Solos (2 page)

“They will. It's amazing. Everyplace does. But of course they have to be right.”

“Don't forget we have Trollope on Tuesday.”

“As if I could forget. As if it's not the high point of my whole life. Come on, Otto! Let's beat it, boy.” She coaxes Otto away from his friends and attaches his leash. “He's so in love with Reba.”

“Too bad they're both fixed. They'd have cute puppies.”

Emily looks dubious. Reba is a low-growing part-dachshund, Otto is a grayish-white mongrel mop with an underslung jaw. “Was that a joke?”

“Yes.”

Marcus's mouth turns down into the little secret smile that Emily loves. She would like to hug him, but she just says, “Otto probably doesn't think it's funny.”

“Otto needs to lighten up.”

As she and Otto are crossing the park, Emily sees Susan Skolnick sitting on her usual bench. Susan Skolnick is given to taking long walks through the neighborhood after which she always ends up sitting on a bench by the dog run, silent and alone—a pariah—watching the dogs at play. She's a park regular, but she doesn't come with a dog. Susan is notorious for an incident involving her six-year-old daughter and the family dog, a border collie named Glenda, who had never shown a hint of bad behavior. In fact, Glenda never even barked except when someone sneezed—an endearing habit Susan and her husband, Murray, used to brag about at the park. But on a summer day just over a year ago, during some boisterous romping in their backyard, Glenda leapt up and bit the daughter, Vanna, on the lip. Within minutes, Murray was hustling Vanna in a car service to the emergency room (where she got two stitches), while Susan tossed the dog into the backseat of their Toyota, took her to the big animal hospital on Long Island, and demanded that she be put to sleep. The Skolnicks were regarded with contempt by the other park regulars. The sight of Susan, sitting stone-faced on a bench, watching the dogs play, only hardened their hearts further, though no one could figure out what she got out of sitting there.

And since no one ever talked to her, no one would ever know.

“As long as she suffers,” Marcus always says. “I don't care why or how, I just want her to suffer. I want her to be eaten away with remorse. I want her to have nightmares about dogs.”

Emily finds Susan's presence disturbing, even ominous, and she turns away from the woman's mysterious pain and continues back to Bedford Avenue. When she makes a brief stop at the Syrian deli for a bottle of water and a bag of chips for the car, Otto sits outside and whines. She knows he's tired; Elvis and Reba have worn him out. He's not a young dog; he wasn't young when she got him, and she's had him since her dog Harry died just before she split with Hart—more than six years. Otto wants his biscuit and a nap now as much as he wanted to play half an hour ago. But when they come to the corner of North Third Street—home—he gets a second wind and trots joyfully toward the sparkling river with its long gray strip of skyline and the bright blue sky above, pulling Emily along behind him.

2

Pa's a sap

Marcus is having Sunday brunch with his father, Tab Hartwell, known to everyone—except Marcus—as Hart.

Marcus insists on calling him Dad, because he knows Hart hates it.

Father and son are in SoHo at a sidewalk café on Wooster Street. Marcus dislikes sidewalk cafés. Why is it considered fun to eat food in the midst of exhaust fumes from traffic and stares from tourists? Tourism was down, but now it's up again, up higher than any city should have to tolerate. On a sunny autumn Sunday, the walk from the subway to the Bistro du Sud requires superior navigational skills, plus more rudeness and aggression than Marcus feels comfortable with, so he's feeling stressed by the time he gets there. Hart is hunched over the Arts and Leisure section, smoking. Hart likes sidewalk cafés because he can smoke, one more thing Marcus has against them.

“So, Dad,” Marcus asks, sitting. “Who was I named after?”

“What?”

“Why was I named Marcus?” He waves away the cigarette smoke. “It's something I forgot to ask Summer.”

Hart folds up his newspaper, looking disgusted. To Marcus's relief, he also butts out his cigarette. “She named you.”

“Well, do you know where she got Marcus? I know Summer liked things to have
resonance
. She was very conscious of what things
mean
. So, like—Neiman Marcus? Marcus Garvey? Marcus Aurelius? Marcus Tullius Cicero? Marcus, Stanley, Dallas, & Polk?”

“What's that?”

“A law firm in Honesdale. I used to deliver their paper.”

“You had a paper route?”

“After you left.”
We needed the dough, asshole, of course I had a paper route
, he wants to say, but knows it would make Hart angry. He doesn't want to make Hart angry because he is hoping Hart will give him some money. “What I'm saying is, even that would be cool, to be named after some lawyer. I just want my name to mean something.”

“It means your mother liked the sound of it. Who knows why? You're lucky she didn't name you Zeus, or Apollo.”

“I wouldn't have minded.”

“Or Fettuccine Alfredo. Or Compost Heap.” Hart raises one hand as if hailing a cab and keeps it imperiously in the air until the waitress arrives. Without looking at the menu, they both order avocado omelettes.

Fascinating
, Marcus thinks. Hart only lived with the family on and off until Marcus was ten, and then he left permanently. Yet he and his father share certain tastes, like this one. Has he inherited the taste for avocado omelettes, for unsalted peanuts, for the color brown, for Victorian novels, just as he inherited his father's strange greenish eyes? Or had these tastes simply rubbed off on him during those brief times together?

“I've been thinking lately about changing my last name to Summerson,” Marcus says, after they have discussed the weather, Hart's arthritis, and Marcus's shirt, which Hart says looks like it came from the Salvation Army and Marcus says no, it's from a thrift shop on Bedford Avenue. “Like Esther in
Bleak House
. Marcus Mead sometimes sounds to me like the hero of a romance novel. I've also considered Marcus A Sucram. Marcus Sacrum. Or Marcus Dame—how about that? Or Marcus Edam. Or Marcus Made. Does that sound cool or weird? I can never decide.”

“Don't think so much, Marcus.” His father leans back in his chair. “You're only twenty-one. Just relax and enjoy your life. Think when you get older.”

“I do enjoy my life. I think I enjoy my life more than anyone else I know. Or almost,” he says, thinking of Emily. Their omelettes arrive, and they both tuck in. “So come on, Dad, what would you have named me?”

“What?”

“Well, if you didn't like Marcus. I mean, what
did
you like?”

“I hate names,” Hart says. “I hate the whole concept of names. So would you if your parents named you Tab. After some flaky movie star from the Fifties.” He resumes eating, shaking his head sadly. “I've never really come to terms with my name.”

Marcus read in the paper recently that five million Americans suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He wonders how they got that figure and if they counted his father.

“Movie star
and
recording artist, Dad. Don't forget
Young Love
.” Marcus thinks his father looks about as unlike a Tab as it is possible to look. He's more of a Thorndike, or a Wolfgang. A Heathcliff. Some saturnine, dark haired, bushy-browed kind of name—not a blond one like Tab. “And Tab Hunter's real name was Andrew Arthur Kelm, anyway. AAK!”

“People should be called by their social security numbers,” Hart says. “Just call me 067. Tell you what—drop the zero. I'm your father.”

“Tab might come back into style, like Chad did after the election. They're both sort of paper names. I mean, names relating to paper. Though of course Tab also relates to typewriters and/or computers.” He doesn't say it also could be short for
tabanid
a horse fly, from the Latin
tabanus
. Or tabloid. Tab Lloyd. “Tab Hunter is kind of a funny name, when you think of it,” he says. “You picture somebody who's a novice at the keyboard looking all over trying to find the tab key.”

His father stares at him. “Are you serious?”

“No.”

“I mean about Chad. Chad became a popular name after the election? Is that true? Do you know that for a fact?”

“I read it in the
Times
.”

“Jesus.” Hart sits shaking his head for a minute. Then he says, “Christ.”

“What's this world coming to, eh, Pop?”

Dad
and
Mom
, he often thinks: my first palindromes.
Pop. Sis
. Hah! Family life is crawling with them!

Hart signals the waitress for more coffee, and when it's poured, creamed, and stirred, he says, “I invited you to brunch for a reason.”

“Because I'm your son.”

Hart briefly closes his eyes, opens them. “Well, obviously, Marcus, if you were a complete stranger I probably wouldn't have invited you. I wouldn't even have known your phone number. Also, I invited you because human beings have to eat food. If we were constructed differently, I might have invited you to gnaw tree bark in Central Park, or hook up to a hose at the gas station. But because you're my son, and because it's necessary to eat food periodically or die, I invited you to brunch.”

“And yet, despite these two compelling reasons, there is apparently still another one.”

“Correct.”

Hart lifts his coffee cup and sips. Marcus hears from Hart three or four times a year. He hopes his father is about to—
finally
—say something about money. Hart used to be hard up, but now he has plenty of cash and Marcus could use some. His dog-walking and pet-sitting gigs don't pay badly, but everyone is cutting back on stuff like that. Luxuries, he thinks, and imagines the lonely unwalked dogs, the unpetted cats left for the weekend with a box of kibble and a filthy litter box. Even when he does bring in decent money—some months are better than others—it doesn't seem like much. He puts half of everything he earns into his account at the Greenpoint Savings Bank. Thirty thousand dollars is what he needs for what he intends to do, and the account is growing much too slowly.

He eats some more bits of a avocado. He's tired of the egg part, but feels he could eat avocados forever. The avocado diet. Could man live by avocado alone? And why doesn't avocado alone? And why doesn't avocado add an eat the end when it turns plural, like tomato does? And potato? He remembers another article in the paper. A woman named Elvira Surito, of Los Altos, California, claimed she cured her arthritis by telekinetically transmitting her negative energy into the eggs of her neighbor's chickens. The neighbor was suing her. He would share this amusing anecdote, except that he's sure Hart's reaction would be to stare at him and then change the subject.

Hart sips, swallows, gazes absently at women who walk by. He is in no hurry to reveal why they're having brunch. Marcus admires his father's silky tweed jacket, which he wears with jeans over a blinding white T-shirt, and entertains himself by imagining Hart saying,
Son, you're twenty-one now, and it's time you had some responsibility for the family fortune
. The words
trust fund
dangle in his mind, with
stock portfolio
and
holdings
close behind. He waits, happily, while his father drinks coffee and looks pensive and ogles women. Finally, putting down his cup, Hart says, “I want you to do me a favor.”

Accept this check, son
…

“Okay. What is it?”

Hart purses his lips and looks down at the tablecloth. His face actually flushes, something Marcus has never witnessed before. He has the feeling Hart is giving himself a pep talk, steeling himself. “Well, the thing is, I've got a little problem. I'm flat broke.”

“Broke?”

“Broke. As in no money.”

“Broke.”

“You've got it. I've had some business reversals, and I'm broke. And kind of in debt. A bit. You know how it is.”

Neither of them speaks for a while. Hart continues to sip coffee and look at the people passing. A woman in a short and very tight skirt goes by, her ass swaying. She has very good legs. Marcus wonders why he doesn't respond to such things. Nor does he respond to the man with her, a smooth Latino dude with a chain bracelet on his hairy arm. He can see they're an attractive couple, easy to look at, but he has no desire to touch, kiss, stroke, fondle, unclothe, or fornicate with either one. He's wondered so often why this is that this time it flits quickly to the back of his mind, leaving the bulk of his brain free to process his father's news.

Hart has no money.

Hart had plenty of money when Marcus first looked him up two years ago. He was running a thriving art gallery. Some of Hart's money-making artists have since abandoned him like Selma Rice, the wound woman, and Merlin Wolf, the dead bird guy; Marcus has seen notices of their shows at other galleries. But it's hard to believe Hart's little empire is
over
. Hasn't he been some kind of art big shot all his life? Or has he? Marcus has very little idea, really, what Hart has ever been or done. And why is Hart telling him this? He isn't the confiding type, and he doesn't like to admit failure. Things must be desperate. Marcus has a sudden horrible thought: Is Hart going to touch him up for a loan?

“Well, that's interesting, Dad.”

Hart sets down his coffee cup and says, “I wondered if I could get you to kill Emily Lime.”

“What?”

“My ex-wife. You know her—you said you walk her dog.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know her. I mean, I don't know her well,” Marcus fibs.
Kill Emily
?

“Presumably you have a key to her place.”