I hadn’t told the Sterling Girls that the staircase was unknown to Bella and Ollie, and I was pleased to see the parent radar that had served us so well in high school still fully functioning and able to kick into gear at the drop of a dildo.
“Making progress?” My mother’s expectant face appeared at the door of the bedroom, glistening above the various Lycra contraptions encasing her lithe body. Sweat and rain streaked her French braids. We all stood around awkwardly, turgid little clouds of guilt filling the room.
Lucy, bless her tidy heart, grabbed a garbage bag and said, “Yep, we’re getting there, but boy… !” And then she actually brought her arm to her forehead and said, “Whew!” which I thought was going a bit overboard, but Bella Zuckerman, no stranger to melodrama, didn’t appear to notice this false gesture.
“It’s disgusting in here, isn’t it?” My mother wrinkled her nose. “Who would have thought? You know, with that cute British accent?” She raised her eyebrows and wiggled her head from side to side to suggest clipped Anglo tones.
“Thanks so much for helping Zephy,” she chirped. “You know, the sooner it’s cleaned up, the sooner she can get it rented out!”
“Mom,” I said sharply. “We know. I know.” My hackles went up as my mother surveyed my friends, smiling. I knew she was wondering how she, one of Newsweek’s Fifty Women to Watch (seventeen years ago, I comforted myself), wound up with a daughter whom she couldn’t even categorize as “opting out” because said daughter didn’t actually have a career out of which to opt. Didn’t she know I was doing everything I could to make that apartment profitable? I shifted my weight nervously and tried not to think about the past three days, during which I had not cleaned, had not called a broker, had not done anything, in fact, but moon over Gregory.
She put her hands on her hips and spun around to Mercedes, focusing her attention like a prison searchlight. “Mercedes, sweetie, I came down because Ollie and I have tickets for this Saturday—will you be onstage that night? We’d love to take you for a late dinner afterward.”
Mercedes scanned the ceiling for a moment. “I-I’m not sure. If I am—I have to check—I’d love to. That’s really sweet of you, Bella.”
I glanced over at Mercedes at the same time Tag did. Mercedes was bald- faced lying. Unless she was on tour, she knew her Byzantine, erratic schedule down to the minute. She was a human Palm Pilot. I smelled Dover Carter.
“Merce, I’m pretty sure you told me you were on that night,” Tag said evilly.
“Like I said,” Mercedes enunciated stonily to Tag, “I’ll have to check.”
“But—”
“Tag,” Mercedes interrupted, “I believe you’re the one who’s got some constraints right now, yes?”
Tag was holding her hands behind her back, assuming a ponderous pose to hide the handcuffs that, I now realized, were still encircling her wrists. A snort escaped me as I tried to keep from laughing. Lucy heard me and looked over. When she saw Tag trying to look innocent, she quickly turned away from my mother, her shoulders convulsing. Mercedes made a weird coughing sound. Tag just raised her eyebrows at us and smiled. My mother noticed nothing.
“A big trip lined up?” my mom asked eagerly. “South America? Asia?” I shot Tag a warning look in case she was suddenly struck with an urge to reveal her current state of bondage.
“Well,” Tag said thoughtfully, “a conference in Spain and then Bora Bora this summer, but that’s about it.”
“Oh, how I envy you!” my mother trilled. “You know what I’m going to do for you girls? I’m going to whip up a batch of energy drink.”
“No!” Mercedes cried out.
“Please don’t,” Tag said quickly.
Bella dismissed their protests with a wave of her hand and headed out of the room, a little bounce in her step at the thought of nourishing us. She paused and looked back.
“Oh, Zeph?”
“Hmm?” I said, looking up from my garbage bag with feigned distraction.
“Did you guys ever figure out the problem with the dryer? Can I use it?”
My breath caught.
“Didn’t quite finish,” I squeaked.
My mom nodded and shrugged. “Back in a minute.”
I followed her to the front door. The moment I double-locked it behind her, I heard an explosion of laughter from the bedroom. I hurried back to find my friends in a tangle on the bare mattress, tears running down their faces, gasping for breath. I was just about to yell at them to pull it together before my mother returned, when I noticed a thin metal key sticking out of Tag’s back pocket. I pointed at it and tried to tell them, but I was laughing so hard that all I could do was flop down next to them and try to catch my breath. The room stank of underpants, the closet was filled with a convict’s trove of sex toys, and the heel of someone’s clog was digging into my back, but it was, maybe because of all those things, a first- world moment.
LUCY, TAG, AND MERCEDES HELPED ME FILL UP GARBAGE BAGS and boxes for another three hours, energized not at all by my mother’s viscous mauve drink (which we tossed down the sink, and which took an unnaturally long time to drain), but by the sheer delight of finding three packages of cookie dough in James’s freezer. We worked our way through two of them—Tag and Mercedes washed theirs down with Brooklyn Lager—in the spirit of cleaning out the kitchen.
While we tossed condiments into the trash and condoms into storage boxes (it seemed wasteful to throw them out), four things happened. Tag discovered two keys hidden inside a picture frame. Mercedes confessed that she had a date with Dover Carter next week. I came clean about Gregory. And Lucy decided to throw a death party for herself.
My mother, when she returned with the energy drink, had pressed Mercedes again about her plans for Saturday night, as if Mercedes had had the inclination to check her schedule in the intervening ten minutes. Mercedes, knowing she wouldn’t be able to fend off my mother for very long, admitted she already had a post- performance date. My mother accepted that with minimal disappointment, but after she left, Tag slipped over to Mercedes and quietly snapped handcuffs on her.
“What the fu- freak!” Mercedes yelled. She looked so panicked, I almost felt sorry for her. “My wrists, don’t hurt my wrists!”
“Then don’t wriggle.”
“Take these off me!”
The three of us looked at her calmly.
“Okay, okay.” She spoke in a quiet rush. “Dover spent the rest of Saturday night with me, but all we did was kiss.”
“C’mon!” I said, feeling whorish by comparison.
“Swear to God. Take these off me, please?” she begged.
“We’ll need a little more, Ms. Kim,” Tag said with fake nonchalance, pretending to examine her fingernails.
Mercedes hurried to admit that in the past three days, Dover Carter had sent her two bouquets of orchids and three of his favorite recordings of Bach cantatas, which we all agreed was commendably understated for a movie star who could have sent her a new car as a token of his affection. And Gregory couldn’t even pick up the phone for me? I fought off a wave of self- pity.
Tag nodded, satisfied, and unlocked the cuffs. Mercedes rubbed her wrists dramatically. Lucy started to distribute rubber gloves from a box that, both disturbingly and reassuringly, had been in the closet next to the lubricants. Finally, I couldn’t keep my sad state to myself any longer.
“I slept with the exterminator!” I blurted out. We stood in James’s gray and black and stainless- steel kitchen as I poured out my woeful tale about the broken dryer and the alley and the staircase and Roxana’s closet and Gregory’s non- calling. I feared chastisement (Mercedes), mockery (Tag), and angry jealousy cloaked in false sympathy (Lucy), but they weren’t judgmental at all. In fact, it seemed I had overestimated their opinion of me. Mostly, they were relieved I hadn’t hooked up with Hayden again. How weak did they think I was? I tried to impress upon them that I was the victim of a hump- and-dump, that I deserved some sympathy, but they were unimpressed.<
br />
“He’ll call,” Tag said, turning back to James’s pantry shelves, tossing an open box of crackers and a dusty bag of flour into the trash.
Mercedes nodded and flipped on the vacuum cleaner. I flipped it off.
“Why don’t you just call him?” she said, and switched it on again. Frustrated, I followed Lucy into the bathroom. She pulled on a second pair of gloves over her first and sprinkled some Comet into the toilet bowl. A part of me was glad I could report to her that I’d been used; it made up for the fact that Gregory had called me and not her. But even Lucy seemed unaffected by my news.
“You know,” she said, swirling a toilet brush around the bowl, and I figured she was about to launch into an over-generalized characterization of the male species’ insipient mating behaviors, “I’ve decided to throw a party for myself.”
“Okay.” I picked up a sponge and waited for her to explain the non sequitur.
“A death party.”
“Lu-uce—” I protested.
“Do you even know what a death party is?”
“Do you?”
“I’m inventing it,” she said, “so of course I know what it is.”
“What is it?” I asked with measured patience.
She sat back on her heels, holding the dripping wand over the toilet. “It’s when you have the good fortune—see, I’m referring to Renee’s prediction as good fortune—to get advance notice of your death, but you’re in good enough health to throw a party that you can enjoy.”
“Lucy,” I tried again.
“People can give the eulogies they’d give at my funeral, but this way I can actually hear them. Isn’t that what everyone wishes for a dead person? That they could hear all the great things people are saying about them?”
She brushed the back of her wrist across her face, trying to push a damp lock of blond hair off her cheek. I reached over and tucked the strands behind her ear. This close up, I noticed how tired her eyes looked on her angular face, and a lump formed in my throat.
“Whatever you want, sweets,” I said lightly, trying not to let her hear the pity I knew she’d resent.
“People are going to have to fly in,” she continued, “like for a wedding. Or a funeral. It’s going to be just as important.”
“But then,” I reasoned, “will they have to come back for the funeral itself? Or is this instead of a funeral?”
Lucy frowned. “I can’t ask Abigail to fly in twice. She doesn’t have that kind of money.” She shook her head resolutely. “No, if they can only come to one, it has to be this.”
Just as I was trying to figure out whether I needed to expend energy trying to dissuade her from this plan, Tag yelled out, “Hey, can I put away these creepy photos?”
“Which creepy photos?” I shouted back, heading out of the bathroom.
“The double whammy over the fireplace!”
Tag was in the living room, standing in front of James’s shrine to himself. For kicks, she’d turned off the lights and lit the candles beside the picture frames. The candlelight flickering across James’s grinning mug, together with the rain pounding at the dark windows, transformed the room from a mildly creepy place to a downright sinister one.
“Tag!” I shrieked, and Mercedes and Lucy came running.
“Oh, gross!” Lucy yelled, flipping on the lights.
“I just wanted to see what James saw when he worshipped himself,” Tag cackled.
“So what do you see, Granger?” Mercedes asked crisply.
“Dust,” Tag concluded, and blew out the candles. She picked up one of the photos and chucked it to me.
“Adios,” I said, catching it and putting it in a box with some of James’s towels. Tag threw me the second one and something rattled as I caught it. We looked at one another. I groaned, suddenly exhausted by James and his pink staircase and his icky mysteries and his multiple personalities, which were becoming less exciting by the minute. I turned the frame over in my hands and pried off the back.
Two keys stared up at me. Two more damned keys that opened who knew what. Another staircase? Another closet? James must have been best friends with a locksmith. I didn’t care what these keys opened. I wanted to be done with James. I wanted Gregory to call. I wanted this apartment cleaned up and rented out so I could be done with it, too.
I handed the keys to Lucy, who happily trotted off to find her color- coded labels. As long as they were categorized in some way, she would not be bothered by them. Neither, I decided, for the moment, would I.
TWELVE
ON THURSDAY MORNING, I WOKE TO A STALE, ACRID ODOR. Gas? Smoke? Helium? I jumped out of bed and frantically sniffed around my apartment. I looked outside for fire trucks, utility trucks, smoking telephone wires. Nothing except an oil truck parked outside. I opened my apartment door and the smell hit me harder. I began to whimper, panic fanning out from my heart to my fingers and toes. Calm, Zephyr, calm. I threw on some jeans, grabbed my keys, and headed for the basement.
I liked our basement about as much as I liked our alley. It was dark and low- ceilinged, crowded with the moldy detritus of past and current tenants. Pipes and wires were exposed in an acrobatic tangle that looked, to my untrained eye, to be up to the safety codes of centuries past.
I flipped the light on and was rewarded with the sight of a cluster of roaches scurrying for the walls. What the hell were we paying Gregory’s company for? I gulped back the bile that rose in my throat and made my way gingerly along the narrow corridor, toward the front of the building. The smell grew stronger, and as I threw open the door to the boiler room, my eyes started to sting. The entire floor was covered in thick black oil, which was quickly spreading toward me and the door. Did I think to throw sand from the red fire buckets in the path of the encroaching goo? Did I throw down an old mattress to stanch the flow? No. I turned and ran.
My heart was pounding. Could the building catch on fire? Should I call the … the police? A plumber? The oil company that James had been getting kickbacks from? Were we allowed to keep using them? Why hadn’t I thought about this sooner? Because it was April and the oil tank had stayed full enough. Until now.
I hurried out the front door and down the stoop. An unshaven guy who I was pretty sure shouldn’t have been smoking a cigarette while he pumped oil through our sidewalk fuel line looked up.
“Stop!” I screamed. His eyebrows lifted imperceptibly, which infuriated me. He should have dropped his hose and matched my panic.
“There’s oil all over my basement floor!” I shrieked. He let the lever on the hose snap free.
“Aw, shit.” He actually smacked his cigarette- gripping hand against his head in a gesture that had been abandoned in a Hollywood studio lot decades ago. “You guys got the broken gauge.”
I just stared. He stepped over to his truck and hit a button, which made an enormous wheel retract the hose.
“You guys got the broken gauge, right?” he repeated.
“I have no idea,” I said in a hoarse whisper.
“Yeah, it’s you guys, cuz James usually hangs out downstairs and then comes up to tell us when it’s gettin’ full. Right. But he’s not here, right? Cuza the money shit, yeah?” All I could do was look at him, my shoulders sagging, my jaw hanging slack. “Yeah, right, so it probably overflowed, huh?”
“You could say that. I have gallons of oil all over my basement floor,” I told him, waiting for him to offer to clean it up as part of what was surely our comprehensive service plan.
He grabbed a rag off the driver’s seat and wiped his hands. “Eh, it’s probably not gallons. Just seems like it cuza the properties of liquid.”
A physics lesson from James’s former colleague at seven in the morning? I would have preferred ten phone calls from Mrs. Hannaham.
“What do I do?” I pleaded, my voice dangerously close to tears.
“Kitty litter,” he said, yanking up some levers on the back of the truck.
“Kitty litter.”
“Kitty litter soa
ks it up and then you just throw it out. Any old cheap brand, but not the organic crap. That don’t work.”
“Maybe you could have warned me that my gauge was broken,” I told him incredulously.
He shrugged. “It’s your building, lady.”
“Can you help me?” I said in a small voice.
He jumped into the truck and lit another cigarette. “Sorry, sweetheart. Other deliveries.” He looked at me, closing one eye against a curl of smoke. “You the new super?”
I nodded.
“A lady super. Cute. Feminism and shit, that’s good stuff.” He started the truck. “A piece of advice?”
I waited, hoping for some secret brotherhood knowledge, a tenet known only to supers.
“Get the gauge fixed.” He drove off.
My dad went to work late that morning, having helped me haul fifteen jumbo bags of Tidy Cats Long- Lasting Odor Control Scooping Multi Cat Litter from Artie’s Hardware on Fourteenth Street, in a handcart the owner lent us. He tried to keep me from thinking about what a loser I was by shoving the purported bright side in my face.
First, there was: “We don’t have to go to the gym today!” and then: “Kitty litter! Brilliant!” and finally, my least favorite: “Darling daught, think of everything you’re learning. How many women your age get this kind of practical education? I think this is great! You’ll be glad this happened.”
In fact, the only bright side was that the whole incident had proved Mrs. Hannaham to be an olfactory liar. If she hadn’t called this morning, of all mornings, to complain about the worst smell to hit 287 West 12th Street since before the days of closed sewers, then clearly the helium and the gas and the smoke she claimed she smelled were all lies, designed to get attention or just to torture me. Had I not stunk of fuel-grade petroleum and a chemical simulacrum of springtime, I might have felt a tinge of pity. Instead, the little singed devil perched on my shoulder clapped with glee at having found her out.
I trudged upstairs in a cloud of self- disgust, eager for a scalding shower. I had just pushed back the curtain when the phone rang. Unable to stomach Mrs. H.’s complaint du jour, I let the machine screen—I very purposely did not have voice mail, for situations such as this. But instead of Mrs. H., it was a message from a broker who’d heard about James’s apartment from a “friend,” and wanted to come see “the listing.” I grabbed the phone and answered breathlessly, pretending I’d just walked in.
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