Audrey’s Door (25 page)

Audrey read the article, then reread it, then searched “Agnew Spalding” and found his obituary. Suicide. In his apartment, after his daughters left for school, but before the maid came, so that it was she who found
his body hanging from a ceiling beam in the kitchen and not his wife. The article noted that his apartment had a view of The Breviary, and his corpse had pointed toward it. Stranger still, he’d shredded the manuscript he was working on,
Generation Vain,
then pulped it into a single upright rectangle with a hole in it. Since he’d deleted all his files, the work was irretrievably lost.

She wanted to stop, but there was no turning back. She clicked the next few links in the queue for Breviary, and found headlines like, “Murder-suicide in Tony Manhattan Apartment” dated just two years ago, “Woman Hurls to Own Death” September 4, 2009. Finally, the most recent article, “Bizarre Construction During Final Days.” The caption next to the photo read:

Infestation?

The photo showed 14B’s den. Above where Audrey’s floor was now rotted lay an indistinguishable pile of what looked like trash.

She recalled what she’d done this morning. Her clothes. Poor Jayne’s hula girl. The scissors. The card. The ruined photo, her favorite, of her and Saraub. She picked it up now. “No,” she whispered at their obliterated black faces. “Please make this not real.”

Then, finally, she enlarged the photo. The carpet in the den was red shag, and the walls were red-painted, too. The items in the pile were clearer now. She could make out their size and shape, and in some cases, what
they’d once been: Tinker toys, hacked red velvet chairs, book spines, the broken top of a walnut dining-room table. She studied them for a long while, ran the permutations in her mind over and over again, and knew that the pile was not random. Each item was a jigsaw piece. She solved the puzzle of the large object that had buckled 14B’s den.

Spalding’s pulped manuscript suddenly made sense. She squeezed her hands into fists and tapped one, two, three, four times. Her nighttime construction was making sense, too. Before she died, Clara DeLea had built a door.

At last, she searched one more name. Looked at the image sidelong, afraid that it might peer back at her. Sharp nose and cheekbones. Tailored wool suit, three pieces. In his younger years, he’d been groomed, but by the 1880s, his long, shaggy hair hung down to his shoulders. Edgar Schermerhorn and the bone-fingered man in the three-piece suit from her dreams were one and the same.

The image suddenly came closer, and Schermerhorn got bigger inside the frame. His smile widened. “Your red ants are showing, my dear.”

W
ith downtown flooded, the subway got stuck at Christopher Street. There weren’t enough cabs, making Hurricane Erebus the great social equalizer. She and her fellow New Yorkers packed like sardines onto the M60 bus. The heavyset Mexican woman to her left wore an extra small T-shirt that read, BUY AMERICAN! She unscrewed a sludgy jar of pickled pigs’ feet and tore the flesh with her teeth as she chewed. To her left, a businessman sporting sprayed-on black hair and a shiny Italian suit clung ferociously to the strap hanging from the ceiling. He seemed new to public transportation and wouldn’t give anybody else enough room to share the strap.

Everybody was looking everybody else up and down. In her sweat suit and broken shoes, Audrey wanted to hide. She needn’t have bothered; unwashed and greasy, nobody looked twice. But then, a skinny black man with working hands shifted his pink Conway plastic
bag, and made room for her to sit. “Here,” he said, and held his hand over the empty space, so no one else could jump in and steal it. She smiled, grateful.

It was after midnight. As soon as she’d jumped up from her cube
(Your red ants are showing!),
she’d hightailed it into reception, where security had politely evicted her because the office was closing. When she’d gotten out of the building, it had been raining too hard to do much planning save race for the subway. The doors to most homeless shelters closed by 10:00 P.M. She was out of cash until her paycheck cleared on Wednesday. The flight to Omaha and the Super 8 Motel bill had maxed out her credit card, so she couldn’t afford another night at the Golden Nugget. Besides, her only currency was her Metrocard: she’d left her wallet at The Breviary.

As she’d stood inside the doorway to her office, rain pouring, she’d made a last-resort call on her cell phone: “Hi. It’s me. The girl you loved and left. Thanks a lot. Sorry to do this, but I’m in trouble, and I need your help. Call me back. Like, now.” When he returned the call, she planned to beg for the spare keys he kept at Sheila’s place, so she could stay at his apartment while he was out of town. Tacky, yes. Unpleasant, without a doubt. But necessary, too.

As for tonight, her options were limited. It was raining too hard to walk the streets. She supposed, like Spalding, that she could pass the time in The Breviary’s lobby. Though maybe that was what had gotten him in the end.

She could knock on Jayne’s door, and ask, despite hula girl, if she could stay in 14E for the night. Sure, the whole building was probably haunted (or just as easily, she’d lost her wits), but at least she wouldn’t be alone. And if that fell through, too, there was always Bellevue. Like mother, like daughter. The nice thing about the men with the butterfly nets: they come to you.

The bus didn’t arrive at 110th Street until after 1:00 A.M.
She raced past the Haitian doorman in white gloves and shoulder tassels, who was reading what looked like a Japanese girly bondage magazine: two tweens in braids and short skirts, smooching. Along the ceiling of the raised lobby, which she now knew had been an altar, she spied about ten exposed, brown-stained supporting beams. The middle one was where Edgar Schermerhorn had tied his noose, she imagined. Because it was the focal point of the lobby, and he’d wanted everyone to see his body as they’d exited the lift.

Her mind made a picture: a dapper madman with shaggy gray hair and a three-piece suit; a creaking rope that swung, got rubbed raw, and broke. He was looking down at her now, through the building’s eyes. She could feel him.

And how did The Breviary know so much about her? The probe she’d swallowed that lived in her stomach, which had been listening all this time. Spalding Agnew had felt it, too. Maybe it got inside everyone who spent time here. The longer they stayed, the more of their person it devoured, and the more like The Breviary they became.

The elevator took an eternity to ascend. While she waited, she mentally packed: Wolverine, the box full of her mother’s things, her wallet, and the soiled trousers, which she would rinse and wear tomorrow. Then she’d knock on Jayne’s door. Do some begging, maybe apologize. Or, hang it, blame dead hula girl on freaky Mrs. Parker from 14C.

By the third floor she heard a low-level din. The voices got louder as the cage climbed. They sounded convivial: a party. By the fifth floor, she gleaned snippets of conversations: a woman’s laugh, high-pitched and tinkling like a pinged crystal glass; “Baby, you’re the greatest!” As she ascended the seventh floor, she saw a pair of feet, then trouser legs and a blazer, and fi
nally, a plain, white mask: Galton. He reached out and grazed her metal cage with his fingers. There were three or four others who’d poured out into the hall. Their necks craned as she ascended. Pretty frocks and black tailcoats. From far away, all their eyes looked black, like the worms inside them had gotten fat. Like they weren’t people anymore, but husks.

The talking resumed once she was out of sight. A man with a sandy smoker’s voice shouted:

—“There she goes, just like I told you.”

—“If it doesn’t work this time, I’m building it myself, you Harpy!”

—“Pow! Zoom! I’d like to see you try, whiskey dick!” a woman answered.

Then they were all laughing. The sound got farther away the higher the metal cage climbed. By twelve, it was white noise again.

The doors opened on fourteen. This morning’s glaring white bulb hallway had been replaced with soft pink. It gave the impression of a fancy Las Vegas bordello. Someone had poured Love My Carpet in a line all down the red carpet but forgotten to vacuum.

She didn’t want to get out. Bellevue, the wet streets, the all-night Dunkin’ Donuts, the frickin’ subway tunnels with the mole people. Any of those would have been smarter than coming here. But she couldn’t turn back now. Grown-ups don’t run away from problems; they confront them. Besides, she wouldn’t get far without her wallet.

When she debarked, she found Mrs. Parker in her gerbil-elbowed glory standing in front of 14B. At her feet were hula girl’s gritty remains. When she noticed Audrey, her eyes bulged. “Eeek!” she shrieked like a surprised mouse, then grabbed the left center of her chest with both hands like her heart had cramped.

Audrey rushed to her side. “Are you okay?”

The woman clutched Audrey’s upper arm with bony fingers, then leaned. She smelled like dead skin. “Oh, sweetie,” she panted. “You startled me!”

“I’m so sorry.”

The woman wore a 1990s, midthigh-length Diane Von Furstenberg v-neck wrap dress. Her knees were wrinkled baby rodents, and her lips were stained the color of blackberries. Dried blood? No, red wine. She blinked her cataract eyes a few times, still recovering, then muttered under her breath, “Sweat suit? Seen that before.”

Mortified, Audrey looked down at her loose-fitting pants that smelled, she noticed for the first time, like stale beer, and were stained with what looked like hardened ice cream. “Laundry day,” she said.

The woman cocked her head like she didn’t know what Audrey was talking about.
Am I losing my mind?
Audrey wondered. “You pointed out this sweat suit, didn’t you?”

Loretta squinted, then smiled, like she thought maybe Audrey was high. “Why would I do that? Now, would you be a dear and give me a hand to the elevator? I’ve got to drop something off on seven. Loretta Parker, by the way. My family goes back to the American Revolution. I was born in The Breviary. So was my father, and his mother, too. Who are you?”

“Audrey Lucas. Pleased to meet you,” she said. They didn’t shake, and Audrey felt a little like somebody’s homeless cleaning lady. She led Loretta by the arm, taking tiny baby steps. The hall light flickered. Everything appeared shadowy and new, like walking through a stranger’s house and not knowing which doors lead to where.

“And how are you settling in?” Loretta asked.

“I don’t like it here. I’m leaving. Tonight if I can,” she said.

The woman made a tsk-tsking sound. “Oh, you haven’t
been reading the paper, have you? Not that bunk with that writer, Spalding Agnew?” Loretta’s skin was shiny with cold cream, and so thin that it appeared blue.

Audrey nodded. “Agnew. And some other things, too.”

Loretta waved her free hand like swatting a fly. “Don’t believe half what you hear, and any of what you read. He was a pansy with all that whiny dead-sister bunk. Used to sit here all night and mumble to himself like he paid rent. Bad manners. You give it time, you’ll love it here. Besides, The Breve loves you. I can tell.”

“Mmm.” Audrey took quarter steps alongside the woman’s neon pink Cole Haan sneakers. Nice shoes, but not a great match for the outfit. Neither was her necklace—triple-wrapped red plastic beads that looked like they came from a supermarket gumball machine.

“How’s your young man? Cuts such a dashing figure with that dark skin.”

Another baby step. “Fine, I guess. He’s not my young man anymore.”

“You don’t say?” she asked.

Audrey pressed the down arrow, and they waited. Her clothes itched. They smelled, too…whose were they?

“Well, then!” Loretta beamed. “You’ve got to start coming to movie night. A different apartment every week, always on Sundays. Been doing it as long as I can remember. We watch the classics. They don’t make them like they used to. Tonight was my pick: The original Disney
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
What pretty songs! I’d almost forgotten. When you think about it, bluebirds really do sing. You can’t help but feel bad for the Queen, though. How was she supposed to eat a pig’s heart? A lamb’s is much better.”

The elevator pinged. Audrey hadn’t been listening. She’d been thinking about this woman’s bony fingers that squeezed too tight, just like Betty. She’d been imagining lopping them off from the wrist and watching her
howl in shock, then feeling bad about that, and blinking her eyes to make the image disappear.

“What about a lamb?” Audrey asked.

The metal door pulled back. “Well, then I’ll see you soon.” Loretta dropped her slow-gait routine, and leaped, spry as a disco fiend, into the elevator. She smiled at Audrey like she’d gotten away with something as she pulled the metal cage shut. “Buh-bye!”