by Ariella Papa
“Sure,” I said. We arranged to meet at eight.
Kelly came out of the bathroom as I hung up.
“It was my friend Jamie.”
“Sounds like she can take a joke.”
“Yeah, we’ve been friends for a long time. Forever.”
“How cool,” Kelly said.
I felt like kind of a dork. I wondered what Jamie would think of Kelly. It was rare that I felt almost comfortable with someone so quickly. I rarely was in situations where I had to be with people. Maybe it was a snow job. If anyone could spot a faker it was Jamie.
“We were going to meet for sushi tonight in Chelsea proper. We have these places we go to that are almost equidistant from our apartments.” Now I was really starting to feel like a loser. “Do you feel like going?”
“I would love to, but I can’t. I don’t eat sushi. I had an allergic reaction once.”
“Actually, this place has Korean food too. It’s cooked.” Was I beginning to sound desperate?
“No, sorry.” She laughed. “That was two separate statements. I would love to go, but I can’t because I have other plans. I’m continuing my very unhealthy relationship with the sound guy, despite all signs that I should know better. Then I was just letting you know that I didn’t eat sushi.”
“Oh, okay.”
“But another time.”
“Sure.” I guess it would have been pretty strange to hang out two nights in a row with someone I barely knew.
I got to Togi first and ordered a green tea. Togi has the best spicy crunchy tuna roll I have ever tasted. The place had the misfortune of having opened with another name on September 10, 2001. It lasted three months, shut down and reopened as Togi. They added Korean food to the menu. It was never crowded.
In a way I was glad that it hadn’t been discovered. But every time I went in there, I worried it would be the last. I feared that Togi would close down and I would never be able to eat such good spicy crunchy tuna again.
“Hey,” Jamie said. “Sorry.”
I stood up to kiss her. I wasn’t sure why she was apologizing. She wasn’t late. We didn’t bother with the menu. When the waitress came back I got an eel roll, a spicy crunchy tuna roll and a couple of pieces of sushi. Jamie ordered bi bim bop, a Korean specialty.
“No spicy, crunchy?”
She shook her head. “No, just in case.”
“Just in case, what?” I asked, and then remembered. “Oh, right. Was last night the night?”
“Well, I was ovulating again. We’ll see how it goes. I hope it takes, because my next ovulation should be right before Memorial Day.”
“Oh, just in time.” Every year on Memorial Day the Jacobs family went to their parents’ summer house in Block Island. They brought all kinds of boyfriends and girlfriends, but I was a staple.
“Yeah, it could be a real family affair.”
“Well, at least you’ll be able to drink some Dark and Stormies if it hasn’t taken.”
Then Jamie gave me that laugh, this time it was the “you are so dumb, of course I would sacrifice ever again tasting ginger beer and dark rum mixed in an amazing concoction if I could only get Raj’s wayward sperm to find my egg” laugh.
Our salads came—seaweed for her, house with ginger dressing for me. I ordered a Sapporo. “So give me the dirt on the latest installment of Three’s Company. How is she, really?”
“Not bad, honestly. We went out for drinks last night.”
Jamie looked shocked. “Wow!”
“What?”
“That’s pretty big.”
“What do you mean?”
She kind of laughed. “I don’t know, you just don’t usually, like, like people.”
“I know, but she seems nice.” I didn’t say that I was probably so open to it because I didn’t want to be alone.
“I’m sure she is, but I rarely hear you say that about anyone.”
“Maybe I’m changing,” I said, twisting my face from side to side so she could see the possibilities. Our meals arrived before she could say anything else.
“Hey, how was your cousin’s party?” Jamie asked, stirring up the egg in her bi bim bop.
“Can I get a fork?” I asked the waitress. I never learned to use chopsticks. I figured, I’m a westerner, I use western silverware. “Fine,” I said to Jamie.
“So, how was your mom?”
“She was…herself. You know, I should be more like Georgia or my other cousins Roula, Toula, and Sula—I know it’s ridiculous—and marry a Greek man.”
“I can’t believe she actually can mention men to you.”
“As long as it could be sanctioned by the church and I promised to only use sex to give her male grandchildren, it would be all right.”
“Jeez.”
I thought about telling her about Helen, but for some reason I never talked about my sisters to Jamie anymore. And since I didn’t talk about them to her, I didn’t talk about them to anyone. If she had been home when I called, I probably would have told her. But it was a new day and I didn’t think I had the energy to mess with my emotions again.
“How’s Georgia?”
“She’s good. You know her. Well, you don’t really, but you know that she brings it all back to mental illness.”
“Right.” She continued to play with her meal. “So, I looked at the tapes of the finalists for Raj’s show.”
“Oh, I love those.” There was nothing better than seeing how far people would go to get on TV. “Do you have any left for me to see? Has Raj agreed to let me write about them yet, anonymously?”
“Well, you’re going to have to take that up with him, but I do have one.” She reached into her bag and pushed a VHS across the table. I picked it up. The name on the sticky was “Warren Tucker.” My mouth dropped. It had been so long since I had thought about that name, and yet, somehow I think I thought about him every day. Mr. Number Two of my two-and-a-half.
“Wow!” I couldn’t quite get my voice back to say anything more.
“I know, I couldn’t believe it. Remember when you had that crush on him? Remember that night?”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “I think I do.”
“Now, he wants to be Mr. Right…Now.”
“Oh panayia mou,” I exclaimed in Greek. “Can we get some ice cream tempura?”
“Sure.” She ordered it. “Voul, are you okay?”
“How was it?” I asked, gesturing to the tape.
“Well, he is almost as cute as he was when he worked at the pub with us. I don’t know. I didn’t watch the whole thing, just saw the intro. The weird thing for me was thinking this guy, you know, pushing thirty guy, wanting to be on TV like everyone else in America is Warren Tucker. The Warren Tucker.”
“Oh.” I dropped my face into my hands. Was everyone deciding to resurface in my life all at once? Dan the Man, Helen, and now, oh, now Warren.
“Are you sure you want to see the tape?” Jamie said, reaching across the table to take it back.
“Yes!” I practically screamed. “I’ll watch it…when I’m ready.”
We got our fried ice cream and talked about what the weather would be like on Block Island. I was glad that she didn’t bring up the baby stuff, because I wasn’t really hearing anything she was saying and I don’t think I would have been supportive. I was too busy thinking about Warren Tucker.
Back home, I stared at the tape. I didn’t feel like bringing it out into the living room where Kelly and her bad-boy cameraman might stumble across me. I wasn’t sure I could watch it.
Warren Tucker.
I wasn’t prepared for this. Warren bartended at the pub where Jamie and I waitressed the summer after our junior year of college. We lived in her parents’ Block Island house for the summer. All of the Jacobs children got the house for the summer after their junior year, and I tagged along. Jamie’s parents took themselves on a cruise those summers and only came out for Memorial Day. It was the longest I had ever been away from home. After the traditiona
l Jacobs reunion that Memorial Day, Jamie rented out the extra rooms and we lived with four other girls. I imagined that that was what going away to school must be like. It felt like I was having a normal life, even though I still maintained all my abnormalities.
But there was Warren Tucker. As soon as I showed an interest in him (and it took me to the Fourth of July to admit it to anyone, including myself), Jamie declared him off-limits to everyone in the house. It wasn’t really a problem, because almost everyone but me had paired up with someone. Jamie had a constant stream of boys that she dated.
There was just one night with Warren Tucker. Oh, I didn’t want to think about it. I never talked about it. It had been my thing. My moment with the boy I’d wanted all summer.
Now that boy was going to be cheapened on network television. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t watch Warren Tucker pandering to nameless producers.
I climbed into bed and read the last of The New York Times Magazine. I should have fallen asleep dreaming of writing for The New York Times Magazine, but instead I thought of sitting on the jetty with Warren Tucker….
Warren smiled as he opened his picnic basket. It seemed pretty loud for Block Island. It sounded like New York City. I was wearing a heavy wool coat even though the sun beat down on me. My face was sweating, but Warren didn’t seem to notice. He just gestured inside the picnic basket and I saw rows of beautiful spicy crunchy tuna. Before I knew it, Warren had lit a match and set the sushi on fire. I smelled it burning. There was a lot of smoke—
I woke up, disoriented. There was smoke in my room and Armando was screaming and banging on my door.
“Our apartment is on fire!”
I grabbed a sweatshirt and slippers and opened the door. Immediately, my throat filled with smoke, and Armando grabbed my arm and led me through the hall.
“My laptop, my laptop,” I said.
“No, Voula, no. I call fireman. They coming. We mus go.” Armando pulled me out of the apartment. The sirens were so close they seemed like they were inside me.
“Kelly! Kelly’s still inside,” I screamed.
“No, she not here. I open door, I look. Non preoccuparti. Let’s go!”
As we started down the stairs, crouching to avoid the smoke, we saw the firemen. There must have been four of them with axes and giant backpacks running up the stairs to the fire. They were so fearless, running toward what we were fleeing.
“Go right downstairs,” a voice behind a mask boomed.
And I ran with Armando still pulling on me—all the way down the four flights that the firemen had raced up.
Outside, it was cold, and a blond woman came up to us immediately. She was wearing a thin T-shirt and a pair of Armando’s silk pajama pants.
“Voula, dis is Nadia.”
“Hello,” said Armando’s latest conquest. “Nadia.”
“Hi,” I said. I was still kind of in shock. I looked up to our floor. There were flames in Armando’s room and smoke coming out of my window. I watched as the firefighters fought it out. In addition to the men that had run up the stairs, firemen hustled up the fire escape pulling hoses from their giant backpacks. On the street, some firemen sprayed hoses to back up the firemen on the fire escape. Other people in the apartment building ran out onto the street where passersby gathered. It was close to two in the morning, but the fire gave the street a new light. The air was filled with the sounds of beeping horns. We had blocked 32nd Street. Armando was cursing in Italian.
The whole thing was unbelievable. There were three fire trucks, and another one arrived just as I saw Kelly walking up the street.
She looked up at our building, not sure what was happening. I yelled her name, and when she saw the three of us standing there, she ran over.
“What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know. Fire.”
“Is all that smoke in our apartment?”
“I think so,” I said. “But at least it looks like the fire is out.”
Soon firemen began to spill out of our building. The minute they stepped outside they lit up cigarettes. The street was full of men in heavy jackets smoking and looking up. When one of the trucks pulled away, I took this as a good sign.
“What time is it?” I asked Kelly, noticing she was wearing a watch.
“It’s two-thirty.”
I couldn’t believe that much time had passed. One of the firemen came up to me.
“Do you live there?”
“We all do,” Kelly said.
“I think the problem was a candle.”
“Porca butane,” Armando cursed.
I looked over at him and his Swedish import. Was this his fault?
“Do you have apartment insurance?” the fireman asked.
“Do we?” Kelly asked me.
I looked at Armando, who shrugged and shook his head.
“No,” I told the fireman, my voice shaking.
“You should never leave a candle unattended,” said the fireman.
“I didn’t,” I said defensively. I immediately regretted it. The man had just risked his life.
“There’s an office in there. A room with a desk and a file cabinet.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. I felt a knot forming in my throat. “My office, my computer. It has everything.”
“It’s fine. There’s some smoke damage. Your health,” the fireman said. “Your life. That’s everything.”
Another fireman came and stood beside us. He was wearing a backpack, and I was pretty sure he was one of the guys who had run up the stairs. The backpack looked like something out of Ghostbusters. For some reason when I looked at him, I felt like an idiot.
“I know, but what happened to my office?” I said to the first guy.
“Part of the desk is shot,” the new fireman said, adjusting the backpack and taking a cigarette out of his jacket. His voice was kinder. “The files in one of the drawers are ash because it wasn’t shut all the way. The computer, I think, is okay.”
I closed my eyes. I knew that I should have been happy for my life, but all I could think was, Why hadn’t I shut the filing cabinet drawer? Why hadn’t I shut the office door?
“What about the bedrooms?” Kelly said.
“Who’s got the one with the candle?”
“Me,” Armando said.
“Gonna be lots of smoke in that one,” answered the new fireman. “You might want to stay somewhere else tonight. We can try to hook you up with a deal at the Marriott down the street. Who’s next to you? With the purple chest of drawers?”
“Me,” Kelly said. “I just moved in.”
“Well, the drawers ain’t purple no more,” the original fireman said. “Everything is going to smell like shit for a few days, but considering the stupidity of leaving a candle out, you guys are lucky.”
“Yeah,” added the second fireman, who I noticed was quite cute.
“Let’s go, Torrisi,” the first fireman said.
Torrisi put out his cigarette and looked at us, in various stages of dress, standing there in shock. He met Kelly’s eyes. “It’s going to be okay.”
I looked down at the ground and then I felt a hand squeezing my shoulder just above where it was beginning to hurt from Armando’s grip. I looked up into Fireman Torrisi’s eyes.
“For real,” he added.
“Thanks,” I said.
Then all of the puffy-coated firemen climbed back into their various positions on the truck and drove away. The crowd dispersed and traffic began to move down the street again.
None of us could bear to be in the apartment. The whole place smelled the way Georgia’s kitchen had when her brother Spiro decided to cook his G.I. Joe in the microwave. I had an awful hacking cough as I picked up my shoes and put on my jeans. I didn’t bother to turn on my computer. I didn’t want to think about what I might have lost.
Nadia went home, and Armando, Kelly and I went to The Blarney Stone. It was us and a bunch of old men who looked like they’d been there drinking since the seven
ties. We got a booth and settled in to drink beer all night.
“I so sorry,” Armando said to us. “I lit candle.” He looked like he might cry. His room was in the worst shape, worse than my office.
Kelly seemed really annoyed, but I was too exhausted by the whole situation to be annoyed. I had no idea what to say. I just drank can after can of beer until I knew I could go home and pass out despite the smell.
Even though it wouldn’t help us, we got apartment insurance the next day. Actually, I called, but I made Armando swear that he was going to deal with our management company. I wasn’t going to accept any of his excuses about not speaking English, and he wasn’t offering them.
It was over a week before the apartment stopped stinking like smoke. All of our clothes reeked of it; the inside of the kitchen cabinets that had been closed were blackened by it. That fire had been powerful, but from what I gathered from the insurance company it could have been a lot worse.
I was lucky that my computer was fine. It almost made me reconsider backing up stuff on disks. But then the disks could get burned. My desk was in pretty bad shape—but it had been a street find after all. A lot of old invoices and several of the magazines where my articles appeared were lost. Luckily I kept the magazine with my first paid story in my room.
Kelly was pretty bitter at Armando for being so careless, but I thought he was beating himself up about it too much, so I went easy on him.
I ordered in a lot that week. I didn’t want to turn on an oven. Heat and fire of any kind freaked me out. Armando told me he had trouble going into the kitchen at the restaurant. Kelly said that she was having trouble smelling matches. I guess we were all pretty spooked.
I started fantasizing about living alone. As much as I was happy that night to have my roommates with me and to not have to be on my own, I couldn’t help but think that I never would’ve been in that situation in the first place if I lived alone. Maybe that would send me into my shell forever, completing my transformation into a hermit, but I wanted to be the one responsible for everything that happened in my life. Never again did I want to be running out of an apartment because of someone else’s negligence. I wasn’t ready to actually move, but the thought kept gnawing at me.