“Don’t move,” the man told her.
“I knew that would happen,” she complained. “They took out my shower and put in this tub.”
“She’s in shock,” a woman said, stirring sugar into her tea. She went on talking to her friend.
“Yeah, pretty tough break. Not the type of thing you expect to happen when you pour in the old Mr. Bubble,” Mick was saying to her. Then they both started to laugh.
“Nice place,” Andrew said. I noticed that he had gotten a good look at the girl’s breasts. Of course everyone had.
“Could we have the check?” the woman who had diagnosed the shock said.
“Yes, I’ll be right with you,” Mick said.
“I don’t think we should have to pay,” the woman’s friend said.
“Yup, yup, you do have a point there,” Mick said. He put their check on their table anyway. He looked at me and Andrew.
“Having a good time, folks? It’s like fucking Niagara Falls in here. Very romantique.”
The two women got up and left without paying. An NYU student writing in a composition notebook asked for a refill.
“Can I have a cookie?” the girl in the tub asked Mick.
“I don’t know about that. They might be a little waterlogged,” he said. “We can give it a try.” Water was pouring down on the chrome pastry case. He opened the glass door and placed an assortment of Italian cookies on a small plate using a pair of tongs. He brought them to her. “I’ll get you a hot chocolate. That’ll warm you up,” he said.
“Maybe you should ask if there’s a doctor,” I told Mick.
“You don’t need a doctor, you need an architect,” Andrew said. He walked over to where the girl was sitting in the tub, careful not to let any debris get on his tasseled loafers, and looked up the hole. There was wood and tin and dirt everywhere. The girl looked up the hole, too.
“They should have reinforced your floor with scuttle beams,” he explained to her. Then he said something I couldn’t hear that made her laugh.
“You don’t need an architect, you need a lawyer,” Mick said.
Andrew came back to our table and we sat there for a long time and watched the girl get carried to the ambulance. The man who had given her the coat asked for it back.
We said goodbye to Mick. “Sorry about that, folks,” he said.
Andrew walked me to my building. “Did you have fun?” he asked. “I had a lot of fun,” he added.
“I think that was probably an omen,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “It was an omen that we should get naked and take a bath together as soon as possible.”
“So what are we doing?” I said.
“Dating, I guess,” he said, smiling. “Are you saying this wasn’t your idea of a great first date?”
If I was going to be a mistress I’d be needing dinner & a movie.
“Can I call you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, Andrew,” I said, dramatically.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said. “We’ll figure everything out.”
He kissed me, Then he took off his glasses and kissed me again. I put my bag on the street at our feet, remembering my gun. He kissed me hard and passionately. He was only a few inches taller than me. It made me feel strong and equal and I kissed him back.
“I have to walk the dogs. I’ll call you when I get home,” he said. He kissed me again, taking my bottom lip between his teeth and biting a little. I watched him walk down the street toward the subway.
A little boy in a stroller passed by me. He was being pushed by his mother. He was wearing a sweater with a mouse and hearts on it. He looked like cupid in his chariot. The little boy pretended to shoot me with a toy gun. “Kill, kill,” he said, pointing the gun in my direction. His mother wasn’t paying any attention. “Kill, kill,” he said to me. I pulled my gun just slightly out of my bag and pointed it at him. “Kill, kill,” I said back. The little boy looked surprised and laughed. I put the barrel of my gun in my wide-open mouth for a second like a lollipop. Then the little boy put the barrel of his gun in his mouth like a lollipop. His mother looked down at him, embarrassed. I put my gun away quickly. Then his mother noticed me and smiled.
When I got home I sat on my bed for a while, squinting one eye and aiming at various things. I really wanted to shoot something but I was afraid of the noise it would make. I needed a silencer. I walked around the apartment holding the gun and then I put it down on the windowsill and tried to watch TV. I couldn’t just leave the gun there.
I opened my jewelry box filled with the things my ex-husband had gotten me and nestled the gun in the center. But it was too beautiful and valuable and real for that box. It dwarfed the antique garnets and pearls and the replacement diamond engagement ring. Before we were married I had thrown the original one Jack had gotten me out of a speeding car window during a huge fight and he had to get me an even nicer one. The gun made it look like a Cracker Jack prize.
Violet called to ask how my date with Andrew went.
“Is he there right now?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Did he lift you this time?”
“No.” I told her about the girl in the tub falling through the ceiling.
“Was she really fat?”
I thought that was a strange question.
“I want to hear everything. Let’s have dinner,” Violet said.
“I don’t think I can go, I’ve got this gun here.”
I told her the whole story and I felt her reach a new peak of jealousy.
“That’s so fantastic,” she kept saying.
“It’s the most incredible feeling,” I said.
“Meet me at Life Café in twenty minutes,” she said, “and bring the gun.”
As I sat in the café waiting for Violet I thought that maybe I was meant to kill myself. That day at lunch my fortune had said, “An important letter or message is on its way to you.” And then I found the gun. I felt like crying. Not me exactly, but my face. My face felt like crying, as if my face had a mind of its own. My cheeks felt smooth and cool like the calm before a storm.
I started making a pro-and-con list in my mind. Killing myself pros: no risk of getting married and divorced again; no more New Year’s Eves; no more craving phantom sex; no more underwires poking through expensive bras; no more waking up early; no more Dale; no more Violet …
Violet rushed in with new highlights, tiger stripes of strawberry and brown in her blond hair. She looked completely different. “Nice highlights,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I like what they did to your hair.”
“I didn’t get it highlighted,” she said, defensively. “It always looks like this.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off her new hair.
“So, where is it?” she asked, in a hushed voice.
“I can’t just whip it out,” I said.
“You have to let me borrow it,” she said. I didn’t think that was a good idea. Violet got very violent at work. She was the most hostile waitress imaginable, accidentally spilling boiling soup on people all the time and dropping steak knives on them.
“What do you want it for?” I asked.
“I just want it in my apron when I work. When I reach into my apron for a straw or a Sweet’n Low, I want to feel it in there.”
She’d probably get drunk and let some guy hold it. “It’s pretty dangerous,” I said.
“I have to see it. Follow me into the ladies’ room.” Without looking at me she stood and walked toward the ladies’ room. I stayed seated. I suddenly didn’t feel like showing Violet my new gun, the way I didn’t like to discuss the size and shape of my ex-husband’s penis with her. I wished I hadn’t brought it. I started thinking about fingerprints. Mine were already on it along with the prints of the guy before me. I knew I was being childish. I put my bag over m
y shoulder and headed for the bathroom.
I took it out of the bag. “Here it is,” I said.
“Is it loaded?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
She looked down at it but she didn’t take it from me. She seemed cowed by it. “You should really take that back,” she said.
“Take it back where?”
“Turn it in or something,” she said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, slipping it back into my bag. “I’ll do that.”
Later when I was walking past Caffe Reggio, Mick came out. “Did you hear what happened?” he asked. “Some dumb cop left a gun in the John and someone found it and walked off with it. He took it out of his holster when he took a crap.” Mick started laughing. “Makes you feel safe, doesn’t it?”
“Who found it?” I said.
“I wish I had. That cop was so embarrassed, he would have paid any amount to get it back. But I wouldn’t have given it to him, because it was so fun watching him squirm.” He put on a dumb-guy voice. “Duh, did anyone happen to find a gun?”
“Was he cute?” I asked. I could be like Prince Charming sliding the gun into every holster until I found the perfect fit.
“Why? Would you date a copper?”
Mick had a point. “Of course not. What kind of sick person would want to walk around with a gun?” I said.
12.
CENTRL HEAT
The next day at Dale’s I was alone in the office so I took out my gun. It was square and made mostly of black plastic. It had the word “Glock” printed on the handle. I couldn’t believe how light it was. I weighed it on the mail scale. One and a half pounds. I could send out announcements to my friends and family, bouncing baby Glock, one pound eight ounces.
The trigger had a tiny piece of plastic sticking out of it, like a fin. I wondered what it was for. I put it in the zippered compartment of my bag and left for an appointment with a new client.
On my way, I ran into a coffee place to get an iced tea but I had trouble communicating what I wanted because I absolutely refused to say the word “grandissimo.” If everyone else in New York wanted to go around saying words like “venti” and “grandissimo” like a bunch of idiots, they could, but I wasn’t going to.
“An extra-large iced tea,” I said.
“We don’t have extra large,” the boy behind the counter said. He was working in Rollerblades.
“The largest size you have,” I said.
“Would you like grande, gigante, or grandissimo?”
“The biggest,” I said.
“Grandissimo?” he asked, really slowly.
I nodded, reluctantly.
He brought me the iced tea. “One grandissimo iced tea,” he announced. I searched through my bag for money.
A pudgy black man, obviously a bum, came in and walked up and down studying the jars of biscotti behind the counter. He ordered a small coffee and grabbed a pile of napkins. Then, when the boy rolled away, he took the contents of the Daffy Duck tip mug, a five-dollar bill, masking it with the napkins. He was slow and fumbled but managed to get the money into his pocket.
The boy behind the counter had sweat stains under his arms.
He gave the bum his coffee and the bum said, “I ordered a grande.”
“Oh, sorry,” the boy said and went to change it.
I noticed a pen on the counter and I grabbed a napkin and wrote, “That bum stole $5 from the tip mug,” and drew an arrow pointing to the thief.
The thief gave the boy the five-dollar bill and the boy gave him change. The thief dropped a nickel in the empty tip mug and it made a loud sound bouncing off the bottom. When the boy rolled back I said, “Excuse me,” and held the napkin up so he could read it. Instead of taking the napkin from me he just stood there slowly reading it, silently mouthing the words.
“Oh,” he said. He looked at the empty tip mug.
The thief was still standing there taking more napkins.
He rolled over to the thief and I put two dollars on the counter and started to leave.
“There was five dollars in the tip jar, man,” the boy said to the thief.
“Maybe she took it,” the thief said, pointing at me.
“Oh yeah? I don’t think so,” the boy said sarcastically, showing the thief my note.
“Bitch,” the thief yelled at me. “You bitch.”
“Oh, like I really care what your opinion of me is,” I said.
“You should mind your own business, bitch.”
I unzipped my bag and pulled Glock out for a split second. “Oh shit,” he said. He ran away. Holding the gun like that made me terrified. It felt the opposite of safe. It gave me vertigo.
Once, when I was young, I wanted to impress my father, so I told him I could go on the roller coaster alone. He said I was too small, but I insisted. He called me a tough cookie. As soon as the ride started I became terrified and started to cry. I felt my face go slack with concentration. Just when I thought I was going to die the ride slowed to a stop. My father had paid the man to stop the ride seconds after it had started. My father climbed up and got me, while the other riders screamed complaints. I wrapped my arms around his neck like a little monkey.
I walked away from the coffee place quickly and when I finally started to slow down I saw something beautiful leaning against a building. It was a child’s legless wooden piano painted cobalt blue with Chinese pink, yellow, and lavender roses on it. I picked it up and touched the keys, which really played. It was heavy. I played something I remembered from all my piano lessons, “Yankee Doodle.” I put it under my arm like an attaché case. I headed to White Street for my appointment with my new gun and piano.
Noah Bausch, my client, was waiting when I got there. He was looking up at the building with his hands on his hips. He had on shorts and a goatee. The richer they were, the sleazier they looked. We waited there for his wife and daughter. Recently I had been spending a lot of time with married men waiting for their wives and babies to stroller up.
I stood there sexlessly holding my child’s piano. I was trying to practice sounding interested without flirting. I didn’t want to alienate the wives. I hadn’t mastered the technique and usually ended up somehow flirting with the wives and alienating the husbands until we were all pitted against each other.
I tried to assume the same neutral expression I had when I used to baby-sit. Baby-sitter and real estate agent were the only two jobs I could think of where you really weren’t allowed to be sexy.
“So you’re a writer,” I said, not caring.
“Yes! And you play piano.”
“Not professionally,” I said.
“Well, I am a writer. Short stories mostly. I love the form.”
Is it true what they say, I wanted to ask, the shorter the story the shorter the …
“That’s great. I love short stories,” I lied. I didn’t ask if they were published.
“And your wife?” I asked.
“Audrey’s a top literary agent,” he said.
“Is she your agent?”
“No, as a matter of fact she’s not my agent, she doesn’t think it would be ethical,” he said. I could tell by the way he said it that he had no agent. “Of course, ethics probably isn’t a big issue in your line of work.”
“No, it isn’t.”
He looked at his watch. “She’s always late.”
“I am not late,” she said, coming up behind him. She was taller than he was and anorexic with dark circles under her eyes.
“Where’s Flannery?” he asked, accusingly, as if she had misplaced their child.
“I convinced LaLa to stay late,” she retorted.
She put out her hand, “Hi, I’m Audrey Bausch,” she said, grandly. I switched the piano to the other arm and shook her hand. “What a cute piano,” she said. “Is that for Flannery? She’ll just love that.”
“Oh,” she said, with fake embarrassment.
“Flannery, what an interesting name,” I said.
“She’s named for Flannery O’Connor,” Noah Bausch said, proudly.
He obviously thought that naming his child Flannery would help his short stories. Flannery will get you nowhere, I thought.
“Aud, not everyone wants to spoil Flannery with presents every-where we go,” Noah snapped.
“Well, the last agent gave her that tea set and I just assumed …”
“Let’s not turn this into a big argument,” he said.
The crazy thing was, it was this more than anything that made me miss my husband. A couple fighting made me more jealous than their hand-holding in the master bedroom, or their loving, knowing glances across the marble bath, or their quick kiss and tummy rub in the elevator. I missed the arguments. I wanted to join in like a swinger.
“Where were you?” Noah asked his wife.
“Dentist,” she said.
“You know, I’ve actually been thinking about finding a new dentist,” I said. “Is your dentist good?” Since the separation I wanted all new doctors, but I shouldn’t have been asking their advice. It made me look ungrounded not to have a dentist.
“Ours is wonderful,” Audrey Bausch said.
“I don’t think he’s a very good dentist,” Noah Bausch said.
I just stood there like a baby-sitter. “Well, should we go up?”
The only thing the Bausches agreed on was their dislike of the loft. It seemed I had forgotten to mention that the loft had a tin ceiling and they had been instructed by their kinesthesiologist that living under a tin ceiling caused cancer, because tin couldn’t breathe so all the bad vibrations stayed inside and ricocheted around like stray bullets. They stood united in their hatred of tin. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry,” I said.
That night I had a dream that Dick Van Dyke and I were sitting on a bench holding hands, in love, and Mary Tyler Moore wanted me to leave. Even though she wasn’t really his wife, they were just actors, she still wanted me gone. She didn’t want me in their sitcom.
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