Things I can’t Explain Page 6

  “Stop!” I yell as I chase after him, but he keeps running and when we turn the corner we’re in Williamsburg somehow, darting through the gentrified streets. It looks like I’m in one of those first-person-shooter games as everything fish-eyes around me. Why am I chasing him? Why can’t I just leave the poor guy alone? How many life points do I get if I catch him?

  Hot on his heels, I hurdle hipsters, shove geriatric men and their walkers aside. At the edges of my vision, I see graphics that digitally ring up an ongoing tally of effective life points every time I shove someone out of my way. I dive through sidewalk racks of secondhand clothes marked EVERYTHING TEN BUCKS. I can’t help pausing to examine a pair of vintage suede Fiorucci gauchos. They’re a killer deal, but Nick is getting away and now I’m losing health points fast, so I leap over the fallen sale items in hot pursuit, calling out his name (now that I know it, I might as well use it).

  If I don’t catch Nick, how will I carry out my secret plan to make him drink the special cup of Lapsang souchong tea I’ve brought, which I may or may not have doctored with knockout drops? And how many points will that be worth?

  We turn down an alley and he’s cornered. I force the special cup to his face. Drink up, Nicky boy! That’s what you get for being so damn cute and shy. I hold his mouth open, making him swallow it all, massaging his Adam’s apple to make sure he drinks it. He awakens to find himself chained to my bed wearing his motocross jacket and nothing else. How convenient.

  Hmmm … I pull back my chair, let’s work that fantasy for a bit …

  “What am I doing!?” I say, and slam my forehead on the kitchen cabinet to wake myself up. Elvis looks at me like … well, like I’m nuts … because I am. Tortured daydreams at a single-cup coffee machine.

  “See what happens when I deprive myself of java?” I try to explain to Elvis, who could care less. “Just brew a cup, Clarissa, and get back to finding a job,” I say, snapping the little plastic pod into the pump and clamping its jaw shut. Seconds later, the coffee beast is drooling java into my cup.

  “He’s gone. Opportunity missed. I just have to deal with it. Right, Elvis?”

  Elvis is so fed up, he acts as if I’ve offended him and heads toward the window—his magic portal.

  “Everyone, Elvis has left the building!” I shout, thinking I’m clever, then plop myself into the desk chair and, looking at my computer screen, I blink. How had I missed them? I blink again. There are five e-mails!

  I look at the time stamps. They must have popped into my mailbox sometime last night after the heart-wrenching demise of my whirlwind sham romance.

  As I click to read I can’t stop thinking about my back rent, knowing I’ll soon cross that shuddersome three-month limit that stands between my life as an adult and having to move back home with my parents, who aren’t even together.

  The first e-mail is an offer of vast quantities of cash from a former head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation in return for my address and bank account number, so I’ll pass on that one. The next two are in the “too good to be true” category, offering unbelievable sums to work in my pajamas at home. And the last one requires a Bitcoin account. All false hopes. Bummer. Wait. There’s one more.

  I click on the last one and take note that Elvis has returned. Hopefully that’s a good sign. I decide not to make an announcement this time. I don’t want to scare him away. This last e-mail is about a job that involves money too, but not transferring money—writing about it—as an investigative financial journalist. It actually looks like an actual job in the actual field of journalism—hallelujah. It’s something called “Nuzegeek.” I wonder what online name generator they used to come up with that cleverly memetic moniker.

  Oh, there’s one drawback. I don’t really have any experience or qualifications as a financial investigative journalist, besides my blog subscription for Paul Krugman editorials and my love and admiration of Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times. Admittedly I fudged and said on my résumé that I covered Wall Street. Okay, it was Occupy Wall Street and the piece was about the lack of Call-A-Head Porta-Potties, but a girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do to get a job.

  Besides, it’s an interview and that is a really incredibly good thing! You never know where it will lead. I’ll just have to come up with some angle that makes me at least appear qualified.

  I squint at the computer screen. The e-mail is cyber-signed by someone named Druscilla Devereaux, assistant to “MT Wilkinson.” Druscilla? That’s got to be one of the vampire girls in Twilight, right? Or Buffy or one of those Rugrats characters? Maybe this is jobspam after all.

  MT Wilkinson, huh? Never heard of him either. Or her. I hate asexual monikers because for one thing, if you ever have to e-mail this person, how do you address them? “To Whom It May Concern”? “Yo”? It’s also unpunctuated, I might add, which doesn’t bode well for MT’s editorial prowess. But you know what? Not my problem. If MT, whoever he or she is, prefers to go sans punctuation and is transgender, what business is that of mine?

  Druscilla suggests I call to schedule a pre-interview. I imagine it’s so the crafty vampiritrix can decide if I’m worthy of an audience with MT. I snatch up my phone. Four digits in I realize it’s only 7:47 in the morning and stop. But you can bet I will be fondling that touch screen again at nine a.m. sharp, and I will be bright, charming, and professional. I will tell Druscilla Devereaux that I would love to be pre-interviewed for an interview with MT.

  I pop up from my desk chair and hustle to the kitchen for my single-serving cup of coffee, which I’m suddenly no longer thinking of as lonely. It’s a symbol of my independence!

  MT’s assistant wants to see me!

  Things are looking up!

  Or at least looking somewhere.

  CHAPTER 7

  Since the phone is in my hand, I program the Nuzegeek number into my contacts. That way, at nine o’clock sharp I can shave a few nanoseconds off my dial time. But as I punch in the last digit, Elvis purrs and rubs up against me and my trusty index finger lingers too long on the touch screen and it’s ringing! Before I can hit END, to my shock, there’s a voice.

  “Nuzegeek.”

  I’m momentarily befuddled. It’s not even eight a.m. I curse Elvis under my breath.

  “Hello?” the voice on the other end asks.

  “Ms. Devereaux?”

  “Hardly,” the voice answers with that aristocratic upper-crust English accent that reminds me fondly of Benedict Cumberbatch. There’s an indelicate snort on the other end of the phone. “Ms. Devereaux rarely arrives before nine forty-five,” the voice continues.

  “Oh.” What am I supposed to say to that? Druscilla’s work ethic is no concern of mine. “Um, well, to whom am I speaking?”

  “This is MT Wilkinson. To whom am I speaking?”

  Shit! Hang up, Clarissa. Better yet, toss the phone across the room; it’s still under warranty. Whatever you do, do not tell MT Wilkinson who you are, because it’s 7:53 in the morning and only a desperate nincompoop would call about a job at this hour.

  “I said, who is this?” MT (female, by the way) repeats in her crisp accent.

  I’m tempted to murmur “cat murderer,” then strangle Elvis and pretend this never happened. But I freeze—caller ID—would she know? Would the ASPCA find me? Damn you, telecommunications revolution! Curse you, PETA.

  “This is Clarissa Darling, Ms. Wilkinson. I received an e-mail from your assistant—”

  “Darling?” I can almost hear MT’s wheels turning as she tries to place the name. “Clarissa Darling. Hmmm … ah, yes. You applied for the investigative journalist position. Hunter College grad. Hugh Hamilton’s former intern.”

  Wow. What does it mean when a potential employer can quote your résumé off the top of her head? Either she’s got that freaky total recall thing happening, or your CV was much more impressive than everyone else’s. Or maybe it’s just that nobody else applied for the job. In any case, she’s spot-on.

  “That�
��s me,” I confirm. “Sorry to be calling so early, but—”

  “Early? Please!” MT laughs and snorts again. I hope she’s not a regular snorter. “I’ve been at my desk since six o’clock. Apparently, you like to get an early jump on the business day, too.”

  Apparently I do. I suppress the urge to spout something silly about birds and worms, which is the kind of thing my dad would say in a situation like this.

  “I’m calling to set up a pre-interview with Druscilla.”

  “So, you’re interested, then? Brilliant.” MT sounds genuinely pleased, which genuinely pleases me.

  “I’m very interested,” I assure her. “But since Druscilla’s not in, I suppose I’ll ring her up later.”

  Ring her up? Ugh! Why couldn’t I just say “call her back” like a normal American? But having MT answer her assistant’s line at this hour with her upper-crust English intonation has caught me off guard and now it’s like her accent is suddenly contagious or something. I should get off the phone immediately, before I say “bloody” or “bugger.”

  “She’ll be in around ten, I assume?”

  “If we’re lucky.” MT laughs, so I laugh, too (hopefully not with a British accent). “Tell you what, Clarissa. Let’s cut right to the chase and get you in here to meet with me directly, shall we?”

  You bet your ass we shall!

  “That sounds great.”

  “When are you available?”

  I want to tell her I could probably make it there before Druscilla does, but decide to play it a little cooler than that. “I’m free later this afternoon,” I say casually.

  “Two o’clock, then?”

  “Two it is.”

  “Lovely.”

  It’s on the tip of my tongue to “lovely” her right back, but instead I go with a good ol’ American, “See you then, and thank you.”

  The second I hang up, a shriek of pure joy escapes my lips, sending Elvis into the bedroom to escape. Seriously, what are the chances of a person inadvertently calling a place of business at sunrise and then having the executive with whom she hopes to schedule an interview actually answer an underling’s phone and be good-natured about it? That’s got to be a positive omen, right? And despite a conspicuous lack of vowels in her name, I have a very positive feeling about MT. She sounded really down-to-earth, approachable, like if we ever ended up in some ladies’ room peeing in adjacent stalls, I wouldn’t feel the least bit wonky about asking her to hand me a wad of toilet paper under the divider.

  Okay, maybe that’s going too far.

  She just seemed nice, even with a British twang. True, Ms. Wilkinson is a bit driven, what with her office hours starting at dawn and all. But if I’m being honest, I’m drawn to high achievers (Norm notwithstanding), which is why this whole job drought has been so hard on me.

  I shimmy around my apartment for a full five minutes performing a pagan dance of exultation to honor the Deity of Job Security, or at least to appease the demigod of Getting One’s Foot in the Employment Door. Take that, unemployment office guy! Elvis peeks gingerly out of the bedroom to see what he’s missing. I look up that total recall thing, just in case it happens to come up in conversation with MT later. Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great had it. Supposedly they knew all their soldiers by sight, all twenty-five thousand of them. For the record: It’s called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, or H-SAM for short.

  I think of Sam and suddenly I feel like calling him. I deserve it. I’ve got a job interview! I think he’d get quite the chuckle out of hearing I might be on the verge of doing something in the financial realm. Besides, it’s been so long since I’ve heard from him.

  Sam’s not your typical millennial when it comes to social media. He has a Facebook page, but unlike Jody, who changes her profile picture at forty-three-minute intervals and has a Snapchat of every Frappuccino she’s ever ordered, the last photo Sam posted was from his college graduation, and that was in 2009. He was wearing a pair of board shorts and flip-flops with nothing else under his gown.

  He’s not a tweeter, a texter, or fond of Instagram either, but to be fair, this is because half the time he’s probably somewhere on the planet where the closest thing they have to cell phone reception is carrier pigeons. He also spends a lot of time underwater, researching stuff where the algae-to-sea-horse ratio is higher than the Wi-Fi-signal-to-noise ratio.

  Sam had been a skateboarder at school in Ohio, but once he saw the ocean, he knew that was the only place he wanted to be. After only one summer in Montauk, he was cutting aerial barrel rolls across point breaks in no time. His dad, who is an accomplished sportswriter and the most laid-back parent on the planet, always said that he’d be fine if Sam became a surfer and read a few hundred books along the way. So Sam majored in marine biology and diving technology and traveled more places than I’ve imagined.

  And get this: He writes letters. On paper! And mails them! With stamps! From exotic places. How retro. Can you imagine? I’ve saved every letter he’s ever written, even the ones with the gloppy smudges that smell suspiciously like chum. I respond to every one but a lot of times my letter arrives at the place where he used to be and the envelope comes back to me. But I don’t care. I love writing him.

  I try to remember how long it’s been since the last letter Sam sent me and I can’t. Has it been so long that I can’t even recall? Seems impossible. Well, it’s time to do something about that!

  I don’t know if it’s three a.m. in Bora Bora or on the Bazaruto Archipelago or wherever he is at this moment, but I touch the screen and tap his name. That’s the nice thing about cell coverage: You can be joyfully ignorant of time zones. The phone rings once, twice, and I get hopeful, but then it skirts right to voice mail. Damn.

  “Sam Anders here. Say something memorable at the sound of the tone.”

  Still, it’s great to hear his voice, even if it is coming to me from the ether of cellular airspace and was recorded weeks or months ago. Sometimes he doesn’t even have a voice message. I’m always tempted to leave something like “Can’t talk long, the contractions are coming three minutes apart. Hope you get back in time.” But I never do.

  “Hey, Sam!” I say cheerfully after the beep. “Just wanted to catch up, say hello. It’s been a while since … well, you know. Hope you’re good. Be in touch? Anytime. Well, not exactly memorable, but you are! Miss you. Bye.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Was it Henry David Thoreau who said, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”? Maybe it was Lindsay Lohan, right after the unfortunate necklace-lifting incident. Either way, I strongly disagree. Aside from great friends, good coffee, and my First Amendment right to protect my journalistic sources, there’s nothing I value more than new clothes. Especially if they’re old ones. Nearly half the items in my wardrobe are two decades more mature than I am.

  Elvis follows me into my closet where we breathe in the heady aroma of linen, silk, cotton, and denim. One of the things I don’t hate about my apartment is the closet. By New York standards, this thing should have its own zip code. This was a huge factor when I answered the roommate ad in the Norm aftermath. Norm and I had to settle for what amounted to little more than a broom closet—fine for Norm’s grungy Ziggy Marley T-shirts and worn-out Levi’s 501s but not at all conducive to crinoline. So when I moved out, my real estate philosophy was simple: Keep your river views, your liveried doormen, and your on-site laundry; I’ll take sweater shelves, shoe racks, and hanging space any day of the week.

  Who’d have thought such storage nirvana could be found in the Financial District? Once Felice, late of Scarsdale, bailed on NYC, my closet space doubled. I’m good for now, at least until economic necessity forces me to find another roommate (other than Elvis). Thanks to my spacious closet, vintage Jean Paul Gaultier no longer has to rub up against secondhand Alexander McQueen that I snagged at a church sale. My practically priceless Mary Quant hot pants and my very own well-worn mid-’90s Doc Martens have lots of room to breathe, and th
e best part is that I can continue to frequent those trunk shows of edgy, up-and-coming designers who are still broke enough to sell their samples cheap in an effort to pay off their FIT student loans.

  I have a nearly boundless space to bring home all my fashion treasures and introduce them to the other clothes in my giant closet, trusting that when the overhead light goes out, they will successfully mingle, mate, and breed all sorts of new and incredible one-of-a-kind outfits. Let’s face it: I’ve been mixing and matching since I was a toddler.

  What I hate most in fashion is coordination, like when you wear blue shoes with a blue jacket and a blue something in your hair. I like fashion when you invent it. Not having been blessed with the sort of mother from whom I could glean any real sense of style (Janet Darling was all about the mom jeans and the polo shirts—tucked in!) left me in an open field to experiment and develop my own style.

  I still rock my wardrobe enough to make some people wonder about my sanity, but as my taste evolves, I get way more compliments than ever before—especially from women asking me where and how I pulled it together.

  In high school, people always wanted to know the secret of my clothes. Someone even accused me of being a postmodern Pippi Longstocking, which slightly offended me at the time. Even I didn’t know how to answer them until I discovered that my secret actually had a name: Loulou.

  Loulou de la Falaise.

  Louise Vava Lucia Henriette le Bailly de la Falaise was her christened name. And I used to think Clarissa Marie Darling was a burden. Just imagine if one of your three middle names was “Vava”?

  Loulou was radiantly beautiful with a tangle of curly hair and a laugh that crackled with delight. Best known as the charismatic muse of Yves Saint Laurent, she was much more than that to me. She was the woman who epitomized my self-made, put-together sense of who I am.

  To have lived her glamorous life!

  La Falaise was allegedly baptized not with holy water but with “Shocking,” the scent by fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, her mother, Maxine de la Falaise’s, employer. Loulou inspired YSL’s famous women’s tuxedo “Le Smoking” and his see-through blouses. She was a woman who flaunted her well-worn beauty with mermaid insouciance and a sense of amused irony and detachment.