| Chapter One |
|
CHAPTER
ONE
Annie Albright thought of herself as an ordinary girl-with an asterisk. She was definitely good - the kind of person who helped little old ladies across lower Market Street and dug for change in the bottom of her faux leather hobo bag when a bum on Haight stuck out a hand. She tried to be kind. She would never, for example, tell her best friend Michelle Garibaldi (who was brilliant, hysterically funny, and unfortunately built) that she looked like an armored personnel carrier in her new Marc Jacobs camouflage-print sheath. Instead, Annie found a darling Chloe jacket on super sale at a boutique on Fillmore Street and gave it to her friend as an "un-birthday" present. When Michelle donned the jacket over the camouflage sheath-instant streamlined. Annie came from hardworking, intellectual stock. Her parents were math professors, and she definitely inherited the hardworking part, even if she sucked at math. Though her job as assistant art director at HottieGirl magazine was achingly dull - doing layout on "Back to School Fashion Musts" was not really her idea of a good use of a B.F.A. from Syracuse--she still tried to do it well. She'd held her position for four years and hoped that someday she'd be promoted. However, her boss was forever taking credit for her ideas, which Annie was sure contributed heavily to her lateral career trajectory. Though she often pictured herself marching into the editor-in-chief's office and sticking up for herself, she couldn't gather the nerve. Assertiveness was not her strong suit. Annie tried to be respectful. For example, the thirty-something muscular Greek guy at the Beanery on 9th Avenue who sold her the occasional coffee and bagel-to-go? She didn't look down on him because he spent his life filling cardboard cups. She might, however, fantasize going down on him, after which he would ravish her on the counter, plastic coffee lids flying like miniature Frisbees. That had to do with the asterisk. Her whole life, she'd had a fertile-Fertile-Crescent-level fertile-imagination. The things she imagined almost always had to do with sex. She never knew when it was going to happen, either; it was something she couldn't control. Annie Albright had the Tourette's syndrome of sexual imagination. At age twenty-nine, she still looked like a college kid due to cherubic cheeks inherited from her round-faced grandmother, Doris. Her dirty blonde hair was baby-fine and wispy. She tried to grow it, but every time it got an inch past her chin it seemed to recoil as if allergic to her shoulders. She had a dimpled, day-glow smile, and saucer-wide blue eyes, which she liked; thin lips and a bra size that matched her initials, which she didn't. Utterly lacking in curves and thin as she was- this really bit her inconsequential butt - she still had cellulite on her thighs. How two math professors had given birth to such a girl was beyond her. Maybe her mother had been beamed up to another planet and impregnated by an alien with cellulite, which, Annie figured, would explain both her imagination and her thighs. Her day started as usual at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Irving Street, waiting for the N-Judah streetcar line to take her downtown to the HottieGirl offices. She wore a don't-notice-me navy skirt, white blouse and navy cardigan ensemble (knowing she was so shocking on the inside made her want to blend on the outside). She was with her boyfriend, Elliot Wenner, who'd spent the night at her apartment. Elliot, a wildly successful pharmaceutical salesman, wore a tailored Ralph Lauren suit and Bruno Magli's with inner lifts that made him two inches taller than the five-eight he actually was. Even counting his being on the short side, Elliot was really good looking. His blond hair was subtly gelled and spiked, his nails were buffed, and his skin glowed from weekly appointments at the Nob Hill Spa at the Huntington Hotel. Elliot considered being high maintenance part of the good life. They'd met six months earlier at the Bridge Point Assisted Living Facility on 19th Avenue, where Annie volunteered once a week as an art instructor. Elliot was visiting his grandmother, a new resident; Annie had been impressed with how solicitous he'd been with the elderly woman, as well as his Daniel Craig-ish good looks. They ended up going for coffee, and Elliot went on and on about how much his grandmother meant to him, which touched Annie deeply. It wasn't until their third date that she found out that Elliot would be the sole beneficiary of his grandmother's sizeable estate unless she forgave Elliot's older sister for marrying a Democrat, which didn't seem likely since grandmother hadn't spoken to granddaughter since Bill Clinton's election. One of Elliot's less-than-sterling qualities was a strong what's-in-it-for-me streak. Still, Annie believed that the good outweighed the bad. Elliot owned a two thousand square foot loft in the Marina with floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge, an impressive wine collection, and every electric toy known to mankind. Nothing made him happier than buying things, and he was as generous with Annie as he was with himself. It was nice of him, but it still made Annie uncomfortable. Other than occasionally spending much more than she should on a rare but exquisite doll (she collected them, and not only because of the lurid fantasies they sometimes sparked) she didn't share his acquisitive nature. Oddly, Annie never had sex fantasies about Elliot. Sex with him was okay, but he was the kind of guy who needed constant feedback on his prowess: Do you like this? How about this? Was it good for you? Was it the best ever? It was kind of exhausting, and it tended to interfere with whatever vision was running through her mind at the time. They took the streetcar down Market Street. Elliott got off near City Hall to visit some accounts before he went to his home office and kissed her goodbye, which was a little distracting because Annie had been imagining a torrid coupling between the tall black guy in front of her bopping to his iPod and an Asian girl in hospital scrubs. At Market and Stockton, Annie hopped off. Instead of going right to work, she detoured to the San Francisco Marriott. She hurried inside and over to the concierge desk, where a uniformed young woman with two-tone hair and a kick-ass body greeted her with a friendly wave. Her Marriott nametag read "Ethereal, Los Angeles," but her real name was Ethel after some long-dead relative. They'd met via Craigslist. Since then, Ethereal had turned into a prime source for Annie's hobby. "Cool, you made it! It came by courier yesterday," Ethereal explained as Annie approached the desk. "Wait ‘til you see." From a small box, she extracted a doll no more than five inches tall, with a head made of papier-mâché and a body of cloth. She wore a green silk ball gown and carried a tiny fan in her right hand. "Talk about a nineteenth-century beauty," Ethereal breathed, handing the doll to Annie, who held it as carefully as she would a newborn. "She's certified. The certificate is in the box." "Five hundred, right?" "Yep. Worth every penny." Annie handed Ethereal the check she'd already written, carefully stuck the boxed doll inside her purse, and flew out the door. What a coup. This would be her first nineteenth-century doll - they were very hard to find. A quick check of her watch caused her to pick up her pace, but she knew she'd still be at least ten minutes late. Her boss hated that. Every time it happened, she'd use two fingers to point to her own eyes and then to Annie's, as if to say: I'm watching you. Annie flew through the lobby, tossed a hello to the security guard (in her mind, he was undressing his petite brunette assistant with his teeth), and rode the express elevator up to the seventeenth floor. She made a beeline for HottieGirl's reception area and got through the heavy double doors before she stopped dead in her tracks. Employees were streaming out, arms laden with boxes of personal effects. "What's going on?" she asked Billy, a paunchy guy from advertising who lived in short-sleeved drip-dry. He'd gotten drunk at the last Christmas party and tried to stick his tongue down Annie's throat. "These fuckers just went out of business! May thirtieth is the end of their fiscal year. And what day is today, boys and girls?" He scooped up a HottieGirl notepad from the reception desk and dropped it into his box. "It's every man for himself -- take whatever isn't nailed down." Annie felt dazed and confused. "Wait, what do you mean?" "Closed, folded, finished," Mary Fitzgerald, an underling in the fashion department filled in. She grabbed a handful of pens. "Sales are trending down, so corporate announced they're shutting down. Nice of ‘em to give us some notice, huh?" "You mean we . . . don't have jobs anymore?" Annie asked. "Aren't you quick on the uptake," Mary observed. She spotted a couple of logo mugs and T-shirts and nabbed them too. "I can totally sell these on eBay." She made a move-along gesture to Annie. "Get going or get gone -- they're locking down at nine-thirty." Dodging exiting employees all the way, Annie made her way back to the cubicle where she'd spent the last four years of her working life. As she took in the gray space, she realized she hadn't invested enough of herself in it to fill even the smallest of boxes. She picked up the pink corporate envelope that presumably contained her final paycheck, a pair of cheap earrings, some Burt's Bees lip gloss, and a framed photo of her with her grandmother. Everything fit in her oversized purse with her new doll. Then she joined the departing lemmings heading for the sea of unemployment. So not good. This time instead of fantasizing about it, she really was getting screwed. It was notoriously hard to find decent jobs in commercial art, and everyone from her department at HottieGirl would be out there pounding the pavement with her. That she had just dropped five hundred bucks on a nineteenth century doll only made matters worse. It wasn't like she had massive amounts of money in her checking account, and her savings account didn't exist. When she hit the sidewalk, she plucked out her phone and called Elliot to tell him the bad news, but got his voicemail. That was typical - he was with customers. Well, she'd just go to his loft. She needed a shoulder to cry on, even if it was two inches higher than where nature had placed it.
* * *
Elliot's building was on Marina Boulevard across the Marina Green, which was already crowded with dog walkers, Frisbee chuckers, kite flyers, and joggers from San Francisco's considerable population that considered nine-to-five employment a sign of mental illness. Annie had a key; she just let herself into the building and took the elevator up to the penthouse. She'd be deposited in his thousand square foot living room with its spectacular view As Annie stepped out of the elevator, she expected to see the bridge and the bay through the floor-to-ceiling windows in a space kept spotless by thrice-weekly maid service. Instead, she saw Elliot. Also, she saw Czuba, the Eurotrash performance artist who lived one floor down and who at the moment was performing on Elliot. Both were stark naked. The thought that flew into Annie's mind was that this had to be one of her fantasies, though it seemed odd that her very first fantasy about Elliot would also involve a performance artist well on his way to a serious case of rug-burned knees. Elliot's eyes met Annie's. He paled. "Oh, shit." Czuba whirled to see what Elliot's ‘oh shit' was about, which caused an even greater "Oh shit!" as he forgot to dislodge the appendage on which he'd been lavishing his attention. All Annie wanted to do was disappear. Instead, she stumbled back into the elevator, catching her heel on the uneven space between Elliot's living room and the elevator proper. Down she went, purse flying, her newly acquired five-hundred-dollar antique doll tumbling out and promptly decapitating itself. In other words, Annie was having a really, really bad day. |
| < Prev |
|---|