Super in the City

by Daphne Uviller

  “It ain’t enough I gotta run all around fuh dem?” He jerked his head toward the citizens carrying out justice behind the closed door. “I gotta tell their fuckin’ husbands howda cook?”

  It didn’t look to me like he did much running.

  Mulrooney made sympathetic clucking noises and opened the door next to the one the chef was putatively guarding.

  A jury room. The single window was cracked and the table’s cheap veneer had been decimated by ballpoint- wielding jurors unable to make their fellow citizens see things their way. A government- issue water pitcher sat sweating in the middle of the table, surrounded by a dozen glasses. I was growing more terrified by the minute. Why couldn’t they have just excused me? Why had I been escorted through a rabbit’s maze to a room where no one could hear me scream?

  Underhill pulled out a chair and gestured for me to sit down.

  “I really do live alone,” I blurted, clutching my backpack as if it were my only friend in the world. “The apartment has its own entrance, its own kitchen. I even have a washer and dryer,” I said, my voice cracking.

  Mulrooney raised his eyebrows at Underhill. “Just relax,” he said. “I’m sure you have a lovely apartment.” He poured a glass of water and pushed it across the table.

  Underhill pulled out another chair and straddled it backwards. Oh, come on, guys, I couldn’t help thinking. This isn’t an audition for SVU. I took a sip of water.

  “A few weeks ago, Saturday, the fourth of April, to be exact,” Underhill said, looking me straight in the eye, “you were seen fleeing the St. Regis Hotel.”

  The wheels of my brain screeched to a halt. Crash test dummies flew into a brick wall.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The St. Regis.”

  “We have it on tape,” Mulrooney said with a pitying smile.

  I shook my head quickly, wondering if I was dreaming. Were we still in a courthouse? Was it still Tuesday?

  “Have what on tape?” I demanded.

  “You fleeing the St. Regis,” Underhill repeated slowly.

  “I wasn’t fleeing,” I said, trying to get up to speed. “I was leaving.”

  “You left real fast, wouldn’t you say?” Mulrooney amended.

  Underhill leaned forward and spread his elbows on the table.

  “You ran out of a party attended by the defendants and their colleagues.”

  The crash- test dummies shimmied out of my mind, abandoning me in an alternate universe.

  I licked my lips and tried to pick my words carefully. “What?”

  “You were at a party with members of the Pelarose family three weeks ago, and now here you are, about to be seated on a jury that will decide whether they go to jail for the rest of their lives. Or go free,” Underhill said, emphasizing the last three words. “You’re telling me that’s a coincidence?”

  “Wait,” I said, holding my face with my hands, feeling my entire life swerve horribly off course. “That party was for Spain. For Spanish people,” I said stupidly.

  “The Pelarose family is Spanish,” Mulrooney said, as if to a sanatorium resident.

  “I thought the mob was Italian.”

  “So why were you there?” Underhill pressed, impatient with my limited knowledge of the underworld’s apparent Benettonlike breadth.

  “I was just crashing a party,” I said in a strained voice. I never thought I’d be in a situation where confessing to crashing was my best option. “With my friend Tag. We do that sometimes. Crash parties.” Used to. Used to crash parties. I wanted to kill Tag. This was her fault.

  “So you’re claiming it was just a coincidence?”

  I nodded vigorously. “Not just claiming. Telling you the absolute truth.”

  “Why do the cameras show you running for the stairs?”

  I blushed. “Well, you know, like I said, we were … crashing.” Maybe Underhill hadn’t been much of a party boy in his day. “We weren’t invited. We had to leave in a hurry.”

  Underhill put his chin in his hand as if he had all day to extract the truth.

  “ Jury- rigging is a felony.”

  “I wasn’t jury- rigged!” I yelped, a sob rising in my throat. “I mean, nobody planted me. No rigging. Nothing. I never saw any of those people before that party, and I never saw any of the defendants while I was there,” I pleaded, just as I realized that the guy Maria Anna had been whispering to in the courtroom was the hottie who’d been manning the door of the Cavendish ballroom. I groaned to myself.

  “Where can we reach your friend?” Mulrooney said, peering at me with big eyes. “It would help if we could back up your story.”

  “She’s at a conference.”

  “Where?”

  I bit my lip as my malfunctioning geography gene chose that moment to right itself. She wasn’t in Senegal or Saudi Arabia.

  “Spain,” I whispered.

  “Could you speak up?”

  “Spain.” I began to see spots.

  The pair exchanged triumphant glances.

  “Why do you suppose she went to Spain, honey?” Mulrooney said. I resisted correcting his mode of address.

  “She’s a parasitologist. She studies tapeworms in sharks,” I said, thinking how ridiculous the truth sounded. Why couldn’t Tag have just become a lawyer? What the hell kind of person mucks around in shark stomachs, I thought angrily.

  One of the lights overhead sputtered and died.

  “Tell us a little more about what you do. You manage your parents’ building?”

  I nodded, nervously working the zipper on my backpack.

  “You don’t look like a super. How did you wind up doing that?”

  So this was how I made Gregory feel. No wonder he hated me. I shook my head, trying to focus on one earthquake at a time.

  “The previous super left. My parents needed me.”

  “Why did he leave?” Underhill asked.

  My shoulders dropped and I rubbed my eyes as hard as I could stand.

  “Arrested.”

  “Arrested?” Mulrooney said, surprised. “For what?”

  “Kickbacks,” I told them, wishing I could put my head down on the table.

  “And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning?” said my buddy Underhill.

  No, I didn’t, but I wondered now if perhaps I should be telling them about the secret staircase James had built.

  “I want a lawyer!” I yelped, suddenly remembering I was a prosecutor’s daughter and should have known better than to sit there for ten minutes like some yo-yo without demanding representation.

  “You’ve got one at home, I hear.”

  I looked sharply at Underhill. He was actually cracking a joke. At my expense.

  “You’re free to go,” he said, spreading his arms, as if to persuade me I wasn’t there against my will. I looked to Mulrooney for confirmation. He smiled and nodded. Apparently, we were all buddies now.

  “Should I come back tomorrow?” I said, pushing back my chair.

  Underhill’s stony face cracked into a smile. “Uh, no,” he chortled, sliding his business card toward me, “consider yourself relieved of jury duty.”

  * * *

  I TOOK THE STAIRS OUT OF THE UNION SQUARE SUBWAY station two at a time—surely that would make up for a shortage of visits to the Y in recent weeks—and gulped deep breaths of the sun- warmed air. As I dodged kamikaze skateboarders and Falun Gong protesters, I embarked on a campaign to be grateful for my current state of affairs. Wasn’t there a Chinese blessing that wished the beneficiary a dull life?

  So I had missed an opportunity to serve on the Pelarose jury. That was a huge disappointment. But I had also missed being prosecuted myself. That was a very good thing. So good that it made the prospect of going home to pay bills seem soothing. As long as I didn’t think about paying the exterminator’s bill.

  I shook my head, clearing away the thought. I would do my job, get the apartment rented, go to Lucy’s tonight to hear about Mercedes’s smooth sail to the isle of l
ove, be a supportive and dependable friend. I’d even prepare to be a proud sister to my Spielbergian brother. Love would come in its own time. If I didn’t look too hard, it would find me. I just had to figure out how to stop looking.

  I turned onto University Place and spotted the dingy yellow awning hanging crookedly over the door to Fast Foto. I considered abandoning James’s prints there instead of forking over my own cash to pay for them. All I planned to do was stick them in the basement with the rest of his stuff anyway.

  Closure. Closure and responsibility. I sighed. They were his property. Reluctantly, I pushed open the door.

  I handed my claim stubs to the gangly teen attempting to hide his pimples behind sprouts of wiry facial hair. The effect was that of an adolescent Osama bin Laden. I tried not to grimace.

  The boy silently disappeared into the back, but when he returned, he brought with him two similarly unappealing teen age specimens. The three of them moved toward the counter in a huddle, guffawing and watching me with wide eyes. I shifted uneasily.

  “Are these yours?” Baby Osama squeaked.

  I glanced down at the envelope, which had my name on it, and looked up at the trio impatiently.

  “Okaaaay,” he said gleefully, punching numbers into the cash register. “That’ll be fifty- two seventy- five.”

  “What!” This was going to come out of the building’s account, damn it. I handed over my credit card, glaring at the ugly boys as if they had forced me to develop the photos.

  “Some people pay a lot more than that for … pictures,” said the one wearing a tattered Sex Pistols T-shirt. The third casualty of adolescence elbowed him and snorted.

  I grabbed the fat envelope and wrenched open the door. I made it as far as the corner before I stopped under the shade of a birch tree and unsealed the package. Pulling out the first envelope, I prayed for photos of kindly old relatives. Rocking chairs on a porch covered in peeling white paint. An old sheepdog curled at their feet. Please.

  As I flipped through the first three photos, I was indignant. Why should I have had to pay for poorly developed film? I could barely make out faces. But at the fourth, I froze. It was grotesquely clear, as if the photographer—as if James—had perfected his technique. A wave of nausea rose in my throat.

  The pictures—about seventy of them—were of Roxana. Roxana pale and naked and having sex with lots and lots of different people. Or wearing the lingerie I had brushed up against in her closet, having sex with lots and lots of different people. And then there were photos of other women having sex with lots and lots of different people. One of the women looked like it might be Mini- Dolly. One of the men was definitely Senator Smith; I recognized the gray helmet of hair.

  I opened the next pack, and the next one, terrified that I would find pictures of myself. In some, Roxana wore expressions of ecstasy, but the worst were the ones in which all that was visible was a man’s face, contorted with pleasure over a naked breast or bare ass.

  I shoved the photos back into the envelope, sending a couple of negative strips fluttering through the air in my haste. I whipped around, trying to catch them. A woman with a newborn strapped to her chest stopped to help, and an elderly doorman limped out of his building to capture the flyaway celluloid.

  “Thanks, no, really, thanks, you don’t have to …” I grabbed the negatives from them, trying to sound grateful instead of panicked. I wondered how many other New Yorkers at that very moment were carrying dark secrets inside something as innocuous as a photo lab envelope stamped with a cartoon smiling sun wearing sunglasses.

  I hightailed it across Twelfth Street, eager to return to the safety of my apartment and unload my illicit haul. I barely managed a smile for the bald guy toting his pet macaw on his bare shoulders, as sure a sign of spring’s arrival in the neighborhood as daffodils might be elsewhere. As disturbed as I was by this new image of Roxana as a whorish sex addict—no judgments, I chastised myself, no judgments—I knew I had to tell her about these photos. I was more certain than ever that she didn’t know about James’s staircase. He had been using it to spy on her, to take pictures of her titillating sex life.

  I clucked with disgust at this rapacious side of James, and absently stepped into the crosswalk against the light. A Harley farting its way down Fifth Avenue swerved to avoid me and I gasped, more terrified at the thought of the photos being found on me by an ER attending than by my brush with death. I hopped back onto the curb. A rail- thin, tattooed dog- walker being pulled along by a dozen mutts staggered to a halt beside me, and the fourteen of us waited for the light to change.

  After I showed Roxana, then what? I crossed Fifth Avenue with the dog- walker, who managed to light a cigarette as her canine charges surged toward Washington Square Park.

  I was going to have to give the photos to the police. Or, more specifically, to the FBI. To Underhill and Mulrooney, who, just hours ago, had accused me of having mob ties. What if James was spying on women and then selling unauthorized porn? Someone was going to find out—I shuddered, thinking of the pubescent counter help at Fast Foto—and I needed to get to the cops before they did. But it was only fair to break the news to Roxana first.

  I finally crossed Seventh Avenue, dodged a phalanx of Trinidadian nannies pushing orange Bugaboos, and broke into a jog. I raced up my front steps, ignoring Mrs. Hannaham, who was puttering around her garden looking like a holy terror in an oversized sailor’s uniform, her garland of white paper clips drooping low over one ear.

  “Zephyr, I need—”

  “In a sec,” I said, knowing I’d pay for my brush- off with a dozen pre- dawn phone calls the following week.

  Upstairs, the door to James’s apartment was open, and the Sandra Oh clone was marching around, measuring every stretch of wall and calling out numbers to a young woman who was wearing the exact same outfit as Sandra, right down to the thin- lipped expression of concentration.

  “Uh…” I said.

  Sandra snapped shut her measuring tape. She and her doppelgänger whipped around, fixing me with identical glares.

  “Who let you in?” I asked, wondering whether I had definitively told her she could have the apartment and had just forgotten.

  Sandra put one hand on her hip and cocked her head as if to say, Please, is there anything I’m not capable of? The assistant put her hand on her hip, too.

  I rubbed my forehead hard, trying to triage. Sandra could wait, I decided, and turned to go.

  “Is she always this loud?” Sandra barked. I stopped and caught the strains of an argument between Roxana and a deep male voice above our heads. “If she is, I’m going to require some kind of soundproofing.”

  The toady assistant echoed “soundproofing” a moment after Sandra said it, as if to prove her allegiance to her boss.

  “I’ve never heard her before,” I said firmly. “I’ll go check.”

  I dumped my backpack in my apartment and listened to the row upstairs. It wasn’t in English or French, and every now and then an exchange was punctuated with a thump, like a palm on a wall. I remembered the naked fear I’d seen in Roxana’s eyes as Senator Smith followed her up the stairs, and her hushed argument with Mini-Dolly on the landing, and I wondered if I should get someone to go with me to her apartment.

  No. There was no Hayden, there was no Gregory, and my father was at work. I was no fairy- tale bimbo awaiting male assistance. I was going to do this myself. I donned my super’s cloak of responsibility, girding myself with thoughts of all the organized files now neatly lined up under my bed, and how I knew what tax forms to file and what grade oil we used. Clutching the photos, I made my way upstairs.

  The voices grew louder. They were speaking Spanish, not with the usual Mexican lilt I was accustomed to hearing from the kitchen of every restaurant in the city, but a lisping, mother-country Spanish. More slamming. More yelling. Roxana was sobbing.

  I nervously flicked the packs of photos against my hand, hesitating. This was a test. If I could stop the fight, go to the
cops with the photos, and get a nice, fat deposit out of Sandra—to whom I had apparently rented an apartment-then I would have finally completed something. I would have proved to my parents and myself that I was an adult. I didn’t know what would come next in my life, but whatever it was, I’d be coming at it like a cheetah charging through the jungle instead of an alley cat skulking along the top of a Dumpster.

  I took a deep breath and knocked. We were in a town house in the middle of Greenwich Village on a Tuesday afternoon.

  I mean, really, what was the worst that could happen?

  SEVENTEEN

  THE YELLING INSIDE ROXANA’S APARTMENT WAS DROWNING out my knocking, so I pounded on the door. Silence, and then a low, angry rumble of voices. I banged a third time, my determination building.

  “It’s Zephyr. Roxana, open the door right now!” I shouted, thrilled by my own authority.

  Roxana flung open the door. Her eyes were puffy and damp, her topknot was unraveling, and her lip was bleeding. Behind her, the apartment was a wreck. Moving boxes were everywhere, stuffed chaotically with unmatching items-fringed pillows and a lamp sticking out of one, books and pots sticking out of another, as though the boxes weren’t going to be closed, just thrown away. Shards of a vase littered the floor in front of me.

  I carefully stepped over the broken pottery, toward her. When I looked up, I was face- to- face with the presumed vase tosser. It took a second to place the sharp jaw, the black eyes, and the even blacker hair.

  Ferdinand.

  Ferdinand, the shrimp- eating Spaniard I’d elbowed up to at the St. Regis. Ferdinand, who, just four hours earlier, I might have been thrilled to reencounter so serendipitously. I might have picked up my fantasies where I’d left off—imagining us touring the world together in his private jet, my dad dandling our dark- haired babies, our lives perpetually framed by Mediterranean sunsets, our thirst ever slaked by cold, slushy drinks.