Uptown Girl

Uptown Girl

Olivia Goldsmith

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Permissions

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

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42

43

44

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47

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Acclaim for Olivia Goldsmith

Also by Olivia Goldsmith

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dedication

To Nina and to Ethel Esther Brandsfronbrener Schutz A lover of books, mangos, oranges and me

Permissions

‘The Hokey Pokey’ ©1950 Sony/ATV Songs LLC.

Used by permission. All rights administered by

Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

1

Katherine Sean Jameson sat behind her desk and looked at her client. Although she was a published psychologist with a doctorate and had even completed some post-doc work, her office was simply furnished. It didn’t feature Freud’s classic psychiatric couch. That was because Kate Jameson wasn’t a Freudian, and certainly didn’t need an office full of relics and pottery shards to look at. To look at her what you’d see was rather a mildly pretty twenty-four-year-old (though she was actually thirty-one) with long curls of wild red hair. Now, as she looked at Brian Conroy, she unconsciously twisted those curls into an impromptu bun at the nape of her neck and pushed a pencil through it to hold it in place, a practiced motion.

It was warm. Her office was not air-conditioned and the breeze from the open window felt good on the back of her neck. Brian, looking intently at her, was sweating, but it could just as easily have been from nerves as from the unseasonable April heat.

Kate sat silently. Silence was an important part of her work, though not something that came naturally. But she had learned that at times stillness and space were all that were needed.

Not today apparently. Brian pulled his eyes guiltily away from hers and looked around the office. Instead of the usual museum reproductions, all of the wall space not covered by bookshelves displayed pictures done by children – some of them very disturbing. Kate watched, waiting to see if Brian’s attention focused on one. Like Rorschach’s ink blot test, artistic expression often helped to open doors. She withheld a sigh. She was trying to wait Brian out but was conscious of their time ticking away and for his sake she needed immediate results. Brian was obviously in crisis. His teacher said he was showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder or even schizophrenia and was disrupting the class. And disruption simply wasn’t allowed at Andrew Country Day School. A private school in a smart neighborhood in Manhattan, it accepted only the best and the brightest – of students and staff. Every amenity was provided, from an indoor swimming pool to a state-of-the-art computer center, to language lessons that included Japanese and French for six-year-olds. That’s why there was a school psychologist. Kate had only gotten the plum job recently, and Brian, like other kids who showed the slightest ‘difficult’ behavior, seemed to be immediately remanded to her office. Nothing was to disrupt the smooth daily ingestion of information by the children of the elite.

‘Do you know why you’ve come here, Brian?’ she asked, her voice gentle. Brian shook his head. Kate rose from her desk, moved around it and sat down in one of the small chairs beside her eight-year-old ‘client’. ‘Can you guess?’ He shook his head. ‘Well, do you think it’s for eating gummy elephants in school?’

He looked at her for a moment then shook his head again. ‘There’s no such thing as gummy elephants.’

‘Gummy rhinos?’ Kate asked. Brian shook his head again. ‘Eating peanut butter and raccoon sandwiches at your desk?’

‘It wasn’t for eating anything,’ he said. Then he lowered his voice to barely a whisper. ‘It was for talking. Talking in class.’

Kate nodded, the pencil fell out of her bun and her hair cascaded down over her face while the pencil clattered to the floor. Brian smiled and actually let a giggle escape before he covered his mouth. Good, Kate thought. She leaned closer to her little patient. ‘You’re not just here for talking in class, Brian. If you were just talking in class, then you’d be sent to the principal’s office, right?’

Brian’s adorable face gazed up at Kate with terrified eyes. ‘Are you worse than the principal?’ he whispered.

Kate felt such empathy for the boy at that moment that she was tempted to take his hand in hers, but he was so very anxious that he might shy away. This kind of work was so delicate – like dealing with Venetian spun glass where the slightest jolt could shatter it – and she often felt so clumsy.

‘Nobody is worse than the principal,’ Kate said. Then she smiled and winked at Brian. None of the kids at Andrew Country Day liked Mr McKay and – as so often – their instincts were good. ‘Do I look as bad as Mr McKay?’ Kate asked, feigning shock.

Brian shook his head vigorously.

‘Well. Thank goodness. Anyway I do something different. You aren’t here to be punished because you didn’t do anything wrong. But everybody hears you talking – even though you’re not talking to anybody.’ She watched as Brian’s eyes filled with tears.

‘I’ll be quieter,’ he promised. Kate wanted to scoop him up onto her lap and let him cry as long as he needed to. After all, his mother had just died of cancer and he was still so very young. Kate’s own mother had passed away when she was eleven, and that had been almost unbearable.

She dared to take one of the boy’s hands in hers and said, ‘I don’t want you to be quiet, Brian. You do what you need to. But I’d like to know what you’re saying.’

Brian shook his head again. His eyes changed from tearful to frightened. ‘I can’t tell,’ he whispered. Then he averted his face. He mumbled something else and Kate only managed to hear one word but it was enough.

Go slow, she told herself. Go very, very slowly and casually. ‘You’re doing magic?’ she asked. Brian, face still turned away, nodded his head, but didn’t speak. Kate was already afraid she had gone too far. She held her breath. Then, after a long moment, she lowered her own voice to a whisper and asked, ‘Why can’t you tell?’

‘Because …’ Brian started, then it burst out of him ‘… because it’s magic and you can’t tell magic or your wish won’t come true. Like birthday candles. Everybody knows that!’ He got up and walked to the corner of the room.

Kate actually felt relieved. The boy wasn’t schizophrenic. He was caught in a typical childhood trap: total powerlessness combined with hopeless longing and guilt. A toxic cocktail. Kate gave Brian a moment. She didn’t want him to feel trapped. Yet he shouldn’t be alone with this pain. She approached him slowly, the way you might move toward a strange puppy. She put her hand on the little boy’s shoulder. ‘Your wish is about your mother, isn’t it?’ she asked, her voice as neutral as she could manage to keep it. Brian didn’t need any of her emotions – he needed space for his own. ‘Isn’t that right?’

Brian looked up at her and nodded. His face registered a cautious relief. The dreadful burdens of childhood secrets always touched Kate. Though she was a long-lapsed Catholic, she still remembered the power and release of the confessional. She had to serve this child well. ‘What are you wishing for?’ she asked, her voice as gentle as she could make it.

Brian began to cry. His face, usually so pale, flushed deep rose. Speaking through his tears, he said, ‘I thought if I just said “Mommy, come back” a million times that she would be back.’ He sobbed and put his face against Kate’s skirt. ‘But it isn’t working. I think I’ve said it two million times.’

Kate’s own eyes filled with tears. She took a deep breath. She could feel the heat of Brian’s face through the thin fabric of her skirt. The hell with professional detachment. She scooped Brian into her arms and over to one of the chairs. He was as small and light as a crushed sparrow. The boy nestled against her. After a time he stopped crying, but his silent neediness was even sadder. They sat for a few moments, but Kate knew their session was nearly over and she had to speak. ‘Oh, Brian, I am so sorry,’ she told him. ‘But magic doesn’t work. I wish it did. The doctors did everything they could to help your mommy. They couldn’t fix her and magic can’t fix that. It’s not your fault that the doctors couldn’t save her.’ She paused. ‘And it’s not your fault your mommy can’t come back.’ Kate sighed. Breaking children’s hearts, even to help them, had not been in her job description. ‘But she can’t and your magic can’t work.’

Brian suddenly pushed against her, wriggling his way out of her embrace. He stood up and looked angrily at her. ‘Why not?’ he demanded. ‘Why can’t my magic work?’ He glared at Kate for another moment then pushed her hard and barreled out of the room, nearly knocking over the dollhouse. The office door crashed and rebounded open. From down the hall, she heard a voice – Elliot Winston’s – try to stop Brian. ‘Shut up, you stinky dick!’ Brian shouted. Kate winced and listened to the little boy’s footsteps recede.

A moment later, Elliot stuck his head around Kate’s door. ‘Another satisfied customer?’ he asked, his eyebrows raised nearly to his receding hairline. ‘Perhaps you should have stuck with French.’

Kate had majored in French as an undergraduate. For a while she had even considered continuing her language studies in graduate school. She had never regretted not doing so, because her work with the children was so satisfying, but, occasionally, particularly at moments like this one, Elliot – one of the math teachers, and her best friend – teased her about her choice.

‘As I recall, the German for “stinky dick” would be reichende Steine. What would you say in French?’

‘I would say you are very annoying,’ Kate told him. ‘That’s good enough. And that Brian and I are making some progress. He expressed some of his true feelings today.’

‘Brian also expressed his feelings about me and my genital odor. Congratulations on your progress.’ Elliot stepped into the room and sat beside the dollhouse in an overstuffed chair – the only piece of adult-size furniture in Kate’s office aside from her own desk and chair. Elliot was dark-haired, average in height, slightly over-average in weight and possessed a much, much higher than average IQ. As usual he was wearing wrinkled chinos, a baggy T-shirt and a clashing open-necked shirt on top. Putting his feet up on the toy box, he opened his lunch sack.

Kate sighed. She and Elliot usually had lunch together. But, today, Elliot had had the dreaded cafeteria duty and was just now, at nearly two thirty, getting a chance to eat. She delighted in his company but she was melancholy from her session with Brian. Elliot, fresh from the horror of the lunchroom, was blithely unaware of her mood as he pulled out several items and tore into a sandwich that smelled suspiciously like corned beef.

‘Brian is in Sharon’s class, isn’t he?’ Elliot asked too casually.

Kate nodded. ‘Poor kid. His mother dies and his teacher is the Wicked Witch of the Upper West Side.’ Kate had to smile. Neither she nor Elliot had much use for Sharon Jones, a truly lazy teacher and a deeply annoying woman.

‘So aside from a recently deceased mom, what’s bugging Brian?’ Elliot asked.

Kate felt too brittle for their usual badinage. ‘You have mustard on your chin,’ she told him, but as Elliot reached up to wipe it, the glob fell onto his shirt.

‘Oops,’ he said and dabbed ineffectually at his shirtfront with one of the hard paper towels from the school’s bathrooms. The yellow splotch looked particularly hideous on the green of his shirt. Watching Elliot eat, Kate often thought, was a spectator sport.

‘He believes that magic can bring his mother back,’ she sighed wistfully.

‘See? See what I mean? They’re all obsessed with witches and wizards. Damn that Harry Potter!’ Elliot said, then took another huge bite of the sandwich. ‘So what’s your prescription?’

‘I want him to give up the magic and get in touch with his anger and pain,’ Kate answered.

‘Oi vey!’ Elliot said with the best Yiddish accent a gay man from Indiana could ever manage. ‘When will you give up on this quest to get every little boy at Andrew Country Day in touch with his true feelings? And why discourage magic in his case? What else does the kid have?’

‘Oh, come on, Elliot! Because magic won’t work and he mustn’t think it’s his fault when it fails.’ She shook her head. ‘You of all people. A trained statistician. A man who could trade this job in, triple your salary and become chief actuary at any pension fund. You’re telling me to encourage magic?’

Elliot shrugged. ‘Haven’t you ever had magical things happen?’

Kate refused the bait. Elliot, raised in the Midwest and stoic to the bone, had told her ‘the unexamined life is the only one livable’. He often challenged her about the efficacy of psychology. Now, just to annoy her, he was going to take a perverse stand on magic. ‘If you think you’re going to start an argument today, Elliot,’ she warned him, ‘you’re out of your mind.’ Then, to annoy him – as well as for his own good – she added, ‘I didn’t think corned beef was good for your cholesterol.’

‘Oh, what’s a few hundred points one way or the other?’ he asked cheerfully, swallowing another mouthful.

‘You’ve got a death wish,’ Kate said.

‘Ooooh. Harsh words from a shrink.’ Elliot winced mockingly as he opened a Snapple.

‘Look, I’m leaving,’ she told him, gathering some notes from her desk and putting them into her file cabinet. If she left now she’d be able to do a bit of shopping before meeting her friend Bina. She took a lipstick and mirror out of her purse, dabbed the color over her mouth and smiled wide to make sure she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth. ‘I’ll see you for dinner.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘None of your bee’s wax.’

‘A secret? Come on. Tell! What if I threw a tantrum like Brian did?’ Elliot reached into the toy box at his feet. Then he hurled a stuffed bear in Kate’s direction. ‘Would you tell me then?’ The plush missile hit her squarely in the face. Elliot curled up in the chair, held his hands in front of his own face and started to beg rapidly. ‘It was an accident. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll show you sorry,’ Kate warned as she threw the bear back at Elliot, but missed.

‘You throw like a girl,’ Elliot taunted. Then he picked up another animal and threw it at Kate. ‘Duck!’ he called as he reached for yet another toy to throw. It was indeed a duck, yellow and fluffy.

‘Duck this, you math nerd,’ Kate almost shouted as she grabbed a fuzzy rabbit and pummeled Elliot’s head. It felt good to blow off some steam.

‘Abuse! Abuse!’ Elliot screamed in delight as he rolled off the chair to protect himself. ‘Teacher abuse! Teacher abuse!’

‘Shut up, you idiot!’ Kate told him and rushed to close the office door. She turned from it just in time to get a stuffed elephant right in the face. Stunned for only a moment, Kate grabbed the pachyderm and lunged at Elliot. ‘I’ll show you abuse, you sniveling cholesterol warehouse,’ she threatened as she fell on top of Elliot and beat him repeatedly with the toy.

Elliot fought back with both an inflatable flamingo and a stuffed dog. He might be gay, but he was no wussy. When he and Kate were both exhausted (and – sadly – the flamingo’s leg was punctured), they sat panting and laughing together in the big chair, Kate on top. The door opened.

‘Excuse me?’ Mr McKay asked, but despite his words he wasn’t the type to excuse anything. ‘I thought I heard a ruckus in here.’

Mr McKay, the principal of Andrew Country Day lower school, was a hypocrite, a social climber, a control freak and a very bad dresser. He also had a knack of using words no one else had used for several decades.

‘A ruckus?’ Elliot asked.

‘We were just testing out a new therapy,’ Kate extemporized. ‘Did it disturb you?’ she asked innocently.

‘Well, it was certainly loud,’ George McKay complained.

‘From the little I know of it, AAT – Airborne Animal Therapy – can frequently be noisy,’ Elliot said, po-faced, ‘although it’s having significant measurable success in schools for the gifted where it’s being pioneered. Of course,’ he added, ‘it might not be right for this setting.’ He nodded at Kate. ‘I’m not the expert,’ he said as if he were deferring to Kate’s professional judgment. She smothered a laugh with a cough.

‘We’ll put this off until after three o’clock, Mr McKay,’ she promised.

‘All right then,’ he said primly. He left as suddenly as he had arrived, shutting the door with a firm but controlled click. Kate and Elliot looked at one another, waited for a count of ten, then burst into giggles that they had to stifle.

‘AAT?’ Kate gurgled.

‘Hey, straight men love acronyms. Think of the army. He’ll be on the internet in less than ten minutes searching for Airborne Animal Therapy,’ Elliot predicted. He stood up and began collecting the stuffed animals. Kate got up to help him. The irony of the situation was that Elliot had helped Kate get hired and since then George McKay had told several teachers that he suspected them of having an affair. Ridiculous as that idea was, the sight of the two of them in the chair was not one to instill confidence in George McKay, who had frequently announced at teachers’ meetings that he ‘discouraged fraternizing among professional educational co-workers’.

When Kate and her ‘professional educational co-worker’ finished laughing she smoothed her skirt and put her hair back up, this time with a barrette she found in her drawer. Elliot was standing still, looking down at the chair. He heaved a dramatic sigh.

‘Oh shit!’ he told her. ‘You crushed my banana.’ He held up the mangled fruit from his lunch bag which had slipped under them during the battle.

Kate turned, struck the pose of a femme fatale and rasped, ‘How times have changed. You used to like it when I did that.’

Elliot laughed. ‘I’ll leave all banana handling to you and Michael.’

Kate’s new boyfriend, Dr Michael Atwood, was going with her to dinner at Elliot’s place. Kate felt a little flurry in her stomach at the thought. She hoped they’d like each other.

‘If I don’t leave now, I’ll be late tonight,’ Kate told him.

‘Okay, okay.’

She picked up her purse to prepare for leaving.

‘So you like your work so far,’ Elliot said. Kate nodded. She loved it. ‘But even though I helped you get the job, you’re still not going to let me know where you’re going.’

Kate didn’t bother to answer. Elliot was what people in Brooklyn called ‘a noodge’.

2

In all the years Kate had known Elliot – over ten now – he’d always managed to cheer her up when she was sad and support her in her successes. Now, as they walked down the corridor to his classroom, she glanced at him affectionately. The stretched-out orange T-shirt, the ugly green over-shirt decorated with mustard, the slight love handles and the wrinkled chinos didn’t make him look like much but he had a keen mind and was a loving and generous friend. She felt a swell of gratitude toward him. As always, he had cheered her up and helped her make the break from school. Kate was proud of the work she did with the kids. She had learned a lot from them, too. For one thing, the school catered to the children of the rich and successful but Kate saw that money, privilege, and education brought as much misery as had her own deprived childhood. She had lost her resentment of those with money and she was grateful for that. She had not picked her calling for the money it earned; in fact, she regarded her work as a kind of vocation. It was one thing she never made light of, and she often found it hard to leave it behind at the end of the day. But tonight she had to, to help Bina prepare for her big night, and then, later, to introduce Michael to Elliot and his partner Brice at dinner.

She waited just inside Elliot’s classroom as he chucked the offending lunch sack in a bin and started messing about in his untidy desk.

‘You know, it’s very hard not to keep thinking about Brian. He’s so adorable, and has had a really difficult time. And I think the disappointment when his magic doesn’t work, which of course it won’t, could cause real problems later.’ Kate sighed. ‘Boys are just so much more fragile than girls.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Elliot sighed deeply too. ‘I’m still getting over the time Phyllis Bellusico told me I smelled.’

‘Did you?’ Kate asked, ready to be either his straight man or his audience. She was used to Elliot’s shticks. Since college they had been amusing one another with dark humor from their childhoods.

‘Well, yes,’ Elliot admitted reluctantly, ‘but I smelled good. I should have. I’d dumped an entire bottle of my mother’s White Shoulders into my underpants.’

‘Pee-yuw.’ Kate imitated any one of her lower school ‘clients’. ‘Maybe Brian has a point. I’d have to agree with Phyllis,’ she said. ‘And this happened …?’

‘… In third grade, but with a little more therapy and Brice’s love and support I expect to get over it in the next decade.’

Kate loved it when Elliot got going. She had to laugh.

Elliot had been tormented by kids in school. After a moment he said, ‘I have to go to Dean & Deluca to get rice for our dinner tonight. Brice is making his world-famous risotto. You can tell Michael it’s your recipe. The way to a man’s heart …’

Kate looked up with a suspicious glance. ‘Yeah, and please be on your best behavior. Elliot,’ she began, ‘can’t you just …’

‘No,’ Elliot retorted, ‘I can’t just anything.’ He walked over to her and gave her a quick hug. ‘I don’t want to discourage or criticize you. I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing.’

‘Oh, God, Elliot! Who knows what they’re doing when they try to find a soul mate?’

‘Well, you have a point there. But I don’t want you to be hurt again, Kate.’ He paused. Kate knew where he was going and she didn’t want him to. Her last entanglement had ended so badly that she didn’t know how she would have gotten through it without Elliot. She had invested a lot of time and emotion in Steven Kaplan, all of it worse than wasted. It had left her more suspicious and distrusting of men than she liked to admit. One of the good things about Michael was that she could trust him completely. He might not have Steven’s banter and easy charm but he had substance and achievement and sincerity. At least she thought so.