“That crazy a-hole was trying to kill you,” an Indian man said, touching my shoulder. “Did you ever eat at Rose of India on Sixth Street?” He was holding a toilet plunger.
Rose of India? Pink and red lights, mirrors. I nodded slightly.
“I remember you,” he said. “Chicken tikka masala.”
“I remember you, too,” I said dreamily. I walked over to a building and leaned against it.
“Do you need a doctor?” the Indian man said.
“I’m a doctor,” a man said, stopping. He took my chin in his hands and looked into my eyes. “Who did these stitches?” he asked, looking at my ear.
“A vet,” I said.
“Nice job,” he said. “Military doctors are usually very well trained.”
After the attack of a bike messenger you usually have to cancel your plans for the day and go home and rest. I decided not to visit Jordan. I’d had enough excitement for one day.
I told the doctor and the Indian waiter I was fine and walked down the street past the theatrical costume store called Mayhem. Its windows were filled with rubber heads and bloody neck stumps and scarred body parts. I had only caught glimpses of it because every time I passed it, I forced myself to look the other way.
When I got home I opened my refrigerator to get a sweater and I suddenly remembered that I had never gotten around to cleaning out the freezer. I pulled the freezer door open and took out the warm ice cube tray. The tray was empty except for one dried, yellowish puddle where an ice cube should have been.
Once when Andrew was complaining after sex that he was in a high-risk category for a heart attack I decided to freeze his sperm in case he died before I could have his baby I had emptied the contents of a come-filled condom into the ice cube tray. I had forgotten about the Spermcicle. I threw it in the garbage.
30.
DOWNING ST—PNTHSE SANCTUARY
The next weekend was Andrew’s birthday, and we were supposed to spend it together. We had planned it ages ago and I thought I might as well keep the date so we could talk. I called and made a halfhearted reservation for Saturday night at the River Café. “Yes, for two.” I wished I hadn’t had my phone restored. “Yes, nonsmoking,” I told the “reservationist,” which is what she called herself. I used my father’s name. “By the window, Miss Kellerman?” she offered. “I guess,” I said. I already had a bad feeling, as Violet would say. Andrew was going to cancel.
Saturday night he called me from a pay phone. “I can’t get away,” he said.
“But I was taking you to the River Café to celebrate your birthday and all the deals I’ve done this month.”
“I can’t get away. It’s complicated.”
“But I have a cake for you,” I lied. I hadn’t bothered with a cake. “And a present.” I hadn’t bothered with that, either.
“Oh, honey, what did you get me?”
“Fifty jazz CDs,” I said, recklessly.
“Oh my God, honey!” he said. “That’s too much.”
“What did Jordan get you?”
“She got me really nice sneakers.” His voice sounded funny. “Sneakers! What kind of a gift is that?”
“Can I call you later?” he said.
“Yeah, you probably want to try out those sneakers and run away. Happy birthday,” I said and hung up.
On Monday babies in strollers kept looking at me and clapping. It was unnerving, all those big eyes focused on me, tiny hands cheering me on. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” one little girl said, furiously, straining against the stroller’s seat belt. It was a sign.
I was certain there was only one thing to do. I must never see Andrew again. I went to the office and e-mailed him: Andrew, Please don’t contact me again for any reason—Liv.
He called a few minutes later.
“Did you get my e-mail?” I asked.
“Yes, I did.”
“Then why are you calling me?”
“We’re going to get married. We’re going to have the perfect marriage,” he said.
“Andrew, my idea of a perfect marriage is twin headstones side by side in a cemetery.”
“We’re going to have that, Liv. We’ll be buried together. Well, I’ll probably get there first. But then you’ll join me.”
I pictured myself standing over Andrew’s grave. I pictured our headstones. Andrew Lugar and Liv Lugar. I didn’t want the last name Lugar.
Whenever I went to a cemetery I always looked jealously at the names on the tombstones. Michael Rafter and Helen Rafter, James Totheroh and Ada Totheroh, Max Block and Jennie Block, names in stone beside each other forever. That was my idea of commitment. That was marriage. After years of fighting and infidelity, sex-lessness and dirty looks, you could end up together in a dignified manner.
“Will Jordan be buried between us?” I asked.
“We’ll get a nice plot somewhere.”
“Did you know you have to be a licensed real estate agent to sell burial plots?” I said for no reason.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t want you to call me again,” I said.
He was silent on the other end of the phone. “All right,” he said gravely. “I can’t fight with you anymore. If that’s what you want.” He hung up. It was really over.
I sat in my armless desk chair, stunned.
I wondered if when I died they could find a nice single tombstone to bury me next to. I wanted to be buried next to someone even if I didn’t know the person. I could take his name. No one would know we hadn’t been married in life.
I was already beginning to miss Andrew. I felt his final words to me in my solar plexus. I felt my stomach fill up with tears.
I let out a single sob just as Kim walked by my desk on one of her rare Nurse Ratched rounds.
“Bad deal?” she asked.
“Very bad deal,” I said.
“What property?” she asked. My heart, that’s what property, I thought. My heart felt like a Hell’s Kitchen tenement building under demolition. Hit by the swinging ball.
“It’s not about real estate, Kim,” I said. “Not everything’s about real estate.”
“I have to disagree with you there, Liv. It’s my experience that everything’s about real estate.”
All week I wondered what Andrew was doing. I wondered if he was thinking about me and missing me. He didn’t call, and it was better that way. Now I could meet someone new. I knew I probably wouldn’t meet anyone new that week, however, so I let myself go a little bit. I drank hot chocolates with whipped cream every night at the Olive Tree. “Keep them coming,” I told the waitress. She just giggled as if she were embarrassed for me.
“Can I tell you something?” she said. “He really likes you.” She pointed at someone behind me. I turned around slowly to see the cook who was right at that moment hacking away at the rotating shawarma. It looked like someone had hacked at his face. It was scarred and pockmarked. I had eaten there every day for months and never once looked at him. He was hideous.
I turned back to the waitress and just shook my head no.
“I know,” she said. “But he’s really nice. I guess I’ll have to tell him.” She cleared my empty cup. “’Nother one?” she asked. I nodded.
I was insulted that the waitress could even think of such a thing. Were those my only choices? Andrew the wild dog-man or the elephant-man cook at the Olive Tree?
I cried in my apartment. Not over Andrew exactly. Fuck Andrew. More over the fact that I was alone, nobody loved me, nobody would ever love me, my ear was disfigured, I was a failure. All I did was show apartments for a living. I helped rich, happy people get richer and happier. I watched couples kissing, the man saying, “Is this the place you want?” and the woman saying, “Oh it is, darling, it really is.” I actually had to watch a man carry a woman over the threshold of a triplex in the Silk Building.
It was too much to bear.
I lay in bed listening to the gobble gobble moaning sounds of the pigeons out my air shaft window. The window that must never be opened. They were so loud it was hard to believe the noises were coming from their round gray bodies. They sounded more like turkeys, or cows. Every morning I woke up to the terrifying flurry of feathers hitting brick. There was nothing more depressing than the pigeons. Nothing made me feel lonelier. It was like hearing my parents fighting late at night or hearing strangers having sex through thin hotel walls.
Friday came, and I didn’t want to face another weekend alone. I showed the Bausches a half-dozen more lofts I knew they wouldn’t buy. I couldn’t stop showing them things. I was addicted to listening to the different reasons why every loft was wrong. We saw one in Sandra Bernhard’s building, one in Edward Albee’s building, one in Isabella Rossellini’s building, one in Susan Sarandon’s building, one in Sarah Jessica Parker’s building, and one in a building where nobody famous lived.
“Who lives here?” Noah Bausch asked.
“No one,” I said.
He frowned and thought for a moment. “I guess that’s not important,” he said, as if he had just found spirituality.
“But Robert De Niro lives across the street if that makes you feel better,” I said. He looked like it did.
The bathroom walls were lined with hundreds of colorful night-lights plugged into hundreds of electrical sockets. The Virgin Mary, Little Orphan Annie, the Statue of Liberty, Garfield, Snoopy, Tweety Bird, the Mona Lisa, Mickey Mouse.
“Liv, there’s something we want to ask you. It’s personal,” Noah Bausch said. I followed him out of the bathroom. I had learned never to lead a customer around an apartment, always to follow as if I were a guest in his (new) home.
Audrey came over with three-year-old Flannery. “Why don’t we all sit down,” she said, as if we were in her living room and not someone else’s apartment that they had no intention of buying.
I wondered if they were going to tell me that they had decided to buy an apartment with another broker. I knew they were looking with brokers all over town. It would be a relief actually, never having to see them again. It was sort of comforting, though, showing them apartments month after month and knowing they would never make an offer. At least I never had to get my hopes up the way I did with everyone else.
We walked over to the two huge sofas facing each other, two white whales on the blue-green carpet. The Bausch family sat on one and I sat on the other. There they were, Dumb and Dumber. She was Dumb, but he was Dumber.
They looked nervous. She had dark circles under her eyes worse than anybody, and his goatee was jagged. Flannery, the baby, had a flat face like a wooden Russian matryoshka doll. I wanted to open her and see if there was a smaller baby inside and an even smaller baby inside that one. Flannery went into the open kitchen and tried to swing from the handles of the Sub-zero refrigerator.
“Well, there’s no way to make this easy. We might as well just say it,” Dumb said.
“What is it?” I asked. I was enjoying the drama of it.
“Liv,” Dumber said, “Audrey and I like you very much and we were wondering if …” He stopped. I wondered if they were going to ask me to swing with them.
“We want you to consider donating your eggs for an in vitro fertilization procedure,” Audrey said, quickly. She took a deep breath as if she were in a Lamaze class.
I sat there unable to say anything. I had never thought about my eggs. I didn’t want to think about them. The little girl smiled at me and clapped.
“You don’t have to give us an answer now,” she said.
“We know it’s a big decision. We would compensate you, of course,” he said.
“Of course,” I agreed.
“We’re born with all of our eggs, if you can believe that,” Audrey said. She looked at her tiny daughter. “Flannery’s filled up with all her eggs, aren’t you, sweetie, and once she starts menstruating she’ll lose one every month until menopause,” she said in baby talk.
“Well, that’s not for a while,” I said.
“You would undergo a series of injections,” she said. I didn’t like the word “undergo” or the word “injections.” “Then your eggs would be extracted and fertilized by Noah’s sperm.” I put up my hand as if to stop her. I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up. “Then they would be placed in my womb.”
My eggs in Audrey Bausch’s womb. This was taking the term “full-service broker” a step too far. “So it would be half mine,” I said. I didn’t want my half named anything like Flannery.
“And half Noah’s,” she said quickly. “But I would carry the baby. Or babies, as the case may be.” She had egg-sized circles under her eyes.
Why didn’t they just adopt me? I wondered. I spent so much time with them we might as well be a family. It was like Daddy War-bucks wanting Little Orphan Annie’s eggs, instead of Little Orphan Annie.
But I had to admit I was slightly flattered. I suddenly felt rich. I was richer than the Bausches with my beautiful golden eggs. They were in a basket somewhere inside me, brightly painted and sitting on shredded green paper. I could give one to the Bausches or keep it for myself and scramble it up later for dinner.
You’d have to think someone was really smart and beautiful to want her eggs. “Why me?” I asked, egging them on.
“We think you look a lot like Audrey,” Noah said. “So we think the baby would look just like her, and like Flannery.”
I had never been so insulted in my entire life. I looked nothing like Audrey Bausch. My eyes, even after nights of crying, were wide awake–looking and sparkly. “That’s so nice,” I said. “Thank you.”
“So what do you think, Liv?” Noah asked, as if I was the one apartment hunting for a place to house my egg.
“Well, it’s certainly something to consider,” I said. “So what do you think?”
“About what?” Noah said.
“About this loft,” I said.
“We would need to have an architect come look at it.” Their friend who was an architect finally stopped returning their phone calls because he got so tired of looking at dozens of apartments with them. “Do you know a good one?”
“No.” But then I thought maybe I did.
I went home and called Andrew.
“I’m calling because that couple I hate, the Bausches, need an architect,” I said.
“Really,” he said. It was intensely infuriating the way it always is when you call a man you shouldn’t be calling.
“Yes, really,” I said.
“Well, I’m flattered that with all the architects you know, you called me.” I knew he was smiling. I suddenly missed Andrew so much my heart felt like a claw-foot tub about to fall.
“I miss you,” I said.
“I’ve missed you, too,” he told me.
“What did you do this week?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You must have done something.”
“I went away for a few days.”
My blood started to boil. “Where?” I asked.
“Just to Vermont with friends.”
“What friends?” I asked. The word “friends” sounded unfriendly in his mouth.
“Just some friends you don’t know,” he said.
“Was it fun?”
“It was fun. Really fun, actually. I flew a kite. I hadn’t done that since I was a kid. It was life-affirming, running on a grassy field, trying to catch the wind.”
I couldn’t believe that while I was suffering all week Andrew was gleefully flying a kite.
“What did the kite look like?” I asked. I couldn’t picture a kite, for some reason. I was having trouble remembering what a kite was exactly.
“It was a great kite,” Andrew said. “A bright blue diamond. The perfect kite.” The way he said it, you’d think he had flown his own priv
ate jet.
I had pictured him locked in his study, fighting with Jordan, punching a wall. I couldn’t stand the thought of him flying that kite. I had never been angrier. If I were a kite at that moment, I would have been shaped like a fire-breathing dragon.
I took my gun off my bedside table, handling it roughly. I was getting more used to holding it now; it was starting to feel smaller and lighter in my hands. At this moment it looked almost like a toy little Flannery would play with. I opened the chamber. It worked almost like a stapler with a spring inside it. I pulled at the handle and a part I had never seen before slid out. It was the part that held the bullets. They were silver with copper tops and had Speer 9mm engraved in tiny letters on each one. They were lined up like eggs in an egg crate. My Glock still had all fifteen of her eggs intact.
Suddenly there was something I wanted to tell Andrew but I couldn’t remember what it was.
“There was something I wanted to say,” I said.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s right on the tip of my tongue.”
“The only thing that should be on the tip of your tongue is my cock.”
Then I remembered.
“Hey, Andrew,” I said. “Go fly a kite.” I hung up.
31.
NO FEE
I have a great loft I can show you,” I told Storm. It was all the way down on Duane Street between Greenwich and Hudson. We would have to take a cab. I had shown her five lofts that day already. I hailed a cab, opened the door, and got in after her. I leaned forward to give the driver the address.
“Duane Street between Greenwich and Husband.”
I realized what I had said.
Storm cackled. “Husband Street. Husband Street.” She laughed. My head was spinning.
We didn’t say a word for the rest of the trip.
I couldn’t believe I was paying for yet another cab.
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