THE UP AND COMER

by Howard Roughan

"Probably not."

  Gwen did a minor panic. "You're kidding me; is anything missing? Did he take anything?"

  Added was more like it.

  "No, nothing's missing, Gwen. It's okay."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yeah, I'm sure."

  "If he comes by a second time and doesn't have any ID, can I kick him in the balls?" she asked.

  "Be my guest."

  Gwen left, and I opened up my briefcase again and took out the picture. I held it in my hands, staring at it. So this was how it was going to be. Tyler Mills was not about to disappear from my life so easily. Don't overreact, I told myself, he's merely screwing with you, the same way he screwed with all those people and their cell phones. What did he tell you eventually happened? That's right, the novelty wore off. He got bored and moved on to his next little caper. The next scheme.

  I had gotten myself into another type of staring contest. Feeling the strain as I may have been, I still wasn't about to blink.

  FOURTEEN

  Let the games begin.

  That Monday at the office saw a barrage of none-too-subtle missives via e-mail and fax. Josephine, sitting at her post in the reception area, had been gracious enough to supply Tyler with all the contact information he needed. As far as she knew, the polite guy claiming to be updating his files on the other end of the line was a representative from the very official sounding MFA. Otherwise known as "the Manhattan Following of Attorneys," she was told.

  Clever, Tyler. Very clever.

  The faxes came every hour on the hour. Never from the same location. The Wall Street Officenter. The Kinko's by Astor Place and later the one up on West Fifty-fourth. The Copy Quest on First Avenue. After Gwen handed me the first one with a curious look, I made sure to get all the rest on my own. It was sort of Pavlovian. I'd hear the distant ring of the office's main fax machine and off I would go — doing my nonchalant best to get to the machine before anyone else.

  Sometimes the faxes were as simple as a single page with a huge dollar sign on it. Other times they were more involved, like the one with the complete lyrics to the song "Every Breath You Take" by the Police written out in longhand, with the line "….I'll be watching you" in all caps. And still other times they were copies of the actual photographs of me and Jessica, too blurry and distorted by the fax machine to be comprehended by anyone else around the office besides myself. Precisely what Tyler wanted, I was convinced. This was about giving me the proper scare, you see, not giving me up.

  Yet.

  As for the e-mails, he sent them in bunches, one right after the other. The messages themselves were blank. Instead, he used the subject heading of each message to string together little warnings for me in my inbox. For example:

  Sender

  Subject

  randall_shadow@yahoo.com

  YOU

  randall_shadow@yahoo.com

  CAN RUN

  randall_shadow@yahoo.com

  BUT

  randall_shadow@yahoo.com

  YOU CAN'T

  randall_shadow@yahoo.com

  HIDE,

  randall_shadow@yahoo.com

  PHILLY….

  Granted, as intimidating messages go, what Tyler had to say lacked a certain originality. The Hemingway of harassment he was not. However, the way in which he delivered them had enough of a Big-Brother-cum-modern-day spin element to render me more than a little uncomfortable. Especially after I would block his address from Yahoo and a short time later there would be more e-mails from him through a different Web browser. If it wasn't Excite, it was Lycos. If it wasn't HotBot, it was AltaVista. And so on.

  The whole thing was silly. The whole thing was surreal. The whole thing was also something else entirely… getting to me. Tyler was proving himself to be quite relentless.

  Then, come midweek, he branched out from my office.

  "Someone's been calling and hanging up all day" was Tracy's greeting for me when I walked through the door at home that Wednesday night.

  Splendid.

  "Do they say anything?" I asked, trying to quell my sudden surge of anxiety.

  "No, they just hang up after I say hello."

  "You should've taken the phone off the hook."

  "I would have except I was supposed to hear back on a freelance job today," she said. "Thankfully, the calls stopped a while back, though it was pretty annoying at the time."

  "I'll bet."

  She walked over and gave me a quick kiss. "How was your day?"

  "Uneventful," I told her. Unless, that is, you would consider eventful my being held hostage by a fax machine while at the same time scrambling to delete hordes and hordes of e-mail messages off the system as fast as possible. "How was your day?"

  "Fine," said Tracy. "I thought we'd order in tonight."

  "Okay by me."

  Half sausage and pepperoni, the other half broccoli and capers. The usual. You get one guess as to which half was mine and which half was hers. I was deciding whether or not to have one more slice when the doorbell rang.

  "I'll get it," said Tracy.

  I jumped up. "No, I'll get it."

  He had slipped in behind another tenant, I told myself. Probably Mr. Hullen from the third floor. As we had no doorman, most everyone in the building was conscious about letting strangers in. Mr. Hullen, on the other hand, was barely conscious. He was a sixties holdover with the tie-dyed shirts to prove it. I was pretty sure he once had an acid flashback while riding with me in the elevator. Not only would he let Tyler in, he'd probably hold the door for him.

  I looked through the peephole.

  The distorted face I saw was not Tyler's. It belonged to our neighbor Sarah Prescott, queen of affectation. Her loft occupied the other half of the floor. The year before, Architectural Digest had done a spread on her minimalist approach to interior design and how it had become all the rage among New York-based Hollywood. She had been pretty much unbearable ever since.

  "Hello, Sarah," I said, opening the door.

  "Philip, Philip, Philip," she began, "I am soooooo, so sorry to intrude upon you like this; I trust you and your lovely wife have been well. I'm doing wonderfully, thank you."

  "Would you like to come in?" I asked her.

  "Oh, no, noooooo, that won't be necessary. You see, I simply came by to drop this off for you."

  I looked down to see what "this" was. In Sarah's hand was a plastic bag, and I watched as she pulled out its rectangular contents.

  "I hope you don't mind terribly that I took a look-see," she said, "but when the delivery boy said you weren't home and tried to leave it with me, I had to make sure what on earth it was."

  What it was was a videotape. She handed it to me.

  "I don't know about you," Sarah blabbed on, "but I just think Cary Grant was the epitome of style. Did you ever see that delicious home he lived in?"

  I didn't hear her. I was too busy flipping over what I realized to be a movie cassette rental. The movie? An Affair to Remember.

  Clever, Tyler. Very clever.

  "What is it, honey?" I heard from the kitchen.

  "A mix-up, I'm afraid," I said.

  "Oh, hello, Sarah," said Tracy, appearing from around the corner.

  "Why, don't you look smashing as ever, darling," said Sarah.

  "And you as well," lied Tracy.

  Tracy grabbed the tape out of my hand. "Oh, I love this movie!" she announced.

  "I know, isn't it the best?" said Sarah.

  "Let's watch it tonight, Philip," Tracy said.

  "We're not even supposed to have it," I said. I looked on the box to see where it came from. "A-1 Movie on the Run," I read, "has made some kind of mistake."

  "In our favor," said Tracy. "Would you like to stay and watch it with us, Sarah?"

  "That is so, soooooo generous of you, but I can't, I truly can't." She lowered her voice and glanced to either side. "I'm supposed to meet with Bobby De Niro in the morning to discuss his new apartment, and there remains a great deal of w
ork to be done by me in preparation."

  The scary thing was, she was probably telling the truth.

  And that's how it came to be. My spending the next two hours of my life, a life that I was slowly losing control over, watching An Affair to Remember with Tracy. Talk about a night to forget.

  After the credits rolled, Tracy got ready for bed while I read Robb Report in the living room. The phone rang. Telling Tracy I would get it, I walked over to the portable sitting on an end table.

  "Hello?"

  "Did you enjoy the movie?" came his voice.

  I hit the off button on the phone so hard and fast I nearly broke my thumb.

  "Was it another hang-up?" Tracy called out from the bedroom.

  "Yep," I called back. I was about to turn the phone back on to leave it off the hook when it rang again.

  "Listen to me, you motherfucker," I said into the receiver. There was more where that intro came from, and I was about to deliver it all when a voice interrupted me. It was a guy's and it was familiar. The problem being that it wasn't Tyler's.

  "Fucking hello to you too, Philip!" said Menzi.

  Whoops.

  I apologized to Menzi and explained that we'd been getting some crank calls. He recommended caller ID, and I told him that it was a really good idea. Which it was.

  "Hope I'm not calling too late," Menzi said.

  "Not at all," I assured him.

  "Good. Listen, tomorrow night, you free?"

  "Why, what's up?"

  "Standard revelry. Lewd and lascivious behavior, public drunkenness, your basic misdemeanors. I've already lined up Connor and Dwight. You in?"

  I didn't need to think about it. "Absolutely," I told him.

  Absolutely anything to free my mind of Tyler.

  FIFTEEN

  Dwight showed up sporting this moussed-up coif that was perhaps only an inch short of being a pompadour. Menzi let him have it right away.

  "Hey, Dwight?" he said.

  "Hey, what?"

  "Wayne Newton called; he wants his hair back."

  Big laughs from Connor and me. Dwight, meanwhile, didn't see the humor. Besides, he was too busy preparing a retaliatory strike. It started with looking up at Menzi's receding hairline. Said Dwight, "Least I'm gonna have hair in a couple of years, you putz."

  Tough crowd. Surviving the taunts and ribbing of your guy friends wasn't that different from political campaigning. If you didn't respond quickly and decisively against anything negative, you were dead in the water.

  Another guys' night out had begun, and I was concentrating my hardest on having some worry-free fun. The scene was the Temple Bar, down on Lafayette Street. And I do mean scene.

  "Christ! Check out the Venetian on her," said Dwight, causing the rest of us to look at a blonde walking by our stakeout at the bar. "Venetian," of course, referred to the horizontal blind-like ripple caused by the tug of a tight T-shirt between a woman's ample breasts. That Dwight could not only take notice of such a phenomenon but also have a term for it was what made him a truly unique specimen of a male. If he had any sense of duty to country, he would leave his brain to science.

  As a group, particularly in the presence of alcohol and pretty women, the four of us weren't much into discussing earnest matters. Though with a few drinks under our belts, we got as close as we were capable of getting. In all seriousness, or so he claimed, Menzi wanted to know how Connor felt about Jessica's not taking his last name when they married. The question took Connor by surprise.

  "What do you mean, like, was I upset?" he asked.

  Menzi nodded. "Yeah, does it ever bother you?"

  Connor started to fidget with a cocktail napkin. He was either thinking or stalling.

  "You could always plead the Fifth, Connor," I said to fill the void.

  "God, I hate lawyers," Dwight muttered under his breath.

  "No, I was merely trying to decide how best to explain it," said Connor to me. He turned to Menzi. "Let me ask you a question. You've met Jessica, right?"

  "Sure, a few times," Menzi said.

  "You've talked to her, gotten to know her a little bit?" said Connor.

  "Pretty much."

  "So you'd say you have a fairly good sense of what type of person she is?"

  "I guess so."

  "Okay, then let me ask you a question. Does it surprise you that Jessica didn't take my last name?"

  Menzi's brow furrowed. "When you put it that way, no."

  "Me either," said Connor. He took a sip of his drink.

  "Wait, you didn't answer my question," Menzi said.

  "You mean whether it bothered me that Jessica didn't take my last name? The answer is no, it didn't. The reason is this: if something doesn't surprise me, it very rarely manages to bother me."

  We all fell silent for a moment.

  "Shit, that was kind of deep," remarked Dwight.

  "Very deep," I concurred.

  "Fuckin' Grand Canyon," said Menzi. "That settles it right there; the next two rounds are definitely on me."

  As we continued to drink ourselves drunk, I found myself thinking about Connor… how his mind seemed to work, and his background. While I didn't know a lot about his childhood spent up in Providence, I knew that, like me, his upbringing was decidedly middle-class. Unlike me, though, he never felt he Was really deserving of anything more. At least that was the sense I got. Connor was thankful for his lot in life. He said he had "fallen into" being a software programmer and never thought he'd ever be making the good money that he was. When I asked him once if he dreamed about starting his own company one day, he looked at me as if I had three heads. "I just like writing code," he said.

  His was a passive presence. There was nothing outwardly aggressive or confrontational about Connor's personality. Which is not to say he wouldn't openly disagree with you, or find a back door through which to provoke you, only that he rarely, if ever, seemed to get emotional about things. The one exception, of course, was when he had confided in me about Jessica and how distant she was being with him. That wasn't cool, calm logic speaking that evening. No, that was something else altogether. That was his love for her.

  Yet, as much as knowing that weighed on my conscience, I couldn't wait to get back together with Jessica. I couldn't help it. I missed her smell and the feel of her hair, cool to the touch. I missed the way she came, her back arching slowly like a drawbridge going up. I missed her keeping me clued in on her twelve-month plan to usurp that "bitch of a boss" of hers and head up the ad sales department at Glamour. Most of all, I missed the way I felt when I walked out of that hotel room after being with her. Utterly and completely saturated with life.

  I stood to go to the bathroom. With one step I knew I was loaded.

  Leaning against the wall at the urinal, I started to get that prickly feeling from head to toe. It was my bloodstream's way of telling me that the party was over. Shuffling to the sink, I stared into the mirror that hung above it. I pretty much looked the way I felt.

  Cold water time.

  After three handfuls to the face, I turned off the faucet and began to wipe my eyes. I opened them and my pupils flared.

  Tyler was standing against the wall behind me.

  I turned and he was gone — or had never been there — it didn't make a difference. I knew what was happening. Knew all too well. Tyler Mills had gotten inside my head.

  SIXTEEN

  In my bachelor days before Tracy, I met this young, pretty thing named Melissa late one Saturday night at the Bubble Lounge. Within the first few minutes of our conversation she made a point of telling me that she was once almost "Miss November" in Playboy, having ultimately lost out to, quote, this bitch from Texas. With that, I was treated to a dissertation on the whole gestalt of posing nude.

  "The Southern girls always get the centerfold," Melissa insisted. "Especially if you're from that lonely star state."

  "Lone star," I corrected her.

  "What?"

  "Never mind." At that point I
was pretty sure the Alamo to her was a rental car company.

  Melissa went on. "It's the same with beauty pageants. Did you ever notice how many times Miss Texas goes on to win Miss America?"

  I hadn't, I told her.

  "It's like a conspiracy or something. Men seem to have this thing in their pants for girls from Texas. Why is that?" Melissa asked.

  "Probably because they've never had the privilege of getting to know you better," I answered.

  She blushed. I was in.

  After taking Melissa back to my place for the night, however, I made an error in judgment the following morning. Lying next to me was this beautiful girl who, most likely because of her minimum-wage background, lacked any real measure of refinement. As if conducting some kind of sociological experiment, I decided on the spot to see how much impact a mass infusion of culture could have on her. It was very My Fair Lady of me, minus the wager.

  In the weeks that followed, we MoMAed and Guggenheimed, truffled and foie gras-ed, and collected more Playbills than I would care to own up to. The "Appreciation of the Finer Things in Life Tour," I dubbed it. All of it on me. Mind you, I didn't really have the deepest of pockets back then. Anything for science, though, right? Besides, I was getting laid on a nightly basis.

  Anyway, after about a month, I took Melissa to the symphony at Avery Fisher Hall. Beethoven and Wagner. Very heavy. To that point my little experiment had shown mixed results. For example: while she had learned that her bread plate was always to her left, she was still pronouncing the g in gnocchi. (Ga-no-key, she would say.) Like Rome, Melissa would not. be built in a day. That evening, I discovered that she would not be built at all. It happened during the intermission. Amid an elbow-to-elbow crowd of well-heeled ladies and gents, she asked me, after looking up from her program, if Wagner was any relation to the actor Robert Wagner. ("Because I just loved him in that Hart to Hart TV series," she added.) I, for one, was perfectly willing to dispense with any discussion of German pronunciation and simply answer that there was no relation between the two men. Unfortunately, there were these two women to our left who had overheard Melissa and felt the need to laugh and whisper in each other's ear. That really got Melissa's Bronx up. Without hesitation she turned to them and asked, "What the fuck is so funny?!" She then turned back to me and waited for her boyfriend to step in and stick up for her. I didn't. Not that I was embarrassed. It was more like I was having an out-of-body experience, paralyzed and capable only of watching, not acting. That's when Melissa let me have it. Profanity, tears, finger-pointing. All of it pretty much bouncing off of me except for one part, the moment when she screamed at the top of her lungs, "YOU MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A FUCKING PROSTITUTE, YOU ASSHOLE!" Finally, before storming off and never being heard from again, she threw her drink in my face. Apparently word had failed to reach her that such a stunt was only performed in the movies.