How Did You Get This Number (8 page)

“And,” she continued, “there’s no hot water. There is, but it’s two seconds and then it turns freezing cold.”

“Good!” I clapped my hands. “Must offset the humidity!”

She could have told me that the mattresses were full of bedbugs and I was going to have to sleep on plastic sheets, and I would have clapped like a trained seal.

We sat in silence. I listened to the traffic on Houston, trying to determine if it would be worse or better at night as I fell asleep in my envy-inducing bedroom.

“How is it that this place is available?”

Sang explained her situation—a bad boyfriend whom she had kicked out. She described him as “one of those non-talkative types.”

“Some people are just so blase about everything.” Sang sighed.

I said that yes, I had heard of such a person.

Then I explained my situation—a bad roommate I described as one of those “non-eating types.” When I mentioned the casual kleptomania, Sang perked up for the first time. Stealing was something to which she could relate. You could really picture her hanging out with open thieves, tiring of people she called “friends” stealing her credit cards and photocopying her passport. Not cool, guys. Not cool. So I delved further, but too deep too fast, uttering more syllables through normal conversation than Sang had released in the past week. The more I detailed Nell’s crimes, the more Sang distanced herself from me.

“So, she wears your stuff without asking? Oh. I guess that can be annoying. I grew up with sisters, so—”

“So did I!” I attempted to sit up straight, but the couch pulled me back. “But this girl isn’t my sister.”

I did a quick mental montage of every time I had attempted to borrow an article of clothing from my sister in high school. Not one image featured her giving it to me of her own volition. Indeed, several featured locked drawers and slammed doors and, in one instance, a thrown Walk-man. I stole from her as a matter of habit. But Sang didn’t need to know this.

What she needed to know was that the first time I laid eyes on Nell was in a broker’s office. We were then chaperoned by a landlord showing us an apartment. Nell kept removing nuts from a plastic bag in her pocket and seemed concerned with installing motion sensors in the grateless windows, but I didn’t mind because I thought,
Well, it’s good to snack
,
and I don’t know why I don’t carry around nuts more often.
And New York is a dangerous place. Why should homeowners have a monopoly on protecting their bodies and their valuables with silent alarms? Desperation is a funny thing, I explained to Sang, who seemed never to have experienced the sensation. Rarely does it announce itself. It is instead the silent killer of expectations until you don’t think of yourself as desperate. You think of yourself as a reasonable person who compromises because that’s what living with a roommate is about, compromise....

I was losing her. She was lost in thought, looking me up and down. I strummed my knees to fill the silence.

“I like your picnic table.” I pointed.

“It’s not mine.” She looked with me.

“That’s cool.” I nodded.

When Sang escorted me to the door, I wasn’t sure how to say good-bye. A hug, a handshake, and direct eye contact were equally out of the question. This woman made me feel naked. Luckily, I had clothes on, so I opted to jam my fingers into my pockets and sway. On the street, cars honked in frustration, trying to get to the FDR. Sang leaned against the thick door frame.

“It’s quiet at night,” she said.

“Even with the ghosts?”

“What ghosts?”

“I read somewhere that this place used to be an old brothel. Apparently, a bunch of prostitutes threw themselves out the window.”

“My God.” Sang covered her mouth. “That’s horrible!”

“It’s sad.”

“No.” She wrapped the bones of her hand around my arm. “That’s so horrific.”

“Well”—I didn’t know how to handle this level of alertness—“it’s certainly
whore-
ific
,
I’ll give you that.”

Sang was not amused. Figures. The one time I’m cavalier about a subject and I’m underreacting. Certainly throwing oneself out the window is objectively worse than borrowing a bra without asking. But most people tended to have Sang’s reaction to Nell’s tendencies.

“Haven’t you ever noticed the pictures in the stairwell?” I asked Sang.

I knew making her feel foolish was probably not the key to her steely heart, but how could she not know? I didn’t expect her to turn into an Asian Scooby-Doo, but surely there was a baseline level of curiosity all humans shared. Food, shelter, clothing, creepy old shit. New Yorkers in particular are masochists when it comes to obtaining housing information that will only piss them off. We are gluttons for discovering that our twenty-unit apartment building used to be a single-family home. And not even a nice one at that.

“Huh,” she mused. “I thought they were from a thrift shop or something.”

I RETURNED TO MY APARTMENT AND LOOKED AT MY bedroom, which felt smaller than ever. Every inch was planned and decorated because I had no choice. I looked in Nell’s bedroom. Everything was so neat and perfectly matched. I felt myself falling somewhere between Nell and Sang. I could sense them both categorizing me as the other when they looked at me, a feeling that made me wish I could put them in the same room together and say, “You think
I’m
bad? Look at
this!”

Mentally, I was already packing, deciding what I’d bequeath to Nell when she returned from Nepal and what I’d have to hide before she found out I was moving. This would be good for her. She could find a more suitable gym buddy to fill my room and cover the kitchen drawers in antibacterial contact paper like she’d always wanted. Maybe they could even share soymilk and—with a little time and a little trust—shampoo.

I got a pair of tweezers, took the peanut butter jar down from the kitchen cabinet, and started digging.

 

 

 

 

IT WAS HARD TO PIN DOWN WHICH WAS STRONGER: the desire to live like a real live grown-up or the desire to spend some quality time with the dead. True, the slutty ghosts had their appeal, but my relationship to the supernatural had a longer history than that. I was nine years old when I saw my first ghost, and I had been waiting for another ever since.

I grew up on a rarely trafficked street—the kind of street you could play just about any sport in the middle of with little automotive interruption. At night, when the occasional car passed through, I could follow its headlights as they projected their way around my walls. Sometimes I’d pretend I had escaped from prison in some brilliantly confounding fashion and they were searching for me. One night when I was tucked in with my disintegrating blankie, a car passed by but failed to take the light with it. My bedroom remained dimly but steadily illuminated. I was not afraid of the dark. The dark is what happens when the sun goes down. It was like cowering from dirt. But I
was
afraid of inexplicable light. In the movies, a sudden glow was generally accompanied by exhaust fumes from an alien spaceship. It’s why I was never comfortable with night-lights. They were unnatural. Plus, if they worked for me, would they not also work for the eight-eyed monster hiding in the closet? Bitch has eight eyes. She can see a night-light. Best to level the playing field.

So I crept out of my room, on the hunt for artificial brightness. I turned off the hallway light and returned to bed.
There,
I thought,
that should take care of it.
But the ghost was just getting started. The perfectly sharp silhouette of a little boy with a bowl haircut appeared in the far corner of my bedroom. He was approximately my size and shape, with a Peter Pan gait, except that he was obviously a minion of Hades. He glided across the wall, stopped, and looked up at some invisible speck on the ceiling. Then he turned to face me for a moment before quickly merging into the darkness of the adjacent wall.

And that was it. Like a photosensitive plant reaching for the sun, I widened my eyes, attempting to absorb all the paranormal presence possible. The strange cocktail of fear and magic kept my eyes bouncing from wall to wall in time with the eyes of my cat-shaped wall clock, which ticked off the seconds with its tail. I assumed the boy would cycle back, but he never did. I felt a little rejected. I always thought there was an understanding in the community of the dead that it’s best to appear before children, who are more apt to accept what they’re seeing. My ghost took one look at me and changed his mind.

“Hello?” I whispered. And he pretended not to hear me.

Beyond the rejection, there were pretty convincing social reasons to keep the sighting on the down low. Every nine-year-old knows the difference between wanting the impossible and getting it. I didn’t need my friends shouting “Boo!” at me on the bus any more than I needed a school psychologist holding up inanimate objects and asking me if they were real. Plus, I was already starting to second-guess myself. Even if it was real, as far as paranormal experiences go, mine was pretty unsexy. Haunting Lite. It was brief and subtle and left no proof for the living—no recovered keepsakes or cardigans folded on headstones. No bones locked in a trunk in the attic, shrouded by a moth-eaten wedding veil.

So I was eager, to put it mildly, to move into McGurk’s. I wanted to see what a real ghost looked like while simultaneously accessing my inner militant feminist/whore. I left a message for Sang, thanking her for showing me the apartment. When I didn’t hear from her, I decided to follow up with an e-mail, thinking the chances of Sang’s phone being disconnected were better than not. I felt like a desperate girl angling for a second date after my nerves had gotten the better of me on the first. Why didn’t she love me? Was I not a catch? She could use my loofah if she wanted to. I never heard from her again.

 

 

 

 

IT WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE NELL REENTERED THIS half of the world. I couldn’t believe I had packed in a whole real estate dalliance in the time she’d been gone. It was like the end of
The Bridges of Madison County.
The never-released director’s cut of
The Bridges of Madison County,
with the dead prostitutes and the broken glass and the decapitated dolls’ heads.

I sat at a bar with Mac near his new apartment, eating stale popcorn and moping into my beer. I said I just couldn’t believe Sang hadn’t called.

“Who?”

“Sang.”

“You did? When? You can’t hold a tune.”

“Shut up, racist.” I laughed.

And he laughed, too. And then he stopped and said, “What are we talking about?”

For the first time, I found myself perversely grateful for Nell. If I didn’t know that her punctual bill-paying and obsessive cleaning originated from a larger fissure in her psyche, I would be happy to have her as a roommate. If I lived with Mac or Sang, I might come home to find the house burned down. Mac wedged a lime into his beer and squirted himself in the face. I reminded him of his amazing apartment tip, which had turned out to be a big, fat tease, robbing me of the impossibly hip version of myself and dooming me to a life of banality and a cupboard of Snackwells sandwich cookies. Though the devil’s food ones aren’t half bad. Mac looked at me.

“I can honestly say I have no idea what you’re talking about. Have you been smoking pot out the window again? ”

“That’s hardly the point.”

It took a few minutes to get his version of the story. Motivated by real estate guilt, Mac confirmed, he did pass on the e-mail. That he remembered. But he claimed never to have called me beforehand, reminding me that we were only tenuously “speaking.” Furthermore, the e-mail was passed on to him via a friend of a friend. He had no idea who this Sang person was.

“Why would I call you to tell you I was going to e-mail you? I’m not eighty years old.”

I said I didn’t know but that I had become accustomed to living with such obsessive-compulsive behavior. No amount of triple-checking or scheduling or Handi- Wiping fazed me anymore.

“I distinctly remember having this conversation with you.”

“I love it!” Mac slapped the bar. “This is so like the
Twilight Zone
movie.”

“That’s a TV show.”

“Movie.”

“TV show. And are you kidding me?”

But he wasn’t kidding. The more I pressed him, the further he backed away from it. My mind spun.
But Grandma’s been dead for twenty years! I
had spoken to someone that night. Hadn’t I? Something had stopped me from putting foam-core museum plaques next to Nell’s Ansel Adams posters and sorority photos. Was it possible I had had an adulterous real estate conversation but couldn’t recall with whom? Now who was the big whore? And where did this end? Maybe Sang was a ghost. She certainly had the demeanor for it. More likely, I had been a party to not one but several unaccounted-for phone calls that night. I am the thing even rarer than a ghost: a chatty pot smoker.