Under My Skin

“Send him an email, will you? Tell him drinks on Thursday?” I ask.

“From you or from me?”

“Would it be weird if it was from you?”

“Seriously weird,” he says, then rethinks. “Well—more like pretentious. Have your people call my people? Do you want to be that person?”

“Fine—from me.”

Ben frequently sends emails at my direction from my account. Never anything big, just setting meeting times, quick one-line answers to various questions.

“Where?”

I shrug. “I don’t care. He can choose.”

Ben hesitates in the door a minute, his lanky form in my peripheral vision. Then he leaves me and I am alone with that image staring back at me from my smartphone. I close the photo app and put the device down, shut my eyes and draw in a few deep breaths. That’s the other thing you’re supposed to do when you’re trying to move on, to smooth out the edges of the panic, sadness, anger or whatever overtakes you—focus on the breath. Breathe, they tell you.

Whatever that pill was, it has smoothed out the edges some, for sure. I’m lighter, less shaky.

But—honestly—I’m scared; fear tickles at the back of my throat. There’s a white noise of anxiety in the back of my head. It’s not just the man in the shadows, on the train. He is scary, sure. If there really is someone following me, then yes, it’s weird and frightening. What’s scarier, though, given my history, is if there isn’t.

* * *

I finish out the day, and work late, pushing everything else away. There are contracts to review, emails to answer, a dispute between a fashion photographer and a model she supposedly came on to, then ejected from a shoot when he refused her, another dispute between a feature photographer who’d submitted photos to a travel magazine, filed for payment via their Kafkaesque system, and ninety days later still hadn’t been paid. Work is easy, a cocoon that keeps the chaos of life away.

When I look up from my desk again it’s after seven and all the other offices are dark. The refrigerator in our break room hums, a familiar and weirdly comforting sound. Half of the hallway lights are off, leaving the space dim and shadowy. I know Ben was the last to leave and he locked me in on the way out, reminding me to set the alarm when I finally took off for the night.

As I’m packing my bag, a phone starts ringing in one of the offices. It bounces to the main line, and I reach over to pick it up. There’s no number on the caller ID, but I see that it came from Maura’s extension. Maybe it’s Alvaro; he used to call late for Jack. We’ve drifted since Jack’s death, not that he and I were ever really friends. In fact, despite his extraordinary talent, and his close friendship to Jack, I’ve always considered him a giant asshole. I really hope, for Maura’s sake, that she hasn’t fallen for him.

“Lang and Lang.”

There’s just a crackling on the line.

“Hello?” A strange sense of urgency pulls me forward in my seat.

There’s a voice but so much interference that I can barely make it out. I hang on awhile longer, listening. A strain of music. The blast of a horn. That voice, it’s throaty and deep, talking quickly, unintelligible through the static. Is it familiar?

Poppy. I think he says my name. Something about it sets my nerve endings tingling.

“Yes, this is Poppy. Sorry—I can’t hear you.”

I press my ear to the phone, cover the other to hear better. But the connection finally just goes dead, and a hard dip of disappointment settles into my stomach. I wait, thinking the phone will ring again. But it doesn’t.

With a niggling sense of unease, I move away from the phone. That voice. My name on the line. Or was it?

I pack up my bag and loop the office, making sure lights are down and doors are locked. It’s a small space; there are only five of us. Walls are made from glass, so there are few places in the office that can’t be seen from wherever you stand. Still, I feel uncomfortable, like I’m being watched. I lock the door behind me, head down in the elevator.

“Working late,” says Sam, the night security guard at the desk. He has a worn paperback novel in his hands. He and Jack used to talk about books, sharing a love of science and history. I glance at the title: The Future of the Mind by Michio Kaku.

“Light reading?”

“The brain,” he says, tapping his capped skull. He has dark circles under his eyes, a strange depth to his gaze. An insomniac who works nights, a veteran who did two tours in Iraq. “It’s the ultimate mystery. We know less about it than we do about space.”

Jack would know what to say; he’d probably have read whatever Sam was reading. They’d chat for ten minutes while I kept busy answering emails on my smartphone. But I just nod, aware of the sad way he looks at me. Most people look at me like this now, at least sometimes. The widow.

“Take care of yourself,” he says as I head toward the door. There is a gravity to his words, but when I turn back, he’s already gone back to his reading.

* * *

On the street, shadows fill doorways and pool around parked cars. But no hooded man, just a young couple walking, hands linked, leaning into each other, an old woman with a shopping cart, a lanky kid walking and texting. A yellow cab swiftly pulls to the curb. Safe inside, I turn to look behind me once more.

Maybe, maybe something moves in the shadows across the street. But it’s hard to be sure.

3 (#u45bdf40c-25ae-5944-ab4b-583b931df908)

Instead of going home, I head to Layla’s, dropping her a text so that she knows to expect me. Not even five seconds pass before her reply. She’s always half expecting me for dinner these days—which makes me feel some combination of grateful and guilty.

We’re having meatloaf. Gma’s recipe.

Whose grandma she is talking about, I’m not sure. Mine, hers or Mac’s? There certainly wasn’t any famous meatloaf recipe in my family. Layla’s brood wasn’t exactly the gather-around-the-Sunday-table type, and most of them are long gone. Mac comes from a long line of glittering one percenters; meatloaf is not on the menu. Maybe she was just being ironic.

Yay! I type. Uh—whose gma?

When the phone pings again, the text is not from Layla.

Hope you’re well, it reads. I’d love to see you again. No pressure. Just drinks?

The name on the phone gives me pause. Of all my recent assignations, he stays with me. I try not to think about the night we shared, but it comes back in gauzy scenes. His touch—gentle but urgent; his laugh—easy, deep. Sandy curls, like Jack’s. Something else just beneath the surface—what was it? There’s a little catch of excitement in my breath, but I quickly quash it. No. I’m not ready for anything more than we shared. I’ve told him as much. I briefly consider responding. It would be another easy night, an escape hatch from my life.

Layla’s text distracts me: I was just being ironic. I got the recipe from the internet—like everything else.

I hesitate another moment, remembering the feel of him, then delete his message without response.

Cold. I know.

* * *

Layla’s Central Park West address is gray and regal with a private motor court, multiple sparkling, marble lobbies manned by a small army of smartly uniformed doormen. It’s a fairy tale, a castle for the ultrawealthy. The towering lobby ceiling dwarfs me as I enter. The scent of fresh-cut flowers and the glitter of the chandelier above create a ballroom effect. Story-tall abstract oils, white leather sectionals, a twisting metal sculpture—there are museum lobbies with less grandeur.

Real people don’t live in buildings like this, Jack would say. He’d seen too much of the world in his lens—people living in poverty, children starving, cities ruined by war, nature decimated by corporate greed. Obscene wealth offended him. Me—not so much. I drift through worlds, as comfortable in a hostel as I am at the Ritz. Living in opulence or squalor, under the skin people are just the same. Everyone suffers. Everyone struggles. It just looks different from the outside.

My heels click on the marble, the staccato bouncing off the walls. Allegedly, Sting lives here. Robert DeNiro lives here. (Though I’ve never seen either of them.) Those mysterious Russian billionaires you always hear about live here. My dear friends Layla and Mac Van Santen live here with their teenagers, Izzy and Slade.

I still don’t completely understand what Mac does. Finance, of course. Hedge fund manager—but what does that really mean? I also don’t get how in the last ten years, he got so crazy-beyond-ridiculously rich. Something to do with “shorts” and the mortgage bond crisis of 2007. Suddenly there was a move from the perfectly spectacular Tribeca loft to the Central Park West penthouse. The monthlong summer trips overseas. The family driver, Carmelo. The private plane at an airport in Long Island.

Layla and I share a laugh over this now and then—mirthlessly—how much things have changed since we were kids together. How her mother worked two jobs. How my parents bought her prom dress when her family couldn’t afford it, how her parents fought in the kitchen over stacks of bills they couldn’t pay. How my dad and I would drive to her place and pick her up when she couldn’t stand the yelling and worse. Her parents are both dead now, having led, short, unhappy, unhealthy lives. But Layla still bears the scars they left on her, literally and figuratively.

The doorman, unsmiling but deferential, knows me and waves me through without bothering to call up.