In the Drink (10 page)

Conversely, the less she knew about me, the better for both of us. I tried not to reveal anything about my life outside her apartment, to manifest only the qualities she needed to project onto me. To this end, I modeled myself after the personal secretaries
I’d seen on
Masterpiece Theatre
, bespectacled girls who blended into the background until their mistresses needed them to take a letter or reserve them a berth on the Orient Express. Whenever she asked a direct question about my life—did I have a boyfriend, what did my mother and father do, where did I plan to go during my two weeks off—I smiled brightly and answered in a chatty, obfuscating stream of non-information, then turned the topic back to her. As a result, she knew only my phone number and where I’d gone to college, and she might have had some general idea of my age.

About two years before, once I’d begun writing what was certain to become a best-selling book, even a crappy one under someone else’s name, I had begun to view my secretarial duties with increasing resentment, and I was neither professional nor dedicated enough to check the consequent downhill slide of Jackie’s accounts, her filing, her correspondence. This was fine as long as I didn’t screw up too badly, but losing the photograph was maybe the worst thing I’d ever done, and there was nothing I could do now but wait for her to find out.

She returned at noon on a gust of cheerful energy. “It’s as cold as the North Pole out there!” she said, coming to stand in the doorway while she took off her coat. Her face was flushed, her eyes were bright, her hair was freshly poufed. “Did you call that man?”

“Which man?”

She looked sharply at me. “Right there on the list I left you. He’s waiting for my answer. I told him I’d call first thing this morning. Call him immediately and tell him, just the way I wrote it.”

A nanosecond later I heard her in the utility room, saying something in her pidgin Spanish to Juanita, who laughed. I felt
intensely jealous of Juanita. I stood up and made my unsteady way out to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. My nervous system jangled and roared. Jackie appeared in the doorway. “What did he say?”

“Jackie,” I said shakily, “I’m a little concerned about something. When I came in this morning, one of the envelopes for Gil Reeve was missing.”

We stared at each other for a while.

“Which one?”

My face was numb. “The Marcos picture,” I said clearly, so she wouldn’t make me repeat it.

“What do you mean, it’s missing?”

“When I left I put both envelopes on my shelf, and when I came in I found only one of them. I thought you might have taken the other one to show someone.”

“Why would I do that? Of course I didn’t touch it!”

There was a bad silence.

“Well, you’d better find it,” she said. “I told you not to lose it. I have no negative and no other copy.”

“I can’t find it,” I said, “and I’ve looked everywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve searched the whole apartment and it’s not anywhere.”

“What,” she whispered. Here it came. “Claudia. That picture is irreplaceable. The book will be absolutely ruined without it.”

“I know,” I said.

She gave a cry of rage. The skin of her face had been stretched over her cheekbones to her ears and sewn into a tight, shiny mask, too firmly pinned in place to express any emotion stronger than mild curiosity. A thick coat of foundation and powder further restricted its mobility, so she had to clasp her hands to her temples and grimace openmouthed to convey her fury. Her neck tendons strained against their moorings.
Her mouth strove to expel the words stuck like apple pips in her throat. “This is insupportable! This should not happen! Do you see how much trouble you cause me? I cannot have a secretary who is so careless and sloppy with my precious things!”

She did an abrupt about-face and tapped to the pantry on her ludicrously high, small pumps. She looked top-heavy from the rear, like a thistle or a tadpole, some primitive unfinished thing. Her big bronze mushroom of hair and the broad shoulders of her suit jacket dwindled to a hard tucked-under little nub of a butt and thin, slightly knock-kneed legs. I lumbered behind her and stood wretchedly by while she began rifling through the filing cabinets, opening drawers and pawing through them, in search of what I wasn’t sure. “What’s this!” she snapped, holding up a piece of paper. “I thought you sent this letter ages ago! What’s it doing here!”

“Oh, there it is,” I said. “I thought you sent it.”

She handed it to me wordlessly. I clutched it in my damp grasp. This was not my fault, but the reason was too long and involved to even begin to explain. A little later she held up something else. “And this! What’s this doing here! This was supposed to have been faxed to Gil last week. There’s no date stamp on it.”

“I’ve never seen that before,” I said faintly.

“What do you mean you’ve never seen it? I gave it to you to fax last week and you told me you’d done it!”

“I must have thought you meant something else,” I said. Again, this was not technically my fault, but at the moment, everything was. “I’m sorry,” I said.

She looked at me shrewdly, penetrating my skull to the gray waste underneath, her eyes as intelligent and quick as a bird’s in the shallow plastic shell of her face. “I don’t know,” she said, “how you function in the world. You’re not normal. It
is impossible for me to understand the way your mind works.” I stood there, a mute lump of apology. “Go and fax it to him this minute. And call Imelda and ask if she’ll send us the negative. Use the New York number, she’s in town right now. Tell her it was 1977, the trip we took to visit them, she’ll remember. And be polite, those Filipinos are very well-mannered.”

We reconvened a bit later. She seemed calm, but I knew it was only an illusion. “What did Imelda say?”

“Her assistant is asking her about the negative. I’m waiting to hear back.”

“You faxed that list to Gil?”

“Ten minutes ago, and I called to make sure he got it.”

“Tell me exactly what you were doing, right before you left yesterday.”

“I sorted through your mail and left it for you on the table, then I put my things away and went home.”

A lightbulb went on above that sleuthing head of hers. “I threw out that whole stack of junk,” she said. “I didn’t have time to look through it. The envelope could very well have been in that pile. I’m sure that’s exactly what happened. Honestly, Claudia, you’re a nice girl, very pleasant, but you just don’t
think.”
Her voice trembled with patronizing pity. “It’s terrible for me to have a secretary I can’t count on. If you worked in the real world, in a real job, I wonder what would happen to you.”

I lifted the receiver and called the doorman. Ralph said with a smile in his voice, “Garbage? Louie went around and got it this morning, I’m not sure what time, I think around nine o’clock, a little later. It should all still be down there in the basement.” I thanked him and hung up. “When did Juanita empty the trash?” I asked Jackie.

She went and consulted with Juanita, and then came back, looking pleased with herself. “Eight this morning.”

The garbage men usually came before that; it might still be down there. If not, I was going to have to go to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and paw through a city’s worth of cat food tins and used maxi pads until I found it. Louie the handyman took me down in the freight elevator to the basement, where he showed me thirteen or fourteen big bags of garbage lined up against the far wall. “Good luck, miss,” he said, and clanked off with his tool belt. I undid the twist-tie on the nearest bag, removed my sweater and rolled up the sleeves of my blouse, then plunged my hands in before I could think about what I was doing. The smell was not unbearable, since this was recent garbage. In fact, I came across a half-eaten ham or turkey on rye that looked pretty good. I hadn’t eaten anything today, I realized, and almost laughed at myself, kneeling there sniffing hungrily.

I mucked through orange peels, chicken bones, wads of Kleenex, cereal boxes, slimy vegetable detritus and no manila envelope. I closed the first bag and looked at the rest of them before selecting another one and pulling off the twist-tie. Thinking I heard something rustling inside, I took it apart warily and then reassembled it as gingerly as if it contained a land mine, but I found nothing alive or explosive, and nothing I was looking for. Long ago, Juanita had escaped to wherever she went at one o’clock, leaving me alone with Jackie, who was cooling her heels overhead, awaiting my reemergence from the underworld with the photograph borne aloft like a celluloid Eurydice. She shouldn’t have trusted someone like me with something so precious, but that was beside the point. I couldn’t return empty-handed. If she said it was down in the trash, it had better be down in the trash: the anticipation of what she would say to me if I failed to locate it there almost capsized me in advance. I dug through the next several bags feeling the encroaching dementia caused by overloading the neurological
channels that reconcile internal knowledge with external reality. What was I doing? For whom, and why? How much was I being paid to root through umpteen bags of garbage? What amount of money, if any, would be enough?

As I was closing the tenth or eleventh bag, I heard footsteps behind me. I looked up over my right shoulder and beheld the merry face of Ralph. “Ralph,” I said, “look what it’s come to.”

“What did she lose now?” he asked, chuckling.

“Photograph,” I grunted, dragging the next bag toward the light. “In a manila envelope. She didn’t lose it, though. I did.”

“You know what she did the other night? Came running downstairs all in a tizzy about some flowers we were supposed to have for her to take somewhere. She said you’d ordered them. ‘My secretary was supposed to have arranged this,’ she said.”

“I thought the hostess called and said she didn’t have to bring them after all,” I said as a big rock fell into my stomach.

“Yeah, I know. That’s what I’m telling you. She’s right in the middle of yelling at me when she remembers something, probably what you just said, and just stands there with her mouth open. Then she sails right out the door like nothing ever happened. What a cuckoo.”

I sat back on my haunches and wiped my hands on the clean concrete floor. They left dark wet smears.

“Anyway, I came down to tell you, there’s a messenger waiting in the lobby. Should I send him up to her apartment?”

“No! No. Don’t send him up. Tell him to come back at four o’clock, the time he was supposed to get here. The package isn’t ready yet.” I gave an unhinged laugh. “It’s in here somewhere.”

“I got you,” he said sympathetically.

“Thank you,” I said, and almost blew him a kiss before I remembered what was all over my hands.

I found the junk mail in the next-to-last bag. I looked through it rapaciously: magazine offer, two catalogues, book club offer, sweepstakes entry, Nature Conservancy donation request, notice of a new French restaurant opening nearby. I laid them out on the floor before me, Tarot-like. I read every word on all of them with incantatory supplication, but they refused to knit themselves together into a manila envelope. After a while I put them all back and closed the bag. Bleary-eyed, I confronted the last bulging glossy blackish-green membrane. I knew that the manila envelope was not in it, and I knew that Jackie would want me to look through it anyway. She would have stood over me insistently while I scrabbled through it for something we both knew couldn’t possibly be there.

I looked at my open hands. I turned them over and examined the backs, and then looked again at the palms. They were rough and dry, hangnails chewed off during my frequent bouts of fear and panic. They were covered in goo. I filled my lungs slowly with air, and just as slowly emptied them. Something snapped in me then. I heard the twang in my head. There was no reason at all to look in the last bag. It was not essential, or possible, or even desirable.

I stood up and tried to pull myself back together. My back and arms ached. The rip in my blouse had widened so much that the sleeve was almost detached. My skirt had a big splotch of tomato juice all over the front that had spilled from an upended can, and my hair was coated with slime from continually having to push it out of my face. I put my sweater back on, then rang for Louie and rode up with him to the fourth floor.

I opened the side door to the apartment and stepped into the pantry. I could hear the clink of fork on plate in the kitchen. I hesitated. She hadn’t heard me come in; I was tempted to gather up my things and run. She would never see me again. I’d screen all my calls for the rest of my life. But
what, exactly, was I afraid of? “Jackie,” I said, walking into the kitchen, “it wasn’t there.”

She sat alone at her kitchen table under a pool of light from the hooded lamp directly overhead, eating the lunch Juanita had left for her. She looked up and saw me, covered in garbage, with a reeking cloud of hair and a glint in my eye. “It wasn’t there,” she repeated in a cautious, pacifying voice. “Well, you certainly looked thoroughly. You were down there almost two hours.”

“I found the stuff you threw out. The envelope wasn’t with it.”

The phone rang. I went to the pantry to answer it. “This is Mrs. Marcos,” said a faint voice. “To whom am I speaking?”

“Claudia Steiner,” I said. “You got my message?”

“I don’t have any negatives from that visit,” she said.

“I’ll put her on.”

I stood in the doorway while they reminisced about what a wonderful time they’d had a few months ago, going out dancing with Mr. Blevins and Mr. Metcalf. “It was such a treat when you got up and sang with the band,” said Jackie. “You have such a voice, Imelda dear. I know I’ve told you this before, but you should really—yes, yes, I know, one is so terribly busy all the time, I know it myself, I hardly have time to write my books. Well, listen, my dear friend, I’m terribly sorry to bother you over such a little thing, but my secretary misplaced that lovely photograph of the four of us together outside the—yes, wasn’t it, I was just telling my secretary, such a wonderful visit. Well, if you don’t have it, I suppose I’ll have to use another picture instead, but it’s a shame. All right. Thank you, dear. We will, very soon. Love to Bongo.”