by Jill Ciment
rollitup: does it smell like a faggot’s fart? faggot farts glow.
blazingwaffles: They burned down my rowhouse! Do you know who burned it down? The Brooklyn Fire department. Do you think your insurance will pay? Think again. Mushrooms are an act of God according to AllState.
Edith left another urgent voicemail, all the while listening, with mounting fury, to Vida’s footsteps overhead.
Vida suspected that Frank, her super, had been sneaking into her apartment and snooping through her things while she was on location. Nothing was ever missing, nothing she could be certain about. Her jewelry was always accounted for. Her spare cash lay untouched in her underwear drawer. Yet something felt amiss. The cash might not have been touched, but her panties were definitely fingered. Someone had neatly folded them, and it wasn’t her. Or was it? Had she folded them? She’d never folded panties in her life. Her entire apartment seemed too clean, as if in her absence, all evidence of life, including her own, had been swept up or scrubbed away. The banister was dustless, the tub spotless, the sheets changed. Had she changed them before she left? No, someone had been in here and had cleaned up after himself with a little too much rigor.
Vida suspected Frank not only because he wielded the building’s master key. Frank also gave her the grin, a licentious spellbound leer, as if he were privy to her erotic aches. He wasn’t the only man who looked at her that way, but he was the only one with keys to her apartment. Ever since she’d made the Ziberax commercial, old men had treated her with courtly craving, and young men with blatant want.
In the commercial, she played a fortyish businesswoman who appeared to have everything—a lovely rambling beach house, her own fashion line, a sexy gray-templed husband who adored her. But the brittleness with which she responded to his playful kisses betrayed her unhappiness. Until her doctor prescribed Ziberax, her sex was as cold and lifeless as plastic.
To introduce the first female sexual enhancement pill, a pink oval tablet, to its target audience—college-educated women between forty and sixty whose husbands or boyfriends already took erectile dysfunction pills—the admen had wanted an especially sexy actress on the kind side of middle age, more striking than pretty, an earned beauty. During the audition, the director had asked Vida to imagine her first satisfying orgasm in years; she’s now in her lover’s arms, and her expression should exude not just sexual bliss—although that too—but also reawakened intimacy. To achieve a look of fulfillment so cellular that it melded her soul with another’s, Vida relaxed the muscles of her face until her expression became as still, and deep, and mysterious as well water.
She’d fire Frank today, but she had no proof. He’d been the apartment building’s super for over thirty years before she came along and restored it to a single house again, except for the rent-controlled parlor floor. She phoned the police to see what they’d advise. After she enumerated her suspicions about Frank, the desk officer asked her what was missing.
“Nothing’s missing,” she said. “But my panties have been folded.”
“You think your super’s folding your underwear?”
“Yes, and I want to know what can be done about it.”
“Without more evidence, all you can do is request a squad car drive-by once a night to make sure no one’s breaking in.”
“He’s the super. He has the key.”
Her agent and lawyer and oldest friend in New York, Virginia, a harried single mother of a clingy toddler, suggested a security firm she used to spy on her son’s nanny, Peace of Mind Technologies. “They set up hidden cameras throughout the apartment and I caught the little Russian sociopath on video giving Zacky an Ambien!”
The young man from the security firm recommended a dozen nannycams with silent-alarm motion detectors that would automatically alert the police if an intruder was present. “Do you have children?”
“Why?”
“The nannycams are usually concealed in toys, but we also have a pencil sharpener, an alarm clock, and a smoke detector model.”
After the tech left the next day, and Vida was alone with the pencil sharpener, the alarm clock, and the smoke detector, she wondered who was watching her. Her plan was to leave early the next morning, but not so early that Frank didn’t see her go. He was perpetually sweeping someone’s sidewalk. He lived on the block, though she couldn’t say exactly where. He seemed to have keys to all the buildings. The neighbors called him the “mayor of Berry Street,” though he looked more like an ex-prizefighter than a politician. He once told Vida that in his sixty-four years, he’d been to Manhattan less than a dozen times.
“Where you off to now? Hollywood calling?” Frank shouted from across the street, broom in hand. He gave her the grin.
“I’ll be back on Thursday. Keep an eye on things,” she said, wheeling a small suitcase behind her. It wasn’t just a prop; she’d packed a few things in case Frank didn’t take the bait right away and she had to spend the night at a hotel.
“Is it a comedy?”
“It’s a police thriller, Frank.”
About an hour later, killing time in a nearby coffee shop, she got the call. “Peace of Mind Technologies,” said a prerecorded voice, “the police are on their way.”
Two squad cars, red lights awhirl, were double-parked in front of her row house. The refurbished Victorian front door had been crowbarred open, its original oval glass shattered. Her tenant Edith and her twin sister Kat leaned out the front window, talking to Frank. If Frank was downstairs, who was upstairs? “What happened?” she asked.
“A burglary was in progress so the police had to smash down your front door,” said Frank.
“Did you get my messages? We have a mold infestation,” said Edith.
Vida stepped over the glass shards. A policewoman stood sentry just inside the foyer. “The landlady’s here,” she said into her walkie-talkie.
Vida mounted the steep staircase. Her apartment door hung wide open. She heard voices coming from inside, a deep, officious male and a brazen, Slavic-accented female. Even with the policewoman beside her, Vida paused before going in. The policeman, who didn’t look a day over twenty, stood in her living room arguing with a small, very pretty young woman about his age. Her shoulder-length black hair was wet from the shower and tied in a ponytail. She sported a Ziberax promotional T-shirt that Vida had thought she’d thrown away, a pair of Vida’s lace panties, and handcuffs.
“Do you know her?” asked the policewoman.
“Who is she?”
“She says she lives here.”
“I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
“We found her hiding in the closet.” The policewoman pointed toward the guest room, a storage room, really. Vida couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in there. “She says she’s been living here a week.”
“That’s impossible,” Vida said.
“You didn’t notice anything? We found her bedding.”
“Oh my god, this is so creepy. She’s been here a week! Get her out, now,” Vida said.
“We need to collect the bedding as evidence.”
“Be my guest,” Vida said, as the policewoman disappeared into the guest room.
“Please I keep my things?” the pretty prisoner asked the boy officer. Vida could now distinguish the accent, throaty Russian. The girl had changed her strategy: instead of arguing, she now flirted with her guard.
“We’ll bag them for you, miss, and you can collect them when you’re released.”
“You’re going to release her? What if she comes back?”
“I steal nothing,” the pretty prisoner told the boy officer. “She left downstairs door open.”
The policewoman called to Vida from the guest room. “There’s a lot of stuff in the closet. I don’t know whose is whose.”
Vida dreaded going in there. She didn’t want to know what, exactly, the officer had meant by bedding. It was a storage closet filled with clothes she never wore. She was hardly about to start wearing them now.<
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“Take everything,” Vida called back.
“Red suitcase is mine,” the pretty prisoner whispered under her breath, forcing the boy officer to lean close, close enough to smell her skin.
Vida hesitantly entered the guest room. It had never looked cleaner. The closet light was on. Vida’s wardrobe had been parted, like theater curtains, swept to either end of the hanger rod, revealing a camp of sorts. The bedding, which she’d dreaded seeing, was a clean white comforter and fairly new rose-patterned sheets. Vida only bought solid colors. Near the pillow, suited in a matching floral pillowcase, stood the guest room’s gooseneck lamp. Arranged around the lamp’s base, as if on a vanity table, lay a brush, a tube of lipstick, an emery board, and a paperback, The New Earth: Awakening Your Life’s Purpose.
When Vida, speechless, failed to instruct the policewoman as to what belonged to whom, the prisoner took charge. “Linens are mine, but not pillow. Lamp not mine, but book and brush is. Also, I have shoes.”
Wearing latex gloves, the policewoman bagged the linens, sundries, and a pair of high heels.
“Don’t forget suitcase,” the prisoner reminded the boy officer. Bound in handcuffs, she used her lovely chin to point even deeper into the closet, under Vida’s swept-aside hems. The policeboy had to crawl on hands and knees. “Marie,” he called to his partner, “take a look at this.”
Ordering the prisoner not to move, the policewoman joined him in the closet.
Alone with the prisoner, Vida suddenly found her voice. “How long were you planning on staying? You thought I wouldn’t notice a stranger living in my house? What did you use for a bathroom when I was home? I don’t want to know.” Vida looked back at the closet. The naked pillow and the gooseneck lamp had been set aside for her—as if she’d want them now. She’d call Goodwill tomorrow and have them take everything away. Then she’d call one of those special crime scene cleaning services.
“Ma’am, have you seen this before?” asked the policewoman, signaling her over.
Reluctantly, Vida stuck her head in the closet. She noticed the pale, otherworldly glow only after the boy officer pointed it out. It appeared to be emanating from a bulge in the wall. The policewoman shined her flashlight on it. “Oh my god, is that a mushroom?” Vida reeled around and shouted at the prisoner, “What have you been doing in there?!”
“It already there when I move in.”
No one had to tell the twins that this wasn’t an ordinary break-in. In addition to the police cars, a fire truck now blocked the street, HAZMAT lettered across its bright red side. Still in her bathrobe, eating a corn muffin with her coffee, Kat watched from the parlor’s bay window, while Edith, showered and dressed, sat at her desk phoning an exterminator.
“What’s a biohazard response team doing at a burglary?” Kat wondered out loud.
Edith walked over to see for herself. “Maybe it has to do with the mold infestation,” she said, opening the window. She called to the firemen, “Are we safe? Should we leave?”
“Stay where you are for the moment,” said the chief. He wore yellow-slicker coveralls, rubber gloves, and disposable booties, but unlike his crew of six, he didn’t have on his respirator. It dangled from a strap around his neck.
Frank and a small flock of curious neighbors stood cordoned off behind a squad car, its front doors open like wings.
“Who called the HAZMAT team?” Edith shouted to him.
“Not me. I’ve never seen a truck like that in my life.”
“Maybe the burglar had bird flu?” suggested Gladys, the neighbor who lived next door with her seventeen cats.
“The lady cop told me the burglar was sleeping in Vida’s guest room without Vida even knowing,” Frank told the twins.
“For how long?” called Kat.
“Long enough.”
Someone knocked at the door.
“Ladies, we’re going to need you to vacate,” said the policewoman, now wearing what looked like a house painter’s mask. “Toxic mold has been found in your landlady’s closet. At the very least, the building will need to be fumigated. Make sure you take all your important papers.”
“We have thousands of important papers, we have a historical archive in here,” said Edith.
“Just take what you need for now.”
Edith hurried to her desk to collect her BlackBerry and purse. She packed an overnight bag with a change of clothes, sundries, and a copy of her insurance policy. Then she reached under the bed to retrieve the shoe box where she kept their mother’s original rent-controlled lease. Even before she raised the lid, she saw a faint greenish luminosity emanating from underneath. A mushroom was feeding on the ancient document. With a tremor of fear so elemental that it shivered all the way back to childhood, she lifted the bed skirt and peeked underneath. The rug was stained with iridescent drips, as if phosphorescence had leaked from the mattress. She looked up. Another mushroom sprouted from the bed frame.
Meanwhile, Kat sat immobilized in the second bedroom, Edith’s former office, on her unmade bed. The three-ring binder, thick with her mother’s most promising letters, was the first and only possession she had definitively set aside to save. The rest of her belongings—T-shirts, a washed-out batik sari, stretched-out underwear, yoga pants, sandals, and a Goodwill winter coat—seemed almost foolish to save, except for her beloved scarves, each bought in a different city. Should she pack the pantsuit that Edith gave her to wear for job interviews? Would remembering to pack the suit finally convince Edith that she was serious about job hunting as soon as the book was finished?
What else should she take?
Edith appeared in the doorway. “You’re not dressed yet? You’re not packed? They’re telling us we’ve got to get out of here, now!”
“Let me get this straight, she breaks into my house and I have to get out?” asked Vida, incredulous.
“Everyone has to leave. Your downstairs tenants have already been evacuated,” explained the policewoman, her voice commanding despite the mask covering her mouth and nose.
“Why not I get mask?” demanded the pretty prisoner, wildly indignant, as only those speaking with Russian cadences can sound. Still in handcuffs, she sat perched on the sofa’s arm, bare legs crossed, while the boy officer stood behind her at military at-ease.
Vida couldn’t help but admire the girl’s moxie. Then she remembered the bedding in the closet, and a shiver of revulsion jolted her, as if the white comforter and the clean sheets had been a rat’s nest. “When can I return?” she asked the masked officer. “Tonight? Tomorrow? How many nights are we talking about?”
“Just pack what you’ll need for now,” said the policewoman.
Vida already had the packed overnight bag for her ruse to catch Frank. She had made a reservation at the Lohito Grand, a thirty-story aquamarine whale breaching the Lower East Side tenements. She went upstairs to her office, directly above the guest room, retrieved her laptop, and then stopped by her bedroom to collect the emergency cash she kept in her underwear drawer. Only when she saw the neatly folded panties did it occur to her: she had worn them all. Why couldn’t she have just stolen the cash and the jewelry and then run away, like a normal thief?
Vida glanced back at the guest room on her way out. The pretty prisoner now stood over the boy officer. Fumbling through her open red suitcase, he was trying to find her something to wear over Vida’s lace panties. On the street, Vida followed the policewoman over to the squad car. Frank and the nosy neighbors crowded around the twins. Normally, whenever Frank saw Vida, he gave her the grin. Not today. He looked right past her. The pretty prisoner was making her slow descent down the stoop steps, escorted by the policeboy as if she were being debuted at a cotillion wearing a white gown rather than being arrested in skintight pink Capris. Her shoulder-length black hair was loose and wild. She was still in handcuffs. Who let the ponytail down? Vida recognized the girl’s gait, an amateur’s stage walk, every brazen sway designed to hide fright. Vida had used that exact same gait f
or her first audition, Tess, the rebellious daughter, in the off-Broadway production of Six Degrees of Separation. In those days, Vida still went by her given name, Debbi. Her parents, a Filipina dental hygienist and an Irish locksmith, had thought it was the American spelling.
“You’ll need to come to the station if you want to press charges,” said the policewoman.
“How long will that take? Please, can’t you just drive her to another neighborhood so that she doesn’t come back?”
“You can get a restraining order to keep her a thousand feet from your house, but you’ll still need to come in.”
“What’s she charged with?”
“Criminal trespass.”
“That’s all? She’ll be out tomorrow.”
“We can charge her with first-degree burglary if you think she’s stolen anything.”
The only items that Vida could prove had been taken were the Ziberax T-shirt and the lace panties. Vida preferred not to have to testify in court, I’m the Ziberax lady and that’s my T-shirt and those are my panties. “Let her go,” Vida said.
“Are you sure?”
Vida made one last assessment of the prisoner, who was standing defiantly under the fierce sun as if under a hot spotlight; the girl was well aware that she held the rapt attention of her audience. A professional at reading and conveying expressions, Vida also noted that the girl’s rebellious insouciance was one exhalation short of panic.
“Let her go, but warn her that if I see her again, anywhere near here, I’m pressing charges.” Despite the nonstop chatter coming from the squad car radio, when the policewoman removed the handcuffs and told her she was free, Vida heard the prisoner’s response.
“Where are sheets and pillowcase?”
Wheeling her suitcase behind her, Vida approached the fire chief. “What happens next?” she asked as calmly as she could manage.
“The city temporarily condemns your building.”
