What's a Girl Gotta Do (17 page)

Some of the details of Griff’s death were
reported too, and there was also a boxed story at the bottom of the
page, a sidebar on Griff, which detailed his alleged “history” with
attractive women, using quotes from First Avenue bartenders. First
Avenue, once the place fashionable singles bed-hopped, was now
where the recklessly unhip went searching for meaningless sex.

It said something about Griff that he was so
well known in anachronistic singles bars. The bartenders said he
flashed a lot of money around and sometimes used pseudonyms and
“cover stories” with the women he picked up, telling them variously
that he was a cop, a magazine reporter, an art forger, and—get this
clunker—Elite modeling agency boss John Casablancas. He regularly
employed “escorts,” preferring redheads, according to one “escort
agency insider.”

“But only real redheads, which are hard to
come by,” the insider added.

Well, I thought, at least I’ve never had to
pay for sex. Let me rephrase that. At least I’ve never had to pay
money for sex. If that wasn’t bad enough, Griff had made
surreptitious films of several attractive young women who lived in
his building, using concealed cameras in their bathrooms to film
some of their most intimate moments. Man, this guy made Jerry
Spurdle look like Germaine Greer.

I put down the papers and, although it was
only the early afternoon, I started getting ready for the evening,
taking a long, hot shower. It had been years since I’d dated a man
other than Burke. The last time was shortly before we got engaged,
when we agreed to see other people while we evaluated our
relationship.

Well, really we agreed that he would see
other people. He was the one pushing for it but he didn’t expect me
to do it too. It’s that old double-standard bullshit. He gets to go
off to the Crusades, wenching all the way, while I stay home
watching the rust grow on my chastity belt. I didn’t I put myself
on the arm of every interesting man in New York who’d be seen with
me in public, and back then there were a few, believe me.

This went on for about a month, and then,
suddenly, Burke was at the door with a bouquet of roses, saying he
figured we might as well get married. I’d had fun dating around,
but he gave me that Correspondent’s Squint and it took me just
fourteen seconds to bargain away my freedom. Okay, I said, let’s
get married.

What sorry sequence of events had brought me
to that disastrous pass, and how could I disrupt the sequence this
time around? I wasn’t sure I could trust myself around a cute guy
in my weakened, vulnerable state.

As I was dressing, I set out two underwear
sets. On one side of the bed was the creamiest, slinkiest fuck-me
lingerie on the island of Manhattan, lingerie that felt so good on
my skin it qualified as foreplay. On the other side was what I
jokingly referred to, when Burke and I were still together, as my
anti-adultery underwear, big old ugly granny underpants with goofy
flowers on them, underwear no man could see me in without laughing.
I knew I wouldn’t commit adultery while wearing this underwear
because I wouldn’t be caught dead in this underwear and, as I was
still married in the eyes of the law at least, I hoped it could
prevent adultery one more time.

My choices suddenly appeared very concrete.
There was the dangerous underwear and the safe underwear. Which
would I wear that night?

I chose the granny underpants and wore them
around for five minutes before deciding they just didn’t feel
right, opting for the slinky stuff over which I wore a sweater and
jeans. Another spray of L’Heure Bleue on my pulse points and a
final sweep through my hair with a natural-bristle brush and I was
ready to go.

There is Murphy’s Law and there are Robin’s
Amendments. Number one: The guy with the biggest tub of popcorn and
noisiest eating habits will always sit directly behind me in a
movie theater (or else a hearing-impaired foreign national with his
translator, so that every line of on-screen dialogue is repeated in
loud German). Number two: The amount a man adores me is roughly
equal to the number of his faults. Number three: When I’m already
running late, something will inevitable happen to make me even
later. Something like, say, Mrs. Ramirez.

When the elevator doors opened on the first
floor, there she stood with Señor.

“You!” she shouted, coming at me.

I tried to press the Door Close button but it
was too late, she had her cane in the doors, forcing them open
again. The old lady, the dog, and the leash effectively blocked my
exit.

“You whore!” she said, raising her cane. I
put my hand up and grabbed it before it hit me.

“Mrs. Ramirez, you’re mistaken in the head
again,” I sang sweetly.

“You had a transvestite orgy in your
apartment last night. Don’t deny it! It woke me up and then I
couldn’t get back to sleep.”

“I did not have a transvestite orgy,” I said,
knowing it was useless to try to reason with Mrs. Ramirez.

“Don’t yell at me!” she shouted. Apparently,
she hadn’t taken my advice about turning down her hearing aid,
because I was talking quietly.

“I saw one of the transvestites, she said.
“The man in the wig dressed up like a woman.” Mrs. Ramirez thought
all my friends were transvestites or hookers. She thought I was a
transvestite and a hooker. A week before, she’d been raving about
Negro prostitutes” working out of my place. Her eyes weren’t so
good either.

“That probably was a woman, Mrs. Ramirez.
Probably coming to visit someone else in the building.”

“Don’t lie to me!” she shrieked. “I’m eighty
years old. You think I don’t know the difference between a man and
a woman? What kinda fool you take me for?”

I considered this. “An old fool?” I
guessed.

“The police are on to you, missy. And the
newspapers too!” Her cries of “Whore” and “Sodomite” followed me as
I pushed past her, and rang in my ears as I left the building.

Some people have luck with cabs; I am not one
of them. Claire can hail a cab at any time of day, in any kind of
weather, in any neighborhood in New York. The cabs come looking for
her. They pick up her scent and zoom in on her from all directions
like hounds.

But me—I always have to work to get a cab,
and tonight was no different. My apartment building is in a
“marginal” neighborhood and not too many taxis cruise the area. My
best bet was Fourteenth Street, four blocks away. Thanks to a
brutal wind-chill factor the streets were pretty deserted and
between me and Fourteenth Street lay a long stretch of dubious real
estate. My own street was a nosy and neighborly sort of street for
New York. I felt relatively safe there. But the streets around it
were less residential and less friendly. There was a whole stretch
of buildings that could have been Berlin during the
blitz—burned-out shells with blackened windows and doors boarded
over with cheap plywood; shops covered with corrugated steel
bearing the bright, ugly spray-paint graffiti of the local youth
gangs. KILL THE SKINHEADS! screamed a choice bit of blood red
graffiti, to which the skinheads responded, DIE NIGGER-SPICS!
signing it with a swastika. Over both of them, in yellow paint,
some gentler soul had written PEACE.

I finally hailed a decrepit cab. It began to
rain. When my taxi pulled up, Eric was waiting outside his
building, huddling under an umbrella, his free hand jammed into the
front pocket of his jeans. He looked thin and a little tired, which
just heightened my desire. A girlfriend and I discussed this once,
how a touch of pathos, a hint of haggard, makes a man more
attractive to a woman. When courting hesitant females, the males of
other species cinch the biological deal by puffing up their
brightly colored plumage. All our men have to do is not shave for a
day and stint themselves on sleep.

When the cab stopped, Eric came forward and
reached into the driver’s window to pay him, over my objections. I
got out and he held his umbrella over me, wrapping his other arm
lightly around my waist. We walked this way, touching under his
umbrella, into his building and his apartment.

The apartment was warm and masculine, but not
in an overpowering way. It wasn’t neat but it wasn’t messy either.
A floor-to-ceiling entertainment center dominated the wall across
from me and the two adjoining walls were lined with books.

He reads, I thought, with some surprise.

While Eric poured drinks in the kitchen, I
scanned the titles, from Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti to a
book of critical essays by Northrop Frye to Stephen King. I hate to
admit this, but I checked the spines and the pages of some of the
books to see if they were largely ornamental or if he had actually
cracked them and read them. He had. He’d even underlined passages
and made funny notes in the margins.

Eric came in with a glass of seltzer for me
and a beer for him, which he put down on the coffee table in front
of the sofa. He came up behind me as I looked at a cluster of
family photographs. I could feel him standing there. I could smell
him, that great clean man smell.

I held up a small, framed photograph of a
little boy in black martial-arts garb of some kind.

“My nephew, Patrick,” he said. “He’s into
ninja. Only seven, but smart. Last time I talked to him, he told me
ninja is—these are his words—‘the art of escape, essentially
defensive, not aggressive.’ Invisibility is apparently a big part
of it. Smart kid, huh?”

“The art of escape,” I repeated.

He went back into the kitchen.

“Are these your parents wearing the fishing
hats?” I asked, picking up a picture of an older couple with their
arms around each other.

“Yeah. Alf and Irma,” he said.

“What are your parents like?” I was nervous
and when I’m nervous I tend to turn social situations into
interviews, which are easier to control. He came and stood in the
doorway, holding a handful of mushrooms. He was cooking dinner, I
realized.

He cooks.

“Mom’s a rock-of-Gibraltar type—kind of a
martyr sometimes. Six kids—I was the second youngest— four boys and
two girls. Seven, if you count my dad. Mom always did,” he said.
“You’re not allergic to anything, are you?”

“No.”

“Any foods you don’t like?”

“Blue cheese and anything that comes from a
goat.”

“Great,” he said.

“What is your dad like?” I persisted.

“My dad,” he said. “You really want to
know?”

“Yeah.” I followed him into the kitchen and
watched while he sliced mushrooms.

“There’s this one story that . . . well, my
dad drove a cab for a while, here in New York, and one day he came
home with this enormous box. He’d bought it off a customer, he
said, for twenty-five dollars, which was a lot of money in our
household. My mother, when she was mad, didn’t frown or yell, she
just went blank. She looked at him like that, and he said, ‘Wait
until you see what’s in here. Just wait until you see.’”

“What was in it?”

“Well, Dad wouldn’t let us see right away. He
liked to build up the suspense. It was dinnertime, so we all sat
down for dinner, for about an hour, while the box sat in the living
room, unopened. After dinner, we all had to watch Cronkite,
silently. By this time, we were bursting with curiosity.”

“So am I,” I said.

“After Cronkite, Dad said, ‘Mother, you know
that wall-to-wall carpeting you wanted?’ Well, my mother’s face lit
up a little, but only a little, because she had been with my father
a long time and she knew better. ‘Ta da!’ my father said, and he
opened the box.” Eric stopped talking but continued chopping,
smiling to himself.

“Well? What was inside?”

“Hundreds of broadloom samples, ten-inch
squares, in dozens of colors and textures, samples from the season
before. Got ’em from a carpet salesman who took his cab. Anyway, my
mother’s face dropped because she had always dreamed of a soft blue
carpet and Dad knew it. Dad always seemed to be raising her hopes,
and then he’d deliver on ‘em in a way that completely . . .
confounded her expectations. She was let down a lot.”

“That’s too bad. What happened to the carpet
squares?”

“Mom and us kids, we spent two weekend sewing
the whole mess together, a white shag next to a nappy orange square
next to a shaved blue patch. Dad got a cheap carpet and Mom got a
conversation piece, an excuse to tell the story about Dad and his
carpet of many colors to every person who walked through the door.
She scorned that carpet, but when Dad could afford to get her a
nice one, she kept the old carpet, put it in the bedroom. She said
she was kind of getting used to it.”

He put the knife down on the cutting board
and looked straight ahead.

“My dad died last year. . . .”

“Oh. I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Yeah, and after he died, Mom moved into a
retirement community and she had that old carpet rolled up and
shipped to her new place. Isn’t that romantic?”

I wanted to have his baby. “It’s . . .
beautiful,” I said.

“Yeah, ain’t it though.” He scooped up the
mushrooms with the knife and the palm of his hand and dropped them
into a wooden bowl into which he sprinkled olive oil, wine vinegar,
and a bunch of spices. I liked watching him.

“I’m not really much of a cook. I make a few
things over and over again, but I make those few well,” he said.
“In our house, everyone had to help out with everything.”

“I don’t cook,” I said. To me, a meal is
something eaten standing up more often than not. For example,
breakfast is eating dry frosted mini-wheats straight from the box
and washing them down with periodic gulps of skim milk straight
from the carton.

“I know,” he said, and grinned. “And you’re a
rotten housekeeper.”

“How do you know that?”

“You have a reputation, Robin.”