I could feel my pulse in the button of my jeans. There is only one reason Stephanie would do such a thing, and it’s not something our viewers would easily forgive.
I didn’t try to talk to her. I couldn’t. But there was someone else who would listen to me, who could possibly help, and so I called her and asked if we could meet anywhere, anytime, but soon.
“She was kidding,” I say to Arch, who is still staring up at me, suspiciously, her red fingernail underlining Stephanie’s inscription. To the love of my life.
“Then why are you blushing?” Arch asks, a salient point.
I take the book from her hands and carry it the few steps into the kitchen, chucking it into the recycle bin. I notice the garbage bag where we’re dumping the contents of old condiments, horseradish and mustard, sriracha and grape jam, just as Kelly returns from the trash room. I see an opportunity to distract Arch from thinking whatever it is she is thinking that is making her look at me like that, and smash the open bag in Kelly’s face.
“Brett!” she shrieks, doubling over with a hysterical retch. Layla shares my wounding laugh. Kelly is so precious sometimes. Kelly recovers and snatches a handful of my hair, dragging me left-ear-side down to the floor.
“Uncle!” I cry, the pain in my scalp ice-cold. “Uncle!” But when Kelly lets go—idiot, she knows we don’t fight fair—I kick her in the shin so hard Arch moans in secondhand agony. Kelly crumples to the floor with a guttural sound, but it is just a fake out so she can spring on top of me, sending me onto my back, pinning my torso between her knees.
“I’m sorry!” I scream more than I laugh. Kelly is red-faced and breathing hard. “Oh, God, no! I’m so sorry!” Kelly leans over me, lips pursed, a line of spit stretching, lengthening, dangling inches from my face. “Layla!” I twist my head left and right. “Help me!”
“Stop it!” Layla cries. “Stop, Mom! Stop!” She looks around for something to throw at Kelly, landing on a rolled-together pair of socks in the laundry bin. Bop! They bounce off the back of Kelly’s head, and it’s as though a switch has been flipped. Kelly swings upright, the trail of spit attaching to her chin.
“I don’t like when you guys do that,” Layla says, sounding near tears. Arch scrambles to her feet, standing behind Layla and slicing a hand under her chin, making furious eyes at both of us—cut it out.
“Oh, we were just fooling around,” Kelly assures Layla, wincing as she stands. She flicks her eyes at me—my turn to corroborate.
“We’re not actually hurt, Layls!” I say, though the tender tempo of my scalp and the way Kelly is putting her weight on her left leg suggest otherwise. I glance at the clock on the microwave. “Eek! I have to meet Miss Greenberg soon. Layls, want to help me pick out my outfit? She’s making us go somewhere fancy.” I offer her my hand. She leaves me hanging for a few moments, mad at me for scaring her. “Please?” I stick out my lower lip. With a sigh, Layla threads her long fingers through mine and we head into my room. Kelly’s room, now.
Yvette Greenberg is seated between an old-school finance guy and a Texan blonde in the golden tomb of Bemelmans, wearing wide, lightweight black pants, a white suiting vest, and red glasses, which she removes when she sees me to declare how happy I look. She licks her thumb to remove the lipstick mark on my left cheek, and for a moment, my mom isn’t dead.
The bartender removes the silver triple-dish server from the bar top. “We’ll replenish this and transfer to your table, Miss Greenberg.”
Yvette mouths, Thank you, Tommy.
“I can’t believe I got you all the way up here,” Yvette says, sitting across from me and fluttering a few elegant fingers at the pianist over my shoulder. He purrs her name into the mic and she drapes her arm over the back of her chair with a laugh when light applause follows. The moment feels like it’s mine too. It is the better accomplishment to be Yvette Linden Greenberg but a close second is to be in her company.
Yvette cups a hand around the side of her mouth. “And to think these fuckers wouldn’t serve me in the eighties.”
“Stop.”
“That’s why I’m a regular here now. You don’t flee the places that discriminate against you, darling one. You occupy them.” She leans back, melding into her seat, an unabashed spill of linen and resistance. “President Mandela told me that.”
“You sure it wasn’t Lennon?”
Yvette laughs, delighted that I’m impressed. And that’s reason one of twenty-seven hundred that I love her. She doesn’t play humble, the way most women have been brainwashed to do. I once told her in an email that I was lucky to have her in my life and she flipped the fuck out at me and lost all ability to punctuate. YOU ARE NOT LUCKY BRETT!!!! YOU ARE TALENTED AND BRILLIANT AND STRONG AND I SEEK OUT TALENTED BRILLIANT STRONG WOMEN AND THATS WHY IM IN YOUR LIFE. I was so moved I printed it out and tacked it behind my computer at SPOKE HQ.
The waiter appears, hand on his gut, asking what he can get for me. I point to Yvette’s glass, and Yvette holds up two fingers. “Tanqueray and tonic.”
The pianist starts in on Paul McCartney and Yvette leans forward on her elbows. “How have you been?” She reaches for my hand, the lines around her gray eyes long and thin, winging out like whiskers. It makes her look like she is always smiling, despite the more indelicate grooves between her brows, the heavy slabs of skin lumbering her eyes. The effect is that of someone who has seen a lot but remains cautiously optimistic about the state of humanity. Yvette rose to fame when she posed as a stewardess in the seventies, chronicling the abject sexism and misogyny that came with the line of work for Esquire. She also happens to have cheekbones for days, and was deemed the foxy femi-nazi by the New York Post. She’s inaccurately held up as a symbol of the women’s movement when Yvette is a crusader for intersectional activism, fighting oppression in all its forms: racial, sexual, religious, gendered, and on and on. She protested apartheid in South Africa and hosted the first women-only Seder in New York City. She coproduced an Oscar-winning documentary about the constitutional violations of the death penalty and founded a nonprofit for at-risk LGBTQ youth. She advised the 2005 MTA strike and she once seriously looked into adopting me. If aliens invade our planet one day, I would hold up Yvette as an example of why they should spare the human race.
My smile is lovestruck. “I have some news.”
Yvette sucks in a giddy breath. “Tell me.”
I pause for effect. “We’re moving in together.”
“Oh!” Yvette cries. “Oh, I knew it. I knew it as soon as I met her. She’s special, Brett. And you’re special.” She puts her hand to her plump cheekbone, as though an exciting thought just occurred to her. “Do you think you’ll get married?”
“Yvette. Pump the brakes, please.”
“Why? You should get married. Everyone thinks I’m anti-marriage because I never did it, but I just never found the right person. Or maybe,” she strokes the underside of her chin, coquettishly, “I just found too many right people.”
I laugh. Yvette’s roster reads like the guest list for Studio 54 in its heyday. “You’ve had a lot of fun.”
“I’m still having a lot of fun. Maybe the most fun I’ve ever had.” The song ends and Yvette booms, “Play ‘Satisfaction’! I need some Mick in my life!” I nearly miss her wink.
“Shut the fuck up.”
“I would never lie to you, my darling one.”
“No,” I say, “I believe you. I just need you to shut up before I spontaneously combust with jealousy.”
“In any case,” Yvette says, “it’s probably better you hold off. If you get engaged Jesse would only try to commodify it for the show. She’d probably talk you into some god-awful spinoff.” She puffs, full of disdain.
“That’s something to consider,” I murmur, noncommittally.