Say You're Sorry

by Sarah Shankman

  “Now, that’s interesting,” said Vinnie.

  “Who’s David?” asked Wilma. “You said David was performing the surgery.”

  Clare blushed. “I meant Dirk. David’s my real ex-boyfriend. The real plastic surgeon.”

  “And did David dump you like Dirk dumped Carol?” Wilma asked.

  Clare nodded.

  “Then forget what I said,” said Julia. “Let’s get him back in that Korean store and shoot that sucker full of holes.”

  “I like the Korean store, too,” said Vinnie, knocking back the last of his grappa. “But now it’s two-fifteen, and we’ve got to scoot back over to Centre Street.”

  *

  Back in Room 1517, the four of them clustered in a corner. They were picking up speed. Dirk lay dead in the grocery store, and they were arguing over whether or not the Korean grocer or Carol subdued the shooter, when the court officer stepped from behind the desk and called their names once more and they had to file into another courtroom.

  This time, the defendant, as Judge O’Banion explained, was a twenty-two-year-old man who, when his girlfriend jilted him, had thrown her in front of a subway train which cut her to ribbons.

  The four cowriters stared at one another. Dirk, mouthed Julia. It’s even better. It’s perfect.

  They couldn’t wait to get out of that courtroom and back to Real Life.

  Vinnie had said that he thought the jiltee was justified. Wilma had said that her eighty-six-year-old mother was once dragged by a train and she just couldn’t listen to the testimony. Julia’s lie was that she had gone to high school with the victim. Clare said that she was obsessed with this case, had followed every smidgen of news about it, and thought the defendant should be strung up. They were all excused.

  “Okay,” said Vinnie, back in Room 1517, “I take it that you like running David, I mean Dirk, over with a subway train?”

  “I love it,” said Wilma. “Carol pushes him, and the train runs over his gorgeous face.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Julia.

  “Absolutely,” said Clare. “It’s perfect. It’s poetic justice.”

  “And does Clare, I mean Carol, get caught?” asked Vinnie.

  “No way,” said Julia. “She doesn’t do it herself. Somebody else does it.”

  “Somebody she paid?” asked Vinnie.

  “Probably,” said Wilma.

  “How much?” asked Vinnie. Then he reached in a pocket of his lovely fawn slacks and pulled out the quarter Clare had loaned him for the phone earlier that morning. He flipped it a couple of times and gave her a wink.

  “Not in real life.” Clare laughed. “Not nearly enough.”

  *

  But it was.

  Shortly after that conversation, the prospective jurors of Room 1517 were dismissed for the day. Clare, energized for the first time in weeks, went straight home and wrote like a crazy person. As the four of them had plotted, Dirk died, his pretty face mangled beyond recognition, and Carol got away with it. Then Dirk’s long-lost twin brother, Dylan, a pediatrician, comes to New York, and the two of them fall madly in love. But then a child in his care dies mysteriously, and an autopsy discovers that the child’s heart is missing. It turns out that Dylan, whose only child drowned ten years ago, has snapped. He’s become a kind of Frankenstein, and there’s a terrible trial…

  Involved in the narrative, Clare had lost track of time. Even though she hadn’t slept in weeks, she was alive with energy. It was almost eleven when her phone rang.

  “Turn on the TV,” said a familiar voice. One she’d heard recently but couldn’t quite place. “The news.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Vinnie.”

  “What…?”

  “Just turn on the TV, okay?”

  Clare did as he said, and there was blond Chuck Scarborough looking deadly serious as he reported a horrible accident that evening at the 79th Street station of the IRT. “The victim, Dr. David Teller, a prominent plastic surgeon, was waiting for a train about 8 P.M. this evening when he seemed to fall onto the tracks and was dragged by the head and killed. There were no immediate witnesses to the accident. No one noticed him standing at the far end of the platform. At this point, there’s no indication of foul play…”

  “Vinnie!” Clare shrieked. “You killed him.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I didn’t mean for you to really kill him! He was a son of a bitch, but I didn’t mean…we can’t be judge and jury…”

  “What makes you think you had anything to do with this little incident? How do you know Dr. Teller wasn’t just an accident waiting to happen?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s just pretend….” And then Vinnie chuckled softly. “You know, pretend, like we were writing a story, that Dr. Teller had really pissed off some important people by giving new faces to some reprehensible characters in the feds’ witness protection program. Like on Real Life, but in real life, too.”

  “Oh, my God,” Clare breathed.

  “And let’s say that these very important people wanted to deliver a very strong message to Dr. Teller. Well, more than a message. They wanted to make damned sure that he cease and desist these practices. Immediately. And permanently.”

  “Oh, Vinnie,” said Clare. She could feel something rising in her chest. Something like relief. Could that be? Something like joy? Delight? Something that tasted like sweet revenge?

  “And let’s say that a friend of these very important people was asked to take care of this Dr. Teller who was causing them so much grief. And this friend had set out to do that very thing when he, by a piece of great coincidence, ran into the former girlfriend of said Dr. Teller in a jury room. And she was having a problem with Real Life. And so he and some other people helped her with her problem.”

  “With Real Life?”

  “Yeah,” said Vinnie. “And this guy, he liked their story so much he rolled it over into little r, little l real life.”

  The feeling in Clare’s chest bubbled over into laughter. And once she started, she couldn’t stop.

  “Good night, Clare,” said Vinnie. She could hear his grin. “Sweet dreams. And good luck with Real Life. If I was you, I’d use this, babe. Use this material. We like this poetic justice business out in the real world.”

  Clare did. She used it all. And when Real Life became number one in its time slot, and the Emmys and the money started pouring in, Arnie, Clare’s producer, raised a glass of champagne to her. “How sweet,” he said, “real life is.”

  Love Thy Neighbor

  “I’m going to shoot him.” Julie glared at the digital dock on her bedside table. Six a.m. She hadn’t gotten to sleep until three: left the restaurant at one, a couple of hours to unwind, study a script, fool around with Patrick. Then, as usual, she’d had trouble nodding off. And now…

  “Hunh?” Patrick rolled toward her but didn’t open his eyes. He was only a millimeter into consciousness.

  “That bastard!” If the hand Julie flung had been a knife, it would have pierced the heart of the man in the apartment upstairs. “He’s killing me. Tromp, tromp, tromp ever since the day he moved in.”

  It didn’t take much to awaken Julie. Sleep—or the lack of it—was her bête noire, her cross to bear. Her insomnia had begun when she was a child back in North Carolina, no napper she, and now her sleep deficit was nearly thirty years deep. Some nights she couldn’t drift off. Others, she awoke in the wee hours, and that was it. She had to learn to deal with stress, her present shrink said. The one before that had given up, opining that some people are simply hard-wired to toss and turn. Julie had all the insomniac’s paraphernalia: blackout shades, earplugs, a white-noise machine. She exercised regularly, took no caffeine after noon, ate lightly before bedtime. Her apartment building had, thank God, installed double-paned windows a couple of years earlier. Still, neighbors were the one thing over which she had no control.

  Patrick flopped over, giving her his bare b
ack, and began snoring immediately, tangled in the hot sheets of summer.

  Julie gritted her teeth. Bad enough that Patrick was in her bed anyway. It wasn’t as if she loved him. Most of the time she didn’t even like Patrick, with whom she worked at Lippi’s, where they, both actor-waiters, served up exorbitantly expensive pasta to those who had already hit the big time. But Patrick had good connections. He was up for a role with a hot young independent director. Besides, Julie’s most recent doctor at the sleep clinic had said, “I want you to use your bed for nothing but sleep and sex.” She was getting precious little of the former, so…

  Now the upstairs neighbor began his morning march. How could anyone walk so much, simply getting dressed? He circled and recircled, doglike.

  “Damn you!” Julie cried. “Sit!” Then she jumped up, grabbed her red-handled broom, and jabbed at the ceiling. Already there was a rash of scarlet pockmarks in the plaster.

  The man above answered with an angry stomp, his hard-soled shoes resounding on his hardwood floors. Wall Street shoes, Julie called them, though she had no idea where he worked, what he did, even what his real name was. There were only initials on the building’s directory. JL. Nothing on his mailbox but the apartment number. John Lennon was what her crazy super had told her when she asked. John Lennon.

  What a sick joke. Everyone knew John Lennon was long dead, struck down by an assassin’s bullets about two miles north and west of her building on the fringes of Murray Hill. Lennon had lived in grandeur at West Seventy-second Street and Central Park West, in the Dakota. He’d died out in front of that fabulous old building, the setting for the movie Rosemary’s Baby. The Dakota was spooky and dark with Gothic arches and gargoyles, a nineteenth-century castle with thick, thick walls and floors through which no one could hear your screams.

  Julie’s building was nothing like that. Red brick, square, with no adornment, it had been cheaply constructed in the 1950s. A friend of Julie’s once told her that she’d grown up in a housing project in Rhinebeck that was its twin. The building’s main drawback, other than its proximity to the traffic of the Midtown Tunnel, was the fact that its plaster ceilings were separated from the hardwood floors of the next apartment by nothing more than two inches of air.

  “Visualize yourself somewhere else,” her shrink had suggested. She’d come up with a dandy: a magical chamber, floating out of time and space. The room was lined with cork and eiderdown, a pillowed and perfumed bower for the Princess and the Pea.

  But, in reality, Julie had no magical chamber, no famously thick walls and floors, as she lay wide awake chewing on her curdled thoughts. For example, it occurred to her that despite the dissimilarities between her building and the Dakota, if someone were shot out front, the crime scenes would look the same on the eleven o’clock news. The crumpled figure on the sidewalk, the pool of blood, the yellow tape, the cops holding back the curious crowd.

  John Lennon, indeed.

  *

  “I’m going to shoot him,” Julie said to Lisa. The two friends were eating hot dogs from a pushcart. Water sheeting down a brick wall to one side of the vest-pocket park provided a modicum of relief from the sticky summer heat.

  Lisa said, “Doesn’t your air conditioner block out some of his noise?”

  “Not nearly enough. He’s up at dawn every morning. Even weekends. Tromp, tromp, tromp. And sometimes he gets home later than I do. Tromp, tromp.”

  “You said you tried a note?”

  “Three or four. They started out sweet and rapidly progressed to ballistic.”

  “He has no carpeting?”

  Julie shrugged. “Some. But nowhere near what he ought to. What is it the city requires, seventy percent?” Julie herself had lots of thick carpets. Even so, she never ever wore her shoes in her apartment. She was a considerate neighbor.

  “You complained to the landlord?”

  “Of course.”

  “And?”

  “He’d love it if I moved.”

  “Oh, right. You have that great rent.”

  “How else could I afford to live in the city? I don’t see my star rising anytime soon.”

  “No callbacks?”

  “Callbacks? I’m lucky if I ever get through an audition without blowing the lines. I’m telling you, Lisa, the man is ruining my life. I can barely remember my own name. And check out these circles under my eyes. I look like a hag.”

  “You do not.” Then Lisa, afraid that Julie would see the lie in her eyes, changed the subject. “How’s Patrick? Have you two kissed and made up?”

  “Are you kidding? We’re civil to one another at work, but it’s definitely over.”

  “Have you tried talking things out?”

  “What’s there to say to someone who thinks you’re crazy? He says I’m obsessed with the man upstairs. That if I weren’t such a wacko, good sex would make me sleep like a baby. I said, ‘Yeah, good sex might…’”

  “You didn’t!”

  “Of course I did. What am I supposed to do, protect his delicate feelings?” Julie was getting a migraine. She pushed her damp bangs back from her forehead. “He certainly doesn’t care about mine. Patrick’s a beast, not even worth shooting.”

  Just then, around the corner on the Avenue of the Americas, a car backfired.

  Lisa jumped.

  Julie smiled.

  *

  “I’m going to shoot him.”

  “Julie, darling, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”

  Julie stared out her dirty windows at the Thursday afternoon traffic. All the rich rats were heading for the Midtown Tunnel to the Long Island Expressway, then on to the Hamptons for the long weekend. “Ma, I’m almost thirty. I’m not a child.”

  “I know, dear. I’m sorry. It’s just that I worry about you in that city.”

  Julie sighed.

  “Wouldn’t you like to come home for a week or so? I’d love to see you. We could go swimming every day. It’s been a while.”

  “It’s even hotter there than here.” Summertime in North Carolina was always brutal. But at least there were no sidewalks lined with rotting garbage, no subway platforms reeking of hot piss.

  “We could go up to the lake. Or to the beach, if you want.” Julie’s mom wasn’t giving up easily. She wanted to get her daughter home, fatten her up a bit. The last time she’d seen Julie, she’d been drawn and peaked.

  “I have to work.”

  “All right, dear. But let’s put our heads together about this hideous neighbor of yours. Have you offered to buy him house slippers? Wouldn’t that help?”

  Have you tried earplugs? Have you considered acoustical tile? How about splitting the cost with him, at least in his bedroom, of wall-to-wall? How many suggestions had Julie heard from well-meaning friends? Suggestions that drove her wild. Considered giving up coffee? Tried meditation? Acupuncture? What about melatonin? Chamomile tea? Getting out of bed when you can’t sleep? As if she were a fool. As if she hadn’t tried everything on God’s green earth to solve her sleep problems. “I left slippers outside his door, Ma. Ages ago. He won’t wear them.”

  “Well, dear, maybe they weren’t his size.”

  Julie had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. “Bigfoot’s shoe size? Huge. That’s what I bought. Huge! Hell, Ma, I’ve never even seen him!”

  Not that Julie hadn’t tried to confront her neighbor. Many’s the dawn Julie had grabbed her robe and raced up the stairs hoping to catch him. But she’d never been successful. She could feel him skulking behind his peephole. He knew what she looked like, while he remained Mr. Mystery Man.

  Once or twice, she’d lost it and pounded on his door. “I know you’re in there, you son of a bitch!”

  Another time, she’d crept up and crouched against his door so he couldn’t see her through the peephole. She’d waited for a long time, but still he didn’t show. He could smell her out there, she was sure of it. A Wall Street wolf, he had a predator’s keenly developed sense of danger.

  “Or
how about the mountains, dear?” Mom was still on the line, still pitching. “Remember how much you used to love the mountains when Daddy was alive?”

  Oh, yes. They’d had lots of sweet times back then. Hot dogs on the grill. Toasted marshmallows. Ghost stories round the campfire. Her father, a loving, patient man, had spent many an hour teaching her how to cast into fish-rich streams. And how to shoot a rifle. Julie had never been afraid of guns. She’d loved the smell of the oiled blue steel, the snick of the cartridges’ slide. Julie was a natural, a good shot. She’d punched many a tin can right out of the blue sky. She wasn’t bad with a handgun either.

  “I could fly down, take the train back,” Julie heard herself saying, that reptilian part of her brain knowing, before she was conscious of it, why.

  *

  “I’m going to shoot him,” Julie said to her friend Cassandra, the two of them waiting to pick up orders at Lippi’s service window.

  “I thought your little trip chilled you out.”

  “I wish. Bigfoot never takes a vacation. He’s right there, every morning, six on the dot.” Julie picked up her two dishes, one scallop, one sea bass. Who could stomach anything heavier? Heat Wave Grips Northeast for Seventh Week! It had actually been cooler in North Carolina.

  “I’ve got a friend back home who can put a curse on your neighbor. Want me to call?”

  “No, thanks. A couple of slugs ought to do the trick.”

  Cassandra’s eyebrows took a hike halfway up her forehead.

  “Whoa, girl. You feeling all right?”

  “No, Cassandra. Actually, I feel like shit.”

  Sleep deprivation will do that. A night or two causes that feeling like a hangover or the flu, headachy, a kind of all-over malaise with which most people are familiar. Weeks, months, years can wreak much more serious havoc. Julie constantly wobbled on the edge of tears. Some days, she couldn’t speak at all. Her chest thrummed with exhaustion, and a deep breath was impossible. Her dulled brain ached constantly and felt as if it were bouncing off craggy places inside her skull. Perhaps, she thought, her intracranial fluid had evaporated. She could feel her bones too, within her skin.