Maiden Lane Read online

  Maiden Lane

  by

  Christopher Blankley

  Chapter 1

  It’s the shoes that get you – what inevitably undermines the working-class resolve. Some will say that it’s the bespoke suits, Savile Row, of course. Or the private Gulfstream G650’s. Or the thousand dollar a plate dinners – anything served south of Houston and above the thirtieth floor will do. Some will say it’s the bottles of Krug Clos du Mesnil Blanc de Blancs 1995, or maybe the hefty shots of Dalmore 62 afterward. Others will focus on the cars – supercars, hand-built: McLaren, Maybauchs, Bugatti’s, perhaps a Pagani Zonda in a pinch, with wing doors and more cylinders than common sense might dictate.

  In an honest moment, one might concede that there’s a mystique to the six-story mansions outside the city, with infinity swimming pools and countless auxiliary buildings, or the trophy wives who inevitably occupy them.

  All these arguments can be made and have been. I might even agree with some. On principle. But I can tell you, from personal experience, it’s the shoes that eventually get you – make you forget any notion of class struggle, or hatred of consumer capitalism. A well-curated, university education is instantly forgotten the moment those hand-sewn, buttery-soft, calfskin shoes touch your feet, molded to your exact contours, every inch in perfect symmetry.

  It’s like you’ve never worn a shoe before, just a strange box laced to the ends of your legs. There’s no willpower known to man that can help you withstand it. YOUR FEET DO NOT HURT, your body purrs with every step. For the first time in your life, your feet do not hurt. And like that, you’re sold. Or have sold, as in your soul to the devil.

  Mine were fitted not a week earlier, in the penthouse suite by a Mennonite girl, Handmaid’s Tale bonnet and all. She measured my feet many times, and caressed the calluses with a delicacy I found slightly troubling. The shoes came yesterday, in the sort of wooden box you might use to store salted fish or bury a beloved pet.

  They fit perfectly, like gloves for my toes. They’re the final salvo in a war of luxury that has finally destroyed the last of my defenses. They’re the chink in my armor, the one thing I cannot resist.

  I’d done so well, up until today, represented my class and my people admirably. I was NOT going to give in to the opulence. I would not succumb. But against the shoes, I am lost. The weight of their perfection is entirely too much. I am an owned man.

  Demon money has finally sunk its claws into me.

  I bend over in the hallway and retie my left shoe. The lace is thick, like a small rope used to moor a ship. But they’re also supple. They tie like they have no other purpose but to make a knot.

  Before the shoes, they’d tried a similar tactic with my clothes. But the wardrobe fitting had failed to dent my proletariat armor. I can even say that it sort of bored me. The folly of it all.

  It normally took three years to get an appointment at number 11 Savile Row, but a call from my generous benefactor jumped me to the head of the line. I had to go to them. That hardly felt like service, but it was only a forty-five minute flight, from New York to London, aboard the Virgin Galactic Sub Orbital. So it wasn’t much of a chore.

  I flew first class, of course; there is no couch in space. I watched in wonder as the air hostess floated weightlessly down the tight aisle, serving Bollinger champagne in sippy cups and keeping her prim uniform perfectly creased.

  Later, a sleek, silver Bentley rolled me over the cobbled streets of Mayfair and down Savile Row. In the back of the car, I struggled to stifle a yawn.

  I stand and straighten the suit’s tie in the hallway mirror. The silk tie is orange and white, my Caltech colors. I hit the elevator down button, and admire myself in the Huntsman.

  The suit is certainly worth the pampering. It makes me look, literally, like a million bucks. It easily could have cost that much, with the flight and the car and the express shipment back to New York. But compared to the shoes...well, there is no comparison. The suit might make me look like a million bucks, but the shoes make me FEEL it.

  I wink at my reflection and look at the Submariner on my wrist. Plenty of time to get to the airport, even considering Manhattan traffic. Submariner. I smirk at the watch. The deepest underwater this watch will ever go was in the glass-bottom swimming pool of the penthouse behind me.

  I look back at the door. I’m almost tempted not to leave. Three stories. Twenty rooms. Chef’s kitchen. The showers...three I never got a chance to use. The New York home of my generous benefactor. Of course, he’s in Seattle, working, leaving me to enjoy the view of New York at night.

  The elevator pings, snapping me out of my musings. The doors open, and I step inside. I wasn’t expecting anyone to be in there. I’m on the top floor, and it’s just me. You need a fingerprint scan just to get the buttons to light up for the floor. But someone is inside the elevator, as I step in. I almost knock the sack of potato chips out of her hand.

  “Sorry,” I mutter, reflexively stepping back to let the girl off the elevator. Then I reconsider, looking her up and down. The pink knit pussy hat. The baggy top. The thick glasses, covered in dandruff, and the heavy, well-worn boots. She certainly doesn’t look like she belongs up here. I’d be hard pressed to guess where she does belong.

  Luckily she doesn’t move. She just stands there munching her Funyuns. I realize she’s just along for the ride, on an elevator going up, when she’d meant to go down. I sigh a little inside and step on the elevator. I don’t want to be the one to ask her who she is or where she’s going.

  The doors close. I give her a smile and straighten my jacket. What a pair we make, I think to myself: me in the Savile Row and her with her onion chips. She smiles back, her mouth full of food.

  I can see the moment of recognition on her face, even before she opens her mouth. “Hey, you’re that guy,” she says, raising a yellow, dusty finger uncomfortably close to my face.

  I sigh again, this time on the outside. I’m not that guy. Even in the fancy suit, with the hand-made shoes and the $10,000 watch, I’m not that guy. Before, back in California, before all this, I got it a lot. I look like him. But now, in the suit, with the hair and the gold...hell, maybe I am that guy?

  “No, not me.” I hate to disappoint her, she looks so excited.

  “Yeah you are!” she says. “You’re that guy.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a mathematician.”

  “No, you’re him. You’re really him! I love your stuff.”

  “I’m not-” I start again, then stop myself. What does it matter? The elevator is already heading down. So, she tells her friends that she met someone famous, when she only met me. What’s the harm? “How you doing?” I ask her instead. “Having a nice evening?”

  Her jaw drops open, showing me a mouth full of half-eaten Funyuns. I find something interesting about the elevator’s control panel to look at.

  “Hi, my name is Eve,” she wipes the yellow onion dust off her free hand and offers it to me.

  I shake it, weakly. “I’m Roderic.” I smile.

  A look of bewilderment, then sadness crosses her face. “Oh, then you really aren’t him?” she pouts, looking up, studying my face.

  “No, my name is Roderic Gant,” I say. We’re still shaking. It’s weird. “Like I said, I’m a mathematician.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t LOOK like a mathematician.”

  No. No, I don’t.

  I finally pull my hand out of the shake. Despite Eve’s efforts, my hand is still covered in Funyun dust. I begin to wipe it off onto my suit, but I stop myself just in time. I reach inside my jacket and pull out a handkerchief.

  “But you are famous?” she asks, reflexively wiping her hands on her clothes.

 
“No,” I chuckle. “At least, not yet.”

  “Are you some sort of celebrity mathematician?” she asks. “Like Stephen Hawking, or Sheldon Cooper?”

  I don’t know how to answer that. There’s just so much wrong with that question. “Err, not really.”

  “Then, what are you doing in New York?”

  “I’m here for a job interview,” I say with pride.

  “By the look of that suit, I think you got it,” the girl laugh-snorts. Her hand goes back into the Funyun bag and comes out with a fist full of rings. She starts munching. Perhaps thirty percent of the chips are making it into her mouth.

  “Well,” I allow myself a smug, self-congratulatory smirk. “It’s more like I’m interviewing the job, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do not,” she says slowly and clearly, taking the Funyuns out of her mouth to hear my response.

  I suddenly feel shy. After all, I shouldn’t be boasting to a perfect stranger. I’m just a kid from El Segundo. So what if I’ve made one of the greatest breakthroughs in mathematics since Newton? Did she care? Probably not. My momma would tell me to be humble.

  But, oh what the hell! Why not? Why shouldn’t I boast, just a little? After all, the girl thought she was meeting someone famous. And she’s half-right. This time next year, I would be a celebrity mathematician. Ten times more famous that Stephen Hawking and Sheldon Cooper put together. I can say with confidence that the name Roderic Gant would soon be a household name. And this girl gets to meet me before I’m famous. That’s quite a story she can tell her friends.

  “You see,” I say in a confiding tone. “I’m here on an all-expenses paid trip, sponsored by a certain dot-com retail giant. They’re wining and dining me, so to speak. Showing me the good life. They want me to come work for them.”

  “Doing what?” the girl asks, hanging on my every word.

  “Predictive algorithms. Big data analytics. Artificial Intelligence. I don’t know. I don’t know if they do, either. Really, anything I want. You see, I’m sort of a pioneer in my field. I’ve founded a whole new branch of mathematics. All the big dot-coms are trying to snatch me up...you know, before the other guy gets me.”

  “New math? What? Like trigonometry?”

  “Sort of. It’s called Megalytics.”

  “Megawhatics?”

  “Megalytics. It’s the math of really, really big numbers.”

  She laughs. “That’s different than the math of regular-sized numbers?”

  “It is.”

  “How big? A billion?”

  “Bigger.”

  “A trillion?”

  “Bigger.”

  Her eyes roll back in her head, thinking. Nobody can think of the one after trillion. It’s quadrillion, by the way, but that’s still nowhere near big enough.

  “Think about a number with a trillion zeros,” I say. “And you’d be about a trillionth of the way there.”

  The girl’s mouth opens ever so slightly, letting a loop of Funyun fall out. I want to tell her more, but the elevator has arrived at the lobby.

  “Sounds neat,” she recovers, reaching into the bag for more Funyuns.

  “It is,” I agree. The elevator doors open. I hold the door, waiting for her to step out first. She shakes her head, nibbling on an onion ring. I step out instead. “Nice talking to you, Eve,” I say back to her.

  “Nice talking to you, Roderic,” she says. And the doors begin to close. At the last moment, she thrusts a hand between the doors. They chime and reopen. “Say, Roderic, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.” I smile, looking at my watch. The limo should be just outside the door. An hour at most to get to Kennedy. That would give me over an hour to get through security. I’d have time to stop and get-

  “What lies at the end of Maiden Lane?” the girl asks.

  “What?” I ask. My thoughts derailed. I’m thinking I didn’t hear her clearly.

  “What lies at the end of Maiden Lane, Roderic Gant?” she asks again.

  I chuckle, but she’s not joking. I look at her, and she’s looking at me from behind those dandruff-encrusted glasses. But now there’s a fire in her eyes. An intensity. She’s no longer that dopey, nerdy Funyun muncher from just moments before.

  She lets go of the elevator doors, and they begin to close. I’ve got so many questions, they all fall over each other trying to get out of my mouth. I say nothing. What...where is Maiden Lane? And what does it have to do with me?

  Before I can react, the elevator doors click shut. She’s gone. I shake myself. That was weird – she was weird. The whole elevator ride was weird. But who cares? I have a plane to catch. I need to get to the airport. I turn and start across the lobby.

  But I stop and look back at the elevator. No, something in that last moment is still bothering me. Before the doors snapped shut, before the girl was gone, I could have sworn that I recognized her. From where and when, I can’t quite put my finger on, but there was something about her, asking that strange question, that was vaguely familiar.

  What lies at the end of Maiden Lane?

  Who knows? I shrug and turn for the door. As suddenly as that sense of recognition hit me, it’s gone. Never mind. I’ll worry about it and Maiden Lane and the girl on the plane. Or not. Whatever. I’m heading back to California.

  I’m heading home!

  Chapter 2

  “Nice suit,” the driver says.

  “Thank you,” I reply. I can forgive his ignorance. He can’t see the shoes from the front seat.

  “Say, are you that guy?” he asks.

  “No,” I reply sternly, a sense of annoyance building on top of my encounter in the elevator.

  “Are you sure?” he asks, stupidly.

  “Yeah,” I roll my eyes. “I’m pretty sure.”

  The driver shrugs unconcerned, and changes the subject “Have a good time in New York?” he asks, but I’ve already got my phone out, checking my texts.

  “Yes, thanks.”

  “I bet,” he chuckles. “I don’t know what kind of Prime membership you have, buddy, but this sure beats free shipping...Just so you know, it’s all taken care of.”

  This makes me look up from my phone. What’s taken care of? Why wouldn’t it be? Maybe he means the gratuity. That would make sense. “Thanks,” is all I say.

  “Totally taken care of,” he repeats.

  I don’t like his tone. What’s he getting at?

  This is the first time since climbing into the back of the limo that I look around at the city outside the windows. I don’t know New York, but even I know you don’t take Broadway north to get to Kennedy Airport. “Hey, where you going?” I ask, putting my phone away. “I want to go to JFK.”

  “I know, I know,” the driver makes a reassuring gesture. “Like I said pal, it’s all been taken care of.”

  “Look, I need to get to the airport. I don’t have a lot of time to screw around.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll make your flight,” the driver says, matter-of-fact. “Or the next one. Like I said, it’s-”

  “All been taken care of.” Then I realize what’s happening. This is some sort of headhunter trick. This guy is from Google or Facebook or Microsoft or somebody, about to give me a twenty-minute pitch on the way to the airport. Jeez, how desperate can you get? But we don’t seem to be heading for the airport. In fact, we’re heading in exactly the wrong direction. “Look, are you going to take me to the airport, or not?” I ask point blank.

  “You bet!” he cheers. “But first...”

  “What?” I growl.

  “Don’t you want to go to a party?”

  No. No I do not. I don’t want to go have cocktails at Tavern-on-the-Green – or wherever he’s taking me – and trade small talk with SnapChat’s technical recruiters. I want to go home! California. Beaches. Sand. The sun. This week has been an amazing experience and all, and I’m extremely flattered by all the attention, but I just want to go home and sleep in my own bed. My normal, average, working-c
lass bed. With the zero-count, scratchy sheets and the side I can’t really lay on because the springs are all broken. No more opulence. No more fancy parties. No more recruiting!

  The driver looks back at me in his rear-view mirror. He’s smiling, nodding. His eyes are saying, “Please Mister, come to this damn party. Be a friend. I don’t get paid if you skip out.”

  I sympathize. He’s just a little guy, trying to make a living. So, he takes a couple extra bucks from some suit to drive me to a swanky party. What’s the harm? I mean, who wouldn’t want to go? Free food. Free drinks. Pretty girls. He makes some extra cash and still gets me to the airport. A little late, maybe, but the flights can always be figured out.

  Like I said, I sympathize. But I just don’t have the time. I sit back, relax. I try to look like I’m resigned to my fate. I even start looking at my phone again. And then when the limo stops at the light at 23rd Street, I leap for the door handle.

  Twenty-Three Skidoo.

  I’m out on the sidewalk, heading east down 23rd. The driver is yelling, standing by his car, but he can’t follow. The light is already turning green. I wave back an apology and turn my attention to my phone. There’s a subway stop a block away. Looking at the MTA map, I can take the 4 train to the A train and that will get me to Kennedy. What do I need with a limo? After all, I’m in New York. Best publicly-funded transit system in America. I can take the subway to the airport. Just like a regular guy.

  I used to be a regular guy. Not a week ago, in fact. There were no limos, no bespoke suits, no orbital flights to Europe. A week ago, I was just Roderic Gant. Mathematician. Has all the good food, top shelf liquor and man-pampering made me forget who I really was? Who I really am? Where I’m from? No, I not only can take the subway to the airport, I need to. I need to shake off some of this capitalist excess. Walk a block, ride a subway, eat a hot dog...

  Yum, a hot dog. That’s one thing I’d forgotten to do in New York. In the flurry of Michelin stars and five-course menus, I’d forgotten the simple pleasure of the sidewalk hot dog. Up ahead, in front of the subway station, there’s a catering truck. It looks like it has dogs.