The Ladder Salesman

I usually ignore my answering machine for hours, sometimes days, but when I heard, “It’s urgent,” I thought better. After all, it was kind of urgent the day she mentioned that her boyfriend of seven years had shot himself in the head. 

This time it was two tickets at the Fox. “Don’t you want to see Johnny Mathis?” 

“No thanks.”

“Come on,” she said.

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Please?”

“Why did you wait to the last minute?”

“Well . . . nobody else could go.”

She needed someone to go with her since her brand-new car is, and always will be, asking for someone else to drive it. Of course, she’s blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other, especially when drinking.

“Don’t you want to see Johnny again?” she said in her plaintive tone.

“He is 80. I guess maybe I should before he doesn’t come back. I’ll drive.”

“Do you have something really cute? A girl can never tell who she might run into when she’s downtown.”

“Mm-hmm. Yeah, actually.”

“We need to hurry. Be over at my house by 6:30. You’re gonna love Johnny.”

I was in her driveway fourteen minutes early. To have a roof over your head, a nice roof, is very important. Of course, she has a lot more ground than I do. Lots of ground and statues everywhere. The other side of her garage has reindeer, Xmas stuff, and things she hasn’t looked at, piled to the roof. She takes the reindeer out every year though, and their lighted heads move around looking at all the statues, including David and the two lions. The lions are another story. Don’t get me started on the lions.

Phoning from my car, “Are we ready yet?”

“I'm getting out of the shower. Can’t you come in and wait?”

“All right.”

She never turns a light on. Hates to use electricity or whatever, but hey, you don’t need light to down the best champagne all day long.

“Oh my God. I love your outfit.”

“Let’s goooo.”

The train rolls and it wasn’t easy, due to all the trees and shrubbery hugging the driveway. While I’m craning my neck to see around the bushes to get onto the street—number one, the dead-ex who shot himself, isn’t around to cut the foliage away anymore—she laments that boyfriend number three disappeared last week. “I really miss him. You know we were together for four months. I couldn't believe how good he was. Ten hours all night long.”

I wondered why I hadn’t heard from her. “Better than number two?”

“No one’s ever been like that with me,” she says.

I knew number one. He had planted trees, removed bushes and changed the statues in her yard. They weighed a ton—try picking up Michelangelo’s David. One day, he was supposed to be cleaning the pool when she looked out the window and saw him lying down on the job. She came out to the backyard screaming “Lazy!” and only stopped when she noticed he was sleeping a bit too soundly. After they took him away, she complained about the hole where his head was and now that had to be filled in.

I knew number two pretty well, too. It seemed to me she took him out to dinners a lot. He would come over and we'd all get together around the pool. He would party in the backyard with his cigar while number one was working inside the house. Number one probably knew she was flirting with number two but he didn’t seem to care. They were all friends; they would all go out together, probably on her dime. Number two was going to move in after number one was gone, but now he’s gone—cancer. She never even called me. I heard it happened pretty quick.

And now she misses number three so much. “Did you have an argument or what?”

“No, nothing like that. He understood me so well.”

They were soul mates on the same wavelength. He knew everything about her, unconditional love, yada yada yada. It was hard to believe any of this, but ok. “You mean all this time you’ve been with him and never had it so good and all of a sudden, one day, for no good reason, he disappears?”

“Oh, yes. He thought it was great and everything, but he disappeared anyway,” she replies.

“What do you think it was? Maybe he needed a little space to breathe.”

“He wanted to marry me. We were going to get married!”

“After four months?”

“We knew.”

She said it with such emotion that anything was possible. And the money doesn’t matter, right? After all she’s so rich, she can save the world like Trump. But then there’s a little hint of something else. “My friends don’t understand why I would go for a ladder salesman.”

“That shouldn’t matter. They can make a lot of money, right, huh?”

So, the whole way downtown she talked about their great conversations and sex until I let her out in front of the diner so she wouldn’t have to walk. (Her bad hip got us past the long lines at the airport on our trip to Greece.) I parked three blocks away on a busy night and came back to witness a large glass of wine sitting on the bar in front of her. It was very crowded, and she was getting agitated waiting for a seat: “We should have gone to Dooley’s.”

“Remember the last time we were there? The food was terrible. You want to start that up again?”

“Where are my pills?” She tried to flag the waiter, a tall young man with a red carnation in his buttonhole who was ignoring us. Finally, they called her name. As soon as we sat down, the waiter was at our elbow with the bread and water. There was a smugness there. “Now here we are ladies. Welcome to Stage Left. I’m Wade. I’ll be your server.” She wanted a second glass of wine. I stared him down. Read my lips, no more wine. She orders a chili dog with cheese and onions and a cup of chili for me.

Back to boyfriend number three. “My friends think he’s ugly. Do you want to see his picture?” Sure enough, number three was uglier than number one and two put together. But then, love’s blind and she’s half-way. “By the way, I bought a ladder from him.”

The waiter returns and distributes the goods: chili, and a chili dog which was veeerrry long. She eats two bites and belches. She always does that, and I always think, why didn’t we split it? But no, she wanted it all. (We both got sick later that night and the next day our tummies were hurting.)

When I asked her why she bought a ladder, she said she didn’t have an immediate use for it. She has a new car on one side of her garage that she doesn’t have any immediate use for either. Same color and style as mine, but newer. That ladder must’ve been made from gold because it cost her $500.

The waiter is back, looking to see that everybody is eating. 

“When were you born, Wade?” she asks.

“November the 8th.” 

She whispers breathlessly, “He’s a queen of clubs. He has dark spots from his past.” The waiter lays the bill on the table and tops off the water, leaving his thumbprint on the inside of her glass.

Oh shit! Snub-nosed Carol comes over from the other side of the room and things got progressively weirder. “What are you doing here?” she says to me.

“You know what I’m doing here; the same thing you’re doing here. We’re all going to the same place. Where’s your husband?”

“At home.”

I shut up because I know what she was going to say next, as if that was the most important bit of info I would get that day, and it happened. “I know your sister’s phone number: 8-6-7-5-3-0-9.”

Repetition can be so repetitive or is it sometimers?

“Anyway, Carol, we gotta get to the Fox.”

We get to the Fox five minutes before Johnny goes on and manage to get past the ticket counter into the seats. Naturally, she had the best seats in the house.

We didn’t have too much to talk about while we waited for the chatter to die down and the singing to start. I got a reprieve because she was enraptured with Johnny’s song about true love ninety-nine miles away. I’m sure she was thinking about her ladder salesman, but he was much further than that.

At intermission, the truth comes out! They had been talking four months on the phone, ten hours a day. She works so hard all day. How can she talk on the phone at the same time? She was pouring her heart out to him until the last weekend when they met in person. How could she not fall in love?

The ladder salesman stayed for a week, talking all that time to get acquainted, before the last night, the night they had such good sex. ‘Course she couldn’t go into the details, but I could only imagine the energy and the variety of life coming from the bag full of vibrators and toys that Santa had brought for the wonderful night ahead of them. Then, poof! He took his ladder and toys and went home. 

She was devastated.

I go to the restroom and come back to see she has another drink with peanuts in a gold bag which cost much more than it should have, like the ladder or the gutter guy, who cleans out her leaves which are abundant because of all the trees and stuff. (I’m forgetting my little weeping cherry tree that she trumped by planting two.)

Soon the thrall of Johnny was over, the lights went up and she was off the wall because we had to walk all the way across this gigantic room to get out of the building. Her voice got louder and louder. Complained more and more. I couldn’t run and hide: “Shut up already. People are staring at us,” fueling more anger. She was shouting by the time we got to the side door. “Where’s the car?”

“We have to walk to the car.”

“I can’t”

“You're a little too big for me to carry. Do you want to sit down here on the steps and wait till I get the car?”

“You’re making it impossible. I’ll walk, but my feet freaking hurt.”

“Do they?”

“They’re killing me.”

“Just try not to fall before we get you into the car.”

She kept complaining as she hobbled along. At the last few feet she says, “I can’t believe how long we’ve been walking.”

“Three minutes and twenty-nine seconds. It’s right around the corner. Do you want to stop here? I’ll back the car if you can’t make it.”

“No, I’ll manage.”

A month went by and the bomb drops—a text message on her phone. She calls me, “Why the hell did his ex-wife’s sister have to tell me there’s a baby on the way between him and her? How could he do such a thing?” 

It’s hard to find answers for things like that. “Darling, remember this: no matter what a ladder salesman does to a woman, she will eventually come out on top.”

So that sealed the deal or shut the door on him. For all they’d been through, she couldn’t believe a ladder salesman would do this. Just like a man, eh? After all, he was such an excellent long-distance therapist till he came, he conquered and was gone.