From Hell to Breakfast Page 5

  Vanessa death-levers her head back at the ceiling. “All I do is pay for their wine and doctor’s bills. Anyway, whatever. At least I’m not selling actual sex yet. I wish Igor over there would stop talking about my embarrassing self-compromises.” She flicks a glance at the mirror. “It’s beyond gross. And he totally wants to sleep with me.”

  Lucinda opens the blender hood. She makes a disgraced face for Vanessa’s benefit and pounds a bubble out of the roaring cup and returns Vanessa’s wave goodbye. Then she spends the rest of the day wondering if Richard really wants to sleep with Vanessa. That’s something that had not occurred to her until Vanessa said it. Now it seems obvious. Is that why he always stands around like such a hobgoblin whenever they are all working together? He never loiters out front talking to Lucinda when she’s alone. He always sits behind the mirrored glass in his office, poking at his calculator and making phone calls, swiveling his chair around to face the wall. At least that’s what she usually saw him doing whenever she had to dash back to get the bins out of the freezer when supplies got low up front.

  Richard was not all that bad. If there was a rush he always came out to help her, so she knew he did look out the glass. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself. She stared into the mirror when she didn’t know if he was back there or not, mesmerized by the dirty smoke of her reflection. It was like the glass was a secret panel in some magic trick, giving her a view of herself from far away. It told her something. Sometimes, imagining that Richard might be looking up and seeing her, she lifted her hand in a vague, viscid wave. She never knew if he was waving back. It always looked like a hand lifted on a dead woman by a slow current of water. Strangely, seeing herself whisking that watery hello was like saying something other than hello to herself. She couldn’t stop doing it. That was probably why he thought she was strange.

  She could see him through the mirror sometimes too, whenever he went to his lamp in the corner to scribble the signatures on paychecks.

  “Got your paycheck,” he would wave it in the air, coming out afterwards.

  This time she took it and he nosed out a chuckle. “Yeah,” he said, as if she was already in the middle of a conversation with him.

  Lucinda split him a quick glance. She was allowed to take one food item home for free at the end of her shift, and she was preparing herself a baked potato—one of several new additions to the menu meant to lure the college dinner crowd.

  “That Vanessa,” Richard said.

  “What?” she said, wondering what from earlier he wanted to revisit. Before he could say anything a soft sashay of steps came up on them.

  Lucinda turned as the customer pawed at her own chest.

  “Hey—fancy that!”

  Lucinda was startled and a little wobbled. “Oh. Hi,” she said.

  “It’s you!” said Lauren, from the play.

  Lucinda’s cheeks split into an ungainly smile. She liked Lauren, but the gash of smile she gave scared her.

  “My heart just did a drum roll! I didn’t know you worked here!”

  Richard expelled a gas of unctuous laughter. “Reunion,” he said, swiping his hands together.

  “Marty gave me a stack of these,” Lauren said, brandishing a sheaf of paper. “Is it okay if I put one up here?” She aimed this question at Richard.

  “Uh,” Richard poked his nose up politely. “What is it?”

  “A bill for a play? Down the street? It’s going to be otherworldly.” Her voice bounced into a trippy tenor. “At the Imago.” She gave the word frills.

  Richard aimed a ferret’s grin at her. “Sure. No problem.” He seemed muted by her enthusiasm, almost normal.

  Lucinda tried to look placid. She did not want that up on the board but Lauren was not to be deterred. There were a lot of people like this in her theater class, who seemed to flit about with some perky omnipresence, turning up in various unrelated precincts of her life. The other day she had seen another one, Rory, in the parking lot at the apartment building, smacking his gum through the driver’s window of a pickup. What was he doing there? Lucinda liked the people in her acting class, but there was a weird, showy ardor about them that could strike her like a bad chime.

  Lauren, who seemed to like Lucinda oddly a lot, actually came up to Lucinda halfway through class on the first day and said, “I’ll be your friend,” with emphasis on the your, as if she were picking her out of a lineup. Since then Lucinda has felt a little singled out, a little trespassed upon.

  Today Lauren looked like Peter Pan, in a soft suede tunic with little moccasins. It occurred to Lucinda that she’d only ever seen Lauren in costume.

  Lauren was already stepping back now and seemed to be taking a big enjoyable swig of the whole exhibit: Lucinda, skullcapped and wallpapered in tropical vegetation, her boss tufting coconut into his mouth and swiping his hands down his voluminous shirt. Can she see Lucinda’s mute lapse into nervy discomfort? Her apparent embarrassment? “Well,” her eyes swing over them with voluptuous ease. She has gone, without so much as a see you soon.

  For some reason, Lucinda turns to Richard. “That was my friend.”

  “Yeah?” He’s leaning back again, busily working coconut out of his teeth with his tongue. He pulls down on his nose.

  “Going home?” His eyes settle on her like a fly.

  Lucinda nods. Her hands fumble at her potato. She doesn’t know why she’s still nervous.

  “That for your boyfriend?”

  She glances over at him. Did she tell him she had a boyfriend? “No.” Lucinda smiles at the idea of her boyfriend eating a potato. It’s for the dog.

  “Yeah,” says Richard, as if disagreeing with her, as if he wants her to be making a potato for her boyfriend. He sniffs. “What a catch,” he says, insinuating something she can’t quite follow. Does he mean him or her?

  “Vanessa told me you’re living with him,” he says. His smile is plucked up like a snarl.

  “Oh.” Lucinda sprinkles bacon and cheese onto her potato. She’s not sure how she feels knowing this about Vanessa.

  Richard wags his head. “She’s a pistol all right.”

  Lucinda makes a sound in her throat, just enough to show she’s listening.

  “You wouldn’t ever do that, would you?”

  “What?” She seems to have lost the thread of the conversation.

  “Cheat on your boyfriend.”

  It takes Lucinda a second to trawl all the way back to where he is.

  When she gets there, she’s swarmed by his germy intrigue. Richard is sifting out a low chuckle. “I don’t know what that girl is thinking.” Now Lucinda is morbidly curious. She wants to know what Richard is thinking. Is he going to talk with her about Vanessa? Is he going to ask her opinion of Vanessa’s sexual accessibility? What will Richard find fit to say? She feels like his smile is crumbling out a secret he wants to confess.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t even really think she has a boyfriend.”

  “Eh. You think he’s made up?” Richard seems to take this without any surprise. “I don’t know—she told me a lot about him.”

  She nods. “But she doesn’t seem to like him.”

  Hairs come out of his nose like the legs of crushed spiders. He pinches it with his fingers. “Yeah. I did that once and my wife went berserk.”

  Lucinda looks up. “What?”

  Richard pushes at his glasses and she sees he has a folded bill in his hand. “Cheated.”

  Lucinda’s brow just went briskly up her forehead. She looks at Richard and the bill. She can’t tell if he’s gloating or looking guilty right now. “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “Not anymore.” He sniffs out a laugh. “She was not a nice woman. But still, cheating.” He shakes his head. “Never a good idea.” He puts his fist with the bill in it on the counter. “Just get out of it. Don’t sit around and make it worse.” Lucinda is feeling somewhat crowded. Why is he telling her this? “But—” Richard charbroils a breath. “I guess I’m a free agent now.”
Now he isn’t saying anything and he has his head tilted at an inquisitive angle. His smile hooks her with a wincing stillness.

  Lucinda wraps the foil around her potato.

  “A bad relationship—it’s not the bed you want to make in the morning, right?” She thinks she nods. “I heard you need cash for a security deposit on another apartment.” He has a knowing smile on his face. “Can’t live with him can’t live without him, huh?”

  Lucinda is a little perturbed. Apparently Vanessa told him everything. “It’s not like that.” And then she realizes it’s exactly like that. But not in the way that he thinks.

  “Uh-huh.” Richard clears his throat. “You should work more hours if you need cash. Minimum wage,” he says, wagging his head. “That’s not the fast track.”

  Lucinda gives him a brief smile.

  She clocks out and Richard watches her. He seems to be probing at her with his eyes, waiting for something. A breeze flaps the playbill on the bulletin board. It’s like Lauren is laughing at her. Daintily, she picks up her smoothie and potato.

  “You know,” Richard says, pointing. “Somebody’s been taking things without paying for them.”

  She stops walking. “What?”

  “Like what you’re doing right there.” A barb in his voice snags an invisible curtain off the conversation, as if it’s really been hiding something else under there this whole time. What is going on? “You’re not trying to set the table for someone at home are you?”

  “What?” She looks down at her potato and smoothie, utterly discombobulated.

  “Saving money?” says Richard. His tone has so barely shifted that she can’t yet tell if he’s joking.

  “I thought I was allowed to take one food item for free,” she plays along.

  “That’s two food items.”

  “Oh—” Lucinda grimaces in surprise. As she does she realizes something. “I didn’t think the smoothie counted. I thought the free smoothie was separate.” She realizes she’s lying.

  Richard shakes his head. “It was one free smoothie when that was all we sold. Now it’s one free food item—smoothie or potato or pretzel or soup bowl. Not both.” He really does seem dead serious.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” It’s barely all she can say. She has been taking right in front of him like this for weeks. All along she had been perfectly aware that she was getting away with something. Lucinda had thought that somehow her actions were exerting some kind of compliance over him, since it was too blatant to even look like stealing. Vanessa did it too. Now it seemed like Richard had been paying attention all this time, building up some kind of collateral.

  Richard pushed off the counter. “I’m warning everybody,” he said. He went to the register to put the bill underneath the tray in the drawer. It was a hundred-dollar bill. “I’m putting this—” Lucinda watched him flick the fold out before he put it in. “If you need.” He put it in. “Here,” he said, his voice at a queer tilt. She waited, shaken, for the rest of his explanation about the bill, but he seemed to sniff up the rest of her angst like a bitter, iffy odor that he couldn’t get rid of any other way. “All right,” he said, to himself, swinging his head away from her, and then he aped his way back to the swinging door.

  On her way out, Lucinda snatched down the playbill with shaking hands.

  “Wait a second,” Vanessa says at the bench, where Lucinda has just told her about it. “Are you saying he was offering it to you? Like here’s a hundred dollars?”

  Lucinda is making a crinkle face. It’s all she can do after having this admission dug out of her. Vanessa had done most of the work, clawing and excavating the exchange as if she had some prior knowledge of it. All Lucinda had said was that Richard seemed sketchy.

  “He didn’t do anything to you, did he?”

  Lucinda still has to work on the way her voice goes pale and dank in times of distress—coming out of her like steam from a manhole. It seems to creep people.

  “Maybe he was just putting it there for some other reason,” she says now, smoothing her thin satin dress for the play.

  “No. He was totally coming on to you.” Vanessa’s hand comes up and flutters at her bangs. “He was feeling you out. And then he was totally threatening you when you didn’t take the bait. Like you shouldn’t tell anybody about his come-on or else he’ll fire you for being a food thief.” She seems slightly miffed at some part of this, and not exactly shocked. “And what’s with the hundred?” she says. “He didn’t give me one.”

  “Give you one for what?”

  “For—I don’t know. For always coming on to me? Why do you think he gave it to you?”

  “He didn’t give it to me. He just said he was putting it there,” winces Lucinda.

  “Well, why would he say that?” Vanessa wrinkles her lip. “I think he’s bribing you to have sex. Like if you change your mind the offer still stands. He should bribe me to have sex. Kidding,” she says, slicing air with two flat hands, before Lucinda can even open a gory look on her. It occurs to Lucinda that she doesn’t think Vanessa is kidding.

  “He is way more pervy than I thought,” Vanessa says, avoiding her eye and looking out at the patio with a squint.

  “Maybe he was just trying to make me feel exposed. For stealing.”

  “You’re taking snack food. Everybody does it.” Vanessa was the one who told her she could. “And he’s not warning everybody. Christ, sometimes he helps me bag mine up.” Vanessa is wagging her head with a slow, showy consternation. “No. If I were you I would tell this Dracula guy to take off his duck bill and come meet you after work. It’s not safe there. Jesus—he wants to rape us.”

  “You know, he doesn’t wear it all the time.”

  Vanessa keels forward, her mouth a silent leer. “That would be funny if he did.”

  Lucinda can’t help it. After a bout of infectious laughter, she begs Vanessa’s confidence. “Don’t tell,” she says.

  “What, about the killer duck you live with? Or the boss who wants to ram-bam you? Let me have one of those if you’re not going to eat them.”

  Lucinda tries not to recoil as Vanessa dives at her celery. She can be so brusque. With a queasy feeling, Lucinda looks down at her watch. Her eyelids feel tacky. She thinks about the play. “It’s time for the next appointment.” She doesn’t know why she told Vanessa all that. Vanessa is not exactly her friend, though she does like her. Lucinda has never exactly had friends and it is because she does things like this. She seems to attract people who don’t know the type of person she really is. She feels a vanishing guilt all the time, like a faint breath on her neck. It’s as if she hovers off to her own periphery, watching and waiting to become what they see. She knows she’s something else.

  She knows Vanessa will check for the bill the next time she is at work. Vanessa will tell Lucinda, not Richard, that it is gone. She’ll say that she looked and she’ll swear she didn’t take it. Did somebody else? Who would steal a hundreddollar bill they knew nothing about? They will confer over this. Lucinda will say nothing about having taken it herself. Together they will speculate over whether Richard took it back or not. If he calls Lucinda to the back to explain herself, she will say that the only person she told about the bill was Vanessa. He will look out through the two-way mirror, his dismal squint turned on her. He probably won’t fire Lucinda. Maybe he’ll proposition Vanessa. Lucinda wants to know what he will do. She wants him to wonder what he is doing, who he is paying and why. She doesn’t know why she wants this but she will wait now to see what he will do. Maybe he’ll put another bill under there. She has a feeling he might. And if he does, then it’ll also be hers for the snatching.

  Vanessa tilts forward with a groan. “God, I feel like a hag.”

  Lucinda stares at her, momentarily abashed.

  “You know,” says Vanessa with a roll of her eyes. “My ovaries have just been eaten out with a spoon? Jesus,” she says. “I hope there really is more in there. Someday I want to have kids.” She grimaces. “If I’m
not made into meat first.”

  The Window

  Dracula can hear the neighbors fighting through the walls. He is surprised that Lucinda sleeps through it. It’s three A.M., and afterwards he finds the neighbor outside smoking a cigarette. The door to his apartment is ajar and he keeps dribbling a stream of sulky comments in through the opening. The neighbor is standing over the ashtray between their doors in gray sweatshorts and a baseball cap. His calves are huge and his cheeks are huger. Dracula takes all this in and hunches further into his coat. His neighbor is Russian, and most of what he says is incomprehensible.

  “I’m sorry. That’s terrible of me.” The Russian pats his hand over his mouth when he sees Dracula, like a little girl. His voice is a flat high tenor that reminds Dracula of a Muppet rendition he once saw of a frog. He has seen the Muppet rendition of himself. It’s a little bit accurate. “Such a mess,” says the Russian, tsking his tongue. That makes him seem more foreign. Dracula shrugs, politely. He doesn’t want a conversation. The Russian is speaking much louder than he needs to and Dracula suspects it’s because of the woman in the apartment. Dracula doesn’t see her come to the door and he doesn’t hear her say anything back to him.

  This is how it is. The Russian is always speaking much louder than he needs to, either yelling across the courtyard at the live-in manager about the broken stove or shouting up to the third-floor windows about the scratch mysteriously marring his car. The thing about the woman inside is that Dracula has never seen her or heard her. He is not sure she exists.

  Somebody next door is always singing songs by Whitney Houston, and he is pretty sure it is the Russian himself.

  “Is that Russian?” Dracula asks.

  The Russian nods. “Yes it is.”

  It’s obvious that the Russian yells because he thinks that no one understands him. He enjoys a privacy that allows him full latitude in front of everybody. He is an exhibitionist.