Now That The Sting Has Gone

Usually I get couples. It’s a bicycle buggy built for two, and half full, it looks sort of dejected.
Today, it was a bit foggy out, chilly for April,  and my shift was kind of slow—a couple of slightly lumpy Avon representatives from Indianopolis, followed by a Frenchman and his chirpy fiancée, some nuns still giddy over a recent trip to the Vatican, and three father/daughter pairs from J.P. Morgan’s “Annual Take Your Child to Work Day.” It was about eight by the time last pair stepped down, proud in their matching yellow tee-shirts, and I waited for a moment outside Trinity Church, unsure of whether to go home early for once, or linger into the prime monkey-making hours, when the tourists are replaced by bankers, flushed and flush and blearily hopeful about their chances of turning biker chick fantasies into reality.
I was coasting down Liberty St. when a blur of salmon and cream stumbled out of the Pound and Pence and flagged me down. One topsider had barely landed on the platform before he’d asked me my name. “Caelie, ” I said, and then wished I’d said something different, more flamboyantly ridiculous.
“Hi Callie. I’m Scott.”
This sort of exchange, commonplace enough among the heartlanders, is often a red flag when voiced by a drunken native. Backseat mobility, I’ve learned, is all the more tempting for its difficulty. I wavered, but only until I heard a mumbled “Commerce and Bedford,” because someday I will live in the West Village, with a husband who wears horn-rimmed glasses and likes to fix things and dance to Ben Folds Five while I bake a souffle I’ve clipped from a vintage Gourmet.
The problem with spring is the absence of candles in the windows, but the cherry and magnolia blossoms make up for it, and Commerce Street is particularly heart-squeezing, small and crooked and expensive enough, I suppose, to keep crayola commercialism and grungy bodegas at bay. I took my time getting there—Scott didn’t seem to mind. He spent most of the ride massaging his temples and dropping his iPhone. When I pulled up to a textbook brownstone—swaying ivy! Navy window boxes! Stone lions!—he shot dangerously far forward. I imagined him sailing into me, the both of us crashing into the pavement in a knot of skin and steel and little white earbuds. In the ambulance, he—mercifully uninjured— would hold my gritty hand. Later on, we’d come home to this very brownstone, where in between the Eames writing desk and the toile loveseat, my pedicab would rest, immortalized in white plaster. “Oops. Sorry about that. Thank you Callie.”
Scott handed me a hundred. His wallet was canvas and covered in hornets. I fumbled with the zipper of my money belt. “Keep the change.” He loped unsteadily toward the door, and pulled himself hand over hand up the black iron balustrade. I took my time remounting. I wanted to see the foyer. I almost didn’t get to though, because the entrance was locked, and apparently who’d ever locked it had no intention of letting Scott in. Her name was Milly, and I winced at the way Scott battered her shiny red door. “Honey, I’m home! Milly! It’s me! Milly! Shit c’mon Milly open the door. Open the doooor. Milly I love you. You know that. You KNOW that. Millllly. Shit.”
Milly saved her door by opening it, but when Scott swayed into the crack, she swayed him back. “Go away, Scott. I don’t want to talk to you right now.”
Her voice had a skeletal quality to it, hastily varnished, and her oxford elbows cut boomerang swathes in the hall’s light. Not the sort of elbows you’d think could shut a man out, but they did. Scott stood still for a moment, his hands clutching his iPhone. Then he kicked one of the lions hard enough that it toppled over and split at the head. “Awesome.”
His laugh had tears at its corners. I dismounted and flipped the kickstand. “Um, Sir? Excuse me Sir?”
He started, and then grimaced tentatively. His lips were pruney with flaky white ridges. I tried to put my hands in my pockets to keep from smoothing them, forgetting I was wearing bike shorts. “Oh hey Callie. Sorry for the scene.”
“Oh no problem.”
I wondered if he could hear the part where my voice went up. “But, ah, do you want me to take you somewhere else?” His face smoothed a little, and he looked at me more closely. “Would you? You’re the best, Cal.”
“Where to, Sir?”
“Elizabeth and Spring, please. 56 Elizabeth.”
He leapt into the carriage, then immediately leapt out. “Hold on a sec, will you?”
I watched his coat flaps wave as he dashed back up the stairs. He came back holding the lion head aloft. The split was very neat—I could only see one jagged edge dipping below where the neck would end.