Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the WB, Amy Sherman-Palladino or her and her husbands creation Gilmore Girls.
Spoiler Warning(s): Last Week Fights, This Week Tights. Recipes and Raincoats.
Rated: Rated R for suggestive and harsh language.
Acknowledgments: Jewls my Beta who does not get enough praise, thanks for being so patient with my absent mindedness and Iâ¤d like to thank the Mac Store for finally fixing my baby if it cracks up again I'm blaming Apple entirely!
I Think of Ice Cubes
Chapter four: Reverie of Indecent Compliments
She's got such a baby face it makes me want to go back on things I've written: The look of her is familiar, a nervous smile with small white teeth and a tongue and a voice that hold shades of a bitter secret. Her eyes used to always be looking up, now she won't stop looking down at her shoes, her shirt, her hands balled up into fists. She keeps her mouth a strong line, her once brilliant blue eyes turned a hard stoney color like wet rocks.
That piano player's pretty good. she says cocking her head toward the windows.
I breathe out. Piano Man, sometimes he does that song from Rear Window.
The one that stopped Miss. Lonelyheart from killing herself?
That's sweet yet kinda spooky, do you have a Miss.Torso?
No, we have a Mr. Torso.
Is it me or did this conversation just get really light and breezy?
Not just you.
My line.
We're just a couple of losers.
My line too.
Well say something relevant and you can keep your lines.
At least he's not blasting Nine Inch Nails
Thank you there is a God?
When did you get so cynical? I pick up her used napkin scrunching it up into a tight ball.
I don't know, never really thought about it. She bites down on her lower lip bringing it inside her mouth the skin around her lips turning pale.
Do you want to get outta here? I ask her.
With you or without you? She brushes her hair behind her ears her watch slipping farther up her arm.
With me. I answer getting up from the floor still holding her napkin. I look down at the top of her head seeing the part of her hair and the stark white of her scalp. She looks up at me showing me her nostrils her cheeks slightly red, the skin under her eyes pinking and puffy.
she says looking up at me, a giselle being gutted by a hungry lion, the whites of her eyes bloodshot from tears.
Please don't look at me like that. I throw out.
Like what? she brushes her hair behind her ears again, it's a nervous habit I'm just now recognizing.
Like a lamb going to the slaughter.
I don't mean to. She gets to her knees her face right at stomach level making me have a vision of something very very inappropriate. Her shirt is orange with a wide collar the front dips down and I am getting a decent view of cleavage.
I'm not afraid of you if that's what you're hinting at. I'm more frightened of my mother... whom doesn't even know I'm here right now.
Let's go. I change the subject; hearing about her mother when I just looked down her shirt and envisioned her going down on me, makes me want to gag on my own saliva.
I start for my shoes feeling out my socks having to sit on my bed to stuff my feet into both socks and shoes. I watch her out of the corner of my eye smoothing her shirt over her belly, slipping her shoes back on, she reaches inside a pocket on her simple brown skirt. I catch a glimpse of her cell phone and a navy blue plastic card. She catches me eyeing her, pulling the card out all the way and showing it to me.
Credit card. she says stuffing it back in her pocket. Didn't have time to go to the ATM. Money talk or a simplified more grass roots version.
Those things'll kill you. I say passing her and opening the front door.
They say the same thing about cigarettes. she pats the obvious pack stuck inside my front pocket while walking through the open door.
Ah, but I can quit anytime, how many people with credit card debt can say that much.
Say that to big tobacco and all their nicotine studies and hooks for getting people addicted faster. Hook 'em young hook 'em forever.
Yes please.
I know a place.
/SC/EN/EC/HA/NG/E
I repeat back to her over my glass of iced-tea, Pink Floyd playing softly over the sound system, two women wailing.
I hate to go back to casual small-talk but I'd actually like to know what you have been doing?
I say sipping my tea.
She takes a gulp of her iced coffee. Outside night foot traffic is thinning out, people are mostly at home having dinner. Now it's just joggers, workaholics coming home late and people walking their golden retrievers. If I-- we sit here long enough I might be able to point out Ethan Hawke walking his chow chow. She brings her glass mug back down to the table her upper lip covered by a thin whipped cream mustache. I watch her chase it with her tongue wiping the rest of it up with a napkin from the metal dispenser on the table.
You want to know what I've been doing? She asks.
School per-usual.
It's August schools not in session yet.
So what have you really been doing? I prompt, my fingers twitching for a cigarette, I shift my seat, scratch a sideburn with my middle finger, watch her deliberate.
Paris, Venice, Barcelona, Bartha as they call it there, Bristol, London, Milan-- Milano I mean, Edinburgh, Bath, Rome, Florence, Leon, Geneva, Vienna, Munich, Salzburgh.
You've been traveling?
It was Grandma's idea, she wanted a companion and me to finally do it right we went everywhere we could that had a hotel up to her standards. The proper menu, thread count, hypoallergenic rose scented soap, High Tea that kind of thing.
Sounds like a Dante's Better Homes and Gardens level of hell.
You have no idea what hell is till you share a bathroom with Emily Gilmore. She says with all seriousness.
You have no idea what hell is till you share a bathroom with my mom's husband.
That's right she got remarried, and you walked her down the aisle.
I did.
How was that?
Short walk, ceremony was-- was different. she let's out a snort.
I know I heard from my mom and other details too. her face lets down after that.
The groom's fascination with tights or details of the merits of being a prison laundryman. She's got this small frown on her face like she's thinking on something she doesn't want to be thinking about.
Tights details but mostly details about Luke.
Oh, yeah.
Do you not like the idea of them? I ask.
I do and I don't, we haven't really discussed it not that it's any of my business really.
I always thought you two told each other everything? She looks up meeting my eyes conveying all her meaning with the look.
Oh yeah, the screaming. she nods.
They're happy, if you want to know. Luke talks, well talks in his own way. She smiles, cocks her head to the side, plays with the straw in her drink pushing ice cubes around.
Thought as much, caught them together a few times. I make the mistake of sipping my tea when she says this sputtering the liquid onto the table top.
I say, wiping up the mess off the table. She points to her upper lip and chin indicating that I have some on my face. I say wiping my face.
That took me by surprise.
I haven't caught them caught them, make the distinction I've only seen PG to PG-13 activity happening.
Not that it wasn't traumatic in it's own parental-guidance-suggested-for children-13-and-younger kind of way. You never get over seeing someone with their tongue down your mothers throat, and hands in... can we talk about something else. She spits out kind of flustered a comedic smirk on her face saying how fearful she really is about her mother and Luke being involved.
Yeah sure, um how was London?
London was hot and muggy, bad food, good shopping, I saw Minnie Driver or at least I think I saw Minnie Driver in Notting Hill. Um went to Abbey Road by my self of course while Grandma napped, I did that a lot; went to places I wanted to see while she slept. Got hit on by some exceptionally slimy looking secondary school boys, they followed me into the Virgin Mega Store but I lost them in the classical section I knew that would scare them off, you know froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, but the middle excellent.
Milan was Milano. Great food, fantastic window shopping. Grandma insisted we go to the jewelry district that's on this great bridge where I fawned over jewelry fit for royalty, she bought me this though.
She holds up her right hand displaying an elegant simple band around her pinky, it looks like a tiny silver lace braid.
White gold, she had it sized too. And these," she pushes her hair behind her ears pointing her index fingers at her lobes. Blue Topaz, probably the most expensive jewelry I'll ever own period, but she insisted, and I'm not gonna say no to semi precious stones, no way.
Nice, I think? Not really a jewelry aficionado.
Me neither. She laughs laying her hands back on the table checking out her ring. I love my ring though. she wiggles her pinky.
I ask.
Paris, museums, the Champs Elysees, Notre Dame de Paris, Montmarte, le Eiffel Tower, The Left Bank, Shakespeare and Company, found a first edition of Stories About White People signed by Langston Hughes, didn't buy it, I groan. But I spent about two and a half hours reading the whole book in the back of the store. Her saving grace.
Saved yourself there, I might've had to kick you if you just stuck it back on the shelf.
Nah I found something better.
A Copy of Hamlet signed by Laurence Olivier.
Get out.
/SC/EN/EC/HA/NG/E
We walk down the street and I have this half urge half impulse to hold her hand but I clamp it down tight stuffing my hands inside my pockets. She still walks like she's unaware of her surroundings a pixie-walk if she sprouted butterfly wings I wouldn't turn a hair. She's a fairy and we're nearing Christopher street at that.
It's past sunset and the lights of the city are on full force. I watch her walk around puddles and unconsciously skip cracks walking around empty soda cups and this mornings news paper wadded up and soggy in the street. I wonder if she realizes just how innocent she looks to the outsider, but now I know that that innocence is cracked and it makes me sad for a second. She's 19 years-old and the daughter of a former teenage mother. She was never as naive as I thought she was, she just chose to close her self off to most of the unpleasantness she was wholly aware of-- I know that now. Now I feel like the naive one because I don't know how to act around her. An hour and a half ago I was having sordid oral sex fantasies about her, even as she drank her coffee and told me about her travels; when she said that she went to Abby Road, I got half stiff I swear and I'm not even a big Beatles fan. I wished I could have been at Shakespeare and Company with her, pouring over books, smelling that old musty book smell, I can see us now even as we're walking down Bleeker that I would have touched her without shame inside that store. A finger brushing a cheek lifting a copy of High Fidelity in front of her face, a D.H Lawrence where she'd bat the book away and give me a sour look I would only know meant she could just as easily pull me to a dark corner and prove she could fit in with the best of the French. But here we are not in Paris not in London not even in my neighborhood because we took the subway down here. I feel ashamed, having her see where I live I can't believe Todd or whoever just let her in like that and told her she could stay. But now even as we pass over broken sidewalk cement and homeless people I'm glad they let her in.
Where to? She asks.
Dunno, home I guess unless you want to go somewhere else in particular?
I'm sure she means my home but deep in the recesses of my brain I think she means Stars Hollow.
Okay then.
I turn a corner finding a subway entrance. She follows me down the steps, she watches me pass my Metro card through the fair machine and walk through, I hand her the card and she copies me, handing it back making sure not to touch her fingers as she passes it into my palm because I'm afraid to touch her. We sit next to each other on a two person bench she looks out the window even though there's nothing to see but black and the rows of lights signaling the entrance to the next stop. At first she sits hunched up against the wall of the car, but a couple of minutes into the ride she relaxes into the hard plastic letting her outer thigh touch mine.
I only ride the subway with you, you know. she says out of nowhere.
I thought as much.
Yeah I just realized that you're so much more utilitarian than most people I know.
Um, thanks? I say with obvious confusion in my voice.
No I mean you're so much more practical well in your own city dwelling kind of way. Most people would just take their car or a cab but you take public transit. See utilitarian, practical.
So it's a compliment?
Thank you then.
You're welcome. she says finally turning her head away from the black window and looking me right in the eye. She quickly turns back to the window bracing her hand on the seat in front of us as the train takes a curve.
I would have praised you more had you praised me less.
I've heard that before. She says to the window. I'm feeling brave.
Do you think if I had given you more praise we would still be together? She turns to me at that her eyessearching my face for sarcasm.
I think there was a whole lot more missing than you complimenting me Jess.
So do I, this is our stop. I say getting up from the bench and walking to the nearest exit. She's still sitting on the bench turned towards where I sat; she stares off into the space that was my face.
Credits: Rear Window is a classic Alfred Hitchcock film starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, Pink Floyd are Pink Floyd, Ethan Hawke does or did own a Chow Chow he and my cousin lived in the same neighborhood and they shared the same dog breed... don't ask. Froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, but the middle excellent. - Voltaire. Stories About White People is a book of short stories written by Langston Hughes, Laurence Olivier is a famous actor/director he's mostly known for playing Hamlet. High Fidelity is a novel by Nick Hornby which was adapted into the movie by the same name starring John Cusack. D.H Lawrence was an English novelist who wrote very naughty things. I would have praised you more had you praised me less. - Louis XIV.