Super in the City

by Daphne Uviller

  I plopped down on the stoop and rubbed at a blister that was starting to sprout over my big toe. A noisy, stilettoed, bridge- and- tunnel crowd teetered up the block in low- slung jeans serving up healthy rolls of waist. Imported muffin tops. I had always wanted to congratulate the woman who first refused to let anorexic models stake a claim on those jeans, the pioneer who let her belly flop over the top and declared, “Ladies, follow my lead!”

  And then I thought, Yes. Let me be like her. Let me be like the woman who would not buy the classic cut. I will not be embarrassed by this odd hiccup in my life. Yes. I am twenty- seven and I have a B.A. worth a hundred grand and I dropped out of medical school and I biffed on law school and my friends are all prematurely successful in their worthwhile, absorbing careers, and I am frightening my parents and maybe even myself with my aimlessness.

  But I would go a different route. I would be the person who cheerfully went with the flow, who didn’t just make lemonade out of lemons, but who invented a new kind of lemonade and not only won the ribbon for her nectar at the county fair, but licensed it to the U.S. government so that it became the only drink NASA would stock aboard their shuttles. I would create a beverage worthy of a moon landing.

  FOUR

  MERCEDES WAS LAUGHING AT ME SHE WAS DRINKING MY Chock Full o’Nuts, eating my frozen waffles, and laughing at me for not knowing the difference between a Phillips head and a flathead.

  “Haven’t you ever had to open, like, I don’t know, anything? Ever?” We were in my kitchen the morning after James’s arrest, surveying the contents of a grimy tool kit my dad had dug up and earnestly presented to me as a first- day-on- the- job- I- never- wanted gift. I told him that even secular humanists were entitled to observe Sunday as a day of rest. He laughed and went back upstairs to the lox spread that was rightfully mine.

  I stuck my tongue out at Mercedes.

  “You know not to lick electrical sockets with that bad boy, yes?”

  “Who the hell is Phillip?” I crabbed, taking a waffle off her plate and sinking down on the step stool. My plan to be a good sport about my life’s new path was temporarily on hold. Mrs. Hannaham had called at seven- fifteen that morning to tell me she smelled something. I had always considered myself a morning person, but I now understood that I was a morning person only when the morning’s activities consisted of lying in bed reading.

  “What kind of smell, Mrs. Hannaham?” I had croaked, squinting at the Mickey Mouse clock I’d kept alive since the fourth grade.

  “Gas, I think. I definitely smell smoke.”

  “They’re pretty different. Could you tell me more?”

  “You mean you don’t smell it? James could always smell what I smelled.”

  So that was how it was going to be.

  “Oh, that smell,” I said, yawning.

  “What did you say? I can’t hear you.”

  I pulled the comforter down from my face.

  “I said, ‘Oh, that smell.’ I smell it now. Like gas or smoke?”

  “Yes!” she replied triumphantly.

  “I’ll go to the basement right now and check it out.”

  “The basement? It’s not coming from the basement.”

  I sighed, wondering whether we’d have to play twenty questions every time she concocted a problem.

  “Right. I’ll come to your apartment?” I asked with dread.

  “My apartment! You will not enter my apartment. There’s no need to enter my apartment unless it’s an emergency.”

  I declined to point out the love affair between smoke and emergencies. I waited for my next clue.

  “You might,” she said, as if the thought had just dawned on her, “want to pay a visit to Miss Roxana.”

  Where Mrs. Hannaham was a meddling, grudge- bearing scarecrow of a widow who had probably been involuntarily celibate for the majority of her life, Roxana Boureau was a lithe, von Furstenberg-clad natural blond widow whose outrageous but genuine French accent oozed sex. Unlike Mrs. H. and her precious Compton, Roxana never mentioned Monsieur Boureau and, also unlike Mrs. H., she mostly minded her own business. She worked out of her apartment, buying and selling on eBay, though what she sold, nobody knew. I asked her once and she answered, with an elegantly dismissive wave that I could only dream of perfecting, “Oh, you know, zees and zat.” She never complained and always kept a sprig of fresh flowers hanging outside her door, which eternally endeared her to my mother. She looked like she was in her late thirties, but, seeing as she was born knowing how to turn a steady diet of Brie and Cabernet into a skin renewal system, she was probably a decade older.

  Mrs. Hannaham, not particularly generous of spirit to begin with, wasn’t inclined to make any exceptions for her fellow widow. I had heard her occasional barbed remarks concerning Roxana’s apparently thriving love life—“Let’s just install a revolving door, for goodness sake”—but I hadn’t realized that she’d harassed her via James. Embezzler though he might be, I was already missing him and his unsung diplomatic skills.

  As soon as I hung up, I promptly fell asleep. The phone rang again a half hour later.

  “Well?” Mrs. Hannaham’s forever- Queens accent punched holes through the remnants of a lovely dream involving George Clooney, me, and a hot- air balloon.

  “Helium!” I yelled, trying to clear my head.

  “Helium! Did you call the fire department?”

  I managed to distract Mrs. H. from her nascent plan to ruin my life by spouting some partially accurate facts about the lightest known element on the periodic table. It was only after I hung up that it dawned on me that had she in fact smelled smoke, I could well have had the worst first day on a job in history and lost my home in the bargain.

  So my plan to make space- worthy lemonade had soured by the time Mercedes showed up an hour later, spurring summer on with a tank top and shorts over her long body beaded mini dreds bouncing around her face. She was irritatingly energetic, ready to help me take on the world even though I just wanted her to let me complain for a while.

  Mercedes Kim was my Black Friend. She was all of the Sterling Girls’ Black Friend, and if she was particularly ornery after an afternoon battling Shostakovich, she would sometimes make us call her that. On the first day of high school, the ninth- graders, all of us new, joined the upperclassmen in unintentionally segregating ourselves (brochure photos of mingling students notwithstanding). But not Mercedes. The girl with the Latina first name—chosen by her father, who, among his many pernicious acts (including stealing her identity fifteen years after abandoning her), named her for his favorite car—and the Asian last name—courtesy of her beloved stepfather, who adopted her and played Schubert’s String Quartet in C Major for her and thus, like a dealer in a schoolyard, got her hooked forever—had carried her tray over and sat down at the table where I huddled with Abigail, trying to remain unnoticed.

  She threaded her legs around the bench and announced, “I didn’t get a full scholarship to this place just to hang out with morons bragging about how wasted they got every night in the Hamptons this summer.” I was so in awe of her courage to denounce the people I was already scared of that all I could do was remain silent. Abigail gripped the edge of her tray and stared at something on the floor beyond our table. But during the next hour, despite the cafeteria cacophony that always sounds like everyone is talking about something you’ll never be let in on, Mercedes turned our nervous silence into a comfortable one. By the end of that first week, Lucy and Tag had found us, and we five never ate lunch apart for the next four years.

  “None of this is going to help you open the garbage thing,” Mercedes said now, snatching back her waffle from my hand. “We need to find the key or call a locksmith.”

  My first on- the- job challenge, after resisting strangling Mrs. H., had presented itself in the form of the garbage lock-boxes, three wooden containers lined up in the alley beside the building. Monday, as we were beginning to smell, was garbage day, and James had the only set of keys to the padlocks.


  I stomped over to the bookshelf, pulled out the yellow pages, and plopped them on top of the toolbox.

  “Wait a minute, chickie. Locksmiths charge as much as plumbers and electricians. You’re sure no one else has a set of keys?”

  I shook my head.

  “What about looking in James’s apartment?”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. Police tape was strung like birthday banners across his door. “It’s probably locked.”

  “You think people remember to lock up and turn off the lights and fold back the bedspread after the cops bust in and take ‘em to the clink?”

  “Listen to you, Shawshank.”

  “Seriously. It’s probably unlocked and, you know, if he left the lights on …”

  My own dim bulb started to flicker. “It’s my responsibility to make sure we’re not wasting the building’s resources.”

  “What if the water’s running?” Mercedes said, all wide-eyed innocence.

  “Mrs. H. said she smelled something! If his apartment was on fire, there’s no way I wouldn’t be allowed in …”

  Mercedes strode through my living room to the front door. I scampered after her out onto the landing. She put her hands on her slim hips and nodded for me to open the door.

  “Why me? It was your idea,” I whispered.

  “Because it should be your fingerprints,” she hissed back.

  “Fingerprints! Fingerprints doesn’t sound good!” I started to back into my apartment, but Mercedes grabbed my arm.

  “Open the frigging door, moron.” I briefly thought about the night before, when Tag had called me a fuckwad, and wondered if maybe we hadn’t all gotten a little too familiar with each other.

  I quickly looked up and down the stairs and then tried the handle, hoping it would be locked. It gave way immediately and I jumped back. Even Mercedes looked surprised. The door creaked open slowly as we peered through the crisscrossed tape.

  In the ten years he’d been our super, I’d never been inside James’s apartment, not even after I’d moved downstairs from my childhood home. If I needed something, I called him or knocked on his door and waited for him to come to my place. From where we stood, it didn’t look like a split personality’s dwelling. It was tidy, if a little dark, well appointed and sleek, if a bit unoriginal. Black leather sofa set, chrome- and- glass coffee table, giant flat- screen TV, plush gray carpeting. Every thing screamed Bachelor Pad.

  I looked at Mercedes. She put her nose in the air and sniffed. “I definitely smell something.” She was not letting me off the hook, and if I was going to be honest with myself, I was starting to get a little excited about the prospect of sanctioned snooping. The police tape was everywhere, but it had been hastily and loosely strung up. I straddled one banner, ducked under another and … I was in.

  Being in someone else’s home alone was the ultimate test of restraint. Or rather, the ultimate test of my restraint. If I had been a dog, I’d have raced in and sniffed every corner. Rooted through the garbage, pawed at the drawers, jumped on the beds. It was only the painstaking evolution of human behavior—and its technological offspring, the nanny- cam—that kept me from opening people’s refrigerators, their desk drawers, their medicine cabinets. (Snooping through Hayden’s apartment didn’t count as a transgression—that had been an act of self-preservation.)

  I stood in the middle of James’s living room. Looking out his window was a slightly itchy experience because the view was just past what I could see out my own window, like being able to see beyond the borders of a photograph. He could see right into the lobby of the apartment building across the street, whereas I could just glimpse the door opening and closing and the occasional flash of the doorman’s brown- and- gold uniform. His window only had the outermost branches of Mrs. Hannaham’s apple tree in front of it, but my view was cluttered by leaves in the summer.

  I wasn’t the only one titillated by unfettered access. Mercedes was on her tiptoes, leaning as far through the tape as she could without actually entering the apartment.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, just come in,” I told her. “Help me look for the keys.”

  Mercedes put her feet down flat and backed away. “I’m not taking any chances. If Denzel could get pulled over by police, then I can, too.”

  “You, my friend, are no Denzel Washington. And it wasn’t him, it was some other guy. You should keep your peeps straight.”

  “Don’t say ‘peeps,’ cracker. If you don’t start looking around, I’m leaving.”

  “Okay, okay! Don’t go!” I decided to check the kitchen drawers first, since in my apartment that was where I kept spare keys, expired coupons, and a protractor that had stayed with me since eighth grade geometry class. I practically tiptoed down the hall.

  “Do you see anything?” Mercedes stage- whispered.

  “Other than the dead body?”

  Annoyed silence.

  “No, nothing yet.” I tentatively pulled out a drawer. Flat ware! The next drawer had … a bottle opener! I opened some equally unrevealing cabinets with a growing fear/excitement that I’d be required to look around the rest of the apartment. I now knew that James had only four plates, none of which matched, though he had four shelves loaded with glasses.

  I opened his refrigerator. An unremarkable jumble of stained take- out containers, crusty condiments, and a stash of film and batteries took up most of the space. But the bottom shelf made my breath catch. On one side were ten perfectly aligned bottles of Brooklyn Lager while the other held ten equally organized jars of Marmite, that noxious, dun- colored yeast spread, beloved only by Brits and likely the real cause of the Revolutionary War.

  Here was my first encounter with a psychopath’s refrigerator. It made me revise my developing theories about who the real James was. After last night, I had assumed that the British accent was the act, or the secondary persona, but now I wondered. What if no psych researcher had ever done a study of multiple personality patients’ refrigerators? Maybe I had before me a crucial diagnostic tool. How many new credits would I need to apply for a doctorate in psychology? I had my dissertation right in front of me. It could be a breakthrough in mental health studies …

  “Zeph?” Mercedes sounded nervous.

  I quickly shut the refrigerator door.

  “Nothing in the kitchen. I’m going to the bedroom.”

  “Okaaay.”

  “What, you think I shouldn’t?” I hustled back to the front door, where Mercedes was still standing guard.

  “No, I think you should hurry up.” She paused. “Did you find anything?”

  “Mismatched plates and ten jars of Marmite.”

  “What?”

  “Marmite!” I was getting antsy and energized. A breeze blew through the apartment, bringing with it the stench of garbage from the holds below, and I realized the window had been left open all night. I went to shut it, kneeling on the comfy window seat James had built for himself. I thought of window seats as furniture for pensive, sedentary people, not psychotic supers. Maybe when he was done caulking the leak in the water heater, the British James took over and read sonnets aloud to himself, looking outside and conjuring up the windblown cliffs of Dover.

  James had a small fireplace. On his marble mantel were some girly- looking scented candles that accounted for the spicy smell of the living room, and two framed photographs sitting side by side. An innocuous family reunion photo of old aunts with stale smiles gathered on an anonymous porch? A big- haired, underdressed girlfriend? Some slovenly buddies with cans of beer and a big fish on a dock? Oh, how I wished.

  They were two identical photos of James. Just James. Big, smiling, identical portraits of just James grinning out at his apartment. Flanked by candles, like a shrine.

  “Euww! Euw, euw. Euwwwwww!” Shivers propelled me back toward the front door.

  “What?!” Mercedes poked her head through the tape. “What euw?!”

  “Photos.”

  “Of… ?” I watched her imagination run
wild.

  “Himself.”

  “Naked?”

  “No! But just him, two photos of just him. And they’re the same photo.”

  “What!” At that, Mercedes climbed over the tape and headed for the hearth. She stood openmouthed at the little alter ego altar. Mercedes’s firm presence and the discovery of the all- bets- are- off photo gallery made me relax. I uncurled my toes, brought my shoulders down from my ears, and started moving through the apartment with more confidence. My parents owned this place. James was a crook. I had a mission. If I didn’t look at the yellow police tape, there was nothing wrong with this picture.

  Keys, I reminded myself firmly I needed to find the keys to the garbage hold. I was not snooping.

  I left Mercedes to gawk at the pictures and headed for James’s bedroom. The stench hit me the second I opened the door. The room smelled like guy. Not the good guy smell, not the kind that makes you think of the spot on his neck where the hair ends in a barber’s neat line, and smooth, innocent skin beckons for a nuzzle. Not the smell that makes you think of tendony tan wrists and a T-shirt hanging just the right way off a trim back. No. This was the smell of yesterday’s boxers and last month’s sheets. Of solo sex and dank carpet. It brought to mind hair- clogged razors, and toothpaste splatters on the mirror.

  I held my breath and picked my way across the sticky carpet, trying not to step on the piles of tangled clothes emitting deadly fumes. The nightstand was strewn with tattered Hustlers fighting for space with pulp- encrusted juice glasses. I grimaced and peered under the bed. It was home to dust bunnies and a bowl with once- soggy cornflakes stuck to the sides. Gingerly, I pulled out a couple of plastic bins that looked promising, but they yielded only boxes of screws, nails, tape, and tape measures.

  I stood up and opened one of the two closet doors. Or tried to. I gave it another tug before realizing it was locked. A locked closet in a criminal’s—well, an alleged criminal’s—home. What was in there? If I pried open the door and discovered stacks of crisp hundred- dollar bills, would my ethics withstand the test? Here I was, living a life of comfort and health and good fortune. Still, I was pretty sure I might try taking a stack of bills. In my defense, though, after I’d allotted a budget for a ten-minute—no, fifteen- minute—chair massage at a local nail salon once a week—no, once a month; no, once a week—I would do really good things with that money. Rescue abandoned dogs, fund Doctors Without Borders, take out full- page ads warning all women not to date Hayden Briggs.