Frontline

by Alexandra Richland

  “How long have you lived in New York?”

  Marco clears his throat. “I came to New York six years ago. First, I delivered pizzas on the Upper East Side, and newspapers, too, very early in the morning. Then, I—”

  “Awesome. This is great stuff,” Kelly says. “Can I possibly interview you formally? Like, with a recorder and all that?”

  “You want to . . .”

  “Interview you. You know, to get to know more about you and the struggles you faced as an immigrant in New York.”

  “You want to . . . get to know me?”

  “Yes, particularly the struggles you—”

  Marco grabs Kelly’s hand from the table so fast her coffee cup rattles in its saucer and almost tips over. He lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses the back of it about four hundred times.

  Denim covers her mouth to stifle her laugh.

  “Marco! Jesus!” Kelly tries to free her hand from his grip while Marco collapses to his knees next to her chair.

  “You make me so happy, Kelly! And I will make you happy, too.”

  “What the hell are you doing? Stand up!” Kelly is suddenly aware of every pair of eyes in the shop landing on them.

  “You just wait and see. You won’t regret asking out Marco.”

  “Asking out? No, Marco, you don’t understand, I—”

  “Marco!” His punk co-worker shouts from behind the counter. “Get back here and help me!”

  A lineup of new customers has formed in front of the cash register and almost reaches the door.

  Marco jumps to his feet and waves to the girl. “Coming! Coming!” He turns back to Kelly. “I finish my shift at seven. We meet then? I’ll take you to a lovely place, best Italian cuisine, almost as good as back home.”

  “Listen, Marco, seriously, you don’t understand . . .”

  Marco turns and runs back behind the cash register. He tightens the strings of his green apron around his waist while he takes an order from the first customer in line, his wide smile sealed across his face.

  Kelly gapes at Denim. “Okay, what the fuck just happened there?”

  Denim wipes tears from her eyes and takes a deep breath to relax her giggling. “I don’t know, but that was absolutely adorable. You, like, made his day. Maybe even his life.”

  Kelly’s temples pulsate, signaling an oncoming headache. She massages them again. “I . . . am . . . so . . . fucked.”

  Kelly has been burned enough times already to know better, but she can’t seem to help herself. Her shameless flirting always greases the wheels, so to speak, and many men are only too happy to do her some extra favors: free tickets to shows at the Garden, ushered through lineups at clubs into the VIP area, free drinks, and phone numbers shoved at her by the fistful. But she always pushes just a little too far. Men expect favors in return for their kindness, and with the hungry expressions they wear when they look at her, Kelly has a pretty vivid idea of what these favors are expected to include. Every favor in life eventually costs something, and New York is one of the world’s most expensive cities.

  Kelly gives Denim two minutes to guzzle her latte before dragging her out of the coffee shop. The afternoon has grown colder and the time until Kelly’s deadline ticks away second by second.

  “Denim, honestly, no more messing around. I need to find someone new to this city and fast. I’ll do just about anything at this point.”

  Denim snickers. “Or anyone.”

  Everywhere she looks, Kelly sees people who might fit her profile, but what on earth would they think of her walking up and asking if they could wait while she runs back to her apartment to grab a recorder so she can interview them about their new life in New York?

  “Excuse me,” she says, stepping out in front of a thirty-something woman bundled in a purple parka and pushing a stroller. “I’m a student at NYU and I need to conduct an interview for . . .”

  The woman peers at Kelly out of the corner of her eye and pushes the stroller even harder to rush past her. Kelly pulls her foot out of the way before the stroller goes right over it.

  “Did you see that?” Kelly turns to Denim, who stands shivering in the doorway of a closed Laundromat. “What a bitch!”

  “Try this next guy.” Denim points behind Kelly.

  A tall man, probably in his late twenties, saunters along the sidewalk wearing a fur-lined brown leather mad bomber cap, a navy pea coat, and dress slacks. He talks on his cell phone but eyes Kelly as he approaches.

  “Excuse me,” she says, touching his arm to slow him down.

  The man lowers the cell phone from his ear after saying, “Hold on a sec.”

  “Listen, I’m a journalism student at NYU and I wondered if I might ask you a few questions.”

  “Uh . . . okay,” he says.

  “How long have you lived in New York?”

  “I’ve lived in Brooklyn my whole life. Born and raised.”

  A giant bolder of disappointment lands on Kelly’s shoulders. She slumps forward and groans.

  “Was that the wrong answer or something?” the man asks.

  “She has to interview someone new to the city for a final essay,” Denim says. “And time is running out.”

  “Sorry, can’t help ya there.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Denim says, when Kelly peers down the street, frantically searching for another prospect.

  The man clears his throat and walks back into Kelly’s eyeline. “Look, uh, maybe you aren’t interested in hearing about me right now, but I’m all kinds of interested in hearing about you.”

  The sentence started awkwardly, but finishes with enough silky seduction to lure Kelly’s attention back from down the block.

  “Um, I’m flattered . . .” Kelly’s eyes start on the man’s shoes as she conducts her customary full wardrobe appraisal from bottom to top. She focuses on his left hand just as the man clenches it into a fist and pulls it up into the sleeve of his coat.

  “Seriously?”

  “What?” the man says.

  “Stick your hand back out of your sleeve. Let me see it.”

  “Nah, it’s cold out here.”

  “Let me see your hand,” Kelly says, more forcefully this time.

  “It’s numb. I gotta warm it up and get the blood moving again. The circulation’s gone.”

  Kelly grabs his coat sleeve and yanks it up. The man tries to pull away, but it’s too late to hide the thin gold band gleaming around his ring finger.

  “You’re married, you pig!”

  The man smiles as innocently as if he’s been busted drinking straight from the milk carton. His eyes dart back and forth between Denim and Kelly before he waves them off. “Fuck the both of you.”

  Kelly throws her hands up in the air. “All the same. Pigs. Total fucking pigs.”

  “Did you get that?” she hears the man say as he raises the cell phone back to his ear and walks away. “Fuck, it was worth a shot. She was hot. Anyway . . .”

  Rude pigs. The city is full of them, and Kelly seems to be on track to meet every single one today. All she needs to do is ask a few questions for a simple school assignment and not one person seems willing to help her. How did it come to this? What had she done to deserve such terrible treatment by her fellow New Yorkers?

  12:42.

  A full hour wasted since she and Denim left her apartment and she’d done everything but clear her head. The only emotion she’s created is disgust, not just in her city and its citizens, but since she’s willing to be totally honest, a little in herself, too.

  The sight of Denim huddled in the Laundromat doorway, her arms folded tight around her beneath her thin little tie-dye shawl is the moment Kelly knows it’s time to give it up. Four hours left until imminent failure. Her future is all but doomed.

  “We need to rally our karma,” Denim says as they start back toward their apartment building, her teeth chattering as a freezing wind blasts down the street and hits them directly in the face. The way she says ‘our’, including herse
lf in Kelly’s academic debacle, is the most comforting thing Kelly has heard all day. At the very least, it makes the total waste of the last hour worth something.

  “What’s a karma rally?” Kelly asks.

  “Well, somehow, our karma has gotten totally messed up. We must be giving off a bad vibe or something.”

  “Right. This whole experience has been totally negative.”

  “Except Marco,” Denim says. “He was cute.”

  “Focus, Denim!”

  “Okay, all right.” Denim tightens the shawl around her shoulders. “So we have to do something to reverse our bad karma. Something positive. Something nice.”

  “Haven’t I already explained this to you?” Kelly is surprised at how quickly the venom seeps back into her voice just seconds after realizing that Denim might be the only friend she has in the whole world. She softens her tone. “New Yorkers aren’t nice. You just saw that firsthand.”

  “Exactly. So break that trend by doing something nice, and your karma will reward you.”

  Kelly frowns. “This is so not going to work. I don’t have any time to waste.”

  They push through the front door into their apartment building. Kelly pulls her keys from her coat pocket and unlocks the security door, holding it open for Denim.

  They sigh as they enter the warm lobby. Denim lets the shawl loosen from around her shoulders; her cheeks and ears burn bright red and her eyes water.

  “Look, if I were you, I’d be willing to try anything right now. Tick tock.”

  “Where the hell do I start?”

  “Hey! Watch out, jerk!” a woman shouts at the end of the hallway in front of the elevators.

  The petite brunette Kelly and Denim saw before they left an hour ago kneels in front of pieces of broken dishware. A cardboard box with a torn bottom sits next to her.

  A short, middle-aged, heavyset man carrying a gym bag and wearing an orange T-shirt and white shorts kicks the pieces out of the way. They clatter over the tile floor. “Get this shit outta here, I coulda slipped or somethin’.”

  “I’m trying,” the girl says. “I didn’t break them on purpose. Do you see a broom or anything around here?”

  The elevator dings and the man steps through its open doors. “I ain’t the maintenance crew, lady.”

  The brunette growls and starts sweeping the pieces into a pile with her hands.

  “Hey, give me a sec to run up to my apartment,” Denim says. “I have a broom and dustpan. I’ll be right back.”

  The girl looks up from the broken dishware pieces and smiles when she sees Denim hurry toward the door leading into the stairwell.

  “Oh, wow. Thank you so much.”

  “No problem. I’ll be back in a jiffy!”

  Denim raises her eyebrows at Kelly and gestures with her head a couple of times toward the brunette when she resumes scraping up all the broken plate pieces.

  “San Francisco?” Kelly says, reading from the return address on the side of the broken box.

  “Yeah, born and raised,” the girl says.

  “How long have you been in New York?”

  “Almost a week. I flew in last weekend and my boxes just arrived today, though not exactly in the same condition I sent them.” She smiles, motioning to the mess in front of her.

  “Well, let me give you a hand.” Kelly pulls her coat off and sets it on top of the nearest pile of boxes.

  “Gee, thanks! I only have the elevator on service for another ten minutes.”

  “We probably won’t even need that long to load the rest of these once Denim gets back.”

  “You guys are so nice! Everyone I’ve met so far has been such an asshole. I was starting to question my decision to move here.”

  Kelly kneels, picks up a jagged piece of dishware, and tosses it into the pile. “I know what you mean. But don’t let it bother you. Underneath their dick-headed exteriors, deep down, I guess most New Yorkers really do have a nice side. It just takes time before you’re able see it.”

  The girl nods. “I hope so.”

  Kelly thrusts her hand out. “Well, like I said, Miss Retro Fashion that just ran upstairs is Denim Jacobson, and I’m Kelly Sheridan.”

  The girl takes Kelly’s hand. The deep creases around her mouth and across her forehead ease. She offers Kelly a grateful smile.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Kelly. My name is Sara. Sara Peters.”

  The Five R’s

  A Tuesday afternoon in late May on a quiet street in New York’s Fort Greene neighborhood . . .

  Minivans, hatchbacks, and station wagons line both sides of a one-way street. Asphalt, wet from recent rain, glistens as the sun pokes through shifting gray clouds. The morning chill gives way to a warm afternoon breeze that sends dry leaves skittering over the sidewalk.

  From behind the tinted windshield of a navy Town Car, two men watch the commotion between a woman and a young girl. Minutes before, the girl pulled free from the woman’s hand and jumped off the sidewalk, splashing into a deep puddle formed at the mouth of a clogged sewer drain. The woman scolded the child. The scolds gradually turned to pleading the more the girl waded around in the water.

  One of the men chuckles at the sight, the other frowns and shakes his head.

  “What’s got you so sour? You didn’t leap into puddles and piss off your mom when you were a kid?” says Sean Mavis, defender of every trouble-making kid in America. In Sean’s mind, what else are kids for if not keeping their parents on their toes every minute?

  “I would expect a little more discipline on the mother’s part,” answers the frowning man, Christopher Maida. “Look at her now.”

  The mother has given up pleading and stands with her arms crossed, unsurprised at the child’s disregard for her authority.

  “My mom would’ve yanked me outta that puddle and marched me home. Then she would’ve taken me over her knee and spanked the shit outta me.”

  “Jesus,” Sean says, “your mom was that harsh? I could’ve drowned in a puddle and no one would’ve found me for hours.”

  Chris smiles at Sean. “And look how good you turned out.”

  Sean laughs. “Exactly.”

  Chris eases his head back against the seat. He closes his eyes behind his sunglasses and enjoys the warmth of the spring sun on his face. “You hungry?”

  “Starving.” Sean glances at the dashboard clock. “Where the hell is this guy? I wanna get this over with.”

  Sean’s eyes shift to two photographs sitting on the seat between him and Chris. One is a small color headshot of Michael O’Day that appears beneath the headline of his daily column for the New York Times. Bright red hair hangs in tangled strands from his head, and thick bangs almost cover his small green eyes. A faint coating of freckles scatters over his long nose and high cheekbones. He wears the same smirk as a know-it-all punk kid Sean remembers from the Academy who always rushed around the classroom immediately after getting a test back and asked what everyone else got, only because his paper always had an A+ at the top.

  The second photograph, taken at a fundraiser two months ago, shows Mike standing in the middle of a group. His slight, wiry frame is dressed in beige khakis and a brown and green plaid shirt buttoned almost to the top, obscuring some sort of logo on a bright yellow shirt underneath. Red stubble peppers his jaw and green plastic glasses that don’t appear to contain lenses sit halfway down his nose. An American Eagle fedora tops it all off.

  “Quite a ladies’ man we have here,” Sean says. “No wonder he’s doing that Kelly chick some favors.”

  “A guy like that has access to classified info.” Chris scowls. “It’s a wonder everyone’s cover isn’t blown.”

  Sean scans the street ahead of them while Chris glances in the side view mirror.

  “So what are your thoughts on that Kelly chick anyway?”

  “My thoughts?” Sean shrugs. “She’s hot. And she’s a royal bitch.”

  “So precisely your type, then.”

  Sean shakes hi
s head. “Not my type. Just the type I like to tame.”

  The men share a chuckle.

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “And your thoughts on her cute little friend? What’s her name? Darlene?”

  “Denim,” Chris says.

  “Denim. That’s it.”

  “I don’t know. She seems nice.”

  “Well, you always pick up the ones who fling themselves at you. Me, I prefer a bit of a challenge.”

  Chris props his elbow against the window and rests his cheek against the knuckles of his fist. “For the last time, she did not fling herself at me. She merely made it known that she might have some interest in seeing me again sometime. Then she gave me her phone number.”

  “Which means she wants you.”

  The discussion pauses the way it always does between two men on a stakeout, but it doesn’t end. Conversations these days are hyper-compressed, squeezed in over lunch breaks, coffees, dinner, or text messages. Stakeouts are the exact opposite. Conversations have time to spread themselves out over hours with plenty of natural lulls in between. A single topic between Chris and Sean can last a whole day, especially when that topic focuses on women.

  Chris thinks back on the women he met in the past that indicated, at the time of their first meeting, eagerly or with a hint of subtlety, that they’d be interested in meeting a second time in the very near future. On one hand, he appreciated it. A woman stepping up and putting herself out there takes a lot of confidence.

  He remembers one encounter, years ago, with a girl in his Quantico NCO training unit named Amanda. The unit had been granted leave that Labor Day weekend. Chris stood next to Amanda in the bus shelter at the main gates and made small talk for a few minutes, mostly about the program.

  Amanda felt the same as Chris—she enjoyed aspects of the training, but at the same time, couldn’t wait for it to be over. She stood almost to Chris’ shoulders with short blonde hair, a tight, sleeveless T-shirt emblazoned with U.S. MARINES in bold black letters across her firm breasts, her torso lean but muscular, especially over her shoulders.

  Her thick pink lips, freshly moistened with Chap Stick, offered a friendly smile and the sweet smell of strawberry perfume drew Chris closer. Such pleasant aromas were rarely found at a military base. He asked Amanda if she had any plans during leave, not for any other reason than to simply continue the conversation while they waited together in the small space.