Greta had laughed and devoured the sixteen-dollar hot dog he’d ordered for her.
“Every bite of food in this town costs at least four bucks,” she said. “Have you noticed?”
“Your cheekbones remind me of the fins on an old Cadillac,” he said.
“I’m forty-five,” Greta said.
“By ‘old’ I meant ‘classic,’？” he said quickly.
“LOL,” Greta said.
He gave her a sorrowful look. “You’re uncomfortable with compliments about your appearance.”
“Me and everyone else,” Greta said.
“Actually, people around here love to be told they’re beautiful.”
Greta thought of that dog she often saw at the dog park, a dopey white boxer who compulsively licked the mouths of other dogs. His name was Popsicle. He followed the other dogs around, lapping at their open mouths with his long pink tongue while they tried to get away from him. Sometimes he got bitten in the face by Greta’s dog, but not even that stopped him.
“That’s Japanese denim, right?” Om asked, gazing at Greta’s pant leg.
“I believe it’s just regular denim,” she said.
Disappointment. She remembered that this was an interview for a job she needed very much, and that her days of sixteen-dollar hot dogs were nearly over, along with everything else. She glanced at Om’s lower half.
“Cute socks,” she said.
“Why, thank you kindly,” he said. “So. You’ve done this before, right?”
“What?”
“Transcribing,” he said.
“Oh yeah, of course. I type seventy words per minute and I have a really good ear.”
“Me too,” Om said. “I have perfect pitch, in fact, which is why I play angklung in a gamelan ensemble. What about you?”
“Bass,” Greta said.
Forty words per minute, 10 percent hearing loss in her right ear, never played bass in her life. Although she was newly single and happier than she’d been in years, a small part of her was still ready to die, and still enjoyed telling lies.
“Okay, so, this might be a strange question, but… what’s your relationship to work?”
“How do you mean?”
“Do you like it?” Om asked.
“Do I like work?” Greta said.
“It’s just—I feel like I have to ask, because a lot of people in this town—I won’t name names, because there’s too many—seem to be allergic to work, and will do literally anything to get out of it, including falling off a roof.”
“My last name is Work,” Greta said.
“Pardon?”
“My name,” Greta said, “is Greta Work.”
An incomplete sentence. A curse, a command. In the rare case she introduced herself with her full name, she felt like she was interrupting herself. If there were an S at the end, maybe she’d have felt like a whole person.
“What is that—German?”
“It’s English. It derives from the ancient word ‘geweorc,’ which means ‘work that’s done or made,’ which may explain why, in my dreams, I’m often toiling away in a factory.”
“Cool,” Om said. “Are you comfortable signing a confidentiality agreement?”
“Of course,” Greta lied.
She loathed official documents of any kind, which was why she hadn’t filed a tax return in six years and didn’t have health insurance. Her own birth certificate made her sick to her stomach. She also hesitated to sign anything, even credit card slips, because she’d never liked her signature. She’d tried changing it over the years, but it was like trying to change her voice. On the other hand, Hudson was overflowing with people who’d successfully reinvented themselves. I was a corporate lawyer in the city for years, and then I moved to Hudson and became a flower farmer/doll maker/antiques dealer/chef/arborist/alcoholic, and I never looked back. “I moved to Hudson to reinvent my handwriting,” she imagined telling someone over drinks. “It’s been an incredible journey.”
Om had gone on, unnecessarily, to explain that everyone knew everything about everyone in Hudson, even people they’d never actually seen or met, because all people talked about were other people and their problems.
“A wise man once said that Hudson is where the horny go to die,” Om said. “And I’m the only sex therapist in town.” He smiled patiently, waiting for her to connect the dots. “You’ll be transcribing some colorful stories. You may be tempted to share these stories after a couple cocktails, if you know what I mean.”
In Greta’s experience, everyone did not know everything. It was worse than that—everyone knew only one or two extremely intimate and shameful things, and the thing Greta knew about Om was that his orgasms were loud and high-pitched. “He sounds like a woman when he busts,” Greta overheard a guy say about him once. This had not been “after a couple cocktails,” but rather first thing in the morning, in line at one of the eight new bakeries in town. The guy, visibly stoned, said he’d heard it from the woman he’d taken home the previous evening, who’d heard it from her housemate, who used to date Om’s housemate back when he had housemates, before he’d reinvented himself as a therapist.
“Seems to me Hudson is where the deeply deranged go to die,” Greta said. “It’s as if my abnormal psych textbook from college grew legs and learned to walk. I mean, have you ever seen so many narcissists gathered in one place? Be honest.”
“I’ve lived in Los Angeles,” Om said.
“Me too,” Greta said.
“Hollywood?” Om asked.
“Inglewood,” Greta said.
“You know, I’ve seen a rise in borderline personalities in Hudson,” he said. “It seems they’re very attracted to narcissists. How’d you wind up in Hudson?”
“Sabine,” Greta said. “Do you know her?”
“Of course,” he said.
“Yeah, well, we live together,” Greta said. “But… we’re not lovers.”
Greta always added that last part as a joke, since it was patently obvious Sabine didn’t have a gay bone in her body. But no one ever laughed, so maybe it wasn’t that obvious. Or maybe it just wasn’t funny. She wondered how many of Om’s bones were gay. One or two, she decided.
“Didn’t Sabine move out of town?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes, but we’re only a one-cigarette drive away,” Greta said, pointing vaguely behind her. “That way.”
“What kind of cigarette?” Om said.
“American Spirit,” Greta said.
“Nice,” he said. “Can you spare one?”
They stepped outside. He held the cigarette between his middle and ring fingers. More than a couple bones, she thought.
“How’d you meet Sabine?” he asked.
“She picked me up hitchhiking,” Greta said.
“In Hudson?”
“Martha’s Vineyard,” Greta said. “It was more like a kidnapping. I was trying to get some pizza, but she took me to a party on the other side of the island, said Quaaludes would be there. ‘Is that a band?’ I remember asking. I was only eighteen. Her eyes misted over, as if we were about to encounter a herd of unicorns. ‘It’s the best drug ever made,’ she said. I asked if she’d tried MDMA. ‘Yuck,’ she said. ‘I’m not into hugs and backrubs.’ Anyway, the party turned out to be in this hippie whorehouse out in the dunes. We took the Quaaludes, laughed for six hours, been friends ever since.”