Filthy Rich (3 page)

By the time
I dropped my mother off in Brooklyn and returned to Greenwich Village, where I live, the paparazzi were swarming on the sidewalk outside my stately old doorman building. Obviously, the bush telegraph that informs these guys there’s a new contender on the scene for the gossip throne previously occupied by Darva Conger, Monica Lewinsky, and their predecessors was already hard at work.

Exiting the taxi, I was blinded by what seemed to be a fifty-megaton flash—the product of several dozen cameramen clicking away in near unison to get the perfect candid shot of yours truly arriving home from her worst nightmare courtesy of
Filthy Rich!

I was surrounded. From all sides, reporters were barking questions at me. Between the flashes going off, and the microphones being shoved in my face, walking the few feet to enter my building was sort of like scaling Mount Everest without the benefit of a Sherpa.

“Look this way, Marcy.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Do you think you’ll get back together?”

“What are your plans now?”

“Did you plan to throw the ring, or was it spontaneous?”

“Would you do it again—be your boyfriend’s Lifeline if he asked?”

“Would you consider dating another orthodontist?”

Hearing that last question, I was tempted to break my silence, but instead took the revolving door into the lobby, leaving the horde behind.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Mallowitz,” the doorman said, as if someone had died and this was a condolence call. He then handed me my dry cleaning.

But before I could make it into the elevator, I was stopped by elderly Mrs. Schwartz, the crabby four-foot-two owner of apartment 7-C. She was heading out to walk her schnauzer, Bruno, who was even crabbier and shorter, and had recently developed the bad habit of peeing on the lobby’s oriental carpet.

“Hi there, Marcy,” she said with unaccustomed warmth. “You were wonderful. May I have your autograph? I want it to show my mah-jongg group tomorrow.”

The request caught me totally off guard. Sure, Mrs. Schwartz and I would exchange pleasantries if we happened to be taking the same elevator. And at a tenant meeting a couple of years ago, I recalled her accusing me and a few other miscreant neighbors of inviting bugs and vermin into the building by failing to adequately seal our
plastic garbage bags before dumping them in the basement trash room—a charge to which I pleaded innocent, standing on my honor as an exterminator’s daughter. But neither she, nor anyone else, had asked for my autograph since the day they handed out the yearbooks my senior year in high school.

I adjusted the dry cleaning to free my right hand, and dutifully signed “Best Wishes, Marcy Lee Mallowitz” on the back of a small, light-blue appointment card from Mrs. Schwartz’s rheumatologist, which she’d excitedly unearthed from her oversize floral purse and handed to me, along with a cheap ballpoint imprinted with the name of a local luncheonette.

“That Kingman Fenimore, don’t you just love him?” she said. “What’s he really like?”

“Frankly, Mrs. Schwartz, I don’t know. I was just a Lifeline. We didn’t get much chance to chat.”

“That’s too bad, dear,” she said, pulling on her schnauzer’s leash. “I better go now.”

Unfortunately, it was too late. While she’d stopped to get my autograph and inquire about Kingman Fenimore, Bruno had left another puddle on the rug. She pretended not to notice and, anxious to take the elevator up to my third-floor one bedroom, so did I.

As soon as I realized my apartment door was unlocked, I could sense that Neil had gotten there ahead of me to clear
out his stuff. The nervous churning in my stomach intensified as I put the key back in my purse and stepped inside.

Turning on the lights, I immediately noticed something different about the living room. Neil, the thief, had filched the old dental chair he told me to consider “ours,” leaving as his final gift to me the faint skid marks he engraved dragging the bizarre item across the apartment’s heavily polyurethaned wood floor. His chair gone, the room seemed suddenly larger and brighter, but also very empty. I stood there for a couple of minutes just staring at the deep indentation left in the corner of the room’s plush cream-colored area rug, less upset, I think, than in a state of shock.

It wasn’t until a trip to the bathroom that the reality of the breakup actually struck home.

Gone was the cruddy pale-green Water Pik Neil displayed on a specially constructed bathroom shelf, religiously dusting it and explaining that it was a valuable collector’s item—a duplicate of one in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.

The old Water Pik was gone, and so was the glass shelf. He’d ripped it out in such a hurry, there were big holes in the plaster. I’d have to fix them myself now without the benefit of the special dental-mold plaster Neil used to bring home from work for such household repairs.

Left behind, though, was at least one tangible souvenir of my three-year fling with a man whose love for the dental arts turned out to be a lot more enduring than whatever he felt for me. There, at their regular berth by the bathroom sink, gleaming in the artificial light of the overhead fluores
cent, were the “His” and “Hers” water squirters Neil had ordered from his dental-supply place. He had them installed as a surprise for me on our first anniversary together.

What a romantic evening that was. After a candlelit dinner at a small French bistro in the Village, we walked the few blocks back to my cozy third-floor apartment at Tenth Street and Fifth Avenue holding hands and sucking on the special sugar-free breath mints Neil always brought along for after meals. We said good night to the doorman, and once upstairs Neil led me wordlessly to the john to show me his gift, which the building’s handyman had installed while we were gone.

“Here’s to us, Marcy,” Neil said, raising the sprayer marked “His.” I picked up the one marked “Hers” and we knocked ends as Neil offered a touching, if somewhat peculiar, toast. I now realize it probably wasn’t original, only a pickup line he learned in dental school, but at the time it seemed heartfelt: “The couple that spritzes together, fits together.”

How Neil loved those squirters. They were just like the ones he used with patients, except the home version didn’t have the capacity to blow air, he would explain to guests, always insisting they not leave the bathroom without sampling the soothing warm-water spray laced with a special mouthwash of Neil’s choosing—his “flavor of the month,” he called it.

Somehow Neil missed the social cues that would inform a normal person that the guest he had followed into the
bathroom preferred to relieve himself in peace without first being lectured about the undeniable virtues of Neil’s spritzers.

When my friends and I had a girls’ night out, Norma would draw big guffaws by imitating Neil’s awkward way of breaking the ice whenever he met new people.

“Hey,” he’d say, typically interrupting the conversation, “did you wear braces as a kid? I’m just asking because you have an interesting bite.”

Having heard all of this, you’re probably asking yourself what an otherwise sane, not unattractive Barnard alumna like myself possibly saw in a conceitedly decent-looking thirty-five-year-old man so plainly obsessed with his power to move other people’s teeth.

As I’ve said, I wasn’t blind to Neil’s flaws. But until his bad behavior on
Filthy Rich!
, I thought him sweet, and told myself his excessive fondness for his profession, while a tad unusual, maybe, was a small price to pay for keeping alive what could be my only hope of getting married and having a family.

My codependent in this was my mother, who persistently plied Neil with her special potato latkes and homemade applesauce like he was the Second Coming, based in part on a mistaken notion about the exact nature of his degree.

“Everyone’s kvelling!” my mother would regularly exclaim, apropos of nothing. “My daughter, the Barnard graduate, is marrying a doctor.”

“Well, Mom,” I’d say, “you got one out of three right. That’s not bad.”

Do the scoring yourself. It was true I went to Barnard, blue-ribbon class of’89. But Neil hadn’t proposed, and he’s only an orthodontist, not a real medical doctor.

My mother would not be moved. “So, what’s wrong with an orthodontist?
New York
magazine says he’s one of the best, and if I may quote, ’one of the innovators in the use of clear-plastic bite plates that do the work of braces while minimizing the embarrassing appearance problems.”

She carried the clipping around in her purse. As far as my mother was concerned, Neil’s early experimentation with plastic braces put him in the elite vanguard of modern science, in a league with Louis Pasteur or, even better, Paul Muni, her favorite movie star as a kid, who, as she’s fond of imparting, acted in Yiddish theater before gaining Oscar immortality by portraying the great French chemist and bacteriologist in the inspiring 1936 Hollywood biography. When I was ten, my mother let me stay up until 3
A.M.
with her to catch it on a local channel’s late-movie show airing in the wee hours now filled by paid infomercials for the amazing Ab Roller. My failure to swoon over Mr. Muni and his overacting remains a sore point to this day, and our discussions of the matter always end the same way—with my mother declaring I can’t really be her daughter, and that there must have been a mix-up at the hospital.

But what really sealed my mom’s case for Neil was his title. “And look here, my smarty girl,” she’d say, pointing to
some tiny type in her pawed-over clipping. “They call him
Dr
. Postit. That’s good enough for me.”

My mother’s desire for me—her pampered only child—to marry a doctor was not a casual thing. When I started pushing the Big Three-Oh with no promising prospects in sight, Mom sprang into action. She started spending less time with her empty-nest housewife friends in Midwood, the middleclass Brooklyn neighborhood where I grew up, and took a volunteer job in the gift shop at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, all with the uncharitable motive of finding yours truly an eligible man-in-white. She didn’t have any luck until the unsuspecting Dr. Abramowitz, internal medicine, happened into the store to buy a newspaper and let himself be cashiered into a blind date. It was a long, awkward evening, although I did learn something about the possible dangerous side effects of certain herbal remedies unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Never again, I vowed, would I allow myself to fall victim to my mother’s matchmaking—a stance, incidentally, that was fully supported by my normally above-the-fray father, Herbert Mallowitz, the hardworking owner of Brooklyn Roach Patrol, a successful extermination company. He has survived harmoniously with my mother all these years by being the only human more relaxed than Ozzie Nelson in the old TV series I watched in reruns as a kid. My dad even wears cardigan sweaters like Ozzie’s.

Actually, in the interest of full disclosure, my father has one decidedly un-Ozzie-like quirk. He enjoys razzing my mother about her spending habits by translating the dollar
amount of her store purchases into a dead-roach count—that is, his estimate of the number of the disgusting bugs his firm will need to kill in order to cover the price tag.

“So what do you think, Herbie?” my mother will say, modeling a new dress she picked up on sale at a little boutique on Kings Highway opened by some entrepreneurial Russian immigrants.

“I think I better fetch my sprayer” is Dad’s stock answer, which only he finds humorous. “For that pretty number you have on, I’d calculate it’s curtains for fifteen hundred roaches, give or take. But for you, Frannie, anything. Wear it in good health.”

The official family shorthand for this tiresome one-joke drill is “The Dead Roach Routine,” as in “Herbie, spare me, please, not your Dead Roach Routine again!”

Anyway, it wasn’t long after the Dr. Abramowitz fiasco that I started going out with Neil.

Except for one brief, awkward moment at the tail end of an introductory Sunday brunch at a choice table in the Molly Picon Room at the Second Avenue Deli, Mom always thought Neil was the greatest. That awkward moment occurred when Neil, sensitive soul that he is, disclosed in response to her prodding that the reason he didn’t get down to Miami much to visit his parents at their retirement community was because he was “really busy,” and because it bothered him “to be around a lot of old people
with dentures.” My mother’s jaw dropped, revealing a big piece of unchewed prune Danish I thought she might spit in his eye. But after I kicked Neil hard under the table, he quickly recovered, reassuring Mom in his sweetest voice that he really loved his parents, and that he had nothing against elderly people or their teeth. He also told my mother her own teeth were particularly lovely, and drew her into an absorbing chat about her use of Arm & Hammer baking soda every other day to help keep them white and youthful-looking. Sticking to this very confined subject area, Neil could be pretty compelling when he turned on the charm.

After that, Neil could do no wrong as far as my mother was concerned. And it always seemed to me that Neil felt pretty much the same way about her, reserving his warmest feelings (notwithstanding his pathetic attempt at revisionist history) for her hearty, home-cooked dishes, especially the brisket. For the record, he also loved her stuffed cabbage. Just not as much.

Indeed, it seemed Mom was the only family member Neil didn’t alienate when, not long after that brunch, he held up my family’s Passover Seder an excruciating twenty-five minutes in order to muddle, turtlelike, through the Four Questions in Hebrew. People around the table tried to persuade Neil to cease and desist, making the powerful argument that little Rachel, my cousin Lisa’s adorable six-year-old, had just covered the very same questions in English, and absent evidence of intentional fraud or tamper
ing, that version should be considered definitive. But my bullheaded, tone-deaf boyfriend insisted on plodding ahead, cheerfully oblivious to the impression he was making on family members, most of whom he was meeting for the first time, and the vehemence of their registered objections.