When I was a child, my shrink told me something I never forgot. At the end of our session, right out of the blue, she said, “Liv, if you had been caught by the Nazis and put in a concentration camp, you would have survived.” “How?” I asked her. “By finding a way to make yourself useful.” She had told me that fifteen years ago but it had bothered me ever since.
Just then Valashenko walked past me in her purple felt hat. She saw me and stopped.
“Hi, Liv,” she said.
“Valashenko,” I said. She looked older and tired, like a camel. Her eyes were bigger and she looked like she had grown another layer of skin. Her hair looked like I had cut it. I felt so terrible I could barely look at her. “You look wonderful.”
“Well, things have been hard but I finally got my license and I’m going to pitch my first exclusive. If I don’t make money soon I don’t know what I’ll do.” I could tell she was still wearing only one contact lens.
“Maybe your family could help you.”
“Hah, my family would never help me. Liv, I grew up with the Hasidim. They sat shivah for me when I became a model. To them I’ve been dead for thirty-five years.”
“Maybe I could take you out to lunch sometime next week,” I offered.
“Oh, I’d love that. You’re the only nice person in this business.” She leaned down to kiss me on the cheek and walked toward Juliet’s building. I was still holding the signed exclusive in my hand. I watched her ring the buzzer and adjust her hat in the door’s reflection. She rang the buzzer again and stood there patiently. She rang the buzzer a third time and I turned and walked quickly away.
I knew I was doing the right thing. I would do a much better job selling this loft than Valashenko, and my allegiance had to be to its owner. If she was going to make the worst mistake of her life and sell her loft, then the least I could do was get her the most money I possibly could. I walked faster, fueled by fiduciary responsibility.
Now that I had my own exclusive, I couldn’t seem to walk fast enough. I couldn’t wait to get back to the office. People were in my way. Everyone’s shoulders were rounded. The pace of New York was getting so slow it was practically at a standstill. I wanted to be in a city where people moved quickly. I would have to move to Hong Kong, where men didn’t laze around all day commenting on women and holding basketballs.
When I got back to the office Lorna was sitting at her desk smoking a joint. I couldn’t believe how unprofessional it was to sit there doing that in the office. “Something stinks,” I said.
“I know, what is that?” Lorna said.
“Your pot,” I said.
“The pot is what’s making it smell better in here.”
“Lorna, how much do you think a two-bedroom loft on Liberty with an unfinished roof deck would go for?”
“How big?”
“About sixteen hundred square feet.”
“Okay, so we’ll say it’s two thousand square feet. What’s the maintenance?”
“It’s quite high,” I said, as if I had already thought of everything. “It’s twenty-two hundred a month.”
“And why do you want to know this?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Well, I’m not here to baby-sit you so figure it out for yourself.”
“I’ll look it up on the computer.”
Lorna laughed. “That’s a good one. Listings on the computer! That’s funny. Where do you think you are, Corcoran?” Most companies, like Corcoran, Halstead, Feathered Nest, Smoothe Transitions, or Douglas Elliman, had thousands of listing on their computers. It turned out all Dale had on the computer was that program to help you learn how to use the mouse.
The phone rang and this time Lorna was the first to answer it. It was Dale calling from Venice. “Yeah-yeah-yeah, ciao,” Lorna said. “Could you tell your darling new employee that I’m not here to do her work for her?”
“Ask her who’s in charge,” I said.
“Who did you put in charge, Dale, me or your new lover? Fine. Well, I can’t stay on the phone all day, I have to try to get some of my own work done around here so I can afford to take trips to Italy and waste time,” she said and hung up. She took one last drag on her joint, strapped on her knapsack, and headed toward the door.
“Well?” I asked.
“We’re both in charge,” she said, slamming the door behind her.
For some reason, I was starting to like Lorna. In a way, I liked her more than Violet. At least Lorna was totally honest. There was something comforting about all that nastiness, like brown water gushing out of my sink. You knew it was bad, you didn’t have to wonder.
I had even been tempted to show her my gun.
As soon as she left Dale called back. “How aaaaare you?” she asked.
“I thought I was in charge, Dale.”
“You are, of course you’re in charge. I just couldn’t tell Lorna that. She has a lot of seniority. Can’t you try to be understanding?”
“I don’t care,” I said.
“Do you miss me?” she asked. I didn’t say anything. “I’m just kidding,” she said. “Harri and I are having a wonderful time. How’s business?”
“I’ve got good news for you!” I said. I told her about my exclusive. “I could really use your help with it.”
“That’s great! You’re the emperor with the golden touch.” She lowered her voice. “Liv, I wish you were here.”
“Me too,” I said. “By the way, it’s King Midas and the golden touch and the emperor’s new clothes. Anyway, it’s a sixteen-hundred-square-foot—”
“I’m serious, come to Venice. Harri’s going home early, it will just be the two of us.”
“You need me to stay here and manage the office,” I said. “I have to ask you how to price the loft.”
“I’ll pay for everything. Venice is so beautiful. Bella. Bay-la.” I could see she wasn’t going to help me. “Listen, kid, I think I have a little bit of a crush on you.” Oh no, I thought. “There, I said it.”
“But, Dale, I’m not gay,” I said.
“I know, I know,” she said.
“I’m straight,” I said. I drew a straight line on the listing sheet on my desk.
“I know.”
“I mean I’m very flattered. Extremely flattered,” I said. “And I respect you as a businessmanperson.”
“I know you could have anyone,” she said angrily. “You should have a real sugar daddy, an older Italian man.”
“Are you going to fire me now?” I asked jokingly.
“Of course not, I love you,” she said, and hung up.
I sat at my desk cringing. I knew I was going to get fired. No exclusive in the world was worth even having to talk to Dale on the phone. I tried to put Dale out of my mind and concentrate on my first night dog-sitting with Andrew.
Just then he called. “Are you coming over?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. I suddenly felt confused. I thought it had been definite. “Do you still want me to?”
“Yes, of course. I just thought maybe you had changed your mind because I left three messages for you and you didn’t call back.”
I laughed. “Lorna doesn’t take messages,” I said. I would have to talk to Dale about voice mail. I noticed the three while-you-were-out slips Lorna had put on my desk. The first said, “I’m not your fucking secretary.” The second said, “Your boyfriend sounds like a loser.” And the third said, “Get a life.”
“Hurry home,” he said. “The girls and I are waiting for you.”
“What’s the address?” I asked.
He gave me the address of a building called the Cedarton on Tenth and University and told me to hurry. “I can’t wait for it to be morning so we can wake up together,” he said.
The whole way to University Place I thought about sex. Just that morning I had had sex. I still felt it, felt him, between my legs. I felt like a
woman who is proud of her walk-in closet, feels richer, more feminine, opulent, even though few people have ever stepped inside it. I knew I looked different because every bum on the street and man in a black jeep with music blaring out of it commented on my appearance. I thought I was looking pretty average but the men of New York apparently thought otherwise.
15.
WEA/80’S 3BR—THIS WON’T LAST
Andrew greeted me at the door with two dogs. He showed me around the apartment we were going to be staying in for the week. He moved the white Fisher-Price baby gate aside so I could get into the living room.
“Does she have a baby?” I asked.
“That’s for the dogs,” he said. I sat on the couch and the dogs jumped up next to me. They were gleeful to be let in.
“Whose apartment is this?” I asked. Maybe Andrew had girl-friends all over New York.
“My friend Lauren’s.”
“And why are you dog-sitting for her?” I asked with a polite question mark.
“That little one was a stray I found,” he said. “But my dog Ajax didn’t get along with her so Lauren said she would take her if I agreed to dog-sit occasionally.” He still didn’t tell me who she was.
The room was filled with whimsical Salvador Dalí -style furniture. Exaggerated shapes, high backs, a wavy clock. A velvet couch that looked like it came right out of the SoHo Starbucks. “She really knows how to decorate,” he said. No, she doesn’t, I thought. I wondered if he was going to spend the whole night complimenting this woman. “Isn’t this a great apartment?” he asked. No, I thought. He was an architect, how could he think this was a great apartment?
“It’s all right,” I said.
The bedroom had a Lifecycle at the foot of the bed. I pictured the friend as tall and thin, biking during commercial breaks.
Andrew flipped me onto the bed and climbed on top of me.
“I thought we were going to go out to dinner to celebrate my new exclusive,” I said.
“We’re celebrating right now. Congratulations,” he whispered in my ear. “I’m proud of you.” I hated when men said they were proud of me. He didn’t even know me. Being proud involved an investment on his part. He hadn’t exactly carried me in his womb for nine months or put me through college. Next he would want a cut of my commissions. “I missed you so much today,” he said.
“Did you buy condoms?” I asked.
“I’m sure there are some around here somewhere.” He reached over my head and opened a tiny drawer in the built-in headboard. He pulled out a condom.
“Have you looked through her underwear drawer, too?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’m a man, Liv. I’m not going to stay alone in a woman’s apartment and not look in her hamper.”
“Did you say her hamper?” I asked. He laughed. “And?”
“They’re really nice,” he said.
“Silk?”
“No, cotton, but really nice.” Cotton isn’t really nice, I thought. I was wearing silk.
One of the dogs, the big one, crawled under the bed.
Suddenly I realized why I wasn’t enjoying dog-sitting with Andrew as much as I thought I would. We weren’t in his apartment. We weren’t in his bed. These weren’t his dogs. You learned about a person by looking around his apartment. You saw his magazines and dishes in the sink. You saw if he made his bed or not and if he had a Brita water filter. You saw if he used Dial soap or Dove, his CDs, books, cereal, screensaver, if the picture of his mother was framed or not.
My job was to look at apartments all day long. I was more familiar with the apartments and dogs of strangers than I was with Andrew’s. By the time I retired from real estate I would have seen every single apartment in New York, except Andrew’s. You just couldn’t know a person until you knew where he lived.
The only thing I knew about Andrew’s apartment was that there was a grandfather clock. I had heard it chime when we were on the phone. But where? In the living room, dining room, a corridor, or foyer? I knew it had to be somewhere near the kitchen. I wondered if the clock belonged to him or to his girlfriend. I could picture it, big, brown, and Roman-numeralled. I didn’t even like grandfather clocks. I couldn’t think of anything more depressing to have in your apartment. Why not just put a sign up saying, “Time is flying by, with each ticking second you are closer to the grave, and this clock is going to last a hell of a lot longer than you are.”
He pulled off my clothes as I lay there limply. He put on his friend Lauren’s condom and slid inside me.
“Andrew, where’s your grandfather clock?”
“It’s in your cunt,” he said. “And it’s going to chime on the stroke of twelve.”
“I’m serious, where is it?”
“I don’t know, it’s in the hall outside the kitchen.” He rammed into me. “Don’t think about grandfathers,” he said.
I thought of the real estate term grandfathering, grandfathered in. A person was grandfathered in if he was already living in a place when the rules got changed. You could be grandfathered in to an Artist-in-Residence building without an A.I.R. certificate. You could be grandfathered in to a rent-controlled lease. If a person had a preexisting greenhouse on his roof and a new law was passed saying that greenhouses were illegal, his greenhouse could be grandfathered in. People were constantly finding ways to get grandfathered in all over the place. Andrew already had a preexisting girlfriend. If Andrew and I ever married, his girlfriend could somehow be grandfathered in to our bed.
Andrew came on top of me and the dog crawled out from under the bed and went into the other room.
“You make an interesting sound when you come,” he said.
“But I didn’t come,” I said.
“Yes you did.”
“No I didn’t. I didn’t even consider coming.”
“You came and when you came you said, ‘Oy vey.’”
“First of all I did not come and second of all I did not say the words oy vey. I’ve never said oy vey in my life.”
“You definitely said oy. You might not have said vey but you said oy a couple of times.” He imitated an old Jewish woman coming. “Oy … Oy … Oy vey!”
“I did not say oy.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. I love all your sounds. I loved when you said oy. You are a beautiful Jewess.”
“Don’t ever call me that again,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
No one had ever called me a Jewess before. I didn’t look particularly Jewish. Cabdrivers always thought I was Indian or Italian. It occurred to me that Andrew was the first Jewish man I had been with. I liked that he was Jewish. I felt intensely intimate with him, like a Hasidic couple after they have said their marriage vows and are allowed to be alone in a room together for the first time. It felt like the first time. I felt skewered to him like a shish kebab.
He propped himself up on his elbow and traced my eyebrows with his finger.
Lying there with our faces so close together I fell in love with his looks. He didn’t seem as hideous as I had once thought. His cheeks no longer looked so munchkinlike, as if his grandmother’s invisible hand were permanently squeezing them. They looked delicious, like fruit I wanted to bite. His eyes looked scared and tired and hurt and happy. His forehead looked smart. His hair looked grown-up and responsible. His lips looked so cute and Jewish saying the word oy over and over again.
“Are you a mensch?” I asked. When I was a child, my shrink told me to marry a mensch when I grew up. I thought it was a nationality like Mennonite or Swede or Californian. When I got home I got out my atlas and asked my father where Mensches lived. “Upper West Side,” my father said.
“No, I am not a mensch,” Andrew said, smiling.
“Maybe you are.”
“I tell you what. I won’t call you a Jewess if you don’t call me a mensch.”
“Mensch is a good thing,” I said
. “What do you think it means?”
“It means nebbish. Wimp. Limp dick.”
“It means family man.”
He got another condom out of the drawer and climbed on top of me again. We fucked for a long time, with his mouth on my ear. This time I didn’t think about real estate. I thought about the mensch I had inside me.
And I remembered the time I stood on line at the post office buying Love stamps for my wedding invitations. The only thing I was sure of in all my wedding plans was the need for Love stamps. That made it somehow more official to me than the vows or the license or the rings. While I was on line a handsome man had smiled at me and I had smiled back. The line snaked around and he was several people ahead of me but we kept smiling. I was in love with my fiancé and I was there to buy Love stamps but I thought at that moment that I could have joined this man where he was on line and left with him, saving the Love stamps for a later date.
Then an old woman went up to the postal clerk and said, “How much is it to mail a letter?”
“Same price as last month,” the man told her. “Do you want to buy more than one stamp this time?”
“No,” the woman said. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll live.” It made life seem so short all of a sudden that I stopped smiling at the handsome man and I thought, I love Jack and I might as well only take that one since I don’t know how much longer I will live.
But my marriage had died an early death and I had outlived it and now I was with Andrew and he was a mensch. He was making me come. I listened to the sounds I was making. I had never felt so close to anyone. I pulled my head away, forcing him to let go of my ear and buried my face in his chest. I started to cry.
“Why are you crying?” he asked, pleased.
I didn’t know. Maybe it was the release of letting him fuck me. Or the tension of it. When I was a child my shrink had told me that no two people ever cry for the same reason, like snowflakes.
“Oy Gevalt,” I said.
“I can’t remember the last time I fucked like that. Twice in a row like that.”
“You’re a mensch,” I said. Tears were pouring down my face. “Maybe I should go home.”
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