I was so smooth it sometimes hurt.
There was no bed—just the scratchy houndstooth couch, which Meghan discovered was a pullout. I prayed for clean sheets; God, for once, heard my plea. Meghan wrestled a fitted sheet onto the wafer-thin mattress as I tugged some cases over pillows.
“Good night,” I told Meghan’s shape.
“Goot night, Meester Vahhhdcheck.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“Vyyy know.”
We settled in for sleep. Well, she did, anyway.
I sat up and watched her for a while. Her lips were parted slightly, long blond hair fanning the lumpy pillow—a perfect vision of peace. Then again, Meghan seems at ease in any given environment. Put her in a prix fixe Walnut Street restaurant or a South Street dive on PBR and Jack night. She belongs, either way.
And she can pretty much float in and out of any situation she wants. Once I asked her what she did for a living, and she told me she was “deferring life.” Meghan can do this because she is the youngest daughter of a powerful Center City lawyer.
I, on the other hand, am the son of a dead hippie musician, and I feel out of place pretty much everywhere. Even people in dives don’t seem too sure about me. I believe that was either my saving grace as a reporter, or my undoing. John Gregory Dunne once wrote that reporters were supposed to feel like outcasts, hands and noses pressed up against the glass, watching the party on the other side. Sounded about right to me.
Nothing has ever happened between me and Meghan, a state of affairs that seems likely to continue the rest of our natural lives. I belong on the other side of the glass. I am supposed to be content to know that a woman like Meghan exists.
But why had she insisted on giving me a ride? Was this a goodbye visit? Was she just bored? Or maybe…
Maybe it was nothing at all.
A few hours later my eyes popped open, my head pounding. Probably a combination of too many beers and no food. I tossed. I turned. The humidity in the apartment was thick as an afghan blanket. Once in a while I’d glance over at Meghan. She still looked perfect.
I rolled out of bed and padded my way to the bathroom mirror, where I was confronted by a sweaty, disheveled thirty-seven-year-old who looked like he needed a nap and a hug. I splashed water over his face, cupped some into his mouth and urged him to spit.
Grandpop Henry’s bathroom was strictly no frills—just a shower stall with an opaque glass door, sink and medicine cabinet. Black-and-white-checkered tile on the floor, framed photograph of a fishing boat above the toilet. An old man’s bathroom.
I dried my face, opened the medicine cabinet door. Something banged against the wall. I pulled the door back a few inches. A metal clasp had been mounted on it. And on top of the toilet tank was an open rusty padlock. Did Grandpop actually padlock his medicine cabinet shut at night? In case what—junkies broke in and stole his denture cream?
I found an oversized vintage jar of Tylenol with a worn and cracked label. Old people never throw anything away. I glanced at the expiration date: September 1982. Not exactly promising. Wasn’t that the time around the whole tampering scare? I remember being ten years old and my mother throwing away every medicine bottle in the house, Tylenol brand or otherwise.
But the pills inside looked okay. It was entirely possible—likely, even—that my grandpop just used the same oversized plastic bottle and replenished the pills whenever he ran out. So I tapped four into my palm. They looked like 250-milligram tablets; a thousand sounded right. A few pain relievers in the middle of the night goes a long way toward easing a morning hangover.
I swallowed them, scooped more water into my mouth, swirled for a second, then spit. Chances were slim that Meghan would wake up and decide to make out with me, but I didn’t want my mouth tasting like a bar sink, just in case.
I went back to bed, slid in next to Meghan and tucked my left arm under my pillow. She was in a deep sleep. I was tired, too. Long day.
I nodded off for a second and then woke up in someone else’s room.
II
Good as Dead
I was on a cold hardwood floor. No sofa bed, no blanket, no pillow.
No Meghan.
The room looked like my grandpop’s apartment, only someone had redecorated the place while I’d been sleeping. The front windows were covered with brown cardboard and masking tape. Tiny needles of light from the El station outside shot out from between the cracks. It was dark in here, but I could make out framed photos on the walls, and in the corner, a potted fern. All of the clutter—the boxes, the milk crates—was gone.
I heard the sound of groaning wood and turned to see a dark-haired woman, about my age, maybe a little older, sitting on a sofa behind me. She didn’t seem to notice me. She was pretty, but had tired eyes, and wore a dress with little multicolored dots that look like they jumped off a bag of Wonder Bread.
“Uh, hi,” I said.
She started speaking without making eye contact.
“You need a break. Come out with me. Have an old-fashioned. My treat.”
“Excuse me?”
She used her palms to smooth out her Wonder Bread dress, then stood up and walked right by me. Like I wasn’t even there.
I pushed myself up off the floor, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Had I been sleepwalking? Did I wander into someone else’s apartment on a different floor? The layout of this room was identical to my grandpop’s apartment. Maybe I was in 2-A, or something. Of course, I had no idea how I might have pulled off such a trick.
Across the room the Wonder Bread Woman picked up a pack of Lucky Strikes from the top of my grandpop’s polished wooden desk. It looked like the same desk on which I’d lined up my empties a short while ago. Only now there was a big guy sitting behind the desk—a seriously big guy. He wore a wrinkled white shirt, and the sleeves were rolled up, revealing forearm hair thick enough to catch flies.
The woman shook a cigarette loose, clicked open a metal snap lighter, puffed the cigarette to life.
The big guy sighed.
“I still need to type up these reports and I have someone coming by shortly for a session,” he said.
“You work too many nights, Mitchell,” the woman said.
“I have to. It’s part of the exp—…job.”
“There are more interesting ways to spend the night than talking to boring patients about their dreams. You could, for instance, be talking to me.”
There was an awkward silence. Awkward for me, mostly. The fat guy behind the desk—Mitchell—finally broke it.
“Look, you should go downstairs to your boy, Erna. Feed him some dinner. It’s late. He’s probably starving.”
“The boy’s fine,” she said. “He knows how to open a can.”
Mitchell sighed and sat back in his chair. The floorboards creaked under his weight.
“Erna, sometimes I wonder if it was a mistake to let you have an apartment here.”
“Admit it. You love having me around.”
“Not when I have work to do.”
Okay, whatever was going on here, it was none of my business, and I should get the hell out. I took a few cautious steps toward the desk.
“Hey, yeah,” I said. “Look—Mitchell? Erna? I’m really sorry, guys. I don’t know what happened, but I’ll show myself out, okay?”