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Downtown Club was going to be strictly membership only. But the cool thing about it was that anyone could get the membership. They would stop at 200, and that would be that. “We want to capture the real downtown—all kinds of people coming together. Not just celebrities or just socialites,” Jose Martin, one of the owners, told me. I liked the idea. Why didn’t our society care more about the everyman? To me, that was where the fascination lay. Every single person I ever met could amaze me.
—Velvet Rope Diaries, New York, New York
5:00 p.m., Friday, December 2
“Will you come with me to look at my wedding dress?” Nina wanted to know. She hadn’t wasted a second. Though we were on the phone, I knew her tabbed up binder was spread in front of her.
Maryann’s Wedding Gowns was just off 3rd Avenue, on 79th Street, upstairs in an old brownstone.
Though I was miserable, I tried my best to be a good sport as Nina and I sat on an ornate, upholstered bench, sipping champagne. Maryann herself went through four gigantic closets lining the room, pushing through the racks of dresses, pulling out the ones she thought fit our criteria. She also pulled out the ones she thought would look good on Nina. “Sometimes those are two different dresses,” she informed us.
Nina had her heart set on one with a scooped out neckline and delicate, lacy cap sleeves, by some Italian designer. She’d added it to her dream years ago when she found it in a magazine. She tried to act like she’d just come across it, but I think Maryann could read a bride.
“Why don’t we just try on some other ones, anyway, for fun? After all, you’re already here. And you only get to do this once.”
We shrugged and nodded her along.
Trying too hard to be a good sport, I wore a maniac’s smile and nodded whenever I could.
When Maryann had one to show that she liked, she said, “Aha???” with big eyes. When she had one that fit our qualifications, she said, “Is this what you meant?” She was neatly dressed in head-to-toe taupe. Even her hair looked taupe.
Maybe marriage and married people and happy endings are boring, I told myself. Taupe. Maybe, in the end, it would turn out I was the lucky one, having murdered my father given up a wonderful man for a runaway, and eventually, losing one of the most coveted jobs to a grody-toothed jerk and his plastic accomplice.
I doubted that was true because looking at the dresses made me yearn for all of it. Here, my love story was ending, and this lovely one was beginning. I employed Fenwick’s technique. I worked out the worst case scenarios. I could live with the possibility that I hurt David so badly that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on work, he’d get fired, lose everything, bungle Susan’s settlement, and they’d both walk outside, depressed, and get hit by a taxi.
Meanwhile, Maryann asked, “Aha???” and Nina said, “Ooooohh, look at that embroidery?” I was living a double life. The champagne helped to fuse them.
Inside the dressing room, I sat on a slipper chair, striped in gold and taupe, and Nina shimmied inside a crinoline and then seemed to enjoy being strapped into a bustier. She looked adorable, like a little shepherdess.
“Oh, get my camera out, Anna. It’s in my purse.”
A camera. Crap. I should have thought of that. I am the maid of honor. I should have realized Nina would want to document every second of this. But no. I was too busy thinking of myself, trying to stop convincing myself I wasn’t a murderer, and living with the possibility that maybe I was. I was a pathetic, horrible friend. I promised myself I’d think of something great to do to make up for it, like paste the pictures into a scrapbook and use all of those adorable, overpriced embellishments you can buy these days.
I looked at her in that little screen, and she was so happy. Nina in her old-fashioned undergarments exposed and open, and yet, happier than she’d ever been.
“Smile for the camera, daaahling. Now hold up your champagne.” We got really into it, and then Maryann came in with the dresses.
“Get in there, Maryann,” I said, gesturing her into the shot because I knew that was something Nina would do. She hesitated but scooched in stiffly. By the time I said, “Lay sunatics!” and they asked, “Huh?” and I said, “I mean, ‘say lunatics,’” Maryann cracked a smile.
The second Nina put her dress on, you just knew it was her dress. Unfortunately, it was one of the “Aha???” dresses, which neither of us wanted to have work out. The dress had a tiny bodice like a china doll’s and then went out into a fancy princess skirt, with a long train that swooped around like a giant’s ping pong paddle. There were crystals around the waist.
Maryann yelled, “Let me get the veil!” She left the two of us in there, and Nina swished back and forth in the big dress watching the tiny stones glimmer in the lights. She looked better than ever. I, behind her, looked half dead. Maybe I just needed to believe that things got worse before they got better. Maybe I just needed a better blush.
“Oh, Nina!” I pulled out the camera again, and snapped her several times, at this angle and that, with her train held up in the crook of her arm, from the front and the back, so she could send the pictures to her mother to criticize. “Hold your head up straight,” I instructed as I maneuvered the various buttons. “Or who knows? Maybe you’ll miss your magic number year!” We laughed and laughed because now it was over it could be funny.
I put Nina in the first taxi, her binder now stuffed with a receipt and a guarantee her dress would be in by February sixth. She was going over to Bernard’s, which was downtown, and it felt she was off to a different country of happiness and contentment that I wasn’t sure I’d ever explore. I smiled and tried not to be jealous. On the way home, my heel cracked right off my shoe, and I had to clip-clop unsteadily home while snobby girls pointed and laughed.
“Come in, I fix the shoe, shine it up. Maybe you smile,” a man standing next to an easel sign said, beckoning me inside his cobbler shop. I stayed too long, enjoying the careful, graceful way he fixed me shoe, the light conversation. “You have big plans tonight? Such a pretty girl, surely the men line up!”
Once intact, he shined my shoes right on my feet, while I sat upon a high wooden seat, and for a little while I was just there in that worn place and nowhere else, nowhere grisly or shameful—only half listening to the scratchy foreign talk radio, picking out the few French words I could recall from high school. Aujourd’hui and lendemain and le garçon.
I counted my change slowly, left him a big tip, though I wasn’t sure that was customary, and walked home. The weekend stretched out ahead of me. I didn’t know what I’d do with myself. Nina was meeting Bernard’s parents up in Westchester. Ray was in D.C., supposedly on business. I tried Belinda.
“Sorry, child,” she said. “I never come back to the city once I get home. If you want to come out to Queens, I’d love to spend some time together.” I couldn’t muster the energy to navigate the unfamiliar trains check stop names, hold on tightly to my purse.
I thought of my mother, how much she’d love to come and spend the night with me. I wanted to call her. I held the phone with every intention of doing so. But I couldn’t. I felt myself slipping back into the comfort of having nothing to push through for.
On a whim, I tried Susan. “Oh, let me take you out to dinner. I’ve got all this alimony to spend, and I just can’t get through it, no matter what I do. Have you ever done the Strip House?” she asked.
Oh god, where was she going? “Er, Susan, I don’t think I’m up for exotic dancing.”
“Heavens no! I would never do that before dinner. You work up such an appetite stripping! This is a steak house, down on Twelfth Street.”
“Okay,” I said. That sounded nice. A nice dinner with a very entertaining friend. I pictured us laughing like diners did in movies, despite the big David-shaped elephant that would be in the room.
9:00 p.m.
My train stopped dead in a tunnel for twenty minutes. There were no lights, no announcements. Two little girls whom I’d noticed on the way in wearing matching green sweatshirts cried and cried. Their voices carried in the frightened silence a long way. Finally, the lights returned, the train moved and we continued without a hitch to Union Square. Once I reached the block, I walked past the restaurant twice. The sign was small, and my mind was elsewhere. Where did one go from here? I tried Ray’s cell phone after I’d missed the restaurant the second time.
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
Ray didn’t invite messages, he once told me. I hung up, turned around and passed the restaurant again. When I reached the corner of University Place, I tried the number again.
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
“Ray, I just found out I might be undone by Joseph via a psychic, spent two hours in a wedding dress salon, got stuck in a train for twenty minutes, and passed the restaurant I was supposed to be at half an hour ago, for the second time. And why am I telling you this? Because I’m standing her wondering, why did I trust you? Why have I been wondering where you’ve been for days and days—conveniently, right when I broke up with David—and feeling like a complete idiot for trusting you?”
I listened to the options when I was through, hoping there’d be a re-record option. There wasn’t.
I found the sign, descended the staircase, and pushed into the cocoon of an inviting restaurant, soft jazz playing. A couple of patrons at a small lounge in front turned around possessively when the door opened as if they didn’t want strangers finding out about their hidden gem.
“Can I help you, mademoiselle?” the host asked warmly.
I resisted the urge to cry on his perfectly dry-cleaned shoulder and said, “Susan Scrimp-Levy’s party, please.”
“Ah, yes, ma’am. He leaned down to pencil in a note on his reservation sheet and raised his head again. “Excuse me for asking, but are you . . . Anna Walker? From Velvet Rope Diaries?”
It was the oddest sensation, to be recognized. “Yes, I am.” I tried not to fidget.
“Right this way.” He grinned, leading me with a stiff arm toward the rear dining room.
Everyone seemed to be having a great time, finding something worthy of a throaty or tinkly laugh. The walls were lined with framed calendar girls—curvy, well-proportioned women, with rolled hair and pointed chests.
“Anna!” Susan yelled. She was in a booth, sharing a banquette with a scraggly man in nylon: ostensibly this was Shakti though he looked more like a Norman.
There were two people opposite—a woman with wiry maroon hair and a man whose slightly thinning, delightfully puffy hair I’d recognize anywhere. It was David. I fought the urge to hold my purse over my face, spin around and run for my life. “Hello, everyone,” I said, an overenthusiastic preschool teacher. “I didn’t realize we were such a big party!”
There was a chair for me—adjacent to David. I looked at Susan, and she hoisted her shoulders as if to say she couldn’t help herself.
I avoided David’s eyes as long as possible, fiddling with my coat and then my purse, and eventually the positioning of my chair. When it was inevitable, I turned, recognized the knowing gaze, of someone who still held various facts about you lumped in their mind, possibly in their heart. I tried not to but probably regarded him similarly.
“Anna,” he said, and leaned in to press his mouth at my cheek.
“I’m Romaneta,” the woman next to hi said, pushy, irritated, too blinky. “From Ukraine, you know?”
“Of course,” I nodded though I had no idea what significance this might have.
I had worn a light blouse and suddenly felt a chill, as if someone had opened the door. Involuntarily, I shuddered.
“Here, take my jacket,” David insisted, standing, removing his navy pinstripe and snuggling it over my shoulders, smoothing it with his palms.
I looked up at him, swallowing back emotions. I had done this to myself. But did he have to look so inviting?
The menu had too many choices, so when the waiter arrived for our orders, I randomly zeroed in on something. “Steak frites.”
After the entrees were picked over, I excused myself for the ladies’ room. Rmaneta decided to join me.
“Don’t you think he izzz so cute?” she said. “And very rich.”
I wanted to tune her out, hunched inside the tile stall. Finally, thankfully, she flushed the toilet, didn’t wash her hands and left.
I closed my eyes. I would not be tempted by the shelter of David. I would not use either of us so poorly.
I straightened out, flushed the toilet though I hadn’t used it, washed my hands, found my face drawn and sickly looking in the mirror, tried to blame the lighting, found it very soft and innocent, and pushed my way into the tiny hallway, off the side of the restaurant.
David was waiting there.
“Hey,” I said.
“Let’s get a drink after,” he said and grabbed my hand—a gesture that squeezed the tears from my eyes.
I quickly wiped them, tried to cover my face with my bangs.
“Hey, hey,” he soothed, his hand rubbing my back, his lashes tickling my cheek.
A few blocks along Fifth Avenue, there was a beautiful restaurant with windows across the front and elegant white lighting. We went in and sat at the bar. He leaned one elbow on the smooth mahogany and faced me, smiling.
I crossed my legs and told him I was very sorry, that it was very nice to see him now. I didn’t know where these polite, adult words came from.
“Anna, you know, it’s not too late to change your mind.” His hand was at my shoulder. I yanked my coat belt tighter.
Long and hard, I looked into his eyes so I would remember always, what I’d risked for love.
I slept off and on, with my neighbor Mrs. Olstead’s cat whining at her door, long haunting meows. I knew she’d been left. I could recognize the sound of it.
1:30 a.m.
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
2:45 a.m.
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
7:00 p.m., Sunday, December 4
I walked around all day, watching people, mannequins, anything and everything that looked more fortunate than myself. It would be so easy to do the wrong thing, but once I’d suffered through the first night, I wasn’t about to waste the perseverance.
When it was dark and too cold, I hailed a taxi, my arm limp, not quite up to the task. None came by, so I decided to walk over to Second Avenue. It was freezing. Why didn’t I have on gloves or a hat and scarf like everyone else did? Had I always lived my life so haphazardly? I would get some tomorrow, a nice set, maybe at Bloomingdale’s. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man as haphazard as myself, stepping off the curb, without realizing a van was barreling toward him.
“Sir!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. He didn’t notice. I started to run. There were several feet between us, and the distance was growing as he moved further into the street. The van seemed to speed up, closing the gap between them. It felt like forever until I reached him. When I did, I grabbed him by the collar, and finally, he realized what was happening, and we both stumbled back onto the curb exactly when the taxi would have killed us both.
“What an asshole!” he yelled, punching the air in the direction of the van.
I wasn’t about to point out that the taxi had the right-of-way and that he was walking into the street without paying attention. “You saved my life,” he said. “You saved me freaking life.”
I looked deeply into the man’s eyes, all the way, I think, because our held gaze held unbelievable meaning to me. The girl who’d killed her father had just saved someone’s life. Surely someone was trying to tell me something. “I’m just glad you’re okay.” I said the words I’d dreamed as the alternate ending to our fire so many times, waking to a cold sweat, my sheets needing to be changed.
As I turned toward home, I realized what this sign was telling me: the person whose life I was meant to be saving was my own. And though I may have faltered, I wasn’t going to give up now.
8:00 a.m., Monday, December 5
Belinda and I met at Farlucks to discuss strategy.
“I think we go to the psychic after work, and that way you’re already in Queens, so you can go home from there.” I’d always been afraid of psychics of sitting down with one and she recognizes right away there is something not quite right about me. She wouldn’t know exactly what it was at first but eventually her eyebrows would jolt, and she would see it there. I wasn’t sure of the kind of responsibility psychics had to report murderers to the police, but I wasn’t keen to chance it.
“Okay, yeah. That’s a good plan. I just hope we can wipe this whole thing out quickly and move on.”
“Belinda, do you believe in psychics?”
“Absolutely not.” I could tell she was lying.
“Me neither.”
5:30 p.m.
We took the N train, and when the doors opened, we meandered around looking for 31st Avenue. At the doorway of a tiny liquor store, there stood an easel sign that read, “Psychic: The Famous Rima,” in curly, hand painted letters.
“Ccchow can I healp you?” she wanted to know once we made our way through the incense cloud to two folding chairs across the card table that—along with a dusty tapestry hanging behind her—made up her office.
She looked at Belinda first. “Oh, you want to know about jour boyfriend—is he going to be okay?”
We wanted to be furious, but how could you be when someone dangled the knowledge of the one thing you were dying to know, right in front of your face? Belinda looked at me, shocked.
“Please continue,” I said. “She would like to know.” I held Belinda’s hand under the table and she didn’t even bat it away.
“You have the fifty dollars?”
Belinda looked to me again.
I nodded.
“Well?” She put her palm out. I handed it over.
“He will be fine.” Belinda exhaled and shoved my hand away.
“Well, we’re mainly here to ask if someone came to see you, someone named Joseph James?”
Her fleshy hand went to her forehead. “You speak the name of evil.”
“Yup, that’s him,” Belinda said.
“Iss tiny pipsqueak with grotty teeth?”
“Yes, aha.” I felt we were onto something. But what?
She was silent.
“So, he was here?”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out two bills, slid them across the table. “I give you discount for dealing with that man.”
“First, for your boyfriend,” she turned to Belinda. “You give him dees.” She pulled out a small poultice tied with a black ribbon. “You put in tea, and he drink. No more panicky.”
“Now, Joseph.” She shivered. “He was her with scratchy hair plastic woman, and they want to know about you.” She pointed at me.
“What did you tell them?”
“Not too much to tell. You Goody Two-shoes. Always do the right thing. They say, so make something up and tell it to Ed, tell him whole paper will go out of business if he keep Anna on.”
“You aren’t going to do that, are you?”
Silence.
“Well, are you?” I pressed.
“Depend.” She leaned across the table, her swingy sleeves sliding past her elbows to reveal cushiony arms.
“On what?” Belinda asked.
“Your offer.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You think about it, but I tell you meanwhile, Miss Anna, I am getting a strong sense of someone trying to contact you from beyond someone trying to say, he love you, he not mad at you, only so proud of you.”
I tried with everything I was not to put any credence to this; I was meant to be living with the worst, after all, not trying to convince myself everything was perfect. I knew the danger of believing this for a moment, only to have it float eternally just out of reach, and yet, the sound was the most brilliant I’d ever heard. Everything in me wanted to believe it could be.
“Oh, Anna, here, take a Puffs Plus,” Belinda said. She turned to Rima. “That’s not a nice trick! You don’t mess with someone’s life like that!”
“I don’t make this up! Also, Mr. R man in your life—he love you, just mixed up. I don’t makeup! And you thinking about that advice column idea . . . it’s perfect. You should do it.”
“Sure you don’t make it up, except for when Joseph and Miss Jackson pay the right price!” Belinda yelled, her anger likely fueled by the possibility that Rima’s advice to her could be false, too. That the poultice in her hand was as useful as hocus pocus.
“It’s not that. It’s . . . well, they—” She didn’t finish, looked up to the bare bulb and folded in ther lips so we couldn’t see them.
“What? What did they do?” I encouraged her.
She looked to us, her gaze unwavering. “They threatened to have me deported. I’m illegal alien. They said if I don’t do this to you, I will get sent back to Russia. And my little girls, too.”
The news hit with a thud, and I realized it was hopeless. Obviously, she couldn’t be deported just to save me.
We all slumped in our chairs. Despite everything we were just three women, trying to make our way. I noticed some brown water leaking through a ceiling tile, making its way through somehow.
“I got it!” Rima said, punching the air. Maybe Rima, too, had been inspired by the water.
“What?” Belinda and I chorused.
“We put a spell on Joseph and Nasty, and they want to do the right thing.”
I exchanged a skeptical glance with Belinda. Sure it would be wonderful to believe this might work, the way I could sometimes dissect my horoscope so that the day’s outlook would appear glorious, but to place all of my hope on it? It seemed asinine.
“What other choice have we got?” Belinda asked.
6:00 p.m.
Rima sent us all over Astoria hunting for crazy ingredients like lodestone and dragon’s blood resin. We had instructions to ask for specific people at the shops: Brois and Trovsky and Zora. We ran, our feet aching in our heels, avoiding sidewalk cracks and children in roller skate sneakers, frantically seeking out the dubious components. After two hours of this, I pulled Belinda onto a bus stop bench.
“What are we doing? I asked.
“Looking for a horse’s butt hair,” she said, referring to the list Rima had scribbled.
I shook my head.
“Do you really believe all this?”
She fluttered her lips, then straightened up and turned to me. “Listen to me, Anna. I need to believe there is some magic in this world. I’m a freaking secretary. I work in a vomit-colored cubicle. I live with a geeky computer programmer with an anxiety condition. I’ll never have a child or own a home or get to see the pyramids. The only way I can shake things up is to wear my hair too big. I need to believe there is something more . . . so get up and let’s find that damned horse’s butt hair and get you back on this fantasy track before I lose my hope altogether.”
Some people had obviously been listening. Two ladies on the next bench applauded. “Get that butt hair!” someone yelled.
In the end, we found all the items, each wrapped in butcher paper and tied with bakery string, and watched Rima boil them in a misshapen pot, over a rusted hot plate, yelling profanities and long, lyrical Russian words we didn’t understand.
We, all three of us, had a lot invested in the possibility of this easy, magical way out of life’s problems. We wanted to leave here free of all the troubles, a trio of careless girls in pigtails, off to live the way we had before the fires and stillborn children, or terrible lives we didn’t want to be deported back to.
Belinda squeezed my hand, her long, shapely nails pinching, and I dug my boyish nails into her palm. No matter what happens, I thought, here was the magic, right here at my fingers.
10:30 p.m.
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
10:45 p.m.
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
11:00 p.m.
I stayed up late waiting for Ray’s call, worried sick about tomorrow. On Emotional Eating, they cooked “Blinded by Love Linguine” and “Do You Believe in Magic Pie.” When I fell asleep twisted on the sofa, no one woke me to go to bed.
10:00 a.m., Wednesday, December 7
Ed called me into his office to go over the column. I was shaking like the last crackly ochre leaf of autumn, hlding on, all the while knowing there were larger factors at play here, and that all the personal strength in the world may not save me after all. I didn’t really believe the spell would work, but I wanted to like heck.
The meeting started out relatively well.
“I hate to say this, but your column’s starting to grow on me . . . like, like a mole.” He never got sick of laughing at his own jokes.
He was impressed, but I couldn’t enjoy it with all I knew to be coming. The amazing bit was that despite everything, I was still here, participating in my life. I could go on. That was the strength Fenwick had tapped in me. It was empty as hell, the prospect of this life, but I moved around in it all the same, putting pen to paper and fork to mouth.
“I’m glad,” I said. “You think I could get that raise now?”
“Good one!” he hooted.
Was I home free? I sat for a second while he drummed his desk in hysterics. “I’ve got something for you,” he said. He leaned down, picked up a bulging shopping bag from behind his desk. He handed it over.
I reached inside and pulled out a handful of envelopes. They all seemed to be addressed to me. I looked up questioningly.
“Your fans.” He shrugged.
Dear Anna,
Maybe Ray is just freaked out because he doesn’t want to ruin your friendship in case things don’t work out.
All the best,
Cindy Gummel
Dear Anna,
I think it was really brave, the way you broke things off with David right away like that. I have such a hard time doing things like that, with all the risk involved. In fact, I’ve got a similar quandary and wondered if you’ve got any advice as to how I could break up with someone gently, and face the possibility that I might be alone afterward?
Sincerely,
Caroline James
Dear Anna,
I just wanted you to know that in my book club, nobody believes you were fooling around with Ray while you were still going out with David. However, we do want to tell you that we all think that Nasty and Joseph might do something really, really bad to you. We’re worried! Please be careful. Also, personally, I’m trying to figure out if the guy I’m with is the right one. We’ve been together so long it has become a routine, and I can’t work out how I actually feel anymore. Any advice?
A big fan,
Louisa Santos
I thought of what Rima had said about the advice column. It seemed coincidental that I would receive these letters now. Maybe this would all work out? I wanted to believe. Maybe if I wanted to so badly it would just work.
I don’t know what made me think of this, but I put down the bag of letters and walked to Nasty’s office. There was another new assistant there, and I recognize that look of manic confusion in her eye.
I walked behind her cubicle because I didn’t want her to see me. I stood for a couple of minutes outside of Nasty’s office, not sure what I was going to do. The secretary noticed me.
“Can I help you?” She was extremely well put together, with matching earrings and a necklace; even a belt. I felt like a mess, although I was wearing a Theresa outfit. I crossed my arms; old habits die hard. I said, “Umm.”
“Hey, I know you. You’re that Anna Walker! You used to hate my job!”
I turned her away from the office so Nasty wouldn’t hear.
“What’s the deal with her?” the girl asked, her eyes wild.
I sighed. “She’s really a good person.” I shocked myself with these words. Deep down, I guess I still believed this. “She’s just insecure.”
“You’re shitting me, right?” The girl had her hands on her hips. “Yesterday, she made me go to Victoria’s Secret to try and exchange a thong she had for three years. I almost threw up.”
She had a point, but so did I. “I’m gonna tell you something, and don’t take it the wrong way.” She leaned in. “You can get another job. If you stay here and don’t like it, it’s not her fault. It’s yours.” It felt wonderful to have the wisdom of experience, to be able to share it with someone, see them benefit from it.
“It’s true, you are a bitch,” she said, turned her back to me, and walked off.
I left the office, another column in, my job still—amazingly—intact. I mused, had the magic actually worked?
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
“Hello, you’ve reached 917-555-1212.”
I didn’t know if Ray and I would ever talk again.
5:30 p.m., Thursday, December 8
Still no word about my being fired. I couldn’t one hundred percent believe it, but it appeared, maybe, just maybe, the spell had actually worked. Each morning, squeezing paste onto my toothbrush, I’d steeled myself to the possibility of being let go, and each evening I huffed up the four flights to my apartment with relief.
Tonight, I left the office early so I could head off Ray since he’d be back from “D.C.”. I was going to make him come out with me no matter what. He’d been ignoring me for over a week now, and if I was to take it one more second, I was afraid I’d lose something of myself I’d never be able to retrieve.
I ran to the six train and down the stairs and in between the doors, as they began to shut. Inside, I stood against them so I could be first off. At third Avenue, I ran around the corner and up three flights of steps. He was just outside, twisting the top lock tight when I opened the door.
He was surprised to turn and see me. He started to step around me.
I grabbed onto his jacket sleeve. “Hey,” I said.
He blinked too much. “What?” Guilt was all over his stiff features.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Going out. It’s happy hour. I’m ecstatic. Can’t you tell?” He bit the inside of his cheek.
He was standing closer to me, now that I’d pulled him there. My cheeks heated, and I could feel the heat from him, too. Our chests expanded and sank. The fluorescent-lit hallway dimmed slightly and then brightened back to normal.
“What the hell is going on here?” I stumbled on the words.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, but while he did, he pulled my face close, my hair tangled in his fingers. The way he looked at me made my stomach plummet.
“You know what I mean,” I breathed, his face so near it blurred. “You know I called and called.” I thought I’d cry but only felt desperation and anger.
“I know. I saw. I saw each call and fought myself not to pick it up.”
“What? Why?” I was yelling but he didn’t flinch.
“I didn’t want to rush you. I wanted you to take your time and be sure.”
“Don’t you think I can figure that out for myself?”
His look said he knew me better than I knew myself.
“I didn’t want you to decide rashly and then feel that since you told the whole world in your column that you just had to stick to that. I didn’t want to have you and then lose you because of that.”
I didn’t know what to say. My anger was breaking up, changing into something different.
“But you leave me no choice now. I knew I couldn’t be this close to you. I fucking knew it.”
He swallowed me with his look, tore off large bites of me with his pointed irises, so steady his gaze, and then touched his lips to the tip of my nose, and my cheeks, and then he pulled my chin up, and we kissed with the hostage passion, finally released in shaky jerks and irregular breaths.
It was deep and soft and angry and had been misunderstood too long. I was backed against the doorway and he was against me. I could feel him at my groin. I tore off his jacket and he yanked at my sleeve. My purse fell against the radiator with a jingle and a thump.
I heard the scrape of the door opposite, and then a gasp as Mrs. Olstead caught us.
“I’ll have you reported!”
We pulled apart, gasping. My hands shook.
Ray picked me and my things up and carried us into his bed. We didn’t bother to remove our clothing, there didn’t seem to be time. If we waited, even a second, would this all change? Would we be back where we began? It was impossible all the while not to think each move, each caress, each tiny hair accidentally snagged, wouldn’t signal the end of it all. The odds were against us. We might not make it, the intimidating odds said, despite our individual merits. When we were done, underpants and belts half off, we began again, with a finger along my thigh.
“All this time you had the bigger room!” I said afterward, looking at him with all my cards showing, with no way to bluff. With a tender grin, he looked me over. We lay, an intricate human knot beneath the damp blankets.
At ten o’clock we showered together, only slightly awkwardly, and Ray sang, “No More Tears” in his best Ozzy Osbourne, while he gently rinsed shampoo from my hair, kissing me on the ear every now and then, soapy and loud. We were delirious.
He had very long legs, I kept noticing, seeing them undressed this way, wet and naked. I hoped he wouldn’t use them to run away from me.
We laughed at everything—his underwear slung over the desk chair, my smooshed-in bra cups, our foggy vanity mirror. We were familiarly unfamiliar.
“Now you’ve really got something to write about,” he joked. We were in the back of a taxi heading all the way through the East Side to the edge of the city. From this distance, the whole place seemed unreal, like something you could store in a box over the winter. A new waterfront bar awaited us. Ray’s arm looped around my waist, the other tickled at my stockings. We couldn’t stop kissing, just feeling each other’s mouths, getting to know each other’s bodies, reinventing the way it had always been in this new, unbelievable way.
You could believe you were in St. Martin at this bar, named Orient Baie, for the most celebrated beach on the island’s French side. Everything was bamboo and bright, elegant teakwood and palms, huge flowers with unbelievable pistils. I’d finally made it to St. Martin.
“You never saw pistils like this before,” I said to Ray.
“Hey, you don’t know anything about my pistils,” he said.
“But I do,” I tried on a sexy line—it was how I felt, bold and better than myself. Ray and I watched the water, the few barges floating past.
“I want something that arrives on a barge,” I said.
“Oh yeah, everyone should have at least one thing that arrives on a barge.”
We drank pink drinks, and I thought how interesting life could be, how it could surprise you and restore your faith in it without explanation . . . just like that. How one thing might begin as another might end.
“Can I have your pineapple?” he asked, removing the juicy ring from the rim of my glass.
“You know I love it when you talk like that,” I said. A big palm curved over us like a giant, protective hand.
We studied each other seriously while trying to look cool. We ate giant shrimps sprinkled with coconut shreds, and Ray danced them around the plate, their wiry antennae swaying. We tried each other’s desserts—pineapple upside-down cake and coconut cream pie—and danced to steel drum music. Everything was unsubtle foreplay.
12:30 a.m.
“Ray?” I asked as we were calming to sleep, in his bed, down the hall from my own.
“What is it?” he whispered, his hand still unbelievable in my hair.
“I didn’t know you had such long legs,” I said, unsure why this one detail mesmerized me.
“And I didn’t know you had such beautiful breasts,” he replied, touching one like it was his now.
We fell asleep, my legs clamped between his, the sirens fading up Third Avenue, and the heat blowing so high it whistled.
5:30 p.m., Wednesday, December 14
I told Fenwick first about Rima, about the horse’s butt hair and how I couldn’t help but want to believe it could work, that maybe it was working. I hoped the humor would soften the news, which I knew he wouldn’t approve of.
“Look, Anna, I’m not saying magic absolutely, positively isn’t possible. That isn’t my field, but there are two ways this could work out, and . . .”
“I shouldn’t try to convince myself that it will go the way that I want because I have to live with the possibility that it might not, and continue on anyway.”
He smirked. “Very good. By George, I think she’s got it.”
I told him I was always afraid of psychics because of the possibility that they’d see what I’d done and I’d wind up in jail. I was almost getting used to talking about these insane things that go on in my head. Fenwick never stood up and said, “Oh, that is too far off the wall; we’ll have to commit you now,” the way I half-expected. Now it had become a sort of strength test—can I endure the humiliation this week? Can I walk out Fenwick’s door after saying the inanest things, as if I were like everyone else running to cross the street before the light turned?
“And Ray and I are finally . . . well . . . we are, I guess . . . a couple.”
“Anna, that’s so wonderful. I’m very happy to hear it.”
“But don’t convince myself it will be perfect, that we’ll be happy, that I deserve it. Don’t try to enjoy myself or have a good time. Right?” I don’t know where the hostility came from, but I was giving it to Fenwick—good.
“Do you think maybe you’re still looking to clean your slate, so to speak? To have me say, “You are totally innocent,” each and every time you’re here, the way I did for you in our first session? Tie it up neatly so you’re free to enjoy all this exciting stuff?”
“I don’t think I am,” I lied.
“Why don’t you think so?” He looked gentle and kind as always. When I cottoned on to that, I started to back down slightly.
“I don’t know,” I said, lamely, fidgeting at the sofa arm, already feeling a pit of guilt developing about the way I’d treated Fenwick poorly, too.
3:30 p.m., Friday, December 16
“Hi, Ed. How are you?” I asked.
“Good, good,” he said. “But how are you?”
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at.
“I mean, how is your hair? Is it thinning at all? Has it lost some of its sheen?” he asked.
Had he officially gone off the deep end, and someone forgot to inform me? Could he be serious?
“I, well, it’s always a little thinner in winter.”
“Oh dear,” he said, shaking his head.
I’d said the wrong thing. “Well, but not so much as last year, I guess. It’s definitely thicker than last year at this time.” What? Was this about me not looking the part again?
He glanced at a paper on his desk then turned back to me, full of concentration. “What about your skin? Have you been breaking out at all?” I had that pimple on my cheek, but surely it wasn’t that bad; I’d actually started thinking this morning it might be a hive.
“I . . . well . . .” Did I have to answer? I should have used cover-up, it was true. But this was mortifying. Besides, I know I was looking much better these days.
“Spit it out! How’s your skin?”
“It’s fine,” I said, panicking.
“But isn’t that a pimple on your cheek, there?” He pointed.
Instinctively, I cupped my palm over the offending bump.
“Did you just pick out a dress for your friend’s wedding? Nina or whoever?”
This was too much. My heart raced. Was this a nightmare? Would I wake up in Ray’s arms in a moment? It was too surreal, these questions, this inappropriateness, Ed’s wild-eyed demeanor. “I did, but what does this—” I didn’t get to finish.
“That’ll be all.”
11:30 a.m., Saturday, December 17
Though I pinched myself all through yesterday, the meeting with Ed was real. Those words had actually passed between us. It had to be something with Joseph and Nasty, I was sure of it.
But today was Saturday. And I was on a mission for Nina; I would let the anxiety hang out and be present for my best friend. We went to the TriBeCa offices of photographer Glen Dubin. Inside, everything was white. One corner was set up with a roll of screens you could pull down for different backgrounds. Currently, there was a farm scene, with a swirling yellow road and a red log fence, a couple of solid looking cows in front.
“Kids.” He shrugged when it caught our attention.
We shook our heads like we completely understood.
Nina pulled out her binder, turning to a checklist. “How many people on our crew? How many photos do you take total? Will they be available on a website? Do you give any credit toward prints?”
We looked through some of Glenn’s albums, oohed and ahhed over what could be done with digital enhancements. It was all quite impressive. I kept hauling back in my wandering mind to consider the amount of digital alterations Glenn Dubin gave to the photo of the dancing couple, whether in that particular photo the sister’s blue dress had been too distracting, if it had been worth it to remove her completely, to change the truth to make things look better.
I flipped through Gregory and Tamara’s wedding, smiling at pictures of ladies having their hair set, a cat pawing at a table piled with dyed shoes, a little girl sticking her toe into a river in a huge, frothy dress, her mary janes tossed to the side, wondering which bits of the story I was seeing had been real, and which Glenn had fabricated. Then I came upon a photo of the father-daughter dance, her head resting on his shoulder.
Nina was calling me but I didn’t realize. I was transfixed. It was at that moment that I worked out I’d been so busy feeling guilty, testing myself, and searching out the truth that would finally shed light on my innocence that I hadn’t been able to miss my dad at all.
But now, at this second, I did. I missed him horribly. I thought of all the things we’d missed doing together: like watching sports; I didn’t understand a thing about football. I was always asking Ray, “What’s that guy doing?” “Why’s that guy running in the other direction now? Is his butt really that big, or are those pads?” I could have asked Roger, sure. But I hadn’t. And he was too polite to push.
I thought of the Thanksgivings and Christmases and school plays, and Mom sitting with Roger, her hand curled in his. Had this bothered me? It all came rising up, and I thought I might drown.
“Anna!” I must have looked crazy for Nina to use that tone.
“Sorry, I’m fine.” But this intense, sudden sense of loss had yanked me so was far from fine, I didn’t even know if I could be digitally altered to look fine anymore.
Nina didn’t go with Glenn Dubin.
“He’s too . . . cutesy,” she said, a flimsy excuse.
“C’mon, I’ve got a surprise for you, a pick-me-up.” She tossed an arm over my shoulder.
“TAXI!” she called. We climbed in, and she said, “Twentieth between Broadway and Fifth, please.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, trying to sound chipper.
“You’ll see.” She turned to me. “Hey, you don’t have to be perfect just because I’m getting married. I don’t want perfect. I want you. It’s hard for you right now. I know that. It’s okay. And that photo! I can’t even imagine how hard this would all be if I didn’t have my father. It means a lot that you are doing all this despite that.”
I shook my head, swallowed gigantically. I felt wet run down alongside my nose.
She hugged me tight, and then we got out of the taxi and she pulled a key ring out of her purse.
“Oh my god! The spa!”
Three floors up, it was all beams and dust, but you could just see how great it was going to be. Some places you walk in and you can just tell. And I thought, if Nina had come this far, well then I would, too. I’d fight for those memories of my father, in honor of who he’d been.
Ray and I spent the evening inappropriately groping each other in public at Sampson’s. I enjoyed myself immensely. Everything felt like it was falling into place.
5:30 a.m., Wednesday, December 21
James was a tiny, new spot in the East Village, which served gleaming free-range chicken, with dramatic sprigs of rosemary, and pot roast with rustic carrot chunks. The wine list was exclusively Parisian, but only boutique labels. I’d taken Nina because she said she wouldn’t be chopped liver because Ray and I had become a couple. She complained the whole tie that she didn’t like small places with small tables that served food still on the bone. She had negative things to say about Rosemary. I couldn’t imagine what was making her so ornery.
“I don’t know if I love Bernard,” she blurted out after declaring the carrot cake far too creamy.
“Nina,” I whispered.
“I don’t know if it’s Bernard or actually getting married. I think I’m completely screwed up. Now I’m actually having a wedding, I keep getting disappointed, thinking: isn’t this supposed to feel so much more monumental? Isn’t the linen supposed to be crisper, the invitation heavier? Where are the chubby singing cherubs and the animated chipmunks?” She cleared her throat, realizing she’d gotten loud.
I waved away her apprehension and went for something Fenwick had said. “You know what? There’s no such thing as perfect.”
Too quickly, she responded. “I know that.”
I gave it a second to sink in. Then I repeated it.
A waterfall sprung from Nina’s eyes, and I figured she got it. I handed her my cloth napkin and offered her some advice on how to deal with the ridiculous imperfections of life. If I was considering doing this for a living, I might as well try some advice out.
“In the meanwhile, why don’t you set up a little test and do more things without Bernard, to help you see how you really feel, see what it’s like to miss him.”
“Thanks Anna. So, what are you doing later?”
“Anything you want,” I said, glad to be there for her, finally.
Just as I was going to suggest we go, she said, “Hey, why don’t we ask for a little more of that carrot cake?”
Afterward, we went to Sampson’s and got loaded off the sweet college drinks we used to love—cranberry juice and vodka. Pete indulged us in some obvious flattery, and we fed twenty bucks into the jukebox to play Led Zeppelin, imagining ourselves having epiphanies all night. After all the swanky places I’d been, I would have thought I’d outgrown our local. Instead, I’d been far and wide and come back with a new perspective: everything I’ve ever wanted was always right here. I just had to figure out how to get it, was all.
Thursday, December 22
Most people were giddy with the idea of being off for four days—more so in the case of those staying out until the new year. I’d already eaten so much caramel and cheese popcorn from a gigantic Santa tin that I had to unbutton my pants. I sat down to pull my blouse hem down a little farther to cover up before I handed in the article to Ed. In exchange, he handed me another bag of mail.
Dear Anna,
I wanted to wish you good luck visiting your father’s gravesite. I lost my mother a few years back, and I know how difficult it can be.
Merry Christmas,
Stacy Miller
I began a new document. I called it “advice column.” A half hour later, the phone rang.
“Hello,” I said, breaking away from the screen.
“Anna, Ed wants to see you.” It was Belinda, and her voice had a strange tone.
“Oh no.” I already knew. “It didn’t work, did it?”
“No.” She sounded as deflated as I felt. All the adrenaline and hope, like a snapped elevator, went screaming into the moldy basement of loss.
As I made my way to Belinda, the office was quiet. Minutes ago, I’d been happy for that, enjoying the rush of an inspired writing jag, creating something I was actually proud of. But now the silence seemed to say something different—that everyone had gone and left me behind.
People had taped printer paper banners across their cubicles. “Gone to Get Drunk,” or “Happy Freaking New Year.” These were creative people and their flavor of joke. I wouldn’t have ever thought of those; I should have recognized it as a sign.
“Hi,” the receptionist said with her own brand of bland friendliness.
After all this time, it hadn’t been as rewarding as I’d imagined, her acknowledgment.
“Are you okay?” I whispered when I approached Belinda. She looked smaller, less vibrant. Her hair was crushed in on one side. “It’s not our fault, Belinda. We did everything we could.” But I knew it was more than that. “This isn’t the end,” I said though I’d felt it, too, the screeching of the brakes.
Belinda shook her head, her lips pursed, and walked me to Ed’s door. She squeezed my arm, knocked twice, opened the door, and shuttled me inside, closing the door between us.
I made my way to the empty armchair. I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
Ed had his elbows on his desk. All the times I’d been in before, he’d sung my name like a doorbell. “An-na!” Now he jerked his head by way of acknowledgment, afterward, letting me squirm in silence for a minute.
“The good news, as you know, is that your column was a hit. For some reason, people are interested in your life. They want to know if you’re going to stay with Rick, and they want to see you happy, angry, whatever.”
Was. Such a tiny, innocent-sounding word.
“I even started to enjoy it. But, I never in a million years would have predicted it could be so popular. Honestly, you don’t know a thing about journalism. Your writing . . . needs work . . . to say the least.” He shook his head and let out a stab of a laugh. “You couldn’t get fewer facts about the bars in there if you tried . . .”
I nodded. “Aha.”
“Despite all that, sometimes phenomena occur. You have a voice, an instinct that just works. You’re relatable and people respond.
“The thing is, Anna, despite all the times Joe begged me to get rid of your column, I was dead set on keeping it. Shit, you got us tons of ads.”
Something rose in me, and I yelled, “Ed, what is it already?”
His eyes flickered, expanded. “You don’t have to yell.”
“Sorry,” I said. “You’re just dragging this out way longer than is necessary.”
“Okay, well, then here it is. I have it from a trusted source that your streak is coming to an end. If I keep you on, it will mean the end of New York, New York. So, you understand. I have to let you go. You fit the profile of the person my, um, source said I had to ax—the pimples, the thinning hair, the bridesmaid thing . . . so, you’re out. Happy New Year. Can you send in Belinda on your way out?”
I hadn’t come this far to give up like that. “You’re kidding, right? Surely you aren’t firing me with a successful column that’s bringing in tons of money for you.” I would say anything about Rima. I wouldn’t hurt her that way, but I could give myself one last shot.
“I know, it sounds nuts. But I always listen to this, um, source, on these matters. She told me to do everything I’ve done along the way, and it’s all worked perfectly. I’m just not going to go and risk changing things now.”
“Ed. Please tell me what I can do. Maybe I can go to see your source, and she can verify that I’m not the person she was talking about. It could be someone else. It could be . . . Joseph, even! He has some pimples, and certainly his hair is thinner than last year! I wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying on bridesmaid’s dresses!” Not my proudest moment.
“No. No. It’s you. I’m sorry. She said it was a woman . . . although with Joseph, who knows . . . but it was you. She also said the person steals toilet paper from the ladies’ room, and everyone knows you do that. And nobody sees Rim—um, my source, you see—but me. Nobody. Now pack you stuff, Anna. Oh, and don’t forget to have a happy New Year.”
I don’t know how I did it, but I got up and walked myself to the door. Then I turned around and said, “Thanks a lot!” I slammed the door as hard as I could as if that might say something I hadn’t.
The few people left stood up to gawk. Belinda pulled her coat around my shoulders and said, “Let’s go take a walk, child.” Just then, all I wanted to be was a child.
It was freezing outside, but Belinda didn’t seem to mind in her flimsy blouse. “Listen, he’s nuts. Everyone knows that. You know that. And he’s right about the toilet paper. What do you want that sandpaper crap for anyway?”
“Enough with the toilet paper. I’m sorry! I don’t know what I did that for! The way he was asking me about my pimples—which aren’t even there anymore, by the way! It was really only just one, honestly, and it was probably a hive—was just crazy.”
Belinda regarded me sympathetically. “That was no hive.”
“How could you fire someone right before Christmas?” We were at the back of the building now, walking fast. Everyone seemed to be going the opposite we so that we had to cut through the stream of them.
“Lunacy waits for no man,” Belinda said, lighting a cigarette.
3:30 p.m.
I sat at my desk and stared at my computer screen before attempting to pack up. Nobody was around. When the receptionist left, she showed me how to lock the door. “Hey, I’m real sorry about your column,” she said before she left. “I really enjoyed it.”
Imagine that.
I put some music on—a mix CD I’d gotten at World—and started backing up all my contacts and files. I told Ray what happened while I watched the file icons on the screen wing their way over to my CD. I waited for him to offer to come and help me, but I knew he wouldn’t. It was something I should do on my own, and I knew he would see it that way, too.
I grabbed a couple of boxes from the mail room, taped them with signs for keeping and tossing, and like I heard you should on an organization program, I started from the bottom up. On the very bottom was a lot of dust. All the shoes I stored down there were covered with a layer of fluff that started to rise around me when I disturbed them. There was the sensible pair I never wear, and next to them, the nonsensible, beautiful pair David had bought me after the LYMJ fiasco.
I sat there with my legs Indian style, and holding up this dusty pair brought me back to that first night. I’d been so scared and insecure about the column and my qualifications for writing it, for being the kind of person would could do something like this.
But I’d been wrong. I did a great job. No matter what Ed said, I’d entertained people. Those people felt so connected to the content that they put pen to paper to reach out and tell me about it. Still others had invested thousands of dollars in ad pages. People were invested in me and my story. It had seemed unbelievable that something like that had landed in my lap. And now it seemed unbelievable that it could be yanked away just as easily.
I tucked the special shoes into the box, though the relic they’d become, I didn’t think I’d wear them. They were fabulous, and I would always think of them with warmth knowing I wouldn’t have gotten to this point with Ray without them.
There was the stuffed mailbag under my desk, too, and I dug my hand into pull out a few letters.
Dear Anna,
I know what you mean about Christmas being hard. I think the same. In fact, I kind of dread them. You see, I don’t have a family, and I always wind up walking the city, feeling useless on Christmas. I’d like to handle it differently next year. Where has this behavior gotten me? Do you have any ideas on where a person might go on Christmas by themselves?
Sincerely,
Erin K.
Right then and there, I put down my packing and pulled out a sheet of paper to write back to Erin K.
Dear Erin,
I am beyond sorry to hear you feel that way at the holidays. I get the difficulty with Christmas. In fact, every time I go home it’s hell. My father died in a fire there when I was eight years old, and I always blamed myself for not rushing through the flames into the basement to rescue him. I hated to go home and face all this, and so I avoided it in whatever ways I could. But then I realized that you have to make things happen for yourself. It sounds like you’re on that path right now. When you forge forward, I found, you can make good things come into your life. If I were you, next year I would tell one of my friends that I’d love to spend Christmas with them. Really get into it and enjoy yourself. You’ll see, it’ll snowball from there. The next year, maybe you’ll throw your own holiday party. On Christmas Eve, I always like to go to the most unlikely, un-New York, New York place: Benihana. It’s a great show, and you sit with a whole bunch of people; it’s impossible to feel sad there.
Best regards,
Anna
P.S.: Email me anytime at anna@supermail.com
I sealed the letter inside an envelope and dropped it down the mail chute before I could change my mind. It felt wonderful trying to help that girl. Much better than trying to fit in at some swanky bar that didn’t want me in the first place. I got the sense that maybe all the pain had a purpose after all.
Into my “keeping” box, I plunked fun trinkets from the different gift bags—key chains and notepads and funky pens that light up. And then there was my mug. The words had now completely rubbed off as if I had nothing left to learn from this token. I threw everything from inside of it into the garbage, and I planned to bring it home and drink from it every day.
I went and got a Coke from the machine and shifted over to the desk chair to empty my drawers. I laughed at a funny picture of Nina and me from last Halloween. We were Rocky and Adrian. I had boxing gloves hanging around my neck and a plastic mouth guard over my teeth.
Nobody had recognized Nina’s costume. She had on a dark wig and thrift shop glasses. Ray went as Drago. He refused to pose for pictures. He kept saying, “No photos, no photos,” as if this were part of his disguise. I saw a bit of his hand at the edge of the photo, and I was overwhelmed with how much I wanted to see him now.
At 11 o’clock, I frantically stuffed the rest of my belongings into the box and a couple of shopping bags, arranged them in my arms, draped the mailbag over my shoulder, and said good-bye to New York, New York. For the second . . . and final time.
11:15 p.m.
I tried Ray on his cell phone before I reached our apartment via taxicab. I couldn’t get him. I snapped the phone shut and tipped the driver a couple extra bucks because I was feeling symbolic.
Once in our hallway, I realized I was going to need two trips to haul all this stuff upstairs. I left the box and grabbed the mailbag and everything else and huffed up the three flights.
I struggled as one of my shopping bags began to tear and finally, it busted in front of our door. I knocked to see if Ray was home, but there was no answer. “Jesus!” I yelled to the empty hall and to all of my belongings and my firing and insane ex-boss. I stamped back down the hallway toward the staircase. Mrs. Olstead came out. “I should have known,” she yelled. “I’ll have you thrown out.”
I turned and took the opportunity to unload some of my stress. “Good!” My whole body jerked with the force of the word. “Then I won't’ have to live across from you anymore!” She was that bad. And obviously, Nasty had been, too. And I wasn’t going to give everyone a million chances anymore.
You could hear a pin drop as I stood atop the staircase. And then, just as I stepped down the top stair, I heard a chuckle. It sounded like it was coming from behind my own apartment door. Olstead and I looked at each other, and then I stamped over there, fished in my coat pocket for my key, and shimmied the lock open. And then the other locks.
When the door edged open, I undid the chain latch. The light streaming through that tiny sliver was flickering.
“What the?” I pushed the door open all the way and all I could see were candles—hundreds of them.
“Well, what is it?” Olstead asked, unable to see from where she was standing. Tea lights dotted the dining table and breakfast bar, coffee table and fireplace mantle. And right there on the couch, in his torn Knicks T-shirt and old college basketball shorts was Ray. It was the most welcoming sight. He was smiling gingerly as if he hoped that were the right reaction. He was so adorable, with his nervous green eyes and perfect features, which I never would have dreamed I’d fall for. The things was that his imperfections were on the inside. There were things about him that only I could appreciate, and that made him infinitely loveable to me.
“Welcome home to the rest of your life,” he said.
“Mrs. Olstead poked her head in. She was showing us her smile, something she’d kept private all this time. And then she yelled, “That’s a fire hazard, you know!” and she showed herself out, slamming the door.
“Olstead.” I shrugged.
“Olstead,” he said. “Hey, Anna—”
“Shhh,” I said, and leaned in, kissed him, amazed with him, with his honesty and those eyes, and the fumbling for the right words—a Ray I’d never known before.
Ray helped me up with the rest of my things. And then I watched this mysterious Ray cook, trying and failing to flip mushrooms in the pan without a spatula. We ate filet mignon with one mushroom each (the others had landed somewhere behind the stove), and string beans. We drank martinis with six olives apiece. And then we were in his bed, the old plaid sheets and the worn comforter. And we lay, two people who’ve known each other for a long time and were now discovering a funny scar in the shape of New Mexico, or a freckle that could be mistaken for Mickey Mouse, which had previously been off limits.
“Ray, hey, I don’t want to ruin the moment or anything.”
“Oh no, here it goes. I’ll wash the dishes tomorrow morning, promise.” He pressed his hand to his heart.
“It’s not the dishes,” I said, smiling. I knew he’d never do them in the morning. “It’s just, I was wondering. What is it exactly that you see in me?”
His smile inverted. He searched my face through drooping eyelids, probably for something he could say in response because it would be pretty bad to have no answer. His chin quivered almost imperceptibly. “You don’t know. Do you? You’ve shown me how to love someone. I don’t know if you realized it before, but I’ve gone through quite a lot of women, and I’ve used them pretty poorly. With each one, I hoped—maybe this one I will love! But never, nothing. I thought it was them, but then it became incredible, ridiculous. It was always me. I couldn’t open up. I couldn’t share the simplest thing. No, I didn’t have a nice weekend; my grandmother died. I wanted to, but I didn’t know how. It sounds dumb to someone like you, so in touch with their feelings, I know, but for me . . . it’s, I don’t know, it was impossible. Don’t you ever wonder why I never had any other close friends besides you? They just don’t stick around because they don’t know me. How could they?
“But you—you reached down into the worst parts of yourself, and you brought me into that, and you let me help you. It was, it was a fucking amazing thing to feel that with you and for you, to watch you tackle this thing once and for all, and to know I’d been a part of it. We’ve always had that something—you and me. And this way you’ve opened me, it just brought me over the top for you.”
1:00 a.m.
Later, we lie warm in each other’s arms, wrapped in blankets. I finally addressed the elephant in the room. “I can’t believe my editor makes all his business decisions based on the readings of a psychic who said he needed to fire me because I had a hive and my hair was thinning.”
“That was no hive,” Ray said.
I smothered him with a pillow and roared with laughter. The dirty martinis had dulled the anger.
“Shit,” Ray said, more serious, the pillow tucked under his arm.
“I’ll drink to that.”
“I bet you Fenprick would say this is a great test for you, though.” And that’s why he’s so perfect for me.
10:00 a.m., Friday, December 23
“Anna, Anna, Anna, Anna.” Fenprick looked over my journal and ran his palm over his thick hair. He blinked three times, bit the side of his bottom lip and then said, “Shit, you’ve had a bad week.”
Surprisingly, I wanted to smile, as if I’d been recognized for outstanding achievement. Yes, it’s true! I had a horrible time! Now I’m free to go home and fall into a deep depression, or revert back to that avoidance thing I found so much easier than this failure I feel now. Whatever the reason for my termination, I had only one equation in mind: Bad writing + no talent = failure. I’d doodled that at least four times on the last page I’d entered into the journal.
“So,” he continued, taking his regular stance, ankle over knee, hands folded over it. “I guess you think you should have never taken the chance and that you failed because you have no talent and you write badly. I guess you should just try to get your old job back.”
Sadly, I had thought exactly that. It seemed my replacement had decided to take a runner, and I thought Nasty and I might be even now. It would be like coming full circle; there was a certain poetic appeal. “Of course not,” I said.
“Good!” He smiled. “In fact, you’ve come so far . . . this is just the kind of obstacle you need to prove that you can overcome anything, that no matter what type of bad luck seems to land in your lap, that you’re never going to let that ruin your life again. This might sound crazy, but I’m glad you lost your job.”
“Thanks?” I screwed up my face.
“Now, get yourself out there and find an even better way to use your talents. You said yourself you didn’t really like going to all those fancy places.”
Sure, it had been okay to say that then, but now that I wasn’t going to get free outfits and dinners and be treated like Lindsay Lohan all the time, I did miss it. Plus, trying something that I really wanted would leave me excuseless I the case that it didn’t work out. But I couldn’t say that.
“Don’t forget,” he said. “Your assignment is to go to your father’s grave this weekend.”
How could I ever forget that?
“I’m sure it doesn’t feel like the right time, with everything that’s going on. But it’s never going to feel like the right time. It’s vital that you go.”