Mercury in Retrograde Page 7

  “Our apartment, actually, dear,” Lana said.

  “Whatever! That’s ridiculous!”

  “What’s ridiculous is that at the ripe old age of twenty-seven you’re wasting your life,” Martin said. “Last month I got a credit card bill from you for fifty thousand dollars, which seems to be the norm these days. I indulged you and your mother during that damned debutante phase—but, young lady, I didn’t pay full-price for Princeton for nothing! You studied art history yet you work at that…that fashion magazine?”

  “I like it,” Lipstick said, picking at her split ends.

  “You may like it. But how is it making you a fully fledged member of society? It pays you a meager annual salary—which you spend in a month. It would be different if it were Forbes, or the Wall Street Journal. We humored you while you dated the Newton boy. Granted, his family has no money, well not like our money, but they have a name and a family crest dating back to Napoleon. Since then, well, you seem to have lost direction. I had higher hopes for you.”

  “Mom! Can you help me out here?” Lipstick cried.

  Lana looked away. “I’m sorry Lena, I have to agree with your father on this one. Did you know Jonathan Framberg is now a partner in his father’s law firm? Wasn’t he in your class?”

  “Lena,” Martin continued, “we are giving you two months to clear out and come home. I want you under my eye. You can come work at my company in the real world. I’ll show you the ropes—it’ll be just like old times. You’ll love it! And you’ll be making your own money.”

  “But I don’t want to!” Lipstick said, starting to cry.

  “Well, you either come home and work with me—and I will turn your credit cards back on—or you’re on your own. See if you can live on forty thousand dollars a year instead of forty thousand dollars a month.”

  Lipstick, wiping her eyes on her sleeve—ruining her blouse, she was sure—was quiet for a minute.

  “Well?” Martin asked, walking over to the hall closet and handing Lana her coat and purse before putting on his cashmere overcoat.

  “Oh, honey, this is so exciting!” Lana said, clapping her hands. “We’ll have so much fun! The house has been so empty since you left.”

  “I’ll call the movers tomorrow,” Martin said, putting an arm around his wife and leading her toward the door.

  “No, wait,” Lipstick said, sniffling.

  “What?” Martin asked, turning around.

  “I’ll call the movers.”

  “Taking responsibility for your own actions already—see, Lana, I told you she just needed to be shaken up a bit!” Martin nodded with approval toward his wife.

  “No,” Lipstick said, raising her head and shaking with fury. “I’ll call the movers and move to my own place. I’m not coming home, and I’m certainly not working for you!”

  5

  SAGITTARIUS:

  The time of hibernation in your private sector is coming to a close.

  Dana’s divorce was spiteful and became even more so as—even though Dana had done nothing wrong and had even tried to excel as the perfect working wife—Noah refused to talk to her directly.

  “I just can’t believe he hasn’t called or texted or anything,” Dana told Sally, despondent.

  “Well, if he does,” Sally said, putting her hand on Dana’s, “you’ll just tell him to go back to hell or Cleveland, or wherever it is that he came from.”

  “Two years! Two fucking years! I was married to the guy—and nothing!” Dana said, starting to cry.

  “He might not call,” Sally said.

  And he didn’t. Instead, Dana negotiated herself a good deal—in which she’d kept Karl, received a small cash settlement, and gotten a legal commitment from him to pay for her new apartment for the next ten years, which, at four thousand dollars a month plus utilities, worked out to close to $700,000 tax free. She’d fallen in love with the penthouse loft at 198 Sullivan Street the second she’d seen it.

  Dana had chosen Soho as it was far, far away from the Upper West Side and Noah. Plus, Sally had once told her, “If you’re going to be single in New York, Soho is the place to be. Lots of eye candy and plenty of bars to find a one-night stand in!” It was a funny building on a funny street. The tourist throngs that filled Soho from West Broadway for six blocks east to Broadway didn’t come to that block, which, had Dana decided to renounce Judaism and become a Catholic, would’ve been perfect as it was bookended by Saint Anthony’s convent on Prince Street and the church on Sullivan. In between, she counted two coffee shops, two dry cleaners, three restaurants, a meat store, a cheese store, and a knitting shop that Dana never set foot in. (People who knitted were to be avoided at all costs. For a capitalist like Dana, she just couldn’t deal with the organic, Zen crowd that did things like Knit Nights. And worse, they were usually vegan, which was taking things a step too far, in her mind.) And best of all, there was a bar that quietly stayed open late so that when she walked Karl at night, there was always a smoker or two out to ensure her safety.

  The building itself was a five-story, four-window-wide, walk-up tenement building that made Dana feel right at home thanks to a mosaic of the Jewish star in the foyer.

  “Most of these apartments are rent-controlled or rent-stabilized,” Mr. Brillman, the landlord, had told Dana upon showing her the apartment. “Some people have been here for years, and when they move out, we do enough collateral renovations to charge more. Once the rent goes above two thousand dollars, all rent-stabilization laws are moot.”

  The apartment Dana was looking at was not rent-stabilized and was grandly referred to as the Penthouse, even thought it was a five-flight walk-up.

  “I consolidated all four apartments on this floor into one for my wife,” Brillman said, sighing, “but then she died and my knees are going…”

  The apartment was an 1,800-square-foot loft, with a large bedroom space in the back against the four floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over McDougal Street (the quiet side), an open kitchen in the middle, a (nonworking) fireplace and a decent-sized bathroom and the living area, whose windows peered out over Sullivan Street. Best of all, there was access to the roof, half of which Mr. Brillman had cordoned off for his (and now her) own private use.

  “I’ll take it,” Dana said, figuring the five-flight walk every day would counteract her marriage thighs and complement her Weight Watchers fitness program. Before she moved in, she got a contractor to resand the blond wood floors, install hidden closets along one whole wall of the apartment, and put in new kitchen appliances as well as bathroom fixtures. She also hired a gardener to replant the roof garden (her section of it) and got Mr. Brillman to sign an unheard-of ten-year lease.

  Even though it was four thousand dollars a month, the apartment was still a coup; similar ones in the area were going for at least six thousand dollars, and Dana wanted to get as far away from the Upper West Side as possible.

  “It’s a whole ’nother country up there,” Sally assured her. “You’ll never see Noah or that slut ever again unless you want to.” Dana didn’t.

  Six hours after hearing “Noah’s Big News,” Dana was almost finished cleaning out the drawer.

  There was a knock at her office door. It was Ifoema.

  “I’m getting a drink at O’Malley’s if you want to come,” Ifoema said kindly.

  “No, I should get home,” Dana said.

  “You always go home,” Ifoema answered. “And you look like you could use a drink.”

  Dana sighed. “Okay, you’re right. Just give me a minute.” It would mark the first time Dana had gone for an after-work drink in almost a year. She heaved herself off the floor and caught a look at herself in the full-length mirror behind her office closet door and froze.

  “And here I am, single again after I thought I had found the one, forty-three pounds overweight, with my love handles hanging out over my skirt like muffin tops. I even own a small dog, who has tiny Ralph Lauren sweaters,” Dana told Ifoema over vodka and diet cokes at
O’Malley’s on the corner. “I used to make fun of people like me—you know, ‘Oh look at her, she’s just trying to substitute a child with a dog, so pathetic,’ ‘Why bitch about weight—get on a treadmill’ and ‘How could you not know your husband was cheating on you? He stopped coming home and gave you crabs, for fuck’s sake.’ God totally got me.”

  “Well you can get on a treadmill and have a kid any time you want,” Ifoema said.

  “That’s a load of crap, Ifoema,” Dana said. “I’ve been on a treadmill my whole life, not to mention going up and down my five flights of stairs for a year, and still can’t get rid of my thighs. And let’s not talk about kids….”

  Dana was particularly sensitive about this subject. She grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family that hailed from Cleveland and Miami. She was raised in Cleveland by parents who were Orthodox, yet reformed enough to allow paper plates at Passover instead of having a separate set of china and who didn’t believe in covering up the shoulders, hair, or ankles. Family was deemed a priority—but most important of all was growing the Jewish family tree. “Jews don’t believe in heaven,” Dana’s mother explained to her when she was a child. “We believe in lineage. Your grandmother was only on this earth because of you, and her grandmother before that. We are the generations who went before us and are only here because of the generations that will go after us.” Her earliest memory was of her mother buying her a doll and saying to her, “When you’re a mother…”

  Dana put her head in her hands and moaned, “I am from Cleveland, Ohio. I was supposed to be married by now with two kids and a good job but with a husband who had a better job so I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to. And look at me! Nothing! No kids, a little fucking dog who has the entire Ralph Lauren doggie sweater and polo shirt collection to keep me company, and an ex-husband who cheated on me with a European exchange student slash model. It’s so trite I could die.”

  “Evya did you a favor and got that cheating bastard off your hands,” Ifoema said, trying to make Dana feel better. “You’re the best lawyer I know, you made partner at the crazy young age of thirty, and maybe you just need to pick yourself up and get back out there. You’re thirty-two now and when was the last time you went on a date?”

  “I don’t remember,” Dana said.

  “Okay,” Ifoema tried again, “let me rephrase that. When was the last time you went out of your apartment and did anything…got a drink, had fun, went to dinner…”

  “Ummm…tonight?” Dana mumbled. Ifoema rolled her eyes. “I went to a Weight Watchers meeting—”

  “Exactly!” Ifoema said. “Why don’t you, instead of staying home every night of every week, start going out again and put yourself out there. How are you supposed to meet anyone, much less a baby-daddy, in your apartment?”

  “Where would I go?” Dana asked. “It’s just so…daunting. I feel like I gave it my best shot. I met the guy I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with, I got married, and, despite my every effort, he left me. What if it’s meant to be?”

  “That’s bullshit,” Ifoema said, slamming her fist on the table. “And I’m sick of hearing you say that. Noah was quite possibly one of the bigger assholes I have ever met and you fell in love with the image of a perfect husband, which he was not. Now, I have to go back upstairs and finish the Callahan brief, but next week, Nader and I are taking you out. Being a hermit doesn’t suit you.”

  “Okay,” Dana said, although she didn’t look like it was okay.

  “Say, next Tuesday?” Ifoema asked.

  “Sure, whatever.” Dana sighed, already knowing she had no intention of going, as that was Weight Watchers night.

  Sure enough, the following week Dana bailed on Ifoema to attend Weight Watchers. At 8:00 p.m. that evening, elated that she’d lost two pounds, Dana walked into her apartment, tossed her briefcase, bursting with case files, behind the front door, took off her camel-colored Burberry overcoat, walked out of her four-inch black Manolos, unzipped the skirt of her black wool suit, and plopped down on her white sofa without bothering to take anything else off. Karl, who’d spent the day at Pup Culture, the doggie day care three blocks away, jumped on her lap.

  “Hello, Mr. Kisses,” she said and scratched his butt.

  Karl got up, ran across the floor, and body slammed himself against the door, his signature I have to pee move.

  “Okay, okay,” Dana said. “I’ll take you out.”

  Dana hauled herself off of the sofa and went looking in one of the hidden closets for her sneakers. It shouldn’t be this hard to find my shoes, she thought. It’s not like I have any furniture to hide them behind. When Dana moved in, she’d felt so burdened by life that she’d refused to clutter up her new apartment. She bought only a white sofa, a glass coffee table, a flat-screen TV, a small white kitchen table with one white chair, a white electronic scale she kept in front of the fridge, and a big white bed with a white nightstand. White made her feel clean.

  Dana finally found the sneakers, which Karl had hidden under her bed, put them on, and, still in her work suit, took Karl out for a quick pee. On the way down the stairs, on the second-floor landing, she ran into what looked like a large, pink Michelin man (or in this case, woman). It was the girl from the fourth floor, wrapped in what looked like ten layers and a pink puffer coat.

  “Oh, sorry,” the girl said, barely looking up, as Karl started barking at her and tried to bite the edge of her coat.

  “Karl!” Dana cried, yanking the snarling dog’s leash, “stop that!” Turning to the girl, she said, “Sorry about that. He’s a little…nuts.”

  “That’s okay,” the pink Michelin woman said. “No one likes this coat. Honestly, the way things are going, I’m surprised he didn’t lunge at my throat.”

  “Bad day?”

  “Try bad month.”

  “Yeah, I hear you,” Dana said.

  “Well, have a good night,” the girl said, before trudging up one more flight.

  6

  SCORPIO:

  As this is a sign that knows no boundaries in its explorations, this time can show you how to transcend your old self through taking a new look at your perceptions, opinions, and judgments concerning work. Be careful of latent stress, which could affect career opportunities and bring about financial shortcomings.

  Penelope was tired. She’d been rejected for a position as staff writer for a women’s magazine and then had to suffer through one more humiliating interview for another position that she didn’t want but financially needed.

  She’d found the listing for an associate editor at a little known plumbing trade publication called Modern Faucets & Toilets in the New York Times. Penelope had never really mastered how to wield a plunger, much less the intricacies of copper versus nickel piping, so the interview was awkward.

  “Why do you want this job?” the managing editor asked.

  “I need to pay my rent,” Penelope answered, unable to summon the strength to lie. Granted, it would never have been her dream job, but her bank account was dipping into dangerously low territories and, according to the latest ATM statement, she had exactly $250 left before complete and utter Ishtar set in. She’d edit a cancer pamphlet if she had to, if only to pay next month’s rent and not have to move back to Ohio.

  All she wanted to do was eat her Chinese leftovers and go to bed. But Neal was coming over to cheer her up. I’d better get my place somewhat cleaned up or Neal will freak, she thought as she opened the door to her apartment.

  It’s amazing what depression can do to one’s cleaning habits, she marveled to herself as she turned on the lights and took a good look around her apartment. Clothes were strewn everywhere and there was a week’s worth of dishes in the sink.

  Daily newspapers were piled high on the kitchen table. A pair of used underwear hung from the shower doorknob, and her bedroom looked like a bomb had gone off in a third-world market. Clothes spilled out from the closet, dresser, and bed, which hadn’t been made for a month. Trinkets and knick
knacks were all over the place, the newspapers she’d read in bed were on the floor, and the sheets on the bed itself were halfway off the mattress.

  Neal was coming in twenty minutes, so she did what she could.

  By 9:30, when she buzzed Neal up, Penelope, who moved her CD clock radio into the kitchen so she could rock out to her Hair Metal Bands of the ’80s CD while she cleaned, had successfully thrown out all the old papers; relocated all the clothes from the living room, kitchen, and bathroom areas safely out of sight behind the bedroom door; and worked her way through the majority of the dirty dishes.

  “Oh, Laverne!” Neal cried, upon entering and seeing the mountain of dripping dishes. Laverne was Neal’s semipsychotic Maltese poodle mix he was obsessed with—so much so that her visage was bedazzled on the black cashmere sweater he was wearing that night over a blue checked oxford and gray slacks. Laverne was trained when she wanted to be, but prone enough to grudge-pooping or biting that the cry “Oh, Laverne!” was commonplace, not just for when Laverne misbehaved, but for everyday shocking situations Neal encountered.

  “Oh, pooky, this is nothing!” said Penelope, kissing Neal on the cheek while scrubbing a pot. “Done in a sec. Start drying, will you, so they don’t fall over and break everywhere.” Penelope stopped washing dishes to turn off the music and said, “Sorry ’bout the music. I was cleaning to it. And Poison drones out the construction during the day.”

  “What construction?” Neal asked as he grabbed a dishtowel and started drying the dishes.

  “Mandonna moved out.”

  “Mandonna?”

  “Yeah—you remember the Madonna-obsessed trannie next door who was always playing ‘Holiday’ till like four in the morning?”

  “Oh, yes. She was…special.”

  “Well. She’s gone. Said she’d found a cheaper place in West Chelsea by the bar where she does her cabaret act. I don’t know if I believe her, though. I think she found some sugar she-male to move in with, but whatever. So they’ve been renovating it for the past couple weeks. Hopefully they’ll be done soon; the work starts at eight a.m. and doesn’t end till six. And now that I’m actually home to hear it, it drives me bazonkers.”