“Why didn’t you tell me there were locked rooms in her apartment?” I whispered accusingly.
“You didn’t ask.”
I couldn’t let go of my towel to strangle him so I stamped my foot, which conferred upon me all the dignity of a child having a tantrum.
“How could I know to ask that?” I hissed. “Is it the room we were … in?”
Gregory looked at me, his lips twitching slightly at the corners, then reached across the threshold, pulled me tight against him and planted his warm, soft mouth over mine. His tongue teased its way inside for a liquid second and then it was over.
“You should get back inside,” he said, pulling away, leaving me limp and damp. He nodded down the stairs, to where Roxana was greeting her visitor in hushed, tense murmurs, then bounded off in their direction.
Dizzy, I started to shut the door, but not before glimpsing Senator Smith’s hoary head close behind Roxana’s. She glanced up and our eyes met briefly, just long enough for me to register the cloud of fear enveloping her delicate face. Helplessly, I let the door click shut and stood frozen inside my bright apartment. I strained to hear their fading footsteps, and when Roxana’s own door closed with a quiet thud, it was like a muffled gunshot triggering the worst my imagination had to offer.
FREDDY GIVITCH WAS A PORTRAIT IN PATHETIC. I PULLED OPEN the door later that afternoon to reveal the saddest sack I’d ever seen taking up space on my stoop. Droopy eyes and a belly to match; moist, blubbery lips; coarsely shaven jowls; fingers worrying the loops around his belt buckle. His checked shirt was two decades late, his pants on the muddy side of brown, and he bottomed out the outfit with a pair of dingy, scuffed sneakers. Of course he was bald. He could have been twenty-five or fifty- five; I couldn’t tell and it didn’t really matter anyway. He sucked sympathy to him like a pile of sand drinking up salt water. He looked at me through thick glasses, and I could see why Officer Varlam tried to help his brother- in- law any way he could. I decided at first glance to give him the listing.
“Come in, come in,” I said quietly, as though ushering him into shelter after a natural disaster, which, I supposed, was what his entire life was.
“Thank you, thank you,” he croaked, his gaze darting quickly to meet mine, then resting somewhere in the vicinity of my forehead. I wondered whether we’d say everything twice for the remainder of his visit.
He followed me upstairs, making little grunts as he went.
“Here it is.” I led him into James’s apartment, wondering whether Freddy had ever successfully rented a place in his life or if I was tossing away my only potential source of income because a man’s floppy, overly long shoelaces made me want to weep.
Freddy crossed his short arms, an effort that elicited another soft grunt. He glanced at the living room, trudged into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, one cabinet, and one drawer.
“I threw out most of—” I began, but Freddy was off again, darting his eggplant- shaped head quickly into the bathroom, then galumphing into the bedroom at a surprising speed.
“You should have seen this room before. It was disgusting,” I told him proudly. The Sterling Girls and I had effected a Mary Poppins-like transformation, so complete that I had briefly entertained the idea of starting a world- class, white-glove cleaning service. I had made it as far as our Good Morning America segment before I remembered that my friends were already gainfully and contentedly employed in careers that did not require squeeze mops.
Freddy nodded and headed back to the front door. The entire tour had taken under a minute. I wondered how he planned to attract future renters to a property he had only given a glance.
He said to the door, “You still got a buncha cans of film or something in the fridge. Get ridda those.” He paused, keeping his back to me and the rest of the apartment. “Fireplace work?”
I started to nod, then said, “Yes.”
“Under the winda seats—any storage under there?”
“I have no idea,” I said, surprised. I walked over to the benches that James had installed, and squatted down. I lifted one cushion and ran my hand along the solid, polished oak surface. I let the cushion drop and picked up the next one, to find a set of hinges gleaming back at me. I wondered how much value the apartment had just gained with the discovery of this precious storage space. Five dollars? A hundred? I hoped Freddy knew.
When I tried to lift the seat, though, it resisted. Looking closer, I found a small lock built into the base. I sighed and wondered whether James wasn’t actually happier in jail, where locks and keys constituted most of the landscape.
“There’s storage space under here,” I announced to Freddy, standing up, “but it’s locked.”
“Clean it out and then we can rent you.”
“Sooo,” I said hesitantly to the folds at the back of Freddy’s neck. “Any idea, I mean, do you think—well, what do you think is the least I could—”
“Four thou. I’ll get you four thou,” Freddy told the door abruptly, before he opened it and left.
I froze in my tracks, afraid that if I moved I’d distort the words still bouncing through the air. I darted my eyes over to the fireplace, as if to ask the grate, Did you hear what I heard?
“A month? Four thousand dollars a month?” I asked aloud, and waited to see whether Freddy would burst back in, pointing at me, his doughy gut jiggling with laughter.
I hurried to the closet in search of the box that held the framed photos of James. I suspected or hoped—the line between the two was blurry—that one of the keys rattling around inside one of those pictures would open the window seat.
Lucy had carefully wrapped the photos in stained linen placemats. I shook each, unfurling the one that rattled and holding it gingerly by its edges as though it was contaminated. If ever there were a boy with cooties, it was James.
I palmed the two keys and started out of the closet. I stopped abruptly and spun around, suddenly inspired. I stuck one of the keys into the lock of the staircase door, the door I’d pried open with Gregory. The lock turned easily and I felt a short- lived flash of triumph. I’d figured out something—Agent Zuckerman reporting. But I didn’t know what it was I’d figured out—back to Chambermaid Zephyr here for mopping.
I glanced up the staircase, allowing myself a brief, delicious replay of my sweaty, bizarre encounter with Gregory-had I really done that?—then closed the staircase door and hurried back to the window seat, the other key already slick with palm sweat. I lifted up the cushion and turned the key in the lock. Agent Zuckerman! Carefully, afraid of finding a bomb, a snake collection, or locks of my hair, I lifted the seat.
Inside was a blue plastic cooler, the ten- dollar kind you grab at the drugstore when you realize you don’t have enough room in your fridge to hold drinks for a party. Gingerly, I lifted the grimy white lid and peeked inside, squinting with anticipated revulsion.
Ten test tubes (one for each jar of Marmite? Did James also have OCD?) with red stoppers were jabbed crudely into ten overturned Styrofoam cups to keep them upright. The cups were surrounded by wet, flaccid ice packs that had long since lost their cool. A stale, synthetic smell wafted up. I reached for one of the tubes, then stopped and grabbed a pair of rubber gloves off James’s counter.
I held each tube up to the sunlight spilling through the window. Inside all of them was a tiny amount of viscous fluid; it looked like whatever had been in them had mostly evaporated. I tilted the tubes in different directions, letting the fluid ooze around the glass like the contents of a lava lamp. Drugs? Explosives? Medicine? Semen? I shuddered and replaced the tube I was holding in its cup.
I closed the cooler, locked the window seat, and washed my hands for a long time under scalding hot water, wondering whether I should call someone. Gregory popped into my mind and I chastised myself. Why would I want to tell him something before I told the Sterling Girls? I’d known him less than two weeks—he wasn’t qualified to be my go- to person. I felt like a traitor.
Office
r Varlam, I reminded myself, pumping out gobs of soap. If there was anyone I should call, it was the law enforcement official in charge of James’s case. But I didn’t want the cops back here, rooting around my building. Delaying my income.
Was I an accomplice to something by not reporting the cooler? The secret staircase? As the hot water ran through my fingers, I tried to reason through the facts as my father might.
Fact: James had been arrested for embezzling money from the oil delivery company.
Fact: James either had a personality disorder or was an international double agent or was excessively narcissistic or was some combination of all three.
Fact: James had an unusually large collection of sex paraphernalia (though that was a judgment, a qualitative and subjective observation, I reminded myself).
Fact: James may or may not have built a pink staircase with access only to his apartment and to Roxana’s, the key to which he kept inside one of two identical pictures of himself.
Fact: James had a hidden, locked cooler under his window seat, with tubes of unidentified fluid inside it.
Fact: For ten years, James had been a responsible, cheerful super.
I turned off the water. Except for the embezzlement he’d already been arrested for, James’s other behaviors weren’t necessarily illegal. In fact, they probably weren’t any odder than those you’d find if you randomly sampled forty- year- old bachelors living alone anywhere in the country, and possibly even common if you narrowed your survey down to those living in New York City.
Still. The prospect of four thousand dollars a month in income had instilled in me, in the past seven minutes, a new sense of self- importance and responsibility. The sugar in my NASA lemonade. It was like my mother preached in her seminars: Ladies, you want your menstrual flow light and your cash flow heavy! The higher the dollar amount, the taller you stand! I had previously accused her of spouting specious maxims, but now I saw a glimmer of truth to them. Now I felt it was incumbent upon me to preserve this strange collection of behaviors and artifacts until time united those facts into a cohesive story, one that would transform those artifacts into evidence.
It was in this new role as evidence protectress that I crossed the hall to my apartment and returned with some cold ice packs to arrange carefully around the test tubes. I thought back to the third grade, when my class had waited for baby chicks to hatch out of the seemingly lifeless shells that had been FedExed into our care from a farm in Utah. We’d had to keep those fragile ovals at 99.5 degrees or they would have sat there forever, as lifeless as their cousins on supermarket shelves. If I kept the test tubes cool, maybe whatever potential they possessed would be maintained.
I put the warm ice packs in James’s freezer, grabbed the film out of his fridge, and closed the door to his apartment. As the latch clicked, a swell of satisfaction rose up inside me and I felt a few millimeters closer to being a grown- up.
And then I was blindsided: by a vivid, pulsing memory of Hayden’s languorous gaze admiring the length of our naked bodies sealed together with sweat. I smacked the wall, trying to make the image disperse, as though it were a rat. A new relationship inevitably brings up old ones, I comforted myself right before I started wondering where Hayden was at this very moment. Stop! What would he think of me earning as much money as he did? Damn it. Was that why we hadn’t worked out? Because I wasn’t his earning equal? Was I going to start thinking about him again now that I was? Did I have no control over my anarchic brain?
I stomped into my apartment and slammed the door— twice in one day. I sat down at the desk in my bedroom and tried to distract myself with a pile of heating bills that needed deciphering. The words “just an exterminator” rose to the surface from wherever I’d been keeping them tamped down. Tears of self- disgust and hypocrisy welled in my eyes and I dropped my head into my hands, exhausted by the hopelessness of ever completely getting over Hayden.
THIRTEEN
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, AFTER I STROLLED THROUGH THE frenz ied Union Square farmers’ market, and just before I went to execute the richly deserved humbling of LinguaFrank at Grounded, I dropped off James’s film, wondering whether it was the British or the Brooklyn side of him that had preferred film to digital. I’d briefly weighed the legal and moral implications of developing the photos and tried to convince myself I was doing him a favor—they might be pictures he’d like to have with him—but really, I just wanted to know what a convicted con artist felt compelled to photograph.
Did he have a soft side that inspired him to capture close-ups of urban flora dotted with ice drops? Puppies frolicking in a basket lined with red velvet? Or would there be pictures of guys in stained coveralls delivering fuel oil? Maybe, I thought as I let the door to Fast Foto bang shut behind me—if they’d bothered with the “Ph,” I might have closed it gently—James’s dual personality made it hard for him to remember people and he needed head shots to keep his deals straight.
I stumbled as I left the store (I’d broken with my “comfort first” rule and was wearing shoes not designed for walking). But even as my calves ached and I had to downshift my stride so I didn’t overcompensate and do that weird forward hip scoop—the hunchbutt—that cancels out any sex appeal imbued by the shoes in the first place, I was feeling my place in the city. I had a job, I had friends, I had a lover, I had very bearable parents. And I’m a native, I added smugly to two willowy transplants opening the door to Equinox to shed pounds they couldn’t spare. My hair was behaving, my mid- section felt flat-tish, and the spring air teased my pale green sundress around my freshly shaved legs. The blue cloudless sky, the late-blooming hyacinths, the light green leaves with their false promise of an endless summer—the city itself was urging me to overlook my Hayden hiccups.
After Gregory and I went on our real date tonight and got going full force, I’d be rid of the Briggs pig forever. It would speed things along just a tiny bit, I couldn’t help thinking as I maneuvered my way across Greenwich Avenue against a red light, if I could see Hayden in person just once, to exorcise him. And it would help a big bit, I added, darting past a conveyor belt swallowing barrels of texturized vegetable protein into the basement of Soy Luck Club, if I saw him right at this moment, while I was feeling very catalog- sexy and suffused with the appeal of a full Saturday night agenda ahead of me: vengeance followed by romance. I looked around hopefully, on the off chance that in this city of eight million people, Hayden would be walking toward me at exactly that moment, preferably looking bereft, having just been fired, and able to tell just from my expression that I’d be on my back with another man just hours from now.
As I rounded Jane Street, my hands flew to my thighs to keep my dress from flying up (on Marilyn, sexy; on me, like wrestling a parachute). As the fabric threatened to slip through my fingers, a barrel- shaped guy with a thin ponytail came blasting by on a skateboard, pounding his straightened, pumping leg into the blacktop like a metronome. “Hey!” I yelped as he whizzed by, just inches from my exposed toes.
Without looking back, he held up his middle finger to me.
“Fucking…” I spat, my man-eater mood dissipating into thin air. I looked around indignantly to see if anyone else had witnessed his random act of spite. I should start a kindness movement. I’d lobby the state, then Congress. I’d write a charter and guidelines and usher in the Century of Goodwill.
The guy got off his skateboard, flipped it into his hand, and headed into Grounded. There was no mistaking the freckles or the pasty face beneath them.
LinguaFrank.
My ire bloomed. He was a hypocritical, arrogant, arguably misogynist, and definitely anti- Semitic boor. And he was even uglier in person than he’d been on his JDate profile. Was Abigail’s bad taste caused by poor judgment, or by desperation? Either way, LinguaFrank deserved no leniency. I felt like a warrior. The justice of what we were about to do made my heart begin to race and I choked back a demonic cackle.
He cased the tables and, seeing no Asian females, sat down
near the front, facing the open double doors. He crossed his leg, ankle on knee—the arrogant, space- hogging leg cross, I noted bitterly—and started picking at his teeth with the corner of an Equal packet. I uttered a quiet gurgle of disgust.
He squinted out at the street and I ducked behind a ginkgo tree. As I did, I spotted Lucy hiding behind a large planter next door to the café. She was watching the front door and taking notes on a small steno pad, which instantly irritated me. We didn’t need a written record of this. At the most, we were going to snap a photo of the moment we told the great scholar Darren Schwartz, aka LinguaFrank, that his would- be Asian dream girl, who happened to be our friend, had seen him from afar and decided he was too fat. And too Jewish. And she had left.
I wanted to shout to Lucy to stop playing Nancy Drew and go inside, but I couldn’t without drawing Lingua’s attention. I left my post and resumed walking west on Jane Street. As soon as I was out of his line of vision, I crossed the street, doubled back, and poked Lucy hard from behind.
She shrieked.
“Shhh!” I whacked her gently.
“What do you mean shhh?” she hissed at me. “You hit me!”
“I didn’t hit you.”
“What do you call this?” She jabbed me.
“A poke.”
“Hey. No fighting.” Tag sneaked up behind us, making us both jump. She rubbed her hands together and raised her perfect eyebrows. “It’s time to go slit ‘im.”
“He’s not a shark,” Lucy reminded her nervously.
“You mean we can’t disembowel him, toss his entrails overboard, and send his head to the Midwest for further research?”
“Down, girl.” I patted her arm. But I was remembering how adeptly she’d handled herself in front of the King of Spain. I felt a rush of gratitude for Tag’s steely constitution, which in turn inflated a small balloon of generosity toward Lucy. “This is gonna be good,” I reassured both of them.
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