The Whopper

When our next-door neighbor was about to move out, Susan and I had some trepidation about who would move in to replace her. She hadn’t been staying there much recently but had been letting another girl use her room: Juanita, a girl in her mid-twenties who worked on and off as an artist’s model, a brown-eyed, raven-haired beauty.

One afternoon Susan and I ran into Juanita in the halls, and she proudly proclaimed, “I’m going to be your new neighbor!”

“Oh, that’s great,” I said, wondering immediately where she had obtained the money.

“I told Stanley I don’t have any money now,” she went on, “but I have a Larry Rivers painting in the room worth thirty-five to fifty thousand dollars. I told him, ‘when I sell the painting I can give you the rent for several months, or a year, whatever you like.’ And he said that was fine.”

“Wow!” I said. “Fifty thousand dollars!”

“Well, estimates differ,” Juanita said. “But it’s worth a lot of money. I asked Stanley, ‘Don’t you want to see the painting?’ And he said, ‘no, I trust you.’”

Didn’t sound like him, but I didn’t say anything.

“Isn’t that weird that he’d let me move in without any deposit or anything?”

Yeah, pretty weird.

“The guys at the desk said Stanley just reads people. Isn’t that funny? He doesn’t need any references. He doesn’t need to do any background checks. He can tell if you’re a good person just by talking with you for a while. My mother was a poet and my father was a sculptor. They knew Brendan Behan. He even wrote them a letter. I showed it to Stanley, and he read it. He agreed that it was worth something, though of course not as much as the painting.”

“What’s in the letter?” I asked.

“Oh, it describes how Brendan had trouble getting toilet paper and getting his drain unclogged and other basic services when he was living at the hotel. It’s typewritten, but you can tell it’s by Brendan by the scathingly satirical tone.”

Neither I nor Susan believed any of this about the painting or the letter; that’s why we didn’t ask to see them. But we figured probably Stanley just liked her—she was a pretty girl, after all—and so was doing her a favor and letting her move in, hoping she could make enough money through modeling or other means to pay the rent.

Then, late one night near the end of the month, we heard a racket outside our door. When I looked out to see what was going on, I saw that Juanita and her boyfriend were moving out her furniture—or anyway, somebody’s furniture—and I asked her if she needed any help. She acted kind of nervous and didn’t seem to want me around. The piece they were moving at that moment was an old, rickety writing desk; she asked me if I knew anything about antiques, and when I said no, she dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

A couple of days later, I asked a girl who knew Juanita, and she said, “There’s no way in hell Stanley would rent a room to her. He never wants to see her again in his life.”

There are any number of con men and pathological liars wandering these halls, but most of their lies aren’t so easily disproved. Juanita seemed to desperately need to believe her wild story, and to need others to believe it. She also might have been hinting around that we should give her a recommendation. “I really feel like I belong here,” she had told us at one point. Most likely, she was right.