by Jane Heller
“What mystery man?” she asked nonchalantly.
“Oh, come on. You’ve been seeing someone. I know you have.”
“What makes you say that, Koff?”
“Because you’re busy every night. I almost fainted when you wanted to have dinner tonight.”
“Just because I’m busy doesn’t mean there’s a man involved. Life doesn’t have to revolve around a man, Koff.”
“Okay. So you don’t want to tell me. Case closed.”
The waiter brought the check, and as Julia grabbed it, I reached into my purse for a mirror, checked my mouth for telltale crumbs, and began to apply a fresh coat of lipstick. Suddenly a familiar face materialized next to my reflection.
“Mrs. Koff, isn’t it?”
It was Cullie Harrington, photographer extraordinaire. I was so flustered I couldn’t think of anything to say, a rarity.
“You don’t recognize me? I shot your house last month,” Cullie reminded me. “You wouldn’t let me in the front door, remember?”
Oh, man. This guy’s attitude was everything I remembered it was. Well, I was not about to give him the satisfaction of saying one nice thing about his photographs. Meanwhile, for some bizarre reason, my heart raced at the sight of him. Never show a man he’s gotten the better of you, my mother always said. Never wear your heart on your sleeve. Never let him know how much you care about him. “Shot my house?” I said, looking as if I were genuinely perplexed and couldn’t place this man for the life of me.
“Yeah, I shot your house all right,” Cullie smirked. “Maplebarf—er, bark—Manor.”
“That’s the name of my house, yes. And your name is Corny—sorry—Cullie Harrington?”
Cullie laughed. He had a great smile, damn it. With his wavy blond hair, his salt-and-pepper beard and mustache, his sinewy swimmer’s body, and that great smile, he was a sight for sore eyes, if you liked the type.
“I’m Cullie Harrington,” he said to Julia, extending his hand.
“Julia Applebaum. Glad to meet you,” she said as they shook hands. “Would you like to join us?”
“We were just leaving,” I said quickly. “Maybe some other time.”
“Or maybe not. I only came by to see if you ever got those brochures I dropped in your mailbox. You do remember the brochures, don’t you?”
“Of course I remember the brochures,” I snapped. Would this man ever stop treating me like pond scum?
“A second ago you didn’t remember that I shot your house.”
“Well, I got the brochures. Thank you.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And did you like the way the house came out?”
“Actually, they were just fine,” I said, stifling a sneeze and rummaging around in my purse for a Kleenex. I was probably allergic to this man.
“Just fine? Nice of you to say so,” Cullie said, sounding surprised at my lack of enthusiasm and a little hurt by my response. Well, I wasn’t going to fall all over myself raving about his pictures. I knew I was being rude, but I couldn’t help it. The photographs were gorgeous, and Cullie was obviously very talented. So why couldn’t I tell him so? Why did I have to high-hat him? Just because I was raised to be a snob didn’t mean I had to be one.
I cleared my throat, looked Cullie right in his bespeckled blue eyes, and said, “The truth is, I thought the photographs were—”
“Hi, hon. I’m back.”
I was about to admit that I really did like the photographs and that I was grateful to Cullie for helping me sell the place, when a young woman with long, blonde hair and very large breasts slid her arm through his.
“Sorry I took so long in there,” she said, pointing toward the ladies’ room. “There was a line.”
“No problem,” said Cullie, obviously happy to see her. “Hadley, this is Julia Applebaum and her friend, Mrs. Koff. Ladies, this is Hadley Kittredge.”
Hadley Kittredge. Give me a break. And what was this Mrs. Koff bullshit? Cullie knew perfectly well my first name was Alison.
Hadley Kittredge smiled at Julia and me. She had perfect hair, skin, and teeth and I hated her. “Pleasure to meet you, Julia,” she said. “You, too, Mrs.…”
“Koff,” I said. “Like the thing you do when you have a chest cold.” Hadley Kittredge probably never got chest colds.
“Let’s go, Hadley,” Cullie said to her. “The movie’s starting in ten minutes.”
“What are you seeing?” Julia asked the lovebirds.
“Moby Dick with Gregory Peck,” Hadley said. “It’s playing at that revival house in town. Cullie just adores sea stories.”
“Have a whale of a good time,” I muttered sourly.
“Hey, that’s a real coincidence,” Hadley said excitedly, slapping her thigh. “Did you get it, Cullie? Mrs. Koff told us to have a whale of a good time, and we’re going to see a movie about a whale!”
God had a sense of fair play after all. He gave this girl a great body but no brain.
“Yeah, I got it,” Cullie scowled. “Mrs. Koff has a lightning wit. The trouble is, nobody likes to get hit by lightning. Nice meeting you, Julia.”
Cullie and Hadley walked out of McGavin’s arm in arm, while Julia paid the check and I sulked.
“What was all that about, Koff?” Julia asked finally. “Why did you treat that nice man like you were Leona Helmsley and he was one of the little people? He was trying to be friendly and you had a bug up your ass.”
“I know, and I’m ashamed of myself,” I admitted. “I act crazy when I’m around that guy. He makes me nervous—so nervous my heart has palpitations, my hands shake, and my stomach gets the dry heaves.”
“Then you’d better do something about it.”
“Like what? Take Prozac?”
“No. See him again. Sounds to me like a case of love.”
Chapter 6
At three o’clock the next afternoon, I left Maplebark Manor for my three-thirty interview with Melanie Moloney. Not knowing what to wear—should I dress like the housekeeper or the lady of the house?—I finally chose a simple skirt and sweater outfit, made even simpler by the removal of all my jewelry.
Bluefish Cove, where Melanie lived, was about ten minutes from my house. A private, gated community that occupied a narrow strip of waterfront on the other end of town from Layton Harbor, Bluefish Cove was known as “Connecticuthampton” because of all the New Yorkers who had bought weekend houses there after having previously owned homes in Westhampton, Sag Harbor, and the like. The commute was better, many of them said.
Unlike the understated-but-nevertheless-million-dollar manor houses of Layton Harbor, the homes in Bluefish Cove were, for the most part, splashy contemporary residences that offered floor-to-ceiling expanses of glass, lots of marble, pickled wood cabinetry, and state-of-the-art bathrooms that were described as “spas.” Old-money Laytonites dismissed the residents of Bluefish Cove as “climbers.” Bluefish Cove-ers considered people who lived in Layton Harbor to be “boring old farts.”
As I drove over to Melanie’s house I tried to imagine how the interview would go. Then I tried to imagine how my life would go if I got the job. Then I tried to imagine how my life would go if I didn’t get the job. Neither prospect thrilled me.
At three-twelve I pulled up to the Bluefish Cove gatehouse, where a uniformed security guard stopped me.
“Your name?” he barked.
“Alison Koff,” I said, after opening my car window. “I’m here to see Melanie Moloney.”
“Koff. Koff. I don’t see any Koffs on the list. I’ll have to call Miss Moloney. Wait here.”
Oh, great, I thought. She’s either forgotten about our appointment or hired somebody else already.
“Go on in,” the guard said finally, opening the gate and waving me through.
I maneuvered my car past a parade of hedges, stone walls, and wrought-iron gates until I arrived at 7 Bluefish Cove. I pulled into the pink-graveled driveway, which was bordered by Belgian bloc
k and dozens of little white spotlights, and parked in the area to the left of the front door.
The exterior of the house was constructed of naturally weathered cedar shingles, and there appeared to be several decks and balconies protruding from all sides. Most striking at first glance were the number and size of the glass doors and windows. I panicked as I imagined myself Windexing all 6,000 square feet of them.
I walked briskly to the front of the house, rang the doorbell, and waited. Nobody came. After a minute or so, I rang again. Still nobody. It was a cold, blustery mid-January day, and the windchill factor made it feel like zero degrees. I pulled my cloth coat around me, wishing I hadn’t pawned my mink. Where is she? I thought. Doesn’t she care that I’m freezing my ass off out here? How rude can you get?
I pressed the doorbell again, this time giving it a couple of extra-long rings. The tip of my nose was starting to hurt, and my fingers and toes were going numb. Where on earth was Melanie? She had to know I was coming, because the guard had just telephoned her. Maybe she’s in the “spa,” I figured. Or maybe she’s on an important long-distance call.
I waited another few minutes before ringing again. No one answered. Then, thinking the bell might be out of order, I knocked on the door several times. Still no answer. Was I too early for our appointment? Or too late? Had I showed up on the wrong day? Did I have the right house? The right town?
I was beginning to wonder if I had hallucinated the entire conversation with Melanie. Chilled to the bone, I decided to walk back to my car, turn on the heat, and sit there until I got some feeling back in my limbs. At three thirty-five I went back to the front of the house and rang the bell once more.
“You’re late,” said the woman who opened the door. She was wearing a black-and-mauve velour warm-up suit and black high-heeled shoes accented with little gold bows. She was short, painfully thin, and had shoulder-length, platinum-blonde hair of a sheen and texture that could best be described as synthetic. Her pasty white face had been stretched and reshaped so many times that it reminded me of the vanilla Turkish taffy my mother used to bring me from Atlantic City. The only color on her face came from her heavily mascara-ed blue eyes and her thin-lipped mouth, which was over-painted with dark red lipstick. How old was she? There was absolutely no way to tell. All I knew was that she was standing inside her front door, her hands on her little hips, wearing the same expression my mother always wore whenever I’d commit some grammatical atrocity.
“Our appointment was for three-thirty,” she said in a Betty Boop voice.
“I was here at three-fifteen,” I protested, shivering as a gust of wind nearly knocked me off Melanie’s front step.
“Yes, but our appointment was for three-thirty. Not three-fifteen. Not three thirty-five. Three-thirty. I’m a woman who demands punctuality. That’s why my housekeeper gets twenty-five dollars an hour and the rest of them get fifteen.”
I nodded, too cold to speak.
“Come in,” she said finally.
I was about to enter Melanie’s house when she raised her hand and blocked me.
“Not this way. Through the service entrance,” she said, pointing to the back of the house.
I gathered my coat around me, braced myself for yet another few minutes of bone-chilling air, and walked around to the back of the house, cursing all the way. I cursed Melanie for playing her little head game. I cursed Sandy for leaving me for Soozie. I cursed the economy for making it so hard to earn a living. I cursed my mother for not being the kind of parent I could go to for a loan. I cursed my father for dying and screwing up my life. I cursed Janet Claiborne for not selling my house. I even cursed the state of Connecticut for having such lousy weather. As I neared Melanie’s back door, I suddenly thought of Cullie Harrington and how I’d made him use my service entrance. Then I cursed myself for acting so pretentious. What goes around comes around, I muttered.
Melanie showed me into her kitchen, a gleaming, high-tech affair with pickled pink Allmilmo wood cabinets, white Corian counters, white tile flooring, state-of-the-art appliances, and a center island, one side of which featured a Jenn-Air Grill, the other side a butcher block cutting board. In the corner was a small round table and four chrome-and-cane chairs. “Sit there,” Melanie said, pointing to one of the chairs. She did not invite me to take off my hat and coat, so I kept them on, wishing I could use my hat to cover my nose. Melanie’s perfume (I instantly recognized it as Giorgio, the fragrance everyone was wearing that year) was so strong it nearly choked me.
“As you can see, I like my house kept sparkling clean,” she said, admiring the spotless white floor under our feet. “My previous girl mopped this floor twice a day.”
My previous girl. How would I endure working for this woman? “That won’t be a problem,” I said. I had come this far and I wasn’t about to back out now.
“Tell me about yourself,” she insisted. “Are you a local person or do you live in Jessup?”
Jessup was the blue-collar town that bordered Layton to the northwest. Most of the people who “serviced” Layton residents lived there. “I’m from Layton,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Really? How long have you been cleaning houses?” she asked.
“Since I was a child.” My mother used to rate the cleanliness of my room on a scale of one to ten. If I earned a ten, she’d take me out to Schrafft’s for a hot fudge sundae. As clean as I kept my room, it was a miracle I wasn’t the fattest kid in town.
“You said on the phone that you were most recently employed by a couple on Woodland Way?”
“That’s right.”
“And you’re leaving because they can no longer afford you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll want their names, of course, so I can check your references.”
“Of course.” Now what was I going to do?
“But first, I’ll walk you through the house so you’ll have an idea of the work involved.”
“Would it be all right if I took off my coat? It’s a little warm in here.” I was beginning to defrost.
Melanie instructed me to leave my things on the chair. Then she led me on a tour of the house, which was decorated in early Maurice Villency. Practically everything in the place was white, just like Melanie’s face and hair. The white wall-to-wall-carpeted living room was furnished with a white leather sectional sofa, white track lightning, and assorted glass tables. The room’s only color came from the Italian verde marble fireplace, which looked as if it had never been used. The dining room, also carpeted in white, contained an enormous rectangular glass table and twelve chairs, upholstered in a white silk fabric. One of the dining room walls was mirrored, with glass shelving and a wet bar. Both the living room and dining room had sliding glass doors that opened up to the pool deck and offered spectacular views of the Sound. Adjacent to the kitchen was a small maid’s room, a laundry room/mud room that had a laundry chute from the master dressing room upstairs and a dumbwaiter shaft to the garage down below, a 300-bottle wine cellar carved into a rock ledge to ensure perfect temperature, a combination TV room/exercise room (it had a large-screen television as well as a NordicTrack), and Melanie’s office, which she said was off-limits until I became a member of her household. The second floor of the house, also carpeted in white, consisted of a spacious master suite: a cathedral-ceilinged master bedroom that enjoyed views of the water through sliding glass doors on both sides of a raised Italian verde marble fireplace; and a dressing room/bath featuring a Jacuzzi, sauna, and stall shower, a “vanity room” with mirrored walls and 24-karat-gold fixtures, and two walk-in closets. Down the hall from the master suite were two guest bedrooms, each with its own “spa.”
No wonder Melanie’s paying the big bucks, I thought. Never mind her crabby personality. With all the glass doors, mirrored walls, and white carpeting, the place was a housekeeper’s nightmare.
“So, that’s the house,” Melanie said when we returned to the kitchen. “Y
ou think you can do the job?”
I took a deep breath and nodded.
“Good. Now let’s talk about your references,” she said. “Give me the phone number of that couple you worked for.”
The moment of truth. Should I stall and say the couple was away on a trip and couldn’t be reached? Should I give her a wrong number? Melanie was no dope; she was a journalist, after all, and she was bound to find out I was lying. I had no choice but to tell her everything. Well, almost everything.
“I’m the couple,” I said, looking her straight in the eye.
“What do you mean you’re the couple?”
“The house I’ve been cleaning on Woodland Way is my own.”
“Look, what is this anyway? Who are you and what are you doing in my house? Are you from one of the tabloids or maybe from the ‘Geraldo’ show? Or do you work for Alistair Downs or something? He sent you here to steal my manuscript, didn’t he?”
Melanie’s face was so taut that when she spoke, nothing moved but her lips. The rest of her face remained perfectly still.
“No, I’m not from the tabloids or Geraldo. And I’m not a spy sent by Alistair Downs,” I assured her, knowing she’d freak out if she found out I did indeed work for Alistair. “My name is Alison Koff and I live on Woodland Way. My husband and I are divorced, and due to his financial reversals, I’ve been cleaning Maplebark Manor myself.”
“Maplebark Manor?”
“That’s our house’s name,” I explained when Melanie looked puzzled. “But just because I’ve never been a professional housekeeper doesn’t mean I can’t clean like one.”
Melanie remained skeptical. “I don’t think so,” she said, handing me my hat and coat.
I wasn’t giving up so fast. “Your ad in the newspaper said you were looking for someone with superb cleaning skills, which I happen to have. It also said you wanted someone who was honest, which I obviously am since I’ve admitted the truth about myself. You said you wanted someone who was reliable. Well, I showed up for this interview fifteen minutes early. You wanted someone who was discreet, and I haven’t told a soul I was coming here. And you wanted someone who spoke English. Think how confident you’ll feel every time you ask me to answer the phone or communicate with your friends and business associates.”
