By noon I was on a Chinatown bus to Rhode Island. My message to the anonymous Craigslist-generated e-mail address had resulted in a tense and flurried correspondence with one “K Mendez” who would happily meet me at the Providence bus station to exchange the ottoman in question for fifty dollars cash, a sum more than three times the original amount listed. “There are other interested parties,” he’d threatened. My e-mail at the crack of dawn, “IS THE OTTOMAN STILL FOR SALE???????!!!!” might have come across as a bit desperate. I had to pay him what he wanted. After spending twenty dollars on my round-trip bus ticket, I’d have only five dollars and change through the New Year. I’d never been that broke before. I’d have to live off ramen, give up a few days of cappuccinos, but it was worth it. “What are the dimensions?” I’d e-mailed K Mendez. He answered that it was about a foot high and weighed around twenty pounds. “I’ll take it!” I replied. I figured I could go to Providence, buy the ottoman, turn around, get on the next bus home, and e-mail Britt Wendt back by nine. I closed my eyes as the bus veered out of town. I would have no book, no earphones, nothing to distract me from my thoughts and thirst and hunger and headache for three hours and seven minutes. I could live on cold, potty-scented air for as long as it took, I told myself. Soon, Britt Wendt would be safe in my arms forever.
Halfway to Providence, the bus stopped at a McDonald’s outside New Haven. It had been more than a decade since I’d set foot in that town. In the bathroom, I studied myself in the mirror. If my twenty-two-year-old self could see me now, I wondered, what would he think? What would he say? I wore my double-breasted cashmere peacoat from Junetree, a two-ply cashmere turtleneck from Boxtrot, a vintage Fendi belt, my usual black jeans, my Amberline boots, the hat from Japan, my Yasir Arafat scarf, the rabbit fur–lined gloves. “You look like a tool” is what I imagined Nick at twenty-two would say. “But my hair,” I’d protest. “Would a tool have Jesus hair?” I debated back and forth at the urinal. My piss smelled like toxic waste. “Yes,” Nick said in the mirror on the way out. I imagined what I must have looked like to the woman at Iga the night before. She must have thought I was one of those rich jerks ruining the neighborhood.
I got back on the bus.
? ? ?
In Providence, I waited, paced, and fumed, and when K Mendez turned up at the bus station thirty-six minutes late in a taxi, I was ready to crumble. The kid appeared to be in his early twenties, tall and thin, wearing baggy jeans, a Thrasher T-shirt, and an unzipped ski jacket with a fake fur–lined hood. He barely looked at me as he set the ottoman down and straddled it between his Vans. I worried that the upholstery would get stained from the dirty, salted layer of slush on the ground, but I was too stunned by his pluck and swagger to air that concern. I held out his money. He turned away and spit and lit a cigarette and told me, in a passionless monotone, “It’s two hundred bucks now. Plus the cost of the taxi.”
“That’s insane,” I argued. “I have fifty-five bucks. And a fifteen-dollar Burger King gift card. It’s all I’ve got.”
“Fuck Burger King,” he answered. Without another word, he picked up the ottoman and headed back to the taxi stand in front of the bus station.
“Wait!” I cried out, shuffling after him. He was a fool, a punk, privileged and greedy, but he had what I wanted. “I’ll give you this!” I said, pulling the scarf off my neck as an offering. K Mendez paused and turned back to face me. His cheeks were riddled with soft, red acne scars. His teeth were like fangs. His eyes, indecipherable. He was probably selling his furniture for drugs. What else?
“Yeah, okay,” he said, surprising me. “Plus your hat. And your coat. That should do it.”
“This coat is worth twelve hundred dollars.” I laughed. I held out the scarf and waved it around. “Here. And the money.” He turned his back and got in line for a cab, looking at me surreptitiously now and then, like a dog. It was a bizarre standoff, and I probably would have won out if I’d stood my ground. But I was impatient. My future was at stake. I came away barely clothed. He even took my Burger King card. The ottoman was a piece of shit, but that didn’t matter in the end.
? ? ?
Back in Brooklyn that night, walking home from the subway with my ottoman, I couldn’t help but smile at all the nice, happy people. Each face seemed spectacular in its originality, like a walking portrait. Everyone was beautiful. Everyone was special. It was cold and windy, and I had just a T-shirt on, but the moon was full, the sidewalks cleared of snow and sparkling with salt. A fleet of fire trucks blared by, deafening and cheerful. When I turned onto my street, there they were again. The flophouse billowed with smoke. Firemen strutted around the area, looking, I guessed, for a hydrant. My neighbors, the lovers from through the gypsum, stood together across the street from the blaze, naked but for towels, watching as flames leaped from an open window like a red flag. As I approached them, I could see that the girl’s eyes were pink and teary. She was thin and short, nose warped like she’d been punched, shoulders concave and white and goose-pimpled in the frigid air. Her skinny legs were plunged into mammoth black motorcycle boots, presumably belonging to the boyfriend, who stood beside her in the snow. He was perversely tall and lanky, his sinewy torso spattered with black moles like flecks of mud. He coughed and reached an arm down around the girl. The vertical disparity between their bodies made me wonder how they’d managed to have so much effective intercourse. An EMT came and gave them each a thick gray blanket. I wished for one myself but was embarrassed to ask.
“They think someone left their heater on,” the girl said to me, arranging the blanket over her shoulders, trembling.
My heart sank, but not completely.
“Was it you?” asked the boy. His mouth was like a horse’s mouth, frothy and shuddering with plumes of white vapor and spittle in the frozen air. “Did you start the fire?”
“Come on,” the girl said gently. “Don’t get feisty. It’s just a bunch of crap burning up. Who cares?”
The boy spit and coughed again and hugged her, his wide nostrils flared and dribbling with mucus.
I set the ottoman down in the snow and considered the boy’s question.
“I didn’t start the fire,” I said, like the dumb man I’d become. “This is an act of God.”
THE SURROGATE
“This suit will be your costume.” Lao Ting pointed to the black skirt and jacket hanging from the coatrack in the corner of his office. “You will tell people you are the vice president of the company. They may see you as a sex object, and this will be advantageous in business negotiations. I have noticed that American businessmen are very easy to manipulate. Has anyone ever told you that you resemble Christie Brinkley, the American supermodel of the nineteen eighties?”
I said a few people had. I did look like Christie Brinkley, and like Jacqueline Bisset and Diane Sawyer, I’d been told. I was five foot nine, 116 pounds, with long, silky light brown hair. My eyes were blue, which Lao Ting said was the best color for someone in my position. I was twenty-eight when I became the surrogate vice president. I was to be the face of the company at in-person meetings. Lao Ting thought American businessmen would discriminate against him because of the way he looked. He looked like a goat herder. He was short and thin and wore a white linen tunic and a belt of rope around his beach shorts. His beard was nearly white and hung down like a magical tail from his chin to his pubis. My previous job had been as a customer-service representative for Marriott Hotels, taking reservations over the phone at home. I’d been living in a studio apartment above a Mexican bakery in Oxnard. The view out my window there was a concrete wall.
“Your last name will be Reilly,” Lao Ting told me. “Would you like to suggest a first name for your professional entity?”
I suggested Joan.
“Joan is too soulful. Can you think of another?”
I suggested Melissa and Jackie.