Super in the City (6 page)

Thinking about becoming the super of 287 West 12th was accompanied by the clang, squeak, and whump of closing doors.

And the idea of Hayden, ace reporter, chief schmuck, finding out that I was mopping halls …

I chewed hard on my lip and traced the curlicues of the iron banister with my thumb. I snuck a glance at Cliff, who was ever so slightly nodding to a beat only he could hear. If he couldn’t stay focused on this turning point in my life, was he really going to be emotionally available to our kids?

“It would just be until you figure out what you’re doing,” my mother said, her voice hitting the high register that bespoke her grave doubts about when that long- awaited clarity might arrive.

Mrs. Hannaham put her hands on her hips. I had an urge to kick her.

“Zephy it’ll be fun,” my dad said gently. “You’re good at this kind of thing.” I looked at him incredulously. “I mean, you’re organized and you’re neat.” If he tells me I’m very special, I thought, I’m going to take to my bed with a jar of Marsh -mallow Fluff.

“And you’re good with people and very responsible with money,” he continued. “It’s just, what, all of us here, plus Roxana and the Caldwells, right? Everyone’s like family.”

Was that a subtle way of telling me I shouldn’t reproduce with Cliff?

“And whoever moves into James’s place,” Mrs. Hannaham added.

Who
would
move into James’s place? I hadn’t thought of that. The apartment was a sweet little one- bedroom, the mirror of my place, across the landing on the second floor. If I was super, I bet I would have a lot of say over who moved in. He would have to be single. Taller than Hayden. And have an exciting career. More exciting than Hayden’s. Was that illegally discriminatory? Would I, too, be led away by my wrists like James was? Where would my case be tried? Too many people knew my father in New York. None of his colleagues would touch me. Ha!

“It’s not going to take much of your time,” my mother said doubtfully. “An oil delivery here, a little sweeping there. Maybe call in an electrician once in a while. I don’t think James ever had much work.”

“Not much … ? You let him have a whole apartment rent-free! It has to be a big job to be worth that.” I scowled at her.

She took a different tack. “Of course you don’t
have
to do this.” Translation: of course I had to do this. “But we need someone we can trust. James just left here in cuffs with an apparent psychiatric disorder, Zephy! This is a small operation that runs on the honor system. You’d be taking a great load off our minds.”

So that was the story they were going with. Bulletproof. I was not my brother, after all. And my entertainment value—I hadn’t even had a chance to regale them with the St. Regis escapade—was clearly no longer enough to satisfy their standards in the legacy department.

I plopped down on the stoop and rubbed at a blister that was starting to sprout over my big toe. A noisy, stilettoed, bridge- and- tunnel crowd teetered up the block in low- slung
jeans serving up healthy rolls of waist. Imported muffin tops. I had always wanted to congratulate the woman who first refused to let anorexic models stake a claim on those jeans, the pioneer who let her belly flop over the top and declared, “Ladies, follow my lead!”

And then I thought, Yes. Let me be like her. Let me be like the woman who would not buy the classic cut. I will not be embarrassed by this odd hiccup in my life. Yes. I am twenty- seven and I have a B.A. worth a hundred grand and I dropped out of medical school and I biffed on law school and my friends are all prematurely successful in their worthwhile, absorbing careers, and I am frightening my parents and maybe even myself with my aimlessness.

But I would go a different route. I would be the person who cheerfully went with the flow, who didn’t just make lemonade out of lemons, but who invented a new kind of lemonade and not only won the ribbon for her nectar at the county fair, but licensed it to the U.S. government so that it became the only drink NASA would stock aboard their shuttles. I would create a beverage worthy of a moon landing.

M
ERCEDES WAS LAUGHING AT ME SHE WAS DRINKING MY
Chock Full o’Nuts, eating my frozen waffles, and laughing at me for not knowing the difference between a Phillips head and a flathead.

“Haven’t you ever had to open, like, I don’t know, anything?
Ever?”
We were in my kitchen the morning after James’s arrest, surveying the contents of a grimy tool kit my dad had dug up and earnestly presented to me as a first- day-on- the- job- I- never- wanted gift. I told him that even secular humanists were entitled to observe Sunday as a day of rest. He laughed and went back upstairs to the lox spread that was rightfully mine.

I stuck my tongue out at Mercedes.

“You know not to lick electrical sockets with that bad boy, yes?”

“Who the hell is Phillip?” I crabbed, taking a waffle off her plate and sinking down on the step stool. My plan to be a good sport about my life’s new path was temporarily on hold. Mrs.
Hannaham had called at seven- fifteen that morning to tell me she smelled something. I had always considered myself a morning person, but I now understood that I was a morning person only when the morning’s activities consisted of lying in bed reading.

“What kind of smell, Mrs. Hannaham?” I had croaked, squinting at the Mickey Mouse clock I’d kept alive since the fourth grade.

“Gas, I think. I definitely smell smoke.”

“They’re pretty different. Could you tell me more?”

“You mean you don’t smell it? James could always smell what I smelled.”

So that was how it was going to be.

“Oh,
that
smell,” I said, yawning.

“What did you say? I can’t hear you.”

I pulled the comforter down from my face.

“I said, ‘Oh, that smell.’ I smell it now. Like gas or smoke?”

“Yes!” she replied triumphantly.

“I’ll go to the basement right now and check it out.”

“The basement? It’s not coming from the basement.”

I sighed, wondering whether we’d have to play twenty questions every time she concocted a problem.

“Right. I’ll come to your apartment?” I asked with dread.

“My apartment! You will not enter my apartment. There’s no need to enter my apartment unless it’s an emergency.”

I declined to point out the love affair between smoke and emergencies. I waited for my next clue.

“You might,” she said, as if the thought had just dawned on her, “want to pay a visit to Miss Roxana.”

Where Mrs. Hannaham was a meddling, grudge- bearing scarecrow of a widow who had probably been involuntarily celibate for the majority of her life, Roxana Boureau was a lithe, von Furstenberg-clad natural blond widow whose outrageous
but genuine French accent oozed sex. Unlike Mrs. H. and her precious Compton, Roxana never mentioned Monsieur Boureau and, also unlike Mrs. H., she mostly minded her own business. She worked out of her apartment, buying and selling on eBay, though what she sold, nobody knew. I asked her once and she answered, with an elegantly dismissive wave that I could only dream of perfecting, “Oh, you know, zees and zat.” She never complained and always kept a sprig of fresh flowers hanging outside her door, which eternally endeared her to my mother. She looked like she was in her late thirties, but, seeing as she was born knowing how to turn a steady diet of Brie and Cabernet into a skin renewal system, she was probably a decade older.

Mrs. Hannaham, not particularly generous of spirit to begin with, wasn’t inclined to make any exceptions for her fellow widow. I had heard her occasional barbed remarks concerning Roxana’s apparently thriving love life—“Let’s just install a revolving door, for goodness sake”—but I hadn’t realized that she’d harassed her via James. Embezzler though he might be, I was already missing him and his unsung diplomatic skills.

As soon as I hung up, I promptly fell asleep. The phone rang again a half hour later.

“Well?” Mrs. Hannaham’s forever- Queens accent punched holes through the remnants of a lovely dream involving George Clooney, me, and a hot- air balloon.

“Helium!” I yelled, trying to clear my head.

“Helium! Did you call the fire department?”

I managed to distract Mrs. H. from her nascent plan to ruin my life by spouting some partially accurate facts about the lightest known element on the periodic table. It was only after I hung up that it dawned on me that had she in fact smelled smoke, I could well have had the worst first day on a job in history and lost my home in the bargain.

So my plan to make space- worthy lemonade had soured by the time Mercedes showed up an hour later, spurring summer on with a tank top and shorts over her long body beaded mini dreds bouncing around her face. She was irritatingly energetic, ready to help me take on the world even though I just wanted her to let me complain for a while.

Mercedes Kim was my Black Friend. She was all of the Sterling Girls’ Black Friend, and if she was particularly ornery after an afternoon battling Shostakovich, she would sometimes make us call her that. On the first day of high school, the ninth- graders, all of us new, joined the upperclassmen in unintentionally segregating ourselves (brochure photos of mingling students notwithstanding). But not Mercedes. The girl with the Latina first name—chosen by her father, who, among his many pernicious acts (including stealing her identity fifteen years after abandoning her), named her for his favorite car—and the Asian last name—courtesy of her beloved stepfather, who adopted her and played Schubert’s String Quartet in C Major for her and thus, like a dealer in a schoolyard, got her hooked forever—had carried her tray over and sat down at the table where I huddled with Abigail, trying to remain unnoticed.

She threaded her legs around the bench and announced, “I didn’t get a full scholarship to this place just to hang out with morons bragging about how wasted they got every night in the Hamptons this summer.” I was so in awe of her courage to denounce the people I was already scared of that all I could do was remain silent. Abigail gripped the edge of her tray and stared at something on the floor beyond our table. But during the next hour, despite the cafeteria cacophony that always sounds like everyone is talking about something you’ll never be let in on, Mercedes turned our nervous silence into a comfortable
one. By the end of that first week, Lucy and Tag had found us, and we five never ate lunch apart for the next four years.

“None of this is going to help you open the garbage thing,” Mercedes said now, snatching back her waffle from my hand. “We need to find the key or call a locksmith.”

My first on- the- job challenge, after resisting strangling Mrs. H., had presented itself in the form of the garbage lock-boxes, three wooden containers lined up in the alley beside the building. Monday, as we were beginning to smell, was garbage day, and James had the only set of keys to the padlocks.

I stomped over to the bookshelf, pulled out the yellow pages, and plopped them on top of the toolbox.

“Wait a minute, chickie. Locksmiths charge as much as plumbers and electricians. You’re sure no one else has a set of keys?”

I shook my head.

“What about looking in James’s apartment?”

I raised my eyebrows at her. Police tape was strung like birthday banners across his door. “It’s probably locked.”

“You think people remember to lock up and turn off the lights and fold back the bedspread after the cops bust in and take ‘em to the clink?”

“Listen to you, Shawshank.”

“Seriously. It’s probably unlocked and, you know, if he left the lights on …”

My own dim bulb started to flicker. “It’s my responsibility to make sure we’re not wasting the building’s resources.”

“What if the water’s running?” Mercedes said, all wide-eyed innocence.

“Mrs. H. said she smelled something! If his apartment was on fire, there’s no way I wouldn’t be allowed in …”

Mercedes strode through my living room to the front door. I scampered after her out onto the landing. She put her hands on her slim hips and nodded for me to open the door.

“Why me? It was your idea,” I whispered.

“Because it should be your fingerprints,” she hissed back.

“Fingerprints! Fingerprints doesn’t sound good!” I started to back into my apartment, but Mercedes grabbed my arm.

“Open the frigging door, moron.” I briefly thought about the night before, when Tag had called me a fuckwad, and wondered if maybe we hadn’t all gotten a little too familiar with each other.

I quickly looked up and down the stairs and then tried the handle, hoping it would be locked. It gave way immediately and I jumped back. Even Mercedes looked surprised. The door creaked open slowly as we peered through the crisscrossed tape.

In the ten years he’d been our super, I’d never been inside James’s apartment, not even after I’d moved downstairs from my childhood home. If I needed something, I called him or knocked on his door and waited for him to come to my place. From where we stood, it didn’t
look
like a split personality’s dwelling. It was tidy, if a little dark, well appointed and sleek, if a bit unoriginal. Black leather sofa set, chrome- and- glass coffee table, giant flat- screen TV, plush gray carpeting. Every thing screamed Bachelor Pad.

I looked at Mercedes. She put her nose in the air and sniffed. “I definitely smell something.” She was not letting me off the hook, and if I was going to be honest with myself, I was starting to get a little excited about the prospect of sanctioned snooping. The police tape was everywhere, but it had been hastily and loosely strung up. I straddled one banner, ducked under another and … I was in.

Being in someone else’s home alone was the ultimate test
of restraint. Or rather, the ultimate test
of my
restraint. If I had been a dog, I’d have raced in and sniffed every corner. Rooted through the garbage, pawed at the drawers, jumped on the beds. It was only the painstaking evolution of human behavior—and its technological offspring, the nanny- cam—that kept me from opening people’s refrigerators, their desk drawers, their medicine cabinets. (Snooping through Hayden’s apartment didn’t count as a transgression—that had been an act of self-preservation.)