No, he couldn’t do it, and now he felt worse than he did before.
“I’m fine where I am,” he said sniffing again.
“Would you like a handkerchief?” Sugar asked.
“Why are you always asking me that?”
“Because you’re always sniffing, honey.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want a handkerchief.” He closed the window and roughly pulled across the curtain.
Nate liked Sugar a lot, more than just about anyone else he could think of. But he got enough of being pushed around at work. He would get there, on his own, one day. Just not this one. Or the next.
He moved the crate of vegetables, tucked away his gardening tools and lay on his narrow bed. Still, today of all days it was nice that someone noticed he had a light, let alone mentioned the bushel hiding it. Sugar’s intentions were good, if overwhelming, he knew that.
25TH
Cupid, awakened from his slumber, got his act together lickety-split and made up for all the time he’d lost shooting arrows into trees and stop signs. Just two days after ripping the scab off the wounds of her romantic past to reveal the tender heartbreak beneath, Sugar bumped into Theo over the last roast duck hanging in the window of a corner store in Chinatown.
“Hello,” she said, the thrill of seeing him blooming on her skin like a sunset. He was wearing another Hawaiian shirt, a fuchsia one covered with turquoise waves and surfboards, making the color in his eyes pop even more than usual. “And here’s me thinking we agreed never to see each other again.”
“Without meaning to sound like a lawyer,” said Theo, with a cautious smile, “you saying you didn’t want to and me saying nothing in response does not actually qualify as an agreement. And I had absolutely nothing to do with this. It’s kismet. There are eight million people in this city, Sugar, and yet the planets have aligned four times to bring us together.”
“Didn’t you hunt me down a little, the second and the third times?”
“Yes, but not the first time and not today. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It tells me you can have the duck,” she said. “I was half thinking of crab salad anyway. They have live crabs in the store two doors down. And shrimp that are still waving their tentacles around, if that’s what tentacles are called when they’re on a shrimp.”
“I would not dream of forcing you to forage for waving tentacles,” Theo said. “I wouldn’t be able to eat the duck knowing I had snatched it out of anyone’s hands, let alone yours.”
“What were you planning on making?”
“Duck pancakes are the shining star in my otherwise limited gastronomic repertoire,” said Theo. “Especially when I’m cooking for my niece. She is only ten but she is very critical of my culinary skills. It’s like having a very small, female Gordon Ramsay in the house. He’s Scottish too, did you know that? Although we’re not so quick to claim him when he’s throwing a wobbly in some poor wretch’s kitchen.”
“You’re cooking for your niece?” Sugar’s heart sank, not on Theo’s account, but her own. She had nieces—four of them—for whom she would love to be cooking. But she’d never even met them.
“Once a fortnight my ex-sister-in-law gets a romantic night out with her husband,” Theo was saying, “and I get the pleasure of being beaten at Scrabble, Monopoly, Mexican Train Game and, as of last month, poker. The kid takes no prisoners, let me tell you.”
The elderly Chinese woman behind the counter clacked her tongs at them and said something to her husband.
“Who’s taking?” the husband asked.
“Honestly, you take it,” Sugar said to Theo. “I feel like crab salad after all.”
“I couldn’t.” Theo shook his head.
“You or her or someone else. I don’t care,” said the man behind the counter as his wife rolled her eyes at him then made sarcastic kissy-kissy noises.
“Really, he can have it,” Sugar said, panic rising in her stomach as she felt the unmistakable tilt of her equilibrium being challenged.
Was it talk of Theo’s niece? The faint minty leathery scent she could detect from standing so close to him? The assumption of the duck sellers that there was kissy-kissy in the air? Or was it the insatiable longing she suddenly felt for the whisper of a Scottish burr in her ear, for arms to wrap around her, for lips to graze her, for gentle fingers to endlessly stroke her?
“Actually, you know what?” she said, her cheeks burning. “I have to run. I have to get the crab and a few other groceries so I am just going to leave you and your duck to live happily ever after and I’ll be on my way. It was real nice to catch up again and good luck with the pancakes and have fun with your niece. Bye now.”
She scuttled out into the street, heart thumping, then turned the wrong way down Grand Street and stopped at the Chrystie Street cross sign.
George was right: she was scared. Petrified. But knowing that wasn’t as helpful as one might imagine. Maybe she should go back. Or cross. But what if she never saw him again? What if four times was all kismet and a bit of stalking would allow? What if four times was already four too many?
“Hang on a minute there,” Theo said breathlessly behind her. “Please, Sugar, I know you don’t want a lifelong commitment, or dinner, or a drink, but could we maybe just sit down and talk for a minute?”
She shouldn’t. She absolutely one hundred percent shouldn’t. Or should she?
But while she was dithering something rattled loose inside her disloyal body, which just turned her in Theo’s direction and allowed him to guide her to a bench in Sara D. Roosevelt Park where a group of Brazilian boys were kicking a football around while three elderly ladies did tai chi moves at a glacial pace behind them.
“You’ve just got to love this city, don’t you?” said Theo as they sat.
“I do,” Sugar agreed. “That is, I do love New York. Not, you know, the other sort of I do, which I definitely don’t. I mean I particularly don’t.”
Theo laughed. “Oh, it’s so nice to see you,” he said. “You’ve no idea. Look, I just wanted a chance to clear the air. But first, I shouldn’t have accepted the duck. In fact,” he thrust the bag at her, “it’s yours. I couldn’t swallow it now anyway and Frankie would tell straightaway that something was wrong and she would grill me as only the precocious child of two academics can do and before you know it I’ll have told her about you and she’ll tell Nina and then there will be two of us stalking you if not three.”
Sugar looked at the duck.
“Who’s Nina?”
“Of course! You don’t know a thing about me. I keep forgetting that. OK, Nina is the closest I have to a sister but actually I was married to her sister, Carolyn, for three years until she ran away with a gardener called Joe. They live in Italy now and they are very happy and I’m happy for them. Honestly.”
“Honestly?”
“I’ve had therapy. I’m quite good at it. We should never have got married in the first place I think was the joint consensus. And I have not had a significant other since then. Not properly. I’ve been waiting and now, well, anyway, I am a lawyer. Sorry about that. I used to be a bad lawyer who earned lots of money, now I’m a good lawyer earning not very much but I like it that way. Shall I go on?”
Sugar nodded.
“I never knew my father, I think I told you that, but I had a wonderful mother so I didn’t really mind. She died the day after I turned twenty-nine, which was the worst thing that has ever happened to me. And even though I’m forty now I still miss her every single day. Is that too namby-pamby?”
“Not namby-pamby at all. I miss my granddaddy every day too.” Sugar missed the rest of her family as well, but she never liked to admit that, not even to herself.
“Anyway, I am one of the poor wretches Gordon Ramsay would throw a wobbly at. I’m a terrible cook, apart from duck pancakes. They’re actually the only thing in my repertoire. What else? I hate radicchio. It’s so bitter! I like Hawaiian shirts because they’re the opposite of
what I used to wear although Frankie says I look like I escaped from the circus and I hate the circus. And opera. Please don’t make me go to the opera. I’m OK with cats but I prefer dogs, I’m thinking of getting a dog, and I’m allergic to—”
Sugar could not say what came over her at that point but she simply couldn’t listen to another word. She just leaned over and silenced him with a kiss, long and tender, as though they kissed like that all the time.
She couldn’t quite believe she was doing it, but she also couldn’t quite believe she hadn’t done it sooner. The scent of him, the taste, the faint bristles on his face against the smooth skin on hers. I should stop, she thought. I should stop before I get used to the taste of him, the feel of him, the possibility of him.
But it was too late. So instead she stopped thinking. She just let her body take the lead and it fell into Theo like she was a key and he was the door to home.
If Theo was surprised, she couldn’t feel it. He drew her closer, one hand in the small of her back, the other beneath her hair, on her neck, gently behind her ears.
Actually he wanted to cry, but he also wanted to sing, and thank God, and his mother, and the universe, but mostly he wanted to keep Sugar wrapped up in his arms forever. Eventually, she drew back, but Theo kept her face in his hands. “I knew it,” he said. “I just knew it.”
She was afraid to look away from him, afraid the magic of what had just happened would disappear in a puff of smoke, taking with it the blissful wonder she was feeling.
“You have to trust it,” he said. “I felt the same way. I feel the same way. From the moment I saw you. I’m just a few steps ahead.”
He took her hands—which were gripping the duck as though it was still alive and about to jump off her lap—and she saw it again; the two of them, in forty years’ time, walking up East Seventh Street together. She hadn’t thought she would feel this way ever again. She’d been so wrong the first time, and so unwilling to risk her heart again since. But a kiss like that, lips like that, arms like that, a smile like that could undo a lot of damage.
“Say something,” Theo said. “And please, please let it be something I want to hear.”
“The duck is yours,” she said, her teeth feeling wooden in her mouth, her lips aching.
Theo didn’t move, just held his breath.
“And I was thinking of having a dinner party on Saturday,” she continued. “It would be real nice if you would come.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes and yes. Just . . . Yes. And thank you. I’ll be there. Of course I’ll be there. I mean I would be there right now this minute if I didn’t need to make duck pancakes for Frankie. But yes. Or we could meet tomorrow? Or the next day?”
“Saturday is good,” Sugar said.
“You’re right. We should wait. I should wait. But don’t doubt me, Sugar. Time can do such strange things. Trust me, please. I know it’s sudden, and foreign, and comfort zones are a distant memory but here’s my number. If I don’t turn up it will be because I’m dead and you will need to know that. That’s the only thing that will keep me from you on Saturday. Death.”
“If you talk like this to every girl you meet it may explain your recent lack of significant others.”
“I haven’t wanted one, Sugar. That’s what I’m saying. It’s just you. You are the one I’ve been waiting for.”
She knew from reading Ruby’s stories in the New York Times that people said these things to newspapers, but to each other? Out in the open? With a woman dressed in blankets going through the garbage can next to them on one side and a Buddhist in saffron robes meditating on the other?
She took his card, wrote out her address on another one and explained that she did not have a cell phone.
He didn’t want to go, didn’t want to let her out of his sight but he had duck pancakes to make. He walked backward so that he could keep watching her until the last possible minute, then she crossed the road, feeling his eyes on her neck, her shoulders, her back, all over her body.
Again she felt a shiver, and it was delicious.
Elizabeth the Sixth could feel the change in Sugar as if it were a warm front sweeping in from the south. Finally, she told the kingdom when their keeper got back from her liaison with Theo in Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Finally.
She started laying again immediately, moving from cell to cell at a sprightly pace. She wouldn’t make a top count of three thousand eggs but at least she was back on the job.
Then Ruby came to visit and Elizabeth the Sixth picked up the pace even more. She’d developed quite a soft spot for Ruby. Her aura was fragile, sickly, sad, yet she radiated a quiet strength from an open heart that never failed to make an impression on the queen.
Today, Ruby told Sugar about Patience Vincent and Ryan Ross, who had been married the previous weekend at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. Patience had been in love with Ryan in high school but never told him so didn’t know that he’d also had a crush on her until twenty-five years later when they hooked up on Facebook.
Elizabeth the Sixth didn’t know what Facebook was, but she sensed hope and excitement emanating in great crashing waves from Ruby. And when Sugar told Ruby about kissing Theo in Chinatown, the unbridled passion surging out of her practically blew the queen from one cell into the next.
Unbridled passion was exactly what had been missing.
Elizabeth the Sixth thought perhaps she might make three thousand eggs that day after all.
26TH
You’re looking mighty pleased with yourself this morning, Miss Sugar,” George said on Saturday morning when Sugar headed out to shop for her dinner party. “Should I take it there’s been an improvement up on the rooftop?”
“There has, George,” Sugar replied. “Blow me down if Elizabeth the Sixth isn’t laying her little patootie off again. All is right with the world it would seem, although I was hoping to buy some balloons for my dinner party tonight but I see Lola is not open.”
The globe had completely deflated now and hung from the railing like a raisin, while all the superhero’s limbs and his head had withered and just his torso remained blown up. The dinosaur leaned on what was left of the hero’s caped shoulder.
“I’m not sure what she’s selling down there but very few people come out with balloons,” said George. “Now tell me, Miss Sugar, those bees the only reason for your smile today?”
“No, they are not, as it happens. Progress has been made, George. With, you know, the someone who might have nothing to do with anything.”
“Or something to do with everything.”
“He’s coming, tonight, to my dinner party.”
“Is that so? Well, I’ll be on the lookout for a Prince Charming at around seven o’clock then.”
“His shirt will possibly blind you before you get a chance, George. But you might even recognize him. You used him as a landing pad the day we met.”
George raised his eyebrows. “How about that? Our friend with the cell phone from Avenue B. What a coincidence.”
“I wish you would come tonight. You’re sure I can’t change your mind?”
“Thanks again for the invitation, Miss Sugar, but I take my meals at ground level. I will want to hear all about it tomorrow though.”
“It’s a date.”
George beamed, and Sugar’s heart swelled at the ease with which some people settled on happiness.
Even Mrs. Keschl seemed almost cheerful when she turned up just half an hour early at six-thirty.
“This is late for me,” she said. “I’m usually in bed with the Sudoku by seven so I hope you cooked something decent.”
“Would you like an iced tea while we wait for the rest of the guests to arrive?” Sugar asked.
“What are you, a Mormon? If I’m going to be up all night peeing it better be because I drank something more interesting than tea.”
Indeed by the time Lola arrived with Ethan, Mrs. Keschl had two bourbon-fueled iced teas under her belt and was wreathed in smiles. “
Give me the kid,” she said, snatching him out of his mother’s arms and dragging him outside to the terrace, where he seemed happy to go.
“Can I fix you a drink?” Sugar asked Lola, who was black eyed and pale faced and said, “Make it a double,” before sloping out the French doors.
Mr. McNally again nearly bowled Ruby over in his haste to get to the honey-roasted peanuts when he spied them from the doorway.
“I’m not invisible,” Ruby said. She carried a big cake box but in truth, she was getting more and more invisible with every passing meal.
“Excuse me,” Nate said quietly behind her.
He had not said he would be coming, but Sugar had set a place for him all the same and now, there he was, bearing a wooden bowl full of fresh greens garnished with his window-box herbs and ringed with nasturtiums.
He couldn’t look up, but Sugar herded him outside with Ruby then watched surreptitiously as the two of them shuffled to the far end of the table and sat next to each other without speaking or making eye contact.
“What’s that growing up out of the pipe over there?” Mrs. Keschl asked when Sugar came out to freshen the drinks.
“I’m going to plant climbing roses,” Sugar said. “Hybrid teas, I think, so I’ve been fixing the trelliswork.”
“Roses? Some people get all the luck.” Mrs. Keschl sniffed.
“What does luck have to do with it?” Mr. McNally snapped. “She’s planting the feckin’ things not conjuring them out of thin air.”
“And what would you know about roses?” barked Mrs. Keschl. “Ouch, there goes my ulcer. When are we going to eat?”
“We’re just waiting for one more,” Sugar said.
“Not another new member of staff I hope,” grouched Mr. McNally. “Because the doorman is about as far as I can go.”