I’d give myself an hour to bask in the memory of Gregory and then, I swore, I’d take some garbage bags and rubber gloves and go back across the hall to embark upon my new career. I headed into the bathroom to run a bath. I’d support myself—Gideon couldn’t claim to do that yet—and I’d be able to sustain a relationship with Gregory. I couldn’t feel sexy for long if I didn’t have a job.
I didn’t quite make it back over to James’s that night—it made more sense, since I was all clean and cozy after my bath, to go to bed and get an early start the next day. But by the next morning, my sexterminator had not yet called me, and I couldn’t complain to any of the Sterling Girls, because I didn’t yet want Lucy to know about Gregory. I was so upset by the double whammy of his non- call and my inability to vent that I knew I wouldn’t be effective across the hall. I accepted a FedEx package that arrived for Cliff and figured I’d done enough as super for the day. I even shook the box and sniffed it—Cliff’s bass case and the late- night schedule were just too convenient not to be a cover for at least a fake jewelry smuggling operation—but reluctantly concluded it might just contain a set of spare bass strings, like the invoice on the front claimed.
By Tuesday, I knew I had to talk to somebody or I’d implode. Gregory’s continued silence, the arrival of my reality-bearing bank statement, and the overwhelming prospect of emptying James’s apartment had all leveled me to a state of cheese consumption and Olivia Goldsmith rereads not experienced since I gave up Hayden. As a dog- eared page of Flavor of the Month fluttered loose from the book’s binding, I wondered why I was working so hard to avoid telling Lucy about Gregory. She was going to have to know sooner or later. It’s just that later was so much more preferable than sooner, I thought as I unwrapped the block of cheddar I’d retrieved from the back of the fridge.
The sight of teeth marks reminded me of my conversation with Abigail and the seeds of a plan that were still bouncing around in the back of my brain. Of course! I jumped up from the couch. I had a great reason to call the SGs. I grabbed the phone and left messages for three of them, enticing them with the promise of a secret staircase and the need to help our Left Coast friend.
They came on Wednesday night, even though it was pouring rain. As I waited for my friends, I peered past the apple tree branches scraping at my window and watched with satisfaction as the city was cleansed of dog piss, leaky garbage bag stains, and Saturday night vomit. It seemed appropriate that I was going to be performing my own indoor ablutions.
Inside James’s apartment, Lucy made us put on rubber gloves and toss everything into trash bags. We got rid of the food items and saved the clothing, since I was still somewhat fuzzy on the subject of property law as it pertained to a convict’s belongings. Lucy hadn’t even let us put clean sheets on the bed, because she said she couldn’t begin to imagine how James defined “clean.”
Tag filled one bag before insisting on seeing the staircase. It was enormously gratifying to watch the expression on each of their faces as I silently opened the closet door and then, with an irresistible flourish, yanked open the door to the staircase.
“I don’t think two consenting and unmarried adults, living alone, need to construct an entire staircase and decorate it in order to have an affair,” I offered now in response to Tag’s hypothesis.
“No, you’re right, you’re right,” Tag muttered, unlocking a pair of furry blue handcuffs. She studied them, then snapped one of the rings around her left wrist.
“Tag!” Lucy and I shrieked as it clicked closed. Even Mercedes opened her eyes in surprise.
“I made sure they unlock,” she said, waving the key in front of us mischievously. She clasped the ring of a sparkling gold pair of cuffs around her other wrist and let the two empty rings clang together. “This is what marriage felt like.” She shuddered.
“I’m just curious,” Mercedes murmured, closing her eyes again. “Would you rank marriage to Glen higher or lower than getting that carnivorous parasite in your scalp?”
“Oh, nasty.” I grimaced, remembering Tag’s trip to Costa Rica. “When you had to hold that slab of raw meat to your head to coax it out?”
“The botfly larvae.” Tag smiled fondly at the memory, the way other people might have recalled a sunset in Hawaii. “I found thirteen new species on that trip. Marriage to Glen was way worse than some little endoparasite. Not technically carnivorous, by the way.”
“Glen or the botfly?” I asked.
Lucy sighed and patted the laptop sitting between her and Mercedes.
“Are we doing this or not? I have to be at work early tomorrow.”
Mercedes, Tag, and I exchanged glances. It was only six o’clock. Lucy was still unexpectedly prickly from Saturday night at Soho House, when Renee Ricardo had foreseen her undated demise. She was also not taking kindly to any mention of Mercedes’s fairy- tale encounter with Dover Carter, which, I suspected, she felt should have happened to her as compensation for all her defaced ten- dollar bills and sodden Sundays on the Brooklyn Bridge. She was right, of course; it wasn’t at all fair that a movie star should become besotted with Mercedes, who wasn’t even looking for a relationship.
In reality, though, it made perfect sense. Mercedes was as self- assured, talented, and stunning as Tag—and looked ravishing in short-sleeved T-shirts over long- sleeved T-shirts, whereas I just looked bundled up—but also exuded a genuine warmth that Tag often didn’t. Lucy, on the other hand, did not have a clear picture of herself or how she came across to others and therefore was never good at gauging men’s responses to her. She was forever hoping for the wrong things to happen with the wrong people, and it was a topic of constant consternation among the rest of us as to how to handle her innate lack of perception. As the years passed, it became increasingly evident that she could not be taught. Should we guide her toward men who were not quite worthy of her, but would look up to her? Would she sense our condescension? Or should we fervently hope that some fabulous man would come along who would be able to see beyond the insecurities, the grating laugh, and the forced expressions she held on her face a moment too long, to the loyal, funny, up- for- anything Lucy behind those deficiencies?
At the moment, though, my concern for Lucy’s fate was displaced by frustration that she was already too down in the dumps for me to reveal the agonies and ecstasies of my four-hour relationship with Gregory. It also meant that I couldn’t grill Mercedes about her incipient Hollywood romance. All I could do was channel my pent- up irritation into the revenge plan I had dreamt up on Abigail’s behalf, a scheme I had dubbed “JDate Jihad.”
“We’re doing it, we’re doing it,” Tag said soothingly to Lucy, plopping down on the bed beside her and Mercedes, her handcuffs clanking together. “Have you found him yet?”
“Here.” Lucy turned her laptop around to show the rest of us the JDate website. She clicked and enlarged a photo of an underwhelming male specimen.
“You’re sure?” Mercedes asked.
Lucy consulted the slip of paper I’d given her with the account information I’d set up and the screen name of Darren Schwartz printed on it.
“Maybe he’s cuter in person,” I suggested doubtfully. LinguaFrank, as Darren had named himself online, was pasty beneath his freckles, and his features looked as if they’d been pulled downward by a negative force. “He’s some guy’s stepson and he gave a great paper on something.”
My friends glanced up at me dubiously. I shrugged.
“Okay, so what are we writing?” Tag asked.
“That we’re a barely Jewish, stick- thin Asian woman who’s looking for a nice Jewish man—”
“An ugly Jewish man,” Mercedes muttered. Lucy started to make a little protest sound in defense of humankind, but then tiredly waved away her own generous impulse.
“Which of us is going to show up being Asian?” Tag said.
“I only got my stepfather’s name,” Mercedes said, and yawned exaggeratedly. I was again overcome with the desire to lock her in James’s
unwholesome closet until she spilled the details of her night with the movie star. She shot me an impish grin.
“We don’t need to show up actually being Asian,” I reminded them irritably. “We just need him to show up hoping to meet an Asian hottie, and then one of us goes in and tells him that she left because she took one look at him and decided he was too fat and Jewish- looking. Just like he said to Abigail.”
This was not our maiden voyage to the land of revenge. In college, Tag had blazed the way with an arrogant legacy admit who’d passed off months of her research on the metazoan parasites of Indonesian sharks as his own. She responded to this trespass by using his Social Security number to un- enroll him from all his classes two semesters in a row, right around midterm, leaving him in a mysterious and hellish administrative quagmire that ultimately required him to spend an entire extra year in school.
I sat down beside Lucy and took over the keyboard.
“Dear LinguaFrank,” I typed. “Your profile intrigues me—”
“Intrigues? Good Lord.” Mercedes sat up and turned the computer to her, and pounded the delete key. “Dear Lingua -Frank, you look really hot—”
“Oh, for fuck sake!” Tag grabbed at the laptop, her manacles clanking. “I’m slim, I’m Asian, I’ve got a Ph.D.” she typed, “and I think, at the very least, we should meet for coffee. I’m attaching a photo. Let me know if you like what you see.”
“And what exactly is LinguaFrank going to see?” I demanded.
Tag Googled “photo Asian” and came up with the website for a company that sold stock photographs. She clicked on a wide- eyed model whose bee- stung lips were the plumpest part of her otherwise skeletal body. Tag looked up and we all nodded with awe. She dragged the image into the message and hit SEND with a flourish. She pushed the computer away from her, ready to return to business.
“Is it possible Roxana doesn’t know about the staircase?” she asked.
“If she doesn’t, don’t tell her. Can you imagine?” Mercedes shuddered.
“Maybe you should call the cops,” Tag suggested to me. “What if he was taping her secretly? Coming into her bedroom without her knowing? Extorting her? Keeping her as a sex slave?” Her eyes lit up.
“You sound like Zephyr,” Lucy muttered.
“Hey,” I said, “I don’t revel in other people’s misfortune! I just have an active imagination.”
“I wasn’t reveling,” Tag said defensively. “I was wondering whether Roxana needs our help.”
We looked at her in surprise.
“ Wha- aat? How cold do you guys think I am?” Tag actually sounded hurt.
Mercedes changed the subject. “Zeph, how’d you find this thing in the first place?” She hauled herself off the bed and poked her head into the stairwell.
I hesitated. The truth would involve telling them about Gregory. A lie would probably also involve telling them about Gregory, because I was a lousy liar.
“I was in the alley cleaning up, and just, you know, saw this brand- new staircase,” I hedged, licking my lips. “What was I gonna do, not check it out?” Tag and Mercedes shot me identical suspicious looks, but Lucy remained in her silent depression-fueled state. Just as Tag started to squint at me, the computer pinged and a message popped up from LinguaFrank. We all dove for the screen.
“I’d love to meet u. Where do u live?” it said.
“This man has a Ph.D. in linguistics,” I griped, “and can’t be bothered to type the ‘y’ and the ‘o’?”
“Civilization is in the crapper,” Mercedes said.
“Wait, he’s online right now?” Lucy asked. “He’s just sitting around waiting for women to e-mail him?” It was hard to tell whether she was deriding the practice or considering adopting it. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to highlight the relative advantages of sitting on your comfy couch scanning a website full of potential dates against the glaring disadvantages of trolling a bridge in inclement weather amidst a sea of pedestrians who could be married, gay, homicidal, or otherwise unsuitable candidates for romance.
“What do we say?” Mercedes asked, her mini dreds bobbing around her face as she bounced on the bed. Her enthusiasm—rarely ignited for anything other than Messieurs Schubert, Handel, and Mendelssohn—validated our mission. Even Tag and Lucy perked up.
Tag wiggled her fingers over the keyboard, frowning.
“Did Abigail say where he lives?”
I shook my head.
“He’s an academic,” Lucy reasoned. “Anywhere on the West Side should be fine with him.”
“But not Starbucks,” I cautioned. “He won’t wanna go there.”
“How about that place?” Mercedes said vaguely. “That place we went once where that woman had the weird coat?” she prompted.
“Yes!” Lucy shouted. “That’s perfect! It’s cozy, hip, a little dark. We could easily eavesdrop on their conversation.” Lucy smiled for the first time in days.
“Luce,” Tag began gently, then stopped. There wasn’t any point in reminding her that there would be no conversation, because one half of this proposed tête- à- tête was imaginary. It would just be a tête.
“Okay, cozy, hip, dark, weird coats. Anyone remember the name?”
“It’s on Perry, near Washington,” I offered.
“A name, people.” Tag tapped the laptop.
“It’s not on Perry,” Mercedes said, shaking her head. “Zeph, that was the other place, the one where Abigail found the bank deposit slip on the bathroom floor with six hundred thousand dollars in the checking account.”
The thought crossed my mind that someone like a movie star, someone like, say, Dover Carter, might be bustling around town with over half a mil in his checking, but I said nothing.
Tag sighed loudly.
“Okay, okay,” I said, “what about Grounded on Jane Street?” It’s where I had hoped to take Gregory before we got sidetracked. I felt myself start to blush and tried to think of other things.
“How… about… Grounded… in … the … Vil… lage?” Tag dictated to herself as she typed. “This Saturday at 5 P.M I’ll be wearing—” She looked up at us.
“A lace teddy and stilettos,” Mercedes said. “Carrying a whip and sucking on a banana.”
“A tight red dress?” I suggested.
“My favorite fitted red dress,” Tag typed.
“Sounds like an L.L. Bean catalog.” I shook my head and turned the keyboard toward me, deleting the last bit. “You’ll know me when you see me,” I wrote. “Believe me.”
“Perfect,” Tag proclaimed, which apparently gave me the honor of hitting SEND. We all watched the screen in silence. In less than a minute, another message popped up.
“Looking forward,” was all it said. I opened my mouth to protest LinguaFrank’s lazy shorthand.
“Zeph, control yourself.” Mercedes cut me off.
“Is this too mean?” Lucy said suddenly, sitting up on the bed.
“Oh, Jesus.” Tag went back into the closet to rifle through dildoes and condoms.
“Abigail was heartbroken,” I reminded her.
“C’mon, heartbroken?” Lucy said bitterly. “I know heartbroken and I know Abigail. She decides a few months ago it’s time to get serious, and after one bad date, she’s heartbroken?”
“You should have heard her,” I said cautiously. This disagreement felt like a substitute for another conversation Lucy and I were not having. “Luce, she was hurt. He was cruel to her.”
Lucy shrugged and I felt myself grow angry. Just because she couldn’t land a date with a guy didn’t mean she was allowed to pull everyone else down with her. I silently pushed the computer toward Lucy and followed Tag into the closet. Let Mercedes deal with the pity party.
Tag shook a box of batteries and whispered, “Cut her some slack. Mercedes snagged a movie star, and that guy, George or whatever, didn’t call her. She’s bummed out.”
“Gregory,” I blurted.
“What?”
“Not Ge
orge,” I said, wishing I’d kept my mouth shut, “Gregory.”
Tag looked up from the box she was holding. “Oh, no. No, no.”
“What?” I tried to look innocent.
“He called you, didn’t he?” she hissed.
“It’s not my fault!” I hissed back, relieved that she’d only guessed as far as a phone call.
“Did you go out with him?”
I hesitated for a split second before settling on the literal truth.
“No, I did not go out with him. Can we talk about this some other time?” I nodded toward the bed.
“Did you find the key, Tag?” Mercedes called out.
“To what?”
“Um, those pretty bracelets you’re wearing?”
“Oh, it’s around,” Tag said dismissively
“Around?” I said, alarmed. “You don’t have it?”
“It’s around,” she repeated, though her forehead creased slightly. We emerged from the closet and started scouring the coarse gray carpet for a handcuff key, which Tag could only describe as a piece of metal that didn’t really look like a key at all. Mercedes and Lucy peered under the bed.
“Girls?” came my mother’s singsong voice from James’s front door.
“Shit!” I hissed, and we all jumped up. Tag grabbed the various plastic penises that she’d used earlier to choreograph a shadow dance and threw them into the closet. I tossed in a few other unseemly items that had migrated out—a bag of feathers, a tube of glittery lubricant—and Mercedes slammed the door shut.
I hadn’t mentioned the staircase to my parents. I told myself it was because I didn’t want them to tell Roxana, on the grounds that it might traumatize her forever if she didn’t yet know about it. The truth was that I needed to have a secret right now. It made up for the fact that my brother was going to present a movie in Tribeca next month. It eased the reality of sitting on the floor of a convict’s apartment sorting out water and sewer bills, contemplating the meaning of ten jars of Marmite, and reassuring a fractious widow that I was investigating her imaginary intruders.
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