Super in the City (12 page)

“But how can she say things that aren’t true?” I insisted, swirling the ice in my glass. “She’d be out of a job. Mobs of people would be pounding down her door demanding a refund.”

“She’s paid by the network.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, she
knew
things about me. And she was so certain about Gregory and me.” I really did love saying our names together, so much that I forgot my promise to myself not to talk about Gregory in front of Lucy.

“What did she know about you?”

I didn’t want to repeat the bit about my strong character. Tag would rip me to shreds.

“She knew my aunt had died.” It was practically true.

Tag frowned.

“She knew I was in a job that wasn’t right for me.”

“That’s fish in a barrel. Most people think their job isn’t right for them.”

“You don’t,” I shot back.

I ran my hand along the smooth copper railing. “She had so much confidence. In me. No one is ever willing to say things with any certainty, not even my parents. We’re all so careful and realistic.”

Tag opened her mouth, but I interrupted her.

“Look, I’m willing to accept that she’s not really a psychic, but what if she’s unusually talented at sizing up a person quickly and knowing what they’re capable of? I feel like I should do everything possible to make something happen with—” I stopped short, glancing at Lucy. “With any guy that might come along. I’m more certain that it’s worth trying, is all.”

“She said you’d spend your life with Gregory,” Lucy finally piped up. “She didn’t say
how,
Zephyr. He might be your exterminator forever, not your husband.”

Lucy was bitter because, she claimed, Renee had told her she was going to die.

“Exactly,” Tag said to Lucy. “So why can’t you apply that logic to what she said to you, dipshit? You asked her whether you’re going to die. Why, I have no idea, but you did. And she said yes, you are. I could have told you that.”

“If it wasn’t going to be soon, she wouldn’t have said it,” Lucy said, feeling—understandably, I thought—sorry for herself. She had downed two caipirinhas after emerging from Renee’s tent and was getting pretty droopy.

“You two are getting on my nerves,” Tag announced. “Where’s Mercedes?”

We looked over to where we’d left her, but there was no sign of her or Dover Carter. We scoured the deck and then searched the ladies’ room. We went downstairs and asked Tiffany, who was sitting on the bouncer’s stool rubbing her feet.

“What does your friend look like?” she asked in a bored voice, her enthusiasm for our attendance apparently a thing of the past.

“Tall black woman in a blue- and- green strapless dress,” I told her. “Head scarf, too.”

Tiffany perked up.

“Oh, she left with Dover Carter!”

“Willingly?” Tag asked suspiciously. Tiffany looked at her like she was insane.

“Call her,” I instructed Lucy. She punched Mercedes’s number into her phone and immediately my handbag started ringing.

I remembered. “Shit. She gave me her phone to hold because it didn’t fit in her bag.”

“What kind of asinine purse doesn’t have room for a phone?” Tag demanded.

“A really pretty beaded one,” Lucy slurred admiringly.

Now, as I lay in bed, I remembered guiltily how quickly we had convinced ourselves that Mercedes was fine, using the same logic I had used to validate Renee Ricardo’s credentials: Dover Carter couldn’t afford any bad publicity and therefore Mercedes was not in any danger.

I grabbed my phone again and dialed Mercedes’s home number. Her machine started to pick up, but then she answered, cutting off her recorded voice.

“It’s seven- thirty in the freaking morning,” she snarled. Mercedes had trained herself not to curse, arguing that a black woman trying to make it in the world of classical music had to hold herself up to a higher standard. It was a favored pastime of the rest of the Sterling Girls to see if we could make her slip up.

“ Seven- forty and I was
worried
about you,” I said, trying to make her feel guilty.

“It’s a little late to worry,” she replied haughtily.

My stomach clenched.

“Why?” I sat up. “What happened? What did he do to you?”

I imagined Mercedes tearfully telling her story on
Dateline.
I’d sit beside her, holding her hand for strength as she recounted how devastating it had been to have no one believe her except, of course, for her closest friends. We would start a foundation for the victims of celebrities. What would we name it?

“Nothing. I’ll call you later.” I heard the ping of her viola.

“You big fat liar! You’ve been practicing for an hour already, haven’t you?”

Then I heard muffled voices.

“Mercedes,” I enunciated slowly. “Is Dover Carter in your apartment
right now?”

“Wait, what? Sorry, I dropped the phone.”

I stood on my bed. “ARE YOU GIVING DOVER CARTER A PRIVATE CONCERT AT SEVEN- THIRTY IN THE FUCKING MORNING?!” I screamed.

“ Seven- forty,” she said, and hung up.

I looked at my phone in disbelief and jumped down to the floor. This is huge, was all I could think as I stomped into my living room. Huge. Huger than huge, and it’s too early to call anyone.
My
friend spent the night with the man of, literally, my dreams. Which of us would be her maid of honor? The right thing would be for all of us to be bridesmaids and have no maid of honor, I decided.

I looked out the front window and congratulated myself on not feeling jealous. Not exactly jealous. Well, I was jealous, but only because my current career would never, in this three-dimensional world, capture a movie star’s interest. There was no scenario in which Dover Carter would have spotted me across a crowded roof deck and recognize me as the object of his obsession. “You take care of your parents’ building? I arrange my shoots around…” Around what? The tax assessor’s schedule? Street- cleaning hours? I waved away the depressing thought.

My phone rang and I raced back to it.

“Mercedes?” I said.

“Abigail,” Abigail said grimly.

I looked at my clock yet again.

“Isn’t it the middle of the night for you?”

“Men suck.” She was trying to sound annoyed, but I heard a quiver in her voice.

“Oh, no.” Damn. Now there was no way I could share the news about Mercedes and Dover. Not this minute anyway.

“Honey, what happened?” I padded into the kitchen and filled up the teakettle. I wiped at a stain on the counter, calculating that it would take about an hour to clean the apartment before Gregory showed up.

“What happened is, my sister finished her dissertation, landed the Yale job, and then found her husband within a year. It worked for her, it was supposed to work for me. But it’s been
two
years since I finished!” I almost laughed at how surprised she sounded that life didn’t adhere to the Greenfield family syllabus, but she sounded too wounded to joke.

“Ab, what
happened?”

“Darren.”

“The guy from JDate?” I dug around the drawers of my fridge and came up with a block of cheddar cheese. “But I thought he lives here.”

“He’s out here for a week for a conference. We went out three times, but only fooled around for the first time last night. I mean tonight.”

I heard a door slam on her end.

“Cat out,” she explained dejectedly. “So we’ve been having a great time. He’s cute, Zeph, really cute.” Her voice faded away.

“And?” I prompted, biting into the cheese.

“And really smart. He’s the step- grandson of Athol Baron.”

“Abigail, I don’t know who that is, but does that mean your guy’s name is Darren Baron?” I watched the flame flicker beneath the kettle and wondered whether I was responsible for forming an evacuation plan in the event of a gas leak.

“He’s not my guy and his last name is Schwartz. He’s so smart and he gave this phenomenal paper on theoretical linguistics …” She paused, not wanting to insult my intelligence. “Well, he gave this great paper and I thought we were clicking. He really listened.”

“Uh-oh.”

“So we’re messing around—”

“How much?”

“Shirts off.”

“Bra?”

“Still on.”

“Prude,” I said, as the kettle whistled.

“You know, I can’t even find Bengal Spice tea out here,” Abigail whined.

“So you’re fooling around …” I prompted.

“And… I still can’t believe this. You know, the more I think about it, the more I’m just livid. What a shit! What kind of man says things like that?”

“Abigail!” I said. “What
happened?”

“He told me I was too Jewish- looking,” she admitted.

I slammed down my cheese. “The guy you met on a Jewish dating site said you looked
too Jewish?”

“And he said I was too chubby. He said he likes thin Asian women.”

I had never met this guy, but I wanted to make him walk naked down Broadway in a blizzard. No, that was too irrelevant. I wanted to publicly humiliate him, break his heart, get him to beg for Abigail’s love. I wanted to string him up, kick him in the guts, and watch him bawl like a baby. My throat closed up with bile.

“What did
you
say?!” I sputtered.

“I told him he was an insensitive prick and kicked him out. About a half hour ago.” I heard her door open and close again. “How can an educated, normal- seeming man… ? Zeph, I really liked him.” I pictured her in her spacious, faculty-subsidized kitchen: shoulders hunched, an oversized Near Eastern Language Association T-shirt hanging to her knees, one finger yanking at her curls. It made my heart hurt and I loathed the three thousand miles between us.

“So who’s next?” I wanted her to move on.

Abigail groaned. “It’s slim pickin’s out here in the mild, mild west. The sun’s deep- fried their brains. That’s why I was trying to import.” She sniffed. “When I told him he was a
prick, he didn’t even understand what he’d done that was so bad.”

“Oh, Ab.”

“Forget it. He’s headed back to New York tomorrow anyway. I’m going to do one of those eight- minute speed- dating things. It sounds extremely efficient.” I could hear her psychically picking herself up and brushing herself off. “So what did you guys do tonight? I mean last night. Tell me how much fun you’re having without me.”

“It’s never fun without you!” I said automatically. I dunked the tea bag in a mug I’d picked up in Mexican Hat, Utah, during a cross- country drive with Abigail and Tag to celebrate the acquisition of their respective Ph.D.s. The cup was a reminder of one of the best trips I’ve ever taken; it was also a stained porcelain memento of how undereducated I was compared to my friends, who, among the four of them, were an alphabet soup of advanced degrees. But they loved me and I wanted to torture any guy who mistreated any one of them.

“Liar.”

“We crashed a party at Soho House. A fortune- teller told Lucy she’s going to die,” I said offhandedly. An idea was beginning to needle the back of my brain.

“Soon?” Abigail sounded worried.

“Unclear.” I sipped at my tea. “Abigail, wait. There’s something that might be worth trying. How do you post a profile on JDate?”

A
T NOON, CLAD IN MY PERFECTLY PAINT- STAINED LEVI’S THAT
suggested a can- do kind of gal (Zephyr helps her friends paint murals, stage sets, and kitchens!) and a long- sleeved, low-plunging white shirt that clung in the right places and miraculously
made my tummy roll go on furlough for a few hours, I did a privacy check of my apartment.

I started in the living room, removing all issues of
Us Weekly
and strategically tossing a couple of
National Geographics
and yesterday’s
New York Times
on the coffee table. I peered into my basket of mail and bills and covered my bank statement with a donation solicitation from public radio. On the pad next to my phone, I scribbled “Pete” and “Mark” so it would look like I had a flock of men in my life. I added “Hayden.” Then I crossed it out. Then I wrote it in again.

I rearranged some framed photos on the bookshelf, remembering James’s creepy portrait duet still holding court across the hall. I put the picture of the five Sterling Girls looking like a Banana Republic ad in front of the others. Tag’s half brother—son of trophy wife number one—had taken it the year before when we’d spent the better part of an autumn Saturday raking leaves at her father’s country house. We looked downright enviable in our twiggy, tousled joy.

In the kitchen, I hid the Entenmann’s devil’s food cake that was ragged with fork furrows and put the cheddar cheese riddled with teeth marks at the back of the fridge. I pushed the box of Corn Pops behind the granola.

In the bathroom I hid the plaque rinse, but left out the fluoride rinse. I didn’t want him to think I was obsessive about keeping my teeth clean (which I was). I debated about the box of condoms. Sexy or overkill? Sophisticated if it was in the right place. I tucked it inside the medicine chest, off to the side, so he’d see it if he opened the cabinet, but where I couldn’t be accused of flaunting it.

At twelve- fifteen the intercom buzzed. I looked out the window and saw the top of Gregory’s head, the mere sight of which made me inexplicably happy. He stepped back and looked up at my window. I threw myself onto the floor.

Fifteen minutes early? I thought as I jungle- crawled out of his line of sight. What kind of sick game was this guy playing?

“I’ll be right down,” I shouted through the intercom. I stood there a moment, pissed off and excited. Excited the way I used to be before sixth- grade dances, which is to say achingly and irrationally so, because the objects of my affection were inevitably huddled in a corner fervently recounting to one another what David Letterman had thrown off the studio’s roof the night before.

I went downstairs and opened the door, which was unbolted. I’d have to put up a safety notice reminding everyone to double lock the door. That thought made me feel professional, responsible, and instantly more attractive, like a streak of eyeshadow for my ego.

I immediately got what Lucy calls the yummies when I saw him. His hair looked more golden than it had the day before and he gave off a woodsy scent. He wore jeans with a deep red button- down shirt that set off his olive skin. I wondered whether he’d dressed as carefully for me as I had for him.