Uptown Girl. Olivia Goldsmith

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ