2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas (19 page)

Ben finds himself in the unexpected position of being devastated. He begins to sneak out. Walking home from one of
these clandestine lessons, toweling off telltale sweat, he imagines cradling the small of Sarina Greene’s back and, over and over, guiding her to the floor.

The little girl’s
diminutive stature does not match her world-weary voice. Sarina updates Ben under her breath: this is the girl she told him about with the singing and the apples and the head lice. Ben is drunk and loves and trusts this whirling coincidental night. Of course, why shouldn’t they meet the girl from the story? What else can this night put forth? In advance, he accepts!

“I live here,” the little girl tells Sarina, pointing to her house. “I live right here.”

Sarina uses what must be her teaching tone. “Go back to bed,” she says. “I will apologize to your father in the morning.”

“A freight train couldn’t wake him up. Who’s that?”

“My friend Ben.”

Ben holds out his hand. “How do you do.”

Her face is blotchy with sleep. Her clothes are wrinkled and old looking. “Madeleine,” she says. “Charmed.”

“And what is it that you do?” he flirts. “Do you sell real estate? Do you preside over family court?” Ben can tell when he’s winning someone by the corners of their mouth. One side normally relents first. This girl’s mouth keeps its downward shape.

“I’m a student at Saint Anthony’s grade school. Or, I was. I got expelled today.”

“So, you spend your days student-ing.”

“This is not the girl,” Sarina whispers. Ben can tell it’s a warning, but he is in a different part of the city with Sarina and a strange girl and he has done more in one night than he has in two years.

“Would you like to see a magic trick?” he says. “I can make this whole courtyard disappear.”

“Do it then.” Madeleine has the bluntness of a city girl. She will watch a magic trick, but it had better be good.

“I’ll need a few things. Your sweater. Off.”

“My sweater?” Sarina says. “Why?”

“You girls ask a lot of questions.”

Sarina removes her sweater, revealing the shell of her blouse for an instant before it is covered by her coat. Ben takes his time folding it onto the ground in front of the little girl. He moves one hand over it as if stirring a cauldron. “Before we begin,” he says, “take in the courtyard around you. What do you see? Bikes, stacks of newspapers, the fountain, your front door, everyone else’s front door, the window boxes, the bikes, the street through the arch.” The girl obliges, looks around. “Your cares, your sorrows. All of those things are about to be gone. Are you prepared?”

“Do it already.”

“Don’t rush me, little girl.” He conjures the sweater. “Count to seven.”

“Don’t you mean three?” she says.

“Who has time to do anything in three seconds?”

The girl still doesn’t laugh.

“One …” he begins.

“… two,” she says.

“Threefourfive,” helps Sarina.

“Six,” the girl decides. “And seven.”

Ben flips the sweater up into the air and covers the girl’s face.

“Presto! The courtyard has vanished.”

“This is bullshit,” the girl says, underneath the sweater.

“Language,” Sarina says, helping to free her.

“You do something then,” Ben says. “And don’t try to sell me a duplex because I already have one.”

The girl smooths her eyebrows and skirt. “I sing.”

Sarina’s breath catches in her throat. “I’ve never heard you sing.”

“Do it!” Ben says. “You can’t say you can sing and then not sing. It’s like saying you can sing and then not singing.”

The girl searches his face for something that tells her whether he is worth it. Ben is accustomed to this look. It is normally followed by the slam of a bedroom door and a night of uninterrupted History Channel. However, this little girl finds what she is looking for.

“Okay,” she nods.

He is surprised by how much this pleases him. “Back up!” he announces. He positions Sarina on the bottom step. He attempts to lean against the pillar but his foot finds no ground. He has forgotten the two steps leading up to the porch. He falls up. One leg vaults out in front of him; the other, bent at the knee, follows. Unsupported by either leg, arms thrown back toward Sarina’s door, he forms a four-pointed star in the air. He lands gracelessly, elbow hitting the hard steps before the back of his head, calves, ass. He sees white then gray then
white. In the air hangs the smell of wet roses, but that can’t be, it’s the wrong season. Sarina is behind a thick pane of glass cheering for him as he swims underwater. What is she saying? She cheers:
Ben! Ben!
He wants to answer but his mouth is filled with tin and chalk. He manages a sitting position on the ground, gravel sticking to his palms. “Give me a minute. I think I need to do this.” He places his head between his knees.

“Your hand is bleeding.” Sarina encircles his wrist and shows him his own injury. “I’m getting a towel.” She disappears inside her apartment.

Ben dabs at his lip. “Quite a show, huh?”

The little girl shifts from foot to foot. “I’ve seen worse.”

“I’m sorry about the apples,” he says. “And the lice. It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Life’s not fair,” she says.

“Tush,” he says. “The world is much more interesting than that. Sometimes, of course, it’s not fair. But sometimes it’s very fair, overly fair, so fair that you want to throw up from all the fairness. Then it goes back to being unfair. The world is cyclical.” He shakes a cigarette from his pack. “Do you mind?”

“Can I have one?”

“She”—he jerks a thumb toward the door—“would throttle me.” He smokes. He checks; Sarina is still inside. “One drag.”

The girl inhales and hands the cigarette back. “Do you know about The Cat’s Pajamas?”

This is what Sarina passes as she hurries toward the kitchen: a sofa with stray glitter collected in its folds, a smattering of Popsicle sticks, a CD of songs with the word
home
in them, a guide to making killer martinis, dark chocolate, darker chocolate, a life-size model of a heart, and an almost-finished painting on her easel. In it a man strides halfway out the front door of a common-looking family room. The viewer cannot see his face: his attention is turned toward a farther room where a boy lurks in a doorway. Half of the man’s head is flayed, the skin collected in uniform curlicues at the base of his neck. The elements of his brain, each lobe and gland, are rendered in meticulous detail. His neck and arms are whole, but his torso is also stripped, revealing the heart’s tender ventricles. They tumble out of the body and wind around the bank of tulips on the porch, reach toward the boy. Other canvases stacked against the wall depict similar scenes of people and animals whose interior workings are on display. An older couple walks a transparent dog in the park. An excoriated bus driver turns the enormous, flat wheel of a bus.

Sarina dampens a dish towel and trills past everything again on her way outside, where Ben sits smoking on the step that tried to delete him. She helps him arrange the ice cubes around his elbow. “I think you should go inside, Madeleine. I will see you in school next week.”

“No,” Madeleine says. “You won’t.”

“I’m sorry, but we can talk in the morning.”

“Fine.” Madeleine hoists one leg over the windowsill then the other. “Later, skaters.” The sash snaps shut.

“Your neighborhood is much more exciting than mine,” Ben says. They sit on the stoop. Sarina imagines millions of white blood cells attending to Ben’s elbow, repairing thin tissue with screws and glue. “I want to dance,” she admits.

“There is a place,” Ben says. “It’s very special. It’s called The Cat’s Pajamas.”

Sarina laughs. “You want to DONCE with Marcos?”

“Why not?”

“How’s your bleeding?”

Ben holds his wrist to his ear as if checking a watch. “How are you doing, bleeding?” He waits for an answer. “Stopped,” he says. “Ready to walk.”

Behind her curtains
, Madeleine eavesdrops. She hears Miss Greene and Ben say they will go to The Cat’s Pajamas. This starts the engine of her heart. It triple-time steps, heel drop, hit. Pas de bourrée. Pas de bourrée.

Madeleine watches them arrange their coats and scarves, getting ready to leave. She weighs several options in the time it takes to cinch a knot.

She could open the window and scream:
Take me with you!

She could do nothing.

She could follow them.

She could unload a sleeve of crackers into her mouth.

A voice in her mind says:
Junk that jazz book, go to bed, get your GED, marry early, have a child. Bury your useless pipes inside you in a box labeled: never open. Everyone will say, what a wise and rational girl you turned out to be. So different from your nutso mother
.

Madeleine closes her eyes and plucks a random card from her mother’s recipe box.

DO WHAT SCARES YOU.

She flips it over. On the other side, her mother has printed: BRING A SCARF.

Miss Greene and Ben have disappeared beyond the archway. Madeleine wraps her scarf and coat around her, throws open the sash, and with a final look back into the warm square of her bedroom, clears the sill in one leap.

I
t has been quite a fucking day for Ted Stempel, and it’s not over yet. His girlfriend has advised him she will be arriving at the store within minutes and when she does, he’d better be ready to explain. The fact that her first name is Delilah makes her last name unnecessary.

Today, Ted was supposed to help transition Delilah’s grandmother from one nursing home to another. It would have required packing up the old woman’s knickknacks and unmentionables at the first home, along with paperwork, niceties, maneuvering the dazed woman down the corridor into his car, taking care that none of her sagging limbs got caught in the seat belt, a ten-minute ride to the new home where, Delilah says, they don’t let you sit in your own filth all day, more paperwork, niceties, knickknacks arranged on a new bureau.

Only, Ted Stempel doesn’t do any of that. He tells Delilah he must work all day at the store, open twenty-four hours and owned by his wife, Kendra, who is famous for her ability to make gravy out of, like, nothing. He sleeps until noon, then walks his true love, Malcolm, a broad-shouldered pit bull puppy who has never once asked Ted to explain himself. Walking a pit bull has the surprising effect of eliminating Ted’s need to engage in niceties. This is one of many reasons Ted would for Malcolm take a Louisville Slugger to the balls.

Here is Ted on South Street around three P.M., holding
an extra-large hot chocolate. His brilliant boy struts next to him in his best sweater, the color of grass. Every so often, Malcolm peers up the leash to confirm that Ted is still there. Ted asks Malcolm if he is in fact the most handsome dog in the world and, without waiting for the dog’s reply, assures him that yes, he is. Ted admires a window display that showcases a new Harley-Davidson and imagines motoring down the California coast wearing mirrored sunglasses. Daydreaming, he doesn’t see the Rottweiler a block away ridding itself of its leash and barreling toward them. Ted feels an upsetting jolt at his side as the Rottweiler clamps down on Malcolm’s neck and lifts him above the ground.

The young blond dog owner, screaming. A horrified parade of passersby. Ted, blinking, tries to understand the scene in front of him, as Malcolm is tossed back and forth in his perfect sweater.

The Rottweiler ignores its name, which is, improbably, Grace. The blond owner cannot get Grace to let go, and Ted cannot wrench Malcolm out of her jaws. Suddenly Grace pauses. Her owner and Ted pause, too. Malcolm, petrified, searches for Ted.
Who is this, why is this happening to me?

“Someone,” Ted chokes, “help.”

A police officer arrives. He takes one tentative step toward the two-dog tableau, then another, crooning promises and compliments. His hand is poised on his holster. To his aggravation, the crowd begins to make suggestions.

“You can’t pull a dog from a dog,” someone says.

“Don’t you think I know that?” the officer says.

Grace the Rottweiler’s eyes flick from her owner to the
officer. She raises Malcolm to the uppermost point of her flinging trajectory, then pauses again, as if to test her control over the scene.

“Drop it, Grace?” her owner says.

Malcolm yowls. Scared by the sound, Grace begins thrashing again. Her teeth gnash through Malcolm’s sweater. Her muzzle darkens with blood. The officer raises his gun and fires once into the sky. Grace, startled, releases her hold on Malcolm, who falls to the sidewalk. The officer scoops up the pit bull and Grace is immediately captured by her owner.

A woman arrives with salves and bandages that she applies to Malcolm on the sidewalk. She is a vet or a bandage supplier, Ted fades in and out of understanding, she had been walking by …

“His name is Malcolm.” Ted holds the bridge of his nose as tears course down his cheeks.

The woman places Malcolm into his arms. “He’s scared, but he’s fine.”

Malcolm, from the sea of cotton bandages, looks at him with a mixture of fear and (it cannot be) adoration.

Cradling the dog to his chest, Ted walks home. He spends the day with Malcolm on his lap, reading aloud to him, changing his dressings, encouraging him to eat. When it is time for his shift he brings Malcolm to the store and arranges his bed behind the counter. He cooks a batch of his famous meatballs. The store fills with their sweet, earthy smell. It is midnight when his cell phone vibrates in the pocket of his jeans. Delilah. He wants to tell her that he has experienced a universal
near miss. He wants her to say Malcolm will be recovered in no time.

Instead, Delilah goes first. “Do you want to tell me how you were on South Street today talking to some dumb bitch when you were supposed to be working? She saw you. Gina saw you on South Street.”

“Gina?” Ted says.

“I am coming there after my shift and you’d better be ready to explain how when you were at work you were also in Center City talking to some dumb bitch.”