Miss Subways: A Novel

by David Duchovny

  “Oh, fuck. I’m a mistress. I’m not, no, I’m not, but okay, okay.”

  “A someone come to me and ask me to get rid of you this week.”

  “Mama Waters.”

  “Someone, I say. I’m like a priest or psychologist. I don’t name names.”

  “A woman?”

  “A woman. Or a man. What’s the difference?”

  “Black woman? Mama Waters?”

  “Mama who-who now? I am like the grave. But if my grave had a headstone, maybe it says Mama something on it.” She laughed at her own wit and looked around. “Nice place. Small. Clean.”

  Emer gulped at her wine; it wasn’t strong enough. Of course Mama knows, she thought. And that bitch, she thought. Emer felt a jealousy rise in her she hadn’t felt in years, and the will to compete poking out like the sun from clouds.

  “And just how did she propose to get rid of me?”

  “You’re saying ‘she,’ not me. I found a job for you in Los Angeles, teach at private school, Crossroad—famous people’s kid school—Tom Hank, Henry Winkle, the Fonz—heyyyyy—rent-control apartment in Santa Monica, Tesla—he/she/it/they have a lot of money.”

  “All that for me? For me to leave Con alone?”

  “Yes. You take? We shake.”

  “I’m tempted. Getting pretty tired of New York.”

  “I’ll go with you. Leonardo DiCaprio is my jam.”

  “Tesla, huh?”

  “Or Porsche. That’s what I would choose, Carrera, and Brentwood over Santa Monica, I think—if you wanna play baseball, you can get all that and a bag of chips.”

  “Would you like a glass of wine?”

  She poured May a glass and she poured herself another. The wine made May’s cheeks red and relaxed Emer’s wild mind, slowed things down a bit for her. How small is the world we live in, she marveled. New York City is still a town, still small in some fundamental way, still human-sized. No matter how big we get, we remain human-sized, she thought, it’s our nature. And then again, how many mistress-dispellers must there be in New York City? Five? Twenty-five? One? Another couple sips helped her move from paranoid to comforted by the seeming coincidence in long red nails sitting in front of her.

  “May, I’m wondering if you’ve ever flipped the script.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m wondering if you ever work it the other way around.”

  “What way round is that?”

  “You know, like get rid of a wife, get rid of a wife for a mistress.”

  “I get rid of man-mistress when man has a mistress who is a man.”

  “I’m sure. But that’s not what I mean.”

  “But, no, never get rid of wife.”

  “Wife-dispeller.”

  “Wife-dispeller, no.”

  “I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud. You never know, maybe she’s not in love anymore, looking for an easy way out.”

  May Wong shrugged. Emer shrugged in response, and said, “Sometimes people do things just ’cause they think they have to.”

  “That’s American psychology. I say—you make a choice, then the choice makes you, and not vice versa.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Kill her.”

  “What?”

  “Have wife killed.”

  “You can have her killed?”

  “Everybody dies sometimes.”

  “No!”

  “I didn’t say I’d do it, but I know people. It’s not my preferred way of business, but it’s business. You have money?”

  “Not really.”

  “No money.”

  “Schoolteacher salary.”

  “Then I’m no wife-dispeller.” And she laughed again.

  Emer had to laugh with her; the woman had an undeniable force, so Emer felt the need to go on record. “Let’s be clear, okay, I do not want to kill anyone, okay?”

  “Whatever.”

  Emer stared at May, but could not figure out the moral code at work here. “Or hurt anyone,” she added.

  “Yeah, yeah. Boring.” May sighed, then continued spitballing. “But what if this wife had another man?”

  “What do you mean? The wife is cheating too?” Emer, having narrowly called off a hit on an innocent woman, was now seeking crystal clarity at every foggy turn.

  “No,” May answered, “but maybe you could find her another man, and she’d be better than she is with this man who cheats.”

  “Huh.”

  “That’s not really my job, though. You need a professional yenta for that. It’s a Jewish area. I stay out, maybe take a finder’s fee.”

  Emer liked this less bloody idea. “But there’s something there; it’s another way out. Listen to this…”

  Emer read from her huge, stolen faerie book: “The female Sidh, as well as faeries the world over, such as the Anansi of Africa, or the Salaceto of Brazil and Yitzang of Mongolia, seek the love of mortals. If the mortal refuses, she must be his slave. If the mortal consents, he is hers and can only escape by finding another mortal to take his place.”

  “That’s some kooky shit there. If mortal refuses, then god must be a slave.”

  “But it’s saying—there can be substitutions.”

  “Gotta serve somebody. For Chinese, three is a lucky number, for marriage-dispeller, two and four are lucky numbers. That’s a numerology I like.”

  “One is the loneliest number.”

  “Three Dogs Night.” Surprised, Emer laughed out loud. “Hey,” May said, “don’t underestimate me ’cause a my accent, bitch.” Then adding, “This wine is nice. So, we have a deal? Should I book your travel to California? I’m also a travel agent. First class.”

  “Not just yet. Have another glass with me.”

  THE CALCULUS OF LOVE

  GRADUATION DAY at St. Margaret’s was a traditionally joyous occasion, though it had been relabeled “Moving Up Day” for terminologically neutral reasons Emer could not recall. Emer had not slept. She had drunk wine and plotted with May Wong all night and then drank coffee all morning—a winning combo breathwise. She looked and smelled like damp laundry. She didn’t want to shower, but she forced herself.

  She jumped on the subway with her hair still wet and saw that the final voting for the Miss Subways reboot was at the end of the week. She wondered what the polls were saying. She remembered a conversation that her parents had had, more of an argument really, during a presidential election when she was a kid. Maybe it was Bush/Dukakis? And she heard her mom keep repeating, “But the polls are saying something else.” And her dad saying, “Fuck the polls, you can’t trust the polls!” Young Emer had worried that her parents were weirdly and specifically racist against just Poland and the Poles.

  Instructed by May and true to his word, Han and a handful of other Dragon King deliverymen on bikes had accompanied Emer from her subway stop to the school. They hung discreetly on the outskirts of the building smoking cigarettes, looking ridiculous and bad-ass at once. Emer went inside.

  As Emer was tidying up her homeroom for the summer break—all the detritus of a year, the nubs of pencils and discarded work sheets—Izzy came to see her. Emer filled her friend in on the pertinent details while omitting almost everything, telling her that she would not see Con anymore (in the cover story, his name was Ken), and adding fictional touches to make the story seem seamless. Emer was surprised at how easily wholesale lying was coming to her, so much so that she preferred to think of it as a “gift for storytelling.”

  Izzy said the general rule for the length of time to get over a breakup is half the time you were together. Izzy said that Con and Emer were together possibly two days, a few weeks if you take into account the amount of time she spent fantasizing about being together, so she’s fairly certain, by her nontrademarked, nonprofessional, nonmathematically rigorous “calculus of love,” that Emer would get over Con in anywhere from five minutes to ten days max.

  Izzy was optimistic about the whole episode. She was just happy Emer �
��broke the schneid” and had got back up on the horse and all that shit people say when you get laid after a dry spell. She wanted Emer to think of Con as training wheels for the real man, or bicycle, who’s about to come a-callin’.

  Hearing Izzy’s trivialization of Con made Emer feel more lonely and alone. She just had to get through the rest of this day, and then she was free for the summer. In three months, she lied to Izzy, this thing will become clear, she thought, away from school, away from Sidney, away from New York City, even. Maybe she would quit. Maybe she’d travel Europe before she got too old, write a book. Her dad would miss her, but she thought he’d probably want her to go; the younger version of her dad would’ve wanted her to go, anyway. She wasn’t sure which version of her dad she should be intuiting.

  When Izzy left, Emer sat behind her desk, looking out at the empty chairs. She said one last goodbye to her homeroom. She was sentimental like that, attributing feelings to things, and she didn’t want the homeroom to feel abandoned. She promised she’d be back. Once she felt the room was properly consoled—didn’t take long, rooms were pretty used to being left—she leaned back and could place all the faces from this year in their assigned seats. And she could do the same for last year and the year before, up to maybe five years ago—interlaying the faces of the children with the faces of the children that came before, like trick photography, the faces morphing, like in that old Michael Jackson video, “Black or White,” was it? Where what was amazing was not how different the faces were, as you might expect, but how similar, even through drastic changes in skin tone and features. It didn’t seem like there was much that needed to be changed to get from face to face. We all look alike, are alike.

  This sameness, over the years and from day to day, weighed upon Emer in this moment, and it did not feel liberating, it felt incarcerating. Black or white, today or fifteen years ago, now or then—the difference was a trick, an optical illusion, the sameness was the truth. Time seemed to move, but only laterally.

  She closed her eyes and heard the ticking of the clock; the spell was broken by the sound of Sidney’s singing coming down the hallway toward her: “In the words of the immortal Barry Manilow—‘looks like we made it.’”

  When Emer looked at Sidney now, she saw Sidhe, and when she thought of Sidhe, she saw Sidney; it was frustrating and unsettling. “So far, so good,” she replied.

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “No,” she lied.

  “He hasn’t tried to contact you?” Sidney sat down.

  “No, it’s over.”

  “You know, Emer, I am of two minds.” That’s exactly what she had been thinking, yes. Was she a puppeteer and the world on her string? Or was she a puppet convinced by the string in her hand that she was not?

  “Yes, I know.” She vaguely agreed so as not to show her hand.

  “I am both what I do and who I am. I am the head of this school, but I am also a man. I am your boss, but I am also your friend, at least I hope I am.”

  “Thank you, Sidney, I think I understand.”

  “I prefer when you call me Sid, it’s been almost twenty years.” He laughed. “May I confide in you, Emer, as you have in me?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “But I feel that I own this terrible secret of yours and it gives me a power over you I do not want and I do not enjoy, and if I were to repay you in kind with a secret of my own, we might recover more even footing.”

  “That makes sense, actually.”

  “I am also dealing with love.” Holy shit, this was not what she bargained for. “Also a love that dare not speak its name. And I have been thinking about love, all different kinds of love, the love we have for a lover, the love we have for Christ, and speaking to you as a friend now, I wonder, I guess I’m wondering aloud, isn’t it all part of the same love? Isn’t all love good? Isn’t love what binds us all together? Not in who we love, but in the mere brute fact that we love?”

  “Yes, Sid, I think that’s true.”

  “I’ve spent my life, lifetimes it seems, denying who I am. Is that what God wants?”

  “I don’t think so, Sid.”

  “Lifetimes, my dear. Do you know what I’m telling you now, as a friend, as a man?”

  “Not really, but enough.”

  “We are all doubles of ourselves. We all inhabit our prosaic space and our magical space, like a strobe light. At rare times, the spaces line up and we are one thing. Like now. You know now who and what I am?”

  Emer allowed that declarative question to settle like a pebble falling through water. She faced up to Sidney, held his gaze and held her ground. “You are Sid.”

  “Then speak to me as Sid.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Figure your way through.”

  “I feel like my deal sucks.”

  “You want to renegotiate?”

  “Why was I picked?”

  “Picked?”

  “I did nothing to bring this on.”

  “Of course you did. And anyway, inaction is a type of action, so I daresay you are damned if you do or don’t. Causality is a road from nowhere to somewhere else called nowhere. Do you know about our school’s namesake, Saint Margaret of Antioch?”

  “No.”

  “She took a vow of celibacy, but was forced to marry a pagan. The vow didn’t sit well with him, so he had her imprisoned. Satan visited her in jail in the guise of a dragon and swallowed her. She used the handy cross around her neck to cut her way out of the belly of the beast. That was Saint Margaret. Damn, I miss those days.”

  “Was that advice?”

  “I’m not sure myself. We are limited by our masters. You cannot be a priest, I cannot be a lover. Listen, Emer, if you want to renegotiate something, you need to offer something else in return, for new terms.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “What have we got?”

  “Maybe I just quit. Maybe I choose perfection of the life over perfection of the work.”

  “I don’t know that quitting is an option.”

  “I’m not sure perfection is either.”

  “I can’t believe I’m weighing in on this like I said I wouldn’t, but maybe you have more power than you think you do, and maybe the other woman doesn’t have the power she claims to have. Maybe she’s all talk.”

  “And maybe you are too.”

  Sidney smiled and got up. “Well, that is another gamble you have to be prepared to take, I suppose.”

  They stared at each other. She wanted to scream. She wanted somebody to level with her, or at least tell her what level she was dealing with. Finally, she spoke.

  “Isn’t there anything I can give you just to leave me alone?”

  Sidney seemed saddened by that request, almost hurt. “There could be, though I think I’ve been clear with you. Schools have rules. Obedience to the rules is how we pay our debt to the future. Speaking of which, congratulations on another year in the books—tits and teeth, Emer—all is as it is. One of the lies we tell these children is that reason will get them through life.”

  He broke out in a laugh so violent, dismissive, sad, and downright weird that Emer recoiled slightly. It took him almost a minute to compose himself. “Okay, let’s graduate these brats and show them nothing of the hell that awaits them. Tits and teeth.”

  Emer straightened her back. “Tits and teeth,” she hissed back at her boss through gritted teeth. “For sure, but Sidney, I want you to meet someone first, someone who understands dual nature and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of it.”

  Emer called down the quiet hallway, “May?”

  Stiletto strikes echoed off linoleum like a queenly fanfare, and May Wong materialized in the doorway.

  “I want you two to talk,” Emer said.

  PEACE TRAIN

  “TITS AND TEETH” was another Sidney-ism. Emer thought he might’ve stolen it from the dancing world, where choreographers would tell their charges not to show the strain and sw
eat but only the pride—the leading chest and white smile. It was a variant on “stiff upper lip,” but Emer much preferred it. How the little priest had intersected with the world of dance, she would speculate on some other day.

  As Emer stood and sat and stood and sat in her row with her nineteenth graduating class, singing the obligatory hymns and listening to speeches these children would never understand or remember, she cried big fat tears. It was an occasion like that, so she felt she could cry for everything under cover of graduation day; tears in drag, in a way. The children sitting next to her felt a little concern for their blubbering teacher, but even this Emer felt to be a “teaching moment”—to show the kids it was okay to cry, okay to give in to deep joyous sadness in public.

  Whenever she felt safe enough, she would glance to the back of the church to see where Con and Mama were with Ashia. She didn’t see him, but they both most certainly were present for their daughter’s last day of school; she could feel eyes on her back, like she might be ambushed. She saw Sidney and May talking. She saw Shoshanna Schwartz-Silberman and her parents. She even kissed Debbie Schwartz-Silberman’s cheek. All was water under the bridge. She saw a happy Maya O’Connor and her mother. Her phone dinged. She wouldn’t look. Little Ashia hugged her from behind and gave her a big kiss, and it was then she saw Ashia’s parents hanging back politely. Everyone was being well heeled, thus far.

  Summer was almost here. Ah, summer. One thing about teaching was you never gave up that blessed relief come summertime—it still meant freedom from work and all those things that it means to little children. Some days, Emer liked that she retained this childish glee at coming June, some days she felt ashamed that she had never grown out of it.

  As the procession came to a close, Emer stood at the head of a receiving line for her kids—to kiss them and shake their hands. This was the final goodbye. Her posture was perfect and she had the easy magnanimity of a head of state receiving guests, five seconds at a time, at some ceremonial function. Like a prince, she never looked down the line to see who was coming up, only straight ahead at who was directly in front of her. She had seen Bill Clinton in person once act like this—focused on a point two feet directly in front of his nose as the people entered his space, into his focus and out, yet his sovereign focus never changed. He made you feel like there was no past or future, only this present with him, and then it was over.