The Pattern Mafia - Manhattan
CHAPTER FORY ONE
The Story So Far… There was a third sun…
Lexington Avenue is reflected in the two big old mirrors in Joe’s Bar. It’s a spring day of sun and fast moving showers, the cars glittering with beads of water, the sidewalks full of marching macks and trilby hats. Joe is fussing over the big vase full of the flowers he buys every morning at the flower market on 28th. He always takes the greatest care and yet he’s never satisfied.
‘Looks good, Joe,’ I tell him waggling my empty glass.
Joe squints at the big array of blooms, head to one side, glances at my reflection in one of the mirrors. I give Joe my sweetest smile and waggle my glass again.
‘Adds a touch of class, Joe.’
‘You want to ease up, Hollywood, or people will call you a lush.’
‘When have I ever cared about what other people think, Joe?’
He turns from his flowers and picks up my glass. Returns it to me with a good shot of Jimmie.
‘Other people care about you, Hollywood,’ he says, holding the glass, making me pull it from his hand.
‘Sure, Joe, I love you too.’
Joe sighs and shakes his head.
‘Holly back yet? She’s been gone a while now.’
‘You know Holly. She’ll be back when she gets bored with whoever she is playing with. Or they run out of money. Or their wife gets into town.’
‘Sheesh. Young girls these days.’
‘Women, Joe, young women these days.’
‘Was it that Brazilian?’
‘Argentinian. It was a race between Holly and me. She won.’
My friend Holly. I’d moved into her flat on East 71st a year ago, girls needing to stick together in New York, if you know what I mean. I turned up with my little card suitcase and the handwritten note giving Holly’s address and rang the bell and she had said, ‘who is it,’ and I said, ‘It’s me, Holly Wood.’ And she said, ‘Like the movies?’ and I said, ‘Nothing better.’ And she said, ‘come on up.’
Her head popped over the stairwell as I made my way up the wooden stairs to her floor and she frowns, ‘Do I know you?’ she asks, and I say, ‘I guess so, I got your address,’ and waved the notepaper at her with my free hand. She says, ‘OK then,’ and that is that.
I was new to Manhattan, but Holly knew all the right moves and places, and seemed to know all the people in the city. Well, all the men anyway. Whenever someone called out, ‘Hey, Holly.’ I knew it was her they were calling not me. Holly showed me about town. She showed me the coffee stall on 5th where she got her coffee and bagel for breakfast, and showed me her favourite breakfast spot, and she showed me Joe’s bar, and how you can walk to the park and how, if you forgot your key, you could always rely on the ugly old Japanese man on the top floor to let you in even after midnight, although he would shout at you.
Holly liked bars and men and talking, so we got on really well, kinda like sisters we never knew we had. We shared a bed just like sisters unless she was entertaining, then I would sleep on the sofa. We shared clothes and hats and makeup but we never shared men, sisters don’t do that sort of thing. We made a splash, the two Holly’s. Everyone wanted to meet the two Hollys. We even looked alike. How is it possible that two women from different parts of the world and different parents end up looking like sisters and have the same name? How many miracles have to line up to make that happen?
‘I’m the original,’ Holly would say. ‘This ones the copy.’ And people would laugh. I would say, ‘but practice made perfect,’ and get the bigger laugh. I stopped doing that when I saw Holly didn’t like it much.
‘The Argentinian,’ repeated Joe shaking his sad head. ‘Not like in my day.’ He missed Holly as much as I did.
‘It’s the sixties Joe. A beautiful new decade. The New Camelot.’
‘You not worried about them Commies, Hollywood? The Cosmonauts? Maybe they got a ray-gun up there.’
‘I think Yuri’s cute. Besides, the President will stand up to the Commies.’
‘Kennedy’s not got the balls, begging your pardon, Miss Wood.’
Joe’s a Republican through and through. Like cab drivers and policemen, all bar owners are Republicans. And sore losers. I hated that Nixon guy, the way he sweated. Someone with a lot to sweat about shouldn’t ever be President.
‘Jackie must know, and she doesn’t look like a gal who would stay around if he had got no balls.’ I tell Joe.
‘Sheesh, young girls these days, sheesh, ‘said Joe blushing. Joe is a marshmallow inside. He looks all hard bitten and surly but I can always make him blush.
Then I hear the darnedest thing.
‘You got birds in here, Joe?’
‘I only got you, Hollywood.’
I look around the bar, looking up at the tall, yellowed, plaster ceiling with its cookie cutter moulded panels, look at the old brass light fittings, the top of the tall mahogany shelves. Nothing but cobwebs and dust and a small brown stain like a dried flower where something on the floor above had leaked through one day. But I can hear birdsong, distant.
‘So that’s weird,’ I tell Joe.
‘What’s weird, Hollywood?’
‘Got birds in my ears, Joe. Like a dawn chorus.’
‘It’s lunchtime, and there are no damn birds,’ said Joe. And I said, ‘I know that, Joe,’ and the birdsong sends a chill through me.
It is too nice a day to be shook up for long. I say goodbye to Joe and walk the three blocks on 71st to the park. That way any birds I hear are real. I am not worried, I tell myself; everyone hears things every now and then. It’s just your mind playing tricks. Besides, it’s a beautiful spring day, fresh and bright and East 71st is so pretty with all its trees.
I get to 5th Avenue before the park and I am being drawn north. And then I am at the grand staircase to the Met. I pay and I go in and begin to search the Met’s cathedral halls which are echoing softly to the voices of the crowd, a gentle continuous susurration, the ocean sound of people. There is this painting I want to see. It’s just at the edge of my mind, a half-remembered thing. I don’t know why I want to see it so badly, but I do. A landscape, on a stormy day, and something odd about it. Something in the sky.
And there he is sitting on marble steps in front of me, a thin line of smoke rising from his cigarette to curl and wave itself out of existence way above his head. His cockatoo hair is as dark as coal, and there is not a single line on his face. He looks so young it shocks me just as much as the fact of him being here. He is wearing a black leather bikers’ jacket over a white cotton T-shirt, blue drainpipe jeans and big bikers’ boots. His hands, his arms, his legs are skeleton thin. He looks me up and down and takes the roll-up from young lips and says,
‘Hello, Charli.’
What a twist, with a homage to Breakfast at Tiffany's. I'm even more intrigued.
Oh wow ! Different dimension? Time travel ? So like you say they died ? The third sun a nuke omg !