Over My Live Body

by Susan Israel

  “Guess you did. What’s going on, exactly?”

  “I’m not sure, exactly. That was a guy I don’t even know telling me I want him. Ivan told me someone’s called me and didn’t leave a name. My bad for leaving my cell phone where he can get it. It’s probably coincidence. Can’t be the same person. Anyway, I’m not even sure if I can trust Ivan’s account of things. He might have set someone up to make that call. I wouldn’t put anything past him now.”

  “Threatening phone calls. There seems to be a lot of that going around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Vittorio got a couple. Something to do with work conflicts. He changed his schedule so he could be free for our anniversary party Saturday night. Remember when you ate with us at the restaurant last week and he excused himself to talk to the manager? Well, someone apparently didn’t like it, said he’d be sorry. Sounded like a scene from a Fellini film. You should’ve heard. Mamma mia! Anyway, he shrugged it off as nuisance calls.” He finishes off the tea. “Yours don’t seem like nuisance calls.”

  “It’s just one phone call, Morgan.”

  “Did you report it?”

  I shake my head. “Did Vittorio report his nuisance calls?”

  “He talked to somebody in Italiano. I don’t know who. Probably the head chef. I think you should be talking to the police. Especially after what Ivan did to you the other night. Did you report that?”

  “It was just a little shove.” I walk back upstairs to the studio. I’m starting to feel guilty for holding up the works.

  “A little shove that made you look like you fell down a flight of stairs.”

  “It shoved me into action, Morgan, that’s good enough. I’m changing the locks on him as of this afternoon. A locksmith’s coming at four. Before he comes back from Wall Street. He won’t hurt me,” I lick my lips. “I don’t think.”

  “What are you going to do if the locksmith doesn’t show?” Morgan frowns. “Go back there and act like nothing’s wrong?”

  “I’ll call Sachi to see if I can crash on her couch. ”

  Morgan snorts. “Have you ever been able to reach Sachi when you need her?” Noooo. I shake my head. “Cara, if you’re in a pinch, you can spend the night at our place.”

  “Thanks.” I peel off the shirt and watch as everybody’s attention focuses on The Bruise. Morgan winces. “Men!” he says, and rolls his eyes, “They’re such beasts!”

  4

  “If you was my girlfriend, I’d want you to have this lock here.” The locksmith holds up a piece of unwieldy hardware with a bar running through it that looks like a smaller version of the bike lock I’ve seen linked on the fence in front of my building. For the last few days it’s been minus the bike. The locksmith babbles on about the difference between vertical and horizontal deadbolts, and I’m too tired to appreciate any of the details until he gets to the prices.

  “I’m not your girlfriend,” I remind him, “and I can’t afford this lock here. Or that lock there, for that matter. What do you have that’s cheaper?”

  “I thought you was worried about someone breaking in.”

  “I am,” I say, “but I’m also practically broke. So what can you do for me?”

  “Well, I can put on another rim lock between the one you got here and the chain. It’s not going to cost you as much, and it’ll give you a little more security. Say I’m someone who wants to break in and I see all these locks you got here. I’m probably not gonna be able to take the time to figure which one goes which way or want to make a lot of noise kicking the door down. But then there’s always someone who might. You want it or what?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I yawn. “Put it on.”

  I take a quick tour of the apartment while the locksmith is yanking tools out of his box. It looks the way I left it earlier: the same chipped coffee cups are still in the sink, the newspaper with its buttery fingerprints folded sloppily on the chair. The bed looks like it was sat on since I left. Trust Ivan not to tidy up after himself. I give the coverlet a yank to make it smoother, as if that’s all I have to do to remove evidence of him ever having been here. He’s not here now; that’s all that matters. I made sure he wouldn’t be. I called his extension at work and hung up on him. Now I look at my cell phone. On cue the voice mail alert chimes.

  “Well, are you gonna play that thing back or stare at it all day?”

  I jump. “Are you going to install the lock or stare at me all day?”

  “Touchy!” He throws a piece of hardware on the floor. “Hey, you never know who it could be. Could be Hollywood calling.” He picks a hand drill out of his tool kit and starts to make holes in the wood under the chain lock. The drill almost but not quite drowns out my cell phone. I can’t not answer it. What I really feel like doing is throwing it through the window. What does he want this time?

  But it’s not a he this time, it’s a she, someone who introduces herself as Heidi Obermeyer calling from the place I worked this morning. “Ah know this is short notice. You came hahly recommended and ah wondered if you’d be free ta work for mah late afternoon class today. It starts in an hour.”

  The Southern drawl takes me back to a long-ago home and I find myself slipping into it, saying, “Sure ah…I will,” without thinking about how much I hated yesterday’s class, the letchy professor with the probing fingers, the beady-eyed students, the men who were at liberty to walk in and out of the room while they worked on overhead wiring. I hope that Heidi Obermeyer is teaching this class, not just doing the hiring for someone else. “Mah class meets at the East Side location,” she adds, and gives me the exact address, immediately putting my fear to rest. Being a woman, being a Southerner, she’ll insist on more decorum, making sure I feel at home. Oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home. The sound of her voice sure suckered me into taking this job. It even made me forget the hassle of getting an uptown bus on Third Avenue during rush hour and that it’s going to be nearly dark when I get to my destination and a whole lot darker when it’s time to go home.

  But it’s not like I can afford to blow off many jobs anyway. I’ve already rationalized that I can’t. Not even the ones that are dangerous to get to and from. Not even the ones that I hate.

  The locksmith shrugs and turns back to his work when he hears the click of the receiver. I wonder if he gets paid by the hour. He’s been here half the day already, or maybe it just seems that way because I was up all night. Now he’s on the other side of the door, holding it open with his foot, securing the lock plate, screwing it on tight. “I guess I don’t have to tell you how this works, since you got another one just like it, but this one’s new, it’s gonna feel stiffer at first. Want to try it?”

  “I will when you leave.”

  “That’ll be fifty bucks.”

  “What? I thought you said…”

  “Flat fifteen-dollar fee for the house call and labor included.”

  “You’ll take a check, right?”

  “Yeah. But I think I better warn you there’s a twenty-five dollar surcharge for returned checks.”

  I scrawl out the amount hurriedly and slap the check in front of him. “No bounce, see?”

  “I need your address and phone number under your name there. And I‘ve got to write your driver’s license number too. That is, if you got a driver’s license?”

  I dig deep in my wallet for it and hand it over. “It’s slightly expired. I don’t live in Kentucky any more.”

  “How about a credit card. You got one that’s not maxed out, by any chance?”

  I dig deeper for my Visa. He laughs as he scribbles the information. He takes the check and almost forgets to hand back the license—I have to grab it from him. He gestures at his handiwork as he leaves. “Don’t forget to lock the door.”

  5

  Heidi Obermeyer may sound like a Southern belle on the phone, but in person she’s pure punk. She greets me at the door wearing a skin-tight black velveteen dress that’s shorter than the shortest shorts I’ve ever se
en. She’s from Texas, hasn’t lived there in “oh-ah-can’t-tell-you-how-long,” and the accent resurfaced after she had her tongue pierced “because raght afterwards it hurt sooo much to talk lahk a Yankee.” Her hair glows purple under the klieg lights she’s set up in the classroom. She’s hired another model too, a male who’s off in the corner wearing a terry cloth robe, sipping espresso. I recognize him. I’ve used him as a model myself. I turn my back to the window and start to undress. A couple of students say “Hi.” I don’t know if they remember me from other classes or they’re just being friendly. I say “Hi” back.

  “What ah want the two of you to do is reenact some Bible scenes,” Heidi suggests airily, fondling the crucifix dangling between her nascent breasts. “Be as inventive as you lahk. Ah lahk my students to have fun.”

  So for the next two hours I’m Eve being banished from the Garden of Eden, I’m the Virgin Mary receiving news from the angel Gabriel, I’m Lot’s wife looking over her shoulder for all eternity—or what seems to be—because Heidi is not very good about giving us breaks on time. I’ve calmed down a lot since I walked into the studio; I’m not shaking any more, not even from the cold. The improvisations absorb me. I find myself getting into each incarnation more and more. So are the students. They’re lapping up every minute of the blasphemy they’re committing and grinning like Cheshire cats as they put the finishing whorls on their last drawing of the evening. And Heidi Obermeyer seems to be enjoying it most of all. She thanks me profusely after I’ve dressed, as I’m heading for the door, and asks me back for next week. She’s a real work of art herself, the downtown variety. She fidgets a lot with her hair, her clothes, her jewelry. Right now she’s running her fingers through her purple frosted hair, pulling it back and up, revealing her earrings—gold bullets with black tips that make them look like they’ve been dipped in dark chocolate.

  6

  “Excuse me.”

  I look up, annoyed. There’s no way I can be in anyone’s way, scrunched up as I am in this seat near the back of the bus. There’s hardly anyone on board now. I expect it to be some street beggar who’s going to try to shake me down for spare change; they’re everywhere now, even on mass transit. The mayor’s pledge to clean up the streets has only made them pop up and multiply in other places, like random phantoms in a computer game gone amok.

  I look up at him. He’s staring at me. This is no street beggar, just some guy wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and indigo jeans splotched with white blobs that stand out much more than he does. “What do you want?”

  “Oh…I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “I thought you were somebody…”

  I am somebody.

  “…somebody I knew. You look familiar.” He hoists a dirty green backpack and slings it over his shoulder, nearly hitting me with it. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  He sits splay-legged across from me and stares. I turn around and look out the window at the flash of brightly lit storefronts along Seventh Avenue. I must look familiar to quite a lot of people. I wonder how many people in this city have drawn or painted or sculpted me over the last two and a half years, uptown, downtown, all around the town. And across the river even. Hundreds. How many people have seen me nude, contorted this way or that, plus or minus five pounds, with and without a tan. Maybe this slightly strung-out looking guy is one of them; he could very easily be one of them. I’d never recognize him, but surely he would recognize me, especially if he’d seen all of me. How many guys who smile at me on the street are smiling knowingly or just because they’d like to know me?

  I wonder if this guy has a sketch book in that grungy backpack, if there are pictures he’s drawn of me in there. How many pictures of me are out there, and where are they? Are there some yellowed and curled, stored in the back of some struggling artist’s newsprint pad with all the other sketches of all the other models he or she has ever drawn, or matted and framed and displayed in a hallway or study or bedroom?

  That was Ivan’s take on it. One man’s ‘fine art’ is another man’s jerk-off material.

  I shrug it off. Ivan has made me paranoid. With just cause.

  You’re not going to brush me off that easily. It’s not like I wasn’t warned a few nights ago.

  The next stop is mine. I go down the three stairs at the exit and have to give the door a shove to make it open. The brisk air sends a chill up my spine. I turn down the corner at Waverly Place and go up the steps leading to my building, sidestepping the concrete flowerpot on the top stoop as I fumble for my keys. The minute I’ve unlocked the second door, the one with the beveled glass window you can’t see through, and step inside, I know I’m in trouble. Someone vaults down the stairs two at a time and grabs my arm. Anyone in the building would recognize him immediately and not question what he was doing here, and he knows it. No one else would suspect what I might be in for. He looks so upstanding. He could have been waiting here for hours in his jeans and Brooks Brothers shirt and no one would think anything of it. He probably was. “I want in, Delilah.” Ivan’s voice is a deep guttural growl.

  I try to pry his hand off me. “No!”

  “Come on, I’m not going to hurt you. I just want my things.”

  “Where are you going to put all that stuff? Are you going to carry it? I don’t think so.”

  “I’ve got my car parked a few blocks away. I’ll go get it now so I can load the stuff in the trunk.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He pokes the cleft in my chin with the tip of his index finger the way I poke cookie dough to see if it’s done. “You’re going to have to let me in when I get back, Delilah.”

  And then he turns around to go; miraculously he’s gone without following me up the stairs, without trying to push his way into the apartment. I’m not used to the new lock. I drop my keys twice before I manage to get the door open and when I do, I slam it behind me. I don’t even bother to turn on the lights. I dig my phone out of my bag and try to read the number of the local police precinct that I wrote in small block print on a message pad stuck on the refrigerator door. I press 7-4-1, then start fumbling. I get the wrong number twice. I press one number too many. I flick on the light and try again, poking each number with breathtaking accuracy.

  “Sixth Precinct.” The voice could be male or female, but couldn’t be flatter. I wonder if it’s on a machine recording. I wait a few seconds. No beep. “Hello? Is anyone there?” The voice sounds animated this time, animated and annoyed, and this isn’t the best way to appeal for help.

  I take a deep breath so I won’t ramble. I already hear the downstairs door open again. There’s no way he could have gotten his car that fast. “Could you send someone over to my place right away?” I tell where I am.

  “What’s the problem there?”

  “Delilah, let me in, goddamn it!”

  I pick up the phone and walk with it so that the banging on the door is audible to the NYPD android on the phone. “Someone’s trying to get into my apartment.”

  “Do you know the party? Is he armed?”

  “Yes, I do know him and no, I don’t think he is, not the way you mean. But he has two arms, and I’m afraid of how he’s going to use them if he gets in.”

  The voice repeats my address mechanically and I confirm it. “Please hurry.” I implore. “Please?”

  “Delilah, cut the crap and open this goddamn door now. I’m warning you. For your own good.”

  “Or else what?” I shout through the door. “What can you do to me if I don’t let you in. Nothing. Whereas if I do…”

  “Delilah, what you’re doing is illegal. Some of my possessions are in there. I have a right to get them. If you don’t let me in, you could be arrested for criminal lockout when the police get here.”

  “I could be what?”

  “If I decided I wanted to press charges.”

  “You called the police?”

  “But I really wouldn’t want it to come to that. Come on now, let me in before they come so the
re won’t be any trouble.” The door rattles incessantly. The vibration of the chain lock makes good accompaniment for my jangled nerves. “Delilah, open the fucking door!”

  “No! I don’t want you in here. I don’t want to be alone with you.”

  “Well then, you won’t be. The police should be here any minute.”

  “I hope so,” I shout. “That’s what they told me too.”

  “What? You called the police?” The rattling finally stops. “Well, they’re here. Now will you please open the goddamn door before you get yourself in a shitload of trouble?”

  “Not until I hear you let them in. Stop bullshitting me.”

  “I left the door open for them. I’m considerate. Look, Delilah, for the last time…”

  I hear the muffled squawk of a two-way radio in the hall.

  “Too late, Delilah. I tried.”

  My fingers slide the chain lock and fidget with the new rim lock and my hand sweats all over the doorknob as I turn it. There are two uniformed officers on the landing right below. Ivan speaks sotto voce to them and turns around to point up. They trudge up the eight stairs and suddenly I’m craning my neck to look up at them and feel on the defensive. “We received a complaint phoned in from this address,” one of the officers says.

  “Actually two complaints,” adds the other.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Ivan and I say, glaring at each other.

  “You both called in complaints.”

  “Yes, probably at the…”

  “Same time.” Ivan takes a few steps closer, and I move to the right of the officer standing across from me.

  The officers look at each other and then back at me. “This your boyfriend, Miss?”