The mother offered her email but I said I’d prefer her street address as my computer had just crashed — it’s tragic, I lost everything.
You’re jinxing yourself.
She asked wouldn’t I rather she give me the phone.
Wouldn’t you?
I was afraid it’d be a mobile but she gave me the landline too.
And you did a reverse lookup?
I had to look up how to do a reverse lookup. You’ll find both on my next invoice itemized separately.
And you’re going to call or send a postcard? Or go over there yourself?
No.
Don’t tell me I should go.
No I’ve met a new man. I call him Alban. He’s Albanian. He works security at my multiplex for the big crowds on the weekends. I’m always wasting Sundays and we talk. He lets me into a double feature no problem. I made a quiche for him last week.
Not Alban, his real name was Enver. He was a recent immigrant, born in Tirana. He worked for a security company that had classified his language skills as Minimal. Before moving to the area he’d lived in New York, which is where all immigrants live until they sleep with their brother’s wife. Enver was not even attracted to her.
His brother’s couch was three-cushioned, comfy. And his job, his first job his brother vouched for him, wasn’t bad. Enver worked for a friend of his brother’s at a pizza joint called, coincidentally, Two Brothers. Albanians being swarthy and proximal to the Mediterranean by birth pretending they knew their dough and cheese and sauce. But Enver wasn’t allowed to make the pies. He was supposed to sit on a stool by the back door, held ajar by cinderblock, waiting until his brother’s friend’s minivan appeared on his monitor. Then he was to open the door all the way, accepting from this man, Arben, whatever he was handed. Electronics, often bags containing something that looked like flour but was not — it was heroin — and less often, bags filled with cash (the entire ring was busted).
Enver was lonely in Brooklyn. His brother came home late from Manhattan. His cousin in Staten Island hated Brooklyn. His cousin in New Jersey hated Staten Island. Enver understood no relevant geography. Across the way was a hair and nail salon. That’s it. No other fact or germane sensation.
He tried to make friends. Like when that one time he was allowed to work the register he didn’t charge three kids for three slices plus diet grape sodas.
They looked hungry, Boss, he said to his boss, a taciturn elderly American with an erratic scar across his neck in the shape of a dollar sign who was the only employee permitted to make the pies and the next time Enver was in back watching the monitor and the minivan pulled up, when he opened the door Arben smacked him in the mouth and said, You looked hungry.
Arben said that in this language.
One night Enver spun home, spread himself like a fine crust on the couch and started watching — the TV, like the fraternal oven, was always on.
Appropriately disappointing: it was a cookingshow, the woman in it was cooking.
Liridona, wrung from the shower, sat next to him.
The recipe was just some simple stirfry.
Peel your vegetables but lose your nutrients.
By the time the show had cut to commercial Liridona’s robe was floored.
Next morning he left for Jersey, pawning himself off on a cousin. His brother never found out, that’s why Enver was still alive with intact knees.
Enver said to his brother, Time for you to have babies, as if that explained his abandonment of the couch.
He went to sit for that test at a security company his cousin’s friend moonlit for, went to a stripmall themed Early American Grange, sat at a desk exposed to a recently foreclosed storefront’s glass — a former florist’s still perfumed — and pondered the questions.
They could use him, they explained, as store security — that was the best job, requiring some sort of intelligence and special training — with the worst being crowd controclass="underline" bars and nightclubs, live events. Almost everyone was retired law enforcement. The proctor, a tubby Hispanic kid who taught communication skills at a community college (a frustrated standup comic), kept calling him “Erven,” then “Mile High” because the corrected Enver sounded like Denver. They laughed through the exam. “Juan will be back ______ fifteen minutes.” (A) in; (B) on; (C) with; (D) about.
Freshly flowering bushes and trees went out of their ways to impress beauty on the youth — the scads of polished khaki kids stalking the kempt paths, groping in the topiary. A frisbee flew overhead. Birds high up enough resembled frisbees. Another class earning credit by punting at soccer. Extraneous jackets were laid out for impromptu picnics. Water bottles wafting clarifying alcohol. A girl smoked a cigarette wedged between her girlfriend’s toes.
She came out of Reading Freud PSY 23090, unbound from Green Hall and onto the green, headed toward Chancellor for a coffee. Did she want it iced? Indubitably. Anything to go with that? No that will be all. It was like a phrasebook come to life. What a terrifically executed textbook exchange, why thank you.
Emmanuelle wore mosquitoeye sunglasses, a tshirt whose logo read Brand, her skirt never showed lines, no underwear map.
While she waited for change her phone rang, she took the call (from friend R., poli sci major, public health minor, in the midst of a shaming crawl back from a date the night before with a 33 year old iBanker in the city), skimmed milk into her coffee and half a packet of artificial sweetener without bothering to stir.
At the testudinal traffic light she crossed.
College students driving adult cars, vehicles actually too fancy for any adult and perhaps better never driven. They drove them impulsively, alternately absent then reckless as if they already had jobs to get to.
Nassau Street laid the boundary of campus.
Em caffeinated while walking, hollowing her cheeks, pursing for suction then chatty again. Such oversize overactive labials. Let’s imagine the waves radiating from her phone — what if they were visible? what if they were colored by her mood? Rainbows, refractive rainbows. Wavelets of talk coursing through the air, coursing daily through our own ears and mouths and minds — yet we’re never privy to that talk. Or we’ll become privy only when it develops into tumors on the brain.
Retail gave purchase to the quieter suburban.
At a corner with a receptacle she stopped, sipped her last, tossed the coffee inside — not a trashcan but an empty newspaper vending machine.
The day was warming, still not warm enough for flipflops — Em’s thongs to soles athwack.
She took two more blocks then rounded the corner: Victorians — two floors, three floors — windows that hadn’t been cleaned in failed semesters, porches in a slump. Stoops stooped. The lawns diseased.
Em stopped to tuck phone between ear and shoulder, scratched in her handbag for keys.
Enver crossed the street and waited at the bottom of the stoop until Em turned the key in the lock then he took the stoop in two steps and once on the porch gave her a smile of glittering fillings.
She kept the door open for him with a flipflop. Thinking he was the roofer?
She was still on the phone but on hold. (Her friend’s banker date had called, the slut beeped over.)
Enver entered, held the door.
She had a teensy stud in the left naris, a diamond pimple.
He waited for her to check mail.
Yes? Em turned to say, flicking hair into a quote behind the uphoned ear.
Enver closed his eyes.
He couldn’t talk while looking at her sunglasses.
What do you want?
She flipped shut her phone.
He said, I want you to change your blogs — opening his eyes only after remembering what Marjorie had told him — I want you to take what you say on your blogs about Mono Man down.