Ladies and Gentlemen (2 page)

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s take this in another direction.” Ms. Samuel came around to the front of her desk and leaned against it. “Do you put much stock in astrology?”

“The science?”

Ms. Samuel started pacing. “Zodiac, stars, the whole thing. Do you believe it has any merit at all?”

This question gave him serious pause. Could she be a horoscope nut or a chart maker? What if astrology was her personal religion?

“I’m an Aquarius,” he answered safely.

“Terrific. I’m a Leo. But do you
buy
it?”

If he didn’t, was he out of the running? If he did, was he a loon? “Sometimes,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning,” he continued, “that if I’m on line at the supermarket, I’ll give my horoscope a glance.”

“A
ha
,” she said, and pointed at him.

“But it’s not a daily thing,” he assured her.

“But when you
do
look at it,” she said, “and the forecast is negative, what’s your reaction?”

“Honestly?” She didn’t look offended by this. “I discount it,” he answered truthfully.

“Exactly. What about a
good
forecast?”

“Then things are looking up!” he said, and smiled.

When Ms. Samuel didn’t smile back, he became serious again.
Listening
.

“What about tarot?” she said, pacing. “Ever consult the cards?”

“No.”

“The prophecies of Nostradamus?”

“Haven’t read him.”

“Believe in past lives? Reincarnation? What about karma?”

Already this was the strangest interview of his whole life. “No to all three.”

“What about ESP?”

I want to fuck you cross-eyed
.

Ms. Samuel waited impassively.

“Not anymore,” he said.

“All right. Let’s try this one.” She pressed her index finger to her mouth and tapped it.

It was like the moment in a play, Applelow thought, right before the offstage gunshot.

“Have you felt,” she said, “for a long time, perhaps for as long
as you can remember, that something good was coming your way? You couldn’t say what it might be, but you’ve always believed it.”

Applelow’s heart was racing.

“Have you believed that this life—right here, right now—wasn’t the one you thought you’d be living?” She leaned toward him. “That there was something bigger for you. You were sure of it. You
are
sure of it. Do you know what I’m talking about, David? Do you know what I
mean
?”

He felt himself pressing into the chair back. Looking at her was like looking into brilliant light. “Yes,” he said.

“Good,”
she said. “Good, David. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Applelow called the employment agency he was working with and canceled the interviews they’d scheduled for the rest of the afternoon. The man who’d been sending him out—Tom Pard—laid into him. He told Applelow he
knew
he’d do this and should’ve trusted his gut when they met, that he could tell from the get-go he wouldn’t make it through a single day of hitting the street.

Applelow hung up on him and, thinking of the million things he could’ve said to Pard in response, adjusted his tie in a store window’s reflection, licked his finger to smooth his light eyebrows, and pushed up his eyeglasses. He narrowed his fox eyes, trying to remember what he looked like before he’d lost most of his hair. No, he thought, no more interviews today. No more questions, no more performing. Enough was simply enough.

On the bus, he began criticizing himself again. Pard was right.
He was soft, lazy, unfocused. So what if he’d had a good interview, that he had a
feeling
about this job—whatever it was. It was oh so typical of him not to explore all the possibilities, to instead latch on to the good thing that came his way (and it hadn’t come just yet, he reminded himself). He could apologize, admit that he was wrong, then go on an interview or two after he ate. He jumped up from his seat and pressed the bell. But calling the man back was impossible, and the driver, shooting him a look in the mirror, flashed past his stop. When Applelow turned to sit down again, he saw that an elderly woman had already taken his seat.

Monday.

But he was sure that his interview with Ms. Samuel had gone well. “David,” she’d said, “it’s been a unique pleasure talking with you. Positively unique.” She walked him briskly to the door. Left no choice, he finally asked what the job was exactly.

Ms. Samuel grimaced. “We’re not at that point yet,” she said.

“Can’t you tell me anything?”

“We work in media. Sociological research. Also entertainment.”

“I’ve spent years in entertainment,” he said, kicking himself immediately. Ms. Samuel ushered him forward and opened the door. The waiting room was now entirely full of young, handsome people wearing appropriate suits.

“You’ll hear from me,” Ms. Samuel said. “Probably by Wednesday.”

Her hand, when he shook it, was ice-cold.

Applelow’s apartment was on 44th Street between Ninth and Tenth, a large one-bedroom on the second floor of a four-story
walk-up—rent-controlled, thank God—that he’d lived in for seven years. He knew all of his neighbors, and approaching the building, he saw Mrs. Gunther, a thick little turtle of a woman, standing on the stoop in her housecoat, holding two full trash bags. Muttering, she dragged them down the steps. Applelow didn’t want to talk to her, but he was sure she’d seen him. He said hello as he hurried past, flipping through his keys at the front door. “Vhat?” she said, and kicked the bags against the trash cans. Then she began to labor up the steps behind him. For years he’d brought her trash down for her—she lived alone on the fourth floor and had an arthritic hip—but since things had taken a bad turn this weekly generosity had been neglected.

“Goot you hev your key,” she said. “I left mine in apartmint.”

Applelow held the door open for her, and when she paused halfway up the first flight and rubbed her hip he grudgingly walked her to the top floor. They didn’t speak, nor did she thank him when they arrived at her door. And after starting back down, he promised himself, Never again.

As he turned down the third-floor landing, he saw Marnie Kastopolis, his next-door neighbor, waiting for him below.

“I heard you come in,” she said as he descended. She blinked once and smiled broadly, revealing her thick, white teeth. Marnie was tall, nearly six feet, and painfully awkward. She was wide-hipped and narrow-chested, a long-legged redhead whose odd proportions reminded Applelow of a Giacometti. She needed something from him now, but her efforts at sultriness were a caricature even more painful because she was wholly unaware of their effect. Or perhaps it was because he was still uncomfortable
around her. Several weeks ago, after sharing two bottles of wine in her apartment, Applelow had tried to kiss her. While she was laughing at something he’d said, he’d lunged forward and hit her teeth when he put his lips to hers. He was sure she’d wanted him to, but the moment he did it she put her hands on his shoulders and, with their lips still pressed together, told him no. “Not that I’m not flattered,” she said, pushing him back. He apologized profusely and stood up, so furious he could barely see, and left soon after. They hadn’t spoken about the incident since.

“I need a favor,” Marnie said.

Applelow waited.

“Zach’s coming down from school tonight.” This was Marnie’s youngest son. “And I have to go to work.” A concierge at one of the luxury hotels near Times Square, she often worked nights. “Can you let him in?” She held up her key. “Just, please, be sure to take it back afterward.”

“Just open the door and let him in?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t trust him with the key?”

Marnie crossed her arms and looked down at the floor. “If he’s in, I want to
know
he’s in. If he’s going out, he has to let me
know.
”

If the fact that she didn’t trust her son was going to be an evening-long obligation,
he
wanted to know
that
. “Has it been that bad?” he said.

“No,” she answered, and looked up. “He’s getting it together, David.” She said this automatically, her tone aping conviction, and she must have noticed the doubt on his face. “I really mean it this time.”

“Terrific.”

“He’s joining the air force,” Marnie offered. “He’s doing basic training in California at the end of the semester. He says he wants to fly jets.”

Who doesn’t? Applelow thought. “You must be relieved.”

“Words,” she said, looking up, “do not describe.”

“So trust him,” he said, though he regretted it immediately. He had no plans tonight. Helping her out wouldn’t cost him a thing.

Marnie looked at her shoe for a moment, checking the heel, the leather’s shine. “I’ve left some dinner in the refrigerator for the both of you,” she said. “There’s even some cake.”

“Lovely.”

“I’ll put a note on the front door for him to buzz you. His bus gets in at seven.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Thank you,” she mouthed, and placed the key in his outstretched palm.

The truth was that Applelow had always been curious about Marnie’s second child, whom he’d never met. He
had
met the oldest son, Aaron. “My little genius,” she called him. He was both: little and a genius. Exactly like her husband, she’d explained, who was a diminutive Greek mathematics prodigy. Aaron had inherited his father’s gift for cogitation and was on a full scholarship in philosophy at a university upstate, “admitted to the doctoral program at the age of seventeen,” Marnie liked to brag. (The brilliant husband had deserted the family long ago.) Applelow had met the boy at Marnie’s door last year; he was oddly attracted to her, so he’d feigned interest in the introduction. The boy was the spitting
image of his mother, though his head, which was enormous, only came up to her breasts. She turned Aaron toward him, resting her hands on his shoulders, and said, “Here he is!” After the three of them stood there uncomfortably for a moment, Applelow mentioned that he’d heard Aaron was quite the scholar. He was secretly hoping for a performance of some kind, for a monologue on systematic reasoning to come streaming from Aaron’s mouth—but the boy just frowned and mumbled hello. Deformed, Applelow thought, frozen boy-sized by so much mama-love.

But it was Zach who kept Marnie up at night. Though she slaved away keeping both boys in private schools, Zach had been kicked out of one for cheating, another for shoplifting, and was then shipped off to an out-of-state institution for troubled youths. He was almost expelled for marijuana possession but finally managed to graduate and got into one of the SUNY schools, where he was currently a sophomore on probation for poor grades and considering dropping out. All this had caused Marnie endless worry. “He’s going to waste everything,” she’d told Applelow during their wine-drinking session.

But all that was in the past, apparently. Zach was joining the air force, aiming high, getting it together. Not enough to be trusted with the key to his mother’s apartment, but there was no telling how far he might go.

At home, Applelow checked his messages—there were none—and put his cash in a book on one of his shelves. From his window he watched Marnie walk up the street and turn the corner, then went across the hall and let himself into her apartment. She’d made meatloaf and a salad, but his sweet tooth was acting up so he
tore off a huge piece of coffee cake, eating it in front of the open refrigerator and drinking milk out of the carton, taking such enormous bites he had to inhale loudly through his nose. Full, he went back to his apartment and lay down in front of the television. On the news, images from Abu Ghraib: a naked Iraqi with his back to a cell, his genitals pinched between his legs and his hands cupped behind his neck while dogs strained toward him on their leashes. Another prisoner stood on a box, electrodes attached to his fingers and penis, looking like a sort of Ku Klux Klansman in his eyeless, pointy hood. A faceless orgy of captives with a female MP lying atop them like a sister on her brothers’ pileup, the blue-gloved guard behind them giving a thumbs-up with a look of sick glee.

Who makes such people? Applelow wondered.

He woke to the sound of the buzzer.

Zach was tall like his mother but better-proportioned, long and lean. He had dark cropped hair and thick black eyebrows. Handsome, Applelow thought. He wore a down jacket over a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and high-tops, and had a small bag thrown over his shoulder. He apologized for disturbing him, and when Applelow looked in the mirror above his coat rack he saw his throw-pillow’s weave imprinted on his cheek.

“No, no,” he told the boy. “I needed to wake up.” He looked on the counter for Marnie’s key, checked under his mail, and then found it in his pants pocket, holding it up as if it were solid gold. After they crossed the hall, Applelow unlocked the door and held it open. The boy waited.

“The key,” Zach finally said.

“I’m sorry?” Applelow asked, suddenly furious with Marnie for putting him in this position. She hadn’t told the boy that he was under house arrest.

“Ohhhh,” Zach said, nodding. He tossed his bag on the floor. “Don’t sweat it.” He collapsed on the couch and folded his hands over his stomach. He grinned. “I’m surprised she didn’t ask you to lock me in from the outside.”

Applelow laughed. “I’m guessing she locked the liquor cabinet too.”

“Mom doesn’t have any booze. She’s a true Jew that way.” Cackling to himself, he seemed in good spirits. “I could go for a beer, though.”

“I’m out,” Applelow said, though he’d immediately warmed to the boy.

“I’ve got some cash.”

“No, I’ll pay,” he said, then went to his apartment and took the book down. When he turned around, Zach was standing in the doorway, looking at his far wall, which was covered with framed posters of productions The Peanut Gallery had done over the years.

“
Cool
place,” he said.

“Thank you.” Applelow looked at the posters. Better days. “Here.” He handed Zach a hundred-dollar bill. “Since I’m warden.”

“I’m not
that
thirsty.”