High Maintenance Read online

  Now I couldn’t think of anything I could do. I felt a new sense of abandonment, beyond my usual sense of abandonment. It made my old sense of abandonment feel like child’s play. I was no longer the house that Jack built. I sat in the café reading the paper. The only thing I seemed to remember how to do was read. I knew how to read, although I hadn’t learned until I was pretty old, seven. But at least I had learned. I looked to see if there were any jobs for readers.

  2.

  DIAMOND IN ROUGH—NEEDS WORK

  When I got off the elevator I found myself facing a large black woman wearing nothing but a huge beige bra and a half-slip. Her dress was hanging behind her desk on a coatrack, soaking wet. She had put pages of the National Enquirer on the floor underneath it. “You’re prolly thinking this is a little unusual,” she said. “But it’s raining and I lost my umbrella on the subway. I forgot that he had an appointment.”

  It was my first job interview so I really didn’t have much to compare it to.

  “It doesn’t seem unusual at all,” I said.

  “Of course I could be sitting here buckass neckid and he wouldn’t know a thing.” I liked the idea of a job where the boss didn’t know if you were buckass neckid. “His Honor’s ready for you,” she said. She waddled out from behind her desk and punched a code on the door’s security system. The door opened. “Come on, I’ll take you there myself.”

  Her slip was so stretched out the elastic looked like it was about to break.

  “I can find it,” I said.

  I walked down a corridor and found my way to the last door.

  “Come in,” a man said before I had knocked.

  I opened the door and stood for a second. I held my breath. There is nothing more awkward than being in the presence of a blind man. I was more out of place than if I had decided to work construction down some manhole somewhere or if I had gotten a job in a lab with rats. This was a mistake.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” he said. “Don’t just stand there. Come in. I’m Judge Garrett.” He was English.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m Liv Kellerman.” He put out his hand and I went over and shook it. If I had gone to work for my father I would be having a drink right now with Isabella Rossellini, not shaking the limp hand of a blind man. I sat in the wooden chair facing his desk. Behind him was a wall of windows with panoramic views of the East River.

  “So what were you thinking about, as you stood in the doorway just now? I have excellent hearing you know, I could hear you thinking.”

  I was put off by the question. He made it sound like my brain was a noisy clock.

  “Your office has a beautiful view,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, as if he had seen it. We sat there awkwardly for a moment. Then I started desperately describing it, like an insane tour guide. Each of the three bridges and how they differed from each other and the lights—”like necklaces,” I said, and the boats in the river—”like the Mayflower,” I exclaimed, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ clock in Brooklyn, and the cars on the FDR, a helicopter, the sky and smoke from the chimneys and the water towers on the roofs.

  “Water towers?” he asked.

  “Yes, water towers—like fat Chinamen looking down at us from rice fields.”

  “I see,” he said.

  I went on to describe workmen on a plank suspended on the outside of a building.

  He sat mesmerized with his chubby hands folded in his lap.

  For some reason I described the Woolworth Building even though it wasn’t in our range—”like the Emerald City!” I managed. I felt like Dorothy, trying to be upbeat.

  “Well, I’m afraid that makes me the Wizard, doesn’t it? And you, our Dorothy, and Ms. Howard can play our yellow-bellied lion.”

  I had seen Ms. Howard’s belly and it was not yellow. He was making fun of me. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’m glad you like the view. Now tell me, are the windows clean?”

  They were filthy, streaked with black dirt. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to offend him.

  “They are a little bit smudged,” I said.

  “Well, that’s very frustrating. I was told they were cleaned last week, but I had a feeling. Do you mind if I take a moment to type a memo to the cleaning staff?”

  I shook my head no. Then I said “no” out loud.

  He swiveled his chair to a stack of paper and clumsily put a sheet in a regular typewriter. He touch-typed furiously for several minutes. I was impressed until he asked me to read it back to him and there were hundreds of mistakes.

  “If you find an error, please correct it with a blue or black pen. I like my correspondence to be perfect.”

  “There aren’t any errors,” I said.

  He nodded in what he thought was my direction, pleased.

  “Now tell me about yourself, Ms. Keller,” he said.

  “It’s Kellerman,” I said quickly.

  As I spoke he took notes on a braillewriter, a clunky antique-looking machine with buttons like a trumpet’s. Raised dots appeared on strips of parchment-colored cardstock, like goose bumps on skin. I told him about the apartment I had lived in with my husband and how I had to leave. I told him about the view of the park and the sun on the bedroom floor, the twenty-foot ceilings and the curve of the banisters leading from the mezzanine to the living room.

  “It sounds like you’re going to miss your apartment more than your husband,” he said.

  “Oh, I do, I will.”

  It was the truth. We had lived in the apartment the whole five years of our marriage, and I felt like I would never get used to not living there.

  “How long did you live there?”

  “Seven years,” I said. I deserved seven years’ worth of sympathy.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “I’m twenty-six.”

  He smiled. “Twenty-six years old and never been kissed,” he said.

  What a jerk, I thought, but then I wondered if it was true. Maybe I had never been kissed. I suddenly couldn’t remember kissing anybody. It’s impossible, I thought. I had been married, after all.

  He pounded away on the prehistoric machine and I watched him. I loved the way I could stare at him openly. You usually don’t have an opportunity to stare at somebody like that. I had a new kind of privacy. He had black hair and a full beard and mustache streaked with gray. He was average height with a round, limp body. He wasn’t fat exactly, just terribly out of shape as if he had never moved from that spot behind his desk. He was wearing a brown suit and an ugly Italian tie.

  “I like your tie,” I said.

  “Thank you.” He beamed. “I always go to the same place and a girl named Shirley chooses all my things. I’ll tell her it garnered a compliment.”

  “It’s really nice.”

  “What are you wearing, if you don’t mind my asking. I only bring it up because I ask that you dress quite formally for this position. From time to time you will have to accompany me in my dealings with the public. So jeans or anything of that nature would be inappropriate.”

  I was glad he mentioned that because now I realized I could wear jeans every day. I looked down at my outfit, a black velvet skirt and a vintage sweater.

  “I’m wearing a gray tweed suit and a white silk blouse. It’s very appropriate,” I said.

  “That’s lovely.” He blushed.

  He pushed a few more valves and levers on the braillewriter and then leaned back in his chair. I wondered if he would be able to tell if I lay down on the leather couch across the room.

  “So,” he said. “Now you have an idea of what the job entails, haven’t you?”

  I wasn’t sure if I had. “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to know what the salary is?”

  “Yes,” I said.


  “I’m afraid it’s only eight dollars an hour, which isn’t very much, is it?”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. If I said it was less than I used to pay the maid it might seem as if I was complaining. “Could you make it ten an hour?” I asked.

  “No, that isn’t possible. I realize it’s grossly inadequate but the city only pays six an hour and I provide the two-dollar supplement myself.” He said this as if he were the most benevolent man who ever lived.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Eight dollars.”

  “Will it be enough for you to live on?”

  He asked the question so sincerely and it was such an absurd idea that I laughed out loud. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want the job.” There was always the option of getting alimony from my husband or money from my father. Or maybe I could read to other blind people on the side.

  “Eight dollars an hour may not seem like a lot of money but, as I explained, some of it comes directly out of my own salary and I require that it fill a financial need for my employees,” he said.

  “It fills a need,” I said.

  “It doesn’t sound like it will fill a need.”

  “It does! It fills a need,” I begged. It didn’t seem fair that I not only had to take such a low-paying job but I had to prove that I was so pathetic as to have a need that could be filled by eight dollars an hour. A need that could be filled by eight dollars an hour was not a need. A real need, my need, couldn’t be filled by a hundred dollars an hour. No amount of money could fill my need.

  “Well, all right,” he said. “As long as the salary will be of help. I’m about to let you in on a little secret. You are not to let anyone know about this.”

  “Okay,” I said, relaxing. Maybe his secret was that he really could see and he was just pretending to be blind.

  Someone knocked timidly on the door. “Come in,” he bellowed in a falsely gruff voice.

  A bailiff came in and said, “Time, Your Honor.”

  The judge waved him away. “Shut the door!” It was shut.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to cut our interview short, although I’ve enjoyed it.”

  “Thank you,” I said and stood up.

  “I hope you’ve enjoyed it.” He was smiling at the chair next to me.

  “Very much, sir.”

  “Call me Jerome,” he said sweetly.

  Jerome handed me the note he had typed about the windows and asked me to give it to Ms. Howard on my way out. Ms. Howard wasn’t at her desk but her dress was still hanging there so I figured she couldn’t have gone too far. I waited for a while and corrected all the typos on Jerome’s note, and finally just left it for her on her desk.

  3.

  GV PRIME/CHARMING!!!

  I left the court building and headed toward MacDougal Street to look at an apartment.

  I couldn’t wait to sign my own lease without Jack there giving me a million instructions about how I shouldn’t mention that he was a lawyer because no one did deals with lawyers, and not to say anything about his country house or who my father was so the owner wouldn’t think we had a lot of money, and not to criticize anything in case the owner was sensitive. What Jack didn’t realize was that every place we went people liked me more than him, and I had to say, “Oh, don’t mind my husband, he’s a lawyer,” to everyone every time he left the room.

  I had been excited to start being alone, but by the time I got to MacDougal Street, and Maria, the super’s wife, showed up, I was crying.

  “This is a good place to be sad at,” she said. She was very fat and wore a gold chain around her neck with the name Maria dangling from it and rubber gloves.

  There was an odd makeshift tin fence around the entrance to the building and I wondered if it was some sort of rat guard.

  I followed her up the five flights of stairs and into the floor-through railroad tenement flat. The front door was unlocked and opened into the kitchen. I continued crying as she led me through it. It had an old fridge and an enormous stove. “Oven don’t work,” Maria said. “I have to be honest with you about that.” Between the refrigerator and the stove was a metal shower stall.

  I stood facing the stall like a small quaking child looking to a terrible new stepmother for comfort. I couldn’t imagine undressing in front of it, let alone standing naked in it. I looked at it and talked to it silently. “Can I do this? Can I do this?” I wasn’t a brave person. The shower had a presence like an angry tree in a Grimm’s fairy tale. It looked like an upright metal coffin.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Its duct-taped hinges. Its tremendous height, beginning a good three feet off the ground and rising to the ceiling.

  The opaque plastic shower door had a small duct-tape patch in the middle of it. I peeled it off slowly to reveal a perfectly round nickel-sized hole. It looked like a bullet hole. It had tiny cracks all around it.

  I put my finger in the hole.

  Maria took her hands off her hips and pressed the gray tape back on the wounded door. “It’s clean,” she said. She opened the shower door and I was hit with the smell of Clorox bleach.

  There were no faucets, just little metal spokes jutting out from the shower wall and a pair of pliers lying on the gray-streaked shower floor.

  “Good strong water,” Maria said, looking hurt.

  I walked into the tiny room next to the kitchen. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a small square wooden door in the wall above a full-sized bed.

  “That’s the window to the air shaft. It must never be opened. Pigeons,” she warned.

  “Who do I have to talk to if I want the place?” I asked.

  “You tell it to me.”

  “I don’t have any money right now,” I said. “Divorce,” I whispered.

  “You have a job?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “Yes,” I said. I hesitated. “I work for a judge.”

  “You a lawyer?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “I’m a reader. But I’m going to be able to pay the rent.”

  “Okay,” she said, “I don’t want to walk up no more stairs no more. It’s yours.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “How much you want to pay?”

  I felt suddenly grateful. Maria was going to be reasonable. Everything people always said about New York was wrong. It wasn’t hard to get an apartment in New York for a good price.

  I wanted to look the whole place over before making my offer. I left Maria standing in the kitchen and walked through the little bedroom into the living room, which held a hideous beige couch. There was a trace of sun and a black-and-white dog in the window across the street. I watched a gray leaf fall from a city tree. In New York the closest thing to being in the country is a tree-lined street.

  I suddenly had a fantasy that I could fix the place up and every week my husband could come over and I could make a big salad that we could eat sitting cross-legged on the floor and then he could leave.

  There were two windows but a large metal sign saying “Apartment for Rent” was covering half of one of them. It would be nice to have two whole windows instead of one and a half.

  I called Maria into the living room. “Will the sign be coming down?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “But you won’t need it anymore. The apartment won’t be available.”

  “She stays,” Maria said, meaning the sign.

  “I’ll give you three hundred a month,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Then you add on another nine hundred a month and you can live in here.”

  “Twelve hundred is too much. I’ll give you nine hundred a month,” I said.

  “Twelve hundred,” she said.

  “One thousand.”

  “Twelve hundred,” she said again
.

  “Eleven hundred.”

  “One thousand and two hundred,” she said, holding up two fingers.

  “I’ll take it,” I said, and Maria handed me three keys. “When can I move in?”

  “You’re in,” she said.

  “What about these things?” In addition to the bed and couch, there was a phone, a TV, and a VCR at the foot of the bed on a small chipped chest with an anchor painted on it.

  “I’ll sell them to you but they belong to the person before you so if he sues you have to give it back to him.”

  That didn’t seem quite fair. I had seen a case like that on one of those judge shows on television where the landlord had thrown out all the plaintiff’s video games and his mother’s ashes. “No,” I said.

  She made a sucking sound with her teeth. “Okay, you can borrow them for fifty dollars.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.” She shook my hand, still wearing the rubber glove, and left me alone there. I cried in the living room for a few minutes and then went to the tiny bathroom to see if there was any toilet paper to blow my nose. I couldn’t believe my luck. There, on the tiny wooden floor of the bathroom, was an almost full roll of toilet paper. I started crying again, but this time from a feeling that the universe was generous and filled with abundance. I felt like I was Scarlett O’Hara, not finding one bitter old turnip in the ground, but an entire blooming cotton crop. I was already taking care of myself. I had a job and an apartment.

  After the toilet paper excitement wore off I suddenly couldn’t stand to be in the apartment for another second. I went for a walk hoping to find some furniture out on the street but furniture is like men—you don’t find any when you’re looking.

  That night I lay in my borrowed/rented bed and stared at the ballerina-shaped crack on the ceiling. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jerome. I should have been thinking about who had slept in that bed before me, or about the horrible scene I had with my husband just a few hours before, but every time I closed my eyes Jerome kept walking toward me, waving his white stick. I tried to keep my eyes closed to see what it would be like to be blind, but they kept popping open. I wondered what it would be like to wake up in the pitch-black morning and be able to see only my dreams from the night before. If a blind man got married he would probably never cheat on his wife. Not that I was going to marry Jerome. But I was really going to make an effort to do a good job for him. And I was going to try to be less critical.