Room for Love (36 page)

“It's not a good time right now,” I tell him, but take his phone number and promise to call when my schedule opens up. As I move past, his eyes never leave my skinny, pale ankles.

A big, bushy Irish wolfhound limps past me and I say, “Hi, baby face, I'm sorry about your leg.” It's an illness really, my compulsion to talk to every dog I see. I think I'm afraid they'll recognize a kindred spirit in me and feel hurt if I don't acknowledge them. I tell myself I'll dump the rest of my frozen yogurt on the next street corner, since it's loaded with sugar and calories and dripping all over my hand, but when I get there, it's too good to part with. I finish it all the way to my corner, where I nod at the family hanging out in their van while wiping yogurt on my old cutoff khakis, and blow kisses at their yappy Yorkie, who barks as I pass.

The door to my apartment isn't locked. It pushes right open, and I immediately sense that something is different. The windows are still boarded over and the space is still dark, but the toxic smell has grown less pungent and the muck in front of the door has been cleared away. A waist-high pile of full garbage bags sits in the middle of the dank cave that used to be my bedroom.

“Hello?” I say, entering cautiously.

“Oh, hey.” Zach the hardware-store boy's head pops out from behind the washer/dryer. He's wearing a dust mask that he pulls down around his neck when he sees me. Then he blushes, as usual, so deeply that I can see it in the dark. He walks out of the kitchen wiping his hands on the bottom of the Smokey the Bear T-shirt he's wearing over a pair of filthy jeans.

“Hey,” he says. “I've been cleaning up the place.”

“You've made major headway,” I say, my eyes adjusting to the darkness. There's another pile of garbage bags in the living room, which must contain all the ash and plaster that was covering the floor, because there's very little of it left. A portable fan hums in the corner, its metal face turning slowly left then right, doing its best to dry up the dampness. The exposed floor is a sight: the damp floorboards curling cutely, yet disturbingly, upon themselves. A pile of cleaning supplies covers the kitchen floor: mop, broom, dustpan, various bottles, rags, sponges. There's a shovel leaning up against the washing machine.

“You didn't have to do all this,” I tell him.

“Well, yeah, I kind of did,” he says, walking over to the bookshelves he built. He turns away from me and starts to sand the wood down with a block and says over his shoulder, “Grab one of those sponges over by the fridge. They're good for getting the soot off.”

I pick one up—it's dry, not like a normal sponge—and start wiping off the refrigerator. “You think you can save those?” I ask.

“Definitely,” he says. “Sand 'em down and stain 'em and they'll be as good as new.”

I look around, trying to get used to my burnt-out home. “Hey, where's my couch?” I ask.

“I put it up on the roof,” Zach says. “Had to carry it up on my head. It was soaked. I think if we leave it in the sun, it might be okay. The cushions are crunchy and I don't know if you'll be able to get the smell of smoke out, but they can be reupholstered. I put that red chair up there, too, and the rug that was bunched up in the corner.”

“Thanks,” I say, peeking into the refrigerator, which Zach has emptied. “Hey, you haven't found any of my stuff buried in here anywhere, have you? I'm wondering about jewelry.”

“You got that one box?”

“Yeah. God, I never did thank you for that. That was so nice. I don't know how you did it, but you managed to get almost everything I have of my grandmother's.”

“Were you close?”

“Yeah, she was around a lot when I was a kid,” I say, dropping my bag to the floor and leaning against the exposed washing machine. An image of my grandmother comes to mind, rubbing lotion on my legs after a bath. “Soft as velvet,” she would say, tears gathering in her brown eyes. “Please God, let me live to see you married. I so want to see you a bride.”

“She died a few years ago and my grandfather later that year,” I say. “I was inconsolable. I think I wondered if anyone would ever love me that much again. Sorry, that must sound pretty stupid.”

“Not at all,” Zach says.

“I don't know what the hell I'm talking about,” I say, suddenly embarrassed. “How do you recommend finding my valuables?”

“I've bagged up a lot of debris,” he says. “But I left most of the bedroom for you. Maybe you'll be able to find something. I did some Internet research, though, and I guess it's hard to find objects in the parts that get hit the worst. They get pulverized.”

“My bedroom did suffer,” I say.

“Some of the books that were closer to the floor are all right,” Zach says. “Soggy but legible.”

I approach the stack he's made on the floor: a motley assortment of plays, a Yeats anthology, movie guides, Toni Morrison, the Proust I never read, Tim Robbins, a stack of romance novels. I run my fingers along the damp pages of a doozy called
One Steamy Summer
before making my way past the countertop, which Zach has leaned against the kitchen wall, past the pile of garbage bags and the flame-broiled wooden stakes that used to be my bedroom walls, and sit down on the floor to start digging though the rubble to search for anything that might belong to me.

“I laughed when I saw all those romantic books,” Zach says. “I got into your books when I was staying here. It was a workout, all those writers you like who make you work for it—Woolf, Faulkner, Nabokov. I read a lot, kept discovering new stuff, like Italo Calvino, awesome, and then I found that hidden stash.” He chuckles.

“I was trying to write one,” I say, refusing to give in to his mockery. “I heard there was a formula to romance novels, so I got the guidelines from one of the major publishers, thought maybe I'd take a stab at it.”

“Oh, tell me you didn't like reading them. You didn't have to get thirty-eight of them.”

“I bought about twenty for a buck at a stoop sale, but fine, I admit I did like them a little.” I laugh. “I even started writing this essay about my guilty addiction, you know, the English-major geek who gets hooked on Harlequin. Never finished it.”

“You could still,” he says. “You're a great writer.”

“Oh really.”

“I've been reading you for years,” he says. “Your film stuff.”

“You read
Flicks?
” I'm incredulous. Only directors, movie fanatics, and the indie community read my rag.

“I have a subscription,” he says.

“That's hilarious,” I say, refocusing on the rubble, but I'm sure his face is crimson.

The first thing I locate is a huge chunk of blue ceramic with dirt still clinging to it. It's a piece of the flowerpot I planted Zach's mini-roses in. The flowers themselves were collateral damage. I look up at him and remember how sweet I thought it was when he brought that plant to Serena, back when he was a mystery to me. How funny that I knew the guy fixing up my apartment all along. It's comforting to know it was Zach, someone who's always been so kind and generous. Digging my fingers farther into the muck, I touch something hard and bore a little tunnel around a smooth object, which turns out to be a Day of the Dead skeleton my sister brought me from Mexico. Its bones are charbroiled. I wonder how it got all the way over here from its shelf.

“Look at this,” I say to Zach, holding it up.

He walks over and peers at the tiny, black and white doll. “Only a dead guy could survive the flames,” he says. “Check out his expression.”

I look down into my palm at the spooky grin on its face. The particles around the doll have dried out a lot. They feel soft and dusty on my hands. I fill my left hand and with my right push away gray and black dust, liberating solid chunks with my fingers to see if they might be anything valuable.

“Hey, you know the books that you saved during the fire, why those?”

“I don't know, really. I didn't have time to think, I just grabbed, but I guess they seemed worn, like you paid attention to them,” he says. “I guess they were the ones I would have rescued if it was my fire.”

We spend the next hour there, Zach sanding while I dig and chuck hunks of gloop. I don't find much except a couple of shattered nail polish bottles amid the unidentifiable slabs. I'm acknowledging the surreal humor in my situation and feeling calm, my mind quiet for the first time in a while.

“You know, Zach, I have good news for you,” I say. “Once the place is fixed up, you can go on staying here if you want.”

He spins around, wiping his hands on his jeans. I don't know why it's hard for me to tell him.

“My boyfriend and I were breaking up, but now it looks like we're staying together,” I say. “I'm going to keep living at his place.”

“Oh,” he says, turning toward the shelves for a second and then facing me again. “I never understood why you would live somewhere else when you have this great apartment.”

“Well, I just told you, I'm staying at my boyfriend's. His apartment is bigger, so it makes sense. I guess we'll see what happens in the future.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“I love Anthony and I'm gonna try to make it work and if that means not living at my apartment, so be it,” I say, feeling as if I have to defend myself. “He gave me a ring.”

“You're engaged?”

“Well, not
engaged
engaged,” I say. “It's more like a promise, you know, to get married eventually.”

“Right,” he says and turns around to keep sanding the bookshelves.

I keep picking through shards, pissed off and irritated that Anthony didn't ask me to marry him. What the hell is a promise ring anyway? Did he even say it was a promise ring?

“You know,” I say, staring into the mountain of dust at my feet, “things are going really great for me right now, you know? My job, the column, did you know I got a column at that magazine
Luscious?
” I look up at him and he nods. I wonder how he knows. “I guess I'm not busier than anyone else in New York, but lately I feel like I'm on some kind of spinning ride at an amusement park that's going faster and faster and I'm glued to the walls and the floor's dropping and I'm waiting to tumble when it comes to a halt, and it's starting to make me dizzy and a little nauseous, even though it's exhilarating and fast, and I don't know how to get off. And now there's all this.” I thrust my hands out, indicating the pitiful remains of my life. “I don't even know where to start with it and I have nowhere to go. Then this guy that I really do care about tells me he wants to make this relationship work and maybe it's what I'm supposed to do.”

Zach walks slowly toward me. I lift my chin up toward him from where I'm sitting Indian-style on the damp, blackened floor. “I always wanted to live a simpler life,” I say, “to find a small, quiet space where I could have some peace, maybe even get a dog. This apartment felt like a start, and I don't know what to do now.” My shoulders slump as I start to cry into my hands.

“Shhhh,” Zach says, crouching down and putting his arm around me.

He's so big, I feel safe and warm and don't want him to go away. When I stop crying he pulls away from me and lightly places his hand on the back of my neck. My whole body tingles.

“This place can be rebuilt, Jacquie,” he says, scooting around to sit on the floor in front of me, the bottoms of his knees hitting the tops of mine. “I know it seems bad right now, but when you get the insurance money, all you'll need is time, energy, a little vision. It should take six months. With focus and determination, I give it three.”

“Where is Buster?” I ask.

“With Serena,” he says. “I didn't think I should bring him here. Who knows what he'd get into? You know, Jacquie, there's nothing to be afraid of. Here's an idea: get excited instead. This is a clean slate, anything can happen. I mean—” He bites his lip. I feel like this is when he's supposed to reach out and kiss me before the sexual tension suffocates both of us, but that's not a possibility, is it?

“I should really go,” I say, jumping up and away from him. “I have this party thing.”

“Yeah, I have to go pretty soon, too,” he says. “Gotta meet Serena to taste wedding cake.”

Now it's my turn to blush and move quickly to the door.

As I'm swinging it open, Zach says, “Jacquie, I have to apologize.” I turn around to face him. “I knew about the light in the bathroom. I'd seen it spark before, and in my line of work, I never should have let that slide. I kept meaning to fix it, but never got to it. You just never think this could happen.”

“I should have fixed it, too, Zach.”

“Yeah, probably.”

When I leave, I don't feel like going back to Anthony's, so I take the F train to Brooklyn and tumble into Courtney's inviting, king-size bed, where I fall dead asleep in minutes.

16

Three month sublet: Beautiful, sunny 2-bedroom with vibrant, warm energy available on quiet, tree-lined block in Park Slope. Fully furnished with lovely, eclectic pieces, luscious plants, homey details, hardwood floors, fireplace, terrace, dishwasher, high-speed Internet. Additional perk: subletter will have the fortunate opportunity to spend time with our big, fat, gorgeous feline whom we will be missing like mad. Call Courtney.

I wake up from my nap to Chaz complaining about how desperately and immediately he needs to be fed. When I pry my eyes reluctantly open, he is seated on top of Courtney's pillow directly in front of my face, iridescent eyes unblinking, obviously irked.

“Fine,” I say, “fine,” and sleepwalk into the kitchen to fetch him a scrumptious health-food brand Turkey and Giblets Feast. It stinks up the whole room as I spoon it into his crusty dish. I open the refrigerator and pull out the Brita pitcher, pour myself a tumbler of water, and guzzle the whole thing. The clock over the stove says eight-twenty when I make my way back to the bedroom and crawl back under the covers. “Shit!” I jump up again, more awake now. The
Flicks
party started at eight way on the West Side, and I'm in Brooklyn. Can I never be on time? I drag myself into the bathroom to examine myself in the mirror and am alarmed to see puffy eyes and big, frizzy hair that resembles Carole King's circa 1973. “Shit,” I say again, realizing that I can't avoid taking a shower and at least wetting my hair. I turn on the hot water and run a brush through the bird's nest on my head. “Your hair is like a broom,” I remember my grandma saying in her Yiddish accent. I miss my grandma. While the shower's heating up, I grab an open bottle of white wine from the fridge, pour a glass, and place it on the edge of the tub to sip while I'm washing off my nap.