. Tell me a story about work.”

“Hmm. You know that new fellow, the oddly straight male who has decided public relations is his
metiér
? Well, it is not, so he’s decided he’s going to sleep his way to the top. Via me.
Really
. Except, Mr. Ruthless Ambition is sending me
flowers
and
chocolates
, if you don’t mind. I mean, do get it over with, if you take my meaning. This is not so much a story as an anecdote.” Lorna laughed lightly into her drink.

“And how’s The Star?”

“Impossible since
Entertainment Weekly
put her on the cover. We got a memo requesting additional services for her bichon frise, including manicure, or claw-icure or whatever,
and
a
massage
. A massage for a
bloody
dog! You cannot make this up. Did I tell you about the mineral water outrage? No? Sure you didn’t hear all about it on Fox?
Well
— ”

Annabelle watched Lorna speak. Watched more than listened, not that she didn’t want to listen, she was a good listener, but she couldn’t really hear. She was stinkin’ drunk. It hadn’t gotten so bad that Lorna was multiplying before her eyes, but focus wasn’t her strong point at the moment. She watched Lorna gesticulate, her usual pristine manicure sparkling in the diffused sunlight, she watched Lorna’s long, white blonde locks shiver, watched her earrings slap furiously against the side of her face. Oh — they were the agate and amethyst stones that Annabelle had given her for her birthday —

“Hey. Heeeeeeeeeeeeeey. You’re wearing the earrings. I didn’t think you would.”

“They go with the Narciso. I do love them.”

“Do you feel any change in the frequency of your migraines? The combination of the crystals ought to have a healing effect — ”

“
Anna
.”

“Okay, okay. Go on.”

Lorna recommenced her detailed and detachedly hilarious account of the high jinks of one of her highest profile clients. Annabelle wondered yet again how the self-possessed Lorna Bates, the avowedly not warm-and-cuddly Lorna Bates, could make such a success out of working in as touchy-and-feely a business as public relations. That, she supposed, was it exactly: Lorna’s self-possession — intimidating on a good day, something akin to nuclear fission on a bad one — could get her and her clients anything they wanted, through sheer force of resolute will.

Annabelle knew for a fact that Lorna had the personal cell number of both the Lifestyle and Entertainment editors of
The New York Times
, and that they ran in fear of her. She presented competence, exuded confidence, suffered no one gladly, much less fools. Even on a Saturday afternoon, she was painstakingly turned out to the
nth
degree, and was without a doubt in line to start her own business, sooner rather than later.

Annabelle looked down groggily at her stained and faded T-shirt, and her threadbare sweats. She had style — sure she did. But the idea of dressing up just to cry like a baby didn’t make sense. Her sweetly bobbed hair was lank, her eyes were sore, the underneath part of her nose was red and raw, and in the intellectual part of her mind, she knew that this was beyond miserable. But she also knew it was necessary.

She tended to fall in love quickly, and fall out of it excruciatingly slowly
. Well, I’m a romantic,
she thought.
Okay?
She’d have a crush, have some dating, maybe it would soon merit the ‘R’ word, and then … and then.

Hey! Not like
she
was the one that got dumped all the time. Sometimes — often — she was the one who made the decision to let the thing fade away. Remember Adrian? She was the one who took it slow. She never even kissed him. It was like elementary school, it was so innocent. That faded away very nicely, thank you, no hard feelings, no endless autopsy of the event. Actually got back on her feet and got onto the next thing.

Which had been Wilson.

“ — And
then
, in she
sweeps
, not even waiting for permission to enter, and she’s holding a chicken leg by the skinny end with her fingertips, demanding to know how this offensive piece of meat found its way onto her vegetarian plate — ”

Oh, Lorna
, she thought.
Sometimes I wish I had a bit of your cool detachment. You never get your heart broken. You would have added up the signs, the little behavioral hiccups, you would have known the score. You would have never gotten blindsided like this, never.
She’d never been so shocked in her life.

Had she? Really? Been shocked? Totally and completely … ?

Well. Maybe in a while, she’d actually be able to look at that truthfully.

But not now. Now, she was going to sink, sink completely and fully. In previous heartbreak situations, she had dusted herself off, gone on a trip, taken a class, gotten a haircut, you name it. This time was different. She didn’t know why, but something had to be processed. Something had to be let go. Maybe that’s what that tarot card was about. Change, shifting direction, not nice gradual change, but brutal, heartless change. Maybe I should look that up and —

“Hold on there, darling.”

Annabelle had lurched up suddenly and almost fallen over. She plopped back down too quickly, and thought for a horrified second that she was going to puke. She imagined Lorna covered in spew. Standing there in those insanely high heels covered in vomit. She shook her head to release the mental image — she’d been practicing her creative visualization assiduously over the past year, and didn’t want it to start working now.

The phone rang.

They both froze. Even Lorna looked wary.

It rang again.

They looked at each other, and Lorna quirked a brow. Annabelle shook her head.

And again.

Lorna shrugged and gestured. Annabelle shook her head faster.

Lorna rose abruptly.

“We can
speak
, it’s only the phone ringing. I’ll get it.” She grabbed the receiver without checking the caller ID and answered it, putting on a fake French accent.

“Oui, ’allo?” Annabelle could hear a confused response through the handset. Lorna smirked and mouthed ‘Maria Grazia’, and batted away Annabelle’s reaching hand.

“Esscusem moi, mais I no speak ze Eeenglish tres good. ’Oo ess thees please? ’Allo? ’Allo? — ” Annabelle snatched the phone from her.

“MG? It’s me. No, Lorna. Sure. Yeah. Of course. Yes. Okay. Bye. Bye.”

Lorna was smiling like the Cheshire Cat wreathed in smoke. “She’s so easy it’s not funny anymore.”

“She says she’ll take care of you in person. She’s on her way over.”

Lorna handed Annabelle another box of tissues as she welled up again. “Here. Good Lord. Anna. We love you. Yes? We want to take care of you … for as long as the statute of limitations allows.”

Annabelle laughed, blew her nose, and threw the soggy tissue at Lorna’s head. Lorna leaped up from the couch and in one fluid motion gained her feet, opened the freezer, and removed yet another tray of ice.

“One more round. Just like old times.”

Maria Grazia bustled. She was perfectly able to affect a sinuous sort of swing of her hips — her lovely and curvaceous hips, as she often thought of them — but it was bustling time, and so she did. Not that Lorna was not a good friend to Belle, but ice was not what was needed right now. A little flash of Italian-American fire would do the trick.

Which inspired Maria Grazia to pull her collar up around her face as she booked down Atlantic Avenue. Holy Mother, if Aunt Angelica got wind she was in the old neighborhood, there’d be hell to pay. She’d never hear the end of it, she’d get cut out of the will, her own mother would rain brimstone down on her head … She cranked up the bustle before she got sidetracked by a bakery.