Solos (15 page)

“This just isn't a kid neighborhood. Plus I think people are afraid because of the rapes.”

“Nobody came to my door but Oliver and Pat. They were wearing their ostrich costumes.”

“Not again.”

“Yeah. They were on their way to the school, to chaperone a party for the kids. I gave them some of those miniature chocolate bars, but there's still a ton.”

“You did this last year, Emily.”

“I know. I do it every year. Maybe it's time to admit I do it so that I can eat the leftover candy.”

“Don't eat it all before I get there.”

“I won't. Will you want a Bloody Mary with yours? I can go out and get some more tomato juice.”

Marcus says he'll bring some, and when they hang up, he dials Hart's number.

“It's me.”

“All I want is a simple yes or no.”

“Simple yes.”

There is a silence, during which he hears his father's breathing get progressively quieter. Finally he says, “Okay, son. Okay. This is good. This is excellent. There's money there for you, Marcus. Lots of it.”

“Can we sign a contract or something? I mean—I want to be sure you'll pay me.”

He expects Hart to blow up at this, but his father just chuckles. “Marcus? What are you going to do? Sue me? Take me to court? I'll pay you, for Christ's sake. Trust me.”

“When?”

“Well, when is the event going to take place?”

Marcus has thought about this. He puts his feet up and gazes into the eyes of Rudy Giuliani's dog on the cover of the
Daily News
. “Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving? That's a month away!”

“No, it isn't. It's three and a half weeks.”

“What?” There's a break while Hart switches the phone to his good ear. “It's what?”

“It's three and a half weeks to Thanksgiving.”

“No, it isn't. What's today? November second? It's—okay, okay, it's three and a half weeks. That's a long time.”

All Souls' Day
, Marcus is thinking. Today is All Souls' Day.
Summer's lease hath all too short a date
. He blames Hart for his mother's death. It's absurd. He might as well blame Tamarind, or the social worker he knew she was seeing before she died. And he does, actually: He has blamed them all from time to time. He even blamed Summer, for dying as oddly as she lived—for dying at all. But the person he
wants
to blame is Hart: Maybe only Hart could have saved her. He has a sudden, ludicrous memory of a picture he saw last summer on the cover of the
Times
, of a large, gray, heavy, patient hippo being evacuated in a red sling from the flooded zoo in Prague. Blindfolded so it wouldn't panic.

The problem, of course, is that when he wakes up in the middle of the night it's himself he blames.

“Do you wanna tell me why you need to wait three and a half weeks?”

“I'm going to push her down the elevator shaft.”

“Down the elevator shafts,” Hart says slowly. “Wow. You mean that fucking freight elevator is still there? Miss Moneybags Anstice Mullen still hasn't brought the place up to code, eh?”

“I think she's applied for legal status, but nothing seems to happen.”

“Ha! Damned right.
Jesus
. Williamsburg, Brooklyn. What a place. Nothing changes. It warms my heart.” He chuckles uneasily. “Well. That's good, son. That's creative. Damned easy for someone to just slip over the edge when they're pulling the fucking cable, eh?” His voice fades away. Then he clears his throat and says, “But that doesn't answer my question. Why Thanksgiving?”

“It's easier with hardly anyone in the building. At Thanksgiving, everybody goes out of town.”

“How do you know that?”

Marcus heaves a sigh. “They've already got me signed up. It's a major dog-walking weekend for me.”

“What about her? Won't she be going out of town?”

“No. I happen to know she isn't.”

“What? You're sure?”

“I'm sure.”

Hart is silent, and Marcus can hear him thinking. He wonders if Hart distrusts him as much as he distrusts Hart. Then Hart says, “You're the only one I can trust, Marcus. I'm depending on you,” and Marcus realizes that his father is alone in the world. As he has always been. Well, why should things be any different? He's a bitter, cynical, mean, half-crazy, and thoroughly disagreeable weasel. No, not a weasel, despite Grandma Mead. Weasels have a bad rep, but not for any good reason. They're prized for their pelts, for one thing: Minks, after all, are weasels. And sure, they steal eggs and chickens, but they also feed on rats and vermin. Marcus can imagine his father as a sort of Ozzy Osbourne feeding on rats, though he can't imagine anyone prizing his pelt. Hart has become distinctly scruffy in his middle age. For a moment, Marcus almost pities him. “You there, Dad?”

“You're really going to do this?”

“Yes.”

“I'll be damned.”

“So when do I get the downpayment?”

“A week from Tuesday.” They arrange to meet at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Hart's idea. “There's never anybody there on Tuesdays but those Hasidic families. Eleven badly dressed kids, plus Mom in her tailored coat and sensible shoes. Let's say late afternoon. By then it's really dead.”

“You go to the Botanic Garden?”

“From time to time. It's relaxing.”

Marcus is strangely pleased by this, because the Botanic Garden is one of his favorite places, but he's also appalled: He hates to think of people like his father being there. He imagines him strolling the paths, thinking malevolent thoughts, ripping the blooms off the roses, sneering at the little Hasidic kids in their yarmulkes.

“Okay,” he says. “A week from Tuesday. What? Four o'clock?”

“Four's good. You know the Japanese pavilion thing? With the pond?”

Marcus knows it well: the pond full of carp and turtles, the red torii gate, the little wooden bridge, the peace that is so un-Hartlike. “Yeah,” he says without enthusiasm. “I'll see you there.”

When they hang up, Marcus dials Emily's number. “Just quickly—I'm taking a sort of poll,” he says. “Suppose you needed cash in a hurry. Where would you get it?”

“What? Marcus, I'm cooking my egg!”

“I know, but humor me. I'm compiling some statistics. You know. What people do. Where they put their—you know—money. Or whatever.”

“Marcus? Is there a problem? Do you need cash?”

“No no no! Emily, this is all theoretical. Just tell me quick, before your egg overcooks. Let's say you need—oh, whatever—fifty thousand bucks.”

“Fifty
thousand?
Why would I need that much money?”

“It doesn't matter. For the purposes of my inquiry, let's just say you need it. What would you do?”

“I wouldn't do anything! I have no way of getting that kind of money! I'd have to ask my mother. Or my brother Milo. He could take a second mortgage on his house or something. Or Anstice. I suppose I could go down on my knees and beg. But I just never would! This is a stupid question. I don't even like to think about it.”

“But just—I mean, you don't have anything you could sell, you don't own anything valuable?”

“Marcus, no! I don't have anything! Just my Nikon. My Hasselblad. My dog. You know what I've got.”

“But—”

“Listen, I want to do my egg now. I want my dinner. Can we talk about this later?”

“Sorry, Emily. Sorry. Okay. I'll see you around eight.”

“You are getting so peculiar,” Emily sighs, and hangs up.

Marcus finishes his tea. Hart is obviously insane. But meanwhile, he'll pick up ten thousand at the Japanese pavilion, money that his father owes him, fair and square. All those years of poverty, living with Summer while their small bank account dwindled away. Delivering papers. Working at a gas station. Hart owes him for all those cold afternoons pumping gas.

With that much money, he can go home.

His goal has been to save thirty thousand; Hart's ten will put him over the top.

Aside from Tamarind's occasional visits, Summer's house in Honesdale has been vacant for more than three years. He knows it needs work. And he has to have a vehicle. And some money to live on until he gets the house in shape and can start to earn a living. He has an idea that he'll work for the little old-fashioned railroad down there. Or learn to train dogs, or teach himself to cook. Marcus doesn't worry about earning a living: If he can make money in Williamsburg, he can make money in Honesdale. What he worries about, increasingly, is leaving Emily.

But he doesn't think about that now. He sits down with that morning's
Times
crossword—Saturday, the hardest—and, though he finishes it off in fourteen minutes, he enjoys doing it: Like the tea, it's soothing. Then he cuts an avocado in half, removes the pit, salts both halves and eats them from their shells with a spoon. When he's done, he puts on his coat and heads out to Emily's.

He stops at the Syrian deli on Berry Street. Elliot C. is at the counter, buying cigarettes, and Marcus is jolted by a visceral revulsion at the sight of his brown leather jacket, dyed blond hair, and arrogant little body. Cigarettes in New York City are now $7.50 a pack. He hopes Elliot C. will go broke buying them and also get emphysema. Then he's vaguely ashamed of himself. He has no reason to dislike this person. Elliot C. turns, looks Marcus in the eye, smirks, and goes out without speaking. Marcus picks up the tomato juice and pays for it, feeling as if a cruel, wintry wind has blown through the place.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date
, he thinks.

And so does everyone else's.

11

Eve damned eden mad eve

(Mid-November 2002)

Emily comes in from a photography session and checks her Emails. There are five. The headings are:

Emily, your dog can be smarter!

Eddie Bauer pre-Christmas Outerwear Sale!

Work at Home for BIG $$$$$!

Emily Limo! Your Mortgage Has Already Been Approved!!

Thanksgiving? London? Mom? California? Guilt? Help?

The last one, she knows immediately, is from her sister Laurie telling her that she's thinking of not going to Berkeley for Thanksgiving. She and Jonathan want to go to London and see some plays, and what does Emily think about all of them meeting up at Mom's for Christmas instead?

She E-mails her sister that she has already decided to fly out only for Christmas this year, not Thanksgiving, and reassures her about the lack of necessity for guilt: Mom's new beau is helping her make the Christmas fruitcakes, so it's serious—she probably won't notice whether her kids are there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Groundhog Day. Emily cc's her brother on the E-mail, puts in a wash, and then curls up under her quilt with Otto and
Miss Mackenzie
. But she's distracted from the book by the need to contemplate her life.

Emily is tired of being poor.

Her sister Laurie, two years younger than she, is a senior curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing in sixteenth and seventeenth century English needlework, and Laurie's husband Jonathan is a pediatrician with a large practice. Emily's brother Milo is a building contractor in Ann Arbor, married to a well-known novelist who teaches at the university there. Both her siblings will offer her money for a plane ticket to California at Christmas, and so will her mother. She will debate whether to accept it from one or the other of them (and make things easy on herself), or scrape together the money (as she usually does) by a creative combination of late rent, a maxed-out Visa, frugal eating, and hope. Hope is not entirely illusory; Dr. Demand has bought photographs from her on four of the eleven Christmases she has lived in Williamsburg. But hope is also, as Emily Dickinson and the posters in the Hallmark shop have it, the thing with feathers, and it can soar into the air faster than Izzy does when he hears a ringing phone.

In the end, she knows she will pay for her own ticket.

But what she will do about gifts for everyone is another question.

Last year, when she made fudge for her family and begged them not to give her presents, they all got together and presented her with a check so large she couldn't bring herself to cash it until Milo flew to Brooklyn in March and escorted her personally to the bank. The year before, she suggested they all draw names: She drew her mother and gave her three pairs of striped socks and a loaf of home-made bread; Jonathan drew Emily and gave her the rare antique “Hummingbird” pattern quilt that she is presently snuggled under with the dog.

Outside her windows, she can see an occasional aimless snowflake. The air was brisk when she was out with her camera, and now her life seems as bleak as the view. The woes of the world are so many, and they come to her at random:
the hole in the skyline, the hopeful unadopted cats at the Pet Pound, the memory of her father's sudden death and her mother's weeping, in the night, the Greenpoint winos with their brown-bagged bottles, her sister's two miscarriages, the story in the morning paper saying the average teenager reads two books a year
. Her own life is aimless, precarious, stalled. The old Volvo was ailing today, so she took the subway to the Village. She didn't find much—an ugly
TIME
from a billboard, a possible
DOG
on a peeling wall on West Fourth Street, another nice
TIME
with a truck parked in front of it so she couldn't get a good shot. She just had time to walk Otto before it started getting dark, and now the river and the skyline are dimming against a smoky sky. The rhythmic chug of the washing machine performs its whiny three-note noise, the start of a Strauss waltz, against the Bach cello suite on the CD player. The CD player, she reflects, was also a gift—from her mother, for her thirty-third birthday. And so were the Bach cello suites.