Solos (28 page)

He looks at Emily, who has a sad, faraway look in her eyes, and wonders if she is thinking the same thing. Her eyes, he observes for the hundredth time, are very beautiful, even in the dim light where they have changed color like the river does, from blue to gray. As he stares at her, she turns her head and looks at him so intently that he begins to feel uncomfortable. It's a moment full of various nameless emotions he can't recognize—as if a piece of music has started up that seems familiar but that he can barely hear. Slowly, he arranges his face into what he hopes is a smile. He can't say what he knows he should say. Instead, he says, “But now you have Otto and Izzy. Who are not rats.” He knows it's dumb, but Emily doesn't seem to think so.

She looks down at Otto, who has licked the plate clean and is gazing up at them expectantly. He has ice cream on his whiskers. “It's true,” Emily says. “I have Otto and Izzy. And did I tell you I'm adopting a kitten? You know how Otto loves cats. Gaby and Hattie said they have an adorable little tortoise shell.”

“Sounds good.”

“Actually, they have two. Siblings.”

“So of course.”

“Of course.”

“Anna and Ada?”

“They're boys.” She smiles at him. “I'm thinking maybe Leon and Noel.”

“Excellent.”

“And how is Willie?”

“He's doing better.” Elliot Cobb's rottweiler ended up at the Pet Pound, and Marcus has been talked into adopting him. He has had him for a week, and he's not sorry, though Willie is difficult.
A challenge
, is how Hattie put it.
Obviously an abused dog
. Willie has mournful brown eyes that follow Marcus around the room. He stands next to Marcus looking up at him appealingly, but when Marcus tries to pet him he backs away. If Marcus approaches him too quickly, he snaps. He whines in the night. “When I took him to the park this morning with Rumpy and Elvis, he actually sort of romped a little, and he slept on the rug next to my bed last night.”

“Those are good signs. The poor thing. He'll be all right.”

“I think so.”

“You know, I'm really drunk, Marcus.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Maybe you should go.”

“Yeah. But first I have to give you this present.” He takes the bag he has stowed under his chair and hands it to her. “I'm sorry I didn't get around to wrapping it. Things have been sort of crazy, with Willie and everything.”

“You shouldn't have.”

“Should too.”

“Well, maybe. And I have one for you.” Emily gets up, wobbling a little in her high heels, and retrieves it from her desk.

His present to her is a copy of Thomas Trollope's memoir,
What I Remember
—a pretty little calfskin edition with marbled endpapers. “Wait,” he says. “Get this.” He opens it to page 137, and points, and Emily reads aloud: “Our mother's new puppy, Neptune, was a frisky Newfoundland.” She gives a squeal of joy. “I knew it! And guess what, Marcus. I have a
DOG
for you. I figured now that you have a dog again, you might like it.”

It's from the window of a groomer in midtown Manhattan, and under the word is a box full of petunias. Emily has put the photo into an antique frame she says was another fruit of her insane shopping spree.

“It's an excellent
DOG
. One of your best.”

“I really wanted to buy you an iMac, but I figured you'd get mad. Or would you? If you won't, I will. It would make me so happy to do that. I could have it shipped to you in Honesdale.”

He grins suddenly. “I wasn't going to tell you. I was going to
E-mail
you. I'm getting myself one, through Saul.”

“Get outta here!”

“It's true. I had a little windfall.”

The windfall is Summer's Whack, which Tamarind FedExed to him. Wrzeszczynski says it's one of the best. “I think he was just starting when he painted this,” Wrzeszczynski said. “Before he got so sick. I think this is a very early Whack. It has such freshness, such spontaneity. And it's funny, too—the burned toast.”

Marcus has done his own deal with the periodontist—a Whack for a Mac, and then some. Marcus figures it was a dumb move—he should have waited for the right moment, sold it through Ptak or at Sotheby's and made a killing. But he likes Wrzeszczynski and wanted him to have it, and he wants the money now, not in a year. There will be the new roof, and he'd like to put a deck on the back of the house, overlooking the woods. When he told Wrzeszczynski all this, the periodontist looked at him curiously and said, “You seem so young for all this responsibility,” and Marcus didn't know how to say he doesn't feel particularly young, and he doesn't feel particularly old either. He feels the way he has always felt.

In Honesdale, he thinks, he will live like a dog. The hand stretched out, or not. The romp on the lawn, or not. The walk in the rain or the nap by the stove. Present tense.

“Marcus?” Emily says. “Will you really E-mail me?”

“With annoying regularity.”

“I suppose it's silly to say I'll miss you.”

“No,” Marcus says. “It isn't. But—hey, Em. Remember how I told you that if you walk in a straight line, you're really walking in a slight curve, so that if you go far enough you'll end up where you began?”

Emily smiles. “What goes around comes around?”

“Exactly.”

“I hope that's true,” she says.

“You will not hope in vain.”

“Still, it sounds like a lot of walking.”

“Get yourself a good pair of walking shoes. Don't try to do it in those heels.”

She accompanies him to the door, where they look at each other for a minute, and then she leans over and kisses him on the forehead.

19

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

It's very late on the night after Thanksgiving. Emily Lime is sitting at her desk drinking a cup of tea. Earlier, she had dinner at Vera Cruz with Pat and Oliver, and over cheese burritos and guacamole they told her that Pat is indeed pregnant, the baby is due in June, they need more space, and would she consider trading her loft for Oliver's penthouse?

Emily is too excited to sleep.

She has been making lists.

She has figured out how she will arrange the penthouse, what furniture will go where, what she will have to get rid of, what she will try to palm off on Pat and Oliver. She has made a tentative list of the antique roses she will grow in pots on the roof: the Gallicas, damasks, albas, eglantines. She has balanced her checkbook and drawn up a budget for the year three, fast approaching. She has jotted down ideas for Christmas gifts for her family.

Now, at one in the morning, she can't think of any more lists to make.

The only thing left is to think about is Marcus, and she takes her tea over to the window to do so—
Marcus
—trying to picture him in Honesdale. His red truck is parked in the driveway of the gray farmhouse. The house will be dusty, spidery, and cold after being closed up all these years. Have he and the dog walked down Spring Hill Road to see the cows? And where did he have dinner? And is he asleep now, with Willie on the floor beside his bed?

Emily checked on the Web and found that the distance from North Third Street in Brooklyn to Spring Hill Road in Honesdale is exactly 111 miles, a fact she desperately wants to share with Marcus. Life, she fears, will now consist of things she wants to share with Marcus. And by the time she does they will be stale, boring, trivial—no longer fascinating little facts and numbers and what did you think of today's crossword puzzle, and the joke a little girl told her at the Pet Pound.
If you cross a cat with a parrot what do you get? A carrot
. She imagines Marcus's small down-turned smile, which will not come through in an E-mail.

Across the river, the city with its lights twinkles like Christmas, and the sky above it is a deep, dark blue. From the penthouse, she will be able to see the sun rise as well as set. The sun comes up in the kitchen, Oliver says, and the big thunderstorms start in the bathroom window, over Queens, and move west through the bedroom to the living room. How strange that she will be upstairs tending her roses and watching her kittens grow up while he and Pat raise a child here where she has lived so long. What she can't understand is how Marcus could bear to leave. Emily knows this odd little corner of the city is one of the things that sustains her, every bit as much as her friends do, and Otto and Izzy, and Noel and Leon, the new kittens, asleep in a tangle on her bed. How much will Marcus regret it all? How often will he think about her, and the park, and Rumpy and Reba and the Trollope group? “You guys were pretty tight,” Oliver said at dinner. “You're really going to miss each other.” The poignant thought has occurred to Emily that she and Marcus will miss each other a lot, and then after a while they'll only miss each other a little, and after a while they'll stop.

There could even come a day when she won't think of Marcus at all. Her SCARUM file will crash and die. The snapshot of little Marcus in his number 7 sweatshirt will fade away, and the photograph of his doorbell with
MARCUS MEAD
printed over it will be lost. She won't arrange his name at odd moments into inspirations like SCRAM, MAUDE. She will have forgotten who gave her Thomas Trollope's memoirs. She'll be a solitary old lady with a faded blue zipper around her wrist, wearing sensible cotton housedresses like they sell on Manhattan Avenue. “Remember Marcus?” Gene Rae will ask when she stops by with a bag of Polish cookies and pictures of her grandkids, and Emily will think:
Marcus. Marcus? Marcus who?
—and she'll have a vague memory of a boy with strange green eyes who used to walk her dog. Then she and Gene Rae will eat cookies and drink tea and talk about Proust, how maybe he was right, that we love only what we want and can't have.

But maybe after a while we stop wanting.

Thinking of cookies makes her hungry, and Emily gets up and looks in the fridge. There is a piece of Anstice's apple pie left. She sits down at the kitchen table to eat it. A postcard from Susan Skolnick is propped against the salt shaker. On one side is a picture of a pine forest with a patch of blue lake and GREETINGS FROM THE LAND OF A THOUSAND LAKES. On the other side, it says:
Here I am. The lake hasn't changed. I'm trying to figure out how to do this. I'll let you know when I get settled. Thanks for your help. Happy Thanksgiving. Susan
.

Emily took the card with her to show to Oliver and Pat at dinner. “What kind of help?” Pat asked.

Emily shrugged. “I didn't tell her she was crazy to go.”

“She was a strange bird.”

“I ended up kind of liking her. I guess we're friends now. If she invites me up to Maine, I'll go and visit.”

“You've heard about Luther and Lamont moving to Italy?”

“Yeah, but so far it's just a twinkle in their eye, I hope.”

“Luther's eye, mostly. I think he thinks he can keep a lid on Lamont if they live someplace where he doesn't speak the language.”

“Lamont will be fluent in Italian in about two weeks.”

“Fiona's been cat-sitting at their place, and she wants to sublet. She's also interested in taking over the Tragedy. I hear they're trying to work out some kind of a deal.”

“I can't think about this. It's too horrible. And I won't believe it until I hear
arrividerci
from Luther and Lamont's own lips.”

“That would devastate the Trollope group. First Marcus, now the L's.”

“Jeanette will be back in the spring. And Dr. Wrzeszczynski and his wife are interested in joining.”

“Really? Maybe Anstice and Dr. Demand will join, too.”

“They'll have to get out of bed first,” Oliver said.

“Who knows how that will work out? It is fraught with difficulties.”

“Speaking of difficulties,” Oliver said, “get Anstice to repair the bathroom window. And frankly, at the rent you're probably going to be paying, I think she ought to put down some new tile. And fix up the kitchen a little.”

“We'll see. I really like it the way it is.” Emily knows she won't change anything: shabby linoleum, broken tile, leaky window. She has lusted after it for so long, it would be like marrying the man of your dreams and making him get a nose job.

“You're such a romantic.”

“I'm not,” Emily insisted. “I'm a stodgy stick-in-the-mud, probably well on my way to becoming an old fart. I hate it when things change. I'm so relieved you guys aren't moving to the suburbs or someplace after you have a kid.”

“Raise little Kizette in the burbs? Be serious. We'll never leave.”

“Kizette?”

“If it's a girl. Prague if it's a boy.”

“Promise you won't move to Mineola or someplace? Larchmont? Fort Salonga?”

“Promise.”

“I'm afraid for this neighborhood. Remember the old days? The pigeon flyers? The lace curtains? The Polish graffiti?”

“Em?” Pat put her hand over Emily's. “They're all still here.”

“Yeah.” Emily knows it's true. Just that afternoon, when the light was leaving, she watched two flocks of pigeons wheeling in the air, crossing each other, and as they angled down, the dying sun caught the underside of their wings, turning them to gold, like leaves swept up by the wind. The sight gave her such comfort she almost wept. “But they're going. You know they are.”

“The crack vials all over the sidewalks are gone, too,” Oliver reminded her. “And the boarded-up stores no one would rent. The garbage dump. And no one has been mugged around here in a long time.”

“I know, I know.”

“Things change, Em. They have to. And sometimes it's okay.”

“I know. Like Anstice says, they used to treat migraines with powdered stag horn dissolved in mead. Now it's Lou Reed and sumatriptan.”