The girl with the big glasses was there behind the counter next to the shaved-bald man with the tiny glasses. “Hi, Liv,” the girl said.
“Hi,” I said. I took the video out of my bag. The girl punched my name into the computer.
“Hmmmm,” she said, frowning at the screen.
I felt like I was getting bad news about an ultrasound. Jack should be here with me holding my hand.
“You don’t have an account with us anymore,” she said.
“I’m on my husband’s account,” I said.
“Hmmmm,” she said, punching keys. “No, he took you off that account.”
I couldn’t believe it. I stared at the Polaroids of dogs taped to the counter under a basket of tiny Milk-Bones.
I hadn’t even been planning to sue him for one drop of alimony.
“I’m sorry,” she said, tortured as if she were our child caught up in the divorce and we were going to have to start shuttling her back and forth between our apartments. “Did you want to open your own account?”
I shook my head no. “I don’t think this video store is big enough for the both of us.” I put the video back in my bag.
The girl stretched out her hand. “Were you going to return The Long, Long Trailer?” she asked.
“No, I think I’ll keep it out another day or two,” I said and left the store.
When I got to the office Dale informed me that I was late. “I expect you here by ten,” she said. “It’s your job to open up and get the messages off the machine.”
“I thought I was allowed to make my own hours,” I said.
She glared. “This is a small firm, Liv. You have to think of yourself as an entrepreneur or a mogul.” Then she gave me the other secret to getting listings. “Call everyone you know and tell them that you’re a real estate broker now. And always start every phone call with the words ‘good news.’ ‘I have good news, I’m a broker now.”
“I’m only an agent,” I said. I had just learned in real estate school that you had to be an agent for a minimum of two years and complete a certain number of deals, and then take a ninety-hour course and pass another set of exams to be a broker.
“It doesn’t matter. Tell them you’re a broker, it sounds better. And you work for a top firm. Call all your friends and relatives. Are you any relation to the designer Peter Kellerman?” she asked.
She was talking about my father.
“No,” I said.
I sat at my desk and considered calling my father. I really missed him and I had read on Page Six that he was in New York. I hadn’t been able to face calling him since I had left my husband. He had spent a quarter of a million dollars on the wedding. It reminded me of when I went around our building when I was a kid selling raffle tickets for my school and lost the envelope of three hundred and eight one-dollar bills. I walked around for weeks hardly able to breathe. But when I told him he just hugged me and wrote a check for three hundred and eight dollars.
I decided to call him and tell him about the divorce. Maybe he would kill Jack. I would tell him I only had one rented video to show for the whole marriage. As soon as Dale left the office I called him.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, resisting the urge to call him Daddy.
“Hi, Liv!” he said. “I called you but Jack said you were away on a vacation.”
I couldn’t believe what a coward Jack was.
“Is everything okay, Liv?”
“There’s something I have to tell you,” I said. My wedding gown, which he designed specially for me, with its Peter Kellerman label, hung practically still-warm in my husband’s closet. I took a deep breath. He waited patiently.
For a moment neither one of us said anything. Lorna stampeded into the office. “It stinks in here,” she said.
“Who’s that?” my father asked.
“No one,” I said.
“Something really stinks,” Lorna said.
“Where are you?” he asked.
I tried to think of the kind of place where you would find someone like Lorna. A diner, the subway. “Jury duty,” I told him.
“So what is it?” my father asked. “What did you want to tell me?”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about leaving Jack. And I certainly couldn’t tell him that I was living in a tenement and working in one, too. I couldn’t imagine one of my father’s friends coming to Dale’s office and perusing the junk shelf. I would have to get listings some other way.
“I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you in so long,” I said.
“No, I’m sorry,” my father said. “I go to Paris tonight but I’ll see you the next time I’m here.” My heart felt tied-off like a sausage. “So I trust everything’s fine?”
I took a deep breath. “It’s okay,” I said. “But the other day I got jealous of a statue.” I thought from this he would know there was something wrong.
“What statue?” he asked.
“You know, just a statue on the street,” I said.
“Well, you’ve always been like that, Liv. Jealous of inanimate objects. You were jealous of my mannequins when you were a child. Remember the time you were jealous of the turkey?”
On Thanksgiving all the children felt sorry for the turkey but I felt excited for it. Everyone always said how beautiful it looked. It was carved and served and eaten and everyone always said how good it tasted. It had a wishbone. It could make a whole family happy just by dying. It had a purpose.
“That’s true,” I said.
“So, I’ll call you when I get back.”
“Great!” I said, as if I were talking to Dale and not to my father. “How’s Mom?”
“She’s fine.”
“Is she still in Nice with Aunt Emma?”
“No, she’s in London now but she’s leaving for L.A. tonight,”
“Great!” I said.
“I love you,” my father said.
“Thanks,” I said. “Me too.”
When I hung up I thought how unlike me it was not to run to him crying about everything. Everybody did. His models came to him with their deflating implants and eating disorders and money mishaps and heroin hassles. They clustered around him like giraffes at a leafy tree.
Dale walked back in, and Lorna stood up and said, “I thought we weren’t allowed to make personal calls.”
“Did you call your parents?” Dale asked.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Call your father right now. It’s the best way to get clients.” She looked like her mouth was watering over all these clients.
“My father’s very busy,” I said.
“Jesus, Liv, I didn’t think I’d have to do so much hand-holding. Just call him. What does your father do anyway?”
“Uh, he’s a judge,” I said.
“Grrreeeaaattt!” She stormed over to my desk and picked up my phone receiver and shoved it at me.
I dialed.
“Judge Garrett’s office, may I help you?” a sexy voice asked. It was his new reader. I wondered what she looked like and if he had touched her face yet, and if she let him walk to the subway alone. I actually missed Jerome. I found myself thinking about him, hearing his weak voice in my head. I wondered if he hated me for leaving him.
“May I speak to him, please?”
“May I ask who’s calling?” she said territorially.
“Liv Kellerman,” I said.
There was a pause. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Hold on, please. Jerome, it’s Liv,” she whispered.
Then I heard Jerome’s English accent. “Yes, Hello? Liv, is that you?” Jerome had a way of making every phone call seem like it was transatlantic.
“Hello …” Suddenly I didn’t know what to call him. “Dad” seemed all wrong. I couldn’t say Jerome or Judge Garrett. “Your Honor,” I said. Dale, who had pretended not to be listening, looked up at me from
her desk.
“Your Honor is it, then?” Jerome said. “Well.”
“How have you been?” I asked.
“We’ve been managing. You know you left me in a bit of a lurch with your sudden departure but my new reader is lovely.”
“So you don’t miss me then?” I said. Dale raised an eyebrow at me as if she could tell she was losing money.
“Does that mean you miss me?” he said. I could see Jerome there, sitting limply as if he were in a wheelchair.
“Ummm, maybe a little,” I said.
“Yes, I see,” he said. “So to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Well, I passed the real estate test,” I said.
“Congratulations, I’m sure that’s quite a feat, isn’t it? Have you grown a fin on your back yet? I bet you have, haven’t you?”
“Yes, a fin, and I have another row of teeth coming in,” I said. Dale didn’t look pleased with the turn the conversation had taken. “Anyway, I wanted to give you my work number in case you know anyone you could refer to me,” I told him.
“You’re at a top firm,” Dale whispered. I nodded at her.
“All right, shoot, then,” Jerome said. I heard the Braille machine clicking as I gave him the number. “There was someone who came by and said he was looking for a loft. Who was it? I’m sure it will come to me,” he said.
I was sure it wouldn’t.
9.
WALK-UP—BUT WORTH IT!
The next morning Dale told me to show an apartment for her. She walked over to my desk and handed me keys. “They’ll meet you out front.”
I was excited to have something to do outside the office but I felt wary.
“Why can’t you show it to them?” I asked.
“Look at this, the kid’s already turning down business. What do you care why I don’t want to show it to them? I’m doing you a favor by letting you do it. If you rent it you get the commission.”
Now I knew there was something wrong with the situation. “I’m happy to do it, it’s just that I had a lot of canvassing planned for today,” I said.
“You have to do it,” Dale said. “The landlord won’t allow me on the premises. We had a falling-out. He’s a real scumbag. He’s a crook. I can’t deal with him. You have to do it. I just want to get someone in that loft.”
She came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed them. She was wearing her men’s cologne, which made me instantly sick.
I stood up and grabbed my coat.
“And tell them there’s absolutely nothing else. They have to take this one. If they don’t take it tell them I axed you to axe them if they really want to move or if they’re just wasting our valuable time. They said they didn’t want anything cookie-cutter. Tell them it’s this or nothing.”
I walked over to Watts Street thinking now I really was a real estate agent. It’s what I did, if anyone was to ask. Or axe.
I found the young couple standing right in front of the building. Just standing there nervously and expectantly, reining in two enormous white poodles. It was almost pathetic, like the people you see at cafés in the Village who are clearly waiting for blind dates.
I introduced myself.
“I’m Dale’s …” I couldn’t think of the right word. I didn’t want to be associated with her in any way. They just stared at me. The woman was wearing a big black fur Buckingham Palace guard’s hat. She shook my hand.
“Thank you for coming out,” she said. “I’m Cheryl and this is my husband, James, and these are …”I didn’t catch the dogs’ names. Her husband looked like an overgrown prep school kid. I could tell right away that Cheryl was going to be making the decision. James had less say than the dogs.
“It’s very close to the dog run,” I said. If you considered about a mile close.
Cheryl beamed. She took off her hat. She had short spiked blond hair underneath.
“Get ready for a hike,” I said.
“Oh?” her husband said.
“Didn’t Dale tell you it’s a walk-up?”
He shook his head. “How many floors?”
“Six,” I said brightly.
I opened the door and we headed up, dogs first.
“We just got married,” Cheryl said. “Yesterday.”
When we finally got to the top we stood sadly in the rectangular loft. “It’s very bowling alley,” Dale had said.
Even the dogs didn’t like it. They waited by the front door.
For half an hour the couple named all the bad things about the loft and then convinced themselves of why those bad things weren’t that important.
“How much did you say it was?”
“Five thousand a month.”
“Five thousand a month for an apartment?” James mumbled.
“It’s a loft,” I said.
“We have to make a decision quickly,” Cheryl said. “Everything we own is still on the moving truck. After the movers loaded our things onto the truck, our other deal fell through. We just can’t bring ourselves to put our things in storage.”
They said they would take it.
As soon as I got back to the office they called to say they had changed their minds. I hung up and told Dale. “Assholes!” she said. “They don’t know what they want.” She glared at me and clicked her pen for five minutes. Then she said, “Call them back.”
“They don’t want it, Dale.”
“Call them back and convince them to take that loft. If you don’t do it, I will,” she threatened.
I felt sorry for the spike-haired girl. I hated the thought of Dale calling her. But I also felt sorry for the loft. It was too good for them. It was better off standing there clean and empty, hopeful that someone interesting would live there, instead of this sad, unappreciative little-rich-kid couple with their entitlement complex and their unexercised dogs. A new apartment was a great thing, a symbol of hope, like a time capsule, a daffodil, a perfect egg. As bad as the loft was, it deserved better. Dale grabbed a ring of keys and stormed out of the office in her Hush Puppies.
I didn’t care if they lived there or not.
I called the couple. “Cheryl, I was thinking maybe you should reconsider.”
“We just don’t know what to do,” she said.
“I understand. It’s very hard,” I said.
“It’s all happening so fast. It’s too much change too fast.”
“I know exactly how you feel,” I said. “I’m divorced,” I added.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I thought we were happy but then my husband started taking Prozac and stopped having sex with me,” I said.
“That’s awful.”
“Yes. You’re lucky you don’t have to do this all alone.” My voice quavered.
“You’re right,” she said. She said they would take the loft.
We signed the leases that night in the office. “I’ll need a check for the first month’s rent, and two months’ security.”
“That’s fifteen thousand before we even move in,” James said.
“And a check for my commission,” I added.
“Which is?”
I tried to act like I was just figuring out the commission right then and there and that I hadn’t done the math a million times on a pad at my desk.
“Uh, let’s see, that’s nine thousand,” I said. I would get to keep half of that and Dale would get the other half.
“Nine thousand dollars,” James said, horrified.
“No, nine thousand beans,” his wife responded, so I didn’t have to.
“Yes, fifteen percent of the first year’s rent.”
James handed me my commission check and said a very reluctant thank-you. They were moving in the next day. They rushed off to make the final arrangements.
I headed to Dean & DeLuca to buy a gift basket for their house-warming present. I
lined a basket with burlap and filled it with apples, lemons, a pomegranate, grapes, cheese, tea, a honey bear, chocolates in a moon-shaped box, and house-shaped cookies. I tied a bow around its handle.
The next night Dale took me out to dinner to celebrate. We went to Lucky Strike. Lorna was supposed to join us but she never showed up. I put the gift basket on the chair between us. I was going to deliver it right after. I ordered a salad.
“Have a steak,” Dale said, but I stuck with my salad, thinking that I could have another dinner after this one somewhere else and wash the memory of Dale out of my mind.
Dale picked a broken brick-red crayon out of the glass of crayons on the table and wrote the word “winner” on the white paper tablecloth. Then she drew arrows pointing to me. “You’ve earned the most money out of the three of us this month,” she said.
She wrote “Liv,” “Lorna,” and “Dale” on the tablecloth and wrote how much each of us had made that month. Lorna had $0 under her name. Dale had $0. I had $4,000. Dale drew stars all around it. “Four thousand is not bad for your first month,” Dale said.
“Actually, it’s four thousand five hundred,” I said.
“There’s a five-hundred-dollar listing fee, which goes to the house.”
“You never told me about a listing fee.”
“I didn’t? Why would I forget to do that? I must be in love or something.” I ignored that comment and crossed out the $4,000 and wrote $4,500 next to it with a gold crayon. I drew my own stars. “Why do you think I would do something like that?” Dale continued. “Someone must be bewitching me.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Have you ever answered a personal ad?” Dale asked.
“No,” I said.
“I have a little confession to make. I’ve been, well, corresponding with a bi-curious girl from Brooklyn.”
“What about Harri?” I asked. I knew Dale was making it up. It was a terrible mistake to come here. The place was filled with models. People were staring trying to figure out if Dale was a man or a woman.
“Harri doesn’t have to know anything about it. When you’ve been married to a person for twelve years you need a change, you need to break your lease and take a sublet once in a while. I like young girls. Nineteen, twenty-one, nothing over twenty-two. Don’t look at me like that, I haven’t done anything wrong. Yet,” Dale said. “What I was thinking about doing was getting a room at the Paramount Hotel and just meeting her. Do you think it’s a good idea? She’s a lot younger than I am.”
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