I lurch off to the bathroom, sure that everyone in the restaurant is staring at me, and when I find the back door next to the kitchen it’s an opportunity for escape too good to pass by. I feel humiliated and sick and I’m sure I have brown sauce on my face.
So maybe it isn’t nice to leave him like that, but I don’t know any happy couple who started off with the misunderstanding that one of them was a Russian sex girl. Luckily Mike doesn’t know my real name or where I live. I throw away my cell phone, tell Alexi that I need a new client, and spend the next few weeks buried in work. Vlad the murderous cabbie gets a break when the two punks get busted for trying to rob a hack in Astoria. Igor and Boris stop fighting about Igor’s useless nephew and instead start arguing about Boris’s niece’s son, who is in trouble with the IRS for several years of back taxes. My friend Maryanne starts dating a police officer; he’s got a friend and we could double-date, she says.
“I’m never dating again,” I tell her. It’s not worth the trouble. I wish my were-curse turned me into a superhero or asset to society but that’s the thing about Old World curses; they’re not useful at all. Mom transforms into a wolf but in her animal stage she doesn’t drag children from swollen rivers or rescue Alzheimer patients who’ve wandered away from home. She eats things, and licks herself, and sheds hair all over the carpet. I can mop up a crime scene but not tell you who the perpetrator was; I can scrub smoke stains off walls but I don’t save people from blazing infernos. I just clean.
Maryanne sighs over the phone when I turn down the double date. “You have to get over this Jason thing.”
“I’m just not interested,” I say. It’s not like I think about Mike every night, wishing we’d met under other circumstances. Or that I checked with some friends and found out that he’s stationed at Engine Company 234, and was honored last year for volunteer work getting homeless people off the streets during the winter.
“Meet us for drinks tonight,” Maryanne says. “For me. Just this once.”
Tonight’s the full moon. I’ve never told her about the curse, and now doesn’t seem like a good time to try.
“Boris is yelling for me,” I say. “Bye.”
Boris isn’t yelling for me at all. He’s sitting in his rolling chair, clipping his fingernails. Goodness knows that if all else fails, I could break in here and free his desk blotter from all those yellow pieces of fingernail that have accumulated over the years. I could dust the ceiling fan and venetian blinds, scrub and wax the floor, organize the shelves—but like Mom always said, you don’t want to bring your curse to your job. Actually, she said don’t piss in your own yard, but it’s the same principle.
Ivan is at his own desk, ostensibly leafing through the pages of a Russian newspaper, but his gaze is firmly on Boris and is so obviously affectionate that I start to feel bereft. No one looks at me that way now. Certainly no one will look at me that way when I’m gray and wrinkled and seventy years old.
“Let’s get some tea,” Boris says to Ivan.
Ivan shrugs without looking up. “Who’s thirsty?”
“Tea,” Boris insists, and you don’t have to be especially insightful to know that’s not exactly what Boris has in mind.
I’m depressed and lovelorn, and unless I find a way to lock myself into my apartment tonight, come moonrise I’ll be a madwoman roaming the streets with a carpet sweeper. Luckily Alexi calls around three o’clock. He has the name of “a nice old lady in a wheelchair, you’ll like her” over in Brooklyn Heights. It’s certainly a very nice neighborhood, with views of Manhattan and well-kept tiny gardens. She lives in a two-story brick house and answers her own door. She’s seventy or so years old, with a gray braid of hair coiled to her waist and sharp eyes in a wizened little face.
“Alexi said you were pretty.” Mrs. Vasilyeva wheels her chair aside to let me in. “I’m afraid it’s so messy. I wish I could clean it on my own.”
I get two feet inside the doorway before a snarl stops me. Sitting in the shadows is the most enormous dog I’ve ever seen—a big black hulk of a canine with wary eyes and a mouth of very sharp teeth.
“That’s just Rocco,” Mrs. Vasilyeva says. “He likes you.”
Maybe he’d like me for dinner, sure.
“The kitchen’s that way,” the old woman says.
The marble hallway leads past a curving staircase and dark library to a modern kitchen that’s all steel and granite. The recessed lights cast pools of cool light. The sink is empty, the counters clean enough to eat off, but the white floor is stained and scuffed. Nothing I can’t handle. Some soap and hot water and scrubbing, hands-and-knees work that I’m good at, with wax and buffing—
Rocco growls from behind me. He’s sitting now next to Mrs. Vasilyeva, who is fiddling with something in her lap.
“Maybe you could put Rocco in another room?” I ask, trying to sound deferential.
“He likes to watch.” She lifts up a video camera and gives me a smile of her own. “I like to watch, too.”
My throat dries up. “Okay. I need to use the bathroom first.”
The bathroom is down the hall. I lock the door behind me, admire the cleanliness of the handicapped- accessible tub, and then shimmy out the window over the toilet. My uniform tears on the sill and I think my bucket cracks the glass. Soon I’m sprinting away from Brooklyn Heights and yelling at Alexi on my cell phone.
“I can’t believe you sent me to that crackpot! I was going to be the star of some snuff video on the internet!”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Who knew?”
“You’ve got to let me into the banya to clean it.”
“I can’t. I’m in Jersey. Why don’t you go see Ivan Federov?”
“I can’t do that.”
“What are your other choices?”
Clean an alley full of puke and other excretions. Been there, done that. Swab down the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall. Hard to do since they opened a police sub-station across the street. Hospitals always need cleaning but I’ve nearly been caught twice—the black dress and tea apron always stand out.
The need to clean something makes my skin itch like there’s an army of germs dancing all over me. The compulsion to scrub the world fresh has me strung out like a heroin addict needing a big bad fix.
You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, Mom always says.
I don’t have Federov’s number, so I go straight to St. Mark’s Ave and slip through an ajar side entrance. Up on the fifth floor, I knock on Federov’s door. The hallway is too bright, too open, and I feel totally vulnerable. Please don’t let Mike be home and waiting for a pizza. A minute of silence passes, and the only sound is the humming of the fluorescent light overhead. I tap on Federov’s door again.
Mike opens his door.
“Hey,” he says, face neutral. “You’re back.”
I nod, unable to think of a single thing to say.
He leans against his doorjamb. His hair is tousled and there are sofa creases on his face, as if he fell asleep while watching TV. “Ivan went into the hospital a few days ago. Broken hip, but he’s okay.”
“Do you have a key?” I ask. Surely beyond Federov’s door there are dirty dishes that need scouring, and dust bunnies under his bed, and a coffee filter turning moldy.
Mike’s eyebrows go up. “You look—kind of anxious. Are you okay?”
At times like this, my nose goes on high alert. From behind Mike I smell something going bad—old Chinese food, I think, sour with old soy. If he doesn’t move out of the way I’m going to knock him flat and storm the apartment.
“Please don’t ask questions,” I tell him. “It’s just this thing. I need to clean something. Your kitchen or your bathroom or anything you want, but please.”
He hesitates, maybe cataloging my mental state for the call to 911. But then he says, “Go for it,” and steps aside.
His apartment is dark and minimalist, with some old movie posters hanging on the wall over secondhand furniture and bookshelves filled with DVD cases. The Chinese food is right where I expect it to be, and there are some dirty dishes in the sink, but aside from that I’ve evidently met the cleanest firefighter in Brooklyn. His bathroom has only one stray hair in the sink. The tub looks like it was scoured by magic brushes from some cartoon TV commercial. Even his bed his perfectly made, and smells freshly laundered.
