Читать книгу Hardly Working - Betsy Burke - Страница 8

Friday

“So… Dinah. The big THREE OH,” said Jake.

My mind hurtled back from the dreamy place where I’d been idling. I slammed my hand down on the mouse. The Ian Trutch page closed and up came the brochure I was supposed to be working on for the important December fund-raiser. The event would also be an opportunity to award the year’s most generous donors and present the pilot project we’d been trying to push through for the last two years, the ecological aquatic waste treatment system, affectionately nicknamed “Mudpuddle” by those of us at Green World International.

“Hi, Jake.” I swiveled around to look at him.

Jake Ramsey, my boss and the office’s token male, hovered, filling up the doorway to my tiny office. He hid a nervous laugh with a nervous cough. “So…you’ve got your great big thirtieth coming up in a couple of days. How are you going to celebrate?”

“Shhh, keep it down, Jake.”

“What? What’s the problem?”

“That three oh number. I didn’t expect it so soon.”

“Life’s like that. You just turn around and there you are. Older.”

“Terrific, Jake. So who finked about my birthday?”

“Ida.”

“I should’ve known.” As small, sweet and wrinkled as a hundred-year-old fig, Ida worked the switchboard at the front desk. She was the employee nobody had been able to force into retirement. Well past the average employee’s spontaneous combustion age, she was very good at her job. Irreplaceable really. She took half her pay under the table in the form of gossip. It was, she said, excellent collateral.

“Well, don’t tell anybody else,” I whispered. “I was planning on staying twenty-nine for another couple of years.”

Probably too late. If Ida knew then everybody knew.

Jake looked expectant. “Big party planned, eh? You have to have a big party.” His reformed alcoholic’s eyes brightened with longing.

His own thirtieth birthday had sailed by a couple of decades ago, leaving him with a pear-shaped torso and an ex-wife who blamed him for everything from her lost youth to the hole in the ozone layer.

He often let us know that his only passion these days was his La-Z-Boy recliner positioned in front of the sports network. He was immune to women, he said, and no woman would ever trick him again. But Green World International was an office full of women. We weren’t fooled.

“I don’t know about a party. The trouble is,” I said, “my birthday falls on the Sunday, and we’ve got Mr. Important CEO from the East coming in on Monday morning, haven’t we?”

“We sure do. Ian Trutch,” sighed Jake, his features clouding over.

Ian Trutch was higher management. In our office, all higher management was referred to as The Dark Side.

The sudden announcement from the main branch about Ian Trutch had come just the week before and everybody was on edge. Trutch would be arriving in Vancouver to do a little monitoring and streamlining around our office. In other words, there might be a massacre.

As soon as Jake had let the Trutch bomb drop, I’d gone into a state of panic. I wanted to keep my job. The downside of working here was the pitiful wages, cramped ugly offices, weird volunteers, and all that unpaid overtime. The upside was the altruistic goals and the great gang of fellow party anima…uh…employees.

So I immediately Googled Ian Trutch, then called the scene of his last slaughter to try to get information on him. When I finally got Moira, my connection in Ottawa, on the phone, she nearly had to whisper. “Listen Dinah, he’s ruthless…last month there were four more empty desks…lower-level employees. You think they’re gonna touch The Dark Side? No way. I don’t even know if I should be talking to you…Big Brother might be watching…and he has cronies… I’ve gotta tell you what happened to a woman here…uh-oh…one of his cronies has just come sleazing in…gotta go.” The phone slammed down. I sat there a little stunned. I knew Moira was overworked and probably needed a vacation—bad. But four empty desks were still four empty desks.

So maybe he was ruthless. And if his Web-site picture was any indication, he was also first-class material.

Ian Trutch was beautiful.

The beautiful enemy.

Green World International’s in-house magazine had run a long article on him. It stated that Ian Trutch had been hired by GWI to bring the organization into the twenty-first century, that his aim was to make GWI into a smooth-running and profitable machine.

Profitable and machine were two words that did not fit Green World’s profile at all. We were an environmental agency, for crying out loud.

GWI’s current interest was biomimicry, which studies the way nature provides the model for a cradle-to-cradle, rather than cradle-to-grave, use of natural capital, or the planet’s natural resources. Our mission was to redefine “sustainable development,” make it less of an oxymoron, promote biodiversity as a business model, and the idea that a certain kind of agriculture was killing the planet, and that the flora and fauna of a forest or an ocean did not need human intervention or human witnesses to be a success as a forest or an ocean. We were trying to talk world leaders and policy makers into letting the planet’s last few resources teach us all how to live.

Simple, really.

If you happened to be God.

My job was in PR and the creative department, finding as many ways as possible to pry donations out of tight corporate fists. And I was good. My degree in environmental studies enabled me to scare the wits and then the money out of people, because the world picture I painted for the future was scientifically backed up and not pretty. Not pretty at all. And let’s face it. Having a world-famous scientist for a mother may have helped a little. The biggest problem was making that first contact with the right people.

And now there was the whole water business. In the last year since Jake had been promoting the Mudpuddle model to our international counterparts, the office had gone crazy. We’d moved to bigger premises. They were still shabby as hell but bigger. Communications with the other Green World offices, in Moscow, Barcelona, Rome and Tokyo, had been flying back and forth.

And the best part of all? We’d finally found Tod Villiers, the superdonor we’d been seeking. The government was going to match his donation one hundred per cent and it was a sum that ran close to half a million.

Tod was a venture capitalist in his late forties. He was fat, sleek, bald, olive-skinned, and had the most unfortunate acne-scarred skin and bulging pale-brown eyes. But the bottom line was that he loved the project, recognized its worth, and wanted to invest. He’d written a check that amounted to a teaser. So lately, I had to keep his interest inflated until the second and largest part of his donation was processed and his contribution awarded at the fund-raiser in the spring. Because although we’d also received the final check, it was post-dated. I wasn’t worried though.

It did mean that all of a sudden, the spotlight was on us in a way it never had been before. We had begun paying fanatically close attention to anything that had to do with H₂O. National Bog Days and World Water Forums were suddenly big on our agenda. Never again would we take a long deep bath, use the dishwasher, jump into a swimming pool, or run the water too long while brushing our teeth, without feeling horribly guilty.

Green World was experiencing a huge growth spurt and this, according to head office, was why Trutch was being sent in. To do a little strategic pruning before the branches went wild.

“Listen, Jake,” I said, “when this Trutch guy arrives on Monday morning, send somebody else out to get the coffee and donuts. Weren’t we going to be democratic about the Joe jobs? Send Penelope.”

Jake perked up and asked, “How are things working out with Penelope anyway?”

A deep, languid female voice broke into our conversation. “Jake, darling, the next time you decide to hire someone who’s good at languages, make sure they’re old enough to drink alcohol and get legally laid first.”

It was Cleo Jardine, GWI’s Eco-Links Officer, and social co-conspirator to yours truly. Cleo is part Barbadian and part Montrealer, a wild-haired woman with coloring that makes you think of a maraschino cherry dipped in bitter chocolate.

She draped a slim dark arm around Jake’s neck and half whispered in his ear, “Little Penelope has a trunk full of brand-new pretty little white things for her wedding night, Jake. She’s got it all figured out. The perfect pristine little life. In any other situation I might find it charming.”

“Huh?” Jake looked slightly startled. Then he laughed. “I know she’s young, but she’s very talented.”

It wasn’t the young and talented part that bothered us.

Well.

Maybe it did.

Just a tiny bit.

“The kind of talent we need in this office,” said Cleo, “pees standing up. And if you had to hire another female, Jake, why couldn’t you have hired somebody with a face like a pit bull but a nice disposition?”

“I couldn’t find a pit bull with her qualifications,” said Jake.

The new talent, Penelope Longhurst, was a very smart twenty-two-year-old. She’d graduated from Bennington College, summa cum laude, at the age of twenty. She was very pretty, too. She had big green eyes and shiny honey-blond hair. But if her necklines got any higher they were going to choke her. She was a self-proclaimed virgin and proponent of the New Modesty and Moralism Movement.

Every office should have one.

Since Penelope had come to work at GWI three months ago, we could sense her getting more superior by the minute, filling up with smugness. Any day, she was going to burst, and purity and self-righteousness would fly all over the office.

“It’s fear,” Cleo observed. “Penelope’s just afraid. She’s sensitive. You can tell she is. She just needs to get over that hump. No pun intended.”

So it was sheer synchronicity that when I left Jake and Cleo and went down the hall to the ladies’ room to splash cold water on my face and fix my makeup in the mirror, that Penelope, Miss Virgin Islands herself, happened to burst out of one of the cubicles in that moment.

She moved with maniacally nervous energy. I couldn’t help thinking that a few orgasm-induced endorphins would have done her good.

For crying out loud.

They would have done all of us good.

She planted herself in front of the mirror next to me and fiddled with her buttons and hair and the lace at the top of her collar. Her fingers wouldn’t stay still. They skittered all over her clothes like policeman’s hands performing a search.

“Hey, Penny. Something wrong?”

She shook her head and huffed.

“So how’s it going?” Bathroom mirror etiquette requires that one must at least make an attempt at friendly chitchat with fellow colleagues. I popped the cap off my new tube of cinnamon burgundy lipstick.

Penelope’s expression was strange. She looked at me as if I were applying cyanide to my lips.

“Like this color?” I asked.

She stared at my mirror image and remained motionless.

I kept it up. “I figure you never know when some gorgeous specimen might come into the office, right?”

Her mouth became small and brittle.

I’m not a person who gives up easily. “Have to be prepared for any eventuality, I always say.”

Now you would think, with Penelope being younger than everyone else, and new to the job, that she might try to get along?

Be nice?

Speak when spoken to?

Even suck up a little?

But do you know what she said? She fixed me, one superior eyebrow still raised, and said, “You know what you are, Dinah? You’re a man-eater.”

I stared at her.

A man-eater?

A man-eater was something out of a forties movie.

An extinct animal.

And furthermore, Penelope knew nothing about me.

There was nothing to know.

Well, almost nothing.

In some ways my life was so narrow you could have shoved it through a mail slot. I was just plain old Dinah Nichols who three years ago had left her ex-fiancé, Mike, over on Vancouver Island, and exchanged her cozy and familiar little homespun angst for the big cold new angst in the city of Vancouver. I had been badly in love with Mike. Sloppily, sweetly, desperately, wetly, thrillingly, forever in love with Mike. And then I had one of those revelations about him. It came as a lightning flash from the overworked heavens. In twenty-four hours I had my bags packed and was ready to leave for Vancouver. I didn’t even give Mike the satisfaction of a fight.

During my last three years in the city, I’d been operating on a tight budget, both financially and emotionally. I had a pared-down existence of work, home, home, work, apart from my occasional clubbing forays with Cleo and my next-door neighbor, Joey Sessna. Joey was the only man in my life. I’d spotted him at one of the GWI fund-raisers a few weeks after I started working there. He was the one guest who didn’t fit the profile for that occasion (millionaire and over ninety). Joey was in his late twenties and remorselessly gay (he’s quite appetizing in the smoldering Eastern European overgrown schoolboy sort of way, with his straight dirty-blond hair, his pale blue eyes, and his pearly but crooked teeth). The day I first set eyes on him, he had snuck into the event through a side door and was shoveling hors d’oeuvres onto his plate with the kind of style and abandon you only see in starving actors. I managed to wind my way over to him before anybody else could kick him out, and by the time the fund-raiser was over, Joey had performed his entire repertoire of imitations and given me a lead on the apartment I have now.

I tried to play things up. If I wasn’t always having as much fun as I’d planned to, I at least tried to give the impression of somebody who was having more than her share of good times.

Whereas Penelope, as far as I could tell, had everything, and could have been having an authentic blast. She was fully financed by her wealthy parents, owned an Audi, credit cards, and could book airplane tickets whenever she felt like it. There were rumors of a nerdy, virginal boyfriend back East, and more rumors that he would pay a visit in the near future, no doubt to indulge in some heavy petting and assure himself that his Penelope hadn’t been accidentally ravished by one of the office Alphas.

Through my lunchroom eavesdropping I knew that Penelope, before university, had been to a Swiss finishing school and it was there that one of the worst moments of her life occurred.

Penelope confided to Lisa that in the school’s elegant dining hall, she was served rabbit on Crown Derbyshire plates. Nobody had been aware that those same rabbits had been her best friends, her furry confidantes, and that every night she’d gone down to the rabbit hutches to tell them all her woes (until they became dinner, of course).

She’d had no other friends at school. Penelope wasn’t like the other girls, that bunch of hoydens who slid down the drainpipe to hitch a ride into town to meet boys and neck and grope and have unprotected sex in the back of a car.

To hear Penelope going on about it, the Swiss finishing school had been torture to a soundtrack of cuckoo clocks. She’d watched from the sidelines as the other girls acted out their fantasies all around her, experimented with their commandment-busting sexuality, destroyed their best years through carelessness.

How tempted I was to cut in and challenge Penelope. I wanted to ask, “When in history have the teenage years ever been the best years for anybody? The teenage years suck.”

And then there was her mortification with the results of her schoolmates’ adventures. At first it was the smaller things, the broken hearts and first disillusionments, and then came the bigger things, the STDs, the pregnancies and designer drugs.

But Penelope had kept her head above water while the other girls had been drowning. She’d kept her corner of the room tidy and her virginity intact. She was able to replace her furry friends with books in other languages. They hadn’t been hard to tackle at all. Everybody in Switzerland spoke at least four languages. And she had a taste for music, poetry and literature. In the lunchroom, I’d overheard her droning on endlessly to Lisa about her favorite books, Le Grand Meaulnes for its hopelessness and romanticism, and Remembrance of Things Past for the lost world she would have preferred to this modern one.

I had the impression that Penelope was like a new-age geisha, cultivated in arts and languages and femininity, putting everything on offer except the sex.

As for me, well, perhaps I’d overdone the whole business of single girl fending for herself. Because there had been offers of help from my mother but I didn’t take them up. Our family’s wealth had been dwindling for quite a while.

I stared back at Penelope’s reflection in the mirror. Maneater. It was a silly, outdated thing to say. I had to think about it for a second. Was it a backhanded compliment? Penelope must have made a mistake. She’d mixed me up with Cleo. Fearless Cleo Jardine, who saw the entire masculine population as her own private buffet.

I said to Penelope’s reflection, “You’ve got the wrong person.”

Penelope replied, “No I haven’t. I know about you.”

“I have a Green World question for you, Penelope. How do you say home, work, work, home in Russian?”

“Dom, robotya, robotya, dom.”

“As in robot?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Penelope, for that depressing bit of information. Now I’m going to say this to you once, and you better believe me. My life is dom, robotya, robotya, dom.”

“I meant what I said. I know about you. You’re a man-eater.”

I didn’t know how to defend myself. I’d grown up on the edge of a boreal rain forest and been homeschooled with a small motley crew of children, the progeny of artists, scientists, and freethinkers seeking an alternative existence. Now that Penelope was standing in front of me, I regretted never having been involved in a schoolyard scrap.

How could I tell her that it had been ages since I’d devoured a man, that I’d barely nibbled on one in over a year? Sure, I was hungry enough, but since breaking up with Mike, men had been getting harder and harder to digest.

Okay, I admit I may have given her the wrong impression. Accidentally on purpose. It had been my idea to get Ida at the switchboard downstairs to give the Code Blue signal any time a hot guy entered the building. And perhaps that could seem a little predatory to the uninitiated. Or the undesperate. But every woman in the Green World International office except Penelope put their shoes back on, slabbed on the cover stick, fumigated themselves with their favorite perfume and got ready to scope when Ida gave the Code Blue.

And I confess that it had been my idea to provoke Penelope a little once we understood her position regarding the opposite sex. She had no position. Not in bed, anyway.

Maybe she was still thinking of the day I got Joey to pick me up for lunch. I stayed away for two hours, then came back to the office with a rose in my hand, a little chardonnay dabbed behind my ears, and my dress on inside out. I stood in front of Penelope’s desk for at least five minutes, so that she couldn’t possibly have missed those great seam bindings.

She’d avoided me for the rest of the day. She hadn’t understood that it was just one of our little office tests.

To see if she had a funny bone.

But the test had resulted negative.

And really, one ersatz male morsel during the lunch hour doesn’t qualify a woman as a man-eater.

Sunday

Here it was, two hours and twenty-five minutes to the official end of my thirtieth birthday and I was still brooding on Penelope’s words, wishing they were a bit true. I was still having trouble imagining me, Dinah Nichols, as a man-eater. Penelope clearly needed to get a life.

Cleo and Joey were late. We were supposed to be having a birthday drink together at my place. I’d even dusted.

Thirty was so big, so critical, so depressing now that I was minus a boyfriend, that I decided maybe it was something I would just brush off lightly.

Okay.

Deny completely.

It didn’t matter, I told myself, that my closest friends had better things to do on my birthday. I’d just stay at home, holed up by myself and meditate on my singleness.

Okay, to be fair, both of them were very busy.

The office had sent Cleo down to the Urban Waste Congress in Seattle. Joey had gone down with her to do an agent audition there and they’d be driving back together.

Joey’s film and TV roles were mostly very, very small and nonspeaking. He’d been lucky. He’d worked a lot over the last few years in sci-fi and police drama series. In the course of his career, he’d been slimed to death, machine-gunned in the street, set on fire, pushed off the side of a building, had his eyeballs drilled by Triassic creepers, had himself disintegrated into fine white talcum powder, and been sucked violently up a tube.

Ever the perfectionist, trying to improve himself in his craft, Joey often begged me to critique his performances. What can you say to a guy who has basically been fodder for extra-terrestrials? “Excellent leg work. Fantastic squirming, Joey. You really look like you’re being mashed to a pulp.”

I made some popcorn to stave off the gloom and settled back into the couch to wait for my friends. Some irrational part of me expected a sign that I’d reached that scary thirty benchmark, like an earthquake or a total eclipse of the sun. But it had been a very quiet Sunday, filled with vital activities like scouring the rough skin off my feet and giving my hair a hot oil treatment. By evening, I’d slumped onto the couch to wait for Joey’s immortal three seconds in an ancient X-Files rerun. I was going to have to resign myself to a life of solitude and strawberry mousse.

Then the phone rang.

I jumped up from the couch too fast and tripped over the plastic bowl on the floor, scattering salty buttered popcorn all over the Persian carpet. It wasn’t too late to hope. Someone had remembered after all.

Some ex-boyfriend from my past?

Or Mike—my ex-true love?

Or an ex-boyfriend-to-be from my future? Some guy I’d met at a fund-raiser then forgotten about, who might be a friend of a friend of a friend and had gone to a lot of trouble to get my number?

Or Thomas? My therapist? For all the money I was paying him, he was supposed to be making me feel better, wasn’t he? And a little birthday call would make me feel better.

And then I remembered.

The Tsadziki Pervert.

He’d been phoning me up and, in an eerie hissing voice, proposing to cover my whole body in tsadziki. You know that Greek dip made of yogurt and cucumbers? Then he was going to scoop it all up with pita bread until my skin showed through. It had to be some guy who had seen me around. Probably with Mediterranean looks and visible panty line, knowing my luck. He knew who I was because he was able to describe some of my physical features. If it was him again, this would be his third and last call.

I skidded into the hallway and found the shiny silver whistle, the kind that crazed PE teachers use. It was supposed to be dangling from a string next to the phone for any kind of Telephone Pervert Emergency that might come up, but I’d forgotten to do it. I’d made a mental note to avoid all of Vancouver’s tavernas and Greek restaurants but I’d forgotten to tie on the secret weapon. I held the whistle near my lips and got ready to pierce the Pervert’s eardrum.

I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t I have a call-checking phone or an answering machine? And you’re right. I should have. But that would have taken such a big chunk of mystery out of my life. Not knowing who was on the other end, and anticipating something good, or something evil involving sloppy exotic foods, burned up at least fifty stress calories. And there was always that got-to-have Gap shirt to spend the money on instead.

My buttery hand grappled with the receiver. “Hello?”

“Happy birthday, Di Di.”

“Mom.” I was relieved and let down at the same time. If my own mother hadn’t called, it would have meant that things were grimmer than I thought. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. Aren’t you supposed to be out in the field up there in the Charlottes?”

“Cancelled that, poppy. Off to Alaska in a couple of days. They want me to go up and take a look at the Stellar’s sea lion situation there. Been following a project on dispersal and we’ve got quite a few rather far from natal rookeries. Shouldn’t you be celebrating with friends, Di Di?”

“I am.” I turned The X-Files up higher.

“Sound a little odd. Not on drugs, are they? By the way, a couple of things. Now…what would you like for your birthday? I think it should be something very special. Thirty. You’re on your way to becoming a mature person.”

As if I needed to be reminded.

“I’ll give it some thought, Mom.”

“Righto, Di Di. We’ll be seeing each other soon anyway. I’ll be popping in and out of Vancouver. Have several guest lectures to give up at the university. Migration of the orcinus orca is first on the schedule. They’ve organized an entire cetacea series this year. I told them I was quite happy to do the odd one as it would give me a chance to see my daughter. Oh, and another thing I keep forgetting to mention. Mike and his little wife came around several weeks ago.”

“His little WHAT?”

“Tiny limp thing, Dinah dear. Believe they’ve been married for about three months. I should think she might just blow away with the first strong wind. Don’t think she’ll be helping old Mike much with the hauling.”

“What hauling?”

“She and Mike were just about to move to Vancouver when I talked to them. I gave them your address and phone number. He seemed very eager to see you again.”

I could feel the popcorn backing up into my throat.

I liked to blame my mother for the fact that I was cruising into the end of my thirtieth birthday and flying solo. And even if it wasn’t her fault, I needed to blame my manlessness on someone. She was the logical choice.

I’d often whined to Thomas, my therapist, “How am I supposed to deal with a proper relationship? I’ve had no role models. My mother thinks that men are beasts of burden who are useful for mending your fences, mucking out your stables, feeding your seals and whales, and worshipping at your feet, but should definitely be fired if they can’t be made to heel.”

My mother is a zoologist. Marine mammals are her specialty.

And Thomas would reply, “No life is accompanied by a blueprint.”

As for a father, well, that was the main reason I was paying Thomas. There was just a terrible lonely rejected feeling where a flesh-and-blood father should have been.

Thomas was very attractive. I’d shopped around to find him. I went to him twice a month. He wasn’t your full-fledged Freudian—I couldn’t have afforded that. He was a bargain-basement therapist with just the right amount of salt-and-pepper beard and elbow patch on corduroy. He cost about as much as a meal at a decent restaurant but wasn’t nearly so fattening. His silences were filled with wisdom. And he had a real leather couch. This probably worried his girlfriend upstairs. I could picture her creeping around, but then having to give in to her suspicions and stick her ear to the central heating grates, just to be sure that nobody was pushing the therapeutic envelope down in the basement studio.

I talked and Thomas listened wisely. Then he’d pull on his pipe, expel a plume of smoke, and sprinkle his opinions, suggestions and bromides over me.

All through my childhood, I’d fantasized about this father of mine. When I was six, and asked my mother who my father was, she gazed coldly and directly at me and explained that he was out of her life, and therefore out of mine, and that I was not to ask about him again.

My mother is tall, lean, white-skinned, rosy-cheeked and blond with the beginnings of gray. She looks like a Celtic princess and is considered beautiful by almost every man she meets. I’m medium height, black-eyed, dark-haired, and on the good side of chubby. Genetically speaking, I had to wonder if that made my father a short, dark stranger.

My mother had been orphaned young, and my great-grandparents, whom I vaguely remember as a couple of gnarled, complaining, whisky-drinking bridge players, had left her a trust fund. My mother is the triumphant product of an elite private school in Victoria where she and other rich girls bashed each other’s shins with grass hockey sticks and studied harder than the rest of the city. There, she acquired her slightly English accent and a heartiness that plagued me all through my childhood. There was no ailment that chopping wood, cleaning fish or a good hike along the West Coast Trail couldn’t cure. I was fit against my will.

From the day I hit puberty, I couldn’t wait to get somewhere where the fish, feed, and manure smell didn’t linger on my clothes.

I’m convinced that if my mother had grown up without a trust fund, and had been forced to have a man support her through a pregnancy, things would have been different. I would be a well-adjusted girl with a steady permanent boyfriend. Studying marine mammals is not exactly a lucrative profession. Only somebody with an independent income could carry out the kind of field work or maintain the kind of hobby menagerie my mother had over on Vancouver Island. The animals; the seals, raccoons, hawks, dogs, cats, sheep and ponies required extra hands and lots of feed.

When I was little, I was convinced that I too was a member of the animal kingdom and that all those pets were my brothers and sisters. To get my mother’s attention, I would get down on all fours and eat out of the dog’s dish. My mother didn’t even blink. Maybe I really was just another vertebrate in all her animalia, an experiment, a scientific accident. But whenever I brought this up with Thomas, he’d tell me that I probably wasn’t seeing the whole picture. Maybe he was right. And maybe not.

I knew what I wanted for my thirtieth birthday.

At twenty-five minutes to midnight, there was a knocking at my door. When I opened up, Joey barged past me brandishing a bottle of Asti Spumante. Cleo followed, holding a bottle of chardonnay. Both of them looked as though they’d run a marathon.

I followed them both to the living room, then Joey did an about-face, said, “Glasses,” and went straight back into the kitchen to look for some.

Cleo flapped her long burgundy fingernails at me. “I know, Dinah, I know, we’re so late and you’re going to kill us.”

“I don’t turn into a pumpkin until midnight,” I said. “That gives us twenty-two minutes to get toxic and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. How was the conference?”

“Shitty, Dinah.”

“Really?”

“No, literally. It was all about what we’re going to do or not going to do with the planet’s crap. Excrement. I feel like I need a bath. You know who the biggest culprits are?”

I shook my head.

“Cattle. The methane emissions from all the cow flop on this planet are going to blow us from here to kingdom come.”

“Imagine it, Dinah,” shouted Joey from the kitchen, “all the way home in the car, I get to listen to a lecture about cow farts.”

“It must have been a gas,” I said.

“Har, har,” he bellowed. I could hear him crashing around in my kitchen cupboards. “Dinah. You’ve got no glasses. Where are all your Waterford crystal wineglasses?”

“They were Wal-Mart, not Waterford and they got broken,” I said.

It was a little embarrassing.

“All of them? Should I guess? Accidentally on purpose?” asked Joey.

“Thomas said it was okay to break things as long as nobody got hurt. Mike bought them years ago and I finally got around to breaking every last one. It felt great.”

“Okey-dokey. We’ll drink out of the Nutella jars. Who wants Minnie Mouse and who wants Donald Duck? I get Dumbo.”

We poured the drinks and toasted my thirtieth.

Cleo sauntered over to my west-facing side window and gazed out. “Ooo. Your neighbor’s awake. Very, very awake.”

I panicked. “Close the curtains, Cleo. If you’re going to be a peeping Tom, try to be subtle about it.”

She whipped the curtains back across the glass and continued to spy through the crack in the middle. “God, what’s that he’s got with him? A black cat? Ooo. Hey. He’s taking off his shirt. Look at that bod. Fantastic. So toned. That man is so buff. This is better than Survivor. Take off the rest of it, honey, we’re waiting.” Cleo’s hot breath steamed up the window glass.

Joey raced over to the window and tried to elbow Cleo out of the way. “Shove over. Let me see.”

“You gu-uuys,” I protested.

Cleo’s face was flushed. “I don’t see how you can stay away from this window, Dinah? Does he always leave his blinds open? He is one hot hunk of man.”

“How would I know? He just moved in. And I try not to spend all my time glued to the window spying on my neighbors.”

It was a lie.

The new neighbor had moved in that summer. From the side window in my living room, I could look straight down into my neighbor’s ground-floor living room. His was a nineties house with floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that filled the lower north and east side of the house. A tiny L-shaped patio had been created outside the sliding doors, and beyond that, a row of bamboo had been planted to shield the windows from the street. Except that from my second-story side window, I could see everything. It was like looking into a fishbowl, perfectly situated for anonymous viewing of his living room as long as I kept the lights turned off and the curtains closed. It was an exercise in futility though because my neighbor was gay.

The neighbor’s partner would show up sporadically, sometimes for the weekend, sometimes for a couple of days during midweek, and there would be small moments, never anything overt, but a hand on a hand, an occasional woeful hug, long intense talks in the living room, wild uncontrolled laughter bubbling up, the both of them so easy with each other, so completely relaxed, that there was no doubting how well matched they were. They were perfect soul mates. I envied and admired them. From my window, their relationship appeared to have everything. Then the partner, who was small and dark in contrast to my heavier brown-haired neighbor, would disappear for a week or more, and my neighbor, obviously at a loss, would pull out his home gym and work out.

During those hot evenings in late August, I was behind that curtain watching him move his half-naked sweat-shined body. And I swear, if Russell Crowe had come along and hip-checked my neighbor out of the way, and taken his place there at the bench press, and let the last shafts of light catch the muscular ripple of his arms and torso, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the two of them.

August flowed into September and September into October and I still went to the window to catch a glimpse from time to time. My voyeurism told me that I’d been hanging on too long. How could I criticize the Tsadziki Pervert when I too was becoming an urban weirdo? I told myself that it was because I needed time before getting burned again. But now the years were beginning to speed up. I’d reached thirty without even realizing it.

“You can get your mind off his éclair, Cleo. It’s not earmarked for you. Take my word for it,” said Joey, “Dinah and I have been surveying him for a while and we are happy to inform you that he is of the religion Pas de Femme. Where information gathering is concerned, we make the CIA look like a bunch of wussies.” Joey’s expression was triumphant.

“He’s not gay,” wailed Cleo. “He can’t be, can’t be, can’t be.”

“He is, he is, he is,” said Joey, stamping his foot in imitation.

She clumped over to the table to pour herself another larger slug of wine. “The best ones. Always the best ones. And anyway, Joey, how do you know?”

Joey said, “I’ve seen him around. In the clubs.”

“Which clubs?”

“Well. I’ve seen him at Luce and Numbers and Lotus Sound Lounge. And he always has his arm around the same guy. The guy that comes over sometimes. Small, dark French-looking man with zero pecs. I’m telling you, he’s so monogamous he’s dreary.”

I took one last peep. The neighbor stood motionless now, looking out at the sky and the luminous gray clouds that threatened to burst. It was odd that we’d never met, never crossed paths. Just bad timing, I supposed. He only lived next door, but his world and mine could have been a million light years apart.

“Oh shit,” said Joey, “he’s turned the light off.”

“Probably tired of his voyeur neighbors,” I said.

Cleo had turned away from the side window to face my big front French doors. She shrieked and pointed. Outside the windowpane, hanging in midair above the little balcony, dangling from a cord, was a shadowy man.