#i miss you korean music store in massachusetts.....you never let me down........instead all i have is this wasteland

[attila-werther]

I stopped checking twitter regularly and missed an album announcement by a handful of days from my favorite band and they're sold out. ugh. AUGH, even.

[kane-and-griffin]

“I Put a Spell On You,” Part 2

A Kabby Halloween fic in three parts for the AU The Woman That Fell From the Sky, in honor of @brittanias‘ birthday!   

Part 1 here

PART 2: “Fox-Trot Time” (Halloween 2009)

“The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.” -- Dashiell Hammett, from The Thin Man

When Abby left New York nine years ago, she left it for good.

She and Jake had built a life there, one they’d believed would last.  She’d moved there young and made it her home and loved it with the same fervent intensity as all the city’s Midwestern expatriates.  But all of that meant nothing without Jake.

There was nowhere she could run to escape the crushing sorrow of loss.  Every bodega, every hole-in-the-wall wine bar, every bench in Central Park, every subway station, Jake was there.  The bank where he’d been shot was on her way to work.  The hospital cafeteria on the third floor looked out over the police station where she’d sat, cold and numb and dry-eyed, filling out form after form while Marcus attempted to comfort the confused and tearful Clarke on the bench in the hallway outside.

She could not stay in this place.

The job in Massachusetts had been offered to her a month before Jake’s death, and she had declined it.  They were New Yorkers, she’d explained to the hospital recruiter.  Their daughter would be a New Yorker too.  The city was their home, and they couldn’t imagine leaving it.

The job was still open six weeks later, something that seemed to Abby to be a kind of miracle; they couldn’t find any other surgeons of her caliber willing to move out to the middle of nowhere – leaving behind every modern amenity, from Korean barbecue to decent theatre – to take a job in a small sleepy town with only a few thousand residents.

But Jake had never set foot in that town.  She had never even told him its name.  It felt, in that moment, like the one place in the world she could go to escape.

So she packed up her car, strapped Clarke into the backseat, and off they went.

And she never went back.

Nine years ago, watching the New York skyline disappear in her rearview mirror as steel buildings turned into green forests, she hadn’t been able to imagine ever returning.  She hadn’t thought the pain would ever fade.

But Clarke is a freshman in high school now, and they’ve made a life for themselves, and it doesn’t hurt to remember Jake the way that it used to.  She’s changed.  Marcus has changed her.  She’s older and sadder than she was when she and Jake were reckless urban twentysomethings together, but she’s also steadier on her feet.

It’s because Marcus knows this – because Marcus can sense this – that he even dares to ask her the question.

It starts with a senior citizens’ cruise to the Bahamas.

Abby’s parents come to Massachusetts for Christmas every year, to flagrantly spoil their granddaughter.  But this year, they have, improbably, entered some grocery store sweepstakes and actually won, which means they will be spending the latter half of December aboard what Marcus describes as “an unfathomably enormous maritime shrine to capitalism, with liquor”, thus depriving them of their best opportunity to buy fourteen-year-old Clarke hundreds of dollars’ worth of things she doesn’t need.  Abby suggests Thanksgiving as a compromise, privately hoping they’ll decline it; her parents have very particular views on proper Thanksgiving food, and with her mother there to appraise it she will never be able to relax about the turkey, even though Marcus has never messed it up once. 

But they have an entirely different solution in mind.  They want to take Clarke to Disneyland for Halloween.

Clarke, of course, is over the moon, and says yes immediately, only afterwards pausing to realize that Marcus – now the fall festival’s most devoted attendee – will be crushed.  It’s quietly become a tradition over the past few years, and if his fans have noticed that he never takes Halloween concert gigs, no matter how good the money, they’ve certainly never put two and two together.  He would never dream of missing a Halloween with Clarke and Abby, and Clarke is afraid she’ll hurt his feelings if she tells him that this year, she’ll be the one who isn’t coming home.

Like a chicken, she makes Abby break the bad news to him.  Ordinarily her mother would protest this uncharacteristic abdication of responsibility, but the tradeoff is a promise to clean her room without being reminded every day from now until the trip, an offer Abby can’t refuse.  She approaches the topic gingerly, and Marcus is predictably disappointed, but brightens almost immediately, that endearing lift in his voice she knows means he’s just had a great idea.

“Come to New York with me,” he says, startling her into silence.

“What?”

“For Halloween.  Come to New York this year.”

Abby has always thought she would never go back.  But she loves the fall festival because Clarke and Marcus love it and she can’t imagine enjoying herself there without them; so, surprising both of them, she says yes.

“You used to love throwing Halloween parties with Jake,” he says, his voice gentle, cautious.  “Do you think maybe . . . we could have one?”

She pauses for a long moment before responding, the magnitude of the thing hovering between them apparent to both.  It sounds like such a small thing, but it isn’t.  It’s massive.  It’s a real question.  It’s a decisive relationship step.  Can she not only return to the city she left behind, the city where she was Jake’s friend and then lover and then wife, but return there for the purpose of being a couple in public with somebody else?

The last time she did this, it was in the tiny Brooklyn apartment she’d shared with Jake since they were college students.  He’d stood on the kitchen table to drape orange and black crepe paper along the ceiling and replace the bulbs in the light fixture with ones that glowed green, and they’d handed out gummy snakes and spiders to all the trick-or-treating kids in the building.  Clarke had been three and told her parents she wanted to dress up for Halloween as a cup, a bizarre notion from which they could not dissuade her (“Clarke, why do you want to dress up as a cup?” “I like cups.” “We could go to the store and look at other costumes –“ “NO A CUP A CUP A CUP”), so Jake had sighed and gone down to the basement and dug through the piles of recycling in the trash room to find a cardboard box, which he cut into a cylinder and covered with a red plastic tablecloth, pleated at the top and edged in white, like a red Solo cup.  He had written “DO NOT DRINK” on it in black Sharpie, which Clarke found hilarious.

The last time she’d experienced Halloween in the city, she’d been a wife and the mom of a toddler and a big-shot surgeon on the rise, shooting up through the ranks at Sloan-Kettering, destined for greatness.

The last time she and Marcus were alone together in New York, they were drinking coffee and flirting and very nearly holding hands while Jake was being raced in an ambulance to the hospital where she worked.

It’s not just about the party.

She thinks for a long time, and he waits patiently, quiet at the other end of the line, letting her have her space.  She turns it over and over in her mind before finally speaking.

“Can we compromise?” she finally asks.  “Yes to New York, and yes to a party, as long as it’s very small and you can promise I won’t get my face in a magazine or something.  I don’t . . .”  She pauses, unsure how to say what she wants to say without hurting him.

“You don’t want to go out in public with me in the city,” he finishes for her, and the sadness in his voice isn’t directed at her, but she feels it anyway.

“I can’t,” she says heavily.  “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Abby.”

“I’m just not quite ready to end up on a Worst-Dressed List,” she jokes weakly, but neither of them laugh.  It’s just a little too close to being true.  

Marcus is very careful about deflecting attention away from Abby and her town.  He’s friends with a lot of beautiful women and he usually takes one of them to the red carpet events Abby finds too terrifying to even consider.  He has a nice comfortable arrangement with a young actress friend of his named Lexa, a rising young romantic comedy star whose agents have been very blunt with her about not coming out as a lesbian until she’s “more reliably bankable,” so she and Marcus are often each other’s red carpet safety net.  Abby likes Lexa.  They had lunch once when Abby was in L.A. for work.  Every time an awards thing comes up, Marcus always asks Abby if she’d like to go, and she always suggests he take Lexa instead.  All it would take, she reminds him, is one sharp-eyed music journalist, and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.  Which is everybody’s nightmare.

So Marcus goes on appearing in public with scores of different lovely women and journalists keep breathlessly speculating about who “The Woman” might be and Abby continues living the calm, quiet life she built for herself, which Marcus gets to share when he comes to visit.

But it doesn’t go both ways.

Abby’s town will always protect her.  New York City never will.

“I’ll come,” she tells him, “if we can be normal people for the weekend.  If you can be Marcus, and not Marcus Kane.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” he tells her, but then she hears that little lift in his voice again.

“What?” she demands.  “What are you plotting?”

“A small private party,” he insists, and she can hear him grinning through the phone.  “Just like you asked.  I promise.”

Jake never liked black-and-white movies.

This was a fight they had many times.  “Casablanca is a classic!” Abby would insist, causing Jake to roll his eyes.

“No, Rocky is a classic,” was his inevitable rebuttal.  “Casablanca is just old.”

“It’s considered one of the greatest films of all time.”

Jake would dismiss this with a handwave.  “It doesn’t even have any explosions in it.”

“It’s a war movie, of course it has explosions,” Abby would retort, though she had not seen it in so many years she could not always reliably remember whether or not this was true.  And so on and so forth, ad infinitum, until Jake would smack her on the ass and make her laugh and they’d forget what they were arguing about because kissing was a much better use of the couch than watching a movie anyway.

But Marcus loves old movies as much as she does.  Just one of the many small constant reminders that this relationship is profoundly different from her last one.  Not better or worse, not more or less, but endlessly, constantly, impossibly different, in ways she is still discovering.

They’d watched The Thin Man together on the couch one night, three or four days after he’d first arrived on her doorstep, the whole world still reeling.  He’d been clicking through the cable channels, trying to find something that wasn’t another replay of the same sickening footage of the plane smashing into the towers, and had landed on a marathon of Myrna Loy films on one of the classic movie networks, The Thin Man just starting.  “I love this movie,” he’d said absently, almost to himself more than to her, and Abby turned from where she sat beside him to rest her forehead against the soft blue cotton of his sweater, and began to cry.  He cupped her cheek in his hand and tilted her face up to regard her with confusion and a degree of worry that teetered on the edge of panic.  But through the tears she was smiling.

“You sounded like you,” she said softly.  “Just now.  When you said that.  It was the first time since you’ve gotten here that you sounded like yourself again.”

He didn’t say anything.  He knew exactly what she meant.

So she rested her head on his shoulder, curled up into the cradle of his arm, and they watched Nick and Nora Charles quip and banter and toss back oceans of champagne and solve murders in glamorous 1920’s New York, along with their faithful dog Asta, and for an hour and a half they forgot about everything that wasn’t the movie and each other, and Abby fell asleep in bed that night with her head pillowed on his bare chest, listening to his heartbeat and thinking to herself that maybe such a thing as happiness was really possible.

They’ve watched it dozens of times in the intervening years, and it has lost none of its charm, which makes it perhaps inevitable as Marcus’ suggestion for their Halloween costume.

“Why are we dressing up? I thought we were just having a small, casual party,” she asks suspiciously, when he calls to make the suggestion, and she hears him hesitate on the other end of the line for just a moment before carefully answering, “ . . . You never said ‘casual.’”

“I definitely did.”

“Small. I agreed to small.”

“Marcus – “

“Clarke will never forgive me if I don’t make you wear a costume this year.”

“Marcus –”

“Is that Marcus?” asks Clarke, strolling in from the other room as if on cue (which she might be; it’s entirely possible that he texted her).  “He showed me your costumes and they’re so cool.”

So that, of course, is the end of that. Nick and Nora it is.  (He’s even managed to locate a stuffed wire fox terrier.)

Marcus has opted for the costumes from the Christmas party scene, with Nora in a floaty tiered confection of black-and-white striped chiffon, hair curled into sleek Marcelle waves, and Nick in a dapper pinstriped suit and white pocket square, hair slicked back, beard shaved off once again into a perfect tiny handlebar mustache. (“You could just recycle your Gomez costume,” she’d pointed out when he sent the photos, which he rebutted with indignation.  “Abby, this is a completely different suit.”)

He’s also decided the party should be held in one of the private banquet rooms at the old Sutton Club Hotel, where Dashiell Hammett wrote The Thin Man, a decision he plays off to Abby as merely aggressive commitment to the theme, but she knows better.  It’s to protect her, and their guests, from being seen coming in or out of his apartment, which is never free from the watchful eyes of paparazzi. 

If they’d had the party at Marcus’ apartment, Abby would never be able to let down her guard, too worried about being spotted.

But anyone can enter a hotel and get into an elevator and go up to the sixth floor and give their name to the pair of unsmiling security guards (incognito in hotel uniforms) outside Event Room C, and close the door behind them, without People Magazine being any the wiser.

They spend the nights before and after the party in the hotel.  It feels like a sinful indulgence to share a king-sized bed with Marcus after so many nights curled up together in the center of the full-sized mattress she’d bought for a house she thought she would always live in alone,  and which she has always felt superstitious about trading in for a roomier one now that an extremely tall man who sometimes hogs the covers is sharing her bed on a semi-regular basis.  It feels too much like tempting fate.  So they’ve simply gotten used to it, sleeping tangled up together in the center of the only-just-big-enough mattress.  The gleaming white linens and pillow-top  at the Sutton Place are an unimaginable luxury.  Though they still sleep tangled up together in the center anyway.  Old habits.

Marcus will not let Abby help with, or even see, the decorations until it’s time for the party.  He has not even shown her the guest list.  It’s impossible to shake the worry that he has perhaps adhered too strictly to the letter of the law (“small”) while entirely discarding the spirit of it (will they be drinking thousand-dollar champagne? Is she going to have to make small talk with Sting again?).  She dresses alone in their room (he put his suit on hours ago and is downstairs with the caterers), and realizes she feels oddly vulnerable without Clarke.  It’s only Halloween, it’s not Thanksgiving or Christmas, she knows that, but it’s the first holiday they’ve ever spent apart.  She would feel safer walking into a room full of strangers in a 1920’s movie costume if her daughter was there to zip up her dress and pin up the back of her hair and hold her hand.

But Clarke’s not here, she’s at Mickey’s Halloween Ball with her grandparents, wearing a pair of orange neon light-up ears and beaming with joy and texting her mother picture after picture of the parade and the rides and the alarming number of shopping bags slowly accruing in her Cinderella-themed hotel room, which means Abby has to make an entrance on her own into a room full of famous strangers, which is basically her nightmare.

Her heart pounds in her chest as she puts the finishing touches on her bright red lipstick, closes the hotel room door behind her, takes the elevator down two floors, says hello to Marcus’ security guards, who wave her past, and then opens the white and gold door.

“Surprise!” says Marcus, and Abby’s heart stops when she realizes she knows everyone in the room.

Marcus didn’t throw a fancy Halloween party for all his famous friends to meet his girlfriend and shove her uncomfortably into a spotlight she doesn’t want. 

He threw a fancy Halloween party as a gift for her, and filled it with all the friends she left behind when she moved out of the city.

He kept his promise; by Marcus standards, 30 people counts as “small”, so she’s willing to allow it.  Because every single one of them is a person that she loves and misses and thought she’d never see again.  The elderly Italian couple who lived next door to her and Jake for six years, who babysat Clarke when the daycare was closed and brought pans of meatballs in Sunday gravy over every week so the broke young parents could eat at least one home-cooked meal.  The two nurses who worked under her the whole time she was at Sloan-Kettering, who’d become her right and left hand, and who had been devastated when she left.  The priest who’d married them and said Jake’s funeral.  The parents of Clarke’s best friends from day care.  And more than a dozen others, friends of hers, friends of Jake’s, people she has missed since the day she left but couldn’t quite bear to face again for fear of reopening old wounds.  People she’d thought, so often, about calling, or visiting, or emailing, but hadn’t, because what if it turned out she wasn’t ready to spend time with anyone who had their own memories of Jake?

But they’re here, they’re all here, and they’re mingling with friends of Marcus’ who she actually likes, the ones who don’t terrify her.  No Cynthia Nixon, no Thelonious J.  But she recognizes his drummer and bass player and road crew, she recognizes his old roommates from the shitty Queens apartment he was living in when she first met him, she recognizes the bartender from the East Village dive where he used to play every Thursday and who always snuck him a free beer when Marcus was too broke to pay for it himself.

These are their real people.  These are their real friends.  This is Marcus Kane’s real New York.

She’s so overwhelmed by the sea of smiling faces in front of her that she doesn’t notice until a few minutes have passed and she’s been hugged by everyone in the room how perfect everything else is.  The decorations, simple and elegant in black and white and gold.  The food, indulgent but not so expensive that it makes Abby uncomfortable, and no pretentious hotel waiters; just trays heaped with crab cakes and spinach tartlets and chocolate truffles all over the room, for everyone to graze to their heart’s content. 

No bartender, either; Marcus has taken on this job himself.

“’The important thing is the rhythm,’” she hears him quoting Nick Charles cheerfully to her old neighbors as she approaches the bar.  “’Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.’”

The neighbors are unimpressed enough with Marcus Kane’s fame and fortune to roll their eyes at this ever so faintly as they take their dry martini, and Abby feels the tension in her spine unknit for the first time since Marcus said the words “Come to New York with me” a month ago.

Her friends are talking to Marcus Kane as though he is a normal person.  As though he is simply the man Abby loves.  A man wearing the costume of a film noir detective, a man who cut decorations out of gold paper himself and taught himself how to shake a Manhattan to fox-trot time and who has spent so many years listening so carefully to everything Abby has ever said to him that he knew every single person she would want to see in that room.  Marcus is already a star by now, Marcus has opened for U2 all over Europe and “The Girl Inside the Mountain” is already piling up an awful lot of zeroes in that bank account that will pay Clarke’s way to college in a few short years.  But nobody mentions this.  They let him leave all of that on the other side of the door for tonight.

And none of them have forgotten Jake.

On the contrary, he’s everywhere, everyone mentions him, everyone tells stories about him, everyone asks if Clarke still has his eyes.  Does Abby remember the year she tried to make Jake hand out raisins instead of candy because it was healthier, so he retaliated by purchasing an industrial-sized bag of king-sized Snickers bars.  Or the time they’d made a green Jello mold full of gummy eyeballs and it had worked flawlessly as a Halloween decoration but looked too weird to eat, sitting untouched in the center of the snack table until everyone went home and Jake threw it away, but left one gummy eyeball in the bottom of Abby’s coffee mug to make her scream the next morning.

It has never occurred to Abby how deeply it would heal her heart to talk about Jake, to hear other people’s stories about him, to know how much he was missed by people who weren’t her lover or her child.

She needed this, and she didn’t even know it.

But Marcus did.

She’s wondered, from time to time, whether her old friends, the people who shared her life when she shared it with Jake, would look on her relationship with Marcus as a betrayal.  Perhaps it’s this, in part, that’s kept her from coming back to the city. 

But she needn’t have worried.

All of them see it.

When they look over at Marcus in the corner, brushing a loose curl out of Abby’s eyes, they smile, every one of them.

“Good for her,” they’ll all say to their spouses in the taxis on the way home.  “I’m glad she’s happy.”