Читать книгу Last Woman Standing - Amy Gentry, Amy Gentry - Страница 14

7

Absolutely not.” I glared at the red cross-front apron full of spray bottles that was lying on Amanda’s sofa. “You said I’d be a runner. You never said anything about a maid.”

“It’s the only Runnr service he uses regularly!” Amanda protested. “Think of it like a part.”

“I don’t do maids.” One of the reasons I’d stopped scouring the audition boards years before I left L.A. was that I got sick of showing up to read for the best friend and getting handed sides for the cleaning lady.

“It’s just a costume,” she said, seeming genuinely bewildered. “And you won’t be wearing it long. Once you get inside—”

“I know, I know.” I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I was a finalist for Funniest Person in Austin. “Just shut up and give it to me.” Amanda dropped the apron into a shopping bag, and I stalked out to the car with it wedged under my arm.

Once home, I donned the cleaning outfit as quickly as possible, to get it over with, and forced myself to look in the mirror. The red Runnr apron aged me ten years, and the half-empty bottles of cleaners in the pockets along the front forced my shoulders into a heavy slump. I thought of my mother hustling off to work in heels every day, her shoulders thrown sharply back. Even after getting laid off from her secretarial job at the helium plant, she had refused to return to the housecleaning work she’d done when she first came to Texas. “I don’t clean up messes anymore,” she’d insisted. “Not your father’s, not yours. Not anyone’s.” I pulled my own shoulders back, straining against the apron straps, and even attempted an old acting-class trick of inventing a walk for the character. But in the end, my waddle more or less invented itself, an attempt to minimize the sloshing of the bottles as they bounced off my belly. Pilot idea, I thought, then stopped myself. Too depressing.

I checked my phone for activity on the app. For a regular weekly job like this, Amanda had explained, Branchik would get a notification on his phone to approve the run before it went out on the app. It was part of the company’s philosophy not to allow standing gigs to go to the same runner week after week. That might foster an independent relationship between user and contractor, encouraging them to drop the middleman altogether.

“The Runnr philosophy is based on the fungibility of labor,” Amanda explained, and then she saw my blank expression and clarified. “Price, speed, and quality are the only variables that are supposed to matter to the algorithm. The way Runnr sees it, familiarity breeds wage inflation and tolerance for mistakes. You get to know someone, you learn their kids’ names, suddenly they’re a person. The Runnr customer is supposed to be able to order up human help like an appetizer, at the spur of the moment, without worrying about that stuff.”

Just then, the notification arrived with a ding. The words We have a Run for you! popped up on my screen, a shower of confetti raining down behind them. I tapped details and watched as Doug Branchik’s address came up with the specs for the cleaning job; bathroom, kitchen, laundry, all boxes checked. At the bottom of the screen, the bidding price Amanda’s program had auto-generated to ensure I would win the run: $16.79.

Unbelievable. If this were a real run, my percentage of the take would barely cover round-trip bus fare. And the bus was, unfortunately, a vital part of this plan, so my car wouldn’t be seen downtown on the day of the strike. I tapped the ACCEPT icon and stormed out the door.

The bus arrived at the stop by my apartment complex ten minutes late. Climbing aboard, I was already sweating heavily, feeling at once ridiculously conspicuous in my uniform and angry at how invisible it made me. By the time I reached Branchik’s door and typed in the key code that had been sent via the app, I was already sick of the whole thing.

Looking around the condo, however, I felt a fresh surge of inspiration. I’d thought I was messy. Branchik’s floor was wall-to-wall dirty clothes and empty takeout containers. An overturned juice bottle labeled POWER PULP lay on the gray sofa next to a greenish splotch. Boxer shorts lay twisted up on the carpet and draped over the elliptical machine in the corner of the living room. This was the cleaning job Branchik expected some faceless runner to perform for $16.79? An anarchic spirit of rage swelled in me as I surveyed the scene. I’d show him “fungible labor.” I crossed the squalid living room and drew the blinds with a brief glance up at Amanda’s balcony—she was on lookout duty—before peeling off the apron and kicking it viciously into a corner. Then I took off all my clothes, pulled the blond wig out of my apron pocket, and slipped it over my hairnet. It was time for my close-up. Naked except for the wig, I put my phone’s camera in selfie mode and started clicking.

The wig was Ruby’s. I’d told her I wanted to borrow it for my act. She had a closetful of them, and this one was a relic of a long-ago attempt at Betty Grable—a miserably failed attempt, since its platinum locks drooped and wouldn’t hold a curl, but it was perfect for my purposes. The goal wasn’t to look natural—nothing about the radioactive blond against my olive skin looked natural—but simply to hide my face from shots that might inadvertently reveal it.

The trashiness was a bonus. The minute I had it on, it transformed my nakedness into a costume far more lurid than fetish lingerie or stripper heels. Like most female comics who weren’t a size 6, I had an arsenal of defensive jokes about my body for the mic, but as I warmed up to the selfie shots, I gained a new appreciation for how well my body photographed. The girl I saw in the pictures was sexy—slutty!—her generous curves pillowing out into pornographic landscapes, wisps of the plasticky blond wig contrasting against brown nipples. It was exhilarating.

So exhilarating that I almost lost track of what I was doing. I needed incriminating shots. The décor in Branchik’s company-owned apartment was generic, and even the mess was largely an anonymous mess, the kind someone might leave in a hotel room. Hoping to capture a few recognizable pairs of boxer shorts in the background, I rolled around in the nests of dirty laundry—another act that would have seemed unthinkably disgusting to me when I had clothes on but that bare-ass Betty seemed to relish—but it wasn’t quite enough. I needed a backdrop that was unmistakably identifiable as Branchik’s apartment. I got up, dusted the crumbs of some bachelor meal off my back, and picked my way into the bedroom.

Bingo.

On the bed, by the nightstand, stood a framed wedding picture. It was shot at sunset on a sparkling beach under a hazy Instagram filter, the bride’s slender gown of tiered lace in the rich hippie style accessorized with a flower-crown veil; she had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. Laughing vividly, as if caught in a candid shot, Branchik’s new wife nonetheless looked a touch rigid, a gleam of manic anxiety in her eye. Knowing what I did about her husband, I might ordinarily have been at least a little moved by her plight, but wearing the garish Betty wig, I thought it was hilarious. In any case, it was the perfect background detail. I plopped myself on the bed and began clicking selfies at virtuosic angles, photographing my mountainous breasts in extreme close-up and then twisting around to capture my ass half entangled in sheets. I contorted myself for crotch shots, experimenting with more and more explicit angles, always careful to keep the photo of Mrs. Branchik’s desperately grinning face in the background.

I was so absorbed in this task that when the first text came, it took me a moment or two to look away from my own image and read it.

DB’s car in garage, get out

I jumped off the bed in a panic, but the texts kept coming:

He’s walking into lobby get out NOW

He’s in the elevator OUTOUTOUTOUTGETOUTOF THERE NOW

I ran for the pile of clothes in the living room, grabbed my jeans, and started yanking them on. I’d gotten one of my legs in when I heard a tiny ding coming from the hallway outside. The elevator. I tripped trying to get the other pants leg on and had to finish lying on my back on the floor, legs in the air. Footsteps creaked outside the door as I frantically threw my T-shirt on, braless, and jostled the apron full of bottles up my arms onto my torso. There was a metallic key-chain jingle followed by the swipe-and-click of a keycard as I jerked the strings into a knot behind my back and stuffed my bra down between the bottles in my pocket. A moment before the door swung open, I remembered the wig on my head and yanked it off. There was no more room in my apron, so I crammed it down my shirt.

I didn’t wait to get a good look at Branchik but instead began yelling indignantly in Spanish cribbed from my mother’s long-ago rants about my room: “¡Sucio, sucio! ¡Es muy sucio!” I stalked back and forth, flailing my arms wildly to indicate the debris on the floor, the mess of takeout containers on the table, the general state of filth. He began to protest, but I yelled over him, “¡No habla ingles!”