Temporary Insanity Page 8

  So with both time and the weather against me, I made a mad dash for the nearest mass transit. I rode the bus back to Newter & Spade in a puddle made by my wet butt and my dripping, backcombed hair that Natalie had sprayed within an inch of its chemically enhanced life. It looked even worse by the time I arrived back at at the office; the hairspray had become a sort of insoluble glue, turning my hair into matted clumps.

  I nearly bumped into Ramona as I exited the elevator. “What happened to you?” she asked, aghast at my appearance.

  “Got caught in the rain. Sorry.”

  “Oh, dear.” She appraised my appearance. “Do you have anything you can change into?”

  I nodded. Her solicitousness was uncharacteristic.

  “I hope you don’t catch a cold.”

  “Thanks. Me, too.”

  “Because you’re too familiar with the tobacco case for me to bring in someone to replace you right now. They’ll never get up to speed. And you had better change into whatever else you have with you because you’ll ruin our furniture if you sit on the upholstery for the rest of the afternoon in that wet skirt.”

  What were you thinking, Alice? That she had a niceness gene implanted during her lunch hour?

  Nope, she was the same old Ramona. And she deserved what she got—which was the Darva outfit. Fully accessorized. I did wish I could have detangled my hair, though. After Ramona retreated to her office, Natalie and I took a trip to the ladies’ room, where she made a brave attempt to return my coiffure to some semblance of normalcy. With limited luck. The best she could manage was to tame the shellacked poufs that had been the Darva-do into flat, shellacked sections resembling cheap wall paneling. “Well, it’s a lot better than it was,” I said, appraising her efforts in the mirror. “Thanks, I owe you one.”

  “If you really mean it, you can marry Dmitri for me,” she scoffed.

  “What is it this time?” I asked her.

  “He wants some hip-hop guy to perform with the band. He doesn’t even like hip-hop. But he says he wants to make some decisions regarding our wedding. He’s mad that I’m choosing the food, the flowers, the musicians. He’s driving me crazy.”

  “So maybe he doesn’t really mean it. Maybe he’s doing this—demanding a hip-hop artist—just to try to show you he wants some control.”

  She tugged at a section of my hair that still seemed to displease her. “No, he isn’t. He’s doing it because he’s a son of a bitch.”

  As we walked back to our desks, I looked at my watch, thinking the sooner I could get out of Newter & Spade, the better. Only a couple of hours to go before I would be liberated for the day. God, I could use a drink. My extension rang and I picked up the receiver, hoping it wasn’t Ramona with a tibit of criticism she’d forgotten to impart upon first seeing my drowned rat impression.

  “Good news, muppet!” Eric. He’s the only person in the world who has ever called me that. “The sun is shining, the birds are singing, there will be no rain delay tonight!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It stopped raining. Are you up for the Yankees game this evening? First pitch is seven-thirty, so we can leave right from the office. I snagged a pair of seats in one of the company boxes closer to home plate. Kind of last-minute, I know, but no one was grabbing them because they figured the downpour this afternoon meant the game would be called. So what do you say?”

  “Don’t they let you pause for breath up there?”

  “Sorry. Shit, you’re right. I was kind of talking pretty fast, I guess. I was just so jazzed about getting the tickets and I wanted to make it up to you, for having to cancel last week. You were really understanding about that and I appreciated it.”

  Did I have a choice?

  “Thanks.” Now, I could go home and be miserable in front of Gram, ruining her evening by rehashing the horrible audition experience, or I could try to do something to take my mind off it. I opted for the latter. “You know something? I’ve had an afternoon from hell…so, what the hell? Yeah, sure, we’re on.”

  “Yee-hah! Oh, shit, that’s Harrison on my other line. Gotta run. Meet me in the lobby at six P.M. See you. ’Bye.” Eric disengaged the line.

  I swiveled my chair around and turned to my temp colleagues. “Guess who’s going to the Yankees game tonight? With Mr. Fast-Track Senior Associate?”

  Marlena, who took many things in stride when she wasn’t cursing Ramona or Bart Harrison behind their tailored backs, looked at me, appalled. “Like that? Don’t get me wrong, honey, I’m sure the cholos at the stadium will love it.”

  Shit. I’m dressed like Darva. I had visions of enduring a symphony of wolf whistles and lip-smacking on the subway ride up to the Bronx. I fingered the fabric of my suit, which I had laid out over two chairs so it would dry faster. While a business suit was nearly as inappropriate for a baseball game as what I was currently wearing, it would still draw less attention. However, there was no way I was going to be able to wear it in a couple of hours; it was still far too damp. “Well,” I sighed, “I guess this is what Eric gets.”

  “Eric and every other Newter & Spade lawyer and his wife who are going with you guys,” Marlena commented.

  Good God, I hadn’t thought about that. “I should have declined, huh?” I asked my co-workers.

  “No, I wouldn’t say that,” Roger said. “Not if you’re an exhibitionist, that is.”

  “Or suicidal,” Marlena added.

  “Have fun, muppet,” Natalie teased.

  There’s something nostalgic about walking through the tunnel at Yankee Stadium and emerging inside the legendary arena, inhaling the crisp evening air as you make your way to your seats. The organ music plays and you can almost hear the ghost of Gehrig echoing, Today-ay-ay…is the happiestest-est day-ay-ay…

  Just thinking about it makes me cry, even though I only know the famed “Pride of the Yankees” as indelibly portrayed on celluloid by Gary Cooper. Another great Yankee was being honored at this game, as it turned out. It was Yogi Berra commemorative bobble-head doll night. All children under the age of fourteen were given a ceramic replica of Mr. Malaprop. The ticket taker took a shine to me, so he gave me one of the dolls. Eric grinned at the guy, handed him a five-dollar tip, and suggested I shove the figurine in my purse or else all the Newter & Spade wives and girlfriends would want one, too. “We’re a very competitive bunch,” he warned me.

  Just before the official start of the game, Yogi was introduced, to a resounding standing ovation. He ambled from the Yankee dugout out to the pitcher’s mound, where a mike was set up.

  Today-ay-ay-ay…

  “I just want to thank everyone here for making tonight necessary,” he said.

  Eric shook his head, amused. “You gotta love this guy.” He placed his fingers together and brought them to his mouth, releasing a whistle so shrill he could have summoned a taxi in Topeka.

  Other Newter & Spade attorneys started to trickle into the stadium as Yogi was returning to the catcher’s mound to receive the ceremonial first pitch. As they scooted past us to their seats, they took one look at my Darva getup and apparently decided that Eric must have hired me for the night. When he introduced me, saying simply, “This is Alice,” he might as well have been telling them he had congenital herpes.

  While the Baltimore Orioles were having an unimpressive series of first-inning at-bats, a tall man holding the hand of a little girl passed our chairs on the way down to the very first row. In her free arm, the child was clutching a staggering array of premium items—an inflatable doll in the home team’s uniform with Bernie Williams’s number on the back of the jersey, a felt pennant, a paper sack of buttered popcorn, a pint-sized catcher’s mitt, and her Yogi Berra bobble-head icon. Her blond braids were tucked under an adult’s pin-striped Yankees cap, nearly obscuring her vision.

  “Look where you’re going, Lucy,” the man cautioned, and I recognized the voice and looked up. It was Dan Carpenter, the guy I’d met in the elevator a few weeks ago. The notc
hildless, and therefore most-likely-married Dan Carpenter, evidently.

  Lucy became distracted by a routine grounder that was misplayed at first, leading to a single. “Tag him!” she was shouting at the top of her lungs. She became aggravated at the Yankee first baseman and started jumping up and down, expertly, vociferously, and somewhat crudely conveying her impressions of the lousy fielding. The overlarge hat slouched over her eyes, and she lost her footing.

  Suddenly she was a little girl in pigtails again. “My Yogi Bear doll!” she shrieked, as she lost control of it among her possessions and helplessly watched it shatter on the cement steps just below her. She burst into gut-wrenching sobs. I watched Dan try to calm her down, but she was inconsolable. “My birthday’s ruined!” Lucy bawled.

  He steered her to their front-row seats without further incident, but the kid was not a happy camper. “I’ll get you something else, sweetheart,” Dan soothed. “What would you like? Should I buy you a jersey?”

  Lucy shook her head and her pigtails went flying. “I already have a jersey,” she said. “I want a Yogi Bear doll.”

  “But they only had a limited number of them,” reasoned Dan. “And they gave them all away. I don’t think we can get another one for you.”

  Eric, too, had been observing this scenario with interest. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he whispered to me.

  I reached into my purse.

  “Do you want to give it to them or should I?”

  I’d love to, but I refuse to approach Dan Carpenter looking like Darva. Even if he’s probably married.

  “It was your idea; you do it,” I urged him. “I’ll watch.”

  I handed Eric the Yogi Berra doll and stood up so he could get past me. He descended the three steps or so to the first row and tapped Dan on the shoulder. The crowd was too noisy for me to hear exactly what Eric told them, but it appeared to be something along the lines of, “My friend and I wanted your daughter to have this.”

  He received an odd response. Lucy broke into a megawatt grin, jumped up and down, and seized the doll from Eric’s hands. Dan shook his head. Did he not want to accept the gift? In response to something Dan said to him, Eric turned and pointed toward our seats, directly at me, in fact. He motioned with his hand for me to stand up and join them.

  Oh, God. No way to avoid it now.

  I rose and tugged on the hem of my miniskirt, feeling like Daisy-Mae-visits-a-kindergarten-class. Gingerly in my high-heeled Candies, I walked down the few steps to Dan’s seats.

  “Hey, sit the fuck down!” one rather energetic Yankee fan yelled.

  “Sit on my lap!” another called.

  “Sit on my face!” chorused a third.

  Lovely. A class act, all of you.

  “Jesus, it’s you,” said Dan, when I approached their seats.

  Eric looked perplexed. “Do you two know each other?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, sounding like the Hertz rent-a-car ad campaign.

  I’m not really a slut, Dan, I was just trying to play one on TV.

  “We met in the elevator of my apartment building,” I explained. “Dr. Carpenter was on his way to a house call.”

  “You’re a doctor?” Eric sounded impressed. “What’s your specialty?”

  “Pediatrics,” I answered.

  “What are you two talking about?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked Dan.

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I’m confused,” Eric said.

  “You’re confused?” Dan echoed.

  “He was carrying one of those black bags like the pediatrician brought to our house when I was a kid,” I said. I pointed my finger at Dan. “And you said it was an emergency and you were making a house call.”

  Dan burst out laughing. I felt my face growing redder and redder, from the apples of my cheeks to the roots of my overteased hair. “I’m not a doctor—I’m a carpenter!”

  I was temporarily flummoxed. “Dan Carpenter—”

  “Who is a carpenter,” he replied, still laughing. “I yam what I yam,” he added, imitating Robin Williams’s imitation of Popeye. “I carry my tools in that bag. I do custom cabinetry, furniture, and the day you met me, one of my clients had a wobbly dining table leg and was in the middle of preparing a huge dinner party.”

  “He built me a dollhouse, too,” Lucy chimed in. “For my sixth birthday. That was last year. And even made me patio furniture.”

  “Well, everyone needs a well-appointed patio,” Eric said encouragingly.

  “And he built me a grandfather clock for the house. From scratch,” the child added proudly. “It chimes, too.” She was clutching the Yogi Berra bobble-head like it was a plaster saint.

  “Maybe you should let me take that from you, honey,” Dan suggested to the girl. “Don’t you want to put on your mitt? You’re in a great position to catch fouls and pop-ups.” The remark was a silver bullet. I was impressed with the way Dan deftly managed to maneuver the ceramic doll away from Lucy without needing to mention that it might end up shattered as well if she didn’t relinquish it for the time being.

  “And I think we should let Eric and Alice get back to their seats so they can enjoy the rest of the game.” He whispered something into Lucy’s ear.

  “Thank you, Eric and Alice!” she crowed.

  Then I caught Dan looking at my outfit. “I’ll…just be…go…sit down now. Nice to see you again.”

  “Uh-yeah,” he said.

  “That was a very sweet idea, by the way,” I told Eric, when we returned to our seats. I gave him a kiss on the cheek. He smelled woodsy.

  “You were a really good sport about it, too, muppet.”

  “What a great father Dan is,” I added.

  But Derek Jeter had just drilled a ball that was sailing out toward Monument Park, the crowd had risen to its feet, and my date didn’t hear a word I said.

  I can’t say that we were ostracized by Eric’s colleagues, but they certainly didn’t make any effort to converse with us during the game. Eric was quite knowledgeable about baseball and he made the experience a lot of fun for me. I didn’t mind the fact that his friends, most of them Newter & Spade partners and their wives or girlfriends, were ignoring us; it gave Eric and me a chance to begin to become better acquainted. I learned that he was born in Queens but had grown up in Connecticut and attended fancy schools like Groton and Brown. It made him a bit of an intellectual snob, but I’ve discovered far worse evils in men. I’d be the last person to fault anyone for enjoying six-hundred-page biographies or for being more fluent in current events than I could ever hope to be in this lifetime. I liked his company and his easygoing generosity. Giving Lucy the bobble-head doll wasn’t exactly offering to underwrite her college tuition, but it was a nice gesture, and it stood out in contrast to his colleagues’ self-absorption.

  So when Eric asked if he could take me to a movie one evening later in the week, providing Bart Harrison didn’t require his presence in the office, I readily said yes. I thoroughly enjoyed the gentle goodnight kiss we shared when he dropped me off in a cab in front of my apartment building. Not only that, I actually found myself looking forward to working at Newter & Spade.

  Sometimes New York can be a very small world. More than seven million stories in this city and Izzy, Dorian, and I were sharing three of them as we sat in a church basement in Greenwich Village waiting to be called to the set of Kevin Costner’s latest movie. Since production companies often hire dozens if not hundreds of extras, depending on the scenes they’re shooting, it’s not unusal for actors to run into their friends on set or in the holding area reserved for the background players.

  “I think tonight makes an even dozen,” Dorian remarked. He started counting film shoots on his fingers.

  “Jeez, we’ve really worked on a dozen films together?” Izzy asked.

  “I think this makes a dozen where we were actually called for the same scenes,” I said. “I know I’ve don
e work on some of the same pictures you have, but on different days. And Dorian’s in practically everything, so that almost doesn’t count. Who’da thunk that—what was it—about eight years ago, when we all met at Nick Katzanides’s memorial, that we’d still be such pals today? You know everyone always says let’s stay in touch, but you almost never do.”

  “I think it was Nick’s ghost that did it,” Izzy posited. “Love him or hate him, if you ever studied with him, it bonded you to everyone else who ever did, too.”

  I nodded my head in agreement. “Even famous people. I had an audition for the the show that Jon Santos is doing, and I hadn’t seen him since the memorial. But it was like old-home week.”

  “It didn’t matter how you knew Nick, either; it still bonded you,” Dorian observed with a chuckle. “Alice studied with him in college, Izzy took his private class, and I was directed by him in summer stock. If you could imitate Nick, it made you family—”

  ”—With everyone else who could imitate Nick!” I laughed. “Isabel, what are you doing? Do you call that acting??” I exclaimed in Nick’s nasal Greek accent.

  “Oh, God, he was brutal!” Izzy proclaimed.

  “But brilliant,” said Dorian. “He was the best director I ever had. You think I’m good at script analysis?” he asked me. “Who do you think taught me everything I know?”

  “Hmnh. Eight years ago, we three were total strangers toasting our mutual mentor with copious quantities of ouzo. And now look at us.” I put an arm around each of them. “My best friends in the world. I love you guys so much.” I felt tears start to spring to my eyes.

  “Oh, no. Don’t cry or you’ll make me cry.” Izzy’s eyes grew moist.

  “Then you’ll both ruin your makeup. And the ladies’ rooms in church basements are notorious for their unflattering lighting.”

  Izzy rewarded Dorian with a gentle shot to the ribs.

  Dorian watched the crafts service caterers setting up tables for the dinner break. We’d had a six P.M. call time, which meant we’d be shooting through the night. Izzy and I had come straight to the set from our respective day jobs. It was now close to midnight and I was bouncing around the room, due to all the caffeine and sugar I’d ingested while waiting around the holding area with nothing to do but drink coffee, eat Krispy Kremes, and shoot the breeze with my two closest friends. We hadn’t done a damn thing since we’d signed in. Every time the production assistants came in and scanned the room, handpicking the actors they wanted from among the hundred or so hirees, none of us was selected. This wasn’t unusual. There have been entire shoots where I’d done absolutely nothing but sit around, until the final scene of the day when a PA would come into the holding area and ask who hadn’t worked yet, then take those background players and use them for whatever was left to film.