by Rita Ciresi
Dodie slung his leather bag onto the closed trunk of the car. “Unlock the door,” he said. I took out my key and opened the passenger side. Like a cop, Dodie reached in and yanked Security Man out by the scruff of his neck, held him up, and evaluated him. After just a brief week on Planet Earth, Security Man suddenly seemed slightly shriveled, less hardy, and less full of himself
“He looks like he needs a good blow job,” Dodie said.
“All yours,” I said, pushing up Security Man’s T-shirt and pointing to the spigot on his plastic belly.
“I’ve sworn off strangers,” Dodie said. “But if you’d like to take a turn, I wouldn’t mind experiencing a little vicarious pleasure—”
“I’m cleaning up my act, remember?”
“This I gotta see.”
“You’ll see it,” I said glumly, and helped Dodie stuff Security Man—who wasn’t cooperating—into the backseat.
We got into the Toyota. As I backed out of the parking space, I spotted in the rearview mirror a country-club couple with silvery hair loading their Hartmann luggage into their Jag. They turned and stared at our strange threesome as we went on our way.
“I won’t ask where you picked this man up,” Dodie said on the drive back. “But—can I guess?—your mother approves.”
“I forgot to thank her,” I said, suddenly remembering. Maybe Mama was right. Maybe I didn’t deserve any gifts.
“Isn’t that your father’s old Yankees cap?”
“And his pants,” I said.
“So now you’ve finally found him: the man who looks like dear old Dad—”
“He doesn’t look like my dad or anyone else we’re related to.”
“What’s his name?” Dodie asked. “Rex?”
“Frankie?” I suggested. “Vinnie?”
“Nah. You just said he doesn’t look like any relative of ours.”
“He looks Bohunk,” I said. “With that red hair.”
Dodie snapped his fingers. “That’s it—Red Rover, Red Rover.”
“Oh, won’t you come over?”
We laughed, and Dodie looked out the window. “My God,” he said, with all the wonder and stupidity of someone who had lived too long in the city. “What are those green things out there?”
“They’re called trees.”
“Oh.” Dodie put his hand over his chest. “No wonder I feel asthmatic.” Then he turned around and looked long and hard into the backseat. “Lise?”
“What?”
“Can I play the bitchy fag for half a second?”
“Don’t let me cramp your style.”
“He’s a bad dresser,” Dodie said. “Dump him.”
I put on the brakes. We pulled over to the side of the road, and like a couple of Mafiosi getting rid of the guy who betrayed the family honor, we deep-sixed him into the ditch.
Dodie had the playful smile and sly hands of a magician. When we got back to my place, he didn’t pull any mind-benders out of his black bag, but he did conjure forth a housewarming present and a belated birthday gift: a pound of chocolate raspberry coffee beans and a pair of bone-china mugs in blue and white porcelain etched with gold, in a process I knew from one of my art-history courses was called “clobbering.” Remembering my manners this time—and still feeling slightly giddy and guilty about ditching Security Man in such a dramatic way—I warmly thanked Dodie and gave him his belated birthday present (a copy of Updike’s tribute to suburban adultery, Couples). Then I led him around my apartment so he could admire everything I had lacked during my dark, miserable years in Brooklyn. Dodie was effusive in his praise of the amenities most Americans, except for those who lived in shacks in the Tennessee hills and in the two-by-four studios of major cities, took for granted: a bathtub big enough to lie down in, a pulsating shower head, a double kitchen sink, a stove with four functioning burners, kitchen cabinets free of rodents and water bugs and roaches, gray industrial carpeting, a real foam couch from the Door Store, and a place to hang your coat at the end of the day.
“Wow,” Dodie said. “Great closet.” For even though Dodie had a very plum studio in a high-rise on the edge of the Financial District—with a window that gave out onto the street and a white chaise longue from Roche-Bobois and even a doorman who smoked Virginia Slims all day beneath the ripped canopy—he had only one cramped closet in which to hang his extensive wardrobe. In Brooklyn I had owned a wooden clothes tree that tipped over when too many hangers were placed on the pegs.
“I owe all of this to you,” I told him.
“Nah.”
“Come on. Really. I mean, I feel almost guilty. I can never pay you back.”
“So shut up and give me your monthly payment. You’re behind a couple of days, you know.”
I got out my purse and wrote Dodie a hefty check. Dodie worked off Wall Street as an investment counselor, specializing in finding smaller or newer companies worth entering on the ground floor. His client list was long and included a few Broadway actors, two tenors from the Met, a Pulitzer prize—winning author, two department-store magnates, and a host of little old ladies who wore mink stoles in the summertime and stank of Estée Lauder perfume on a year-round basis. And then, of course, there was me. From the day I got my first job in publishing, Dodie insisted I send him at least twenty-five bucks a week out of my meager paycheck. He handled my money. Sometimes he passed on to me the Christmas gifts he got from the little old ladies—which came in lacquered turquoise Tiffany bags—and shared with me the comp tickets to the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic. We had our own social lives, to be sure, but every now and then we both welcomed having a pressureless date.
After I showed off my apartment, I took Dodie on a leisurely drive around Ossining and past Boorman’s corporate headquarters with its well-manicured lawns and ostentatious fountain.
“Let’s go in,” Dodie said.
“Will you behave?”
“But of course.”
I doubted it. But I wanted to show off my new office, and I figured since it was Saturday the chances of us bumping into anyone in my department were extremely slim. Only four or five cars were in the staff lot behind my building. The best-looking was a tan BMW in the area reserved for top management. Next to it was parked a less pretentious silver Audi.
Neither Dodie nor I had a real thing for cars. Still, we walked close enough to check out these luxury vehicles, and Dodie commented, “Now these are wheels, Lise.”
“Nice,” I agreed.
At the back entrance we had to sign in with the armed security guard—a Dominican guy named Gussie who had a gut fatter than my father’s, but a much better disposition and a sweeter smile. Gussie glanced down at the clipboard after I scribbled L. and D. Diodetto.
“Miss Lisa,” Gussie scolded, “I didn’t know you were married.”
“My cousin.”
“Then there’s still hope for me?”
I laughed and introduced Dodie, who shook Gussie’s hand too quickly. Armed men made him nervous, and he had mentioned to me—more than once—that he could not understand the strange phenomenon of people dressing up in their bedrooms as traffic cops, Cossacks, Israeli commandos, Gestapo guards, and even Roman centurions. I know sex is sometimes about power, he’d said, but does this have to be illustrated in costume? How do people keep a straight face?
As we rounded the corner and started down the first long carpeted corridor, Dodie whispered, “Why was that guard flirting with you?”
“He’s bored. And I’m beautiful.”
“He’s old,” Dodie said. “And you’re not.”
“The man is harmless.”
“A harmless man with a gun?”
“He’s not going to use it on me. He’s supposed to shoot folks who stuff too many aspirin—substitute samples down their shirt. Now stop acting like my mother”—Dodie’s look of horror was a joy to behold—“and get ready for the grand tour.”
I took Dodie around to my office the long way, past the art shop, the financial o
ffice, the lavish boardrooms, and the chief administrative officer’s suite. As we rounded the corner that led to the ramp to the lab, I heard the faint sound of music—an aria—that reminded me of cold winter afternoons back in Brooklyn, when I would bag the trash and iron clothes and sweep the bugs off my floor to the sad sounds of the Metropolitan Opera Saturday broadcast.
Dodie’s ears perked up. “Do I detect a paesano on the premises?”
“Shh,” I said, for I was sure the music came from Dr. Peggy Schoenbarger’s office, although it did sound more like Puccini than Wagner. I told Dodie I hadn’t yet perused our internal phone directory, but so far I seemed to be the token Sicilian at Boorman, with the possible exception of a certain Tony Russo in maintenance, who had posted an index card on the cafeteria bulletin board announcing no problem was too large or too small for the man whose weekend pseudonym was MR. FIX IT!
Dodie wasn’t listening. His head was cocked toward the music. “What is that song, Lise? I know that song; it’s from Gianni Schicchi—”
I also listened. “O mio bambino caro?”
Dodie gave me a playful shove. “It’s mio babbino caro—my darling daddy, not my darling baby.”
I shrugged. I didn’t like being thought uncultured, but the truth was I had never seen a performance of Gianni Schicchi—I only knew the aria from my Great Opera Highlights tape.
The fluid, swelling music pleased me as much as an unexpected gift—it seemed so out of whack with the straight and narrow corridors of Boorman. We listened until the end of the aria, then stopped to peer into the cafeteria and the well-appointed employee lounge.
“You done good, Lise,” Dodie said.
“I owe you this one too,” I said—for Dodie had urged me to get out of the city and helped me research my prospects in the Fortune 500. He told me how to find Boorman’s annual report in the public library and got me an MCAT study guide so I could memorize enough medical terminology to ace Boorman’s stiff editing exam.
“I now can spell—and define—contraindication and retrovirus,” I told Dodie.
“Not bad for the girl who got a C in freshman biology.”
“And now I spell them, and define them, in a private office,” I added, as I ushered him back into Editorial. I was proud of my bright, clean office in the back wing, where my sparkling white-laminate work station was wiped and dusted every evening and my wastebasket was emptied every single day. Every morning I marveled at how and why I ever had worked in a cubicle at a steel desk whose rusted drawers would not pull out and which I would have been loath to open anyway for fear of what I would find there. For three years in publishing I had faced, every morning, a stack of yellow and blue and white boxes containing pounds of the written word. All day long—as water bugs marched across the frayed carpet and an occasional mouse made a straight trajectory from under one pile of manuscripts in the corner into the other—I opened the boxes and logged them in, answered phones, and made copies. After six months of having only the privilege of typing my own fatuous, high-minded reader’s reports, I had begun to edit, and after I displayed my talent for ripping into particularly dense prose, I always was given the “weightier” manuscripts. My dreary job seemed to have nothing to do with the end product—the beautiful books with neat, colorful spines, the glitzy covers that shined like molten wax, and the full-page ads in The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly.
“I’m never editing somebody else’s shit manuscript again,” I told Dodie. “I’m writing my own. And I’m done with wearing black.”
“Covers up the dirt,” Dodie said, “but after a while it grows boring, doesn’t it?” Out of the corner of his eye, he checked me out. “You look different already, Lise. Tighter. Healthier.”
“I’m working out. Every day. At a gym. If you’re a good boy, I’ll let you feel up my biceps after dinner.”
“I can hardly wait,” Dodie said in a distinctly unenthusiastic voice. He turned toward my desk. “Is that Big Blue or a Wang?”
“Pardon me?”
“Your word processor.”
“It’s a computer. I was terrified of it at first. It’s like something out of 1984—it’s hooked up to some kind of Big Brother-like eyeball—”
“That’s called a mainframe.”
“Whatever. It makes me nervous. Tons of records are stored on it, and there’s even this program on it called All-in-1, where you can check who’s working on their computer at any given time and send them messages.”
Dodie examined my unwieldy dot-matrix printer, which shook the windowpanes whenever I ran off one of my word-processing files. He had been working on a computer for over a year now and was not impressed.
Dodie sat down and recommended I ask for another desk chair—with arms—to make it clear I was not just a glorified secretary at Boorman. Then he picked up the photo of my family I had felt compelled to post on my desk. “You don’t look half-bad in an Easter bonnet.”
“Thanks.”
“Even Carol looks cute in this picture.”
“And my mother?”
Dodie didn’t deign to comment on my mother’s stern posture and stony face. “Your father was good-looking, in his own way. You ever miss him?”
“Why should I?”
“You cried a lot at his funeral.”
I shrugged. Although Dodie would have been the first to understand, it still hurt to admit my tears had been for the love my father and I did not have between us. I cried for what I had wanted, not for what I had lost.
“He never paid attention to me,” I told Dodie. “He never even talked to me.”
“He never talked to anyone,” Dodie said. “Not even my dad.”
Dodie’s parents—Zio Gianni and Auntie Beppina—lived two doors down from us. Although our mothers visited back and forth, our fathers (who were brothers) never said boo to one another. I always had the feeling my dad was jealous of Zio Gianni for having Jocko and Dodie while he got stuck with a pair of girls. To add to his misery, Beppina went on to have three more boys after Dodie—younger brothers Dodie hadn’t spoken to in years—while my mother had only miscarriages.
“Do you suppose your mother—?” Dodie asked. “You know, misses him?”
I shrugged again. I didn’t know why the fact that there was no love lost between my parents should still bother me. But it did. Mama and Daddy were famous for trading insults sotto voce—as if the barbs didn’t count if they were delivered under the dramatic illusion that the offended party couldn’t hear. I never once saw them hold hands or kiss. They never even said each other’s names. They were simply “you” to each other’s face, and behind each other’s back, “Pops” or “The Mama”—or plenty of other names much worse.
Yet Mama remained faithful to his memory. She swept the autumn leaves off Daddy’s grave, and she always spent a long time haggling with the owner of the garden store where she bought the geraniums she planted every spring in front of his headstone, claiming, “Pops would have wanted the best for the least.” Whenever we sat down to dinner now, she made it a big point to remind Al Dante, “Here, you sit in Pops’s old chair. You sit here; this is what he would have liked.”
I did not ask Dodie if he missed his own father—whom he hadn’t talked to since the famous earring incident, which had left a thin white stripe of a scar on his lobe that I always was tempted to reach out and touch, as if the pressure of my finger could heal it.
“You want to see my boss’s office?”
“Actually, I need to see the can.”
“Too much coffee on the train?” I asked, because Dodie had already used the bathroom twice at my place.
“Actually, bad Mexican food last night.”
I took Dodie into Karen’s office, where I knew she kept in her bottom file drawer some over-the-counter remedy for diarrhea and indigestion. I poured him a Dixie cup full of the pink liquid. Dodie swallowed it, then poured himself another. “Your boss is going to come up short the next time Montezuma strikes,” he s
aid.
“She can’t have this anymore,” I said, tucking the bottle back where I found it. “She’s pregnant.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Why do you think I took the job?”
“Oh. Lise. You’re smarter than I thought.” Dodie looked around the large office with admiration in his eyes, then shook his head at Karen’s New England snowy scenes and her monogrammed pencil cup and the stained-glass sun-catcher in the shape of the letter K.
“She’s nice,” I said. “I swear it.”
“Still, you’d better redecorate.”
After that I walked him down the hallway to the men’s room, which was across from the employee lounge. I moved a discreet twenty feet or so down the corridor to the window, where I gazed out on the flower beds—purple hyacinths and yellow tulips and jonquils tinged light blue that reminded me of the lilies that graced the altar on the day of the Resurrection. I moved in closer to the glass, wishing I could hear the soothing sound of Boorman’s showcase fountain.
What I heard—in its place—was the thunk of a vending machine from inside the employee lounge. I heard the snap and fizz of a soda can and turned, expecting to see Dodie surface from the lounge with some Canada Dry to ease his upset stomach. Instead, a man in a white shirt and chinos rounded the doorway. He stopped in his tracks. Either I startled Mr. Eben Strauss—whom I hardly recognized sans ugly tie—or he was embarrassed to be seen drinking a generic brand of root beer, which announced on the side OLD TIME FIZZ!
“Working overtime already?” he asked.
Here was the perfect opportunity to score a few points with management. “I just had a few things to clear up on my desk,” I said.
“I have the same dilemma.”
“I’m done now.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
We stood there awkwardly for a moment.
“So that was you, then, listening to the Puccini?” I asked. “That was pretty. I mean, beautiful. I stopped to listen …”
My voice trailed away. He made me nervous, the way he was staring and holding the soda can too far away from his body, as if he were scared he would spill it all over his own white shirt. He really looked good in that shirt, never mind those chinos—both of which were so neatly pressed he clearly had donned them straight from the dry cleaner’s bag. Maybe he wanted to avoid yet another trip to the cleaner’s. He certainly didn’t need to worry about tripping and spraying fizz on my highly unprofessional outfit: a pair of cutoffs and a man’s white V-neck T-shirt that Dodie proclaimed was the equivalent of a neon sign that said GUINEA. The ethnic theme was further reinforced by the blue miraculous medal hanging conspicuously on a silver chain between my breasts.
