The Last Manly Man (32 page)

Why didn't I feel worse about this? I wondered. My home and almost all my belongings were gone. Under normal circumstances, this would have been cause for self-pity and an excuse to drink vodka, but for some reason I didn't feel too badly about it yet. Maybe it was because I was still in a state of shock. Maybe it was those two months on four continents, which made me harder to surprise, and made me realize that sanity and reality are relative concepts, relative to the patch of land you're standing on and the people you're with. What I was now in was just another alternate reality. Roll with the punches when you have to, right? And if that last trip had taught me nothing else, it was the value of traveling light, in every sense of the word, whenever possible.

Or maybe I was just too fucking tired for angst. I dropped off to sleep pretty quickly and slept until around four
A.M
., when I was roused by a terrible pounding and a hollering at the door.

“Hey! You in there?” a man called out.

Before I went to the door, I looked around for something to use to defend myself and that's when I felt the first twinge of real loss from the fire. I'd lost my entire arsenal of innocuous-looking self-defense weaponry—all my poison ivy, my various glue guns, my pepper spray, my cordless, gas-canister curling iron. I still had the nineteenth-century Enfield rifle, though, which I'd taken with me for its sentimental value. It had no bullets in it, probably didn't work anyway, but it was pretty scary looking.

“Hey, baby, let me in!” he said. “Baby, come on!”

As quietly as I could, I climbed down from the loft bed, picked up the rifle from the desk, and crept in the dark toward the kitchen, where I grabbed my cell phone and took it with me so I could call for help quickly if I needed to.

“You've got the wrong apartment,” I shouted back, my eye to the peephole. Through the fish-eye lens, he looked like a white man/boy with a very small body and a very large head. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a day or two's growth of peach fuzz.

“I know she's in there. Let me in!” He was surly and antagonistic.

“She's not here,” I said. “Who lives here? Do you know?”

“Uh, I don't know. Or I forget. Nadia knows you.”

“You've got the wrong apartment,” I said. “Go away!”

“Let me in!”

“You've got the wrong apartment! Go away or I'll call the police.”

He swore in some other language. I didn't speak that language but after you've traveled in enough countries and stepped on enough toes, you can recognize the curse words just by tone.

I watched until he was out of view, waited a moment longer, and went back to bed. Barely an hour had passed when, around five
A.M
. I was awakened by more racket.

“Hey! Who put the chain on?” a woman called out. “Hello? HELLO! Tamayo? Are you home already?”

The door was ajar, the chain on it. The woman kept pounding on the door. I stood in the shadows, away from the light coming in from the hall, so I could see her but so she couldn't see me. It was a young woman with bleached-blond hair and big, dark glasses, wearing jeans and a big T-shirt. She had a suitcase and a small backpack. Behind her across the hall and down a couple of doors, a bald man was standing in his doorway, watching us and lifting hand weights.

“I hear you in there, TaMAYo!”

“Who is it?” I asked, in a low, clear voice. “I've got a gun.”

“Uh, er, uh. Is this TaMAYo Scheinman's apartment?”

“It is. How did you unlock the door?”

“TaMAYo sent me the keys. See?”

She stuck a padded envelope under the door chain.

I grabbed it and said, “Don't move,” then slammed the door shut, and turned on the light.

“Dear Nadia,” it said. “Here are the keys. Hope all goes well with your fiancé. Be very careful. E-mail me when you're grounded. If you need any help, call Maggie in 709. Good luck and good sex.”

It was a note from Tamayo all right. I recognized the handwriting and the style.

I opened the door.

“I'm sorry, I didn't know Tamayo had other guests coming. Come in,” I said.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asked, with just a trace of an accent.

It sounded foreign, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. In the kitchen light, she looked like a teenager, but that may have been because she had the kind of baby-face cutes that tend to make a woman look younger than her years all her life.

“Robin Hudson, a friend of Tamayo's.”

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“My apartment burned down. I had keys, so I came to stay here. You were expecting Tamayo to be here?”

“No. But when I saw the chain was on the door I assumed she had come back to New York. How do I know you're a friend of Tamayo's?” she asked.

“Don't be paranoid. What is it with kids today? You're so suspicious,” I said, but held back all sarcasm and hostility, a little trick I'd had to learn and use a lot while on the road.

“I need to know if you're telling the truth about being Tamayo's friend,” she said imperiously. “Otherwise, you'll have to leave.”

“I'll have to leave? My apartment burned down. It's after five in the morning. I was here first.”

“I have a written invitation to be here,” she said.

“I have a blanket invitation. Look, I am so tired I can't think straight—”

“How do I know you know Tamayo? I need to know.”

“Oh hell. Let me prove it to you,” I said.

In Tamayo's publicity library, several loose-leaf binders containing media coverage about her, I found an article from a women's magazine about “Girls' Nights Out” among women of all ages. Tamayo contributed with a story about our most legendary girls' night out, one Halloween. It was accompanied by a photograph showing me, Tamayo, another friend of ours, Claire Thibodeaux, and my former intern, Kathy Loblaws.

The girl looked at it and said, “All right, you can stay tonight. How long are you planning to be here?”

“I don't know how long I'll be here. My apartment burned down. How long are you planning to be here?”

“Not long. I'm meeting my boyfriend here, we have a little business, and then we're leaving.”

“Oh right. He was by earlier,” I said.

“He was here already? Where is he now?” she asked.

An awesome transformation occurred as her entire demeanor changed, from surly youth to gushy teenager. Her eyes lit from within, her face broke into a smile, a rosy glow flushed her cheeks.

“I don't know. I thought he was at the wrong apartment. I sent him away.”

“YOU SENT HIM AWAY?!”

“Sorry, but a strange man pounds at the door at four
A.M
. and wants to come in? You'd do the same. Jesus. You'll find each other soon.”

“You don't understand,” she said, and slumped into a kitchen chair, her bag sliding off her to the floor. She started to cry. There was something about the way she cried that made me think of a terrier with its tail caught in a door. It was not a pretty sight.

I wasn't sure what my “human duty” was here—to leave her alone, or see if I could do anything. By now, I was dead tired, but I decided to give her a drink and sit with her. Tamayo had a whole cupboard full of expensive liquor in gift boxes, and Nadia took a glass of brandy. After a big glass of brandy, she was almost human. She was nineteen, she told me, her name was Nadia, “just Nadia,” and she had been raised in New York, though the slight accent suggested otherwise. She'd met Tamayo about a year before and had stayed here at the Chelsea a few months earlier when in New York shopping.

“I'm only telling you because you're a friend of Tamayo's … My fiancé and I are planning to elope,” she said. “It's tricky. We have to be careful.”

“Why?” I had this sneaking suspicion that she and the boy were both underage, and somewhere there were very worried parents who wanted to keep their children from making a terrible mistake.

“We just do!” she said. “Why do you need to have so much information?”

“Okay, okay. I really don't give a damn, I was just trying to … Change of subject. If Mr. Right shows up tonight, are you going to want privacy? To have sex.…”

“We do not have sex. We'll have sex on our wedding night. We'll only be here a day or two, then we'll go get married. Oh my Godt, oh my Godt, where is he?” She began to cry again. “It's your fault.”

“It's not my fault, and it's not the end of the world—” I began.

“If you had a boyfriend, you would understand.”

Where did she get off assuming I didn't have a boyfriend? I mean, I didn't, not really, not officially. But just for the hell of it, I told her I did, and told her about Pierre, the French genius I'd had a fling with in Paris. It made for a good moral fable about the benefits of grown-up love, mature adults being so much calmer on the subject, but if Nadia caught the parable, she didn't appreciate it, sneering slightly at me instead.

“Look. Why don't we both get some sleep? You'll feel better if you do, I'm sure,” I said.

She headed toward the loft bed, but I stopped her. “I'm sleeping there. The sofa bed is through there, in the living room.”

“The sofa bed?” she said disdainfully.

“Yeah.”

“I guess the sofa bed will do,” she said.

I crawled back up into the loft bed and wondered what manner of stray this little princess was. She didn't look old enough to be out on her own. Not having sex until the wedding night? Kids today. What was it with the so-called New Modesty anyway, or the New False Modesty, as it were? Who knew so many children of former promiscuous pot-smoking hippies would rebel by embracing the sexual mores of the 1950s? After pondering this briefly, a nuclear apocalypse couldn't have kept me awake, and I fell into a deep, oblivious sleep.

chapter two

W
hen the alarm went off a few short hours later, the morning light was shining through a crack in the curtains and through the pink-and-orange screen, lighting the room in those colors and giving the place a deep, warm cast. If it wasn't my last day before vacation and if I didn't need to tie up so many loose ends, I would have taken the day off. But there was a meeting and I had two reports to finish and turn in to my higher-ups.

Nadia was up already, or still up, sitting in Tamayo's kitchen, tapping on a laptop computer.

“I guess the fiancé didn't get here,” I said.

“No, he didn't, thanks to you!” she snapped.

Rude child. I was about to say something when I remembered she was missing her boyfriend. That, and not being able to get a good night's sleep on account of the pea under her mattress, had no doubt made her a tad cranky. I cut her some slack.

“Are you going to be hanging around all day?” she asked.

“No, I'm going to work,” I said as I poked around Tamayo's cupboards for something Louise Bryant could eat.

“When you come back, call first from the house phone in the lobby, in case my fiancé is here,” Nadia said.

Tamayo's cupboards were stocked with canned goods and food presents from her various admirers—tins of caviar, European cookies in fancy boxes, all manner of delicacy from canned rattlesnake to a big jar of pickled whole squid, which looked like something from an old-time carnival freak show. There was a lot of fancy Japanese food too, with Japanese language labels, and it was hard to tell from the pictures what exactly was inside the cans. Even when the Japanese products were labeled in English, it was hard to know exactly what was inside. In the fridge, for instance, were two blue-and-white cans of frosty Pocari Sweat.

“What do you think a Pocari is?” I asked Nadia, showing her the can. She didn't even smile, and this worried me, that she had no visible sense of humor. Didn't bode well for an early marriage.

Finally, I settled on a can with a picture of a fish on the outside, which turned out to contain a premium salmon. Louise Bryant picked at her food, but finally gave in and ate it before slinking off for her hourly nap.

I was going to need clothes to go to work. In order to go out and buy clothes, I was going to have to borrow some clothes, since I had fled in nightgown, coat, and slippers. Though Tamayo is shorter than I am, we are the same size otherwise, right down to shoes. Her closet was full of clothes, but there wasn't a thing in there I could wear to work. Apparently, Tamayo had taken the one conservative outfit she owned with her on the road, leaving behind the wardrobe for
La Cage aux Folles.
It's all lovely stuff, if you're a drag queen, a free-spirited comedienne, or Marilyn Manson, but not if you're the head of programming for a major network. Amid the jumble of feather boas, sequins, see-through blouses, black leather, and silver go-go boots was one relatively conservative outfit, lime green capri pants and a periwinkle sweater-top. I put them on with matching periwinkle shoes, grabbed my purse and coat, and left.

In the elevator, I rode down with two tailored, proper-looking women in pale suits, their various colognes mingling in the closed space.

“This isn't at all what I expected,” said one of the women, who had dark hair and bore more than a passing resemblance to Marilyn Quayle.

They were holding their purses close to them in the way wary tourists do, so I gathered they were here for a short stay and were not long-term residents. Each carried a pale pink folder with a red rose border and the words “Mary Sue Enterprises.” They looked like they were here for either a gathering of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum or a cosmetics convention, but Mary Sue Enterprises is actually a women-run business that teaches people how to buy up foreclosed mortgages and resell the properties for enormous profits.

“Loosen up. I like this place. I have a lovely room,” said one tourist woman. “Think of the history and the character. Dylan Thomas lived in the room you're in now …”