Etiquette for the End of the World

chapter Eight





Tess awoke to the irritating sound of sleet pelting the air conditioner outside the window. She rolled over but kept her eyes closed, trying to will the noise to stop. She did not want to wake up. She wanted to sink back into the dream she was having… .

She was in an enormous, sunny classroom, filled with old-fashioned desks of dark wood. A billboard-sized blackboard covered the wall at the front of the room. Everyone in the class was getting up, one by one, to perform a song—a song that was supposed to represent who they were, what their life was about. There was a graduation-party atmosphere, with a lot of cheering and laughter in the audience. It was the end of the school year, a big final project. Tess’s turn was coming up. She was surprised she was not more nervous; she was actually looking forward to singing. The only problem was that the song was in Spanish and so she was going over and over the pronunciation in her mind. There was some kind of universal translator in the audio system so everyone could understand any language. But at the moment, the thin, curly-haired boy who was trying to sing up at the microphone was having trouble getting the words out; there was something wrong with his throat, his face was red and he was just sputtering, “Ffput, ffput, ffputtt!” And suddenly Tess saw with alarm that his teeth were falling out, one by one, and then she realized with increasing horror it was her own teeth that were falling out, they were just dropping all bloody out of her mouth into her cupped hands, and she frantically tried to put one front tooth back into her upper jaw … .

Tess woke up again to the staccato rat-a-tat, ffput-ffput of the icy rain. She felt an overwhelming sense of relief that she had been dreaming and that her teeth were still intact. Then, as she surfaced into full consciousness, she was hit by the unwelcome memory of the last three weeks.

Why did people always talk about how soothing the sound of rain was anyway? Maybe if it were rain on the roof—say, a nice shingle cottage roof somewhere out in the country, on a summer evening—it would be more comforting, less punctuatingly pingy. As it was, it was just like really mean people outside throwing pebbles, trying to annoy her out of bed.

Tess sat up and looked out the window. It was always dark in January in her bedroom, but had it always been this dark? “Carm, has the world ended already?” Tess muttered absentmindedly to the cat as he came over for his morning nuzzle.

She swung her feet over onto the floor, and as she got out of bed she ran her hand along the side of the new bed frame. It was so smooth and sturdy. The one solid thing left in her life. She was not sure now if anyone but her would ever see it, but she was still glad she had bought it. Even though the whole purpose for it had never taken place.

Peter Barrett. What an a*shole. She still could not believe that he had dumped her the way he did. Without a call, without an email. Without even a flimsy excuse or a bad breakup line. He had just vanished like an overdressed, sleazy one-night stand.

He had told Tess he was flying to California to go to his sister’s for the Christmas weekend, so when she did not hear from him during the week before Christmas Tess had at first just assumed he was overwhelmed. Everyone got that way over the holidays, right? And she knew she was going to see him for the casino New Year’s party. In preparation for Peter’s first overnight at her place she cleaned her whole apartment, even the outside of the windows—not an easy task in the middle of winter. She was nervous; what if he expected something more architecturally digestible? Something less shabby-chic? She could not do too much about the areas of the ceiling that needed painting, but at least she had thrown out Carmichael’s old faux-leopard bed—which was, she had to admit, pretty ratty—and bought a brand-new one in red velvet. (Ginny had reminded her about the way many men felt about women with cats, so Tess wanted everything to be as unhairy as possible.)

But as the days went by, and he did not return her emails or phone call, the twisted-up feeling in the pit of Tess’s stomach became a solid lump of doom. Most of her friends were away for Christmas, so Tess had holed up and ordered pizzas and Chinese food and watched movies on HBO. She watched one dumb Robert Downey Jr. movie three times. (She kept thinking the whole time, Get out of the car, Robert! Why are you riding across country with this bum?) She ate chocolate-covered cherries—a fence-mending present from Stuart’s wife, Nancy—in bed while rereading her entire collection of young adult novels from the 1950s: Saturday Night, The Fabulous Year, Men are Like Streetcars, Stag Line, Angel on Skis, Princess in Denim (the girl always got the boy in the end). She stayed away from Facebook, which she knew would make her even more depressed, between the possibility of accidentally seeing holiday posts from Stuart and the general cyber-cheeriness (or, as Tess liked to call it, bragging) abounding there. “Here’s the whole clan up in Vermont! Everyone in the family had a great time,” everyone was always posting, or “Here’s our little Amy with her very first skating medal!”

Now, as Tess dragged herself into the kitchen to make coffee, she thought, Maybe I should go on Facebook and post a picture of the New Year’s dress that never left my apartment. I could write: “Here’s the dress I wore for being stood up on New Year’s Eve! OMG! LOL! LMAO!”

She had gotten all ready to go out New Year’s Eve, even though she hadn’t heard from Peter since the night at his Gramercy Park apartment two weeks before. She was still thinking he would show up at the door in his tuxedo with a dozen roses and a somehow believable explanation for his radio silence. He lost his cell phone, been arrested for drunk driving. He hit his head getting into a limo and been unconscious for days (but the first thing he thought of when he finally came out of it was her). The minutes ticked by in an excruciatingly slow way. She called his phone six times. She emailed him in all caps. She texted him a whole line of question marks, and then a whole line of exclamation points. (For one crazy moment she had an impulse to go knock on the door of Feng Shui Sarah to see if somehow she had gotten her claws into Peter too.)

At around two in the morning Tess suddenly remembered the psycho ex, Marla, and her hurt feelings slid over onto the worry side of the scale. What if Marla had tracked down Peter when he was in California and done something horrible to him? Gone off her meds, and gone off her rocker? Stabbed him while he was inside his coat this time? Or tied him up so he could not use the phone? Maybe Tess should be calling the LAPD. By the next day she was pacing around in a state of near panic.

But then, on the evening of January 2, she received the following text from Peter: Business trip. Not sure when I will be back. Thanks for everything.” Thanks for everything?!! Tess wanted to take the phone and throw it out the window. There went her last hope that he might be lying in a ditch somewhere. He had just up and left her, flat.

So now here she was three weeks later, still suffering from a big, disgusting Peter Barrett hangover. I am obviously a naïve idiot, she thought, as she laboriously cranked the handle of her antique coffee grinder, hating the contraption, wondering why she ever thought it cool to grind beans by hand, and wondering if it would ever finish so she could at least have a cup of f*cking coffee. She had not heeded the warning signs with Peter, she had not wanted to. He was way too handsome, too charming. And he was too sophisticated to be working for a kooky outfit like WOOSH.

She stopped right in the middle of grinding and closed her eyes in self-disgust, shaking her head. When she met Peter she had been in such a tailspin—from her job, her brother, Matt—and what did she do but glom right onto this perfect cardboard cutout of a man. Now she saw everything about him in a different light. His phony super-salesmanship, his reluctance to talk about anything real. Why had she ignored it all?

She knew she should write the whole relationship off as a wild fling, like the ones you have when you are traveling in foreign countries. But the problem was, she missed him. She had loved the feeling of his firm hand at the small of her back as they entered a restaurant or theater, with all eyes on them (well okay, on him, mostly), and the way he could make her laugh at anything. They had played like kids; they were always improvising scenes for taxi drivers, bartenders—pretending they were fighting, pretending they were criminals. They had finished each other’s jokes like a seasoned comedy team. Tess felt she was always waltzing, or flying, when she was with him. Peter had made her feel that all the people who had ever rejected her had all been incredible fools to let her go. With every look he implied he had discovered priceless treasure. (So then why had he decided to toss her away?)

She leaned on the kitchen counter and buried her head in her hands. She had to figure out her life before it was too late. Wake up Tess!

She longed to email Ginny but didn’t want to bother her on vacation. Ginny was in Barcelona and Seville for a rare month-long trip, which her husband had insisted they take. Before she left she had sent Tess, as a joke Christmas gift, a whole box of self-help and New Age books from her office—some that Ginny had published, some that people had given to her. Despite her usual disdain for the genre, Tess had perused them over the last few weeks, in between her consumption of 1950s YAs. She had thrown Eat, Pray, Love across the room after the first chapter. The writing was good enough, but how the hell were you supposed to feel for someone in her mid-thirties whose only real problem is an unhappy marriage, and who is rich enough to go running off to live in Italy, where she eats great food and takes Italian lessons from gorgeous hunky identical twins?

If being dumped yet again wasn’t bad enough, she had not yet received her WOOSH check. Now she could not be certain Peter had even put in for it, as he had promised her. Who knows what he had been lying about? She was completely white-knuckled at this thought. She was dead meat without this money. She had put her New Year’s Eve home improvements on a credit card, and yesterday she had gotten overdue notices from Con Ed and the cable company. Plus her back tooth was hurting in a way that felt ominously like a $1,500 crown, or even root canal. Was that why she was dreaming about her teeth falling out?

On top of everything else tomorrow was January 26, her birthday. Last year, on her thirty-ninth, she had been fantasizing about the big party she was going to have for her fortieth. Now that seemed like a hundred years ago. The poker gals had made some noises about doing something, but without Ginny Tess didn’t feel like it.

She was, however, having dinner with her aunt in Connecticut. This was an annual event, always held on the actual night of her birthday, and Tess found herself looking forward to it, as if it were a lifeboat in the middle of an empty sea. As eccentric as Aunt Charlotte was, she was practically the only family Tess had left. And it was better than staying home alone, wondering where the hell Peter Barrett was holed up, and what she could possibly have done to make him run from her like an escaped convict with hounds at his heels.



***



The little rose-colored station house in Cos Cob looked the same as it always did, pristine and pretentiously quaint, like one of the props in Tess’s childhood train set that used to get put up around the Christmas tree. Aunt Charlotte was waiting for her in the parking lot, in the old Buick LeSabre wagon with its fake wood side panels. Charlotte’s gray hair was frosted blonde and permed, circa 1980. Her hairstyle evolution had pretty much stopped there. Under her black wool coat she had on an amber necklace with beads the size of golf balls, and an orange and green paisley muumuu. She wore muumuus almost exclusively. Tess had always thought her too thin for them. On larger women they could look stylishly bohemian; on skinny women they just looked like big sloppy robes.

Tess had once used Charlotte for the subject of her column; the title of the piece was “Just Say No-no to Muumuus.” Charlotte wore them to the grocery store, she wore them to lunch, she wore them to the opera. She had hippie Indian print muumuus, and black silk dressy muumuus. She had African ones and Hawaiian ones. In the summer she wore them with big straw sun hats while she swept the area around the pool with big dramatic swooshes. Tess and Stuart had always been convinced that Aunt Charlotte’s obsession with muumuus—which according to their mother began when she stopped dancing professionally in 1974—had been a reaction to the many years of torturous toe shoes and tight tutus.

“Halloo, Tess, halloo!” Charlotte said, leaning over to the passenger side to grab Tess’s face in her hands. Her aunt’s skin was lined and spotted but her laugh was the same child-like trill it had always been, cascading up the scale and then back down again. She could not quite reach over far enough toward Tess for an actual kiss, so she just went “mwah, mwah” into the musty air of the car.

“Knock, knock?” Charlotte said gaily, while maneuvering the big boat of a car out of the small lot. Tess took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a brief second, steeling herself. Other people got lavish fortieth birthday parties at the Algonquin or the Plaza. Tess? Tess got Aunt Charlotte.

“Who’s there?” Tess singsonged obligingly.

“Abby,” said Aunt Charlotte.

Charlotte had taught her this ditty when she was eight or so, along with her famous dinner table trick where she transformed a linen napkin into an extremely pointy white bra. “Abby who?” Tess tried to sound happy to play.

“Abby Birthday!” Charlotte went into peels of delighted giggles. She never got tired of that old joke.

Tess climbed up the steep cobblestone steps to the bright blue wide-planked kitchen door she knew so well and stepped into the low-ceilinged colonial kitchen. The place was even more packed with stuff than it had been the year before. There were piles of magazines on the counters and kitchen table, and glass jars lined up in rows on the shelves like an apothecary’s. Some of the jars were filled with herbs, some with pencils and pens, some with sea glass, some with nails and bobby pins, some with coins, some with marbles, some with rubber bands, some with knives and forks and chopsticks, and some with coupons.

The tall glass cabinet on the far wall still housed the large collection of Charlotte’s salad dressing, leftover samples from one of the several failed businesses she had started after she stopped dancing. The company, her very own brainchild, had been called I’m Dressing. All the dressings had been made from her personal recipes, and were all natural, with no preservatives (which turned out to be somewhat of a problem as far as shelf life went). It was packaged in hourglass-shaped bottles, bearing names like I’m Dressing Japanese, I’m Dressing Blue (Cheese!), I’m Dressing Russian, I’m Dressing Ranch, and I’m Dressing Lite. Charlotte had posed for the labels herself, in different costumes; that had been her late husband’s idea. Charlotte’s husband, Charles—Tess’s father’s brother—had been a commercial artist who’d worked for Disney as well as on Madison Avenue. He and Aunt Charlotte used to love to call each other by the nickname Charlie, telling everyone who would listen they only got married because they had the same name. At family dinners everyone would always call, “Charlie and Charlie! Time to eat!”



Tess’s birthday dinner was takeout from the local Italian restaurant, with a supremely delicious flourless chocolate cake for dessert. Charlotte didn’t cook, at least not since Charles had died. The best news was a bottle of extremely good Bordeaux. (Charles had been a wine collector, and the wine cellar had enough fine wine in it to last for decades.) The worst news was the salad dressing Charlotte blithely brought to the table: her own I’m Dressing Italian, which Tess was terrified would make her sick, seeing as how, although the bottle was sealed, it had no preservatives and was god knows how many years old. She told Charlotte her new thing was eating salad with no dressing. “You kids and your trendy diets,” Charlotte said, shaking her head. “So, Tess, tell me how this year has been for you, sweetie.”

During the course of the meal Tess explained to Charlotte about losing her column and finding her current writing assignment, knowing that WOOSH would not faze her aunt one bit. Indeed, Charlotte looked at her with her exotic cat eyes (emphasized by thick dark eyeliner that slanted up slightly toward her temples), smiled brightly, and said, “That is fascinating, Tess. So great you have landed on your feet! But then you always do, my brilliant niece, famous New York writer!” Tess smiled politely. Superlatives were the bread and butter of Charlotte’s conversational larder.

Tess felt she had landed on anything but her feet—her ass was more like it. She changed the subject to Charlotte’s wood-painting class, which was her aunt’s latest passion. She was painting driftwood and pieces of found furniture. In the corner of the kitchen was an old step stool done over in black, white, and aqua spatters, Jackson Pollock style.

After dinner they cleared the dishes away from the table and Charlotte led Tess into the living room—the room Tess always thought of as the Velvet Room—for the yearly birthday ritual: Aunt Charlotte’s tarot card reading. Whether or not Tess was in the mood, this reading was never optional. Surreptitiously Tess looked at her watch, wondering if she’d be able to make the 9:50 train back to the city.

Charlotte had a fire ready to go, which she lit with a long match. The couch, which had been there for as long as Tess could remember, was a dull gold velvet. The walls were dark red. While the walls were not actually velvet, in the dim light they had always seemed that way to Tess and Stuart, when they used to come for a visits right after Christmas. On either side of the mantel there were two comically huge candlesticks, nine inches thick and three feet high, that once belonged to a church; Charlotte had picked these up in Greenwich Village when she lived there years ago.

Charlotte sat down and pulled out her cards. No matter how batty she was, with her flowing muumuus and silly jokes, she always seemed powerful in the firelight once she brought out the tarot cards. The truth was her readings could sometimes be uncannily accurate. On the other hand, they were also sometimes wildly off base. Charlotte began to lay out the cards on the black lacquer coffee table. “Tess Eliot, age forty,” Charlotte murmured formally, to whatever spirits she believed were listening in.

Her aunt turned the first card over. “Ah, the Tower,” she called out in triumph, as if she had expected it. The illustration on the card was of a cliff-side castle engulfed in flames, with big pieces of rock falling into a stormy sea below. “Everything is coming down all around you,” Charlotte went on. (Well, that’s for sure, thought Tess. It didn’t take a psychic to tell that.) Her aunt pulled a few more cards and began to arrange them in the traditional Celtic cross pattern. “Halloo! This says you are going to have a son … that he will arrive, probably, within the next year.”

Tess laughed derisively, sort of a shout-laugh. “Charlotte, remind me to tell you about my love life when this is over.” But she felt a slight twinge of nervousness. She had always been very careful with Peter, but of course nothing was totally foolproof. God, that was all she needed to really send her over that Tower-card cliff.

“Well, of course, it could also just signify a new creative project,” Charlotte giggled, and then turned over the Knight of Swords, depicted by two men in armor riding on a horse together, swords drawn. “The Discouri Twins, in this position … hmm … Tess, how’s your brother these days? ... Are you all getting along?”

“Ah … well, not fabulously,” Tess said uneasily.

“Aha. This reveals a painful sibling split of some kind, discord … disharmony, division! The three Ds.” She frowned and flipped out a few more cards. Then she nodded knowingly. “The Emperor. The Two of Swords. Whatever it’s about, you are unable to see that you’re not mad at your brother. You’re mad at your father.” This gave Tess goose bumps. Though she couldn’t see how her brother should get a pass.

“You are at a major crossroads.” (Okay, Charlotte said that every year.) “Here’s the Wheel of Fortune … . You’re in the hands of the Fates … . Better hang on for dear life … . We reap what we sew … .” Charlotte went into her regular recitation of New Age aphorisms and Tess drifted off, only half listening. She was suddenly thinking about Betty Phoenix and Gregory Frankstein, and the terrible crazy threat of the computer bugs. She realized she had not really given it much thought since Peter had left. Which was weird, considering how much it had freaked her out. Could it be that Charlotte’s Tower card was about a larger kind of destruction?

“So, Tess, are you involved with someone, romantically?” asked her aunt suddenly. At this Tess snapped back into focus.

“Yes … I mean no. Not anymore. At least I don’t think so.”

Charlotte stopped with a card halfway from the pile in her hand to the table, looking at her with raised brows. “You’re not sure?”

Tess laughed, a little sheepish. “No, I’m sure. It’s over.”

“Hmm. The Queen of Swords … This card tells me that the man you love is being kept from you by a woman who has cut him down to size. She is between you, she is getting in the way … .”

“A woman?” Tess stared at the card, a stern queen sitting on a throne, her long blonde hair flowing out from under her helmet, her left hand holding a long silver sword. Marla! It’s Marla with a big knife! Tess caught her breath, suddenly shivering in spite of the fire burning in the fireplace next to her. Oh my god. Maybe Marla had sent that text from Peter, the text that had sounded so unlike the urbane man she knew. Why had she completely rejected the possibility that something bad had actually happened to him?

“I’m not sure what that could mean,” she said aloud to her aunt.

Charlotte looked at her closely, then finished up the reading with her usual positive-sounding flourish. “Future outcome card is the Ten of Pentacles, Tess. A card of success. Congratulations.” But Tess was distracted, thinking about what she might do to find out whether Peter was all right.

When she got home to her apartment, Tess unwrapped Charlotte’s present. It was a green plastic hand-crank radio. On the back Charlotte had painted a red face on it with its mouth open—to connote communication, Tess supposed. In her frame of mind, it was disturbing to say the least. There was also a card from her aunt: You may never know when you will need this. (Oh great, thought Tess, another paranoid survivalist sentiment, and not only that but another hand-cranked device—the last thing she wanted.) Tess stashed the radio in the back of her closet with last year’s Aunt Charlotte gift—Siamese cat slippers that meowed when you walked. They had scared the shit out of Carmichael.



***



The next day Tess decided the thing to do was to go down and talk to Dakota, or if she wasn’t there, someone else at WOOSH. (She only prayed she would not have to deal with the creepy Alfred.) It was imperative to ascertain if her project was still on track—and the check on the way—but more than that, she wanted to find out if anyone had heard from Peter. Of course, she needed to somehow manage this without revealing that she had been sleeping with him, and she was not quite sure how to go about it. But she certainly could not go to the police, not when all she had was a story about stitched-up suits, a tarot card reading, and being stood up on New Year’s Eve. They’d put her away.

The #1 train was not crowded at eleven in the morning. Tess smiled across the aisle at a mother and her toddler, who was playing with a small toy. Lately, when she looked at children, she had a longing feeling verging on jealousy. What would have happened if she had broken up with Matt two years ago, when she probably should have? She might have had time to find someone else and have a baby, even if she had had to get fertility treatments like everyone else she knew. The toddler took his yellow plastic toy and jammed it at his mother’s ear as if he were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

“Ouch,” said Tess with a “yikes” kind of smile, trying to show empathy to the mother. But inside she was thinking: Okay, maybe there are some pluses to the no-kids life. Like undamaged orifices.

Tess looked out the subway car window to see they were just passing 28 Street, her stop. Damn it. Now she would have to walk five more blocks in the cold, and it was already a hike to begin with.

After exiting the subway at 23 Street, she tromped through the dirty slush up Seventh Avenue, then turned west on 25th. At Eighth a man in a black puffy coat had a woman by the arm; he was shouting at her, “Well. I am miserable, so I’ve done that much for you, right? What else do you want? Can’t you be satisfied now?” Tess hurried by, her boots plopping uncomfortably into the deep curbside puddles. Everyone Tess passed seemed to have their heads down. When had everyone stopped smiling? Was everyone in the world unhappy?

The hydroponic plants in the WOOSH window looked more lush then they had before (Tess wondered how they managed that in the middle of winter), but everything else—down to the bleached-blond receptionist, the pamphlets on the coffee table, and the Enya music—was the same. Tess felt sheepish about not having called to make an appointment, but to her relief the boy announced pleasantly that Dakota Flores would be out in a minute.

Dakota greeted Tess with a surprisingly warm hug, which took Tess off guard. “Oh, Tess, it is such a blessing from the Universe to see you today,” she said, leading her back to the conference room.

Well, that’s a good sign, Tess thought. At least Dakota didn’t say, What the hell are you doing here?

Dakota was all dressed in a flowy, white gauzy something, which looked odd to Tess, because it was winter. It was as if the woman had just been transported from the middle of an island spa. She wore the same medallion she had at the first WOOSH meeting, which Tess now recognized as the symbol prevalent in so much of the 2012 lore—a carved sun with a face in the center with a lot of complicated markings around it. The Mayan/Aztec calendar.

“Actually I have not seen Peter at all since our meeting on the Winter Solstice five weeks ago,” Dakota remarked when Tess casually asked after him. Tess’s feeling of worry intensified to alarm. In her mind’s eye she could see Peter slowly bleeding to death in Marla’s Malibu house. How could she tell Dakota she had been expecting him to show up at her apartment on New Year’s Eve, that he was majorly MIA, that she knew something had to be wrong—without letting Dakota know they had been dating?

“I did have a phone conversation with him, however,” Dakota continued, pouring out two glasses of water. “He called me from the beach, actually. He said he would be out of town for a while. Apparently he’s on vacation somewhere exotic. To tell the truth, it sounded quite enviable, considering the cold here. I think it was Australia. Hamilton Island, I think?” As if she had suddenly fallen out of a tall tree into the dirt below, Tess’s fear for Peter’s life switched immediately back into a feeling of betrayal. So. He was just a callous bastard after all.

Dakota added quickly, when she saw Tess’s face, “If you are worried about your payment for the book, Tess, don’t be, he signed off on it. We really love what you have done so far.” (Thank god for that, thought Tess.) “I don’t know how much Peter had to do with it, but you really got what we were saying, about the humor and everything. Alfred thinks some of it too silly, but I’ve always been someone who believes that silliness is another word for love on a playground.” Dakota didn’t just smile, she positively beamed, and for the first time, Tess found herself drawn to her. Love on a playground. Maybe there was more wisdom to her than Tess had realized.

Dakota poured some more water into Tess’s glass. Tess hadn’t even been aware it was empty; she must have drained it in almost a single gulp. Dakota looked thoughtfully at Tess. “When I last saw Peter, he did seem super-fired up about some wild new fund-raising angle … . I probably should not say this to you, Tess, but back in my hometown in New Mexico that man is what my tunkasila used to call a Flim Flam Sam. If it were up to me personally, we would not be involved in exaggerating possible scenarios in order to gain funds through fear-mongering.” She sighed. “But Orbus knows best, I suppose. Often they say the end justifies the means, don’t they? And I suppose, if it helps us to prepare, to help more people, then I guess …” She trailed off.

Tess donned the face she used in her poker game when she was holding four of a kind. The last thing she wanted Dakota to know was that the computer virus story had come from her.

Dakota went on to say that she would be Tess’s direct contact on the project going forward. They still hoped Tess could finish by the end of the summer, sooner if possible.

As she left the WOOSH offices (going back out “The Way Through” door), Tess comforted herself with the thought that at least her money was coming. Now she had to get back to work. As ridiculous as this assignment was, and even if only a handful of people ever read what she wrote, it was still a job. Whatever might happen on December 21, it would help not to be destitute.



***



Harriet and Tess sat side by side at Harriet’s dining room table.

“But, Tess, it says ‘push here’ to retrieve messages. I can’t push here. When I do it beeps and there are these two upsetting arrows! Where is ‘here’? How do you push ‘here’?” Harriet looked helpless and desperate. She was poking her index finger with vehemence at the display on the phone. She suddenly looked about eight years old and begging for help. It was in such contrast to her usual tough-as-nails modus operandi that it made Tess laugh. Harriet could out-talk, out-smart, and out-scare anyone, but here she was, beaten by a simple cordless telephone. And admitting defeat.

This was one of the few skills Tess had that Harriet didn’t. She could fix Harriet’s phones, her printer, her internet settings. And when she did, Harriet always acted as though it were a holy miracle.

Tess took the handset firmly out of Harriet’s grasp. “Let me just see this … . Right. You have to push “menu” first. See, Harriet? Look, here.”

But instead of looking at the phone Harriet looked into Tess’s face in helpless amusement and they both started laughing.

Eventually, with only a little bit more knowledge of how her telephone system worked than she had had before, Harriet put away her phone to fight another day.

“So what did you mean when you said you were finished with men?” Harriet wanted to know. “You said that when you came in. Matt again?”

“No, not him.” Tess grimaced. “I got stood up—stood up on New Year’s Eve!” She filled Harriet in, briefly, about her affair with Peter.

Harriet’s face went dark with disapproval. “What were you thinking? I told you! Tess, those WOOSH people …”

“But he wasn’t one of them,” Tess said, “That was part of why we bonded. They were all nuts, and we weren’t. But I guess I really never knew what his real feelings were toward me. He was just so … so much larger than life—I always thought that was a ridiculous expression, but now I get it, because it was like Peter was in a movie all the time. I don’t know, he was always joking, and moving on to other subjects … . ”

Harriet snorted. “His real feelings? My darling Tess, you haven’t learned? Men don’t have feelings, men only have ideas about having feelings.”

Tess laughed a rueful laugh. Harriet’s opinions were always the most outrageous, but that’s what made them so comforting. “To be honest I feel more humiliated than anything else. I mean, he just left me without a word. Who does that?” Who knows, thought Tess, maybe that was just normal for him—having a romance that is just a convenient thing while you’re in town, then leaving it behind like the extras in a hotel room you don’t want to bother packing.

The doorbell to Harriet’s apartment rang. Tess rose to get it, but Harriet motioned for her to sit back down. “Don’t get that, it’s the exterminator. The super sent him because a few tenants have roaches—supposedly. But I’m not going to have this place full of pesticides. It’s poison to my lungs. I’d rather have a roach or two. It’s not like it’s bedbugs. Tess! Do you know I now know three people with bedbugs? My friend Mallory wrote in yesterday’s Times that bedbugs are the nouveau riche of vermin—completely aggressive and consuming everything in sight.”

Tess blinked, trying to listen to Harriet while ignoring the insistent buzzing of the door, and then said, “Actually, Harriet, speaking of aggressive insects, you will never guess what happened to me.” Tess began to tell Harriet about meeting Betty Phoenix, about the missing book, her trip to the boat basin, the alleged NSA document. While Tess was talking, Harriet turned her breathing machine on, and inhaled her asthma medicine. She had the look of a professor puffing solemnly on a pipe.

When Tess finished, she waited for Harriet to dismiss the whole thing as crazy, but instead she seemed thoughtful. “F*cking hell, Tess. That’s just the kind of horrific thing those Pentagon pricks would think up. Christ!” She sounded almost scared.

“Tess,” Harriet wheeled over to her desk and took out her date book, “I’ve decided to go to Mexico in two weeks. I want you to come with me. I’ll pay your airfare.”

“Mexico?” Tess knew Harriet adored her house in Mexico, but she had not been for some years because her poor health made traveling so difficult.

“I found Margie,” Harriet went on, a fighting glint in her eye. “I have not spoken to her yet, but through the museum, from those paintings of Mr. Chilam Balam”—she raised one brow for emphasis—“I obtained her whereabouts. I’ve had an email from her. She wants to see me. Besides, I need a change of air. So do you. Haven’t you always wanted to see my house?”

Tess opened her mouth to tell Harriet that of course she could not go to Mexico with her. For one thing she had work to do, and then there was Carmichael, and (though she would never say this to Harriet) Tess balked at the logistics of traveling with her. It would be like being a personal assistant and a medical aide besides, what with the inhalers, the drugs. and the paranoia she knew Harriet would carry with her. And Tess was in no condition to plan for this kind of trip, in her current state of mind.

But then, all at once, like a light switching on inside her, going to Mexico with Harriet seemed the perfect thing to do, as if it were predestined. Tess might even be able to write her expenses off on her taxes, if she went through the motions of doing some “research” about the Maya while she was there. What the hell. Why not? Why not go to Mexico?



And so, fifteen days later (the WOOSH check having finally arrived and—rather miraculously, Tess felt—cleared in one day), Tess found herself on a plane to Guadalajara. After she had finally gotten Harriet settled into her seat (organizing her two different kinds of water, her portable ionizer, the Mozart CD on her clunky Walkman, her shopping bag full of vitamins, her special pillow, and her emergency-only Ativan) with the help of the most of the flight attendants and several of the more amenable passengers, Tess leaned back, opened her purse, and took out her copy of Eat, Pray, Love. Okay, so maybe she would read it after all. She could at least get some travel tips, right?