Uptown Girl Read online

  When Kate and her ‘professional educational co-worker’ finished laughing she smoothed her skirt and put her hair back up, this time with a barrette she found in her drawer. Elliot was standing still, looking down at the chair. He heaved a dramatic sigh.

  ‘Oh shit!’ he told her. ‘You crushed my banana.’ He held up the mangled fruit from his lunch bag which had slipped under them during the battle.

  Kate turned, struck the pose of a femme fatale and rasped, ‘How times have changed. You used to like it when I did that.’

  Elliot laughed. ‘I’ll leave all banana handling to you and Michael.’

  Kate’s new boyfriend, Dr Michael Atwood, was going with her to dinner at Elliot’s place. Kate felt a little flurry in her stomach at the thought. She hoped they’d like each other.

  ‘If I don’t leave now, I’ll be late tonight,’ Kate told him.

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  She picked up her purse to prepare for leaving.

  ‘So you like your work so far,’ Elliot said. Kate nodded. She loved it. ‘But even though I helped you get the job, you’re still not going to let me know where you’re going.’

  Kate didn’t bother to answer. Elliot was what people in Brooklyn called ‘a noodge’.

  2

  In all the years Kate had known Elliot – over ten now – he’d always managed to cheer her up when she was sad and support her in her successes. Now, as they walked down the corridor to his classroom, she glanced at him affectionately. The stretched-out orange T-shirt, the ugly green over-shirt decorated with mustard, the slight love handles and the wrinkled chinos didn’t make him look like much but he had a keen mind and was a loving and generous friend. She felt a swell of gratitude toward him. As always, he had cheered her up and helped her make the break from school. Kate was proud of the work she did with the kids. She had learned a lot from them, too. For one thing, the school catered to the children of the rich and successful but Kate saw that money, privilege, and education brought as much misery as had her own deprived childhood. She had lost her resentment of those with money and she was grateful for that. She had not picked her calling for the money it earned; in fact, she regarded her work as a kind of vocation. It was one thing she never made light of, and she often found it hard to leave it behind at the end of the day. But tonight she had to, to help Bina prepare for her big night, and then, later, to introduce Michael to Elliot and his partner Brice at dinner.

  She waited just inside Elliot’s classroom as he chucked the offending lunch sack in a bin and started messing about in his untidy desk.

  ‘You know, it’s very hard not to keep thinking about Brian. He’s so adorable, and has had a really difficult time. And I think the disappointment when his magic doesn’t work, which of course it won’t, could cause real problems later.’ Kate sighed. ‘Boys are just so much more fragile than girls.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Elliot sighed deeply too. ‘I’m still getting over the time Phyllis Bellusico told me I smelled.’

  ‘Did you?’ Kate asked, ready to be either his straight man or his audience. She was used to Elliot’s shticks. Since college they had been amusing one another with dark humor from their childhoods.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Elliot admitted reluctantly, ‘but I smelled good. I should have. I’d dumped an entire bottle of my mother’s White Shoulders into my underpants.’

  ‘Pee-yuw.’ Kate imitated any one of her lower school ‘clients’. ‘Maybe Brian has a point. I’d have to agree with Phyllis,’ she said. ‘And this happened …?’

  ‘… In third grade, but with a little more therapy and Brice’s love and support I expect to get over it in the next decade.’

  Kate loved it when Elliot got going. She had to laugh.

  Elliot had been tormented by kids in school. After a moment he said, ‘I have to go to Dean & Deluca to get rice for our dinner tonight. Brice is making his world-famous risotto. You can tell Michael it’s your recipe. The way to a man’s heart …’

  Kate looked up with a suspicious glance. ‘Yeah, and please be on your best behavior. Elliot,’ she began, ‘can’t you just …’

  ‘No,’ Elliot retorted, ‘I can’t just anything.’ He walked over to her and gave her a quick hug. ‘I don’t want to discourage or criticize you. I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Oh, God, Elliot! Who knows what they’re doing when they try to find a soul mate?’

  ‘Well, you have a point there. But I don’t want you to be hurt again, Kate.’ He paused. Kate knew where he was going and she didn’t want him to. Her last entanglement had ended so badly that she didn’t know how she would have gotten through it without Elliot. She had invested a lot of time and emotion in Steven Kaplan, all of it worse than wasted. It had left her more suspicious and distrusting of men than she liked to admit. One of the good things about Michael was that she could trust him completely. He might not have Steven’s banter and easy charm but he had substance and achievement and sincerity. At least she thought so.

  ‘That’s why you’re meeting Michael.’

  ‘Ever since Steven, I get to meet your new boyfriends. I’d like you to just find the right one and make him an old boyfriend.’

  ‘He’s thirty-four. Old enough?’

  Elliot rolled his eyes. ‘I worry about you.’ Kate looked directly at Elliot. ‘This one is different. He’s got his doctorate in anthropology and he’s very promising.’

  ‘Promising what? You always think they’re different and you always think they’re promising, until they bore you and then …’

  ‘Oh, stop,’ Kate interrupted. ‘I know: I won’t pick losers on account of my father and I won’t pick winners on account of my father. Yadda, yadda, yadda.’

  ‘Don’t leave out your fear of commitment, yadda.’ ‘I’ll have you committed if you bring that up one more time. How come for thirty-one years you’re allowed to be a gay bachelor – in both respects of the phrase – and then one day you hook up with Brice. Bingo! But since then I’m neurotic for not doing the same.’

  ‘Hey, I don’t want you to hook up with Brice,’ Elliot mock-protested. ‘We’re both strictly monogamous.’

  ‘I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear that,’ Kate retorted. ‘But don’t project your fears onto me. It isn’t easy to find a kind-hearted, dependable, intelligent, sensual single man in Manhattan.’

  ‘Tell me about it!’ Elliot exclaimed. ‘I had to try almost every guy on the island before I met Brice.’

  ‘Try not to be bitter, Elliot. I try so hard not to be.’ She reached up and wiped off a remaining bit of banana from his mouth with her thumb, then gave him a little peck on the lips. ‘Do you really have to be gay?’ It wasn’t the first time she had asked him that. Ever since their college years – when the two of them became instant friends during a calculus class that bored him and that Kate had barely managed to pass – Kate had depended on Elliot to be her friend, sometimes her brother, more often her sister, and occasionally even her father. Elliot was family. Still, like family, he could be a pain in the ass. Then she smiled. Elliot was everything to her, except her lover. And sometimes she thought that’s what made her love him the most. Elliot was safe. Unlike the other men in her life, Elliot would always be there.

  ‘What makes you think I’m gay?’ Elliot asked with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Is that your professional opinion, Doctor, or just a guess? Is it my spectator pumps?’

  In fact, Elliot was not a flamboyant homosexual. He didn’t look or act like what Kate’s old Brooklyn crowd might have called ‘a fag’ and, like most of the young gay men in New York, he didn’t go in for the high-maintenance GQ look. Elliot looked and acted like a grade school math teacher – no, what he looked like, she thought affectionately, was a classic nerd: the only thing missing was the broken glasses held together with a paper clip.

  ‘How did a little queer kid from Indiana get to be so well adjusted?’ Kate asked him, also not for the first time.

  Elliot r
eached over, took one of Kate’s hands and held it in both of his. ‘Listen closely,’ he told her, ‘because I am going to tell you something from Indiana about getting in touch with your true feelings.’ He looked at her intently and asked, ‘Are you listening, because I am not going to repeat this.’ Kate nodded, and Elliot continued. ‘I got in touch with my true feelings by learning how to mask them very early in life. When you realize that your true feelings are most likely going to get the shit kicked out of you, you learn how to hide them for as long as you have to. You wait for a safe place to express them.’ He smiled and gave Kate’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Like I do with you and Brice. But I wouldn’t tell a kid to try and find a best friend and a lover here at Andrew Country Day.’

  ‘I hear you,’ Kate agreed, and thought of poor Brian again.

  ‘So, what are you doing before dinner? Feel like making the trip to Dean & Deluca with me first?’

  Kate noticed the time – she’d have to hurry now – and gathered up her backpack and cotton sweater. ‘No can do. I must run. I have a date.’

  ‘You’re meeting this early with Michael?’ Elliot asked, surprised. ‘You have a date with him before he’s coming to dinner with us?’

  ‘It’s not with Michael.’

  ‘You have another date with someone else before Michael? And I don’t know about it?’ Elliot’s voice rose with shock and offense. ‘How could that happen? On average we speak six point four times a day in person and two point nine times by phone. A date I don’t know everything about is a statistical improbability.’

  Kate rolled her eyes and decided to put him out of his misery. ‘It’s just a date with Bina. Barbie’s told her Jack is finally popping the question tonight – they’re going to Nobu because Jack wants to make it really special – and to help prepare her I’m taking her out for a manicure.’ She wriggled her fingers in the air. ‘They should look good for the ring,’ she said in an accent similar to Bina’s Brooklynese.

  ‘You’re kidding! And you didn’t tell me?’ Elliot asked.

  She shrugged, slipped on her jacket, shouldered her bag and started toward the door. ‘I guess not.’

  Elliot followed her to the school door. ‘The fabled Bina and the much-sought-after Jack. Together at last.’

  ‘Yep, wedding bells have broken up that old gang of mine,’ Kate said. ‘Bye-bye Bitches of Bushwick. It’s only Bunny and me left unmarried.’ She looked down at her Swatch, refusing to engage with the depression this thought gave her. ‘Gotta go.’

  ‘Where are you and Bina getting together?’ Elliot demanded.

  ‘In SoHo,’ Kate answered, as she pushed against the bar of the school safety door.

  ‘Oh, good. I’m going that way. Just let me pick up my stuff.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Kate told him sternly.

  ‘No. No. Wait for me!’ he begged. ‘We can take the subway together and I can finally meet Bina.’

  Kate tried to keep her face still. Elliot had waged a year’s-long campaign to meet her old Brooklyn gang. But Kate didn’t need it. In fact, as she’d made clear more times than she could count, she loathed the idea. She’d tried in the dozen years since she’d left home to erase most of the dark memories of her troubled background and though she was still close friends with Bina Horowitz and occasionally saw her other pals, she didn’t need Elliot’s jaundiced eye appraising them.

  Kate gave him a look. She disappeared out of the door, then called back, ‘You need to meet Bina like I need another unemployed boyfriend.’

  She thought she was safely away and down the steps of the school when she heard Elliot behind her. He had a madras hat on and was clutching his backpack with one hand while he ran in a crouch that was a cross between Groucho’s walk and a begging position. ‘Oh, come on,’ he pleaded. ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘Tragic. Absolutely tragic. Just like so many things in life,’ Kate told him and kept on walking while he flapped at his other backpack strap.

  ‘How come I never get to meet any of your Brooklyn friends? They sound so fascinating,’ he demanded.

  Kate stopped in the schoolyard and turned back to Elliot. ‘Bina may be a lot of things, but fascinating is not one of them.’ The girl had been her best friend since third grade and was still, in some ways, the most dependable. Kate had spent every holiday and most summer vacations at Bina’s, partly because the Horowitz house was so clean and orderly and Bina’s mom was so kind, but mostly because it allowed Kate to avoid the empty apartment that was her home or, worse, her father who was too often drunk.

  If Kate had perhaps outgrown Bina, who’d dropped out of Brooklyn College and worked at her father’s chiropractic office, it didn’t stop her from loving her. It was just that they had different interests and none of Bina’s would appeal to Elliot or any other of her Manhattan friends.

  ‘Elliot,’ Kate said sternly, as they made their way down the street. ‘You know your interest in Bina is only idle curiosity.’

  ‘Come on,’ Elliot coaxed. ‘Let me come. Anyway, it’s a free country. The Constitution says so.’

  Kate snorted. ‘Like the US Constitution, I believe in the separation of church and state.’

  ‘No,’ retorted Elliot, ‘you believe in the separation of gay and straight.’

  ‘That’s not fair. I let you have dinner with Rita and me only a week ago.’ She wasn’t going to let him manipulate her with his politically correct blackmail. ‘You’re not meeting Bina because even though she’s my oldest friend, you have nothing, absolutely nothing, in common with her.’

  ‘I like people I have nothing in common with,’ Elliot argued. ‘That’s why I like you and live with Brice.’

  ‘Don’t be greedy, you’re getting to meet Michael tonight,’ said Kate. ‘Isn’t that enough for two yentas like you and Brice?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Elliot, giving in. ‘It will have to do.’

  Kate laughed and said, ‘Come on, I’m going to be late for my girly date. Let me give you some advice I gave Jennifer Whalen just a couple of hours ago. “Try to make your own friends dear.”’

  They were at the IRT subway entrance. She gave Elliot a big smile and then hugged him goodbye. He shrugged, admitting his defeat. As she descended into the shadow of the subway, Elliot shouted after her, ‘Don’t forget; dinner’s at eight!’

  ‘See ya there!’ she yelled back and ran to get the train.

  3

  Kate and Bina walked down Lafayette Street, gazing in the windows of the fashion boutiques and art galleries that lined the SoHo strip. Kate looked and felt at home in SoHo. She would have liked to live in the neighborhood, but it was far too pricey for a school psychologist’s salary. Her apartment was on the West Side, in Chelsea, but Kate could pass as a downtown hipster. Bina Horowitz, on the other hand, was still all Brooklyn: her dark hair too done, her clothes all ‘matchy-matchy’, as Barbie used to say back in high school. Short, a little dumpy, and wearing too much gold, the truth was that Bina stuck out like a sore thumb among the modelesque shoppers converging in one of the coolest sections of downtown Manhattan. That didn’t stop Kate from loving her friend dearly but she was grateful for all she herself had learned about style from Brice, college, Manhattan boutiques and her current New York friends. She’d left her Brooklyn look far behind, thank goodness.

  ‘My God, Katie, I don’t know how you live here,’ Bina said. ‘These people in Manhattan are the reason girls all over the country go anorexic.’ Kate just laughed, though Bina was far from wrong. Bina continued to crane her head around at every opportunity, slowing them down to look at a pedestrian painting of a nude at which she raised her brows, a dress shop window where the clothes were torn into strips, and to marvel at the boutique called Center for the Dull. Kate had to explain it was just a clothing store like Yellow Rat Bastard – a store that Kate didn’t shop in though she did have a shopping bag of theirs.

  ‘Why all the confusing names?’ Bina asked. ‘And isn’t it hot?’ she added, fanning herself frantically w
ith a flyer for a failing off-off-Broadway show that some guy had just shoved into her hand as they walked by. He hadn’t tried to palm one off on Kate, but then she didn’t look like the kind of person who accepted garbage.

  ‘Well, it is nearly summer,’ Kate observed. She tried to quicken their pace – the salon was notorious for demanding promptness – but Bina was Bina and she simply couldn’t be rushed or silenced. The Horowitz family had taken Kate in when she was eleven and Kate knew practically everything about Bina. Kate had once done the math and realized Mrs Horowitz had fed her more than five hundred meals (most of them made with chicken fat). Dr Horowitz had taught her to ride a two-wheeler bike when Kate’s own father was too drunk or too lazy (or both) to bother to do it. Bina’s brother Dave had taught the two of them to swim in the municipal pool, and Kate still swam laps three times a week. Kate was grateful and loved Bina, but she had to admit that Bina was the Mistress of the Obvious in most of her observations.

  ‘It’s really hot,’ Bina said, as if Kate needed proof of her belief.

  Back in Brooklyn, when Kate had had no other outlet and longed for more sophisticated friends – like Elliot and Brice and Rita – with whom she could banter or talk about books, Bina had sometimes annoyed her. But now that she had a circle of intellectual, cosmopolitan pals, she could give up the frustration over Bina’s provincial interests and conversation and simply love her good heart.

  ‘It’s really hot,’ Bina repeated – a habit she had when Kate didn’t respond to her.

  ‘Is it hotter in Manhattan than it is in Brooklyn?’ Kate asked her, teasing.

  ‘It’s always hotter in Manhattan than it is in Brooklyn,’ Bina confirmed, completely missing Kate’s mild irony. Bina definitely had an irony deficiency. ‘It’s all these damned sidewalks and all this traffic.’ Bina looked up and down Lafayette Street and shook her head in disgust. ‘I couldn’t live here,’ she muttered, as if the choice was hers and million-dollar lofts were an option she and Jack could consider. ‘I just couldn’t do it.’