“Did you notice the racehorses had these companion ponies that didn’t leave their sides?”
“I guess.”
“Well, I think that was us, me and Bails.”
She pauses a minute, exhales a long plume of smoke, before she says, “You were both racehorses, Len.” I can tell she doesn’t believe it though, that she’s just trying to be nice.
I shake my head. “C’mon, be real, I wasn’t. God, no way. I’m not.” And it’s been no one’s doing but my own. Bailey went as crazy as Gram when I quit my lessons.
“Do you want to be?” Sarah asks.
“Maybe,” I say, unable to quite manage a yes.
She smiles, then in silence, we both watch car after car creep along, most of them filled with ridiculously bright rubber river gear: giraffe boats, elephant canoes and the like. Finally she says, “Being a companion pony must suck. Not metaphorically, I mean, you know, if you’re a horse. Think about it. Self-sacrifice twenty-four/seven, no glory, no glamour … they should start a union, have their own Companion Pony Derby.”
“A good new cause for you.”
“No. My new cause is turning St Lennon into a femme fatale.” She smirks. “C’mon, Len, say yes.”
Her C’mon, Len reminds me of Bails, and the next thing I know, I hear myself saying, “Okay, fine.”
“It’ll be subtle, I promise.”
“Your strong-suit.”
She laughs. “Yeah, you’re so screwed.”
It’s a hopeless idea, but I have no other. I have to do something, and Sarah’s right, looking sexy, assuming I can look sexy, can’t hurt, can it? I mean it is true that seduction hardly ever fails in movies, especially French ones. So I defer to Sarah’s expertise, experience, to the concept of jouissance, and Operation Seduction is officially under way.
I have cleavage. Melons. Bazumbas. Bodacious tatas. Handfuls of bosom pouring out of a minuscule black dress that I’m going to wear in broad daylight to band practice. I can’t stop looking down. I’m stacked, a buxom babe. My scrawny self is positively zaftig. How can a bra possibly do this? Note to the physicists: Matter can indeed be created. Not to mention that I’m in platforms, so I look nine feet tall, and my lips are red as pomegranates.
Sarah and I have ducked into a classroom next to the music room.
“Are you sure, Sarah?” I don’t know how I got myself into this ridiculous I Love Lucy episode.
“Never been more sure of anything. No guy will be able to resist you. I’m a little worried Mr James won’t survive it though.”
“All right. Let’s go,” I say.
The way I get down the hallway is to pretend I’m someone else. Someone in a movie, a black-and-white French movie where everyone smokes and is mysterious and alluring. I’m a woman, not a girl, and I’m going to seduce a man. Who am I kidding? I freak out and run back to the classroom. Sarah follows, my bridesmaid.
“Lennie, c’mon.” She’s exasperated.
There it is again, Lennie, c’mon. I try again. This time I think of Bailey, the way she sashayed, making the ground work for her, and I glide effortlessly through the door of the music room.
I notice right away that Joe isn’t there, but there’s still time until rehearsal starts, like fifteen seconds, and he’s always early, but maybe something held him up.
Fourteen seconds: Sarah was right, all the boys are staring at me like I’ve popped out of a centerfold. Rachel almost drops her clarinet.
Thirteen, Twelve, Eleven: Mr James throws his arms up in celebration. “Lennie, you look ravishing!” I make it to my seat.
Ten, Nine: I put my clarinet together but don’t want to get lipstick all over my mouthpiece. I do anyway.
Eight, Seven: tuning.
Six, Five: tuning still.
Four, Three: I turn around. Sarah shakes her head, mouths unfreakingbelievable.
Two, One: the announcement I now am expecting. “Let’s begin class. Sorry to say we’ve lost our only trumpet player for the festival. Joe’s going to perform with his brothers instead. Take out your pencils, I have changes.”
I drop my glamorous head into my hands, hear Rachel say, “I told you he was out of your league, Lennie.”
There once was a girl who found herself dead.
She peered over the ledge of heaven
and saw that back on earth
her sister missed her too much,
was way too sad,
so she crossed some paths
that would not have crossed,
took some moments in her hand
shook them up
and spilled them like dice
over the living world.
It worked.
The boy with the guitar collided
with her sister.
"There you go, Len," she whispered.
"The rest is up to you."
(Found on a folded up flyer on the sidewalk, Main Street)
“May the force be with you,” Sarah says, and sends me on my way, which is up the hill to the Fontaines’ in aforementioned black cocktail dress, platforms and bodacious tatas. The whole way up I repeat a mantra: I am the author of my story and I can tell it any way I want. I am a solo artist. I am a racehorse. Yes, this puts me into the major freaker category of human, but it does the trick and gets me up the hill, because fifteen minutes later I am looking up at Maison Fontaine, the dry summer grass crackling all around me, humming with hidden insects, which reminds me: how in the world does Rachel know what happened with Joe?
When I get to the driveway, I see a man dressed all in black with a shuck of white hair, waving his arms around like a dervish, shouting in French at a stylish woman in a black dress (hers fits her), who looks equally peeved. She is hissing back at him in English. I definitely do not want to walk past those two panthers, so I sneak around the far side of the property and then duck under the enormous willow tree that reigns like a queen over the yard, the thick drapes of leaves falling like a shimmering green ball gown around the ancient trunk and branches, creating the perfect skulk den.
I need a moment to bolster my nerve, so I pace around in my new glimmery green apartment trying to figure out what I’m going to actually say to Joe, a point both Sarah and I forgot to consider.
That’s when I hear it: clarinet music drifting out from the house, the melody Joe wrote for me. My heart does a hopeful flip. I walk over to the side of Maison Fontaine that abuts the tree and, still concealed by a drape of leaves, I stand up on tiptoe and see through the open window a sliver of Joe playing a bass clarinet in the living room.
And thus begins my life as a spy.
I tell myself, after this song, I will ring the doorbell and literally face the music. But then, he plays the melody again and again and the next thing I know I’m lying on my back listening to the amazing music, reaching into Sarah’s purse for a pen, which I find as well as a scrap of paper. I jot down a poem, spike it with a stick into the ground. The music is making me rapturous; I slip back into that kiss, again drinking the sweet rain off his lips—
To be rudely interrupted by DougFred’s exasperated voice. “Dude, you’re driving me berserk – this same song over and over again, for two days now, I can’t deal. We’re all going to jump off the bridge right after you. Why don’t you just talk to her?” I jump up and scurry over to the window: Harriet the Spy in drag. Please say you’ll talk to her, I mind-beam to Joe.
“No way,” he says.
“Joe, it’s pathetic … c’mon.”
Joe’s voice is pinched, tight. “I am so pathetic. She was lying to me the whole time … just like Genevieve, just like Dad to Mom for that matter…”
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Boy, did I blow it.
“Whatever, already, with all of that – shit’s complicated sometimes, man.” Hallelujah, DougFred.
“Not for me.”
“Just get your horn, we need to practice.”
Still concealed under the tree, I listen to Joe, Marcus and DougFred practicing: it goes like this, three notes
, then a cell phone rings: Marcus: Hey Ami, then five minutes later, another ring: Marcus: Salut Sophie, then DougFred: Hey Chloe, then fifteen minutes later: Hi Nicole. These guys are Clover catnip. I remember how the phone rang pretty much continually the evening I spent here. Finally, Joe says: Turn off the cell phones or we won’t even get through a song – but just as he finishes the sentence, his own cell goes off and his brothers laugh. I hear him say, Hey Rachel. And that’s the end of me. Hey Rachel in a voice that sounds happy to hear from her, like he was expecting the call, waiting for it even.
I think of St Wilgefortis, who went to sleep beautiful and woke up with a full beard and mustache, and wish that fate on Rachel. Tonight.
Then I hear: You were totally right. The Throat Singers of Tuva are awesome.
Call 911.
Okay, calm down, Lennie. Stop pacing. Don’t think about him batting his eyelashes at Rachel Brazile! Grinning at her, kissing her, making her feel like she’s part sky… What have I done? I lie down on my back in the grass under the umbrella of trembling sunlit leaves. I’m leveled by a phone call. How must it have been for him to actually see me kiss Toby?
I suck, there’s no other way to put it.
There’s also no other way to put this: I’m so freaking in love – it’s just blaring every which way inside me, like some psycho opera.
But back to BITCHZILLA!?
Be rational, I tell myself, systematic, think of all the many innocuous unromantic reasons she could be calling him. I can’t think of one, though I’m so consumed with trying I don’t even hear the truck pull up, just a door slamming. I get up, peek out through the thick curtain of leaves, and almost pass out to see Toby walking toward the front door. WTF-asaurus? He hesitates before ringing the bell, takes a deep breath, then presses the button, waits, then presses it again. He steps back, looks toward the living room, where the music is now blasting, then knocks hard. The music stops and I hear the pounding of feet, then watch the door open and hear Toby say: “Is Joe here?”
Gulp.
Next, I hear Joe still in the living room: “What’s his problem? I didn’t want to talk to him yesterday and I don’t want to talk to him today.”
Marcus is back in the living room. “Just talk to the guy.”
“No.”
But Joe must have gone to the door, because I hear muffled words and see Toby’s mouth moving, although he’s quieted down too much for me to make out the words.
I don’t plan what happens next. It just happens. I just happen to have that stupid it’s-my-story-I’m-a-racehorse mantra back on repeat in my head and so I somehow decide that whatever is going to happen, good or bad, I don’t want to be hiding in a tree when it does. I muster all my courage and part the curtain of leaves.
The first thing I notice is the sky, so full of blue and the kind of brilliant white clouds that make you ecstatic to have eyes. Nothing can go wrong under this sky, I think as I make my way across the lawn, trying not to wobble in my platforms. The Fontaine panther-parents are nowhere in sight; probably they took their hissing match into the barn. Toby must hear my footsteps; he turns around.
“Lennie?”
The door swings open and three Fontaines pile out like they’ve been stuffed in a car.
Marcus speaks first: “Va-va-voom.”
Joe’s mouth drops open.
Toby’s too, for that matter.
“Holy shit” comes out of DougFred’s perpetually deranged with-glee face. The four of them are like a row of dumbfounded ducks. I’m acutely aware of how short my dress is, how tight it is across my chest, how wild my hair is, how red my lips are. I might die. I want to wrap my arms around my body. For the rest of my life, I’m going to leave the femme fatale-ing to other femmes. All I want is to flee, but I don’t want them to stare at my butt as I fly into the woods in this tiny piece of fabric masquerading as a dress. Wait a second here – one by one, I take in their idiotic faces. Was Sarah right? Might this work? Could guys be this simple-minded?
Marcus is ebullient. “One hot tamale, John Lennon.”
Joe glares at him. “Shut the hell up, Marcus.” He has regained his composure and rage. Nope, Joe is definitely not this simpleminded. I know immediately this was a bad, bad move.
“What’s wrong with you two?” he says to Toby and me, throwing up his arms in a perfect mimicry of his father’s dervishness.
He pushes past his brothers and Toby, jumps off the stoop, comes up to me, so close that I can smell his fury. “Don’t you get it? What you did? It’s done, Lennie, we’re done.” Joe’s beautiful lips, the ones that kissed me and whispered in my hair, they are twisting and contorting around words I hate. The ground beneath me begins to tilt. People don’t really faint, do they? “Get it, because I mean it. It’s ruined. Everything is.”
I’m mortified. I’m going to kill Sarah. And what a total companion-pony move on my part. I knew this wouldn’t work. There was no way he was going to toss aside this behemoth betrayal because I squeezed myself into this ridiculously small dress. How could I be so stupid?
And it’s just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there’s no overlap.
He’s walking away from me. I don’t care that there are six pairs of eyes and ears on us. He can’t leave before I have a chance to say something, have a chance to make him understand what happened, how I feel about him. I grab the bottom of his T-shirt. He snaps around, flings my hand away, meets my eyes. I don’t know what he sees in them, but he softens a little. I watch some of the rage slip off of him as he looks at me. Without it, he looks unnerved and vulnerable, like a small disheartened boy. It makes me ache with tenderness. I want to touch his beautiful face. I look at his hands; they are shaking.
As is all of me.
He’s waiting for me to speak. But I realize the perfect thing to say must be in another girl’s mind, because it’s not in mine. Nothing is in mine.
“I’m sorry,” I manage out.
“I don’t care,” he says, his voice cracking a little. He looks down at the ground. I follow his gaze, see his bare feet sticking out of jeans; they are long and thin and monkey-toed. I’ve never seen his feet out of shoes and socks before. They’re perfectly simian – toes so long he could play the piano with them.
“Your feet,” I say, before I realize it. “I’ve never seen them before.”
My moronic words drum in the air between us, and for a split second, I know he wants to laugh, wants to reach out and pull me to him, wants to tease me about saying something so ridiculous when he’s about to murder me. I can see this in his face as if his thoughts were scribbled across it. But then all that gets wiped away as quickly as it came, and what’s left is the unwieldy hurt in his unbatting eyes, his grinless mouth. He will never forgive me.
I took the joy out of the most joyful person on planet Earth.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I—”
“God, stop saying that.” His hands swoop around me like lunatic bats. I’ve reignited his rage. “It doesn’t matter to me that you’re sorry. You just don’t get it.” He whips around and bolts into the house before I can say another word.
Marcus shakes his head and sighs, then follows his brother inside with DougFred in tow.
I stand there with Joe’s words still scorching my skin, thinking what a terrible idea it was to come up here, in this tiny dress, these skyscraping heels. I wipe the siren song off my lips. I’m disgusted with myself. I didn’t ask for his forgiveness, didn’t explain a thing, didn’t tell him that he is the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me, that I love him, that he’s the only one for me. Instead, I talked about his feet. His feet.
Talk about choking under pressure. And then I remember Hey Rachel, which explodes a Molotov cocktail of jealousy into my misery, completing the dismal picture.
I want to kick the postcard-perfect sky.
I’m so absorbed in my self-flage
llation, I forget Toby’s there until he says, “Emotional guy.”
I look up. He’s sitting on the stoop now, leaning back on his arms, his legs kicked out. He must have come straight from work; he’s out of his usual skate rat rags and has on mud-splattered jeans and boots and button-down shirt and is only missing the Stetson to complete the Marlboro Man picture. He looks like he did the day he whisked my sister’s heart away: Bailey’s Revolutionary.
“He almost attacked me with his guitar yesterday. I think we’re making progress,” he adds.
“Toby, what’re you doing here?”
“What are you doing hiding in trees?” he asks back, nodding at the willow behind me.
“Trying to make amends,” I say.
“Me, too,” he says quickly, jumping to his feet. “But to you. Been trying to tell him what’s what.” His words surprise me.
“I’ll take you home,” he says.
We both get into his truck. I can’t seem to curb the nausea overwhelming me as a result of the hands-down worst seduction in love’s history. Ugh. And on top of it, I’m sure Joe is watching us from a window, all his suspicions seething in his hot head as I drive off with Toby.
“So, what’d you say to him?” I ask when we’ve cleared Fontaine territory.
“Well, the three words I got to say yesterday and the ten I got in today added up to pretty much telling him he should give you a second chance, that there’s nothing going on with us, that we were just wrecked…”
“Wow, that was nice. Busybody as you like, but nice.”
He looks over at me for a moment before returning his eyes to the road. “I watched you guys that night in the rain … I saw it, how you feel.”
His voice is full of emotion that I can’t decipher and probably don’t want to. “Thanks,” I say quietly, touched that he did this despite everything, because of everything.
He doesn’t respond, just looks straight ahead into the sun, which is obliterating everything in our path with unruly splendor. The truck blasts through the trees and I stick my hand out the window, trying to catch the wind in my palm like Bails used to, missing her, missing the girl I used to be around her, missing who we all used to be. We will never be those people again. She took them all with her.