Smart vs. Pretty (9 page)

Amanda was nowhere to be found. The cops were inside, lapping up some complimentary brew (show of support for the police presence). Amanda had probably slipped upstairs for the night. It wasn’t like her to miss out on hubbub, but Frank assumed she was worn out from the long day, especially considering that it’d kicked off with her dead date on a gurney.

“Do you have wrapping paper?” asked Walter at Frank’s side. “This woman wants to gift wrap her French press.”

“No, sorry,” Frank said to the customer, who bought the press anyway and slipped the box into her purse. Frank had to admit that, with Walter at her side, she was glad her sister had disappeared. Amanda never meant to take male attention away from Frank. But she did, starting with their father, continuing with boys in school, and finishing with Eric, Frank’s ex-fiancé, who came to life at Greenfield family gatherings.

Frank wondered why Walter paid any attention to her with Clarissa in the room. But hadn’t she said they spent the night talking? That nothing happened? Was it even remotely possible Walter was interested in her, not Clarissa? Frank let a small fantasy surface. She imagined herself in a gown, Walter in a tux. They were dancing somewhere elegant, a ballroom with heavy curtains, a long spiral staircase and a balcony. Yes, a balcony with a view of a fabulous garden, the air heavy with pine and roses.

“Francesca.” He said her name like a song as they dipped to violins. She was draped in backless satin.

“Uh, Francesca.” His voice again. Soft and heavy at the same time. They kissed by moonlight. Walter touching Frank’s face gently with his hands. Then touching her shoulder. Then shaking her gently, then a bit more firmly.

“Earth to Francesca,” Walter said.

Frank descended back to reality. “Yeah,” she sputtered. “I’m here. What? Walter, what?”

“This lady would like her change,” Walter said evenly.

“Here you go.” She passed some quarters to the customer. Frank’s face had to be poker red.

Walter said, “Where were you?”

“Forget it.”

He said, “I’d like to go there with you sometime.”

“You just can’t be for real,” she said dismissively. He couldn’t be.

A flash went off. Piper Zorn had taken their picture. Clarissa was standing next to Zorn, smiling slyly.

“It’s nice to see you two are getting along. Looks like the start of a beautiful friendship,” said Clarissa, emphasizing the word
friend.
Clarissa turned to Piper and pecked him on the cheek. “Thanks so much for coming out. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She waited for Piper to clear the door. Then, to Walter, Clarissa said, “If we leave now, we can still catch the show.”

Walter said, “That’s right. I completely forgot.” To Frank he said, “We have concert tickets. I’m sorry, Francesca. I’ll come in again soon. And I’ll bring in all my friends. We’ll suck in every woman within a fifty-mile radius. Your café is safe with me.”

“But you’re not safe with me,” Clarissa said. She took his arm and led him out the door into the cold night.

The fantasy over, Frank reminded herself that Walter would never prefer her to Clarissa. Any hopes or expectations were bound to leave Frank disappointed. Besides, if he were interested, Frank would never betray her friendship with Clarissa. That had to have more value than any man. Frank resolved to eject Walter from her mind and go about her lonely, spinsterlike business as usual.

Even if it killed her.

T
he cop was cute. He was rugged and tall and furry and unquestionably Italian. Jewish girls were drawn to Italian men. They seemed to respect women, love children, and value family. Amanda had to crane her neck to look at his dark face. She fantasized briefly about sex with him, his largeness, how he could probably pick her up and spin her around like a pliant rag doll. She would be physically powerless under his massive maleness. Amanda smiled at the police officer, wondering if he had any clue about the picture she painted of the two of them. He asked for her phone number. She wasn’t surprised. But she took his instead. Amanda would never out-and-out refuse attention from a desirable man, but right now she couldn’t imagine falling for anyone while she was still mourning Chick, her latest great hope for a soul mate.

She said good-bye to the cop with a pretty smile and went upstairs to her apartment. Sleep would be her bedroom activity of choice tonight. Frank was downstairs with all those people. She could handle it. Amanda, usually a reliable squeeze of social ointment, just couldn’t make small talk after her daylong bombardment of negativity. She didn’t even bother applying her replenishing overnight creme before she undressed and slipped into her four-poster fluffy, ruffly bed in the pink-wallpapered room. She couldn’t shake the sight of Paul and Sylvia’s daughter, yanking her mother’s sleeve, saying, “Let’s go, Mom.” Guilt, guilt and more guilt. Amanda searched her memory for overlooked signs of Paul’s secret love. He smiled at her a lot. And offered her free drinks. Paul did roll his eyes a lot around her dates. He doled out unsolicited advice. But most men treated Amanda that way. Was every guy she knew hiding a secret passion for her? How completely horrible. And absurd. Amanda knew pretty was a tool, but it wasn’t
always
a hammer. She imagined Chick being battered on the head and cried a bit in the dark.

“Everything has gone downhill,” she said to herself. And it all started when Clarissa had walked in the door. No, it wasn’t possible. A person wasn’t a bad-luck charm. Amanda thought of that ominous I Ching toss of Frank’s. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

Amanda must have dozed for a little while; she didn’t remember hearing Frank come in. The digital clock by her bed blinked 4:39 the last time she checked. Only an hour and a half before six o’clock. She’d be a zombie all day.

Whenever she had trouble sleeping, Amanda thought about her past loves. That morning she thought about an affair she almost had in college with one of her professors, a man she’d had a crush on for semesters. One night this professor got drunk with a handful of students while watching a basketball game at the local bar. At halftime, he put his arm around Amanda’s shoulder and said, “My wife is having a troubled pregnancy. She’s refused sex for months. I think about you often, Amanda. And not in the way I should.” The invitation to sleep with him was embossed, with gold trim and red letters.

Amanda, twenty-one at the time, agreed to leave the bar and go to a local off-campus inn with him. They didn’t speak on the drive over. Once in their room, they fell on the creaky bed, kissing. After about ten minutes of rolling and making out (Amanda never detected much life in his slacks), the professor started to sob. He sat up, threw his legs over the side of the bed, put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. He cried like the baby on the way.

In her room, Amanda threw aside her comforter and got out of bed. No use lying there, recalling other aborted love affairs. Chick’s dying was a sign, she decided. She’d never find her romantic ideal. She was cursed—pretty enough to attract hordes of men, but none she really wanted. She might as well be like Frank and give up, she thought bitterly. Her soul mate existed only in her dreams.

Amanda’s pink flannel nightshirt wasn’t warm enough, so she slipped on her chenille bathrobe and slid in her slippers to the living room. She sat down at the window seat and looked outside at empty, deserted Montague Street. The predawn hours in Brooklyn were peaceful. The sidewalks were empty, the streetlights glowing yellow-pink. Amanda imagined how romantic and tragic a figure she made, sitting alone in that light in the window. A few pigeons loitered on the curb in front next to a tree planted in a cutout square of dirt on the sidewalk. Someone must have thrown some bread down for them. Frank always complained about the pigeons—her big urban-renewal idea was to catch them, cook them, and serve them in homeless shelters as squab. Amanda loved all creatures and wished harm on none. Pigeons would have to be slow-roasted for hours to kill all the germs. God knows what kind of—

Crash.

The pigeons flew to the bottom tree branches. The sound seemed to come from underneath her, inside the coffee bar. Amanda looked for signs of activity, but she couldn’t see anything from her perch directly on top of the store. She should go down there. Investigate. Or she could wake up Frank and go down together. But that wouldn’t be fair. Frank needed her beauty sleep, Amanda thought jokingly. She quickly admonished herself. Just because she was feeling like a failure was no reason to poke at her sister’s insecurity, even in her own mind. The pigeons drifted back down to the curb. Amanda’s heart slowed in her chest. There had been no crash. It was all in her imagination. Frank hadn’t seemed to hear anything, but then again, she slept like the dead.

Crash.

The pigeons flew away for good this time, heading west toward New Jersey. Amanda decided that, since she felt so inept at her prime directive of finding true love, she might as well seek purpose as it presented itself. She went into her room and dressed in cat-girl clothes—black wool drawstring palazzo pants, a black long-sleeved Lycra T-shirt, a black leather car coat, and black Adidas (black cashmere socks, of course). She put her hair up in a ponytail. Since it was so dark, she didn’t bother with makeup. On her way out she touched the knob on Frank’s door. She’d be proud of me for handling this on my own, Amanda thought, smiling to herself. Since their mom and dad had died, Amanda sought the equivalent of parental approval from her big sister, even though Frank rarely supplied it.

The morning cold bit into Amanda’s naked neck. Outside at street level, all was still. No sign of activity. No nothing. Amanda rattled the storefront’s folding metal gate to make sure it was secure. The bars were like icicles. The front window was intact. She unlocked the gate and let herself in the front door of the café. All the lights were out except for the neon in the display cases. She checked the bathrooms and behind the counter. No one, nowhere. Relief warmed her. She’d set a goal and completed it. Wouldn’t Frank be impressed?

Creak.
Not a crash this time, but the sound of tired wood weeping. Amanda nearly jumped out of her skin at the noise. It was clearly coming from the basement. She picked up the phone to call the cops. No dial tone. The line was dead. She big-gulped fear. What now? she wondered. Amanda breathed in, out. She closed her eyes and summoned courage from previous lives, grabbed a bread knife, and walked toward the basement stairs. She opened the door as silently as possible and peered into the cellar. A dim light was on somewhere down there. She listened and heard muffled sounds, like sneakers on cement.

She could turn back now, give up. Get Frank, not finish the job by herself. But Amanda resolved to press on, to do something all the way through. Small steps toward self-improvement, she thought. As she crept down the stairs, Amanda was glad she’d chosen sneakers—actual gumshoes, a smart choice. She edged along with one hand on the railing. In the dim light, she couldn’t see much. When she hit the bottom step, a swell of pride filled her body. She’d achieved another goal. Maybe sticking to the matter at hand wasn’t so hard, she thought. Clarissa would give her an A+ for this effort. Should she venture into the basement? Amanda paused for breath, listening to the air whooshing in and out of her nostrils. She looked around. No signs, no shadows.

She peered ahead into the
L
-shaped space. Not two steps forward, Amanda felt a cold, dead hand fall heavily on her shoulder. Her skin icing over, she shut her eyes and shrieked. Her feet lifted off the dirty floor and dangled. She was being held aloft, a thick arm encircling her waist. She shrieked anew. A large hand covered her mouth, nose, and eyes. She struggled and kicked backward, trying to hit her captor in the knee. In the struggle, she barely heard the ringing clang of metal landing cleanly on skull.

Suddenly airborne, Amanda landed on the floor. She scrambled to her feet and turned to see Matt, the anarchist barista, broken cappuccino machine in his arms, leaning over the motionless body of a giant dough man in an apron. The man’s bloodied head was resting on the bottom step of the basement stairs.

Amanda exhaled. “Matt, you saved me!”

Matt blushed. “Just doing what I can to protect the oppressed,” he said, shuffling his feet.

Amanda looked at the unconscious human mound. His apron read,
Patsie’s Breadstuffs
. She said, “He could have killed me.”

“No chance,” Matt said. “Not with me around.” Matt dropped the cappuccino machine and took a small steno pad out of the back pocket of his jeans. He read, “‘At four-fifty-seven,
X
opened the street-side basement hatch door with his own key. He walked down the hatch door steps, carrying three gray cardboard boxes. He closed door behind him. He put down boxes’”—Matt pointed to the stack—“‘and checked their contents. Weapons cache? Explosives? Bombs? He exited hatch, returning moments later with more boxes.’” Matt looked up at Amanda. “Then you came down. I’m not sure what this is about, but it smells like a conspiracy to me.”

Amanda approached the alleged weapons cache. “Smells like cookies to me,” she said, opening the lid of one of the boxes.

Matt screamed, “Nooooooo!” and dove behind the basement steps.

“Mmm. Chocolate chip,” she said. The box was filled with cookies. The next one had muffins. The one beneath that had croissants. “You didn’t notice the smell?” Amanda asked Matt. The aroma was heavenly.

Matt peeked out from under the steps. Convinced that an explosion was not forthcoming, he came over to Amanda. “Born without a sense of smell,” he said. “But I still know when something stinks.”

Amanda picked up a cookie and bit. “What are you doing down here, anyway?” she asked.

Matt fumbled with his steno pad. “I’ve been kind of camping out for the last couple days. Hope you don’t mind.” His eyebrows went up like a white flag of surrender.

“This is why you wouldn’t give us an address. You
are
homeless,” Amanda said.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Matt protested. “I’m between addresses.”

“That’s why you keep a notebook?” she asked. “You’re not some kind of undercover restaurant inspector looking for rats and bugs, are you?”

“You think I’m an undercover anything? I pride myself on being the opposite: one man’s honesty—and poverty—against the money machine of lies and deception. And occasionally I like to take notes. Literary types might even call it a journal.”

Amanda reached out. “Can I see?”

“It’s not ready.”

“Just a peek?”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he said.

Amanda groaned. “Not another one. Please, Matt. Keep your secret passion to yourself.”

Matt seemed puzzled. “Didn’t I just say that I hide nothing? If I have passion for you, it’s not a secret. Not that I do. I’m considering my passion for you. Once I make a decision, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I can hardly wait,” she said. “Meanwhile, what do we do about the muffin man?” Amanda had the vague recollection that the muffins were delivered on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturday mornings (it was Sunday). She never gave much thought to who made the deliveries or what the procedure was. Frank dealt with all of the suppliers. She now remembered seeing the Patsie’s Breadstuffs van parked on the street out front. From the living room window where she’d been sitting when she heard the crash, the street hatch door wasn’t visible.

“Do you think he’s all right? Should we call an ambulance?” she asked. “What did you do to my phone?”

Matt said, “I unplugged it so the ringing wouldn’t wake me up.”

“We don’t usually expect calls to the store in the middle of the night.”

He said, “You could get a wrong number. Look, I always unplug the phone before bed. It’s a habit.”

Matt did whatever he could to disconnect himself, Amanda thought. She did whatever she could to connect. He was her opposite. “Can you please replug the phone? And get a wet rag. Let’s try to revive this man,” she said.

Matt tucked his notepad into his back pocket and went upstairs. Amanda hoped Frank wouldn’t fire Matt for this. He meant no harm. She kneeled over Patsie Strombo and slapped the muffin man gently across the cheeks. They jiggled and wiggled. His skin was flaky and white, like flour, and his chins were multiple. His eyes fluttered.

Amanda said, “Hello? Are you terribly hurt? Are you in pain?”

The muffin man shook his head. A drop of blood rolled into his ear. “What happened?” he asked.

Matt came down the steps and handed Amanda a rag. He said, “Hey, man, I’m sorry I hit you. I thought you were going to do something unspeakable.”

Patsie rolled to the left and then to the right. He rested in the middle.

“Do you need help getting up?” asked Amanda. The muffin man was too big and rattled to get on his feet. Matt got behind his shoulders and helped him sit up.

The man dabbed at his head wound with the towel. “I heard someone coming down the stairs,” he blubbered. “I didn’t want to frighten you, so I put my hand on your shoulder. And then you screamed and scared me.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Amanda asked.

“My mouth was full,” said Patsie.

Matt and Amanda looked at each other. “Pardon?” she asked.

“My mouth was full. I was eating a corn muffin. That’s why I didn’t say anything when you came down the stairs.”