Vickie half growls, half sighs. I picture her on the other end of the line, ready to throw herself on the floor in a tantrum.
“If you want, I can try again tomorrow.” How, I can’t imagine, unless someone can replace my entire cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems with bionic parts. Not to worry—Vickie won’t take me up on my bluff.
“Fine,” she agrees.
“Really?”
“I said fine.”
All right, fine. I’ll think of something. It’s not as if I had anything else to do. It’s sad that Vickie doesn’t have a better way to occupy her time. Though she hasn’t asked, I let her know she owes me seventy-five dollars for today’s work.
“How did you come up with that?”
“It’s based on fifty dollars an hour.” I decided on this figure after much deliberation. It’s nothing compared to my Hayes Heeley salary, but with no experience in detective work, it hardly seems fair to charge more.
“Seventy-five dollars? How long could it have taken to follow him ten blocks?”
I explain that it took thirty minutes to get over to her side of town, fifteen for actual surveillance, and forty-five to hobble home. Vickie argues that she had been thinking more along the lines of what she pays her cleaning lady and, furthermore, that she shouldn’t have to pay for travel time. She offers fifteen dollars an hour. As soon as I agree I want to slap myself.
After we hang up I call Joan in Human Resources at Hayes Heeley to ask when to expect my severance check. (“Month,” she answers absently, perhaps interrupted at a critical moment in her computer solitaire game.) Then I ask to be transferred to Val’s extension. I get Val’s voice mail and leave a message offering details of my assignment in exchange for details about her date. After that, I use up another ten minutes dropping off my laundry at the wash-and-fold around the corner. Then, well, what do unemployed people do all day? Should I watch the soaps or get on the Internet to find work? I compromise, turn on the TV, and log on to my computer.
Here’s a quiz for a focus group: Which of these selections in my mailbox is not junk e-mail?
A. “DEBT FREE IN MINUTES!”
B. “XXX three-way action!”
C. “End female impotence!”
D. “Bliss Blitz From Joy!”
Those who chose D would be the ones getting my mother’s newsletter. Who else but my mother, finding herself divorced after two decades of marriage, could pick up and leave the city she’d grown up in and start an entirely new life? Once a yoga-doing, herbal-tea-drinking, alfalfa-sprout-eating Southern California mom, she is now, fifteen years later, remarried and a cottage industry, a guru with a Web site and newsletter, who dispenses nuggets of goddess wisdom to women she’s never met from a six-thousand-square-foot Arizona hacienda.
TO: Friends
FROM: Joy
SUBJ: Lost love? Lost career?
Dishearteningly enough, my own new status as a woman lacking a job and a husband makes me just the type who would come to Joy in search of easy answers. I never asked Joy to send me “Bliss Blitz.” I usually delete it without opening it. But this week’s subject line is speaking directly to me.
Dearest Goddesses:
If there is one thing in life we can count on, it’s that few things truly turn out as we’ve planned. Dreams can die, relationships wither and the plans we made can shift and change. Don’t despair! If we are able to embrace our disappointment, we can weather the storm and then emerge into the sunshine, a phoenix-goddess, reborn.
My mother, the Scottsdale goddess, goes on to outline a rebirthing ceremony in which any woman struggling with a setback should form a “sacred circle” of close girlfriends around a plastic kiddie pool. She who wishes rebirth steps into the pool, and her friends pour water over her head “as a symbol of spiritual cleansing.” Just before I hit the Delete button, I set up my mailbox to begin auto-forwarding each week’s “Bliss Blitz” to Val. She’s always complaining that her mother is emotionally repressed. Maybe she’ll see that a little repression can be a good thing.
“You’ve got mail!” my computer announces.
The newly arrived e-mail to which it’s referring reads more like an interoffice memo than a personal note:
TO: Iris Hedge
FROM: Kevin Asgard
SUBJ: Agenda
Tonight actionable for me; call to arrange synch-up.
I call Kevin’s hotel room. He answers halfway through the first ring. “That was fast.”
“I was online.”
“Job-hunting on the Internet? Bad ROI.”
“ROI?”
“Return on investment. You’re better off utilizing your existing contacts.” It appears he’s trying to tell me I’d be smarter to ask people I know to help me find work. But there’s also a wink in his voice. “Unless you were really having Internet sex.”
“You’re more than enough man for me.” I say it teasingly but am in fact sincere.
“So,” he goes on. “Cabernet or zin? And is ten too late?”
“Don’t bother bringing wine. Teddy has all the wineglasses, and I don’t know where the movers packed the corkscrew. And why ten?”
“I want to go upstairs to the fitness center first.”
“No problem. Go ahead.” Here’s something nice about being unemployed: I can sleep in. No, wait a minute. “You know what, I have to be up early tomorrow.” And that’s when I have my first clever idea in days. “Kevin, would you please do me a favor?”
“Name it,” he says.
“Skip the gym tonight. You can go running at the reservoir in the morning.”
THREE
The alarm goes off at six. Kevin opens one eye and croaks, “Let’s streamline our time allocation and wait for him in the park instead of at his building.” In English: Let’s shave off fifteen minutes so Kevin can sleep more.
I’ve been staring at the ceiling for an hour, having been wrenched awake by the alarm of a weatherbeaten Cutlass Supreme parked under my first-floor window—the kind of alarm that cycles several times through whoop, whoop, whoop, eeeop, eeeop, eeeop, aaaa, aaaa, aaaa, aaaa, oooooeee, oooooeee, oooooeee, oooooeee, until it finally wears itself out. By now fully conscious, I slide out of bed and shuffle to the kitchen for a glass of water. This must cause a considerable racket, because my basement-dwelling neighbor, as he so often does, immediately begins pounding on his ceiling with some sort of blunt object, perhaps the butt of a rifle. So by the time Kevin starts trying to negotiate with me, I’m pitiless. “Come on, get up. I don’t want him to get away again.”
“Iris, the most effective solution is generally the simplest. Odds are, he’ll do exactly the same thing today as he did yesterday.”
“How do you know? Is this business-consultant logic?”
“Yes. Plus, I’m jet-lagged,” he mumbles, right before I pull the sheets off him.
Meet Kevin Asgard, the ultimate no-fuss fling. Kevin is from California; he and I have known each other since high school and, up until the week before I moved, were nothing more than platonic friends. Now we have a deal: We see each other once or twice a month when he comes to New York on business; then he flies back to his home in Newport Beach, no strings attached. It’s the ideal setup. I never want a serious relationship again; Kevin is about as commitment-phobic as a man can get. And though he’s hardly my soul mate, he is easygoing and game for anything, which is why he finally rousts himself from my bed and accompanies me to the Central Park Reservoir, as promised, because I myself am not up to this “enterprise,” as he would put it.
Besides, Joy is the one who believes in soul mates; that love between two people is a mystic, inexplicable connection of spirits. I can hardly think about it without gagging.
“I don’t understand where you get so much energy,” I tell Kevin. Earlier sleepiness long since forgotten, he is doing lunges, leaning into the spear-point-topped iron fence that divides the running track from the water. The sun glints off the golden hairs on his legs. The track
is just a few feet wide, and it’s not the best place for him to be warming up; a runner in a leopard-print bra has to hop over the back of his foot as she goes by. Still, she gives him not a dirty look but a “Hi, there, handsome” grin. So that’s one of a hundred reasons Kevin will never be anything but a fling. He is so much better-looking than I am that if I had any real claim on him, I would be continually insecure.
Kevin stretches his arms behind him, narrowly missing a ponytailed runner, who emits a small squeak but doesn’t slow down. “Sorry!” Kevin calls after her. She turns back to answer, and her face softens. She keeps looking back at him as long as she possibly can.
Kevin says to me, “It’s a win-win. If I didn’t work out, I’d be out of shape and the top of my head would blow off.”
“Isn’t that funny. My head would blow off if I did work out. Yesterday I exerted myself for ten minutes; now look at me.”
I knew I should have tried the scotch. My calves are so stiff, I’m limping with both feet. The cramp I was feeling yesterday has honed itself into a knifelike pain on one side of my waist, my right breast is sore from its wallet beating, and, for whatever reason, under the “Caesars Palace” logo on the back of today’s T-shirt, one I poached six years ago from Gregg Singer, who spent every other weekend in Las Vegas, my left shoulder is aching. And I thought I was in good shape because I can walk thirty blocks. Ha.
Something gets Kevin’s attention. He tilts his head slightly toward an approaching runner. “That him?”
It isn’t. “The one we’re looking for is about this tall, brown hair, with a Jack Russell terrier.”
Kevin surveys the blue water of the reservoir. Hundreds of seagulls have congregated on the narrow bridge of land that juts out into the lake. I can never understand how they locate their mates in those big crowds, but evidently, to seagulls, all seagulls don’t look exactly alike.
Right then he appears: Speedy Steve and his sidekick, Wonder Dog, approaching the reservoir’s lower track. Not the one up here by the fence, with the view of the water, but the horse trail through the woods below us. I grab Kevin by the shirt. But just as I’m spinning Kevin around, Steve stops abruptly. Still on the lower track, he stoops to tie one of his shoelaces. Maybe it’s nervous energy, but before thinking it through, I shriek, “Steve!”
It comes out ten times louder than I intended. Steve starts a little as he looks up. I duck behind Kevin and clamp my lips shut to keep from laughing. “That’s him,” I mutter.
Steve takes off for real.
This time I give Kevin a push. “He’s getting away!”
As Steve rounds a bend ahead of us, Kevin sprints down the embankment.
Back at home, I shower, drink more coffee, and straighten up the apartment—not hard, since the bed takes up about a third of the floor space. My apartment is a coffin-shaped studio on the “parlor floor” of what must have been a gracious brownstone house back in the eighteen-hundreds. It’s not without its charms, such as a real fireplace and Victorian woodwork. And although the rent costs more than my monthly mortgage did in California, things could have been much worse. Val says her place has no closets, so she keeps her vintage wardrobe in boxes behind the sofa. Instead of a kitchen, the stove, sink, and fridge are in a nook behind the front door. One time, Val says, she had Thanksgiving over there and had to stuff the turkey on a card table in the hall outside her apartment. Her neighbors just walked around her without looking twice.
I wonder how Kevin’s mission is going. The way we’ve set it up, he’ll give chase until Steve gets to where he’s going, and will either call me on his cell phone or return here with a full report. It’s been half an hour already with no call, and I’m beginning to think Steve caught Kevin following him and invited him up to his mistress’s house for some XXX three-way action. But if there’s one thing I know about Kevin, he lacks the patience to juggle more than one woman at a time.
I e-mail a few friends from California, updating them on my employment status but assuring them everything will be all right. When Kevin still hasn’t called, I walk to the corner to pick up yesterday’s laundry before I run out of cash completely and have to abandon my clothes forever in wash-and-fold purgatory. On the way home, I nearly collide with a woman who walks up to me, touches my arm, and sings out, “Well, hello, there!” She’s in her early twenties, pert and petite, with a messenger bag under her arm. “How are things going?”
I say hello equally enthusiastically while I try to place her. Someone in this city recognizes me! It would be a shame to have to admit I have no idea who she is.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question? Who cuts your hair?”
I shift the laundry sack onto my hip. Of course! I’ve heard of this happening: A woman in New York stopping a stranger for a salon recommendation. I wish I could help, I tell her, but my stylist is in Encino, California.
“California! That’s far for a haircut!”
I set down the laundry bag. Out of nowhere a lump has set up camp in my throat.
“But it’s your lucky day.” She whips out a coupon book. “Rapture Salon, just over on Broadway, has a special deal for special new clients like you—seven haircuts for the price of six when you buy one of our VIP styling packages. We also do color, corrective color, highlights, lowlights, baliage, and Japanese straightening.”
My cell phone rings. Actually, because I have never figured out how to switch it to a normal ring, it plays “La Cucaracha.” Usually this annoys me, but right now I couldn’t be happier to hear it. I should have known she was trying to sell me something. “Hello, Kevin!” I sing into the phone, hauling up the laundry bag and glowering at my nonacquaintance.
“I’ll be at your place in a few minutes,” Kevin says.
Brownstone etiquette: Usually, when a visitor you’re expecting rings the outside bell, you buzz him in through the intercom and wait for him to get to your apartment door. In this case, I am already at the front entrance of the building. When Kevin comes up the front steps, sweaty and enigmatic, I pounce on him: “Tell me!”
“Let’s do a walk-and-talk,” he says, sounding serious. My stomach begins to reknot itself. My first assignment, and I’ve just busted someone. Or, rather, the person to whom I’ve “outsourced” the assignment has just busted someone. I may have to beg Kevin to help me break the bad news to Vickie.
Yet even after we’ve turned onto Columbus and walked two blocks up to the Natural History Museum, I still can’t get anything out of him. Kevin is not a man who follows anyone else’s agenda. He doesn’t like to be pushed. First he has to stop at a deli for a bottle of Gatorade. Then he has to dig out the correct change. All the while I’m grinding my teeth, trying not to say anything. It’s only when we’re in the little park around the planetarium, below the enormous glassed-in atrium with the models of Saturn and Venus and Jupiter, that he fixes me with a grave expression.
“Come on, Kevin. Is it awful? A hooker?” I’m rigid with anxiety. “A man?”
“He went running.”
There must be a hidden meaning in this phrase. “Running as in . . . ?”
“As in running. He ran around the reservoir—”
“Aha, like yesterday!” Except on the lower track. This has got to be significant.
“—and then, by the tennis courts, got onto the park road and went down and around the park and back to his building. A good five miles.”
“Twelve Seventy-five Lexington. That’s the building? Big white monstrosity by the subway entrance?”
“Green awning.”
That’s the one. “Nothing unusual at all?”
“Nothing. He was one hundred percent aboveboard.”
I sink onto a bench in relief. Kevin finishes his sports drink and drills the bottle overhand into a metal wastebasket several feet away. Makes it. A passing couple gawks.
“Tourists,” Kevin says.
“How can you tell?”
“You just can.”
The couple huddles together on t
he tree-lined pathway. The man fumbles with his fanny pack and pulls out a New York guidebook while his companion studies her acrylic nails, which resemble ten squared-off, French-manicured miniature kitchen spatulas. He says something to her and points at a page in the book. Kevin and I watch as he approaches us, looks at me, then at Kevin, then at me, and finally says to Kevin, “We’re pretty near the World Trade Center, right?”
“Not really.” Kevin finds the correct chapter in the guidebook and points the couple toward the subway station on Central Park West. The woman waves at Kevin as they wander off.
Kevin shakes his head. “You know they’re going to end up in Inwood.”
“Why did he ask you and not me? You don’t live here.” For some reason I’m insulted. On the other hand, I couldn’t have told the couple how to get downtown and am eager to get back to the Steve story. “You’re sure about Steve? You kept up with him the whole time?”
“Based on what I saw today, you can tell your client not to worry; there’s no negative change agent in her interpersonal enterprise.” Kevin plunks down next to me and stretches luxuriously. Even though he’s all sweaty, I would have no problem ravishing him right this minute. If Vickie’s marriage is intact, that’s one less divorce in the world, one less couple quibbling over who gets the dishes and who gets the TV and whose books are whose, not to mention who keeps which friends. The dirty little secret about divorce is that once your paired-off friends hear of your marital problems, a good number stop inviting you places and returning your calls. They must be worried about catching the discord virus.
When my divorce is final, most of our couple-friends will wind up allying with Teddy. This already depresses me. I’m not the one with the spotty employment record and the little-kid habits, leaving my socks on the hamper instead of in the hamper. “What. Is. So. Hard. About. Opening. The. Hamper?” I once screamed at Teddy, just before throwing his sweaty gray sports socks in his face. I regretted the outburst instantly. Teddy had stood there in his purple-and-yellow Lakers basketball shorts, just taking it. Until that moment I hadn’t realized I had the capacity for that kind of cruelty. I’m glad Vickie’s marriage isn’t in trouble. Nobody should have to find out just how much ugliness she has buried inside herself.
It's About Your Husband Page 4