Solos (23 page)

Her life is very far from cinematic, however, unless some eccentric filmmaker decided to do a documentary called
Broken Dreams;
even then, the audience would have walked out long ago.

And the problem is not just Marcus.

It's her ailing car, her phone bill, the coming holiday dilemma, and the fact that she just spent the ten dollars that was supposed to get her through the weekend on bakery stuff and flowers. It's the garden of gray hair growing near her left ear. It's her failure to do what she came to New York so many years ago to do: make a career for herself as a photographer. She replays in her mind the uncomfortable fact that she has made exactly four thousand dollars this year from her photographs. Last year she made five. Next year … next year she may very well not make anything. Dr. Demand, her best customer, seems to have enough
BREADS
and
TIMES
, and he's run out of friends and relatives to give them to. The gallery that was supposed to call her back hasn't. As for her new idea, it will probably be a dead end, too. “Disappearing Brooklyn” indeed. Who cares? Good riddance. And what if Sophie should move to Mexico, lay her off, get hit by a bus?

She is in a mood, she knows: By tomorrow this mopey Emily will have faded away, and her usual optimistic self will be back.
Which just proves what a sap I am
, Emily thinks, but she can feel herself cheering up already. She struggles to remember some lines from W. H. Auden that she used to know, something about
the baffle of being
, and about how, even when there's not much joy to be had,
a laugh is less heartless than tears
. And her father's old joke:
Q. Why are cats like radio announcers? A: Wee paws for station identification
. And gray whales like to have their bellies tickled. And gorillas, she read, run out and dance in the rain. And then there is Otto, who is looking up at her with a look that is half adoration, half impatience, thinking,
What is she doing? I am so sick of waiting fuh huh
. She always imagines Otto, who was born in the neighborhood, with a thick Brooklyn accent.

She bids good-bye to Julia Roberts, and she and Otto turn up North Third to Havemeyer, then go back along North Sixth, a route Otto particularly likes because it takes him past Reba's house. Sometimes Reba is sitting in the window watching the world go by, her little long-nosed face darting back and forth between the curtains. Sometimes she is even in the front yard, tied to the fence, barking. Today she is nowhere in sight, but Otto sniffs around the fence anyway. “Come on, Otto. You'll see her at the park in the morning,” Emily says, and, after she gives him the last bite of her Danish, Otto lets himself be dragged away.

Emily likes the route too, because they walk by Marcus's building. When Marcus moves away, she thinks, she'll walk by here with Otto every day. A pilgrimage. Like when the Mona Lisa was stolen and people lined up at the Louvre to look at the bare wall—or like tourists at Ground Zero gazing into empty space—she will walk by 222 North Sixth and think her thoughts.

She resolves to do what she's been avoiding: call Marcus and ask him if what Luther told her is true. If Susan Skolnick can pull herself up out of a violent assault ending in death and desert her family and relocate to the Maine wilderness, Emily Lime can make a simple phone call to ask Marcus about his plans.

As she is thinking these things, Otto begins straining at the leash, whining, and there is Marcus just coming out of his front door. She lets Otto go, and he bounds up to Marcus, who squats down and says, “Hey boy, hey boy, what's up, boy, hey Otto, how's my doggie, how's my boy? Hey hey hey hey hey,” and lets Otto lick his face. Emily stands beaming at them—her two great loves—until Marcus straightens up and says, “You're just the person I wanted to see, Emily. I tried to call you last night, but I kept getting your voice mail.”

“Sophie and I finished up for the season, and she took me out to dinner to celebrate. We got slightly looped on Mojitos at a Caribbean place in Brooklyn Heights. I didn't get home until after midnight.”

“So how's Sophie?”

Emily looks with happiness at Marcus's sleek hair, green eyes, and bright blue sweater, the one she especially likes, with the hole in the sleeve. How is it that Marcus always looks exactly right? So perfectly himself. Always so
Marcus
.

“Sophie's good. We were looking at a guidebook to Greece. She's going next week. The more I looked at pictures of that blue water and those little white villages, the more Mojitos I needed to drink.”

“You should go with her.”

“Right. And Otto should go with Reba to Las Vegas and play the slots.”

“Come on in,” he says. “There's something I want to talk to you about.”

Her heart sinks:
It's true, then
. She follows him inside, wondering what he will be like when he's living in Honesdale in his old house, mowing the lawn, calling the plumber, cleaning out the gutters. It seems an odd life for a twenty-one-year-old person. Shouldn't he be in college? Or bumming around Europe? It's one more thing she has never asked him: Why he is a dog-walker in Williamsburg, why he is doing with his life what he is doing. Why he always seems like someone who is vacationing on earth but is a little bit sorry he ever left home. If he moves away, her questions will never be answered. Letters, phone calls, even an occasional awkward visit—it's never the same, and she knows it. The gloom threatens to re-descend.

“Take a seat,” Marcus says. “Can Otto have a biscuit?”

Otto, who has flopped on the rug, leaps up. “Is the Pope's dog Catholic?” Emily asks. “You said the B-word, Marcus. There's no way you can't give him a biscuit.”

Otto takes his biscuit and chomps noisily. Emily doesn't see Marcus's living room very often; their Scrabble games and weird little dinners are usually at her loft, because of the animals and the river view. His place fascinates her in the same way Marcus does:
It's true to itself
, is the only way she can put it. The room she is sitting in contains very little: Marcus's comfy chair with its batik pillow, a less comfy but still okay chair for guests, a coffee table made from a wooden crate, and—because Marcus is thrifty and also believes in patronizing the public libraries—one bookcase. Emily has looked at Marcus's books many times; when she and Gene Rae were in college, their motto was:
By their books ye shall know them
. But Marcus is as unknowable from his books as he is from anything else. Six dictionaries, several poetry anthologies, a volume of Shakespeare's sonnets,
In the Shadow of Man
, a couple of mysteries, a shelf of obscure novels by Eastern European writers, two Oulipo collections, a stack of phone books, and a whole shelf of Victorian novels, heavy on Gissing and Eliot, including the fourteen Trollopes he has read since he joined the group.

Today the place looks different. “Is your spare, minimalist decorating ethic a little sparer than usual, Marcus?” she calls out to the kitchen. “Something seems to be missing.”

“I took a load of stuff to the Salvation Army this morning.”

“Oh.”
Now he will tell her
. “Just weeding things out, or what?”

“Live lightly on the earth.”
No, he won't, not yet
. “Do you want tea?”

“No, thanks. I just had tea with Susan Skolnick.”

“You did? How is she?”

“You heard?”

“Yeah, everyone is talking about it.”

“She's okay. She didn't get charged with anything. She's got a black eye and a horrible-looking cut, but she seems all right. I guess. I hope.” Away from Susan's kitchen table, Emily isn't so sure. Maybe Susan is in shock. Maybe her idyllic vision of Lake Schoodic is a crazed reaction to struggling with a rapist and pushing him to his death. Should Emily have talked her out of it? Called 911? Stayed to look after her, even though Susan quite blatantly wanted her to leave? “The whole thing is heart-damping,” she says, a word she learned back in college from Coleridge, and that seems particularly expressive.

“Yeah, but—” Marcus sticks his head around the kitchen doorway. “I don't want to say what I want to say.”

“I know.” They look at each other. “It's wrong to be glad of anyone's death.”

“Lamont will be upset. They were sort of pals. Or something.”

“Lamont will be upset that he was pals with a rapist.”

“Yeah.”

“Gene Rae panicked. She said she was going to buy a gun. I wonder if she did.”

Marcus brings his tea and sits down in his chair across from the
Daily News
front page. “I wish I had an update on that,” he says.

“You could call her.”

“No, I mean the dogs. Seamus and Goalie. How are they doing? There ought to be a hotline you can call.”

“1-800-CELEBDOG.”

“What a great idea. Isn't it? Somebody could make money with that idea.”

She can't stand it another minute. “Marcus? What do you want to tell me?”

“Ah. Yes.” He leans back in his chair, smiling. “Emily, Emily, Emily,” he says. “Something very good could be happening. But first tell me what you know about Joe Whack.”

“
Joe Whack?
”

“The same. You remember him?”

“Of course I remember him. He lived downstairs from me. He was a painter. He—Marcus, why do you care? What's with Joe Whack? He's been dead for something like six years. Seven years.”

“Do you know what he died of?”

“Haven't a clue. He was wasting away for as long as I knew him. He was hospitalized for the last month or so. We—I went to visit him. He was a skeleton. He wasn't really responding. Then he died. It was horrible.”

She hasn't thought of Joe Whack in a while, but now she remembers him in the hospital bed, she and Hart on either side. He was unconscious. His breathing was loud. That was all he was: the sound of breathing, the up and down of his wasted chest. Once, he opened his eyes briefly and moaned, and Emily went running for the nurse, and when they got back he was gone. Hart was holding his hand.

“Emily?” Marcus's voice is gentle, wary, as if he's going to ask her a trick question. “You have his paintings, don't you?”

“What? Yes. There's a bunch of stuff up in Anstice's storage closet. Why? Do you want one? Take one! Take two! I have no use for them. They're up there gathering dust, and they can gather dust forever, as far as I'm concerned.”

She is upset. She doesn't want to talk about Joe Whack, whose dying moan stays in her mind along with the thought of Elliot C.'s broken body on the sidewalk, the gash across Susan's face, Marcus mowing his lawn in Honesdale, the blank space in the air across the river.
Why does life, with all its beauty, have to be so cruel?

“Would you mind if I showed them to someone?”

“Who on earth wants to see them?”

“You know Wrzeszczynski, right?”

“Wrzeszczynski the periodontist? Of course. Everybody knows Wrzeszczynski. He has a very nice
TIME
. Dr. Demand bought him one, years ago.”

“He's a big Whack fan.”

“Joe has fans? How can Joe have fans? He was a recluse. He didn't like to show his stuff to anyone. He hardly ever tried to sell a painting, just piled them up. This is ridiculous, Marcus! I don't know what Wrzeszczynski said to you, but it's all bullshit.”

Emily has devoted even less thought to the paintings than she has to Joe Whack—those odd little still lifes, meticulously painted but drab and slightly absurd: collections of disparate objects on bare tabletops. Hart left them behind when they got divorced. And why not? She couldn't imagine anyone wanting them, much less Hart, who probably filled his new place with the sickening paintings of dead things that he favored. The garish watercolors by the severed-limb guy. And the work of the wound-art woman, who became famous and, no doubt, made Hart a fortune. “What? He wants a Whack? Great. He can have the whole lot for fifty bucks.”

The thought of the Whack paintings is making her irritable. Everything is making her irritable. What she really wants to do is go home and climb into bed with Otto.

“Emily.” Marcus comes over and crouches down beside her. He takes her two hands in his. “Listen to me. Those paintings are worth money. A
lot
of money. Wrzeszczynski is a collector. So is his friend Sztmkiewcz.”

“Ziggy Sztmkiewcz, with the restaurant?”

“Yep. And he's not all. There are others, and not only here. There are collectors in Poland. There's a woman in Paris, Wrzeszczynski says, and a guy in Czechoslovakia. Some of these people are seriously rich, and they'll pay good money for a Whack. They had no idea there were more Whacks. And you've got
seventy-four
of them.”

“How do you know how many I've got?”

Marcus flushes. “Anstice let me into the storeroom.”

“What? When?
Why?
”

“She heard from Wrzeszczynski that he's interested and remembered that you've got a bunch of them. I just kind of … happened along. I was there. Somehow I got involved.”

But Emily isn't listening. She has finally taken in what Marcus said, that the Whacks are worth a lot of money.
Well, maybe
it's true. Who ever said the art world wasn't crazy?
But then she thinks of Hart.
Aren't they his?
She tries to remember what their agreement was. It was so long ago, and she didn't care, she just signed things. The paintings meant nothing to her: She didn't even keep one to hang on her wall. She remembers that she wouldn't have even agreed to hang on to them if Anstice hadn't offered her storage space.… She vaguely recalls carting them up there and leaving them, their faces turned to the wall, and being glad they were gone. “I don't know if they belong to me or not.”

“What do you mean?”