Kitabı oku: «Wish Upon a Star»

ONE

Once upon a time in a magical city called New York a girl under a spell lived on an island.

It was Staten Island. And to get to work in Manhattan, Claire Amelia Bilsop had to commute almost two hours each way. She took a train from Tottenville, then a short walk to the ferry slip, then the ferry to Manhattan. She did it with her friend Tina and today was no different from most other days.

‘Oh, c’mon,’ Tina said. ‘Come with us. You never go anywhere and you’ve never done anything.’

Claire looked down at her knitting and frowned. When the ferry bumped against the pilings she had dropped a stitch. ‘That’s not true,’ she said, though in fact it pretty much was. She thought of her trips to the library, the video store, the wool department of Kelsey’s, all on Broad Street in Tottenville. ‘I have traveled broadly,’ Claire retorted, ‘and I come into Manhattan every day. Last summer I went to Long Beach Island.’

‘Long Beach, for god’s sake! In Jersey! And you went with your mother and that douchebag boyfriend of hers.’

Claire winced. Tina’s heart was in the right place but her mouth was in the gutter. ‘I prefer to think of him as a windbag,’ Claire said.

‘Douche, wind, whatever.’ Tina stuffed her magazine into her purse, fished out her sunglasses and stood up. Claire stood beside her. ‘Put that wool away, Granny,’ Tina told her and looked at her watch. Claire sighed. The ferry had docked and, as always, they had twenty minutes to walk up Water Street, get coffee and bagels from their regular street vendor, then be upstairs on the thirty-eighth floor of the Crayden Smithers Alliance Building. They had plenty of time but Tina always behaved like a child at a birthday party, afraid she wouldn’t get the last seat in musical chairs. As if anyone else would want their seats at Crayden Smithers. Claire picked up the dropped stitch, wrapped up her knitting, slipped into her coat and joined Tina and the crowd jostling to get off the boat.

As Tina pushed to the head of the line she pulled Claire in her wake. ‘Jersey, for Christ’s sake!’

‘I went to the Poconos,’ Claire murmured. People were looking at them angrily. Even in Manhattan, a city fabled for pushers, Tina stood out.

‘The Poconos!’ Tina almost spat as they stepped off the ferry. ‘That’s one step lower than Jersey.’ She shook her head and her big hair trembled. ‘And you went with that yutz. You didn’t even have sex with him.’

Claire colored. She looked around but the crowd paid no attention, busy dispersing to buses, subways, and a new day of boredom or aggravation. Claire’s sex life – or lack of it – meant nothing to them. ‘I slept with him,’ she protested. She wouldn’t admit to Tina that it had been mostly sleeping. Bob had not been an Italian stallion, as Tina always claimed her fiancé, Anthony, to be.

‘That’s even more pathetic,’ Tina said. ‘Sleeping with Bob. Fah!’ They stepped out of the terminal and the wind off the bay battered them. ‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ Tina complained. ‘It’s March, for god’s sake. When’s it gonna warm up?’ Claire knew Tina didn’t expect an answer so she didn’t venture one, letting Tina continue her ongoing monologue and possibly well-meaning harassment. ‘It’s warm in San Juan, Claire. Beaches. Casinos. Bars.’

The trouble was that Claire didn’t really like any of those things. She burned in the sun, she’d never gambled – not even on a Lotto ticket – and she hated bars. Though Tina had been her friend since they’d grown up on the same street in Tottenville, there wasn’t much that Tina enjoyed doing that didn’t make Claire bored or uncomfortable or both. People who lived in Manhattan referred to people like Tina as one of the ‘bridge and tunnel crowd’. Though they didn’t take a bridge or a tunnel to get to Manhattan from Staten Island, Claire felt this technicality wouldn’t affect Tina’s status. She was parochial, and not just because of her Catholic school upbringing. Claire hid a smile.

She often thought what a strange, ill-matched pair they made. Tina was tiny and dark, with big breasts she liked to be noticed and she wore bright, tight fitting tops. Her skin was olive and her make-up was dramatic. Claire was tall and, though fifteen pounds overweight, her chest was almost embarrassingly small – god must be a man because a woman god would not let all the weight she put on go to her hips. She had pale, fine skin and eyes that were somewhere between gray and green (but if she was honest – and she always was – closer to gray). Her light brown hair hung straight, cut below the chin in a simple bob. Aside from some pink lip gloss and an occasional (inept) wave of a brown mascara wand, she wore no make-up at all. Now the cold made her lick her lips and wish she’d brought the lip gloss with her.

The buildings on either side of them made a wind tunnel and Claire felt like Dorothy about to be battered by the tornado. Except, of course, there was no Oz. ‘If it’s about the money, hey, I got a few extra bucks,’ Tina offered. Claire blushed. She regretted telling Tina recently that her mother had begun charging rent. ‘Just for you to stay in the room you’ve slept in since you were four years old?’ Tina had demanded, outraged. Claire had nodded. Since Jerry had moved in, her mother seemed more short of cash than ever, though his contribution and the insurance money from her father’s death should have been more than enough for her mother to live on.

‘Ya know, it’s a sin the way your mom treats you. My uncle says if your dad left the house to you, you shouldn’t be payin’ no rent.’ Claire neither pointed out the double negative nor the fact that it was none of Tina’s uncle’s business. Of course, it sometimes seemed that Tina’s uncle – some of her other male relatives too – didn’t have a business. And their wives spent lots of cash and discussed everyone’s. But Claire never criticized – she knew what could happen to people who criticized Tony Brunetti. But if Tina was bossy, judgmental and a gossip, she did have a generous heart. ‘So, you want a loan?’ she asked.

‘No. It’s not that,’ Claire told Tina. They were only a block from the office but the chill was piercing. She tucked her chin down against the wind and tried to adjust her muffler – one she’d knit for herself – so that none of her throat was exposed. At least when they turned the corner, in sight of Sy’s pushcart, the wind abated.

‘Hello, ladies,’ Sy called out over the heads of the other customers on line for their morning caffeine and carbohydrate fix.

‘Hey, Sy!’ Tina replied. ‘Wanna go to Puerto Rico with me?’

‘Nah,’ Sy said. ‘I’d rather stand here in the cold, freezing my nuts off and doling out coffee to rich, cheap bastards.’

The rich cheap bastards on line were too busy reading the Journal headlines or talking on their cell phones to react, but Claire smiled.

‘Yeah. You got the life,’ Tina agreed. When she and Claire got to the front of the line Sy, without needing to be told, put their regular orders into two little bags. He handed them over to the girls with a flourish.

‘Tell ya what,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask my wife’s permission. But screw Puerto Rico. If she says yes we’re going to Aruba.’

‘If she says yes, I’ll buy Aruba,’ Tina wisecracked. ‘Then I’ll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.’

‘Been there, done that. That’s why I’m pushing this cart,’ Sy said. He turned to Claire. ‘But maybe a cutie like you could sell me the Williamsburg.’ He winked.

Tina was rooting around in her gigantic purse. She looked up. ‘Geez, I barely have enough money for Danish and coffee. Hey, Claire, can you lend me a twenty till Friday?’

Sy, still looking at Claire, shook his head. ‘Same shit, ‘nother day,’ he smiled.

Claire nodded, opened her backpack and handed the bill to Tina. ‘Thanks,’ Tina said, and handed the twenty to Sy. ‘My treat.’

Claire smiled. That was so Tina. Always there with her hand out but always willing to share. She’d give you the blouse off her back – but she’d probably already borrowed your money to buy the blouse. Claire was the kind of person who always had money saved to lend to Tina – who was the kind of person who always needed to borrow some. Claire wasn’t old or experienced enough to know the whole world was divided into those two kinds of people, one never happy with the other. She just smiled at her friend as Tina handed Claire the bag of black coffee and a buttered bagel. As they walked from the cart, though, Claire did idly wonder why she was more comfortable lending than borrowing. It certainly wasn’t her mother’s influence. Her mother owed money not only to Claire but also to most of Tottenville. But neither did Claire remember her late father being open-handed with money. Perhaps she didn’t take after either one of them. Despite genetics she had always seemed completely unlike her parents or her brother Fred.

‘My brothers and Anthony went out last night and got hammered,’ Tina said. ‘Boy, were they hung this morning. They said they missed Fred. How is he?’

The truth was Claire had no idea how her brother was. He had joined the Army and had been shipped off to Germany. Claire had written to him dutifully for the first six or eight months after he left but he had rarely responded and when he did it was only with a brief postcard (no picture). As her letters became more and more difficult to write, Claire had admitted to herself that she and Fred never had much in common. So her letters had petered out. That didn’t mean that her guilt did. Aside from Fred and her mom she had no relatives she associated with. There was an aunt on her father’s side, but Claire had been told that the Bilsops had disowned her forever.

Tina, on the contrary, lived amidst scores of complex ongoing relationships: cousins, second cousins, their wives or husbands, godmothers, goddaughters, and dozens of courtesy aunts and uncles where no blood relationship existed at all. Sometimes Claire was turned off by Tina and her boisterous clan, but now and then she was envious of their closeness and even their feuds. You had to care about somebody to bother to fight with them. Now Fred was away, she only had her mother and Jerry, her mom’s repulsive boyfriend.

‘I guess Fred’s okay,’ Claire told Tina. ‘My mother got a card from Dusseldorf.’

‘Dusseldorf? Who’s he?’

Claire just shrugged. She’d decided long ago that educating Tina was not her job.

They arrived at the enormous glass doors to their office building with the usual couple of minutes to get upstairs. The lobby was crowded and the elevator was, as usual, jammed. The ride in the elevator was Claire’s least favorite part of the day. She had told herself over and over that it was only ninety seconds but she still dreaded it. In the summer people’s sweaty bodies were oppressive and in the winter the smell of wet wool was equally unpleasant. But it probably wasn’t the smell as much as the crush. All those strangers’ bodies rubbing. At that very moment Claire felt the breasts and belly of a large woman pushing against her back while in front, inches from her, she faced the wall of a man’s black coat, almost touching it with her nose. Her coffee had to be cradled directly against the tall man’s back. She was waiting for the day when the bag broke.

She was always relieved when the doors opened on the thirty-eighth floor and she could make her way out of what she thought of as ‘the aluminum sauna’. But her relief was almost immediately replaced by dismay as she remembered her next challenge: Once she had said goodbye to Tina she would have to scuttle down the rows of secretarial desks lined up outside the windowed offices which were ranged around the edge of the floor. Then she would have to turn and make her way down the windowless hallway that led to an even deeper corridor. It, in turn, would bring her to the interior room she shared with half a dozen other ‘analysts’, lorded over by Joan, a woman who proved that a little authority could make one a petty tyrant. Another day, another ninety-two dollars take-home Claire thought.

As they filed out of the elevator Claire hunched her shoulders in her habitual way but Tina, beside her, was jaunty, queen of the floor. How could she be so cheery? Maybe it was because Tina worked for Michael Wainwright, otherwise known as ‘Mr Wonderful’. Claire repressed a sigh at the thought of him. All the girls in the office talked about him. He was thirty-one, single, gorgeous, successful, and deeply in love … with himself. He had a hot- and cold-running stream of women, all of them financial executives in size six Prada suits. That wasn’t mentioning the shoes they wore, which cost more than Claire earned in a week. Michael dated them serially, replacing an investment banker with a broker with a fund manager. Secretaries like Tina and analysts like Claire were not his style. Many of them hated him, many admired him, but Claire was the only one who was in love with him. Of course, she wasn’t stupid enough to betray that information to any of her coworkers, not even Tina.

Michael Wainwright had spoken to Claire exactly four times in the eighteen months she’d worked at Crayden Smithers. The first time he’d asked, ‘Would you make five copies of this right away, please?’ The second time he’d said, ‘I need these numbers crunched by this evening.’ The third time – Claire’s favorite – was when she’d delivered a report to his office and he’d said, ‘Thanks. Nice dress.’ The last time was a little over two weeks ago when he had brushed against her on his way out to lunch and said, ‘Oh, sorry.’

They got to Tina’s desk. Claire glanced at the office behind her but couldn’t see Michael Wainwright. ‘I’m meetin’ Anthony tonight,’ Tina said. ‘We’re goin’ to the bridal registry at Macy’s. You wanna go?’

Claire doubted that even Anthony wanted to go. Was the choice that or garroting (something Tina’s uncle might know about)? She just shook her head. ‘No. I want to get home. I have a book to finish.’

Tina shrugged. ‘You and the books.’

Claire shrugged back and refrained from saying ‘You and QVC.’ Then she began the unpleasant route which made her disappear down the corridor like Alice down the rabbit hole.