Nice Girls Finish Last (7 page)

On the other hand, I didn't want to make it any easier for them by quitting prematurely, not if there was a chance I could stay in television a while longer. I don't know why. It wasn't like television had been bery, bery good to me. But it certainly had its high points, like the vigilantism series, and it was kind of like a home to me. I'd been with ANN since the beginning, and if I made it to my next anniversary I'd get a silver-plated satellite pin and a signed certificate from Georgia Jack Jackson.

“I'm flying down to Miami late tomorrow,” Bob said, putting on his coat. “I'm going to miss a few of the meetings.”

Now I suddenly saw the whole picture. It could go any way for me, and McGravy wouldn't be here to stand up for me in the executive meetings, so I had to be extra good and make an extra-swell impression on the higher-ups.

Bad news indeed. The Stoly bottle behind the oak bar was glinting at me most invitingly. But before I could consider the temptation further, McGravy said, “Don't do it, Robin, remember Max Guffy.”

The door into Buddy's opened and the resulting draft blew Bob's comb-over up, so it stood almost on end, exposing his bald spot. He didn't notice and was about to go when I pulled him back and gently pushed the hair back over his bald spot. “Look nice for your date,” I said.

Bob smiled at me, kissed my cheek, and said again, “Remember Max Guffy.” Then he left me to finish my beer alone.

Max Guffy was a good reason not to give in to the vodka goddess. It was such a good reason that I pulled out my reporter's notebook and wrote it down, inspirational saying number 247: Remember Max Guffy.

As if I could forget him. Getting avant-garde undertaker Max Guffy had been a real coup for me, as he'd never done a television interview before and he'd never allowed cameras into his operation. For months I'd schmoozed him, and finally he had agreed to talk to me, without cameras, in preparation for an on-air interview that would set the tone for my special report on death in modern America.

The meeting began well and we established what I thought was an immediate rapport. Then Guffy showed me around the embalming, makeup, and hair facilities, where I had the dubious privilege of watching three dead people sitting side-by-side, strapped into chairs under hair dryers while a stylist coiffed a fourth corpse in front of a mirror. Afterward, we sat in Guffy's eerily quiet office and I confessed I felt uncomfortable, knowing that most of the people in the building were dead, that we were outnumbered, so he poured us both shots of vodka from the full bar he kept in his office for the bereaved.

Now, it wasn't just vodka, it was Zubrowska, a beautiful, hard-to-find Polish vodka that goes down like water and leaves a light honey aftertaste in the mouth. As you can imagine, a swift shot of Zubrowska really loosened us up. Before long we were laughing together like old friends and exchanging mordant undertaker jokes. When he offered another shot, I was feeling rather warm and convivial, and took it. I hadn't had vodka for a while but I thought, hey, I'm in a funeral home. How much trouble can I get into here?

One slip of the tongue later, and an angry, red-faced Max Guffy was asking me to leave his office, saying he wouldn't speak to ANN if his life depended on it.

He called me “tabloidesque.”

No more vodka, I resolved after that. As I said, that day with Guffy was the second-to-last time I had vodka, so clearly my resolve didn't last long. The last time I had vodka (and rather a lot of it) was with comic Howard Gollis, on our fourth date, the night we almost had sex.

Blessings in disguise, bright sides, silver linings … I wanted to believe in all that stuff, but it wasn't easy. Walking down Fifty-seventh Street to the subway, I passed five or six homeless people. Could they look at their lives and say, well, this is a blessing in disguise?

On the subway ride home I read the evening papers. Not having much information, they played the Kanengiser murder pretty light, with brief stories. None of them knew about the handcuffs yet, and none of them made any mention of his patients except to note that the police had sealed his files.

As I folded up the newspapers and stuffed them into my valise, a tough, mustachioed guy next to me, smelling strongly of liquor and chewing tobacco, struck up a conversation, telling me just how attractive he thought I was.

I wanted to be nice, so I said, “Thank you, that's kind of you.”

He took this as an invitation to proceed further. He asked me out on a date and confided he'd been recently paroled from prison.

Where I come from, this is a courtship killer. What is it about me and ex-convicts? I wondered, because this had happened to me before and, coincidentally, both men had been free for exactly five days. For some reason, I'm very popular in the freedom-impaired community and I look especially good to guys who've been free for five days. You know, I appreciate their honesty and all, but what is it about me that makes recently released felons think a criminal record wouldn't be a big thing with me? To be honest, it wasn't even the criminal record that bothered me so much. It was that Aryan Nations tattoo.

In order to cut off conversation with this stranger politely and safely, I pulled out a book, a special book I had bought just for this purpose, called
So You Have Lupus.
I'll take conversation-stoppers for 200, Alex. This can stop it cold, since most people don't know what lupus is and are not sure if it's contagious. If they do know, they aren't particularly interested in hearing about it in detail.

The man had distracted me from my train of thought. I'd been wondering how the killer got into the building without alerting security. If he—or she—had come after six p.m., he or she would be required to sign in before proceeding to the commercial floors. However, someone could have come into the building during the day, when no sign-in was required, and just hidden out somewhere. That would require hiding out after the murder and leaving the next day during regular business hours. Risky, to say the least, but not impossible.

I made a note in the margin of my book. Even as I did, I was thinking, don't sweat this story. Just do the minimum required by Jerry, slap the security tape onto a generic piece about S&M, and move on to nobler things. Do not let yourself get sucked too deeply into a sleazy murder. Avoid unpleasantness.

“So,” said the guy next to me, after roughly clearing his throat. “You have lupus?”

I got off at the next stop and took a cab the rest of the way home.

6

W
hen I got home the guillotine was gone, retrieved by the artist, and my building foyer was free of delusional neighbor ladies. Things were looking up, until I got into my apartment and saw my answering machine was blinking three times, each flash like a threat. Lately, I had looked on my answering machine as at best annoying, at worst a sinister tool that allowed people I was avoiding to reach beyond the constraints of time and space to invade my home. It made unpleasantness unavoidable.

I pushed the play button and went to fix dinner.

“Robin, guess who,” said the voice of Daffy Duck.

“Howard Gollis, I'm ignoring you,” I sang to the machine. It had to be Howard because who else would call me and leave a rude message as Daffy Duck? Also, I recognized his flair for words. Tonight, he called me a “vodka-swilling red-haired succubus.”

Speaking of crazy people. A dark, twisted renaissance man —comic, artist, writer—Howard Gollis was really sexy, truly brilliant, and unbelievably needy. Although we hadn't dated in a while, he hadn't yet stopped calling me. Of course, he hadn't had the courtesy to leave his name—or use his real voice—since we had that big telephone blowout, the time he called me at three in the morning because he ran out of Prozac and needed to try some jokes out on somebody and have them laugh. I had a five a.m. crew call the next morning, so I told him he couldn't call me at three in the morning anymore and he got mad. Since then, I had been screening all my calls.

I don't mean to make it sound like I am some femme fatale who has hordes of muscular, well-oiled men panting after her every casual acknowledgment. I do see myself that way in my more grandiose moments, but as much as I like to think I'm Theda Bara, the truth is I am probably a little more like Fanny Brice (in the body of Rita Hayworth).

There were plenty of men I liked who weren't panting after me, who barely knew I was alive. Those men who were panting after me generally did so because they were (a) psychotic or (b) couldn't believe someone like me would turn down someone like them. We clearly weren't compatible, but they didn't see that. I wasn't good enough to turn them down. It was a vanity thing, they had to redeem their self-image and it had little to do with their genuine feelings for me, so it wasn't flattering. I say that with the knowledge that I, too, am just a tad self-absorbed.

Anyway, Howard fell into the redeem-his-vanity category, as did Reb Ryan, who, despite my best efforts to dodge him, had cornered me in the hallway earlier that day and invited me to go to his gun club with him the following Saturday to shoot a few rounds.

And they say romance is dead.

The answering machine beeped into a message from Gary Grivett, a nice, funny guy from Minnesota I went out with once on a blind date. He wanted to know where I was at lunch. Apparently, we'd had a second date and I'd stood him up. As he was just in town for the day, he said he'd take a rain check. This was the third time I'd missed an appointment since losing my old Filofax in the Great Purse Robbery.

Two down, one to go. Somehow I knew the last message would be the worst of all. Sure enough, the next voice I heard was one that has chilled me to the marrow since girlhood, the voice of my dreaded Aunt Maureen.

That voice of hers … What can I say? It was like a trauma time machine, wrenching me back to the past. I heard her voice, and I was fifteen again and everyone was over at the house for a potluck. All the aunts and uncles are sitting around talking, I walk in with a guy I want for a boyfriend, and Aunt Mo grabs my face and says, loudly, “How's your ACNE?”

Then she twists my head back and forth so she can examine it more closely before starting a major debate on my ACNE in front of a guy I was trying to impress. I would like him to look beyond my ACNE and see the whole me, but it's going to be hard for him to forget I have ACNE when my aunt is moderating a panel discussion on my ACNE and suggestions are whizzing back and forth—“oatmeal plasters,” “witch hazel,” “tetracycline.” Aunt Mo interrogates me. How often are you washing your face? Are you eating chocolate? You're eating chocolate, aren't you? She's eating chocolate, that's what she's doing!

I'm completely humiliated. I've been exposed as an illicit chocolate-eating ACNE Girl. I hope I never see this guy again as long as I live.

“Aw, let her go, Mo,” one of my uncles says. “You're embarrassing her in front of her boyfriend.”

Which just makes it worse. I'm embarrassed to be embarrassed. I'm embarrassed because he isn't my boyfriend and never will be now and he probably thinks it's really funny that they presume he's the boyfriend of a Girl Who Has ACNE.

“I … I have to go,” the boy says. He leaves, I burst into tears and flee the room only to hear Aunt Mo say, “That girl's oversensitive, isn't she?” Another panel discussion about my social skills ensues.

That's my Aunt Maureen. No ounce of body fat, no wrinkle, no blemish, physical or psychological, can escape her keen all-knowing eye or sharp tongue. As I got older, her rebukes grew worse. Even after all these years, she could get at me in a way nobody else could, maybe because she was such a big part of my life before I moved to New York, maybe because she looks so much like my dad, although my dad's jolly personality made his features more Churchillian than Mussoliniesque.

“I'm in New York,” she said to my answering machine. “Well, I have to say, I'm not impressed with this city you love so much. It's filthy! The whole place needs to be boiled.”

Not everyone appreciates New York's gritty and chaotic beauty.

“And it's full of homosexuals and nuts!” she sniffed.

Well, jeez, Aunt Mo didn't have to go all the way to New York City to find homosexuals and nuts. Why, she could just look around our own family. Aunt Mo might be in denial about her sister Lucille and Rosalind, Lucille's truck-driving roommate of seventeen years. But she couldn't deny the nuts in the family, not only my mother but Aunt Mo's only offspring Raymond, my cousin, who was standing beside his unsmiling wife Vivian in the family photograph in my living room.

See, here was a key difference between our points of view: Aunt Mo thought Raymond and Vivian were the perfect respectable couple and was always holding them up to me as an example of stoic marital perseverance, whereas I saw them as a murder-suicide just waiting to happen.

Seriously, my cousin Raymond is even nuttier than Aunt Mo. As a child, for example, Raymond had been terrified by women in curlers. If he encountered one in the Safeway or Kresge's, in the street, in his own home, he'd run screaming in the opposite direction and it would take his mother a full hour to calm him down.

Aunt Mo, who often chastised me for being oversensitive, had no problem with Raymond's “frail nature,” as she called it. Frail, my ass. He taunted me constantly and when I rushed to throttle him he screamed for his mother, who would come in, see me on the offensive, and whip my behind with a large wooden paddle on which the words
GOD
'
S LITTLE HELPER
were written in gold-painted macaroni. (It had been the arts and crafts project at Raymond's Bible camp the summer before. Imagine, they'd had the kids make their own instruments of punishment to present to their parents in a ceremony on pickup day. At my Bible camp we made plaster-of-paris plaques that said,
THE FAMILY THAT PRAYS TOGETHER STAYS TOGETHER
.)