Summer and the City. Candace Bushnell

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СКАЧАТЬ Campbell’s soup can. In honor of Valerie Solanas.” She pauses. “The SCUM Manifesto? Andy Warhol?”

      “Oh, sure.” I have absolutely no idea what’s she talking about. But I’m not about to admit my ignorance. Plus, this girl sounds kind of . . . bizarre.

      “Good. I’ll see you in front of Saks.” She hangs up before I can get her name.

      Yippee! I knew it. The whole time my Carrie bag was gone, I had a strange premonition I’d get it back. Like something out of one of those books on mind control: visualize what you want and it will come to you.

      “A-hem!”

      I look up from my cot and into the scrubbed pink face of my landlady, Peggy Meyers. She’s squeezed into a gray rubber suit that fits like sausage casing. The suit, combined with her shining round face, gives her an uncanny resemblance to the Michelin Man.

      “Was that an outgoing call?”

      “No,” I say, slightly offended. “They called me.”

      Her sigh is a precise combination of annoyance and disappointment. “Didn’t we go over the rules?”

      I nod, eyes wide, pantomiming fear.

      “All phone calls are to take place in the living room. And no calls are to last more than five minutes. No one needs longer than five minutes to communicate. And all outgoing calls must be duly listed in the notebook.”

      Duly, I think. That’s a good word.

      “Do you have any questions?” she asks.

      “Nope.” I shake my head.

      “I’m going for a run. Then I have auditions. If you decide to go out, make sure you have your keys.”

      “I will. I promise.”

      She stops, takes in my cotton pajamas, and frowns. “I hope you’re not planning to go back to sleep.”

      “I’m going to Saks.”

      Peggy purses her lips in disapproval, as if only the indolent go to Saks. “By the way, your father called.”

      “Thanks.”

      “And remember, all long-distance calls are collect.” She lumbers out like a mummy. If she can barely walk in that rubber suit, how can she possibly run in it?

      I’ve only known Peggy for twenty-four hours, but already, we don’t get along. You could call it hate at first sight.

      When I arrived yesterday morning, disheveled and slightly disoriented, her first comment was: “Glad you decided to show up. I was about to give your room to someone else.”

      I looked at Peggy, whom I suspected had once been attractive but was now like a flower gone to seed, and half wished she had given the room away.

      “I’ve got a waiting list a mile long,” she continued. “You kids from out of town have no idea—no idea—how impossible it is to find a decent place in New York.”

      Then she sat me down on the green love seat and apprised me of “the rules”:

      No visitors, especially males.

      No overnight guests, especially males, even if she is away for the weekend.

      No consumption of her food.

      No telephone calls over five minutes—she needs the phone line free in case she gets a call about an audition.

      No coming home past midnight—we might wake her up and she needs every minute of sleep.

      And most of all, no cooking. She doesn’t want to have to clean up our mess.

      Jeez. Even a gerbil has more freedom than I do.

      I wait until I hear the front door bang behind her, then knock hard on the plywood wall next to my bed. “Ding-dong, the witch is dead,” I call out.

      L’il Waters, a tiny butterfly of a girl, slips through the plywood door that connects our cells. “Someone found my bag!” I exclaim.

      “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful. Like one of those magical New York coincidences.” She hops onto the end of the cot, nearly tipping it over. Nothing in this apartment is real, including the partitions, doors, and beds. Our “rooms” are built into part of the living room, forming two tiny six-by-ten spaces with just enough room for a camp bed, a small folding table and chair, a tiny dresser with two drawers, and a reading light. The apartment is located right off Second Avenue, so I’ve taken to calling L’il and me The Prisoners of Second Avenue after the Neil Simon movie.

      “But what about Peggy? I heard her yelling at you. I told you not to use the phone in your room.” L’il sighs.

      “I thought she was asleep.”

      L’il shakes her head. She’s in my program at The New School, but arrived a week earlier to get acclimated, which also means she got the slightly better room. She has to walk through my space to get to hers, so I have even less privacy than she does. “Peggy always gets up early to go jogging. She says she has to lose twenty pounds—”

      “In that rubber suit?” I ask, astounded.

      “She says it sweats the fat out.”

      I look at L’il in appreciation. She’s two years older than I am, but looks about five years younger. With her birdlike stature, she’s one of those girls who will probably look like she’s twelve for most of her life. But L’il is not to be underestimated.

      When we first met yesterday, I joked about how “L’il” would look on the cover of a book, but she only shrugged and said, “My writing name is E. R. Waters. For Elizabeth Reynolds Waters. It helps to get published if people don’t know you’re a girl.” Then she showed me two poems she’d had published in The New Yorker.

      I nearly fell over.

      Then I told her how I’d met Kenton James and Bernard Singer. I knew meeting famous writers wasn’t the same as being published yourself, but I figured it was better than nothing. I even showed her the paper where Bernard Singer had written his phone number.

      “You have to call him,” she said.

      “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to make too big a deal of it.

      Thinking of Bernard made me all jellyish until Peggy came in and told us to be quiet.

      Now I give L’il a wicked smile. “Peggy,” I say. “She really goes to auditions in that rubber suit? Can you imagine the smell?”

      L’il grins. “She belongs to a gym. Lucille Roberts. She says she takes a shower there before. That’s why she’s always so crazy. She’s sweating and showering all over town.”

      This cracks us up, and we fall onto my bed in giggles.

      The red-haired girl is right: I have no problem finding СКАЧАТЬ