“What did you have to discuss with her?” he asked.
I went right to the war Geneva and I were waging. “Her podcast, The Yearbook.”
“What about it?”
“She stole that yearbook, which belonged to my mother.”
Apparently, one did not use the verb “stole” in the same sentence as a family member of Myron Wisenkorn’s. Without asking me to explain, his whole demeanor changed from merely grouchy to bellicose. “You’d better watch what you say, young lady. You keep that up, and—”
“You’ll what?” asked Jeremy, now on his feet, looking none too scary. “Because if you use that tone with her, I’ll call security over here and tell them you just threatened my girlfriend.”
“Calm down! I didn’t threaten anyone. I’m trying to find out what’s wrong with my kid and I’ve got this one here telling me about some goddamn program I don’t watch.”
Finally, a nurse or aide or someone with a stethoscope wrapped TV doctor–style around her neck came toward us. “Mr. Wisenkorn?”
“What?”
“I can bring you in to see your daughter.”
Jeremy and I sat there, me trying to look absorbed in the medical emergency while thinking what I’d do once Geneva discovered my heist. Maybe we should slip away right now while the coast was clear. “I took back the yearbook. She doesn’t know,” I whispered.
“How? When?”
“She was lying on the floor, and the super was watching her, making sure she didn’t die. I ducked into her study and stole it—right off her desk! Whoosh!”
“Where is it now?”
I gave his arm a nudge with my elbow. “I had to run into my apartment for my coat and bag, didn’t I, before jumping into the ambulance?”
He smiled.
“I know. She’ll kill me.”
Whatever his reaction was, it had to wait because her father was walking back toward us. We reset our expressions to Good Samaritan. I asked, “Good news?”
He seemed to have acquired some manners, perhaps due to relief. “They stitched her up here”—tapping his own scalp—“keeping her for an EKG. Also, they’re x-raying her elbow. So thanks. You can go. How about if I get you an Uber?”
I said yes he could, that would be very nice.
Jeremy asked if they were keeping her overnight.
“Doubt it. They don’t keep anyone overnight anymore. I had a cabbage and I stayed for one night! Jesus! You’d think they’d want the business!”
“Cabbage?” Jeremy repeated.
“Coronary bypass surgery,” Wisenkorn said. “Which, by the way, I came through like a man of forty. That’s what they told me.”
“Did you get to talk to her?” I asked.
“About what?”
Could the man not answer the most logical question? “About what happened to her—whether she fainted and hit her head or slipped and knocked herself out on the way down?”
“I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you,” he said.
“It’s safe with us,” I said.
“Okay, but this is as far as I can go: It’s a condition she doesn’t like to talk about.”
I said, “As her neighbors, we should know in case this happens again. I think we would be, like, a safety net—”
“Daphne’s a teacher. She knows first aid,” said Jeremy.
Mr. Wisenkorn seemed to be weighing caretaking versus the wrath of Geneva. He sat down again. “Okay. She has a condition. We used to call them petit mal seizures. She’d just go blank, stop in her tracks, once in a while lose consciousness. It’s why we never let her get her driver’s license. Now they call them”—he fished out a small square of paper and opened it—“absence seizures. Whatever.”
“So this has happened before?” I asked, earning me a lecture on Geneva’s productive, healthy, accomplishment-filled lifestyle. “She’s making a film right now,” he said. “Working day and night. About a yearbook.”
Jeremy and I went silent. I refrained from saying, Oh, really, like I didn’t tell you fifteen minutes ago that I was dragged kicking and screaming into a stupid podcast titled The Yearbook?
Jeremy took over, asking in born-yesterday fashion, “A film? Did she tell you anything more about it?”
I felt this was my cue to add, “Jeremy is an actor. When he hears ‘film’ his ears perk right up.”
I could see Jeremy weighing his options: either go along with Daphne’s riff on film or set the record straight. He said, “A slight correction: Your daughter’s project may’ve started out as a documentary in her mind, but that went nowhere so she started a podcast—”
“And you’re producing it!” I said.
“I am? Me? I’m the producer?
“It just means you bankrolled it.”
“I thought ‘podcast’ meant ‘documentary,’ but what the hell do I care? She asks me to fund her projects and I usually say yes.”
“Even without asking for the details or who it might hurt—” I started to rant.
“Uber? Now would be good,” Jeremy said.
Mr. Wisenkorn took out his phone, tapped to unlock it, and handed it to Jeremy. “Here. You do it. Andrew calls them for me.”
“Andrew’s your husband?” I asked.
His yes was delivered warily, as if unsure of my sympathies.
“Good for you,” I said. “Belated congratulations.”
Jeremy said, “All set . . . We have Zahid a block away.”
I asked Mr. Wisenkorn when he thought Geneva would be released. Would be back in her apartment, discovering the larceny.
“Now. Today. But she’s coming home with me for a day or two at least.”
“Which is where?”
“Woodmere.”
“Will you be stopping by the apartment for her things?” I asked.
Fortunately, that sounded to her father like another caring gesture, an offer to gather and pack what Geneva might need during her Long Island convalescence.
“Thanks, but she keeps stuff at our place.”
He surprised me with a hug and a thank-you that finally, apologetically, had some warmth to it.
We ran out the door to Tenth Avenue. Zahid was already there, double-parked and asking “Mr. Myron?” We said yes, close enough. I wondered aloud on the short ride back to our building what would happen when Geneva discovered that the yearbook was missing.
“Why? You didn’t take it.” He smiled. “She probably misplaced it. It’s hard to keep track of things after a whack on the head, right?”
“You’re saying I’ll deny it?”
“Sure. She would. And when she keeps accusing you, you tell her to come over and search your apartment. Ransack it. See what she finds, which will be diddly-squat.”
“Because I’ve burned it?”
“No. Because it’ll be at my place, where she’s never set foot and never will.”
I kept watching for signs of her return, bracing for the pounding on my door, demanding the return of her property. I wasn’t the world’s most skilled liar, so I practiced in the mirror, assuming a look of, by turns, surprise, then shock, then umbrage at being accused of theft. After three days, I asked two different doormen if Ms. Wisenkorn had returned. Each said no with an unconvincing shrug.
I woke up on day four to an email from her sent at 1:05 a.m. the previous night. “Still on Long Island. My dad told me you and Jason (?) stayed in the ER for a couple of hours. Thank you for helping me after my stupid fall. I’d have been able to get up myself except for what I did to my elbow. I’m getting work done here so not rushing back. G.”
Thus I knew: not back yet so still in the dark. Nor was she admitting that a seizure caused the accident. Her father must have nagged her to write and thank me for my life-saving help. What a brat. Would it have killed her to mention that she might still be lying in a pool of blood if I hadn’t fortuitously come by that very hour to knock her block off?
28
Happy Hour
Now this
, sad to say: Neither Jeremy nor I expected permanency as a couple, and I regret suggesting otherwise. Even though he’d rushed to my side at Mount Sinai five days earlier, even though the words “girlfriend” and “boyfriend” had been used, when does that ever advance to a commitment when one of them is male and under thirty and gets fan mail? Shouldn’t I have seen that we were merely sexual placeholders in a city filled with eligibles? Other people come along. Perhaps one of them is named Tina and she is too young to have worried aloud about creeping infertility and the quality of her eggs, which were already beginning to deteriorate.
Jeremy didn’t take up with Tina in a sneaky way. What he wanted to discuss with me in a dark corner of a bar on Ninth Avenue, ironically during happy hour, was that he was thinking about seeing other people. “I still want to be friends,” he told me. “I know that’s a cliché, but I mean it. I’ll still be across the hall. We can still have martinis and we’re still partners in crime, right?”
I asked which crime, thinking he might mean off-the-record sex.
“Geneva related. She’s not going away anytime soon.”
“And that’s your problem how?”
“I didn’t say ‘problem.’ I meant—and please don’t take this the wrong way—that you can get worked up in a way that isn’t totally productive.”
“So you’d be the steady hand making sure I don’t go off the rails? How charitable of you.”
“It’s not charity. I’m invested in this.”
Invested? What kind of left-brained thing was that to say in the middle of a breakup? Borrowing a scene from my own marriage’s unraveling, I asked, “Who is she?”
“Who is who?”
“The woman you’d like to go out with.”
That’s when he told me he hadn’t acted on it yet. Well, there was someone who’d asked him out, but he wasn’t going to accept the invitation before talking to me.
“What kind of invitation?”
He made the face that any theatergoer would have made, which was helpless, innocent incredulity. “Two orchestra seats to Hamilton,” he said.
“And she’s asking a total stranger?”
“Not exactly a total stranger.”
“Let me guess: She’s a fan.”
“No.”
“Another actor?”
“No, she doesn’t watch the show. Which I like—”
“Do you? Hooking up with someone who’s not steeped in popular culture.”
“I meant that it makes her overture not, you know—”
“Star fucking?”
“She wouldn’t even know what that means. She’s an adjunct professor.”
I must have repeated the “adjunct” with something like disdain because Jeremy asked, “Something against adjunct professors?”
Besides the obvious, her interest in you? I said, “‘Adjunct’ means she pops in once or twice a week to teach one class and borrows someone else’s desk for her office hours. What’s her field?”
“Sustainability.”
I gave that a good smirk, though I didn’t know what that field was. “How does an adjunct professor afford tickets to Hamilton?” I asked.
“She didn’t say.”
“How’d you meet this millionaire?”
“Why’d you say that?”
“Do you know how much those seats cost? Like a thousand bucks apiece.”
I knew this wasn’t going as he’d expected. I tried a somewhat more neutral “How’d you two meet?”
“Daff—what does that matter?”
Only my beloved nonbiological father was allowed to call me Daff from now on. “Tell me it wasn’t through online dating.”
“Since when am I online dating?”
“You mean why you, the famous star of the small screen?”
He was doing some agitated shredding of his napkin instead of answering. What a brat I’d suddenly become. “Everyone does,” I continued. “Maybe your membership was up for renewal and you thought, I’ll see what’s out there.”
“You know I’ve never done online dating.”
“I knew no such thing. You could’ve been swiping right and left next to me in bed.” I added “naked” for extra weight.
“Wow . . . Daff . . . I didn’t expect this.”
I repeated, “How’d you meet her?”
“She lives in the building.”
“Which building?”
“Ours. She keeps her bike in the rack in the basement.”
“Well, that’s convenient,” I said. “Again.”
When he looked puzzled, I said, “Like us. Geographically compatible. Only now you might have to take the elevator to have sex. What floor is she on?”
“Two. But—”
“So you ran into her one day and you welcomed her to the building—”
“Like I know who lives here and who’s new? No. She had a flat tire and she’d seen me leaving with my bike, so she gave the doorman a note asking if I knew of a local place where she could have her tire patched.”
“Patched,” I said. “How touching.”
“You’re mad. I’m sorry. Nothing’s happened yet.”
Why was I mad? Hadn’t I been using him to forget my humiliating marriage and build a case for my being a woman with big-city sexual mores?
So I made a weak effort to pivot, to show how coolly this cosmopolitan woman, me, could conduct herself. I said, “Let’s start this conversation over. You want to see other people. So do I. This doesn’t have to be awkward. Certainly not between us. And you know what? Even if I see you and Tina together, I’ll be civil. And from now on, when I ask if I can borrow a cup of sugar, it’ll mean an actual cup of sugar, not code. I’ll have my panties on.”
When that didn’t evoke anything but a pained expression, I asked, “Does she know about me?”
“Not specifics—”
“Not anything?” I prompted. “Not my name?”
“Just that I was involved with someone.”
“When’s the show?”
“Saturday.”
“Matinee?”
“Nope. Evening.”
“Well, good for you.”
“I mean it—I want us to stay friends.”
What was that proverb? Good fences make good neighbors? If it had been wise to apply that to Jeremy and me, shouldn’t the same go for Tina? I said, “I think it’s best if you gave me back the yearbook.”
“Not a good idea. It shouldn’t be in your apartment. Geneva’s crazy enough to hire some guys to turn your place upside down. Like the opening of The Big Lebowski, where these thugs ransack—”
I said I’d never seen that. But, okay, keep it. Just be sure to notify me if you’re moving.
That earned another disappointed, possibly hurt, look. I knew how I was sounding, but I couldn’t stop myself. And though the waiter had already slipped the check between us, I said I’d have another glass of the pinot.
I didn’t speak until the refill arrived. “Okay if I hate you now?”
He slipped the check to his side of the table. “You don’t mean that.”
“I want to,” I said.
29
I Thought I Knew Everything
Of course it would be now that my father suggested a double date. I accepted, opting for mañana to tell him that Jeremy couldn’t make it—this night or any other.
I asked if he’d like to come for dinner.
“You mean at your place?”
“Sure.”
I waited for a delighted acceptance. Instead, I heard a wary “Would that have to be on tray tables?”
I said no worries! I’d found a table on Craigslist. We’d christen it.
“Can Kathi come, too?” he asked.
I said, “Of course she’s invited. This will be my chance to get to know her better,” hoping to imply that she and I had never had a conversation about his erectile dysfunction. I added, “I guess that thing you were worried about, her cooling off, was just a misunderstanding.”<
br />
Because we were speaking by phone, I couldn’t see what I hoped was relief on his face or, still better, his blushing over where Kathi’s entreaties had led. He said, preceded by a heh-heh, “Your old man hasn’t had much experience in the dating world, don’t forget. Kathi is definitely on board. I don’t know what you said, but it must’ve helped her express her feelings.”
Oh, God: busted as sexual therapist. I said, “She didn’t need any coaxing. She hadn’t realized that maybe there was a way to reassure you that her feelings were as strong as ever.”
On my end of the phone, I was making tortured faces that only a discussion of one’s father’s love life could induce.
“Is Saturday good for you?” he asked.
I said yes. I was free. Quite. Seven? Seven-thirty?
“You know your old dad. Six?”
“Perfect,” I said.
Now I could reassure Holly, who’d been calling more than usual, that in exactly five days I’d be seeing Dad, and under the right circumstances, I might confess that the Geneva thing had metastasized into a podcast featuring an actor pretending to be him.
I reached her in her car, in traffic, on her Bluetooth. She told me that she and Doug had talked to their friend, the famous attorney. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be a slam dunk.
“Which means what?”
“The intellectual property part. The slander or libel part. The invasion of privacy. Not much to go on.”
“Did you tell him the producer made up stories and had actors pretending to be”—I almost said, “Peter Armstrong,” but caught myself—“students and friends of Mom’s and Dad’s without a warning label saying, ‘The following story is bullshit. I totally made it up.’”
Then, gravely, Holly asked, “Did she?”
“Did she what?”
“Make it all up.”
“Yes! You know she did. She has no scruples!”
“Having no scruples isn’t actionable.”
“I didn’t have a year of law school like you did. I guess I thought ethics might count when it comes to ruining a dead woman’s reputation.”
Good Riddance Page 17
