A Clean Slate

by Laura Caldwell

  “Miss McGraw,” he said, dipping his head at me.

  What was his name? What was his name?

  “Afternoon,” I said. Then I hesitated a second, feeling as if I had to be granted access to the building. Keep walking.

  The doorman crinkled his eyebrows together, but I managed to get my feet moving again. I walked down the hallway, knowing his eyes were on my back, wondering if he would shout at any second and accuse me of breaking into someone else’s apartment, because it felt very much like I was trespassing. I forced myself to take careful footsteps, until I reached the double doors that led to the anteroom and the elevators. As I pulled them open, I glanced back, and sure enough, the doorman was still watching me. I gave him what I hoped was a nonchalant grin before I ducked through the door.

  Once upstairs and standing in front of apartment 1204, I hesitated as I held the key to the slot. Keys hadn’t worked so well for me lately. What if this key was wrong, too? What if I’d somehow forgotten again? What if I didn’t live here anymore? But no, that couldn’t be right. The doorman had recognized me, after all. I shook my head and before I could freak myself out any further, pushed the gold key forward. It fit perfectly, turning the lock with a smooth click.

  8

  Walking around my apartment, tiptoeing really, reminded me of the way Dee and I used to prowl through the newsroom offices when my mother took us to work. As a single mom, she was often unprepared when a baby-sitter quit or we didn’t have school on a given day, and lacking any other options, she’d schlep us to the station with her, bringing along a bag of toys and books. She worked in the newsroom, a massive, busy place with ringing phones and running people, a place that fascinated Dee and me. But the newsroom wasn’t for kids, Sylvie would say. And so she’d find an unused office—one normally occupied by a station executive or newscaster who was out of town—tell us not to touch anything, and leave us there for the next eight hours.

  Our books and Barbies would occupy us no more than a few hours, then the temptation to prowl and pry would overtake us. We’d peek through drawers, study photographs and read letters, looking for “clues” about the person whose office we were desecrating.

  Now I was opening drawers in my own apartment, reading crumpled receipts from the garbage and peering cautiously into closets. The apartment itself was still so foreign and devoid of character. And yet so many things I came across, things I’d owned before my birthday, were fiercely familiar, like the Waterman pen given to me by Attila the Han, which I found next to the phone, or my favorite red T-shirt crumpled at the side of the bed. The whole snooping-on-myself experience brought back that house-of-cards feeling, rendering me nervous and nauseous and slightly claustrophobic.

  It occurred to me that the claustrophobia might be partially due to the closed drapes and the dust hanging in the air, and so I decided to tidy the place. I threw the drapes open, letting in the bright fall sun, then dusted, vacuumed and scrubbed the apartment clean. Along the way, I came across nothing particularly alarming. No cryptic notes or receipts for odd purchases. The apartment seemed more like a way station, a place where a human being had merely subsisted for a few months. One of the most disheartening realizations was that there were no new outfits in the closets or drawers. No new clothes for five months!

  I went searching for my date book, something I used to carry with me at all times. Unlike the rest of the analysts at Bartley Brothers, I’d never used a Palm Pilot or other electronic calendar. I liked turning the pages of my date book and seeing my weeks spread out before me, reading the notes on what I’d done in the past, looking through the upcoming appointments to remind me what shape my future would take.

  When I found it in the top drawer of my nightstand, it was all but empty for the last five months. There were none of the usual notations such as, “Drinks with Laney, 9:00,” or “Work out, 5:30.” Instead, I saw only one appointment listed over and over—“Ellen Geiger, 2:00.” It appeared that I went to see her every Monday and Thursday at the same time. So Laney had been right. I’d been keeping my psychiatrist in business.

  I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock on Monday afternoon. Was I supposed to have been at Ellen’s office a few hours ago?

  I left the bedroom and went back to the kitchen. The answering machine next to the fridge was blinking. When I hit the button, the voice that rang out of the machine was Laney’s. She was just checking on me, she said. She hoped I would get out today and get some fresh air. The automated woman who came on at the end of the message told me that Laney had left the message Saturday morning, probably right about the time I was in Lincoln Park, trying to pick up my nonexistent dry cleaning.

  No one else had called me the rest of the weekend, which struck me as sad. I used to be one of those people who had too many messages—from Ben, Laney, Jess, friends from work, Dee, my mom. I used to get irritated by the number of calls I had to return, trying to squeeze them in on my cell phone as I hurried about town.

  There was one more call on the machine, though. It had been left today, and as I expected, it was from Ellen Geiger.

  “Kelly,” she said in a soothing voice, “you were scheduled for two o’clock as usual, and it’s two-thirty now. Please call me and let me know you’re all right.”

  She did sound a little worried, which made me feel guilty, so I picked up the phone and hit the speed dial for her number.

  I could picture Ellen’s elegant office from the few times I’d been there last winter. I could see her perfect ash-blond hair pulled away from her face by a headband, her hands holding a thick ink pen, gently jotting a few notes as I talked. She was perfectly nice, and I’m sure perfectly competent, but after a few sessions I didn’t see how paying her more than a hundred dollars an hour would help me get over Dee’s death. I wasn’t in denial about it; I was just heartbroken and angry.

  But if I stopped seeing her after my sister died, what had made me go back this summer?

  As Ellen answered, I sat on one of the bar stools in the kitchen.

  “Oh, Kelly,” she said. “Is everything okay?”

  “Great.” I swiveled back and forth on the stool, wondering if I should explain the weekend, my whole memory loss. The problem was that I didn’t remember seeing her twice a week for the last few months, so the thought of confiding in her felt somewhat awkward.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said, and I remembered that murmur she uttered when she was thinking, that frequent “Mmm-hmming.” “What happened with this afternoon?” she said. “Why didn’t you show up?”

  “Well…I forgot my appointment.” There. That was true enough.

  “You forgot?”

  “Right.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Do you want to reschedule for tomorrow?”

  “No. And I won’t need to come in Thursday, either.” I opened my date book on the counter and crossed out Thursday’s appointment.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Actually, I don’t think I need to see you for a while.” I felt as if I was breaking up with her and should try to let her down easy. “I appreciate all your help.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Kelly, are you having suicidal thoughts?”

  “What?” I stood up from the stool.

  “Are you having thoughts about suicide?”

  “No! Why would you ask that?”

  “Well, you’ve been depressed, as you know, for some time, and now you call me, sounding like you’re putting your affairs in order, so to speak.”

  I laughed. I really did. It struck me as ludicrous and funny. “Ellen, look. I can promise you that I’ve never had a suicidal thought in my life.” I stopped for a moment, wondering if that was true. Had I had any inklings over the last five months? No, no matter how depressed I’d gotten, I knew, somewhere down deep, that I would never think of taking my own life. “The thing is,” I continued, “I’ve had a bit of a memory loss, but I feel fantastic. I really do, and so I don’t think I need to see you anymore.”

  “Mmm-hmm. What do you mean by me
mory loss?”

  How could I explain in a short and easy fashion? I gave her a brief rundown of my weekend, ending with how wonderful I was feeling, and reasserting again that I didn’t need to see her.

  “I have to insist that you come for at least one more session. Amnesia is nothing to be taken lightly, and it can be the cause of other psychological or physical damage. What about tomorrow? I can fit you in at the end of the day. Say seven-thirty?”

  I was about to protest. I didn’t want to spend money on therapy, when for all practical purposes I was feeling better than ever. And despite the tentative snooping I’d done around my own apartment that day, I was truly scared to remember the months I’d lost. Wouldn’t those memories bounce me back to that depression? It was as if I was finally standing on solid ground, but could sense an abyss only a few footfalls away.

  Despite my fear of that abyss, though, I was more and more curious about why I couldn’t remember, about what had caused this whole strange episode in my life. Maybe Ellen could shed some light on that.

  I opened my date book again and flipped to tomorrow’s date, then wrote in, “Ellen Geiger, 7:30.”

  I met Laney for drinks near her office in the Loop, and we joined the masses of people looking for alcoholic sustenance before their train rides home. We found a tall, high table in a corner of a bar, and I ordered a beer, but barely sipped it since I wanted to be fresh for my interview. I hadn’t been on an interview since the one for Bartley Brothers eight years ago, right after college graduation. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had my Nikon in my camera bag with me, along with a small portfolio of my stuff, and I’d flipped through my multitude of photography magazines, which I’d located in my apartment. What else to do, I wasn’t sure, and “Cole,” whoever he was, hadn’t been much more explicit.

  “I have to tell you that I’m jealous,” Laney said, after she listened to what I’d done with my day. She took a sip of her margarita and cocked her head at me.

  “Why would you be jealous?”

  “Well, maybe not jealous—that’s too harsh—but envious.”

  “Still confused over here.”

  She sighed. “You’ve got a whole new lease on life, and you’re following a dream by interviewing for this assistant job.”

  I played with my beer bottle, thinking about that for a second. “I don’t know if this Cole guy could ever fulfill a dream for me. Sounds a bit wacko.”

  “That’s not the point. You’re trying to break into a profession that you’re passionate about.”

  “What about you? You’ve already broken into your profession and you love your job.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Sure you do! You’re always telling everyone how much you love it. You always say—”

  “Kell,” she said, cutting me off. “When I say that, I’m talking in relative terms.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I like my job enough. I like the people I’m working with, and I consider myself lucky to have a gig like that, but I don’t love it.”

  “Really?” For some reason, this disappointed me.

  “Did you love your job at Bartley?”

  I was quiet.

  “See,” Laney said. “You didn’t love it, either. You were kicking ass and taking names, and you said you wanted to be partner and all that, but you never loved it.”

  “This is so depressing. Do we know anyone who loves their job?”

  We were both quiet now, taking sips of our drinks, struggling to come up with someone, anyone, who adored what they did.

  “I know!” I said, pointing at Laney. “You’re passionate about music. You love that, and you’re taking guitar lessons.”

  Laney scoffed. “That’s hardly the same thing.”

  “It is, too. Instead of thinking about the fact that you’d love to play guitar, you’re actually learning how to do it.”

  “But it’s not my job. I mean I wish it was, I’d love to be in a band, but that will never happen.”

  “One step at a time, right? Maybe you will be someday. Maybe Gear will ask you to join them.”

  “Never. That’s the problem with the guys I date. They invite me backstage and to the studio, but only as arm candy.”

  “Gear seemed nice.”

  “He is. He’s nicer than the rest, but…” Her voice died away.

  “But what?”

  “He’s got his band and his buddies. He really doesn’t need me for much except—sex, I guess.”

  “Hey, at least you have someone.” I thought of the load of Ben’s belongings—the grubby flannel pajamas he loved, his financial books and the sunglasses he’d spent $200 on—that I’d stuffed in a Hefty bag and thrown down the garbage chute that afternoon.

  “Well, you could have someone, you know,” Laney said. “You could date someone just to date, instead of thinking where it might lead. You could have a fling for once, instead of being a serial monogamist.”

  “Don’t start, Lane.”

  “I’m just speaking the truth.”

  “It’s entirely possible that I might have a fling,” I said.

  Laney guffawed.

  “Seriously. I’m a different person than I was a few days ago. I might have a one-night stand tonight.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Maybe this Cole guy. Maybe I’ll sleep with him.”

  I wasn’t sure why I was protesting so much, except that sometimes I found myself woefully embarrassed about the fact that I’d never picked up a guy and slept with him. It wasn’t as if I was living at the turn of the century. Everyone I knew had had a few one-night stands—at least—so why not me? It wasn’t for lack of opportunity—the bar scene was filled with men looking for action. But Laney was right. I had those set plans in my head about getting married and having a kid by a certain age. I was always looking to see if a guy could take me somewhere, if he might be something special. On the other hand, Ben certainly hadn’t turned out all that special. Maybe a fling was exactly what I needed.

  “Your new potential employer?” Laney said, still laughing. “You’re going to have a one-night stand with your new boss?”

  “It’s entirely possible!”

  “All right then,” Laney said, throwing some bills on the table, “let’s go get you some sex.”

  “This has to be it,” I said, checking for the third time the scrap of paper where I’d written Cole’s address.

  Laney and I were standing in front of a large warehouse, just south of the Loop near Printer’s Row.

  “He said it was his ‘flat.’ Isn’t that British for apartment?” I said.

  “Maybe flat means dump.”

  It was true. The warehouse was no prize. Thick bars guarded grime-covered windows, and the brick was flaking and crumbling. It was a long way from the marble and mahogany of the Bartley Brothers’ offices.

  “Maybe we should go get another drink and forget this.” I shifted my camera bag to my other shoulder. Orange light from the sunset hovered behind the Sears Tower and the other skyscrapers. Soon it would be dark. Why wasn’t I in my old plush office right now, tying up the day’s loose ends, still drawing a hefty paycheck? I’d worked my ass off for almost a decade and had nothing to show for it.

  Laney took the address from my hand. “What the hell? We’ve come this far, and you still might get laid tonight.”

  “You know I’m not going to sleep with him,” I said, irritated for pretending a one-night stand was in my repertoire.

  Still, I followed Laney around the side of the warehouse, where we found a huge metal door that was propped slightly open with a wooden block. Inside was a dreary little foyer with a set of buzzers. Laney looked at the address once more and pressed the button for number 3. There were no names by the buzzers, and I wondered if we were about to stumble into some sort of pornography den. Maybe that’s why Cole had asked me about my nationality. Maybe he was doing a Paddy-and-the-Irish-Girls kind of a flick.

  After a second, the int
ercom came on and the same abrupt, British-sounding “Yeah?” that I’d heard on the phone today bellowed into the lobby.

  “It’s Kelly McGraw. I’m here for the interview.”

  He buzzed us in, and Laney and I took a rickety freight elevator to the third floor.

  “How do I look?” I said, pulling at the ends of my hair.

  “See? You do want to sleep with him.”

  “Lane, please.”

  “Sorry. Not what you were looking for, hmm?” She peered at my face, then tucked my hair behind my ears. “Perfect. Absolutely perfect. If he doesn’t hire you he’s nuts.”

  The elevator creaked to a stop and opened onto a massive room that must have taken up the whole span of the building. One end housed the living quarters, judging from the rumpled bed and tiny yellow kitchenette overflowing with dirty dishes. To our right was every photographer’s dream—a wide-open space with tall (clean) windows that would surely let in tons of light during the day. The hardwood floors were scarred but beautiful, and the exposed brick and ductwork gave it the perfect studio feel. The problem was that my pornography fears appeared to be coming true.

  In front of a white backdrop was a topless model sitting on a shiny white washing machine. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and she was smiling demurely at the spiky-haired man photographing her.

  He must have heard us come in because he yelled, “At ease,” to the model, who dropped her arms—along with her demure smile—and leaned back on her elbows. I looked to the floor, trying not to stare at her breasts. “And Vicky, you can go,” he said to a woman, who was apparently a makeup artist.

  “So, which one of you is Kelly Kelly?” the man said, walking toward us.

  He was lean and wiry, probably in his mid-thirties, although the sharp lines around the jade-green eyes made him look a little older. The lines, combined with his disarming smile, gave him a somewhat wicked appearance. He reminded me of Chaz Miccelli, a guy from high school who used to smoke pot between classes and slump at the back of the room. Laney and I would roll our eyes and mutter “gross,” whenever we passed him, but Chaz had a way of looking at me, a devious way of smiling, that made me go home to my four-poster bed and fantasize about him.