High Maintenance

by Jennifer Belle

  “Well, you’re here early,” Kim said to me. She wore a sort of junior suit. She didn’t even really look like a grown-up. “All right, all right, let’s begin,” she said. “I’d like to start by asking Tony Amoroso to tell us what he does every morning.”

  Tony had been the Downtown salesman of the year for five years in a row.

  “Go on, Tony. I really think everyone can learn something from what you told me you do every morning to start your day.”

  Tony’s wife stood behind him holding a pad and pen. The more successful agents hired their own assistants and paid them a salary out of their own pockets. Tony had hired his wife. I felt sorry for her, one for being married to him, and two for being a real estate agent’s assistant. He was the only agent at Transitions Downtown with his own office. He was also one of only two male agents in any of the Transitions offices who was straight.

  “Well,” Tony said. “Every morning I walk on the treadmill in my bedroom for thirty-five minutes.”

  This was already more than anybody wanted to know about him. I pictured him in his undershirt and boxer shorts or worse, some sort of robe, walking in place while his wife was busy getting his work clothes together.

  “And I listen to motivational tapes while I exercise. You know, how-to-sell-ice-to-the-Eskimos sort of things.”

  A couple of agents close to the door left as if they had just been beeped.

  “I’ve asked Tony to bring in some of the tapes and we’re going to post a sign-out sheet at the front desk so you can borrow them,” Kim said.

  A black woman holding a beautiful downy baby walked into the conference room.

  “I know many of you have been anxious to meet my daughter,” Kim said, taking the baby from the woman. “Everyone, this is Dakota,” she said, raising her voice several octaves. I wondered if she was named for the building or the state. A few agents ooohed and aaahed and three more left the room. She handed the baby to the agent on her left, who held her on her lap for about a second and then passed her on to the next agent.

  “Now, we have some ribbons to hand out, Melanie gets a yellow ribbon for biggest deal of the month.” Everyone clapped as Kim tossed the yellow ribbon across the table at Melanie. It was big and ruffled with a pin on the back and the words “Bigge$t Deal” in the center. “Adrienne gets a red ribbon for most deals closed.” Again, everyone clapped. Adrienne handed me Dakota so she could accept her ribbon properly.

  “The blue ribbon for most overall money earned this month goes to Tony. Big surprise,” Kim said. Two more agents left and the rest of us, including Dakota, clapped.

  “And finally a green First Deal ribbon goes to Liv Kellerman for successfully completing a condo sale.” Everyone clapped and a few people looked around to see who I was, even though I had already been there two months. “Liv,” Kim said, “we ran out of green ribbons, I’m really sorry, but you’ll get it as soon as they come in. I told Yvonne to order more ribbons.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “Congratulations anyway,” Kim said. I sat there holding her baby. I remembered being on a plane with my husband going to Mexico City. He was asleep with a blanket over his head and the woman across the aisle from us, a fat Mexican woman with many children, stood up to take some of them to the bathroom. She hovered over me for a moment and then thrust her large fat baby at me. I held the baby for twenty minutes, rubbing its back, until she finally returned. My husband never woke up. I wanted him to wake up so I could say, “Honey, look, we have a baby.” I felt like an impostor, like Lucille Ball carrying a whole cheese in a baby bunting to get it through customs. I thought about keeping the baby and telling my husband it was just a cheese. For days after, I felt the baby’s weight in my arms.

  I noticed Carla Lerner had left the room when my name was announced. She was in a bad mood because she had stupidly locked herself out on the roof of a building and no one had found her for seven hours.

  Kim stood and came around the table to collect Dakota from me. I wondered if Kim had gotten a ribbon that said First Baby on it. She announced that a prize of a one-hundred-dollar bill would go to the first agent who canvassed the Sunday Times each week and got at least one listing from it.

  There were only about nine of us left in the room now so Kim brought the meeting to an end and I went back to my desk, ribbon-less and childless.

  There is one thing I remember about my marriage that makes my body curl up on itself like peeling wallpaper when I think about it. I think about this one night when my husband bought theater tickets and I was getting dressed to go. I had terrible period cramps, which I usually don’t have, and I had a bad headache but I was so happy because he had planned this night for us. He sat on the bed and watched me brush my hair and put on a necklace. He watched me apply lipstick. “You look beautiful,” he said. I felt beautiful going down in the elevator with him, sliding into a cab, sitting next to him in our orchestra seats. I felt beautiful all night. What a fool I was.

  I left the office and got on the downtown six train. The train was completely empty. I stood at the end of the last car like a little kid looking out the back windows at the blackness and occasional red light bulb. The word “Will” was etched jaggedly into the dark windowpane. I had heard some idiot on the news say that this was a new form of graffiti known as “scratchitti.” “How will New York solve its scratchitti problem?” the newscaster had said. It sounded like a skin disease. I wished this boy Will, whoever he was, was here right now. “Hi, Will, I’m Liv,” I said ludicrously out loud as if I were really introducing myself to someone.

  I took my keys out of my bag. The key ring had a retractable blade on it I used to neatly cut apartment listings out of the Sunday real estate section. I scratched my name on the subway window under the word Will. Will Liv.

  When I got home I did something I hadn’t done in a long time. I lay on my bed crying and sort of wailing the words “What have I done” over and over like a lunatic. I didn’t know why I was saying that. I hadn’t done anything. “Oh no, oh no,” I cried. “What have I done?”

  Then my mind stopped crying before my body did. My body continued bucking and shaking with sobs even though my mind had lost interest in the whole thing and was, almost, still. “You haven’t done anything,” I told myself. “You just missed a few clues.”

  On my twenty-first birthday, when I was first dating my husband, he gave me a present. He handed me a rectangular wrapped box. I opened it slowly.

  “Oh, it’s Clue,” I said.

  “I thought we could play it together,” he said. “It’s silly I know, but I thought it would be fun.”

  “Oh no, it’s great,” I said, telepathically telling him never to do this to me again. The next day my friends said it was as good as over. “If a man gives you a board game for your birthday …” they said.

  I still had the game. I pulled myself up off my bed and took it down from my kitchen cabinet. We had opened it together but never played it. We couldn’t because you needed at least three players, a sort of ménage á Clue.

  I lifted the lid off the box and picked up the sealed plastic bag containing the little game pieces. The revolver, the lead pipe, the candlestick holder, the knife, the wrench, and the rope. They were all metal except for the rope, which was white plastic.

  I ripped open the bag and held the six loose pieces in my fist. I went to the windowsill to get a can of ginger ale since my refrigerator still didn’t work. It was warm but I opened it. Then I did a strange thing. One by one I popped the game pieces into my mouth and swallowed them down with the ginger ale. With the pieces inside me, I was sure the mystery could somehow be solved.

  25.

  W/D IN BSMNT

  The next morning I woke up exhausted. I felt strange from the dream I had just had. I dreamed that the swami from the photo on my desk came to me and asked me to open my mouth wide. Then he reached into my mouth and started pulling yard
s and yards of white silk cord from my throat. He kept yanking and yanking and the cord continued coming up. The swami pulled like a longshoreman. Finally I woke up.

  I wondered if the swami had gotten the last of it out of me. I had a terrible taste in my mouth. I went into the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. My bathroom was so small I had to kneel at an awkward angle with my legs out the bathroom door into the kitchen. After, the white plastic rope game piece floated in the toilet water.

  I got myself together in time to go to see a loft for rent. The building was on York Street, which was nothing more than a small alley tucked behind Beach Street. The American Thread Building loomed over it. The loft I was looking at was on the fifth floor and was essentially a walk-up even though there was a manual elevator. “You can use the elevator,” the landlord said, “but you have to bring it right down and then walk back up.”

  “Of course,” I said, not understanding that at all.

  “I’m glad you understand,” he said. “You’d be surprised how many people can’t understand such a simple concept. If you take the elevator up to your floor then no one else in the building can call it down. My wife and I live on the top three floors and we bring the elevator up there at night for security purposes but it’s here for the tenants the rest of the time. It’s a great convenience.”

  It took me a few minutes to figure out that would only be useful for bringing things up so you wouldn’t have to carry them or for freighting old people.

  “So it’s basically a walk-up,” I said to the landlord, making a note on my pad.

  “Well, there is an elevator,” he said angrily. He was about seventy and wore a baseball cap that said “Empire Trophies” on it and had a picture of a trophy in the shape of the Empire State Building. White hair poked out from the back of the cap. He wore a shirt with a tiny golf flag over his right nipple and new-looking jeans and sneakers. He was pretty thin.

  My father had dressed like that one Halloween when I was a kid saying he was going as “a regular Dad.” He took me to a party and I felt proud but halfway through he got bored and put on a long Indian feather headdress and spent the rest of the night doing Cher imitations.

  The landlord took us up slowly and stopped at the number 5. He slid the metal elevator gate open and unlocked the door facing us. We stepped off the elevator right into the loft. I started to look around.

  “This is a beautiful loft,” I said. It had barrel ceilings, one bathroom, and an island kitchen right in the center. But it was dark. As dark as the planetarium.

  “I bought the building in 1969,” he said.

  “A pioneer,” I said like an idiot. I was off today for some reason. Maybe it was the metal Clue pieces banging around in my stomach.

  “We’ve been living here ever since. Put in a roof deck, small swimming pool, small antique cage elevator that’s just for the top three floors.”

  “So you have your own private elevator.”

  “Put that in recently, about twelve years ago. Never had one regret about buying this place. You hear about Letterman buying a loft on North Moore? What’s his name, David?”

  “Yes, David Letterman,” I said slowly and authoritatively as if I were speaking to someone with Alzheimer’s. I was beginning to sound more and more like a broker. “He paid two million for it.” I didn’t know exactly how much he had paid but I knew it was something like that.

  “As a matter of fact it was closer to three. In ‘seventy-two I could have bought that loft for five thousand dollars. Didn’t think it was worth it at the time.” He smiled at me. “This building used to be a Greek foods warehouse.” He pointed to the old wooden floor, which had giant black rings on it. “Can you guess what those circles are from?”

  “No,” I said, flirtatiously, as if only he in all his wisdom could tell me.

  “This floor was used to store heavy barrels of olives,” he said.

  I took one last look around the loft. I considered doing that thing I had seen other brokers do where they walk the length of it trying to space their feet so that each step represents a yard. I decided against it and just drew a little picture of the loft on my pad. “Would you let someone build a darkroom?” I asked. I had a client, a man with long hair, who wanted to put in a darkroom.

  “I don’t think so,” the landlord said.

  “Well, I think I can rent it right away,” I said.

  He didn’t look bowled over by this news. “If you don’t someone else will,” he said. “Come on, I’ll take you down.”

  I followed him into the elevator and as we descended I looked up through the grillwork to the top of the elevator shaft.

  “A lady baker lives on the third floor,” he said. “Bakes pies and things. A lady writer was living on the fifth floor in the loft I just showed you, but she fell in love with the painter on the second floor so she just moved in with him. That’s why we have the vacancy.”

  He released the lever and we came to a bumpy stop. He handed me keys and I took them gratefully. I was relieved. Now I could show it at my own convenience without involving him in any way. I got out of the elevator and he closed the doors between us.

  “If you want to take a look at the basement, go right ahead,” he said. “We have, what we consider to be, quite an unusual feature.” He grabbed the lever, pushed it all the way forward, and rode all the way up.

  I hesitantly took the stairs down to the basement wondering what this unusual feature could be.

  At the foot of the stairs I saw it. A shiny white washing machine and a shiny white dryer with a stack of plastic laundry baskets standing next to them. There were no slots for coins. They were free! If you lived in this little building, underneath the old rich landlord and his wife, you got to do your laundry absolutely free. That was probably where the man from the second floor met the woman from the fifth floor. They probably made jokes about the episode of The Odd Couple where Felix rendezvouses with the Pigeon sisters in the laundry room.

  Clothes were thudding gently in the dryer. Sex took place in this building. New sex and old sex. A new couple and an old married one. I pictured a beautiful young couple having sex in the second-floor loft, and then washing their sheets for free. I pictured the landlord and his wife embracing in their small swimming pool.

  I put both my hands on top of the dryer and felt the warm massaging motion. I was suddenly filled with hope. I stood that way for a long time, almost praying. A smell of baking cookies wafted toward me.

  I was startled when the dryer suddenly stopped. I hadn’t realized how noisy it had been. I wondered whose clothes were in there. Women’s panties? Men’s blue pajama bottoms? Baker’s whites?

  I opened the dryer door as quietly as possible and bent down to peer in. I reached in and pulled out a big peach towel. I spread my arms wide to fold it and put it on top of the dryer. Then I reached in and pulled out another peach towel and carefully folded it and put it on top of the first one. The dryer was filled with four more peach towels. I folded them all quickly and left.

  I walked all the way to the office composing the ad in my head. It was Wednesday and if I got it into the computer by four o’clock it could still make it into the Sunday paper. I would have to find a way to convey that this was the only building in New York with a free washer/dryer in the basement. “W/D incl” didn’t seem to convey enough. Sweet-Smelling Loft. Downy Soft Loft. 1700 sf of Heaven. Loft of Love. Nothing seemed quite right.

  When I got to my office, there was a sign on the door saying that the elevator was broken, so I walked up nine flights. When I reached the top the receptionist signaled me over. I was so out of breath I had to brace myself on her desk. “There’s someone here to see you,” she said.

  “Who is it?” I asked. I was a little upset because we weren’t supposed to have drop-in clients. We were too upscale for that, unlike firms like Dale’s that welcomed any homeless person or college student to come in and get fre
e real estate advice.

  “I don’t know who he is,” she said. She looked worried. “He seemed sort of …” She stopped talking.

  “Sort of what?” I asked.

  “Aggressive,” she said.

  “Is he in the conference room?” I asked hopefully. I hoped whoever he was he wasn’t sitting in my tiny cubicle next to Carla Lerner looking at my picture of the swami.

  “He insisted on sitting at your desk.” She handed me a tall stack of toilet paper rolls. “Would you mind putting these in the bathroom? I can’t leave the phones now.”

  I slowly walked up the aisle between the cubicles. There was hardly anybody in the office probably because no one wanted to climb up nine flights just to get to work. I walked up to my desk holding the rolls of toilet paper in my arms like a janitor. There was Andrew sitting in my chair reading a Faulkner novel.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Why are you here?”

  “God, this guy is good. Listen to this.” He read a sentence but I didn’t listen to it. I wondered if he had gone through my Rolodex.

  “Andrew, I don’t have time to listen to Faulkner.” And I didn’t have time to listen to Andrew if he wasn’t going to leave Jordan. Andrew was a time-waster, as Dale would say.

  “I wanted to take you to lunch.” He swiveled around in my chair and faced the dirty air shaft window with two pigeons pecking each other on the sill, which was white from bird shit.

  “I’m only at this desk temporarily while they finish the construction,” I said. Andrew stood and looked around. There was no construction being done anywhere. “Anyway I’m really busy right now.”

  “I can wait,” he said. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  Carla Lerner walked in and said hello, expecting an introduction. She was out of breath from the stairs. She stared at us. “Hello,” she said again.