Page 8 of Eye Candy

Lyssa gasped hearing someone use my pretend name. Frantically, I made shushing motions at her.

“Is this Teddy Bircher?” the voice repeated.

“Why?” I said in a low voice, hoping the crackly speaker box and my natural accent would disguise me.

“I’m Chase Sanford. I’m looking for Teddy Bircher. I buzzed apartment five but that wasn’t right.”

Good Greta Garbo.I could have kicked myself.

Last night at the gallery, before Joe had arrived, I’d been talking to Sonya, the curator. I knew she was friends with Joe, so I’d feigned interest in a piece of art because I thought Teddy would, and I’d written down my building because it was the first address I thought of. The area made sense for a young heiress,although she wouldn’t be on the street level, she’d be in the penthouse, so that’s what I wrote.

Was there nothing a rich, handsome man couldn’t get just by asking? I bet all he’d had to do was turn a bespectacled gaze in Sonya’s direction and she would have fallen over herself to give him a potential client’s private details. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have the wig on and this apartment was not heiress chic. Lyssa and I always joked that our apartment aesthetic was cluttercore (her) and broke whore (me).

An idea struck from nowhere. It was a last resort, but all my ideas were these days.

“Teddy is apartment five,” I said into the box, fumbling for my phone. “This is one. Try five again.”

I was out the door and taking the stairs two at a time as my apartment door swung shut on Lyssa’s cry of, “Wait!”

A few weeks ago, my elderly upstairs neighbor had given me her number after her cheese-of-the-month box was delivered to our apartment by mistake. We’d struck up a friendship, bonding over a shared nemesis, the violinist in apartment four.

I mumbled a quick prayer to Dolly Parton that my neighbor was home as I raced up the stairs.

Mrs. Clarissa answered her phone on the second ring as I heard her intercom buzz in the background.

“Don’t answer that Mrs. C!” I panted. “I lied to a man and said I lived in apartment five!”

My neighbor’s voice, thin with age but sharp with intelligence, cut to the chase. “Why? Are you scared? Or trying to impress him?”

“Impress!” I heaved.Fff… Fanny Brice these stairs suck. “I’m not scared, Mrs. C. Just chronically single.”

The intercom buzzed again.

“I was just about to head out, I’m meeting the girls for drinks downtown…”

“Please, wait!”

Giving up wasn’t in the Holliday DNA. If it had been, I wouldhave left this city months ago, Dad would have sold the café, Mike would have let me suffer through my credit card bills alone, and I wouldn’t be embroiling myself in an identity fraud. My behavior was unhinged. I knew it was. An intelligent person would give up. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I’d come too far.

Even if a dim, seldom-consulted corner of my brain recognized that the Never Give Up gene was the same as the Always Make Things Worse gene, I ignored it and kept scaling stairs.

When I rounded the last corner, Mrs. C stood in the open doorway of her penthouse apartment, her phone in her hand. The intercom buzzed again, two short buzzes that had an air of finality.

If I didn’t catch Chase now, he’d leave, and I’d be left with a massive plot hole in the hands of someone who could ruin me. Could you go to jail for impersonating someone? Someone like Teddy? I hadn’t stolen or cheated. I’d just been a bitch for cash. Was that so bad? I was often a bitch for cash—I’d built entire burlesque routines out of it. Or was this a double standard that was OK in sticky cabaret bars but not in shiny art galleries? Similar to how living at a hotel was classy if you were rich, but trashy if you were poor.

“Please, Mrs. C.” I begged. “Please.”

Mrs. C stepped aside and gestured at the intercom on the wall. “Talk to your boy, Caroline.”

“Thank you!” I darted past her and hit the button. “Hello?” I said in my Teddy voice. If Mrs. C noticed the change in accent she didn’t comment.

“Teddy? This is Chase Sanford.”

Before my brain caught up to me, I hit the button again and said, “Come on up.” My stricken eyes flew to my neighbor. “I’m so sorry Mrs. C! I panicked! Fuck, he’s coming up now. Fuck, I saidfuck. I’m trying not to sayfuckas much,” I explained, though she hadn’t asked. “I said it in front of a casting agent once and it cost me a job I really wanted. Although, honestly, if the F-wordfreaks you out, you’re not ready to see my nipp—uh, never mind. Ffff… red Astaire, he’s coming up.”

I dragged my hands down my face as I thought. “I know. I’ll meet him on the stairs and tell him to walk with me. That sounds like a good thing to say, right? Very New York.Walk with me.I’msorry Mrs. C, I swear I’m not trying to let a strange man into your home.” And still, I kept talking because of that gene, that wonderful, awful NGU gene that meant I would always go down fighting. “His name is Chase Sanford; his family is very well-known. Which is not to say well-known people can’t be murderers, but I don’t get those vibes from him.”

Lecture you to death, maybe.

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