Saturday, May 25
THE MINUTE FRANCOISE FORD turned off the shower she heard voices over the partition.
“You don’t put weight-lifting gloves in the washing machine!” a man shouted.
She had a hunch that was Bruce, the owner of Bodies-PLUS.
“It’s not the end of the goddamned world!” The second voice shouted with a slightly Central American accent. That had to be Rick, the towel boy.
“It’s the end of an eight-hundred-dollar dryer if Velcro gets jammed in the heating element—and that will be the end of your job.”
Francoise dried herself, gave her short, blond hair a quick once-over with the hairdryer provided by Bodies-PLUS, slipped back into her street clothes. She zipped her workout clothes into her gym bag and stepped out of the changing room.
The men were still shouting, only now the washing machine was making a grating noise like a rusty saw. She couldn’t make out the words, only the tones. The tones told her the fight was getting meaner.
Down the hallway, past the owner’s office, the door to the laundry room was open.
She tiptoed.
The smell of dirty towels grew stronger. It was a heavy, decaying body-waste odor—worse than ordinary sweat, because it combined sweat with Body-PLUS anabolic protein supplement.
She sneaked one eye around the open door, just enough to see without being seen.
“You’ve started showing some high negatives.” Bruce was hunched forward like a bull in search of a brawl, the veins in his face taut with hostility.
Rick held himself straight, crapped-on but tough and unbowed, pushing out a dark stone silence.
Francoise liked that.
“I’m talking to you!” Bruce slammed a fist on the washing machine. “You could at least shave before you come to work!”
“You’re paying me four-fucking-fifty an hour to wash towels and clean the shit out of toilets,” Rick shouted, “not to model for your customers!”
“You have the same obligations as anyone else on the staff. Look your best! You represent Bodies-PLUS!”
“Fuck representing Bodies-PLUS!”
A glaze of pure hating came over Brace’s face. “Would you rather get paid zero dollars an hour?”
Francoise had a feeling she was seeing the downside of Bruce McGee, the side Bodies-PLUS clients never got to see. She suspected too, this was the downside of steroids, the downside of recreational coke, a lot of downsides intersecting and exploding at once.
She felt ashamed for prying where she had no business prying. She turned around and walked back through the gym.
Bodies-PLUS took up half the top story of a midtown building. Soft indirect lighting supplemented the illumination from the skylights. The floors were covered in comfortable moss-green shallow-pile carpeting, and the free weights and Polaris workout machines were placed like art works in a gallery.
The gym floor was deserted. The weights gleamed in their racks like the eyes of crocodile in a swamp.
She glanced at her watch. Six fifty-five. Bodies-PLUS closed at seven on Saturdays. She realized she was the last client to leave.
Someone had forgotten to switch off the music tapes. A stream of chin-up, cheer-up, pump-that-iron happy rock poured from the wall speakers. It struck her as eerie, like merry-go-round music when there was no merry-go-round.
She pushed the door open and had one foot in the corridor when she heard a weight crash onto the gym floor.
Rick came stumbling into the vestibule. He was holding a jockstrap to his forehead. “Don’t you fucking try, man!”
I shouldn’t be seeing this, Francoise thought.
Before she could get out the door Bruce stepped into the vestibule. His right hand clenched a fifteen-pound dumbbell.
Right away he saw Francoise. He gave her a look, and the look said, Stay out of this, or I’ll cut your titties off.
“Hi,” Francoise said, brightly.
Rick turned around, startled. He jerked the jockstrap away from his face. The side of his head showed a mean blue bruise.
She could feel him trying to put his dignity back together with Crazy Glue. That look on his face invaded her.
“How about dinner?” she said. “My treat.”
“Who?” Rick looked shocked. “Me?”
She nodded. “You.” She turned and sang out, “Good night, Bruce.”
Bruce didn’t answer. His gaze was fixed on her, affectless, like a dead rat’s.
She held the door for Rick.
Riding down in the elevator, he looked over at her. “Did you mean that about dinner, or were you just trying to bust Brace’s chops?”
“I meant it.”
A smile opened on his face. His teeth were incredibly, beautifully white.
“Do you like health food?” she said.
He nodded.
“I know a terrific restaurant,” she said.
FRANCOISE’S TERRIFIC RESTAURANT was crowded and dark. The waitress gave them a table wedged in between the laser juke box and the kitchen. They both ordered tofu steak.
Rick sat there pulling apart a piece of pita bread.
“Bruce shouldn’t treat you like that,” Francoise said. “Why do you work for him?”
“I need the job.”
“It’s a lousy job—no one ever holds it more than a month. Can’t you get another job?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have papers.”
She was jolted. She’d never before met an illegal alien. Except her stepmother. But that didn’t really count.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to unload my life story on you.”
“I want to hear it.”
He seemed to make the decision right then that he trusted her. For the next ten minutes, in a gentle, sad voice, he unloaded. Francoise gradually began to get a sense of what it must be like to be driven from your own country, forced to beg for your living in a land of strangers who would prefer to see you dead.
Oddly enough it reminded her of her own life since her father’s death.
“I’m fresh out of phoniness,” she said. “What can I tell you that wouldn’t be bullshit? I identify? I’m sorry?”
And then he reached over the table and touched her hand. The touch was sad but also sweet. “Your turn,” he said.
“Complete anticlimax. I’m a rich kid. I’ve never had to do a day’s work in my life.”
“You work hard,” he said. “I’ve seen you training.”
“That’s not the same. You work to stay alive. I’m trying to control a weight problem.”
“Where I come from, a girl with a body like yours would be a ten.”
“Maybe you should give me the address of your hometown.”
“You can see my hometown over on Avenue D.” In anyone else’s mouth the remark would have seemed angry or self-pitying, but Rick said it in a completely matter-of-fact way. “Where would I go if I wanted to see your hometown?”
She shrugged. “Upper East Side.”
“So what are you doing taking a towel boy to dinner? People like you are supposed to spend their time shopping at Bloomingdale’s and partying with famous people.”
She wondered if the remark was meant to sting. Because, oddly enough, it didn’t. “Maybe I’ve tried that. Maybe I don’t like it.”
“I’ll bet your parents want you to go to those parties and marry a rich husband.”
“My parents are dead”
“Hey, we’re both orphans.”
There was humor floating in his gaze, humor that was utterly without malice or put-down. For a minute Francoise didn’t get it. And then it dawned on her that this had to be one of the most fundamentally good-natured people she had ever met.
“How did your parents die?” Rick said.
“My mom died of cancer when I was four. My dad died last year. He had a heart attack on an airplane. What about your parents?”
“They died when the government bombed our village.”
Francoise’s jaw dropped. “Where was that?”
“El Salvador.”
“I didn’t know things like that happened in El Salvador.”
“Things like that go on everywhere. So now that you’re an orphan, who do you live with?”
“I live with my stepmother.”
“You say stepmother like she’s a witch.”
Francoise laughed. Suddenly, telling it to Rick, it seemed funny. “She’s spending my father’s money, trying to make herself a big New York socialite. People think she’s a joke.”
“How’d your father meet her?”
“She was our cleaning lady.”
“Oh, boy—so now she’s going to make you the cleaning woman.”
“Kind of. She’s giving a big party on May thirtieth—she didn’t invite me.”
“Your own house, and she didn’t invite you?”
“She inherited the apartment.”
“Still, you should crash the party. Show that witch. Tell you what—I’ll show her. What night is the thirtieth?”
“It’s a Thursday.”
“Okay. Thursday the thirtieth I’m going to come to your house with a huge bouquet for you.”
“I like the way you think.”
“Who would it kill her if you got flowers from?”
Francoise didn’t even have to think to answer that one. “Robert de Niro. Olga’s invested in his restaurant, and she’d do anything to get into one of his parties.”
“Her name’s Olga? Shit. What’s your name?” She realized she’d spent the last hour with Rick without even introducing herself. “Francoise Ford.”
“I’m going to put a card with the flowers that says TO FRANCOISE FORD WITH LOVE, BOB DE NIRO.
It was odd—sitting across a table from this complete stranger with dark brown stubble on his cheeks, Francoise felt relaxed and accepted for the first time in two years.
“You think I’m kidding,” he said. “But on Thursday the thirteenth, watch out, Olga!”