The Deed (5 page)

True enough. Her voice was wildly unfamiliar…unprecedented, really, with a gently modulated, almost musical quality he couldn’t quite identify. The effect was quite hypnotic, and Jason had to remind himself of the danger of first impressions made over a phone. He shuddered at the mental image of a nude four-hundred-pound woman on the other end of the line, swatting a cockroach on her naked belly with a wet slap.

“Amanda,” he affirmed, glad for the handle. “What can I do for you, Amanda?”

Again the caller remained silent, and Jason frowned. “I’m not really sure where to begin,” she said at last. “I’ve been watching you for a while now.” A pause, then an audible breath. “Well, that isn’t it. I’m not a stalker, or anything. I’m calling you because…our lives are connected, in a strange way.”

Curiouser and curiouser,
thought Jason, as a faint aroma of prank reached his nostrils. The handful of Princeton friends he hung out with in the city were not above enlisting a stranger’s help to pull off a practical joke, and a woman with a sexy voice was a famous Achilles’ heel of Jason’s.

Ever since high school, he hadn’t had—or desired, for that matter—any real long-term relationships, confining himself instead to balmy summer romances and a string of one-night to one-week stands. He had become a sort of catch-and-release fisher of women, and flirting had become a virtual end in itself—not just a carefully honed skill, but a raison d’être. He was strictly a vegetarian when it came to relationships, but by God, he loved the hunt.

“You’re that woman who breaks into Letterman’s house, aren’t you?” he wondered idly, in no particular hurry to get back to smacking his head against the wall.

“No,” she replied, with a devastating little laugh—an easy mark. “Let me explain…I’m sorry, but I need to make absolutely sure I’m talking to the right person. Are you from Westchester?”

“I grew up there,” he confirmed warily, eyebrows narrowing. “What’s this about, Amanda?”

“I’m sorry; I must be making you terribly nervous.”

“No, no, I’m intrigued,” he said. “Just promise me you’re not pregnant with my baby.”

Another laugh; she had a dangerously fetching little chuckle, this one.

“Okay. Last question,” she promised. “Has your family ever changed the spelling of its surname?”

The bizarreness of the question caught Jason off guard; unable to scramble a witty riposte, he had no choice but to deliver. “Yes, I believe we did. It used to be spelled with a double
a,
or so I’ve been told, anyway. Haansvoort,” he pronounced, elegantly spreading the dipthong.

“Bingo,” said Amanda in quiet triumph. “Oh, my God, I
found
you, you elusive son of a bitch.”

“Excuse me?” said Jason, as the amorous daydream coughed up a spray of dust.

“Nothing, I’m sorry—that’s not about you. Listen, Jason, I…I have to see you,” said Amanda. “Can you meet me for lunch? I’ll explain everything, I promise.”

Jason pulled the handset away from his face and regarded it strangely, the bewildered bushman wondering how they got that tiny person into the phone. “Of course not,” he said, returning the phone to his ear. “No.”

“No?” she said in real surprise. “Why not?”

“Why
not?
” he repeated. “Are you serious? Because I can’t just go around having lunch with escaped mental patients—this is New York City.”

He was only toying with her now, but her voice took an agitated turn. “I
swear
I’m not crazy,” she protested. “Jason, I—I just need to talk to you face-to-face. It could mean a lot to you…a
lot.
Oh, my God, more than you could possibly imagine. I know this probably isn’t making much sense, but just hear me out. A
lunch
—that’s all I ask.”

“Listen, you sound like a nice person,” Jason replied, “but you’ve got to give me something to go on.”

Having apparently sensed his crumbling resistance, the stranger brightened. “Lunch today. I’ll meet you in any well-lit public place,” she urged. “If you’re not overjoyed that I tracked you down, I’ll buy.”

“No,” said Jason.

“Why
not,
damn it?” she demanded.

He grinned involuntarily. Whoever she was, the girl had attitude. “Because I already have a lunch,” he said.

“Oh. Okay, okay,” she said hopefully. “Well, how about after work, then?”

“You’re relentless, aren’t you?”

“You have
no
idea,” she replied smoothly. “How’s seven o’clock?”

“Fine,” said Jason, crossing himself. “Where do you want to meet?”

Jason watched, entranced, as his pal Nick shook clotty Parmesan cheese onto a slice of pizza already swimming in tangerine grease. The two occupied one of five tiny tables in the frenetic shoe box of a Midtown pizza joint, the smell of bread thick in the air, faux-Venetian mosaics on the wall, plastic bottles of pizza spices loitering in intimate trios on every horizontal surface. A line of lunchers straggled along the length of the counter, sizing up the pies to the tinny call and response of the swarthy doughboys on the other side.

Nick, the lady-killer, looked tanned and dashing in tailored ocean-blue pinstripes, with an authoritative, almost swashbuckling jade tie and a patterned, yet somehow coordinated, shirt. He was preparing two slices of some meat-lover monstrosity; shake-shake-shake went his little off-white blizzard, clogging and coagulating the sprawling system of greasy rivers and lakes that spread over the raw, red meat–strewn landscape.

“That may be the most disgusting sight I’ve ever seen,” Jason observed, grabbing a sheaf of napkins from the dispenser. “I can hear your arteries gasping from over here.” He began laboriously blotting the grease from the top of his own plain slice.

“Actually,” Nick replied, putting down the nearly exhausted shaker, “did you know that sausage has, ironically, been shown to reduce the risk of some types of coronaries?”

“That’s a filthy lie,” said Jason. “Even
you
ought to be ashamed.”

Nick shrugged. “It may be a slight exaggeration,” he allowed, dark eyes flashing as he leaned his body into the edge of the table, protecting his Brooks Brothered lap. “Ah, the glorious first bite,” he said, addressing his slice, which was now poised, curled and aimed, just outside his mouth.

“The heart meat, sliced from the pizza’s soft belly.” He closed his eyes in anticipation and sensuously sank his teeth in with a low murmur. “From here on in,” he proclaimed, still chewing, “it just gets colder and stiffer as you inch your way toward the dry and dusty hills of the baked crust-bubbles.”

“Uh-huh,” Jason nodded, still blotting.

“When I win the Lotto, I’m never eating two bites out of the same slice again.”

“When
I
win the Lotto,” Jason countered, “I’m never eating anything in the shape of a triangle again.”

“Snob,” sniffed Nick.

The two munched in silence for a few moments, watching through the blocked-open front door as jacketed passersby braved the light rain that had begun to fall. The sky was bright but overcast; it would probably shower on and off all day. A bicycle messenger rocketed by, scattering terrified citizens in his wake.

“What do you think
their
life span is?” Jason wondered, still focused outside.

“Four years,” Nick asserted distractedly. Jason didn’t bother to spare his friend a glance; he’d almost certainly made up the number on the spot.

A young mother soldiered by, squinting, trying to keep her oversize umbrella from buckling in the wind as she pushed a stroller sealed in plastic like a miniature oxygen tent.

“I’ve been thinking I might want to start looking into possibly getting a new job,” said Jason.

Nick paused in midbite, intrigued, then continued chewing. “You sound awfully sure,” he laughed. “New position? New company? New career?”

“I’m not sure. That’s actually the first time I’ve put that thought into a sentence.”

“And what a sentence it was,” said Nick. “Does this have to do with that Afro-Sheen stuff?”

“Hair Peace,” Jason reminded him, for the dozenth time. “That’s part of it. It’s turning out to be a really phenomenally hard sell. I just don’t know if I can do it. I don’t even know if I
want
to do it.”

“You know what your problem is?” said Nick.

“Tell me,” Jason encouraged, with all the sarcastic patience he could muster. “What’s my problem?”

“Well, you’ve mastered perspiration,” said Nick. “But you don’t have any feel for inspiration. You stack bricks as fast as you can, but you never design the building.” He folded the slice deftly with one hand and waved it before him. “Instead of throwing more and more hours at the problem, you need to work smarter. Step away from the engine and look around and let your cerebral cortex make wild, magical connections for you.”

“What a delicious blend of metaphors,” Jason replied. “Unfortunately, the reality isn’t that romantic. A positioning strategy doesn’t just come to you while you’re eating a Pop-Tart. There’s actual work involved.”

“How long have you been beating your head against the wall on this thing?” Nick wondered.

“I’m not beating my—”

“A month?”

“I’m not beating my head against the wall,” Jason insisted.

“This falls right in line with your usual M.O.,” said Nick. “You put all this pressure on yourself because you can’t be satisfied unless you change the course of Western civilization with your trailblazing approach to this particular fish sauce or whatever. And then, surprise! You can’t focus because there’s too much at stake.”

“Thank you for your adorable, childlike insights into the creative process, you fucking banker,” said Jason with all the disdain he could muster.

Nick laughed at this. “You
can’t
be implying that you don’t think I’m creative.”

Jason grinned. “You’re right; I can’t say that.”

“You may not remember this,” Nick continued, “but right out of college I was offered a job in Saatchi and Saatchi’s creative department.”

Jason’s eyes opened wide. “Really?”

“I’ve never told you this story?”

“Nick, I’m
kidding.
It’s the biggest whopper you’ve told in…well, in minutes.”

“Jesus,” said Nick. “What a jaded old skeptic you’ve become. I was having a Sapphire martini with this account executive at the Temple Bar, and—”

“Don’t,” said Jason, shaking his head, a ghost of a smile still on his lips. “Don’t waste a goody on little old me.”

Nick shook his head sadly and took another bite. “I frankly don’t know why you stayed in advertising
this
long. What do you get out of it that makes it worth all this busy work?” He paused, shrugged. “Do you get
any
kind of orgasm at the end?”

Nick’s predilection for asking the big questions was at once his most and least endearing quality. On the positive side, going for the conversational throat turned dialogue into a rich, layered experience; the pale conversations that sufficed for most people seemed, in comparison, like so much insipid banter. At the same time, though, friendship with Nick meant subjecting your soul to constant, often harrowing scrutiny; his conversational excesses were at their most charming when their object was anybody else.

“Let me put it this way,” said Nick, filling the pause. “You’re either doing what you want to do for the rest of your life, or you’re paying the rent while you figure it out. So which is it? You ought to at least know
that
much about yourself.”

Jason gave him a quizzical look. “Well, come on—there’s a big middle ground there. Who knows for sure what they want to do for the rest of their life? That’s like saying, ‘Promise me you’ll love me forever.’”

Nick was smiling. “Ah, but you see, lots of people
do
promise they’ll love each other forever. There’s a whole diamond industry predicated on the concept. It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily right; couples break up all the time. It just means they
know
they’re right.”