“Please stay here with me tonight, Liv. Please stay with me all week.”
We took the dogs for a walk and sat holding hands on a bench in the pebble dog run of Washington Square Park, sharing a big bottle of water.
16.
SUB-O
In the morning I got to the office first and got the messages off the answering machine. One was for Lorna. I copied down the information and erased the message.
“So who’s that freak who kept calling you yesterday?” she said when she got in. “Your boyfriend?” Her voice was filled with disgust.
I couldn’t believe she wanted to attempt girl talk.
“Maybe,” I said.
“I need a joint,” she said. “I went to visit my friend Mario in the hospital. He only has three T cells left. He’s hitting on all the female nurses, trying to pinch them and shit. All of a sudden he likes girls. The AIDS has made him straight. They finally figured out a cure for homosexuality—dementia. He can’t remember he’s gay. It cured him.” She laughed. “How ironic, if you think about it. His boyfriend’s furious.”
“That’s funny,” I said. Lorna was always telling you how many T cells everyone had left.
“So what’s he do?” Lorna asked.
“Who?”
“The freak you’re seeing.” Women, no matter how much they hate each other, always are friendly enough to talk about each other’s boyfriends.
“He lives with a woman,” I said.
“So?” She pulled a joint out of a cigarette pack and lit it. I tried not to be judgmental about the joint.
“So, he’s not really my boyfriend. I have to stop seeing him.”
“He’s not married,” she said. “Who cares if he’s living with some idiot. She doesn’t have the exclusive. All men are gay anyway.”
“So you think I should keep seeing him?” I asked.
“How do I know? It’s been a long time since I left junior high. Why’s your ear all swollen?”
“Sex,” I said.
“He fucks your car? Maybe you should tell him he’s not doing it right. His dick’s probably so small your ear’s the only part of your body that’s tight enough.”
“Hey, Lorna,” I said. “You got a message.” I held it up like a dog biscuit.
“So?”
“So I was thinking what do you say we make a deal? I’ll give you your messages if you give me mine.”
“You know, Liv, this is the real estate business, not some mom-and-pop Hallmark store. This isn’t a fucking florist, it’s a brokerage for Christ’s sake. This isn’t a fucking not-for-profit charity shit. Where do you think you are? We don’t sell fucking Beanie Babies here, we sell property in Manhattan.”
“So what do you think?”
“Okay,” she said. I put her message neatly on her desk, smoothing it a little.
Then I called every real estate firm in the downtown area and told them about my exclusive. I had learned in real estate school about multiple listings. There was something called the Downtown Brokers Association. You were required to share your listings. I could take another broker and her customer to my listing and if her customer bought it we would split the six-percent commission. And I could take my customers, once I got any, to their listings. It was called cobroking. No one had ever heard of Dale Kilpatrick Real Estate Gallery but I described the loft to a dozen secretaries, giving my phone and fax numbers.
Within the hour seventeen brokers called me to make appointments to bring their customers to the loft. The pages of my organizer filled. And faxes started coming, descriptions and floor plans of their listings. I was in business.
I sat at my desk trying to come up with a headline for my first New York Times ad. fincl dist excl ph/loft of my life/2000sf + rf deck, own mailchute, i-of-kind showr, I wrote on my pad. Lorna came over and looked at it. She crossed out Fincl Dist and wrote in Tribeca.
“Own mail chute? That looks ridiculous,” she said.
I crossed it out. “Thanks,” I said.
“That and a token … You should ice that ear. Great, now I’m a nurse,” she said, walking out the door.
I took the clip out of my hair so it fell down over my ears. I called Noah Bausch. “Good news,” I said. I told him they could be the lucky first to see the loft.
“Where is it?” he asked, excited.
“Liberty Street.”
“Liberty Street?” he said, as if I had just named an exit in New Jersey instead of a chic downtown address. “Where’s that?” he asked. I could tell he was working his mind to its full capacity.
“Southern Tribeca,” I said. “Tribeca is where Nobu is.”
“Yeah, but Liberty’s way south of that.”
“It’s a few blocks south of Nobu.”
“Can you even get cabs down there?”
“Of course. The market is moving farther south,” I said. I made the “market” sound like a band of gypsies.
We spent forty-five minutes arguing about whether Liberty Street was officially in Tribeca.
“It’s Tribeca slash the Wall Street area,” I acquiesced.
“If you could move the loft north about fifteen blocks it would sound perfect.”
“Well, I can’t physically move the loft,” I said as if I were speaking to a small retarded child. “It’s in a great building.”
“But it’s not in Tribeca.”
“Well, where do you think it is then?” I asked.
“Chinatown slash South Street Seaport,” he said.
I hated Noah Bausch so much at that moment I swore I would never let him set one foot in the loft. It made me physically sick to think of him writing his inane Faulknerian short stories in the third bedroom, looking quizzically at the gargoyles between each presumptuous omniscient third-person sentence, and then looking back down at his old-fashioned yellow legal pad because he’s far too literary to use a computer and none of his twenty-six antique Underwoods works, and leaning back so smugly in his leather desk chair that it tips over backward and he cracks his head open on the marble mosaic floor.
“Well, it’s fine if you don’t want to see it,” I said. “I just wanted to offer you the opportunity.”
Of the seventeen brokers who made appointments, fourteen showed up, and two people made offers. With every showing, I adjusted the price based on “feedback” from the other brokers, until I arrived at a final price of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I couldn’t believe how easy it was; I just stood at the door jingling the keys and looking at my watch to let them know I had a lot of other buyers coming.
When my ad came out in the Times, fifty-two people called about the Loft of My Life, including Noah Bausch.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this loft?” he asked.
“I did. That’s the one I told you about. You said it was in Chinatown.”
“Well, we’d be interested to see it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I already have several offers. You could have been the first,” I added. “What a shame,” I added further. And “What a shame,” I added again to that. “How’s the writing going?” I asked with a voice full of sympathy.
“Fine,” he said, sounding small and tortured.
That weekend I showed the loft to the people who had answered the ad in the Times, my customers, and one man and his fiancée made an offer. “How old are you?” I asked the man. He looked like he was about sixteen. “Twenty-six,” he said. He gave me his business card. Senior Vice President, Solomon Brothers. Amazing. His mother and father, the Zeislofts, came to the showing, both architects, and his fiancée’s mother and father, the Meads, also both architects, came, too.
“My boyfriend’s an architect,” I announced.
“This is where I can put the collection,” his fiancée said. She was totally unattractive.
“Oh? What do you collect?” I asked with a look of pure co
ncentrated interest on my face I used to use at business dinners with my husband. African masks? Tibetan kilims? Grecian urns?
“Snow domes,” she said proudly. “I have over a thousand.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said, actually clapping my hands. A thousand snow domes junking up my loft. I was sorry I asked.
“We’re going to get a see-through refrigerator,” she said. “With shelves that rotate like those cake display cases you see in diners.”
Juliet’s refrigerator was fine. Who would want to wake up in the morning and have to try to catch up with the milk? My refrigerator didn’t even work. It was dark inside like Howe Caverns. It was huge with rounded edges like a Love bus from the seventies. I had finally given up on it completely and put my shoes in it. Shoes on the top shelves, sweaters on the bottom, socks in the butter and condiment side trays, bras and panties in the meat and vegetable compartments. The freezer still worked though, so it made a nice combination freezer/armoire.
I was beginning to notice that people in this business cared more about refrigerators than anything. A Sub-zero refrigerator was more important than the maintenance, or ceiling heights, or school district.
The family of architects invited me to dinner at Montrachet and talked excitedly about the loft. I did math in the ladies’ room on toilet paper. I would get the whole six-percent commission if I sold it to these people instead of to a customer brought by another broker. I would split six percent with Dale instead of three percent. Thirty-nine thousand dollars split with Dale was nineteen thousand, five hundred each. I couldn’t wait for Juliet to call so she could accept their offer and I could start the paperwork to present to the lawyers and the board.
When I got back to the table the waiter suggested the pigeon. I almost considered it. My father always said if you were afraid of rats you should eat one. I thought of the pigeons screaming from deep in their throats in the air shaft out my window. Maybe if I ate one I would feel different toward them as they woke me up each morning. Maybe now that I was a real estate agent I could handle eating pigeon. Any broker worth her salt should be able to eat her city’s Official Bird.
“Well?” the waiter asked. I choked on a sip of red wine and spit it out on the white tablecloth. “Oh, excuse me,” I said.
They looked at me pityingly.
Nineteen thousand five hundred, I thought.
I chickened out and ordered steak. I wondered if Andrew had walked the dogs yet.
“To Liv,” Mr. Mead, the girl’s father, said, raising his wineglass. “For finding our kids the perfect place.” We all raised our glasses.
“Thank you,” I said. I hoped nothing horrible would happen, like it burning to the ground.
“And now you have to sell our place,” he said. He and his wife looked at each other.
“What!” the daughter said.
“We want to sell the apartment and get a building,” he said. “And we want to give Liv the exclusive.”
I smiled and tried to act calm and professional. This would mean three deals right in a row. This is what they called a rollover, or a tripleheader, or something like that. Whatever it was called, in the end I would get three commissions out of it. The three deals spun in my head like pictures on a slot machine. I imagined the gift baskets I would have to make. Gift baskets replete with snow domes and Dom Pérignon. Perhaps a picture of me in a Cartier frame. I felt like making myself a gift basket. I let the waiter refill my wineglass. Lorna would die. I couldn’t wait to see her face when she heard about this.
“Does your firm handle townhouse transactions?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m very familiar with townhouses. I can show you some wonderful townhouses.”
I was familiar with townhouses. When I was a child my shrink’s office was in a townhouse. I had a Barbie townhouse. I had been given a chocolate townhouse one Easter by a relative who didn’t believe Jewish children should get chocolate rabbits. In the eighth grade I made out with Darren Sullivan in his father’s townhouse, on his father’s bed, watching one of his father’s porn videos called Sex World, a sort of X-rated version of the TV show Fantasy Island. My whole life was one townhouse after another. I was sure I knew more than enough about them.
I ate orange sorbet and cookies and hugged everyone goodbye on the street outside Montrachet. I felt as close as family. I felt that blissful awkward confusion you feel with your in-laws when you are first married, wondering if you should call them Mom and Dad.
When I got to the Cedarton, Andrew was waiting for me, sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cornflakes and soy milk.
It was our last night dog-sitting together. I felt suddenly panicked, as if I would never see him again after tonight. I didn’t know what would happen. Would Andrew call me from the kitchen while he washed dishes and see me from time to time for an hour or two right after work? I wondered if he missed his girlfriend. If they would have home-from-dog-sitting sex. If she would cook something special. I had never cooked for Andrew. I had eaten steak at Montrachet while he ate cereal and fake gray milk.
“Where were you?” he asked suspiciously. He had a lot of nerve being annoyed with me when he was the one who lived with his girlfriend.
“I sold the loft and my clients took me to Montrachet.”
“What’d you eat?” he asked sulkily.
“Steak.”
“Steak,” he said, as if I had put another man’s dick in my mouth. “I bet you’ll pass a big load tomorrow.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said. Men who talked about passing loads really weren’t my type. “Did you walk them?”
“Yes. They also passed a couple of big loads.”
“Andrew, I have an idea. Why should we stay here when I have the keys to somewhere better?” I said. “The loft is so beautiful, I want you to see it.”
“I want to stay here,” he said.
“Come on,” I said, pulling on his arm. I told him the address on Liberty. “We can take a cab and be there in ten minutes. I want you to see the roof deck.”
“I said no.” He stood and walked into the bedroom.
I followed him. Suddenly the apartment with its gated-off living room and sterile exercise equipment became unbearable.
“Well, I’m going there,” I said.
“No, as a matter of fact you’re not,” he said. He threw me down on the bed and clamped my left ear between his teeth. I kneed him as hard as I could from that position. It didn’t really hurt him but it made him jolt upright, and I managed to get out from under him. I grabbed my bag. “Bye,” I said, and ran down eight flights of stairs instead of waiting for the elevator.
It turned out to be an unnecessary measure because he hadn’t bothered to come running after me. Out on the street I felt like a complete idiot. I had been famous for scenes like this in my old dating days. When I stormed out I expected a man to catch up with me, take me in his arms despite my struggling, and kiss me, apologizing as hard as he could for whatever it was that he had done wrong. Usually, however, I just sat on a bench crying and finally went back to whomever I had run from, finding him sleeping soundly in bed or finishing his meal in the restaurant or watching the end of the movie, his arm resting contentedly over the back of my empty chair in the movie theater.
I stood in the doorway of the Cedarton not knowing if I should reconsider and go back up. I missed Andrew and the dogs. Why did I have to act like this? I wondered. Now he would never leave his girlfriend. I stood under the building’s awning nervously hoping he would come looking for me. Inside the lobby, the elevator doors opened but no one came out. I remembered the ultimate failure when I was a child—leaving a sleepover in the middle of the night, parents called, sleeping bag rolled up and tied.
But maybe it was for the best that I had driven him back into the arms of his girlfriend. I deserved better. I deserved a man who didn’t talk about passing big loads, who followed a
fter me, and lived alone in his own apartment with his own condoms. A man who was single and didn’t bite. And I deserved a fridge with food in it instead of clothes, and a loft like Juliet’s.
I walked for over an hour until I got to Liberty Street. Practically Brooklyn. I opened Juliet’s loft with my key, marked with the initials LOML for Loft of My Life on a small piece of masking tape. I had learned in real estate school never to put the address on the key.
I turned on all the lights, touching the mail chute as if for good luck. I called my answering machine to see if Andrew had called but he hadn’t. I opened the door to the walk-in closet and slid open the built-in drawers. Everything was perfect. I had never seen anything like it. Juliet had used a label maker to indicate her many different styles of leggings—Ankle lengths, Bikers, Capris. Her panties were divided into Thongs, Bikinis, and something called Hipsters, and her T-shirts were listed as V’s, Scoops, and Tanks. The hamper was also built-in. Andrew would have had a field day in here.
I got undressed and went into the bathroom. I looked at the shower with its glass walls. The gargoyles were illuminated with soft white light coming from between carved marble pillars, and the empty office building across the street was lit with fluorescents, flickering randomly. I loved this bathroom. I would never get bored in here.
I turned on the shower and stepped into it, bravely. It was like jumping out the window without falling. I pressed my whole body against the glass wall facing the street, the way a child smushes his face against a school bus window. My wet nose and breasts and stomach and pubic hair flattened. I felt like Spiderman. I forced myself to look down. It was desolate. Then a cab pulled up and a dog jumped out, then a man, and another dog. It was Andrew, carrying his duffel bag, his white sneakers glowing in the dark.
He looked up at the building and I stepped away from the glass wall and right out of the shower. I was sure he hadn’t had time to see me. I wondered if he would remember that I was in the penthouse and figure out what buzzer to ring. I took a towel from the shelf marked “Bathsheets” and wrapped myself in it. Twice.
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