Audrey’s Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

him a little better, but not much. He’d lived with his parents in the Trump Towers, and kept talking about howmuch money he would inherit when they died. From the broken veins across his nose and the half bottle of Bombay Gin he downed, she got the feeling that she’d hooked herself a boozer. “You’re forty-two years old, right?” she’d asked, thinking such a question would shame him, but instead he’d answered, “I lied on the application. I’m forty-nine.”
    Compared to his predecessors, Saraub was Prince Charming. His name was pronounced Sore-rub but his friends called him Bobby, because, before political correctness, that was what kindergarten teachers at Manhattan private schools renamed all the Indian kids—they didn’t like having to pronounce foreign words. Worse, she later learned, his real name was Saurabh, but the hospital got it wrong on the birth certificate.
    From his short, no-nonsense e-mails she’d learned that he was a documentary filmmaker, he liked Frank Miller comic books, especially Batman, and he was teaching himself to play the harmonica. Badly. He’d never once written that she was hot, that he’d like to poke her, or that he wanted to fill a room with oodles of crisp hundred-dollar bills and swim naked through them with her. “Yours, Saraub,” he always signed, and the first time she’d read that, she’d thought: Okay, I’ll take you.
    “Are you stoned?” Saraub had asked when she met him outside the Film Forum movie theatre, where they’d arranged to see Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Her pupils must have been dilated to the size of black aggie marbles. So far, he was the only guy who’d noticed.
    “Yeah. I hardly ever smoke anymore. But I got nervous,” she’d confessed.
    He was about six-foot-six, and wide as a linebacker, but he stood kind of slumped, like he’d been putting people at ease about his girth for so long that he’d given himself bad posture. His online profile had framed only his face: clear skin and big, puppy-dog brown eyes. Shehadn’t noticed his twenty-inch neck. Probably, to get his blue pin-striped shirt to hang so nicely, he’d had it made special.
    He bent down so that they were talking eye to eye. “Do I look that scary?”
    She’d shrugged. This was her third date in a month, and already she was sick of the bullshit. “Yeah, you do look scary, but that’s not why I’m high. I don’t date normally, but ever since I moved to New York, I decided to try, you know? I don’t come from much, but I’m trying.”
    He’d frowned. Maybe he’d expected the gleeful Audrey Lucas from the singleny.com profile, who ended all her sentences with exclamation points (looking forward to meeting you!!!) to be his soul mate, but the somber woman with crow’s-feet waiting for him at Film Forum had dashed his hopes. He looked up at the sky, like he was just a little pissed off at God. It occurred to her that getting high before a date is kind of rude.
    “Hey, I’m sorry. What can I do?” she asked.
    Cars trundled down West Houston Street and toward the Holland Tunnel. “I’m trying, too,” he said as a cab hit a pothole, so she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.
    “What?”
    He shook his head. “Forget it. I should go. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
    Normally, she would have let him leave. Her tiny, four-walled dorm room whose bathroom she shared with three other girls needed vacuuming, and he was a fat Indian guy, so why chase him? She could call forty-nine-year-old contestant number two tonight instead. They’d go out and get sloshed, and in a way that would be easier because he wouldn’t look at her the way Saraub was looking at her right now, like he was actually trying to see her.
    He started to walk away, and it slipped out before she had the chance to censor herself: “Don’t go. I like you.”Suddenly, she was red-faced and sober. Her heart beat in her ears (squish-squish!), and she looked around for a hole to crawl inside