“The receipt, please?”
“It’s in the bag.”
“It’s right there.” I point at the register.
She tears off the receipt and makes a big show of holding it out to me.
Part of me wants to climb over the counter and slap her. I pull the receipt out of her hand. Before I can stop it, the other part of me says automatically, “Have a nice day.”
Arrgh! Supremely irritated by now, I turn and plow right into the man behind me. I am about to yelp, “Sorry,” but what comes out of my mouth instead is a surprised gasp.
This person looks so familiar!
Why? I think. Who? Where have I—?
A split second later, something clicks in my brain and I’m opening my mouth and exclaiming, “It’s you!”
And one more split second after that, something else clicks in my brain and I understand, clear as the face before me, that I’ve said too much.
FIVE
Caught in the act of patronizing an Upper West Side copy shop by a woman he’s never met, Vickie’s husband looks exactly as you’d imagine he would: as if he’s drawing a complete blank. He turns around to glance over his shoulder; seeing no one else behind him, he turns back to give me a long, slow, exceedingly nerve-racking once-over. “I beg your pardon?”
I, meanwhile, have clapped my hand over my mouth while trying to muddle through my cognitive dissonance. Why is Steve here? Why isn’t he at the reservoir in his running clothes? He must be having an affair! With this counter clerk! “My mistake,” I gasp out. “I thought you were someone else.” I wish he’d stop staring.
After what seems like several hours, he shrugs. “No problem.” He gives me one last look, then steps past me up to the counter to speak to the clerk. “How are you today, um . . .”
“Mona,” she tells him.
“Now I remember. How are you, Mona?”
He’s having an affair with the counter clerk and doesn’t even know her name!
The haze in my brain begins to dissipate. That seems unlikely. Besides, Mona, with her two-tone hair and too-tight top, can’t possibly be Steve’s mistress. Surely he could do better.
The smart thing to do now would be to bolt out of the store before Steve connects me with Vickie. But my leaving quickly would imply I had a shred of common sense. “Then why are you here?” I blurt out instead.
Now he’s staring like I’m one of those lost souls who mutter in the subway, and my face is ten degrees hotter than it already was. I rush to the door and yank it open.
“Can you believe the rudeness?” I hear the clerk say as the door closes behind me. I dash up the sidewalk and race-walk back to my apartment so intently that a blister rises up underneath my sandal strap.
When I call Kevin to tell him about seeing Steve, he seems to think it’s no big deal. “What is the critical issue here?”
I’ve got plenty of issues. What is Steve up to? Do I tell Vickie I saw her husband acting suspiciously? Who’s the blond bombshell? Why was he on the Upper West Side? And why a copy shop? “You’re trying to tell me a real estate executive wouldn’t have his secretary do his copying at the office?”
“He could have been getting photos developed.”
“You don’t think he’d own a digital camera?”
“Do you own a digital camera?”
“No, but he’s got money. Besides, this place is nowhere near his neighborhood.”
“So it’s near his office. Or a building his company manages. You did say he was in commercial real estate—maybe he was showing property nearby.”
“Maybe he’s cheating on his wife.”
“You have no actionable proof of that.”
“Kevin. Come on. ‘Where’s the blond bombshell?’”
“What makes you think she wasn’t referring to—what’s her name again?”
“Who, Vickie?” The thought hadn’t occurred to me. Would anyone call Vickie a blond bombshell? A cute blond, sure. But a bombshell? “It’s too odd a coincidence, then. What are the chances that I would randomly bump into Vickie’s husband?”
“People bump into each other in New York all the time.”
“Right, right. It’s just a big small town.”
The next day, over a breakfast of Cheerios and my next-to-last Diet Coke, I write a cover letter for my résumé. I explain that I’m hoping to build up a client list by apprenticing with an established moderator and that I have a decade of experience in qualitative research, including five years as a recruiter at PKS Associates in Brentwood, California. But how to account for only a few weeks at the famed Hayes Heeley Market Research, New York? I can’t come up with an answer, so I decide not to mention it at all. I print out individual letters tailored to each of the two dozen firms I’ve dug up. I’ll stuff everything into envelopes later; there’s a far more pressing problem to tackle first. I finish the last flat remains of my soda and leave for my meeting with Linda.
On the way out, I brush up against my neighbor’s bike for the umpteenth time.
That’s it. Someone needs to tell him he’s being inconsiderate. I march one flight down to his subterranean lair, miss the last step in my haste, and land with a thud at the bottom of the stairs, bashing my tailbone in the process. Ouch, ouch, ouch!
At the crash, a barking begins behind the door: “Woowoowoowoowoo!”
My downstairs neighbor has a dog? You’d think a man so averse to noise would have opted for a nice, quiet boa constrictor or tank of piranhas.
The doors in my building are impressive: solid oak, nine feet high. Backside throbbing, heart pounding, I knock.
“Woowoowoowoowoo!”
I knock harder.
“Who is it?”
“Your neighbor!”
From inside, the clicking and thwacking of a dead bolt being disengaged. The door swings open four inches until it reaches the end of the safety chain. My neighbor is in his mid-forties and cue-ball bald; his head appears to have been buffed to a mellow patina with scalp polish and a soft cloth. On a chain around his neck, a diamond peace sign clicks against a gold cross and a pair of military-style dog tags. He looks at me.
“Hi. I’m Iris, from upstairs.”
From inside the apartment the dog barks again: “Woowoowoowoowoo!”
“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but—”
“Woowoowoowoowoo!”
“It’s come to my attention that—”
“Woowoowoowoowoo!”
Despite what I suspect he would have me believe, my neighbor’s expression does not appear to be genuinely apologetic.
“Woowoowoowoowoo!”
“Pardon me, doll, but as you can see, the baby’s crying. Perhaps some other time.” He smiles tightly and shuts the door.
Linda sits, dwarfed behind a massive desk. There’s a rectangular carafe of icewater to her left and, to her right, a sinister, spidery alien life form disguised as an orchid. Otherwise the desk is bare. There is none of the comforting flotsam of office life—not a scrap of paper, photograph, or pushpin. She unfolds her spindly arms and pulls from a drawer a folder of printed-out instant messages and e-mails. She passes it to me—the written record of Sexy Lexy’s and Icarus’s relationship. “For background,” she says, fixing me with her intense, white-gray eyes.
I open the folder to skim the first line of the first note, and slap it shut again, red-faced. “I’ll read these when I get home,” I promise, anticipating a long evening ahead of me.
She next removes a pencil and a graph pad from the drawer and instructs me to take notes. I scribble madly to keep up with her instructions: I’m to meet Icarus/Elliot at the bar at the Hotel Royal in Midtown, have a drink, flirt a little. If he tries anything, I am to excuse myself and call Linda, who will be here at her office, blocks away, ready to trip-trap over in her high heels and confront him.
I look up from the pad. “You’re sure you want to do that? If it were me, I wouldn’t want a public scene.”
“If he’s cheatin
g, he deserves a scene.” Linda jiggles one pointy-pump-shod foot and looks pointedly at my graph pad. I dutifully make a notation. “Next, your appearance. Sexy Lexy has red hair. I trust you’re comfortable with disguises. Buy a hair color you like at the drugstore and put it on my bill. Get the semipermanent kind and it’ll wash out in a week.” She appraises my chest. “You’re certainly no Playboy bunny, so you’ll have to stuff your bra. Good. You’ll be less tempted to take your clothes off.”
Back at my apartment I call Val at her office.
“You have no idea what it’s been like around here,” she starts in right after we exchange hellos, her words nearly drowned out by what sounds like a mile-long procession of fire sirens passing seventeen stories below her office. When the noise fades, she continues, “Michelle is suddenly sending me all over the country. She just told me I have to leave Sunday to run groups in Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Tampa. Three second-tier cities in three days. I just joined an Internet dating service and have dates lined up for Monday and Tuesday that now I’ll be forced to cancel.”
“What happened to Declan?”
“Declan wore out his welcome.” That’s the extent of Val’s explanation. “You’re lucky not to be working, Iris. If I’d known how demanding this field was when I got into it, how far it would cut into my social life, I would have gone into jewelry design.”
There’s no use, really, in trying to explain to Val the true meaning of the word “lucky.” “You wouldn’t happen to own an auburn wig, would you?” I ask instead, going over the highlights of my assignment tomorrow night.
Val does own a wig, she confirms. It’s blue.
I sigh. “I was afraid of this. I have to color my hair.”
“No, Iris, you should be glad. Your hair just begs for some drama. I’d give you the number of my salon, but there’s a four-month waiting list.”
I explain that I’ll be doing it myself.
Val gasps. “You’re not going to a salon?”
“She didn’t offer.” I collect the morning’s dishes and lay them on the mustard Formica countertop in the kitchen, between the avocado refrigerator and the sink with the cold-water tap that reads “hot” and the hot-water tap that reads “cold.” “Do you think you could come over and help me? I’ll use semipermanent color, but it would help to have someone supervising.” It also would be nice to have company.
“Can’t. I’m going out tonight. But since you’re a dye virgin, I could pick out a color for you on the way home from work and send it over. I’ll loan you something to wear, too. Nobody’s going to believe Sexy Lexy in that denim skirt.”
I blush. My entire wardrobe does seem mysteriously off-kilter: dresses all too short or too long, beachy, anachronistic skirts, blouses with freakish buttons, pants of the wrong cut or fabric or both. I’d been planning to wear a sleeveless navy linen shift bought right before the move, which looked chic to me at the time, and a pair of four-month-old slingbacks that suddenly have heels of entirely the wrong height and shape.
“I’ll throw in some chicken cutlets, too,” Val continues.
My phone makes a beeping noise.
“All I ask is that it’s not too big a change, Val. Promise me.”
My phone beeps again.
“Is that your call-waiting?”
“Beep,” goes the phone. It’s hard to believe that two people simultaneously want to speak to me. “So, nothing drastic.”
“Have fun,” Val says. “Don’t sleep with Linda’s husband unless you want to.”
She clicks off before I can explain that I have no intention of sleeping with Linda’s husband or anyone else’s, or ask Val why she’s sending me food. I switch over to the second line and say hello.
“Iris?”
It seems I haven’t had enough recent practice operating the call-waiting, because it’s still Val on the line. “What did you mean by ‘chicken cutlets’?”
“It’s Vickie.”
Oops.
“Steve’s at it again,” she says. “I need you to follow him tomorrow morning. You’re not busy, are you?”
There’s something to that old saw about how in New York you can get anything delivered, anytime. At eleven o’clock Thursday night, a scruffy, marijuana-scented bicycle messenger arrives with a battered Louis Vuitton garment bag and a box of haircolor in the shade Val has chosen especially for me: Scarlet Sunset.
I reach for the phone, to call Linda and back out. Then I stop. I need the money. I can’t back out. And, it already being past my bedtime, I’m too tired to walk over to the drugstore for some other, barely detectable color—called, say, “Infrared.” Truth be told, I’m not all that concerned. In my former working life I observed countless hair-care focus groups, and one of the most common complaints is that hair color is never as vibrant in real life as it is in the package photo. Besides, it will wash out soon enough. I set the box aside to unzip the garment bag. Inside is one of those slip-girdles designed to hold you in under a clingy dress. The actual dress must have slid off the hanger and fallen into the bottom of the bag. I feel around inside, and my hand brushes against something clammy. I yank it back, suppressing a shriek, and zip the bag open all the way. Two glistening, flesh-colored blobs tumble out, slap-slapping softly onto the floor.
I bend down and poke at one; it jiggles gently. I pick it up. It’s half-moon shaped, made of some kind of space-age polymer with the pliant surface of a slab of raw meat crossed with the rubbery heft of a water balloon. And then I understand, not just that these must be what Val meant by “chicken cutlets,” but also what they’re for. I reach under my shirt, stuff one cutlet into each side of my bra, and then stand on the toilet and lean out over the sink to view them in the bathroom mirror.
Amazing. I’ve never minded being small-breasted, but my 34-Bs have become nothing less than awe-inspiring. I spend the next fifteen minutes trying on every last bra, camisole, and tank top I own, balancing in front of the bathroom mirror, sticking out my chest at various angles, and staring down into my own cleavage. I snap out of my self-worship only after my downstairs neighbor, out of nowhere, starts another round of percussion practice on his ceiling. Bang! Bang! Bang!
I pull the cutlets back out of my bra and toss them onto my bed, open the hair color box, put on the plastic gloves, pour vial B into bottle A, shake well, and get to work. It’s simple: You squirt the dye onto dry hair, let it fester for thirty minutes, and then rinse it out. Since I’ll be sacrificing a T-shirt to the cause, I choose one of Teddy’s but still try to protect it from spills while gingerly squeezing overlapping stripes of goo into my hair. Once I’ve painted every last strand and molded the entire mass into a gloppy spiral on top of my head, I set the digital clock on my microwave to “timer only,” punch in thirty minutes, beep-beep-beep-beep, and “start,” beep. Then I hit the speaker button on my phone, ready to collect my first unemployment check.
The routine supposedly works like this: Once a week during your allotted time on the dole, you call a special number, where a recording welcomes you to the New York State Department of Labor’s self-service phone line and asks for your personal identification number. You press a few buttons, and a few days later the check arrives in the mail. It’s pretty simple, aside from one thing: I’ve been calling all week during business hours and haven’t gotten through. It seems the line has been in use by untold scores of other downtrodden New Yorkers calling in for their checks. So my new plan is, do it after hours! Surely all those other unemployed people are asleep or dead drunk by now.
Wrong. It’s the same routine as always: I dial, get a busy signal, hang up, hit redial, get a busy signal, hang up, and so on. I finally get through, but it’s so frustrating that when the microwave timer goes off—beeeeep!—I don’t hear it. It’s only after I hang up in relief, absentmindedly scratch an itch on my head, and come into contact with the slimy mess up there that I realize I’ve been engrossed in my phone-calling for much, much longer than thirty minutes, and when I dash into the bath
room (admittedly an easy two steps from where I’ve been sitting), it is as bad as you might expect.
The Beauty Parlor Massacre. Scarlet Sunset glistening like congealing blood in my hair, my scalp stained fuchsia. I bolt into the shower and rinse frantically. Crimson water swirls into the drain. Maybe it won’t be that bad, I try to reassure myself during the interminable two-minute conditioning phase.
But after blow-drying and styling and forced objectivity, the truth is, it’s that bad. Scarlet Sunset falls somewhere on the red spectrum between “strawberry Jell-O” and “traffic light.” And then my stomach jumps as I remember the one thing I forgot to double-check. I dig the dye-covered box out of the trash. “Permanent haircolor,” it says.
“I said subtle!” I wail into my phone. “Now I’m Raggedy Ann’s punk-rock love child!”
Val laughs. “Subtlety gets you nowhere in New York.”
SIX
That’s not Steve. That’s not Steve, either. Neither is that one. He’s not Steve, nor is he; no; no; no. Not that one, either.
The first few weeks after my move to Manhattan I navigated the city in a constant state of sensory overload. Honking horns, thundering delivery trucks, barking dogs, screeching toddlers, singing drunks. Groaning cranes hauling steel beams high into the sky, jackhammers biting through sidewalks, and backhoes ripping up chunks of street. The random intermittent scream of emergency sirens. People everywhere, overheard gossip, public foreplay, subway drummers, drunken singing. Garlic and stale beer and raw fish, the cloying piña colada smell of the taxicab air freshener. A trick wind gusting up from a sidewalk grate as a subway train passes beneath, and farther below, under the asphalt and cement and bedrock, the pounding pulse of the city, like the heartbeat of a malevolent giant. I felt drained and manic at the same time, unable to sleep or think.
Not Steve; no; no; that one doesn’t even look like Steve; no; no; no.
But you have to adapt quickly or you’ll lose your mind. One day, on Sixth Avenue, I found I was able to resist the skyscrapers’ magnetic pull, the compulsion to gawk up every few steps to catch a glimpse of the people inside. A few days later, I realized I could focus enough on the subway map to no longer find myself on the train east to Queens when I’d meant to take it west to Times Square, and as people passed by I could become thoroughly focused on the smallest of details, such as the limitless diversity of the human earlobe. I’ve learned to filter out the stimuli and concentrate only on the task at hand. Not Steve; no; no; not Steve; nope; this one has cute shoes; that one has a cute baby; not Steve; not Steve; no; did that cyclist just laugh at my hair? I can think all of these thoughts at once while standing for another morning in Central Park, this time poised on in-line roller skates, vetting the passersby, waiting for one of them to be Vickie’s husband.
It's About Your Husband Page 6