How Did You Get This Number Read online

  Three guards, two women and a man with boobs, put on latex gloves, and one of them handed me a pair of scissors so that I might autopsy the mysterious package myself. For no particular reason beyond being given a knifelike object, I imagined stabbing one of them with the closed scissors. An excessive means of teaching them the hypocrisies of airport security? Sure, but in the visual, I also knew karate. So I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  Two of the guards stood behind me as I sliced open the top of the bubble wrap. I thought this would be satisfactory. You could see the wooden top of something decorative. No wires or egg timers here. Still, they encouraged me to keep cutting. As I roughly sliced through layers of tape and plastic, I thought, If I was going to blow up a plane, why would I do it so conspicuously? Terrorism isn’t customarily the terrain of reverse psychology. Ceci n’est pas un ticking suitcase! The whole Trojan horse bit doesn’t have a place in the era of metal detectors.

  No matter, I still retained a skeptical appreciation for the law. Sometimes the best way to see your tax dollars at work and protectors in action is to get caught yourself. It’s when they gestured for me to take off my shirt that I lost that.

  “Pardon?”

  “Your shirt,” said one of the female guards, pointing to make herself clear.

  In my carelessness with the scissors, I had actually managed to cut my shirt along with the bubble wrap. Surely, I thought, this will get me off the hook. I can’t even cut bubble wrap successfully. Who’s going to blow up a plane? Not I.

  She picked up the thermometer and held it the way one might hold a rabbit one has just shot. She quickly felt along the body for any irregularities but found none. She set it down and they all ran cotton swabs over the thermometer and consulted their military-style computer. They took turns frowning at one another, then at the thermometer, and then at the hole in my shirt. Something was showing up on the screen, but they couldn’t categorize it. Whatever traditional bombs are made out of, this was not it. There must be some rarely registered airport security category that also includes gunpowder. If you are guilty of possession of these rudimentary explosives, men in wigs and brass-buttoned coats take you into yet another room and slap you senseless with their gloves. Only then may you board the plane.

  Man Boobs called in a supervisor, a diminutive but determined gentleman with bags under his eyes that looked like mine but permanent. He asked me to have a seat. He wanted to know where I got the thermometer, and I told him. He wanted to know when I had purchased it, and I told him. He wanted to know if I had purchased it or if someone had purchased it for me, and I told him, adding an “I wish.” He wanted to know how much I had paid for it, and I beamed when I told him. But I wasn’t about to tell them about the mercury. I had made it this far. The thermometer was the one piece of Paris that was mine. I was a terrible godless lying American idiot, but the fucking thermometer was mine.

  Bracing for the possibility of a lie-detector test, I tried to wind my mind back like a speedometer. Only a few hours earlier I was still ignorant of the thermometer’s innards. I looked at the digital clock on the desk. I could feel myself about to confess. All I wanted was to crack open a fleece blanket as the flight attendants encouraged me to peruse my options for duty-free grilling equipment and Clinique.

  “Okay.” The supervisor clicked his pen and slid it into his shirt pocket. “Just make sure you declare it at customs when you land.”

  You mean if I land, I thought. If I really did have designs on blowing up the plane between here and New York, notifying customs was a bit of a moot point. It made me wonder what else they were willing to let go. I yanked my shirt down so that the hole was more of a slit and less of a belly-button peep show. I put the thermometer underneath my arm like the musical instrument it wasn’t. A woman’s voice came through the PA system, first in French and then in English. My plane was starting to board. I got up and thanked them for detaining me.

  Off the Back of a Truck

  If you have to ask, you can’t afford it. This is the second most useful piece of romantic advice I have ever received. It arrived at our house with the Tiffany catalog, that manual so thick it had to be forcibly removed from the mailbox. Unlike other catalogs, with their cheap vertebrae of staples down their spines, this one was fused with glue. There were no prices listed in it. It was just layout after layout devoted to isolated jewels, as if they were criminals. Their crime? Fostering unreasonable desires in the hearts of consumers. There were moonstone necklaces that would pay for college. Not like tuition. Like to found a college. There were earrings that would rip the lobes off your face and call you Sally for crying about it. There was an amethyst bow that froze, sorority sweet, for the camera but smuggled a sharp weapon behind its back. The catalog opened with antique estate jewelry. This was the Blinging Out the Dead section—one-of-a-kind baubles older than sea turtles. They dared you to imagine all they had seen. And you accepted, leaning into the gloss of the page until you could almost make out your own reflection. Had they been loved? Ignored? Better traveled than you’d ever be? These sparkly roaches would outlive everyone. This ring, that necklace, had been with a person, now gone, on the best day of her life and the worst. And so they were reminders of how very odd it is to be young. When you are ten or eleven, you know in your heart that you have yet to hit either of those days. But both are out there. Waiting for you. One like the shiny front of a brooch and one like the piercing tack hinged to the back.

  In the latter half of the catalog were the engagement rings so new they held the promise of a whole life yet to come. But a very specific kind of life. Here, said the book, here is what your epilepsy-inducing diamond will look like from above. Here is the angle at which you will show it off to your friends. Here is what it will look like tilted and sliding with sweat as you shake hands with a squash racquet even though you don’t even like squash. Harold likes squash. And you don’t see why you have to like everything a man twenty years your senior likes. Now here is the ring digging into your hand with each unforced error, pressing the very spot where your fifth-grade boyfriend once placed a ring made of gum wrappers. Finally, here is what your ring will look like in profile when you remove it in a Ritz-Carlton in Dallas four years hence, placing it on the nightstand along with a stranger’s watch and what’s left of your blackened heart.

  I preferred the honest morbidity of the estate section.

  I showed my mother a ruby necklace and opened my mouth to ask the obvious question.

  “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

  “Okay, but let’s guess how much it’s worth anyway.”

  I flipped the catalog back toward me. I was just home from school and swiveling on a kitchen stool while she breaded things.

  “Our dining room table and chairs?” I offered. “Grand-ma’s dining room table? That thing’s oak.”

  It wasn’t only that we couldn’t afford this jewelry, it was that I had never met anyone who could. It was like the jewelry of Narnia. Maybe there was an index of prices in the back. Even criminals had to hold up a little sign with numbers on it.

  “Let’s not and say we did,” said my mother, invoking my sister’s favorite conversation ender. “Set the table.”

  “It’s set.”

  “I don’t see napkins,” she said, not turning around. She put her hand over an open jar of olives and flipped it over the sink. “And I don’t want to have this discussion with you.”

  My parents, as a rule, refused to talk about money. Even if it was fake money. So I began bidding on the jewelry, using kitchen supplies. Did we think an emerald necklace was worth the same as eighty mustard jars and one hundred boxes of frozen spätzle? Have you ever had frozen spätzle? It’s amazing.

  “Maybe if this was the end of the world and people lived off mustard. But the thing is,” she said, olive juice streaming through her fingers as she doled out her first most useful piece of advice, “you should never wear anything you can’t afford to lose.”

 
AND THEN I PROMPTLY FORGOT THE ENTIRE CONVERSATION for fifteen years. Partially because at the time we were talking inanimate objects, not boys, and partially because these nuggets of wisdom were an eyesore of practicality in the midst of an exceedingly impractical time. Coveting was commonplace. Kids were being mugged for Air Jordans and leather eight-ball jackets. So, sure, from a strictly life-or-death standpoint, you shouldn’t wear something that will get you shot. Or even slapped around a bit. No one can afford to sacrifice their life defending a piece of mass-produced rubber. But that’s not advice, that’s Darwinism.

  As an adult, of course, the symbolism of these twin philosophies is as apparent as a punch to the face with a fistful of diamonds. If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner, to call you when they land, you can’t afford to be with them. It’s not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog, no one tells you what that price is. You set it yourself, and if you’re lucky it’s reasonable. You have a sense of when you’re about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, Enough of this shit. Stop making excuses. No one’s that busy at work. No one’s allergic to whipped cream. There are too cell phones in Sweden. But most people don’t get lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you’ll figure out if it’s worth it later.

  So, assuming you’ve gone ahead and purposefully ignored the first adage because it doesn’t apply to you and you are in love the way no one in the history of spooning has ever been in love: now what? You’ve gotten what you want, but the state of mutual ownership has shifted. Like that piece of jewelry that you’re never quite comfortable wearing, you become concerned with its whereabouts, who borrows it and for how long. You wonder if you’ll lose it, if it might look better wrapped around someone else’s neck. Admit it: wouldn’t it be less stressful not having it touching your body at all?

  WHAT DID STAY WITH ME FROM THE DAY THE TIFFANY catalog landed was a fascination with and proclivity toward material impracticality. For example, I had some idealistic fantasies about my first studio apartment. I was going to build a sliding bookshelf ladder, install a chandelier, purchase an old subway turnstile from a scrap yard and put it in just inside the door. Slutty, yes, but not as slutty if I could find one that didn’t require tokens. The ceilings in my studio kitchen were pointlessly high, and at least once I thought, I could keep a midget up there. I could build a cubby and rent it out to a midget. I would bake in the winter to keep him warm, maybe toss him balls of raw cookie dough. In reality I was trolling stoop sales for shelving units, figuring out how I was going to pay an entire electric bill on my own. And yet a week after I had signed my lease, I found myself walking into the most overpriced furniture store on Fifth Avenue. Just because it was there and I was there. It wasn’t going to kill anything but time for me to look. Just to look. Pawning a napkin ring from this place would solve the electric bill conundrum.

  The store took up three floors and was called something like Out of Your League or I Sleep in What You’re Wearing. Nothing within its walls ever went on sale. (A policy that must be a source of comfort for its regular customers, who will never have that “God damn it” moment six months after their purchase.) Every item speaks the same rarified language so that what you’re really paying for isn’t an object but fluency in the dialogue of wealth.

  The more daunting pieces of furniture lived on the top floor, where a loft space was split into fake living rooms. And if nothing else, I was in the market to be daunted. The elevator itself was meticulously designed, down to the hand-stitched upholstered bench on which I sat. It’s extremely rare to be alone in Midtown Manhattan outside of a post-apocalyptic film. Instead of the silence-inducing panic and an acute curiosity about the edibility of dog meat, it lends itself to everyone’s favorite game: What If This Was My House? Often played at art galleries and upstairs bars, it also works for more unexpected spaces. Like botanical gardens. I know this fern terrarium is humid, but will you look at that light? Will you? Look at it. The third floor got a whole lot of light.

  In the corner was a giant wheel of hanging carpets, hand-woven into thick geometric shapes that flapped down, forming the world’s fanciest car wash. They were the kind of rugs that would look great beneath a full-sized crystal chandelier. The kind of rug you look at and think, I could really see my midget lounging on this. But like an oversized spinning display of personalized key chains, I did not expect to find one that called my name. Or my wallet. Which is when I saw it. Not too big, not too small, striped in all the right places. I pushed the other rugs away to get a better view and stroked it with my palm. How much could an area rug possibly cost? Even one spun from goat chin hair and fairy semen. Let’s guess how much it’s worth, anyway.

  Four thousand dollars. Not including tax.

  “Holy shit,” I yelped, unhanding the carpet as if it had burned me.

  “Can I help you?”

  A burly man in a pit-stained T-shirt emerged from a stockroom door. A door that blended into the wall, as the ones in the Oval Office do. He did not look like he was part of the Out of Your League corporate family. Or, rather, he looked like he could have worked in a different Out of Your League chain. Like a Home Depot. Or a steak house. Anywhere I felt equally out of my depth.

  “Noooo.” I stepped backward. “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s not cheap,” he said, gesturing around at the porcelain birdhouses and hand-painted garden fences. “But maybe I can help you with something on another floor?”

  I declined and made my way back to the elevator. Suddenly I felt self-conscious. I didn’t mind this man thinking I had enough money to be in the store. I minded him thinking I spent it on porcelain birdhouses.

  “I don’t suppose the rugs ever go on sale?” I asked the already answered question and pressed the already lit button.

  “Nah.” He paused for a moment. “But give me your number, and I’ll call you if they do.”

  The elevator came, a gaping little gullet that would carry me back to street level, where I belonged. I looked at him, watched him lightly wheeze. I let the elevator door shut.

  “I’m Daryl.” He shook my hand.

  “Daryl, if the carpets never go on sale, why would there be a reason to call?”

  “Well, sometimes they have display discounts in case the stuff gets beat up being in the store. From foot traffic.”

  We looked around simultaneously at the gleaming wooden floors, our joint focus settling on the rack of carpets that were not, in fact, touching the floor. I smelled pine.

  “So you have sample sales?”

  “What’s a sample sale?”

  “Blink once if the carpets go on sale, twice for no sale.”

  He winked at me. This was an unproductive conversation. But he insisted on exchanging numbers. I thought, Fine, give Daryl the three-hundred-pound handyman who probably doesn’t work here but killed five old ladies in the stockroom your number. Who’s it going to hurt? I scribbled it on a piece of scrap paper, along with my name, watching him as I wrote. His face remained stoic as he handed me his self-printed card. I had made it no more than three blocks when my cell phone rang, a foreign configuration of numbers on the display.

  “Hey, Solange.”

  “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “It’s Daryl. From five minutes ago.”

  “Oh. Hey.”

  “I found you that carpet.”

  “That was quick.” I stopped short on the street.

  “I looked in the system, and the Greenwich company store has a display carpet. It’s the one you were looking at.”

  “That’s funny.” I held a finger against my free ear. “I didn’t know you guys had a company store in Greenwich.”

  Daryl proceeded to describe a fairly simple process by which I would meet him at a street corner of my choosing away from the st
ore. I would give him three hundred fifty dollars in cash. In return, I would receive a packing slip with a routing number. Because this was about the shadiest thing I’d ever heard, I felt compelled to tell Daryl, “That’s about the shadiest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  And because I wanted the carpet, I made plans to meet him during my lunch break the next day. I told myself that this was an overpriced item. I was basically getting it wholesale. It was the same as if I was an employee of the company. Clearly the universe was trying to give me a housewarming present. I wasn’t about to tell the universe to go fuck itself by rejecting its bountiful bounty. Plus, if I paid less for it I could afford to destroy it. It was only a carpet, not an eight-ball jacket. More than anything, it just didn’t feel like stealing. Which, I am aware, is a paltry excuse for a crime. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it just didn’t feel like murder. Oh, well, okay, be on your way, then.

  IN THE MEANTIME, I HAD TO GET DOWNTOWN. I WAS meeting a gentleman named Ben. I had only ever really seen Ben in passing at book parties. But the Venn diagram of people we knew in common had become so saturated, it seemed that our not knowing each other was the one space to be filled in. We were growing tired of friends insisting that we knew each other when we didn’t, grabbing our arms and explaining that we must be mistaken. As if the harder they squeezed, the more likely they’d get an Oh, BEN. You mean roommate Ben. Kidney donor Ben. Siamese twin Ben. Sorry, took me a minute.