Act of God (2 page)

Kat knew that Edith dismissed her book project as just another excuse not to look for a job. The last few years had been lean and scary. Kat’s soap-making business had dissolved; then she’d lost her booth at the Eugene farmer’s market, and spent the fall living in a campground trailer amid the California redwoods. She’d met a fascinating crew—mystics and migrants who picked the marijuana crop—and it had been glorious living in a prehistoric forest until winter came. Even then, when the ocean fog clapped against the frigid air and shrouded the mile-high treetops, the behemoth trunks looked as if they were holding up heaven.

Kat regretted nothing about her life—not the many lovers, both gracious and brutish, not the failed sturgeon farm
in New Mexico or the soap fiasco in Oregon, not the years as a Deadhead, not the singing lessons or the political street theater, not the exalted clarity of acid or the cheery bliss of alcohol. Only this: when they were girls, Edith had worshipped her, and now she pitied her.

Edith left an urgent message on Vida’s voicemail knowing beforehand that Vida wouldn’t answer. She never did when she saw Edith’s number flashing on her phone. Last week, Edith had left four messages about the fetid odor in the laundry room and another when the foul smell permeated the rear garden. Vida had been home the whole time. Edith had heard her sharp footsteps clatter across the ceiling.

Edith left Kat making a mess of the orderly archives and went downstairs to check for water leaks. The bulk of the letters were stored in the basement, hermetically sealed in double-strength plastic boxes.

The cellar was always jungle hot in August, but that Sunday, after three and a half weeks of hundred-plus temperatures, Edith felt as if she were descending into a live volcano. The ceiling was veined with old pipes, but none appeared to be leaking. She checked the archive boxes for any signs of mold, but the plastic appeared clean, the seals unbroken. Then she shut off the lights and stood in the hellish heat, looking heavenward. A small eternity passed before her vision adapted, but gradually dozens and dozens of luminous pinpricks perforated the darkness overhead. She couldn’t tell if the stars were growing bigger and brighter or if her pupils had finally adjusted. Whatever was blooming on the ceiling didn’t need a leak for sustenance.

Back upstairs, she left another message on Vida’s voicemail. “It’s me again, pick up, I know you’re there. We have a
mold infestation in the basement. Kat and I found a mushroom growing in our hall closet this morning. I don’t have to tell you how disturbing all this is. Phone me.”

After she hung up, she stayed in her bedroom, alone, the door shut, her only sanctuary from Kat. Three months ago, she’d retired after thirty years as head librarian at Price, Bloodworth, Flom, Mead & Van Doren. She’d taken immense satisfaction in her work over the years, attaining a near-omniscient knowledge of New York tort law, but the recent digitalization of her beloved legal tomes and the increasing stress on billable hours had decided her. She had just begun to enjoy the quietude and attend to a few personal projects, such as the Smithsonian exhibition of her mother’s archive, when Kat called late one night from the Port Authority bus terminal, asking to spend the night. Two months later, Kat still occupied the guest room with no prospects of affording her own place, unless
Dr. Mimi’s Greatest Hits
or whatever she called her book became a best seller. Edith had Googled Sutton House. They published novelty books. Her poor delusional sister had always mistaken irresponsibility for daring, eccentricity for originality, obsession for intimacy. That first night, when Edith opened the door for her bedraggled sister, Kat looked blurrier, as if she had become a poor, faded copy of her former self. Edith hadn’t seen her in nearly a year. She was dressed in her usual bangles and bright scarves, but everything about her looked smudged, except her blinding new smile. She’d had her front incisors capped in brilliant porcelain. Two big white tombstones in a graveyard of antique canines and molars. The dentist must have suggested a tamer white, something more muted that might have better blended in, but her crazy sister must have insisted,
I want the biggest brightest teeth you have.

Edith’s skin felt hot and clammy from the basement. Her air conditioner rattled in the window, but its cold breath brought little relief, a flower vase of water thrown on a grease fire. There were twelve thousand BTUs of cold air blowing through the apartment, but Vida had registered the building as a historic site and all street-facing units had had to be removed. The front half of the apartment, including the infested hall closet, was stifling.

Sitting at her desk, Edith woke her computer. She wanted to identify the mushroom so that she could describe it accurately to the exterminators tomorrow. She typed—
mold, fungi, bioluminous, rapid propagation, lack of water source
—into the search engine, then clicked on images. Her screen filled with countless pictures of glowing mushrooms sprouting from walls, baseboards, acoustic ceilings, toilets, shower tiles, bathtub grout, drains, light fixtures, and a piano.

She didn’t usually read blogs or enter chat rooms, but that Sunday she found herself visiting websites devoted to every fear man experienced when the kingdom of fungi bloomed in his castle. She watched a YouTube video of a luminescent mushroom growing out of an electric socket while a baritone male voice with a Brooklyn accent kept incanting, “Holy shit, mother of god, holy shit …”

His mushroom looked just like theirs. Or did it?

She read the comments below the video, though she knew what kind of hysterics and bullies posted opinions online.

bobandbarb: don’t call the New York City Health department, whatever you do, we made that mistake when we found the first glowing mushroom under our bed, and now we’re living in our truck.

Flatstomach886: ewwwwwwwwww. boo hoo!

grandmafairy: Don’t wait for the mushrooms to appear. Look for signs of memory loss and pulmonary hemorrhage. If you have symptoms for which the doctors cannot find a cause, I advise you to get out now.

prozacbaby: Just yesterday I tried to lie down for a nap and suddenly this overwhelming smell filled the room, it wasn’t making me gag but it made me get really scared. It smelled the way my grandfather smelled at the funeral home. Will I die soon? We’ve got mushrooms.

rollitup: does it smell like a faggot’s fart? faggot farts glow.

blazingwaffles: They burned down my rowhouse! Do you know who burned it down? The Brooklyn Fire department. Do you think your insurance will pay? Think again. Mushrooms are an act of God according to AllState.

Edith left another urgent voicemail, all the while listening, with mounting fury, to Vida’s footsteps overhead.

Vida suspected that Frank, her super, had been sneaking into her apartment and snooping through her things while she was on location. Nothing was ever missing, nothing she could be certain about. Her jewelry was always accounted for. Her spare cash lay untouched in her underwear drawer. Yet something felt amiss. The cash might not have been touched, but her panties were definitely fingered. Someone had neatly folded them, and it wasn’t her. Or was it? Had she folded them? She’d never folded panties in her life. Her entire apartment seemed too clean, as if in her absence, all evidence of life, including her own, had been swept up or scrubbed away. The banister was dustless, the tub spotless, the sheets changed. Had she changed them before she left? No, someone had been in here and had cleaned up after himself with a little too much rigor.

Vida suspected Frank not only because he wielded the building’s master key. Frank also gave her the
grin,
a licentious spellbound leer, as if he were privy to her erotic aches. He wasn’t the only man who looked at her that way, but he was the only one with keys to her apartment. Ever since she’d made the Ziberax commercial, old men had treated her with courtly craving, and young men with blatant want.

In the commercial, she played a fortyish businesswoman who appeared to have everything—a lovely rambling beach
house, her own fashion line, a sexy gray-templed husband who adored her. But the brittleness with which she responded to his playful kisses betrayed her unhappiness. Until her doctor prescribed Ziberax, her sex was as cold and lifeless as plastic.

To introduce the first female sexual enhancement pill, a pink oval tablet, to its target audience—college-educated women between forty and sixty whose husbands or boyfriends already took erectile dysfunction pills—the admen had wanted an especially sexy actress on the kind side of middle age, more striking than pretty, an earned beauty. During the audition, the director had asked Vida to imagine her first satisfying orgasm in years; she’s now in her lover’s arms, and her expression should exude not just sexual bliss—although that too—but also reawakened intimacy. To achieve a look of fulfillment so cellular that it melded her soul with another’s, Vida relaxed the muscles of her face until her expression became as still, and deep, and mysterious as well water.

She’d fire Frank today, but she had no proof. He’d been the apartment building’s super for over thirty years before she came along and restored it to a single house again, except for the rent-controlled parlor floor. She phoned the police to see what they’d advise. After she enumerated her suspicions about Frank, the desk officer asked her what was missing.

“Nothing’s missing,” she said. “But my panties have been folded.”

“You think your super’s folding your underwear?”

“Yes, and I want to know what can be done about it.”

“Without more evidence, all you can do is request a squad car drive-by once a night to make sure no one’s breaking in.”

“He’s the super. He has the key.”

Her agent and lawyer and oldest friend in New York, Virginia, a harried single mother of a clingy toddler, suggested a security firm she used to spy on her son’s nanny, Peace of Mind Technologies. “They set up hidden cameras throughout the apartment and I caught the little Russian sociopath on video giving Zacky an Ambien!”

The young man from the security firm recommended a dozen nannycams with silent-alarm motion detectors that would automatically alert the police if an intruder was present. “Do you have children?”

“Why?”

“The nannycams are usually concealed in toys, but we also have a pencil sharpener, an alarm clock, and a smoke detector model.”

After the tech left the next day, and Vida was alone with the pencil sharpener, the alarm clock, and the smoke detector, she wondered who was watching her. Her plan was to leave early the next morning, but not so early that Frank didn’t see her go. He was perpetually sweeping someone’s sidewalk. He lived on the block, though she couldn’t say exactly where. He seemed to have keys to all the buildings. The neighbors called him the “mayor of Berry Street,” though he looked more like an ex-prizefighter than a politician. He once told Vida that in his sixty-four years, he’d been to Manhattan less than a dozen times.

“Where you off to now? Hollywood calling?” Frank shouted from across the street, broom in hand. He gave her the
grin.

“I’ll be back on Thursday. Keep an eye on things,” she said, wheeling a small suitcase behind her. It wasn’t just a prop; she’d packed a few things in case Frank didn’t take the bait right away and she had to spend the night at a hotel.

“Is it a comedy?”

“It’s a police thriller, Frank.”

About an hour later, killing time in a nearby coffee shop, she got the call. “Peace of Mind Technologies,” said a prerecorded voice, “the police are on their way.”

Two squad cars, red lights awhirl, were double-parked in front of her row house. The refurbished Victorian front door had been crowbarred open, its original oval glass shattered. Her tenant Edith and her twin sister Kat leaned out the front window, talking to Frank. If Frank was downstairs, who was upstairs? “What happened?” she asked.

“A burglary was in progress so the police had to smash down your front door,” said Frank.

“Did you get my messages? We have a mold infestation,” said Edith.

Vida stepped over the glass shards. A policewoman stood sentry just inside the foyer. “The landlady’s here,” she said into her walkie-talkie.

Vida mounted the steep staircase. Her apartment door hung wide open. She heard voices coming from inside, a deep, officious male and a brazen, Slavic-accented female. Even with the policewoman beside her, Vida paused before going in. The policeman, who didn’t look a day over twenty, stood in her living room arguing with a small, very pretty young woman about his age. Her shoulder-length black hair was wet from the shower and tied in a ponytail. She sported a Ziberax promotional T-shirt that Vida had thought she’d thrown away, a pair of Vida’s lace panties, and handcuffs.

“Do you know her?” asked the policewoman.

“Who is she?”

“She says she lives here.”

“I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

“We found her hiding in the closet.” The policewoman pointed toward the guest room, a storage room, really. Vida
couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in there. “She says she’s been living here a week.”

“That’s impossible,” Vida said.

“You didn’t notice anything? We found her bedding.”

“Oh my god, this is so creepy. She’s been here a week! Get her out, now,” Vida said.

“We need to collect the bedding as evidence.”

“Be my guest,” Vida said, as the policewoman disappeared into the guest room.

“Please I keep my things?” the pretty prisoner asked the boy officer. Vida could now distinguish the accent, throaty Russian. The girl had changed her strategy: instead of arguing, she now flirted with her guard.

“We’ll bag them for you, miss, and you can collect them when you’re released.”

“You’re going to release her? What if she comes back?”

“I steal nothing,” the pretty prisoner told the boy officer. “She left downstairs door open.”

The policewoman called to Vida from the guest room. “There’s a lot of stuff in the closet. I don’t know whose is whose.”