Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen Page B

service and found out from them that I wasn’t on the schedule for a car this morning. But the network guys probably figured that if I could scream at some stranger named Ramon at daybreak it would cool me off a little bit so they’d get off easy. Which is not the way it eventually happened, but that was probably their thinking.”
    “Oh, God,” I said.
    “I can’t even run,” she said, and her voice seemed a little thin, as though that monologue had exhausted her. “Or swim. Yesterday was the first morning I’ve missed swimming in eleven years. When I covered the Sydney Olympics, I got off the plane and swam double laps to make up for the twenty-three hours in the air and the time difference.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Never mind. It’s such a relief to talk to someone who doesn’t go like this”—and turning her voice into something between a moan and a croon, she said—“Meghan, how aaaaaare you? Which of course really means, Jesus, girl, you are so screwed and I can’t wait to report back at lunch about what a shadow of your former self you’ve become almost overnight. Which reminds me. Want to have lunch?”
    “Where are you, anyway? I tried you at Harriet’s and no one answered.”
    “How did you know I was at Harriet’s?”
    This is my particular area of expertise. I step in it. I am the person who once asked a woman who was not pregnant when she was due, who congratulated Meghan’s producer on the great job she was doing at a party fifteen minutes after she’d been fired, who thought Meghan was joking when she said she was going to name the baby Leo.
    “Bridge-et? Bridget Anne Fitzmaurice?”
    “Evan.”
    “Evan called you?”
    “Evan came up here to see me.”
    “Up to the Bronx. Evan?”
    “Yesterday morning.”
    “Black car, I assume?”
    “Duh.”
    “And he said…?”
    “He was upset.” Oh, no. I let my head drop into my hands. I am the woman who asked the wife of the Nobel Prize winner in Literature whether she critiqued her husband’s poetry three months after her husband had left her. For a twenty-two-year-old waiter at Repaste. A male waiter.
    Perhaps I only imagined that the silence on the other end was vibrating. It might have been the connection. “Do you have a pen, Bridget? I’m at three thirty-two Central Park West, at the corner of Ninety-fourth Street. Apartment eight-N. I’ll order out. Indian?”
    “Sounds fine. Do you want me to bring anything?”
    “Not a thing. Put Tequila back on, please.”
    From the other room I heard Tequila say, “Here, baby.” Then there was a long silence. “I’ll say a prayer for you,” she finally added.
    “What did she say?” I hollered out to reception.
    Tequila came in unwrapping some Dubble Bubble, her eyes lifted heavenward. “She say if her husband come back here, I oughta cut his thing off.”
    “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
    “Taking the Lord’s name never improved a damn thing.”
    “I have a date in housing court I’ve got to cancel.”
    “No you don’t. That woman went to North Carolina. She called this morning, said to hell with this city and everybody in it. She say she going where it’s nice and warm.”
    “I get that.”
    “Me, too,” Tequila said.

         
     
     
    H ARRIET’S BUILDING WAS right around the corner from a building I’d lived in for two years when I was still working as a potter. In fact, there are few Manhattan neighborhoods in which, sooner or later, I do not walk past a vaguely familiar stoop and realize with a pleasant shock that I once had an apartment there. The tiny floor-through in the Federal house in the south Village with the fireplace in the living room out of which a terrified squirrel had erupted one day. The one-bedroom in Chelsea on that seminary block with all the trees that I’d had to vacate because a venture capitalist bought the house and wanted all six thousand square feet for his family of three. The place on Ninety-sixth Street where I’d lived while I