by Bill Scheft
“I mean he thinks you’re coming to, you know, see him.”
“I am.”
“But he thinks you’re coming to, you know, see him.”
“Oh, please. Half the time on the phone I have to keep introducing myself to him.”
“Yeah. His short-term memory is really going.”
“Well, that’s it.”
“What?”
“If he tries to start anything, I’ll say, ‘But Mort, I just blew you ten minutes ago.’”
“Nicely done. That went awfully well.”
That was the first and last segment of Mort improvisation that evening. Neither of them could ever do any better.
The weekend—Good Christ, had it been six and a half months ago—had been that rare intersection where uneventful meets memorable. Sheila, at the insistence of Mort’s sister, Dottie, stayed at the Sussman home in Lynn…and in her son Harvey’s room. She cracked herself up thinking that although she’d saved a hundred dollars on a motel room, she might have made five hundred charging College Boy for such kinkiness. Two nights sleeping alone in his bed? Five hundred dollars was about right. The absurdity of all this was not lost on College Boy. And if it took the littlest hiatus, Sheila would bring it back with a line like “Your poster of Vada Pinson says hello.”
Dottie loved Sheila, especially Sunday morning, when she had changed the sheets and vacuumed before ten A.M. “What do I owe you, dear?” she asked. “Five hundred dollars,” said Sheila. And they both laughed.
Mostly, the three of them, Mort, Sheila, and College Boy, sat quietly in front of the TV at Vinnin Estates. It hadn’t dawned on anyone that spending more than a half hour in each other’s company with nothing to do could be so uncomfortable. Uncomfortable as Mort letting Sheila see him try to get into a chair. Saturday afternoon, Mort had thrown two well-wadded twenties at her lap and told her to get herself a manicure and facial at “that Lancôme joint in the mall that’s always empty.”
“Mort, I have my own money.”
“Don’t make me look bad in front of the kid.” Another twenty knuckled in front of her. “What the hell, get your toes Simonized, too. You never let me make a fuss over you.”
College Boy told her after she left how Mort had confided to him that this was an inopportune time to have marriage pressure put on him. “I told him, ‘Ah, Mort. I think she just came down for a visit. Nothing else.’ And he said, ‘I think I know a little more about redheads than you, kid.’”
Sheila used the money to procure a big-time North Shore clam-bake and they ate at the dining room table like people who do that sort of thing by design. Mort was as happy as Parkinson’s allowed. He kept repeating two wishful thoughts: “Didn’t the Lancôme folks do a wonderful job?” and “Isn’t it too bad Sheila has to leave early tomorrow morning and this is the last we’ll be seeing of her?”
They met in the China Sails parking lot at ten-thirty Sunday morning so College Boy could show her the payphone.
“I think your uncle broke it off with me.”
“What did he say?”
They both blurted simultaneously—“Good-bye, Helga.”
“You are wonderful with him,” she said. “Man, could I be wrong about more people?”
He kissed her like he had just come up with the idea. She did the same thing. Neither one fell for it. And when the kiss ended, as it had to, neither one said good-bye. Not even “Good-bye, Helga.” But they both thought of it.
Right around the spot where the Wilbur Cross Parkway inexplicably becomes the Merritt Parkway, Sheila Manning remembered she had a 7:30 appointment that night in front of Tower Chemists. A new guy. Marshall Something. Jesus, not a new guy. There hadn’t been a new guy in over a year. Sheila was a rent-controlled building. The only openings came when someone moved or died. Jesus, not another orientation session, followed by enthusiastically feigned interest. She pulled into the next Mobil rest stop and called Marshall Something’s work number. She told his voice mail she couldn’t meet him because she wouldn’t be back in time and she might have Hepatitis C. Well, she might….
Monday morning, she made all the other calls. The four-plus hours a week Sheila had devoted to her cottage industry were briefly reinvested in a non-profit venture, phone calls to College Boy in the China Sails parking lot. Briefly, as in eight days. The Sunday after she got back, College Boy asked if she could ship a couple of his bats up to Salem. (“How do you ship bats?”/“In a box.”/“A bat box?”/ “Yeah.”/“And where do I get a bat box, from Bruce Fucking Wayne?”) The snow was still at least a month away and he thought he might escape to the cages on Route 1 during Mort’s afternoon naps and redirect his caregiver’s frustration to the pitching machine, a slightly more inanimate object than his uncle.
She called back Tuesday and said she had tried to get into Mort’s apartment for two days, but her key didn’t work. And neither did the one the super had. They needed Mort’s approval to call a locksmith.
College Boy went cold.
“No need for the locksmith. I forgot. My fault.”
“Forgot what?”
“Uh, I changed the locks before I left.”
“And when did you plan to tell me that?”
“Uh, I guess now is not a good time.”
“Actually,” Sheila had said, “now is the perfect time.” And she filled the awkward pause that followed with her first “Fuck you, College Boy.”
There had been a few calls to Mort after the lock change exchange, where College Boy answered the phone and she tersed, almost Cajun, “He there?” But that got real fraught, real fast. So, she stopped calling the week before Halloween. Hey, the old guy had already dumped her, hadn’t he?
As for her evenings, she stayed quit because she’d already started, hadn’t she? And Sheila Manning would not let any man, any subject of that pathetic hegemony, make her restart. Just as no man had made her quit. She had closed shop eight days before she found out about the locks. Eight days. Phone company records would back this up, if it came to that. But it hadn’t. Sheila Manning had received the ultimate retirement gift for a call girl. Privacy, respectfully folded and left on her dresser at home.
The last six months had been what those New Age assholes would call a “journey.” Many, many more good days than bad, but the bad ones carried an aftertaste worse than pre-aspartamane Fresca. For the first two weeks, she ate a lot of questionable food in front of a lot of bad television, then reversed the process the next two weeks—bad food, questionable television.
The Monday after Thanksgiving (And don’t believe that bullshit about one box of Stove Top stuffing feeding six people. That’s a single serving, Jim.), Sheila walked to the north end of Roosevelt Island and up three flights of stairs to Serious Fitness, Inc. As she caught her breath and adjusted her eyes to that daytime dusty indoor sunlight, she was able to make out four masses of black men, each one bigger than the next, each one somehow laughably contained in the screaming thread count of their tank tops, their mammoth necks and arms emerging through loopholes in the laws of physics. Weights rang. Rap music throbbed. No one looked up.
That’s it, Sheila thought. I went through the wrong door and now I’m in the prison yard.
Through the dustiest light, a man her size appeared. Her height anyway. Twice as wide up top, then narrowing violently into an enviable waist. And half her age. The owner’s kid.
“Welcome to Serious Fitness. My name’s Ray. I’m the owner.”
“No shit. Sheila Manning.”
“You here for a free workout?”
“No. I’m here for the night job.”
“You’re a cleaning woman?”
“Yeah.”
“No shit?”
“Hey, kid. If you can own a gym, I can be a cleaning woman.” He laughed. If you call a kid “kid” and they laugh, always a good sign. “How much?”
“It’s easy work. Clean the bathroom. Vacuum. Garbage. We have a laundry service for the towels. It’s like an hour a night.”
&nbs
p; “It’s two hours.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Now I’m embarrassed about the money.”
“Well, hold your breath and tell me.”
“Five nights. A hundred dollars.”
“You can get someone. Just not me.”
“I guess so.”
“Why don’t you do it after you close and save the money?”
“I’ve got evening clients in Manhattan.” Sheila tried to catch herself from nodding. Too late. “And I take classes two nights a week.”
“Very admirable.”
“Oh, I’m admirable.”
“Where are you from?”
“L. A.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“The Philippines.”
“You know, I’d do it for two hundred, but I’d never ask you for that.”
“What if I give you the hundred dollars and train you twice a week for an hour?”
“What?”
“I charge fifty dollars an hour for a workout. That’s a hundred dollars. Plus, you get to use the cardio machines—the bike, the stair-master, the treadmill—for free anytime.”
“Anytime? Like after I finish disinfecting the toilet?”
“Sure.”
“Now why would I take a deal like that?”
“Because you’ve never had a personal trainer before. And because you like it here…. Come on, you like it here.”
Fucking mindreader.
Shelves are glutted with books that barf on incessantly about the merits of exercise and the need to increase flexibility, stamina, and muscle tone. And those are all damn important. But not nearly as important as having a place to go. And that, above all, is what Serious Fitness, Inc., became for Sheila. A place to go. More to the point, a place to go Tuesday and Friday mornings to collect on her two free weekly training sessions. And even more to the point, a place to go at night.
Ray Quintano, “Q-Dog,” as the brothers working the weights called him, was not half Sheila’s age. He was twenty-three, which was still too damn close. His family had fled to California when he was three, just after all the martial fun began with Ferdinand Marcos and his shopaholic wife, Neiman Marcos. By eight, Ray was bench pressing twice his weight. He won every junior bodybuilding title available before his career effectively ended at eighteen when he just said no to steroids. He spent two more years in L. A. learning the Zen patience required to be a personal trainer, then moved his parents and older brother to Astoria and built a Manhattan-based clientele before taking the big-time debt plunge and opening Serious Fitness, Inc.
Sheila walked in as Q-Dog was celebrating his eight-week anniversary. The place was doing okay. The housewives and self-employed who loved his riveting care and his default setting—extreme encouragement—had little problem taking the tram to Roosevelt Island, even if they didn’t buy Ray saying it was “just like the one at Disney World.” The others he’d see at night at Crunch or the Vertical Club or the NYHRC, and they’d have to pay the additional fifteen-dollar Visiting Trainer Fee. Mostly, the dusty-lit walk-up was a haven for Ray’s former colleagues, those slabs of mankind still in the gravity of competitive bodybuilding. Men who every other weekend greased up in a high school auditorium and vied for titles like “Mr. Atlantic Corridor” or “Mr. Iroquois Region” and trophies slightly less vague. Who needed no encouragement or attention, just a brooding, stark space to hold their intensity. A serious fitness place, inc. A place to go.
Ray’s older brother, Joey, helped with the renovation and trained any stray women who were more interested in the, ahem, social, nonworking component of working out. His father, a former officer in the Philippine army, was a marksmanship instructor at the police academy in Manhattan. His mother was the laundry service for the towels.
Sheila would meet all of them in the first week. She would only immediately understand Joey, whose opening line to her went something like, “Are you still modeling? Man, they were crazy to let you go.” Good one, Joey. The old man repaired the plug on the vacuum her first night and bowed when he was finished. Seriously. He bowed. Sheila’s second night, she helped the mother gather up the towels and asked, “What do you want me to call you? Mrs. Quintano? Mrs. Q.?” “Oh no,” she said. “I’m Mom.” That would take a while.
As compelling as the others were, the kid, Ray, was the star of the show. He was one of those guys who remembered everything you ever said to him and would then bring it up a few days later as if it was part of your long storied history together. “Remember the time you said you hated the leg extension machine?”/“You mean Tuesday? Three days ago?” Like that. Second, he was one of those guys who remembered everything you ever said to him and would use it as ammunition to tease you, or preferably, himself. One time, once, one time, the radio was on in the gym and the song “Vehicle” by the Ides of March came on. Sheila said, “Ray, you were two when this song came out.” From then on, whenever Sheila needed a break to combat her tentativeness before the next machine, Ray would cup his ear, whether or not there was music playing, and say, “Was I born when this song came out?”
Those were the easy, disarming moves that kept things lively. And that was the point with Ray. Get your work in, be serious, keep moving, keep the body guessing, but fill the moments in between with playful shit before the next challenge. “Give me fifteen reps, one second hold, three sets, ten seconds in between.”/“You do three sets of fifteen reps, you sadist.” Like that. Sheila, who had given God the job of keeping her in shape the first forty-two years—and the Big Fella had done fine work—knew nothing about exercise and fitness other than it was a smashing idea for the rest of the world. She knew a little more about health clubs, having walked by more than a few and seen various women on treadmills and thinking, every time, “That’s all I need. To officially be running nowhere.” And she had an idea about personal trainers, that they paid rapt attention to most of these same women and their bodies for an hour or two a week in exchange for money. Hmm. Sheila never judged the motives or sincerity of the personal trainer. Professional courtesy.
Had she been wrong about everything! Everything, including how long it took to clean the headquarters of Serious Fitness, Inc. Maybe an hour and a half. Closer to an hour than two. She’d finish the bathroom and the vacuuming and tie the garbage up, then hop on the treadmill for forty-five minutes. Nobody there. No music. No TV. The only outside stimuli the motorized hum of time passing. At ten minutes, the first buds of sweat. At twenty-five, the endorphins, whatever they were. At thirty-five, the smell, whatever that smell was. Ah yes, triumph. So, take that great line about “officially running nowhere” and shove it up your untoned ass.
Tuesday and Friday mornings, after berating Kathie Lee in the comfort of her own living room, she found herself beating Ray Quintano to his own gym and letting herself in with her key. A key that fucking worked, too…. Fifty dollars an hour, which Sheila didn’t have to pay, and all the self-esteem she could swallow. She would be warming up on the treadmill when Ray came in, 5–10 minutes later, and they’d have their full hour of “Good job!” and “Remember the time?” “Have any pizza?” and “You do it, you sadist.” Ray, Q-Dog, usually came up with a nickname for each client within the first month. Free of charge. It took him six weeks with Sheila. One Tuesday or Friday morning, he walked in and asked her, “How long have you been here?” A half hour. “You’re like a delinquent,” Ray told her, and she laughed so helplessly he started calling her “JD,” which was shortened by the middle of the session to “D.” Four months, and she hadn’t missed a workout. Not one. He canceled twice because of some family emergency shit, but not her. Not D.
The greatest gift from Serious Fitness, Inc., was that Sheila was never asked about her singleness. Not by Ray, Joey, nor the brothers who couldn’t abide looking at someone else’s body. Thank God, there was nothing to talk about. Sheila Manning’s world had gotten very simple the last six months. Her apartment, 301 East Sixty-fifth, the gym. That was it. This pie had only thr
ee slices.
Oh yeah, and the two minutes when she’d been a lesbian.
A few days after Mort moved to Salem, still unaware of the lock change, Sheila was in the lobby of 301 East Sixty-fifth, telling Benny the doorman she was now available Tuesday afternoons. Before she could add the line “first come, first serve,” a young woman who was clearly moving out said, “I’ll give you two hundred dollars to help me unpack tomorrow.” Which was Tuesday. “I’m moving down to the Landmark on Fifty-ninth and Second. Seven blocks.”
“Okay.”
“And how much every Tuesday after that?”
“Seventy-five dollars.” Sheila had authorized herself a 33 percent raise.
“Nah. Let’s just do the unpacking.”
“Fine.”
“Nice try,” whispered Benny the doorman.
Janet Grasso was the President and CEO of Janet Grasso Associates, a publicity firm which in the past five years had grown from a one-bedroom apartment to two bedrooms and a terrace overlooking the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Janet Grasso couldn’t do anything to make you better looking, funnier, or more in tune, but that wasn’t her job. Her job was to get you mentioned, and if things started happening for you, her job was to hang on tight and start charging two thousand dollars a month. She now had three two-thousand-dollar-a-month clients: an a cappella singing group, a soap opera actor turned bad stand-up comic, and Al Goldstein.
Janet Grasso’s success coincided with a major softening of her appearance and approach. Sociologists have a term for this: less dykey. The transition was so impressive—not just the longer hair, the twenty-pound weight loss, the makeup, and the skirts, but the smiling!—that Sheila did not recognize this suddenly friendly, attractive former tenant as the dour bowling ball with the Chrissie Hynde T-shirt she used to avoid in the laundry room.
“I have to tell you,” Sheila had to tell her the next day at the Landmark. “I don’t know what you did, but you look sensational. After we talked in the lobby yesterday, I kept saying, ‘That’s Janet Grasso? Wow.’”
Janet blushed, another recent addition to her 50 percent more femme repertoire. “I’m glad you won’t be coming here every week, Sheila.”
