by Jason Starr
I continued down to the subway, feeling shaken up and out of it. Several people on the packed platform seemed to be staring at me, and I wondered if it was because they recognized me from the news last night or if they just thought there was something wrong with me.
I didn’t remember that today was my first day at my new job as associate editor until I entered my office building. It was too bad that a blackmailer had pictures of me leaving the body of the man I’d killed against a trash can, and that the world had just found out that my dead girlfriend was a psychotic killer, or I might’ve had something to look forward to today.
When I got off the elevator, I went right to my new office and tried to get involved in my routine. On my calendar, I had scheduled two early phone interviews with analysts familiar with the operations of PrimeNet Solutions, the DSL company I was doing a story on. I called the analysts, who had some doubts about the company. Due to severe competition, unreliable customer service, and a mixed balance sheet, the future of PrimeNet was uncertain. I began writing my article:
Odds are you’ve never heard of PrimeNet Solutions, but that’s about to change. Thanks to a flood of new subscribers and an already satisfied customer base, this resurgent DSL company is about to take charge of Manhattan’s high-speed Internet industry.
Writing the positive opening paragraph improved my mood. I outlined the rest of the article and started pulling out the most positive portions of the analysts’ quotes. I also came up with a title for the article: “PrimeNet: Primed for Greatness.” By later in the morning I was able to block out most of my worries, and I felt almost normal again.
“You’re here,” Angie said.
I swiveled away from the computer monitor and saw her standing at the entrance to my office with a baffled expression.
“Yeah, I decided to come in,” I said. “You know, it being my first day at the new job and all.”
“Oh,” she said. “I just figured you’d be taking some time off. So how are you?”
“Okay,” I said. “I mean, considering.”
Angie pulled up a chair and sat across from me. In the fluorescent light I noticed her bleached mustache hairs.
“I was going to call you today anyway,” she said. “That Detective Romero talked to me again. This time he came to my apartment.”
I felt a surge of panic, wondering why Romero wouldn’t leave Angie alone.
“So I guess you heard everything,” I said.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “So is it all true?”
“I guess so.”
“Detective Romero told me she might’ve made a mistake. She might’ve really meant to kill me.”
“I doubt that. Rebecca had a lot of strange friends, and she was probably mixed up in some kind of drug thing downtown.”
By the look Angie was giving me, I wasn’t sure she believed me.
“It was just really scary,” Angie said. “I mean to even hear something like that.”
“They’re just following up leads,” I said. “They get all kinds of crazy leads they have to explore in cases like these. But I’m telling you, I really doubt it had anything to do with you.”
“It’s just all so freaky,” she said. “I mean, I know it’s even freakier for you, but still . . . So you’re really okay?”
“I’m just trying to go on with my life,” I said. “Hopefully, in a day or two, everybody’ll forget all about this.”
Angie looked at me as if she thought I was joking. She left my office and returned with a copy of the Daily News. She held the newspaper up and I saw the headline, “MANIAC,” with what looked like an old mug shot of Rebecca.
“The Post has the same picture except they went with ‘PSY-CHO’ as their headline,” Angie said.
I remembered how, months ago, my friends had warned me that Rebecca was psycho and how I’d refused to believe them. I was going to ask Angie to hand me the copy of the News so I could read the article, but I decided against it.
“Hopefully it’ll all die down by tomorrow,” I said, but I knew it wouldn’t. This was the type of story that grew and grew. The tabloids would have a field day with it.
“I still can’t believe you came in at all today,” Angie said. “You should go on vacation to Mexico or someplace. Just lie on the beach for a couple weeks and veg.”
“Maybe we could go together.”
Angie seemed surprised for a couple of moments, not sure how to react, and then she played along. “Okay, where do you want to go? Puerto Vallarta? Cancún?”
“How about Cozumel?”
“Cool, let’s do it,” she said. “How long do you want to stay?”
“How about a week?”
“A week it is,” she said. “I better go bikini shopping. I better go on a diet too, if I want to fit into it.”
“You kidding? You look perfect just the way you are.” There was awkward silence, and then I added, “Well, better get back to work.”
“Me too,” Angie said. “Hey, you up for going to lunch later? Or maybe we could order in?”
“Jeff and I talked about doing lunch today,” I said.
“Ooh, an editorial lunch,” Angie said jokingly.
I smiled. I could tell she was waiting for me to suggest another time to go to lunch or to do something else, but I didn’t say anything.
“Anyway,” she said. “Maybe we could do something tomorrow?”
“Yeah, tomorrow,” I said, leaving it vague.
Angie left and I tried to lose myself in my work again, but people kept stopping by, interrupting me, to offer their condolences about Rebecca. I thanked everyone graciously, although I really wanted to be left alone.
After Kevin and Amy from Payroll came in together to offer their support, Jeff stopped by.
“I heard what happened,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You know, you could’ve taken some time off, just to rest or—”
“I wanted to get back into the swing of things,” I said.
“You sure? Because if you want someone to cover your stories for you, that’s no problem. And we don’t have to discuss your new editorial duties until later in the week.”
“Aren’t we having lunch today?”
“I thought you’d want to take a rain check on that.”
“No, I really want to go,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t cancel the reservation yet, so I guess I’ll come by to pick you up around noon?”
“Sounds great,” I said.
As the morning went on the flow of people stopping by my office dwindled, but I kept getting interrupted by phone calls. The media had found out that I worked for Manhattan Business, and reporters from all over the country were harassing me, trying to get me to comment about Rebecca. After I hung up on reporters from the Miami Herald, the L.A. Daily News, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Hartford Current, I turned on my voice mail. I wrote a rough version of the entire PrimeNet article, in which I described the company’s twenty-seven-year-old CEO as “a young Lee Iacocca” and concluded that the company’s stock price—it was currently trading at about two bucks a share on the Nasdaq—was a bargain at current levels. When I checked my voice mail there were about a dozen new messages from newspapers and radio stations around the country. There was also a message from Aunt Helen. She said she’d read about me in the newspaper and was very concerned that she couldn’t reach me at home. She told me to please call her as soon as I got her message.
I was deleting all the messages when Jeff came into my office and said, “Ready?”
I didn’t see how it could possibly be noon already, but it was.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Jeff and I went to a steakhouse on Forty-ninth Street. The maître d’ seated us at a table upstairs, and a waiter automatically arrived with a mixed drink and a plate of fried calamari. The waiter asked me what I wanted to drink, and before I could answer Jeff said, “Another Ma
nhattan.”
Several minutes later, my drink arrived; then Jeff lifted his—it was already half-gone—and said, “To better days.”
“To better days,” I said.
We drank. The alcohol was relaxing me, and, for a while, I managed to forget all of my problems. It helped that Jeff was avoiding talking about Rebecca. He went on about his daughter Gretchen, who was the star of her high school soccer team and had just had a small role in her school’s production of Our Town. I told him about how my sister, Barbara, had played Emily in Our Town in our high school production. As he went on, telling me about his daughter, I remembered how Barbara had looked so pretty and confident onstage and how proud I’d been that she was my sister.
“I was so proud of you,” I said.
“What?” Jeff said.
“What?” I said.
“You said you’re proud of me. Why are you proud of me?”
“Oh, not you, I . . . I mean I was just thinking, Our Town ’s a really great play, isn’t it?”
Jeff was looking at me in a confused yet concerned way when the waiter arrived at the table. Jeff ordered another round of drinks, and then the waiter asked me for my lunch order. I said I’d have the Caesar salad with grilled chicken. The waiter didn’t bother to ask Jeff for his order; when the waiter was gone, Jeff told me he’d be having the sirloin.
Jeff started telling me all about his country club near his house in Upper Westchester and I was zoning out, thinking about Barbara onstage again. I stared at Jeff’s mouth and concentrated on the words he was saying, but I kept seeing Barbara in the outfit she wore during the play’s third act—a white blouse tucked into a knee-length navy skirt. Jeff invited me to come play golf with him sometime. I warned him that I was an awful golfer, and he said that was fine with him; he loved playing with bad golfers because it made him feel better about his own game. I smiled, remembering how, at the end of the play, Barbara had smiled at me in the front row while the audience applauded.
We ordered another round. I was feeling pleasantly buzzed, but the alcohol was having a noticeably opposite effect on Jeff. As he told me about my new duties at the magazine—in addition to editing I’d have the authority to assign stories to the reporters—I noticed that he was starting to slur. Then, as he went on about how the magazine needed to start covering more provocative local stories to differentiate itself from the national competition, he started cursing and speaking in a louder voice. I declined a fourth drink, but as Jeff had his he suddenly started telling me a joke about a priest who had sex with a gorilla. He said the punch line in a booming voice, and two women at a nearby table who seemed to be having a business lunch kept glaring in our direction.
When Jeff stopped laughing, he said, “I got another one for you—a guy goes into a proctologist’s office,” and I suddenly started feeling nauseous. I was hoping it was just indigestion, but then the discomfort started moving higher, from my stomach toward my throat, and I knew I was about to get sick.
“Excuse me,” I managed to say as Jeff was still telling the joke.
Keeling over, holding my stomach, I headed toward the bathroom. I was feeling even sicker, and I didn’t think I’d make it to the toilet. I thought about solid things—wood, cement, bricks—and I reached the bowl just as I was starting to yak. After a few minutes I thought I was through, but the sour taste lingering in my mouth reminded me of the last time I threw up—in Charlotte’s bathroom—and I threw up again.
I was sweating badly, and then my knees buckled as I started to stand and I had to grab onto the toilet paper roll to steady myself. Finally I made it to my feet and over to the sink. I stared at the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot and my mouth was sagging open. Splashing a few handfuls of cold water against my face didn’t make me look or feel any better. I gargled a few times, and then I left the bathroom and headed back toward my table.
Jeff was arguing with the waiter, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The waiter had his back to me, and Jeff’s face was pink as he spoke in an animated way, gesticulating with his arms. As I got closer to the table, I heard Jeff saying, “. . . and you’re telling me this meat is rare? There’s no blood in it. Show me the blood. Show me the fuckin’ blood!”
The waiter, a young blond guy, said calmly, “Would you like me to bring the dish back, sir?”
“For what?” Jeff’s thin salt-and-pepper hair was usually combed straight back, but now loose strands were hanging over his eyes. “What’re you gonna do, uncook it?”
The waiter was acting as if he’d seen outbursts like this from Jeff many times before. “We can cook you a new order, sir.”
“Yeah, and I’ll have to wait another twenty fucking minutes to eat. Did you tell the chef I wanted rare? Did you tell him or did you forget?”
“I told him, sir.”
“Sure you did.” Jeff looked toward me, but didn’t make eye contact. “See? This is what happens when they don’t hire professional waiters and they hire fucking actors instead.”
“Would you like me to take your dish back, sir?”
“Do whatever the fuck you want,” Jeff said. “I’m not eating that shit.”
Jeff was shaking his head and cursing to himself; he didn’t seem to notice me as I joined him at the table. My salad had arrived, but just looking at food brought back memories of the toilet bowl, and I had to cover the dish with my napkin.
“What?” Jeff said. “Something wrong with your food too?”
“I’m just not feeling very well,” I said.
“It was probably the calamari,” Jeff said, and then he downed the rest of his drink. As he signaled to the waiter for another, he said, “Take a good look at me in this shithole. This is the last time I’m coming here. Four, maybe five years ago the food was great. The last couple of years it started going downhill. Now they should serve it in a fucking feedbag.”
Another drink was brought to Jeff. As he drank it he quickly deteriorated into full-blown drunkenness. He was cursing, spraying spit, talking too loud. When he got back to the office he’d probably fire an intern or two.
As another wave of nausea overcame me I said, “Maybe we should just go.”
“Good idea,” Jeff said. “What do you say to some Japanese?” He pulled on the sides of his face with his index fingers, slitting his eyes.
“I think I’m just gonna get back to the office,” I said.
“Come on, don’t be a wimp,” he said. “The afternoon’s young.”
I felt like I was at some college frat party and a guy was trying to peer-pressure me into drinking. I got up and went outside. Breathing in the fresh air—if you’d consider the air in midtown fresh—didn’t help much. I still felt sick, and I wondered if I had a virus or if maybe Jeff had been right about the calamari.
Jeff came out of the restaurant, mumbling to himself, and we headed up the block; he was walking half a stride ahead of me, as if I weren’t there.
At the corner, I said, “Jeff, I don’t want to hold you back. If you want to go someplace else—”
He grunted, then said, “It’s all right. I’ll just order a sandwich or something.”
We didn’t say anything else to each other until we were back in the office and I said, “See you later,” and he said, “Yeah, later.” Then I branched off along a different corridor and went into my office.
I had gotten about ten more messages from reporters and one message from Aunt Helen. She sounded even more concerned than before and told me to please call her back as soon as possible.
I still felt zonked out and really didn’t feel like talking to her, but I didn’t want her to worry about me.
“Hi, Helen.”
“David, where are you?”
“Work.”
“I was calling you at home too—I thought you’d be there today. So is it all true?”
“Looks that way.”
“You poor thing—I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay—thanks.”
“So you ha
d no idea? I mean, about her husband in Los Angeles.”
“No,” I said, suddenly feeling clammy.
“It’s so awful,” Aunt Helen said. “All of it. I’m just glad to hear you’re safe.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Tell me something, David. Does this have anything to do with the money you borrowed?”
“No, of course not,” I said.
“Oh, because I was just wondering,” she said, “because you were so secretive about it, and then I heard about this and . . . I just thought I’d ask, that’s all.”
It was hard to think clearly with the way I felt, but I realized that Helen’s trying to make a connection about the money could be a potential problem. If, for some reason, the police started investigating me, they could talk to Helen. She’d tell them about the thousand dollars I’d borrowed, and they’d wonder if I’d given Rebecca money for drugs, or if I were involved some other way.
“That money was for a class at the Princeton Review,” I said.
“The Princeton Review?” Aunt Helen said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I wanted to see how I did on the test before I told you about it, but I’m studying to take the GMATs. You know, so I can get into an MBA program.”
“That’s wonderful!” Aunt Helen said. Then her voice became distant as she said to someone else in the office, “My nephew’s going to get an MBA.” I heard a woman’s voice say, “Mazel tov.”
I knew the MBA lie would make Aunt Helen happy. After college, before I got my job at the Journal, she used to nag me to apply to grad school every time I saw her.
“So what’re you going to do with your MBA?” she asked.
“I don’t know, probably get a job as a stock analyst,” I said. “You know how much those guys make? Mid–six figures or more.”
“I think that’s great, David.” Then, as if suddenly remembering why she’d called, she said, “I just wanted to tell you . . . if you want to come stay with me, you know you’re always—”