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‘So aside from a recently deceased mom, what’s bugging Brian?’ Elliot asked.
Kate felt too brittle for their usual badinage. ‘You have mustard on your chin,’ she told him, but as Elliot reached up to wipe it, the glob fell onto his shirt.
‘Oops,’ he said and dabbed ineffectually at his shirtfront with one of the hard paper towels from the school’s bathrooms. The yellow splotch looked particularly hideous on the green of his shirt. Watching Elliot eat, Kate often thought, was a spectator sport.
‘He believes that magic can bring his mother back,’ she sighed wistfully.
‘See? See what I mean? They’re all obsessed with witches and wizards. Damn that Harry Potter!’ Elliot said, then took another huge bite of the sandwich. ‘So what’s your prescription?’
‘I want him to give up the magic and get in touch with his anger and pain,’ Kate answered.
‘Oi vey!’ Elliot said with the best Yiddish accent a gay man from Indiana could ever manage. ‘When will you give up on this quest to get every little boy at Andrew Country Day in touch with his true feelings? And why discourage magic in his case? What else does the kid have?’
‘Oh, come on, Elliot! Because magic won’t work and he mustn’t think it’s his fault when it fails.’ She shook her head. ‘You of all people. A trained statistician. A man who could trade this job in, triple your salary and become chief actuary at any pension fund. You’re telling me to encourage magic?’
Elliot shrugged. ‘Haven’t you ever had magical things happen?’
Kate refused the bait. Elliot, raised in the Midwest and stoic to the bone, had told her ‘the unexamined life is the only one livable’. He often challenged her about the efficacy of psychology. Now, just to annoy her, he was going to take a perverse stand on magic. ‘If you think you’re going to start an argument today, Elliot,’ she warned him, ‘you’re out of your mind.’ Then, to annoy him – as well as for his own good – she added, ‘I didn’t think corned beef was good for your cholesterol.’
‘Oh, what’s a few hundred points one way or the other?’ he asked cheerfully, swallowing another mouthful.
‘You’ve got a death wish,’ Kate said.
‘Ooooh. Harsh words from a shrink.’ Elliot winced mockingly as he opened a Snapple.
‘Look, I’m leaving,’ she told him, gathering some notes from her desk and putting them into her file cabinet. If she left now she’d be able to do a bit of shopping before meeting her friend Bina. She took a lipstick and mirror out of her purse, dabbed the color over her mouth and smiled wide to make sure she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth. ‘I’ll see you for dinner.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘None of your bee’s wax.’
‘A secret? Come on. Tell! What if I threw a tantrum like Brian did?’ Elliot reached into the toy box at his feet. Then he hurled a stuffed bear in Kate’s direction. ‘Would you tell me then?’ The plush missile hit her squarely in the face. Elliot curled up in the chair, held his hands in front of his own face and started to beg rapidly. ‘It was an accident. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll show you sorry,’ Kate warned as she threw the bear back at Elliot, but missed.
‘You throw like a girl,’ Elliot taunted. Then he picked up another animal and threw it at Kate. ‘Duck!’ he called as he reached for yet another toy to throw. It was indeed a duck, yellow and fluffy.
‘Duck this, you math nerd,’ Kate almost shouted as she grabbed a fuzzy rabbit and pummeled Elliot’s head. It felt good to blow off some steam.
‘Abuse! Abuse!’ Elliot screamed in delight as he rolled off the chair to protect himself. ‘Teacher abuse! Teacher abuse!’
‘Shut up, you idiot!’ Kate told him and rushed to close the office door. She turned from it just in time to get a stuffed elephant right in the face. Stunned for only a moment, Kate grabbed the pachyderm and lunged at Elliot. ‘I’ll show you abuse, you sniveling cholesterol warehouse,’ she threatened as she fell on top of Elliot and beat him repeatedly with the toy.
Elliot fought back with both an inflatable flamingo and a stuffed dog. He might be gay, but he was no wussy. When he and Kate were both exhausted (and – sadly – the flamingo’s leg was punctured), they sat panting and laughing together in the big chair, Kate on top. The door opened.
‘Excuse me?’ Mr McKay asked, but despite his words he wasn’t the type to excuse anything. ‘I thought I heard a ruckus in here.’
Mr McKay, the principal of Andrew Country Day lower school, was a hypocrite, a social climber, a control freak and a very bad dresser. He also had a knack of using words no one else had used for several decades.
‘A ruckus?’ Elliot asked.
‘We were just testing out a new therapy,’ Kate extemporized. ‘Did it disturb you?’ she asked innocently.
‘Well, it was certainly loud,’ George McKay complained.
‘From the little I know of it, AAT – Airborne Animal Therapy – can frequently be noisy,’ Elliot said, po-faced, ‘although it’s having significant measurable success in schools for the gifted where it’s being pioneered. Of course,’ he added, ‘it might not be right for this setting.’ He nodded at Kate. ‘I’m not the expert,’ he said as if he were deferring to Kate’s professional judgment. She smothered a laugh with a cough.
‘We’ll put this off until after three o’clock, Mr McKay,’ she promised.
‘All right then,’ he said primly. He left as suddenly as he had arrived, shutting the door with a firm but controlled click. Kate and Elliot looked at one another, waited for a count of ten, then burst into giggles that they had to stifle.
‘AAT?’ Kate gurgled.
‘Hey, straight men love acronyms. Think of the army. He’ll be on the internet in less than ten minutes searching for Airborne Animal Therapy,’ Elliot predicted. He stood up and began collecting the stuffed animals. Kate got up to help him. The irony of the situation was that Elliot had helped Kate get hired and since then George McKay had told several teachers that he suspected them of having an affair. Ridiculous as that idea was, the sight of the two of them in the chair was not one to instill confidence in George McKay, who had frequently announced at teachers’ meetings that he ‘discouraged fraternizing among professional educational co-workers’.
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 (#ulink_abc5d9b0-e591-511a-934f-3af50aab768f)
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 reached 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.’
