“Rosa and Carmen did whatever they wanted until Carmen ruined it,” Sid grumbled. “Because of you they watch me like I’m some kind of criminal mastermind.”
“You are a criminal mastermind.”
There was a sharp rap on the door and Betsy popped her head in. “Kids! Everybody’s asking for you.”
“We’re coming.” Carmen rose reluctantly from the bed.
“ ‘Where’s Rosa? Where’s Rosa?’ ” Sid sniped. “ ‘What’s she working on now?’ ”
In spite of Carmen’s reluctance, I was eager to meet the Dietzes’ friends. The living room was crowded, but Len spotted us immediately and waved us over to the piano, where he was talking to a good-looking middle-aged couple. He threw an arm around Carmen’s neck and kissed the side of her head. He introduced me to John and Amanda Rubin, but I’d already recognized John, a Broadway star who also did commercials for home insurance.
“What are you doing with yourself, Carmen?” Amanda asked. “Are you writing?”
Len gave Carmen’s shoulders an affectionate shake. “She’s been working for Bertha Sykes.”
John laughed, and Amanda said, “Oh, you poor darling. That’s really paying your dues.”
“Is Adam here yet?” John scanned the room.
“I haven’t seen him,” Amanda said. “He’ll want to hear all about what you’re up to, Carmen.”
“Carmen is such a talented writer,” John said to me. “We went to see a play she wrote in high school. Remember that, Mandy?”
“How could I forget? The Limbo Cafeteria!”
“Starring Rosa as the Cheerleader,” Len said.
“Rosa was lovely in that,” Amanda said.
“She lights up the stage,” John said.
“She’s got that rare quality,” Len said. “She… how can I put it? She elevates whatever material she’s given.”
Carmen’s lips tightened.
“I hope you’re working on something, Carmie,” John said. “You know, you could have a play produced like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Carmen doesn’t have time to write,” Len said. “She’s too busy playing downtown bohemian.”
John shook his head. “Adam’s the same way. I tell him, ‘Don’t go on any streets that have a letter for a name, you’ll get yourself killed.’ Does he listen to me?”
“All the proper streets are numbers,” Amanda agreed. “Except in Greenwich Village, of course.”
“What kind of an idiot goes walking around Avenue C at night?”
“Ah, well,” Amanda said. “We all go through that phase.”
“Is it a phase?” Len said. “I don’t remember going through a phase like that.”
“You know what?” Carmen said. “I need a ginger ale. What about you, Phoebe? Do you need a ginger ale?”
“Ginger ale. Yes.” I let Carmen drag me away toward the bar. “Nice to meet you!”
She ordered us two whiskey and gingers. We slipped into the dining room to pick at the shrimp platter. Through the window, the East River flashed and rippled under the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. “They seem nice,” I said about the Rubins.
“Ugh.”
“Carmen, there you are.” A stout woman in her sixties bustled toward us in a sequined caftan, toting a miniature terrier around like a purse. “Hold Mimi for a minute while I straighten my unmentionables,” she growled, thrusting Mimi into Carmen’s arms and proceeding to tug on something beneath her caftan. Once her unmentionables were settled, she retrieved her dog. “Thank you, darling. Now, get me a drink so I can throw it in your father’s face. A Manhattan, nice and sticky.”
“Bertha, this is my friend Phoebe,” Carmen said.
“Charmed.” Bertha barely glanced at me. “That drink…?”
“Coming right up.”
We bypassed the bar and went into the kitchen, where Carmen freshened up our whiskey and gingers and mixed her own Manhattan for Bertha. “See that light fixture up there?” She nodded at an unremarkable frosted glass shade, flush against the ceiling.
“Yeah?”
“See how the plaster around it looks kind of patchy, as if there’d been an explosion or something?”
“Now that you point it out…” The plaster around the light had a slightly different texture from the rest of the ceiling, as if a hole had been patched.
She dashed bitters into Bertha’s tumbler. “There’s a story behind it.”
I waited to hear the story, but she kept jerking the little bottle over the glass. I hoped Bertha liked her Manhattan heavy on the bitters.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
She capped the bitters bottle and stirred the drink with her pinky. “I want to. The story is this: Many years ago, when I was about ten, I had some friends over for a slumber party. We were watching TV in the living room in our pajamas, eating popcorn and giggling and getting goofy over staying up till midnight. Rosa and Sid were asleep, and my mother wasn’t here. That was the strange thing—I don’t know where she was, but I think she and Len had had a fight. He was going through a hard time then. He’d written an opera that bombed, and we were having money troubles. I knew we were having money troubles because I heard my parents fighting late at night over all the unpaid bills.”
“I didn’t know he’d ever had a time like that,” I said. He radiated the confidence of someone who’d known nothing but success.
“This is a couple of years before Cottonmouth. Anyway, I didn’t know what was going on, my parents never told us anything, but Len was acting weird that night. He kept walking between us and the TV, back and forth from the hall closet to the kitchen, carrying things. He’d say, ‘Don’t mind me, girls,’ and then walk in front of the TV with a stepladder. ‘Dad, get out of the way! We can’t see!’ I yelled at him. He said, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ but then he did it again, this time carrying a rope. I didn’t think about why he was making a big show of carrying a rope and a ladder in front of us, and I didn’t care. I wanted him to leave us alone and let me be with my friends.”
I studied the ragged plaster around the light fixture. “What was he doing?”
“The next thing I know there’s a huge crash in the kitchen. We all run in here and there’s Dad in a heap on the floor with a rope around his neck, covered in plaster. He’d pulled down half the ceiling trying to hang himself.”
“I don’t see how you could tie a rope around that light. There’s nothing to hook it to.”
“You can’t. That’s the new one, replacing the one Len pulled out of the ceiling. Betsy bought that specifically because you can’t tie a rope around it.”
“Oh.”
“Once he got over the shock of the fall, he started sobbing.”
“Oh my God. What did you do?”
Carmen sipped Bertha’s Manhattan. “We all just stared at him. I didn’t know what to do. Finally he got up and brushed himself off and tried to act like it was funny, like he’d done it to amuse us. ‘Nothing to see here, ladies.’ ” She imitated him leaning back on his heels, thumbs in his belt, like Don Knotts in The Shakiest Gun in the West. “Then he said it was time for bed. Nobody argued. We ran into the living room, dove into our sleeping bags, and pretended to sleep for the rest of the night.”
“He obviously wanted you to see what he was doing,” I said. “Maybe he wanted you to stop him.”
“How? I was ten.”
From the living room a foghorn voice bellowed, “Carmen! My drink?”
Carmen took another slurp from Bertha’s Manhattan. “Come on.”
“Wait.” I paused at the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room. “Did he ever try anything like that again?”
“Not that I know of. Whatever the problem was, he got over it.” She pushed through the door with her back. “Bets was mad at him for a long time though. Pretty hilarious, right?”
“Yeah.” Anyway it seemed like her father was doing okay now. I didn’t find the story all that funny, but i
t had a happy ending, or at least not a tragic one—a big hole patched up with visible scars. It was such a Carmen story.
* * *
As Carmen delivered Bertha’s Manhattan, I overheard a woman complaining that she’d had a genius idea for a song while her boyfriend was going down on her.
“I mean, what do you do?” she said to her friend. “I don’t want to spoil the moment, but I don’t want to lose the lyrics either. I know if I don’t write them down right away I’ll never remember them, but I also know as long as I’m repeating these lyrics in my head I’ll never come!”
“What were they?”
“What?”
“What were the lyrics?”
“I don’t know!”
“You went for the orgasm?”
“I went for the orgasm.”
“You’ll find them again.”
“No,” she sighed. “I won’t.”
The woman was in her thirties and beautiful, with thick dark hair, black leather boots, a red wool dress, and lots of gold chains. “Who’s she?” I asked Carmen.
“I don’t know. Some lyricist.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I hate these parties.”
“Why? Your parents have such cool friends.”
“Let’s go to my room and smoke.”
“I left my cigs in my coat.”
In the vestibule, I dug through my coat pockets until I found my Camel Lights. I was digging for matches when the door opened and a young couple walked in. The guy was wiry and energetic, late twenties, with thinning hair. The woman wore dark glasses, jangly silver earrings, and a military coat studded with jeweled pins. She waited languidly while he helped her remove the coat. Underneath she wore a dress made of one long silver scarf wrapped around her body. Waves of black hair flowed around her melancholy face, pale except for a bright red pout.
“Carmen!” the guy said. “This is Zuzanna Ruiz-Alta.”
“Zu.” She offered a creamy, beringed hand, nails polished metallic blue. “Ciao.”
Carmen perked up. “Ciao, yourself. What’s up, Adam?”
Carmen and Adam exchanged a hello kiss. She introduced us: Adam Rubin, the musician son of John and Amanda.
“Come get a drink,” she said.
“Our parents used to fantasize about me and Carm getting married,” Adam told me.
“Not in a million years,” Carmen said.
Adam made kissy noises at her.
Zu’s silvery presence parted the crowd in the living room as we headed back to the bar. I overheard Adam telling Carmen that he’d picked up Zu at 8BC the night before. “She’s fantastic—but a slippery one. Hard to pin down. She works the door at Plutonium and says she can get me in whenever I want. But she won’t give me her phone number.”
“Can I come to Plutonium with you? I’m dying to go there,” Carmen said. Everyone was talking about Plutonium. It had opened in September, a new kind of nightclub, club as performance art. Every month, artists completely redecorated the space to fit a theme chosen by the owners. In September they opened with Surrealism; for October, Honky-Tonk. November’s theme was Home—an ironic take on suburbia, family, and nostalgia, just in time for the holidays. Night after night mobs clamored in the street outside the club, desperate to get in. They tried everything: bribes, pulling strings, showing up naked… nothing worked. The only way to gain entry was to be deemed cool enough by the door Nazis. “To stand in line and not get in is to die,” Carmen turned to tell me. It meant you were nobody.
Zu accepted a vodka on the rocks from the Columbia student the Dietzes had hired to bartend, lifting her sunglasses to survey the room with eyes thickly outlined in kohl. She looked disdainful and lost, a gleaming silver island in a sea of sweaters and tweed.
“Are you in the theater?” she asked me.
“No. I work in a bookstore.”
“Oh.” Bookstores didn’t seem to interest her. I felt desperate not to bore her. I sensed that catching her interest was like winning a prize. Maybe a bit of black magic would work.
“I’m also a fortune-teller,” I said.
She brightened. “You are? Do you read palms?”
“She reads ticket stubs,” Carmen said.
“What?”
“We’ll show you.” Carmen led us all down the corridor to her bedroom.
Adam picked up an old teddy bear. “You’ve done wonders with this place.”
Carmen snatched the bear back and tucked it under her arm. “You still have that Snoopy bedspread?” She picked up the top hat and shook it. “Behold the Oracle of the Ticket Stubs. Ask her anything. It’s amazing!”
Zu sat on the bed. “Oh, hmm, well, let’s see…. Can you just tell me, what does my future hold, like, in general?”
I closed my eyes and shook the hat, hoping to look mystical. I reached in, drew a stub, and opened my eyes. Fame. What a stroke of luck.
I showed Zu the ticket. She laughed and gave a delighted shake of her bracelets.
“Ask her something else,” Adam said.
“All right.” Zu looked away from him and straight into my eyes, as if we were alone together in a room. “When will I find my true love?”
I performed the same routine—closing my eyes, shaking the hat—and pulled out Airplane!
“Are you planning to take a trip?”
“Not soon. I can’t afford to go anywhere at the moment.”
“Well, you will meet your true love on an airplane.” I showed her the ticket. “It may not be until later in your life. But it will be worth waiting for.”
“Zu, let’s fly to Miami next weekend,” Adam said.
“What is your name again?” Zu asked me.
“Phoebe Hayes.”
“Phoebe Hayes, listen. There’s a big party at Plutonium on New Year’s Eve—the theme is ‘The Future,’ you know, like, will we all be wearing jet packs? Will robots take over? Will we live on Mars? And all that. Everybody wants to know what the future will bring. Wouldn’t it be great to have you at the party to tell us?”
“Yes,” I said, my pulse quickening. “It would be great.”
“That would be so great,” Carmen said.
Zu took a pen from Carmen’s nightstand. On the back of my hand she wrote down a name, Toby Belzer, and a phone number. “Tell him I sent you.”
* * *
I called Toby the next day. To my amazement, he hired me over the phone on nothing but Zu’s recommendation, promising me three hundred dollars for one night’s work—telling fortunes at a party in a club most people would never be allowed to enter. “You can thank me by bringing me with you,” Carmen said, as if I’d ever consider going without her.
10 ROSES
A shiny new path unfurled before me, and the city sparkled with fresh possibility. Yes, I now owed Robin three months’ rent, but I planned to beg her for one more month; after the Plutonium party I’d be able to pay off some of my debt, with more, surely, to come. Screw Ivan. I didn’t care about him anymore; I was on to bigger and better things.
I enjoyed this optimistic feeling for a few days. Then: a bad omen. My period was late.
My breasts ached and I had terrible heartburn. I went to the drugstore and spent an outrageous amount of money on a pregnancy test. In the bathroom I unwrapped the test, read the directions, and peed on the stick. It burned when I peed. Everything burned.
While waiting for the result, I thought about a toddler my mother and I once saw outside the grocery store. His mother pushed her shopping cart through the parking lot, leading him on a leash. I was horrified. “She’s humiliating him,” I said. My mother saw it differently. “He may be humiliated, but he’s safe.” Parents had to see life that way, putting safety above all else. That wasn’t for me. Not yet.
I checked the test stick. The second pink line bloomed.
* * *
On Friday, Carmen’s gynecologist confirmed that I was pregnant, with a mild case of cystitis. She gave me a prescription for antibiotics a
nd scheduled the procedure for the following Wednesday. It would cost a thousand dollars. I had five days to find the money.
Ivan’s answering service said he was out of the country until Monday. Carmen and I spent the weekend lying on the mattress in my room, plotting ways to get the money if Ivan didn’t come through, while I slurped endless vanilla milkshakes and chewed Tums. We could ask my parents—never. We could ask her parents—no. We could go to Belmont and bet on a long shot. We could play the slot machines in Atlantic City. We could buy a lottery ticket.
I called Ivan’s office on Monday morning and left a message. I tried again at lunchtime, saying it was urgent. The fourth time I called, his secretary impatiently told me that she’d given him all my messages. He’d call as soon as he could.
The next day I went to the office in person, hoping to catch him. His secretary insisted he wasn’t in; he’d be out in meetings all day. “He’s avoiding me,” I said. She didn’t deny it. I asked her for a slip of paper and a pen. I wrote, I’m pregnant. –P, folded up the note, asked for an envelope, sealed it, and left it for him.
I walked the thirty blocks home. It was a gray afternoon in late November, the bite of impending snow in the air and the city tinseled in Christmas lights. Tourists clogged the sidewalks, gaping at store windows. At the edge of the park, horses tethered to carriages snorted and jingled, stamping their feet, their eyes big and frantic.
Back at the apartment, Robin was home with a cold. A long white box leaned against the door of my room. “Someone sent you flowers,” she said.
Inside: a dozen thorny red roses and an envelope marked FOR PHOEBE HAYES. In the envelope: a thousand dollars, cash. No note.
Zowie.
* * *
In the waiting room I sat next to a young guy, eighteen or nineteen, trying to put pink socks on a baby girl in a stroller. She kept taking the socks off. “Jasmine, STOP. You want powpow?” He gripped her feet in one hand while she squirmed. “I’m holding your feet hostage.” He laughed, turning to me and Carmen. “She’s trying real hard to get out of my grip.” He shook the baby’s legs. “You can’t get out. You’re never gonna get out.” Jasmine struggled and kicked to get free. “You gotta do better than that, Jas,” he singsonged. “You gotta do better than that….” She started to whimper so he let go of her feet and rested one of his legs across her lap. Calm now, she tugged on his sock, trying to take it off over his shoe.
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