I Wish I Was Like You Read online

  In this half-world of existing and yet being nothing, I daydreamed a lot. It helped to pass the time while the machines around me churned out thousands of photocopies…

  I was on a break one afternoon. I was reading the latest issue and grinding my teeth when Vaughn walked in. He strolled slowly, dramatically, up to the counter and hit the service bell. Tam stuck her head around a corner of the machine she was running and nodded.

  “I’m here to see Greta,” he said.

  Tam went back to what she was doing. I gave Vaughn the best greeting I had, a lame little wave.

  “I’m so pleased to see you’re alive,” he said.

  “You could call it that,” I told him.

  “Don’t be a smart aleck,” he said. “I was worried. Why wouldn’t you answer the door? I had to call the office to find out what happened. Boy, those are some rude people you work with.”

  “I don’t work with them. I make copies.”

  “Right,” he said and reached for the newspaper in my hand. “But you’re still following their antics, I see.”

  “Who isn’t? Pretty soon they’ll be as popular as the Stranger. I knew them when. Lucky me.”

  “Please! They wish they had your wit and your talent.” He took the paper from me, folded it, and tossed it into a trashcan next to the counter. “Do you believe the article that kid wrote about copycat suicides? People are in mourning and he’s being satirical.”

  “It sells papers.”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “People are disgusting,” I said.

  “Oh, come on. He’s an upstart, a snotty child. He’ll never achieve anything.”

  “He’s a con man,” I said. “He’ll probably make a fortune. Listen. Sorry about the review of your show, Vaughn.”

  “Is this why you’ve been avoiding me? Are you serious? You think I care about a goddamn review? Honey, you have to stop kicking people away or you’ll be alone all of your life.”

  I leaned against the counter and watched the rain through the shop window. Vaughn put one hand over mine.

  “You’re having dinner with me tonight,” he said. “No excuses. No pretending you’re not home.”

  “Okay,” I told him. “Yeah.”

  I was tidying up as well as I could in my shitty apartment that night when there was a knock at the door. Remembering what Vaughn had said, I didn’t hesitate. Only it wasn’t Vaughn. It was Daisy, draped in fake fur and silk scarves, eyes flashing.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I was going to call you,” I lied.

  “If you were going to call me you would’ve fucking called me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “What the fucking fuck?” she shouted. She stepped into the room and I closed the door. She was going to get loud and I didn’t want to add angry neighbors to the growing list of awful things in my life.

  “Daisy,” I said. “I’m sorry. Really sorry.”

  “What an eloquent apology. Did you write it yourself?”

  “Really, really sorry,” I added.

  “What the fuck is going on? I come to you for advice and you steal my fucking words! Do you know what this means to me? Words are all I have! My words are me, Greta; they’re everything I am! The way I write is my voice. If you take my words, you take my voice! You silence me. You rape me. You make me nothing. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do not say you get it if you don’t. Please don’t lie to me,” she said.

  “I’m not,” I said. My throat felt raw. “I get it. I know what I did.”

  She shrugged and faced the window. She shook her head.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ!” she shouted so loudly the windowpane rattled. “All the way over here I was planning to kill you. With my bare hands I wanted to rip out your spleen. You know? Rip it out and eat it! Like a fucking mad dog.”

  Her shoulders shivered and I knew she was laughing. Letting it go and laughing the way I would never have done. Because I wasn’t her, I wasn’t golden and talented and sure of the words that belonged to me. I would have been petty, spiteful, shitty to the end, but she was laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “I’m going to stitch that on a pillow and give it to you to sleep on,” she told me. “You’re a fucking maniac.”

  She threw her arms around me. I inhaled the honey and wildflower and rain scent of her body. She groaned, deep and throaty like an animal finding a lost cub, anger and joy inextricably spun together in her soul.

  “Come on, let’s drink,” she said. “Everybody’s dead. Let’s drink.”

  “Vaughn’s coming over,” I told her. “He’s bringing dinner.”

  “Great,” she said. “I’m starving! Your food is my food now, Greta. Your apartment is mine, too,” she said and laughed for a long time.

  When Vaughn showed up with red wine and manicotti we stuffed our faces. We listened to his horror stories about high-strung stage managers and ingénues with allergies. We laughed. We drank. We sang songs into the night…

  Yeah. Some people would end right there. Others would go on to describe how adversity only increases one’s appreciation for friendship. Most people would enjoy that story more than the truth.

  In fact, Daisy never called, never stopped by while she was in town, never returned my phone calls. And the kind words and solicitations I’ve attributed to Vaughn never happened. He didn’t stop by the copy center and he never invited me to dinner. I read about Nate replacing Eve as editor at Boom City while I was on a smoke break, alone, in the alley.

  Vaughn got busy with another project around the time I was fired. I told him my profile of his company wasn’t going to appear in Boom City (or any of the other papers to which I subsequently submitted the review, by then long outdated). Vaughn didn’t say he was disappointed. He didn’t pass along any gossip he’d heard about me or why I’d been fired. He just drifted away. The last time I saw him he was chatting on the stairs of our building with a woman whose performance I’d unfairly mocked in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She rolled her eyes and laughed when I edged past. Vaughn waved hello and turned his attention back to the actress.

  I spent most evenings watching the street from my living room window, invisible to the world. At this point some people would begin a new adventure. Others would reflect and find a measure of inner peace. I did neither of these things.

  Deep beneath the city, in a tunnel corridor drilled by a machine named Bertha.

  I wish I’d brought a hardhat. Not that I needed it, but the atmosphere makes me crave authenticity. Wow. This is every bit as impressive as the news articles make it out to be. And loud, for fuck’s sake. It’s loud! How do you put up with it? Earplugs can only muffle so much. Are yours custom made?

  There’s the bitch, way up ahead, Big Bertha, pounding her way through the underpinnings of the city. Drilling through dirt and rock and bone. What a gal! She’s 326 feet long and she weighs over 6,000 tons. Expensive date, too. She’s worth $80 million. She’s a hell of a girlfriend, isn’t she?

  If I were you I’d go mad. Would you like to lose your mind for a while? It’s easy to accomplish. Ruminate about your ex-wife and your ex-children, for a start. Remember how you almost took that job in the Midwest, the one that would have made your family love you. Instead, you’re doing the worst work imaginable for a lot more money and an empty apartment. Makes you wonder, and drift, and cry.

  Tell you what. How about a vacation? Because in a few hours your girlfriend up there, she’s going to slam up against a steel pipe left over from 2002, and this whole operation’s going to come to a shrieking, grinding halt.

  When it happens you’ll be laid off. You’ll have hours and days and weeks to lie on the couch thinking about how lonely you are. You’ll call your ex in the middle of the night and she’ll hang up on you. Your kids will forget your birthday.
Your best friend will kill himself after checking in to the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, and only you will know why.

  Tell you what. Set all of it aside. Step back and watch your life as though it were a cartoon. Does it amuse you?

  On one of those long nights on the couch, reach over and grab the Swiss Army knife from the table. Pull open the corkscrew. Run your fingertips over it, following the spiral to the vicious tip.

  Nestle in the cushions and tilt your head back. All it takes is one swift, sure jab to the jugular. The pain will be excruciating, stunning, unlike anything you’ve ever imagined. But then all of the terrible nights will slip away. All of the unanswered calls and unspoken words of affection will fade. Your blood will pulse and flow, warm, metallic and sweet. Your eyelids may flutter but this is only a nervous spasm, not a desire to stay alive. Let the blood flow down your throat and onto the floor. You’ve been looking after ungrateful people most of your sad life. Let someone else clean up the mess for a change.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I didn’t think Carl would answer the phone. But I knew exactly where to find Eve. And I had nothing better to do on my day off.

  The morning was mild gray with bright and cloying notes of cherry blossom in the air. Walking down Pike to Rosebud, I noticed for the first time how briskly other people moved. I had laughed at the lazy, ambling pace of the locals, and somehow I’d missed this change from idleness to a sense of purpose. People were not on the street to wander and mingle. Each pedestrian seemed to have a clear destination. Were they really moving faster, or was it my perception, my sense of being outside everything?

  The shift from daylight to the cloistered murmuring shadows of Rosebud had never been as jarring. I squeezed my eyes shut to adjust. When I opened them I spotted Eve immediately. The court had moved on but the queen refused to relinquish her throne.

  She didn’t look up from the book she was reading until I reached her table. Her expression told me nothing.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Want?” I took the unoccupied chair opposite her and rested my elbows on the table. “What else could I want? Carl fired you, right? He gave Nate your job. Doesn’t that make my life just about perfect?”

  “Why?” She studied me. “Why does it matter to you? My life has nothing to do with you, or Carl, or the children he hires.”

  I laughed. It was a nasty, snorting sound.

  “Carl didn’t hire me,” I reminded her. “You did.”

  “One of many mistakes,” she said.

  “Good. You admit you did a lousy job.”

  “Admit?” She let the word hang in the air. “Are you trying to interview me? Are you still pretending to be a writer?”

  “I wouldn’t write about you,” I said.

  “Another difference between you and the woman you plagiarized.”

  It’s always a disadvantage in any exchange with your enemy to be confronted by unexpected news. My blank expression prompted a nasty grin, transforming Eve’s lines and dark circles into the visage of a mischievous demon. She might have been a gargoyle crouched atop one of the old apartment buildings on Capitol Hill.

  “You’re a foolish young woman,” she said. “You keep trying to convince someone you have talent.”

  “Keep trying?” I was still wearing a stupid expression.

  “The awful short story you submitted to the Citywide Arts competition?” She made a little clucking sound with her tongue. “Yes, yes, I recognized your name when you applied for a job. Your fiction submission was memorably bad.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “Why would I?” She sipped her coffee. She had all the time in the world. “You wanted a job and I thought you could handle it. You could have started slowly, with 250-word reviews, and you might have improved your skills. I was willing to take the chance, to give you a start.”

  “Well,” I said. “Thanks for that.” I could see she wasn’t at all intimidated by my sarcasm.

  “Writers earn their reputations,” she said. “They don’t become famous just because a few people are conned into taking them seriously.”

  “Oh, is that why Nate’s turning into a celebrity and you’re out of a job?”

  She scanned the room. Taking in the couples arguing in whispers, the hung-over office workers guzzling caffeine, the actors, dancers, and writers gathered in clusters to plan projects and trash rival artists.

  “Apparently the new editor of Boom City is in touch with the zeitgeist,” she said.

  “What would that be?”

  “Style over content,” she said. “Over-energetic wordplay. If he wrote fiction, he might have potential.”

  I made my move. Sliding her books aside and leaning in, my elbows still resting on the table, I said, “Our young Nate is writing some of the most popular fiction in town.”

  “What is it you hate so much about women?” I once asked Lee Todd on a hazy night when we lay awake, naked on top of the sheets, smoking and drinking. It was one of our rare extended conversations.

  “Obviously, I don’t hate women,” he said.

  “I don’t mean in bed. You know what I mean.”

  “Greta, I’ve been married three times. The one and only thing I know for sure about women is this. They don’t know when to quit.”

  “Quit what?” I asked.

  “See what I mean?”

  After I explained Nate’s status as a liar and a charlatan, Eve grabbed her books and bags and stormed out of Rosebud. I had intended to be cool about it but once I got started—once I saw the range of emotions playing across Eve’s face—I couldn’t stop. She was my enemy and Nate was hers. I knew she would use everything I told her to bring him down. When she ran from the table I imagined she was on her way to the nearest pay phone. I assumed she would track Daisy down in Portland and give her the tip of a lifetime.

  Boys can get away with anything as long as they’re brash and charming. Some of the places and sources Nate mentioned in his articles couldn’t exist but his readers had grown accustomed to his breathless style, and his habit of tossing off and not following up on colorful details. No one asked how he could locate his idiosyncratic interview subjects when the most reliable journalists in the city had never profiled, never mentioned, never even heard of them. No one had called him out. His fans didn’t doubt him for a minute.

  I was twitching like a trigger finger. It would be delicious, watching Nate’s newfound career go down in flames. He would be ruined and Boom City would be the biggest joke in town. Daisy would have an award-winning article and she would owe it all to me. Sure, it might also make Eve feel vindicated but I couldn’t worry about that. If Daisy wouldn’t speak to me and Carl had forgotten who I was, I needed Eve to be a catalyst.

  After all, I would never lose the sweet satisfaction of seeing her shock and sadness when I confessed to sending Nate to the paper. In a flicker between disappointment and determination, I saw her sleepless nights, her single meals, and her drunken phone conversations with acquaintances, bored and skeptical, who probably advised her to move on. She was stuck. The city kept spinning around her but she had no will to join any of it. Until I gave her the information she needed to ruin Carl and his pet.

  I told myself I was primarily interested in justice. Lee Todd would have seen through my high-minded internal speeches.

  Every day I spent running those loud, filthy copy machines was a new lesson in bitterness. For a long time I’d lived like a cast-off girlfriend still wishing the man of her dreams (who was nothing but a bald guy in ugly shorts) would pay a visit. But the morning I confessed to Eve, everything felt different. I pretended this was due to a lightness of heart since I’d done the right thing. In my secret heart, though, where I lived most of the time, I knew the lightness, the glee, was pure spite. The people I’d known, the ones who had praised and then rejected me, were on their way to unemployment, thanks to me.

  At home I poured a glas
s of wine and kicked off my shoes. I smoked and tried to read but it was too hard to concentrate. My brain buzzed with excitement. I knew Daisy would soon be investigating Nate’s stories. All I had to do was wait for the news to break. Daisy would expose Carl and Nate, and become famous in the process.

  Eve might think she was going to be exonerated but her failure to spot Nate’s fabrications would further damage her reputation. Maybe Carl and Eve would fight over who was to blame. Maybe they would sue one another. All of the possibilities were delightful.

  All I had to do was wait. A normal person would have waited.

  “The killer inside isn’t a psychopath, Greta. It’s that plain, old, regular-sized bastard…vanity. The need to be noticed, not even respected exactly, but noticed, acknowledged. We all have the craving and we have to conquer it.”

  I had failed to conquer it. (So had Lee Todd, in my opinion, despite his words of advice.) Despite all I had done and how badly I’d screwed up my only chance, an ugly voice inside kept piping up with cruel observations, pitching pebbles at windowpanes, demanding to be noticed, demanding to be heard.

  “Trouble,” my mom had said all those years ago. “Always trouble.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  On Friday morning I wasn’t looking forward to the weekend. Two co-workers were feeling queasy. If they called in sick my Saturday would turn into a workday. On Sunday I could sleep in and then wander around.

  I thought of Daisy and a hundred scenarios of forgiveness flashed through my mind. I told myself she was busy researching Nate and writing the biggest assignment of her career, thanks to me.