Slightly Suburban

Well, not just my motto. It’s actually the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s motto, but I’m down with it.

I spot a couple of candidates who look as if they might be up to something, but they’re probably just your garden-variety street thugs. There’s a woman who’s acting furtive and seems to have something strapped across her front, but then she turns around and I see that it’s a baby. Close call.

At the automated ticket machine, I feed a couple of soggy dollar bills into a slot that keeps spitting them back out again. After many frustrating tries, I wind up waiting on a seemingly endless line at the booth.

Finally, new Metrocard in hand, I’m through the turnstile, where I almost head to the uptown stairs out of habit. Home is a mere forty-three blocks and five stops up the line, I think wistfully. Jack is about the same distance in the opposite direction.

Should I just forget about meeting him? I so wish Mitch weren’t there. I so wish Mitch weren’t everywhere. Lately, he’s camped out on our new (custom-upholstered, a Christmas present to each other) couch night after night, watching sports with Jack.

Hey, if I go home now, I’ll have the couch—and remote—all to myself. I have to admit, E! True Hollywood Story sounds better than anything else right now.

But Jack is counting on me. And who knows? Maybe Mitch will take a hint and leave when I get there.

No, he won’t. He loves us. Even me. Jack is always telling me that. “He loves you, Tracey. He thinks you’re great.”

I’m so great and he loves me so much that a few months ago, Mitch decided to move into a studio apartment right around the corner from us. Thank God there were no openings in our building. He checked.

Don’t get me wrong—he’s a terrific guy. He and Jack have been friends since college and he was best man at our wedding. It’s just that my weekdays (and nights) have become so challenging that when I’m not at work, I want my husband—and our apartment, and our couch, and our remote—to myself.

I guess I should probably stop being so nice to Mitch whenever he’s over, so he won’t want to hang around. Or I should get Jack to tell him we need more time to ourselves. Or I should tell him myself.

Yeah. Or we could just move far, far away.

I trudge down the stairs leading to the southbound number six track, where I sense something is amiss.

My first clue: the platform is a squirming sea of humanity wearing a collective pissed-off expression, and the loudspeaker is squawking. The announcement is unintelligible, but it’s not as if they can possibly be saying, “Attention, subway riders, everything is running like clockwork tonight and we’ll have you where you’re going in no time. Have a great weekend!”

Hopefully it’s just a temporary delay.

I wearily force my way into the crowd, steering clear of the edge of the platform because really, the last thing I need right now is to fall onto the tracks and get hit by a train. Although, I wouldn’t really be surprised. If I lived to be surprised.

“Excuse me, what’s going on?” I ask the nearest bystander, who, if she were any nearer, would be huddled inside my coat with me.

She explains the situation, either in a language I don’t understand—meaning, something other than English or Italian—or with a major speech impediment, poor thing.

I smile and nod, pretending to get it.

Meanwhile, I eavesdrop on the guy whose elbow is pressed into my rib cage mere inches from my right breast. He’s saying something into his cell phone about a derailment down near Fourteenth Street.

Derailment?

Forget it. There’s no way in hell—which is pretty much where I am right now—that I’ll ever make it down to the Village.

I have no other choice but to squirm my way back to the stairs as—wouldn’t you know it—an uptown train comes and goes without me on the opposite track.

When at last I make it up the stairs and am heading toward the other side, I hear another train roaring into the northbound track below. Already? They usually don’t come this close together.

I break into a run, shouting, “Someone hold the doors!”

Nobody does, dammit.

I reach the platform just as they’re dinging closed, and this guy standing on the other side of the glass—some lame guy in a wet trench coat who could have held the doors, because I can tell by his expression that he heard me—offers a helpless shrug.

I dare to glare, hoping belatedly that he doesn’t have a gun, and watch the train trundle off toward my distant neighborhood without me.

Oh, well. Another one will be along in a few minutes, right?

Wrong. So, so wrong.

Twenty minutes later, this platform is nearly as crowded as the other side, and someone near me has terrible gas. I keep trying to move away, but the stink keeps moving, too. By process of elimination I’ve isolated it to three possible people: a guy with a goatee and backpack, an old lady, or an attractive businesswoman who’s about my age and may be trying too hard to appear nonchalant.

I’ve also just been treated to an a cappella rendition of Billy Squiers’s “Stroke Me,” sung by some dirty old man whose fly is down—making it less serenade than suggestion. When I refuse to throw some change into the hat he passes, he tells me to %@#$ Off, with an accompanying hand gesture.

By the time the next train comes hurtling into the station—so packed that the only way to get on is to literally shove past people crammed by the doors, who shove right back—I am wondering, once again, why I live in New York City.

I mean, seriously…what am I doing here?

Yes, my husband is here. And my job. And my friends. And all my stuff.

But…why?

These days, unless one is supremely wealthy—and we’re not—the quality of life in the city seems pretty dismal. Traffic, poverty, crowds, the smell…I can’t imagine it’s that much worse in Calcutta.

Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. They have monsoon season in Calcutta, right? And a lot of curry. I’m not crazy about curry.

But there’s a lot of curry in New York, too. And this might not be a monsoon, but as I splash back out into the deluge, I decide it’s worse. Whatever’s falling out of the sky has now frozen into sleet, or hail, and it’s pelting my face and head.

Remembering that there’s probably nothing to eat at home, I detour two blocks to the deli. I pick up a loaf of whole-grain bread, a half pound of turkey breast, lettuce, an apple, a diet raspberry Snapple and a couple of rolls of toilet paper because we’re almost out.

“Twenty-seven fifty-eight,” says the clerk.

I blink, look down at the counter and shove aside a big fruit basket that’s sitting there in shrink-wrap. “Oh, this isn’t mine,” I tell her.

“I know.”

Then why did you add it to my bill? And would it kill you to crack a smile?

Wait a minute. The fruit basket alone would have to be at least fifty bucks.

“How much was it?” I ask again, gesturing at my stuff, because I thought she said—

“Twenty-seven fifty-eight.”

Jeez. Can this measly little pile of groceries possibly cost that much?

Yes, it can, and Unsmiling Cashier is waiting for her money.

I open my wallet again, wondering why I’m surprised. I mean, after all these years of living in Manhattan, I know things are superexpensive. Yet every so often, I still find myself caught off guard at cash registers.

All that’s left in my wallet are two ones and a wad of receipts.

With a sigh, I pull out my American Express card. As Unsmiling Cashier runs it through the machine, a quick mental calculation tells me that in my hometown, this would run me ten bucks, maybe twelve. Tops.

Back out in the monsoon, I make my way to the doorman building that seemed like such a luxury when I first moved here from my dumpy little studio in the East Village.

As luck would have it, Jimmy, my favorite doorman—who actually flew up to Brookside for our wedding a few years ago—isn’t on duty tonight. He always cheers me up.

Unlike Gecko. He’s on duty tonight and always has the opposite effect. He’s the ultimate pessimist. I swear, you could win the lottery and he’d immediately list every past lottery winner who ever went on to get divorced, go bankrupt or commit suicide. He’s just that kind of guy.

“What a crappy night, huh?” he comments as he opens the door and I blow in on a gust of frozen precipitation.

“Yes,” I say.

“I mean literally.”

Uh-oh.

I know what he means by that.

“The M.C. has struck again,” Gecko informs me.

“Where?” I hold my breath.

“Third floor.”

I sign in relief. That’s six floors away from ours.

The Mad Crapper has been terrorizing our building for over a month now. He never strikes in the same place at the same time, so he’s been impossible to catch. Some tenants want to band together and organize a twenty-four-hour surveillance team with mandatory participation.

I really hope it doesn’t come to that. Because really, the last thing I want to do after a long, exhausting day at work is lurk in a shadowy corridor waiting for some stealthy figure to come along, squat and deposit a steaming pile of fresh crap before my very eyes.

Anyway, who’s to say the Mad Crapper isn’t living right here among us?

Sharing much T.M.I. about the latest strike, Gecko follows me to the mailroom, where I retrieve a stack of bills and catalogs from our box, along with an envelope addressed to Resident.

Uh-oh. Is this from the Citizens Vigilante Group?

No, thank God.

Even better.

“Building’s being fumigated again on Monday,” Gecko informs me as I open the envelope and skim the super’s note telling me just that.

“Again? Why?”

“Roaches,” says the perennial bearer of bad news. “Seventh floor’s infested.”

Infested. Now there’s a word that can’t possibly have a positive connotation under any circumstances.

“Uh-oh,” I say, making a face.

“Uh-oh is right. They’re probably crawling around in your place, too. Keep an eye out when you turn on the light.”

“Believe me, I will.”

It’s not like I’ve never seen a roach. Just about every apartment in New York has them at some point or another. But I freak out every time one scuttles past.

Going back to the Crapper’s latest M.O.—the culprit apparently signed his most recent offering with a fecal flourish—Gecko follows me toward the elevator.

“Have a good night,” he calls after me as I step in.

“You, too.”

“I doubt that,” he replies dourly as the doors slide closed.

For once, I’m right there with him.

On our floor, I make my way to apartment 9K, the tiny Ikea-furnished one-bedroom where we’ve been living for—is it almost five years now?

Five years. No wonder.

After unlocking three dead bolts, I step inside and promptly crash into a chair.

Not because somebody left it practically in front of the door, but because that’s where it belongs. There’s just no other place to put it.

I drop my barbell—I mean, bag—on it.

Ah, relief.

Rubbing my aching shoulder with one hand I turn on a lamp with the other, and check to see if roaches are scurrying into the corners.

No. But they’re probably there, tucked away into the cracks, watching me.

Just to be sure none has invaded our space, I give the apartment a good once-over. That takes all of four or five seconds, because there’s not much to it. Two boxy rooms—living room and bedroom—plus a galley kitchenette and bathroom.

Maybe the place would seem more spacious if we got rid of some of this clutter, I think, trying to be optimistic.

Like what, though? Our toothbrushes? The television set?

A booming sound overhead makes me jump, until I remember that a family of circus freaks moved in upstairs last month.

Seeing them in the elevator, you’d think they were a perfectly respectable Upper East Side family of four: Dad in suit with briefcase, Mom in yoga pants pushing designer stroller, one older kid who’s invariably plugged into something handheld with earphones, one younger kid placidly rolling along in said designer stroller.

The second they get home sweet home, though? Sideshow, full swing. Our ceiling shakes so violently you’d swear there are elephants, giants and fat ladies stomping around up there. Jo-Jo-the-dog-faced-boy scampers to and fro in an endless game of fetch, and there must be at least a couple of klutzy Wallendas who regularly fall off their trapeze onto the uncarpeted floor.

I’m betting a full-time live-in decorator is there as well, because furniture is rearranged as regularly as most of us pee. And I think there’s a resident carpenter, too—that, or a serial killer, because I hear what sounds like a hammer and a buzz saw at all hours. (Jack claims it’s just high heels and a blow-dryer, but he has a high noise tolerance. I could be standing right over him, talking to him, and he doesn’t hear me. I swear, it happens all the time.)

Oh, and I don’t know what happens to Older Kids’ ubiquitous earphones when he crosses the threshold of his bedroom—which has to be right above ours—but he’s not using them there. Our room vibrates day and night with the audio from his television and iPod speakers and arcadelike video-game system.

Valentine’s Day was a nightmare. To celebrate the third anniversary of Jack’s popping the question—yes, I’m big on commemorating relationship milestones—I staged this whole cozy scene for when he got home from work. There I was, waiting in our bed with lingerie, candles, champagne, chocolate fondue and Norah Jones (her new CD, I mean, not Norah herself—we’re not into threesomes).

About five minutes into our romantic evening, our room filled with deafening screams—not mine, and not pleasure. Then came the squealing car-chase tires, cursing and gunfire. Talk about a mood wrecker. Obviously, the kid was tuning in to some cable movie or a PlayStation game that wasn’t rated E for Everyone.

If you ask me, our upstairs neighbors should be censoring their kid’s audio-video habits.

That, or we should get the hell out of Dodge.

You know what? I really think it’s time.

Because, suddenly, I can’t take it anymore.

The circus freaks, the cramped quarters, roaches and pesticides, Mitch, the prices, the subway, Gecko, the Mad Crapper, my job, Crosby, the elevators, the lugging and hauling, the bodily contact with strangers.

When Jack and I first got engaged, I remember, I wanted to move.

But he said—and I quote: “one major life change per year is my quota.”

Ever since, there’s been at least one major life change per year. First we were newlyweds, then he got promoted at work, then I got promoted at work…

Worst of all, in the midst of the job shuffling, my father-in-law died suddenly.

Jack’s had a somewhat contentious relationship with his father for most of his life, and his parents’ divorce after more than thirty years of marriage didn’t help matters. As the only son, with two older sisters and two younger, Jack has always been his mother’s favorite—and his father’s least favorite.

Jack Candell Senior was a high-powered ad exec on Madison Avenue for years, and he pretty much pushed his son into the industry when what Jack really wanted to do was go to culinary school.

I think—no, I know—Jack Senior was hoping his son would become a wealthy, high-profile account-management guy, like he was. Instead, Jack found his way into the Media Department, where he’s great at what he does, but hasn’t become the big shot Jack Senior wanted him to become, and probably never will.

Over the years, Jack and I maintained regular contact with his father—mostly at my urging. My family is tight-knit and it just doesn’t feel right to me to shut out a parent. I’m the one who made sure we stopped to see Jack’s dad when we were up in Westchester, and I’m the one who invited him—and the woman who was his fiancée at the time, soon to become his wife—to the surprise thirtieth birthday dinner I threw for Jack.

Did they come?

No. But his father did write out a big check and stick it into a card with his apologies for being busy elsewhere that night. The card was one of those generic ones you get in a box of cards, not even a “special son” or “thirtieth birthday” one.

Jack was hurt when he found out I had extended an invite and his father turned it down, and his mother, Wilma, was livid.

“He’s a bastard,” she told me privately. “I don’t like to badmouth him to my kids. But he always has been a bastard, and he will be to his dying day.”

Which, sadly, wasn’t all that far off.

Not long after the party, we got one of those chilling early-morning phone calls: Jack’s sister Jeannie, with the news that their father had suffered a fatal heart attack.

Jack’s since had a hard time dealing with all that was left unreconciled—or at least, in his perception—between him and his dad.

He’s thanked me, many times, for trying to bridge the gap, for what it was worth.

Anyway, time is helping to heal.

And I think a fresh start is in order.

We’re a couple of months into this calendar year, and so far, there’s been nary a major life change in the Candell household.

Yet.

2

The next morning:

“Happy anniversary!”

That’s me, to Jack, all kiss, kiss.

“Er…anniversary?”

That’s Jack, to me, all deer in headlights.

I know what you’re thinking: typical male, forgot his wedding anniversary already. This honeymoon is more over than cargo capris. From here, it’s all downhill, like that old Carly Simon song where married couples are fated to cling and claw and drown in love’s debris.

Well, I, Tracey Spadolini Candell, am here to say: Wrong!

Of course Jack and I are still happily married.

And it isn’t our wedding anniversary.

Jack just thinks it is.

But not for long.

“Wait…we got married in October, Tracey. This is March…” Jack’s eyes dart to his watch calendar, just to be sure. “Right. March.”

He looks relieved.

“I know.” I perch on the arm of his favorite chair, which he sat in, fresh from his morning shower, newspaper poised and stereo playing, right before I kiss-kissed him. “But it’s the eighth. We met on the eighth, remember?”

“Of December,” he says, after another brief mental calculation. “We met on the eighth of December.”

“Right. But this is kind of like our diamond anniversary, if you think about it.”

Apparently, Jack really is thinking about it, wearing the same expression he had the other day when I asked him what inning it was in the Knicks game he was watching.

Look, I’m no ditz. I’m not a big sports fan either, but I’ve been married to this one long enough to know basketball games have quarters and baseball games have innings. When I said inning it was a slip of the tongue because I was weak from hunger at the time, and we were supposed to be going out to dinner after the game was over.

He hasn’t let me live it down. “Hey, guess what, Mitch? Guess what, Jimmy the Doorman? My wife thinks basketball has innings. Har dee har har.”

Good stuff. I’m surprised Conan hasn’t called.

“Diamond anniversary?” he echoes now, wearing that same my wife is slightly crazy look.

It doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it did back when we were newlyweds and I was much more emotional and touchy. Probably because I, too, have a look: the one I flash at him whenever he stands cluelessly in front of the open fridge telling me we’re out of butter, or mustard, or milk.

Um, no, hello, it’s right here in this gi-normous-can’t-miss-it plastic jug, see? All you have to do is look beyond the week-old container of moo goo gai pan you insisted you’d eat for a snack, and the wee jar of quince jam that came in a gift basket from some Client back in December, which you also claimed you’d eat for a snack, and, voila! Milk.

Like my friend Brenda once told me, love might be blind, but marriage is no eye-opener.

“I sway-uh, Tracey, no married guy I’ve ever met can find anything around the house,” she said in her thick Jersey accent, “not even when it’s right in front of his face. Scientists should do some kind of study and find out why that is.”

I figure scientists are still pretty wrapped up in global warming and cancer, but as soon as there’s an opening, I’m sure they’ll get to it. Because it really is strange.

You know what, though? I don’t really mind Jack’s masculine faults. In fact, I find most of them endearing. Except for the one where he farts under the covers and seals the blankets over my head, laughing hysterically. He calls it the Dutch Oven.

I figured all guys also do that. But when I asked my friend Kate about it, she reacted like I’d just told her Jack was into golden showers.

“What? That’s disgusting,” she drawled in her Alabama accent. “Billy would never do that to me!”

As if Billy—who is a total douche bag—isn’t capable of flatulence, or, for that matter, far worse behavior where Kate is concerned.

But I won’t get into that at the moment. So far, I haven’t dared get into it with Kate, either. I’m waiting until the time is right to mention that I saw her husband walking down Horatio Street in the Meatpacking District late one night with a woman who wasn’t Kate.

Granted, I was walking down the same street at the same hour with a guy who wasn’t Jack.

However, I had just come from my friends Raphael and Donatello’s place, and the guy, Blake, was a friend of theirs and while infinitely gorgeous and masculine, not the least bit threatening to my marriage, if you catch my drift.

Blake and I were both a little loopy from Bombay Sapphire and tonics and were singing a medley of sitcom theme songs when I spotted Billy and the Brunette.

They weren’t kissing, or groping, or even holding hands, but there was definitely something intimate about the way they were walking and talking. As in, she might have been a colleague but she definitely wasn’t just a colleague, and they might have been coming from a restaurant but they definitely weren’t coming from a dinner meeting.

And she definitely, definitely, wasn’t his sister. For one thing, I know—and strongly dislike, but that’s neither here nor there—his sister, Amanda.

For another, if that woman turned out to be some other unlikable Billy sister I haven’t met, then there’s something distinctly Flowers in the Attic about their relationship.

How do I know Billy and the woman aren’t platonic? Sometimes I just get a feeling about things for reasons I can quite put my finger on, and that was one of those times.

Blake—who must have met Billy at Raphael and Donatello’s wedding three years ago but probably wouldn’t know him if he fell over him, which was not unlikely in his Bombay Sapphire-fueled condition—was oblivious to the situation.

He launched us into the theme song from One Day at a Time as I saw the rest of Kate’s life—as a divorcée—flash before my very eyes.

Maybe I was jumping the gun. Maybe they really were just colleagues.

Blake elbowed me as I stopped singing and turned to watch Billy and the woman get into a cab together.

“Tracey, you’re supposed to back me up. Let’s try it again,” Blake said, and sang, “Thiiiis is it…”

“Thiiis is it,” I obediently echoed in tune, watching the cab make a right turn onto Hudson, heading downtown, instead of continuing on the next short block, making a right onto West Fourth and heading uptown.

Billy and Kate, of course, live uptown. Shouldn’t he have been heading home at that hour on a weeknight?

And even if she lived downtown, if they were going their separate ways, shouldn’t they have gotten separate cabs? There were plenty around. Believe me, I checked.

I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t get into this whole Billy thing at the moment, but I can’t help it. It’s been weighing me down for weeks now and even though I know it could have been perfectly innocent, I also know that it wasn’t.