Agorafabulous! (16 page)

Elizabeth approached me with a folder in hand.

“Sara, do you think you might be able to photocopy these for me?” she asked politely. “I need two hundred copies for the visitors.” I looked up into her sparkling blue eyes and found myself immediately eager to please. This woman had an intimidating charm and an undeniable magnetism. I could see why she was such a successful figure in her field. There was just something about her that made you want to pay attention. And she smelled like the slightest dab of some wonderful, expensive perfume.

“I’d be glad to help,” I said. “I can copy them in Arthur’s office.”

“Oh, thank you
so
much,” she said, and a genuine smile broke over her face. It was like the sudden emergence of the sun on a cool, pleasantly quiet gray day. I hurried into the house.

It takes a bit of time to make two hundred copies on a small, antiquated photocopy machine in a home office. I was only halfway through the task when I heard the first paying guests arrive. Immediately after I noted the car sounds, I noted a much louder, much nearer sound. It was getting closer, and closer, and closer and—BOOM!

Edgar flung open the door. His face was redder than I’d ever seen it, and he looked angrier even than the day I’d dropped the vase at the dump.

Oh, fuck,
I thought.
He is so going to fire me this time. How am I gonna explain this to my parents? They’re gonna think I can’t hold down a job. They’re gonna think I’m still crazy and a baby.
I didn’t know what the reason would be, but Edgar didn’t really need a reason to scream at anybody. Rage was his default setting.

Instead of screaming, he hissed.

“What the
fuck
are you doing up here?”

“Making copies for Elizabeth.” My voice was very small. Unconsciously, I braced for an actual physical attack.

“Making copies for Elizabeth?”
Instead of getting louder as I’d expected, his voice got lower and lower.
“And who the
fuck
told you to do that?”

“She did.”

“She did!”

I gulped. Edgar’s face remained frozen in a kind of immovable fury. I scrambled to explain my apparent sin.

“I’m sorry. I thought it was part of my job, to help you out by doing little things for the guest speakers. So you wouldn’t have to be bothered with them.” Outside, the voices of visitors grew louder. More cars were pulling into the driveway each minute.

Edgar looked hard at me.

“I want you to understand that I am not angry with you,” he said very carefully, as if he were afraid he’d choke on the words. “I am not upset with you. This is what she does. This is how she operates. She manipulated you into thinking you were helping me, because you love me.” I wasn’t about to object to that last bit, so I nodded and he went on.

“Elizabeth must be the center of attention at all times. She must feel that everyone worships her.” Edgar was pacing now, slightly bent at the waist, with his hands grasped together behind his back. “She was the same way when we all lived together thirty-five years ago. She was Queen Elizabeth, and her sister was Queen Mary, and we were their worthless subjects. Arthur was patient with Elizabeth because she was very beautiful, and even gay men are easily controlled by beautiful women. I don’t mean to imply that anything happened between them. He was captivated by me. Utterly captivated. And he hasn’t been with a woman since college.” I nodded again.

“But that is just the way women like Elizabeth work. They pretend to be feminists and peaceniks and Buddhists or whatever you want to call them, but they’re actually weak and selfish creatures. They cannot abide another person having any power. She saw that I was a successful businessman and nonprofit director with my own personal assistant, and she wanted to co-opt you for her own needs. To show me that I’m still beneath her. To show me that she is the queen. Well, would you like to hear something, Sara?” I nodded for the third time, as if I were in a trance.

Edgar rose up with all his might and gazed at me with the fury of Kali, Mother-Destroyer (if Kali wore Birkenstocks with thick gray socks).

“I am the queen of this kingdom,” he declared, throwing his chin up and squaring his shoulders. “
Princess
Elizabeth will never take that from me.” He kept staring at me. I searched desperately for a proper response.

“Well, you look much younger than she does,” I offered weakly.

“Sara, don’t be superficial,” Edgar said. “That’s your generation’s greatest weakness. You only care about what’s on the exterior. In the sixties, we concerned ourselves with greater things.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. You apologize all the time. It’s the mark of a woman who doesn’t know who she is.”

“Well, you’re right about that,” I agreed pleasantly. “Would you like me to start the coffee for the guests?”

“You haven’t started the coffee yet? What am I paying you for? Go do it, now!”

I abandoned Elizabeth’s photocopies and scurried down to the kitchen, where I hid for most of the remainder of the day. I churned out more tea and coffee than an entire kingdom could consume. The two hundred now-enlightened middle-aged white people who filed through at lunch left more caffeinated than was probably legal. I served them with an obsequious manner, taking care to offer them an array of vegetarian snacks and, controversially, roasted chicken drumsticks (“People need fucking protein,” Edgar had snapped when I timidly ventured that most of the attendees would be vegetarians).

As I cleaned up and the guests began to depart, I heard a woman in a flowing purple dress thank Edgar for the event.

“That girl you’ve got working for you is just lovely,” said the purple lady.

“She’s my personal assistant,” Edgar said. “But she’s more like a daughter to me. I’m teaching her so much.”

“I wish I’d had a mentor like you when I was her age,” the woman said.

“So do I,” Edgar said. “I had to teach myself everything I know.”

“To be quite frank,” the woman said, dropping her voice, “I wasn’t very impressed with that writer woman’s workshop. Arthur, the rabbi, and the minister were lovely. Perhaps next year you can give a lecture instead.”

“Oh, I’m no public speaker,” Edgar said. I looked over and saw him actually blush with happiness.

As I squeezed more organic dish liquid on another Pottery Barn plate, I knew I wasn’t going to come back to the Blessed Sanctuary. And in that moment, for the first time since I’d begun working there, I felt something that might be described as inner peace.

At dusk, I went outside to ask Edgar’s permission to leave for the day. He nodded, barely seeming to notice me. He and Arthur were standing together with arms slung around each other’s waists, laughing gently at something Elizabeth was saying. Elizabeth’s sister Mary was laughing, too. All traces of anger had left Edgar’s face. He and Arthur looked like an older couple enjoying themselves immensely at a high school reunion. Or maybe they looked like a pair of medieval royals, grateful to dispense for a moment with the duties of state and simply enjoy themselves with members of their inner circle at court. I left them there, King Arthur and Queen Edgar, and drove out of their kingdom and into the real world.

The next day, I called Edgar and told him I’d decided to enroll full-time at the local community college. I asked if he’d like two weeks’ notice. He said it wasn’t necessary, and without a trace of anger in his voice wished me well. I returned his good wishes in kind.

The community college thing was a lie. I went out on the job hunt again and found a gig back home in Flemington at a “health bar” inside a twenty-thousand-square-foot mega-gym. My primary job was to make smoothies, a task at which I excelled. I also served espresso shots to juiced-up Jersey muscle-heads and wheatgrass shots to anorexic, farty, “vegan” trophy wives. My favorite customers were the cardiac rehab patients who met their physical therapists in the special mini-gym for medical cases and then stopped by my bar for a bagel with cream cheese and a mocha latte with whole milk.

A couple of months later, while I was filling out new college applications (some schools actually let you apply in May for the next semester), I got an e-mail from Jason, the intern who had mysteriously disappeared. He asked how I was doing, and if I was still working at “that place.” He said he’d wanted to get to talk to me more, but he’d done his best to avoid Edgar at all costs, and that meant avoiding me, too. I wrote back that I was doing well, and that I’d, thankfully, left the Blessed Sanctuary behind. We exchanged a few more e-mails, and he invited me to meet him in New York for the day.

I hadn’t had a meaningful interaction with a boy in nearly six months. This fact alone was enough to make my brain circuits override my trepidation about New York City. I told Jason I’d see him that weekend.

I took out the cassette tape I’d used for the first time I drove to the Blessed Sanctuary, the one with Enya and Gregorian chanting and me saying soothing inspirational things. It didn’t seem quite right for this trip. It seemed a little too . . . cheesy. And boring. And like it was designed for someone I didn’t relate to as much anymore. So I made a mix tape of Liz Phair songs interspersed with my voice. “This is fucking awesome!” I said into the tape recorder. “Look, you’re on the train! Look around. Look at the windows. You can see outside. You’re safe. You can get off the train at any stop and then take the train back home. You could call a local taxi service anywhere and have them drive you to Flemington. You took your medicine today. You’ve got your journal with you. Did you bring your giraffe, Mary? Of course you did. See, you’re fine. I’m so proud of you.” It meshed rather well with Liz Phair’s expletive-laced lyrics. I rode the train listening to the cassette player on headphones. And I made it in just fine.

Jason met me at Penn Station. He was cuter than I remembered, and looked way more relaxed. We greeted each other enthusiastically, and began walking down to Union Square. He was going to show me the L train, which would take us to a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Williamsburg.

“It’s where all the punks and artists live now,” he told me as we wandered past rainbow flags and leather boys in Chelsea. “Manhattan’s too expensive. Even the Lower East Side. Everybody’s moving out there.”

On the L train, he asked me why I’d dropped out of school.

“I went kind of nuts, I guess,” I said. “I got really depressed, and I just didn’t want to leave my house ever. I had all these panic attacks.”

“That happened to me in high school,” he said. “It sucked.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Is it okay that we’re on the train? We can get off anytime you want and just walk.” He was looking at me in such a matter-of-fact way, it was as if he’d just asked, “Do you want to grab some lunch?” There was no pity, no fear, no concern. I’d never seen someone look at me like that when I first talked about my weird mental problems. He looked at me like I was normal.

“I’m okay, actually,” I said. “But thank you.”

We got to Williamsburg pretty quickly. It was a neighborhood of warehouses and humble row houses. Here and there we passed an open garage that had been turned into an art studio or a ramshackle bar. We walked past a bread factory with a Dumpster outside, where a vat of discarded dough rose in the hot late-spring sun. The smell of yeast mingled with the exhaust from the delivery trucks and the odor of tacos from a nearby cart. Men dressed like nineteenth-century Polish villagers strode by, yammering on cell phones. Women in ankle-length skirts and wigs pushed baby carriages down the sidewalk. Punk kids with liberty spikes on their heads and jagged black tattoos on their arms rode past us on souped-up bicycles. Girls with short hair and chunky-rimmed granny glasses drank cans of beer on their front stoops.

What shocked me the most about Williamsburg was the sky. It was enormous. It was almost as wide and bright as the sky back home in Flemington. I’d grown up a Manhattan tourist, rarely venturing beyond the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the north and Times Square to the south. We never went farther east than Park Avenue. I hadn’t known you could be in New York City and see this much sky. I could breathe here.

We climbed up a ladder to the top of this warehouse he knew about and sat drinking iced teas in the sun.

“So Edgar is awful,” Jason blurted out, as if he’d been waiting the whole time to say it. “You know that, right? I’m not, like, a homophobe.”

“Totally fucking wacky,” I said. “He flipped out on me so many times.”

“You know why I had to leave?”

“Why?”

“He said I didn’t make enough eye contact when I spoke to him. He said I didn’t talk to him as much as I talked to Arthur. I was there to talk to Arthur. I had an internship for credit, and my job was to help Arthur with his lecture business—booking, events planning, scheduling, writing, all that stuff. I planned to be there for four months. Edgar kicked me out after one. Every day, it was something else about how I didn’t look at him enough or talk to him enough or offer to help him enough. I didn’t know I was supposed to help him. I’m not good at building things. I’m a nerd.” He was speaking in a rush, barely stopping to breathe.

“I had a bicycle there. I brought it with me. He wouldn’t let me use it. I had to ask him to drive me every time I wanted anything from town. He would spend the whole time telling me about how I had problems with authority, and how my generation was selfish and I was a perfect example, and how he knew I just wanted to use friends and throw them aside and I couldn’t deal with a boss.” He cringed at the memory. “It was so scary. It was seriously really scary every day.”

“And Arthur didn’t do anything?”

“Dude, that guy is nice but he did so much acid back in the day. I don’t think he’s all there.”

“I know,” I said, and sighed. “Jesus. I thought Edgar was weird to
me
.”

“No, he liked you. But I felt so bad when you got there. I wanted to warn you, because I knew he’d be crazy to you, too. I called my dad and told him what was going on, and Edgar caught me and freaked out. He said, ‘Ooh, you really get off on criticizing people, don’t you, you little asshole?’ It was so fucked up!”