Super in the City (9 page)

We reached the first landing and Gregory’s eyes widened slightly at the police tape. Exhibiting a self- restraint I could never hope to cultivate, he said nothing and continued up the stairs.

“I usually start at the top and work my way down.” He passed Roxana’s and Cliff’s apartments and headed for the top landing, which my parents shared with the Caldwells, a surgeon/sculptor couple who threw elaborate Martin Luther King, Jr., Day celebrations even though they were paper- white WASPs
who hailed from New Canaan. Gregory turned to Lucy and me, whereupon we embarked on a silent competition to flash him the most winning smile. I rolled my shoulders back, sucked in my stomach, and tried to convey that I was intelligent, interesting, funny, and self- knowing.

He looked back and forth between us, a hint of fear creasing his brow. He was alone at the top of an empty house with two strange women, one of whom randomly spewed imprecations at passing tour buses, and both of whom were grinning at him like asylum residents. Meanwhile, the one person in the building he did know was missing, his apartment decorated with dingy police tape.

Gregory bounced the canister hose in his hand, perhaps to remind us that he was armed.

“Keys?”

“Oh, right! Keys!” Lucy and I giggled. We turned to each other expectantly.

“I don’t know where they are,” I said before she could say it. She struggled to look angelic to Gregory while shooting me darts of venom.

As she raced down the stairs, I almost felt sorry for her. Lucy was an inveterate hopeless—no,
hopeful—
romantic. She regularly defaced U.S. government tender in the hopes of finding true love. She used to write “Middle of Brooklyn Bridge, Sun, noon” on all her ten- dollar bills before putting them into circulation, hoping the money would fall into the hands of some equally lovelorn and optimistic man who would then go linger at the appointed spot. Every Sunday, rain or shine, she would Roller blade back and forth to eye potential bait, but things got confusing when she realized two other women were doing the same thing. After that, she started writing “3 Lives Books, Sun, noon,” which was an improvement, as the Tenth Street bookstore
was, first of all, indoors. It also deterred illiterates, as well as uptowners who wouldn’t deign to go below Bloomingdale’s for a date.

So far, she had gotten two dates out of the scheme—a bald performance artist and a married man—and gently let down a handful of women, after which she started adding a “
c?
” to her missive. But she also cheated at fate: Lucy was not above spotting an artsy cutie through the window of Jamba Juice and going in to ask if he had a twenty for her two tens, which was, of course, patently absurd. Who needs
bigger
denominations? Still, Lucy was a wide- eyed bundle of cute, and few men balked at her questionable currency maneuvers.

Lucy returned in a flash, bearing not only the keys, but colored tags and a pen.

“Let’s do it!” she said, her organizational zeal momentarily overshadowing her quest for love. We had already identified the keys to James’s apartment, the front door, the garbage hold, and my apartment, but there were still about seventeen motherless keys left. Lucy started jamming them into the Caldwells’ lock one by one. Gregory put down his poison and leaned against the pale yellow wall. I tried to look like a super.

It suddenly occurred to me that I had the key to my parents’ apartment. Gregory and I could go in there
alone
and he could start working. I opened my mouth, then stopped. I wasn’t cruel enough to leave Lucy by herself, crouched on the floor in front of the Caldwells’ door. I didn’t need Gregory that badly: I was confident that I would one day soon find a true love, and that Lucy, in that classic irony that besets so many therapists, was going to have a tougher go of it. Poor Lucy!

“Hey, Luce,” I offered, “give those to me. You shouldn’t have to do that.” She looked at me suspiciously, as if there was a way to Gregory’s heart she hadn’t considered that involved sticking a mess of keys into a lock. She reluctantly switched places with me.

“What’s with James’s apartment?” Gregory finally inquired. Aha! He wasn’t as detached as he was pretending to be. I thought for a moment, but there wasn’t really a lie that would be either more interesting or less embarrassing.

“He was arrested for embezzlement.”

“No shit?”

Lucy and I traded quick glances. Casual cursing: unsexy. Colorful, vigorous, articulate cursing at appropriate moments: manly. A guy had to know the difference. I was suddenly less interested in Gregory. Apparently, so was Lucy.

“Hey, you guys could start on Zephyr’s parents’ place,” she said cheerfully. After all I’d just tacitly done for her. I blew her a mental raspberry.

“Who was he stealing from? You guys?”

“The oil company. Kickbacks.”

“How was James in a position to offer anyone anything that might merit a kickback?”

Lucy and I looked at each other again. That might have been articulate enough to redeem the “no shit.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, he wasn’t running some big operation. I mean, what could he offer anyone that they’d be willing to pay for? A fixed bid on an oil delivery contract for a seven- unit house?” He laughed.

Gregory’s entire body lit up when he laughed. His stooped shoulders righted themselves. His arms and hands relaxed. His smile was enormous. It took over his face, and his features abandoned the surly layout they maintained in repose. For just a few seconds, his guard came down and his eyes generously let me far inside.

For just a few seconds, Hayden Briggs was out of my system.

“Hey, Gregory,” Lucy said, “do you have a twenty for two tens?”

S
IX O’CLOCK ON A SATURDAY NIGHT IN APRIL IS AN EXCELLENT
moment to be twenty- seven, single, and living in New York City.

I was standing in my underwear—sexy, uncomfortable,
matching
underwear—with a new thrift- shop find freshly steamed and hanging on the bathroom door, experimenting with my hair up/down, earrings long/short. All the lights in my apartment were on and
Abbey Road
was blasting on the stereo while I prepared to crash a party with Tag, Mercedes, and Lucy.

It had taken a while to get back to this point. That first year after the towers fell, I’d stopped wearing contact lenses because the smoke blowing up from Ground Zero wrecked every pair after a day or two. I’d carefully kept my gaze cast downward when I crossed Sixth Avenue because the skyscape was too brutally unrecognizable. And I woke up every morning with a gasp, unable to purge my memory of the flames and the jumping bodies I’d witnessed from the rooftop of Tag’s father’s
Tribeca loft, where I’d been studying for a post- bac organic chemistry test. In those twelve months, there was no night- out anticipation, no belting out “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” no accidentally crashing an infanta’s birthday party. First- world moments seemed to be a thing of the past.

But I was secretly shocked and a little ashamed by how normal life had become after the first anniversary. Even the small residual effects on our lives, like Tag’s heart palpitations, had evaporated. When her syncopated valves started interfering with her ability to sketch a tapeworm, she finally went to a doctor. He made her wear a diagnostic heart monitor for what was supposed to be twenty- four hours, but when a security guard at the museum spotted the wires hanging out of Tag’s shirt, a brief lockdown had ensued. Being Tag, she’d found the irony of the whole incident so hilarious that her palpitations had stopped instantly.

I tried to keep the enormity of the attacks fresh in my mind, out of respect for the mourning families. But I was a fourth-generation New Yorker and, except for the occasional fantasy in which I alerted the police to a bomb in the subway, was interviewed on the news, and was subsequently offered my own PBS talk show because Charlie Rose’s producers had just that morning decided he had interrupted one too many guests, I wound up going back to living the only life I knew.

Which, at the moment, consisted of balancing on a chair in my living room in front of a mirror, gauging whether my black bra and panties looked good or whether they just highlighted my end- of- winter pastiness. I had never bought a full- length mirror, out of fear that it would make me vain (a favorite subject of analysis and ridicule among the Sterling Girls). As a result, I could only see from my thighs up to my hearty arms, round face, and rebellious hair, a disproportionate view that allowed me to be pleasantly surprised whenever I caught my
full reflection in a store window. I peered into the mirror and wiped a smudge of peanut butter off the corner of my mouth.

Tag had managed to persuade Lucy, Mercedes, and me to crash a book party at Soho House, the private hotel in the meatpacking district favored by movie stars, moguls, and anyone who wore a size zero. I was still recovering from the fiesta fiasco at the St. Regis two weeks before, but Tag insisted we get back in the saddle.

“So maybe once a year—”

“Uh,” I interrupted.

“Okay, twice a year, even three times, we get caught. Is that a reason to give up our only window into lifestyles we’d otherwise never encounter?”

Oh, she was good.

I watched myself dance on the chair, grunting and scowling to “She’s So Heavy” and suddenly realized that I was dressing for Gregory. Usually, my primary source of fashion guidance was whether if I encountered Hayden he would drool with regret at botching his chances with me. But tonight, I was imagining bumping into Gregory. He was a sourpuss in a jumpsuit with a rat and a roach on it, and I still wasn’t sure whether he was an undercover cop, but there it was.

The revelation made me freeze mid- gyration. I didn’t know which part of the equation was more shocking to me: that Hayden was, at least momentarily, out, or that the sullen exterminator was in.

The phone rang, and I made a mental note to run this new development by the Sterling Girls when they arrived.

“Sweetie,” came my mother’s brisk, efficient voice. “We’re just headed out to meet the Lowells for dinner and the ballet…”

She paused. My mother and Derek Lowell’s mother had
unsubtly waged a campaign since he and I had been in kindergarten to get us married to each other. It had been intensified (by my mother) when he had gotten into Harvard, relaxed when I was dating a Legal Aid lawyer, intensified (by his mother) when he had broken up with the actress, and then intensified some more (by my mother) when I had dropped out of med school. If I wasn’t going to make anything of myself professionally, she must have thought, let’s at least get her safely married.

“Uh-huh,”
I said warningly

“… and our dryer isn’t working. When you press start
,
it makes these noises that sound like ‘O Canada.’ ”

I laughed. “Bummer. Do you want to use mine?”

There was an awkward pause.

“Uh, well, actually, Zeph, we need you to fix it. Or have it fixed.”

And there it was. It had been no problem escorting Gregory around the building while he fumigated apartments— practically a first date. It was annoying but tolerable to humor Mrs. Hannaham and her phantom odors. I found it downright educational to help the Caldwells measure their bathroom windows for new blinds. (It turned out that the retired surgeon and her effete sculptor husband slept in separate beds, a fact I’d wasted little time in relaying to Lucy, who chewed over the information intently, even though she’d never met them.)

But I had avoided thinking about the moment when I’d be called on to act as my parents’ super. It shouldn’t be any different, I advised myself quickly, as my mother breathed over the phone, from someone who worked in a family business. After all, 287 West 12th Street
was
a family business. How many hardware stores, accounting agencies, medical practices, and bagel shops were So- and- So and Sons? Or Zuckerman and
Zuckerman, LLP. How many Korean grocers had made their kids pause during their calculus homework to ring up my order of Ben & Jerry’s?

But the difference was that in those businesses, Junior was
working
for his parents, but
serving
other people. If I had been an accomplished forest ranger living downstairs from my mom and dad, and they’d called me to help them with their dryer, I would have been performing a familial favor. My position as super, on the other hand, required me not just to work for Ollie and Bella Zuckerman, but to serve them.

I twirled my earring nervously and fought off a wave of anxiety, the kind that comes from realizing one has made a very bad decision.

“Zeph?”

“Yeah, no problem,” I squeaked out. And then I had a terrible thought. “Does it need to be taken care of… tonight?”

My mother chortled loudly and I had to hold the phone away from my ear. “Sweetheart, no repairman works on a Saturday night. Just take a look at it tomorrow and …”

Then, I believe, Bella Zuckerman had a similar realization to the one I had just entertained, though it probably flashed up on her brain as a spreadsheet. In one column: money invested on four years of private high school and four years of college plus additional pre- med classes, med school itself, and law school applications—multiplied roughly by two to take into account her wayward filmmaking son. In the other column: zero ability of any child of hers to repair a Frigidaire dryer that was humming the Canadian national anthem.

“Well, just take a look at it, then look in James’s files for a repair person and call him. Or her,” she quickly amended. “Of
course.
With the money we’re saving on James’s salary, we’ll have no problem covering fees to outside sources.” Her mental spreadsheet was in the black once more.

I hung up dejectedly. It felt like the end of the evening instead of the beginning. My strapless bra felt saggy, my thighs suddenly looked pale against the black lace, and I was tired. The phone rang again. Did her toilet need plunging, too?

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Um …” came a male voice.

I perked up. “Oh, hello?” I ran the voice through my audio inventory, first stop Hayden. Hayden?