Blue Rose In Chelsea Read Free

proclaim.
         Evan leans into his hand; his gaze floats over me, as if reading words superimposed across my silk blouse.
         “And lots of mediocre loves in the meantime,” Dylan adds.  “My sister’s got a little black book.  Oh, I stand corrected; it’s actually pink with little cartoon cats on it.”  Dylan has now single-handedly squelched any headway I may have made in passing myself off as an urban sophisticate.
         “They were not loves.  They are called dates.  Remember that concept?  Coffee and a kiss on the cheek,” I stammer, feeling myself blush because I don’t want Evan to get the wrong impression of me.
         “Coffee and a kiss on the cheek?  What is this 1950?”  Brandon looks as if someone has sprayed perfume in his face.
         “Coffee and a kiss on the cheek will suffice when it’s my sister.”  Dylan adopts a militant tone, as if issuing a general warning.
         “So, you’re a man-eater?” Evan persists with his silky voice.
         “She’s a tofu eater,” Dylan answers for me.  “And I’m just warning you in advance; I am not in the mood for the Bleeker Street Bolsheviks, so can we just skip the Tutti Fruitti Tiger today, and pick up some Ray’s pizza before we catch the train?”
         “Best pizza in the city.”  Brandon clicks his tongue, crooking his fingers like a gun to shoot his point across the room.
         “ The Tempting Tiger , and hey those budding socialists serve the best baba ganoush in the city,” I return playfully.  I don’t bother to waste my breath telling Dylan that he is confusing the sprout Mecca downtown with a café in Princeton.  Dylan hates all of my vegetarian haunts, although he’s become partial to hummus wraps, something he would rather die than admit to.
         Rattle and Hum is playing on Brandon’s tape player.  While Dylan rattles on, Brandon hums along to U2s, “All I Want Is You.”
          Brandon croons the lyrics about a river and riches and a highway with nobody on it.  “That is just as much poetry as anything Byron wrote.”
         I steel myself for an onslaught of Bono Worship; Dylan and Brandon idolize him.
         “Would you like all the riches in the night?” Evan asks of me, with a delirious mixture of earnestness and mockery that he pulls off with aplomb.
         “Don’t they all?  Women are always looking for the BBD, the Bigger Better Deal,” Brandon surmises.  Now that Brandon has traded high finance for a bare-bones bohemian existence, his love life is a bear market.  “Treasure, diamonds, a ring of gold.  Yup, that’s what they’re all looking for.”
         “Haley would like a planet with no one on it.  She’s claustrophobic and won’t get on the subway,” Dylan taunts.  “Are we going to have to walk a billion blocks to that bookstore?  Where is this place exactly?”
         “Gotham Book Mart.  Wise men fish here ,” I quote their motto, which is hung on a small sign in their window.  I offer the coordinates: Forty-Seventh, between Fifth and Sixth.
         “Okay, so, it’s the East Side.”  I’m not sure why Dylan says this, other than perhaps to display his knowledge of the city grid.
         “It’s above fifth,” I correct gently.
         “Right, that would be the East Side.”
         “I think that would be the West.”
     “Sixth Avenue divides the east and west side,” he says, slightly defensive and with a tinge of condescension.  Why is Dylan challenging me on this?
         “I believe it’s Fifth.”  I filter any confrontation from my voice, so as to appear the epitome of benevolence before Evan.
         “Sixth Avenue divides the East and West Side, Sis, Avenue of the Americas.”  Dylan says this as if I am somehow embarrassing him in front of these savvy city denizens.
         Evan watches this with deep fascination.  He has lived in the city for years; he could