When the Messenger Is Hot (4 page)

This might seem like a given, knowing that I grew up in Manhattan, but I didn't have a lot of experience with building, and because I was kind of winging it I figured I'd start with sort of a modest studio, just a bedroom, really, since I already had the whole outside, and the terrarium and everything. (I'm not much of a cook; I've opened my oven about three times since I moved to Chicago, and that was to make toast, which I figure I could pretty well make with, you know, a toaster, which is what Anna had been referring to as my kitchen. She got me a mini-fridge as well.) Anna brought nails and power tools and a ladder, and I looked at it as a sort of biggish game of blocks, but with nails. Believe me, it fell down not a few times before I finally got it right. But I mean, how hard is it really, to nail together a big box? It was just the door and the windows that gave me a little trouble. I made the holes too big, and so you can imagine it was a little drafty at first. But I have to say, when you've finished building a house, of any kind, there's quite a feeling of accomplishment. Someone says,
Hey look at this pot holder I made
, you can say,
Really, well I built this
house.

I left the outside unpainted, for a log-cabiny feel, and Anna helped me choose wallpaper in a tasteful leaf design. She offered to buy me some nice linens, as a sort of housewarming gift, but since she'd already essentially funded the entire project, I told her I thought I could make do with whatever old ones she had around the house. (Strange thing about Anna, she has this beautiful silk bedspread in her room, matching curtains and all, and countless giant fluffy bath sheets, but she's still holding on to numerous ancient shredded towels she tells me have sentimental value, that they belonged to her grandmother. Some of them are worn down to washcloth size. I myself have countless items from long-gone members of the family, but I also think there's a time to let things go, like when it takes you twenty minutes after a shower to get dressed because that's how long it takes to pat yourself dry with what's left of your towel.) She also brought up some extra throw pillows and an afghan for the living room, which helped warm up the place a bit. You know, you can't hang anything up on a glass wall, and obviously you have the skyline and the sky as your art, but still, the decor was just boring.

Anyway, all the home-building and decorating took a while, and after it was done I wasn't in any rush to leave; still, there wasn't a lot to do. I had thought I might use the opportunity to get some writing done, but if you can believe it, in spite of the view I wasn't terribly inspired. So I didn't see any reason not to have a phone line installed, and by the time I plugged in my modem, there were a lot of e-mails in my box. So I set out to catch up, and when I started to mention to people that I was having this extended stay in New York, when I told them about my deal, a lot of them were pretty envious. I got caught up fairly quickly and continued to keep in touch with people via e-mail or the phone, and of course Anna came up almost every day to hang out, so I really didn't feel lonely at all, in fact, I couldn't think of a more perfect situation. Actually, I had been trying for years to figure out a way to arrange my social life to my exact specifications; I've always had friends, but I never really liked going out, and also I have this thing about being out with large groups of people, together, I mean — if it's more than a single-digit affair, I get kind of overwhelmed and don't know where to direct my attention and something happens inside my head where I start to think that everyone is thinking about me and how odd I look among their double-digit group, and so I avoid certain things altogether, like obviously New Year's Eve has never been a favorite of mine. (The whole idea of New Year's, everyone jumping up and down because this great new year is coming, year after year ignoring the implication that really the next year's going to suck, as evidenced by the fact that these same people will again be, on the following New Year's Eve, jumping up and down because some great new year is coming. If I were the leader of the New Year people, I would institute a more subdued celebration, and perhaps it could be pointed out, on a year-by-year basis, the exact ways in which the past year sucked or didn't suck, and that the celebration could be adjusted accordingly each year. I always wanted to fix it so that I could have, let's say, a New Year's with the exact configuration of my friends that I wanted present, at my house. But people always had other plans by the time I thought of it. Also I get weird about mixing my friends, like I'm responsible for their getting along and having a good time, which is another headache entirely, and another reason I don't entertain.) I don't think this is agoraphobia either, because I knew someone who had agoraphobia, and she had everything delivered and left outside her door so she wouldn't have to see anyone. I like people, I want to see people. I even like meeting new people, I do. I just kind of want it my way.

One day I ordered some lemon chicken from Harriet's Kitchen when Anna wasn't around, and so one of the elevator men brought it up and I was a little concerned at first that he might give me away, but actually not only did he not look surprised at all, I kind of had the feeling he could understand my need for privacy.
Cool
, was pretty much all he said that first time, about my little house, and when he went back down I thought to myself, you know I never really got that whole thing about the UPS guys, but either that elevator costume is working for me or that guy was kinda cute. His hair was short but a little messy, like I like, but mostly it was just the way he had about him. He seemed kind of casual. Like he could see certain things, but maybe they didn't bother him so much. So you can imagine that right away I made a mental note of his schedule, ordered a fuzzy deep lavender sweater from the Internet (it had to be something that I might actually be wearing around the house, so I thought my best bet was to choose an important color, to emphasize my eyes [which are not in fact lavender but a grayish blue that seems to be most blue-looking when set against purple]; this almost ended in embarrassment, because it arrived during his shift and he brought the box up to me himself, but he didn't say anything about it), and a week to the day, called Harriet's for more chicken, two orders. I didn't know what he'd do, but the chicken is just as good the next day, so I wasn't worried about it going to waste. Which it didn't, anyway, because he did stay, only for a little while, because he wasn't really on a break, during which time I of course imagined a lot of testy people waiting for the elevator. He told me he wanted to stay and chat the first time but he thought maybe I didn't want to see anyone.
I don't mind if people come up
, I said.
It's the going out. I'm not very outgoing
. I leaned in to emphasize my little play on words, and he nodded like he understood, but he didn't laugh out loud or anything, and obviously, the guy goes out.
Look, I have to go now
, he said,
but would you mind if I came back another time?

Let's review: fabulous rent-free Central Park West penthouse, free everything else, cute elevator man wants to come up. This was all working out even better than I'd hoped.

um, no, not at all
, I said.

The elevator man came back the next day; I almost didn't recognize him in his street clothes, black Levi's and a rumply lavender oxford shirt, untucked. I wondered whether to take the lavender as some sign of solidarity. He looked even better than he did in his uniform, but it left me unable to cast him exactly, some cross between edgy and messy prep. He was obviously neither, and although we talked at some length over time, it turned out that he was fully his own person, with some thoughts and ideas I found to be both original and comprehensible. I didn't agree with everything he said, and he didn't seem to need me to, which was sort of a refreshing change from some of my exes, although I can't exactly say whether we were dating or not. Anyway, he told me that his parents were with the circus; I felt it might be invasive to ask in what capacity, but I'm pretty sure they weren't freaks of any kind. He's extremely normal-looking, and also, while he seems to have a sense of humor, he kind of always has this serious look on his face. (You have to look for the twinkle when he's trying to be funny — that's how you can tell, when you're not sure.) They traveled extensively around the country when he was a kid, and then when he was seventeen his parents moved more into circus management and settled down in a small town in Oklahoma, which was about when he moved to New York. He's been an elevator man here in this building almost ever since then.

So you like what you do?
I asked.

It's a good job
, he said.
It doesn't change much. I like the people. You'd be surprised how interesting that can be
.

I don't think I would
, I said. I was thinking how people were often a little too interesting for me. He admitted that he writes a little poetry too.
It's fairly bad
, he said with that twinkle.

Another time he stopped by when I had been looking down onto 73rd Street, trying to figure out about all the people (something I did often, it wasn't any weird coincidence), and I said,
Come here, look
, and he looked and nodded and I said,
Where do they all
go
all the time? Home? Work? Home again?
he asked.
I think so
, I said,
but over and over again like that? I'm pretty sure
, he said, smiling. The elevator man didn't ever ask me a lot of questions, and I'm not stupid, I'm sure my residency on the roof probably answered most of them in his mind. Looking down at all those tiny people moving around like that all the time, home, work, in, out, day after day, I dunno, it just seemed to me like it wasn't me who was acting strange.

A few months went by, and the elevator man and I had gotten to know each other pretty well, and like I said, I was never really sure about the romantic thing, it occurred to me that as much as I knew he liked me as a person maybe he didn't think I was cute or his type or whatever. Maybe his type goes out. Nevertheless, it had been some time since I'd had a real shower (I had running water and a lot of aromatherapy products, that's not my point); there are separate men's and women's bathrooms in the solarium, but no shower, and by then I was longing to have a really good shampoo. So one day I asked the elevator man if he'd mind washing my hair in the sink, and he didn't seem to think this was weird in any way, and the next time he came back with this really nice-smelling chamomile shampoo, which I thought was pretty sweet. We brought a chair into the bathroom, and he put a towel around my neck, and if he were an actual shampooer in some salon, I'd have given him a lot more than two or three dollars, because he was especially careful about getting the temperature just right, and I can't even really describe how great it felt except to say I was just about hallucinating, and he took a lot of time, and I thought about asking him to marry me afterward. The only reason I changed my mind was that we hadn't kissed or anything and I thought it might be too soon. I did ask him if he'd mind doing it once a week, and he said,
Not at all
.

One day Anna came up to tell me that this guy jumped off the roof of one of the other sections of the building, that he was pretty young, married, with a family. She didn't know him at all and there was a little bit of speculation in the building about what the story was; it didn't really matter to me, it was obvious that there was one. Some people said it was money, which seems pretty absurd from my point of view, seeing as how anyone in this building has to be rich, and apparently his health was fine. Other people said it was an accident, but there are very high bars on the terrace, much taller than a very tall person, and so that's pretty unlikely. There wasn't any note. Anna seemed pretty stressed about it, and I guessed that this had never happened to her before, but when I was growing up on West End Avenue, it happened not once but twice in my building, and you know, it's not ever a good thing but it starts to be less of a surprise after the first couple times. The first time we heard a lot of shouting coming from the apartment below us (which was nothing unusual, this forty-year-old guy lived there with his mother, and they were always shouting) and it seemed kind of louder than usual so my dad climbed up on the kitchen sink and looked out the window and there was the guy, hanging halfway out the window threatening to jump, and my dad, lacking any training in any such emergency situations, said,
Get back in there
, to the guy and he actually did, which is totally not what you'd expect, but let me say we were all really glad not to have seen him not get back in there, and a few weeks after that he did jump right out that same window, which thankfully for a lot of the tenants was in the back, and there was no shouting that time. The second time some other person went up to the roof and jumped off the front, right around dinnertime, when my dad was just getting home from work, and my mom and I were both kind of squeamish so we asked him to skip the rest of the grisly details after he told us that they were laying down not one but two white sheets, some distance apart on the sidewalk, to cover up this one person. I walked to and from school smushed up against the building for a while after that.

Anyway, Anna said,
Maybe you should think about coming down
. This was the first time she seemed worried about me at all, all this time, but I assured her,
Anna
, I said,
I'm fine. I'm not going to jump. I'm happy here
. But then the elevator man came up too, to talk about it; I asked him what he thought the story was, he said he didn't ever work in that other section except to cover someone occasionally, but that the one time he saw the guy his impression was that he looked a little sad. I said,
Almost everyone looks sad to me
. The elevator man hadn't seemed concerned about me before either, but he said the same thing Anna did, exactly,
Maybe you should think about coming down
. And I said,
I'm fine, I'm not going to jump
, and he said,
What's the difference, though
, and I said,
What?
and he said again,
What's the difference
. Like a sentence. He said,
It's like you jumped up
.