Super in the City (23 page)

I heard the skateboard before I saw it.

I was regaling Gregory with a dependably funny story about backpacking through Greece with Tag. It involved a fight between me and some Gypsy children over floor space on the ferry from Patras to Brindisi, and it was one of the few times in my life when I had been as bold as Tag. I relished the memory, though not half as much as I was relishing the pleasure of making Gregory laugh in the retelling. But the familiar clatter of wheels over cracked pavement stopped me mid-sentence and reduced me to the paralyzed state of a rabbit facing a fatal fender.

“YOU WHORE!” Darren Schwartz bellowed before I could grab Gregory by the collar and drag him inside.

I vainly pretended I hadn’t heard anything. “So then the youngest Gypsy kid just flung himself onto my sleeping bag—” I continued in a high, shaky voice.

“You can’t even wait long enough to make it to a bed!” Darren, aka LinguaFrank, aka The Devil, had squealed to a stop at the bottom of the stoop. He flipped his skateboard to a vertical position and glared up at us. From this angle, he looked like a red- faced gnome. I had a powerful urge to step on him.

My mouth fell open. “Did you
follow
me?”

“You know this guy?” Gregory looked at me with a mixture of horror and betrayal.

“No,” I said emphatically, “I mean, he went on a date with—”

“Oh, you know me,
Zephyr”
Darren drawled, “you know me really, really well. But then, you know a lot of guys, don’t you?”

I looked at Gregory pleadingly, but he crossed his arms and frowned, waiting for clarification.

“She and her friends,” Darren spat, “they don’t stay with any one guy for long. We were just chatting about it over some java at Grounded. They sleep with everyone, all over the world.”

One corner of my brain was masochistically impressed by Darren’s powers of hearing and retention, but mostly I was consumed by the drowning sensation I felt as I watched Gregory’s face. It was like watching time- lapse footage of a tender bud of trust withering under a late frost. And there was something else there, too, something I wouldn’t understand until much later. Gregory put his head in his hands, as if he were disappointed in himself as much as he was in me.

“Gregory,” I said with a harsh laugh, trying to convey how absurd this was. “You’re not going to listen to this guy, are you? Hey, look at me. Let me explain.” I tried to pull his hand away from his face but he jerked away from my touch so abruptly that my hand hit the step. I stared at him.

“Is that what you use the staircase for?” he whispered.

“Wha—” I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but LinguaFrank caught on like a shark to bloody chum.

“Oh, yeah,” he crooned, “she likes it on the staircase. She luuuuvs it on the staircase. And in hallways. Elevators. Fire escapes. I’d watch out if I were you. She’s toxic.”

I sprang up.

“Shut up!” I screamed. “Shut up, you sick, perverted, nasty piece of shit! Go crawl back under your rock!” As I cursed him, I cursed myself for not coming up with something more original, and for sounding as petulant as he had sounded outside Grounded. But I was desperate to make this stop, desperate to make him climb back on his skateboard and roll away from me before any chance of a future with Gregory was snuffed out.

“I want to meet the Asian slut,” Darren said calmly, flipping his stringy ponytail from one shoulder to the other in a gesture that was decidedly unmanly. “You tell your friend she’d better show up next time.”

I let out a crazy laugh and saw Gregory flinch. “You moron,” I spat, “there is no Asian, or anyone else! No one stood you up. We set you up because you were such a pig to Abigail Greenfield. You don’t remember? You don’t remember calling her fat? Too Jewish? Telling her you liked thin, Asian women?”

I couldn’t believe I was having to spell it out—it significantly detracted from a revenge fantasy when you had to point out to your target exactly why you were getting revenge. I glanced over at Gregory, who was edging away from me.

“No, wait,” I shrieked at him. “Darren, you shit, you tell him what you did. You tell him that I’ve never seen you before today.”

“You’re Abigail’s friend?” Darren said disbelievingly.

“Who’s Abigail?” Gregory asked.

“The fifth friend. Remember, I told you about my high school friends?” I said pleadingly. “The one in California?”

“Why would …
he,”
Gregory didn’t even look at Darren, “be on a date with someone in California?” He studied me carefully.

“What does that have to do with—? Gregory, this guy is
lying.
I paused. “Do you think I would ever, ever, in a million years go near someone like him?”

I glared at Gregory, my need to be vindicated momentarily overshadowing my fear of losing him.

“Zephy? Is everything okay?” I whirled around to find my father standing in the doorway. I felt the blood rush to my face. My parents and I had what most people would call an open relationship, but there was still a limit to what I wanted them to know. The fact that I’d had sex with the exterminator on a secret staircase they didn’t know about, presumably built by our convicted super, wasn’t something I was eager to share. I was also in no hurry to introduce LinguaFrank to my father.

But Lingua’s world had apparently righted itself.

“Abigail’s friend!” he chortled to himself, morphing into an avuncular figure, shaking his head in an “Oh, those crazy kids” way. “Got it. Okay, then.” He gave the rest of us a cheerful grin. “I think my work here is done. Later, dudes.”

He tossed his skateboard to the ground and pushed off, his dingy khakis straining against his wide ass. I glanced at Gregory, who was now standing as far from me as possible, arms crossed, his angry gaze fixed on his scuffed oxfords.

“It was just, uh, well, the decibel level was on the high end,” my dad pointed upward, apologetically, to his open windows, then noticed Gregory. “Hey, it’s the exterminator! Gregory, how are you, lad?” He looked as if he’d found his long- lost son.

“Dad.”
I widened my eyes at him.

“Were you yelling about staircases?” he persisted. I chewed my lip. “You know the dryer is working beeeeautifully!” he told Gregory, snapping his fingers as though he’d just walked out of the 1950s. “Did you and Zephy fix the pipe?”

“Yes,” I lied, just as Gregory said, “No, we never got around to it.” We exchanged mutual looks of disgust.

“Well, whatever magic we worked together really, uh, worked. Hey, cream puffs! Any extras for a guy with hollow legs?” Without waiting for an answer, my giraffe of a father bent down and helped himself to a chocolate pastry. He made cooing sounds as he bit into it.

“Is there anything we can’t get in this town? Don’t you think about how lucky we are when you taste something like this?”

“Dad!” I repeated sharply.

“Have the rest.” Gregory reached down and grabbed his backpack.

“Are you leaving?” I asked in disbelief.

“I really think I should.” He wouldn’t look at me.

My father finally sensed the lava flow about to envelop his daughter and her exterminator.

“Oh, don’t let me interrupt! You kids keep talking, yelling, staircases, what have you. Mom and I have to get going, we’re seeing the great Mercedes Kim shake out some Shostakovich, ba- da- da, ba- da- DAH.” He headed inside, taking another bite of his cream puff. “I should quit law and become a baker …” The door closed behind him.

“Gregory,” I said firmly, reminding myself that none of Lingua’s slander was true, “we are supposed to go out tonight.” And then go
in
tonight, I added silently. “Are you really gonna let some insane stranger end what seems like the beginning of something pretty great?” My voice trembled with the courage it took to be honest.

“I need to think,” Gregory said quietly. “I need to know you are who you say you are.”

“And you’re going to do that by leaving?” I said as coldly as I could. And before he could abandon me, I turned and ran inside so he wouldn’t see the tears beginning to stream down my face.

I
’M SMELLING IT AGAIN,” MRS. HANNAHAM SAID WHEN I PICKED
up the phone Monday morning. I glanced at the clock. Six-thirty. A new low. I had grabbed the receiver before the end of the first ring, hoping it would be Gregory apologizing for his behavior on Saturday night. Instead, I heard Barry Manilow crooning “Copacabana” in the background.

“The helium?” I said impatiently.

“Don’t get yourself in a swivet, missy,” she croaked at me. “And don’t take it out on me just because you had a fight with your new man friend,” she added.

I pulled the comforter over my head, but that only made the crone’s voice more intimate, so I flung it off again.

“My Compton and I never had a single fight in all our years. We were blessed,” she bragged.

Yeah. You, Compton, and the secretary. The holy trinity.

“I’ll go into Roxana’s apartment again,” I promised, neglecting to tell her I’d still never been in there.

“When?”

“Today.”

“When today?”

I sighed loudly, a huff full of self- pity. “I have jury duty, so after that. Okay? Mrs. Hannaham, is there something else about Roxana that’s bothering you? Something I could actually help you with?”

“Jury duty!” she said excitedly. “Maybe you’ll meet Lennie Briscoe.”

I opened my mouth but didn’t know where to begin. Did she know that
Law & Order
was fictional? That Jerry Orbach was dead? Was Mrs. Hannaham fit to take care of herself, or should I be consulting social service agencies about her welfare? Maybe I should call Lucy for advice. I bet it would help her flagging self- esteem if her friend called her for her professional opinion—

“As for Mrs. Boureau,” Mrs. Hannaham continued haughtily, “I’ve urged you to keep an eye on her visitors.”

I made a “Yeah, and?” gesture to my ceiling.

“You got it,” I said. “Will do. Done.”

“Don’t tell them you read the
New York Times.”

“Excuse me?”

“They’ll think you’re too liberal. But not the
Post
either. The defense will knock you off. If you want to get picked for jury duty, you say you read the
Daily News.”

“Thanks for the tip.” Did scanning the occasional left-behind copy of the
Post
for Hayden’s byline count as reading?

Mrs. Hannaham hung up.

I lay in bed and considered the fact that Mrs. Hannaham and I shared an apparently rare passion for jury service. I had a choice. I could either let that thought depress me and accelerate the downward spiral triggered by Gregory on Saturday night, or I could ignore it and focus on my immediate future as a star juror.

I swung my feet to the floor and studied the contents of my closet. Maybe I’d get to be foreman. I’d stand before the entire courtroom, visibly bearing the weight of the jury’s decision, and solemnly reveal the long- awaited verdict. And before that, I thought, thumbing through yards of non- professional clothing accumulated over half a decade of being a staunch non-professional, I’d be in the jury pool. I’d meet businessmen and ballerinas, immigrants and heiresses. There would be drama in the courtroom, in the jury room, in the hallways, and maybe even in a hotel room, if we were sequestered.

I’d have to remember not to lie about myself. No tales of roping cows on my Australian uncle’s Outback ranch or going mountaineering with my Chilean cousins while under oath. I selected a gray turtleneck sweater and black pants—neutral colors for the impartial juror. I replayed the scenario in which I met the love of my life in the jury room, but now, as I recounted the story to my children, I built on the drama: I had trudged to the courthouse
thinking
I was nursing a broken heart, but the idiot I was crying over—funny, I can’t remember his name now, George? Geoffrey?—was just a hotheaded, judgmental grad school dropout who couldn’t hold a candle to your father, the man who’d halted global warming. As I zipped up my leather boots (a post- Hayden consolation purchase), I felt my excitement recovering.

If I had known just what the next two days had in store for me, I might have opted to tell the judge I read the
Times
and the
Post
whenever I wasn’t studying the crack on my ceiling, and hurried back to Mrs. Hannaham and her helium odors as fast as I could.

B
Y ELEVEN O’CLOCK THAT MORNING, I HAD READ MOST OF A
Wall Street Journal
left behind by a CFO who had thoroughly
bored me with a lengthy monologue on why he was too important for jury duty. I was pleased to watch his face pinch up as his name was called, but it wasn’t enough to relieve the tedium of sitting in an enormous gray room for nearly three hours. I had also watched the video on how to be a good juror, read thirty pages of my new Ian McEwan novel, and taken a couple of laps around the room to see what other people were doing, which yielded no entertainment: knitting, reading, staring into space, sleeping.

I stood up, stretched, and looked hopefully over at the clerk, the guardian of the phone line over which demands for potential jurors came. He was slowly thumbing through the
Post,
so I embarked on another tour of the trenches. This time I decided to explore the little workroom adjacent to the main holding pen.

In here, the more industrious members of society could plug their laptops into individual carrels. This crowd was younger, chic, and equipped with portable electronics. The quiet clack of keyboards sent a wave of collegiate nostalgia through me and I paused, awash in an unexpected memory from my first winter at college. I’d been toiling away in the warm library, a little too conscious of being engaged in the noble pursuit of Higher Learning, when word quickly spread that a snowball fight of massive proportions was unfolding on the central campus. I abandoned my paper, had the time of my life, and wound up with pneumonia and my first D.

The halt in my stroll caused a short, curly- haired man in his thirties to look up at me sharply. He was geeky cute, as if he worked in tech support: collared shirt half- buttoned over a T-shirt bearing a logo of a fish- fry joint, wire- frame glasses slipping down his nose, a nervous energy vibrating around him. He was using the top of his closed iBook to organize his cash, laying it out according to denomination, putting all the
bills faceup in the same direction. He had already attended to the rest of his wallet, because next to the computer was a neat pile of receipts and business cards. I had almost passed him, thinking how Lucy would appreciate this use of time, when I caught sight of his ten- dollar- bill pile. I halted mid- stride and backed up.