Queen of Babble in the Big City (9 page)

“No, I really don’t. Enlighten me?”

“You know,” I say. Because he’s clearly never going to let it go. “Get them to commit.”

“Get them to…” Comprehension dawns across Chaz’s face. Comprehension combined with what appears to be a healthy dose of horror. “You want to
marry
Luke?”

I have no choice but to lift up one of the gold cushions and hurl it at him in fury. “Don’t say it like that!” I yell. “What’s wrong with it? I love him!”

This time Chaz is too stunned to duck. The cushion bounces off him, nearly overturning his empty gin and tonic glass, already teetering precariously on the uneven floor.

“You’ve only known the guy like three months,” he cries. “And you’re already thinking about
marriage
?”

“Oh, what?” I can’t believe this is happening. Again. Why did I open my big mouth? Why can’t I ever keep
anything
to myself? “Like there’s some kind of correct time frame in which you’re supposed to decide these kinds of things? Sometimes you just
know,
Chaz.”

“Yeah, but…
Luke
?” Chaz is shaking his head in disbelief. This is not a good sign. Considering Luke is his best friend. And he probably has insider information.

“What
about
Luke?” I demand. But I’ll admit it, even though I sounded cool about it—to my own ears, anyway—my heart was beginning to race. What was he talking about? Why did he have that expression on his face? Like he’d just smelled something bad?

“Look, don’t get me wrong,” Chaz says. “I think Luke’s a great guy to hang out with and all. But I wouldn’t
marry
him.”

“No one is asking you to,” I point out. “In fact, in most states, that would be illegal.”

“Ha, ha,” Chaz says. Then he clams up. “Listen. Never mind. Forget I said anything. You go on forest-creaturing him, or whatever it is. Have fun.”

“Woodland,” I say. Now my heart isn’t just racing. It feels like it’s about to explode out of my chest. “Woodland creature. And tell me what you mean. Why wouldn’t you want to marry Luke? I mean, aside from the fact that you’re not gay.” And that he hasn’t asked. Me, I mean.

“I don’t know.” Chaz looks uncomfortable. “I mean, marriage is pretty final. You have to spend the rest of your life with the person.”

“Not necessarily,” I say. “I think your father’s built himself a pretty lucrative career proving that this isn’t always the case.”

“That’s what I mean, though,” Chaz says. “If you pick the wrong person, it can end up costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars. If my dad’s firm represents you, I mean.”

“But I don’t think Luke is the wrong person,” I explain to him patiently. “For me. And I’m not saying I want to get married to him tomorrow. I’m not an
idiot
. I want to be established in my career before I start having kids and all of that. And I told him the whole moving-in-together thing was on a trial basis and all of that. I’m just saying that, if things work out, when I’m thirty or so, marrying Luke would be very nice.”

“Well,” Chaz says. “That’s fine, I guess. But
I’m
just saying, a lot of stuff can happen in the six years before you turn thirty—”

“Seven,” I correct him.

“—and that if you guys were horses, and I were a betting man, Luke’s not the horse I would bet on to come in first. Or at all, for that matter.”

I shake my head. My heart has slowed down. It’s clear Chaz doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. Not bet on Luke? What is he talking about? Luke is the most fantastic person I’ve ever met. What other guy does Chaz know who’s memorized every song on the Rolling Stones’
Sticky Fingers
album by heart—and frequently sings them in the shower—on
key
? What other guy does Chaz know who can take oil, vinegar, some mustard, and an egg, and make the most delicious salad dressing I’ve ever tasted? What other guy does Chaz know who was willing to give up his lucrative salary as an investment banker to go back to school to become a doctor, and
help heal sick children
?

“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your friend,” I point out.

Chaz looks defensive. “I’m not saying he’s a bad person. I’m just saying that I’ve known him a lot longer than you have, Lizzie, and
he’s always had a problem with—well, let’s just say when the going gets tough, Luke has a habit of getting going. As in quitting.”

I’m appalled. “Because he put off medical school to become an investment banker, then realized he made a mistake? People do that, you know, Chaz. People make mistakes.”

“You don’t,” Chaz says. “I mean, you make mistakes. But not that kind. You’ve known what you’ve wanted to do since the day I met you. You’ve also known it was going to be hard, and that it would take a lot of sacrifice, and that you probably wouldn’t make a lot of money at it right away. But that never stopped you. You never gave up on your dream when the going got tough.”

I gape at him. “Chaz, have you even been in the same room with me for this entire conversation? I just got through telling you how I’m about to give up on my dream.”

“You just got through telling me how you were going to move home and figure out some other way to pursue it that doesn’t include New York City,” Chaz corrects me. “That’s different. Listen, Liz, don’t get me wrong. I’m
not
saying Luke’s a bad guy. I’m just saying I wouldn’t—”

“Bet on him to finish first if he were a horse and you were a betting man,” I finish for him impatiently. “Yes, I know, I heard you the first time. And I get what you’re saying, I guess. But you’re talking about the OLD Luke. Not the Luke he’s turned into, now that he has me to support him. People change, Chaz.”

“Not that much,” Chaz says.

“Yes,” I say. “They do. That much.”

“Can you give me empirical data to support that statement?” Chaz asks.

“No,” I say. Now I’m really getting impatient. I don’t know how Shari puts up with Chaz sometimes. Oh, sure, he’s cute, in a jockish kind of way. And he totally adores her, and is supposedly fantastic in bed (sometimes I think Shari shares a little too much). But what’s with the turned-around baseball caps? And the
Can you give me the empirical data to support that statement?

“Then that,” Chaz goes on, “is a specious argument—”

What’s that Shakespeare saying?
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers?
It should be,
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the graduate students getting a Ph.D. in philosophy.

“Chaz!” I cut him off. “Do you want to help me measure your windows so I can go home and start on your curtains, or what?”

He glances at the windows. They are covered with hideous folding metal gates, in order to keep out the few remaining crackheads in the city, all of whom seem to live in his neighborhood, for some reason.

They are terrifically ugly. Even a guy should be able to see that.

“I guess,” he says, looking deflated. “It’s more fun arguing with you, though.”

“Well,
I’m
not having any fun,” I inform him.

He grins. “Okay. Curtains it is. And Lizzie.”

I’ve scooped up the measuring tape and am slipping off my shoes so I can climb up onto the radiator to measure. “What?”

“About the job. In my dad’s office. There’s one more thing.”

“What?”

“You’re going to have to keep your mouth shut. I mean, about who you see and what you overhear in there. You’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s a law office. And they promise their clients total discretion—”

“God, Chaz,” I say, irritated all over again. “I can keep my mouth shut, you know.”

He just looks at me.

“If it’s important, I
can,
” I insist. “Like, if my paycheck depends on it.”

“Maybe,” Chaz says, almost as if to himself, “recommending you for the job isn’t the best idea…”

I throw the measuring tape at him.

Yes, I know. Everybody’s doing it. Well, if everyone jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it, too?

So stop letting your bra straps show!

I don’t care how much you paid for your over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder, it’s uncouth to force us to look at it (especially if the straps are graying or frayed—and ESPECIALLY on your wedding day)!

Keep your girls where they should be by having your wedding-gown specialist attach about an inch and a half of seam binding or a thread chain under the shoulder seam of your sleeve or strap. Then have her sew a ball snap to the free end of the guard, and a socket snap toward the neck edge.

Then snap your strap. It will be out of sight…and so will you!

L
IZZIE
N
ICHOLS
D
ESIGNS
™

If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.

—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), French politician and historian

N
ew York is a strange place. Things here can change in the blink of the eye. I guess that’s what they mean when they say a New York minute. Everything just seems to go faster here.

Like, you can be walking down a street that seems perfectly tree-lined and pleasant, and not even one block later, you suddenly find yourself in a trash-filled, graffitied seedy underbelly of a neighborhood, resembling something out of a crime scene on one of the
Law and Order
s. And all you’ve done is crossed a street.

So I guess, considering all this, I shouldn’t have been so amazed that in a forty-eight-hour period, I went from having no job in New York City to being the proud owner of
two
of them.

The interview with the human resources division of Chaz’s dad’s office is going well.
Really
well. It’s like a joke, actually. The harried-looking woman whose office I’m escorted into after waiting for nearly half an hour in the fancy lobby (they’d upgraded from gold-trimmed couches to deep-brown leather ones, which blended nicely with the dark wood paneling on the walls and rich green carpeting) asks me one or two pleasant questions about how I know
Chaz—“From the dorm we all lived in in college,” I say, not mentioning that Shari and I had met him at an outdoor movie night sponsored by the student government of McCracken Hall, at which Chaz had been the one who’d started passing around a joint, causing us to refer to him for days afterward as the Joint Man…until Shari spied him eating breakfast in the dining hall by himself one morning, plunked herself down beside him, asked him his name, and by that evening had slept with him in his single in McCracken’s tower suites. Three times.

“Great,” Roberta, my interviewer, says, apparently not realizing she’s getting a less than complete relationship history from me. “We all love Charles. The summer he worked here in the mailroom, he had us all in stitches the whole time. He’s so funny.”

Yeah. Chaz is hilarious.

“It’s just too bad,” Roberta goes on wistfully, “that Charles didn’t choose the law. He has his dad’s same brilliant academic mind. When either of them starts arguing a point—well, get out of the way!”

Yeah. Chaz likes to argue a point, all right.

“So, Lizzie,” Roberta says pleasantly. “When can you start?”

I gape at her. “You mean I got the job?”

“Of course.” Roberta looks at me strangely, as if any other turn of events would be unthinkable. “Could you start tomorrow?”

Can I start tomorrow? Is there a grand total of three hundred and twenty-one dollars in my checking account? Are my credit cards maxed out to their limits? Am I fifteen hundred dollars in debt to MasterCard?

“I can
definitely
start tomorrow!”

Oh, Chaz, I take it all back. I love you. You can say whatever you want about Luke. You can be as pessimistic as you choose about the wisdom of my wanting to marry him. For this, Chaz, I owe you. Big time.

“I love your boyfriend.” I call Shari on my cell to tell her as I come out of the skyscraper on Madison Avenue in which the offices
of Pendergast, Loughlin, and Flynn take up the entire thirty-seventh floor.

“Really.” Shari sounds, as always when I call her at her office these days, a little frantic. “You can have him.”

“Taken,” I say. I’m on Fifty-seventh Street between Madison and Fifth. It’s such a nice fall day—just warm enough that you don’t need a coat, and just cool enough that you don’t feel sweaty—I decide to walk to Monsieur Henri’s, just thirty blocks north, instead of taking the subway, saving myself a whopping two bucks. Hey, every little bit counts. “Chaz got me a job in his dad’s office.”

“A job?” I hear computer keys clacking. Shari is talking and e-mailing at the same time. But that’s okay. I’ll take whatever I can get, it’s so hard to reach her these days. “I thought you already had a job. At that wedding-gown place.”

“Yeah,” I say, realizing I hadn’t been quite as upfront with my friends about my deal with Monsieur Henri as I ought to have been. “That’s not really a paying gig—”

“WHAT?” I realize by her tone—and the cessation of clacking keys—that I now have Shari’s undivided attention. “You took a
nonpaying
job?”

“Right,” I say. It’s kind of hard to walk down a busy sidewalk like the one I’m currently hurrying along and talk on your cell at the same time. There are so many businesspeople rushing back to their offices, street vendors hawking Prada knockoffs, tourists stopping to gawk at the tall buildings, and homeless people asking for spare change that it’s as hard to navigate as the Indy 500 Speedway during the race. “Well, it’s not easy to find a paying fashion gig in this city when you’re just starting out.”

“I can’t believe that,” Shari says, sounding incredulous. “What about
Project Runway
?”

“Shari,” I say. “I’m not going on a
reality show
—”

“No, I just mean…they make it seem like it’s all so easy—”

“Well,” I say. “It’s not. Anyway, I want us to get together to cel
ebrate—you and me and Chaz and Luke. So what are you doing tonight?”

“Oh,” Shari says. I hear the clacking start up again. Which isn’t easy, considering the fact that there are cars honking and people talking loudly all around me. And yet, I can still hear the fact that my best friend is only half paying attention to me. “I can’t. Not tonight. We’re getting slammed here today—”

“Fine,” I say. I understand that Shari’s new job is the most important thing in the world to her right now. Which is as it should be. I mean, she is, after all, saving women’s lives. “How about tomorrow night, then?”

“This week is really bad for me, Lizzie,” Shari says. “I’m going to be working late just about every night.”

“What about Saturday?” I inquire patiently. “You aren’t working on Saturday night, are you?”

There’s a pause. For a second or two, I think Shari’s going to say that she does, indeed, plan on working through Saturday night.

But then she says, “No, of course not. Saturday it is.”

“Great,” I say. “We’ll hit Chinatown. And then Honey’s. On Saturday night the serious karaoke players come out. And, Shari?”

“What, Lizzie? I really have to go, Pat’s waiting—”

“I know.” There’s always someone waiting for Shari these days. “But I wanted to ask you—are things okay between you and Chaz? Because he asked me about you.”

I have her full attention again. “He asked you
what
about me?” Shari demands, somewhat sharply.

“Just if I thought you were all right,” I say. “I said I thought you were. I guess he misses you as much as I do.” I think about this as I wait for the light to change before crossing the street. “Actually, he probably misses you more…”

“I can’t help it,” Shari snaps, “if I’m too busy helping victims of domestic violence find safe places to live to worry about my boyfriend. This is part of the problem, you know. I mean, men think
the entire world revolves around them. And so when the woman in his life finds herself thriving—excelling, even—in the workplace, a man naturally feels threatened, and eventually leaves her for someone who has more time to give to him.”

I am, to put it bluntly, stunned by this speech. So stunned I actually stop walking for a second, and am bumped from behind by an irritated-looking businessman. “Excuse you,” the businessman mutters before hurrying along.

“Shari,” I say into the phone. “Chaz does
not
feel threatened by your new career. He loves that you love your job. He just wants to know when he’s ever going to see you again. He isn’t leaving you.”

“I know,” Shari says, after a pause. “I just—sorry. I didn’t mean to lay all that on you. I’m just having a bad day. Forget I said anything.”

“Shari.” I shake my head. “This sounds like something more serious than just a bad day. Are you and Chaz—”

“I really have to go, Lizzie,” Shari says. “I’ll see you Saturday.”

And then she hangs up.

Wow. What was
that
about? I wonder. Chaz and Shari have always had something of a stormy relationship, full of bickering and even some fights (the most serious of which was the one stemming from Shari’s decision to kill and dissect her lab rat, Mr. Jingles, even after Chaz had found an identical replacement rat at PetSmart for whom none of us had developed the kind of affection we all felt for Mr. Jingles).

But they’d always made up quickly (except for the two weeks after Mr. Jingles’s death that Chaz wouldn’t speak to Shari). In fact, the fantastic makeup sex was one of the reasons Shari cited for picking so many fights with Chaz in the first place.

So is that what’s going on now? Just an elaborate ploy on Shari’s part to inject a little more excitement into their relationship?

Because, as I’m discovering myself, it’s not easy to keep the flame alive when you’re living together. Mundane everyday things can totally get in the way of blissful cohabitation. Like whose turn
is it to do the dishes, and who gets control of the remote, and who unplugged whose cell phone charger to plug in the hair dryer instead then forgot to plug the cell phone charger back in.

Those kinds of things are real romance killers.

Not that I don’t love every minute of living with Luke. I mean, from the moment I wake up to see the Renoir girl’s smiling face above my head, to the moment I fall asleep, listening to Luke’s gentle breathing beside me (he always falls asleep before I do. I don’t know how he does it. The minute his head touches the pillow, he’s out like a light. Maybe it’s all that boring reading for his Principles of Biology and General Chemistry that he does before bed in order to keep up with his homework), I thank my lucky stars that I made the decision to leave England and go to France. Because otherwise I would never have met him, and I wouldn’t be as happy as I am now (worries about finances aside).

Still, I guess I can understand it if Shari is trying to get a rise out of Chaz just to shake things up a little. Because I’ve watched television with Chaz before, and the way he flips up and down the channels instead of just leaving it on one semiinteresting program and then going to the onscreen guide to see what else is on can be almost as annoying as the way Luke, it turns out, considers really upsetting documentaries about things like the Holocaust suitable viewing for a fun Friday night at home.

But I don’t have time to worry about Shari and Chaz—or even Luke’s aversion to romantic comedies—because when I get to Monsieur Henri’s that afternoon and ring the bell to be let in (he hasn’t given me a key, and probably won’t, I fear, until I’ve proved myself capable of doing something other than a cross-stitch), I find bedlam.

An older woman with big hair and the kind of brightly colored clothing that I’ve already learned pegs her as “bridge and tunnel” (someone who lives outside Manhattan, and has to take a bridge or tunnel to get to it) is holding this enormous white box and shout
ing, “Look! Just look!” while a girl who could only be her daughter (even though she’s more stylishly attired in black and a blowout) stands nearby, looking sullen, and not a little rebellious.

Monsieur Henri, in the meantime, is saying, “Madame, I know. This is not the first time. I see this often.”

I try to keep out of the way, and sidle up to Madame Henri, who is watching the drama unfold from the curtained doorway to the workroom at the back of the shop.

“What’s happening?” I ask her.

She shakes her head. “They went to Maurice” is all she says in way of reply.

Which of course tells me nothing. I still don’t have the slightest idea who Maurice is.

But then Monsieur Henri reaches into the box, and carefully pulls out a long-sleeved, virginal, fragile-as-gossamer-looking white gown.

At least, it used to be white. The lace has turned a sickening shade of yellow.

“He promised!” the woman is saying. “He promised the preservation box would keep it from yellowing!”

“Of course he did,” Monsieur Henri says, in a dry tone. “And when you took it back to show him, he told you that the reason it turned this color was because you broke the preservation seal.”

“Yes!” The woman’s chin is trembling, she’s so upset. “Yes, that’s exactly what he said! He said it was my fault, for allowing air inside the box!”

I let out an involuntary sound of protest. Monsieur Henri glances in my direction. I immediately blush, and take a quick step backward.

But Monsieur Henri has fastened his blue-eyed gaze at me and isn’t looking away.

“Mademoiselle?” he asks. “There is something you wish to say?”

“No,” I say quickly, aware that Madame Henri is staring daggers at me. “I mean, not really.”

“I think there is.” Monsieur Henri’s eyes are very bright. He can’t see anything close up without his glasses. But his farsightedness is uncanny. “Go on. What is it that you wish to say?”

“Only,” I begin reluctantly, fearing I might be saying something he won’t like, “that storing textiles in a sealed container can actually harm them, especially if moisture gets in. It can cause the material to mildew.”

Monsieur Henri, I see, looks pleased. This gives me the courage to continue. “Not one of the historic costumes at the Met is stored in an airtight room,” I go on. “And they’re doing just fine. It’s important to keep old fabric out of direct sunlight—but there’s no way breaking the seal on a preservation box caused the yellowing on that dress. That was caused by improper cleaning before storage…most likely the result of the gown not having been cleaned at all, and stains from champagne or perspiration being left untreated.”

The smile Monsieur Henri bequeaths me upon my concluding this recitation is dazzling enough to cause his wife to suck in her breath…

…and throw me a look of surprise. It’s clear she’s reassessing her “stupid” remark from earlier in the week.

“But how can that be?” the woman asks, her brow furrowed. “If the gown was cleaned before it was put in storage—”

“God, Mom,” the girl interrupts, sounding disgusted. “Don’t you get it? That Maurice guy didn’t clean it. He just stuck it in there, put the lid on, and gave it back,
saying
he’d cleaned it.”