Audrey’s Door Read online

  From the day she’d arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal four years ago, New York had tried to spit her back out. She’d met with a thick-accented Corcoran Real Estate broker whose dyed black hair had matched her imitation Chanel Purse. (Chinel! The label had exclaimed, like it was excited to meet you.)

  As soon as Audrey eked past the credit test, Chinel! took her to the East Village: “I’ve got some efficiencies on Avenue A. Ya’ll LOVE it there!”

  Chinel!’s three-inch heels had gone crack!-crack!-crack! like kids’ cap toys, while beside her, Audrey had tried not to crane her neck and gawk at the finely crafted stone peaks of the old tenements on East 3rd Street. They saw three places, all of which Chinel! had promised cost less than $800 but magically turned out to be at least $2,100. A month!

  “You can’t get no cheappa than two grand,” Chinel! had exclaimed with exasperation at apartment number four, like Audrey was insulting her hospitality. The place was a fifth-floor walk-up that smelled like mice.

  “You don’t understand. I can’t afford this,” Audrey had answered with tears in her eyes. Her whole life, she’d scraped. As a kid, she’d stolen Coffee Mate creamer out of motels, like “milk solids” was a food group. In college, she’d ladled slop at both cafeterias, just so she could afford the textbooks. To keep the grad-school application checks from bouncing, she’d skipped the sweet air for a month. Never once had anything come easy. Never once had a rich uncle died, so baby could wear a pair of new shoes.

  “So take out anotha school loan! That’s what all the kids do. Me, I live farther out. But you can’t commute that fah. This is the best deal you’ll get.”

  The tough, callused pads of Audrey’s feet had rubbed against cheap linoleum because the soles of her special-occasion-only loafers had been worn to a thin layer of rubber. She hadn’t changed her fancy corduroy jumper since the bus transfer in Pittsburgh, and as they’d entered each small, stuffy studio, she’d learned the hard way that the concentrated sweat dried to her underarms smelled a lot like piss.

  Audrey sighed. She’d been in the city less than six hours, and already, she wanted to take the next bus back to Omaha. But by now her old job at IHOP was filled, and someone else had rented her tiny, black-painted studio apartment. She was alone, and home was gone.

  Chinel! clapped her hands together like she thought they were going to make a deal, and Audrey had wondered: Why did I think I could pull this off?

  She didn’t know how to buy a Metrocard, or read a subway map, or fix a blown fuse, or apply for a job other than at IHOP. She was weird Audrey Lucas, who hadn’t learned to balm her lips in high school, so in the winter, they’d bled. Not to mention the maxi pads. It was too humiliating to even think about the maxi pads. She hadn’t known about table manners, either. When she got to the new-student banquet at the University of Nebraska, she’d rolled her flat chicken cutlet like baloney and eaten it with her hands. Even the shit-booted farm kids had hooted their amusement. Weird Audrey Lucas: she raised herself, only she didn’t do a very good job.

  Chinel!’s cell phone had jingled to the tune of Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” She’d looked at its lit-up screen, then at Audrey, like she was trying to figure out which was worth her time. She grudgingly picked Audrey and dropped the phone back into her purse.

  Maybe it was something in this New York air. Dirty, but dignified, like tarnished copper. Maybe it was Audrey’s semiretarded busboy at IHOP who’d forgiven her two-hundred-dollar hash debt, and pressed five fatties into her palm for the road. “Shit on a stick: Columbia University! Forget about that stuff with your mom. You’re going someplace. Write me sometime, even if I don’t write back. I’m proud to know you, Audrey Lucas,” Billy Epps had told her. She’d looked down at her black Reeboks before thanking him, because the kindness had been so unexpected.

  If a nice guy like Billy Epps could think she was worth something, why was she letting tacky Chinel! get her down? Who was this woman to con her out of an education, a new life, just so she could make a quick buck on the signing fee?

  Audrey made her decision. She wanted this new life so much she could fucking taste it. Sure, she might not be special or smart or tough enough. But not this way. She wasn’t going to let this fake-pursed phony be the bitch who took her down.

  Chinel! beckoned toward the dingy, nonworking fireplace with shellacked red nails: “Look at this, sweetie. A real prewar detail.”

  Audrey didn’t move, and Chinel! came back to retrieve her. Blood rushed to Audrey’s face: hot and salty, like liquid fire. “I booked this appointment from Nebraska! You told me you had apartments in my range! You told me no problem!”

  “Hun-ee,” Chinel! clucked, then rolled her eyes. But when she looked at Audrey, whatever she saw there changed her mind. She smiled crookedly, a real smile, like suddenly the game was over—nothing personal—and they could part friends. “I had you pegged all wrong. I thought you was the daughter of a rich man when you said you was going to Columbia. Forget the East Village. It’s Neva-Neva Land. Do ya-self a favor and go to stoodent housing up in Morningside Heights. They’ll find you something cheapa.”

  Audrey didn’t bother saying good-bye, or even shaking hands. She left Chinel! in the dirty walk-up. After a thirty-minute search up and down 14th Street (she refused to ask for directions because—Dammit!—she could do this!), she found the crosstown L. It was only after she held to the metal strap, and the subway roared through its noisy tunnel, that she smiled. She’d never guessed she had it in her to yell at another person. Better still, yelling felt pretty stinking good.

  After that day, she kept fighting. And scratching. And working. And learning the little things, like why dental floss was good and the creepy old men on 113th and Amsterdam were bad. And then one morning, she looked in the mirror, and discovered that she’d lost her sad-sack slump. Her hair wasn’t greasy anymore. And her smile happened to be kind of pretty. For the first time in her life, she looked happy. New York was where she belonged.

  Even grad school worked in her favor. Turned out, she had real talent. If she’d been any good at reading people, she might have recognized the envy of her fellow students, and even a few of the teachers, whose snipes had not been intended to encourage but to undermine. But after growing up under Betty Lucas’ thumb, the subtleties of academic pettiness flew right over her head. Nothing stopped her, or even slowed her down.

  By the end of her first year, the department chair selected her to help design New York-Presbyterian’s Pediatric Wing. Instead of shared bedrooms, she suggested small, alveoli-like rooms in clusters of three along the edges of the building, so the really sick kids still had their privacy, but they also got a view. Her design won the New York Emerging Voices Award in Architecture. That summer break, even though nobody else in her class landed so much as an interview for an unpaid internship, she had her pick of firms.

  During her second year in school, with one aspect of her life in place, she decided to shoot for gold and shore up the other part, too. Her first effort was E-Harmony, but their standards against weird were too high, because after she filled out their hundred-item questionnaire, they told her she was unmatchable. Next she tried singleny.com, then smoked up with the last of Billy’s hash before her dates because she’d needed the courage. She let the first guy kiss her even though she didn’t like him, because a girl needs a first kiss. “Farmer’s daughters are my favorite! You’re as sweet as jelly!” he’d announced, and she hadn’t corrected him by letting him know that the closest she’d gotten to a farm was when Betty had worked as a secretary at the John Deere in Hinton.

  She let the next guy get to second base. She liked him a little better, but not much. He’d lived with his parents in the Trump Towers, and kept talking about how much money he would inherit when they died. From the broken veins across his nose and the half bottle of Bombay Gin he downed, she got the feeling that she’d hooked herself a boozer. “You’re forty-two years old, right?” she’d asked, thinking such a ques
tion would shame him, but instead he’d answered, “I lied on the application. I’m forty-nine.”

  Compared to his predecessors, Saraub was Prince Charming. His name was pronounced Sore-rub but his friends called him Bobby, because, before political correctness, that was what kindergarten teachers at Manhattan private schools renamed all the Indian kids—they didn’t like having to pronounce foreign words. Worse, she later learned, his real name was Saurabh, but the hospital got it wrong on the birth certificate.

  From his short, no-nonsense e-mails she’d learned that he was a documentary filmmaker, he liked Frank Miller comic books, especially Batman, and he was teaching himself to play the harmonica. Badly. He’d never once written that she was hot, that he’d like to poke her, or that he wanted to fill a room with oodles of crisp hundred-dollar bills and swim naked through them with her. “Yours, Saraub,” he always signed, and the first time she’d read that, she’d thought: Okay, I’ll take you.

  “Are you stoned?” Saraub had asked when she met him outside the Film Forum movie theatre, where they’d arranged to see Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Her pupils must have been dilated to the size of black aggie marbles. So far, he was the only guy who’d noticed.

  “Yeah. I hardly ever smoke anymore. But I got nervous,” she’d confessed.

  He was about six-foot-six, and wide as a linebacker, but he stood kind of slumped, like he’d been putting people at ease about his girth for so long that he’d given himself bad posture. His online profile had framed only his face: clear skin and big, puppy-dog brown eyes. She hadn’t noticed his twenty-inch neck. Probably, to get his blue pin-striped shirt to hang so nicely, he’d had it made special.

  He bent down so that they were talking eye to eye. “Do I look that scary?”

  She’d shrugged. This was her third date in a month, and already she was sick of the bullshit. “Yeah, you do look scary, but that’s not why I’m high. I don’t date normally, but ever since I moved to New York, I decided to try, you know? I don’t come from much, but I’m trying.”

  He’d frowned. Maybe he’d expected the gleeful Audrey Lucas from the singleny.com profile, who ended all her sentences with exclamation points (looking forward to meeting you!!!) to be his soul mate, but the somber woman with crow’s-feet waiting for him at Film Forum had dashed his hopes. He looked up at the sky, like he was just a little pissed off at God. It occurred to her that getting high before a date is kind of rude.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. What can I do?” she asked.

  Cars trundled down West Houston Street and toward the Holland Tunnel. “I’m trying, too,” he said as a cab hit a pothole, so she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Forget it. I should go. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Normally, she would have let him leave. Her tiny, four-walled dorm room whose bathroom she shared with three other girls needed vacuuming, and he was a fat Indian guy, so why chase him? She could call forty-nine-year-old contestant number two tonight instead. They’d go out and get sloshed, and in a way that would be easier because he wouldn’t look at her the way Saraub was looking at her right now, like he was actually trying to see her.

  He started to walk away, and it slipped out before she had the chance to censor herself: “Don’t go. I like you.” Suddenly, she was red-faced and sober. Her heart beat in her ears (squish-squish!), and she looked around for a hole to crawl inside of and hide.

  Saraub turned back and smiled like he was amused. He saw her. Her whole life, she’d been a phantom. She and Betty had moved around so often that she’d never had time to make friends, and when they finally did put down roots, it had been too late to learn how. Sometimes she got so lonely, she caught herself talking to the damn cactus. But, looking at Saraub, she glimpsed the promise of something better. His arms looked firm. Like if he wrapped them around her, he’d weigh her down and make her real. In her mind, she hugged him back. She pressed her fingers along his spine and let him know that around her, it was okay to stand tall.

  “Come on,” she pleaded, even though this was the first time she could remember ever chasing a man instead of running in the opposite direction. It felt scary. It felt alive. “It’ll be my treat.”

  He narrowed his eyes like he was thinking hard on something. “The thing is,” he said, “my family has somebody picked out. An arranged marriage. I thought…I’d see what else was out there. I’ve only ever dated Indian girls, but I’m getting married next month. Twenty-four days, actually.”

  “Oh,” she said. She tried to swallow the lump in her throat, but it stayed there. She looked down at the sidewalk. His shoes were shiny loafers. Hers were ballet flats. The smell of popcorn was in the air. She wondered if she cleaned more often than necessary because she was lonely.

  “I shouldn’t complain. I’m no catch,” he’d said, patting his ample gut. In his profile he’d called himself fit. Then again, she’d called herself an optimist. “The girl—she’s not my type. She smiles all the time, but she never says anything. It’s annoying.”

  “What’s your type?” Audrey asked. She ached so much at the thought of losing this stranger that she thought she might cry, so she bit her lip and looked at the man in the ticket booth, who was counting quarters one by one.

  Saraub ran his hands along his suit, straightening the fabric. It was a Saturday. She didn’t think he was going to work after this, which meant he’d worn it for her. “Complicated. My type is complicated. Would you mind seeing the movie, just as friends?”

  She nodded. By the time the tennis star’s wife got murdered in the reflection in Patricia Hitchcock’s glasses, they were holding hands. By the third “just friends” date, he’d postponed the wedding.

  She was afraid to tell him that she was a thirty-three-year-old virgin, so they didn’t sleep together until their tenth date. To avoid the humiliation of such a confession, she’d considered breaking up with him. But she liked him too much, so instead she braved the adult section of Kim’s Video on 112th and Broadway, and rented three pornos. Dr. Cocksalot, with his fingers made of penises, provoked the most giggles, though it had lacked the desired erotic effect. She studied it until she thought she could put on a decent show and make him believe she wasn’t new to the world of love.

  Her plan had one flaw. Sex is terrifying. As soon as he unzipped his jeans, and his little friend poked its way out of his blue silk briefs, she started crying. What was she supposed to do with that thing? Hold it? Compliment it? Give it a cute name? She’d never seen one before in real life!

  Then she’d laughed, loud and braying, because this was absurd. After all the bad shit with Betty she’d faced with the kind of poker face that even a stoic would envy, she’d picked now to cry, when she was happy for the first time in her life, and a nice man finally wanted to touch her.

  Saraub hiked his trousers. Shirtless and blushing so hard his brown face turned red, he’d looked down at his stomach like it had done something wrong, hunched his shoulders, and tried to make himself small.

  She stopped laughing, and leaped off his queen-sized bed. Melted Mallomar crumbs from one of his late-night snack sprees were stuck to her back like freckles. “It’s not you. I—I love you,” she’d blurted, so intent on keeping the immediate secret that she hemorrhaged the more important one. “But I’m…. I never dated, you know? I used to be kind of a shut-in. I was too scared. I never…”

  He’d smiled then, a lazy, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and dropped his trousers again. “It’s okay,” he told her. “You don’t have to say.” She cried through the whole thing, but not because she was sad. She’d gone and done something stupid. After all the ways she’d let crazy Betty Lucas break her heart, she’d finally opened up and trusted somebody again.

  “I’m glad it was me,” he told her when they were done, and lying in each other’s arms. “Because I really love you.”

  At those words, she’d felt something inside her crack apart. Her whole bod
y got warm. Sometimes you can feel your walls as they break. “Me, too,” she said.

  Six months later, she and her cactus moved into Saraub’s apartment on the Upper East Side. With his wedding officially canceled, his family, who lived twenty blocks away on Park Avenue, cut him off. No more ski trips. No more health insurance. All they had to live on was his freelance income and her tips from waiting tables on weekends at La Rosita. “I’m so sorry,” she’d told him.

  He’d rubbed the back of her neck in that way that made her purr. “I’m not. I’m relieved. I wish I’d done it sooner.”

  She tried to hide it for the first few months, but after a while, she couldn’t help it; she rearranged his kitchen cabinets, moved the framed poster of dogs playing poker to the space behind the door so she wouldn’t have to look at it, and scrubbed all the floors with a toothbrush. He was understanding because he had a few quirks of his own. He was a documentarian, which provided him the excuse of filming people with his camera phone when they weren’t paying attention. At least once a week she caught him holding up his phone while she sipped her morning coffee. She shooed him with a wave of her hands like he was a fly: “Are you kidding? I haven’t even brushed my hair!” But after a while she learned to ignore it. Some men buy flowers, others carry around footage of what their girlfriends look like at 6:30 A.M.

  After their first year of domestic bliss, Saraub started talking about finding a bigger place. With his I NY tourism commercial editing gigs, and the job at Vesuvius, she was about to start, they could afford a house in Yonkers, maybe even start a family. She’d nodded and changed the subject, because she’d figured he wasn’t serious. Besides, it wasn’t that outlandish: she’d kept a cactus alive for five years; a baby couldn’t be that much harder, could it?…Right? And the truth was, this happy family bullshit, with its white picket fence and healthy Campbell’s-Soup-looking kids he kept dreaming about; it sounded pretty good.