See Jane Date

by Melissa Senate

  “I’m really looking forward to meeting you,” I said. “I’ll be there, seven o’clock.”

  “Great. See you tomorrow.”

  I hung up and burst into a smile. I had a mystery date tomorrow night. At a thing!

  I pulled out my datebook and flipped to Tuesday, June2. I’d scribbled down the details Amanda had given me on Sunday afternoon. Andrew Mackelroy, 30, Computer Engineer, Jeff’s company. Five-eleven, dirty-blond hair, blue eyes. Good guy, family oriented, into sports.

  I was family oriented, too, sort of. And I did like to walk; that was a sport, sort of. I transferred the address he’d given me into my datebook and slipped it back into my tote bag.

  I felt like doing a cartwheel down the hall, but opted instead to rush to Eloise’s tiny office. She was peering at slides through a loop on her light-box.

  “Guess who just called?” I whispered in her ear. “Tuesday’s guy, Andrew! We’re going out tomorrow night. Some surprise thing involving Italian on Delancey Street.”

  Eloise looked up. “Ooh—I’ll bet it’s a trendy gallery or club opening. The Lower East Side is beyond trendoid now.”

  I semi-frowned. “Should I wear something really hip? Like what?”

  Eloise’s intercom crackled. “El?”

  It was Daisy, her boss. “Could you c’mere and bring the slides for the bulimia book?”

  “Sure,” Eloise said, pushing off the intercom.

  Eloise was designing the cover of Memoir of a Skinny-Minny Wanna-Be: My Bulimic Years. The title was so long that hardly anything else could appear on the cover. Eloise had thought of placing a tiny digital scale between the title and subtitle, with flashing red numbers popping up and fading. Skinny-Minny was Gwen’s book. I was “baby-sitting” it while Gwen was out, which meant I was being burdened with seeing it through all the phases of production and sending everything for approval by FedEx to Gwen’s house. The cover mechanicals had come back with corrections and dried slime that looked like either baby food or baby barf. But thanks to Jeremy, I no longer had to deal with it.

  “I’ll plan a hipster outfit for you and bring it upstairs tonight,” Eloise said, shutting off the light-box. “Oh, and I checked out the Gnat. She doesn’t look that much like Nicole Kidman. And hello? Who wears leather pants past Memorial Day weekend, anyway?”

  I kissed her, peered out of her office until I saw Morgan trot off somewhere, then sneaked out for the much-needed cigarette.

  The tea kettle started shrieking in my kitchen just as I sat down to read the very juicy first paragraph of the Gnat’s first chapter. I ran to the stove to turn off the burner.

  Ten minutes later, everything I could ever want, for the next two hours, at least, was on a bamboo tray: a cup of apple-cinnamon tea, two chocolate-caramel rice cakes, a half-full pack of Marlboro Lights and an unopened pack, a lighter, an ashtray and two dark lead pencils. I carried my bounty into the main room of my studio and settled myself on the futon, the first chapter of the Gnat’s memoir square on my lap. Cigarette lit and rice cake bitten into, I began reading.

  I was fucking one of the most famous actors currently in show business when he handed me a legal document to sign. Three pages preventing me from ever discussing him or our relationship in any medium to any media. He’d been trailing kisses up my thigh moments before he’d reached over me to the nightstand to pick up The Document. “It’s just a precaution that my agent, manager, accountant and press people insist on,” he’d told me between darts of his tongue against my clitoris.

  One of People magazine’s sexiest men alive was performing oral sex on me. Me, a small-time actress who’d never been cut a break. Me, Natasha Nutley from Queens, New York. The girl who’d never had a best friend. The girl whose parents thought she was a disappointment for as long as she could remember. The girl who’d managed to get two lousy lines on a prime-time hospital drama because she’d slept with the casting director’s assistant’s assistant.

  Who was I not to sign anything anyone put in front of me? And who was I not to feel like the luckiest woman in the world because The Actor was making love to me? Making love. That was a laugh. Making a loser out of me was more like it.

  Seven weeks. Seven of the most meaningful weeks of my life meant absolutely nothing to him. I’d reminded him of a girlfriend from drama school. He later told me that was why he’d chosen me. And while I thought he was falling in love with me, he was simply getting blow jobs from a girl who’d learned that was the way to a man’s heart a long, long time ago.

  Whip out the violins. And a barf bag, please. Did I really have to read this pornography?

  Remke and Jeremy would love it; it was exactly what they wanted. Dirty words, sex and enough woe-is-me, boo-hoo baloney to fill a big fat mass-market paperback summer read. What a bunch of melodramatic hooey.

  Never had a best friend. Her parents thought she was a disappointment. Give me a break! Natasha Nutley had had everything handed to her on a sterling silver platter from the moment she’d flashed those green eyes and red ringlets at her mother’s obstetrician twenty-eight years ago. Who did she think she was fooling? Maybe the American people at large wouldn’t know she was lying through her capped teeth. But I did. I’d been there.

  The first time I’d clapped eyes on Natasha Anne Nutley was in the sixth grade at P.S. 101, when Mrs. Greenman had introduced her as a new student to our class. The Gnat and her family had moved into an apartment building around the corner from my own. Aunt Ina, Uncle Charlie and Dana lived in a building a few blocks away, where Ina and Charlie still lived, a few more blocks over from Grammy—and Ethan Miles, Incinerator Man. Natasha’s father had inherited his father’s pharmacy and moved the Nutley family to upscale Forest Hills from Flushing. To this day I remembered Mrs. Greenman introducing Natasha with the pleased smile that had been previously reserved for the class president.

  Natasha had scored more invitations for roller-skating and McDonald’s and slumber parties on her first day at P.S. 101 than I’d had in the history of my grammar school career. All the girls had wanted to be her best friend. And all the boys had salivated over her. Unable to take their eyes off her, they’d constantly failed tests or lost track of what the teacher was saying. Robby Evers included. I was always staring at him, so I was very well aware that he was always staring at Natasha and her budding breasts. She’d had her eye on Jimmy Alfonzo, the sixth-grade equivalent of James Dean or Dylan from Beverly Hills 90210. By science hour, day two, she and Jimmy were a couple. That was when I realized I could have a shot with Robby. Because the girl he wanted was already taken. There was nowhere for him to go but down.

  I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem in grammar school.

  Robby Evers, who’d dreamed of being a hard-hitting journalist like his hero, Walter Cronkite, hadn’t been interested in the skinny, quiet girl with the dark eyes and dark hair who hung around with the quieter and skinnier Miner twins. Not in sixth grade, or seventh, or eighth. Or even ninth, when my current C-cup-sized breasts had begun to make themselves known. In eleventh grade, Robby and I had been paired as partners in biology class. He’d been sickened by the idea of slicing open the dead frog, so we’d held the little knife together, my hand guiding his. With the first prick, he’d looked into my eyes, terror and discomfort forcing shut his own sweet brown eyes. I’d made him feel understood, and I’d made him feel right. And so Robby Evers began to notice me. Or my C-sized breasts, more likely. He still stared at Gnatasha, but she was involved in her on-again, off-again long-term relationship with Jimmy Alfonzo.

  In biology and English, the two classes we shared, Robby would show me newspaper clippings that he’d brought in to discuss in his social studies class and at meetings for the high school newspaper, which I’d joined to be near him. He’d go on and on about the injustice and the horror in the world around us and declare his intention to travel that world and document the atrocities so that everyone would be alerted and do something about it. I was in love. Robby Evers cared about ev
erything. No other boy in Forest Hills High School gave a hoot about the ozone layer, let alone apartheid in South Africa. He was known for his intensity, and girls liked that, but the intensity combined with his awkwardness worked against him. He was going to be a foreign correspondent, and most girls at Forest Hills High had no idea what that was. I was going to be a poet. He liked that. Once, while I’d been passionately agreeing with him about the devastating photos of children starving in America, Robby had touched my hand. For three days I washed around the spot where his flesh had touched mine.

  I’d been so sure he was going to ask me to the junior class semiformal, which was in two weeks. It would be my first dance. Every day after school I’d stop at Macy’s and try on the pink gauzy dress I’d spotted while on a forced family shopping expedition to find Dana a dress for her own first dance at Russell Sage Junior High. (She was something of the Natasha Nutley of the seventh grade.) But a week before the dance, Robby still hadn’t asked me. And suddenly, we were down to three days. In English class, I was gearing up to ask him, ever so casually, if he’d like to go with me. But then I’d heard the sound that accompanied Natasha Nutley everywhere she went: the jangle of bangle bracelets.

  She was giggling and leaning over Robby’s desk, her butt in the air. “So you’ll pick me up at seven-thirty, right, Robby?” He’d nodded, a speechless expression of bliss on his face. “Don’t forget the corsage, white with a pink ribbon to match my dress.”

  My dress was going to be pink.

  Robby watched her sashay her little hips back to her own desk, then pumped his fist in the air with a silently mouthed Yes! He’d passed me a note: “Where do you buy a corsage, do you know?” I’d written back that he should stop at Forest Hills Flowers on Queens Blvd, a few long blocks from the school. He’d smiled at me, and then hadn’t taken his eyes off the back of Natasha Nutley’s ringletted head for the fifty minutes of AP English.

  I’d cried for three days. The day after the dance, I’d dared to ask Robby if he’d had a good time. He’d barely lifted his head from his desk. Said she’d canceled at the last minute, that she and Jimmy Alfonzo had gotten back together. He’d spent a whole hour at Forest Hills Flowers, he’d told me, only to end up throwing the corsage away.

  The corsage that should have been mine. Robby Evers had been ruined by reality. Natasha Nutley had taken all his sixteen-year-old idealism and introduced the hard facts of real life. And Robby never touched my hand again.

  Okay, okay, whip out the violins for me now, right?

  As if on cue, the sweeping crescendo of an operatic overture burst through the wall. Opera Man must have gotten into a fight with his girlfriend. I didn’t recognize the composer, but I knew drama when I heard it.

  I lit a cigarette, took a long drag and leaned back against the futon as I exhaled slowly.

  How was I supposed to carefully read and thoughtfully comment on Natasha’s chapter while some Italian woman boomed next door? I pounded my fist on the wall. Opera Man pounded back, but he lowered the volume.

  Five cigarettes later, I’d finished reading Chapter One. Ten cigarettes later, I’d finished editing it. I’d penciled notes in the margins. Expand here. Flesh this out. Show, don’t tell. I’d corrected her atrocious spelling. Natasha Nutley had apparently slept her way into high school AP English, too.

  I reached for a cigarette—the pack was empty. Twelve butts littered the ashtray on the Parsons table. I hadn’t even realized I’d smoked so many cigarettes. I stood up and stretched my legs, then crumpled the empty pack into the ashtray and carried the bamboo tray into the kitchen.

  As the butts and ashes fell into the little garbage can under the sink, I could hear Serge shouting in his Russian accent. “I do not understand, El-weeze! In my country, when people love each other, they spend time together!”

  “I need my space, Serge!” Eloise declared.

  I thought only men said that.

  A few minutes later, a door slammed, and heavy footsteps bounded downstairs. Then came the sound of Eloise unlocking her door and running up the steps. She knocked to the tune of the “Wedding March.” “Open up, I have the best outfit for you for Trendoid Night!”

  If I hadn’t overheard that little tidbit of a fight, I never would have known that Serge had moments ago stormed out of Eloise’s apartment. Eloise’s expression gave nothing away.

  “El? Are you okay?”

  She opened my closet door and hung up the outfit, which involved lots of low-cut black matte jersey. “Yeah. Why? Oh, you heard that?” I nodded. “He’s just so clingy, you know? I like to have nights to myself.”

  I tried to imagine wanting a night to myself when I had a boyfriend. I couldn’t. I’d wanted to spend every waking and sleeping minute with Max; he was my only reference. And if Jeremy Black were mine, would I tell him I needed space? I don’t think so.

  “Ooh, we’re missing Will and Grace,” she said, pointing the remote at my thirteen-inch television. “Let’s watch it, then I’ll dress you and we’ll accessorize.”

  We dropped down on the futon and cracked up at something funny Grace’s secretary said. At a commercial, I slipped the marked-up first chapter of the Gnat’s memoir into a folder and dumped it into my tote bag. It was time to forget about Natasha and her semi-charmed life and concentrate on making my own exactly that.

  Five

  Delancey Street smelled like a combination of rotisserie chicken, cigar smoke and garbage rotting in the rain. Where were all the quaint pickle barrels a` la the movie Crossing Delancey? Where were all the kosher delis? Wasn’t the Lower East Side supposed to look like it did at the turn of the last century?

  “Ooh, mama!”

  Three teenagers piled onto one child-sized bicycle sped past me, licking their lips at me and making kissing sounds. I decided to take that as a compliment. I’d worn a boring black pantsuit to work, then changed into my hot-to-trot date outfit, which I’d lugged to work in a garment bag. Eloise had done my makeup under the fluorescent lights in Posh’s women’s bathroom. Not that I was wearing much. According to Eloise, this season it was all about lips. Mine were currently lined and shined in Bobbi Brown’s Raisin. Which was currently lining and shining the rim of my cigarette filter. I flicked the cigarette into a puddle of something lining the curb, then popped a Certs into my mouth.

  Five thirty-three, 535, 537. I was getting close. Deep breath, deep breath. I still had a few blocks to go before I hit the address Andrew had given me.

  The Lower East Side was the kind of neighborhood that was shared by the very old and the very new. Tiny, hunched-over elderly women in kerchiefs wheeled carts down the sidewalks; young trendies in bizarre clothes flocked into the bars, clubs and restaurants that had opened in droves. But as I walked farther down Delancey toward Chinatown, the trendy bars got fewer and fewer. The women pushing carts seemed to multiply.

  Here I was—563 Delancey. It was a tenement, much like the one I lived in. A five-story brick walk-up. I leaned my head back and stared up at the ugly building. Five concrete steps led to a metal door. Perhaps the hipster club or hot art gallery was housed on the first floor. No sign, name or indication of an establishment was supposedly all the rage now for the hottest downtown nightspots. Places too cool to be revealed to the general uncool public. I headed up the steps in my three-inch strappy sandals, relieved that I’d let Eloise convince me to borrow her clingy, low-cut dress. I looked like hot stuff tonight. It wasn’t every day I got whistles and licked lips from teenage boys.

  A plaque of surnames, apartments numbers and buzzers was on the left of the door. Mackelroy, 4R. Did Andrew live here? Wouldn’t he have mentioned the thing was in his own apartment? Maybe it was some sort of performance art? I pushed the round button next to Mackelroy.

  “Who is it?” sing-songed a child’s voice.

  Who was that? “Um, it’s Jane, I’m—”

  The buzzer buzzed. I pushed open the door and was immediately overwhelmed by the smell of frying onions. A long, stee
p staircase loomed in front of me. I braced my palm on the banister and twisted my head to peer up in the dim light. I didn’t see anything. But I could hear the basic apartment building sounds—muted televisions, telephones ringing, footsteps, voices.

  My long dress twisted around my ankles as I negotiated the rickety steps. By the time I reached the fourth-floor landing, I was huffing and puffing, and a tiny drop of perspiration rolled down my cleavage. You’d think I’d be used to climbing four flights of stairs, considering that I had two more to go in my own building. Nope.

  I fanned myself in front of 4F, took a deep breath, plastered on a friendly smile and walked across the narrow hallway to 4R. A little sticky label under the apartment number read MACKELROY. I pushed the bell.

  “Who is it?” sing-songed the same childish voice.

  “Get away from the door, Jenny!” snapped an older woman’s voice. “Go put the soup bowls on the table like I asked you to.”

  I gnawed my lower lip. A few locks were turned and the door swung open. An attractive woman in her fifties or sixties pushed back strands of hair into her gray-blond bun, then wiped her hands on her apron. “Welcome,” she said, extending her wiped hand to me. “You must be Jane.”

  Maybe not, I thought. Maybe I’m someone else, depending on who you are. I smiled—sort of.

  “I’m Janice Mackelroy, Andy’s mom. Come on in. Andy’s going to be a little late. Tied up at the office again. The way they work you kids now, you’d think they were paying you a fortune.”

  Before I had a chance to process any of the above, Janice Mackelroy took my hand and led me down a long, narrow hallway into the living room.

  “Why don’t you have a seat, and I’ll bring you a nice glass of wine.” She smiled, then disappeared.

  I found myself walking farther into the room and sitting down on a sofa covered with plastic. It creaked. There was plastic on all the upholstered furniture. A rectangular glass coffee table was so close to the sofa that I couldn’t lift my leg to cross it. A stack of coffee-table books on art and sailing and a purple glass bowl containing wrapped sour balls was set on the table. I thought about flipping through a book to have something to do, but I felt eyes on me. I followed the feeling to the stern face of an elderly man in a portrait above the television. I darted my gaze back to the top book. Modern Sailors.