Cleopatra and Frankenstein(71)

“You’re crazy.”

“Don’t call me crazy.”

Cleo sat up farther against the headboard and yanked the sheets around herself. Her face was pinched and white.

“Look—” He wrestled her hands away from where they were knotted at her chest and took them in his. “I know this is difficult, what with Frank coming back and us not knowing … Well, how to proceed. But we’ve had such a happy time together. Let’s not fight now, please.”

“I’m going to say something to him,” she said.

He dropped her hands. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t—” She stopped, trying to find the right words. “Something has to change.”

Anders felt a pull in his stomach, as though a plug had just been yanked out.

“Cleo, please, whatever you do, do not say anything about us to him. Not yet. I need … I need more time.”

“I won’t bring you into it.”

“Then what do you want to say?”

“I don’t know! That I’m not happy. That I’m moving out. I have to do something. Can you just promise me one thing?”

She reached to pick up his hands from where they had fallen in his lap. Anders could feel himself physically inclining away from her as she grasped for him. He had to resist the impulse to leap up off the bed and out the fire escape.

“What?”

“Promise me you’ll be there. You don’t have to come out and tell everyone we’re together. Just promise you’ll be there for me.”

“Look, I have to go,” he said. “It’s my day with Jonah, I told you. There’s porridge for you there. Just please don’t do anything rash, Cleo. Please.”

He kissed her hastily on the cheek and pointed to the porridge, as if eating that would solve everything.

“Stay,” she said, but he was already heading out the door.

He hailed a cab and headed west. He was running late. As they turned onto the West Side Highway, Anders relaxed his head against the back of the seat. Runners bundled against the cold jogged along the water, beyond which the unglamorous skyline of New Jersey stood. Eleanor was from New Jersey, he remembered Frank saying. Anders did not give much credence to Cleo’s theory concerning their feelings for each other. Cleo was sensitive, imaginative, slightly paranoid; she read too much into everything. Frank would have told Anders if he had fallen in love with someone else. Anyway, what would possess him to pursue a woman like Eleanor when he had Cleo?

Anders’s own feelings for Cleo were a riot of contradictions. His initial reaction to the prospect of her telling Frank about them had been terror, almost repulsion. Now, in the quiet of the taxi, the thought of Cleo being his all the time, out in the open, not just for a few stolen moments, kindled a warm blush of pleasure within him. But at what cost would that pleasure come? He’d known Frank for over two decades, Cleo only a year. But being with Cleo made him feel reckless, as though he could burn his life to the ground and rebuild it anew.

He arrived at Christine’s and rang the buzzer for her apartment. He’d loved the place when he lived there, its curved walls and dusty skylights, but he’d been relieved to move back downtown when they split. He found the Upper West Side oppressive, with its unavoidable strollers and school talk. He’d always felt, perhaps delusionally, that he was too young to live there.

He stepped into the elevator and waited for it to be called up to her floor. Christine was an accountant for an architecture firm and made a good living without help from a partner, a fact she was extremely proud of. The doors opened to reveal her angular, familiar face. She pulled him in for a hug.

“Oh, Anders,” she said, rubbing her face into his neck. “You haven’t started smoking again.”

“Only socially,” he said.

“You smell like a teenager.”

“You smell the same,” he said.

He recognized the familiar scent, woody and a little spicy, of the cologne she used to steal from him.

“Jonah’s in his room getting ready,” she said. “Cities have been erected in less time.”

He followed her to the kitchen.

“There’s a chance I’ll have to run a little early.”

Frank would be landing now, he calculated. Then an hour, maybe two, to get through customs and back into the city. Would she say something the moment he walked through the door? He trusted that she would not betray him to Frank. But what would she say? Would she leave him? What if Frank suspected him anyway?

“That’s fine,” Christine said. “Have fun with Jonah, but not too much fun. He’s on my shit list at the moment. Espresso?”

Anders nodded and checked his phone. Nothing from Cleo.

“What did he do?” he asked.

“He called me a bitch because I won’t give him a credit card like all his other friends supposedly have. A credit card! He’s thirteen, for God’s sake. He should feel like a millionaire if he has fifty bucks.”

She walked to the hallway and called Jonah’s name. His name in her mouth was two long syllables, like an air raid siren.

“Woman, I’m coming!” he heard Jonah yell.

Christine rolled her eyes.

“Grows ten pubes and thinks he can call me ‘woman,’” she said. “Sometimes I worry I raised a real brat.”