Authors: Daphne Uviller
“Where can we reach your friend?” Mulrooney said, peering at me with big eyes. “It would help if we could back up your story.”
“She’s at a conference.”
“Where?”
I bit my lip as my malfunctioning geography gene chose that moment to right itself. She wasn’t in Senegal
or
Saudi Arabia.
“Spain,” I whispered.
“Could you speak up?”
“Spain.” I began to see spots.
The pair exchanged triumphant glances.
“Why do you suppose she went to Spain, honey?” Mulrooney said. I resisted correcting his mode of address.
“She’s a parasitologist. She studies tapeworms in sharks,” I said, thinking how ridiculous the truth sounded. Why couldn’t Tag have just become a lawyer? What the hell kind of person mucks around in shark stomachs, I thought angrily.
One of the lights overhead sputtered and died.
“Tell us a little more about what you do. You manage your parents’ building?”
I nodded, nervously working the zipper on my backpack.
“You don’t look like a super. How did you wind up doing
that?”
So this was how I made Gregory feel. No wonder he hated me. I shook my head, trying to focus on one earthquake at a time.
“The previous super left. My parents needed me.”
“Why did he leave?” Underhill asked.
My shoulders dropped and I rubbed my eyes as hard as I could stand.
“Arrested.”
“Arrested?” Mulrooney said, surprised. “For what?”
“Kickbacks,” I told them, wishing I could put my head down on the table.
“And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning?” said my buddy Underhill.
No, I didn’t, but I wondered now if perhaps I should be telling them about the secret staircase James had built.
“I want a lawyer!” I yelped, suddenly remembering I was a prosecutor’s daughter and should have known better than to sit there for ten minutes like some yo-yo without demanding representation.
“You’ve got one at home, I hear.”
I looked sharply at Underhill. He was actually cracking a joke. At my expense.
“You’re free to go,” he said, spreading his arms, as if to persuade me I wasn’t there against my will. I looked to Mulrooney for confirmation. He smiled and nodded. Apparently, we were all buddies now.
“Should I come back tomorrow?” I said, pushing back my chair.
Underhill’s stony face cracked into a smile. “Uh, no,” he chortled, sliding his business card toward me, “consider yourself relieved of jury duty.”
* * *
I
TOOK THE STAIRS OUT OF THE UNION SQUARE SUBWAY
station two at a time—surely that would make up for a shortage of visits to the Y in recent weeks—and gulped deep breaths of the sun- warmed air. As I dodged kamikaze skateboarders and Falun Gong protesters, I embarked on a campaign to be grateful for my current state of affairs. Wasn’t there a Chinese blessing that wished the beneficiary a dull life?
So I had missed an opportunity to serve on the Pelarose jury. That was a huge disappointment. But I had also missed being prosecuted myself. That was a very good thing. So good that it made the prospect of going home to pay bills seem soothing. As long as I didn’t think about paying the exterminator’s bill.
I shook my head, clearing away the thought. I would do my job, get the apartment rented, go to Lucy’s tonight to hear about Mercedes’s smooth sail to the isle of love, be a supportive and dependable friend. I’d even prepare to be a proud sister to my Spielbergian brother. Love would come in its own time. If I didn’t look too hard, it would find me. I just had to figure out how to stop looking.
I turned onto University Place and spotted the dingy yellow awning hanging crookedly over the door to Fast Foto. I considered abandoning James’s prints there instead of forking over my own cash to pay for them. All I planned to do was stick them in the basement with the rest of his stuff anyway.
Closure. Closure and responsibility. I sighed. They were his property. Reluctantly, I pushed open the door.
I handed my claim stubs to the gangly teen attempting to hide his pimples behind sprouts of wiry facial hair. The effect was that of an adolescent Osama bin Laden. I tried not to grimace.
The boy silently disappeared into the back, but when he returned, he brought with him two similarly unappealing teen age
specimens. The three of them moved toward the counter in a huddle, guffawing and watching me with wide eyes. I shifted uneasily.
“Are these yours?” Baby Osama squeaked.
I glanced down at the envelope, which had my name on it, and looked up at the trio impatiently.
“Okaaaay,” he said gleefully, punching numbers into the cash register. “That’ll be fifty- two seventy- five.”
“What!” This was going to come out of the building’s account, damn it. I handed over my credit card, glaring at the ugly boys as if they had forced me to develop the photos.
“Some people pay a lot more than that for … pictures,” said the one wearing a tattered Sex Pistols T-shirt. The third casualty of adolescence elbowed him and snorted.
I grabbed the fat envelope and wrenched open the door. I made it as far as the corner before I stopped under the shade of a birch tree and unsealed the package. Pulling out the first envelope, I prayed for photos of kindly old relatives. Rocking chairs on a porch covered in peeling white paint. An old sheepdog curled at their feet. Please.
As I flipped through the first three photos, I was indignant. Why should I have had to pay for poorly developed film? I could barely make out faces. But at the fourth, I froze. It was grotesquely clear, as if the photographer—as if James—had perfected his technique. A wave of nausea rose in my throat.
The pictures—about seventy of them—were of Roxana. Roxana pale and naked and having sex with lots and lots of different people. Or wearing the lingerie I had brushed up against in her closet, having sex with lots and lots of different people. And then there were photos of other women having sex with lots and lots of different people. One of the women looked like it might be Mini- Dolly. One of the men was definitely Senator Smith; I recognized the gray helmet of hair.
I opened the next pack, and the next one, terrified that I would find pictures of myself. In some, Roxana wore expressions of ecstasy, but the worst were the ones in which all that was visible was a man’s face, contorted with pleasure over a naked breast or bare ass.
I shoved the photos back into the envelope, sending a couple of negative strips fluttering through the air in my haste. I whipped around, trying to catch them. A woman with a newborn strapped to her chest stopped to help, and an elderly doorman limped out of his building to capture the flyaway celluloid.
“Thanks, no, really, thanks, you don’t have to …” I grabbed the negatives from them, trying to sound grateful instead of panicked. I wondered how many other New Yorkers at that very moment were carrying dark secrets inside something as innocuous as a photo lab envelope stamped with a cartoon smiling sun wearing sunglasses.
I hightailed it across Twelfth Street, eager to return to the safety of my apartment and unload my illicit haul. I barely managed a smile for the bald guy toting his pet macaw on his bare shoulders, as sure a sign of spring’s arrival in the neighborhood as daffodils might be elsewhere. As disturbed as I was by this new image of Roxana as a whorish sex addict—no judgments, I chastised myself, no judgments—I knew I had to tell her about these photos. I was more certain than ever that she didn’t know about James’s staircase. He had been using it to spy on her, to take pictures of her titillating sex life.
I clucked with disgust at this rapacious side of James, and absently stepped into the crosswalk against the light. A Harley farting its way down Fifth Avenue swerved to avoid me and I gasped, more terrified at the thought of the photos being found on me by an ER attending than by my brush with death. I hopped back onto the curb. A rail- thin, tattooed dog- walker
being pulled along by a dozen mutts staggered to a halt beside me, and the fourteen of us waited for the light to change.
After I showed Roxana, then what? I crossed Fifth Avenue with the dog- walker, who managed to light a cigarette as her canine charges surged toward Washington Square Park.
I was going to have to give the photos to the police. Or, more specifically, to the FBI. To Underhill and Mulrooney, who, just hours ago, had accused me of having mob ties. What if James was spying on women and then selling unauthorized porn? Someone was going to find out—I shuddered, thinking of the pubescent counter help at Fast Foto—and I needed to get to the cops before they did. But it was only fair to break the news to Roxana first.
I finally crossed Seventh Avenue, dodged a phalanx of Trinidadian nannies pushing orange Bugaboos, and broke into a jog. I raced up my front steps, ignoring Mrs. Hannaham, who was puttering around her garden looking like a holy terror in an oversized sailor’s uniform, her garland of white paper clips drooping low over one ear.
“Zephyr, I need—”
“In a sec,” I said, knowing I’d pay for my brush- off with a dozen pre- dawn phone calls the following week.
Upstairs, the door to James’s apartment was open, and the Sandra Oh clone was marching around, measuring every stretch of wall and calling out numbers to a young woman who was wearing the exact same outfit as Sandra, right down to the thin- lipped expression of concentration.
“Uh…” I said.
Sandra snapped shut her measuring tape. She and her doppelgänger whipped around, fixing me with identical glares.
“Who let you in?” I asked, wondering whether I had definitively told her she could have the apartment and had just forgotten.
Sandra put one hand on her hip and cocked her head as if to say, Please, is there anything I’m not capable of? The assistant put her hand on her hip, too.
I rubbed my forehead hard, trying to triage. Sandra could wait, I decided, and turned to go.
“Is she always this loud?” Sandra barked. I stopped and caught the strains of an argument between Roxana and a deep male voice above our heads. “If she is, I’m going to require some kind of soundproofing.”
The toady assistant echoed “soundproofing” a moment after Sandra said it, as if to prove her allegiance to her boss.
“I’ve never heard her before,” I said firmly. “I’ll go check.”
I dumped my backpack in my apartment and listened to the row upstairs. It wasn’t in English or French, and every now and then an exchange was punctuated with a thump, like a palm on a wall. I remembered the naked fear I’d seen in Roxana’s eyes as Senator Smith followed her up the stairs, and her hushed argument with Mini-Dolly on the landing, and I wondered if I should get someone to go with me to her apartment.
No. There was no Hayden, there was no Gregory, and my father was at work. I was no fairy- tale bimbo awaiting male assistance. I was going to do this myself. I donned my super’s cloak of responsibility, girding myself with thoughts of all the organized files now neatly lined up under my bed, and how I knew what tax forms to file and what grade oil we used. Clutching the photos, I made my way upstairs.
The voices grew louder. They were speaking Spanish, not with the usual Mexican lilt I was accustomed to hearing from the kitchen of every restaurant in the city, but a lisping, mother-country Spanish. More slamming. More yelling. Roxana was sobbing.
I nervously flicked the packs of photos against my hand,
hesitating. This was a test. If I could stop the fight, go to the cops with the photos, and get a nice, fat deposit out of Sandra—to whom I had apparently rented an apartment-then I would have finally completed something. I would have proved to my parents and myself that I was an adult. I didn’t know what would come next in my life, but whatever it was, I’d be coming at it like a cheetah charging through the jungle instead of an alley cat skulking along the top of a Dumpster.
I took a deep breath and knocked. We were in a town house in the middle of Greenwich Village on a Tuesday afternoon.
I mean, really, what was the worst that could happen?
T
HE YELLING INSIDE ROXANA’S APARTMENT WAS DROWNING
out my knocking, so I pounded on the door. Silence, and then a low, angry rumble of voices. I banged a third time, my determination building.
“It’s Zephyr. Roxana, open the door right now!” I shouted, thrilled by my own authority.
Roxana flung open the door. Her eyes were puffy and damp, her topknot was unraveling, and her lip was bleeding. Behind her, the apartment was a wreck. Moving boxes were everywhere, stuffed chaotically with unmatching items-fringed pillows and a lamp sticking out of one, books and pots sticking out of another, as though the boxes weren’t going to be closed, just thrown away. Shards of a vase littered the floor in front of me.
I carefully stepped over the broken pottery, toward her. When I looked up, I was face- to- face with the presumed vase tosser. It took a second to place the sharp jaw, the black eyes, and the even blacker hair.
Ferdinand.
Ferdinand, the shrimp- eating Spaniard I’d elbowed up to at the St. Regis. Ferdinand, who, just four hours earlier, I might have been thrilled to reencounter so serendipitously. I might have picked up my fantasies where I’d left off—imagining us touring the world together in his private jet, my dad dandling our dark- haired babies, our lives perpetually framed by Mediterranean sunsets, our thirst ever slaked by cold, slushy drinks.
But that was this morning, before the party at the St. Regis had ballooned into an event that seemed destined to cause me no end of regret. As I cursed Tag yet again, I watched the rage in Ferdinand’s face flicker to confusion and settle on—could it be?—fear.
“What
you
doing here?” he rasped in heavily accented English. Just as well he’d kept silent during our first meeting.
“What the hell are
you
doing here?” I retorted, panicked by the thought that he’d been tailing me since the St. Regis. Maybe Underhill and Mulrooney had seen him following me and assumed that he and I—
“Carajo!”
he bellowed, echoing my own sentiments.
“Caaa- raaaa- joooo!”
Ferdinand fixed me with a searing stare of such loathing that I stopped in my tracks, my foot crunching a shard into smithereens. Roxana slumped down on the couch and began weeping.