“Hey, come here.” Arnold Allen walked toward her. Up close, he smelled vaguely medicinal. Like rubbing alcohol. Or maybe floor wax. “You’re not nervous, are you?” He threw an avuncular arm around her back. “ ’Cause there’s nothing to be nervous about.”
“I’m fine.” She smiled wanly before she slipped out from under his arm and disappearing into her tiny bedroom, where her cheap, trendy clothes hung between a stranger’s suits. “I’ll just be one minute,” she called out into the living room. Then she scanned her wardrobe, settled on a raspberry wraparound miniskirt and an off-white satin-polyester blouse. She was a little embarrassed about her legs—she hadn’t shaved them in three days—but she didn’t have the patience to put on stockings. She wanted to get her debut over with. She didn’t like having this man in her apartment. But she wanted the part in the pilot; she wanted it badly now. Just as her reality seemed suddenly, pitifully, inadequate. She hated sharing a closet with a phantom.
She came back out in the miniskirt and blouse.
“Wow!” bleated Arnold Allen. He was sitting on the sofa now, his legs crossed like a woman, his coat still on but open to reveal a maroon V-neck sweater and the gentle swell of a beer belly. “You look hot!” Again he stood up, walked toward her. “Don’t be scared,” he said, reaching for her blouse, which he unbuttoned to the height of her bra, while she stood there frozen, stranded, strangely calm. As if her own paralysis rendered her inviolable. “There, that’s better,” he said. “That’s even hotter.” Then he went back to the sofa. “Okay, so I want you to walk in from the bedroom—imagine you’re walking into the classroom from the hall—and then I want you to tell the kids to quiet down.”
As directed, Phoebe disappeared back into the bedroom before sauntering back out to the tune of “I want quiet in this classroom!” The image of Mr. Spumato coursed across her brain. “One more peep, and you’re outta here! Is that understood?” She swung her hips as she made her way over to an imaginary blackboard—actually a framed poster of a Monet painting. The water lilies. She grabbed a ruler off the desk, tapped the glass. Now she was Mrs. Kosciouwicz. “Today you’ll be learning about the Pilgrims. I want you all to open to page two-sixty-three in your social studies textbooks.” She looked at Arnold Allen.
“Bravo,” he said, clapping in slow motion. “You’re a natural, Phoebe.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling fraudulently, thinking maybe that would satisfy him, maybe he would leave her alone now.
“Hey, come here,” he said, patting the seat cushion next to him.
She didn’t move. He patted the seat again. She didn’t see that she had a choice. Or did she?
She walked over to where he sat, took a seat next to him on the edge of the sofa. “Hey,” he said, reaching for the back of her neck. “You seem tense.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
But she no longer knew if she was. She was suddenly seized with terror, not so much of Arnold Allen but of the trajectory she felt herself to have put into motion—a trajectory that seemed to have a momentum of its own. Such that there was no escape, only capitulation. Every night, right before she fell asleep, she would feel herself falling, and she would lurch in her bed. It was like that now, except there was no corrective frame that followed, no return to stasis, just a terrible feeling in her stomach that she was getting exactly what she deserved—that she’d been a very bad girl.
“You sure?” Arnold Allen wanted to know, his breath on her neck, his hands fanning out to her shoulders. “ ’Cause there’s nothing to be scared of. Hey, you got any lotion? Your legs look dry. Let me put some lotion on them. It’ll relax you—I promise.”
In that moment, Phoebe felt strongly that it was wrong to let this man touch her. But Arnold Allen was attractive in a kind of fatherly way. Was that it?
Or was it rather that she was so intent on the job he dangled before her that she would have submitted to any number of degradations in order to secure it, lotion being the least of them?
“I’ll be right back,” she said on her way to the bathroom.
She came back gripping a large squirt-top bottle of moisturizer—“for sensitive skin” it read in large red capitals. Then she sat back down next to the man in the sheepskin coat. “Hey,” he said, tapping his knee twice in rapid succession. “Stretch your legs out. Come on. Don’t be shy.”
Slowly, diffidently, performatively, Phoebe turned sideways, positioned her back against the arm of the sofa, extended her legs across Arnold Allen’s lap, and closed her eyes—while he ran his greasy hands up and down the length of her calves. And when he moved farther up her legs, to the top of her thighs, she didn’t mind. Or maybe it was rather that she was willing not to mind—willing to live with this bargain with which he seemed to be presenting her. So long as things didn’t go any further. That’s what she kept telling herself.
So long as he didn’t touch her “there.”
Oh, but who was she kidding? There must have been a side of Phoebe that wanted to be there, watching herself, watching herself go where no nice girl from Whitehead, New Jersey— no self-respecting student of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart— was supposed to go. Just as there must have been a side of her that understood the mistake she was making, and relished the lapse. Wasn’t she far from home now? Wasn’t she really living now?
Wasn’t it disgusting?
To think she’d only known this man for forty-five minutes!
And when would it be over? When? When? When? When would she find peace?
IT MUST HAVE been five minutes later that Arnold Allen jumped up and onto his feet, dislodging Phoebe’s legs in the process. “I almost forgot about dinner!” he squawked.
Phoebe stood up, too. She was energized by the prospect of his imminent departure. “So anyway,” she said, yanking on the back of her miniskirt. “Where do I show up on Friday?” “Oh, right,” he said. “You got a piece of paper and a pen?”
She brought him a notebook and a pencil from the desk.
In a large, childish scrawl, he wrote down a low-number address on Broadway.
“Do you know the side street?” she asked him.
He squinted at the ceiling. “The side street? It might be Eleventh. Yeah that’s it. It’s, like, Eleventh or Twelfth or something. I’ll write it down for you.” He looked up in the middle of his 2. “Oh, hey,” he said. “I almost forgot. You’re a member of the Guild, right?”
“The Guild?”
“The Screen Actors Guild.”
Phoebe’s eyes fell to the floor, her ribs contracted around her heart. She felt the omission was somehow her fault. In her zeal to impress Arnold Allen, she must have led him to believe that she was someone she wasn’t—an aspiring actress, a member of his tribe. “I’ve never really acted before,” she mumbled miserably.
Now Arnold Allen squinched up his face, sighed through his teeth. As if it were a big problem, a huge problem, an insuperable problem. “Damn,” he swore. “I shoulda thought of that.” Then he fell silent, lifted his chin, squinted critically at the ceiling as if deep in thought, his lips folded down in a frown, his eyebrows knit into one, while she stood there waiting, watching, about to be disappointed. Just as she always was. At least, it seemed that way to Phoebe—as if her whole life had been a series of near misses. She thought back to the Counties, sorority rush. Even Hoover had been a disappointment; she’d wanted to go to Yale but hadn’t gotten in.
“Look, I’m going back to L.A. in the morning,” Arnold Allen began again. “I can probably sign you up out there—I got some friends I can call, some strings I can pull—and if we’re lucky, they’ll get the application processed by Friday.” He nodded his head up and down. “Yeah, I think that’s what we’re going to have to do.” Phoebe’s breath returned to her. Maybe the situation was salvageable, after all. Maybe this time she’d get lucky. “Yeah, I think it’s all gonna work out,” Arnold Allen continued. “But I should tell you that it’s five hundred bucks to join.”
“Five h
undred bucks?” she whispered in disbelief.
“And it’s gonna have to be up front.”
“Can’t they bill me?”
“I’m afraid not, sweetheart,” he said with a knowing chortle. As if it were an old problem, a familiar problem. “I mean, you can try and do it yourself in New York. Go ahead! But it’ll probably take a week or two to process. That is, unless you want to try and pay someone off.” He winked and laughed some more.
What was to be done? She didn’t feel it was polite to ask Arnold Allen to lay out the cash himself. Except five hundred dollars was the sum and total of her checking account. And she didn’t have a savings account.
And yet, to have come this far only to be back to square one all because of a little money! And what was money, anyway, but a false promise, a flimsy rectangle that passed from hand to hand, and man to man, like some kind of airborne virus? “I mean, I guess I can give you the cash,” she found herself saying.
“Listen,” he began again in a newly sober tone of voice. “I’ll write you a receipt for the amount just in case there’s any problem, which I’m sure there won’t be.” He put the pen back to the paper. “Five hundred dollars received from Phoebe Fine,” he wrote at the bottom of the page. Then he signed his name.
“Shouldn’t you date it?” she asked him.
“Oh, right,” he answered.
The phone was ringing. “Excuse me,” said Phoebe, lifting the receiver to her ear, thinking she should have let the machine pick up. But what if it was Kevin? He would start to worry if she wasn’t home. She’d told him she’d be home by seven. But it wasn’t Kevin. It was Emily calling from the West Coast. Emily was in her last year of law school. Emily was engaged to be married to an independently wealthy Argentinian Jewish human-rights activist. “Oh, hi,” said Phoebe. “Listen, I have company. Can I call you right back? I actually can’t just talk for a minute. I’ll tell you later. Emily, please. Look—I’ll call you back in ten minutes!” Out of the corner of her eye, Phoebe saw Arnold Allen motioning at his watch, mouthing the words, “I have to go.” She felt yanked in every direction; she felt like a marionette manned by competing puppeteers.
She somehow blamed her older sister—for always being so suspicious. And for never giving her the benefit of her doubt. And for never having had to resort to desperate measures like this. Indeed, things came easily to Emily, always had. At least, it had always seemed that way to Phoebe— it seemed to Phoebe that Emily thought you only had to ask for what you wanted in life and you got it. Whereas, in Phoebe’s experience of the world, sometimes you had to grovel.
“EMILY—PLEASE!” she lashed out at her sister before she hung up.
THERE WAS A twenty-four-hour banking center on the corner. Arnold Allen waited on the sidewalk out front. A homeless guy with an eye patch opened the door. It was the same homeless guy with an eye patch who always opened the door. “Pretty lady,” he said on Phoebe’s way inside. “Can you spare some change on the way out?”
She didn’t answer. Just as she always didn’t answer. She felt she worked too hard for her money to be giving it away.
After every hundred dollars she withdrew, the screen flashed, “For security purposes, please reenter your secret code.” (They were all the same, they were all suspicious—even the bank machine.)
She told the homeless guy, “Sorry” on her way out. Then she handed over her life savings to Arnold Allen, who tucked the wad in his back pocket and kissed her carelessly on the forehead. “Thanks, love,” he said. “I really gotta run. I got a dinner at Elaine’s in twenty minutes. Listen, you get nervous, have any questions, just call. I’m staying at the Carlyle. I’ll be back in L.A. tomorrow night. I’ll call you Thursday. You got my card. And don’t forget—Friday, ten A.M. sharp. Don’t be late. You’re gonna be great. Hey, that rhymes!”
Then he turned his back, flagged a cab, and sped off into the New York night. And Phoebe watched him go.
AT FIRST THERE was relief—relief to be alone again. Relief to be unharmed. Relief that things hadn’t gone any further than they had. Of course, she felt somewhat guilty about the lotion. But Kevin wouldn’t have to know. And besides, it wasn’t like she’d had sex with Arnold Allen. These were her thoughts on the short walk back to her apartment—that it was a small price to have paid for success.
She rode the elevator wondering what she would do about dinner. She was suddenly starving, almost faint with hunger. She could make spaghetti. She could have breakfast cereal. But she didn’t have any milk, and she was too lazy to go buy some. Maybe she would celebrate with some takeout from the Thai restaurant on the corner, she thought to herself as she turned the key in the lock. She was in the mood for Khao Soi.
It was the sight of Arnold Allen’s proof of payment— “Dollars,” Phoebe now noticed, had been spelled with just one l—that left her suddenly uneasy. Would a Hollywood executive really not know how to spell such a simple word? And now that he was gone, the evidence of their transaction seemed suddenly, queasily, insubstantial. Upon closer inspection, Arnold Allen hadn’t even written a floor or suite number next to the Broadway address of her tryout.
In need of reassurance, she called information for the Carlyle Hotel, then the Carlyle Hotel itself. “I’d like to leave a message for Arnold Allen,” she told the woman at the front desk.
But the woman at the front desk told her, “No one by that name is staying in this hotel.”
But how could it be? Had she gotten the name of the hotel wrong? But no, he’d said the Carlyle. She was quite sure of it. “This is the Carlyle Hotel?” she felt compelled to double-check.
“Yes it is,” the woman replied. “May I be of any further assistance?” But her tone of voice belied her words; her tone of voice was hostile.
Phoebe hated her for it.
Her whole life, it seemed to Phoebe, she’d been made to feel guilty for asking too many questions. She thought again of old Mrs. K, who only liked answers. “Has trouble following directions,” the old battle-ax had written in the comments section of Phoebe’s report card. And Emily—at some point during her adolescence, Emily had nicknamed Phoebe “N.P.” (short for “Nosy Parker”), and all because she’d once caught her younger sister flipping through her diary, trying to find out what really happened at Emily’s junior prom. (Not much, as it turned out.) And Bruce Bledstone—she hadn’t been able to ask him anything; she’d learned so much the day she made the mistake of asking if he loved his wife. Only Kevin seemed oblivious to her “curiosity problem.” But then, she could never think of anything to ask him that she didn’t already, intuitively, know the answer to.
She hung up the phone convinced that the woman at the front desk of the Carlyle Hotel was just another naysayer from her past. But where was Arnold Allen? Phoebe remembered now that he’d left her his business card. She fished it out of her purse and dialed the ten-digit number printed in the bottom right-hand corner—the number she was supposed to call if and when she had any doubts whatsoever as to whether or not he was a nice guy, a good guy, the kind of guy you could trust with five hundred dollars.
But it wasn’t his office at all. It was no longer in service. That’s what the automated recording said. But it wasn’t possible. That’s what Phoebe kept telling herself. That everything would make sense in the end. Except doubt had begun to infiltrate the equation, throwing up X’s and Y’s where once there had only been digits. Why had he told her he was staying at the Carlyle if he wasn’t? And why had his phone been disconnected? And what about Friday? What about her big break?
In the lamplight now Phoebe could make out writing on the back of the card. Flipping it over, she found a name, Jill Lewis, handwritten in a different-color ink but in the same, barely legible chicken scrawl. And next to Jill Lewis’s name was a number with an outer-borough area code. She dialed blindly. A gruff-sounding man answered the phone. “My name is Phoebe Fine,” she said in her best executive-secretary voice—the one she’d used that very afternoon at Toffler Ass
ociates. “And I’m calling in reference to a man named Arnold Allen. Jill Lewis’s name and number were printed on the back of a business card he left with me.”
Now the gruff-sounding man let out a furious laugh. “Arnold Allen tried to con my wife out of a large sum of money today. We’ve already filed a complaint with the police. You should call them, too. Tell them it’s the same guy. Did you give him anything?”
“No—I—,” Phoebe started to tell him. But she couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t begin to admit that she had. She couldn’t even breathe. “Thank you,” she whispered into the receiver before she hung up.
SHE MUST HAVE stood there for ten minutes, the receiver pressed to her blouse, the truth defying her grasp like one of those superbouncy rubber glitter balls from a five-cent machine. She couldn’t bear to believe it had all been a scam—couldn’t bear the idea that a girl like her would fall for something like that. She couldn’t cry, either—not until she’d gotten to the Italian bakery where Kevin McFeeley currently made his living shoveling cannoli into white paper bags. (The copy shop had fired him for printing Mr. Potato Head flyers on the company bill.)
It was the image of Kevin’s sallow face reduced to wearing that two-foot-high white paper hat that pushed her over the edge. Two idiots in love—that’s what she was thinking, but she couldn’t say it out loud. She needed Kevin McFeeley too much right then. She needed him to make it better, and he tried. He took one look at Phoebe’s twisted face, threw down his cake server, sideswept the counter, laced his arms around her quivering frame, and whispered, “What’s the matter? What is it, baby—are you okay?” Like the wonderful boyfriend that he was.
So she could tell him between gasps, “Something really awful happened.”
So he could tell her that he still loved her, always would, no matter what mistakes she’d make in life.
Then he got permission to leave work early. And on the walk home, Phoebe told him as much of the story as she could bear to tell him. (She left out the part about how the man in the sheepskin coat came awfully close to touching her where only Kevin did.) And for a moment or two, in the act of recounting, she imagined herself a blameless victim of a random crime. That’s what Kevin kept saying—that the guy was a professional; that she couldn’t have expected to come away unscathed; that she was lucky to have gotten away as cleanly as she had. It was the sight of that half-empty squirt-top bottle of hand lotion leaned up against the leg of the sofa that made her curl up in a little ball by the stove and rock herself back and forth against the linoleum until her spine was bruised.
What She Saw... Page 20