Authors: Daphne Uviller
“Someone dooble- lucked zuh door,” she explained, regaining her regular dulcet tones. She started to slip past Gregory, when he suddenly straightened his shoulders and said in a booming voice completely unsuited to his proximity to Roxana,
“Ma’am, aren’t you the resident in 3B?”
Roxana looked at him like a frightened puppy. She nodded, and I wondered why he was sounding like he’d stepped off the set of
Dragnet.
“There were two rooms in your apartment I couldn’t access when I sprayed the building last Monday. They were locked.” This was news to me. A qualified landord, I thought morosely,
would have kept an eagle eye on the stranger she let into her tenants’ homes instead of engaging in petty rivalries out on the landing. Another black mark on my quickly darkening record.
“James knoss zey are never spread,” she said quickly. “I am very sensitive to zuh poison.” She started down the stairs again, her tiny back rigid.
“ Uh- huh, uh- huh,” Gregory continued tenaciously. “Right, he’s told me that, but is there any way we could schedule a time when, say, you’ll be out of town, that we could do it? It’s just that it makes spraying the rest of the building nearly ineffectual if we have to skip a spot. The vermin congregate where the poison isn’t.”
I shuddered, and Roxana’s eyes grew wide. “Zere are no vehrmin in my apartment,” she said defensively, as someone started pounding on the outside door. “I keep eet vere clean. Everysing ees vere, vere clean!” She twisted away, down the stairs.
“Why didn’t you tell me there were locked rooms in her apartment?” I whispered accusingly.
“You didn’t ask.”
I couldn’t let go of my towel to strangle him so I stamped my foot, which conferred upon me all the dignity of a child having a tantrum.
“How could I know to ask that?” I hissed. “Is it the room we were … in?”
Gregory looked at me, his lips twitching slightly at the corners, then reached across the threshold, pulled me tight against him and planted his warm, soft mouth over mine. His tongue teased its way inside for a liquid second and then it was over.
“You should get back inside,” he said, pulling away, leaving me limp and damp. He nodded down the stairs, to where Roxana was greeting her visitor in hushed, tense murmurs, then bounded off in their direction.
Dizzy, I started to shut the door, but not before glimpsing Senator Smith’s hoary head close behind Roxana’s. She glanced up and our eyes met briefly, just long enough for me to register the cloud of fear enveloping her delicate face. Helplessly, I let the door click shut and stood frozen inside my bright apartment. I strained to hear their fading footsteps, and when Roxana’s own door closed with a quiet thud, it was like a muffled gunshot triggering the worst my imagination had to offer.
F
REDDY GIVITCH WAS A PORTRAIT IN PATHETIC. I PULLED OPEN
the door later that afternoon to reveal the saddest sack I’d ever seen taking up space on my stoop. Droopy eyes and a belly to match; moist, blubbery lips; coarsely shaven jowls; fingers worrying the loops around his belt buckle. His checked shirt was two decades late, his pants on the muddy side of brown, and he bottomed out the outfit with a pair of dingy, scuffed sneakers. Of course he was bald. He could have been twenty-five or fifty- five; I couldn’t tell and it didn’t really matter anyway. He sucked sympathy to him like a pile of sand drinking up salt water. He looked at me through thick glasses, and I could see why Officer Varlam tried to help his brother- in- law any way he could. I decided at first glance to give him the listing.
“Come in, come in,” I said quietly, as though ushering him into shelter after a natural disaster, which, I supposed, was what his entire life was.
“Thank you, thank you,” he croaked, his gaze darting quickly to meet mine, then resting somewhere in the vicinity of my forehead. I wondered whether we’d say everything twice for the remainder of his visit.
He followed me upstairs, making little grunts as he went.
“Here it is.” I led him into James’s apartment, wondering
whether Freddy had ever successfully rented a place in his life or if I was tossing away my only potential source of income because a man’s floppy, overly long shoelaces made me want to weep.
Freddy crossed his short arms, an effort that elicited another soft grunt. He glanced at the living room, trudged into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, one cabinet, and one drawer.
“I threw out most of—” I began, but Freddy was off again, darting his eggplant- shaped head quickly into the bathroom, then galumphing into the bedroom at a surprising speed.
“You should have seen this room before. It was disgusting,” I told him proudly. The Sterling Girls and I had effected a Mary Poppins-like transformation, so complete that I had briefly entertained the idea of starting a world- class, white-glove cleaning service. I had made it as far as our
Good Morning America
segment before I remembered that my friends were already gainfully and contentedly employed in careers that did not require squeeze mops.
Freddy nodded and headed back to the front door. The entire tour had taken under a minute. I wondered how he planned to attract future renters to a property he had only given a glance.
He said to the door, “You still got a buncha cans of film or something in the fridge. Get ridda those.” He paused, keeping his back to me and the rest of the apartment. “Fireplace work?”
I started to nod, then said, “Yes.”
“Under the winda seats—any storage under there?”
“I have no idea,” I said, surprised. I walked over to the benches that James had installed, and squatted down. I lifted one cushion and ran my hand along the solid, polished oak surface. I let the cushion drop and picked up the next one, to find a set of hinges gleaming back at me. I wondered how
much value the apartment had just gained with the discovery of this precious storage space. Five dollars? A hundred? I hoped Freddy knew.
When I tried to lift the seat, though, it resisted. Looking closer, I found a small lock built into the base. I sighed and wondered whether James wasn’t actually happier in jail, where locks and keys constituted most of the landscape.
“There’s storage space under here,” I announced to Freddy, standing up, “but it’s locked.”
“Clean it out and then we can rent you.”
“Sooo,” I said hesitantly to the folds at the back of Freddy’s neck. “Any idea, I mean, do you think—well, what do you think is the least I could—”
“Four thou. I’ll get you four thou,” Freddy told the door abruptly, before he opened it and left.
I froze in my tracks, afraid that if I moved I’d distort the words still bouncing through the air. I darted my eyes over to the fireplace, as if to ask the grate, Did you hear what I heard?
“A month? Four thousand dollars a
month?”
I asked aloud, and waited to see whether Freddy would burst back in, pointing at me, his doughy gut jiggling with laughter.
I hurried to the closet in search of the box that held the framed photos of James. I suspected or hoped—the line between the two was blurry—that one of the keys rattling around inside one of those pictures would open the window seat.
Lucy had carefully wrapped the photos in stained linen placemats. I shook each, unfurling the one that rattled and holding it gingerly by its edges as though it was contaminated. If ever there were a boy with cooties, it was James.
I palmed the two keys and started out of the closet. I stopped abruptly and spun around, suddenly inspired. I stuck one of the keys into the lock of the staircase door, the door I’d pried open with Gregory. The lock turned easily and I felt a
short- lived flash of triumph. I’d figured out something—Agent Zuckerman reporting. But I didn’t know what it was I’d figured out—back to Chambermaid Zephyr here for mopping.
I glanced up the staircase, allowing myself a brief, delicious replay of my sweaty, bizarre encounter with Gregory-had I really done that?—then closed the staircase door and hurried back to the window seat, the other key already slick with palm sweat. I lifted up the cushion and turned the key in the lock. Agent Zuckerman! Carefully, afraid of finding a bomb, a snake collection, or locks of my hair, I lifted the seat.
Inside was a blue plastic cooler, the ten- dollar kind you grab at the drugstore when you realize you don’t have enough room in your fridge to hold drinks for a party. Gingerly, I lifted the grimy white lid and peeked inside, squinting with anticipated revulsion.
Ten test tubes (one for each jar of Marmite? Did James also have OCD?) with red stoppers were jabbed crudely into ten overturned Styrofoam cups to keep them upright. The cups were surrounded by wet, flaccid ice packs that had long since lost their cool. A stale, synthetic smell wafted up. I reached for one of the tubes, then stopped and grabbed a pair of rubber gloves off James’s counter.
I held each tube up to the sunlight spilling through the window. Inside all of them was a tiny amount of viscous fluid; it looked like whatever had been in them had mostly evaporated. I tilted the tubes in different directions, letting the fluid ooze around the glass like the contents of a lava lamp. Drugs? Explosives? Medicine? Semen? I shuddered and replaced the tube I was holding in its cup.
I closed the cooler, locked the window seat, and washed my hands for a long time under scalding hot water, wondering whether I should call someone. Gregory popped into my mind and I chastised myself. Why would I want to tell him
something before I told the Sterling Girls? I’d known him less than two weeks—he wasn’t qualified to be my go- to person. I felt like a traitor.
Officer Varlam, I reminded myself, pumping out gobs of soap. If there was anyone I should call, it was the law enforcement official in charge of James’s case. But I didn’t want the cops back here, rooting around my building. Delaying my income.
Was I an accomplice to something by not reporting the cooler? The secret staircase? As the hot water ran through my fingers, I tried to reason through the facts as my father might.
Fact: James had been arrested for embezzling money from the oil delivery company.
Fact: James either had a personality disorder or was an international double agent or was excessively narcissistic or was some combination of all three.
Fact: James had an unusually large collection of sex paraphernalia (though that was a judgment, a qualitative and subjective observation, I reminded myself).
Fact: James may or may not have built a pink staircase with access only to his apartment and to Roxana’s, the key to which he kept inside one of two identical pictures of himself.
Fact: James had a hidden, locked cooler under his window seat, with tubes of unidentified fluid inside it.
Fact: For ten years, James had been a responsible, cheerful super.
I turned off the water. Except for the embezzlement he’d already been arrested for, James’s other behaviors weren’t necessarily illegal. In fact, they probably weren’t any odder than those you’d find if you randomly sampled forty- year- old bachelors living alone anywhere in the country, and possibly even common if you narrowed your survey down to those living in New York City.
Still. The prospect of four thousand dollars a month in income had instilled in me, in the past seven minutes, a new sense of self- importance and responsibility. The sugar in my NASA lemonade. It was like my mother preached in her seminars: Ladies, you want your menstrual flow light and your cash flow heavy! The higher the dollar amount, the taller you stand! I had previously accused her of spouting specious maxims, but now I saw a glimmer of truth to them. Now I felt it was incumbent upon me to preserve this strange collection of behaviors and artifacts until time united those facts into a cohesive story, one that would transform those artifacts into evidence.
It was in this new role as evidence protectress that I crossed the hall to my apartment and returned with some cold ice packs to arrange carefully around the test tubes. I thought back to the third grade, when my class had waited for baby chicks to hatch out of the seemingly lifeless shells that had been FedExed into our care from a farm in Utah. We’d had to keep those fragile ovals at 99.5 degrees or they would have sat there forever, as lifeless as their cousins on supermarket shelves. If I kept the test tubes cool, maybe whatever potential they possessed would be maintained.
I put the warm ice packs in James’s freezer, grabbed the film out of his fridge, and closed the door to his apartment. As the latch clicked, a swell of satisfaction rose up inside me and I felt a few millimeters closer to being a grown- up.
And then I was blindsided: by a vivid, pulsing memory of Hayden’s languorous gaze admiring the length of our naked bodies sealed together with sweat. I smacked the wall, trying to make the image disperse, as though it were a rat. A new relationship inevitably brings up old ones, I comforted myself right before I started wondering where Hayden was at this very moment. Stop! What would he think of me earning as much money as he did? Damn it. Was that why we hadn’t
worked out? Because I wasn’t his earning equal? Was I going to start thinking about him again now that I was? Did I have no control over my anarchic brain?
I stomped into my apartment and slammed the door— twice in one day. I sat down at the desk in my bedroom and tried to distract myself with a pile of heating bills that needed deciphering. The words “just an exterminator” rose to the surface from wherever I’d been keeping them tamped down. Tears of self- disgust and hypocrisy welled in my eyes and I dropped my head into my hands, exhausted by the hopelessness of ever completely getting over Hayden.
S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON, AFTER I STROLLED THROUGH THE
frenz ied Union Square farmers’ market, and just before I went to execute the richly deserved humbling of LinguaFrank at Grounded, I dropped off James’s film, wondering whether it was the British or the Brooklyn side of him that had preferred film to digital. I’d briefly weighed the legal and moral implications of developing the photos and tried to convince myself I was doing him a favor—they might be pictures he’d like to have with him—but really, I just wanted to know what a convicted con artist felt compelled to photograph.