The last of the regulars stumbled out, and the two of them were left alone. He looked around, realizing that over the years he had never seen anyone work here but Freya. How did one tiny girl keep the whole place together?
When the bar was tidied and clean, Freya shrugged on a green army flak jacket, oversized and gigantic on her small frame. It was the kind of jacket worn by Special Forces teams parachuting into jungles, and it looked incongruous against her delicate features, which made the whole effect even more charming. She pulled up the hood to cover her hair. “Come on, I’m just down the street.”
On the way to her apartment, Freya stopped by the Korean grocer on the corner. She chose a bouquet of flowers, two tubs of fresh fruit, and a spray of mint. Unlike the usual lackluster offerings found at the corner deli, everything Freya touched seemed to glow: the strawberries red and succulent, the melons shone with orange intensity. The mint smelled like it had just been picked from a field in Provence.
She led him to a shabby tenement building with a broken front door. “We didn’t get the gentrification memo,” she joked. He followed her up the stairs to the third landing. It had four doors, and she opened the one painted red. “Thank goodness I face out to the street. Those two over there just look at the courtyard.”
It was a small apartment by anyone’s standards, but in terms of New York real estate, even tinier still. There was an old-fashioned claw-foot tub in the middle of the room and a minuscule galley kitchen with aging appliances. Against the window was a four-poster bed draped with a paisley print tapestry. But once Oliver entered the room, he was startled to find it was not as small as it had looked from the doorway. He had been mistaken. The apartment was large and magnificent, with a library full of books on one side and a proper formal dining room on the other.
“Sit,” she said, pointing to a grand settee that he was certain had not been there before.
There were ancestral portraits on the wall, and what looked like museum-quality art. Was that a Van Dyck? That one was surely a Rembrandt. The usual bohemian squalor had vanished, and instead Oliver was sitting on a proper couch in an elegantly furnished living room with a cracking fireplace. The windows to the fire escape still looked out onto Avenue C, but Oliver could swear he heard the ocean.
Freya disappeared into the back bedroom to change (again, he hadn’t seen it from the doorway—and what happened to the four-poster bed? And the claw-foot tub? Was he losing his mind?). When she returned she was wearing flannel pajamas. She fired up the stove—a sleek industrial design and not the old and ugly white one he had seen from the doorway—and began to crack eggs. “You need breakfast,” she murmured as she chopped the mint.
A delicious buttery smell began to waft from the kitchen, and after a few minutes, Freya placed two plates on the table in the little breakfast nook. By this time, Oliver had accepted the fact that the apartment was not quite what it was, and he was no longer surprised by the appearance of yet another cozy and beautiful piece of furniture. Was this a dream? If so, he wanted to keep sleeping.
Oliver took a bite. The eggs were soft and creamy, and the mint gave them a sharp and interesting taste. He finished the whole thing in three bites.
“You were hungry,” Freya observed, pulling up her knees to her chin.
He nodded and wiped his hands with a linen napkin. He watched as she ate her eggs slowly, savoring every bite. “Tell me about her,” Freya said, licking her fork.
“She was my best friend.” He told her everything about his friendship with Schuyler from the beginning to the bittersweet end. He found that with Freya, he could talk about Schuyler without feeling pain. He laughed and reveled in the memories. Oliver talked into the late morning hours. He dimly remembered helping with the dishes, and then falling asleep in her bed.
“You are too young to be so lost and so bereaved,” Freya had whispered, before he closed his eyes.
When he woke up later that afternoon, he had his arms around her.
FOUR
Under New Ownership
Oliver went back to school and to his life. He felt better than he had in weeks, and he was looking forward to seeing Freya again. She had been hard to reach, neither picking up her phone nor returning his calls, but school and Repository work had kept him busy. It wasn’t until a week later that he returned to the Holiday Cocktail Lounge.
He noticed there was something different about the place as soon as he arrived. For one, there was a bouncer at the door with a flashlight who glared at his fake ID.
“Hawaii, huh?” the big gorilla asked skeptically.
“Look, I don’t want a drink. I’m just here to see Freya.”
“No one here by that name.”
“C’mon, man.”