After he leaves, I go to bed, and I dream the recurring dream in which I blow up Bebe, the women’s clothing store. When the smurf salesgirl tells me she doesn’t have the peacock blazer I want in a medium, even though I am not a medium, I am a tenuous, hard-won large, I tell her it’s fine. And it is, for once. Because I can feel the dynamite strapped to my stomach under my XL Ann Taylor cardigan. When I show her why it’s fine, she screams and I scream and then up we all go in smoke. The strappy bodycons. The billowy, asymmetrical blouses. The whole of their rhinestone-studded aerobic line. And even though I die in the great fire, I also get to watch it burn from above. And it’s beautiful to behold the mushroom cloud, the bauble ash, to feel the hot wind of the explosion in my hair. But the sirens and alarms that signal Bebe’s end are beyond the dream too, they are in my apartment, they are deafening. I open my eyes. Fire alarm. The voice of Carlos, the night security person, telling us, Do not panic, Do not panic, over the PA system that is piped into every unit.
I shrug on a housecoat and stumble out. I stagger toward the emergency exit, passing by Char’s apartment as I do. Her door is wide open.
From the doorframe, I watch her pace a flipped-over version of my own floor plan. She’s got one cat tucked under her arm, and she’s calling out “Toffee!” in a shrill voice. She’s still in her workout T-shirt. Jogging pants that hang on her. And over that, an open ratty robe. As I watch her, I think of the one-eyed tiger I saw at a zoo once. How she walked back and forth across the length of her stone enclosure while we all watched. I stood there with my head against the glass, feeling her panic and misery in my bones for I don’t know how long, until a child beside me piped up, Why is she pacing like that?
She’s tense, the zookeeper said.
And I remember hatching a plan to free her then and there. I’d come back at night. Hop the spiked fence. Hurl a garbage can at the hand-thumped glass. Ride the tiger into the night if she didn’t eat me first.
As I enter her apartment, my peripheral vision registers the absence of food on the granite kitchen counters, the tall vases of blown glass brimming with fake orchids, the sleek tables and chairs, the amorphous metallic statues. Details I will store to tell Ruth later over Iron Maidens.
Can you believe how she lives?
It’s sad.
It is sad.
What a sad existence.
Though she doesn’t ask for help and I don’t offer, I follow her into her living room. We both crouch down on her eggshell carpet (I see that she too opted for eggshell over taupe). There, under the wicker love seat, right beneath its sagging underbelly, I see a couple of yellow eyes wide open. Toffee.
Char lifts one end of the love seat while I attempt to gather Toffee, hissing and spitting, into my arms. To do this, I have to pry her paws from the carpet claw by claw. I carry her with her legs straight out and her claws unsheathed and aimed at my neck, all the way out of the apartment and down the concrete stairs toward the ground floor emergency exit. We leave the building, walk toward the grassy verge between the parking lot and the Malibu Club, where the sound of the alarm is slightly fainter.
We sit on the overclipped, parched grass, between crop circles of bland landscaping. Flowers planted like sentinels, flowers so boring they have no names. The cats hiss in our arms. We do not speak or look at one another. Above us, the pink blaze of the morning begins to rim the night. She does not thank me. When I look at her, I see she is looking straight ahead into the aquarium windows of the Malibu Club. She’s watching a woman there, on Lifecycle One, pedaling in the dark. I do that sometimes, if I can’t sleep. I’ll come down early, before the real estate agents and business analysts start arriving for the 5:30 a.m. time slot. I’ll keep the lights off until some asshole in a terry cloth headband comes down and flips a switch. Somehow it’s easier to pedal in the dark, to put one ridiculous, unbelieving foot in front of the other with just the exit signs and the blinking red lights of the cardio machines to contend with.
I’ve seen the pedaling woman there before. Apart from the Aquafit diehards, you cannot imagine a creature more stagnant in terms of results. She’s like a soap opera that you tune in to after ten years only to find that the plot hasn’t moved an inch. All the love triangles and intrigues and scandals are exactly where you last left them. The actors are just a bit older, on their faces more evidence of cosmetic preservation.
“Haven’t seen you down there lately,” Char says, jutting her chin toward the dark windows of the club.
“No,” I say.
“Taking a break?”
“Sort of.”
She nods sagely and reaches into the pocket of her robe for a pack of cigarettes. She extends the pack toward me like a question. I shake my head.
“Do you like the zoo much?” she asks me, lighting one.
“The zoo? Yes. Sometimes.”
“I work there, you know. Fund-raising.”
“Do you?” I say, like I don’t already know this.
“I could get you a couple free passes,” she says. “You know, for you and a friend.”
I think of Mel. How when we were in high school, we used to go to the zoo and she’d bring me into the monkey room just because she knew I was terrified of them, and then, feeling guilty, she’d lead me away toward the turtles. Looking back, it still doesn’t add up how we went from lying in the grass and listening to the same set of headphones to where we are now. Nowhere. I really need to e-mail her.
“I might even be able to arrange a behind-the-scenes tour. Not of every animal, obviously. But one, maybe. Your favorite.”
Silence.
“So what’s your favorite?”
“I don’t know. Turtle?” I tell her.
“Turtle,” she repeats. I can tell my choice disappoints her. I should have chosen some breed of big cat. A cheetah. A lynx.