The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (15 page)

That’s what Fleur St. Germaine, the most beautiful, the smartest, the most independent, the everything-I-wanted-to-be girl said to me the day after Christmas. She had given me the briefest of looks. Fleur as the Little Match Girl? I didn’t know what to say.

At the university library, reading about Desdemona again depressed Fleur. She dropped her forehead onto the wooden table with a mild thud. Her blond hair hid her face. “Totally depressing,” she said.

I thought she meant the ending of the play, when Othello strangles Desdemona.

“She reminds me of my mother.” Her voice was garbled behind her hair.

I laid my head down on my arms next to her. “Who?”

“Desdemona. Desdemona reminds me of my mother.” She turned her head so that her cheek lay flat on the table. “My mother sees her future husbands’ ‘visage’ in her mind. She consecrates herself to them. All of
them. And in the end all of her husbands strangle her—metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Even your dad?”

“Twice.”

“Twice?”

“He told her the first time they were married that monogamy was not for him and then went on to prove it to her many times.”

He sounded much like Ashley’s father.

“He was also husband number three, because although he had an aversion to monogamy, he was charming and handsome and all of those romantic qualities that my mother falls for and that match her hats.” Fleur blew her hair from her eyes. “He looked like that old movie star Tyrone Power. Do you know him?”

“A guy with a mustache?”

“No.” She snickered. “My mother doesn’t like facial hair.”

“What about the second husband?” I said, whispering because a girl with a huge stack of books had sat down at the end of our table.

“A Vietnam veteran. Purple Heart. Big and brave. Just like Othello. Nice too, except when he was drunk. He was drunk a lot.”

“And number four?”

“An old guy, Foster. Don’t know much about him.” She lifted her head slightly and smirked. “He died of a heart attack on their wedding night.”

“You’re making it up.”

“I wish.”

“Number five?”

“Had ties to the Mafia.”

“You
are
making these up!”

“No.”

“Number six?”

“Haven’t met him. He’s her plastic surgeon. She says she’s found happiness at last.”

“Maybe it’s true this time.” I didn’t really believe it.

“About as true as those TV miniseries that my mother seems to be copying. Life copying TV.” She sat up. “I’m whining,” she said.

“It’s refreshing to find you have a weakness,” I said. “Come on. I’ve got all the articles I need. Let’s go home.”

Driving through our neighborhood, looking at the bare branches of elms arching over the streets, heavy with snow, at the windows lit with yellow lights, at the streetlamps glowing softly, I began to see that my life
was
a romance. And as we pulled into the garage, I realized that I had always expected my parents to be there, together, pleasant, humorous, understanding, and they were.

Later that evening at the airport, when Fleur’s flight had been called for boarding, she said to us, “Rich told me there was a splendid neighborhood in St. Paul where George Bailey and his family still lived. I thought he was lying his head off, but I believe him now.” She looked fondly at my parents.

“I do have a striking resemblance to the young Jimmy Stewart,” Dad said.

Bjorn snorted. “In your dreams, old man.”

“Pleeze,” my mother said. “I’m no Mary Bailey. I always
thought Donna Reed was smarmy—all that patient smiling.”

“But you’re not Joan Collins either.” Fleur laughed. “I’ll try the recipes.”

“Call me,” Mother said and hugged her hard. “You have the number.”

“Memorized,” Fleur said. “Good-bye, handsome.” She pecked my dad’s lips and hugged him.

“Come back.” He kissed her hand. “Chocolates are waiting in the kitchen cupboard.”

She hugged Bjorn and Trish. “Next year, let
her
pick the tree!” she teased Bjorn. Then she hugged Richard. “I owe you,” she said. “Thanks for letting me come.”

He nodded.

I pulled a red recorder out of my parka. “Here,” I said, handing it to Fleur. “Something to remember us by.”

“My own recorder!” She grasped it tightly.

“Next time we’ll play a trio,” I said. “Or you can find someone else to play with.” “Maybe someday.”

We held on to each other. “You’re not your mother, Fleur. You’re not Desdemona either.”

Still holding on to me, she moved her head away from my face and looked at me, grinning. “And you’ll still be the Kate Bjorkman we all know and love even without those glasses.” We laughed at each other then, like girls, hysterical, fluttery, romantic, pleased with our closing speeches.

“Oh, here,” I said, digging into my pockets. “Some Polaroids to remember us by.”

“I’ll have more pictures when I can get back to my darkroom,” Trish said.

The Polaroids put me on the verge of crying, but the final boarding call saved me from myself. Fleur, with carry-on luggage, recipes, her own recorder, and photographs, blew kisses and walked down the jetway. Exit Fleur St. Germaine.

There’s this old idea that fiction writing should imitate real life, that the situations and the characters must seem plausible to the reader. The trouble I’m having with beginning this chapter,
Chapter
Twelve
, has to do with that idea. See, the problem is that sometimes life is a whole lot more absurd than any imagination can conjure up. Like last year Maren Jacobson wrote this short story for Midgely’s unit on creative writing. In this story, a woman drops fifty floors at high speed in a broken elevator. Not only does the woman survive, but she steps out of the elevator and asks, “Have I passed the mezzanine?”

When Maren read this aloud to the class, we all just about passed out. “Give us a break,” we said.

Midgely held up his hand—“Wait”—and, turning to Maren, said, “The class, understandably I think, is having trouble accepting this scene.” The corners of his mouth twitched up slightly, but his voice was kind. “It sounds pretty far-fetched, don’t you think? Especially since the rest of the story is so realistic.”

Maren, who grasped the pages of her story as if she might fall into a hole, said, “But it really happened!”

“Be serious,” we said.

“It did! My aunt LaPriel—”

That cracked us up—that name, LaPriel. It sounded like a picante sauce.

Midgely quieted us with his raised hand. He could do that, but he was the only one who could. “Go on,” he told Maren.

“Aunt LaPriel fell fifty stories in an elevator in the Chrysler Building in New York City in 1947. She worked there as a mail clerk and later married and had three children. It’s true!”

“We believe you,” Midgely said. “But the question is does this ‘true story’ work in the fiction?”

Midgely’s question is loud in my ear right now, even though he’s lying in the hospital with a thousand tubes in him. It’s his voice that has kept me from saying more about New Year’s Eve. It’s like Maren’s aunt LaPriel—real life—but you’re not going to buy it. I’m just going to have to ask you to do as Coleridge said: suspend your disbelief.

Here goes: I have a rich aunt, my father’s sister, who lives in a pink stucco mansion way out on Lake Minnetonka—a house she bought completely furnished after it was showcased one spring for charity. Every year she throws this enormous dinner-dance on New Year’s Eve, and her name is Eve. Get it? New Year’s
Eve.
It is so incredibly stupid, but the thing is, it’s true. I’m not making this up. But why am I being defensive? This book is not even fiction really; it’s my life. Think of it more as
autobiography. I mean if this were fiction, would I make up a name like Eve for a woman whose whole identity comes from throwing an annual New Year’s Eve party? Would I make up New Year’s
Eve?
Never. I swear it on that Dylan Thomas book with Richard’s inscription in the front.

Anyway, Aunt Eve married Uncle Lanny, whose family got stinking rich in the grain business a couple of generations ago, which is why we call him the Doughboy. That and because he looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy: cherubic and pale. He also speaks with a high voice and giggles a lot.

When I say “we” call Uncle Lanny “Doughboy,” I mean Bjorn and me. Dad calls Lanny the “White Eunuch”—behind his back at least. (Lanny and Eve never had children.) Dad’s usually not that acerbic, but Lanny is always taking tacky digs at him, like “I guess a schoolteacher’s salary doesn’t go very far these days,” or “Becca’s probably making more than you with that designing business of hers, huh?”

So my dad, who loves to dance with my mother, despises this party. Usually his narcolepsy kicks in for the entire New Year’s Eve day and my mother has to wake him to get showered and wake him again to get dressed. Sometimes she has to drive him there herself. “Eve would be so insulted if her little brother didn’t show up for this one party,” she tells him when he rebels.

But this year there was no sign of rebellion. “I’m resigned,” he said at lunch. “The White Eunuch has won.”

Raised eyebrows all around.

It was Richard who lay like a dead slug on the sofa, eyes rolled toward the ceiling. “Tell Ashley,” he said as I swung past on the way to Dad’s study, “that I have the mumps. Mumps are dangerous in a grown man.”

“Could turn
you
into a white eunuch.” I laughed and pulled my paper on Desdemona from the printer tray.

“Might be preferable,” Richard muttered.

“You don’t have to marry her; it’s just one night,” I said, whisking past him again.

He caught my arm and pulled me down onto the sofa. “What are you doing walking back and forth so efficiently?”

“Don’t crinkle my Desdemona paper,” I said, holding it up.

“Is that what you’ve been working on all morning?”

I nodded. “I just have to pull my Works Cited page together and I’m finished.”

“Stay here a minute.” He raised my hand to his lips.
“Ich küsse die Hand.”
He kissed my hand. “That’s what that
GQ
god from Berlin will be saying to you, no doubt.”

I laughed hard then. “Maybe he’ll say, ‘
Ich küsse die Lippen
.’ ” I kissed him lightly on his
Lippen
.

“Hell.”

“Richard.” I laughed. “I’ve never seen you so—so—”

“Inadequate? Petty? Whiny? Boring? Stop me when I come to it. Feeble? Lame?”

“Stop.” I couldn’t stop laughing.

“Imperfect, deficient, sour—”

“Wow, only Mr. Radio could come up with a string of adjectives like that.”

He smiled. “That blabbermouth, Fleur.”

“She said you were a smoothie.”

“What does she know?” He pulled me down and kissed me, one of those breast-on-chest kisses that I refuse to describe further to you. Faces pleasantly mashed into each other. Arms gripping. All that stuff.

“Kate, I don’t want to go with Ashley at all, in case you haven’t noticed. She could look like Miss Universe and I’d still feel deprived, because I want to spend New Year’s Eve with you, and I want you with me and not horny Helmut.”

He was too funny. “Helmut is so harmless,” I said. The thought of Helmut as horny made me giggle uncontrollably.

“Well,” he said, “Ashley isn’t harmless.” There was a glint in his eye. “I’ll have to carry a baseball bat, or a ray-gun. I’ll have to wear a raincoat and a Plexiglas mask!”

I burst out in fresh laughter.

“Maybe a suit of armor,” Richard continued. “I’ve got it—skunk oil!”

“Will you cut it out?”

He grinned. “How did she get invited to your aunt’s party anyway?”

“Same way you always got invited—friend of the family.”

He growled.

“Aunt Eve sends Ashley her own invitation now, and she’ll continue to until I ask her to stop.” Which I would do this year.

“Let’s meet after the dance, here, at one.” He patted the sofa.

“That’s too early,” I said. “It takes forty minutes to get back, maybe more if it starts snowing again.”

“Two?”

“Yes, two, here. If we’re late—”

“Oh please, let’s not be later than two.” He groaned again. “I’ll be here at two.”

“Same here.”

Kiss kiss. Embrace embrace. Sigh sigh. Et cetera et cetera.

T
HAT EVENING WHEN
I stepped into the hall wearing my new glasses and looking as great as I knew how to look in black velvet with gold rope trim on the bodice, I met Richard coming out of his room looking stunning in a tuxedo. My stomach curled, and I was immediately sorry that I had not phoned Helmut to call the night off. Sorry that we had not told Ashley to stuff it, politely, of course. “You look beautiful,” I said. “Edible, in fact.”

“You’re stealing my lines, I think.”

We stood eyeballing each other.

He stepped forward. “We could still call Ashley and Helmut—”

“Helmut’s downstairs,” I said. “Come and meet him.”

Richard made a noise deep in his throat that sounded like “arrgh.” He leaned forward and kissed me lightly. “This night is one grand charade,” he said.

“Is that Obsession I smell?”

He colored slightly. “Appealing?”

“Very.” We moved down the stairs together. “I thought you were going to wear scent of skunk oil.”

“I’m afraid it would turn her on.”

I laughed. He was so handsome, it made me dizzy walking down the stairs next to him, and I have to confess that I was filled with yearning and longing and all those euphemisms for sexual desire. “His closeness was like a drug, lulling her to euphoria.” That’s what the phrase book might say.

I was hot for Richard but going out with Helmut, alas, who waited for me in the front room looking quite Teutonic in a dark suit. Quite handsome, really. I was grateful to have him look so good in front of Richard—grateful that his cowlick was flattened down for once. I introduced them to each other and they shook hands. “Richard is our houseguest,” I explained. “He grew up down the block. He’s a friend of Bjorn’s. He’s at Stanford.” Ta duh, ta duh, ta duh.

They muttered greetings at each other. Helmut was stiff and formal, a little nervous. I felt sorry for him. Richard was completely relaxed, if not downright smug.