part for me to play.
Then I get to work. There is some serious providing to be done.
I WAKE UP, HARDLY AN EASY FEAT given the cocoon of silky cotton sheets and a mattress forged from some fluffy polymer of the future. Louvered blinds temper the morning sun. Rich people sleep better, which might be one of the reasons why they’re rich.
Liz sits on the edge of the bed, Indian style, staring at me.
“You’re awake,” she says. “So glad.”
“Me too.” I sit up, keeping the sheets over my lap. Partly I don’t want to offend with my nakedness, as she’s already fully dressed: jeans and a pink Oxford button-down. Mostly I’m just resistant to having to give up the luxury of the sheets. “Last night was great.”
“Great?” she asks. Her tone is scolding. Last night’s sex kitten in tights has clearly departed, replaced by a dour devotee of the L.L. Bean catalog. “That’s what you think? Great?”
“Really great?”
“Really great? Really great. Good God, I’ve just hit rock bottom.”
“I’m a little confused. Did I suck in bed?”
“No, you were fine,” she says. “Better than fine. I had fun, I did. But I need someone to explain to me how I go from a date with a doctor, a very successful single doctor, a grown-up, for once in my life, who knew about Lucy and still wanted to …
Who still seemed interested in me as something more than … How do I go from That Guy to sex with my teenage drug dealer?”
“I’m no psychologist, but you were high. We were high. Speaking of which … I don’t know about you, but I’m a big fan of the wake-and-bake.”
“I was high,” Liz says.
“I don’t know why, but saying it just makes you feel better, doesn’t it?”
“High while I was nursing my daughter. While my teenage drug dealer fucked me from behind. I mean … what kind of parent does that makes me?”
Liz picks up the telephone and thrusts it toward me.
“Will you call Child Services? Because if you don’t, I will. Lucy would be better off in a foster home.”
“All right, sister. Let’s take a deep breath. First of all, I’m not a teenager. I’m twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one. Imagine that.”
“Almost twenty-one-and-a-half. And while I agree, the sex plus the nursing might have been a little on the freaky side, it doesn’t make you a bad parent. Trust me on this one. I know the bad parent, and lady, you’re not him. We had fun last night.
Everybody deserves to have—”
“You’re sweet,” Liz cuts me off. “Thank you so much. You’ve really helped me to see how completely fucked up and out of control my life has become. Now if you could just get dressed and get out of here, I don’t need Clarinda judging me too.”
She exits the room.
I gather my clothes and dress quickly, passing a husky nurse — this must be Clarinda — on the way out the door. She grins at me, a gap-toothed smile that knows all about what goes on in the night.
“Lady’s gonna be in a good mood this morning,” she says.
“I wish you were right,” I say, mostly to myself, and board the down elevator. In the lobby I’m treated to an equally knowing but much less smiley look from the doorman. At college, we had called this experience “The Walk of Shame.”
I hail a cab back to the Chelsea. I slink low in my seat, replaying the night in my head, trying to freeze-frame the moment when it went all wrong.
The scene I keep stopping on is me, entering K.’s apartment, tickets held high like a peacock’s feathers.
I pay the cabbie and walk into the lobby, immediately grateful that Herman’s weekend replacement is behind the desk. Manuel happily ignores me in favor of the Spanish-language soccer game on the small black-and-white. I’m halfway up the stairs to the safety of my room when I run into K.
“Ho ho,” she says. “I heard you had an interesting night.”
“Interesting?”
“Nate says you ditched him for some doctor’s girlfriend.”
She’s smiling at me with a look I’ve seen before, generally when my rap has crashed and burned.
You’re cute and I might sleep with you, it says, if I was a loser devoid any self-respect. Whatever window I had with K. is now closed.
“It wasn’t exactly the night I planned,” I say coolly.
“The night we planned, actually.”
“You knew I had a boyfriend.”
There might be some regret in the way she’s said it, but I’m in no mood to see it. I can’t think of anything else to say that doesn’t sound desperate, vindictive, or just plain pathetic, so I continue up to my room.
Under normal circumstances, I am a big fan of the long postcoital shower. As sick as it probably sounds, washing dried sex off my body makes me feel like a man with a mustache who discovers a few crumbs from last night’s delicious meal. But I don’t want to think about last night anymore.
Despite the unspeakable luxury of having the communal bathroom all to myself, I scrub quickly and return to my room.
The Motorola is buzzing on the bed. A Long Island number I don’t recognize. I throw on some clothes, grab a handful of change, and walk downstairs to the Mexican res-taurant.
“Kings Park,” says the receptionist on the other end of the line, quickly clearing up the identity of the mystery caller.
“Daphne Robichaux, please.” Two more quarters go into the phone before she speaks.
“Hiya!” Daphne says brightly. “How’s America?”
It’s a line from Sid and Nancy, a call-andresponse we’d appropriated as our own. “Fucking boring,” I finish. “Now, who are you, cheerful person, and what have you done with Daphne.”
“She met fluoxetine. And let me tell you, it was love at first swallow.”
Daphne’s bubbly take on life in the loony bin makes it sound more like F Troop than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I actually find myself getting envious of her life, spent with colorful characters in what sounds like a stress-free environment. Maybe not entirely stress-free — when my father finally called the police to drop the charges, they told him she still faced possible criminal prosecution — but Daphne’s last conversation with Larry has her feeling confident that at least there won’t be any jail time.
I’ve just about run out of quarters when she asks me if there’s been any news about her father. I promise to call the private investigator, which I do as soon as I hang up. This conversation turns out to be a lot shorter.
“Glad you called,” says Henry Head. “Why don’t you swing by the office?”
The office is in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. On the second floor of a storefront promising fake IDs and Live XXX, I find the door with Head Investigations stenciled on the tempered glass. There is no receptionist, just the Head-man himself, leaning back in his chair, feet on the desk. He wears a track-suit that looks more ironic than functionalHenry Head must weigh three hundred pounds. He notes my arrival, washing half a Twinkie down his throat with a Snapple. “Brunch,” he explains, gesturing toward a couch splattered with mysterious stains. “Make yourself at home.”
I play it safe, resting my ass against the armrest.
A radiator clangs noisily in the corner, pushing the temperature about five degrees higher than comfortable. It really does feel like home.
“Do you have any idea how many Peter Robichauxs there are in the tristate area alone?”
Head asks.
I shake my head.
