Miss Misery

by Andy Greenwald

  “David? Is that you?”

  I turned, and it wasn’t the city made flesh, responding to my sun-drenched whimsy. It was Agnes, a former colleague of Amy’s from another summer job, this one at Amnesty International. Agnes was only five years our senior but decades apart from us in demeanor. She was prim and tidy, even today wearing gray slacks and a polo shirt just red enough to highlight the lack of blood in her neck and just loose enough to accommodate the baby that was growing in her belly. She had mousy hair that mushroomed in all directions and an accent that, to my ears at least, caromed dangerously between Swedish and French.

  “Hello, Agnes. Long time no see.”

  “Yes, I knew that it was you!” She clasped my left hand clumsily and then made some attempt to lean into me, brushing my cheeks in a sloppy recreation of a European greeting.

  I smiled dumbly, taking in the sight of her. “Yes,” I said. “Here I am.”

  “You are looking a little tired, no?”

  “Maybe,” I said in halfhearted cheerfulness. “Maybe.” I ran a hand through my hair, let the backs of my fingers brush my face. Once again I had forgotten to shave.

  “Paul and I were just speaking of you,” she said referring to her husband, a professional percussionist at Broadway shows. “We were thinking that we wish Amy were here for when the baby comes. She always said she’d help with the babysitting. And what a delight it would be with you both in the neighborhood!”

  I smiled but it came out like a grimace. “Oh, I’m sure she would have loved that.”

  Agnes took my left hand again in her own clammy paw. “Oh, you poor dear. She really left you all alone, didn’t she?”

  I took my hand back as gently as I could. “It’s not so bad. I’m managing.”

  Agnes clucked, and the tendons in her neck seemed to make a desperate lunge for freedom. “Managing! We shouldn’t have to manage!”

  “No,” I said, feeling torn in two. “We shouldn’t.”

  We stood there then, feeling the sun beat down on our heads, with not a single thing more to say to each other. Why hadn’t I noticed her first? Then I would have been able to do the sensible thing: pretend I hadn’t seen her and walk farther away until awkward pauses like this one—in fact, entire awkward conversations like this one—would have been an impossibility.

  When the weight of the silence became overwhelming, we both made efforts to repel it.

  “Have you—?” Agnes said.

  “What is—?” I said.

  “Go ahead,” Agnes said, bored and blushing.

  “No, no,” I said, rubbing my palms against my jeans. “You.”

  “Have you been following Amy’s case in the papers? They’ve been doing an awfully good job of reporting it.”

  “Amy’s case,” I repeated, with no inflection.

  “Yes—Radzic’s trial? Did you see that he’s insisting on representing himself and has been calling everyone—everyone—in as a witness? Yesterday he called Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, and the Pope, but when none of them miraculously appeared, he settled for his prison guard and his anesthesiologist.”

  I shook my head. All of a sudden I wanted to grab this poor mousy pregnant woman and shake her and bury my face in her shoulder and cry and beg her to tell me everything she knew about the person I should have given up everything for. Instead all I said was, “Crazy.”

  “Yes,” she said, believing it. “Very crazy.”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was only an incoming text, but I took it out and regarded it like it was the phone call I’d been waiting for half my life. I glanced up at Agnes with a look of extreme concern on my face. “I’m sorry to be rude,” I said. “I’m afraid I have to take this call.”

  “It is no problem,” Agnes said, waving me away as she would a mosquito. “When Amy returns we will all have to get dinner again. This time at a place with high chairs!” She rubbed her swollen belly as if a genie would pop out and grant us each three wishes.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Absolutely. Take care.” And I headed off down the platform, still clutching my phone like it was a grenade with its pin removed. When I was well out of earshot, I actually opened the phone, held it to my ear and mimed speaking to someone for a moment, but I needn’t have bothered. Agnes was headed off to the other end of the platform, no doubt as grateful for the interruption as I would have been had it been genuine. Feeling disgusted with myself, I slid the phone from my ear and looked at the screen. It read:

  1 New Text Message From: David

  6:22 p.m.

  Rock stars love us. ;-)

  I felt fury rise in my throat, and I slammed the phone shut. Up and down, up and down. I rubbed at my forehead, felt the sweat that had begun to appear there, as if massaging my skull could make my brain divulge the mysteries of its massive mood swings.

  The papers have been doing a good job of reporting it. I hadn’t looked at the papers; I hadn’t even known what Amy was doing over there. I hadn’t picked up the phone, and I certainly hadn’t bothered to ask. There was no mystery to that realization, only shame. A shame that burned even brighter when I felt the almost imperceptible weight in my shoulder bag: the mix CD I had made for someone else.

  I felt—no. Finish the thought:

  A mix CD made for a twenty-two-year-old you barely know that you are racing to see. While another version of you laughs and preens and snorts and flirts and scores. Really, I thought to myself, it’s enough to give someone some sort of breakdown. The idle G train stalled in the middle of the station rumbled to life then, and I looked down the tunnel to see the faint light of an approaching F. Time to go; time to keep moving.

  My phone buzzed in my hand:

  1 New Text Message From: Cath

  6:25 p.m.

  To: Creepo. From: Stalkee. Please bring beer.

  That is all.

  I smiled in spite of myself. I felt that tickle in my sternum again as the train approached and opened its doors wide. Independence Day. I hoped I wasn’t lying to myself and I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake, but in that quick pause before I stepped aboard I reached up and pulled down a curtain on my brain. I forgot about Agnes and her baby and the international court case that I knew nothing about and the doppelgänger and the state of my checking account and the sad little yank of loneliness that threatened to pull me back onto the platform and down the stairs and up the street and back to the four dull walls of my apartment.

  I had been invited to a party and I had accepted. I needed to buy beer because they had run out of it and because I, for one, planned on drinking some.

  The train rolled on into the city.

  Chapter Twelve: The Grand

  Finale

  THE FIRST THING THAT HAPPENED in Manhattan was that I got lost. Actually, that was second. First, I managed to successfully purchase a six-pack at a bodega on the corner of Sixth Street and Avenue C, though that hadn’t been without its own drama. Beer choice is as important for a party as the music, and for a time—standing dumb-struck before the altar of refrigerated shelves—I was overwhelmed by the decision and considered fleeing back to Brooklyn. Corona? Too girlie. Tsingtao? Too exotic. Wine coolers? Too trashy. Asahi? Too expensive. Bud? Too cheap. I opened one of the sliding doors, felt the cool blast hug my face, then closed it again. At the counter, neighborhood kids taunted the clerk in Spanish—something about hot dogs and fire hydrants. Come on, Gould—get it together. It’s only a simple choice.

  The Miss Misery I spent hours reading about would probably have appreciated the urban poetry of a guest arriving exactly on time with nothing but two forties of Olde English and a leering grin on his face. But Cath Kennedy probably wouldn’t have liked it. Some things are funny only in theory—not so much when you actually have to drink them.

  Finally, with the weight of the inebriated world on my bony shoulders, I slid open the door and removed a six-pack of Stella. No one actually liked Stella, of course, but no one actively disliked it either—which made it, for my purpos
es, perfect.

  I paid eleven dollars to the clerk, who asked for ID (por favor) and then looked at my passport like he would an unwanted card in a low-stakes game of gin rummy before returning it. He never bothered to look at my face.

  Alphabet City was giddy and eager with the holiday. As the blazing day started to recede into a serene and faultless evening, hipsters and natives alike crisscrossed the avenues en route to their various parties and events. On days such as this, even the most brutal-looking blocks of Manhattan—graffiti-scarred Pentecostal churches, bombed-out bodegas—could appear almost pastoral. There was a warmth and vibrancy to the air that made me feel that my intensive exercise in self-deception was going to work. It was at precisely these moments—the in-betweens, the almosts, the about-tos—that I knew I should be reflecting on the uniqueness of my situation. I should be mulling and stewing, thinking and deciding. Firing up the machinery two decades of education had installed in my brain and let the creaking, unoiled behemoth heave and shudder to life. It was in the walking and the traveling—the expository paragraphs—where the protagonists of books I loved and admired came to know themselves and by extension reveal themselves to their devoted readers. But I had no such desire to reflect, to reveal, to consider, to decide. All I wanted in that moment was to be at this party, and I wanted to be there as myself.

  I walked up Avenue C past the German beer-and-schnitzel haus and the Basque tapas bar—little flowers of gentrification in an otherwise untended garden—and turned eastward on Eighth Street. This was the block where Cath Kennedy lived with Stevie Lau, but the building numbers seemed to get bored and give up halfway down it. There was a dry cleaner on the corner and a fortune-teller, and at the far end was a lighting-fixture store, but there were apartment buildings everywhere—each with its own family out front barbecuing on hibachis placed haphazardly on the stone steps. Boom boxes were out in force: more reggaeton, some dance hall, and from the corner of Avenue D the almost wistful crooning of Tony Bennett. I walked up and down the street three times, getting stranger looks from the families on each pass, before I paused and checked the address again. Was it possible to be in the right place and still be lost? If it was, I had no doubt that I had managed to do it.

  “You need help, kid?”

  I turned to face a small brown-skinned woman seated on a folding chair that had a paisley scarf draped over it. This was, I gathered, the fortune-teller. She seemed enormously bored, and I wasn’t sure if she was working or just enjoying the day; seated outside as she was, but behind a small card table with a box of tarot cards and an incense candle on it, the answer was probably both.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m looking for 358.”

  She smiled a feline little smile. She could have been thirty or she could have been eighteen. “This is 358,” she said. “Are you looking for me?”

  I smiled back, not because I wanted to but because I had nothing else to offer in return. “No…ah, no. I’m looking for 358 East Eighth Street. Apartment three-B.”

  The fortune-teller whistled. “Oh, the apartments. That’s upstairs. You have to cut through here.” And with that she gestured lazily behind her at a door draped with more paisley scarves.

  “I see,” I said. The incense was picked up by the breeze and wafted up my nostrils—clove, maybe, or cinnamon. “Thanks.”

  She cocked her head at me. “You sure you don’t want a reading? Holiday special. Only two bucks.”

  “I thought you’d charge something like $17.76,” I said, trying to be merry.

  She stared. “That’s way too expensive.”

  “Oh,” I said, crushed slightly. “I guess you’re right.”

  She leaned forward. “Something is troubling you,” she said portentously. “There are two paths laid out but you cannot choose.”

  My ears felt hot. “Really?”

  She nodded and took my hand. “You try to deny what’s best, but the only person that hurts is you.”

  I stared.

  “It’s your boss, isn’t it? He places demands on you that cannot be met.”

  I pulled my hand back. “I don’t have a boss,” I said.

  She shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Oh, well,” she said. “I was just making that shit up, anyway.”

  I blinked. She exhaled extravagantly.

  “It’s a holiday—who wants to work?”

  I pushed past her into the building.

  The stairway was grim and narrow, as if constructed for a fantastical race of metropolitan pygmy people slightly shorter and leaner than normal Homo sapiens. There were cigarette butts on the linoleum and the smell of fatty chicken soup in the air. Apartment three-B was on the third floor, marked by a steel door with wilting paint the color of blush, an embossed numeral, and a sticker advertising a 1-800 number that only charged $3.99 a minute for dirty talk with a “real live” transsexual. I knocked twice and waited.

  When the door opened there was no one I knew behind it—just a random NYU type with a massive jewfro and thin metal glasses over a pimply face. His T-shirt said JESUS IS MY HOMEBOY, and in his hand was a half-empty bottle of Miller High Life dripping condensation onto his black Umbro shorts and flip-flops. From the long hallway behind him I could hear the muffled sounds of hip-hop, laughter, and the steady whirring of a Cuisinart.

  “Hi,” I said. “Is Cath in?”

  He stared at me dumbly for a moment.

  “I’m a friend,” I said. “I’m here for the party?”

  Without taking his eyes off me, he shouted over his shoulder, “Cath! Someone’s here!”

  There was no answer. Lacking anything better to do, I coughed.

  Jesus’ homeboy turned around fully this time before bellowing “Cath!” again and stomping off. Alone in the doorway, I heard the Cuisinart stop, and then Cath popped her head around into the hallway. “Aha,” she said. “It’s you. One second.” Her head disappeared for a moment and then was replaced with her whole body walking the length of the hallway in those great, gulping strides of hers. She was wearing a sky-blue skirt and a tangerine-colored ringer T-shirt with bands of pure orange at the neck and arms. She was rubbing her hands with a red-and-white-checked kitchen towel. And clomping on the uncovered wood floor were violet cowboy boots that ended mid-calf. All those colors together shouldn’t have worked, but against the white walls and drab hallway the effect was like an Alka-Seltzer dropped into a plastic cup of dingy tap water.

  She walked right up to me and kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t touch me,” she said. “I’ve been making dip.”

  “OK,” I said.

  She turned and started back up the hall. “Well, come on! Follow me!”

  I did as I was told. The hallway was decorated with wrinkled Morrissey posters and lined with cast-off shoes—filthy New Balance sneakers, leather sandals, leather boots, round canvas Campers—and it stretched the length of the apartment. Off of it was a door to the bathroom, a pathetic little closet, and the cramped kitchen. Then the hallway became some sort of common room, and behind that were the two bedrooms. There were people gathered in the common room and Mobb Deep was playing on the stereo, but I glanced quickly and didn’t recognize anyone. I followed Cath into the kitchen instead.

  “Here,” I said. “I brought beer.”

  She turned and took the bag from me. “Thanks.”

  I was nervous, so I babbled. “I was going to bring forties, but I thought that might have been too gangsta for you.”

  Cath put the Stella in the refrigerator. I caught a glimpse of Chinese take-out boxes and ginger-ale bottles. “That would have been awesome,” she said. “You totally should have.”

  “Yeah,” I said. And put my hands in my pockets.

  The kitchen was no bigger than the bathroom in my own apartment, but what it lacked in size, it made up for in cabinets, which were piled on top of one another almost all the way up to the ceiling. The fixtures were new—gold handles, $8.99 at Home Depot—and everything else was white. Everything, that is, except for
the counter, which was splattered with salsa and avocado and God knows what else. It looked like Jackson Pollock’s midnight snack. In the center of it all stood the Cuisinart—proud, useful, grubby—and next to that a casserole dish, full and spackled with more colors than either Cath or the counter.

  “What are you making here, exactly?” I asked.

  “It’s a seven-layer dip!” Cath beamed like Sandra Lee at a Tupperware party. “My mom used to make it on New Year’s when I was a kid.”

  “It’s very impressive,” I said, leaning my hands against the refrigerator. “Very colorful.”

  Cath smacked me.

  “I was being serious!” I said, smiling.

  “I didn’t like your tone,” she said. But she was smiling too.

  “Well,” I said. “Is it done? Can I try it?”

  Cath regarded her creation with a critical eye. “I suppose you can. It’s only got six layers, though. At present.”

  I took a step toward the counter and lifted a chip out of an open bag of Tostitos. “And which layers would they be?”

  Cath counted on her fingers as she recited. “Black beans, jalapeños, salsa, guacamole, tomatoes, and jack cheese.”

  “Goodness,” I said, chip poised and at the ready. “What could possibly be missing from that?”

  “Sour cream,” said Cath, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “But go ahead. Sample. Be my guest.”

  I scooped inward, doing my best to get some of all six layers. En route to my mouth, a suicidal black bean leapt to its death on the floor below.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “I’m going to have a lot of cleaning up to do tonight anyway.”

  I bit down and the chip began to crack, so I panicked and shoveled the whole mess into my mouth. It tasted all right—Mexicany, or at least a Canadian’s version of Mexicany—but then the rosy glow of spice on my tongue and at the back of my throat exploded into a full-scale mouth inferno. “Gah,” I said, waving my hand in front of my face. “S’hot.”