The next morning, for the briefest moment, I considered tracking down Will. He’d always kept a clear head, even when I’d pulled the plug on us from a distant land. I hadn’t spoken to Will since that dreaded phone call from Melbourne. Calling him now to steer me through the reverberations of my original wormy sin would be more than vulgar.
My parents were planning a thirtieth-anniversary trip. They’d talked about it since I got back; they’d never been to Europe together. “Not with you two in college, we never had the money for a proper trip to Paris.” They didn’t need this mess. Sylvia and Joseph Ganelli were hip enough for sixty-somethings, in an updated sitcom way. They recycled. They sporadically used terms like cyberspace or alternative rock. But aiding a heroin addict?
And I did not want to get my girlfriends mixed up in Stuart’s salvation. Then I’d have to spill the story, and I couldn’t chance that. Frieda knew a Brooklyn-based Aussie filmmaker, and Veemah the Jetsetter—oh boy. Veemah was the warlord of us gossips. We’d spent many an entertaining afternoon together tearing some bitch to shreds. Loose lips sink ships. I imagined a knock on the door from Interpol.
Janet, a Mayflower descendant, was an outside possibility; she was bred to keep her mouth clamped.
Other relatives? They’d go straight to my folks. Lord help me if Aunt Virginia got a whiff of this. She’d hail a taxi and a priest to sprinkle holy water over him.
Weren’t methadone clinics impossible to get into in New York? What was methadone? Did I want this approximately 150-pound weight around my ankle? I didn’t have savings.
After three morning coffees, I settled on my trustworthy childhood plan of action: whenever I’d been terrified by a creepy-crawler, I’d called big brother.
“Frank?” I said to his machine, after his beloved soundtrack snippet of Charlton Heston’s soliloquy as the sole functioning post-Apocalyptic survivor in Omega Man. “You there? Frank?” I was going to dial his second number, used mostly for his modem, when he picked up.
“Hey. Can you drop it a few decibels?”
“I need your advice.”
“Shoot.”
“Tell me everything you know about heroin.”
“What kind of request is that for ten A.M.? You better not be telling me you’re getting fucked up with that shit?”
“Not me. A friend of mine is in trouble.”
“‘A friend of mine’? What, one of your super-achiever friends dropped out of corporate America? Doubt it. What did they try, grass? Flash bulletin—pot ain’t heroin. She’s not going to die.”
“Please. Listen! I need to know about heroin.”
“Are you insinuating that I know these things? I’m offended.”
“You know more than me.” Frank knows that much more than me about everything, except supernovas and PMS. “My friend’s in trouble.”
“Read Basketball Diaries. Or Junky. Carroll and Burroughs sinned for our entertainment.”
“I’ve read them already—”
“Then you know what I know.”
It is difficult for Frank and me to talk without ironic phrases. Even at Uncle Barry’s funeral, we bantered our way through grief.
“This is real. Now. I want real advice.”
“What do you want to know? It’s all about the Man—energy revolves around the Man. Jones is the craving. It’s about the ritual as much as it’s about the drug. You have a jones, you find the Man.”
“How much does it cost to feed a habit?”
“I don’t know—ten dollars a bag? Rachel. Lesson over. I’m not a junkie. If you’re so keen to know, snort a tiny bit. You’re not going to get addicted off a tiny bit. Someone who’s got the habit really wants to numb a life. I think you have to try it fifty times before you start to form a habit.”
“Remind me not to let you baby-sit my kids. Get serious. What do you know about withdrawal?”
“Stand outside a methadone clinic on East Broadway and watch people.”
“Ask a junkie nodding off, foaming at the mouth, Yeah so what happens next? What do you know about it?”
“You sweat and puke and scream. What else is there to know? Where’s your friend living? Seriously, maybe you should call her parents and get her into a treatment center.”
“He has no money. He has no parents.”
“Who’s he?”
“Stuart Gibbs, the guy who got shot.”
“Come again? This isn’t another sniper on Fifth Avenue yarn—”
“He’s resurfaced. The roommate I saw dead in Australia.” I started to sniffle. Jesus, hurry up, Frank. Tell me what to do. A few seconds to internal combustion.
“You trying to bug me out? Get the fuck out of here.”
And into outright bawling.
“Rachel? You okay? Take a breath. What the fuck is going on? What can I do?”
“Can you come over?” I impaled out of my mouth. “Maybe we can have him go cold turkey here.”
“Oh shit, you can’t do that there. Are you crazy? I’ll come over but—”
“I’m in over my head. Stuart was given money to pretend he was dead.”
“This is the craziest thing I’ve—”
“He has no money and he’s strung out on Mom and Dad’s bed and he needs to get off of it or everyone I know is going to be thrown in jail.”
“He’s in Mom and Dad’s bed? Are you out of your fucking mind? You know what you’re getting into? Addiction is vile—this shit’s nasty. Brice went through this hell with his cousin Tim. Quitting cold is a nice concept, on paper. Tim tried shooting up anything he could get his hands on. Coffee. Laundry detergent—”
“Laundry detergent?”
“Christ, Rachel, I’m in the middle of stretching canvas—okay, here’s my RX—take everything out of the apartment, install a drain in the center of Mom and Dad’s room, taper the walls, throw meat in, lock the door, and hose the fucker down every two days.”
I didn’t respond. Frank hates that even more than my high emergency pitch. In our Jewish-Italian family, silence is the ultimate SOS.
“Oh, fuck, fine, I’ll bike over. You shouldn’t be alone with him. Give me time to shit and shave. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
I brightened a tad. I wasn’t going this alone.
“If nothing else, I’ll get my comics out of there. I don’t want your resurrected smack addict selling off my Fantastic Four number forty-eight, the first appearance of the Silver Surfer.”
“Frank, please, we have to get him sober—” In times of true duress, I am known to outright squeak.
“Don’t make that sound. The guy sounds like a loser—he’s already dicked you around. And this isn’t about getting sober, Rachel. He’s an addict. He could hurt you. Keep him calm. Offer him milk or something.”
Just about the second I clicked the receiver, Stuart rolled into the kitchen with a rank odor and a three-day stubble. He’d put his greasy jeans back on and a red T-shirt I knew from Melbourne. Christ. This was real. “There’s Raisin Bran and milk, if you want it.”
“Raisin Bran? You mean Sultana Bran?”
“Americans eat Raisin Bran.” I stared at him like Elliot the morning after he found ET. I passed him the box, the milk, a bowl, and a teaspoon. He didn’t touch anything.
“I’m skint. Could I bot a twenty off you ’til I see you next? I’ll be out of your sight this afternoon.”
Why did I care one iota about saving this cretin’s soul? Where was his fabled relative in Buffalo? Goddamn. “You’re not going to live on twenty dollars. You need help. Remember last night, you asked me for help?”
“You were good to put me up here, but I’m leaving.”
“You’re in no position to leave for anywhere. Where are you going to go? My brother’s coming over to help us sort this through—”
“You talked about this?”
“Listen to me will you? Frank’s cool. He’s an artist. His best friend’s cousin went through an addiction—”
But Stuart was already in the living room, packing his army surplus knapsack.
I yelled from the kitchen: “I’m going to help you, Stuart! Don’t you see I need to help you?” I stood there, pulling my fingers as far back as I could. When I came out to take a look, Stuart was riding my Dad’s rusting exercise bike at about five miles per hour, staring out the window onto Avenue of the Americas.
The phone rang. Divine intervention? “Glad I got you, Rachel,” Selena from Temp Solution said. “I have another job for you. I think it should last about two weeks. It’s not glamorous, but the pay is seventeen dollars an hour because they’re in such a bind.”
“What is it?” I said, breathing hard, one eye on the door. I wanted to be sure that Stuart wasn’t going to bolt.
“At a nice private school, Friends Seminary on Sixteenth Street —the lunch staff’s on strike. They need someone to serve hot food to the students.”
“Selena, that was the school I went to for eight years, I don’t think I could do that.”
“You shouldn’t be proud. That’s loads of money for moving some spoons around. We’re in a recession. Everyone needs the money.”
“Look, I’m not proud, but I won’t cross a picket line.” Bullshit, Rachel, you’d die before being seen in a hair net by one of your old teachers. “But Stuart, a friend of mine who’s visiting New York, he’d take it.” I heard the bike noise stop.
“From out-of-town? Is he American?”
“No, but—”
“Working papers?”
“No—”
“Sorry, we couldn’t help him. You don’t want the job?”
“Yeah. Please call me though with other work.”
“Okay, but I have to tell you that the people who accept every job get called more often.” She hung up. Cow. Stuart was sitting on the couch now. I put on a game show, and we sat there in silence.
Eventually, I heard the lock turning. Frank propped his bike up in the hallway.
“Is he still here?”
“On the couch.”
“So, you going to introduce me to the French Connection?”
“Shh!”
Frank poked his head into the living room. I have a proud feeling when anyone meets my brother. He’s actually very average looking, five nine, brown eyes, a slightly pointy nose. But even when he had his retainer, cats ran to his lap. Sideburns hadn’t come back into style yet. (They’d be in the next year.) But Frank had them now, long black rectangles.
“Stuart, isn’t it? Frank—Rachel’s brother.”
“Yeah.”
“So how’s it going?”
Stuart shrugged his shoulders.
“I hear you’re a drug addict.”
Stuart looked to me to protect him from this strange creature with no mercy. No way, Problem Child. Frank is Easy Street compared to other fates I could have thrown your way.
“First trip to New York, right?”
“Yeah—” What do heroin addicts think of between injections? Stuart was so expressionless I thought his head might be empty except for where to get his next purchase. A mindless loop. See worm. Catch worm. Raise wings. Fly. See worm.
“Rachel tell you I’m an artist? I’m picking up some comics I have in my old desk. I want to be inspired when I start my new piece. Lichtenstein made a million bucks off his comic book collection, right?”
No response from our mute. Anesthetized existence, no Art 101 under his belt, downright intimidation, all three.
“Talkative, huh? I was going to take Rachel out for lunch, to calm her down. She’s freaked out over your arrival—and you don’t want her going off the rails, yeah? Want to join us?”
“I can’t afford any restaurants, ta.”
“Ta? What’s ta?”
Stuart looked confused. He was in no shape to comprehend that lower-class Australian is as much a dialect to Americans as Northern Territory pidgin is to Melbournians.
“Ta is ‘thanks’ in Australian,” I said quietly, the UN translator.
“Ta? Yeah, well, it’s my treat. Why don’t you? I’m not a priest, man. No jive from me.” Frank’s street talk was embarrassing, but as always, somehow he carried it off to great effect.
“You’re paying? Yeah, sure.”
“Throw something else on, man—it’s fucking cold out there for April. Let me pick up my comics from the back. I should be able to dig up something warm for you from the closet. My mother never let us throw out anything. Depression-survivor mentality.”
Stuart slipped on Frank’s old double-layered RISD sweatshirt. My brother carried his precious cargo with him—The Silver Surfer was safe. The three of us went out for lunch at the local Greek coffee shop.
“So let me get this straight,” Frank said, taking a sip of ice water. “The head of the morgue pretended you were dead?”
“Yeah,” Stuart said, grabbing a roll.
“This guy Colin has goddamn chutzpah.”
“New York for audacity,” I translated.
“What’s audacity?” Stuart asked.
“Fucking nerve,” I tried again. That got a small smile from Mr. Gibbs. “What do you want, Stuart?” Frank said when the waitress came over.
Stuart looked nervous again. His eyes were watery. “Your call.”
Oh, right. He couldn’t read the menu. At home, he could have faked it by ordering a basic Australian standby, like a hamburger topped with a fried egg. “You can get a great cheeseburger here,” I said, a shield for further embarrassment.
“Nah,” Frank said. “I know. We’ll have three cold turkey sandwiches.”
Stuart again raised the slightest corner of his mouth, John Lennon–style. Frank was breaking through, talking to Stuart like a regular Australian mate, ignoring the sheila, the woman, me, at the table.
“Man, that was some crap you pulled on my sister.”
“Rachel wasn’t part of it.”
“How can you say that? You see how out of whack she is. The way I see it, bro, she’s an accomplice if she doesn’t turn you in. I think my sister’s pretty fucking nice offering to help you out—”
“Yeah, well—”
“Pity you’re splitting town. We could’ve saved your ass. My best friend’s cousin went cold turkey last year. I know how it’s done.”
Frank had pulled the one-armed bandit and come up with three cherries. Stuart took the bait. “Where’s your friend’s cousin now?”
“It was rough. But he’s off the shit. Started his life over. Think he even has a job now. At a magazine. Rachel, what’s that magazine Tim’s at?”
I never even met Tim. “Life.”
“He works for Life?”
“Yeah,” Frank said, with a frown that said I should have picked a more reasonable life jump, like Guitar World.
Gold at the end of the strung out rainbow. Why were we feeding him this? We wanted this so badly?
“We could use my place for you to chill,” Frank offered.
Suddenly Frank was caught up in my plan. I wished I knew what it was. I felt like we were side characters in a Mod Squad episode, Frank’s favorite show when we were kids. He even had the metal lunchbox. Frank looked at my hands. I was torturing my knuckles again, pulling fingers back until they almost broke off. He gave me a “stop that” head motion. “Rachel, is there anyone else you trust? We would need to take shifts. I’d have Brice help us, but he’s back in London.”
“There’s Janet. She’s discreet.”
“I don’t know about a chick watching me eat meself up.” Stuart tapped out a hesitant rhythm on the counter.
Frank ribbed me under the table. He was reeling the fish in. Lucky us. “You’ll like Janet,” Frank said. “Unlike Rachel’s other friends, she’s not a motormouth.”
“I don’t know.”
“Great ass,” Frank said. “Janet’s ni-iicce.”
“Right, send her over.” Stuart leaned over toward him. “I’m going to need your help, man.” Aussies don’t say man, they say mate; that stereotype holds true. This male bonding was obscene.
When Stuart went to the bathroom, I leaned over to Frank. “Do you have to bring yourself down to his level?”
“It worked, right? I know how men think.”
When Stuart returned, the three of us agreed that we would get the Ganelli detox unit rolling in two days. Frank promised Stuart that he would take him down to Clinton Street to secure last-hurrah smack for the evening. My job was to prevail upon Janet to join our Florence Nightingale junkie crusade.
“Hi, bit of banana in my mouth, sorry,” Janet said.
“Yo, dig the fruit-in-cheek greeting,” I said, and I meant it; answering the phone like that was out of character for her.
“Hey, where’ve you been? I thought you were dead—”
“Sorry about not returning your calls. I’ve been in hiding. I forgot how brutal this city is.”
“The vortex of depression. You okay now?”
“Uh, somewhat. Do you think I could come over for a bit?”
“The place is a pigsty.” Janet’s idea of a pigsty was a sweater arm hanging out of an armoire. (We had lasted three seconds as college roommates. Veemah had fared better with the Queen of Neat; I was the one forced out of the freshmen triple for being a slob.)
“Not likely,” I said.
“I guess I could vacuum. How long are you going to be?”
“Half an hour?”
“Don’t forget those photos of Australia. It’s been two months and I haven’t seen what your roommates looked like.”
How about dinner with the dead one who washed up in a bottle? “There’s maybe one roll. I wasn’t on vacation in Australia. I was—”
“Running away?”
“Look, whatever. I have bizarre shit to throw your way, so be prepared.”
“You’re going to leave me hanging on tenterhooks, aren’t you? I hate when you do that. You can’t tell me now?”
“I’d rather not.” This mess needed the exact psychological moment.
• • •
I looked at the clock. I planned on leaving for Janet’s house in twenty minutes. Her parents had bought her the top floor of an 1880s Eleventh Street brownstone when she graduated. Her folks lived back in Montecito, an old-money suburb of posh-to-begin-with Santa Barbara. Janet’s relatives back East had relayed the suitable block for her to live on in the Big Apple.
When I visited their home sophomore Thanksgiving break, Janet’s father told me that he encouraged his daughter to go to a school back East so she could explore her genteel heritage. The Alexanders had an ancestor from Casanovia, New York, the one proper suburb in the blue-collar city of Syracuse. On this thread of history, Janet accepted a spot at the family Alma Mater Syracuse University, now “known” for a preponderance of spoiled girls from Long Island. Regardless of ethnicity, the prominent faction of girls there were uniformed in big banana hairclips, Champion sweatshirts over leggings, and Timberland boots. They were derided as JAPs, Jewish American Princesses. Girls who studied food science (cooking), or retail management (shopping).
I used JAP several times during a university break, and my mother was shaken. “You’re half Jewish and worse than an anti-Semite!” I couldn’t believe how flipped out she got. My father joined her: “It’s a degrading word, Rachel. Plenty of Italians and WASPs and Irish kids are spoiled rotten, too. And you’re no innocent. Look where you’re going to school. After Columbia offered you that generous physics scholarship.”
I continued to sit in the kitchen, preparing myself to go tell Janet that the sky had fallen. I had indeed been a brat. My City College–educated parents wanted me to go Ivy, my college counselor wanted me to go Ivy, but I wanted to go to Syracuse. There was a strong film and television program there, a discipline too garish for the Ivies. I made my point something fierce, even though Columbia offered a free ride if I was willing to live at home. “Syracuse is willing to give me a fifty-percent scholarship if I dual major in physics. They need more women in science journalism,” I said, a blatant attempt to win over my father, who maintained that commercial TV was crass. “I could become a science ambassador, like Carl Sagan.”
I was frozen in a meditative stare at one of Frank’s high school paintings, an abstract canvas that won him his RISD graphics scholarship—three amorphous bodies in reggae-bright oils. Frank had pointed out the figures when he hung it up: my red wailing father cradling my purple dead grandmother’s head, my orange mother staring toward the viewer’s perspective. Frank told my folks that it was called Family Portrait.
I’d realized that senior year of high school that after years of private schooling for my brother and me, even half-off expenses would be tough going for my family. We were the last of a dying breed in dichotomous rich-poor Manhattan. An outsider might think that we enjoyed a cushy upper-crust existence. But to a New Yorker in the know, a different story was evident. The civil servants and labor-leader middle class in our building bought their apartments eons ago, before the eighties boom. Give up a New York apartment? Not my neighbors. Any new faces were subletters, and they were almost always a neighbor’s niece or a friend’s son. Middle-class families like ours sent their kids to private school only after giving up on a P.S., a public school, maelstroms of black versus white tension in the late sixties and early seventies.
In real time, I was crushing Domino Dots with the handle of a steak knife.
Mom had cried when she and Dad pulled Frank and me out of our public grade school; we were the only white children left and racial tension was getting out of hand. “If the Democrats don’t have hope,” she said, “this city is screwed.”
I put my denim jacket back on, getting ready to go to Janet’s. Why did Frank know about Clinton Street? I would think that you could get heroin in Washington Square Park, where men in black caps whisper “sens, sens,” short for sensilmillia, a potent kind of pot. But then Frank always knew the crevices of Manhattan. The Sunday I got back from Australia, the magazine section of The New York Times ran a puff piece on The Best Slice in New York. Frank told me about a five-star pizza joint that the author failed to ferret out, one adjacent to a blini store out in Brighton Beach. “In the City,” he said, “there’s always a better slice if you do the legwork.” I looked at the clock. Ten of. Time to go.
The well-heeled brownstone rentals from University Place across to Seventh Avenue and from Eighth Street up to Thirteenth Street are for the most part leased to ex–Ivy leaguers and Seven Sisterites who brand themselves hip. I’d never pinpointed this until I’d started dating Will. I would go to a party thrown by one of Will’s buddies from Dartmouth, or one his buddies’ Vassar alumna girlfriends, and inevitably the address would fall within this five block radius—only blocks away from my mammoth brick building teeming with fifty-ish Italian women in big curlers throwing Hefty bags down the incinerator chute. New York is like that. One street can divide whole classes.
In the elevator ride down, I remembered that three years prior—while rinsing out the Epcot mug I’d received from my shared secretary in the Bell Press kitchen sink—I’d fancied myself the anthropologist. I’d spent my whole life trying to be like those people, I thought: upper crust. But their apartments all had the same cloying details. An exotic mask from a primitive tribe like the Asmat of New Guinea, the last Stone Age people discovered, who now fly commuter planes in Adidas shorts with bones in their noses. The women who lived on those social registrar–approved streets installed imposing books as interior decoration—Seven Plays by Henrik Ibsen, perhaps, propped up against a vase of lavender pruned from Mom and Dad’s weekend estate. The men used nice stationery from Italy, or box sets of Navajo-blanket greeting cards they bought at the Met. Men with nice stationery irritate me.
With another four-and-a-half excruciating hours to the end of the work day, I had lost myself in my “fieldwork”—christening the district the Ivy Ghetto. I doodled a map of the Ivy Ghetto over a report on likely suspects to contribute a chapter for Bell’s particle accelerator journal. Why did I hate them so much? I’d lived twenty-five years of a life of enormous privilege. Not ski trips to the Alps, maybe, but private schools, trips to Yosemite.
While walking the few blocks that separated Janet and me, I decided that in retrospect, none of the highbrow crowd was that terrible. Some members were scholarship kids who had worked hard as hell to get where they were. I’d been covetous, if I had to name the exact word—despite my early private schooling, my acceptance to Columbia, and my continued ticket to peripheral blue-chip existence via engagement to Will. I was jealous, but at my core I never wanted any of it.
Janet answered the door in a pastel-yellow polo and madras shorts, her straight strawberry blond hair in a ballet-school chignon. “So what’s so urgent? Do you want a nosh?”
Janet didn’t mean nosh like a Borscht Belt comedian ordering a bagel with a smear. She was employing it in its English usage. She’d spent her first summer after college abroad in a centuries-old cottage rented by her parents, and ever since had peppered her sentences with Anglish-isms. Bangers instead of sausage. Porridge instead of oatmeal. And then there was her precise language. Spearmint, never simply mint. Or a hint of camphor or cedar; nothing ever smelled “nice” to Janet. A study in contradictions—that’s why I liked her. A proper girl who in her quiet way was as much a tawdry film nut as me.
“I’ll take a soda if you have it.”
“Sprite?”
“Sure.” I popped back the tab and poured a few inches into the glass. She swooped up my can like a bird of prey. Yes. This was the confidante Frank and I needed. There wasn’t a speck of mess anywhere. Janet would put my slipshod life in order. “I’m in a bind, Jay. I need you to hang out with one of my roommates visiting from Australia.”
“Did Frieda put you up to this? I told her to stop trying to fix me up. I may be dateless, but I’m not desperate.”
“No, I wish that’s what I’m asking—no, I’m going to need you—”
“I’ve never heard you ask me for anything. This must be big stuff.”
“It’s complicated. I’m trusting you won’t tell anyone anything—especially not Frieda and Veemah.”
“You know me better—what could you need me for anyway?” I waited as Janet nervously retrieved her hamster Harry from his habitat, scratching his ears and under his chin. His little rodent face was in ecstasy.
“Well, the reason I came home was—well my Aunt Lillian wasn’t ill—I left because I witnessed a murder—”
“Get out—”
“One of my roommates was killed by the mob.” I had never phrased it this way before, even to Frank; it sounded ludicrous. I meant to cry but I broke into a peculiar half-smile.
“Stop, Rachel, you’re a terrible liar. This is like your shameless story, the one where your boss offers you a stick of gum while a loony is shooting at your office.”
“Listen. I’m not going to argue that one anymore. I was telling you my roommate got shot by the mob.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It wasn’t a murder after all. I was duped. So was half of Australia. Two of my roommates made a satanic pact with the third one, who got shot. A complete set-up. He gets dead, and they get the murder on tape during the filming of their video. Instant fame.” My voice cracked by the end of the full histrionic explanation.
After a few still moments, Janet had convinced herself that I wasn’t shitting her. She was out of tissues and opened a drawer in the coffee table, and handed me a roll of Charmin. “Wow.”
“No kidding.”
“What do you need my help for then? I’m scared to ask.”
“Look, Frank or I would be with you always. Remember that Otto Preminger flick in Sy Cooper’s class—The Man with the Golden Arm? Everyone kind of sat guard—”
“You want me to be there with you?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Frank’s going to be doing the ugly stuff.” I wished I knew what I meant by that sentence.
“Frank’s in charge?” She widened her eyes in contemplation. Janet had always had a bit of a crush on Frank, but then so did Veemah and Frieda. Frank was flirtatious with everyone, even Mom. Before he moved to Minnesota, where Ingrid had him locked away from his many fans, any combination of my gaggle of friends might run into him in the park while he was shooting some hoops. His adventurous spirit was infectious; he might have treated “his girls” to “out-of-this-world wheat noodles only a ferry ride away” in Staten Island. “I ask you, Ladies, which would you prefer for three bucks—a greasy Big Mac in midtown, or a scenic boat ride and a tasty platter of Malaysian food?”
Janet has that unfortunate Anglo-thin skin that tears like mica. Her cat, trying to get at the hamster, scratched her lightly; blood dripped from Janet’s arm. She hit the cat rather hard on its cheek, which made me wince.
“Whatever you need me to do,” Janet said. Was she angry or scared? “I’m on vacation this week.”
Janet and I were surrounded by pink, tan, and black dildos of ridiculous lengths and widths. We were waiting near the counter at the Pink Pussycat, an erotic gift shop favored by the weekend bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Stuart had had the noble idea of handcuffing himself to one of Frank’s wooden bedposts. “Then I won’t kill one of you in a no-dope frenzy,” he’d said. Captain Frank thought it would be a good idea to have Stuart help shape his own withdrawal program, like a dieter developing his own 1200-calorie menus.
The middle-age saleswoman with a studded dog collar was serving a biker who was buying Edible Undies.
“Such bathos this afternoon,” Janet whispered. Bathos was one of Janet’s distinctive words; she’d picked it up from her granduncle, who’d been a Princeton authority on Lewis Carroll. Janet always thought that I was a magnet for bathos. (The first time she said it, I thought she was implying that I was pathetic. I took great offense.)
“A nice addition,” the saleswoman suggested, “might be Emotion Lotion. Rub it in, blow on it—it makes your partner’s skin hot and tingly.” The biker put a drop on his inner arm and blew.
“Great,” he agreed, choosing a lime rickey flavor. She added it to his bill.
“And what can I do for you girls?” the saleswoman asked.
“We’d like handcuffs,” I said.
“We have a selection over in the counter. The more expensive ones are stronger.”
“We’ll need strong ones,” I said. She slid open the counter glass and pulled out a red metal pair. She reached for my wrists and locked me in, passing Janet the key to undo me. “Fine. How much?”
“Those are $39.99.”
“Okay, we’ll take them.” Janet wasn’t saying a word, she was fidgeting with a lipstick molded to resemble a penis tip.
“Would you like anything else?”
“No.”
“You girls might like a strap-on. The Boss is on sale.”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Very well. Enjoy yourselves, girls.”
“A strap-on?” Janet said a few minutes later, on the corner of Seventh Avenue South.
“A cock on a belt.”
“Why would you want that?”
I laughed and licked her ear puppy-style. Through college, I’d liked to shock her with my bravado—she’d been an easy target to unnerve. The passing mailman didn’t even flinch. “She thought we were dykes.”
Janet grimaced as she wiped her ear with her finger, but she started smirking about a block later.
“What?” I asked.
“You’d be on top, you know.”
“Duh—like that’s why she was asking me about the Boss,” I said, in perfect Valley Girlese. We snickered most un-PC-ly until we got to the corner and I extracted the handcuffs from the pull-string bag.
“He’s going to lock himself in?” Janet asked to the ground. “And then what happens?”
That sobered us up.
After Frank had secured Stuart’s left arm to the bedpost, I handed over the universal remote. Stuart decided on the Young and the Restless. Not a mystery there: Phillip and Stuart had been out-and-out Y & R addicts back in Australia. Australian episodes were four years behind. (It would have spoiled the fun for them if I’d revealed the fate of a villain, so I’d kept quiet.) Stuart’s eyes were glued to the Olympic-spaced time warp as we locked him in. “Wait? Lauren’s kidnapped? Bloody hell.”
Frank spread out the Scrabble board on the far side of the loft. The two of us set up behind an old pale-blue sheet with blood stains from my first eighth-grade bungled tampon/Vaseline experiment. (I’d soaked that sucker for two hours, but it had been ruined and was used as a last resort back-up linen, never for company.) Frank had taken it from the back of the linen closet over at my folks’ place and thumbtacked it to his ceiling so Stuart could have a bit of privacy.
“That sheet has stains, Frank. It’s gross. Why don’t you drape something else up?”
“This isn’t the time to fret about interior decorating, Bozo.”
“Fine,” I snapped. “Let me keep score.”
Playing Scrabble without Aunt Virginia for competition felt odd. It was a pastime Frank and I had shared with her since the days when she’d picked us up from Sunday school. Frank treated the game as an extension of Dada: never mind the rules. Aunt Virginia, however, was a consistent true match. For a God-fearing Catholic, she was a board-game mercenary, having memorized every two- and three-letter word in the dictionary like ai, a three-toed sloth, and ich, the fish disease. I liked to win and had no problem putting down a mundane word if it gave me maximum points. The three of us played numerous matches the year before I left for Australia. (My Dad was in the hospital for a week with chest pain that later turned out to be gas. Every once in a while Will joined the game, but mostly he found the aunt/niece rivalry ugly. But Aunt Virginia and I valued the distraction of combat. Every clan has its rites, no matter how trivial.)
For the previous seven years I almost always put down JEW for my first word. Even Aunt Virginia would laugh at this mysterious coincidence. If anything was ever going to get me back into a house of worship, it was my deific draws. It was as if fate had a trusty yellow highlighter and continuously underlined our family’s sore point.
With Stuart chained to his post on the far side of the sheet, I looked over my current letters: W T O O O E J. I gasped. I lay JEW down across the middle pink star.
“Get out of here! Again?”
I wrote down “26” on the pad. Frank shook his head. “I’m calling fucking Ripley’s. Anyhow, isn’t Jew proper?”
“I’ve told you ten times, Frank. You can use it as a verb—jew down. It’s in my regulation Scrabble dictionary.”
“That’s awful. Mom would have you fucking re-bat-mitzvahed if she knew you use jew as a verb.”
I checked on Stuart for a second while Frank contemplated his next draw. With his left arm raised and fastened to the head-board, Stuart looked the lost cause, nodding to the last traces of junk.
“They’ve got to kill Michelle,” Stuart said. Kill Michelle? The withdrawal was no doubt kicking in, making deranged words flow out of his mouth—like the New Orleans junker without his H in the William Burroughs book Frank had facetiously suggested I reread. But then it struck me that Stuart was still in TV land. I left him alone.
Janet rang the bell, dressed in a revealing black T-shirt and black leggings. I didn’t know “Muffy” owned anything black other than a proper little cocktail dress.
“How is he?” she asked.
“Right now,” Frank conceded, “he’s surprisingly okay.”
“Oh, well, I brought some chocolate pâté,” Janet said, removing a small mason jar from her public television tote bag.
Chocolate pâté?
“Sounds delicious,” Frank said. “Is that the new Milan Kundera book?”
She brought a book?
“It’s a wonderful read.”
“You read such interesting things, Janet. Let me get a pen, you might as well write down a few titles for me while we have the time.”
Frank spooned out pâté for each of us. I gave her that fucking book. And before that, Frank had given it to me, when I first got back from Melbourne. My territory problem was flaring up again. “I think we’re forgetting our mission, guys.”
Frank handed me a scoop; I let it melt on my tongue as I pushed past the sheet to the bedside of our very own Elephant Man. “Stuart, you want to meet Janet?”
He smelled my breath. “I think I’m going to sleep until the craving hits. Can I have some of that chocolate?”
I went to get him a spoonful of Janet’s pâté. “He’s not too bad, really, he wants to sleep though. I’m going to give him some chocolate.”
“Is that okay to give him?”
“Let him have anything he wants,” Frank said. “Though I thought you can’t sleep when you’re going off heroin.”
I went back to hand him the pâté, which he ate in a drowsy state. I quietly left the room. Frank had resumed our game, with Janet as scoremaster, and vertically laid down E-S-S for JEWESS.
“Excellent, Frank,” Janet said.
“That’s such a waste of your esses,” I jeered.
“But it’s a cool word. It looks good,” Frank said.
“It’s proper anyway,” I said. Frank removed the letters and put down SKID.
When the game was over, I went to check on the patient, who had finally fallen asleep. Live at Five was on, the gossipy news with Sue Simmons. Jimmy Stewart was promoting a book of poems, and Sue had allergies.
“Gazun-tight,” Jimmy Stewart said after his introduction.
I sat down for a moment in a chair splattered with dried blue paint drips. I twirled the handcuff key ring like a top. I wasn’t sure what was coming next. Why wasn’t anything climatic happening? Wasn’t Stuart supposed to twist and moan and attempt to scrape his eyes out?
I heard the phone ring. “Oh hi, Virginia.” Frank calls my aunts by their first names only. He finds the word aunt embarrassing.
“No, Rachel went away to her friend’s weekend house. No, don’t worry—she’s fine—a little blue, she’s looking for a job. I’ll tell her you asked after her.”
“Anything new in there?” Frank called.
“Not yet.”
Frank insisted that Janet should stay. I went back to the smackhead-saver part of the loft again and could tell in a glance that Janet was pleased with Frank’s extra attention. Take a number, girl.
After an hour, Janet offered to check up on Stuart—we hadn’t heard a sound. “Oh shit!” she screamed from the other side of the blood-stained sheet.