High Maintenance Read online

  4.

  FNCL DIST—WALK TO WORK

  My first week at work I spelled the word “business” wrong. I sat in the library-style chair in front of Jerome’s desk with my legs spread wide apart like a man on the subway. I winked at him seductively and pursed my lips while he continued to complain about my spelling. He kept talking about how it was completely unacceptable to spell a word like “business” wrong.

  “Was it sloppiness or do you really not know how to spell it?” he asked. That was a no-win question.

  “I don’t know how I could have missed that,” I said. I stared down at the document in question. In the bottom right-hand corner, under my initials, L.K., were the initials J.M.

  “Imagine my embarrassment,” he said. “I felt badly having to check up on you but obviously that was a necessity, wasn’t it? I showed it to my former reader, a young lady who has been with me for two and a half years. I am really sorry to see her go. She’s getting married next week….”

  “Well, now I’m here,” I said.

  “But I have to be able to trust you not to make foolish mistakes. You represent me. She never made a mistake in two and a half years. She was a perfectionist.” I couldn’t believe I was getting jealous of Jerome’s other reader. He was pitting us against each other.

  “I’m a bit of a perfectionist myself,” I said.

  “I haven’t seen any evidence of that as of yet. You know, when I showed her the letter you wrote, and she discovered the word ‘business’ spelled incorrectly, she gave me quite a hard time about the woman I had chosen to take her place. I believe the word she used was ‘trollop.’ She accused me of only hiring you for your looks.”

  “I’m sure you will soon come to see that I am the far better reader. And you can tell that to your mysterious J.M.”

  “I’ll let Jordan know that you feel that way.”

  “Did you tell her your secret?” I asked.

  “What secret?”

  “You told me you had a little secret that you were going to let me in on.”

  “As a matter of fact I didn’t. I was getting ready to tell Jordan about it when she announced her resignation. But I have convinced her to stay on for another week or two to help me make the transition. Maybe I’ll let the two of you fight it out and the survivor will know my secret. I don’t know if I will be able to handle two readers. That could almost constitute a harem, couldn’t it? If but a small one?”

  He looked pathetic slumped in his chair talking about his harem. I considered telling him there was a rainbow out his window even though there wasn’t. When someone is blind you will do anything to make their world better. I thought it might give him pleasure to picture a beautiful rainbow. I looked down and noticed that my shirt was buttoned wrong. I unbuttoned the whole thing and started from the bottom. I was wearing a fabulous bra. If Ms. Howard could sit at the front desk in a dingy beige bra then I could sit in the inner chamber in my yellow La Perla. I lifted my breasts out of my bra. I could almost feel my husband’s hands on them. I started to cry silently.

  “Are you crying?” Jerome asked.

  I nodded.

  “It’s all right. I’m sure you’ll be more careful in the future. Would you mind going out and getting us some lunch?”

  He sent me to McDonald’s and I was happy to be among the seeing, although I still felt the numbness of not being seen. Of being invisible. Businessmen looked at me. I walked with my feet turned out and the belt of my raincoat trailing behind me. I had put my breasts back.

  Jerome’s ten fingers curled around his Big Mac. He groped for his fries. I had to set it all out on his desk for him. I chewed with my mouth open because he was blind.

  I cried silently off and on for most of the day.

  “So tell me about this husband of yours,” Jerome said.

  “He’s older than me,” I said. “Fourteen years older.”

  “And how long did he take to propose? Or, rather, how long before you told him to?”

  “He asked me. On the beach,” I said. “He handed me a seashell with a ring in it.”

  Actually what had happened was we had been in bed together and Jack went under the covers and said, obscenely, “Look what I found in your cunt,” and I felt something sharp against me and then Jack sat up with a diamond ring on the tip of his tongue. “Well, if it was in my cunt it belongs to me,” I said. “Hand it over.” He passed the ring from his mouth into mine and that’s how he proposed. I always had to make up a story whenever someone asked me how it happened.

  “I’m not much of a beach person,” Jerome said.

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  “How are you getting home?” Jerome, or the Blind Guy, as I was now referring to him in my mind, asked.

  “Cab,” I said.

  “Oh, because I thought if you were heading toward the subway we could go together,” he said cheerily, as if I would enjoy that.

  “I’d be happy to walk you there,” I said.

  Cab, cab, cab, I thought.

  Suddenly the Blind Guy stood up and gripped the back of his chair. “I am not a dog!” he yelled. “You can walk with me if you like, but you cannot walk me.”

  “Then I’ll just put away my leash,” I said nastily. “It’s an expression I would use with anyone, I’ll walk you there. Walk me home. People say it all the time.”

  He cocked his head and listened to me, fascinated to know what people did.

  He gathered his things and prepared to leave the office. “Shall we, then?” He clicked his heels slightly.

  Gently holding my left elbow, he crept along beside me. He had to tell me how to go. “The blind leading the …”I stopped myself from saying.

  “Would you mind if we stopped at a cash machine?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said. I’m a reader, not a banker, I thought. He led me to an ATM and I watched him punch the numbers, noticing the Braille on the keys for the first time. He withdrew one hundred dollars from checking. “Did I just request a hundred-dollar withdrawal?” he asked me. He looked nervous.

  “No, you asked for two hundred from savings. Some of those bills are fifties.” He became flustered and I regretted my joke. “I’m just kidding,” I said. “You asked for one hundred from checking.”

  He didn’t laugh. He counted the five twenties twice and we continued walking down the street.

  We passed a statue of a man I didn’t know. It was a regular pigeon-covered statue, but when I saw it I started crying. I had seen it so many times it had become invisible. Which is how I must have become to Jack. But for some strange reason I suddenly felt incredibly jealous of it. It was lucky, except for the pigeons. It got to stand there in an exciting intersection in New York City and not have to feel everything.

  I wished I could be a statue. I wanted to be the statue of Joan of Arc without actually having to have been Joan of Arc. I wished I could go straight to statue. I wanted to stand in a triangle in New York, hard and cold and permanent. Almost lifelike. My whole body, bronzed like a baby shoe. I could stand and watch a girl, I might even say a beautiful girl, walk with a blind judge to the subway. And I thought, I must really hate my life if I can get jealous of a statue.

  “Every year one or two blind people die in the subway,” Jerome said. “When they’re waiting on the platform and the train comes to a stop, instead of walking in through the doors, they accidentally walk between two cars and fall into the tracks and get flattened when the train moves again.”

  Jerome, flattened. I guessed I’d be walking with him to the subway every day.

  “Why don’t you get a dog?” I asked.

  “Why get a dog, when I have you?” Jerome said affectionately.

  5.

  PIC POSTCARD VUS

  I sat in Jerome’s chambers looking through his mail. He was late and the tea I brought him from Starbucks every morning out of the goo
dness of my heart was cold.

  The phone rang and I answered it, receptionist-style, saying hello as though I were right at that moment being fucked. There was silence. I said hello again, breathlessly.

  “Is this Judge Garrett’s new reader?” a woman asked.

  “Yes it is,” I said. “He’s not in yet.” I asked if I could take a message.

  “He’s not there?” The woman sounded very upset. “He left home forty minutes ago!”

  “He’ll be here any minute, I’m sure,” I said. I was sure he had wandered off the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “Oh my God, have him call me the minute he gets in. I have to try not to worry. I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “I’m Sarah, Jerome’s girlfriend,” she said, proudly.

  Girlfriend! I thought.

  Just then Jerome came poking and prodding his way in with his too-long sleeves, gripping his stick and his tattered brown briefcase. This was the worst job. His face had a smudge of dirt on it. Was it my job to tell him he had a smudge? No! Definitely not. Sarah could tell him when he got home.

  “Sarah, wait, he just walked in.”

  Jerome threw down his raincoat and sidled along his desk to his chair. I was glad I had gotten out of it to answer the phone. He said a few words to her and hung up quickly.

  “I had a crazy cabdriver,” he said, pronouncing crazy as cwazy and driver as dwiver. This happened more when he was flustered. “There were no seat belts in the backseat. They are wequired by law to have seat belts. I swear I was almost killed.” I thought about him feeling around for the seat belt, every little bump cause for panic. Nobody put on a seat belt in a cab.

  “That’s awful,” I said. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the L-shaped smudge. “Why don’t you go to the men’s room and splash some water on your face and calm down.”

  “No, I’m fine,” he said, curtly. He did nothing for a few minutes, which I was beginning to get used to. It meant he was thinking.

  “Do you want me to read you your mail?” I asked. My first duty was to pick up his mail. Someone had sent him a postcard, a photo of a happy-looking family on a beach, wearing bathing suits and sunglasses. It was a strange card to send to a blind man. The mother had huge breasts.

  “Not now,” he said.

  “Your girlfriend sounds nice.”

  “Yes …” He put his face in his hands. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure,” I said. His face was slack and flat from never seeing himself in a mirror. He couldn’t practice forming his face into various pleasant, sharp, pursed expressions like other people. I had one I hadn’t even debuted in public yet that involved smiling playfully and clenching my teeth like a tiger.

  “Liv,” he said, hesitantly, “I find myself wondering where you live. You’ve told me so much about your husband’s apartment, where you used to live, but I don’t know where you are now.”

  I felt moved by his wondering that. He probably pictured me tucked into bed in a straw hayloft like Heidi, or laughing on a futon couch with roommates. For a moment I thought about bringing him home with me and leading him up the five flights of stairs, guiding him around the place, careful not to let him trip on the hole in the kitchen floor. I wondered what his girlfriend would think about him coming over to my apartment with his cane.

  I told him it was a floor-through railroad flat in a tenement on MacDougal Street. I lived five flights above a “restaurant” called King Shawarma. The whole restaurant, the whole block, my whole apartment smelled like rotting flesh. Each morning a new barrel-shaped lamb was placed on the vertical rotating spit with one onion stuck on top like a hat, or with the onion on the bottom and the lamb on top like a seal balancing on a beach ball. The smell invaded everything, settling into the nooks and crannies of my English muffin, coating the feathers of my one down pillow, getting between the stitches of my grandmother’s handknit sweaters.

  I hadn’t smelled it the day I took the apartment. I was crying too hard to breathe.

  “I suppose you’re sorry you asked,” I said.

  “No, on the contrary,” Jerome said. “I live in a small one-bedroom on the second floor of an elevator building in Brooklyn. And I’m told that I got the apartment for such a good price because it is apparently quite dark.”

  I didn’t know if he was making a joke. He didn’t laugh. “Liv,” he said. “I despise myself at this moment.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Do you ever have a moment of utter self-loathing?” His voice sounded strangely light. He dropped his chin. “I’m just not a very good person.”

  I didn’t know what to say. A recurring image came into my mind—me flying at my ex-husband and violently stabbing him over and over again in the chest. A sort of reflex fantasy.

  Another thing that came into my head a lot lately was the time we went to Shakespeare-in-the-Park when we were dating and I packed a picnic dinner with veal Milanese, and cheese, and fruit, and wine, and pasta salad, and pie. So sad to think of myself planning and cooking and wrapping everything in tinfoil.

  “Oh, Jerome,” I said. “I’m sure you’re a very good person.”

  “Anyway, yes, Sarah is very nice. Do you have a suitor?”

  I laughed. I had a lawsuit—I was suing my husband for divorce. I had a Chanel suit, two actually, that I had left in his closet. I had a suitcase. But I didn’t have a suit-or. “I’m not seeing anyone right now,” I said. I shouldn’t have said seeing.

  “Why do you put up with that? Rumor has it that you are very attractive.”

  “When I started that rumor, I believe I used the word ‘beautiful,’” I said. I had wondered if Jerome had been asking about me. He probably wanted to touch my face like blind people always want to do in the movies. Out of the question, I decided.

  “You’re probably the sort who likes to be showered with gifts,” Jerome said, obviously amusing himself. “I’ll bet you’re quite a handful for a man.”

  “Do you shower Sarah with gifts?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. I doubted it, “In fact, let’s order her some flowers. Would you get the phone book?”

  He looked proud. I got the White Pages from the windowsill and gave him the number he wanted for a florist in Midtown near her work. On the phone, he demanded salmon-colored roses. Apparently they didn’t have salmon. “No, I don’t want pink or peach, I want salmon!” He slammed the phone down on the desk and then fumbled to hang it up. He asked for the number of another florist. Again he asked for salmon-colored roses and bellowed when he was offered champagne roses instead.

  “Champagne-colored roses are beautiful,” I told him, although I couldn’t quite picture them.

  “Her favorite is salmon-colored,” he said.

  “Salmon and peach are pretty close.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  It felt ridiculous arguing about colors with a blind man. There was a knock on the door, and Jerome said come in. “Jury wants to see you, Judge Garrett.” It was the bailiff, bony and bald with a red ponytail. He smiled at me. “Hi, Liv.”

  “Hi, Ray.”

  “You look very nice today.”

  “Thank you.”

  That was the problem with having a job—having to associate with people you wouldn’t sit next to on the subway.

  “Wait for me outside, Ray, and close the door.”

  “You have a little dirt on your face, Your Honor,” Ray said.

  “Thank you for telling me.” Ray closed the door loudly. Jerome turned toward me. “Why didn’t you tell me my face was dirty?” he asked.

  “I didn’t notice it until Ray said it just now,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you.” He sounded like a miserable teenager.

  “It’s true, it’s barely noticeable.”

  “Well, I need you to notice these things, Liv.” H
e reached around in a drawer and pulled out a black leather dop kit.

  “May I watch you in court today?” I asked.

  “You certainly may,” he said, blushing. “We don’t seem to be getting much work done anyway. Liv—is that short for Olivia?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Lavinia?”

  “No!” I told him about how I was only three pounds when I was born and nobody thought I would make it and my father stood over the incubator in the hospital and chanted the word “live” over and over again and a nurse thought that was my name and I did end up living and it stuck. I told him about the picture of me, asleep in my father’s left hand.

  “You delight me,” Jerome said. “I look forward to coming to court in the morning.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  I thought of my favorite television commercial. A beautiful woman walks up court steps as a man’s voice says, Jennifer is going back to court today. She’s not a lawyer, though she makes as much money as some. She’s not a plaintiff or a defendant, but she cares what each one says. She’s not a judge, although she hands down her share of sentences. Then we find out that Jennifer is a court stenographer who got her training at the Cit-tone Institute in New Jersey. Maybe I could be a court stenographer.

  “I was wondering if you might—” He stopped abruptly. He looked like he hated himself again. He stood up and walked over to my chair.