The Parallel Apartments (21 page)

“And would you like to use your Neiman's card today?” asked the dramatically fashionable and attractive Neiman's salesgirl.

“Not today,” said Marcia, sliding her pair of Blahniks across the counter, excited and happy for the first time since… well, when? A long time. “I'll pay cash.”

She had maxed out her Neiman's card in 2001. She owed them nearly four thousand bucks, nine hundred over the measly limit. A pittance, compared to her general debt, virtually all of which was carried, unsecured, by MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express. She even had a couple of JCB cards, a Russky Standart, and an LG from Korea. Every single card was completely full and floating helplessly in a shoreless ocean of its own interest, penalties, and fees.

“I have ninety-one credit cards,” Marcia told the salesgirl, with not a little pride. “All maxed.”

“Wow,” she said, attractively impressed.

She was more attractive than Marcia, and Marcia was pretty attractive. Marcia was attractive enough that she had far more gay male friends than straight women friends. This was a reliable formula. The higher the gay-male:straight-woman-friend ratio, the more attractive you were. To everyone. At least this was what Casey, her best male friend, had once told her.

“Believe you me,” Casey had said, “Aishwarya Rai has no straight women friends. Stalkers, sure, but zero friends.”

“That's stupid,” Marcia had said.

“There are lots of stupid, true things, Marcia. This is one of them. Let me give you some money.”

“No.”

“For god's sake, why?”

Casey had a lot of money. Before Marcia's inheritance Casey had offered—many times—to pay some or all of Marcia's debt. But Marcia was determined to honor her father's memory and financial probity, and to make his beneficent spirit proud by paying off her debt, on her own, even if it took her entire life, even if it meant assuming even more debt. Which was part of her fantastic new idea.

“I want to do it on my own, no free rides.”

“Whatever,” said Casey. “But why all the ethical wind now? Too bad there weren't any ethics blowing around back in your Faro parlor days.”

Almost all of Marcia's debt had come from cash advances and convenience checks that she used to start small businesses or invest in stocks or schemes; the fervidity with which she invested was in stride with the anxiety investing provoked. Not all of these commercial assays had been wholly legitimate, and none had been profitable. Marcia had asserted and fully believed that her Faro parlor was entirely legal, and she could not be convinced otherwise, until her game, run after-hours in the woodworking studio at Austin Community College, was raided by Travis County constables, who placed her in jail. The following morning she was released on her own attractive cognizance. Later, in place of ten days in Del Valle Corrections, she paid a breathtaking fine using a virgin WaMu Visa that she found clipped to the passenger's-side visor of her old Toyota Cressida, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar card she had completely forgotten about.

“My intentions were always honorable,” Marcia would say to Casey whenever the subject came up.

“I still think you should just rent the goods,” Casey would respond.

“Jesus, Casey. You can be awful sometimes. And
that's
illegal, goods-renting, in case you forgot, Mister Moral Compass.”

“You could pay off quite a bit, quickly, if you put together a really good personal website. Especially if I was your McDaddy. Might pay it all. Less than a year. We could get fifteen hundred a day, easy.”

“It's ‘Mac Daddy,' Casey.”

Even though she knew Casey had never been serious about her becoming a hooker to pay her credit-card bills, Marcia
had
thought about it. She was very attractive, after all. Her shoulders were naturally set back, causing her enviably shapely bosom to thrust just a little, making her attractive in even the schoolmarmiest outfits, and causing people to want her to shed her clothes and give them sex.

But she would never have sex again, either for love or money or fun, at least any of the variants where pregnancy was a risk. And pregnancy
was
a risk, since Marcia was unable to provide her uterus any harbor from the fertile rains of the many men she would like to fuck: she was either fatally allergic to or repulsed by not just latex but lambskin, nonoxynol-9, neem oil, and the alloys composing IUDs, and thus would be forced to screw in the untrammeled way impelled by evolution and intended by God; a way she could not enjoy for its possible conclusion.

Because, if she did have a child, and if Marcia orphaned it by dying in one fashion or another, her child would inherit all of her debt—not to mention her genetic wont to accumulate it—and the child's life would be ruined. That's how it worked. So, no sex. It was one of the hardest parts of her oath. Because Marcia liked sex a lot. The straight kind. The straightforward kind. A needy penis in a needy vagina, a practice in vigor and endurance, uninterrupted by kissing and sucking and all that other moist ancillary theater. Blow jobs she especially hated. They felt gross and gobbly, like she was bingeing on gristle in the dark. She wasn't any good at the business, anyway. Her gag reflex was abnormally shallow, and there was nothing fun about throwing up naked. Cunnilingus wasn't fun, because nobody she'd ever slept with had executed it correctly, no matter their level of enthusiasm, and it frustrated her to the point of tears trying to explain or pantomime or guide or demonstrate the process to even the most enthusiastic of students.

Schmidt, her sheepdog, was the only being that seemed to understand the oral laps and rhythm-shifts necessary for Marcia to reach orgasm. Thank goodness for Schmidt. Yes, thank goodness. But even he wasn't really very satisfying, and would sometimes gnaw. Plus, to get him going, Marcia had to paint her nether parts with bacon grease. Marcia ate a lot of bacon. This, collocated with her aversion to dishwashing, meant there was always a pan in the sink with lots of bacon grease inside.

Marcia had told Casey about Schmidt. Marcia had regretted doing so. Casey had a bit of a cruel streak, and it was this bestial tidbit that most vividly sparked it. But Marcia never did, and never would, tell Casey that she and Schmidt had taken Schmidt's fore-actions to the next level. Marcia quite liked being on her knees, and even though this was the female posture Schmidt would by nature become most rutty about, and the position that held the most promise for them as a couple, it never quite worked out: Schmidt was insubstantial; Schmidt was as quick to finish as he was to start; Schmidt's toenails would leave long, welting scratches on Marcia's rib cage; and bacon grease, though superb as cunnilingual bait, was inadequate as a lubricant. Plus, like some real couples, they fought afterward. For the several hours following an engagement, Schmidt and Marcia pretended to ignore each other around the house, but would express remote petulance by slamming cabinets or tipping over water dishes or playing XBox really loud or chewing through spendy purse straps. The day they both contracted outstanding infections of great medical rarity was the day their affair ended. Schmidt, limited by his canine sense of cause and effect, understandably took the breakup much harder than Marcia, and grew depressed.

“Twenty-one eleven,” said the Last Call Neiman Marcus salesgirl.

Marcia reached into her large purse and removed a hundred-dollar bill, one of more than four thousand she had in there, all so crisp that she had to be careful two didn't stick together. She slid the banknote across the glass counter.

“Out of one hundred,” said the salesgirl, Jilliette, according to her name tag.

Marcia no longer had a checking account, as credit-card companies, when owed, are permitted by law to evacuate them. This fact had come as a surprise to Marcia when one day, while at a drive-through teller to withdraw a little cash for things that credit cards could not buy, her Bank of America business checking account, supposedly fat with six thousand dollars recently
cash-advanced from a Chase MasterCard, reported her balance as zero. It turned out that Bank of America had taken all the money to pay down the nine Visas they had issued her over the years. It was the first time she'd ever heard the word
garnish
outside of a culinary context.

So Marcia did not put a cent of her parents' bestowal into a bank account. When Casey had, with dramatic protests, cashed her probate check and given her all of it in hundreds, she immediately put the banded wads in her largest purse, the one made of recycled seatbelts.

“Thank you, Casey,” she'd said, hugging him hard in a personal banker's windowless office at the Wells Fargo on Airport Boulevard.

“Don't forget about Uncle Sam,” said Casey.

“I won't!”

“You can't pay with credit anymore, you know that, right? Because you have none?”

“Leave me alone,” said Marcia, unhugging Casey.

One of the smartest things she'd ever done was to always pay her income tax—when there was any income—with credit cards. Better to owe Discover than the IRS, she reasoned. Even Casey had concurred.

“I know, Casey, jeez. But I'm not going to pay any taxes on money I haven't made yet.”

“And how are you going to make it this time?”

“I don't know. I'll know when I know.”

The shopgirl counted back Marcia's change. Marcia took the opportunity to steal a look at the salesgirl in the reflection of the counter. God, she was looking back.

“Those are great shoes,” Jilliette said.

“Lucky.”

“Yeah. They'll look great on you.”

She was smiling warmly. Marcia wondered if she had a boyfriend. Surprisingly often, very attractive people did not have mates. Marcia didn't, a case in point. And if the salesgirl didn't, maybe she could be the first customer for Marcia's new venture.

“I hope you'll come back and see us.”

The two woman traded attractive smiles. Then Marcia leaned over and said quietly: “I bet you have a shitload of boyfriends.”

She shook her head. “No… none.”

“I might be able to set you up, if you want. Do you have a business card?”

She did. It read, Jilliette Baylor, Client Satisfaction Specialist. When the time came for Marcia to hire Casey as business manager and client-drummer-upper for her new startup, now nearly fully formed in her head, she would have him cold-call Jilliette Baylor. She might not like the idea at first, but she'd call back. She would.

“So that's a pretty awesome window,” said Marcia, dropping the business card into a purse pocket not crowded with cash. “Bet you did that.”

Jilliette smiled and flushed just the slightest bit.

“That man mannequin,” said Marcia. “I swear I'd date him.”

“God. Tell me about it.”

A fifties-something woman armored in shoulder-padded blue silk and swinging bangles of hammered gold appeared. She could not have been from anywhere except Dallas, perhaps banished to Austin as a penance for some anchor-store botching.

“Jilliette, darling,” she said, “Nan looks like a Weimar Republic hooker. I would like you to make her decent. Please spray more Fake Bake on the backs of her knees and please have her sitting on her bottom rather than presenting it to our window shoppers like a doe in estrus.”

“Yes, Billie.”

“And put some Ray-Bans on Rance. He watches me.”

Billie jangled off toward Intimates, a couple of times glancing over her shoulder at the male mannequin.

“Rance,” said Marcia.

“Rance,” said Jilliette. “I thought about stealing him. Just for a night.”

Marcia nodded and smiled. A year, and her debt would be gone. A year at most. Guaranteed.

Marcia spent the next week researching, calculating, imagining. Finally, when she felt confident she was on to something big, she quit her waitressing job, a position her dad would have insisted she keep, despite her sudden wealth.

“I'm going into business for myself again,” she told Brown, her boss.

“Not that bauxite mine you were jawing about.”

“Nope, no half-assed investments this time. I'm gonna have my own cash-only home-based LLC. I got a DBA this morning, and a state-sales-tax certificate is in the works. And the whole idea's pretty much totally legal, I'm pretty sure.”

“Sounds foolproof.”

“Shut up. The important thing is that I'm my own boss again and the Monstrum can't get me.”

The Monstrum was the drooling, leash-straining, long-jawed credit-card industry.

“Your job'll be here waiting for you in two weeks, when you go under. Unless you're in jail, of course.”

“Shut up again. You're mean.”

“Tell Casey yet?”

“About my idea? No. I'm on my way to.”

“Bet he'll be meaner than me.”

Casey
had
been pretty mean upon first hearing Marcia's idea.

“That's silly and perverted and probably breaks about two hundred state laws. And I won't be able to stay friends with you.”