Spoiled Read online

  A hammered silver mirror, another of Trish and Tim’s wedding presents, hung to the right of the door as one went out. Evgenia paused there to redo her lipstick.

  Trish said with a touch of impatience, “Were you waiting for me?”

  The girl rubbed her lips together to blend the color. “No,” she said, making a pout and then a dentist’s lips-only grin for the mirror. “Just waiting.” She turned and smiled at Trish. “It’s okay. I am student. I go to class now.”

  “All right,” Trish said uncertainly. “Well, I may see you next time, I may not. It depends on my schedule.” When Evgenia merely nodded, continuing out, Trish called after her, down the hall, “So, what is it that you study?”

  “Fashion design!” Evgenia called back. “I want to be next Donna Karan!”

  An eventless week followed, but the week after that—Trish was vexed to find—the television incident repeated itself. Again Trish heard the noise from the hallway, and again when she entered, she found Evgenia sitting on the couch, remote control in hand.

  “What are you watching?” Trish asked. She detached several plastic grocery bags from her arm where they had cut into her wrists and made red marks. She was unable to keep the irritation out of her voice.

  “Oprah,” said Evgenia, standing up. She was not tall—Trish was taller—but her posture was erect. When she came toward Trish she seemed to lead with her collarbone, in the wake of which the rest of her body seemed to glide. “She is so great. I love how she can talk to anyone, you know? Cat or king, it doesn’t matter to her.

  “Your cable remote is totally screwed up,” she added. “Why you don’t have universal?” Before getting her coat, Evgenia passed the device to Trish, who turned it over in her hands several times, frowning. As Evgenia was doing her lipstick, Trish told her not to wait in the apartment in the future, but to leave when she had finished cleaning. “My husband and I just don’t feel it’s professional,” she said. She shut the door and bolted it and went to the fridge to see if there was an open bottle of wine. Standing at the counter she poured herself a glass of chardonnay and gulped it down.

  THERE WERE TIMES when Trish seriously didn’t know why she bothered. Her sister, Jan, who had followed her to New York, and who now taught preschool in Hoboken, was still single. Trish had engineered a setup for Jan with one of the technology guys from work. When the guy never got around to calling her, having promised to, Trish tried to put a positive spin on it when she talked to her sister on the phone. “Forget this guy! You just have to get out more, Jan—get out of your neighborhood, you know? Come to Manhattan. Meet people. Maybe you should move here.”

  “How am I going to do that?” Jan asked, her voice trembling with hostility. “I’m not going to bleed Mom and Dad the way you did!”

  “Well, maybe you’ll meet someone in Hoboken,” Trish said, swallowing the insult, though it made her eyes smart.

  “Yes, Trish,” Jan had replied bitterly, “it may surprise you, but it actually does happen.”

  Then there was the box of Christmas cookies that she had left for the cleaning lady, just before the holidays. They were homemade frosted sugar cookies—reindeer, bells, Christmas trees. Not only did Evgenia not thank her for them, but she called Trish on her cell phone while Trish was away to inform her that she had forgotten to leave Evgenia’s check. “‘I look in drawer but you never put!’” Trish said, mocking Evgenia’s syntax to Tim. “Wouldn’t you think she could wait a fucking week? Does she really have to call me on my vacation?”

  “I don’t know,” Tim said, noncommitally. “These people live pretty close to the edge.”

  “Oh, please!” Trish cried. “This girl wears high-fashion! She probably spends more money on her clothes than I do! You should see her.” With loathing, Trish recalled the encounter she’d had with Evgenia just before she left for vacation. Trish had been heading home, on one side of the street; Evgenia was walking toward the subway on the other. Trish saw her first. She looked rather jaunty in her red coat, carrying the tin of cookies, stepping around a dog. It was not a beautiful coat, but Evgenia seemed to take a huge amount of pride in it. There was an arrogance in her carriage, Trish noticed, an unbecoming arrogance, when she was wearing it.

  Trish was on the point of letting the girl pass without saying hello when she instead hailed Evgenia and darted across the street. Trish’s stopping her seemed to unsettle Evgenia; she barely managed to greet Trish, stammering out the words, as if she’d been unprepared for a sudden segue into English, and she looked worried and unhappy, as if she thought Trish was going to tell her something unpleasant—find fault with her work or even fire her. Seeing this, Trish said quickly to reassure her, “You do such a good job, Evgenia. Tim and I are always talking about it.

  “It must be really tiring—cleaning,” she went on when Evgenia didn’t answer. “I’m sure if I were in your place—”

  She was only getting started, but Evgenia, who seemed to have found her voice all of a sudden, cut Trish off with a laugh and said, “Are you kidding? Your apartment is nothing! Wednesday, I have classic six! Classic six have two bedrooms, two-and-half bath—”

  “I know what a classic six is!” Trish said furiously. “You don’t have to tell me!”

  AND HERE SHE was, three weeks later, being made a fool of at what had very nearly become her café. She ought to go right up to Evgenia and say, in a blatantly condescending voice, “Oh, my God, what are you doing here?” as an acquaintance had once said to her at a party. Or better yet, walk up to the bar and, when Evgenia accosted her, turn to the girl, and look faintly puzzled, squint and frown. “Oh—hi. Gosh—how strange. I mean, I’m sorry—how are you?” as if the coincidence was simply too bizarre to make sense of. With a stealthy movement Trish snatched her overcoat off the spare chair and sat there motionlessly for a moment, hugging the coat tightly to her chest and holding her breath. Then she got abruptly to her feet and left the restaurant. It seemed like an act of defiance, like walking out of a meeting or a bad movie in protest—she refused to be cowed by other people’s expectations.

  Among the jobs Trish had held to eke out a living her very first summer in New York, one of the less disagreeable had been that of coat-check girl in a steak house. Trish had been a pro at the job. The right, customer-pleasing mixture of professionalism combined with ingratiating touches—“Yours was the navy blue, wasn’t it, sir?”—had netted her better tips than the girl who worked the other three nights of the week, the waiters always told her. It was the only one of her preprofessional jobs that Trish looked back on fondly. In recent years she had developed a habit of smiling at whoever was manning the closet, to wish the girl luck or pass on some bit of optimism about the future. At this hour the tiny room was deserted. The door was ajar, though, and Trish glanced into it automatically. Except for a few forgotten items in the overhead bins, the coatrack itself was all but empty; there was only one coat on the whole rack. The red coat. Ludicrously solitary it hung there. Or not so much hung as clung, precariously, from one of the numbered hangers, one sleeve already having slipped off, as if the coat had been carelessly tossed aside and left to its own devices. For a moment Trish actually believed she was going into the room to set something aright—hang up the coat properly by buttoning the top couple of buttons around the hanger, as everyone knew you had to do. But she slipped the coat from the hanger and tucked it over her arm.

  “I’m sorry?” she was going to say, if anyone stopped her. “Oh, my God, I’m such an idiot! Of course it’s not! Jeez”—she would shake her head for emphasis—“I think I’d lose my head today if it wasn’t screwed on.”

  Two blocks from the restaurant, she stopped to replace her camel’s hair coat with the coat she had stolen. She made a bundle of the former and stuffed it into a paper shopping bag—not an easy task, as it was thick and luxurious, a Christmas present from Tim. As she slipped her arms into the sleeves of the red coat, she saw its lining for the first time: It was cheap red satin, rent in sev
eral places. Galled, because the damage was so unnecessary and could have been prevented, Trish nevertheless did up the buttons. She gathered the belt around her waist, and buckled it. She felt her head rise a few inches as she set off again, throwing her shoulders back and walking briskly, with a sense of purpose. She happened to be right up the street from one of the high-end grocery stores that dotted the neighborhood, and she suddenly got an inspiration: to make Tim a five-star dinner for when he got home from work that night. She would buy candles and wine and make lots of courses—even better: She would do an entire menu out of Gourmet, to which, after buying it off the newsstand for years, Trish had finally subscribed.

  THE NEXT WEEK, Evgenia caught Trish in the apartment before Trish could get out. Trish was so preoccupied with reconstructing the whereabouts of the red coat (she had moved it from the hall closet to a box under her bed, and finally, one evening when Tim was working late, to the storage locker in the basement of the building) that she was almost out the door before it occurred to her to have a look at its replacement. It wasn’t a proper coat but a jacket that Evgenia took off—an unflattering man’s foot ball jacket in kelly green and black, with what looked to be a new zipper sewn in.

  “What happened to your red coat?” Trish asked plaintively, pausing in the threshold of the door.

  Evgenia made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat as she tied on her apron. “I lose it—in a bar somewhere.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Trish said. The recounting of the fact dismayed her. “You mean someone took it?”

  Evgenia shrugged. “Is my fault.” She made a gesture of raising a glass to her mouth. “Too much party.”

  “But—that’s awful!”

  “Yeah,” Evgenia sighed. “And I really like that one, too.”

  It was the friendliest conversation the two young women had ever had. Trish tried to think of something to add just to prolong the camaraderie. “Oh, Evgenia? I meant to tell you,” she asked. “I’m actually giving away a whole pile of clothes. I have so much stuff—I never wear half of it, and, I don’t know if this would interest you at all, but—” Trish put her handbag down on the floor, letting the front door of the apartment close behind her, and opened the coat closet. She took her camel’s hair coat out and removed it from its hanger. “I’ve just never liked this one. It was expensive and all that, but I don’t know—it’s just not really me. Course I can’t tell Tim …”

  “Yeah?” Evgenia seemed truly to look at Trish for the first time then, in all the months she’d been working for her, and though she looked at her skeptically, sizing her up with reservations, Trish could see she was not displeased. She took the coat from Trish and when she saw the label, her eyes flew up. “You mean it? Are you serious, Trish?”

  “It’s yours if you want it,” Trish said hoarsely. Hurriedly, she picked up her handbag and left, leaving Evgenia trying the coat on over her apron. Normally Trish never took the stairs down from the apartment; she didn’t like the hollow sound her shoes made on the concrete. But today she didn’t feel like waiting for the elevator. She was a little embarrassed, she found, by her own good deed.

  Bad Ghost

  MARGERY’S MEMORIAL IS at 4:00 P.M. on a Tuesday, all the way up the West Side, in a defunct movie theater, known nowadays as a “space,” that’s put to various uses—staged readings of new plays, Latin dance programs, obscure offbeat awards shows. The setting seems about right for the gathering Stacey’s expecting for her former boss: odd solitary fans, not professionals but backpack-carrying overgrown teenager types who have time for this kind of thing—the few people left in this city who aren’t flogging their own books, who still enjoy making up the audience.

  Stacey’s only in New York for three days and she hasn’t been this far uptown in years. At home in L.A., she’d known, as she read the clipping from the Dulwich Herald Anita sent the week before, that it would be an effort to show up, that it was more than likely she would decide at the last minute, indolent and probably hungover in her downtown hotel, that she couldn’t be bothered. The slightest nuisance—rain for instance—might have deterred her, but the May day itself is fine, if breezy, and Stacey alights from the long, expensive cab ride with the confidence of having hit upon the right outfit for such an event—her double-breasted navy skirt suit, with the oversized buttons and Peter Pan collar, open-toed shoes, and bare legs: formalish, yes, but zippy. You wouldn’t want to overstate the connection, she thinks, slamming the taxi door behind her and adjusting her sunglasses, by wearing anything too severe or gloomy. For Stacey is going not to mourn Margery’s death, some six months past, but out of some light curiosity. She has the notion that her being there will bolster the turnout, in terms of both numbers and quality—she’s had a feeling all morning of “lending her presence” to the event—and why not? When she’s finally in a position to lend it? In the end, it was simply too much of a coincidence not to show up—her happening to be in town for the network upfronts, Anita’s sending her the article just in time. And now that she has managed to show up, Anita will be able to say to her Dulwich friends, “Oh, yes—Stacey was at the New York memorial. I guess it was quite a scene.”

  These small gestures of thoughtfulness toward her mother are easy for Stacey to make nowadays. It seems perverse that when she was first in the city after graduation—then out in LA., praying that she wouldn’t have to come crawling back—she’d go weeks without calling home, taking an angry pleasure in ignoring Anita’s messages on the machine; withholding any good news she got and then doling it out in terse, defensive admissions: “So … I guess I can tell you that I got an agent.” “Well, I sold this one pitch.” “I’m getting on a show, but it’s for a season only, Mom—nothing’s guaranteed. So don’t get all excited.”

  Leaving behind trash-blown upper Broadway, Stacey steps into the gilt and marble lobby of the theater. At the entrance to the large, sloping auditorium a pert young woman hands her a program. She thanks the girl but hesitates before going in, taken aback by the voluble, good-looking crowd that fills the first several rows of the main seating section and the outer seats of both of the side rows. She wouldn’t have thought Margery would draw such a crowd.

  There must be three times as many women as men—a publishing crowd, Stacey realizes, walking a little way down the near aisle. Of course. She’d forgotten Scholastic was throwing the party. For a party it suddenly seems to be, the air chatty, anticipatory, punchy. All the people, Stacey thinks, slipping into an empty side row, who couldn’t be bothered to return Margery’s calls this last decade, turning out now to show it was nothing personal—they always loved Margery. It wasn’t their fault her books didn’t speak to teenagers, with their autoloading irony, their careless dips into bisexuality, their alternative online lives. What on earth would a provocative YA “problem” novel even consist of today? Stacey wonders, glancing around to see if she recognizes anyone. An anti-rebel perhaps? Instead of Dinkie Hocker Shoots Smack, maybe Dinkie Hocker Is Planning to Stay a Virgin? But no—even the super-straight movement had been mainstreamed already. Hell, Stacey herself had written a fundamentalist Christian episode for a WB show years ago; at the time, it had seemed a radical departure.

  She’s been away too long; she can’t see a single familiar face, and although she’s the one who left—quit publishing, tore up her MFA applications—Stacey keeps glancing around, as if someone at least ought to know her. Then there’s a respectful murmur through the crowd as a stout, graying woman of about sixty in a brocade jacket walks up to the podium and adjusts the mike. Stacey recognizes Margery’s longtime editor, Renata Townsend, as she turns her knees to the side to let two girls—office temps, perhaps, they are slouching and giggling—squeeze by her. Renata is—or would be—her peer, and seeing the woman, Stacey suddenly wonders why she hasn’t made more of the fact that Margery died young. Stacey didn’t really dwell on the fact at all when Anita called her with the news last fall: Margery’s massive stroke in her sleep, at fifty-six, t
hat had rendered the paramedics’ quick response—and for such a small town, too—useless. It didn’t help that Margery had been alone in the house, Anita had said, and Stacey had thought—of course, she’d thought briefly—of Helena, though the girl was long, long gone. She’d dropped out of the high school at sixteen or so; run off with some older, bearded (Anita had always remembered that detail) boatbuilder from Maine. She had left the man, one child later (a son? a daughter? Stacey couldn’t recall), downgrading, seemingly, for a short-order cook she’d met waitressing, who was going to start an indepen dent brewery. After that Anita had lost track, and if she couldn’t keep it straight, then certainly Stacey could not be expected to, long-distance.

  Perhaps it was the knowledge that Margery didn’t suffer that mitigated, in Stacey’s mind, the suddenness of the death. The truth is, Stacey would rather not focus on the element of personal relief in her old employer’s sudden death, however tenuous her and Margery’s connection had become in the years since Stacey had worked for her. Unexpected, too, you could say the woman’s death had been. But you couldn’t really call it premature, at least in terms of her career. That sense, all-around, must be contributing to the air of giddiness in the crowd: Writing-wise, anyway, Margery was way past her prime.

  At the podium Renata Townsend—Stacey has got the name now—draws up smart black half-glasses from a chain around her neck. A hush falls, and the giggling of the two girls next to Stacey is grating. They both look a bit cowed and Stacey wonders if they’ve turned up for the wrong thing and are too embarrassed to get up and go. Most of the other women here today are dressed like Stacey, in of-the-moment flats or pumps, with sharp haircuts and pricey totes; the older ones are tweedier, that’s all. But these two girls are something else. The one sitting closer to Stacey is tall and makeupless and would be severe-looking if she wasn’t trying not to laugh, a hand clamped, childlike, over her mouth. Her lank dirty blond hair reaches halfway down her back, and you never see truly long hair in New York. But what’s more noticeable are the outfits: The other girl, a brunette, is shorter, with buck-teeth and freckles. But what’s more noticeable are the outfits: They’re both wearing sheer black dresses, and high heels. The latter has huge breasts popping out of décolletage. On second glance they’re not all that much younger than Stacey—twenty-two or twenty-three to her twenty-nine—but their touristy getups (for this is how out-of-towners often seem to dress for Broadway shows; for bachelorette nights out on the town) and their drunken-seeming hilarity give them an air of much younger girls. The brunette drops her handbag and reaching down to grab it bangs her head on the seat in front of her. At this the taller girl laughs so loudly and rudely, with no consideration for the setting, or the nature of the event, that Stacey looks sharply at her, ready to say something—enforce some decent behavior, for Renata has started to introduce herself. “I was Margery McIntyre Flood’s editor for thirty-three years,” she says, with smooth quiet confidence. In the moment before she recognizes the taller girl, Stacey’s mind seizes on a fact she’d forgotten—excised it so thoroughly from her mind she would have denied it outright a minute before. She wrinkles up her face in distress. She never returned Margery’s calls, either—so to speak. Not that she actually received any message on her answering machine, but several years ago—Stacey had been in L.A. maybe six months—Anita had written in one of her letters that Margery was having trouble selling her latest book; her agent had evidently dumped her a while back. Margery had buttonholed Anita after a town meeting and when Anita told the former about Stacey’s “success” (For Christ’s sake! Stacey remembered thinking, what success?), Margery had asked Anita to ask Stacey if she could talk to her agent out there on Margery’s behalf. Stacey had been seized with rage at this presumptuous importunity. (In the hard auditorium seat she crosses her arms over her chest, remembering.) It made no sense! TV agents didn’t do fiction—surely Margery realized this. And even if they did, Stacey hardly knew Ryan. She was probably the least important writer on his list. What was she going to do, call him up and say that this woman she used to babysit for who had been big maybe fifteen years ago but now found herself agentless had a new novel? The arrogance—no, not even the arrogance but the absurdity of the request! When she was beyond helpless! She was lucky if Ryan returned even her legitimate phone calls.