Free Blue Rose In Chelsea by Adriana Devoy

could just as easily have been a field of violets, like George Emerson and Lucy Honeychurch.  Granted, it was a cramped hallway, but you could see the city skyline through a small window.  Okay, maybe not the skyline, but at least a building, some brickwork, at the very least.”
         “A loo with a view,” he nods.
         I move on to Brandon’s debut as a bunny, and Evan and I departing the loft via the stairs rather than the elevator.
         “A farewell in the stairwell,” Sinclair interjects from the side of his mouth not plagued with pins.  “Did Hemingway write that?”
         I describe our thwarted goodbye on Seventh Avenue.  “Oh, don’t even get me started on the cows,” I say wearily.
         “Oh, honey, I wonder udder a word.”
         “It’s hopeless.”  I perform an impromptu pirouette to see how the tutu holds up.
         “He’s the one you will wonder about twenty years from now, even though you may be happily married.”  Sinclair seems suddenly lost in reverie, replacing the pins in their tomato-shaped clump of orange felt.  He leans against the worktable, arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle.  “You may not think about him for years, and then suddenly you’ll see his face in a dream and be plagued by thoughts of him forever after.”
         I sink onto the wooden floor, with my legs splayed so as not to crush the tutu, transfixed by Sinclair’s elegiac words.
         “You’ll wonder what he’s doing, what he looks like, if the years have aged him.  Somehow you know, that no matter how he looks today, he will always look to you as he did the last time you saw him, forever young, bright with potential.  You’ll obsess, does he still have the same essence of personality, or is he changed?  Is he more lighthearted, or has he grown heavy with the weight of experience?  Has suffering softened him or hardened him?  You will see a man on the street, loading groceries into his car, and you will think, ‘That could be him.  He might look like that now.’”
         “You sound like you speak from experience,” I say with tenderness, but Sinclair waves this away, as if that is a discussion for a future time.
         The tutu is a beautiful sky blue, sewn through with shimmering sequins, like moonbeams on tropical water.  But it still needs to be taken in another half inch.  Sinclair begins to croon a tune, his voice muffled from the pins stuck in his mouth, his rubbery lips like a pale pincushion.
         “So, what is the remedy?  How do I avoid such a damnable fate?”  I turn out my toes and plant my hands on my hips.
         “You could start by not being so afraid of him.”
         I’m taken aback by Sinclair’s perceptiveness.  I’ve never been so magnetically drawn to, and yet so frightened of, anyone as I have Evan.
         “I feel like he’s so far ahead of me, in so many ways.  I mean, at school there were all sorts of accomplished people there, but this is different somehow.  He has seen and done so much with his life already.  He has lived.   I have to do something big, something huge first, to put me on equal footing with him, something worthy so that I won’t be swallowed up by his fabulousness.”
         “Okay, Gatsby,” he says, yanking me into position to secure the waistband.
         I giggle, recalling how my father had that very book on his shelf when I was a child, and its worn cover made the title appear as The Great Catsby, leading me to imagine an epic tale of a master mouser.
         Sinclair sighs as if it has become wearisome to listen to me.  “Why do we always think we must do something to be worthy of love?  Why can’t we all just be ?”

 
    ~ 8 ~
    Romeo In Black Jeans
         
         Careen and I float up the escalators, past the newsstands stocked with candies and magazines, and through the frenzied crowds and onto the street level of Seventh Avenue.  The city