Brown-Eyed Girl

  If you touched a butterfly’s wing, the teacher had said, it would knock off some of the scales and they would never grow back. Some butterflies had clear patches on their wings where you could see right through the membrane. But even with some lost scales, a butterfly would still be able to fly after you let it go.

  It would get along just fine.

  Six

  D

  uring the long drive home, Sofia and I talked about the wedding and rehashed every detail. I did my best to keep the mood light, forcing myself to laugh from time to time. When Sofia asked casually if anything had happened with Joe Travis, I replied, “No, but I gave him my number. He might call sometime.” I could tell by her quick, speculative glance that she didn’t entirely believe me.

  After Sofia plugged her phone into the car audio and started a jaunty Tejano song, I let myself think about the previous night and tried to figure out why I felt so guilty and worried. Probably because having a one-night stand was so unlike me… except that since I’d done it, it was like me.

  The new me.

  Feeling a stirring of panic, I pushed it back down.

  I thought back to when I’d first met Brian, trying to remember how long I’d waited until sleeping with him. Two months, at least. I had been cautious about intimacy, having no desire to careen from one man to the next the way my mother had. Sex would be on my terms, within the margins that I established. Brian had been fine with that, patient, willing to wait until I was ready.

  We had been introduced by mutual friends at a cocktail party held in the outdoor sculpture garden at the Met. We had been instantly comfortable with each other, so naturally in tune that our friends had laughingly accused us of already knowing each other. We’d both been twenty-one at the time, full of ambition and energy, both of us having just moved from other places, me from Dallas, Brian from Boston.

  It had been the happiest time of my life, that first year in New York, a city that had infused me with the perpetual feeling that something great, or at least interesting, was just around the corner. Having been accustomed to the lazy, sunstruck pace of Texas, where the heat forced everyone to ration their energy, I had been galvanized by Manhattan’s cool autumn vitality. You belong here, the city seemed to say, with the honking of canary-colored taxicabs and the screeching and grinding of construction equipment, the sounds of street musicians and bars and rattling subways… all of it meant that I was in a place where things were happening.

  It had been easy to find friends, a group of women who filled their spare time with volunteer work, clubs, lessons in things like foreign languages, dancing, tennis. The Manhattanite’s passion for self-improvement had been contagious – soon I’d found myself signing up for clubs and lessons, trying to make every minute of the day purposeful.

  In retrospect, I had to wonder how much of my falling in love with New York had been the adjuvant to falling in love with Brian. Had I met Brian in another place, I wasn’t certain that we would have lasted as long as we had. He had been a good lover, considerate in bed, but his Wall Street job had entailed sixteen-hour workdays and preoccupations with things such as the upcoming nonfarm payroll numbers or what was happening on Bloomberg at one a.m. It had made him perpetually tired and distracted. He had used alcohol to relieve the stress, and that hadn’t exactly helped our love life. But even at the beginning of our relationship, I had never experienced anything with Brian that even remotely resembled what had happened last night.

  I had been like an entirely different person with Joe. But I wasn’t ready to be someone new – I’d grown too accustomed to being the woman Brian Palomer had jilted at the altar. If I let go of that identity, I wasn’t sure what would happen. I was afraid to imagine the possibilities. All I knew was that no man would ever hurt me the way Brian had, and I was the only one who could protect myself from that.

  Later that night, as I sat in bed reading, my cell phone rang and vibrated on the nightstand.

  I stopped breathing as I saw Joe’s caller ID.

  My God. He’d meant it when he’d said he would call.

  My heart throbbed against a painful tightness, as if it had been wrapped in a million rubber bands. Covering my ears with my hands, closing my eyes, I didn’t respond to the insistent ringtone. I waited it out. I couldn’t talk to him – I wouldn’t know what in the hell to say. I knew him in the most intimate way possible, yet I didn’t know him at all.

  As wildly pleasurable as it had been to sleep with Joe, I didn’t want it to happen again. I didn’t have to have a reason, did I? No. I didn’t owe him any explanations. I didn’t even have to explain it to myself.

  The phone went silent. The tiny screen flashed a message that a voice mail had been left.

  Ignore it, I told myself. I picked up the book I’d been reading and focused blindly on a page. After a couple of minutes, I realized that I’d read the same page three times without comprehending a word.

  Exasperated, I tossed the book aside and grabbed the phone.

  My toes curled beneath the covers as I heard his message, that unhurried drawl seeming to sink inside me and dissolve like hot sugar. “Avery, it’s Joe. I wanted to find out how your drive back to Houston was.” A pause. “I thought about you all day. Give me a call when you feel like it. Or I’ll try you again later.” Another pause. “Talk to you soon.”

  Blood heat had turned my cheeks red and prickly. I set the phone back on the nightstand.

  The adult thing, I reflected, would be to call him back, talk to him in a calm and reasonable manner, and tell him that I wasn’t interested in seeing him again. It’s just not going to click for me, I could say.

  But I wasn’t going to do that. I was going to ignore Joe until he went away, because the thought of talking to him made me break out in a nervous sweat.

  The phone rang again, and I stared at it in disbelief. Was he calling again? This was going to get annoying, fast. As I looked at the caller ID, however, I saw that it was my best friend from New York, Jasmine, who was the fashion director of a major women’s magazine. She was a friend and a mentor, a woman of forty who seemed to do everything well and was never afraid to be opinionated. And her opinions were usually right.

  Style was religion to Jasmine. She had the rare gift of translating street trends, shopping blogs, Internet chatter, and cultural influence into a clear-eyed assessment of what was happening in fashion and what was coming around the corner. From her friends, Jasmine demanded and gave absolute loyalty, friendship being the only thing she valued nearly as much as style. She had tried to stop me from leaving New York, promising to use her connections to secure me a job as a special fashion correspondent for a local entertainment show or possibly doing a retail collaboration with some bridal designer who wanted to tap into a more affordable market.

  I had appreciated Jasmine’s efforts to help, but I had refused. I’d felt defeated and tired, and I’d needed a break from fashion. Most of all, I had wanted to live with my newfound sister and form a relationship with her. I had wanted to have someone in my life whom I was related to. And part of me had liked the way Sofia looked up to me – I’d needed that. Jasmine hadn’t necessarily understood, but she had relented and backed off, after telling me that someday she would find a way to lure me back to New York.

  “Jazz,” I exclaimed, delighted. “How are you?”

  “Sweetie. Do you have time to talk?”

  “Yes, I —”

  “Great. Listen, I’m about to run to a party, but I have some news that can’t wait. Here’s the thing: You know who Trevor Stearns is.”

  “Of course.”

  I had been in awe of Trevor Stearns since I’d been in design school. The legendary celebrity wedding planner was also a megasuccessful bridal fashion designer, author, and host of a cable show titled Rock the Wedding. The show, based in L.A., was an effervescent mix of style, sentiment, and drama. Every episode featured Trevor and his team creating a dream wedding for a bride who didn’t have the budget or the vis
ion to do it on her own.

  “Trevor and his producers,” Jazz continued, “are planning to do a spin-off series based in Manhattan.”

  “Isn’t that going to cause wedding show fatigue?” I asked. “I mean, how many people are willing to watch?”

  “If there’s a limit, they haven’t found it yet. The cable channel is airing reruns of Trevor’s show all the time, and the ratings are huge. So the thinking is, Trevor wants to mentor someone. Preferably a woman. He’s going to create a star. Whoever he decides on will be the host of Rock the Wedding: NYC, and Trevor will make guest appearances on the show until it’s established.” Jazz paused. “Do you get where this is going, Avery?”

  “You think I should give it a shot?” I asked in bewilderment.

  “It’s perfect for you. I still remember those interviews you did during Bridal Week – you looked amazing on camera, and you had so much personality —”

  “Thanks, but Jazz… there’s no way they would pick someone with so little experience. Besides —”

  “You can’t assume that. You don’t know what they’re looking for. They may not even know what they’re looking for. I’m going to put together a video of various things you did on camera, and you’re going to send me your résumé and a decent head shot, and I’ll make sure Trevor Stearns’s producers take a look at everything. If they’re interested, they’ll fly you up here to talk in person, so if nothing else, you’ll get a free trip out of it and you can see me.”

  I smiled. “Okay. For that reason alone, I’ll give it a try.”

  “Wonderful. Now, tell me quickly – everyone doing okay there? Your sister?”

  “Yes, she’s —”

  “My ride’s here. Let me call you later.”

  “Okay, Jazz. Take care of —”

  The call ended. I looked down at my phone, still bemused by the rapid-fire conversation. “And Joe said I talked fast,” I said aloud.

  For the next week and a half, I received two more calls and several texts from Joe, the relaxed tone of his messages turning into perplexed impatience. Clearly he understood I was avoiding him, but he didn’t give up. He even tried the event-planning studio’s number and left a message that, although innocuous, provoked considerable interest from my employees. Sofia quieted them in a deliberately light, amused tone, telling them that whether or not I was going out with Joe Travis, it was no one’s business but mine. After work, however, she cornered me in the kitchen and said, “You’re not yourself, mija. You’ve been acting strange ever since the Kendrick wedding. Is everything okay?”

  “Of course,” I said quickly, “everything’s fine.”

  “Then why have you been having an OCD meltdown?”

  “I’ve been doing a little cleaning and reorganizing,” I said defensively. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You put all the takeout menus in color-coded folders, and stacked all the magazines in order of their dates. Even for you, that’s too much.”

  “I just want everything to be under control.” Uneasily, I opened a nearby drawer and began to rearrange the utensils. Sofia was silent, waiting patiently while I made certain that all the spatulas were in one compartment and slotted spoons were in another. “Actually,” I said in a rush, fumbling with a set of measuring spoons, “I slept with Joe Travis the night of the wedding, and now he wants to go out with me, but I don’t want to see him again and I can’t make myself tell him, so I’ve been avoiding his calls and hoping he’ll just go away.”

  “Why do you want him to go away?” she asked in concern. “Did you have a bad time with him?”

  “No,” I said, relieved at being able to talk about it. “Oh my God, it was so amazing that I think I lost brain cells, but I shouldn’t have done it in the first place, and I really wish I hadn’t, because now I feel weird, like I have emotional jet lag or something. I can’t catch up to myself. And I’m embarrassed every time I think about how I jumped into bed with him like that.”

  “He’s not embarrassed,” Sofia pointed out. “Why should you be?”

  I gave her a dark glance. “He’s a man. Just because I don’t agree with the double standard doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  “In this situation,” Sofia said gently, “I think the only person carrying around a double standard is you.” Closing the utensil drawer, she turned me to face her. “Call him tonight,” she said, “and tell him yes or no. Stop torturing yourself. And him.”

  I swallowed hard and nodded. “I’ll text him.”

  “Talking is better.”

  “No, it has to be texting so there won’t be any paraverbals.”

  “What are paraverbals?”

  “All the things you communicate besides the words,” I said. “Like the tone of your voice, or the pauses, or how fast or slow you talk.”

  “You mean the things that help to convey the truth.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You could just be honest with him,” she suggested.

  “I’d rather text.”

  Before I went to sleep, I opened the messages on my phone and forced myself to read Joe’s most recent text.

  Why aren’t you answering?

  Gripping the phone tightly, I told myself that I was being ridiculous. I had to deal with the situation.

  I’ve been busy, I texted back.

  His reply appeared with startling immediacy. Let’s talk.

  I’d rather not. After a long silence, in which he was no doubt trying to figure out how to reply, I added, No possibility of this going anywhere.

  Why not?

  It was perfect for one night. No regrets. But I’m not interested in anything more.

  After a few minutes had passed, it was clear that there would be no answer.

  I spent the rest of the night struggling to fall asleep, battling my own thoughts.

  Pillow’s too flat. Covers are too hot. Maybe I need some herb tea… a glass of wine… melatonin… more reading… I should try deep breathing… I need to find a nature-sounds app… a late-night show… no, stop thinking, stop. Is three o’clock too early to get up?… maybe I should wait till four…

  I finally started to doze just as the alarm sounded. Groaning, I crawled out of bed. After a long shower, I pulled on some leggings and a roomy knit tunic and went down to the kitchen.

  Sofia and I lived in a partially renovated building, a former cigar factory in Montrose. We both loved the eccentric neighborhood, which was filled with art galleries, upmarket boutiques, and quirky restaurants. I had bought the warehouse at a steal, owing to its ramshackle condition. So far we had converted the ground floor into a spacious studio with exposed brick walls and endless rows of multipaned factory windows. The main-floor plan included an open kitchen with granite countertops, a central seating area anchored by an electric-blue sectional sofa, and a design section with an idea wall and tables piled with books, swatches, trims, and samples. My bedroom was on the second floor, and Sofia’s was on the third floor.

  “Good morning,” my sister said brightly. I flinched at her cheery tone.

  “God. Please. Turn it down a notch.”

  “The light?” she asked, reaching for the dimmer.

  “No, the perkiness.”

  Looking concerned, Sofia poured a cup of coffee and gave it to me. “You didn’t sleep well?”

  “No.” I stirred sweetener and creamer into the coffee. “I finally texted Joe back last night.”

  “And?”

  “I was blunt. I said I wasn’t interested in seeing him again. He didn’t reply.” I shrugged and sighed. “I’m relieved. I should have done it a few days ago. Thank God I don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  “You’re sure it was the right decision?”

  “Without a doubt. Maybe I would have gotten another night of great sex, but I’m not interested in being some rich guy’s cheap entertainment.”

  “Someday you’ll run into him,” Sofia said. “Another wedding, or some other event —”

  ??
?Yes, but by then it won’t matter. He’ll have moved on. And we’ll both behave like grown-ups.”

  “Your paraverbals seem worried,” Sofia said. “What can I do, mija?”

  I didn’t know what would have become of my life without Sofia in it. Smiling, I leaned sideways so our heads touched briefly. “If I ever get arrested,” I said, “you will be my one phone call. Bail me out – that’s what you can do.”

  “If you ever get arrested,” Sofia said, “I’ll already be in jail as your accomplice.”

  That morning, Val came to the studio at her usual time of nine o’clock. It was a mark of her innate tact that although she obviously noticed my unkempt condition, she said nothing, only went to take care of e-mails and answering machine messages. However, Steven showed no such reticence when he walked in a few minutes later.