“Yeah,” I answered.
“Um …” came a male voice.
I perked up. “Oh, hello?” I ran the voice through my audio inventory, first stop Hayden. Hayden?
“This is Gregory Samson.”
My bra rose up, my thighs grew a shade tanner.
“Hi!” I said. “How are you?” I chirped. I was glad that, in my official capacity as super, I’d thought to scrawl my phone number on an old hardware store receipt for spackle and caulking.
“Fine. I was wondering if you were free tonight,” he said brusquely.
I looked in the mirror to see if my reflected self knew what to make of this.
Gregory’s tone was rude, though I reminded myself that some people were challenged by phone performance. And even though this wasn’t the 1950s and it was perfectly cool for a woman to admit she didn’t have plans for a Saturday night, I was still offended.
“Did you suddenly remember a corner you forgot to spray?” I said meanly, and regretted it instantly. Why were Gregory and I—ooh, that sounded nice—so snippy toward each other?
He said nothing.
“Actually, I’m about to head out. What’s up?” I tried to sound lighthearted.
“I wanted to see if you’d have dinner with me, but forget it.”
I sighed loudly. What a pain in the ass. But at least we were dispensing with game- playing. Except that I liked the game-playing.
“Look, I’m sorry, but you just asked me kind of… abruptly.”
“So come out to dinner and teach me some manners.” Again, this Jewish exterminator was confounding me. Was he obnoxious or refreshingly direct? Sexy in his confidence or a geek with no social graces?
Just then, someone pressed hard on the intercom buzzer, someone else threw something at my window, and, just in case I didn’t know my friends had arrived, Tag bellowed my name from downstairs. If he was going to be direct, so was I.
“How about you come over here tomorrow afternoon and help me figure out what’s wrong with my parents’ dryer, and then I’ll take you out to coffee?” I held my breath. What kind of alternative mating dance was this? Fumigation and busted dryers?
“It’s a deal.”
I raised my eyebrows in surprise.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
This relationship was never going to work.
“See you tomorrow at…” I did a quick calculation of how good the night might be, and how late I’d want to sleep, “noon.”
“ Twelve- thirty,” he said. What a creep.
“Twelve thirty- five,” I rebutted and finally got a laugh out of him. I remembered what he looked like laughing and was suddenly eager to get through tonight so I could see him again.
I hung up and buzzed the girls in. Their faces fell when they saw my state of undress.
“No, no, I’m ready—see?” I stepped into my dress, and slid my feet into the Nine Wests I’d worn two weekends before.
Mercedes looked at me suspiciously. “You’re always ready twenty minutes early. What happened?”
I felt a rush of affection for my friend who knew me so well, followed by a twinge of irritation at being pigeon holed.
“I’m a minute behind,” I assured her, replacing a mismatched earring and putting my hair up one last time. “My mother called. About her dryer.” I looked at them to see what they thought of this.
“And did anyone else call?” Lucy asked shrilly.
I bent down and pretended to adjust my shoe. That afternoon on the landing outside the Caldwells’ apartment, Gregory had fished a twenty out of his wallet and accepted Lucy’s two ten- dollar bills with a puzzled expression. She and I then waged an exhausting battle of wits as we escorted Gregory to each of the seven apartments. The result was that the two of us chattered animatedly to each other and left no opportunity for Gregory to say anything. After he left, we finished sorting paperwork in James’s apartment, and the pink elephant in the corner of the living room grew pinker, until Lucy finally went home.
I didn’t know how to break the news to her. None of the Sterling Girls had ever been interested in the same guy: we had vastly different taste in men. I had weakly hoped that in the few days since I’d last seen Lucy, she’d gotten over her infatuation. Apparently, she’d been hoping the same for me.
I looked at her now, my tiny friend, standing in her electric blue halter dress, her sheen of blond hair brushing her bony shoulders.
“Gregory called,” I said carefully. Mercedes and Tag stopped making hurry- up noises, sensing a delicate matter at hand. They looked back and forth between us.
Lucy’s face fell, and I lost my courage.
“He said he noticed mouse holes in Mrs. Hannaham’s apartment. He wants to come back and stop them up.” The lie was worth it. Lucy relaxed and the whole evening veered back onto the right path.
“Who’s Gregory?” Mercedes asked.
“Oh, just this exterminator,” Lucy said disparagingly. She shouldn’t talk that way about my future husband, I thought before I could rein in my brain.
“Or an undercover cop,” I joked. Half joked.
“What!” Lucy was wide- eyed. And that, I realized, was my way out. If Gregory was investigating James’s embezzlement, he would of course need to talk to me regularly. Sometimes over lunch or dinner. And if later, we happened to fall in love-assuming we could first achieve a civil exchange—then Lucy would understand the natural progression. It wouldn’t be about him picking me over her after just one afternoon of spraying for vermin.
“Well, think about it. He doesn’t look like an exterminator. He might be an undercover cop checking out James’s background.”
“What exactly do exterminators look like?” Mercedes challenged, an instant member of Fumigators Against Stereo typing.
“Black,” Tag shot back at her. “They’re all black. Zephyr is secretly racist and thinks black people can’t do anything more than become exterminators. Or musicians.”
Mercedes abruptly put Tag in a headlock.
“Her hair!” Lucy and I shouted at Mercedes. “Don’t mess up her hair!” Mercedes let Tag up and studied her gorgeous tangle of black curls.
“As if anyone could do anything to that mop. Hey, wait, there’s a tapeworm dying in there …”
After a small scuffle, a round of last- minute peeing, and an extra application of deodorant, we eventually got ourselves out the door. As I locked my apartment, we heard the front door buzz open.
Senator, was my first thought when I saw the perfectly coiffed, gray helmet of hair ascending the stairs. The ‘do was followed by an impeccable, absurdly L.A. Confidential pinstripe suit and shiny black lace- up shoes.
He stopped abruptly when he saw us on the landing. He looked startled and then delighted.
“Well,” he said, giving each of us the once- over. His voice was oily, with a hint of the South, and he reeked of cigar smoke. As he appraised us, his smile grew. He was truly repugnant.
“Can we help you?” Tag scowled at him, her arms crossed.
His smile grew wider and he looked like an animal that could swallow us whole. “Why, yes, I do believe you can.” He looked at Mercedes. “You, in particular, could be a big, big help.” He turned to Lucy. “Although you could help me in many ways, too, my dear. How old might you be?”
“Meester Smeet? Meester Smeet?” Roxana hustled down the stairs and froze when she saw all of us.
“Aw, Zepheer, hallo.”
All I could think was, Roxana has a boyfriend! Roxana has a boyfriend! Finally, some dirt on Roxana.
Mr. Smith from Washington looked at her happily, as if she were about to tell him the dessert specials.
“Ah, well yis, Meester Smeet, zees iz my neighbor, I mean, my zooper, yis Zepheer?” She laughed throatily, but it caught halfway. “You and your friends are out for a night wiz duh town, no? Zees is Meester Smeet. We do zuh eBay togezer, yis? We must deescus a problem we are hafink wis zuh eBay. Come zees way Meester Smeet, rig
ht zees way!”
“But…” he protested, as she took his hand and led him upstairs. He looked longingly at us. “I was just making the acquaintance of these fine ladies.”
“Ew,” Mercedes said to his face.
A storm cloud instantly closed in on the senator.
“How dare you speak to me that way!” he sneered. “You little nigger!”
Roxana pulled him into her apartment, threw me a distraught look, and slammed the door.
The four of us stood in shocked silence.
Mercedes pressed her index finger to the bridge of her nose, as if she were thinking hard, but I knew it was a trick she’d developed at auditions to keep from crying.
Finally, Tag put her arm around Mercedes and said, “The thing is, you’re not little. You’re really very tall.”
SEVEN
OH, YOU WERE RIGHT, TAG,” LUCY COOED, SIPPING SOMETHING pink and frothy and lying back on a deck chair. She tossed one calf up in the air and seemed to be admiring her kneecap.
“I’m sorry, would you repeat that, please?” Tag demanded.
“You were really, really right,” Mercedes murmured, looking out from the safety of our little coterie, toward Soho House’s rooftop pool, which was filled with floating lily pads and candles, and surrounded by tiki torches and B-list celebrities. She downed a glass of champagne and exchanged it for a full one floating by on a waitress’s tray.
“This was the right move.”
After our appalling encounter with Roxana’s swine, none of us had been in the mood to crash the book party at Soho House, but Tag insisted that it would be the perfect anodyne. So we made our way reluctantly along the five blocks to the club, parsing the incident the whole way.
“He so clearly wasn’t a business partner, but why would she lie?” I said, sidestepping a delivery guy who was biking on the sidewalk to avoid the cobblestones.
“Wouldn’t you lie if he was the guy you were fucking?” Tag retorted.
“She’s in an abusive relationship,” Lucy concluded sadly. “We can get her help, you know.” We turned onto Gansevoort Street and a warm breeze greeted us.
“What we could get her is a hit man,” advised Mercedes. “But I don’t think he was her boyfriend. She’s smarter than that.”
“You don’t even know her,” I pointed out. “How do you know she’s smart? Just because she has a cute French accent?”
“And really great clothes,” Lucy added.
“I just want any woman to be smarter than that, okay?” Mercedes stopped short outside the microscopically marked door to Soho House and looked at us, annoyed. “Can we drop this? If we don’t, I’m going home.”
A PR chippie with a clipboard who was hovering at the red velvet rope—behind which exactly nobody was lined up—overheard Mercedes and suddenly looked anxious. Were four age-appropriate, correctly gendered pieces of eye candy about to turn their backs on her party?
“Ladies, ladies, wlcome!” she crowed, teetering on skinny legs and even skinnier stilettos. “You’re just in time! There’s almost no more room upstairs.” She tossed her slippery blond hair conspiratorially “Grab a goodie bag—there’s amazing stuff in there—and head up to the pool! Walter is serving up the best caipirinhas you have ever, ever tasted! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
Tiffany (why not?) shooed us inside and hustled us onto the elevator. As soon as the mirrored doors closed, we all started yelping with laughter.
“This is makeup karma for last weekend,” Tag said to me.
And now here we were, huddled together in a moonlit corner, with no one bothering us except for the circulating waiters who snuck glances at us, trying to assess whether we were important, as we speared their crab- filled dumplings. A morning talk show host, a tennis champ with his singer/songwriter girlfriend, and a pair of twin teenage stars with raccoon eye makeup all strolled by, smiling prophylactically at us in case we were important.
“Who’s this party for?” I asked Tag, as peals of laughter rose up from the bar.
“It’s for Renee Ricardo’s book,” she answered.
“She’s on some show?” Mercedes asked vaguely, her nimble fingers rapidly fingering a piece on air viola.
“One of the morning thingies.”
“Anyone know what the book is about?” I pressed, feeling a tad cretinous that someone had slaved away at an entire tome in order for us to suck down free seafood, and we didn’t even know the title.
“She’s a psychic,” Lucy informed us. “She does a segment every week on Hello, America!”
“You said you’d quit watching morning television,” Tag said suspiciously. “Learning to love your quiet spaces and all that.”
“My clients?” Lucy replied with the intonation of a seventh- grader stopping just short of “duh.” “They watch her. They say she’s really accurate.”
“Like?” the scientist prompted.
“Like, she predicted for this one woman that she would find a buyer for her line of handbags, and that the buyers would be an Indian couple. And they were, and they did!”
“And don’t you think that by airing what was essentially a promotion for the handbags, she was making the future happen?” Mercedes gently challenged.
“She acknowledges that in telling someone their future it of course helps shape it,” Lucy said defensively. “She’s very down to earth and realistic. But she predicts the sex of people’s babies—”
“ Fifty- fifty shot,” Tag interrupted.
“Look, I’m not Renee Ricardo’s lawyer! Go have your future told by her. If you dare,” Lucy added dramatically. She pointed to a kitschy gauze tent that was set up in a far corner of the roof.
“Oh, please.” Tag fluttered her hand at the suggestion and polished off her martini.
“I’ll go!” I volunteered, jumping up. A fortune- teller? Why hadn’t I gone to one before? Just because I was raised to believe only in what I could see, touch, taste, hear, smell, or prove, and that among my family and friends throwing money away on a hoax was a clear indication of a weak character?
But this was free! And the woman was on national tele vision—she must have a good track record, otherwise wouldn’t angry viewers demand she be taken off the air? She could tell me what I was going to do with my life. If I knew that I was going to relent and join the legal establishment in five years, then I could relax and enjoy being a super now. Or, at my college reunion, I could confidently say that I was taking time off to help my family and would be heading back to medical school. A fortune- teller could put the sugar in my lemonade.
“We’re supposed to keep a low profile, Zeph,” Tag reminded me ominously. “Or did you just love being chased out of the St. Regis?”
“Hey, I got chased out of the St. Regis, too!” said a deep, familiar voice. We all looked up and there, close enough to stroke the stubble on his perfect cheek, was the one and only Dover Carter smiling down at us from his awesome height.
I was used to seeing celebrities on the street, but I rarely looked them in the eye, because I wanted to demonstrate that we New Yorkers were sophisticated enough to grant them the privacy they sought… and I hoped one day to be rewarded for my self- restraint. Maybe I’d be doing some good deed like helping a family push their stalled car, when a celebrity—ideally Jill Amos from Getting Warmer—would fall into step beside me and together we’d push the car to a garage. Something sitcomishly funny would happen—a shoe lost in a pothole, uproarious miscommunication with the car’s owners—and we’d have a good belly laugh together, and then she would comment on how great it felt to be a real, regular person for a brief time, and our friendship would blossom as she sought refuge in my refreshingly unglamorous life. I’d introduce Jill to the Sterling Girls and we’d be the genuine friends she’d always wanted, refusing to be interviewed by the press and remaining reliably unimpressed by her fairy-tale lifestyle.
But if my current reaction to Dover Carter’s proximity was any indication, I had a long way to go before I quali
fied to become Jill Amos’s best friend. As I gazed up at the star of Last Call, The Ecstasy, and Who Needs Mo? and the voice of the kingly grasshopper in Squashed! my heart rate doubled and my vision narrowed.
Why was Dover Carter slumming it at a B-list bash? Dover Carter only made films that were historically or politically important. He showed up at Democratic fund- raisers and was unafraid to tout liberal ideals. He was the first guy in Holly wood to drive a Prius and install solar panels on the roof of his Malibu mansion. If someone had asked me for which movie star I’d most want to bear children, there was really only one answer. And now he was standing next to us, smiling sheepishly. I sank back down onto the lounge chair I’d been sharing with Lucy.
“Oh, yeah?” Tag looked up at him dubiously. “Why’d you get chased out?”
Lucy and I exchanged nervous glances. It was entirely possible that Tag had no idea who she was talking to.
“Paparazzi,” he said simply. No false modesty there. “You?”
Tag looked at him quizzically, trying to place him. Lucy and I groaned.
“We crashed the Princess of Spain’s birthday party.”
“Really?” Dover Carter said, crossing his arms and holding his elbows, a sweetly insecure gesture, like he was protecting himself. “Do you make a habit of doing that?”
“Yes,” Mercedes interjected. “We’re doing it now.”
Tag whirled around, furious. Mercedes shrugged and sipped her champagne.
“I’m glad you did.” Dover looked… shyly? … at Mercedes.
“Why?” Tag demanded. “You don’t know the first thing about us.”
Lucy and I watched mutely, like slow- witted spectators at a tennis match. I kept trying to think of something droll to offer up, but wisely continued to censor myself.
“Yes, I do,” the movie star said.
Oh, here it comes, I thought, already disappointed. A feeble pickup line revealing Dover Carter to be as gormless as the bulk of the single male population.
“You’re the third chair violist for the Philharmonic,” he said to Mercedes.
As exciting as it was to be in Dover Carter’s airspace, it was nearly as thrilling to see Tag speechless.
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