Hotel No Tell Page 6

  And on the glorious blue-skied Monday morning following my rock-climbing debut with Lieutenant Fisk, I was thrilled not to have kids merely so that I could be right here, right now, sipping Sumatra, watching a Weimaraner and a vizsla romp in the plastic pool at the Leroy Street dog run, listening to Macy chatter on about her latest bridal victory. I wasn’t worrying about whether a new nanny was slipping nonorganic contraband to my offspring. I wasn’t wiped out from night feedings. I wasn’t thinking about affording nursery school or saving for college. My day wasn’t going to be circumscribed by an obligation to enforce someone’s eight o’clock bedtime, with the promise of an hour or two to myself and another adult (with whom conversation would presumably revolve around the diminutive members of the family) before I collapsed into bed to begin the whole exhausting cycle again.

  Instead, I was waiting for visiting hours to begin at the psych ward at Bellevue so that I could go have a chat with Jeremy Wedge, who had, apparently against his will, lived to see another day. After that I would go to the office to check in with Pippa and catch up on e-mail. Then I’d head home at around five and take a nap before going out again. I had a few options for the evening, including a free dinner cruise around Manhattan, given to Macy and one guest courtesy of a No Divas client. Macy had calculated for the bride that the wedding shoes she wanted would average out to a hundred dollars an hour and would never be seen beneath her floor-length gown unless she hiked up her dress and pointed. Macy had talked her down to a pair of comfortable white sandals from Payless for thirteen bucks. As thanks, the relieved woman, proprietor of a fleet of event boats around the city, had offered Macy the free ride. We could go or not go, and the decision could be made at the last minute.

  Two dalmatians streaked by and I steadied my coffee cup against the force of their tails.

  “Remind me, which train do we have to catch tomorrow for dinner in Hellsville?” Macy stretched her pale, freckled legs and rested her head on the back of the bench. “I need time to wash and dry my straitjacket.”

  “Do you have an extra for me?”

  “At the very least, I’m gonna wear old, dowdy clothes. I suggest you do the same,” Macy added ominously.

  “Yeah, and exactly how much of the night are you going to spend within spit-up distance of the babies?” I asked, nudging her foot with mine.

  “It’s not for the babies. It’s because if we don’t look even a fraction as exhausted and miserable as Lucy, she’ll start crying.”

  If my life and Macy’s were a series of various freedoms, Lucy’s was a suit of chain mail. To be sure, at the beginning, her troubles were self-inflicted. Three years earlier, not long after she’d begun dating Leonard, Lucy called me in the throes of indecision over whether to keep her name or take his.

  I sat up in bed. “You’re engaged?”

  Gregory groaned beside me, not because his slumber was being disturbed but because, regardless of which Sterling Girl was on the line, this news would disrupt his foreseeable future.

  “No, not exactly.” She sounded out of breath.

  “What do you mean ‘not exactly,’ Luce? And are you exercising?” I accused her.

  “I’m trying to find matching lids for the Tupperware and, no, we’re not engaged. But we will be, and then what? I don’t want to change my name!” she wailed, as a drawer slammed in the background. “I love that people ask whether I’m related to Alice B. I love that people don’t always know how to pronounce it. It makes me feel unique. And, Zephyr, I love Leonard, I really do, but I just don’t like his last name. Do you?”

  This was a terrifically loaded question on two counts. First, I couldn’t remember Leonard’s last name, which made me a certifiably lousy friend. If I’d known that he was a matrimonial candidate, I would have dislodged some other bit of trivia from my brain and made room for it. Second, even if I did know what it was, in the name of future peacekeeping there was no way I was going to give anything other than a noncommittal response.

  “His name is fine. Whichever you choose, you’ll be fine,” I said smoothly.

  “Really?” Lucy asked hopefully. “You don’t think Lucy Livingston is too much alliteration?”

  Livingston, of course.

  “Actually, I think it sounds pretty great,” I told her truthfully. “A great stage name.”

  “Plus, I haven’t met his mother yet—what if I don’t want to be another Mrs. Livingston?”

  A year later, with Macy firmly steering Lucy clear of her own proclivity for melodrama, Lucy was still Lucy Toklas, but the blinding bling on her left hand proclaimed to all the world that she was, now and forever, Mrs. Leonard. As it turned out, Lucy’s name-keeping decision was studiously ignored by her mother-in-law, who gave the newlyweds household linens monogrammed with Lucy’s would-have-been initials: “LL.” It was a portentous gift, and if we’d all known what lay ahead, we might have advised Lucy to melt the ring and flee to another borough.

  Not long after their wedding, Lucy and Leonard’s conception project moved declivitously from romantic getaways in the Hudson Valley to an IVF clinic in a Manhattan office building. The moment it was confirmed that little Alan and Amanda were certain arrivals, Leonard summoned his thus-far-missing backbone and insisted to Lucy, a lifelong New Yorker, that they move out of the city. A few months later, on bed rest in her new four-bedroom colonial in an upstate town called Hillsville—five minutes’ drive from his parents—Lucy wept and blamed the surfeit of hormones for her temporary but disastrous insanity.

  The twins were now thirteen months old, and Macy and I, and occasionally Mercedes, hopped a Metro-North train whenever we could bear it. Sacks of Murray’s bagels and City Bakery marshmallows hanging from our wrists, we vacillated over the best approach to comfort: Agree that car culture was soul-sapping and remind Lucy she could always move back or point out the benefits of life with a lawn? Agree that her mother-in-law, around whom Leonard shrank to half his size, really was the most oppressive human being we’d ever met outside of a Dickens novel or point out how helpful it was to have her take care of the twins, even if the first thing she did upon arrival was change them into outfits she preferred?

  “Seriously,” Macy said, drawing in her legs as the dalmatians made another frenzied circuit past our bench, their soaking-wet coats brushing against us. “I don’t even know how to have a conversation with Lucy anymore.”

  “Don’t say that. That’s her worst fear!” I chastised, feeling sorrier than ever for my upstate friend. I wiped water from my legs with my hands and then tried to dry my hands on the bench.

  “She says she doesn’t want to bore us with talk about the kids or complain about Lenore, but she has nothing else to talk about, and then if you talk about your own life, she gets that hangdog look.”

  “So talk to her about weddings.”

  “Are you kidding?” Macy used a paper napkin to wipe away a wet streak on her skirt. “Then she gets nostalgic for the days when wedding planning was all she had to worry about.”

  I glanced at Macy to gauge the true extent of her exasperation with Lucy. Surely, this woman who tutored, ladled, baked, and phone-banked for no fewer than four different service agencies had a little extra room in her heart for a friend. It turned out that Macy’s hostility to my early granola-bar-distribution proposal was atypical and that her own aversion to parenthood was driven by a desire to serve many rather than just a few. There were times when it was clear that Macy had an easier time caring about strangers than about her friends. Well, why not? It was easier to give someone all your energy and focus between three and five on a Monday afternoon than to give it all day every day.

  I couldn’t believe Macy’s friendship fuse was this short. She had shown extraordinary patience with me as I navigated one failed volunteering attempt after another. Inspired by her insistence that refusing to burden ourselves with financial and emotional dependents did not make us socially irresponsible, morally deficient, or—that blackest of character stains—selfish, I
eagerly followed her to The Door, a drop-in center for teens. During my second tutoring session, though, the heavy-lidded, multipierced dropout across the table did not suddenly look up—eyes shining with the beauty of the John Updike passage I’d assigned—and declare herself Eager to Learn. She left the program soon afterward, and I slunk away, in search of another, hopefully less boring means of giving back.

  Macy gently prodded me toward food pantries, park spruce-ups, a school for the deaf, and even boatbuilding with shelter kids, but I was a poor fit for all of them. Finally I settled on accompanying her to the Hudson Street Nursing Home every few weeks to chat with residents. Some were angry with dementia, some were eager to treat me as family, and there was one who took enormous pleasure in pretending to me that she’d been the mistress of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Robert McNamara—simultaneously. The time passed quickly there, but, unlike Macy, I couldn’t pretend to myself that the reason I wanted to remain childless was so that I could help Mrs. Lefkowitz finish her scrambled eggs or try to instill political sensitivity into a half-blind, mostly deaf racist World War II vet named Mr. Frankenmuller.

  “So how many party boats does this bride own?” I asked, deciding just to be grateful that Macy wasn’t backing out of the upstate trip altogether.

  “Four. Two of them she won in the divorce from her last husband.” Macy slurped the dregs of her coffee.

  “You don’t think she’s going for boats five and six with this husband, do you?”

  Macy shuddered. She perceived a divorce by her clients as a personal failure on her part, an irrational attitude that confounded me.

  A jogger unlatched the gate and let herself in to the dog run. We both sat straight up as she headed to the doggie pool, lifted the hose, and doused her head under the cold stream.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Here he comes.” Macy covered her face with her hands and peeked out between her fingers. “I can’t watch.”

  The self-proclaimed mayor of this nine-hundred-square-foot patch of concrete stalked over as forcefully as a person can stalk while wearing bright-orange testicle-outlining Lycra biking shorts. His bald, freckled pate reflected sunlight, and a gold chain with a heavy crucifix swung against his bare gray-haired chest. He yelled as he approached the pool.

  “Hey! HEY! That is for the doggies only.” He put his hands on his naturally padded hips.

  The jogger put down the hose and looked around.

  “Do you mean me?” she asked, confused.

  “Do you see any other bipeds taking advantage of the doggies’ cooling system?”

  The jogger’s mouth fell open.

  The mayor wagged a finger at her. “And where’s your doggie? No people unaccompanied by canines allowed in here. New York City Parks Department rules.”

  The jogger wiped her dripping face with her arm and sized up her foe. We could see her making the do-I-or-don’t-I-get-into-it? decision.

  She shook her head at him and walked out, taking the high road, while he yelled at her all the way to the double gate. Actually, this tirade, which we’d heard before, was minor compared to the one he bestowed upon those who carelessly opened one gate before the other was shut.

  It looked like the jogger was going to stay above the fray, but once she was safely outside the dog run and had resumed jogging, she tossed out a parting “Psychotic faggot asshole!”

  “Frigid Republican bitch!” he parried without pause, then rolled his eyes at us, as though we were compatriots in his battle against the dogless. He headed back to his bench, his encased thighs swishing, and resumed his post.

  We had no idea why he didn’t oust us from this four-legged haven. We suspected he thought we were a gay couple and that he was wont to make exceptions as he saw fit. Or it could be that we’d been coming for so long that he’d forgotten we didn’t have dogs.

  Macy stood up and tossed her cup into the trash. “Ah, now I can start my day. Coffee and a hostile exchange that didn’t involve me. Invigorating.” She stretched her arms wide. “Headed to the office?” she asked casually.

  If Macy had noticed my unusual new schedule, she’d refrained from asking me about it directly. I suspected she was trying to spare me my own blabbing tendencies, and I tossed her a grateful glance. In fact, her self-control only increased my urge to tell her about the Greenwich Village Hotel.

  “I am,” I said truthfully, slinging on my backpack and following her past the garbage can to the gates. “But first I have to go do an interview over at Bellevue.”

  “Interesting case?” she asked, opening the gate.

  I thought for a moment. Right now the only interesting thing about the hotel case was why I was still on it.

  “Not really.”

  “Even though you met this rock-climbing firefighter?”

  So I hadn’t been completely tight-lipped about the investigation. But I had remained vague about the circumstances surrounding my meeting Lieutenant Fisk, an introduction I couldn’t possibly be expected to keep to myself. Early on, when a courtship was not yet a relationship, a large percentage of the fun was had in the reporting and the analysis. Going rock climbing at ten-thirty on a first date with a firefighter was exciting, but dissecting it later with Macy made it much more so.

  “Even though,” I said.

  “Are you going to call him?” she asked as we waited to cross the West Side Highway. Cars whizzed in front of us, cyclists behind us.

  “Undecided. I’m having trouble remembering how I know whether I’m interested in someone.”

  “Excuse me?” She raised one eyebrow, a move she’d confessed to teaching herself to do when she was twenty-five by holding the stationary brow in place with her hand.

  “You know what I mean. I’m all out of whack after Gregory.”

  “You make him sound like a car accident.”

  “No, but my sensors are dulled. No first date is going to pass muster if I compare it to a terrific three-year relationship. I don’t remember how to assess a new guy.”

  “So don’t compare, don’t assess, just have fun. Go out with him, go out with other guys.”

  I glanced at her as we headed east on Morton. “When’s the last time you took your own advice?” Macy had fully recovered from feeling like she was the kiss of death in her professional life. But after two different men sprained their ankles immediately following dinner-at-Momofuku/dessert-at-Veniero’s second dates with her, she had declared indefinite single status.

  She wagged her finger at me warningly. “We’re not talking about me.”

  “Macy, come on. You’re not really going to stay celibate for the rest of your life.” She picked up her pace, as though she was trying to ditch the conversation. I hurried to keep up with her. “Want me to see if the lieutenant has any firefighting buddies?”

  “Don’t you dare,” she said, stopping short at the corner of Hudson Street.

  I stood my ground. “It’s actually an excellent idea.”

  “If you do say so yourself.”

  “You’re small potatoes compared to burning buildings. A firefighter couldn’t possibly be felled by you and your lousy mojo.”

  She exhaled through her nose. “I’ll consider it.”

  “Have your girl call my girl,” I said, shaking my head.

  I started walking, but Macy pulled me back. “Zeph, why do you care whether I date? What does it have to do with you?”

  The answer was simple—I cared about her—but that truth would be met with suspicion.

  “Nothing, Mace. It has nothing to do with me. It’s just that I assume this isn’t really the end of the road for you and relationships. I don’t believe that, at thirty, you’re done with penises and are devoting your life to work. And since I don’t believe it, I thought it would be fun to help you date again.”

  An older woman wearing a John Lennon T-shirt and peasant skirt halted, prompting the mangy dog she was pushing in a shopping cart to emit a feeble bark. She looked Macy up and down and sa
id, “My son is a dermatologist. He’s thirty-five and could stand to lose a few pounds, but he’s a good boy. You want his number?”

  Macy had been poised to give me her opinion about my meddling, but now she closed her mouth, startled. The woman dug under the dog’s ratty pillow and held out a business card.

  “Think about it,” she said. “Redheads are prone to melanomas. He’d look out for you, so that’s a bonus.”

  Chapter 4

  As far as the hospital personnel were concerned, I was now Jeremy Wedge’s sister. I squished myself against the back wall of a Bellevue Hospital elevator and closed my eyes against my own stupidity. Two nights earlier, I had seen fit to jeopardize my undercover status because of the length of a guy’s eyelashes, but here, trying to gain entry to the most notorious psych ward in the city, I chose to keep my badge hidden and instead get upstairs on wits and artful deception.

  Two young doctors stepped in, murmuring quietly to each other over a chart. I studied them surreptitiously, with their stethoscopes and high-heeled shoes and pagers, and, for the briefest of moments, I envied them. In another lifetime, I’d spent a year at med school and then quit, denying myself the chance to attain the cool sophistication that comes from earning your prescription pad. Their white coats broadcast years of hard work and an acquired knowledge that was universally recognized as useful to all of humankind. I—finally—had a real job, one that I loved, but it seemed I was destined to always be on the scrappy side of things.