Chapter One
“Baby!”
And I cringe. I have developed a Pavlovian response to the term of endearment “baby.” Instant dread.
“Baby, it’s me!”
She doesn’t know I’m here. How could she know I’m here? I don’t move a muscle.
“Come on, baby! Open the door! It’s me!”
I hear a fistful of pebbles smack onto the lower windows of the building. It’s probably just the second-floor windows. Clancy hasn’t got much of an arm. And since the second-floor is divided into two apartments directly above the front door, I’m not sure if she’s strafing Marc’s apartment or Linda’s apartment or both. But it only matters if she cracks the glass because Marc and Linda are single young professionals who work normal Manhattan hours and it’s not yet three p.m.
I exhale slowly. Weigh my options.
“Baby! Are you home!? Baby!”
More pebbles hitting glass. Who stands on a sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon throwing fistfuls of gravel at the windows of a brownstone? After all these years, Clancy still has the ability to mortify me like nobody else in the world. That must mean something.
“Hey, there, cutie-pie!” I hear a window slide open, one floor below me. Sluggo. He shouts from his third-floor window, “You want me to buzz you in?!”
“Oh, hey, Sluggo!” Clancy shouts back sweetly. His real name is Mike, but everyone calls him Sluggo because he looks exactly like this character from an old-time comic strip called Nancy. The fact that it’s such an esoteric reference speaks to how much he looks like this Sluggo character. And it’s not a good look. Go ahead and Google it.
“Cutie-pie, when are you gonna forget that bozo upstairs and start taking the elevator to floor three?!”
“Sluggo, you rascal!” Clancy shouts playfully. I could vomit.
And now I have to get involved because Sluggo has no problem engaging in a full-on third-floor-to-street dialogue at high volume. And that’s not fair to the neighborhood moms. I walk to the front of my apartment and slide my window open.
“Oh, there you are!” Clancy shouts, all cutesy-like, as if she’s talking to a kitten. “Hey, baby!” She’s bouncing up and down, waving at me from the sidewalk. What Clancy looks like is a nineteen-fifties movie star, updated for the new millennium. Think Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield, re-scaled for two-thousand nineteen.
Take how she’s dressed right now. You lay Clancy’s clothes out on a bed and you’d think someone was screen dressing a right-wing television personality. You’ve got two strings of pearls. You’ve got a wide-collared white knit sweater with short sleeves. You’ve got a Laura Ashley lightweight skirt, dark blue with big white polka dots. You’ve got snow-white tights - not stockings, like a normal woman would wear. She’s wearing tights, like a child who’s dressed up for church.
But you put these clothes on Clancy and it’s a wet dream come true for any guy who struggles with repressed mommy fantasies, which – keeping it real – is probably all guys in some shape or form. Clancy’s two strings of pearls hang just a bit too tight, not quite a choker, but definitely not country-club loose. And they do just enough to attract eyes to the neck of her knit sweater, the collar so wide as to allow clear and frequent visibility of a lightly laced, sheer white bra that strains to contain two of the most spectacular breasts in the world today. The Laura Ashley lightweight skirt, which no one would ever confuse with a miniskirt, is just short enough to billow with the slightest breeze or twirl, revealing the opaque whiteness of her tights and panties with a frequency that you would think is intentional. And it probably is. Maybe it is. I’ve never gotten up the nerve to ask her, because asking would make me feel like I’m the pervert.
Anyway, intentional or not – almost definitely intentional, I think – what Clancy does to grown men is make them feel the way puberty-aged boys would feel about a middle school teacher that’s Disney princess hot and remarkably careless in terms of keeping her private parts covered.
When we first started dating, this whole accidental exposure schtick bothered me. After a couple of years, I have to admit, it kind of turned me on. But lately I’m just over it. And even though we dated for four years and were engaged for eight months, I never spoke to her about it.
Makes me wonder if we ever had the slightest clue what real intimacy is all about.
“Aren’t you going to buzz me up?!” Clancy shouts.
I look down at her, slide my index finger across my neck in an aggressive throat-slashing gesture. Clancy’s mouth drops open. Score. Then she smiles at me, as if we’re sharing a joke. Take back the score.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Clancy yells, oblivious to how many innocent, well-to-do mothers are negotiating nap time with their toddlers on this high-end Jersey City waterfront block.
“It means we’re not on Staten Island,” I reply, my voice loud enough for her to hear but still an octave or two below an actual shout. “We don’t scream at each other from streets and windows around here.”
“I got no problem with window-to-street dialogue, cutie-pie, if that’s…” Sluggo shouts and lets the balance of his sentence hang. He’s got the same view of Clancy that I do – her wide collar hanging so loose below us that, even from our height, you can see the outlines of pink nipples pressed tightly against her sheer bra. Honestly, I’ve known no other woman so adept and consistent in doling out the cheap thrills.
Sluggo has freely admitted to me that he is deeply in love with Clancy. Just like pretty much every repressed male is in love with Clancy. Every repressed male except for me. The irony is not lost. I point down at Clancy and then point to the front door, shut the window, walk to the buzzer.
All the other tenants in the building have video buzzer tech that lets them see who’s in the vestibule, talk back and forth, open the door – all from their smart phones. My buzzer, it’s a custom job. Restored, actually. From the building’s original buzzer system, installed at build in the nineteen-fifties. Fortunately, contractors never tear out old wiring systems when buildings are updated, because… why bother? So I just had my contractors patch up some of the prior electrical work and, bingo, it’s as good as old. The buzz is so loud that I can hear it clearly through my open fourth-floor window.