How Did You Get This Number Page 6

  She could have told me that the mattresses were full of bedbugs and I was going to have to sleep on plastic sheets, and I would have clapped like a trained seal.

  We sat in silence. I listened to the traffic on Houston, trying to determine if it would be worse or better at night as I fell asleep in my envy-inducing bedroom.

  “How is it that this place is available?”

  Sang explained her situation—a bad boyfriend whom she had kicked out. She described him as “one of those non-talkative types.”

  “Some people are just so blase about everything.” Sang sighed.

  I said that yes, I had heard of such a person.

  Then I explained my situation—a bad roommate I described as one of those “non-eating types.” When I mentioned the casual kleptomania, Sang perked up for the first time. Stealing was something to which she could relate. You could really picture her hanging out with open thieves, tiring of people she called “friends” stealing her credit cards and photocopying her passport. Not cool, guys. Not cool. So I delved further, but too deep too fast, uttering more syllables through normal conversation than Sang had released in the past week. The more I detailed Nell’s crimes, the more Sang distanced herself from me.

  “So, she wears your stuff without asking? Oh. I guess that can be annoying. I grew up with sisters, so—”

  “So did I!” I attempted to sit up straight, but the couch pulled me back. “But this girl isn’t my sister.”

  I did a quick mental montage of every time I had attempted to borrow an article of clothing from my sister in high school. Not one image featured her giving it to me of her own volition. Indeed, several featured locked drawers and slammed doors and, in one instance, a thrown Walk-man. I stole from her as a matter of habit. But Sang didn’t need to know this.

  What she needed to know was that the first time I laid eyes on Nell was in a broker’s office. We were then chaperoned by a landlord showing us an apartment. Nell kept removing nuts from a plastic bag in her pocket and seemed concerned with installing motion sensors in the grateless windows, but I didn’t mind because I thought, Well, it’s good to snack, and I don’t know why I don’t carry around nuts more often. And New York is a dangerous place. Why should homeowners have a monopoly on protecting their bodies and their valuables with silent alarms? Desperation is a funny thing, I explained to Sang, who seemed never to have experienced the sensation. Rarely does it announce itself. It is instead the silent killer of expectations until you don’t think of yourself as desperate. You think of yourself as a reasonable person who compromises because that’s what living with a roommate is about, compromise....

  I was losing her. She was lost in thought, looking me up and down. I strummed my knees to fill the silence.

  “I like your picnic table.” I pointed.

  “It’s not mine.” She looked with me.

  “That’s cool.” I nodded.

  When Sang escorted me to the door, I wasn’t sure how to say good-bye. A hug, a handshake, and direct eye contact were equally out of the question. This woman made me feel naked. Luckily, I had clothes on, so I opted to jam my fingers into my pockets and sway. On the street, cars honked in frustration, trying to get to the FDR. Sang leaned against the thick door frame.

  “It’s quiet at night,” she said.

  “Even with the ghosts?”

  “What ghosts?”

  “I read somewhere that this place used to be an old brothel. Apparently, a bunch of prostitutes threw themselves out the window.”

  “My God.” Sang covered her mouth. “That’s horrible!”

  “It’s sad.”

  “No.” She wrapped the bones of her hand around my arm. “That’s so horrific.”

  “Well”—I didn’t know how to handle this level of alertness—“it’s certainly whore-ific, I’ll give you that.”

  Sang was not amused. Figures. The one time I’m cavalier about a subject and I’m underreacting. Certainly throwing oneself out the window is objectively worse than borrowing a bra without asking. But most people tended to have Sang’s reaction to Nell’s tendencies.

  “Haven’t you ever noticed the pictures in the stairwell?” I asked Sang.

  I knew making her feel foolish was probably not the key to her steely heart, but how could she not know? I didn’t expect her to turn into an Asian Scooby-Doo, but surely there was a baseline level of curiosity all humans shared. Food, shelter, clothing, creepy old shit. New Yorkers in particular are masochists when it comes to obtaining housing information that will only piss them off. We are gluttons for discovering that our twenty-unit apartment building used to be a single-family home. And not even a nice one at that.

  “Huh,” she mused. “I thought they were from a thrift shop or something.”

  I RETURNED TO MY APARTMENT AND LOOKED AT MY bedroom, which felt smaller than ever. Every inch was planned and decorated because I had no choice. I looked in Nell’s bedroom. Everything was so neat and perfectly matched. I felt myself falling somewhere between Nell and Sang. I could sense them both categorizing me as the other when they looked at me, a feeling that made me wish I could put them in the same room together and say, “You think I’m bad? Look at this!”

  Mentally, I was already packing, deciding what I’d bequeath to Nell when she returned from Nepal and what I’d have to hide before she found out I was moving. This would be good for her. She could find a more suitable gym buddy to fill my room and cover the kitchen drawers in antibacterial contact paper like she’d always wanted. Maybe they could even share soymilk and—with a little time and a little trust—shampoo.

  I got a pair of tweezers, took the peanut butter jar down from the kitchen cabinet, and started digging.

  IT WAS HARD TO PIN DOWN WHICH WAS STRONGER: the desire to live like a real live grown-up or the desire to spend some quality time with the dead. True, the slutty ghosts had their appeal, but my relationship to the supernatural had a longer history than that. I was nine years old when I saw my first ghost, and I had been waiting for another ever since.

  I grew up on a rarely trafficked street—the kind of street you could play just about any sport in the middle of with little automotive interruption. At night, when the occasional car passed through, I could follow its headlights as they projected their way around my walls. Sometimes I’d pretend I had escaped from prison in some brilliantly confounding fashion and they were searching for me. One night when I was tucked in with my disintegrating blankie, a car passed by but failed to take the light with it. My bedroom remained dimly but steadily illuminated. I was not afraid of the dark. The dark is what happens when the sun goes down. It was like cowering from dirt. But I was afraid of inexplicable light. In the movies, a sudden glow was generally accompanied by exhaust fumes from an alien spaceship. It’s why I was never comfortable with night-lights. They were unnatural. Plus, if they worked for me, would they not also work for the eight-eyed monster hiding in the closet? Bitch has eight eyes. She can see a night-light. Best to level the playing field.

  So I crept out of my room, on the hunt for artificial brightness. I turned off the hallway light and returned to bed. There, I thought, that should take care of it. But the ghost was just getting started. The perfectly sharp silhouette of a little boy with a bowl haircut appeared in the far corner of my bedroom. He was approximately my size and shape, with a Peter Pan gait, except that he was obviously a minion of Hades. He glided across the wall, stopped, and looked up at some invisible speck on the ceiling. Then he turned to face me for a moment before quickly merging into the darkness of the adjacent wall.

  And that was it. Like a photosensitive plant reaching for the sun, I widened my eyes, attempting to absorb all the paranormal presence possible. The strange cocktail of fear and magic kept my eyes bouncing from wall to wall in time with the eyes of my cat-shaped wall clock, which ticked off the seconds with its tail. I assumed the boy would cycle back, but he never did. I felt a little rejected. I always thought there was an understanding in the
community of the dead that it’s best to appear before children, who are more apt to accept what they’re seeing. My ghost took one look at me and changed his mind.

  “Hello?” I whispered. And he pretended not to hear me.

  Beyond the rejection, there were pretty convincing social reasons to keep the sighting on the down low. Every nine-year-old knows the difference between wanting the impossible and getting it. I didn’t need my friends shouting “Boo!” at me on the bus any more than I needed a school psychologist holding up inanimate objects and asking me if they were real. Plus, I was already starting to second-guess myself. Even if it was real, as far as paranormal experiences go, mine was pretty unsexy. Haunting Lite. It was brief and subtle and left no proof for the living—no recovered keepsakes or cardigans folded on headstones. No bones locked in a trunk in the attic, shrouded by a moth-eaten wedding veil.

  So I was eager, to put it mildly, to move into McGurk’s. I wanted to see what a real ghost looked like while simultaneously accessing my inner militant feminist/whore. I left a message for Sang, thanking her for showing me the apartment. When I didn’t hear from her, I decided to follow up with an e-mail, thinking the chances of Sang’s phone being disconnected were better than not. I felt like a desperate girl angling for a second date after my nerves had gotten the better of me on the first. Why didn’t she love me? Was I not a catch? She could use my loofah if she wanted to. I never heard from her again.

  IT WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE NELL REENTERED THIS half of the world. I couldn’t believe I had packed in a whole real estate dalliance in the time she’d been gone. It was like the end of The Bridges of Madison County. The never-released director’s cut of The Bridges of Madison County, with the dead prostitutes and the broken glass and the decapitated dolls’ heads.

  I sat at a bar with Mac near his new apartment, eating stale popcorn and moping into my beer. I said I just couldn’t believe Sang hadn’t called.

  “Who?”

  “Sang.”

  “You did? When? You can’t hold a tune.”

  “Shut up, racist.” I laughed.

  And he laughed, too. And then he stopped and said, “What are we talking about?”

  For the first time, I found myself perversely grateful for Nell. If I didn’t know that her punctual bill-paying and obsessive cleaning originated from a larger fissure in her psyche, I would be happy to have her as a roommate. If I lived with Mac or Sang, I might come home to find the house burned down. Mac wedged a lime into his beer and squirted himself in the face. I reminded him of his amazing apartment tip, which had turned out to be a big, fat tease, robbing me of the impossibly hip version of myself and dooming me to a life of banality and a cupboard of Snackwells sandwich cookies. Though the devil’s food ones aren’t half bad. Mac looked at me.

  “I can honestly say I have no idea what you’re talking about. Have you been smoking pot out the window again? ”

  “That’s hardly the point.”

  It took a few minutes to get his version of the story. Motivated by real estate guilt, Mac confirmed, he did pass on the e-mail. That he remembered. But he claimed never to have called me beforehand, reminding me that we were only tenuously “speaking.” Furthermore, the e-mail was passed on to him via a friend of a friend. He had no idea who this Sang person was.

  “Why would I call you to tell you I was going to e-mail you? I’m not eighty years old.”

  I said I didn’t know but that I had become accustomed to living with such obsessive-compulsive behavior. No amount of triple-checking or scheduling or Handi- Wiping fazed me anymore.

  “I distinctly remember having this conversation with you.”

  “I love it!” Mac slapped the bar. “This is so like the Twilight Zone movie.”

  “That’s a TV show.”

  “Movie.”

  “TV show. And are you kidding me?”

  But he wasn’t kidding. The more I pressed him, the further he backed away from it. My mind spun. But Grandma’s been dead for twenty years! I had spoken to someone that night. Hadn’t I? Something had stopped me from putting foam-core museum plaques next to Nell’s Ansel Adams posters and sorority photos. Was it possible I had had an adulterous real estate conversation but couldn’t recall with whom? Now who was the big whore? And where did this end? Maybe Sang was a ghost. She certainly had the demeanor for it. More likely, I had been a party to not one but several unaccounted-for phone calls that night. I am the thing even rarer than a ghost: a chatty pot smoker.

  “This is going to drive me crazy.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Mac put a thumb over the neck of his beer and turned it upside down. “From where you’re sitting, I think you can walk there.”

  INQUIRIES WERE MADE. MINOR INVESTIGATIONS launched with finesse so as not to set off any “How many fingers am I holding up?” alarms. When those proved inconclusive, it occurred to me that it didn’t matter. Perhaps this is always how ghosts appear in real life. More the suggestions of themselves, a series of shadows and arrows and unaccounted-for conversations. Even if I did move downtown, I would probably never see one of McGurk’s famed prostitutes in all her detailed glory. I would just see Sang, sitting barefoot at the Norwegian picnic table, one leg drawn up to her chest, staring into space. And she wouldn’t be able to do that for long....

  Just as Nell and I had gotten back into the rhythm of things (me hiding my possessions and her hunting them down like Easter eggs), she moved out. Shortly after a new roommate moved in, I happened to walk past 295 Bowery. The building was boarded up from the inside, and a piece of official city letterhead was stuck to the door. I ducked under the orange tape and peered through a cloudy peephole. It looked the same as it had when it was inhabited. But that wasn’t saying much. The only real difference was that the framed pictures were gone.

  Despite valiant efforts on the part of the long-term tenants to get the building recognized as a landmark, McGurk’s was evacuated and set to be torn down as soon as the city got around to it. When they did, 295 was replaced with the universally abhorred high-rise that currently bloats the space between Houston and Stanton. The building is tall and reflective, covered in futuristic (if by “future” you mean 1984) windows. They enable the residents to live on the Bowery but not live on the Bowery, to pick over choice pieces of the past and dump the rest. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not one to stand on principle when I can sleep in a duplex. I wouldn’t kick gentrification out of bed if it crawled in there free of charge. But it never does. And so despising it becomes not only the right thing to do but the economical thing to do. Reading the ordinance, I found some small consolation in all this, both morally and personally. My haunted real estate heaven would have quickly become a living hell. A few months of freestanding fireplaces and toothbrush haircrafting and the whole building would be dragged down into a pile of rubble. Not reduced but worse—replaced.

  Already replaced was my conviction that my whole New York existence hinged on my address. Nell ceased to bother me as much once I realized how close I came to leaving her, how easy it would have been to say good-bye if Sang had welcomed me into her home with track-marked arms. I was a grown person and free to do as I pleased. It was the unhappy whores of McGurk’s who were trapped at that site. I knew a thing or two about ghosts. So I knew a bulldozer, though a literal interpretation of “confronting the ghost head-on,” wouldn’t actually release them. Instead, they would be forced to move into the new space, fixed and displaced at the same time. They would confuse one homogeneous condominium for another. Lose one another in identical walk-in closets. Find themselves shoved into odorless rooms, where they would be doomed to run like mercury along those perfect lines where the walls meet floors for all of eternity. A horizon of happiness around every corner.

  It’s Always Home You Miss

  Every New Yorker’s personal annoyance scale is best pictured as a cell phone commercial. The semipermeable bars of varying colors and heights extend up from people’s heads as they move along the sidewa
lk. One person finds an open-air cigar smoker more irritating than a skill-less subway performer. Another considers the person who mistakes a subway pole for a full-body pillow during rush hour exponentially worse than a taxicab keeping its overhead lights aglow despite being occupied. One person knows that frozen-yogurt chains are the devil’s handiwork and will penetrate the ground levels of civilization as we know it, softening our brains into the consistency of same, like hazelnut-flavored soylent green. Another just likes low-fat dairy. You begin to wonder if all of these infractions are actually detailed in a warning pamphlet you were meant to see when you moved here. It probably had pictures of people in solid-color clothing, like those on airplane safety cards. It was slid under your front door and accidentally discarded with the take-out menus. Now you are forced to learn the rules on a case-by-case basis.

  “I mean, honestly,” says a speed-walking aficionado trapped behind a dawdler, “you wouldn’t pull your car over in the middle of the street without signaling, would you?”

  Well, no.

  “And you wouldn’t synchronize drive across the highway.”

  Certainly not!

  “And you wouldn’t change lanes without looking!”

  Never admit you’ve done this.

  And what of the more personal situations, the ones where money is exchanged? With so many options to get it right, people are always ready to brandish a laundry list of “no excuse” peccadilloes. No excuse for slow waiters, for faulty coffee lids, for mangled manicures—for actual bad laundry service. The question is never “Should I be annoyed?” but “How annoyed should I be?” Those cell phone bars are never not there. If you want a dead zone, move to New Mexico. But there is one annoyance common to all New Yorkers. One grain of sand slipped into every oyster, one irritant that joins us together at our intolerant edges like a giant puzzle of irritation. Local tragedies fade, scaffolding comes down, and not to worry: someone will always be there to break the buttons of your cashmere sweaters and clip their fingernails onto your lap. But somewhere in that varied cacophony of callousness there is the single constant that unites us all: everyone has been victimized by the smell of a taxicab.