Bewere the Night (48 page)

“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.

“What are you, a clean fanatic?” I demand of him.

He laughs. “Says the lady in the maid uniform.”

My face heats up in a fresh new wave of humiliation.

Mike stops smiling. “Tania, sit down. Please. Tell me what’s going on. Is this a bipolar kind of thing? You can trust me. I’m not going to judge you for it.”

Trust him. Trust him not. This is how my father met my mother: he was walking by Brighton Beach Pier early one winter morning when he recognized the tracks of a wolf in the sand. Not your usual kind of wolf, he thought. He took to sitting out at night with a scraps of meat. It took months of patience before he befriended the animal, who was skittish and wary of humans. He followed it through the dark streets of Coney Island until it climbed through a bedroom window. In the morning my mother came down to breakfast to find him drinking coffee with her parents, and their courtship started.

“I will tell you everything if you find me something to clean,” I vow.

He purses his lips, deep in thought, and then grabs his shoes. “Come on.”

Six blocks from Mike’s apartment, there’s an old building that was once a Jewish hospital. The courtyard is locked off by big iron gates. Mike has a key to the gates and then to a basement Laundromat that must have been the hospital laundry once. He flicks on some of the fluorescent lights and steers me past some old industrial washers and dryers. Dozens of paper and plastic sacks sit piled in the corner.

“How do you feel about doing laundry for strangers?” he asks.

Clothes that reek of vomit, sweat, spilled alcohol, stale cigarette smoke. Sleeping bags and towels with stains of brown and red and yellow. Underwear and clothing with very questionable stains on them.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“Homeless shelter,” Mike says. “I volunteer here. There’s about two hundred people sleeping on cots upstairs, and none of them can afford a Laundromat.”

I can’t help myself. I kiss him right there and then.

I’m in heaven.

Mike stays with me all night. I tell him he doesn’t have to; he says I owe him a story.

Between soap and bleach, fabric softener and lint sheets, I reveal the improbable tale of my parents and the were-curse, and what drives me to the streets every full moon. He drinks soda from a vending machine and nods in all the right places. He lets me teach him how to fold a fitted sheet, and we have a long conversation about the best way to fold socks (tie them together or invert one into the other), and near dawn he looks at the clock and says, “We better scoot before the day shift gets here.”

“What are you going to tell them?” I ask.

“That they were visited by the laundry fairy godmother.” He stretches with a grimace; plastic chairs are bad for the back. “I bet they’ll beg you to come back tonight.”

By the time we lock everything up and go outside, the sky is gray with pre-dawn light. The air is fresh and clean. Or as fresh and clean as it gets in a metropolis of grime. Mike says, “Let me take you home,” but that means he’ll know where I live. He’ll learn my last name. The were-maid’s final secrets will be revealed.

“Look, thanks for all you did—” I start.

He puts one finger to my lips to silence me. Uses the other to point at the sky.

“See that? It’s beautiful. Like dirty dishwater.” He steps closer, a warm smile on his face. “I don’t care that you’re cursed. I want to spend more time with you. Full moon, half moon, no moon. Maid uniform or blue jeans. Apron or high heels.”

It’s a risk, trusting people. They can break your heart as surely as lemon rinds make a garbage disposal smell nice. But I kiss Mike anyway. He touches my hair just as the rising sun makes my hair unwind and yellow gloves dissolve. The were-maid is gone for now, and cleaning is the last thing on my mind.

SHE DRIVES THE MEN TO CRIMES OF PASSION!

GENEVIEVE VALENTINE

The scene was this: Cocoanut Grove, Saturday night, packed so tight you had to hold your drink practically in your armpit, and the band loud enough that you gave up on conversation and nodded whenever you heard a voice just in case someone was talking to you.

You never went to the Grove on the weekends if you had any kind of self-respect at all—by 1934 all the stars had turned their backs on the Grove and fled to the Sidewalk Café, where they could drink themselves onto the floor without any prying eyes. The reporters had given up trying, and now they came to the Grove to dig up dirt on the third-rate bit players.

It was fine for the bit players, but I had some prospects.

Well, one picture. It hadn’t done well. I knew they were talking about putting me on pity duty with the melodramas that shot in four days on the same set. No extras, no stars; nothing to do but come to the Cocoanut Grove and look around at the bit players you were going to be stuck with for the rest of your life.

“You need a friend in the studio, fast,” said Lewis. “Come down to the Grove with me. There’s bound to be someone.”

I nursed my Scotch and grimaced at the crowd for an hour, looking for a studio man I could talk to.

None. Damn Sidewalk Café.

I was on my way across the floor to leave when the music ended, and the dance floor opened, and I saw Eva.

She’d been dancing—strands of her dark hair stuck to her shining brown skin, a spiderweb across her forehead. If she’d been wearing lipstick it was gone, but her lids were still dusted with sparkly shadow in bright green and white that shone in the dark like a second pair of eyes.

I saw her coming and held my breath. I could already see her at the end of the lens—turning to look over her shoulder at the hero, giving him a smile, tempting him to do terrible things.

“You should be in pictures,” I said, and it sounded like a totally different line when you meant it.

Her audition alone got me into Capital Films for a feature with her. I knew it would.

There was no point in making her into an ingénue (exotic and ingénue did not mix), so we went right to the vamp. I made her a fortune teller in
On the Wild Heath
. She captivated the lord of the manor, put a curse on him when he scorned her, and got shot just before she could lay hands on the lady of the house.

The Hollywood Reporter called her “Exotic Eva” in the blurb—couldn’t have planned it better—and went on for a paragraph about the passion in her Spanish eyes. They wrapped with, “We suspect we haven’t seen the last of this sultry siren.”

Capital signed me for another flick, and started making us reservations at the Sidewalk Café.

Eva wore green satin that matched her eyes, and as we danced under the dim lights there were shimmers of color across her skin.

“I think I love you,” I said.

She said, “You would.”

It sounded ungrateful, but I let it go. There was time for all that; right now, our stars were rising.

Capital didn’t want her being a heroine yet. (“Keep her mysterious,” they said. “The fan magazines can’t even tell if she’s really Mexican or if it’s just makeup. It’s perfect.”)