Lush Lives, page 10
Sorry about bf! His loss, no question, Parkie texted back. Similar for me. Went on date with potential client, then gave client to Dr. K to avoid conflict of interest. Then date pretty much ghosted me. In person. Because: work stuff! Thought sexytime was a sure thing. Also thought nobody worked more than us.
Domage! Nicholas wrote. And, wow, I’d say that blows but . . . schadenfreude, anyone? Sounds like you did the right thing, tho? Can you ghostbust him on another pretext? Need to “finalize transfer of account,” etc.?
Dude. She’s a she. Have we met?
Srsly? Hadn’t the foggiest. Now I really want it to work. Maybe SHE has real, actual stuff to do. Maybe SHE’s got a pathological—or economic—need to succeed? Can’t imagine what that would be like :0
Parkie had to take a second to respond to that one.
Maybe. She does work a lot.
The reply from Nicholas was instant.
She may not be ghosting you at all. And you’ll never know if you don’t try—as my grandma used to say right up until I tried kissing boys in high school. We can’t end up mean and bitter and wrinkled like Madeline. Or Armand. Or Dr. K. (Actually, Dr. K is more wrinkle-free than permanent press, have you noticed?) Somebody has to find their forever home. Report back on Monday! I’m going to bed!
*
When Parkie awoke on a bright, cold Saturday morning, it was almost noon. As always, she reached for her phone as it lay charging on the painted antique chest that also served as a nightstand in her tiny bedroom. There was an email from her mother about Christmas and New Year’s—would she or wouldn’t she be joining her and Daddy and her brother and his fiancée in Florida? There was also a message from her first college roommate, who was getting married in Belize next summer. And something from a woman she played soccer with and sort of dated, who was having a baby again. And then there was one from Madeline: Did Parkie arrange a time to shoot the watch with the photographer, and was that kid who did the French stuff working on the copy with Comms? And if he wasn’t, tell him he should be.
But nothing from Glory. Not even the “sorry again I couldn’t sleep with you when I really wanted to” text she’d been holding out for.
Parkie stretched. The generalized stomach upset was still present. And it wasn’t from too much lactose.
No, this was the sickening sensation of having fucked up. She’d obviously mishandled things with Glory more than she thought; she shouldn’t have been such a baby about the early start when they were on the couch. And maybe she shouldn’t have confessed to all the misdeeds at work. Because the woman who couldn’t get enough of her only a few nights ago had been perfectly happy to send Parkie home alone after their second date. Without so much as an “I’ll text you tomorrow” or “Let’s try for Monday.”
What comes around, Parkie thought.
She hadn’t been ditched for a while. In fact, Parkie was typically the bad guy. La Dumper not la dumpee. For at least a year now, nobody was worth her time. Or her emotional energy. It didn’t help that where dating was concerned, she’d become as wary as a spooked horse. An apt simile if there ever was one.
For the origin of that wariness, as Parkie knew, was her relatively long-term entanglement with Loden Bradley. That relationship, her last real one, had conveniently gone to shit, like a cheap appliance under warranty, around month thirteen.
They’d met at an opening at Parkie’s old gallery. It was exhilarating in the beginning. Loden FedExing her tickets to Aspen or pulling up in her restored Wagoneer to whisk Parkie away without warning for a weekend on Fire Island. They were rarely on their own, though. Loden’s equally established fortysomething finance friends were always in the background. Loden had boundless energy. She was athletic. Sophisticated. The blue-eyed, shot-swilling, poker-playing, snowboarding devil-may-care sexy older sister everyone wanted to sleep with.
And Loden, as would be revealed, was good with that. She had a very hard time saying no.
Until she broke up with Parkie. Over the phone. At the precise hour Parkie was packing for their belated first anniversary trip to Saint Kitts. “We can’t do this anymore, Parks. You’re sweet and so pretty,” she had said. “But I’m bored. Nobody who’s with you should be bored.”
That call had sent Parkie into a spiral of self-loathing that resulted in a general swearing off of women. She’d given Loden too much control. Being that passive had even bored Parkie, truth be told, especially during sex. Which was the only thing they both enjoyed doing together, most of the time. In the beginning Parkie had relished being the nubile May to Loden’s seasoned December. But by the end she had started to see Loden and her shallow, blissfully ignorant friends as immature, at times cruel—and frozen in their twenties in ways she hoped never to be. Wannabe millennials. Perish the thought.
Glory was unlike any of the women Parkie had been with. And not for the reasons Glory seemed to suspect. Parkie had dated pretty widely across race and ethnicity, even in prep school, where the girls were effectively brainwashed with multicultural twaddle about all being the same “underneath” as long as they stayed thin and personable and feminine enough. She guessed she could have told Glory this, but she hadn’t wanted to seem like she was trying to score points. There was also the fact that Parkie had never moved beyond the hookup stage with any member of her rainbow coalition.
She had to remind herself that being with Glory made her—or would make her—part of an interracial couple. It was different for her than it was for Glory. Parkie knew that. And while it was premature to be talking about being together—her whiteness and Glory’s Blackness had already come up.
Glory was openly bitter about being dropped into a homogenously white world when her parents had moved their family to Colorado. That experience didn’t make her comfortable in all, or nearly all, white spaces now. But she wasn’t always comfortable in Harlem either. Glory seemed to be amused by Parkie’s curiosity about certain (to her) unfamiliar aspects of Glory’s everyday life. Her affinities, her assumptions—her beauty regimen. In fact, Glory’s often difficult upbringing in a place that sounded a lot like Greenwich had probably rendered Parkie’s questions that much less surprising—maybe no less annoying either.
It was funny—not comical but unaccountable—that after so many college seminars grounded in gender, race, and class, the adult Parkie felt a little unprepared for seriously dating a woman who wasn’t white. Learning about someone’s experience isn’t living it. She knew that, too. Maybe the reality was that she felt more willing to hear about Glory’s life than Glory was to hear about hers, which had its downside, too. So far, she’d tried to follow Glory’s lead.
And look where that had gotten her.
Parkie was on the point of caving—scrolling through Instagram was merely a pretense for having her phone in her hand—when, just as she was about to do something she’d promised herself she wouldn’t, Glory texted her.
I didn’t sleep :( Did you?
Not where I wanted to, Parkie wrote back. But I have an idea.
Chapter 11
Glory loved the tranquility of her South Harlem street, all the more so on a Saturday afternoon when the neighborhood was still waking up. Sometimes she painted for hours while listening to music—Jessye Norman or MJQ or Bach. But today she’d been working steadily in silence since dawn.
At first, she didn’t give any thought to the sound of a car screeching away from the curb outside. Then something, who could know what, made her put down her brushes, wipe the wet paint off her hands, and walk into the foyer.
Through the sheers gathered across the front door’s narrow windows, she caught a blaze of color at the bottom of the stairs. She immediately recognized the tall, shapely figure and its sharp movements. Glory grimaced at her giddy expression in the mirror.
“Parkie,” she said aloud. “What are you about to do to me?”
She watched through the glass for a moment as Parkie set down some of what she’d been carrying on the stoop and prepared to come up. Glory swung open the door, ran down the steps, and grabbed the bags.
“Oh, yay,” Parkie said, beaming. “You are home.”
“You could have called first,” Glory said, relieving her of an armful of flowers and inhaling their heady scent as she scaled back to the top.
“I thought you might not pick up,” Parkie said. “Or you’d tell me not to come if you did.”
“Did you bring food?” Glory asked with faux seriousness.
“Korean barbecue. Which I hope you like. I figured maybe you hadn’t eaten anything real since our dinner.”
“It smells terrific. And I haven’t. Eaten, I mean.”
Glory stopped to wait at the top of the stairs. Normally, the last thing she would want was an interruption of these, her daylight working hours. But all she could feel as she stood in her doorway was the excitement of watching Parkie get closer.
“Welcome back,” Glory said.
Once they were inside, she led the way into the kitchen and Parkie followed.
“Just give me a few minutes,” she said as Parkie hovered near a chair.
“You’re working.” Parkie looked like the possibility had just occurred to her. “Of course, you’re working. I should let you work.”
Glory rolled her eyes in response and deposited the bags along the tiled counter.
“Have a seat,” she said. “Be right back.”
There was a trumpet-shaped green glass vase Glory remembered Lucille using for roses and she suddenly felt compelled to find it. The big crystal vessel in the entry had served its purpose since long before Glory’s time. Moving it might disturb some celestial harmony. The vase Glory had in her memory was something she’d seen on one of the side tables when she was a kid. It was simple but she liked the fan of flowers it produced. She found it upstairs, all the way in the back of one of the high cabinets in Lucille’s kitchen.
Once back in her own kitchen, Glory filled the vase with warm sugar water, as she’d been taught, and started snipping off the ends of the rose stems at an angle. They were long but not the thornless and overbred commercial kind. The large petals of these flowers were supple and peachy yellow with a bleed of dark pink along each edge. They had the look of the old hybrids her mother cultivated in Denver. Glory thought they might be Peace roses, and they smelled as divinely complex as a sachet.
“That’s a very pretty vase,” Parkie said.
“Don’t bother trying to make it something it isn’t,” Glory answered. “I like it no matter what.”
Parkie lowered her head and looked up at Glory through her eyelashes like a remorseful puppy. “I meant it. I like it, too,” she said. “Are you hungry? Everything’s still pretty warm.”
“I could definitely eat,” Glory said. “This always happens. I don’t feel hungry until I remember how long it’s been since I had food. Then I can hardly stand up.”
“I know the feeling,” Parkie said.
Glory finished assembling the roses in the vase. “Was that bad?” she asked. “I mean, was it ableist to say that?”
“Some people would probably think so,” Parkie said. “Not being able to stand from self-inflicted hunger is a little different from not being able to stand from a congenital condition or an injury. Didn’t bother me personally. Not like ‘crippling.’ Or ‘lame.’ I reliably go off on that.”
“Like if someone said ‘Torpedoing an otherwise perfect second date is so lame’?”
“Exactly,” Parkie said. “Torpedoing an otherwise perfect second date is pathetic, whereas technically, I am lame. But that doesn’t make me pathetic.”
“Me, on the other hand . . .” Glory said. She had started opening the takeout cartons one by one to see what was inside. “Bibimbap! I love this.”
The downstairs kitchen hadn’t had an update in probably fifty years. Surely the height of fashion when it was done up in yellow and gray, the rental apartment’s dark and defenestrated kitchen had always depressed Glory. She remembered playing spy games under the big table as kids—hiding their faces against the cold metal legs until Lucille got wind of it and shouted them out.
But now, with Parkie in it, the dreary room suddenly seemed warmer and brighter—even the wan overhead fixture and the old refrigerator struggling in the background almost felt cozy. And Glory thought Parkie was different there, too, without her armor of couture and stockings and chunky gold jewelry and long, shiny shoes. She wasn’t softer, exactly, just more relaxed in the way she held herself.
Her cheeks glowed from the climb up the front stairs and Glory could picture her as an athlete. She always seemed so ready. Game for whatever. Glory watched Parkie’s eyes flicker across the room, presumably attempting to take in whatever traces of Lucille she could find.
She piled their rice and egg and sprouts on two large plates and they ate in pleasurable silence.
“Look at these roses,” Glory said, setting her chopsticks on her plate after a few minutes. “When I go through the park, I can’t walk past the roses without stopping to smell them. Cliché or not. And these are perfect. Long-stemmed no less. Like you.” She leaned toward the vase. “Thank you, Parkie. I don’t deserve them, as you’ve rightly pointed out.”
Parkie raised an eyebrow. “I love roses, too. Maybe we can go to the park together sometime. We both live so close to it.”
“Your park is not my park, though,” Glory said.
“I like your end better. You’ve got salsa dancing at the Meer, which I find much more interesting than CrossFitting at the reservoir.”
“The Meer. You must feel right at home.”
“If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much,” said Parkie, finishing her rice. “My grandfather used to say that. And not in an ironic way.”
“I didn’t know meer meant ‘lake’ until I overheard some guide telling a bunch of tourists about the ‘legacies of New Amsterdam’ a couple of months ago when I was walking home. It’s obvious now, but growing up I never thought of Harlem as having anything to do with Europe. And definitely not Dutch people. Did they tell you there was slavery in the North in school?”
Parkie shook her head.
“Me neither,” Glory said. “I mean, there were only ever like two other Black girls in my grade, anyway. We didn’t want to rock the slave ship.”
“I took an intro history class freshman year called Imagining Colonial America. It wasn’t until about the last week we got to imagine the Lenape Indians. Most of us never knew ‘Manhattan’ was an Indigenous word. I just had to inform Madeline that the Flagg family—this terrible consignor of mine—made their money selling enslaved people just to get her to put the brakes on a press release about their awesome entrepreneurship as eighteenth-century rum dealers.”
“Jesus. Good for you,” Glory said, refilling her plate.
“I love this place,” Parkie said, looking at the food containers. “And it’s conveniently close to my sad little cave. I’m there like once a week.”
“For the record—and before you make any more polite conversation—I’m glad you came over. I wasn’t kidding about being distracted by you. I was just trying to find a way to . . . manage that, I guess.”
Parkie had on tight yoga pants and a concealing hoodie. Her hair was in a loose braid and she wore just a hint of mascara and lip gloss. Glory watched her throat contract as she downed half a glass of water. The woman even made swallowing sexy.
“I get it. I’m just not used to being . . . rebuffed,” Parkie said. Her glass made a loud rap when she set it down on the laminate. “However distracting you might have found me, I was really looking forward to fucking you and instead I had to go home alone and eat all the ice cream in my freezer.”
“That sounds like a close second.”
Parkie looked up from her plate. “It wasn’t.”
Glory felt her cheeks warming.
“I should have been the one coming to your place with flowers and dinner. Now I’m down by two. What can I do to make amends?”
“I almost lost your aunt’s property, so I’d say we’re even,” Parkie said. “Anyway, I hope your big morning went well with me safely out of range.”
This was her opening to tell Parkie about Sarkisian. She knew this. But Glory couldn’t get herself to kill the vibe.
“It was fine,” she said. “I got a chance to show some new work, which I think went over well. And I learned at least two people, counting me, have seen my group show downtown.”
“Make that three,” Parkie said.
She couldn’t believe it.
“You saw the show?”
“Why wouldn’t I? It’s not like I expect to rate a studio visit. I really, really like the new work, Glory. I was moved by it, if you really want to know. I think the figures—if that’s what they are . . . Those textures. So beautiful. Painful. Visceral. All the things. I had a moment with them for sure. The guy at the desk didn’t know what to do with me.”
“I can’t believe you saw the show,” Glory said. The first few words came out so dry she had to start over. “Thank you. I’m not sure yet about this new direction, though. And you don’t have much to compare it with.”
“There is a thing called the internet,” Parkie said with a laugh. “I looked at your past reviews, Hyperallergic, Culture Type, the usual. Besides, you forget I was in the business. I’m pretty surprised my old bosses didn’t have you on their to-exploit list. Not that they don’t routinely miss some very obviously amazing people. Lucky you, as far as that goes.”
