I'm with Stupid (14 page)

My mouth falls open. Max comes to my defense. “We don’t know anything about that,” he dismissively answers.

She looks at Max then at me and finally at Libby, who gives Noreen her hand. “Hello, I’m Libby,” she cheerily says.

Noreen has a confused look on her face. “Well, if you do have something to do with it, I want to thank you,” she says to me. “I’m so glad I ran into you on Valentine’s Day.”

Noreen explains that, like me, she had no idea that Richard was cheating. She didn’t believe it at first—and when they came home that Valentine’s night Richard tried to convince her that I was just a crazy person, and that he didn’t even know me. But when she couldn’t shake her suspicions she started following him. And her suspicions were confirmed. She says he tries to hit on everything that moves. He’s made a fool of not only me and her but a handful of other girls that he’s been seeing on the side.

“So if you
are
the one behind the pranks I want to thank you,” she says to me. “He deserves it.”

Max interjects: “Why are you still here?” he asks in confusion and blows into his cupped hands to warm them. “Who are you?” He wasn’t listening.

“Richard’s fiancée,” she repeats. “I’ve been following him, and now I’m ready to confront him. Richard and me are through. I want to get married but not to someone like that.” She takes her engagement ring off her finger and puts it in her pocket. “I don’t know why I’m still wearing this,” she mumbles.

Max jumps in. “Oh, Noreen,” he warmly says to her. “You are wearing too much makeup but I like you anyway. Don’t confront him yet. Why do that? Let’s work together instead. I’m sure I could put your knowledge of Richard to use.” He offers her his hand. She takes it, then touches her face. “Do you really think I wear too much makeup?” she asks with genuine concern. Max smiles at her wistfully and nods: “Of course you do.” He points to Libby. “But Libby here is an expert. She’ll give you a little update.” Libby moves over to Noreen and nods enthusiastically. “Totally,” she says, lifting Noreen’s chin to the sun with a manicured finger. She examines Noreen’s blue eye shadow and too-dark foundation. “I know just the right shades for you.”

Noreen turns to me: “Sorry I pushed you on Valentine’s Day,” she says sheepishly as Libby continues examining her face. I smile at Noreen. She’s not my type of chick, not by a mile, but she’s genuinely harmless—especially now that she’s not trying to scratch me with fake nails. Max breaks up our love fest. He knows the neighborhood; there’s a convenience store one block away. He’s going to run over there to pick up a few supplies. He tells us to stay put and keep an eye on Richard.

We see Max again some ten minutes later. He is now across the street. He casually sits down on a park bench twenty feet from where Richard and the girl are sitting. Libby, meanwhile, opens her purse, removes some cosmetics, and begins redoing Noreen’s makeup. When Richard and the girl finally get up, Max gets up, too, and begins jogging toward them, his head down. When he gets to Richard he bumps into him but doesn’t stop running. “Sorry!” Max calls over his shoulder and keeps moving down the block. Richard and the girl turn to look at Max then continue walking in the opposite direction. I raise my binoculars. There is a sign taped to Richard’s back:
I WET THE BED
. Mature. Completely. Just then Libby’s cell phone rings. It’s Max. He tells us to meet him and the driver on Madison Avenue, one block away. He adds that Noreen should leave her cell number with us. She does so, gladly. “Tell him to call if he needs anything,” she says. “And let him know that I still have the keys to Richard’s apartment.” Her makeup, by the way, looks great.

George the driver drops off Libby and me in front of our apartment building. We air-kiss Max good-bye. Libby and I, as previously mentioned, live across the hall from each other. We have identical two-room studios consisting of a kitchen and living room—the living room also serves as the bedroom. If Libby opens her front door and I open mine we can see into each other’s kitchens. The space between our doors is about four paces. Libby has lived in the building for years. I’m a more recent addition, having moved in one month ago, when Libby told me about the vacancy. I’m indebted to her. The place is rent-stabilized—which means the rent can only be increased a nominal percentage each year. It’s a steal by New York standards. Most people I know have to move every couple of years because landlords raise their rents out of the blue by two or three hundred dollars. The market is evil.

As I reach into my jeans for the house keys the yellow Post-it note given to me by Helga falls out.
EMERGENCY
. I wrinkle it into a ball, unlock my door, and wave good-bye to Libby as she shuts hers. Home sweet home. I drop my suitcase and walk around to make sure nothing has been stolen, and nothing has. I begin sorting through my stack of mail. Okay, a few too many credit card bills here. Not ready for that just yet. Wish someone would steal those. I put the mail aside, press the play button on the answering machine, and collapse onto the couch. I-am-back. Let’s see what we have . . .

The first message is from my mother:

“I know you’re in South Africa right now but I have a question for you about canned soup. You like soup, I know you do. It’s the good kind. But I don’t know what flavors to buy. Okay, call me as soon as you get home. I love you. And remember we want to come see the new apartment. We need to set up a day. You know I’d rather have you home in Brooklyn but your father’s been asking . . .”

The second message is from, oh, what do you know? My mother. Same with the third and the fourth and the fifth. I momentarily zone out, thinking of William. I press stop on the machine. I turn on my computer and get online. Before checking e-mail I look up flights to South Africa, just for fun. It’s never too early to plan another vacation. Besides, seeing William again would be great. It would be amusing to rendezvous annually. Ha! I can’t believe I had a one-night stand. It feels surprisingly liberating. I feel like a guy.

I type in two arbitrary dates during the month of July. I light a cigarette while waiting for the results. I begin to hum. What a memorable trip. The price pops up at last. I lean in for an oversize dose of reality . . . $2,230! Holy cow, that’s expensive—and that’s the cheapest fare? I check a few other dates—same price. Okay then, never mind. That sucks. Wow, why is it so much money? Crap, so much for that. I next open my e-mail to check messages. I scan the row of new messages but nothing catches my eye. Nothing from William.

I pour myself a tall glass of sink water. Here’s to living dangerously! I again press play on the answering machine. It starts the messages from the beginning. I listen to the same messages about soup and start systematically pounding the delete key. This is why I don’t have a cell phone. And then somewhere around message eight the tone of my mother’s voice changes. I catch the first words in a message that begins, “Your poor dad . . .” but I accidentally press delete before it ends. It’s my mother’s voice but it’s not her voice. It’s broken. It sounds like she’s been crying. I lean into the machine for the next message. “I can’t get in touch with you. Where are you? Dad is in the hospital . . .”

Hospital. The water glass drops from my hand and crashes to the wood floor. It shatters, spraying shards across the room. I fumble with the phone and dial my parents’ number. When my mother answers she is angry. “Where have you been?” she asks, her voice unraveling. “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last four days. I’ve left messages saying it’s an emergency. Dad had an accident.”

Within five minutes I’m in a taxicab, on my way to Brooklyn.

I let myself into my parents’ house using the key I never relinquished after moving out years ago. I hear my parents talking upstairs. I race up the stairs two at a time to their bedroom. My father is lying in bed on a floral bedspread. His right leg, propped up on pillows, is in a cast from the knee down. His left thumb is completely bandaged up, too. He is holding a stack of papers, which he sets next to him when he sees me. “There you are,” he says and smiles weakly. He takes off his reading glasses on a rope. They fall against his chest. I give him a hug and he kisses my cheek. My mother hugs me, too, but I can see she’s ticked. She has her coat on and is holding her purse. I ask what happened. Start from the top. I only got part of the story on the phone.

“He fell off the roof,” my mother says. “A man his age acting like a twenty-year-old. I told him not to go up there but does he listen to me?” I ask what in the world he was doing on the roof. My mother gives him a look.

“I was hooking up a satellite dish,” he answers.

“He was hooking up an illegal satellite dish so he could get every Polish news program,” she says. “I ask you, what does a man living in America need with that? What does he care what’s happening in the village of so and so at this very moment? Even the people who live there don’t care. But your father . . .”

I ask how he’s feeling. “It hurts like a son of a bitch,” he offers. “Your mother is right, maybe I shouldn’t have gone up there.” She throws up her hands: She knows she’s right. “But I’ll tell you,” he says with a smirk, “that dish works.”

“It works,” my mother repeats sarcastically. She buttons up her coat. “I have to go to the deli. Your father can’t do it.”

My father is a fixture at the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, deli he and my mother own; he knows every customer by name. Apart from family vacations, he’s never missed a day.

My mother removes gloves from her purse and puts them on. She tells me that Henryk is at the deli now helping out, and that she’s going to check in on him. She adds that it would be nice if I pitched in, too. I nod.

My father calls to my mother as she leaves. “Tell Henryk to cut the Krakus ham thin,” he orders. “People don’t like it too thick. Mrs. Kurczynski will complain. She doesn’t have all her own teeth.”

“But she still has a mouth on her,” my mother offers.

He next addresses me: “You want to watch the Polish news?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I answer. I sit down next to him in bed and pat his hard cast. “You gave me a scare.”

“Did I?” he asks with some pride. “You were worried about this old man?”

I look at him disbelievingly. “Of course,” I say.

He looks off for a second and shakes his head. “Came right off that roof. When I landed I couldn’t breathe.” He picks up the remote and turns on the TV without speaking another word. For some reason I’m afraid to ask more questions. Despite what Richard thinks, everything is not a joke to me.

On Monday, beat from viewing so much Polish programming with my father, I return to my job at the literary agency, where I am an assistant, an assistant who daily considers staging a heart attack at lunch so she can go home early and rest. It’s not that I don’t like my job, I just prefer rest. See, I am at heart a slacker. I don’t understand those who want to wring their jobs of status, power, and promotions, those who yearn for trophies and plaques announcing their valuable commitment as team players. I’m not going to lie: As far as I’m concerned all the team players in the world can take turns hitting each other on the spinal column with trophies while brainstorming. I’ll hang with whoever is left.

I settle in at my desk and open the first manuscript in a pile of unsolicited manuscripts that will surely challenge my attention span. It’s a memoir by some woman named Sandra May Hanson. I don’t like the name and toss the manuscript aside. Unless Sandra May pulls up to my desk in a pink Cadillac I’ll continue to assume no one by that name is good at anything. I take another manuscript from the pile and open it to page 134: “The moon crested over the dunes . . .” What’s that supposed to mean? I look at the clock. I’ve been sitting at my desk for two minutes. Okaaaaay, time for a drink of water.

I walk to the watercooler. My boss’s secretary, Barbara, whose job it is to be really loud on the phone, lumbers over. There’s something unsettling about Barbara. She’s really fidgety and nervous and can be sweet one minute and Beelzebub the next. She humiliates the mailman on a regular basis. And she’s always crying—not to mention throwing office supplies when she’s frustrated: paper clips, pens . . . they usually manage to strike me when I’m walking past her desk to use the copy machine.

“How was your trip?” Barbara asks while smoothing her brown hair, which reaches to the chin, where it swoops out dramatically, giving her the appearance of the Liberty Bell.

“It was good,” I answer. “South Africa is—”

She cuts me off. “I’ve had a busy few days. The kids were acting up,” she informs me while anxiously tugging at her New York Yankees jersey. I don’t know what’s going to happen if my boss ever enforces that dress code. I am about to make my exit when she starts telling me about her daughter’s medical bills, which are skyrocketing. Unlike Barbara, I don’t consider her daughter to be a human being. She’s unique among “daughters” because, unlike most, she eats cat food. And she eats cat food because she’s a cat, not a child. Barbara’s two pets are her life. I know this because she talks about them all the time. There’s Buddy the beagle and Tchotchke, the sickly, aforementioned cat. Around here they are often referred to, exclusively by her, as “the kids.” (This is what happens when you don’t have kids: You start calling animals kids. Someday I may be Barbara.)

Barbara yammers on while I consider what I can bring my father to help him pass the time while he’s laid up at home. I nod my head at her for what seems like two hours until I hear the question: “Do you want to take a look?”

“What?”

“Do you want to take a look?” she repeats.

Yeaaaaaaaah, I heard that part. But that’s all I heard. “Sure,” I tentatively respond, hoping she doesn’t want to show me a mole. She drags me back to her desk, which is crowded with framed photos of her pets as well as stuffed animals and inspirational and feel-good messages like
THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY!
and the very confusing
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED, SHOP!!!
She pulls a framed photograph from the desk and hands it to me. “Isn’t it darling?” she gushes, standing too close to me.