Waking Beauty (5 page)

No, I’m out there, dumb-ass. I’m cartwheeling down the hallway
.

“Almost done.”

“Well, hurry up. I have to pee!”

Virginie kept several coffee cans full of makeup in the bathroom—a myriad of mysterious powders and paints, for lips, cheek, lash, and brow. There was a container reserved exclusively for the face artist’s numerous brushes, everything from a big puffy one for dusting on beige “light-diffusing crystals” to a miniature brush for taming unruly eyebrow hairs. I fished out one of her newer lipsticks and examined it: #043, Pretty in Pink. It smelled good and the color was fresh and summery. It occurred to me to try some on, you know, just for laughs, but I was wary. There was something vaguely herpetic about Virginie, and the last thing I needed was an STD without the benefit of ever having experienced the S. I wiped the tip of the lipstick. Then I poured half a bottle of rubbing alcohol over it, swabbed the tip again, and dabbed a little on my mouth.

“Are you still in there?!” said Virginie, pounding on the door.

“Sorry,” I said. “Just a sec.” I surveyed the results in the mirror. Portly in Pink.

I wet some toilet paper and wiped the smile off my face.

3    

“So how’s your mom?” asked Isadora, smiling sympathetically.

“Not bad, thanks.”

“She still off the…?” Isadora tipped her hand to her mouth as if she were drinking.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good. Good for her. And the
Porco
, what’s up with that?” Porco—pig in Portuguese—was Isadora’s name for Virginie.

“I’ve got a good one,” I said, knowing that Isadora would be equally titillated and disgusted by Virginie’s living-room sex antics, “but I’ll tell you when we get there.” I gestured to her parents, indicating that it was too lurid to discuss in front of them.

I was seated with the DeSouza offspring on a homemade bench that had been bolted through carpeting to the metal floor in the back of the industrial van. It was pretty much the same drill every weekday: We’d exchange greetings and climb on in. Isadora would ask me about the Porco, and I would fill her in on Virginie’s latest transgression. Apart from that, the ride to work was largely silent, punctuated by the occasional
“Bandido”
or
“Idiota!”
from Mr. DeSouza as he navigated through traffic. Aside from hello and good-bye, Isadora was the only DeSouza who talked to me. The parents didn’t speak English, but Paulo, Mina, Alvaro, and Abril did. I noticed that Paulo, Isadora’s handsome young cousin, wouldn’t even look at me; that is, he would never meet my eye. He wore dark sunglasses, even in the van, and listened to a Discman. Mina, typically, would wile away the journey, inspecting and picking at her cuticles or chipped fingernail polish. Mrs. DeSouza would lock her fierce gaze on the road—keeping the van on track with mind control. And the twins, Alvaro and Abril, would fiddle with their matching Game Boy devices, occasionally comparing scores. I would chat with Isadora and
sneak peeks at Paulo until we arrived at our destination, at which point the DeSouza scouring squad would spring from the van and launch into a flurry of action.

My duties were relatively light. I would pick up the keys and my cart—essentially a giant garbage bag on wheels—and forge ahead on my route, moving from office to office, emptying trash cans. That’s all I had to do. The DeSouzas would come up the rear, sweeping, vacuuming, dusting, wiping—taking care of the tough stuff, entrusted to family members only. For me it was easy. A paid form of exercise, I guess. And if I had to empty office garbage cans for a meager living, 505 Richmond was a comparatively pleasant place to do it. In fact, 505 Richmond was a thing of beauty—an old warehouse that had been thoughtfully transformed into a funky, four-story office building. Many of the original features remained: tastefully worn pine plank flooring, huge casement windows that actually opened, sandblasted brick walls, twelve-foot-high ceilings with exposed rafters, and snaking ductwork that had been painted in rich Farrow & Ball colors.

It was an impressive building that attracted well-heeled, artsy tenants. There were all kinds of design firms—industrial, fashion, furniture, graphic. There was an animation company, an ad agency, several entertainment lawyers and PR firms. There were photographers, film producers, and loads of multimedia types.
WUT Up
magazine was headquartered here. As was IZ Talent Management, one of the country’s most prestigious modeling agencies. On the main floor there was a groovy little café (just closing for the day by the time we got there) and a progressive day-care center (that looked like Keith Haring had a happy hand in the design). The whole joint just reeked of young, edgy success. And the fact that it was located in the middle of the club district—most of the surrounding warehouse buildings had been turned into ultra-groovy nightspots—further enhanced its hip factor.

One of my favorite features of the building was its abundant plant life. On every floor, between the large industrial
service elevator and the passenger lift, the owner had installed a growing station. Long shelves of African violets, cyclamens, gloxinia, star jasmine, creeping fig, golden pothos, grape ivy, and emerald ripple glowing happy and healthy under fluorescent tube lights. There was also a lovely display of rock, cacti, and other succulents on the main floor by the front doors. And then there was the crowning glory, a rooftop patio, brimming with tangled vines and bursting with flowers, where people could go to eat their lunch or take a smoke break.

I should point out that the only reason I know the names of all those plants is because Nathan taught them to me. Nathan had a part-time job taking care of them. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when he was done with his day shift at the video store, Nathan would come down to water, feed, and prune the plants. He was good with them, but he wasn’t into them. Nathan was into movies. Big time. I’d never met anyone so obsessed with cinema. Virginie and Fraser put on airs, but they didn’t know what they were talking about. They just adopted and parroted popular opinion (i.e., Indie film: good, Hollywood film: bad; Jean Seberg: good, Doris Day: bad). Nathan formed his own opinions, and really knew what was what. Plus he wasn’t snobby about it. It wasn’t like he saw only foreign art films featuring endless close-ups of sad-looking actresses with adorable overbites. He saw
everything
. He seemed to have seen every film ever made, from every country on the globe. His typical evening viewing might include a South African documentary, a Hong Kong action pic, and Julia Roberts’s latest romantic comedy. He was shocked that I had never seen or even heard of the original version of
The In-Laws
, one of his fave comedies. And he laughed his ass off when I said Antonioni sounded like something Chef Boyardee would make. Antonioni-os.

Nathan gave me lists of “must-see” movies, most of which I’d never even heard of, all of which I enjoyed when I was able to hunt them down and view them (the truly obscure titles he would occasionally lend me from his personal collection). He
laid the titles on me in groupings that had a logic known only to him. This was one list:
Charade, Carnal Knowledge, Crumb, Cat Ballou
, and
The Conversation
. Semi-alphabetical, right? All C titles. But the list before the C list was not a B list, it was a Y list:
You Can’t Take It with You, Young Frankenstein, Yojimbo
, and
You Can Count on Me
. The list before that was evidently name-based:
Harold and Maude, Zelig
, and
All About Eve
. And the one prior to that seemed to be a simple rhythmic pairing:
A Taste of Cherry
and
A Touch of Class
.

I once asked Nathan what his favorite film was. He responded with a tortured groan and the look of a parent who had been asked to select his favorite child. “No,” he said, shaking his oddly shaped head from side to side, “no, it’s not possible.” The next time I saw him, he presented me with a list of one hundred of his favorite films—not, I repeat,
not
ranked in order of preference-which, he told me, he agonized over and altered regularly.

In a dilapidated khaki knapsack, Nathan toted around a giant paperback called
Video Hound—
a guide to every film that had been released on video or DVD. It was his bible. He would invite you to flip to any page and select a movie title at random. He would then tell you who wrote, directed, and starred in it, provide you with a synopsis, tell you how many bones it rated in the guide, and then give it his own cogent review and rating. We would often play this
Video Hound
game when I took my twenty-minute break at ten o’clock. I enjoyed it. I looked forward to it, actually. Not so much the game, just being in the presence of Nathan. He was the one person in the world with whom I felt simpatico, not comfortable—he made me nervous, actually—but temperamentally…correct. I think the New Age notion of humans giving off vibrations is true. It seemed to me that Nathan and I were like adjacent strings on the same instrument. We vibrated at slightly different frequencies, but in good harmony.

I was already looking forward to seeing him, as I rode the service elevator to the second floor to continue my rounds.
The first floor had gone smoothly enough. Apart from a lawyer trying to explain a contract to her mystified-looking client, I hadn’t encountered anyone working late. 505 Richmond had the kind of energetic young tenants who regularly stuck around until the wee hours, but because it was the first summery night of the season, a lot of people had lit out at closing time, slipped out to sip Mojitos in trendy outdoor cafés, or gone home to their loft-style condominiums to rearrange the placement of their Eames chairs. Good. The fewer bodies around, the better. Even though most of the late workers completely ignored my presence—I now know what it feels like to be an apparition, a trash-can-emptying ghost-I found it depressing to be carting away the garbage of people roughly my own age while they were sitting there in front of me, toiling at their glamorous, challenging, and well-remunerated jobs. Still, there were only two offices in the building that I truly disliked going into. One was the
WUT Up
magazine office, the other was IZ Talent Management.
WUT Up
was on the second floor, and as I rolled my cart off the elevator, I could already hear the boisterous shouts of the managing editor reverberating beyond the imposing
WUT Up
doorway. I shuddered and rolled on by. I decided to do the rest of the floor first. Maybe by the time I was done…Alas, no such luck.

“Hazel, my friend, how’s it going?”

As usual, the
WUT Up
office was still populated with a bevy of young, attractive hipsters, including the youngest, most attractive hipster of them all, Andrew McKay, the founder/managing editor, reclining in his oh-so-ironic 1970s stereo chair. He was smoking a Nat Sherman cigarillo and drinking a beer, with his long legs and his giant Italian shoes stretched out in front of him.

I gave him enough of a fake smile to protect my employment status, then went about my business, emptying the bulging trash cans of the filthiest office in the building.

“Hazel,” he shouted, standing up and moving to his desk. “C’mere, I have something for you.”

A small titter emitted from a trio of idiot hipsters lounging on a faded velvet sofa.

“It’s a present!” said Andrew, laughing, showing off his adorable dimples.

“She doesn’t understand, dufus,” mumbled an anorexic-looking sofa-dweller, clad in a polyester leisure suit that either cost two dollars at the Salvation Army or two thousand dollars in a retro boutique.

Somehow, Andrew McKay had gotten it into his head that I was Portuguese and didn’t speak English. So I went with it, taking a small measure of comfort and amusement in playing dumb. The funny thing was, Andrew knew me, or he should have known me. We went to the same high school. Out in the suburbs. We actually had quite a few classes together. Of course, I remembered him. Six foot two, curly blond hair, big blue eyes, and those dimples. He was very good-looking and wildly popular: Mr. Yearbook Committee, Mr. Football/Hockey Hero, Mr. Everybody Adores Me (until the incident that almost got him expelled). Yup, it was pretty hard not to notice and remember Andrew McKay. But I guess I never registered on the radar. Either that or he didn’t recognize me. Either way I was glad.

“She may not understand me, but she knows her name,” said Andrew. “Hazel,” he shouted. “Yo, Hazel!”

I finally looked up. I had to. He smiled and gestured me over, his long arms beckoning as if I were a toddler taking my first steps. I moved toward him.

“No, bring your cart,” he said, miming the activity. “Your cart,” he shouted, as if I were deaf.

I had a flash of mowing him down with the rolling garbage can, and stepping on his larynx until all sound and breath had stopped.

Instead, I rolled my cart docilely to his desk.

“Here you go,” he said, taping a photo of a smiling Shirley Booth as Hazel Burke onto the cart. “Isn’t that nice?” Another titter from the sofa hipsters. Then Andrew made a
big show of emptying his own trash can into the garbage bag. Mr. Magnanimous.