Filthy Rich (7 page)

Moreover, there was the not-so-little matter of taste. I cringed at the thought that I—Marcy Lee Mallowitz—
risked becoming forever identified as a prime example of the habitual elevation of unaccomplished nobodies a recent cover story in
Newsweek
dubbed “America’s Growing Pseudo-Celebrity Crisis.” I don’t disagree that there is such a crisis or that so-called reality shows like
Filthy Rich!
and
The Plank
are its epicenter. Only please do me a favor and keep my good name out of it.

Thus my decision to stay holed up in my apartment, dressed in yesterday’s sweats and popping fancy chocolates, was not part of some carefully calculated strategy to heighten the media’s interest in yours truly. But it seemed to have that effect, turning me into some sort of game show Greta Garbo.

Speaking of the ring, it wasn’t long after Frank brought up the gifts that he made a return trip, this time bearing a note hand-delivered by a man Frank described under my interrogation as a “tall, decent-looking sort, probably fortyish.”

“Dear Ms. Mallowitz,” said the note, which was typed on plain white paper, “You don’t know me, but I was at the show, and think your ex-boyfriend is a real jerk. I saw that junky ring he gave you sitting on the floor of the set as everyone was leaving, and I took the liberty of grabbing it and selling it for you on eBay. It went yesterday for $5,200. I have the check, and if you have a moment, I’d like to deliver it in person.” The letter was signed, “Your fan, Cliff Jentzen.”

I was touched that someone—a perfect stranger—would go to the trouble of selling the ring for me. I was also
impressed by the financial result. Hey, I thought to myself, $5,200 is probably $5,000 more than Neil paid for it. Amazing thing, the power of television.

“He’s in the lobby, waiting,” Frank said. “I told him I could give you the check, but he said he’d rather wait and do it himself.”

“You left him alone there in the lobby?” I asked Frank.

“Yeah, he seems like a nice enough guy,” Frank said. “Decent-looking. I don’t think he’s the type to steal Social Security checks from the mailboxes when no one’s looking. No harm in you saying hello. I could send him up if you want.”

“Frank,” I said, “not so fast. We don’t know anything about this mystery benefactor of mine. Maybe he’s from the
National Enquirer
, and the eBay bit is just a ruse to get an interview or a photo of me looking like a slob. Or, he could be a more conventional weirdo who saw me on TV and developed a sick obsession. Or maybe he just wants to worm a big tip out of me. I can’t say he doesn’t deserve it. And then, of course, there’s always the possibility that this Cliff Jentzen, if that’s his real name, is as nice as you say.”

“Maybe,” Frank said. He was now my co-conspirator. If I met this guy in the lobby, the two of us strategized, I would be sacrificing any expectation of privacy, as a handful of reporters and lensmen were still camped outside the building hungry for breaking developments in the Marcy Lee Mallowitz story. I could also be sacrificing a lot of money, since once informed of the ring’s fate, Neil, the
cheapskate, was certain to insist on being cut in. Knowing Neil, he would probably demand the whole wad. So my doorman and I devised Plan Two: I would meet this Jentzen fellow in the basement laundry room. The place has security cameras up the wazoo, we figured, so Frank would be able to keep an eye on things from the monitors in the lobby.

“If he’s bad news, I’ll signal for you to come running,” I said. “Just promise me, Frank, you won’t leave on a coffee break.”

We shook on it.

“Okay, then,” I said. “The laundry room in five minutes.”

Within seconds of laying that plan, the stomach butterflies from the other night came fluttering back with a vengeance. As I rode the elevator down to the basement, I felt as jittery as Marcia Brady at the very beginning of Episode Seventy-five. It was very perplexing. Marcia had good reason to be nervous: She was facing her first day of high school. What was my excuse?

The elevator doors opened, landing me in the middle of the musty basement storage area. On the left, just before the door to the laundry room, I was surprised to see Neil’s ugly black-leather “thinking chair.” He’d apparently parked it there for safekeeping on his hurried way out the door the other night. It had a white piece of paper Scotch-taped to
the seat with his name on it, and a notation: “Save for Pickup.” On it, someone in the building—I assumed it was my doorman Frank—had scrawled “Good riddance, you bastard” in red Flair pen, and signed it with a reasonable approximation of a skull and crossbones.

I had a good mind to remove the note and ask this Jentzen guy with whom I was about to rendezvous to try making another sale for me on eBay.

Quick, give me
a five-letter word meaning “Dumped Female Lifeline.”

The answer, of course, is M-A-R-C-Y. Yes, me. Marcy Lee Mallowitz. If you got that right, give yourself a generous pat on the back; you’ve clearly been paying close attention. Moreover, you’ve correctly completed number 8 Down in
The New York Times
crossword puzzle that appeared the same day my mystery eBay hero turned up out of the blue. Lucky for me, I was unaware of this mocking reference at the time, as I probably would have been too depressed to leave my apartment and go meet him. I was feeling plenty down already without any crossword
tsoris
.

On a more philosophical, less purely egotistical level, my mention in the crossword amounted to jarring confirmation that my television travails had already become part of the cultural vocabulary. Much as I tried to resist, I was nevertheless getting thrust into Darvaland. Any day now, I expect to see an erudite
New Yorker
essay by Daniel Patrick
Moynihan expounding on my unwarranted emergence in the spotlight—“Defining Celebrity Down.” Personally, I’m not sufficiently deep or insightful enough to know exactly what my rise to fame on the flimsy basis of one brief, embarrassing appearance on
Filthy Rich!
says about our society, me, or the clever wordsmiths who write the
Times
crossword. But I have a sinking feeling it isn’t good.

There is something strangely comforting about watching someone else’s laundry sloshing about in a sea of suds through the round glass window of a communal washing machine. You can enjoy the rhythm of the waves without worrying if those stain-zapping enzymes used to fortify Extra-Strength Tide with Bleach are dissolving the giant ketchup stain threatening to force your favorite blouse into retirement. At least that’s what I was thinking as I waited for my male visitor amid the half dozen coin machines in the basement of my building. This may be idiosyncratic on my part, but the spin cycle, I have found, can be almost hypnotic.

Just as I was nearing a trancelike state, I heard a man’s deep voice. “Marcy, Marcy Mallowitz, that you?”

Startled, I turned around.

“Cliff Jentzen,” the man said. “Sorry if I scared you.”

On quick inspection, he looked to be fortyish and quite “decent-looking,” much as my doorman Frank had described. He was clad in a worn pair of jeans with a subtle blue-plaid cotton shirt I was almost sure came from J. Crew.
A slight paunch suggested exercise deprivation, but nothing a month’s worth of gym visits couldn’t significantly reverse. Between his friendly manner, cute cleft chin, and full head of slightly disheveled wavy brown hair, the overall vibes were positive. Make that
very
positive.

“Hi,” I said as we rather tentatively shook hands. “Welcome to my private office.” I withdrew my hand somewhat quickly, preferring to risk appearing a tad impolite than make a permanent bad impression with my sweaty palms. “It’s a little noisy,” I added, gesturing with my other moist hand to the surrounding machines, “but you can’t beat the location if you like doing laundry as much as I do.”

“I’m not real big on laundry,” he said without missing a beat, “it’s the decor I can’t get enough of.” Not a Henny Youngman classic maybe, but as throwaway banter goes, not bad. Definitely a big improvement over Neil’s lame nitrous oxide jokes. In the three years I was with Neil, I couldn’t recall him ever saying anything funny. Not ha-ha funny. At least not on purpose.

Whoa, Marcy, I reminded myself. This guy’s here to deliver a check, not be checked out for a date. It’s just two days since Neil gave you the heave-ho. What would it do to your media profile if it got out you were back on the hunt already?

That was followed by a warring message from a small, decidedly unhip corner of my brain. Whaddaya talking, “media profile”? Two days ago, you didn’t even have one. Get back to business. You still don’t know if Cliff Jentzen is
really a guardian angel who sold Neil’s junky ring on eBay for you, or some kind of reporter or even a pervert.

And, of course, one more important thought: Idiot, why are you still in your Rosie sweats?

“Well, here’s the check,” he said, handing over a small, folded blue piece of paper he excavated from one of the back pockets of his jeans.

I opened the check and looked it over. It was for $5,200 all right, but it was a personal check from his account, raising my suspicions.

“I’m confused,” I said. “I thought the ring sold on eBay. Why your personal check?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get the money back. But the eBay payment could take a few days. I thought it would make you happy to get the money now. I thought you could probably use a lift.”

“You’re right about that,” I said, folding the check back in half and hunting for a sweatpants pocket to store it in.

Zip. Bam. End of transaction, I figured.

Happily, I was wrong.

“Much as I love laundry rooms,” Cliff said, “how about continuing this conversation elsewhere—say, lunch?”

“Lunch?” I said dumbly, as if totally unfamiliar with the concept of a midday meal.

“Yeah, lunch,” he said, “It’s almost noon, and giving away big checks makes me hungry. How about it?”

The only trouble, I explained, was that I hadn’t been out
side once since the show. I wanted things to die down. “This publicity stuff is not my thing,” I said.

“I gather,” he said. “And I think it’s great the way you’re holding out. The media sharks circling around you don’t deserve the time of day. The kind of fame they’re peddling is a pile of crap, as far as I’m concerned. Real life is too important to sell out to ratings and reality TV. On the other hand, just because your ex-boyfriend makes a fool of himself in front of the whole country is no reason your life should totally stop. He’s the one who should feel embarrassed.”

“Thanks for that positive spin. Everyone else is saying I’m nuts not to go for the gold. I’m a little confused at this point.”

“That’s just your body saying you need fresh air,” he said. “I know the press can be pesky, so I brought this just in case.” He pulled a wrinkled, deep-purple bandanna from his back pants pocket and waved it like a flag. “Ta-da.”

Instantly, I thought of my Life Coaching client Jane McDee, the hamburger heiress with the bad dye job and the buck teeth it seemed Neil had been working on forever. She had a lot of bandannas in her collection, but not this particular shade of purple.

“Put it on,” Cliff instructed, handing me the bandanna. “We’ll add my sunglasses, and you’ll just look like another weird New Yorker.”

He had our escape planned. “We can slip out the building’s service exit, and no one will know you’re gone. My car’s parked right outside. I know a great Chinese place in
Astoria. It’s a real melting-pot neighborhood—full of new immigrants who speak every conceivable language except English. Barbara Walters and her friends will never find you. Promise.”

The invitation was even more irresistible than the baskets of fattening edibles upstairs. “It’s worth a try,” I said, tying on the scarf.

Just as we were departing the laundry room, my doorman Frank appeared. I’d forgotten he was watching our meeting unfold on the lobby’s security monitors. This provoked an instantaneous flicker of recognition. Just like contestants on that sick shiver-me-timbers show,
The Plank
, forget about the cameras watching their every move, I realized.

“That you, Ms. Mallowitz?” Frank said, plainly puzzled by the bandanna and dark Ray-Bans I was sporting. “Everything okay?”

“Fine, Frank,” I said. “Everything is fine.”

I know what you’re thinking. Her judgment sucks. Has she never heard the phrase “decent interval”? Besides, she got the same positive vibes when she first met Neil, and look what a self-centered meanie he turned out to be. She doesn’t even know yet what the man does for a living, and she’s getting in an automobile with him to go eat Chinese in some colorful ethnic neighborhood in Queens? That’s not lunch. That’s a DATE!

We think alike. These same thoughts occurred to me as I was trying to scrunch into the front seat of his ’91 Corolla without cracking any of the plastic disc boxes messily lining the floor. Given my background, I recoiled at this clue of what his closets at home must look like. A momentary panic set in. But then I said to myself: Marcy Lee, you knew from the start that Neil was a great orthodontist, and very neat, and where did that get you? Insulted and abandoned on prime-time network television three years later, that’s where.

I know my track record in the man department does not inspire confidence. But trust me on this one. Besides, as I kept trying to reassure myself during the half-hour ride to Astoria: This wasn’t a date. We were just having lunch.

A long lunch, as it turned out.

The restaurant was a small, unpretentious jewel only recently discovered by
Zagat
. We arrived a little after twelve-thirty and stayed until around four, by which time some of the other tables were occupied by seniors there to take advantage of the early-bird dinner specials.

Here is what I found out about my companion, apart from his weakness for extra-spicy Kung Pao Chicken. Cliff was raised in Plainview, Long Island, which I wouldn’t have guessed, since he retained as little of his Long Island accent as I retain of Brooklynese. He was a big sports guy in high school, which led to a track scholarship to Cornell, where he graduated (barely, he claimed) a couple of years before I finished Barnard. Since then, best as I could piece together,
he’d held different jobs. Lately, he told me, he’d been working “in production,” which I took to mean that he was some kind of packaged-goods middle manager. Not much glamour to it, I supposed, but a lot of free samples.

He wasn’t a doctor, which would disappoint my mom. But, if we ended up going out, at least I could tell her he wasn’t some out-of-work bum.

Somehow I never did find out what Cliff was doing at
Filthy Rich!
But he said it was “spunky” the way I threw the ring at Neil and gave him what for. “Unlike Lou Grant,” he explained, drawing a contrast to the gruff but lovable newsroom boss on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
that bespoke a certain sitcom savvy, “I
like
spunk. Actually, I like it a lot.” He made it clear he wasn’t just being a Good Samaritan picking up the ring and selling it for me; he wanted an excuse to meet me.

Oh, and this is important: Cliff said that while he had come close to marriage a couple of times, he had never tied the knot. He broke up with his last steady girlfriend, a veterinarian specializing in exotic birds, he explained, because he began to get the feeling she cared for her feathered patients more than she cared for him. Cliff said that was more than a year ago.

Mostly, however, we didn’t talk about Cliff. Mostly, we talked about me, which I wasn’t exactly used to after three years of Neil’s steady blathering about his amazing break-throughs in orthodontics. Cliff just kept peppering me with questions, even to the point of exploring my close but com
plicated relationship with my mother, which, I realized while talking it over, had become even more complicated in the aftermath of
Filthy Rich!

For my mother, I explained, the whole idea of being in
People
was a dream come true. It’s not really that she’s shallow. It’s just she can blot out the humiliating reason
People
was interested. She’s like the rest of America, which sees celebrity as a laudable achievement in and of itself.

“So what makes you different?” Cliff wanted to know. “You obviously grew up loving television. Classic comedies at least, though not
Sonny and Cher
.”

“That was a
variety show
,” I reminded him. It was still a sore point. But thinking about it, my resistance to being celebritized was probably a form of delayed rebellion. I have one friend who was dragged to Loehmann’s by her mother so much as a kid, she now refuses to buy anything on sale. Me, I didn’t want to be famous for being dumped by my boyfriend on a game show, even if it
was
in prime time. I’d gotten some interesting offers, though. I told Cliff about the one from kosher Baco Bits.

Cliff paid the check, and I was tying on the bandanna again, getting ready to leave, when our server, a silver-haired Chinese lady who didn’t speak any English, returned to the table and started waving her order pad in my face. She kept repeating something in Chinese, and the more we tried to tell her we didn’t understand, the more agitated she seemed to become. Finally, her son, the restaurant’s owner, came over.

“Please excuse Mother,” he said. “She saw you on TV, that
Filthy Rich!
She wants your autograph.”

Cliff and I looked at each other and laughed. Then, naturally, I obliged this new fan. “Best wishes,” I wrote, “Marcy Lee Mallowitz.” Next to my name, I drew a smiley face, something I intentionally omitted when I signed for the unlikable Mrs. Schwartz from my building. I also posed for a picture with the owner. If I ever return to the place, I thought, I fully expect to find it hanging on the wall by the tiny coatroom in the front of the restaurant, along with pictures of the governor, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tony Bennett, and the owner’s other famous diners.