What's a Girl Gotta Do

by Sparkle Hayter

  Some of the details of Griff’s death were reported too, and there was also a boxed story at the bottom of the page, a sidebar on Griff, which detailed his alleged “history” with attractive women, using quotes from First Avenue bartenders. First Avenue, once the place fashionable singles bed-hopped, was now where the recklessly unhip went searching for meaningless sex.

  It said something about Griff that he was so well known in anachronistic singles bars. The bartenders said he flashed a lot of money around and sometimes used pseudonyms and “cover stories” with the women he picked up, telling them variously that he was a cop, a magazine reporter, an art forger, and—get this clunker—Elite modeling agency boss John Casablancas. He regularly employed “escorts,” preferring redheads, according to one “escort agency insider.”

  “But only real redheads, which are hard to come by,” the insider added.

  Well, I thought, at least I’ve never had to pay for sex. Let me rephrase that. At least I’ve never had to pay money for sex. If that wasn’t bad enough, Griff had made surreptitious films of several attractive young women who lived in his building, using concealed cameras in their bathrooms to film some of their most intimate moments. Man, this guy made Jerry Spurdle look like Germaine Greer.

  I put down the papers and, although it was only the early afternoon, I started getting ready for the evening, taking a long, hot shower. It had been years since I’d dated a man other than Burke. The last time was shortly before we got engaged, when we agreed to see other people while we evaluated our relationship.

  Well, really we agreed that he would see other people. He was the one pushing for it but he didn’t expect me to do it too. It’s that old double-standard bullshit. He gets to go off to the Crusades, wenching all the way, while I stay home watching the rust grow on my chastity belt. I didn’t I put myself on the arm of every interesting man in New York who’d be seen with me in public, and back then there were a few, believe me.

  This went on for about a month, and then, suddenly, Burke was at the door with a bouquet of roses, saying he figured we might as well get married. I’d had fun dating around, but he gave me that Correspondent’s Squint and it took me just fourteen seconds to bargain away my freedom. Okay, I said, let’s get married.

  What sorry sequence of events had brought me to that disastrous pass, and how could I disrupt the sequence this time around? I wasn’t sure I could trust myself around a cute guy in my weakened, vulnerable state.

  As I was dressing, I set out two underwear sets. On one side of the bed was the creamiest, slinkiest fuck-me lingerie on the island of Manhattan, lingerie that felt so good on my skin it qualified as foreplay. On the other side was what I jokingly referred to, when Burke and I were still together, as my anti-adultery underwear, big old ugly granny underpants with goofy flowers on them, underwear no man could see me in without laughing. I knew I wouldn’t commit adultery while wearing this underwear because I wouldn’t be caught dead in this underwear and, as I was still married in the eyes of the law at least, I hoped it could prevent adultery one more time.

  My choices suddenly appeared very concrete. There was the dangerous underwear and the safe underwear. Which would I wear that night?

  I chose the granny underpants and wore them around for five minutes before deciding they just didn’t feel right, opting for the slinky stuff over which I wore a sweater and jeans. Another spray of L’Heure Bleue on my pulse points and a final sweep through my hair with a natural-bristle brush and I was ready to go.

  There is Murphy’s Law and there are Robin’s Amendments. Number one: The guy with the biggest tub of popcorn and noisiest eating habits will always sit directly behind me in a movie theater (or else a hearing-impaired foreign national with his translator, so that every line of on-screen dialogue is repeated in loud German). Number two: The amount a man adores me is roughly equal to the number of his faults. Number three: When I’m already running late, something will inevitable happen to make me even later. Something like, say, Mrs. Ramirez.

  When the elevator doors opened on the first floor, there she stood with Señor.

  “You!” she shouted, coming at me.

  I tried to press the Door Close button but it was too late, she had her cane in the doors, forcing them open again. The old lady, the dog, and the leash effectively blocked my exit.

  “You whore!” she said, raising her cane. I put my hand up and grabbed it before it hit me.

  “Mrs. Ramirez, you’re mistaken in the head again,” I sang sweetly.

  “You had a transvestite orgy in your apartment last night. Don’t deny it! It woke me up and then I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

  “I did not have a transvestite orgy,” I said, knowing it was useless to try to reason with Mrs. Ramirez.

  “Don’t yell at me!” she shouted. Apparently, she hadn’t taken my advice about turning down her hearing aid, because I was talking quietly.

  “I saw one of the transvestites, she said. “The man in the wig dressed up like a woman.” Mrs. Ramirez thought all my friends were transvestites or hookers. She thought I was a transvestite and a hooker. A week before, she’d been raving about Negro prostitutes” working out of my place. Her eyes weren’t so good either.

  “That probably was a woman, Mrs. Ramirez. Probably coming to visit someone else in the building.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” she shrieked. “I’m eighty years old. You think I don’t know the difference between a man and a woman? What kinda fool you take me for?”

  I considered this. “An old fool?” I guessed.

  “The police are on to you, missy. And the newspapers too!” Her cries of “Whore” and “Sodomite” followed me as I pushed past her, and rang in my ears as I left the building.

  Some people have luck with cabs; I am not one of them. Claire can hail a cab at any time of day, in any kind of weather, in any neighborhood in New York. The cabs come looking for her. They pick up her scent and zoom in on her from all directions like hounds.

  But me—I always have to work to get a cab, and tonight was no different. My apartment building is in a “marginal” neighborhood and not too many taxis cruise the area. My best bet was Fourteenth Street, four blocks away. Thanks to a brutal wind-chill factor the streets were pretty deserted and between me and Fourteenth Street lay a long stretch of dubious real estate. My own street was a nosy and neighborly sort of street for New York. I felt relatively safe there. But the streets around it were less residential and less friendly. There was a whole stretch of buildings that could have been Berlin during the blitz—burned-out shells with blackened windows and doors boarded over with cheap plywood; shops covered with corrugated steel bearing the bright, ugly spray-paint graffiti of the local youth gangs. KILL THE SKINHEADS! screamed a choice bit of blood red graffiti, to which the skinheads responded, DIE NIGGER-SPICS! signing it with a swastika. Over both of them, in yellow paint, some gentler soul had written PEACE.

  I finally hailed a decrepit cab. It began to rain. When my taxi pulled up, Eric was waiting outside his building, huddling under an umbrella, his free hand jammed into the front pocket of his jeans. He looked thin and a little tired, which just heightened my desire. A girlfriend and I discussed this once, how a touch of pathos, a hint of haggard, makes a man more attractive to a woman. When courting hesitant females, the males of other species cinch the biological deal by puffing up their brightly colored plumage. All our men have to do is not shave for a day and stint themselves on sleep.

  When the cab stopped, Eric came forward and reached into the driver’s window to pay him, over my objections. I got out and he held his umbrella over me, wrapping his other arm lightly around my waist. We walked this way, touching under his umbrella, into his building and his apartment.

  The apartment was warm and masculine, but not in an overpowering way. It wasn’t neat but it wasn’t messy either. A floor-to-ceiling entertainment center dominated the wall across from me and the two adjoining walls were lined with books.

&n
bsp; He reads, I thought, with some surprise.

  While Eric poured drinks in the kitchen, I scanned the titles, from Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti to a book of critical essays by Northrop Frye to Stephen King. I hate to admit this, but I checked the spines and the pages of some of the books to see if they were largely ornamental or if he had actually cracked them and read them. He had. He’d even underlined passages and made funny notes in the margins.

  Eric came in with a glass of seltzer for me and a beer for him, which he put down on the coffee table in front of the sofa. He came up behind me as I looked at a cluster of family photographs. I could feel him standing there. I could smell him, that great clean man smell.

  I held up a small, framed photograph of a little boy in black martial-arts garb of some kind.

  “My nephew, Patrick,” he said. “He’s into ninja. Only seven, but smart. Last time I talked to him, he told me ninja is—these are his words—‘the art of escape, essentially defensive, not aggressive.’ Invisibility is apparently a big part of it. Smart kid, huh?”

  “The art of escape,” I repeated.

  He went back into the kitchen.

  “Are these your parents wearing the fishing hats?” I asked, picking up a picture of an older couple with their arms around each other.

  “Yeah. Alf and Irma,” he said.

  “What are your parents like?” I was nervous and when I’m nervous I tend to turn social situations into interviews, which are easier to control. He came and stood in the doorway, holding a handful of mushrooms. He was cooking dinner, I realized.

  He cooks.

  “Mom’s a rock-of-Gibraltar type—kind of a martyr sometimes. Six kids—I was the second youngest— four boys and two girls. Seven, if you count my dad. Mom always did,” he said. “You’re not allergic to anything, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Any foods you don’t like?”

  “Blue cheese and anything that comes from a goat.”

  “Great,” he said.

  “What is your dad like?” I persisted.

  “My dad,” he said. “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah.” I followed him into the kitchen and watched while he sliced mushrooms.

  “There’s this one story that . . . well, my dad drove a cab for a while, here in New York, and one day he came home with this enormous box. He’d bought it off a customer, he said, for twenty-five dollars, which was a lot of money in our household. My mother, when she was mad, didn’t frown or yell, she just went blank. She looked at him like that, and he said, ‘Wait until you see what’s in here. Just wait until you see.’”

  “What was in it?”

  “Well, Dad wouldn’t let us see right away. He liked to build up the suspense. It was dinnertime, so we all sat down for dinner, for about an hour, while the box sat in the living room, unopened. After dinner, we all had to watch Cronkite, silently. By this time, we were bursting with curiosity.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  “After Cronkite, Dad said, ‘Mother, you know that wall-to-wall carpeting you wanted?’ Well, my mother’s face lit up a little, but only a little, because she had been with my father a long time and she knew better. ‘Ta da!’ my father said, and he opened the box.” Eric stopped talking but continued chopping, smiling to himself.

  “Well? What was inside?”

  “Hundreds of broadloom samples, ten-inch squares, in dozens of colors and textures, samples from the season before. Got ’em from a carpet salesman who took his cab. Anyway, my mother’s face dropped because she had always dreamed of a soft blue carpet and Dad knew it. Dad always seemed to be raising her hopes, and then he’d deliver on ‘em in a way that completely . . . confounded her expectations. She was let down a lot.”

  “That’s too bad. What happened to the carpet squares?”

  “Mom and us kids, we spent two weekend sewing the whole mess together, a white shag next to a nappy orange square next to a shaved blue patch. Dad got a cheap carpet and Mom got a conversation piece, an excuse to tell the story about Dad and his carpet of many colors to every person who walked through the door. She scorned that carpet, but when Dad could afford to get her a nice one, she kept the old carpet, put it in the bedroom. She said she was kind of getting used to it.”

  He put the knife down on the cutting board and looked straight ahead.

  “My dad died last year. . . .”

  “Oh. I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah, and after he died, Mom moved into a retirement community and she had that old carpet rolled up and shipped to her new place. Isn’t that romantic?”

  I wanted to have his baby. “It’s . . . beautiful,” I said.

  “Yeah, ain’t it though.” He scooped up the mushrooms with the knife and the palm of his hand and dropped them into a wooden bowl into which he sprinkled olive oil, wine vinegar, and a bunch of spices. I liked watching him.

  “I’m not really much of a cook. I make a few things over and over again, but I make those few well,” he said. “In our house, everyone had to help out with everything.”

  “I don’t cook,” I said. To me, a meal is something eaten standing up more often than not. For example, breakfast is eating dry frosted mini-wheats straight from the box and washing them down with periodic gulps of skim milk straight from the carton.

  “I know,” he said, and grinned. “And you’re a rotten housekeeper.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You have a reputation, Robin.”

  “A bad one?”

  “Well, an interesting one,” he said. “So tell me about your family.”

  “My mom lives with my aunt Minnie in my hometown. All my mom’s sisters are there. My dad died.”

  “When?”

  “When I was ten.”

  “Wow. How did he die?”

  “Well, you know how you can’t get a traffic light at a bad intersection until somebody dies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My dad was the guy who died. My father was a real safety nut, you know? He was always warning of the hidden menace in things, and looking for ways to thwart it. Anyway, he was one of the organizers of a petition drive to get a light at this intersection in the middle of town. It was a really bad one, a blind corner with the streets crossing at funny angles and a lot of thick bushes on one side.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, that day he was taking measurements of the street dimensions for the committee’s report, and a truck barreled around the corner and killed him. There’s a little plaque there with my dad’s name on it, near the traffic light.”’

  “That’s terrible. You were pretty young,” he said. He took a cut mushroom from the board and put it up to my mouth. I ate it. His fingers touched the tip of my tongue.

  “Yeah, you know, life’s a bitch,” I said. “I used to imagine my dad was in those traffic lights. Oh God, does that sound crazy?”

  “Not really. . . .”

  “I didn’t believe my father was reincarnated as a traffic light, or anything. It’s a metaphor for a kind of . . .”

  “Benign authority,” he said.

  “Exactly!”

  “Something telling you stop, go, caution.”

  “Yeah. So—how did you dad die?”

  “Um, massive coronary,” he said, almost apologetically. “In the bathtub. He smoked, ate, and drank himself to death. Slowly. He was sixty-nine.”

  “I’m so sorry.” There was an awkward moment. We had divulged too much. Or I had, at least. Eric, actually, seemed unbothered, but I felt like I had made a tactical error.

  The bowl went into the fridge to marinate, and Eric wiped his hands on his apron before taking it off and hanging it on a hook. I loved the way he dressed, a navy blue corduroy shirt over faded jeans. He had a great physique, like he worked out, but not too much. He didn’t have that bowling-balls-in-pantyhose look of muscle men or anything like that.

  Did he have a hairy body, I wondered? His arms weren’t very hairy,
but just above his open collar there was a nice hint of dark hair on his chest. Too hairy didn’t turn me on, but some strategically located body hair would be nice. Burke was almost hairless.

  “Have a seat and I’ll plug in the Fritz tape,” he said, but then the phone rang. He took it in the bedroom. The door was open and I could see him sitting on his bed, a four-poster.

  I sat down on an overstuffed sectional sofa, which sank comfortably as I nestled in. It was warm in Eric’s apartment, a nice contrast to the icy rain outside, and I was feeling very good and very pretty.

  When he came out, he said, “Sorry, that was Greg, about some show plans for next week. The guy never stops. Never. He wants me to watch Greg Browner Weekend.”

  “He has a weekend show now?”

  “It’s highlights from his live shows the previous week. We repackage the stuff and sell it to a new advertiser. Do you mind watching? He thinks he wants to change the lighting. He thinks it’s making him look old.”

  “Age is making him look old,” I said.

  “I know, but I don’t how you work for Browner,” I said. “Are you a saint?”

  He smiled. “No. I’m just not a news moonie, like some of you. For me, it’s a great job. Technically, I work for Greg’s production company—I don’t actually work for ANN anymore—and I make twice what I made when I worked on Ambush. I give him that youthful edge he’s missing. I do what Greg tells me to do, and if I have a better idea I tell him and he turns thumbs up or thumbs down. I don’t sweat it, and every two weeks I get big bucks, relatively speaking. I have money for my real life.”

  “What is your real life?”

  He thought about it and said, “It’s an endless search for true love. How about yours?”

  I gritted my teeth and, through sheer force of will, sucked a blush back from my skin. “I don’t really believe in love,” I said. “I think my life is an endless search for the guilty party.”