A Kick-Ass Fairy: A Memoir (7 page)

When the computer center was swamped, he came over and borrowed my Compaq portable computer with the two 5¼-inch floppy drives. I could dial into the school’s mainframe telephone number by detaching the phone from the wall and plugging the computer into the jack using a telephone cord and a 300-baud modem. Then each of us slogged through and corrected the “trivial” and “fatal” errors in the semester-long projects for our system programming class. We were usually doubled over laughing—the irony being that the program didn’t execute regardless of how “trivial” an error in the program was.

Together as a kind of family, we watched movies on HBO on cable and rocked out to some of the tamer displays on MTV. When I bought my first CD player, Robert said I had to get the disc by the new artist Whitney Houston, whom he, like all the other guys at school, thought was hot. Unlike me, he could sit and watch cartoons with Kim for hours. He helped me buy and put together Kim’s first bicycle, with training wheels, and took her around the block in circles weekend after weekend until she got tired or it got dark.

I didn’t really feel like I had much in common with other students besides school, but welcomed groups of them over to my house for group work and fed them home-cooked meals in the dining room. Kim enjoyed all the attention, but I was still lonely, longing for the intimacy of my partner.

I went with Kim to the local church, a southern charismatic Catholic parish. At the time it didn’t really register that there could be other options. I knew that I needed to have a spiritual connection to something greater, mystical, more magnificent, more holy, more transcendent, more something beyond the ticking of the clock and the flipping of pages on the calendar. I wanted to understand the church and its sense of history. I wanted to understand how the rituals and traditions came to be and what they meant. I needed to belong to something. I needed community, a community of adults with grownup lives, children, babies, real death.

I met with the pastor of the Incarnation Church and told him about how lost I felt. He asked many questions. He told me I could read about the faith. I told him I didn’t have time to read anything else. I asked, wasn’t there a program for Catholics that fell off the wagon? He told me that they had a program for people wanting to become Catholics but I was already one. He kept looking at his watch.

He told me, “You know, you are a very angry person. You exude anger.”

Rather than storming out of his office citing his poor real-time example of the story of the prodigal son, my reaction to his comments was to set out to prove that I was good—a good sheep ready to join the flock in following the Shepherd up the hill to salvation. I signed up for the program to become an initiate in the Roman Catholic faith for adults. And yes, I was angry. I was angry that my husband died. I was angry that I felt lost and alone. I was trying to feel something else, and the pastor couldn’t see that. For that, I was frustrated.

I was assigned a sponsor, a highly educated black woman who was “born again.” We met once or twice a week to address my inquiries. We attended church together. She walked by my side with the other initiates, the real initiates, as they were all baptized in the faith (I was already baptized), and we were all welcomed by the church at the Easter Vigil, surrounded by the large congregation and the mystical light of candles, each of us wearing a white robe.

So I became a practicing Catholic, “practicing” for what I didn’t know. The Church gave me a sense of home, some continuity with the life I knew before, as a child. But, though the community was there, I still didn’t feel like I fit in. I had one foot in the world of being a student, the other in the world of a single mother, still a widow. I never came to feel any closer to Dave through my involvement in the Church, and no one had any answers that resonated with me about why we are here. But at least the light of Christ was in my heart—though it was just a tiny, fragile flicker of a candle flame, still a pinprick of light nonetheless.

In the summer of 1986, I woke up one morning drenched in sweat, having spent the last few hours making wild whoop with Dave. Unfortunately, it was another dream—but it felt so real. It spoke to the hunger of a 29-year-old woman with raging hormones, and proved I was still alive even if it was just fantastical. One of my girlfriends had been asking if she could set me up on a date with her brother, an attorney in Washington D.C. I finally said yes. It was my first date since I was a junior in high school. I hated it.

I packed up the car and headed to New Jersey to visit with my girlfriend Nancy. She was Aunt Nancy to Kim, a sympathetic ear for my grief, and a stalwart supporter of my move to Virginia. Everyone else said, “Why do you want to throw away all your nursing experience?” upon hearing that I was switching to major in business. Nancy said, “That’s great, a new beginning. You will always have your nursing; it is part of who you are.”

She was hosting what she called “Party Aid,” an ironic homage to the previous summer’s Farm Aid and Live Aid events—a party to aid in the consumption of large quantities of alcohol. It was there that I met Mark. Mark was charming, a not-so-tall but dark-haired and handsome guy around my age. We drank, laughed, danced, and sang. After the party we got together for dinner before I headed back to Virginia with Kim for her start of kindergarten and my last year of school. We exchanged phone numbers. It was three years after Dave died.

In the late fall, after numerous telephone conversations, Mark flew to Charlottesville for a visit. He was working full time at the corporate headquarters of AT&T. He said he was living at home temporarily. I wasn’t looking for the next love of my life and he lived hundreds of miles away, which was perfect. He was easy to be with on a limited basis. He was funny and sang well. We cooked and drank, which then led to sex. The sex was good and I was happy to know that everything still worked. But there were no sparks; my heart was still with Dave.

He visited every couple of months, and in between those visits I went up north and saw him in New Jersey on my trips to see family. I also spent time in New York City for inspiration, job interviews, and firm office visits for positions after graduation. The year went by quickly.

Toward the end of my time at UVA, as I was preparing for finals, studying for the CPA exam, packing up the townhouse, and readying for a move back to New Jersey, I started adding up the things about Mark that didn’t add up. Yes, he lived at home with his parents. His job didn’t require a college degree. Oh, and why didn’t he own a car? My parents met him at Easter and weren’t very happy when he announced to all of us that he used to be addicted to cocaine. Then my parents asked me, “Why are you exposing your daughter to someone like this?” How could I say, Because the sex is very good?

He attended Robert’s and my graduation from the university, displaying overt jealousy of Robert and more possessive pride in me than he should. Later that weekend, after the festivities were over, for some reason I decided to check his coat pocket for something, found his wallet, opened it, looked at his driver’s license and saw that the expiration date had been badly forged. I confronted him, only to find out that he lost his driver’s license for drunk driving a couple of years before, which indicated to me that he still wasn’t driving legally and this was not a first offense. During the past year he had been driving Kim and me around on a suspended license in my car. I was furious. What was I thinking? He was very cavalier about the whole thing.

So, a few weeks before moving back to New Jersey, I decided to send him packing. No sex was better than good sex with an addict and a pathological liar. Months later, I learned that he was having other relationships during our long-distance relationship and I added cheater to the list.

Chapter 7

1987–1992

I
squeezed into the PATH train at the Hoboken terminal during the morning rush, which was a Darwinian case of survival of the fittest, the aggressive prelude to a day of work in downtown Manhattan. Some were lucky enough to have seats, the rest hung on to support poles. On view were arms over arms of all ages, grasping, mostly in suits, the occasional sparkle of a cufflink or an initialed cuff popping out. While hanging on for the ride of their lives, most commuters were busy reading origami-like foldings of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, or Barron’s. The exceptional few read a paperback book.

As the subway car rickety-ricked its way under the Hudson, started up and stopped, slowed and swerved around curves, our bodies moved in unison, tilting this way or that, riding the wave, feet planted firmly on the tiny piece of turf we’d claimed on the train. Bodies touched, colognes were smelled. There were other smells as well—mothballs, coffee breath, armpits, and halitosis. Breath was held, gum was chewed, the herd of humanity prepared to be propelled into battle. The habit of reading, I later learned, immunized one to the alternative of checking out skin quality and the manner of hairs, and (God forbid) making eye contact.

As the announcement was made and we pulled into the station, the conductor called “World Trade Center,” newspapers were tucked under arms and briefcases plucked from between legs. En masse, we all exited into the bowels of the World Trade Center complex. Like a school of salmon dressed in shades of gray, blue, and black, we moved toward the multiple lines of escalators that were our river heading upstream to the concourse level. At the top, some headed left, some right, some straight ahead to the towers, some out the doors to the wilds beyond.

As I entered the lobby of One World Trade Center the crowds thinned out. I waited for the 78th floor Sky Lobby elevator, very excited about the first day of my new job as a fledgling accountant and auditor in New York, New York. The express elevator delivered us to the next set of elevators at the Sky Lobby, and finding the one with my final destination, I rode that until stepping off at the 93rd floor lobby of the Touche Ross Financial Services Center.

It was August of 1987. I had arrived. It was four years after Dave died. The vision of working in New York that motivated me through the stressful years of school was realized. Now at age thirty I was about to begin a new career as an auditor.

While on the new hire tour, I noted that, except for the view, the office could have been anywhere—dark paneling, long halls, cubicles and perimeter offices, computer terminals, printers, the smell of coffee, a gathering of men in an inside glass-walled office all in white shirts with ties chuckling about guy stuff, the secretary sitting at a desk in front of a perimeter office with a premium view applying lipstick with a compact or answering a telephone sounding a whoop, whoop, whoop.

The floor plan was massively confusing, a maze for worker ants, a labyrinth. The narrow windows along the outside perimeter of the floor let in the light and at night beamed out to the world. Views spanned the Hudson River to the west, the skyscrapers of midtown to the north, the buildings of downtown and Brooklyn to the east, out past Battery Park and the Statue of Liberty to the Atlantic Ocean to the south. Using the view assisted me in finding my way around the office, since after my initial orientation I visited the office only occasionally. Most of the time I was assigned to one client or another, working out of that company’s office space elsewhere in the city.

Now in the first grade in Madison, New Jersey, Kim was being watched and shuttled around by Dave’s Aunt Emma both to school and after—to gymnastics or dance class and then fed dinner. After my monthlong orientation, which included a trip to Houston, I was assigned to the audit of a new client for the firm, a “broker dealer,” the brokerage subsidiary of a large international bank. The senior auditor arranged to meet Janet, a fellow new hire, and me at the office. His name was Doug, and he was to be our supervisor for the next few months. We followed him like little ducklings as he escorted us through the subways and on the streets to the client’s office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where we would be doing the field work of the audit.

In the next few months, we learned under Doug’s tutelage how to audit and began to learn about the brokerage industry. Doug arranged most of our meetings and understood the scope of what needed to be done and how we needed to do it. We set up our satellite office in a client conference room at 30 Rock, using our IBM personal computers with the big heavy CRT terminals. I was already comfortable with computers, so I was given the task of setting up a mirror of the client’s financial information on our company’s general ledger financial statement program. Every day, Janet and I scurried back and forth from meetings with client personnel, collecting our paper trails, while in the background the high-pitched whine of the Epson dot matrix tractor-feed printer spit out reams of perforated paper into a neat pile. It was a cause for celebration when our version of the client’s preliminary trial balance finally totaled to zero and the whining stopped. We all went to Rosie O’Grady’s on Seventh Avenue at 52nd for lunch.

Rockefeller Plaza was beautiful, a landmark complex of multiple buildings, with the enormous sculpture of Atlas carrying the world on his back facing Fifth Avenue, and Radio City Music Hall on the Avenue of the Americas side. NBC’s studios and the Rainbow Room were in the building where we worked. The concourse under the plaza was like a small city itself, with shops and restaurants from another time all in black and white and metal in the art deco style. Through the maze of the concourse was the Sixth Avenue line of the subway. To work there, I took New Jersey transit to Hoboken, then the Hoboken PATH to 33rd Street, and then the B, D, or F line to Rockefeller Plaza. At night, I would do it all again in reverse, more than ninety minutes each way. But it was worth it.

In 1987, 30 Rock was also known as the GE Building. The façade of the building and the lobby, like the concourse, were covered in art deco elements, from bronze reliefs to enormous murals on the walls and ceilings. The excitement was electrifying. The trees in the plaza had art deco bronze grates around them. If you entered the building through the plaza you passed under a large sculpted relief of a Zeus-like god with the carved inscription “Wisdom and Knowledge Shall Be the Stability of Thy Times.” “Wisdom” was flanked on either side by the goddesses of “Sound” and “Light,” symbolizing those attributes of radio and television, since this originally had been the RCA building. I loved the details, the creativity that went into the design of the hardscape, the building’s exterior and interior, the decoration, and even the bolts on the doors. It seemed everything had meaning. After taking the gilded art deco elevators to the client floor, however, I stepped into an office space that could have been in Kalamazoo—again except for the views.

Spending day after day mostly in a small room with the same people creates a bond, a team, almost family. You learn each person’s strengths and foibles pretty quickly. Janet was 22, a recent graduate of Boston University, struggling to make ends meet in New York on a first year auditor’s salary. Every night and sometimes at lunch she would rush out to go to the gym to further tone her tight, young, five-foot-one-inch body. She’d storm into our office on a regular basis, sit down with a harrumph, and go off about being flustered in dealing with the client. She’d mutter under her breath more than a few times how she didn’t need four years of college to use the copy machine, and fly into a rage in a proverbial New York second when she couldn’t unjam the machine. But then she just as easily really laughed at things Doug said that I didn’t even find that funny. She would break into uncontrollable chuckles at her own impersonation of a client. She even laughed at her own frustrations.

Doug was very even-keeled and steady, like an ocean liner. He took everything in stride and was a patient teacher. He was tall, six foot three, from New Jersey, balding with wisps of light brown hair, but pleasant looking with large brown eyes, a nice smile, and straight teeth. He seemed self-confident and was deemed an audit god by Janet and me. One day he brought in homemade oatmeal raisin cookies. He wasn’t married. He made them himself. He didn’t seem gay. Even though we were all so close at work, at night we all went our separate ways.

As time went by, one of them would notice me picking steel wool out of my fingers with a push pin and learned that on weekends I was refinishing the floors of the little Cape Cod I’d bought in Madison for Kim and myself. Soon they started asking on Monday mornings for status reports on the wallpaper stripping and occasionally pointed out the streaks of oil-based paint that remained in my curls even after repeated washings. I began to pin up Kim’s first grade art projects on the walls of our office. Since Janet would usually do her own thing at lunch, Doug and I would get a sandwich, and when the weather was nice enough, sit on the benches placed around the perimeter of Rockefeller Plaza with a view of the skating rink, or go to the café when they took out the ice at the end of the season.

We were about the same age and had both grown up in New Jersey, listening to the same music. We talked about our families. He learned about Dave’s death. I learned about his younger brother Joe, who was being treated for recurrent brain tumors after receiving an enormous overdose of radiation at 5 years old. Just about the time I noticed how large his hands were and the golden brown hair growing from his strong-looking wrists, he asked me on a date. The timing also corresponded with our finishing up with the client at 30 Rock and, individually, joining teams at other clients.

After we’d gone on a few dates in the city, one weekend day Doug pulled up in his Volvo sedan in front of my 875-square-foot turquoise mess of a house to pick up Kim and me for an outing to pick apples. Kim was full of energy, a little hyper, babbling on and on, interrupting and asking question after question. When we finally arrived at the apple orchard in Upstate New York, I let Kim run around within eye range to burn off some of her energy. I think she was nervous. I know I was. Doug seemed cool as a cucumber, as usual, although I noted he was very quiet. He seemed to like Kim, and together they collected a bag of delicious high-limb apples left hanging on the trees. He lifted her up over and over, placed her onto sturdy branches, then gently placed her back on the ground.

Overall, I thought the day went great. There were some laughs. I was impressed by how well he got along with Kim. When he dropped us off, Kim ran to hug Doug good-bye. He lifted her up, and—maybe she thought he was going to kiss her—she bit him on the chest, through his shirt, and drew blood. He told me not to worry and said good-bye. I thanked him for the day and Kim, and I went inside.

I didn’t know what to make of any of this. I had just started a job, my new career. I had just bought a 1950s fixer-upper with me, myself, and I doing the fixing. Kim was happy being back in New Jersey near her grandmother (Dave’s mother) and spending time with Aunt Emma. The fact that she was happy helped me to transition to working sixty hours or more a week. But the stability was fragile. Do I want to complicate my life at this time? I asked myself over and over again.

Doug and I continued to date. We met for lunches in the city, sometimes in Chinatown or for sandwiches in the World Trade Center Plaza, at the Sphere fountain. We ate in the Winter Garden atrium of the World Financial Center or at the Greenhouse Restaurant at the Vista Hotel or our usual spot, The Big Kitchen in the WTC mall. We had dinners in the city, some of them very expensive. We saw an occasional Broadway show or performance at Lincoln Center, which usually turned into expensive naps after a long week of work. Sometimes we just met for drinks at the Tall Ships Bar.

In January we returned to the broker-dealer at 30 Rock where we’d met for the year-end audit, and had to pretend that nothing had changed. Janet was amused by our constant bickering. Doug was a teaser, and I was quick with a response or a put-down. Before we finished the job we were all working seven days a week for weeks on end.

In March, when the audit was finally done, Doug started coming over to my house on the weekends. He seemed to like ripping out linoleum, going to the hardware store, picking out wallpaper, scrubbing. We worked well together.

In the spring he started talking about getting married. I told him it was too soon, but two months later I asked Nancy to babysit for the dinner date when I suspected he was going to propose. In the antique railroad car at Rod’s Ranch House in Convent Station, Doug—who’d brought a rose, a letter of proposal, and a love letter—asked me to marry him. I agreed, but the engagement had to remain secret since we worked together. We planned the wedding for the following fall.

I was 31, he was 30. We had fun spending time together. We worked well together and had enough in common. He cooked well. He was responsible. I was happy not to be so lonely. On his balance sheet I tallied up the debits and credits and concluded that his assets far outweighed his liabilities. Everything happened so fast. The feelings of love were the same as they’d been with Dave—the expectant feeling of joy getting ready to see him, the full, warm feeling in my heart when I thought of him, the care I felt, the desire. At times I had to remind myself that this was Doug and not Dave.

The summer before our wedding, Doug’s apartment lease came up for renewal. Since he was working at my house all the time and we would be married in a couple of months anyway, we decided he should move in. We started making a life together. For over a week he carefully cut the wick cord draining the newly lanced abscessed boil on the cheek of my ass every morning before work. We grocery shopped together. I learned he snored, a lot. He bought Kim a Nintendo Entertainment System with Super Mario Brothers, and when they weren’t playing it together she was playing it alone. Just thinking of that repeating jingle still makes me want to get a hammer and smash something.