Authors: Daphne Uviller
“Then don’t wriggle.”
“Take these off me!”
The three of us looked at her calmly.
“Okay, okay.” She spoke in a quiet rush. “Dover spent the rest of Saturday night with me, but all we did was kiss.”
“C’mon!” I said, feeling whorish by comparison.
“Swear to God. Take these off me, please?” she begged.
“We’ll need a little more, Ms. Kim,” Tag said with fake nonchalance, pretending to examine her fingernails.
Mercedes hurried to admit that in the past three days, Dover Carter had sent her two bouquets of orchids and three of his favorite recordings of Bach cantatas, which we all agreed was commendably understated for a movie star who could have sent her a new car as a token of his affection. And Gregory couldn’t even pick up the phone for me? I fought off a wave of self- pity.
Tag nodded, satisfied, and unlocked the cuffs. Mercedes rubbed her wrists dramatically. Lucy started to distribute rubber gloves from a box that, both disturbingly and reassuringly, had been in the closet next to the lubricants. Finally, I couldn’t keep my sad state to myself any longer.
“I slept with the exterminator!” I blurted out. We stood in James’s gray and black and stainless- steel kitchen as I poured out my woeful tale about the broken dryer and the alley and the staircase and Roxana’s closet and Gregory’s non- calling. I feared chastisement (Mercedes), mockery (Tag), and angry jealousy cloaked in false sympathy (Lucy), but they weren’t judgmental at all. In fact, it seemed I had overestimated their opinion of me. Mostly, they were relieved I hadn’t hooked up with Hayden again. How weak did they think I was? I tried to impress upon them that I was the victim of a hump- and-dump, that I deserved some sympathy, but they were unimpressed.
“He’ll call,” Tag said, turning back to James’s pantry shelves,
tossing an open box of crackers and a dusty bag of flour into the trash.
Mercedes nodded and flipped on the vacuum cleaner. I flipped it off.
“Why don’t you just call him?” she said, and switched it on again. Frustrated, I followed Lucy into the bathroom. She pulled on a second pair of gloves over her first and sprinkled some Comet into the toilet bowl. A part of me was glad I could report to her that I’d been used; it made up for the fact that Gregory had called me and not her. But even Lucy seemed unaffected by my news.
“You know,” she said, swirling a toilet brush around the bowl, and I figured she was about to launch into an over-generalized characterization of the male species’ insipient mating behaviors, “I’ve decided to throw a party for myself.”
“Okay.” I picked up a sponge and waited for her to explain the non sequitur.
“A death party.”
“Lu-uce—” I protested.
“Do you even know what a death party is?”
“Do you?”
“I’m inventing it,” she said, “so of course I know what it is.”
“What is it?” I asked with measured patience.
She sat back on her heels, holding the dripping wand over the toilet. “It’s when you have the good fortune—see, I’m referring to Renee’s prediction as good fortune—to get advance notice of your death, but you’re in good enough health to throw a party that you can enjoy.”
“Lucy,” I tried again.
“People can give the eulogies they’d give at my funeral, but this way I can actually hear them. Isn’t that what everyone wishes for a dead person? That they could hear all the great things people are saying about them?”
She brushed the back of her wrist across her face, trying to push a damp lock of blond hair off her cheek. I reached over and tucked the strands behind her ear. This close up, I noticed how tired her eyes looked on her angular face, and a lump formed in my throat.
“Whatever you want, sweets,” I said lightly, trying not to let her hear the pity I knew she’d resent.
“People are going to have to fly in,” she continued, “like for a wedding. Or a funeral. It’s going to be just as important.”
“But then,” I reasoned, “will they have to come back for the funeral itself? Or is this instead of a funeral?”
Lucy frowned. “I can’t ask Abigail to fly in twice. She doesn’t have that kind of money.” She shook her head resolutely. “No, if they can only come to one, it has to be this.”
Just as I was trying to figure out whether I needed to expend energy trying to dissuade her from this plan, Tag yelled out, “Hey, can I put away these creepy photos?”
“Which creepy photos?” I shouted back, heading out of the bathroom.
“The double whammy over the fireplace!”
Tag was in the living room, standing in front of James’s shrine to himself. For kicks, she’d turned off the lights and lit the candles beside the picture frames. The candlelight flickering across James’s grinning mug, together with the rain pounding at the dark windows, transformed the room from a mildly creepy place to a downright sinister one.
“Tag!” I shrieked, and Mercedes and Lucy came running.
“Oh, gross!” Lucy yelled, flipping on the lights.
“I just wanted to see what James saw when he worshipped himself,” Tag cackled.
“So what do you see, Granger?” Mercedes asked crisply.
“Dust,” Tag concluded, and blew out the candles. She picked up one of the photos and chucked it to me.
“Adios,” I said, catching it and putting it in a box with some of James’s towels. Tag threw me the second one and something rattled as I caught it. We looked at one another. I groaned, suddenly exhausted by James and his pink staircase and his icky mysteries and his multiple personalities, which were becoming less exciting by the minute. I turned the frame over in my hands and pried off the back.
Two keys stared up at me. Two more damned keys that opened who knew what. Another staircase? Another closet? James must have been best friends with a locksmith. I didn’t care what these keys opened. I wanted to be done with James. I wanted Gregory to call. I wanted this apartment cleaned up and rented out so I could be done with it, too.
I handed the keys to Lucy, who happily trotted off to find her color- coded labels. As long as they were categorized in some way, she would not be bothered by them. Neither, I decided, for the moment, would I.
O
N THURSDAY MORNING, I WOKE TO A STALE, ACRID ODOR.
Gas? Smoke? Helium? I jumped out of bed and frantically sniffed around my apartment. I looked outside for fire trucks, utility trucks, smoking telephone wires. Nothing except an oil truck parked outside. I opened my apartment door and the smell hit me harder. I began to whimper, panic fanning out from my heart to my fingers and toes. Calm, Zephyr, calm. I threw on some jeans, grabbed my keys, and headed for the basement.
I liked our basement about as much as I liked our alley. It was dark and low- ceilinged, crowded with the moldy detritus of past and current tenants. Pipes and wires were exposed in an acrobatic tangle that looked, to my untrained eye, to be up to the safety codes of centuries past.
I flipped the light on and was rewarded with the sight of a cluster of roaches scurrying for the walls. What the hell were we paying Gregory’s company for? I gulped back the bile that rose in my throat and made my way gingerly along the narrow
corridor, toward the front of the building. The smell grew stronger, and as I threw open the door to the boiler room, my eyes started to sting. The entire floor was covered in thick black oil, which was quickly spreading toward me and the door. Did I think to throw sand from the red fire buckets in the path of the encroaching goo? Did I throw down an old mattress to stanch the flow? No. I turned and ran.
My heart was pounding. Could the building catch on fire? Should I call the … the police? A plumber? The oil company that James had been getting kickbacks from? Were we allowed to keep using them? Why hadn’t I thought about this sooner? Because it was April and the oil tank had stayed full enough. Until now.
I hurried out the front door and down the stoop. An unshaven guy who I was pretty sure shouldn’t have been smoking a cigarette while he pumped oil through our sidewalk fuel line looked up.
“Stop!” I screamed. His eyebrows lifted imperceptibly, which infuriated me. He should have dropped his hose and matched my panic.
“There’s oil all over my basement floor!” I shrieked. He let the lever on the hose snap free.
“Aw, shit.” He actually smacked his cigarette- gripping hand against his head in a gesture that had been abandoned in a Hollywood studio lot decades ago. “You guys got the broken gauge.”
I just stared. He stepped over to his truck and hit a button, which made an enormous wheel retract the hose.
“You guys got the broken gauge, right?” he repeated.
“I have no idea,” I said in a hoarse whisper.
“Yeah, it’s you guys, cuz James usually hangs out downstairs and then comes up to tell us when it’s gettin’ full. Right. But he’s not here, right? Cuza the money shit, yeah?” All I
could do was look at him, my shoulders sagging, my jaw hanging slack. “Yeah, right, so it probably overflowed, huh?”
“You could say that. I have gallons of oil all over my basement floor,” I told him, waiting for him to offer to clean it up as part of what was surely our comprehensive service plan.
He grabbed a rag off the driver’s seat and wiped his hands. “Eh, it’s probably not gallons. Just seems like it cuza the properties of liquid.”
A physics lesson from James’s former colleague at seven in the morning? I would have preferred ten phone calls from Mrs. Hannaham.
“What do I do?” I pleaded, my voice dangerously close to tears.
“Kitty litter,” he said, yanking up some levers on the back of the truck.
“Kitty litter.”
“Kitty litter soaks it up and then you just throw it out. Any old cheap brand, but not the organic crap. That don’t work.”
“Maybe you could have warned me that my gauge was broken,” I told him incredulously.
He shrugged. “It’s your building, lady.”
“Can you help me?” I said in a small voice.
He jumped into the truck and lit another cigarette. “Sorry, sweetheart. Other deliveries.” He looked at me, closing one eye against a curl of smoke. “You the new super?”
I nodded.
“A lady super. Cute. Feminism and shit, that’s good stuff.” He started the truck. “A piece of advice?”
I waited, hoping for some secret brotherhood knowledge, a tenet known only to supers.
“Get the gauge fixed.” He drove off.
My dad went to work late that morning, having helped me haul fifteen jumbo bags of Tidy Cats Long- Lasting Odor
Control Scooping Multi Cat Litter from Artie’s Hardware on Fourteenth Street, in a handcart the owner lent us. He tried to keep me from thinking about what a loser I was by shoving the purported bright side in my face.
First, there was: “We don’t have to go to the gym today!” and then: “Kitty litter! Brilliant!” and finally, my least favorite: “Darling daught, think of everything you’re learning. How many women your age get this kind of practical education? I think this is great! You’ll be glad this happened.”
In fact, the only bright side was that the whole incident had proved Mrs. Hannaham to be an olfactory liar. If she hadn’t called this morning, of all mornings, to complain about the worst smell to hit 287 West 12th Street since before the days of closed sewers, then clearly the helium and the gas and the smoke she claimed she smelled were all lies, designed to get attention or just to torture me. Had I not stunk of fuel-grade petroleum and a chemical simulacrum of springtime, I might have felt a tinge of pity. Instead, the little singed devil perched on my shoulder clapped with glee at having found her out.
I trudged upstairs in a cloud of self- disgust, eager for a scalding shower. I had just pushed back the curtain when the phone rang. Unable to stomach Mrs. H.’s complaint du jour, I let the machine screen—I very purposely did not have voice mail, for situations such as this. But instead of Mrs. H., it was a message from a broker who’d heard about James’s apartment from a “friend,” and wanted to come see “the listing.” I grabbed the phone and answered breathlessly, pretending I’d just walked in.
I figured he was a colleague of my mom’s friend Eva Lowell. But when I pressed him, it turned out that Officer Varlam, who’d been assigned to James’s case, liked to help his
brother- in- law by alerting him to the vacancies that often resulted from the collars he made. Freddy Givitch and I made an appointment for that afternoon. I was so excited about having a listing that I surprised my workout clothes by putting them on and taking them Rollerblading along the river. I figured since I was already sweaty, I might as well purge the oil fumes from my skin and the black thoughts from my tired head.
Outside, branches littered the street, and soggy circulars from Rite Aid clung to every step of our stoop in mushy lumps, but the air was crisp and clean and dry. I crab- walked down the steps, strapped on my helmet, and took off along Twelfth Street. I whizzed over the jagged sidewalk, past the neighbors waiting for their parking spots to become legal. They were making the best of their bi- weekly, car- bound ninety minutes. There was the hefty woman who leaned out her door, rolled up her jeans, and applied depilatory to her legs (only in warm weather). There was the frazzled pale woman in a tracksuit who pounded on her laptop, shouted into her headset, and guzzled caffeine from two Murray’s Bagels coffee cups on her dashboard. There were the three guys in a row—a pickup truck, a dented blue van, and another pickup truck—who slept, mouths open, radios blaring.
I turned twice and continued along Thirteenth Street, past the yoga center, past the drunks who reigned over the triangular patch of ragged green struggling to be a park, and past Aqua Kids, the clothing boutique that sold ninety- five- dollar shirts for toddlers and that the Sterling Girls had deemed the embodiment of everything wrong with the world.
I had crossed the highway and was about to take off down the riverside path when I noticed two policemen and two tall women in snug, sequined clothing tottering on high heels, arguing in front of the public bathroom. I made my way over as
casually as I could, trying to commit the scene to memory in case I needed to serve as a future witness. What does a witness wear to court? I knelt down and pretended to tighten my laces.