Afterburn (22 page)

"Okay." She nodded quickly.

"Just don't
fib
to me, either, because I do her evictions for her. I mean, I get someone who does it for her, someone who, you know,
likes
to do evictions."

"Right." He's cruel, she thought, so don't beg.

He looked her over, first hanging up a dress. "Now then, you're back in the city?"

"And need a cheap place to live."

"What was your last place of residence?"

"Prison, actually."

"Oh well, forget it!" He waved his hands in frantic dismissal.

"What do you mean, forget it?"

"Forget it means
forget it
. You're a criminal."

"Not really."

"What's that mean?"

"I broke the law, but I'm not a criminal."

"What did you do?"

She took a breath. In the future she would not mention prison. People couldn't handle it. "My boyfriend worked in a ring that stole shipments out of cargo warehouses and then resold the stuff. Most of the time I just went to college. But then I dropped out and read a lot. Then I helped him a little bit with his scheduling. I got caught. The others didn't. I didn't talk, which made the D.A.'s Office pretty mad. They had, shall we say, very little compassion."

"What happened to the rest of the baddies?" said the shopkeeper, arms folded in front of him.

"I have no idea."

"Was it drugs?"

"The stuff in the trucks? No."

"Are you a junkie?" he asked Christina.

"You already looked at my arms, I saw you."

He peered at her through his half-frames. Then, as if losing interest in the conversation, he held up a heavy silvered hand mirror.

"That's very nice."

"London, turn-of-the-century. I keep it to remember what
style
those Victorians had." His eyes, however, narrowed again. "You have some kind of regular income?"

"Soon."

"Kids coming to live with you?"

"No."

He set the mirror down. "Do you have kids?"

"No."

Then he sighed, shaking his head. "Tell me something that lets me
understand
you, honey, that makes you a
person
to me, something that lets me see your mind."

"It's a question of whether or not I'm presentable?"

"You could put it that way."

She nodded silently and gazed around, as if for a topic of conversation. Then she picked up the old silver mirror and held it close to the shopkeeper's face so that he could see himself, peer at his own whiskers and saggy eyes. "Victorian England," she began, "in addition to the ornately mannered upper-class style that you find so attractive, was notable for its return to the use of flogging minor criminals, a practice that had ceased years before. Under the Vagrancy Act of 1898, those who were convicted of
deviant
male behavior—including exhibitionism, solicitation of homosexual acts, and masquerading in female attire—were
flogged
with a
lash
, often quite brutally."

He glanced from the mirror into her eyes. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I think I
see
. Is that your period? The Victorian era?"

She shrugged.

"Tell me something more."

"Because you don't believe me?"

"No, just for the
pleasure
of it. Flog me with another fact or two."

She looked about the shop for inspiration, spied a man's long wool coat with heavy buttons. "When Charles Dickens died, the momentousness of his death was such that his grave at Westminster Abbey was left open for two days. During that time thousands of people passed by, gazing down into the earth at his open coffin. Hundreds dropped in bouquets. He was a genius buried in flowers."

"Yes." The shopkeeper picked up the phone. "Yes!"

TWENTY MINUTES LATER,
she had been admitted into the lobby of the blue six-story apartment house across the street and was shaking the gnarled paw of a Mrs. Sanders, who appeared to be about eighty. The woman had been interrupted in her daily practice of chopping up pieces of beef heart for her four cats, who lounged fatly in her dilapidated living room, quite unworried about where their next meal was coming from, while she shuffled across the floor in a stained housecoat and set down a tiny china bowl before each. "Now then," Mrs. Sanders said to Christina. "You want to rent a room and Donald sent you over? Well, that's very good. What's your name?"

"Bettina, Bettina Bedford."

"Glad to meet you, Bettina. You can pay by the week to start. Cash is fine. Better, in fact. I only have one room, and the girl may come back. Maybe soon, maybe not. That's why I can let it go very cheaply, because if she comes back, then you're out right away, with no complaint. I don't know when, but it's going to waste. She said she would come back sometime this fall, and I suppose I— Now, wait a minute." Mrs. Sanders probed her leathery right ear with a finger, which still had quite a bit of beef heart adhered to it, and extracted a waxy brown pill, which Christina understood was a hearing aid, and fiddled with a button. She frowned in frustration. "I can't get it! They make these things too small! Miss, please—" Mrs. Sanders held out the hearing aid in her gnarled hand; it appeared to be nothing so much as the shell of an insect, furry with cat hair. She pointed at a tiny button. "Please push that twice."

Christina ventured a finger—a fingernail, really—against the tiny button and pushed twice, each time producing a tiny click. Mrs. Sanders plugged the little brown pill back into her ear. "Yes, yes, I think that will—Ooh!" She widened her eyes, as if that helped with the fit, frowned, blinked, then smiled at Christina. "Much better. Let me get my book, just a moment . . ." She shuffled off to a desk overflowing with cat literature. "I keep it all— Now, just a moment, yes. Here." She came back with a thick ledger that she clutched with two hands and sat down on a sofa. "Here we are in nineteen eighty—"

"Ninety-nine," Christina said.

"Yes, of course. This is the new one." Mrs. Sanders pushed open the front cover, which had been repaired with heavy tape. "This one started in nineteen seventy-seven. But I've been here since fifty-one."

"Seen all types, I guess."

"Seen? I've seen them, I've heard them, I've carried out their bodies. One fellow died in the bathtub. We had one of the Black Panthers living here once, we had Woody Allen visiting some friends, we had Janis Joplin sleeping here for three weeks, that fellow Allen Ginsberg left his pants here once—oh, we had quite a bit of it go through this place, let me tell you. We had a man who tried to raise chickens in his apartment, we've had four or five transvestites, we had a man who slept inside a broken refrigerator, we've had everything."

"I don't have very much money."

The old woman had heard this before. "Nobody here does."

"I don't know if—"

"You see, I'm a socialist. You don't get
that
too much anymore. People don't remember what it meant to be a socialist. I don't charge too much. I charge what I can get and I charge what I need to get." Mrs. Sanders flipped pages absentmindedly. "They tried to buy me out a few years ago, they said I could get more. I don't care. I'm an old woman, I have my cats, I have everything I need. We all thought it was going to get better, that's what we were working for. Well, it didn't happen and a lot of us died. I just got older—so far." She smiled to herself, then switched thoughts, her eyes fiercely upon Christina's. "Now then, I've seen your type. I know something about you that you don't know yourself. I'm going to put you in one of my quiet top rooms, where I put girls like you. Fifth floor, front. It's got nice light. You almost won't hear the garbagemen, you just sit up there and think whatever you need to think about. The last girl, she moved out so fast, she left a pile of boxes in the closet and maybe she'll pick them up and maybe she won't. I can't be worried about it. Now, just follow me . . ." Mrs. Sanders stood up and shuffled to the back of the apartment. "Come on, follow me, bring your bag. Yes, this is the elevator,
my
elevator, not for the tenants. I'm too old to climb the stairs." They squeezed into a tiny caged box, and Mrs. Sanders creaked the door shut and pushed her finger against a panel of buttons. It's a city of elevators, Christina thought, as the box slowly rose. "They said the building was worth almost a million dollars. What do I care? Where am I going to go? I've been here since Eisenhower got elected. I raised four children in this building, two and a half husbands."

"How do you get two and a half husbands?"

"Oh, the first two were just fine in the romance department, but the last, well, he gets a half. He died of liver cancer. He drank and drank and I never asked him not to." Her old cheeks lifted with the memory. "He used to drink and play the trumpet for me, the saddest thing in the world. That would make me cry and love him all over again. When he played the trumpet, he was my king." The elevator bumped to a stop. "This is the fifth floor. Get a few groceries every time you go out—that's my advice." The hallway led gloomily past one door after another, walls streaked with obsolete vitality, yearning unanswered. "Now then, I have a few rules. I want to get paid every Sunday. Go two days without paying and I put you on my list. Don't get on my list. It's not worth it. People say to me, You can't get me out of here. I always tell them I got the best landlord lawyer in the city, I know all the judges and all the inspectors, I've got fifty years of smarts to get you out. My other rules are no violence, no stealing, no guns, no dealing. A boy here and there, okay, but just keep it quiet. I have liberal attitudes. I think people should enjoy themselves. God gives us more trouble than pleasure. Trouble erases the pleasure, but pleasure also erases trouble—at least for a little while. But no noise."

They reached a blue door marked 5A, marred with old tape and thumbtack holes. Mrs. Sanders pulled a key from her housecoat. Inside was a plain room, ten by twelve feet, with a small bathroom connected to it. In one alcove of the bathroom stood a tiny stove and refrigerator. Above the sink hung the electric meter.

"Why is the meter there?"

"Only place it would go," said Mrs. Sanders. "If you cook a lot, open the bathroom window, even in winter. It ventilates and keeps the smells down. The fire extinguisher is under the sink, and as you can see, there's a fire escape. If there
is
a fire, please escape. That's what I always say. We had a fire years ago and a Dominican boy died from the smoke. They carried him out naked, like a fallen angel." She dug into her apron. "Here're your keys. This building is my building. I want people to be happy. If you can't be happy, Miss Bedford, go live with the unhappy people. Somewhere else."

The old woman pulled the door shut and Christina set down her bag. The walls had not been patched or painted in ten or twenty or thirty years; the floor was scraped rough and uneven; two of the windows were cracked. It was perfect. The bed sagged in one corner, and a dresser with three drawers sat against the opposite wall. She pulled open the drawers one at a time, inspecting the minute detritus of others' lives: paper clips, a few pennies, something from the inside of a computer, a bead to costume jewelry, a flier from a neighborhood acupuncturist, three pencils with broken points, a fingernail, an obsolete subway token. I like this, Christina thought. She lifted the worn, gray sheets from the bed and examined the mattress. Overlapping stains of different size and origin ringed the parallel ridges; she could identify piss, blood, house paint, crayon, wine, candle wax, cigarette burns, and what appeared to be motor oil. In the closet she found a white pump with the heel broken off; whoever had once owned it had carefully applied white polish over the worn toe. The pump suggested not just the sloppy movement of souls through space but defeat. I need to make this room mine, she thought. She hung her new dress in the closet, set the copy of the
Voice
on the dresser, re-folded her clothes, and laid them in the top drawer. In the closet she found three large boxes taped shut, each marked property of melissa williams. She lifted one down, smelling its papery mustiness, and set it on the bed. The tape was the cheap kind that is wetted, then stuck on; dried, it had curled and lifted from the cardboard, easy enough for her to peel up. Jumbled inside were letters, photographs, movie ticket stubs, bank statements, a packet of condoms, magazine clippings, several paperback books—seemingly every piece of paper that Melissa Williams had ever touched. Christina put the photos in a pile, then the letters, then the documents. The photos revealed a young brown-haired woman in eyeglasses and baseball cap. Not so pretty, maybe, but fun, willing to drink a beer or two. Up for whatever it was. Alert, yet not sophisticated. Legs a little heavy, didn't wear much makeup. Industrious, needed approval. Melissa, the documents showed, was twenty-seven years old and until two months prior had been working at a company on Prince Street that designed Web sites. She was a graduate of Carleton College and had taken classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her mother had written to say that she was very worried about Melissa's brother, who was found in Seattle unconscious with a needle hanging out of his arm. The letters became increasingly desperate. "Your brother will
kill
himself one of these days," said the last, "and there is nothing (!) I can do. Only God knows what it took to bring him into the world and now he is going to
throw away his life
with a needle. Melissa, I know that I have not been the mother you would have wished for yourself. Sweetheart, I
know
that all of your orderly habits and responsible behavior have been in direct reaction (!!) to me, and that I have forfeited any last favors (!!) I might request of you. But your brother
needs
you, he needs
someone
who will take him away from there and bring him home. He will listen to you. I am
beseeching
you. I am begging you to
save your brother's life
. From what you tell me, they are very happy (!) with your work at your company and I trust that if you explain the situation they will let you leave for a while and then come back. In any case you are
so
talented that I know you will have very little difficulty in reestablishing yourself in New York City."