Authors: Daphne Uviller
Super in the City (34 page)
Lucy threw her arms around all of us in turn. “This is Leonard! Aren’t you excited to finally meet him? Leonard, these are my best friends in the whole world!”
Leonard nodded sheepishly in greeting and flicked at his ear.
“I was just telling Leonard how the last time I was here, a fortune- teller told me I was going to die, and how that made me carpe diem and now I have her to thank for finding him! Hey, and it turns out his dad and my dad are buried in the same cemetery in Westchester, can you believe it?” She grinned at Leonard proudly.
I started to protest that Renee Ricardo had not been the one slinking around an ice- cold jury- pool room playing currency Cupid, but changed my mind.
“And Zephyr can thank her for Gregory,” Lucy added generously.
“She told her you two would be spending your lives together.”
“You asked a fortune- teller about me?” Gregory asked, his dimples appearing. “What else did she tell you? Bet she didn’t know you’d apply for a P.I. license,” he said, laughing.
Silence.
I hadn’t planned on telling anyone until I was sure I was going through with this new idea, not even the college classmates I’d be facing tomorrow morning at my reunion. To them, I’d still be a super. I hadn’t planned on telling anyone until after I had landed a junior investigator’s position with the Department of Investigation, and perhaps not even until I’d completed my three years’ training, passed the state exam, and actually had my New York State private investigator’s license in hand. If I could have managed it, I would have kept the news from my parents until they were senile and unable to process the fact that their daughter might have occasional need of a bulletproof vest.
“Uh,” Gregory said, looking horrified. “Sorry.”
“Zephyr?” Tag said, her eyes wide. Mercedes, Abigail, and Lucy gaped at me.
“Cool,” Leonard said.
“Lucy,” I blurted. “This is Hayden.”
That did the trick.
Whatever fragile web of diplomacy the rest of us had managed to achieve in the preceding minutes was instantly shattered by Lucy. Her lips formed an O and her eyes went just as round.
“Hayden? As
in
Hayden
Hayden?” She whipped around to confirm this with the rest of us.
“And his wife,” Mercedes added cheerfully, tugging her strapless sheath dress higher. “Nanda.”
“Okay,” Gregory said suddenly. “Zeph, I’m gonna go get a drink. Coming?” He studied me.
I looked over at Hayden, who was grinning the same cocky grin he’d reeled me in with at the Odeon two years earlier. Close a door, Zephyr, I thought. Close it and see what it feels like. My friends were watching me. Nanda was watching me. Even Leonard was watching me.
I turned and followed Gregory, peeling my dress off my sweaty legs as I went. He led me through the crowd, but stopped short of the bar. He put his hands on my waist. I traced his jaw with one finger and looked into his brown eyes. This was a man who would drive me up a wall and teach me about myself and let me be myself and make me laugh and turn me on and never hurt me. This was a man I already loved.
“All done?” he asked.
I nodded. “All done.”
“Good. What are we drinking?”
What did the super of 287 West 12th Street drink? What did a medical school dropout drink? What did a law school non- enroller drink? What did the sister of the next Coen brother drink? What did a future ace detective drink? What did someone who’d finally unhitched a wagonful of horseshit, romantically speaking, drink? What did someone on the rooftop of Soho House having a first- world moment drink?
“Lemonade,” I said, going up on tiptoe to plant a kiss on his soft, full lips. “I’m drinking lemonade.”
A person can feel pretty foolish sitting alone in front of her computer writing a story that no one asked her to write. For vaporizing the alone part, I thank the generous, tolerant staffs at ‘SNice, Grounded, and Così in New York City, and at the Tuscan Café and Caffé à la Mode in Warwick, NY. You do so much more than sell coffee—you nurture creative communities. For diminishing the foolish part, I yell to the world my love and admiration for Deborah Siegel: co pilot, confidante, colleague. Laptop à laptop, we forge ahead. Also making writing a team sport is Heather Hewett, whose intelligence, wit, and perseverance in scheduling writing retreats have sustained me for years.
I thank all my friends for letting me steal from their lives and their stories. In particular, Rebekah Gross for medical details and a singularly dry outlook on life that is often just what the doctor ordered; Amanda Robinson for letting me benefit from her erudition and early encouragement; Shannon and Ben Agin for jaw- dropping generosity, including giving us and our rambunctious toddler months of shelter; Elisha Cooper and Michael Lee for buoying me in their inimitable ways whenever I hit the rocky shores of self- doubt; and Elizabeth Gilbert, for telling me to be a mule when I most needed to hear it, for keeping old promises like nobody’s business, and for inspiring me with her generosity lo those many years ago. For taking dozens of precious hours away from their families to read drafts and give keen, detailed, invaluable comments, I am deeply indebted to Shannon Agin (again), to Alix McLean, and to Alex Sapirstein.
Alix McLean, Kathy Sillman, Nicole Krieger, Sarah Kirshbaum Levy, and Sarah Trillin—this stable of dependable, caring truthtellers are my beloved inspiration for Zephyr’s Sterling Girls. I am kept sane by their unwavering candor, irreverence, and steady flow of hand- me- downs.
Kate Miciak, Kerri Buckley, Molly Boyle, and the entire team at Bantam Dell—including the second- to- none Pam Feinstein—devoted a kind of editorial attention to this book that I thought had gone the way of the typewriter. They manage to be eagle- eyed while maintaining the lightest of touches. Most astoundingly, their commitment to Zephyr matches my own, a gift for which I can never thank them enough. I am grateful on a nearly daily basis to have Tracy Brown as my agent. His decades of editorial experience, his gentle demeanor, and his genuine love of the book business make him nothing less than a fairy godfather.
As for my astounding family, I thank my daughter, Talia, after whose birth, for better and worse, I became an efficiency expert who never again knew an idle moment. Her wild embrace of life fills gaps I didn’t know existed in mine: somehow, mysteriously, she has made me a better writer. Of course, so have her babysitters—Ofelia Ariza and Catie Quinn—without whom I couldn’t have finished this book. My in- laws, Paula, Jerome, and Jennie Spector, continue to floor me with their generosity—they feed us, they move our furniture, they take our kids for entire weekends; I hope I am half as helpful to others as they are to me.
I hope to write many more books in the future if only to keep singing the praises of my parents, Rena and Richard, in the acknowledgments. I stole the most dialogue, the most stories, and the most observations about human nature from my mother, from whom I learned to love and delight in absurdity.
And the memory of my father’s fierce, often blinding pride in me continues to fuel each of my waking moments.
Always, always my boundless gratitude to my steadfast mate, Sacha Spector, who takes my writing seriously (or at least graciously keeps his doubts well hidden) and whose own creativity is as varied and inspiring as any I have ever witnessed in a mere mortal. It’s a privilege and a thrill to share my life with him.
Finally, I thank New York City, my muse, for being a bottomless well of material, for having a spirit unmatched by any other city (though how would I really know, since I rarely leave it?), for being a hometown that I love deeply, despite, and often because of, its many flaws.
DAPHNE UVILLER was superintendent of her family’s building in the West Village for ten long years. She is a former books/poetry editor for
Time Out New York,
is the co-editor of the anthology
Only Child,
and has written for the
New York Times, Washington Post, Newsday, New York, Allure,
and
Self.
A third- generation Greenwich Village resident, she now lives in her childhood apartment with her husband and two children.
SUPER IN THE CITY
A Bantam Book / February 2009
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2009 by Daphne Uviller
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Uviller, Daphne.
Super in the city / Daphne Uviller.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-553-90628-8
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Janitors—Fiction. 3. Apartment houses—Fiction.
4. Landlord and tenant—Fiction. 5. Greenwich Village (New York, NY)—
Fiction. I Title.
PS3621.V55S87 2009
813’.6—dc22
2008032631
v3.0