The View From Penthouse B - By Elinor Lipman Page 0,8

outlaw story,” she said. “They love when the bad guy gets caught and is paying his debt to society.”

She meant Charles. I didn’t correct her, didn’t say “that would be your outlaw story” because by this time we held joint custody of each other’s tribulations. I said, “Not in this situation, not with someone on the alert for crime. The law enforcement part of it would have been okay, but the rest? It would’ve brought us back to the topic of sex.”

Margot said, “I’ve never known anyone who thinks so much before she speaks. I’m the opposite. I say, ‘Hello, nice to meet you, my ex-husband is in prison and I lost all my money in a Ponzi scheme!’ I can’t help it. It just comes tripping off my tongue. And no offense, but what comes tripping off your tongue is ‘Edwin this and Edwin that. He was born missing a part of his heart.’ Men don’t find a late husband such an interesting topic.”

We then role-played. Margot said, “Pretend there’s a lapse in the conversation. You say, ‘I have an interesting situation in my own family: My sister’s husband was an obstetrician specializing in getting women pregnant, but it was more like a one-man sex ring.’ Say that. And say ‘gynecologist.’ Guys love that. You can’t lose. It’s riveting, and while it appears that you’re talking about Charles, the guys will pick up on the subtext.”

“Which is what?”

“Fucking,” said Margot. “No matter how you spin the inseminating, they’ll find it a little stirring.” She was staring at me now in an appraising fashion. She asked if I realized that I visibly shuddered when she uttered the word “sex” in the context of conversation with a potential date.

“Do not,” I said.

“Do, too. And I’m going to work on the other words that also render you silent.”

“Such as?”

“Death. Dying. The month in which it happened. The year in which it happened. And one more time: sex.”

“Why bother?” I asked.

She said that she and Betsy had talked after our last dinner. Not that they were worried . . . not that I was a drag to be around. But they had talked about something that she, the live-in sister, could work on to desensitize me to several words and concepts.

“To what end?” I asked.

“Normalcy,” she said. “Progress. Moving forward.”

“It was situational,” I told her. “Having dinner with an undercover cop set me back a few months. What was I thinking? That I could be a G-rated madam?”

Margot shook her head. “We have to move forward, both of us. What if I was stuck in the past, crying every day about my stolen money? I’d be figuring out a way to break into prison and commit murder.”

Crying every day? All she did was exaggerate. She wasn’t going to murder Bernard L. Madoff. There, I’d said it. I’d pronounced the name aloud. How’s that for a start on desensitizing? Let’s stop the psychoanalysis and the drama. I didn’t need it. I didn’t cry that often anymore.

Edwin

THOUGH I USED TO leave my retail employment off my résumé, I look back on it now with pride and nostalgia. To escape the long solitary confinement of my proofreading cubicle, I became a buyer-in-training, despite being not terribly well suited or well dressed enough to catch the eye of managers who might promote me. The job was the result of more parental networking, a propitious conversation between my mother and a stranger at a bridge tournament. And though a wrong turn professionally, it turned out to be the high point of my romantic history because Edwin and I met on the mezzanine level of Nordstrom in Farmington, Connecticut, in what now seems another life.

It was luck or kismet or just being on the right shift at the right time. The store’s famously unreliable piano player, Viktor, had come to work drunk.

“No, sorry, I do not take requests,” we sales-associates-in-training heard him say. He ranted about the stupid clichéd songs Americans always requested, which then led to a sarcastic rendition of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” He punctuated his tirade with swigs from a Styrofoam cup, its contents clearly alcohol. When he stopped playing altogether and started muttering, presumably obscenities in Russian—acoustics were wonderful in his area—two security guards rushed over.

“Sir,” said the lead guard, reaching for his walkie-talkie, a hand on Viktor’s shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” Viktor yelled.

“I think it’s time for your break,” said the guard.

Have I mentioned that we all knew Viktor, and all knew he was an émigré