A Preview of the Sequel to Some Girls: Jade&Claire

First Pages:

         She could still remember everything about those first few weeks in New York, soon to be a decade ago now – how terrifying the city had seemed, how beyond her, and yet there she suddenly was, one more person in its stream, buoyed up by every individual around her.  What she remembered most -- it was etched, crystalline, a photograph unfaded -- was the first time she saw Jade:

     At the dingy corner deli one evening, Jade wearing a beautiful gown and the deli's cat, perched on her shoulder, his beautiful ringed tail wound around her neck, one of her swan-graceful hands on his back as she stooped and pointed at things behind the glass – 'for breakfast,' she'd said, pointing at exotic foods things Claire had never eaten, and she remembered how the deli man served her with gusto, adding an extra dollop to every portion, how the smile split his face.

     She had waited, her own dumb, plebeian purchases in her arms (tissue paper, a small carton of milk, a box of cereal, two greenish bananas), and stared at this woman, this city denizen who could wear a dress like that as casually as somebody else might a track suit, her 'une nuit blanche' as she'd put it to the deli man, clear in the slightly fatigue-bruised flesh beneath her eyes, and then how she'd smiled faintly at Claire, so faintly Claire felt utterly unseen.

     Nearly impossible to believe how much time they'd spent together since that first glimpse, but when she stopped to count it was at least seven years ago; time did strange things when she was with Jade – circled, stopped still, flew ahead – so the years were hard to track.

     The surprise of it was like so many things in life, Claire thought now, with a measure of sophistication she never would have believed herself capable of before.

     Before Jade, that is.

     Or was it just before New York City?

     The two were deeply twinned in her mind and she remained unredeemably in love, the city in constant construct, so that you could stay in one place and the neighborhood would simply change around you.

     Her friendship with Jade, who was in fact her next-door neighbor, had been forged very quickly, just a week after that first glimpse in the deli, during a moment of danger and rescue, and quickly evolved into something else entirely, something Claire had been unable at the time to integrate into her own sense of self, an event which – maybe, maybe not, but the more time passed, the more Claire thought it probable – had sent Jade on a sudden, unannounced trip to Paris.

     Weeks later, she'd come back a platinum blond, with a man in her wake:  Luke, very much the alpha male, a war journalist, with dark blonde curly hair in a fit, stocky body, who wore blue jeans, black t-shirts, and a well-made, well-worn dark corduroy jacket every day.

     It simplifies my choices in the morning, he said (that he also looked good in it didn't hurt either). 

     His adoration of this woman he'd snagged at a Parisian café ('you should've seen her,' he'd said, chuckling, 'smoking like she thought it was gonna save her life, and looking like she was one meal away from starvation') was evident; he took constant pictures, Polaroid and otherwise, pressed her up against walls in bars and kissed her, took her on trips with him – even back then, when it was so dangerous, too (he loved how she refused to be afraid), when they were sending Luke all over Eastern Europe during those crazed months before and after the end of 1989.

     But he was gone and Jade was home on New Year's Eve, so he knew nothing of how Claire found Jade that night -- and then staggered back to her place, cars hounding her with their horns, drunken mobs roaming the streets, until finally a New York City angel in the form of grizzled cabbie whose top light said Off-Duty who braked next to her, rolling down the window and asking did she need a ride...?

     Nor did Luke know how Jade came home much, much later, and of their consequent wild New Year's Day escape from New York to Mexico City, where Jade rented a beat-up Bug and took Claire on a barefoot, desperate and harrowing ride literally to the end of the road, the only-surfers-knew-about coastal village of San Jeronimo.

     A handful of not-nearly-enough days later, they returned to New York City together, radiant with color, the tips of their hair gilded, the salt a sugar still glimmering on their skin, holding hands furtively under the blanket on the plane, and later in the taxi all the way home. 

     Claire had been surprised and grateful that their connection had not only remained un-severed but had actually healed over, that it hadn't been simply of that moment, then and there...a deeply consoling feeling.

     Even if the one thing she knew without needing to consult any sage was that paradise was a shimmeringly impermanent state.

     This was all seven -- or was it eight -- years ago now, at the beginning of the new decade, during those newborn, freezing post-Cold War first months after the Berlin Wall had been taken down, brick by brick by cheering people on both sides (Claire still had the one Jade had brought back for her, a slash of German grafitti in one corner), and Luke's presence, according to everyone, especially his editor, was still in need everywhere – Berlin, of course, but also Prague, and Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia (one of the most beautiful countries he said he'd ever seen, with its gorgeous forests and enormous lakes) – now quickly falling prey to 'civil' unrest.

     God, the endless Newspeak!  Jade had said despairingly, citing 'collateral damage' and 'friendly fire' and wondering how in the stars above Orwell had foreseen it all?
     That's how, Claire had said; she was having a grim Earth day, when she would swear she could feel the rape and pillage of the planet going on continuously, animals pushed out of habitats, glaciers going, water becoming scarce, everything poisoned poisoned poisoned, around the clock, 24/7.   And why are we not capable of learning from these overseas wars the first, or let's just say (counting on her fingers), Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq -- it's not as if we've ever 'won,' and how this latest was already turning into ever-larger skirmishes with their ever-fiercer gunfire, alongside war crimes so ugly I can't stand to even read about them.
     Jade had had to step in, distract her, pour her a drink, put on music, made her dance.
     Come on, she'd coax, Do the sulky dance!  Do the dance of I hate people!  Stomp around!  Background, mill around!  Make a hubbub!
~page break here~

     Upon Luke's return, which followed their own from Mexico by only a few days, it was as though nothing had changed between himself and Jade (hadn't it, though? Claire kept asking herself), and he'd been received right back into Jade's orbit -- because despite his considerable charisma, it was always her orbit.  Claire could not explain it, but Jade's gravitational pull was stronger than any other she had ever been close to -- besides, of course (giving it only the briefest nod), gravity's itself. 

     Her beauty, of course, might have gone a long way to account for the weight of such pull, but Claire knew better.  She'd known other women with comparable looks, but none with such an irresistible combination of luminosity, unpredictability, fierce independence and wild love, a force that was yet felt so lightly she was pulled to compare her to one of those gaspingly gorgeous butterflies, born without digestive tracts, so short was their stay on Earth, but absolutely riveting despite – or was it because? – of it.