Robert Rodi's follow-up to The Sugarman Bootlegs once again finds him mixing lethal social satire and nail-biting suspense, in the classic Alfred Hitchcock tradition. When financial collapse hits Marcus Hyde — a fussy, high-end art dealer — he's forced to give up his spacious apartment and move in with his sister Pamela, a large, slovenly woman who still uses the orange-crate furniture she had in college. What he doesn't know is that Pamela is also pregnant; he finds her damp, ungainly, and given to appalling fleshly eruptions and eyeball-stinging emissions. But there's even worse in store for Marcus when Baby is born. He's never seen anything more horrifying than this scarlet, steaming, shrieking lump of raw greed and unchecked will, with yellow eyes and fingernails like teeth. Baby kicks and shrieks and vomits up sulfurous bile and his head lolls about as though he's drunk on sheer malevolence, and everyone but Marcus is utterly enchanted. And when things start happening — terrible things; deadly things — Marcus alone understands why. And Marcus alone realizes that for his own safety and sanity ... Baby must go. A wry, wicked tale of psychological (and biological) horror, Baby is endlessly addictive — a postmillennial mash-up of Rosemary's Baby and Psycho.And here, for your enticement, is the first chapter, absolutely free. If you like it...you know where to find more.
His mentor, Oliver Swell — the man from whom he’d bought his first
gallery, so long ago — ridiculously
long ago — had told him, “Never forget that every show you do, might be
someone’s first.” Meaning: avoid cynicism; avoid phoning it in; and don’t book
a show you don’t believe in, just because nothing else has come along. Bare
walls are better than corrupt walls. You might turn someone — that
hypothetical first-time viewer, dragged in by a friend or a spouse — against art
forever. You can make of your captive a convert; or you can earn his lifelong
disdain.
It was advice he’d followed for fifteen years, first as a
partner in the Oliver Swell Gallery, then — when Swell’s sister became too
contentious and the relationship soured — as proprietor of his own space,
Marcus Hyde Arts. He’d spent a decade on Huron Street, nurturing talent,
launching careers, taking chances … or just turning out the lights when no one
was worth the effort or the risk.
Until now. This show — the canvases currently on his
walls — Davis Jane — what was there to say? He’d had a weak moment. Allowed
himself to relax his guard. In place of vision, a point of view, he’d winked at
a gimmick. Davis Jane trawled second-hand shops for third-rate landscapes — the
kind that hang in lower-middle-class living rooms, or in airport hotels — and
then altered them with his own brush and palette, populating them with
artificial fauna. Here, a forest glen in which he’d placed sock monkeys and
piggy-bank pigs. Here, a waterfall scene in which he’d made frolic
balloon-sculpture dolphins. And so on.
Marcus had told himself it was witty, and of course it
was. There was even a point of view, although it was of the tragically hip,
we-live-in-a-fallen-world variety he usually shunned. (Marcus Hyde was no
friend of irony.) But it was a shallow collection; a one-note affair. The first canvas was the only one that
held any surprise; the remainder were just restatements. It was a juggling act.
A circus attraction. It wasn’t art.
But Marcus had been worn down by care and by worry. He’d
thought, “Just this once.” He badly needed the cash, was the thing. The
financial crisis had hit him hard. He didn’t understand the particulars; he
didn’t have that kind of mind. All he understood was that half his savings had
suddenly gone up in smoke, and he’d run through the rest keeping up the
mortgage payments on his six-flat — this after two of his tenants (and hence
two-fifths of his rental income) had bottomed out and simply walked away; and,
alas, as sales at the gallery dwindled concurrently. In a time of fiscal tumult
and uncertainty, people didn’t buy paintings, they bought food. Or firewood.
And so today Marcus stood in his gallery, taking in a
sweeping scene of the Great Plains aswarm with rocking-horses, and thought,
with infinite regret, “This is my legacy.” Because when Oliver Swell had told
him, “Never forget that every show you do, might be someone’s first,” he could
have added, “It might also be your last.”
And so it was. Marcus had thought the juvenile charms of Davis Jane would
loosen the purse strings of otherwise cautious buyers — in times of national
distress, whimsy has a greater appeal — and he was right; but not right enough.
The show hadn’t met his expectations. Which were also his needs.
And so he was closing his doors.
Fifteen years of pushing boundaries — of encouraging
boldness, rewarding bravery, and fostering genius — was ending with this: the
setting sun on a rocky promontory, where a grinning wind-up monkey banged on cymbals.
Marcus squinted and leaned into the canvas, into that faux primate’s leering
face, in search of something remotely valedictory; but all he found there was
ridicule and malevolence.
Ruin, Marcus Hyde was learning, had many layers.
His friend Jeremy had invited him to lunch. Jeremy, who
as a successful attorney had honed a keen insight into the human psyche, had
intuited that the hardest part of this morning for Marcus wouldn’t be turning
his key in the lock for the final time and walking away from the gallery
forever. The hardest part would be determining what to do next … how to fill
the two, three hours immediately following. Jeremy had ridden in like the
cavalry with this invitation to dine. Ethiopian food, too: messy, communal,
with big, bold flavors. A shock to Marcus’s well-ordered life: something to
work on — to occupy and challenge him.
The trouble was, Marcus wasn’t all that hungry. And he
was bone-weary of working. What he wanted was something tidy, something
contained, something streamlined. A braised chicken breast, a sprinkle of
paprika, a squirt of lemon; something he could slice, fit on the end of a fork,
to wave about as he spoke before taking it into his mouth … as much punctuation
as nutrition. Such a thing was impossible with the enormous platter before him,
indiscriminately larded with heaps of steaming meats and roughly chopped
vegetables, all swimming in vibrant sauces and meant to be attacked not with
utensils, but with hunks of torn flatbread fetched from a wicker basket for the
purpose. Marcus watched as Jeremy indulged in his lunch with abandon, forming
his flatbread into a kind of finger puppet that he sent plunging into the swamp
of aromatic edibles, gobbling what it could, like a pelican, then swooping up
and depositing it (or most of it, anyway; accuracy was apparently not so much
the point of this cuisine) into Jeremy’s yawning maw.
Marcus contented himself to dip his own bit of bread into
a little of whatever sauce happened to be pooling nearest him at the moment —
first the overly sweet red one, later the murky, acrid green one — and nibbling
at it. In the background, an African jazz combo shrieked and wailed as though
trying to frighten hyenas from a campfire.
“You’re not eating,” said Jeremy.
“No, I am,” said Marcus, displaying his shred of bread as
evidence.
Jeremy’s arm lashed out over the platter and hovered
there a moment, till he decided which pile of provender would next suffer his
aerial attack. “This is my treat,” he said, just as he decided on some grilled
lamb suffocating in curry and sent his bread-glove plummeting thereupon. “You
should really take advantage. A free meal is nothing to sneeze at, these days.”
He flicked the ungainly mass of bread and lamb up to his face; a little jet of
yellow whizzed over his shoulder and onto the floor behind him. He appeared not
to notice, but stuffed his mouth with gusto.
“I know you’re right,” said Marcus with a sigh. “I just
can’t find the appetite. I feel utterly empty inside.”
“All the more reason to eat something. Emptiness is for
filling.”
Marcus folded his hands in his lap, unconvinced. “I
thought I’d be grieving right about now. I thought I’d cry. I thought … I don’t
know what I thought. But I didn’t think it would be this. This blankness. I’ve no will left for anything.”
“You must immerse yourself in pleasures,” Jeremy said.
“Stimulate and provoke your five senses. Remind yourself you’re alive.”
“Am I?” Marcus asked, his voice small.
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
Jeremy was tall and lanky, with a head of wavy,
shoulder-length ginger hair and a long face with wide features. His limbs moved
loosely; his gait was almost pinwheel. He favored baggy clothes that billowed
when he walked, and his hair flapped behind him in the wind. Everything about
him was kinetic; the parts of his body seemed to have independent life, each
carrying on its own business with no mind to what the others might be up to.
One arm might hold a cigarette, the other a cocktail, and with equal relish.
Marcus was shorter and more compact; he wore his hair cropped
close to his skull and sported a mustache which he trimmed obsessively,
checking it in a magnifying mirror several times a day. Any whisker that dared
to stray from its fellows was immediately clipped off, with no attempt to weave
it back in. There was no forgiveness, no redemption in Marcus’s world; when you
stepped out of line, you branded yourself a troublemaker. And you had to go.
He dressed in custom-tailored clothes and cultivated a
dignified demeanor; there was about him a kind of stillness — almost an
absence. When he spoke, he barely moved his lips. His features were small and,
being nearsighted, he wore glasses with lenses that made his eyes seem even
smaller. When he walked, he didn’t swing his hands; he refused to. If he felt
the urge, he forestalled it by clasping them behind his back; this also forced
him to adopt the slower pace to which he always aspired. There was really no
reason at all that Jeremy and Marcus should be friends; Jeremy was joyful
anarchy, Marcus, mute inertia. And yet. And yet.
Jeremy had now seemingly eaten his fill. He shoved aside
the basket of flatbread, sat back with an audible sigh, and sucked each of his
fingers, one right after another. This was something Marcus would rather have
died than do; you couldn’t have forced him to it at gunpoint.
Jeremy returned to his theme of sensual pleasures. “Go to
the opera,” he said.
Marcus scowled. Jeremy should have known by now that he
didn’t like the opera. It was too big, too loud, too messy. He liked chamber
music; string quartets. But what he said was, “Can’t afford it.”
“Theatre in the park, then.”
The park! Seated on a blanket, waving away gnats and
mosquitoes, the smell of other people’s food insinuating his nostrils. “Hay
fever,” he said.
Jeremy crossed his arms. “There’s always sex,” he said.
“It’s free. And you’re not that
ugly.”
Marcus felt a little twinge in his abdomen, as he always
did when this subject cropped up. He still felt like a novice, and not
regretfully so. He didn’t much like intercourse; the sloppiness of it, the
dampness, the unpleasant surprise of crevices unexpectedly revealed; the
blotches and the odors and unexpected patches of hair. Pornography was so much
easier to maneuver through, easier to regulate, easier to compartmentalize …
and significantly easier to forget about immediately afterward. By far the most
difficult thing about sex, for Marcus, was the awkward presence of someone else
still being there once the red haze dissipated and your head was clear again.
Still, he was a man, and there had been times. That’s how
he and Jeremy had met, in fact; both had been jilted by a tennis instructor
named Wally (“So really, we should have known from the start,” Jeremy said
acidly) who made surreptitious charges on their credit cards while they were asleep.
Marcus had been glad when Jeremy had tracked him down to compare notes; it had
been such a relief to him, to have this energetic, life-excreting man in his
living room, snarling out a narrative that so exactly matched his own. If someone like this can have been taken in,
Marcus had thought, I needn’t feel so
humiliated. Friendship had followed.
Over the ensuing years, Jeremy had conducted an ongoing
string of affairs, usually of no more than two or three weeks’ duration. He
seemed incapable of resisting the siren call of variety. A man tasted, was a
man whose secret no longer tantalized; time to move on. Whereas Marcus had had
no lovers of any kind since Wally; the mortification of that episode had frozen
him into effective celibacy. He didn’t discount the idea of having sex again;
but he didn’t actively seek it, and on the occasions when it seemed likely to
become an issue, he backed away.
“The last thing I need right now,” Marcus said, “is some
great oaf making my life a misery.”
Jeremy daubed his lips with a napkin. “I think you’ll
find great oafs have compensating qualities.”
Marcus wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “Not for
me.” He took a sip of his iced tea, hoping this signaled a change in topic.
But Jeremy, who’d ordered a bottle of pinot noir and
nearly drained it single-handedly, was not a man to sympathize with Marcus’s
avoidance of earthly joy. He himself, at forty-six, had sold his partnership in
a law firm when it merged with a larger outfit, preferring to go back to being
a mere associate so that he could pursue all the pleasures he’d missed out on
during his years of struggle. “Well, you’ve got to do something,” he said. “You can’t just sit up in your apartment and
stare out the window.”
“No, indeed,” said Marcus, his heart beginning to beat
faster. “I can’t do that.” He paused for effect. “I literally can’t.”
Jeremy, picking up on the emphasis of that pause, put
down his glass and said, “Now what?”
Marcus, a proud man, had been putting off having to
reveal this to Jeremy — to anyone. But he’d known the moment must come. So why
not now? Gather all the bad news into one black-letter day. It was tidier that
way. “I have to move out,” he said.
Jeremy’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”
Marcus raised his palms in the air, expressing his
helplessness. “I have no income, Jeremy. I have no savings. And I have a
mortgage.”
“You’re going into foreclosure?”
“No, thank God. I’ve arranged it with the bank. A
short-sale. They get the building back for the amount of the outstanding loan.”
“And you walk away with nothing?”
“Well, my dignity.”
“Dignity, schmignity. You love that place!”
“I do. But it’s another thing I have to let go.” He
smiled beatifically. “I’m getting rather good at it.” It was much easier to be
heroic for an audience, than it was when all alone, in the small hours of a
sleepless night.
Jeremy put his hand over his mouth and turned aside,
taking it all in. Then he turned back and said, “Where will you live?”
Ah. They’d arrived at the moment a tad faster than Marcus
had anticipated. He hadn’t had a chance to lay the foundation for what he hoped
would be a case of Jeremy inviting him to move temporarily into his ten-room
apartment on the Gold Coast. He didn’t want
to live with Jeremy, but he needed
to. It was an awful situation in which to find himself. Somehow he had to
prompt his friend to offer him something neither of them desired, that would be
wrong for both of them — perhaps fatally wrong, for their friendship. The two
of them under the same roof would be like unstable chemicals on a single shelf,
with the corks insufficiently stopped.
As he looked at Jeremy now, he saw only earnest concern
in his eyes as he awaited Marcus’s answer. But then there was a moment — a
flash — no one could have seen it but Marcus, who had known him so long — when
the idea of cohabitation flitted across his mind, and was as swiftly dismissed.
He continued to regard Marcus with solicitude and expectation; but a door had
been closed, before Marcus had even had a chance to nudge it open.
He would have to retreat — with reluctance, almost with
shame — to his backup plan.
“I’ll move in with my sister,” he said.
“What sister?”
“Pamela.”
Jeremy put down his wine glass and rubbed the bridge of
his nose. “Marcus, you know what you’re like? A chest of drawers, all wedged shut.
You can tug and pull on them all you like, and it’s no good. But every once in
a while one of them just pops open without warning and the shock nearly kills
you.”
“What do you mean? I’m certain I’ve mentioned my sister.”
“Never. No family of any kind. Not even at Christmas.”
He waved his hand — a familiar gesture of dismissal.
“Christmas,” he said. “Don’t start me.”
“As if I could. As if anyone could ‘start’ you. My God,
the life you’d be leading if that
were possible.”
“I thought this lunch was meant to make me feel better.”
“Oh, I’ve given up on that. Since it clearly hasn’t.”
Marcus, not wanting to appear ungrateful, dipped some
more flatbread in the red sauce, and even took up a little wedge of
indeterminate meat. He popped it all in his mouth and chewed; it was like
gnawing on an open wound. “I’m enjoying myself.”
“Yes, I can feel the waves of pleasure you radiate in all
directions.”
“I’m just feeling a little … tentative. I’m newly
unemployed, I’m essentially homeless, and I’m eating food that looks like it
was eaten already. I could use something resembling a mooring.”
“Hence the sister?”
“If you want to look at it that way.”
“I don’t want to look at it at all. Marcus, be careful.
Family can derange a man faster and more thoroughly than anything else. Torture
… deprivation … forget it. You want to break someone? Make him spend a weekend
with his parents.”
“I really don’t see that I have a choice,” he said, with
just a hint of accusation in his voice — an edge of, You haven’t offered, so you can’t fault me.
“And she’s agreed? She’ll take you in?”
“I haven’t asked her yet.”
Jeremy gave a little exasperated sigh and sat back in his
chair. “Sometimes it astonishes me that you’ve made it to age forty.”
“In view of recent events, ‘made it’ is open to debate.”
“You know what I mean. Still, maybe this is all for the
best. Maybe your sister will have the common sense you clearly lack, and turn
you down.”
“Oh, she won’t. Pamela is the kind of woman who lives her
life with all her windows open, and just accepts what the wind blows in.”
“Well, that sounds like an ideal pairing. You being the
kind of man who nails the casements shut and draws the blackout curtains.”
Jeremy’s abuse, twining with the cacophony of the jazz
band, was edging Marcus closer to a fit of temper. He had to ball his fists and
fight it back. Fortunately, a moment later the band abruptly stopped playing,
and the sudden silence came as an inestimable relief to him; it was as though
someone had removed his head from a vice.
One of the musicians now moved among the tables,
distributing leaflets promoting a nearby bar where the band would next be
appearing. There were also a few ads for other local businesses, which Marcus
took up and read aloud in a kind of sustained gasp. “‘Lady Abbess Bathsheba,’”
he said, holding the leaflet aloft as though it might bite him; “‘tarot
readings and zodiac charts a specialty.’ Excuse me, ‘speciality.’ And for some
reason there’s a picture of the pope; presumably he’s a client. And here’s
‘Zoltan Gluck, occult investigator par
excellence.’ Oh, I’m glad he made that clear; I might’ve confused him for a
run-of-the-mill occult investigator.”
He flicked the leaflet back on the table. “Really, the kind of places you
frequent! You don’t have to suffer this kind of thing at Alinea.”
Jeremy smiled indulgently at Marcus’s little rant. “Tell
me more about her,” he said, pouring himself the dregs of the wine bottle. “I
mean your sister, not Lady Abbess Whatever.”
Marcus sighed. “She’s four years older than I am. So we
were never close as children — never playmates. She was always just that much
more advanced than I. Out in the world long before I was; in fact it was hard
to draw her back in. I thought her very grand. She’d be in her room playing
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and twirling around and around, and it was such bliss to
watch her. I used to wonder what it would be like to be her.”
Jeremy blinked. “Forgive me. I just had this picture of
you leaping about to a glam-rock record and it’s sort of stopped me cold.” He
paused. “All right. Better now. Go on.”
He shrugged. “Not much more to say. She left home when
she was twelve; she wanted to be in the city, so she went to live with my
father. I stayed in the suburbs with my mom. I was only eight. I rarely saw her
after that.”
“Even after you moved here?”
“She came to see me in my first apartment. Brought me a
housewarming gift; some enormous potted plant. Hideous thing — great big pods.
A week later all the pods exploded, and there were foul-smelling spores all
over the house; it was like it had rained mucous. I thought I was going to have
to move. In fact, I did, ultimately. Though the stench came with me, in my
furniture.”
“You, with a houseplant. This is a most revelatory
lunch.”
“It was my first and last.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. If you move in with this woman,
you may find yourself surrounded by them.”
He hadn’t considered that. He didn’t like houseplants.
They were either too febrile—too needy—or too robust and invasive. Plus, they
throve in dirt. There was something about the idea of soil indoors that defied
Marcus’s every attempt to accommodate it. It made as much sense as having a
refrigerator in the yard.
Jeremy signaled the waitress for the bill. “Marcus, I’m
sorry you’ve come upon rocky shoals. I don’t mean to be hard on you. I just
don’t want you to make any more mistakes. Whatever choices you make now, are
the ones from which you’ll have to rebuild your life.”
“You make it sound like I’m choosing too swiftly,” he
said testily, “like I haven’t looked over the whole menu. In fact, there are
only two items on it: Pamela, or the street.”
Jeremy brought out his wallet, which so brimmed with cash
that the edges of the bills stuck out beyond the fold. “I doubt you’ve really
tried to think in any different terms, but never mind.”
“Oh, no,” said Marcus as the waitress appeared with the
check. “You don’t get to play those rhetorical games with me. You can’t say ‘I
won’t make an accusation’ while you’re bloody well making it. And then give me
that hurt look you’re wearing right now, when I call you on it. That may work
with your little harem of himbos, but I’m just a hair smarter than they are.”
“Speaking of which,” Jeremy said, slipping his platinum
AmEx onto the table without even looking at the bill, “I have company tonight.
A kickboxer. Twenty-eight.”
“So we’ve established his I.Q. Now tell me how old he
is.”
Jeremy’s face, which had briefly worn a smile for the
waitress as she took up his card and retreated, now fell into a frown. “It’s
just sad when you get like this. That brittle, cruel cleverness. You only
impress yourself with it, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, realizing he was insulting his best
friend while that friend was in the very act of paying for his lunch. “A
kickboxer.”
“Never mind,” said Jeremy. He turned to the window. “Beautiful
day.”
Marcus had a look for himself, and the conversation
stopped there, till Jeremy abruptly turned and said, “Pardon me for asking —
but you’re current on your medications, right?”
Marcus felt his face burn; it almost felt like his skin
was blistering. “Yes,” he said, so humiliated by the question he could only
manage a single syllable.
“It’s just, this is your biggest upset since Wally. I
don’t want to see you back in that state.”
Marcus glowered at him.
“I only mean to say, if you ever needed help paying for
your prescription …”
Marcus glowered even harder, silencing Jeremy until the
waitress returned with the receipt. Jeremy signed it, and they rose to leave.
Marcus waited for him to turn towards the door, then
opened the plastic sleeve and examined the bill. Jeremy turned back and caught
him at it. “What are you doing?”
“I just want to see how much it is.”
“I told you, it’s my treat.”
“That’s very kind, but I can’t allow it.” Marcus snatched
up the pen and scribbled the amount on the back of the band’s leaflet, which he
then stuffed into his pocket. “I fully intend to reimburse you when I get back
on my feet.”
Jeremy looked as though he might argue; then he appeared
to think better of it, and let it go. Marcus wished he knew why. Was it because
he respected Marcus’s dignity and didn’t want to offend it? Or because he
didn’t really believe Marcus ever would
get back on his feet, so why bother?
Outside the restaurant they said their goodbyes with
careful casualness. Marcus would have accepted a ride back to his house, but
Jeremy didn’t offer one; so he took the train partway and walked the rest.
En route, he tried to conjure up Pamela. It had been so
long since he’d seen her, he wasn’t sure he’d recognize her if she were to pass
him on the sidewalk. What he remembered most about her — because it grated on
him so — was the kind of haphazard way she went through life. All during their
childhood, she wore clothes a certain way — as if she hadn’t quite finished
pulling them on. Even when she’d visited him at his first apartment, her dress
looked like it had been put on backwards and was trying to twist itself the
right way around without her help. Half her hair had been knotted up in a
scrunchie, while the other half fell into her face. Her fingernails were
different lengths, and some of them were dirty — presumably from digging into
the soil of the potted plant she’d carried over. She’d come into the apartment,
braying her approval, and kept speaking as though she were addressing an
auditorium of fifteen hundred. It was as though the concept of calibrating
one’s volume to the size of the room was utterly alien to her.
She’d had a friend with her — some pale, wan
nonentity; Marcus couldn’t remember the name, or even the gender. She always
had someone like that trailing after her, when they were growing up; someone
who seemed, even when you looked at them, to be viewed from the corner of your
eye. It was as if her life force was so vibrant, the only room left in her
vicinity was for someone with almost none of his or her own. Marcus had taken
to referring to these individuals, whenever Pamela showed up with one, as
“today’s lunch.”
He turned the corner onto his block; it was an old
street, with a canopy of trees through which the sun dribbled lazily. He did love
it here; it would hurt him very much to leave it. But it wouldn’t kill him. As
he approached his six-flat, he tried to situate his mind so that he could
pretend he was seeing it for the first time. He did this every now and then,
and it was always a thrill when he reached the point at which the grand,
blond-brick apartment building next door moved aside like a curtain, to reveal
the classic lines and noble proportions of his property. Three units on each
side, six balconies facing the street, each spilling over with the lives lived
inside (except, of course, those that had recently been abandoned). There were
Clark Lewis’s pots of herbs on One North — Marcus could just smell the basil on
the breeze; there were the Zbrzieks’ flower beds on Three North, barely
containing riots of multicolored pansies; and Vanna Plaice’s gently tinkling
wind chimes and Buddhist paraphernalia on Two South, adding to the scene a note
of both serenity and eternity. He didn’t know these people well; he thought it
advisable to hold himself at arm’s length from his renters, lest they be
tempted to take advantage of the access. But he felt now that he would miss
them. Or rather, he would miss his responsibility for them. This hadn’t always
been a joy to him — authority comes at a cost, and he had been drawn into many
unnecessary disputes and disagreements — but it was far better than submitting
himself to someone else’s authority;
to being someone else’s responsibility.
As he made his way up the stairs, he heard a flurry of
footsteps on the floor above, and turned on the landing just in time to see
Vanna Plaice’s door close quietly into its frame. She’d clearly taken refuge in
her apartment rather than spare him a friendly word; a reminder that, while he
might miss his tenants, they wouldn’t return the sentiment. In fact, they were
borderline hostile to him, ever since the remaining trio had banded together to
make him an offer for the building — and a generous one, too, by current market
standards. But he’d had to turn it down; it was unfortunately for less than his
mortgage. He’d have lost money, had he accepted it. He tried explaining to them
that he was a victim of the housing bubble, but they weren’t interested in
listening. And so he’d had to leave them to the mercy of the bank, whose deal
allowed him to escape scraped, but not skinned.
He entered his apartment — long, cool, and silent — and
thought with satisfaction that there was an advantage to living the way he did
(sparely, ascetically, almost monastically), which was that packing up would be
a breeze. He’d contracted a specialist to come and handle the canvases on his
walls — take them down and move them to storage; they were too many, and too
large, to travel with him during this itinerant stage of his life — but beyond
those, he didn’t possess much. Some mission furniture; a respectable amount of
copper kitchenware; and a small wardrobe (he always wore black, which
eliminated the need for much accessorizing). Technology had delivered him to
the point at which he could carry his entire home entertainment center out the
door under one arm. And really, what else was there? He enjoyed the feeling of
being so free; he wasn’t significantly more encumbered by possessions than he
was as a teenager. He could almost go where the wind would take him.
Almost.
He went to his desk, sat down, and sighed. Then he dialed
Pamela’s number, which was scrawled on a Post-It note and stuck to his blotter,
awaiting the inevitability of this day.
The phone rang twice; then the line connected, and he could
hear her voice — but not speaking to him; she’d picked up the phone while
talking to someone else, something he now remembered was her habit. “… know you
can’t help being curious, but it gets very tiring of me to always have to be on
your case about it, hello?” This last word, with greater volume, into the
phone.
“Uh, yes, hello — Pamela?”
“Speaking. Who’s this?”
“It’s Marcus,” he said, adding, “your brother,” in case
it needed clarification.
He expected an exclamation, some kind of abashed
observance of how very long it had been, but he’d forgotten how unflappable she
was. Nothing fazed her, ever. They might last have spoken yesterday. “Hey
there, Marco Polo,” she said. It had been her nickname for him since childhood.
“How’s it in your world?”
“Fine, fine. Is this a good time?”
“It’s a super time.”
“I’m not interrupting you?”
“No, I’m fine, just hanging out by my lonesome.”
He blinked. “I’m sorry. Weren’t you just talking to
someone?”
“Only the dog. Incorrigible. Where are you?”
“At home.”
“Do you still have the gallery?”
He blinked again. It disconcerted him that the
life-realigning trauma he’d just been through was to her something that
might’ve happened any old time. “No, as a matter of fact, I just lost it.”
“Ah. Bummer. What are you doing instead?”
“Well … less.” He laughed nervously.
Agreeably, she laughed as well. Then, “Do you need
money?”
He blinked yet again; twice. This wasn’t how the
conversation was supposed to go. He’d spent several sleepless nights rehearsing
exactly how best to turn the subject to his needs, but she was beating him to
it by tossing off the major points as if they were discussing the weather. “I
don’t need … what I mean is, I do but … but what I really find myself in want
of right now is a place to live. For a while. Temporarily.”
“Absolutely
not!” she said, with such unarguable finality
that he felt an urge to hang up the phone and go and cower in a corner. Then
she chirped, “Sorry, dog again … Here? Were you thinking here?”
He waited a moment for his heart to carom back into his
chest, then said, “I’d be very … that is, if you wouldn’t mind, and if the
invasion of your privacy isn’t too hugely terrible.”
“You can have the guest room,” she said, as casually as
though she were offering him the loan of a ladder, or a rake. “When’s good for
you?”
“Well … the sooner the better, actually. As of yesterday
I no longer own this place. I’m paying the bank a daily rent on it, which
unfortunately I can ill afford. I have a moving contractor all lined up, I just
have to give him the word.”
“All righty, then. Let me know.”
“Well … really, at the earliest possible time when it
won’t hugely inconvenience you.”
“This afternoon?”
He actually took the phone away from his head and looked
into the receiver, then put it back to his ear. “I think they’ll need a little
more notice than that.”
“Tomorrow, then. Or whenever you want. I’m always here.”
It was true. She had managed to sustain a career as a freelance copyeditor for
almost two decades; the waxing and waning of the economy never seemed to affect
her quiet progress through manuscript after manuscript. “Just show up.”
Something about her indifference to his timetable —
to the point of being ready to welcome him this very day — bothered him, and he
was finally able to put his finger on why: she was obviously not allowing for
time to clean the guest room for his arrival. Which presented a difficulty; he
couldn’t actually ask her to do so,
on top of the enormous favor she was already granting him. He decided to try to
shame her into it. “I’ll give you plenty of notice,” he said, “and I’ll even
come by and clean the room myself, so you don’t have to.”
“Oh, the room’s plenty clean,” she said airily, evading
his trap.
Marcus remembered that, growing up, her idea of “plenty
clean” was when a majority of the floor was visible beneath the debris; say, a
sixty-forty ratio. And the nature of the debris didn’t enter into the equation.
A pile of wolverine carcasses would have counted as much as dirty sweatshirts.
“No, really, I don’t mind,” he said. “I can come by tomorrow. I’ll bring my own
cleaning supplies.”
“You were always such a funny kid,” she said with a lilt
in her voice. “Always on your hands and knees, scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing.
I remember you even used to scrub the bathtub.”
“Of course I scrubbed the bathtub! What a thing to say.”
She laughed, as if he’d just said something wildly funny.
“Oh, honey, you’re just precious! Scrubbing something with soap and water that
gets filled every day with soap and water.”
Oh my God, he thought, she’s never cleaned
her tub.
“It’s, like, scrubbing a sink, or something.”
Oh my God,
she’s never cleaned her sink.
He had a desperate, momentary thought that maybe living
on the streets wouldn’t be so bad.
But no, he required a fixed address in order to rebuild
his credit and look for a job. For better or worse, he needed the shelter of Pamela’s roof. And since she was actually
offering it without conditions, he’d better accept it graciously and proceed
accordingly. No looking back.
It was only after they’d hung up that another thing
wriggled its way to the forefront of his mind:
Pamela has a
dog.
Well, how bad could that be? It appeared to have a few
obedience issues, but it was a dumb animal. He could certainly maneuver around
any inconveniences it might present. No, a dog was fine; not ideal — far
from ideal — but survivable.
Just as long as there was
nothing else.
