“So then, they say to me that I have ten days to get out of this country, so I come back to New York, and I decide. I must get married—
to the American.
”
She pauses for theatrical effect, continues.
“So now I have nine days left to find the husband. I put the advert on craigslist.”
She sniffs haughtily, the lady of the manor, hacks up a large phlegmy glob that she deposits in a shredded, linty tissue retrieved from the pocket of her jeans, and disappears to the ladies’ room, wobbling like a custard.
New York City, a dream and a nightmare. You start contemplating the incomprehensible, incorporating it into everyday living. Oscillating between the lives of the people I work with and my own life here, strangely illusory and insubstantial, everything starts to feel fictional. What is real? The curled-up degree certificate in the bottom of my suitcase? The five years spent traveling alone around the world? The rejection letters from company after company? The bank statement so depress ingly void of digits before the decimal point? The dreams that keep me on this peculiar path, stop me from jacking it all in, book a ticket somewhere new, put a middle finger up to the city that wouldn’t accept me? Or the fears that keep me from going back to London, insubstantial fears, fears of being nobody among my glittering contemporaries, fears of being nothing there, not even (dare I say it?) illegal? Or the knowledge that I’d been in the U.S. for eight weeks and seemed no closer to finding a base and filling in the empty spaces that were so glaringly apparent in my life from years of transience—was that real? Or could I just gloss over it? It’s irrelevant! I’ll laugh about it in a year’s time! It’s all part of growing up, of adventure, of life experience.
Tina nods to me chirpily, her mouth twisted into a grin.
“
Gimme a Woah!
English, how’s it going? You ain’t working today are you? Hey, did I tell you about that fucked-up three-some I had that time with the bartender from O’Grady’s with one arm . . .”
“Tina, I need help.”
She stops, frowns, her eyebrows knitting heavily together.
“What kind?”
“Social Security number.”
“What’s it for?”
“It’s for me. I need to get a new job. I can’t keep working off tips, and freelancing doesn’t pay. I need a real job, a wage, not working sixty-hour weeks for sod all. You know how it is. Most people don’t check the visa, they just want the SS number, so it’ll tide me over.”
“Thought you had a visa? Just get a journalist’s visa, easiest kind to get, that’s what I did back in Australia. Made up a fucking newspaper, wrote a few letters on letterhead—
bang,
ten-year entry.”
“I’m applying for that. I just need a job now until it comes through. Soon. And the only way I can get a decent-paying job is that damned number.”
Tina pauses, nods. “Hey, Julio,” she yells to a waiter. He turns and walks over. “English here needs your help.”
He flashes me a disarming smile. “Why don’t we go outside for a cigarette?” He opens the door, and we sit on a doorstep, just out of sight of the restaurant.
“Whadda you want?”
“Social Security card.”
“No problem. We’ll text you the number tomorrow. The card will take, maybe a week. It’ll cost you fifteen bucks, pay on delivery. All good? Cool.”
He hurls his half-smoked cigarette into the street, where it rolls, stops, smolders. Already the snow had gone, spring was creeping in. New York was changing, starting to wake up. And having hovered, frozen in stasis, the Mimi side of things was beginning to mature as the ice thawed, the buds opened. And it was painless, that’s the strangest, most unusual thing about it. This Mimi-puberty wasn’t like the first, dredged in Sylvia Plath poetry and black clothing and stylish anorexia and tears and marijuana and acoustic guitars and dry humping spotty boys with Oasis hair and corduroy pants. This was utterly painless, and even the fear of doing something illegal, something that could have me thrown out of the country, something that was completely, unmistakably
wrong,
was complemented by that sharp pure smack of living, that pleasurable sting of existence, the realization that this, definitely, was something more.
My new employment, secured with the fake SS number, is directly opposite the gaping wound where the World Trade Center used to be. The basic premise was that I would be responsible for interviewing potential carers, nannies, nursing aides, butlers, chefs, housekeepers, and other staff for the crème de la crème of New York society. Brenda, my boss, explains my duties in great detail.
“So then you, like, pick up the
phone
when it
rings,
and there will be, like, a
person
on the other end, and you have to say ‘Hello, Star Skivvies. How may I help you?’ and they will
reply
. . .”
The office is beige and pink. They play supermarket music continually at a tone set to resemble Chinese water torture. Brenda wears brown tweed and shoulderpads. I spend an hour playing solitaire on the computer. The phone rings.
“Hello, Star Skivvies. How may I help you?”
A quavering voice trembles across the line.
“It’s Po-lly. Who’re
you?
I don’t know your voice. Who are you?”
I put the call on hold and tell Brenda that it is Polly. She mouths (using accompanying hand gestures) that I should tell Polly, one of their clients, a Texan septuagenarian millionairess living in New York, that her nurse, Ramona, had gone to the hospital to have a cyst removed from her inner thigh and that Nurse Gloria would be caring for her today. Charades over, Brenda resumes instant messaging with Leroy in the PR Department, on the next desk. I go back to the call.
“Hi, Polly, Ramona can’t make it today . . .”
“I know, but I don’t want a
noo
nurse, I jes’ want my Ramona or
nobody,
young lady . . .”
There is a scuffle in the background. A croaky male voice yells, “Is she young? Good lookin’? Ready fer anythin’?”
Polly’s voice tremulously reemerges.
“
Shurrup,
Bill. That’s ma husband. Tell me, young lady, this Gloria, is she . . .
black?
”
“Erm . . . no?”
“Wa-all, I guess I kin have a noo nurse jes’ fer
one
day. I’m jes’ worried about the time it takes me to open the door. It takes me a real long time to open the door. What if I spend all that time gettin’ to the door, and she ain’t
there
no more?”
I check the time. 10:20 A.M. Gloria is scheduled to arrive at 11:00 A.M.
“Polly, tell you what, how about you set off for the door
now,
and by the time you get there, she’ll probably be standing on the doorstep waiting for you.”
“Oh. I guess. Oh. I’ll get up now. Oh it hurts. Oh the
pain
. . .”
I hang up.
Star Skivvies prides itself on its staff-selection process, which is, according to the website, “likened to Fort Knox” in its ability to filter out “smokers,” “those with fake documentation,” “illegals,” and other “undesirables.” How they managed to miss the chain-smoking illegal on the front desk answering the phone for ten bucks an hour with a fake SS number and no work visa is anyone’s guess.
Back in Brooklyn. “How the hell you manage to get that job?” Raoul inquires as he tenderly cradles his scrotum and holds aloft a Bud Light glistening with dew, standing in the doorway of my room wearing a pair of graying boxer shorts that are disturbingly full. His attitude had changed. He was now playing the role of concerned parent, plying me with beer and food when I stepped into the apartment, telling me about the JAP he was fucking, carefully watching my inscrutable face for signs of interest. He was not used to women ignoring his charms. He was coiled, ready to snap, but he was admirably controlling his temper and his sexual frustration. I didn’t trust Raoul. I look at him sideways. He assumes a vacant expression.
“Craigslist.”
He grunts, amused, hands me a beer.
“So what’s the plan now? Stay there until the visa comes through?”
“Well, I guess. They pay me in cash, which is nice. But I’m still trying to write more articles for other newspapers. I was going to do a piece on illegal sex workers, sex trafficking—that kind of stuff. Going over to a stripclub at the weekend to speak to some of the girls. To be honest, I think I’d rather be a fucking stripper than work with Brenda.”
Raoul looks at me and laughs.
“You ain’t got the titties for that one, girl. Good job as well. You don’t wanna be one of them fucking hos. You wanna watch
Hiroshima mon amour
with me afore I get back in the box?”
We sit on the sofa wrapped in a duvet. I feel defiant. I didn’t, have never, liked being told what I can’t do.
You’ll never get to Cambridge,
they said back home, because people didn’t, not from my town, not to read an arty-farty subject like English Literature. I don’t like being told what I can’t do. I catch Raoul looking at me hungrily more than once,
I don’t like people thinking they know me, my actions,
but I stare resolutely at the movie, ignore a tentative hand on my knee, until I fall asleep and wake up in the morning, alone.
Monday morning in the office. Brenda reveals to me a new gift—in the form of office attire, complete with shoulderpads.
“I thought that you could do with some more suitable clothes. Maybe baggy combats aren’t the best wear for some of our more priority clients? We’re, like, the same size, right?”
Brenda brandishes a size 16 jacket.
Swamped in tweed, bolstered by shoulderpads, and inhaling the pungent stench of ozone and menopause, I commence my sentence. The phone rings.
“Hello, Star Skivvies. How may I help you?”
It is Polly, the septuagenarian Texan millionairess.
“Who’s that? Who is it? Is that
Brenda?
”
“No, it’s Mimi. How are you, Polly?”
Bill, Polly’s dearly beloved, passed away on Friday, presumably after overexposure to their noo “colored” nurse, Dotzy, from St. Lucia.
“I’ve lost his teeth. They’re
gone.
That noo nurse
stole
’em. Tell her to give ’em back. I need Bill’s teeth fer the funeral. I can’t
bury
him without his
teeth
. . .”
She starts to weep hysterically. I switch to speakerphone. Brenda snickers cruelly before turning back to
People
magazine and a bumper packet of Twinkies, keeping one eye out for any new instant messages from Leroy in PR. I transfer Polly to the harassed office assistant, Sally-Jane. Sally-Jane is Brenda’s favorite target. She bears the brunt of the brutal and cutting instant messages that Brenda had honed to perfection after years of mastering the skilled art of office sadism.
SJ. R U S2pid? Do u want 2 keep this job?
Sally-Jane flutters anxiously.
SJ palpitates visibly and retires to the photocopier. I had earlier informed Brenda that I possessed a debilitating and highly unpleasant bowel disorder that necessitates frequent hourly trips to the bathroom, thus ensuring my cigarette breaks go uninterrupted. Noting that I have twelve callers on hold, I decide it is prudent to exercise one of such breaks, and vanish to my usual spot outside Ground Zero.
Returning to The Office, I am greeted by a sheaf of letters that have, yet again, failed to live up to the high standards set by Brenda and must be retyped for the sixth time. I surreptitiously click on the Internet while Brenda works industriously on her eleventh Twinkie of the day, and I start to write an e-mail. Instantly my IM flashes.
I close the window and return to correcting letterheads. Check the time. Reach, quietly, for my cellphone. The IM icon flashes.
R U making personal calls?
The phone rings.
“Hello, Star Skivvies. How may I help you?”
I arrive home that night to find that we had run out of toilet paper, we could no longer reach the bathroom because of the amount of trash piled in front of it, and the cat had developed unsightly dags all around its derriere. The musicians were nowhere to be seen. “Japan,” says Raoul vaguely from his horizontal position on my bed, presumably favoring it to his own. “On tour. We’re looking after the apartment.” We, this ubiquitous
we.
It makes me uncomfortable, though why I couldn’t tell you. I wasn’t fucking him and had no intention of it, though I could, and probably would have, under less trying circumstances. I used to believe, once upon a time, that you should save yourself for the special ones, the ones you love, the ones you care about. Then when I left the old me behind, started to unleash this Mimi-monster lying sleeping within me, I stopped.
I venture deeper into the apartment. A thick, fierce stench wafts up from some indefinable location, disseminated swiftly through the loft by the industrial heater blasting like a giant blow-dryer. I follow the aroma of poop to what is not, as I had thought in a brief moment of terror, a deceased roommate, but a plastic box hidden behind a molding sofa, half a bicycle, and a drum kit. Upon removal of the lid, I am greeted by a veritable Pompeii of fossilized kitty crap, resembling miniature TerraCotta Warriors. I reach for a nearby garden trowel, and through a process of trial and error, manage to deduce that rather than throw the entire box away—litter, crap, and all—it is possible to sift gently through the offending articles, remove them, and
recycle
the actual litter, so that the apartment
smells
only of cat pee, as opposed to shit. The ingenuity of this astounds me.
Next morning. The Office is eerily quiet. Even Sally-Jane desists from typing away in her usual manic mode, and glances at me nervously as I slink in five minutes late and head to my desk. Brenda appears. She wears the look of one deeply, deeply bereft.