That did it. Moments later, she and Max were sitting in the parking lot of the next town’s deli (Max didn’t want to risk being seen close to home), tearing into their eggs.
“Oh my God, that is freaking incredible,” said Max, mouth full.
“Orgasmic.” Emma began giggling. “Hey, you have egg on your face.”
“So? You do, too.” He lobbed a piece of food at her cheek and barked out a laugh.
“How dare you!” She tilted her coffee cup toward him in mock threat.
“All right, I surrender.” Max held up his hands. “You know, we should do this more often. I mean, not you peer-pressuring me into breaking the dietary laws of my faith, but, like, hang out more. It’s the New Year now, the time to look at our lives, to reflect, to think about what kinds of changes we’ll make in the coming year—”
“But, Max, the problem is you’re always doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“That. Lecturing me to go to temple or to feel some Rosh Hashanah spirituality, or trying to convince me to take some class about the Talmud—whatever your latest campaign for the chosen people is.”
Max was quiet, nodding. “I see. By the way, I’m sorry about what Caleb called Nick last night.”
“Goy boy? I thought that was actually pretty clever. It has a nice poetic ring.”
“It’s Alysse, not me, who’s so concerned about Nick not being Jewish. But you know it comes from a place of love.” Emma arched her eyebrows. “Truly. She’s just worried about you. She thinks it might cause problems down the road to have a partner with such an unfamiliar background, someone who grew up so differently from you.”
“You make it sound like he was raised by wolves.”
“You know what I mean. But, Emmy, an interfaith relationship isn’t insignificant.”
“Whatever you say.”
“And I admit it makes me sad that you’ve turned your back on our faith. Make fun if you like, but Judaism gives our family a real sense of peace and purpose.”
“Max, it’s my instinct to make fun when I feel like I’m being proselytized. We’re not the same, okay? It doesn’t give me a sense of peace and purpose, for example, to wake up early on a Saturday and spend half the day singing along with that tone-deaf cantor, then kibitzing with all the perfumed old ladies of Westchester. Look at little Maximillian, such a mensch, with such a sweet punim!” She pinched her brother’s cheek, imitating the elderly Jewish women who were the mainstays of the shul’s congregation.
Max swatted her away. “Cantor Cohen is kind of tone-deaf, isn’t he?”
“Completely! What kind of crazy person who can’t carry a tune decides to make a career out of singing?”
Max shook his head, laughing. “Let’s make a deal, okay? I’ll stop nagging you about the Jewish stuff, if you stop treating my devoutness like it’s some kind of ridiculous, antiquated hocus-pocus. How about it?”
“Fine,” said Emma. They shook on it. “This seems like a good time to invite you to my Islam conversion ceremony.”
“Ha ha. Anyway, as I was saying before, we should be in each other’s lives more. I know I’m always on you to trek up to the ’burbs, but I could come into the city, too. We’ll hit the bars like we used to.” He said it with enthusiasm, as if he really believed this was something he’d do, so Emma nodded along. He’d made similar proclamations before.
“Sounds good,” she said.
“Bring it in.” Max extended his arms, and their embrace was tight and warm, not like those fake hugs his wife doled out. “Okay, we should get back to the house. Everyone’ll be waiting on us, and I’ve got to get the kids ready for shul. Remember, you rat me out about this sandwich to Alysse, I’ll kill you.”
“Noted.” They drove back in silence, Emma thinking how, bedbugs or not, she would never trade her life for Max’s. She guessed he was thinking the same about her.
It seemed like five days, not five hours, later when Emma and Nick found themselves idling outside the building in which they’d rented a space to live. They were waiting for their new landlord, who’d communicated via text message that he’d arrive Btween 2&3:30 and no, he could not be any more specific.
With her brother’s help, Emma had successfully fended off Alysse’s insistences that they join the family for services, then she and Nick had boarded Metro North, where they’d spent the whole trip back to the city researching bedbugs. Nick had quickly become captivated by a series of slideshows of the critters, eyes peeled like at a car crash, while Emma entrenched herself in housing law. She’d been heartened to discover that it was a landlord’s responsibility—legally and financially—to act in the face of an infestation. She’d then read up on all the available extermination techniques, and built a spreadsheet organized by companies’ supposed effectiveness, price, and user ratings; if they acted fast, they could get this taken care of by their move-in date. She’d imagined how relieved Luis would be to learn that she’d already gathered all this helpful info.
By 3:45, there was still no sign of their landlord. Nick had decamped to the corner bar a half hour earlier, but Emma was still standing in front of the building, optimistically scanning every passerby for Luis’s face. She hoped their conversation would be finished by four, when she’d told Sophia to come meet her. She’d explained the situation over the phone (well, a version of it, saying services were running late and she wouldn’t be able to make it up to Midtown in time for their appointment—she didn’t want her client knowing about the bedbugs), and the girl had happily agreed to another adventure out to Brooklyn.
“Man, you can go to temple in sweats?” Sophia appeared, ten minutes early, eyeing Emma’s outfit. Emma had never changed out of her pajamas from morning. “Lucky. For church, my mom makes me wear these awful Lilly Pulitzer getups.”
“Oh, hey, Sophia. Um, no, I was uncomfortable, so I ran home and changed.” Emma realized how little sense this made, and also what a bad idea it was to have Sophia there when Luis showed up; she scolded herself for this poorly planned attempt at multitasking. “I had to arrange a last-minute visit with my new landlord, so I’m thinking we should cancel today’s appointment. I know it was a pain for you to get out here—I’ll talk to your mom and credit you a session.”
“Ooh, so these are the new digs?” Sophia asked, ignoring the part about the canceled session. She lunged for the front door and, discovering it unlocked, disappeared inside before Emma could stop her—or warn her about the bedbugs. Sophia was back outside a minute later, thumbs working her phone.
“What are you doing?” Emma asked.
“Instagramming. That is one insane rat trap in the hall.”
“Excuse me?” Emma peeked at the phone screen, and her stomach flipped. “Surely it’s a mouse trap. Practically every building in New York has mice.”
“No way, José. Look at the size of that thing.” Emma watched as the girl typed a caption: Epic #rattrap. #grittybrooklyn #eek!!!
Emma decided to excise this new information from her mind, figuring that if she didn’t, she might have a breakdown right there on the street. “So about today’s session.”
“Oh, come on, please let me tag along to your meeting. I was excellent support the other day, remember? If it’ll make you feel better, you can quiz me on vocab until he shows up.”
Sophia made a good point about her support with the other landlord, so Emma considered the proposition. Well, why the hell not? Plus, part of her suspected that, as if to prove something, Luis would continue to keep them waiting well past four.
She was right. Emma and Sophia had made their way through nearly a hundred SAT words—“abjure” all the way to “winsome”—before Luis sauntered by the building at 4:25, as if his tenants hadn’t been waiting on him for two and a half hours. His relaxed stance seemed like a put-on.
“Good afternoon,” he said, shifty eyes playing over Emma and Sophia in a way that made Emma want to wrap her teenage client in a protective embrace.
“Let
me grab Nick,” she said. “He’s just over in that bar.”
“We’ll all go to the bar,” Luis declared. “I’m thirsty.”
“Okay,” Emma said. It couldn’t hurt to meet in neutral, non-bedbug-infested territory. “Sophia, you can wait—”
“I’ll come,” she chirped, whipping out a driver’s license that aged her five years and darkened her hair several shades. Sophia didn’t even drive, Emma happened to know.
“All right, whatever, but no drinking. Come on.” So the motley crew consisting of Emma, her teenage client, and her new landlord, set off to join Nick at the corner bar.
There were certain difficulties Emma had anticipated about this meeting—one, that they’d have to be delicate about their delivery, since no one wants to hear that his property is overrun with bedbugs; two, that the money part might get tense, since the treatments deemed most effective were also the priciest; and three, that they’d have to be pushy about the time frame, so everything could be handled before their move-in. But there were also certain assumptions that Emma had taken as givens about the meeting—one, that Luis would be as invested as his tenants (if not more so) in ridding his building of the bloodsucking parasites; two, that he would not argue with the letter of state housing law; and three, that he was a rational human being and would act accordingly.
But the longer Emma sat slumped in the bar booth, sandwiched between Nick and Sophia, and across from Luis, who between utterances sipped infuriatingly small quantities of club soda through a long straw, the more Emma was reminded of a childhood maxim: To “assume” is to make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”
“The reason we set up this meeting,” Emma began, “was because it’s come to our attention that the apartment we’ve rented from you is infested with bedbugs.” At this, Sophia gasped, making Emma feel like she was starring in a soap opera before a rapt live audience—more and more she was regretting letting the girl tag along. The bigger surprise was that Luis began laughing.
“This is very interesting,” he said. “None of my other tenants have ever had a problem with my walls, but then you two show up and the place isn’t good enough, so you bring in your noisy construction crew.” Emma wasn’t sure how one worker could be construed as a crew, but she was too stunned to respond. Luis went on: “And none of my other tenants have ever complained about bugs, but then the two of you come around and suddenly my building is infested. Very interesting.”
“Are you suggesting we’re making this up?” Emma was indignant. She felt a hand on her knee—Nick’s—so she softened her tone. “What motivation would we possibly have for inventing a bedbug infestation?”
“I’m just wondering, is all. I wonder, too, maybe the worker brought in the bugs?”
“This is rich,” Emma said. “I sent you the pictures, right, of the bedbugs crawling out of the walls? Would you like to see them again?”
“Ooh, I would,” said Sophia. Emma ignored her.
“Look,” said Nick, “regardless of who brought in the bedbugs, they’re there now, so we have to deal with them.”
“Whatever you say, teacher man,” said Luis.
Although Emma now felt less confident about her spreadsheet of solutions, she whipped it out anyway, and began explaining the different options to Luis—the sniffing dogs, the industrial-grade vacuums, the specially trained exterminators.
Luis snorted. “Last time I checked, dogs sniff out food and the assholes of bitches, not little bugs. Who exactly is going to pay for all this?”
On her phone Emma pulled up the housing law Web site; she scrolled to the statute about a landlord’s responsibility to provide a bedbug-free environment for tenants, and how the expense of eradication fell to the owner. Despite her jumpy stomach, the legal jargon calmed her; this was official, government-decreed, indisputable.
“This is a joke, right?” Luis asked, waving the phone away. “You hire some handyman who comes in, makes a racket all day long, then tells some story about scary bugs, and now you expect me to pay a fortune to get rid of this so-called problem?”
Emma felt disoriented; it had never occurred to her that Luis would hear the law and simply consider himself exempt. Despite her doubts, she still thought she might appeal to his sense: “The legitimate companies charge by the procedure,” she said. “So if they brought in the dogs and found nothing, you’d only get charged for the evaluation.”
“Oh, how generous,” Luis seethed. “Okay, I’m going to be reasonable with you.” An unreasonable-looking grin spread itself across his face. “I’ll go to Home Depot and buy a few cans of foggers, which are probably ten dollars a pop. That’s on me, my treat.”
“But.” Emma looked to Nick for help, but he seemed paralyzed, his knuckles clenched white. Although she’d bookmarked the page on the Health Department site that explained how foggers were a scam and could actually exacerbate a bedbug problem, she sensed the futility of calling it up on her phone. In fact, she, too, found herself frozen. Here before her was one of those people she’d heard about but had never really believed existed—the ones who didn’t subscribe to reason, who were suspicious of science, and who, based on ignorance or anger or Emma didn’t know what, had invented their own set of rules for how the world worked. The worst part was, unlike a muttering nut on the subway whom you could escape by sliding a few seats away, Emma and Nick were bound and beholden to this particular nut—by contract.
Luis continued: “I’ll tell you what else. I’ll indulge your little fantasy about the creepy-crawler invasion. I’ll hire an exterminator. But I’m not going to tell him about the so-called bedbugs, because then he’ll do what any smart businessman would do: rip me off. Who wouldn’t? He’ll go along with it and charge me a fortune to get rid of the ‘problem’”—here Luis made air quotes—“that was never there in the first place. So I’ll have him look around and see what he finds. If it’s bedbugs, fine, I’ll get the foggers. Or if you two want to hire your fancy experts, that’s on you. And that’s final.” Luis slurped up the last of his soda, and then placed his hands on the table. “Excuse me, I need to go relieve myself.” He stood up, saluted them, and sauntered to the back of the bar.
“Holy shit,” said Sophia, as soon as he was out of sight. “What a psycho. Is every landlord in New York like that?”
Emma’s head was churning. She was working furiously to devise a more convincing tactic, to figure out an approach that would make Luis understand their perspective. A tug at her shirtsleeve jolted her from her strategizing. “Emma,” Nick said. “We’ve got to get out of this lease.”
“What?”
“Luis is dumb and dangerous. Do you really want this to escalate any more?”
“But—”
“Can you imagine if something goes wrong with the plumbing, or if the heat breaks down? We’d be living under that guy’s reign of terror. We’d be held hostage by this lunacy.”
“But both our leases are up in less than two weeks. We’ll have nowhere to live.”
“We’ll find somewhere else.” Nick nodded, as if to close the case. He signaled to the waitress with his empty pint glass.
Emma began rubbing her temples. She looked up to see Sophia’s beseeching grin. “So this might not be the perfect time, but I’m curious, did you happen to save any of the bug carcasses? I bet I could make an awesome installation out of them.”
Emma found herself giggling in a pitch an octave higher than usual. “Sophia, that’s an excellent idea. Why don’t you ask Luis? Maybe he can sponsor your exhibit, and write up the commentary. He can expound upon our culture’s obsessive fear of bedbugs, and how the infestations are often just a product of our deranged, middle-class imaginations. He can theorize how this speaks to the guilt of the modern-day gentrifier, a xenophobic paranoia about urban living spaces, an uneasy symbiosis with nature, a—”
“Easy there,” Nick said, cutting off her ramble. “Let’s save the postmodern crackups for the privacy of our home, okay?” Sophia, who’d been
furiously scribbling Emma’s words onto a cocktail napkin, looked disappointed.
Luis had reappeared. “So, my tenants, what do you say? How are we going to handle this big, scary bug situation?” He wiggled his fingers in front of his face.
Nick tilted his head at Emma. She looked down in defeat. “Luis, we want to talk to you about ending our tenant-landlord relationship. We’ve realized this is not the right living situation for us, and we’d like to terminate the lease.”
He shrugged. “Fine by me. I have the paperwork here—we can tear it up right now.”
“Excellent,” said Nick. “So you can just write us a check for, let’s see, first month, last month, security, the broker’s fee … We can call the repairs even.”
Luis laughed. “Be serious, man. You wasted my time and energy, you terrorized my tenants with your construction, you made crazy claims about bedbugs, and now it’s too late for me to find another tenant for October. I say you count yourself lucky that I’ll let you out of our contract without penalty, instead of charging you twelve months’ rent as I could definitely do. Let’s say we tear up the lease, all shake hands, and walk away.”
“Without all the money you owe us?” Emma asked, incredulous.
“Like I said, I don’t believe I owe you guys shit. We had a deal, fair and square. You want to pull out of the deal? Be my guest, but you’ll have to face the consequences.”
“Emma,” Sophia said. “You need to talk to a lawyer. I think I can help.”
Without waiting for Emma’s okay, Sophia turned to Luis, and said, “Hold your horses, mister. Don’t tear up a thing. We’ll get back to you soon enough. And we’ll have the law on our side!” Despite the lines that seemed lifted from a bad cowboy movie, Emma welled up with gratitude for the girl’s gumption—and for her fake ID.
After Luis fled from the bar, muttering on his way out about “the goddamn gentrifiers,” Nick ordered them a pitcher of beer, then another one, and then several drinks in, Emma caved and let Sophia have one, too, and then it started to seem like a good idea to join Sophia at a party uptown where she claimed they’d find her housing lawyer friend. (Emma was reluctant to call her lawyer brother, for fear that Max would skew the story into an I-told-you-so opportunity.) It didn’t occur to her to question why Sophia was going to a party on a school night, or to consider the inappropriateness of attending said party with her teenage client; although she did think to ask why, at age seventeen, Sophia was partying with someone who was old enough to have completed law school.
If We Lived Here Page 16
