The Misfortune Cookie

Where was I?

Oh, right. People getting killed.

When murder is mystical in nature, I know from personal experience how important it is to nip that in the bud. Because if you fail to step up to the plate as soon as you realize Evil is rearing its ugly head again, then the next thing you know, a voracious demon summoned forth from some hell dimension will wind up eating half of Midtown during a lunar eclipse. (Don’t even get me started. It was this whole big thing.)

So that’s my excuse for going to great lengths—wholly unappreciated, I might add—to save Lopez’s life in Chinatown when he damn well didn’t deserve such consideration from me.

Also, I really needed the work. I got a role in an indie film after the holidays, and there was no way I was going to let Evil mess that up for me. Especially not when, thanks to Lopez, I had no other way to pay my rent.

Not after the night he arrested me, exactly one week after he’d slept with me.

FADE IN: New Year’s Eve in Little Italy . . .

Esther Diamond, a grumpy, depressed actress, twenty-seven years old, is waiting tables at Bella Stella, a notorious mob hangout and tourist trap on Mulberry Street, where she works as a singing waitress when she’s “resting.” About five foot six, with an average build, fair skin, brown eyes, and shoulder-length brown hair, her cheekbones are generally considered her best feature. Her looks are versatile enough for a variety of stage roles, including romantic leads, and she’s done a little television work, but she’s not Hollywood gorgeous.

Which is not to say that she’s so unattractive that it naturally follows that a man who spent half the night making love to her a week ago would be so horrified by the sight of her first thing in the morning that he’d decide never to call her again. Not even after she’s left a message asking him to call! Where does a man get the nerve, the stinking gall, to treat a woman that way? A man who pursued a woman to her apartment that night! A man who told her he wanted to get back together . . . Or together for the first time, I guess, since they’d never really been . . . That is to say, we’d always . . . But we never . . . Oh, forget it.

Where was I?

Oh, right, working at Bella Stella on New Year’s Eve.

The restaurant, which did good business even in lean times, had been a gift to Stella Butera, its owner, from her lover Handsome Joey Gambello. This generous gesture may not have been wholly disinterested, since Bella Stella was rumored to launder money for the Gambello crime family. I had never met Handsome Joey, who got whacked right there in the restaurant a few years before Stella hired me.

Stella Butera was a fair employer, and since she wanted servers who had performance skills, she accepted that our acting careers were more important to us than waiting tables. Prior to becoming a semi-regular staffer at Bella Stella a couple of years ago, I had been fired from several demeaning, poorly paid jobs by managers who were unwilling to accommodate my occasional scheduling requests so I could go to an audition, or who were enraged when I wanted to spend two days acting in a guest role on a television show more than I wanted to work the underpaid shifts they refused to let me have off. Stella, by contrast, was accommodating about that sort of thing. She also understood that actors come and go from day jobs, depending on whether or not we’ve got acting work. So I was able to rotate in and out of the staff at Stella’s pretty comfortably.

Most of the time, that was. By the time the limited run had ended for The Vampyre, an Off-Broadway play I was working in through late November, Stella’s staff was so packed with musical theater majors coming home from college for the holidays that she had very little work for me in December. And one or two shifts per week wasn’t going to cover my rent—especially not in Manhattan. I live in a rent-controlled apartment that’s rapidly surrendering to entropy and located in the seedier part of the West Thirties; but in New York, that just means it’s very expensive rather than catastrophically ruinous.

So, facing the cold and harsh reality of my living expenses, I had taken a job in December playing Santa’s Jewish elf at Fenster & Co., a famous old department store in Midtown. Depending on your point of view, this was either a blessing or a curse, since it meant I was around to foil a deviously demented and deadly scheme to destroy the store, the Fenster family, and (incidentally) much of New York City.

Despite my role in saving the volatile Fenster family (and a large swath of Manhattan’s retail industry) from annihilation, I felt certain the Fensters would never want me back in their employ, even if they still had a retail empire next Christmas—which was by no means certain, now that one of their own family members had been exposed as a key culprit in the series of high-profile heists which had wrecked the season of love, joy, and shopping this year. And, in fact, I was perfectly comfortable with no longer being wanted at Fenster & Co. (whereas no longer being wanted by the arresting officer in that mess was making me a little crazy these days), since I was still undecided about which experience had been more horrifying: working the sales floor of Fenster’s as an elf during the holidays, or confronting a voracious solstice demon rising from a hell dimension there.

In any case, elf season was now over—much like my train wreck of a love life—and no one really hires new staff between Christmas and New Year’s, never mind holding auditions. (In fact, with the business so dead at this time of year, my agent was in Wisconsin until early January, reluctantly visiting his family and probably drinking a little human blood. But that’s another story.) However, on the day I realized that my food supply had dwindled down to one box of bargain-brand pasta and some nonfat yogurt, I finally caught a break.

Stella called me to say that a couple of the college kids who’d signed up for tonight’s lucrative New Year’s Eve shift had just informed her, at three o’clock this afternoon, that they’d decided to go to a party out on Long Island instead. They also asked her to mail them their final paychecks for the holiday season. Stella told me she was thinking of having the checks personally delivered by a Gambello enforcer who’d explain the meaning of responsibility to them.

I, on the other hand, wanted to send a thank you card to those brats. I was very pleased to get called in for tonight’s shift. Wiseguys tip well, and tourists in town for New Year’s Eve usually do, too. By the time I finished the shift, I’d have a nice wad of cash in my pocket, which was a profound relief to me. Although I had scraped together enough to pay my January rent, I had no money left over for food or utilities. And within the next few days, the extra holiday staff would be going back to school, so Stella should have plenty of shifts available for me after this. At least I’d be able to eat this month—and start saving for next month’s rent.

Working at the restaurant tonight would also get me out of my apartment, and it was high time for that. I’d been wallowing for several days, and I had no plans for tonight, having been too grumpy and depressed to make any. So I welcomed the obligation, as a singing server, to focus on something other than my empty bank account and my humiliation (as well as my raging hurt) over being dumped right after sex.

One other guy had done this to me. Back in college. That kind of treatment is mortifying when you’re nineteen, and it had taken me a long time to get over it. But that jerk did the same thing to other girls, too, as I later learned. Whereas Lopez had never seemed like that kind of guy to me. Whatever else I may have thought of him from time to time (rigid, cranky, critical, cynical, arrogant, and, believe me, I could go on and on), I’d always thought he was a good man, and a sincere one. And I was . . . fond of him. Or had been. Until I realized he wasn’t going to call. So this was even more mortifying than my previous experience had been with this kind of insensitive, inexcusable, dipshit behavior.

It was also painful because our—let’s call it “friendship”—had been complicated from the start. When that guy in college had dumped me right after getting me into bed, I had wondered obsessively if he hadn’t liked my body or had found me sexually boring. But Lopez’s uninhibited enthusiasm that night, and the following morning as he was getting ready to leave for work, ensured I had no insecurities about his views on that score . . . so I was obsessing over a lot of other possibilities. Did he think I was too flaky? Too much trouble? Not someone he really wanted to get serious with, after all, despite some of the things he’d recently said to me about this?

Or was he just such a guy that it didn’t occur to him I might expect to hear from him—and to see him again—after he’d spent the night in my bed? What sort of person doesn’t call after that? For a week?

Yes, I really needed to get out of the apartment and focus on something else.

So it was a relief, in more ways than one, to be serving food and drink to notorious criminals at Bella Stella as midnight approached on New Year’s Eve. In fact, pretending to be in a festive mood was making me feel better. I’m a professional, after all, so I had my game face on from the moment I started my shift. I gave good service, I was friendly to visitors and cheerfully firm with the wiseguys (who could be a little grabby), and I threw my heart into every song I sang for the crowd.