Chapter One

Chapter One


The night I went to the St. Regis hotel and accidentally crashed the birthday party of the Princess of Spain was the same night I was crowned superintendent of 287 West 12th Street. Both events took me completely by surprise and both led me to Gregory the exterminator, who wound up saving me in ways I didn't even know I needed to be saved. (I don't mean saved in a Jesus way. This is not a Jesus-saving kind of story.)

To be honest, I was not even aware that Spain still had a princess until I was standing under the chandeliers in the hotel's Cavendish Room with my mouth stuffed full of her free tapas. I thought modern royalty was the purview of the British—Charles, Harry, William, tragically dead Di—something to keep the international tabloid business afloat. And I certainly didn't know I was at a birthday party. My black silk Ann Taylor sheath with cracked rhinestone brooches on the shoulder straps, a fifteen-dollar score at Housing Works Thrift Shop, was not meant to be employed in a way that would infringe upon a personally meaningful event: birthday parties, like wedding receptions, were off-limits under a set of hastily conceived crashing criteria. Tag and I had agreed upon this moral distinction a year ago, beneath the Akoustolith tiles outside the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, right after we were unpleasantly outed at the sixtieth birthday party for the CEO of a door-hinge distribution company.

Tanya Granger, known as Tag to distinguish her from a nursery school classmate named Tanya Tokowsky, had called me an hour earlier to announce that she was hungry.

"I've got frozen pizza and orange juice," I told her,