By her teens, the backyard frolicking of her childhood having given way to a covert if demanding fitness regime, Serenata entertained jobs that might put exertion to practical employ. She pictured herself as the only woman on a construction crew, pounding spikes, wielding big flats of Sheetrock, and manipulating heavy jackhammers—thus amazing her male coworkers, who would scoff at the upstart girlie at first, but would come to revere her and defend her honor in bars. Or she might become a great asset to a team of moving men (who would scoff, come to revere her, and defend her honor in bars . . . ). She contemplated tree surgery. Alas, hard physical labor was apparently low-skilled and low-waged, and her middle-class parents dismissed all these backbreaking prospects as preposterous.
For years, the only child had amused her parents by performing original radio plays. She recorded all the parts on a portable cassette player, punctuating the dramas with sound effects—door slams, floor tromping, crumpling paper for fire. At once, her girlhood’s reigning ambition to pursue a solitary occupation seemed to display a gut self-knowledge. What fit the bill, then, was to become a writer.
Oh, her parents didn’t regard this aspiration as any more practical than becoming a construction worker. They expected she’d just get married. But at least a literary bent would argue for a college education, which would raise the quality and earning power of her suitors. So with their blessing she enrolled at Hunter, within shouting distance of New Brunswick, emerging like most liberal arts graduates as roundly unemployable.
Serenata’s twenties were aimless and hand-to-mouth. She couldn’t afford her own apartment, so (anathema) had to share digs with other girls whose twenties were aimless and hand-to-mouth. The menial jobs she procured hardly required a college degree. She tried to make time for “her work” without saying the pretentious expression aloud. Mortifyingly, every other peer she encountered in New York City also described themselves as writers, who were also making time for “their work.”
It was manning the phones at Lord & Taylor’s Customer Service that turned her tide. A young man called about needing to return a gift of a tasteless tie. He described the gaudy item in comical detail. He enticed her to explain what a customer should do both with and without a receipt, when surely he had the receipt or he didn’t. It dawned dimly on the store’s representative that he was keeping her on the line. Finally he implored her to repeat after him, “Please watch the closing doors.”
“What?”
“Just say it. As a favor. Please watch the closing doors.”
Well, it wasn’t as if he’d asked her to repeat “Please can I suck your dick.” She complied.
“Perfect,” he said.
“I’m not sure how one would say that badly.”
“Most people would say that badly,” he countered—and proceeded to explain that he was a civil servant with the city’s Department of Transportation. He’d been tasked with finding a new announcer for recorded public transit advisories, and begged her to try out for the job. She was leery, of course. As a precaution, she looked up the NYC Department of Transportation in the phone book, and the address he’d provided matched.
In the end, it was decided higher up that New Yorkers weren’t quite ready for female authority, and she didn’t get the job. As Remington shared with her later, one of the other men on the team had declared after replaying her audition tape that no male passenger listening to that sultry voice would ever hear the content of the announcements; he’d be fantasizing about fucking the loudspeaker.
Yet before the disappointing determination was made, she did agree to a dinner date—albeit only after Remington’s second invitation. She was obliged to turn down the spontaneous one on the heels of her audition because the bike trip between her East Village apartment and the DOT office downtown was officially too short to “count,” and it wouldn’t do to dine out when she hadn’t yet exercised. They agreed to meet at Café Fiorello on Broadway, a high-end Italian trattoria that longtime New York residents would generally consign to tourists. Despite the upscale venue, Serenata, as ever, insisted on cycling.
From a distance in the restaurant’s entryway, Remington had apparently watched her standard Cinderella transformation beside an alternate-side parking sign. She toed off a ratty sneaker, balanced on the other foot, and shimmied from one leg of her jeans—ensuring that the skirt fluttering over them continued to cover her person in a seemly fashion. It was still nippy in March, and ivory panty hose had doubled as insulation. From a pannier, she withdrew a pair of killer heels in red patent leather. Steadying herself on one high heel by holding the bike seat, she repeated the striptease with the opposite leg and stuffed her rolled jeans into the pannier. After giving the skirt a straightening tug, she applied a hasty touch-up of lipstick; the ride itself would provide the blush. She removed her helmet, shook out the thick black hair, and bound it with a homemade fabric binder not yet called a scrunchie. By then Remington had tucked back into the restaurant, enabling her to check her filthy jacket and the greasy saddlebags, their erstwhile hi-viz yellow now the queasy, sullen color of a spoiled olive.
Over a lobster pasta, her date responded to her hopes to become a writer with a neutrality that must have disguised an inner eye roll. After all, she was rolling her eyes at herself. “I’m afraid the aspiration has started to seem self-indulgent. And everyone I run into in this town wants to be a writer, too.”
“If it’s what you really want to do, it doesn’t matter that it’s a cliché.”
“But I wonder if it is what I want to do. I do thrive on isolation. But I don’t yearn to reveal myself. I want frantically to keep other people out of my business. I prefer to keep my secrets. Whenever I try my hand at fiction, I write about characters who have nothing to do with me.”
“Ha! Maybe you do have a future in literature.”
“No, there’s another problem. This isn’t going to sound good.”
“Now you’ve intrigued me.” He leaned back, leaving his fork in the fettuccini.
“You know how people on the news are always starving, or dying in an earthquake? I’m starting to realize that I don’t care about them.”
“Natural disasters are often far away. The victims seem abstract. Maybe it’s easier to feel for folks closer to home.”
“Suffering people don’t seem abstract. On television, they look real as sin. As for the people closer to home—I don’t care about them, either.”
Remington chuckled. “That’s either refreshing or appalling.”
“I’d opt for appalling.”
“If you don’t care about other people, what does that make me?”
“Possibly,” she said cautiously, “an exception. I make a few. But my default setting is obliviousness. That’s a lousy qualification for a writer, isn’t it? Besides. I’m not sure I’ve got the voice to stand out.”
“On the contrary,” he said, “you do have the voice. I’d gladly listen to you read the entire federal tax code.”
She enhanced the silky tone in her throat with a rough edge: “Really?” Remington admitted later that the adverb gave him an erection.