Super in the City

by Daphne Uviller

  “How could you possibly know that?” Lucy blurted out. He smiled at her, and she leaned back, as if the sheer force of his gaze required her to seek shelter.

  “I’m a groupie.” He spread his arms helplessly. “I try to schedule my shoots around your performances.”

  “You’re bullshitting us,” Tag said, recovering quickly.

  “ Ta- aag,” I managed to say.

  Dover Carter, to his everlasting credit, just laughed. “Well, I purposely skipped some of last season. Too much Rock and Shostakovich. Maybe it’s unoriginal, but I’m a Mozart man. I think you guys are better at it, too.”

  Mercedes nodded intently.

  “Rock?” I asked, bravely trying to be a part of this historic conversation.

  “Rachmaninoff,” Mercedes and Dover said together. I turned red.

  “Did you catch Josh Bell’s concerto? You think he’s the real thing or an overrated pretty boy?” Mercedes asked earnestly.

  And they were off. It would have been surreal, except that Dover seemed more in awe of Mercedes than she was of him. He was a genuine nerd, in the best sense. He knew the names and stats of nearly every member of the Philharmonic, savoring this bulk of largely unimportant information as if he were a baseball junkie. He knew who had joined when, and where they had played before, and what pieces they were best at. All he needed was trading cards.

  “Let’s check out that fortune- teller,” Tag said in an uncharacteristically considerate gesture.

  Mercedes and Dover didn’t notice the three of us sidling away.

  “Is that really happening?” I asked, looking back at one of my oldest friends in an intimate tête- à- tête with last year’s sexiest man of the year (according to scientifically rigorous periodicals).

  “Are we really going to a fortune- teller?” Tag asked disdainfully.

  “I am,” Lucy told her firmly “I need to know when I’m going to meet my soul mate.” She steeled herself. “I’m prepared for her to tell me it’s never going to happen. I’m strong. I’m independent. I’ll be okay.”

  Tag looked at me.

  “Aren’t you curious?” I asked sheepishly.

  Tag gave us a look of disgust and headed for the bar. Lucy and I got on line behind a square- jawed network weatherman who had a woman clinging to each arm.

  A warm breeze rolled across the roof deck, sending the Chinese lanterns fluttering, and blowing the women’s hair across their faces, making it catch in their lipstick. This made the three of them laugh riotously, and I imagined the women recounting the incident the next day to other friends and laughing again with equal gusto. I was on the verge of a moment of snobbish superiority—windblown hair is what these people find funny?—when one of the women caught my eye and gave me a sweet, conspiratorial smile that belied her high-pitched giggle. I decided she was savvier than anyone I knew and that she would probably be anchoring the evening news long before I learned how to fix a running toilet.

  I looked impatiently toward the front of the line and was rewarded by the sight of Adam Mason, one of my earliest objects of desire, emerging from the tent. He gave all of us waiting on line a thumbs- up and a white- toothed grin. I elbowed Lucy frantically, instantly awash in the same desperate longing I used to feel when I was ten, watching him cavort around a soundstage kitchen. Adam was not aging well, but Lucy clutched my hand and gasped, apparently also in thrall to our childhood crush. Dover Carter and Adam Mason, moonlight, free food, lily- pad- filled pool… this was turning into a stellar evening. And tomorrow I’d see Gregory. First- world moment approaching.

  After the weatherman and his arm candy made a quick trip into the tent together, a hand beckoned from inside, and I grew jittery. I was afraid of being outed as a party crasher for the second time in a month. I started to veer off the line, but an assistant pretty boy in tight black jeans parted the curtain and led me into the tent.

  Seated at a table covered in candles and a pile of books (at thirty percent off the cover price) was a woman I vaguely recognized from the sides of buses. She was plump—as plump as you could be and still hold a job on network television—with a red bob. She wore Mardi Gras beads and exuded an unthreatening, matronly aura. I could see why people believed what she told them.

  “I’m Renee Ricardo,” she said in a voice that was higher than I expected. “Thank you so much for coming out tonight to share my good fortune.” She gestured to a seat across the table. “Won’t you please sit down?”

  The chair was warm, and I indulged a tingle at the thought of Adam Mason’s molecules clinging to my dress.

  “Before you ask me your question, I’d like you to give me something to hold, preferably a piece of metal that’s always on your hand, maybe a ring or a watch. I can learn a lot about you from the energy.”

  So this was all going to be a circus act. Politely, I pulled off the garnet ring my parents had given me on my twenty- first birthday and handed it over. I wondered how fast I could get out of there without offending her.

  Renee held the ring between her palms in a prayer pose. I looked over at the assistant. He was thumbing through a copy of Renee’s book and chewing his fingernail.

  “I’m getting a vibration, but it’s not strong enough. Do you have anything else? Let’s try your watch.”

  I unclasped my watch, certain I was about to be outed as an imposter. It had to be the only Timex in the whole building.

  “Oh, much better,” she said with her eyes closed, smiling. “I’m getting a lot. You have a very solid character and that’s making this easy.”

  Well, I am pretty solid, I thought hopefully.

  “Your guides are speaking to me. I’m getting a very strong maternal voice. Do you have a mother or grandmother who just passed over?”

  “My aunt died this year!” I said excitedly.

  “Oh, boy, does she love you. She is watching over you and she is so happy about something.” I tried not to think about the fact that I had talked to my aunt about twice a year while she was alive.

  “She’s saying you recently switched jobs? Or, it’s hard to hear exactly… she thinks your current job is not exactly right for you.”

  Why hadn’t I gone to a fortune- teller before?

  “Both,” I shouted. The assistant looked over at us. I lowered my voice. “Both. I recently switched, well, yeah, switched jobs and I don’t think it’s the right job for me!” I could barely catch my breath.

  “Okay.” Renee opened her eyes and looked at me, smiling. “What would you like me to ask your aunt?”

  My mind was reeling. This was a momentous opportunity. What did I most need to know?

  How long will I be a super?

  Will I ever stop looking for Hayden?

  What am I going to be when I grow up?

  “Am I supposed to get involved with Gregory Samson?” I blurted out.

  Renee smiled at me.

  “Wait!” I said. “I don’t want that to be my one question.”

  “You can ask more than one question,” she said kindly.

  “I can?” I thought about how to phrase what I wanted to know without letting on that I was responsible for disposing of people’s garbage and had no right to be at her book party. “Am I ever going to … to … find work that makes me happy?”

  Renee closed her eyes again and furrowed her brow.

  I fidgeted. The assistant spit out some chewed- off fingernail and looked over at us.

  “Yes,” Renee said quietly. “You will be very happy. Some time soon, you will discover what it is you want to be doing—”

  “How soon?” I interrupted. Was I imagining it or did a look of impatience flicker across her foundation- saturated face?

  “In the next two years,” she said crisply. “And actually, you are going to spend your life with Gregory Samson. Con gratulations! Would you like to purchase a copy of my book at thirty percent off the cover price?”

  EIGHT

  AFTER JUST TWO WEEKS, I WAS ALREADY RESIGNED TO Mrs. Hann
aham’s wake-up calls. When the phone rang the next morning, I wondered whether the sententious “early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” had in fact been coined out of resignation: perhaps Ben Franklin just lived next door to Mrs. Hannaham’s annoying ancestors.

  “There are strange people going into her apartment,” Mrs. Hannaham croaked into my ear at seven- fifteen.

  My bladder was about to burst. I took the phone into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet.

  “I’m sorry, who’s speaking?” I couldn’t resist needling her.

  “Zephyr, this is Mrs. Compton Hannaham, your tenant on the garden level. What is that sound? Is something leaking?”

  I was leaking and I didn’t plan on stopping. I hoped my hearing was that good when I was her age.

  “It’s the faucet,” I told her. “I’m doing dishes.”

  “Make sure you use the Joy and not the Ivory. The Ivory doesn’t get the china as clean.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, thinking about my chipped IKEA “china.” I rested my elbows on my knees and closed my eyes.

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So there are strange people in her apartment,” Mrs. Hannaham growled.

  “Whose apartment?” I said, cementing my place in hell for needlessly tormenting a lonely old woman.

  “You know,” Mrs. Hannaham said ominously. “Hers.”

  I said nothing.

  “Mrs. Boureau.”

  “What kind of strange people?” I was too tired to get off the toilet so I paged through an old water- stained New Yorker, skimming for cartoons.

  “Men, women. Unseemly men and women. At all hours of the night.”

  I suspected that Mrs. Hannaham construed any hour after eight as “all hours.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ll talk to her about it.” I yawned loudly.

  “You should take something for that cold,” she instructed before she hung up. For a moment, I pictured her shuffling around her white apartment, straightening the white feather boas she sometimes wore, looking through photos of Compton (no doubt in white frames), and I tried to feel sorry for her. I really tried.

  I flushed the toilet and hurled myself back into bed. Now I could go back to thinking about Gregory and our definite future together, beginning with what I would wear when he came over to help fix my parents’ dryer that afternoon.

  Renee Ricardo’s predictions the night before had been met with a certain amount of skepticism.

  “You’re a damned fool,” Tag said. After Lucy had taken her turn inside the fortune- teller’s tent, we reconvened on a corner of the roof that had an unfettered view of the Hudson River.

  “But how can she say things that aren’t true?” I insisted, swirling the ice in my glass. “She’d be out of a job. Mobs of people would be pounding down her door demanding a refund.”

  “She’s paid by the network.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, she knew things about me. And she was so certain about Gregory and me.” I really did love saying our names together, so much that I forgot my promise to myself not to talk about Gregory in front of Lucy.

  “What did she know about you?”

  I didn’t want to repeat the bit about my strong character. Tag would rip me to shreds.

  “She knew my aunt had died.” It was practically true.

  Tag frowned.

  “She knew I was in a job that wasn’t right for me.”

  “That’s fish in a barrel. Most people think their job isn’t right for them.”

  “You don’t,” I shot back.

  I ran my hand along the smooth copper railing. “She had so much confidence. In me. No one is ever willing to say things with any certainty, not even my parents. We’re all so careful and realistic.”

  Tag opened her mouth, but I interrupted her.

  “Look, I’m willing to accept that she’s not really a psychic, but what if she’s unusually talented at sizing up a person quickly and knowing what they’re capable of? I feel like I should do everything possible to make something happen with—” I stopped short, glancing at Lucy. “With any guy that might come along. I’m more certain that it’s worth trying, is all.”

  “She said you’d spend your life with Gregory,” Lucy finally piped up. “She didn’t say how, Zephyr. He might be your exterminator forever, not your husband.”

  Lucy was bitter because, she claimed, Renee had told her she was going to die.

  “Exactly,” Tag said to Lucy. “So why can’t you apply that logic to what she said to you, dipshit? You asked her whether you’re going to die. Why, I have no idea, but you did. And she said yes, you are. I could have told you that.”

  “If it wasn’t going to be soon, she wouldn’t have said it,” Lucy said, feeling—understandably, I thought—sorry for herself. She had downed two caipirinhas after emerging from Renee’s tent and was getting pretty droopy.

  “You two are getting on my nerves,” Tag announced. “Where’s Mercedes?”

  We looked over to where we’d left her, but there was no sign of her or Dover Carter. We scoured the deck and then searched the ladies’ room. We went downstairs and asked Tiffany, who was sitting on the bouncer’s stool rubbing her feet.

  “What does your friend look like?” she asked in a bored voice, her enthusiasm for our attendance apparently a thing of the past.

  “Tall black woman in a blue- and- green strapless dress,” I told her. “Head scarf, too.”

  Tiffany perked up.

  “Oh, she left with Dover Carter!”

  “Willingly?” Tag asked suspiciously. Tiffany looked at her like she was insane.

  “Call her,” I instructed Lucy. She punched Mercedes’s number into her phone and immediately my handbag started ringing.

  I remembered. “Shit. She gave me her phone to hold because it didn’t fit in her bag.”

  “What kind of asinine purse doesn’t have room for a phone?” Tag demanded.

  “A really pretty beaded one,” Lucy slurred admiringly.

  Now, as I lay in bed, I remembered guiltily how quickly we had convinced ourselves that Mercedes was fine, using the same logic I had used to validate Renee Ricardo’s credentials: Dover Carter couldn’t afford any bad publicity and therefore Mercedes was not in any danger.

  I grabbed my phone again and dialed Mercedes’s home number. Her machine started to pick up, but then she answered, cutting off her recorded voice.

  “It’s seven- thirty in the freaking morning,” she snarled. Mercedes had trained herself not to curse, arguing that a black woman trying to make it in the world of classical music had to hold herself up to a higher standard. It was a favored pastime of the rest of the Sterling Girls to see if we could make her slip up.

  “ Seven- forty and I was worried about you,” I said, trying to make her feel guilty.

  “It’s a little late to worry,” she replied haughtily.

  My stomach clenched.

  “Why?” I sat up. “What happened? What did he do to you?”

  I imagined Mercedes tearfully telling her story on Dateline. I’d sit beside her, holding her hand for strength as she recounted how devastating it had been to have no one believe her except, of course, for her closest friends. We would start a foundation for the victims of celebrities. What would we name it?

  “Nothing. I’ll call you later.” I heard the ping of her viola.

  “You big fat liar! You’ve been practicing for an hour already, haven’t you?”

  Then I heard muffled voices.

  “Mercedes,” I enunciated slowly. “Is Dover Carter in your apartment right now?”

  “Wait, what? Sorry, I dropped the phone.”

  I stood on my bed. “ARE YOU GIVING DOVER CARTER A PRIVATE CONCERT AT SEVEN- THIRTY IN THE FUCKING MORNING?!” I screamed.

  “ Seven- forty,” she said, and hung up.

  I looked at my phone in disbelief and jumped down to the floor. This is huge, was all I could think as I stomped into my li
ving room. Huge. Huger than huge, and it’s too early to call anyone. My friend spent the night with the man of, literally, my dreams. Which of us would be her maid of honor? The right thing would be for all of us to be bridesmaids and have no maid of honor, I decided.

  I looked out the front window and congratulated myself on not feeling jealous. Not exactly jealous. Well, I was jealous, but only because my current career would never, in this three-dimensional world, capture a movie star’s interest. There was no scenario in which Dover Carter would have spotted me across a crowded roof deck and recognize me as the object of his obsession. “You take care of your parents’ building? I arrange my shoots around…” Around what? The tax assessor’s schedule? Street- cleaning hours? I waved away the depressing thought.

  My phone rang and I raced back to it.

  “Mercedes?” I said.

  “Abigail,” Abigail said grimly.

  I looked at my clock yet again.

  “Isn’t it the middle of the night for you?”

  “Men suck.” She was trying to sound annoyed, but I heard a quiver in her voice.

  “Oh, no.” Damn. Now there was no way I could share the news about Mercedes and Dover. Not this minute anyway.

  “Honey, what happened?” I padded into the kitchen and filled up the teakettle. I wiped at a stain on the counter, calculating that it would take about an hour to clean the apartment before Gregory showed up.

  “What happened is, my sister finished her dissertation, landed the Yale job, and then found her husband within a year. It worked for her, it was supposed to work for me. But it’s been two years since I finished!” I almost laughed at how surprised she sounded that life didn’t adhere to the Greenfield family syllabus, but she sounded too wounded to joke.

  “Ab, what happened?”

  “Darren.”

  “The guy from JDate?” I dug around the drawers of my fridge and came up with a block of cheddar cheese. “But I thought he lives here.”

  “He’s out here for a week for a conference. We went out three times, but only fooled around for the first time last night. I mean tonight.”

  I heard a door slam on her end.

  “Cat out,” she explained dejectedly. “So we’ve been having a great time. He’s cute, Zeph, really cute.” Her voice faded away.