“A lot of unpacking, sweetie?” the woman called. Her face shone, pasty and slick with what looked like cold cream. Something about her was off. It took Audrey a beat before she figured it out: plastic surgery. The woman’s pale, paper-thin skin was without wrinkles, though she had to be at least eighty-five. Her cheekbones were preternaturally high, and her chin was too sharp, as if its bone had been sawed to a point. The effect wasn’t pretty, but insectile—a praying mantis. Even her eyes were wrong. They were too wide for her narrow face, and as Audrey looked more closely, too perfect in their roundness, like a doll’s. Man-made holes like slits in fabric. Audrey couldn’t help it. She gasped. The woman looked inhuman.
“I said, a lot of unpacking?” the woman repeated, slower this time, like maybe Audrey was simple.
“Uh-huh,” Audrey answered. She tried not to look at the woman, then couldn’t help looking, and imagining the surgery. Skin sliced open, pulled tight, stapled closed. Bone and flesh separated like strangers.
The woman opened the door wider. Audrey blinked, then blinked longer, but both times, she saw the same thing. The woman wore an aged and yellowed dressing gown. Nineteen-twenties vintage silk—something Jean Harlow might have strutted through an old gangster movie. It fit her like the clear plastic casing butchers squeeze over sausages. Her saggy arm flesh disgorged from its short sleeves, then hung all the way down to her wrinkled elbows. Oh, Audrey hated wrinkled elbows worse than knuckles. They were like giant gerbil babies!
“You building something in there?” the woman asked. Audrey saw now, that her eyes were clouded with cataracts. Partly this was reassuring. Maybe half-blind, she didn’t realize she’d gone overboard on the surgery.
“What do you mean?” Audrey asked. A few floors down, the elevator hummed.
The woman smiled. “All that hammering about last night.”
Literal hammering? Audrey wanted to ask, Because I don’t remember that so well. Instead she said, “Sorry if I kept you up.”
“Oh, don’t you worry, sweetie. Everybody here builds. We all try our hand, but I know you’ll be the best,” she said. Then, with one useless eye, she winked.
The elevator pinged, and 14 lit up. Audrey got inside and pressed “L” just as the woman planted her bare feet on the hallway carpet. All that money spent on a wrinkle-free face and a liposuction-skinny body, but her toenails were yellow with fungus. “Don’t be a stranger!” she called.
Audrey nodded, too shocked to speak. The metal cage closed, separating her from 14C’s strange beast. “Leaping Jesus!” she muttered, as the car plunged.
9
The Business of Grief
A shooting spree in Times Square closed off Broadway, extending gridlock all the way into Harlem, so she took her chances and headed for the subway. On her ride, the #1 train slammed to a stop at Columbus Circle. Audrey clung to the metal strap in the ceiling with both hands while a middle-aged Dutch tourist in an “I NY” T-shirt and Mickey Mouse backpack stumbled down the aisle with his arms outstretched, like he was racing toward his long-lost true love, lederhosen-clad Minnie.
Before impact, he squeezed his deli coffee cup. Its lid saucered into the air. As he plunged into her chest, he crushed the cup between them. She swung from the strap while he held her shoulders for balance. The good news: The coffee was lukewarm and didn’t burn. The bad news: where to begin? Her shirt was sopping wet, and by the time she got to the office, it was 11:10.
As soon as she walked through the door, Bethy Astor popped out from behind her narrow reception podium like a restaurant hostess, and announced in a loud whisper, “You’re in so much trouble. Jill shit a brick. She shit two bricks. It’s shit-brick-splatter all over the walls.” The sun shone bright through the windows, so Bethy’s auburn hair looked like it was on fire. Devil Bethy. Slightly less annoying than regular Bethy.
“That bad?” Audrey asked. Her shirt from the coffee spill on the subway was wet and cold. Sticky, too. Figured Mr. Mickey Mouse was a three tablespoons of sugar kind of guy.
Bethy leaped across her desk so that half her body dangled. She was a friendly, nervous girl just out of college who couldn’t transfer callers without disconnecting them. Like most of the people who worked here, she wore thousand-dollar suits and her blood was blue. Also like most people here, she’d gotten her job through connections. “Sooo bad,” Bethy