Super in the City (2 page)

“No idea which one she is,” I said, spraying a mouthful of crumbs down my dress. As I was brushing them off, though, I got a clue. Like a punch in the gut, a brass band struck up behind us, causing Tag to spray out a mouthful of sangria.

A
cobla
promenaded in, with a red- and- yellow- striped flag waving prominently above their brass instruments, and took their place pretty much beside us, which isn’t the kind of thing you hope to have happen when you’re crashing a party. I assumed a half smile and tried to sway to the music, but traditional Catalonian tunes aren’t particularly conducive to swaying. I glanced over at Tag and saw that she, too, had pasted on the same slightly constipated smile of a bride being photographed for the hundredth time.

We had begun inching away from the band as inconspicuously as we could when they abruptly swung into a universally recognizable tune. A side door flew open and out strode a middle- aged man with a handlebar mustache and an honest-to- God, real- life crown on his head. On his arm, wearing a floor- length ivory satin dress and, ah, there it was, a tiara, was a dead ringer for Penelope Cruz—if she were fifteen with a thyroid problem. Señorita Cruz smiled and waved (without looking the least bit constipated), while everyone around us began clapping and yelling
“Felíz cumpleaños!”

I still hadn’t hit upon the Spanish for “meat things,” but I remembered “happy birthday” at about the same moment that Tag did. She tugged at my dress, but the princess had spotted us—not a hard thing, since she was on a direct course into our
embrace—and was frowning. She leaned over and whispered into her father’s ear, who locked us in his crosshairs and scowled, too. The family resemblance was remarkable.

We started to inch backward, which seemed to propel the pair faster toward us. Tag bumped into a gaggle of wrinkled
abuelas,
who started waving their arms around, their black shawls flapping like angry bats’ wings, and my precious accumulation of quiches, cakes, and crackers slid onto the feet of Ferdinand. The music slowed to a confused stop, and a couple hundred brown eyes stared at us. The infanta began yelling. She was not as attractive up close, with spit flying from between her thick lips. When we didn’t respond, her father—the king—joined in, but louder.

This may sound surprising, but being yelled at by a king is not unlike being yelled at by the school principal. I suppose if I had been a prisoner in a dungeon and my life was on the line, I might have felt differently, but the only thing imprisoning me at the moment were my L’eggs control- top pantyhose. How ever, as any Teaneck High senior could attest, it is awful to be yelled at by the principal in front of everybody. Especially in front of the boys.

A man who could have been Ferdinand’s shorter brother broke through the crowd and planted himself in front of us, demanding in an angry, velvety lilt, “Who invited you? Are you friends of the prin
cess
?” He put the accent on the second syllable.

My right eyelid started to twitch, but Tag, who has talked her way past customs officers while carrying a thousand undocumented specimens in her luggage, answered immediately and with righteous indignation.

“The prin
cess
?! We are not here for the prin
cess.
” You would have thought from Tag’s disdain that Her Highness was
a stripper recently demoted to whore. “We are supposed to be at a reception for Friends of OPEC.” She glared back at the man, who seemed flustered by the about- face.

“Why,” Tag continued, “were we not told this upon our arrival?”

The king said something to Ferdinand’s brother, who shrugged his shoulders. The princess tugged on her father’s sleeve and whined something. I had been wildly counting little squiggles in the paisley carpet (twenty- three so far). When I ventured to glance up, I met the gaze of my shoulda- woulda-coulda- been husband and found that Ferdinand was laughing at us. Twenty- four, twenty- five, twenty- six …

The king started to yell again, but Tag, bless her fearless self, yelled back.

“You’ve wasted enough of our time this evening. I hope your daughter has a lovely little birthday party. Next time, you might want to consider having a bloody
guest
list!” The last thing a crasher wants is a guest list (as for a
bloody
guest list, that was the British branding boyfriend still clutching a portion of Tag’s brain), but it was a ballsy bluff.

Sensing my paralysis, Tag put her hand forcefully between my shoulders and pushed me to the doorway. We feigned calm as we marched out of the room and down the hall. As we approached the elevators, though, we heard angry voices behind us, so we headed straight for the fire stairwell and crashed through the door. Whereupon Tag leapt in front of me and flew down the stairs at breakneck speed, screeching, “Zephyr, you fuckwad, run, goddamn it, RUN!”

I was still holding an hors d’oeuvre plate smeared with tomato sauce. I didn’t want to be charged with trespassing
and
theft all in one night, so I carefully set it on the landing and made after my satin- clad friend as fast as I could. Which is not that fast, when you consider that my name means “breeze.”
Every few days, I did a waffle- burning plod of about three miles, but that paltry regimen had hardly prepared me for escaping capture by angry Iberian royalty on two- inch heels, in a five-star hotel.

As I flung my way down the cement flights, clinging to the rail and growing dizzier with each step, I pictured myself recounting the evening’s story to my parents, whose primary purpose in producing my brother, Gideon, and me was, as far as I could tell, so they’d be guaranteed entertainment for the rest of their days. That, and, when we were small, to have someone hand up the plates from the bottom rack of the dishwasher.

I’d roll out of bed around nine the next morning, pad up the two flights to apartment 4A, knock as a punctilio while letting myself in, plop down at the lox- laden table, and ask, “Hey, Mom, St. Regis security didn’t call here last night, did they?” Or maybe, “Hey, Dad, it turns out the King of Spain wears the same cologne Uncle Hy used to wear.”

And my father would fold up the
Week in Review,
slap the table, and lean forward, bellowing, “Do tell!” My mom would chuck the
Book Review
and bustle into the kitchen, saying, “Wait, wait, don’t start, I want a full cup of coffee for this.”

First, though, I had to ensure that hotel security did not actually become acquainted with my parents or their telephone number.

Tag and I race- walked across the lobby and emerged, panting, onto Fifth Avenue—surely the streets were safe, like international waters?—and into the magnolia- scented spring evening.

“Oh my God!” Tag shrieked, her hand on her side, trying to catch her breath.

I could only wheeze and push sweaty, renegade tendrils off my cheeks.

“What is the point,” Tag gasped, “of having a party in another country if you can recognize everyone there? Did they just fly in everyone she usually hangs out with?”

Leave it to Tag to find the princess at fault.

“I mean, we could have been, you know…”

“Senators’ daughters,” I ventured between breaths.

“Or soap opera actresses!”

“Or borough presidents.”

“Yeah! Or venture capitalists looking to invest heavily in … in … what does Spain make?”

“Yellow rice?”

“Yellow rice!” Tag put her hands on her hips defiantly. She looked so convinced that she was a venture capitalist wanting to invest in Spanish rice that I started laughing, which left me so out of breath that I had to sit down on a planter. Tag seemed to remember that she was not a wealthy speculator and sat down beside me.

“You have to pay more attention at these things, Zeph,” she said sternly. “Not get all googly- eyed over the first bag of tricks to give you visions of villas.”

I glared at her. “Me? You were supposed to do due diligence! I would have been fine at home with my pizza.”

“Of course you would’ve.” She licked her finger and rubbed at a sangria stain on her dress. “If it weren’t for me, you’d never go north of Fourteenth Street.”

“This from the woman who’s allergic to the Upper East Side,” I announced to no one in particular. Tag had spent her childhood shuttling between a mother who boasted that she’d married Tag’s father for the alimony, and a father who was now on his third wife (second trophy). Tag had concluded that their behavior was the result of their neighborhood. Reminding her that people behaved badly on the West Side, and even downtown, did nothing to dissuade her from her theory.

We were quiet for a moment.

“Friends of OPEC?” I finally said. “FOOPEC?”

Tag shrugged, but she started to smile.

“So what now? It’s only nine- thirty.” Though we both knew we’d be in our beds within the hour, we went through the motions as a nod to our youth and to New York’s reputation for being the center of the universe.

“Movie?” I said, glancing toward the marquee of the Paris Theatre two blocks away.

“Kind of late to start a movie.”

“Drink?”

“I don’t wanna spend the money.”

“Jazz at Smoke?”

“Since when do you like jazz?” Tag asked suspiciously.

Since spotting the buzz- cut bass player who’d moved into the apartment between my parents’ and mine two months earlier.

I shrugged. “Just trying to think of something new.”

But Tag was starting to squint in a way that meant she really wanted to go home and get up early and go into her lab to look at her beautiful tapeworms under a microscope. And I was thinking of the three Netflix DVDs waiting in their inviting red- and- white envelopes at home, an orgy of chick flicks, with Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Aniston receiving equal representation. Plus a fresh bag of Newman’s Own Ginger- O’s. A yawn escaped me.

Ten minutes later, we were waving to each other across the Columbus Circle subway tracks, as Tag waited for an uptown train and I headed downtown. I paced back and forth to the beat of the steel drum player, who was pinging out the grooviest version of “Hava Nagila” I’d ever heard. The guy was grinning and sweating while two Latino guys alternately danced and sucked face in front of him and a tourist family—towheaded, wide- eyed,
clutching
Lion King
programs—took pictures of the whole scene, no doubt deriving better entertainment value from their MetroCards than they had from their orchestra seats.

Plugging my ears as the express roared past, I grew giddy from a familiar first- world high, a euphoria that suffused my body like an electric current: I had been born into circumstances that allowed me clean running water, heat, and toilets that flushed, where no tanks rolled down Fifth Avenue and I could find tofu in a variety of configurations twenty- four hours a day. I adored my friends, I loved my parents, and I usually didn’t mind my brother. I lived in a city, if not a country, where two men could make out in public with impunity. There was no one to keep me from heading out of the subway station, going to the airport, and, if my bank account permitted, hopping a plane to China. Or Atlanta. Or Spain. I pushed aside guilt, figuring
someone
had to actually experience the freedom to which so much of this subjugated, avian- flu- fearing, war-stricken world aspired. If no one lived it, then what was the point of anyone having dreams?

And I was living It.

Right?

I was pretty sure I was living It.

I boarded my train and tried to hold on to my high.

I
SQUEEZED INTO A SEAT ACROSS FROM A SLEEPING FAMILY
with teenagers for parents—poof went my life- is- grand high— and reflexively scanned the subway car for Him. Just as quickly, I tried to convince myself that I was studying the bilingual ad exhorting HIV testing.

Oh, the lust of my life, the thorn in my side. The light in my heart, the pain in my ass. Hayden Briggs, that son- of- a- bitch— no, that troubled, sexy psychopath—was the main reason I could not declare myself a well- balanced, completely healthy woman. (Almost, but not quite.) Hayden and I had been broken up for a year already—okay, two years—and I was over him, I really was, but I was still obsessed with him. There
is
a difference, which not enough books, psychiatric diagnoses manuals included, make a point of articulating.

I had moved on, dated other guys, considered what each would look like at the far end of a petal- strewn aisle, but I still dreamed about Hayden at least once a week, and I looked everywhere for that distinctive thatch of red hair falling lazily
over one mischievous eye. On the street, at the Food Em porium, in Hudson River Park, through the windows of cabs stopped at red lights. In elevators and cafés, at crashed parties, in the background of murder scenes on the evening news.

I’d met Hayden at the Odeon, that Deco mainstay of West Broadway, where Tag and I had crashed the afterparty for the New York Press Club awards. Hayden was a reporter for the
New York Post
and his homicide beat was one of the main reasons I’d been attracted to him. He’d call me while I waited alone at Café Loup to tell me he was standing in the blood of three murdered men in the South Bronx. It was titillating enough to distract me from the fact that he was also standing me up.

He’d show up three hours later at my apartment, sweaty, with a tired smile, holding a six- pack and flowers, and tell me all he wanted was to climb into bed with me.

“On you, I mean,” he’d amend, pursing his lips. And I was so turned on by his lithe, freckled body and his grown- up career—all the other guys I’d dated were production assistants who bossily halted pedestrian traffic or grad students slogging through classes in pursuit of a lofty, low- paying degree—that I let him stand me up over and over again.

When Tag was too busy describing new species to listen to the blow- by- blow accounts of my Hayden addiction, I turned to three other fellow survivors of the Sterling School, which had been a pit of institutionalized snobbery save for them, my angels of snarkiness and sensitivity. I didn’t want to bother Abigail, who was grading exams and packing for Stanford to pursue aforementioned low- paying, lofty career. Lucy, perki-ness incarnate, was a social worker who might be too easy on me. When I needed tough love, I interrupted Mercedes, who was merely boning up for the Philharmonic’s fall season.