Orangetheory
I woke up thinking it hadn’t been much of a spring, rainy and cold. I was hungry. For breakfast. Maybe bacon, egg, and cheese on a toasted sesame bagel? They don’t make good bagels in New York City anymore. Other cities emulating New York make better bagels than New York. Isn’t that disappointing? But before I allowed myself to fall into a food-related vortex of regret and anger, I groaned to a standing position, took two steps, my right heel hurting when I put weight on it, and peered around the side of the shade, out at our third-floor balcony and the gleaming blue city beyond.
Sunny. June. 2022. Huh.
I looked back at the bed where Laura, on the far side, lay smothered in our white comforter and her own black hair. She pretended to be asleep while I pulled on cargo shorts, a torn flannel, and a crusty cap, thus completing a look I call down-on-his-luck fisherman. Feet clad in flip-flops, I crept out the apartment door.
Wondering for no apparent reason whether Laura and I should have had children, I padded down the long hallway toward the center elevator, the dull sconces turning on as I passed. Yeah, my heel was still hurting. Bone spur? What exactly is a bone spur? Maybe it’s one of those things that’s well enough left alone? Hitting the down button, I pondered my lifelong philosophy of leaving well enough alone. Had that been a mistake? But then in the elevator, a follow-up thought: no use fighting one’s own nature—that’s a losing battle.
The doors slid open onto the ivy-trellised lobby, and there she was: Alina, small behind the granite-topped front desk, reading a paperback with a library number on the spine. She looked up—oh, those large unfashionable glasses, her professional lacy white button-down, and that smile—and she said, “Good morning, Paul.”
Yes, it is a good morning, Alina. It’s sunny! It’s June! It’s 2022!
But I merely grumbled, “Morning,” because I didn’t want my sudden internal cheeriness at the sight of her to freak her out. Our tenant/front desk person relationship rested on a bedrock of apparent apathy.
“Did you forget someone?” she asked.
“Oh shit. The dog. Hopefully he’s asleep on the couch?” I’d hear hell from Laura about not taking the dog out when I got back upstairs. “Unless it found a job and entered society. That would be a relief.”
Alina didn’t laugh. But why should she? It wasn’t funny. She just stared at me, waiting for me to say something else stupid. She did that sometimes. That was our thing. No. We didn’t have a thing. After all, I was a middle-aged man who knew his way around a muffin and looked it. And she was cute and smart and maybe thirty. I wasn’t that deluded. Not yet.
“Want anything from outside?” I said because I had to say something.
“Where are you going?”
“Bagels, Bagels, Bagels.”
“Their bagels are good.”
“They’re not. But I’m going there anyway.”
“Nah. I’m okay.”
I squinted down the sidewalk, leaning on my left foot to relieve the pain in my right. Next to me, four lanes of early-morning traffic lazily loped in both directions on McGuinness Boulevard. I wondered whether there was anything in my repertoire with Alina that I hadn’t covered that I could bring up on my way back in. Ah yes, we did have one inside joke: I’d say, “Still trying to get fired?” And she’d say, “You know I am.” Because she was trying to get fired, and I knew that she was. Honestly, I thought while waiting for my breakfast sandwich, she isn’t trying very hard. I’d learned over months of idle chitchat that Alina had taken this job sitting at the front desk of a luxury building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, because it gave her time to work on her chick-lit romance novel. Her home life was chaotic, so it was difficult for her to write there. She was Dominican or Puerto Rican or half of each or half of one? This should’ve been an easy thing to verify, but honestly, too many questions, they felt creepy, and who knows, I could do something stupid like . . . mispronounce Dominican?
“I’m seriously worried that inertia will keep me here my entire life,” she once confided in me. “And that’s okay, but it means I don’t want to live a long life.” And so she spent her days concerned she’d spend her days signing for packages and being nice to the rich tenants in the 190 or so units. Well, I wasn’t rich, but we can get to that later.
I made my way back past the still-shuttered shops, all the while attempting to drink my coffee, but the opening of the lid was aligned with the seam of the cup, and the coffee dribbled down my shirt. Shouldn’t everyone in the hot drink biz know not to align the opening with the seam? And how come it happens so often? Like the opening and the seam are mysteriously drawn to each other. Looking forward to being distracted from the nonsense in my head, I pulled open the large glass door of the eight-floor, block-long, brick facade I called home, and there was Alina, still in her book but then looking up at me, her smile smaller now that she’d already seen me once today. I didn’t take that personally for too long.
“Still trying to get fired?” I asked.
“You know I am.”
Not eager to go back upstairs, I leaned on her desk with one elbow, heart thumping a bit in my ears. “I just think you’re not trying hard enough.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” she said with a flat affect. “No perverted stuff.”
“I’d never.”
“You know, don’t suggest I should have sex with someone in the mail room or—”
“Now I’m uncomfortable,” I muttered.
“That’s the best thing about you.”
“That I’m uncomfortable?”
“Yes.”
The way she was looking me in the eye, maybe she did like me a little. Or maybe she just wasn’t afraid of eye contact. Either way it was hard for me to relate. She had said sex in my presence; pretty sure that was a first. Without thinking about what I was saying, I let the following words tumble out: “The other day, I thought of one thing I could use your help with, and it would definitely get you fired.”
“Intriguing.” She sat back, arms crossed.
The floor was mine, but I lost my nerve. “It’s personal. And um. I don’t know if I could actually do it. I tend to get stuck.”
“We have that in common.”
“I guess we do.”
She was still looking at me, and so I stumbled on with, “The plan I’ve formulated that you would help me with, the sort of action I’m thinking of taking, I’d have to be really angry. At my wife. You know, moved by my emotions in the moment.”
“I’m game whenever.”
“Oh, I don’t think you will be.”
“Oh, I will be.”
This really was turning out to be a great day. But still, I felt relief when Alina’s walkie-talkie squawked because what I wanted to suggest, what had been on my mind since I realized my wife was having an affair, was extreme.
From the walkie: “Helloooo, Alina. Can you come up to the roof, please?” The throaty voice of Stovan, the building’s Serbian maintenance man.
“To the roof?” Alina asked.
“Something is happening on the roof,” he said melodically.
“Jesus.”
“Yes yes yes, and the woman, the same woman, she is crying, and she asks can you come up—”
“Of course.”
“There’s a ruckus on the roof?” I sympathized.
“Do you mind standing at the desk for a minute?” Alina crinkled her nose. She did that sometimes when she wanted to be cute. “It’s nine thirty, so the UPS person should be here soon, and someone needs to physically be at the desk or they can’t leave packages and all hell will break loose.”
“Sure. But wouldn’t it help you get fired if you left the desk unattended?”
“I’m a coward. And I hate when people are angry with me.”
That was one thing we did not have in common. I had resigned myself to other people’s anger a long time ago.
Alina shrugged, I shrugged, and then she jogged to the elevator. As I rotated my body behind the desk, I congratulated myself for not looking at her butt.
The first person to enter the Jax (the building has a name—why judge?) in Alina’s absence was a skinny hipster with a hairstyle nodding toward the mullet, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and track pants. I said, “Hi, do you live here?” and he grimaced at me and kept swaying through space. Now it’s true that Alina doesn’t have to ask people if they live here; she just knows—a feat of genius.
That skinny hipster is indicative of a certain type of resident, the young dude who looks like he’s come from the beach. Another type is the attractive professional in her thirties who still knows how to party. And then there’s a contingent of less attractive young people who live with their dogs. My wife and I are forty, which makes us the oldest people to have ever set foot in this building.
Then the UPS guy came in with so many boxes that you wouldn’t believe me, so why bother describing other than to say they were on the floor and on the desk in such a way as to partially block my view of the lobby and the glass-enclosed common area on the far side of the center elevator. Alina would have to enter all of these packages into the computer so that the tenants would get email notifications, a task the thought of which made me queasy.
The third and final person I saw enter during my time as front desk substitute was the one who would haunt me in the days to come. This leather-clad figure pulled the glass door open with one straight arm and strode across the lobby, head encased in a cherry-red motorcycle helmet, visor down. At first, I thought he was a delivery guy and would stop at the desk, but by the time I squeaked out an “Excuse me, sir?” he’d stalked down the parqueted hallway and was flinging open the stairwell door next to the northern elevator.
I sped-drank some coffee so that I’d be caffeinated enough to chastise him on his way out. And then I ate my breakfast sandwich. It wasn’t bad: they actually cook the bacon there while you wait, rather than plucking it from a metal tin of premade meat. Which I do appreciate.
It was only after the first tenant died that I realized I never did see that visored stranger come back down.
Thirty minutes later, Alina was back behind her desk, and I was back in front of it, watching her anger-type on the keyboard, checking in packages. She seemed genuinely upset by whatever had transpired on the roof.
“The fucking tenants here,” Alina said.
“Tell me about it.”
“I mean it, Paul. I’m done. I might be angry enough to actually do whatever the thing is you want me to do that will get me fired.”
“Excellent.”
“So tell me what the thing is!” I think she meant to mock-shout, but it came out as a shout-shout.
“I’m not there yet,” I said. “Sorry. It’s . . . it’s some next-level shit.” And then, seeing that she was nearly in tears: “What happened up there?”
“On the roof?”
“Yeah.”
“Fucking tenant in 705.”
“The one you watch her dog?”
“I do all sorts of shit for that self-indulgent bitch. Every Saturday morning at nine, she’s up on the roof, in the pool.”
“The pool doesn’t open until ten,” I said, playing the part of well-behaved tenant.
“Drunk,” Alina mouthed.
“And inebriation in the pool area is forbidden.” We have an outdoor pool and a landscaped garden on the roof. This building is a whole thing.
“So Stovan was trying to fish her ass out of the pool,” Alina continued.
“And today is the day he has to change the air filters in all the eighth-floor apartments.”
“How do you know that?”
“I pay attention to what you say.”
“So he’s already fed up. That’s when he called me, ’cause she’s being belligerent, refusing to get out of the pool, and me and her, we’re like friends?”
“You’re not friends,” I said.
“I know. I coax her down to her apartment. She gets naked ’cause I don’t know why, and so I left her there in her king-size bed, completely passed out, snoring, with Ozark playing on the TV.” Alina let out a sob. “This can’t be my life.”
***
A few minutes later, I was back in my apartment, tugging at my beard, looking at the carnage on our bedroom balcony.
“I don’t understand why you let this happen.”
“What’s to understand?” Laura asked me. “I let the dog shit on the balcony because you didn’t take him out with you this morning.”
I turned away from the glass door to where Laura was standing at the foot of our bed, the central air rippling through her silk robe. I still couldn’t believe we had central air—in New York City? Who did we think we were? We deserved any tragedy that might—and would—befall us. Well, any tragedy save one.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t take the dog out,” I ventured.
“I let the dog out,” she snapped.
“But Jesus, the neighbor upstairs hates it when Theo shits all over the balcony.”
“Just answer a question for me,” she said, employing a new tactic.
“Okay?”
“Our nicely proportioned balcony. Is that, or is that not, outside?”
“I prefer the dog to go to the bathroom outside. Like outside outside.”
“Then you should have walked it!”
She had me there, so I scooted by her formidable figure and hurried into our open-plan kitchen, where I grabbed some paper towels and a trash bag. Then I scooted by her again and scurried out onto the balcony and tried to pick up all of the dog’s half-liquid shit before the upstairs neighbor smelled it.
Laura often reminded me that our cockapoo has digestive issues because I bought him from a pet store where he picked up a parasite. I should have gotten a dog from a rescue shelter. But Theo had looked so miserable, so hadn’t I, in a sense, rescued him from the pet store? In any event, while I was picking up mushy turds, Theo, curly haired and russet colored, leaped down from his napping perch on our outdoor chair and joyfully jumped up, trying to nab the gloppy poop-towel in my hand. I gave him a pat-pat. I love that stupid dog.
Laura brought out her coffee and surveyed the parking lot below and the narrower luxury building behind ours. But I guess all that looking around got boring because she taunted me with, “I bet you were down there flirting with that front desk woman.”
“I watched the desk for her because she needed to deal with the tenant in 705.”
“You know she’s paid to be nice to you. You know that, right? Like a hooker.”
“Couldn’t you at least say like a waitress?” I asked.
“If you want to sleep with her, go ahead. I just think it’s going to be expensive.”
“She’s paid to be nice to me like a waitress!”
Shoving the paper towels in the trash bag, I huffed through the bedroom with the dog at my heels. Laura was making me angry, but not angry enough to implement my plan (the plan that would get Alina fired). There was only one thing Laura could say that would make me initiate that course of action: Orangetheory.
“What are you going to do with that trash bag?” Laura called, coming in from the balcony.
“I’m going to tie it tightly and throw it down the trash chute immediately.”
“Good boy.”
“Don’t patronize me,” I groused as I picked up Theo before I opened the front door so that he couldn’t make a run for it.
“You’re so sensitive.” Laura leaned on the bedroom doorframe and stared into the middle distance.
“What are you planning to do today anyway?” I asked, one foot in the apartment, one foot out.
“Maybe sit by the pool on the roof? Watch all the young people. Are you going to get rid of the trash, or do I have to do that too?”
I cast Theo back inside, made my way down the corridor, pulled open the small square metal door, and let the plastic bag spelunk into the darkness. No doubt, the past few months, Laura and I had been too hard on each other. We were both exhausted. It took a lot of energy to pretend we didn’t despise each other.
Ironically, we’d moved to this building hoping it would restore some marital happiness. That living here would bring us back to the carefree attitude we used to enjoy at local bars or nice hotels. We’d been living in a tiny East Village walk-up that I’d bought in the early 2010s after a string of good-luck acting jobs. I’d been making decent money playing bit parts on the blurry edges of your TV screen. Maybe I’d have a bit part where I found my fiancée dead on the stoop. Or I’d be a day-player begging a bookie for some extra time to repay a loan. Or I’d have a walk-on as a jersey-wearing sports fan who yelled chug chug chug before his buddy died of alcohol poisoning.
But ten years later, our East Village apartment had gone from dilapidated chic to actually dilapidated, and I couldn’t think about auditioning without feeling existential vertigo. Was I really going to continue documenting my aging process by playing a consecutive string of “passersby” or “additional attendees” on shows you’ve never heard of? And that’s if I was lucky? I was pretty sure I was one “Hey, any auditions?” email away from my agent suggesting I join an extra service where they pay you a hundred bucks to stand in the background. And meanwhile, in my marriage, Laura had lost all respect for me, or I had lost all respect for me (it was hard to tell the difference), and I was relegated to the person my wife complained to when things in the apartment broke, which was happening with precipitous frequency.
Happy day, then, when a real estate agent told us he could sell our East Village shithole for $1.2 million, netting me, us, $300,000 more than I’d paid for it when it was overpriced in 2011, so I said yes, please. And even though I wasn’t acting much anymore (acting?), I still had a bit of passive income due to a couple of shows that were popular on the streamers. So, after a year of Covid-related isolation in our cavernous, book-lined, sagging-in-the-middle one-bedroom, we moved to Greenpoint in search of sunlight, an on-site maintenance man, and a pool on the roof.
Back inside our apartment, I peered into the small guest bedroom/office space where we stored extra clothes, to glimpse Laura . . .packing a gym bag? She wouldn’t dare . . . would she? Just because I didn’t take out the dog? Or just because I gave her a hard time about letting the dog do his business on the balcony? Or just because she woke up in a shitty mood? Warm anger filled my body. Without realizing it, I’d walked into the kitchen. I made myself a Nespresso. Maybe she’ll just say she’s going to the gym in our building. Right? She won’t dare say . . . Orangetheory.
Then I was sitting at our table in the living room, tiny espresso cup nesting in my fingers, gazing out through our wall of windows toward the water treatment plant (nicknamed “shit tits” for its eight giant metal breast-shaped cones heaving heavenward). Goddamn it, was she really going to start this Orangetheory stuff again?
When we’d moved to the Jax a year ago in 2021, Laura had seemed happy. We were exploring restaurants and even making some friends in the building. Sure, we were a bit older than our neighbors, but because our jobs weren’t in finance or digital marketing, we were interesting. In particular, we’d get together with Randy and Lisa, whom we’d dubbed the plant people because they had so many goddamn plants. And because their lack of enthusiasm in general made them seem . . . floral. But soon we realized that although we might be interesting, our new friends had nothing to say at all. So Laura and I would talk nonstop at get-togethers, and as you can imagine, that became tedious for all parties. I mean, these people must have discussed something when we weren’t there, but I literally had no idea what that something might be. Soon we all just smiled at one another in the hallway, silently pleading, Don’t stop to say hi, please. I’m listening to a podcast.
Laura dropped her gym bag on the counter, and my mind returned to the present moment. I saw her standing in the kitchen clad in gray and blue nylon. She was glaring at me, daring me to ask where she was going. I simply sipped my Nespresso and turned back to the window.
Around the time our social calendar dried up, Laura started going to fitness classes at Orangetheory on Saturday and Sunday mornings. At first, this solved our weekend ennui. She’d trot back into our apartment, flushed from her workout, and we could surf those endorphins to brunch or shopping or even a bike ride by the river. Those first few weekends, I’d sit by the window and actually eagerly anticipate her return.
But then one Saturday I noticed something strange. She wasn’t returning from anywhere. See, our apartment is an end unit that runs the width of the building. So while our bedroom balcony overlooks the parking area, our living room windows look down and over onto the main entrance and directly down at the additional stairwell entrance. On the other side of that door is the metal gate that opens into the building’s parking garage. Those are the only entrances in and out of the building. That Saturday, I happened to be watching the people and their animals stroll by on the sidewalk when Laura bounded through our apartment door. But I couldn’t remember having seen her reenter the building. And so, the following day, I peered down through our windows after she left the apartment. And I never saw her exit the building. Let alone walk back in two hours later. Yet there she was back in our apartment. Sweaty.
So a week later, after she left, as soon as I thought she’d made it into the closest elevator, I sprinted to it and watched the electronic numbers go up to floor eight. The building’s gym was on the eighth floor, but that’s not where she was going, so there would be no reason to lie. I was certain in my bones that she was visiting a . . . gentleman acquaintance. To confirm my theory, all I had to do was stand in the gym and peer out of its glass door like a deranged maniac until Laura appeared from one of the apartments. And, goddamn it, that’s just what I did.
Curling the smallest fucking weight I could find, I stared out onto the eighth-floor hallway for two full hours. (I couldn’t care less what the lone Peloton rider thought of me; my eyes were so full of blood, I couldn’t even tell you if that bike-riding son of a bitch was male or female.) When Laura finally emerged, she was laughing, almost stumbling out of the second to last apartment on the other end of the hallway, nearly a full city block away. To confront her right then and there would have been ridiculous. Me running down a hallway toward her for like two minutes, my heavy torso heaving up and down—that would have rendered me the cuckholdest cuckhold the world had ever seen. Not to mention I’d been lifting a two-pound weight for two hours—I was exhausted. So I watched her figure blissfully float to and then disappear down the far stairwell. I never even saw him, whoever him was.
Feeling murderous and hungry—a bad combination—I stalked down Manhattan Avenue and bought myself a honey-glazed donut at Peter Pan Bakery. Somewhat sedated by the carbs, I glowered back to our apartment, now feeling more pouty than angry.
Laura was in the glass-enclosed shower. I stood at the sink.
Me: “I know you were just in apartment 825.”
Laura: “That’s ridiculous.”
Me: “I saw you come out. I was in the gym.”
Laura: “That’s on the other side of the hallway.”
Me: “I have twenty-twenty vision!”
Laura: “I was at Orangetheory!”
She stepped out of the shower and grabbed her towel, but she didn’t cover herself with it. She was mocking me with her magnificently tall nakedness.
Me: “You never exited the building!”
Laura: “What are you talking about?”
Me: “You’re cheating on me!”
Laura: “And so what if I am!”
And then she cloaked herself in the towel and grabbed a second towel to dry her hair.
Me: “You don’t even like sex!”
Laura: “I don’t like sex with you!”
She pushed by me and shoved on her clothes.
Me: “Tell me you’re not having an affair with the guy in 825, whoever that is!”
Laura: “Here I thought we could have a nice day today.”
Me: “So you’re not even going to deny it?”
Laura: “Exactly.”
And, makeup-less, Laura strode out of our apartment. This time I saw her exit the building.
In the intervening two months, Laura had never mentioned, let alone gone to, Orangetheory, a tacit admission of her own guilt. But the threat of those two nonsensical words smushed together hovered over us when we bickered over banalities in bed or sat in silent contempt on either side of a meal. You might be wondering why we didn’t explore divorce. Well, the cynical part of me knew that with her modest salary working for a not-for-profit, she couldn’t afford to live in this building without me. And for my part? Divorce involves a lot of paperwork, and I have an irrational fear of paperwork. But honestly, I loved Laura. I admired her and knew that her head was a dark place from which to serve out a life sentence. And when we were in sync? It was us against the world. We knew it all, cigarettes and whiskeys in hand, everyone else be damned.
Sucking up the last foamy bits of Nespresso, my thoughts toward my wife were becoming kinder and warmer, when I realized she was standing over me. She was saying, probably repeating . . .
“Hey! Paul! Hey!”
“What?”
“I’m leaving now.”
And then she said, almost apologetically . . .
“I’m going to Orangetheory.”
