The Last Manly Man

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Who is it?” I asked, in a low, clear voice. “I’ve got a gun.”

  “Uh, er, uh. Is this TaMAYo Scheinman’s apartment?”

  “It is. How did you unlock the door?”

  “TaMAYo sent me the keys. See?”

  She stuck a padded envelope under the door chain.

  I grabbed it and said, “Don’t move,” then slammed the door shut, and turned on the light.

  “Dear Nadia,” it said. “Here are the keys. Hope all goes well with your fiancé. Be very careful. E-mail me when you’re grounded. If you need any help, call Maggie in 709. Good luck and good sex.”

  It was a note from Tamayo all right. I recognized the handwriting and the style.

  I opened the door.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know Tamayo had other guests coming. Come in,” I said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she asked, with just a trace of an accent.

  It sounded foreign, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. In the kitchen light, she looked like a teenager, but that may have been because she had the kind of baby-face cutes that tend to make a woman look younger than her years all her life.

  “Robin Hudson, a friend of Tamayo’s.”

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “My apartment burned down. I had keys, so I came to stay here. You were expecting Tamayo to be here?”

  “No. But when I saw the chain was on the door I assumed she had come back to New York. How do I know you’re a friend of Tamayo’s?” she asked.

  “Don’t be paranoid. What is it with kids today? You’re so suspicious,” I said, but held back all sarcasm and hostility, a little trick I’d had to learn and use a lot while on the road.

  “I need to know if you’re telling the truth about being Tamayo’s friend,” she said imperiously. “Otherwise, you’ll have to leave.”

  “I’ll have to leave? My apartment burned down. It’s after five in the morning. I was here first.”

  “I have a written invitation to be here,” she said.

  “I have a blanket invitation. Look, I am so tired I can’t think straight—”

  “How do I know you know Tamayo? I need to know.”

  “Oh hell. Let me prove it to you,” I said.

  In Tamayo’s publicity library, several loose-leaf binders containing media coverage about her, I found an article from a women’s magazine about “Girls’ Nights Out” among women of all ages. Tamayo contributed with a story about our most legendary girls’ night out, one Halloween. It was accompanied by a photograph showing me, Tamayo, another friend of ours, Claire Thibodeaux, and my former intern, Kathy Loblaws.

  The girl looked at it and said, “All right, you can stay tonight. How long are you planning to be here?”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be here. My apartment burned down. How long are you planning to be here?”

  “Not long. I’m meeting my boyfriend here, we have a little business, and then we’re leaving.”

  “Oh right. He was by earlier,” I said.

  “He was here already? Where is he now?” she asked.

  An awesome transformation occurred as her entire demeanor changed, from surly youth to gushy teenager. Her eyes lit from within, her face broke into a smile, a rosy glow flushed her cheeks.

  “I don’t know. I thought he was at the wrong apartment. I sent him away.”

  “YOU SENT HIM AWAY?!”

  “Sorry, but a strange man pounds at the door at four A.M. and wants to come in? You’d do the same. Jesus. You’ll find each other soon.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, and slumped into a kitchen chair, her bag sliding off her to the floor. She started to cry. There was something about the way she cried that made me think of a terrier with its tail caught in a door. It was not a pretty sight.

  I wasn’t sure what my “human duty” was here—to leave her alone, or see if I could do anything. By now, I was dead tired, but I decided to give her a drink and sit with her. Tamayo had a whole cupboard full of expensive liquor in gift boxes, and Nadia took a glass of brandy. After a big glass of brandy, she was almost human. She was nineteen, she told me, her name was Nadia, “just Nadia,” and she had been raised in New York, though the slight accent suggested otherwise. She’d met Tamayo about a year before and had stayed here at the Chelsea a few months earlier when in New York shopping.

  “I’m only telling you because you’re a friend of Tamayo’s … My fiancé and I are planning to elope,” she said. “It’s tricky. We have to be careful.”

  “Why?” I had this sneaking suspicion that she and the boy were both underage, and somewhere there were very worried parents who wanted to keep their children from making a terrible mistake.

  “We just do!” she said. “Why do you need to have so much information?”

  “Okay, okay. I really don’t give a damn, I was just trying to … Change of subject. If Mr. Right shows up tonight, are you going to want privacy? To have sex.…”

  “We do not have sex. We’ll have sex on our wedding night. We’ll only be here a day or two, then we’ll go get married. Oh my Godt, oh my Godt, where is he?” She began to cry again. “It’s your fault.”

  “It’s not my fault, and it’s not the end of the world—” I began.

  “If you had a boyfriend, you would understand.”

  Where did she get off assuming I didn’t have a boyfriend? I mean, I didn’t, not really, not officially. But just for the hell of it, I told her I did, and told her about Pierre, the French genius I’d had a fling with in Paris. It made for a good moral fable about the benefits of grown-up love, mature adults being so much calmer on the subject, but if Nadia caught the parable, she didn’t appreciate it, sneering slightly at me instead.

  “Look. Why don’t we both get some sleep? You’ll feel better if you do, I’m sure,” I said.

  She headed toward the loft bed, but I stopped her. “I’m sleeping there. The sofa bed is through there, in the living room.”

  “The sofa bed?” she said disdainfully.

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess the sofa bed will do,” she said.

  I crawled back up into the loft bed and wondered what manner of stray this little princess was. She didn’t look old enough to be out on her own. Not having sex until the wedding night? Kids today. What was it with the so-called New Modesty anyway, or the New False Modesty, as it were? Who knew so many children of former promiscuous pot-smoking hippies would rebel by embracing the sexual mores of the 1950s? After pondering this briefly, a nuclear apocalypse couldn’t have kept me awake, and I fell into a deep, oblivious sleep.

  chapter two

  When the alarm went off a few short hours later, the morning light was shining through a crack in the curtains and through the pink-and-orange screen, lighting the room in those colors and giving the place a deep, warm cast. If it wasn’t my last day before vacation and if I didn’t need to tie up so many loose ends, I would have taken the day off. But there was a meeting and I had two reports to finish and turn in to my higher-ups.

  Nadia was up already, or still up, sitting in Tamayo’s kitchen, tapping on a laptop computer.

  “I guess the fiancé didn’t get here,” I said.

  “No, he didn’t, thanks to you!” she snapped.

  Rude child. I was about to say something when I remembered she was missing her boyfriend. That, and not being able to get a good night’s sleep on account of the pea under her mattress, had no doubt made her a tad cranky. I cut her some slack.

  “Are you going to be hanging around all day?” she asked.

  “No, I’m going to work,” I said as I poked around Tamayo’s cupboards for something Louise Bryant could eat.

  “When you come back, call first from the house phone in the lobby, in case my fiancé is here,” Nadia said.

  Tamayo’s cupboards were stocked with canned goods and food presents from her various admirers—tins of caviar, European cookies in fancy boxes, all manner of delicacy
from canned rattlesnake to a big jar of pickled whole squid, which looked like something from an old-time carnival freak show. There was a lot of fancy Japanese food too, with Japanese language labels, and it was hard to tell from the pictures what exactly was inside the cans. Even when the Japanese products were labeled in English, it was hard to know exactly what was inside. In the fridge, for instance, were two blue-and-white cans of frosty Pocari Sweat.

  “What do you think a Pocari is?” I asked Nadia, showing her the can. She didn’t even smile, and this worried me, that she had no visible sense of humor. Didn’t bode well for an early marriage.

  Finally, I settled on a can with a picture of a fish on the outside, which turned out to contain a premium salmon. Louise Bryant picked at her food, but finally gave in and ate it before slinking off for her hourly nap.

  I was going to need clothes to go to work. In order to go out and buy clothes, I was going to have to borrow some clothes, since I had fled in nightgown, coat, and slippers. Though Tamayo is shorter than I am, we are the same size otherwise, right down to shoes. Her closet was full of clothes, but there wasn’t a thing in there I could wear to work. Apparently, Tamayo had taken the one conservative outfit she owned with her on the road, leaving behind the wardrobe for La Cage aux Folles. It’s all lovely stuff, if you’re a drag queen, a free-spirited comedienne, or Marilyn Manson, but not if you’re the head of programming for a major network. Amid the jumble of feather boas, sequins, see-through blouses, black leather, and silver go-go boots was one relatively conservative outfit, lime green capri pants and a periwinkle sweater-top. I put them on with matching periwinkle shoes, grabbed my purse and coat, and left.

  In the elevator, I rode down with two tailored, proper-looking women in pale suits, their various colognes mingling in the closed space.

  “This isn’t at all what I expected,” said one of the women, who had dark hair and bore more than a passing resemblance to Marilyn Quayle.

  They were holding their purses close to them in the way wary tourists do, so I gathered they were here for a short stay and were not long-term residents. Each carried a pale pink folder with a red rose border and the words “Mary Sue Enterprises.” They looked like they were here for either a gathering of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum or a cosmetics convention, but Mary Sue Enterprises is actually a women-run business that teaches people how to buy up foreclosed mortgages and resell the properties for enormous profits.

  “Loosen up. I like this place. I have a lovely room,” said one tourist woman. “Think of the history and the character. Dylan Thomas lived in the room you’re in now …”

  “Oh, I don’t care how many artists live here. I was expecting it to be like the Marriott, with room service and little bottles of shampoo. And these elevators are so ancient and slow,” said the miserable, dark-haired tourist. “Can’t we move into a bland, modern place with no character?”

  “I checked. There are no hotel rooms available anywhere in the city right now. There are five big conventions in New York,” said another woman, who then changed the subject. “Are you going to the financing seminar this morning?”

  I beat them to the street and grabbed a cab just ahead of them to take me to Macy’s, where I have my own personal shopper, Blair. I share Blair with other harried professional women, but all the same, it’s a nice luxury. She had all my sizes and designer tastes in her well-organized database, so all I had to do was pick out a few things to change into for work, and she’d get the rest and send them to the office later that day.

  When I got to the WNN offices, on the twenty-second floor of the Jackson Broadcasting Building in east Midtown, our six executive producers were waiting around the oval glass table in the pastel conference room. Our president, Solange Stevenson, and our veep, Jerry Spurdle, were not there yet. All of our executive producers were women, with the exception of Dillon Flinder, who was in charge of our health and science programming, and Louis Levin, in charge of repackaging foreign entertainment programming. Jerry and Solange had hired the other four, and I’d brought Louis and Dillon onboard, albeit after a bitter fight with Solange over Dillon. Back in the late 1980s, Solange and Dillon had repeatedly made the “beast with two backs” (and on one occasion the beast with three backs, according to Dillon, though he refused to tell me who the third party was). Dillon’s presence was a constant reminder of their sexual intercourse, but that wasn’t why I’d brought him aboard. I didn’t know about him and Solange at the time. Dillon had made quite a few strange beasts in his sexual prime, one involving a drilled watermelon, and it was hard to keep track of it all. The man had tried almost everything possible involving consenting adults and/or inanimate objects, though I knew for a fact he hadn’t yet made it with a bearded lady or a native Texan, because he’d told me so one night at Keggers, our regular watering hole.

  While I was filling everyone in on the fire the night before, Jerry walked in and interrupted.

  “I hear you had a fire,” he said to me, smirking his oily little smirk. He was stirring his coffee, which he drinks in a mug that says “Chief Melon Inspector, WTNA TV.”

  “Yes, there was a fire,” I said.

  “What happened? Some drunken sailor fall asleep in your bed with a lit cigarette?” Jerry asked.

  “I don’t know the cause of the fire yet,” I said, ignoring the bait.

  “Sounds like something you’d do, burn down your building,” he said. “I mean, it fits the pattern.…”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “Methinks she doth protest too much,” he said. “So how’d you do it?”

  Jerry’s ability to provoke didn’t come from his cleverness, obviously. The secret lay in his persistence, the way he buzzed around you like a hungry mosquito. Jerry was always trying to get a rise out of me, get my goat, “make my monkey crazy,” in the terminology of my friend, producer, and peasant-king Louis Levin. This was a constant quest of Jerry’s. I don’t know why. There are some vexing people you can’t ever quite escape in life—they keep popping back up—and Jerry was one of those people in my life.

  “Whatever you like, Jerry. Boozy sailor with a lit cigarette? Works for me,” I said with a laugh.

  He wasn’t finished. “By the way, I just got some more reports about your last trip, sent by foreign affiliates,” he said. “You really angered some people. Did you really defile the heads of the five children of the Thai TV president?”

  Touché. It was true. I had completely alienated the very proper Thai TV president by patting his kids’ heads—not just patting their heads, but mussing their hair. And when informed of my crime, it’s true I laughed and said, “You’re kidding me.” But who knew that it was an offense to pat a child’s head in Thailand? Okay, our protocol department knew, but somehow, I had missed the head-patting thing. You do twelve countries on four continents, each with its own intricate customs and etiquette, and try to keep it straight. I’ll tell you, in the beginning I was diligent and alert about all this etiquette, but after the first five countries it becomes a blur, and you forget where you are, and which way you should or should not point your feet or bow, when you should and should not smile, or pour your tea, or whatever, in order not to give offense to the local potentate or six-armed god.

  Somehow, I’d managed to offend people and minor deities in several countries without even trying. Far be it from me to ask where the “offense” is in hoisting my glass with the wrong hand to toast the vainglorious wife of the current dictator while outside the palace walls the ethnic majority is parading the heads of murdered minorities on pikes, or women are stoned to death for real or presumed adultery. An idiot like me just doesn’t get this good-manners business, I guess.

  But if being on the road taught me anything, it was to keep one’s mouth shut as much as possible, lest someone take offense, or your words be misconstrued or misquoted, which could have a harmful effect on your company’s business. So I kept all this to myself.

  “What did you do in Singapore?” Jerr
y went on. “The liaison there says you insulted some people but he’s too much of a gentleman to go into specifics.”

  “Singapore?” I didn’t remember offending anyone in Singapore.

  “You really offended people,” Jerry said, pushing forward, a hint of desperation in his voice because he had been unable to provoke me all week. “I hear you were really on the rag in Beijing too.”

  The producers took a collective breath, and all eyes turned to me. It would have been so easy to say something wiseass to Jerry, Mr. Cultural Sensitivity. But I didn’t.

  “Enough squabbling, children,” said Solange Stevenson, behind me. She had come in like an Apache without any of us hearing her. “I have lunch with Barbara Walters at one, so let’s get down to work. Jerry, you’ve sent feelers out to some new sponsors?”

  “It’s preliminary with most of them, although Lose It Fast Diet Products is very close to making a worldwide deal,” he said.

  “Let’s ask ourselves, do we want them as sponsors?” Solange said.

  Before I could pipe in, Louis said, “I agree. Do we want to perpetrate western beauty ideals on the rest of the world? They have enough problems.”

  “Five million bucks,” Jerry replied.

  “On the other hand, being overweight is also a health issue,” Solange said.

  “Isn’t there some question about whether those particular weight-loss products cause gallbladder disease?” asked Dillon.

  “Is there?” Solange said, looking as if she was giving these pros and cons meaningful thought. She turned to Jerry. “Make sure the products are safe and fair to women. If they are, take the advertising.”

  This was akin to letting a tobacco lobbyist determine if cigarettes were safe for preschoolers. Jerry’s pairing with Madame Solange would seem a fractious one. Solange, after all, is a card-carrying feminist on the board of a number of women’s groups. Jerry is not what you’d call a real pro-woman guy, except when it comes to his sexual preference. At first Jerry was embarrassed as hell about working at the “chick network,” and this made him even more of a macho braying ass than he already was. But Jerry knew how to get money out of sponsors, and Solange is a canny businesswoman first and foremost. She talked the good woman game, but would sacrifice her ideals in a New York minute for the sake of business. Perpetrating western beauty ideals? Bad. Five million bucks? Good. What was just as galling was that every one of the women they had hired had fallen in line with this philosophy. And the biggest feminists in the place were Louis and Dillon.