The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [14]
“You’re a member of what we call ‘the experiential generation,’ dear.”
“Meaning what?” Charlotte had asked.
“Meaning you spend all your money now and save nothing for later,” he’d chuckled. “Now how ’bout experiencing a nice glass of $350 Germain-Robin brandy?”
Kicking off her flats and hoisting herself up from the couch, she walked down the narrow hall towards her bedroom. The pink silk sari walls looked as fresh as the day she’d tacked them up. While her clients insisted on spending fortunes and buying only from top notch textile dealers, Charlotte preferred to hunt for saris in the tacky Mom and Pop stores on Lexington Avenue. She loved the strings of garish colored blinking lights strung up inside the windows, the pungent restaurant smells of oily curries and spices, and the cheerful rat-tat-tat of Urdu, the language of Pakistani taxi drivers. Picnicking from the hoods of their cars, the drivers would stand around and gossip as Charlotte sat in one of the shops, drinking tea and haggling as if her life depended on it.
Sometimes, like with the sari on her hallway walls, she’d get lucky. The owner would pat her hand and ask her to wait as he wandered off into a dimly lit backroom. Charlotte would drink her tea and fantasize about discovering some long lost treasure like the Baroda carpet. Seven feet long, the rug was a piece of soft deerskin studded with a million pearls, over 2,000 rose-cut diamonds, and hundreds of rubies and emeralds. It had disappeared in the 1940s during Partition when an Indian maharani had sent it to Switzerland for “safekeeping.”
The sari on her walls may not have been quite as precious as the Baroda carpet. But when the dealer emerged from his backroom, he treated it almost as reverently. Unfolding the yards of heavy silk from a bed of wrinkled white tissue, he’d run his fingers along the hand-embroidered borders. “Real gold filigree, Miss.” he’d boasted. “A wedding sari from long ago.” Two cups of tea and fifteen minutes of bargaining later, the sari was hers.
Then she remembered that it was Paul who had helped her tack it up. Two years, they’d been together. And he’d dumped her for some twenty-three-year-old British party girl with an I.Q. of 4.
“She’s OD’ed on Gs and Es,” he reported the night he called from New York Hospital. As in grams of cocaine and ecstasy. Apparently, the girl’s father sent some lackey from an international concierge service to pick up his own daughter in the emergency room. There was this girl strung out and nearly dead, and all Paul wanted to talk about was the concierge service.
“It’s free, Charlotte. I mean, it’s part of the lifestyle management team at her condo.”
Charlotte assumed that people used these services for booking front row seats at fashion shows and last minute tables at Nobu. Not for picking up comatose daughters. “Uhhuh,” was the only word she’d managed to summon up from the depths of sleep. Did he really think she cared? Who did he think he was, waking her at 2 in the morning to talk about his new girlfriend?
This was the problem with opening yourself up to people; when you were generous and loving and serving, always serving, the needs of others. They turned on you. They exploited you. My whole life is about other people, Charlotte sighed. And I never get any thanks. Neatly folding back the top sheet on her bed and plumping the goose down pillows, Charlotte tried not to think of the shrunken old lady she’d seen shuffling through the checkout line at D’Agostinos. As Charlotte flipped through the pages of the Enquirer and the woman exchanged green points for TV dinners and Bumble Bee tuna fish, Charlotte imagined herself at a similar age, hunched over and hiding the hump on her back with shawls and droopy, oversized clothing.
She could sense the woman’s shame, her humiliation. Years of bending over backwards, of pleasing and appeasing, and this was her reward. But this is what protecting and serving people