Mercury in Retrograde Read online

  Lipstick’s eyes shot open when she heard voices coming from her garden.

  Oh, God, she thought. What if somebody scaled the wall? Her heart started racing, and she began to sweat. She could hear the banging of the garden doors downstairs. Someone was breaking into the apartment.

  Lipstick grabbed her cell phone from her purse and keyed in 911. She tiptoed through the living room into the kitchen, took a large knife from the wooden knife block, and peered out of the glass doors leading down to the garden. She couldn’t see anything, so she turned on the garden lights and stepped outside onto the terrace, her thumb hovering above the send button on her cell phone, which was set to call the police at a touch. She peered over the side of the railing and said, “Hellooooo…”

  Looking back up at her were her parents.

  “Lena, darling! You’re home!” Lana cried, shivering in the cold in a thin baby-blue cashmere sweater set and tan wool pants. “We came out to check on the garden and the door locked behind us. Our coats and my purse are inside and everything. Thank God you’re home and not out on one of your gallivants. We’d have died if we’d spent another minute out here!”

  SAGITTARIUS:

  Your oversights have led to a blindness that hid betrayal.

  As Dana continued cleaning “the drawer,” a photo fell out from a stack of papers. Dana picked it up and immediately the bile rose in her throat again. The photo of her, Noah, and his friend Bill—who was clinging onto the arm of a tall, gorgeous model—was almost too much for her.

  Their marriage hadn’t been going well, but nothing that Dana was too concerned about. Then one night, Noah didn’t come home and didn’t answer her many frenzied calls. All night. On her way to work the next day, Dana was getting on the southbound A train at Seventy-second Street and ran into Noah, getting off the train.

  “It wasn’t so much that Noah was getting off the train as I was getting on to go to work, it was that he was wearing the same clothes from the night before,” Dana slurred to Sally later, recalling her breakup in a drunken haze. “But whatever—I mean, it was Noah. He said he was helping his friend Bill move into a new apartment in Cobble Hill and then just crashed. I swear, it made sense! Bill is always asking for help with shit like that.”

  A week after Noah spent the night at Bill’s, Dana found herself with a raging case of pubic lice. Semitraumatized after finding a tiny living thing residing below her underwear line, Dana called her mother who snapped, “You’ve got crabs. Are you having an affair on my darling son-in-law?”

  When Dana confronted Noah, who had been suspiciously and discreetly scratching “down there” as well, about the invasion of the tiny bloodsucking pseudocrustaceans, he blamed Bill’s most recent conquest: Evya, an Eastern European exchange student/model Bill met at Hunter College a month before in the psychology class for which he was a teacher’s assistant.

  “You know those Eastern European girls—they’re all dirty and infect everything,” Noah explained. “And crabs get everywhere.”

  It seemed logical enough and the tiny bloodsuckers were gone soon after, thanks to a bottle of RID and a fierce spring cleaning in late February, which Sally had helped with (Sally came dressed for nuclear winter, wearing a homemade hazmat suit and chanting, “Ooooom. Om. Ew. Oooom”).

  After that, Noah became…distracted. He spent much of his time furiously typing on his BlackBerry and came home from work even later than usual.

  His newfound Crackberry addiction was so bad that during a dinner to celebrate their two-year anniversary at Nobu in Tribeca, Dana, not usually one to throw tantrums, threw her napkin down on the table. “Dammit!” she said. “If you are going to spend all night on that fucking BlackBerry, I may as well go home. What on God’s green Earth is so important that you can sit here for an hour and ignore me on our anniversary?”

  “Sorry, babe,” Noah explained, looking sheepish. “It’s Bill. He and Evya are having problems and I’m just trying to help them.”

  “What?” Dana asked, incredulous. “Crab girl? Bill is still with her? She cost us five hundred dollars in cleaning bills—and you’re trying to help them stay together? You should help him by sending her a ticket back to Belarus!”

  “You’re right, babe, I’m sorry,” Noah said and turned his BlackBerry off.

  A week later, on a Thursday evening, Dana was putting on her mascara in the hall mirror in preparation for meeting Sally and some other friends at the Soho House to celebrate Sally’s birthday and asked Noah if he wanted to come.

  “I have to take a client out to dinner,” he said. “See you at home later?” He kissed her on the cheek on her way out.

  As she was walking to the corner of Seventy-fifth and Columbus to catch a cab downtown, Dana realized she’d forgotten the cupcakes she had bought Sally at the new Magnolia Bakery on Columbus and Seventieth. She was about a block away from her house nearing the corner of Seventy-fourth and Amsterdam, by the concrete playground, when she saw Noah, hunkered down against the wind in his shearling coat, a black scarf, and matching cashmere hat thirty feet in front of her.

  I bet he’s coming to meet me. God, he’s great, Dana thought.

  She was about to run up behind him and playfully slap his butt when Noah walked up to a tall, striking, black-haired model type waiting by the bus stop, put his arms around her, and, whispering, “Evya…” he gave the woman a long, deep kiss.

  It turned out Noah had not been helping Bill, but rather, Evya—right into bed.

  Dana stood there, frozen, feeling the blood rush from her face. She couldn’t move for a good two minutes, long enough to watch Noah and Evya walk off, hand in hand, disappearing down West Seventy-fourth. When they were out of sight, Dana finally regained her senses enough to move and ran home sobbing across the playground. She called Sally—who made some excuses to her other friends at the Soho House, leaving a three-quarters-full bottle of wine, and came right over.

  Noah didn’t pick up the phone the twenty times Dana, imbued with the courage and hysteria that only a half bottle of Jack Daniels can give, tried calling. So, in a rage, she packed up all of his clothes, and Sally helped her carry them down the stairs to the vestibule by the trash on the first floor.

  Sally was still there three hours later with a red, puffy-eyed and sniffling Dana when, from the window, they spied Noah coming back from his “business dinner.” The friends sat on plastic garbage bags on the sofa (just in case Evya’s crabs were back now that Noah was officially having an affair with her), waiting to confront him.

  But Noah never came up, nor did he call. In the morning Dana went downstairs and saw that his bags were gone.

  “He treated your two-year marriage like he’d treat a two-week hookup,” Sally said months later. “What a sociopath.”

  LIBRA:

  Your extravagance has led to unwanted attention, and the consequences will be severe.

  “What are you guys doing out here?” Lena said, dropping the knife onto a patio chair. “You scared the hell out of me! I was about to call the cops.”

  “Don’t talk to your mother that way,” her father, dressed in his usual navy suit and tie, said, trudging up the steps with her mother and striding past Lipstick into the kitchen. “We were just checking on our investment.”

  “What?” Lipstick asked, coming in from the cold and locking the door behind her. “Your investment?”

  “The apartment. It’s ours, you know. We paid for it, and my name is on the deed, not yours.”

  “Oh, right,” Lipstick sighed, rolling her eyes. Every couple of years her father got this way. Martin Lippencrass, the “King of Distressed Debt,” according to Business Week, was a self-made man, having “pulled myself up from my own bootstraps and got myself out of Brooklyn to the Upper East Side by my own wits.” What Martin always edited out of the so-called rags-to-riches story was that while he did grow up in Brooklyn, it was in the upper-middle-class area of Brooklyn Heights, and when he went to Harvard, his parents had been able to pay f
or it.

  “Lena, dear, we’re worried about you,” her mother, an older, more sophisticated version of her daughter, said, stroking Lipstick’s hair.

  “Why?” Lipstick asked, brushing aside her mother’s hand. She sat down on one of the stools around the kitchen island while her parents remained standing. “I’m fine. Great, actually. Except for some reason my credit cards won’t work. We have to sort that out.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” Martin said.

  “Me too—Bergdorf won’t hold those dresses forever.”

  “What dresses?” Lana asked.

  “Oh, Mommy, they are fabulous! There are two Chanels, one Allessandro Dell’Aqua and two Pradas. You’ll love them!”

  “Oh, that does sound nice—are they formal or casual?”

  “Formal! Nan Thrice is out of intensive care and the May gala season is in hyperdrive.”

  “I’d heard that—”

  “Enough!” Martin said, slamming his fist on the kitchen counter. “We are not here to talk dresses that I am expected to pay for.”

  Lipstick and Lana stopped talking and looked down at the floor like chastened children.

  “Well, then, what are we here to discuss?” Lipstick asked. “And what are you doing snooping around my apartment while I’m not home? That’s not cool.”

  “It’s actually our apartment, dear,” Lana said. “Although you insisted on getting an apartment down here—and without a doorman, I might add—we did pay for it.”

  “I know,” Lipstick said, “you keep reminding me.”

  “Lena, your cousin Max has decided to come home,” Martin said. “And we’ve decided to let him stay at the apartment.”

  Lipstick’s twenty-four-year-old cousin Max—who’d been practically adopted by Lana since his mother, Lana’s sister, died five years earlier due to complications that arose after an experimental cosmetic procedure involving fat transfers had gone awry—considered himself something of a modern-day Vasco da Gama with a touch of Mother Teresa. After four years at Brown, he decided to trek the Himalayas and spent a year in the Annapurna base camp “communing” with Sherpas and various monks. Max left Shangri-la after a physical altercation with some local Gurkhas for a two-year stint at the Peace Corps camp in Namibia, teaching locals English. “I already have money, Lena, thanks to the family,” he told Lipstick. “I need to use my life to do good and explore.”

  It seemed he was finally ready to come home.

  “Oh! That’s great!” Lipstick said, clapping her hands. “Maxie’s back! He can have the second bedroom.”

  “Well, actually, no.” Martin said. “We’ve decided to give him the entire apartment. He’s bringing some of the local African children he taught with him to study actual Americans—he calls it ‘complete culture consumption’ or something like that—and they’ll need the whole place. You’ll have to vacate, I’m afraid.”

  4

  SCORPIO:

  Differences of opinion may come up, especially between family members.

  An hour later Penelope was back home but Neal hadn’t returned her “urgent! SOS!” messages yet.

  Omigod, omigod omigod, omigod, thought Penelope as she climbed the three flights to her apartment in shock and opened the gray metal front door.

  Penelope made a beeline for the freezer, where she took out a bag of frozen peas to put on the angry red throbbing lump that was growing like a horn out of her forehead and attached it to her head via a black elastic headband. She then flung herself fully clothed onto the bed facedown and moaned, “Isshhhhhtarrrrrr.”

  The box-office bomb had, over the years, become a euphemism Penelope used to describe anything akin to hell. Penelope’s mother, Susan Rosenzweig Mercury, had a lifelong crush on both Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty and, in 1987, had been thrilled when the planets finally aligned to put her two dreamboats into the same big-screen comedy. While the critics had rightfully railed against the flick—which posed the affable odd couple as bickering lounge singers “hilariously getting caught up in a CIA drama on their way to the Ishtar Hilton”—Susan loved it with such fervor she’d insisted Penelope watch the dreaded flick with her at least once a month on their aging Betamax player for all of 1988. The movie left such an impression on Penelope that she’d since used the film’s title as an adjective to describe the worst horrors imaginable. And now was very Ishtar.

  Ishy ishy ISHTAR! she thought. You have no job. Not only did you not get the promotion, you got fired. Or did you quit? I think you quit first. It sounds better, either way.

  But, oh no, you couldn’t just stop there, could you? You lit the Telegraph on fire. And threw up on your boss. To top it all off, you’ll probably die from pneumonia by morning, looking like the demon in Hellboy.

  Five minutes of self-pitying cow moans later, Penelope rolled over and blindly fished her phone out of the pink puffer coat’s pocket and, as she usually did in times of unexpected distress, called her mother.

  “Are you nuts?” Susan cried after Penelope blubbered out the details of her horrific day. “Rule number one—one!—and this is important: never, ever quit a job without having another one! How are you going to pay the rent?”

  Penelope’s mother loved rules almost as much as she loved the movie Ishtar. Rules made her life orderly. And there were a lot of them, a side effect of being a primary-school teacher who was inexplicably still married to someone with whom she had almost nothing in common, namely Penelope’s born-again, slightly paranoid, right-wing father, Jim Mercury. She felt rules provided stability to a world she often found dangerous and disappointing. They were her safety blanket.

  Susan Mercury also liked to number the rules to give them added authority. When Penelope was a child, there were the obvious rules: “Rule Number 4: no cursing at your mother—I don’t care what you say to your sister or your father but do not curse at me or I will smack that ass,” “Rule Number 15: No TV until after dinner—M*A*S*H or Taxi. Not both—TV rots your mind!” and “Rule Number 32: All boogers go in the trash can!” (as opposed to “booger alley,” which Penelope and her older sister Nicole had created in the space between their twin beds in the shared room). Later came rules like “Rule Number 214: Never date a man who is mean to the waiters, because that’s how he will eventually treat you,” “Rule Number 237: Never date a man with a van—only thieves and rapists drive vans!” and “Rule Number 112: Whoever makes dinner doesn’t have to do the dishes—so start washing or you’re grounded.”

  Back on the phone, Penelope, still sniffling and in full-blown flu mode, said hopefully, “Well, baybe you could load be sub bunny?”

  It was a futile question.

  “Penelope, even if we did have the money, you know damn well I wouldn’t give it to you. Rule Number 21: We’ll never give you a cent, but there’s always a plane ticket home so you will never be homeless. Would you like a plane ticket home?”

  “Doh,” Penelope said, “I’d like sub bunny.”

  “You know your father and I don’t have any money,” Susan snapped, “especially since he joined that new church last month that insists on tithing—tithing!—as if, on your father’s university salary and my teaching pay, we can afford to give ten percent to anything…Jim, stop that! Take that Jesus statue away, it’s freaking me out!”

  “Oh, ogay,” Penelope mumbled. “Thangs eddyway.”

  “Now, you go back in there tomorrow and beg for that job back!” Susan ordered her.

  Susan, unlike Penelope, had a fatalistic view of life and always chose the safer option when coming to a fork in the road. Even if the safer option was illogical or inane and made her miserable. Like her marriage.

  Susan, a tiny Jewish woman from Queens, resembled Rhea Perlman from the ’90s sitcom Cheers. Jim was a six-foot-three, Catholic-turned-Protestant blond redneck with a comb-over from Butler County, Kentucky. The two met on a blind date during both of their saner days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and had been together ever since, despi
te Jim’s being born again several times after the marriage and Susan’s voting for Carter—twice. They had not really spoken to each other (as opposed to speaking at each other) since a fight in 1982, when, as Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes were warbling “(Love Lifts Us) Up Where We Belong” over the radio, Susan called Jim a Nazi for voting for “that damned actor” again (“Love lifts us up where we belooong…”) and Jim called Susan a “pink-blooded commie” for her Dukakis vote (“Where the eeeeagles cry—on a mountain hiiiigh…”). But neither believed in divorce and so they stuck together through the years in an uneasy partnership based on that one belief they still had in common.

  And they wonder why I can’t find a date. Ha! As if I’d had a normal relationship to learn from…

  Penelope’s father had started to yell in the background, “Jesus loves a working woman, Pax Christi, baby!” followed by her mother’s, “Jim, shut up and get rid of that goddamn Falwell poster!” when Penelope decided it was time to end the conversation.

  As her parents continued to bicker, Penelope said, “Well, ogay, I’b goig dow, byeeeee!” and hung up the phone, sighed, and blew her nose.

  After padding into the tiny kitchen to down three Sudafed, a mug of TheraFlu, and two Tylenol PMs, she passed out cold for twenty-four hours with the bag of defrosting peas strapped to her head and her pink puffer coat still on and the small green Pakistani flag Ahmad had given her earlier that day for good luck poking out of the pocket.

  LIBRA:

  You may need to downsize.

  It wasn’t going much better for Lipstick. Her parents had threatened to cut her off before, but this time was…different. Like they were serious. Martin was insisting she move out and work at his company. And he wasn’t budging an inch.

  “But that’s not fair! It’s my apartment!” Lipstick cried in desperation.