Solos (3 page)

“Well, yeah. I go in and out. I don't actually see
her
that often. I just pick up the dog and take him to the park when she's not there.” He feels the need to keep talking so Hart won't. “I actually sort of forgot she's your ex-wife,” he fibs further. “To me, she's just one of my customers.”

“Good.” Hart puts on a look Marcus recalls from his early childhood: the self-righteous smirk he wore whenever he told Marcus he was leaving but he'd be back real soon and they'd have some good times, they'd go fishing, they'd go to the zoo. “It's better that you don't know her very well. Then it won't bother you so much.”

Marcus tries to take this calmly. His father has always been given to clumsy joking, making sarcastic, sometimes outrageous suggestions with no real intent behind them. He's going to assume this is a joke, too. “I have a few vices, Dad,” he chuckles. “But I don't kill people.”

“Even for money?”

Hart isn't looking at him, he's gazing across the street, he's lighting a cigarette, he's blowing smoke up toward the sky.

Of course it's a joke.

“Dad?”

Hart swivels his head slowly and looks at him. “Even for quite
a lot
of money, Marcus?”

“Emily Lime seems like a nice person …”

“Yes, but don't forget, she's also the reason I left your mother. So deep down you hate her. You can never forgive her for—”

“You didn't even
know
Emily when you left Summer.”

“Not technically, but I left Summer so I could find the
kind
of woman Emily was in those days. Younger, smarter, thinner. Less of an oddball. I was looking for
an
Emily, and when I left Summer I found one.”

This is a pack of lies. Marcus knows perfectly well why his father left his mother. But lying is one thing and paying someone to murder your ex-wife is another. Could Hart really be this despicable? Of course, the world is full of people who pay people to kill people. Well, not
full
, but certainly
well equipped
. It's in the paper all the time. There was just that case in Colorado. Montana? Someplace out west. If Hart is serious will he keep asking people until someone says yes?

“Are you serious, Dad?”

“I'm afraid I am, Marcus. It's not something I want, of course. In an ideal world. But I think we're pretty aware that this world is far from ideal.”

His father is serious. He's either serious, or he's playing some sort of game. Or he's stark raving mad. Whatever the truth is, Marcus realizes he shouldn't alienate him. He studies his father's saturnine face and, to calm himself, obsesses on the word for a minute.
Saturnine
has nothing to do with Saturn the Roman god of agriculture, who has always sounded quite pleasant, even noble. A civilized god, married to Ops, the earth goddess—another nice one.
Summer could have named me Saturn
, he allows himself to further digress, and tries to picture himself with that name.
Saturn. Name of a car. Saturn Mead. Made as runt. Aunt dreams … Saturnine
refers to Saturn the planet. Which for some reason is supposed to be cold and distant—well, it is, of course, both those thing. It's planet, after all. Hart's saturnine face is handsome, though he's “not aging well,” as people say. He's only forty-eight, but there are deep lines around his mouth, and they don't look good on him. Him black hair is getting very gray ditto. He squints. And he says, “What?” a lot, and turns his head so his left ear faces out, as if he's losing the hearing in his right.

“So why do you want Emily Lime to be dead?” Marcus asks.

“I'd rather not reveal that at this early stage of negotiation,” his father says, like someone in a movie about hostages or the Mafia. “You let me know how you feel about it, and then we can talk details.”

“I see. Sure.” It's important to say he'll think about it, so that Hart has to wait for an answer. But he needs to ask one question. “Can you just tell me this, Dad? How much money? What are we talking about here?”

“Hard to say, really, but I figure at least two hundred.”

“Two hundred?”

“Thousand.”

“Two hundred thousand.” Marcus takes a deep breath and asks, cautiously, “Dad? Where are you going to get two hundred thousand dollars?”

“From Emily's death. It could be more. I'd give you twenty-five percent.”

Marcus wonders if his father has lost his mind. Emily Lime pays six hundred dollars a month for a scruffy loft in Williamsburg, in a building that until recently housed a spice-importing firm. It still smells of mace and cinnamon on a warm day. It doesn't even have screens on the windows or a sink in the bathroom. Emily Lime sometimes has to make him wait a week for his dog-walking money because she's so strapped. She can't make a living from her photography, so in season she does manual labor for a gardener. She hauls pots and bags of soil and rosebushes and flats of perennials up to roof gardens in Brooklyn Heights. Marcus has lowered his dog-walking rate from fifteen dollars an hour to ten for Emily because she's so hard up.

And because he's so fond of her.

“Well, that kind of money is certainly tempting,” Marcus says, cautiously, the way he might humor an escapee from an asylum before he tries to get him into the van.

“I thought it might be. That's why I asked you.”

Marcus would like to reach across the table and stick a fork into his father's windpipe, a knife into his heart. His father wrecked his mother's life and—in a roundabout way—was responsible for her strange death. His father thinks his son is the kind of person who would murder someone for money.

“Do you understand me, Marcus? Are we on the same page here?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Marcus says. His stomach lurches. “Basically, I think we are.”

“And Marcus.” Hart's face is cold, distant, grumpy, mean. And suspicious. “I have to see the body. You understand? I have to have evidence—”

“Wait, wait,” Marcus holds up a hand. “You're getting ahead of me here. I need to
think
about this.”

“What? Oh, right, think about it. Of course. I didn't expect an answer right this minute. But let me know by—let's say the weekend, will you? I'd like to set this in motion. It will take a while to realize the money.”

“Do I get a deposit?”

“Ten.”

“Thousand?”

“That's all I can lay my hands on right now.”

“You're going to give me ten thousand dollars?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” There is no way this preposterous statement can be true, but Marcus raises his eyebrows and purses his lips in a look that says he believes it. “I'd sure like to buy a pick-up truck.”

“That would just about do it. Get yourself a used Toyota or something.”

“Right. Just what I was thinking.”

“Or hold out for the big bucks—a couple of months, tops—and get yourself a fancy SUV.” He smiles at Marcus across the table, showing yellow teeth. “Or whatever you like.” The smile stays as is, but the eyes get a little plaintive at the corners. “I know I haven't been a good father, Marcus. Here's a chance to make it up to you.”

“Gee, Dad.”

“Better late than never.”

In a flash of memory, Marcus sees his father's eyes welling up with tears as he explained that Marcus's dog phoebe had been hit by a car and was now buried in the woods. Even then, in the midst of his grief, Marcus wondered how Hart managed the tears. Onion juice? “Well, I really appreciate this, it's definitely interesting,” Marcus says.

Sad fatherliness is immediately overlaid with greedy hope. “How interesting?”

“I'll let you know by the weekend.”

“Let's get out of here then.” Hart pays with cash, and leaves a stingy tip.

Horribly, when they stand up, he holds out his hand, and Marcus has to shake it.

He watches his father cross Wooster Street, heading east toward his apartment on Crosby, holding his rolled-up
Times
like a club. He adds three bucks to the tip. Then he goes into the men's room and scrubs his hands with soap.

3

Egad! no bondage!

Emily pays six hundred dollars a month for fourteen hundred square feet on the fifth floor of her building on North Third Street. The slum floor, she calls it; the fifth floor is the South Bronx of 87 North Third, the sixth floor is Central Park West. The lofts on the sixth floor have been renovated into pristine white spaces with sanded floors and new combination windows and air-conditioning units and nice bathrooms.

Emily wouldn't live on the sixth floor if you paid her.

Actually, that's not true; she would
if
someone paid her.

But she wouldn't pay the two-thousand-dollar-plus rent to do so, even if she could afford it. She thinks the sixth-floor lofts are banal, boring, pretentious, untrue to the spirit of Brooklyn in general and Williamsburg in particular. What she covets, however, is the penthouse, which sits on the roof above the sixth floor like a treehouse. The penthouse is a gem. Anstice, her landlady, whose vast loft takes up half of the sixth floor, got tired of rehabbing. So, like the lofts on Emily's floor, the penthouse has never been renovated. It was added on in the sixties and looks it. It has ancient faded linoleum in the kitchen and a cruddy little bathroom and a badly sloping floor in the bedroom and it's not even very big, about half the size of Emily's place.

But it's all windows and sunshine, or windows and darkness and city lights, or windows and rain and lightning. Nothing obstructs your view of the river, and you can have a garden on the roof. The place combines the grandeur that comes with the view—river, skyline, and the kind of sunsets only a seriously polluted city can provide—with a certain faded and rakish charm. Oliver Czerech lives in the penthouse, and he has no plans to move. But because Oliver's girlfriend is Pat Shapp, one of her best friends, Emily gets to visit it from time to time, which partly satisfies her—it's such a pleasure just to be there—and partly feeds her desire to possess it.

Emily is at the penthouse on Sunday afternoon, perched on the window seat that runs the length of the living room. Lying on the rug in front of her is Gus, the obese cat Oliver takes once a month, along with a shiitake mushroom, to the nursing home on North Sixth where the old folks chuckle over his powerful purr—when he really gets going, Gus can be heard two rooms away—and his legendary lust for mushrooms. Gus is purring now, though at muted volume, only revving into higher gear when Emily reaches out a foot to scratch his big belly. She is just finishing the Sunday
Times
crossword. If she looks up, which she does frequently, she can see the three bridges: Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Bridge is very distant and beautiful. The Williamsburg, closer up, is massive and ugly. The Manhattan Bridge sits blahly in the middle. If she turned slightly to the right she would be able to see the Queensboro Bridge, but she has no particular desire to do this. She prefers the Brooklyn bridges and the view to the south.

Pat and Oliver are in the kitchen making a cake for Lamont's birthday party later that night. Pat Shapp is, oddly, as plain as the sound of her name. Her features are small and neat, as are her hats, her handwriting, her gestures, her hands and feet, and her studio apartment in Greenpoint. She is brisk and practical and teaches English in a private high school on the Upper East Side, where she is Ms. Shapp, hinting at erratic, even drunken wantonness. Emily pictures the headmaster at Pat's retirement dinner chuckling about how “We've had a li'l misshapp at our school.”

Oliver is the other English teacher at Taggart, and he is as large and rumpled as Pat is small and neat. He is tall and overweight, and his many-angled but somehow fleshy face reflects his complicated heritage, which encompasses Poland, France, Russia, England, and—Oliver claims—a far distant maverick great-grandmother who married a man named Juan Menchaca to provide a soupçon of Basque. A thin beard decorates Oliver's chin like pencil strokes, but his hair is thick and black, and straight as porcupine quills.

Both are writers: Pat occasionally writes a sharp, nasty essay on New York City politics for the
Village Voice
; Oliver publishes sonnets in an obscure literary magazine based in South Dakota. Emily can hear the two of them talking softly in the kitchen, but she can't hear what they are saying; there's loud big band music on the CD player. Pat and Oliver tend to talk about literature or current events: They are probably talking about Trollope or the Williamsburg rapist.

Emily is thinking about a different subject entirely. She's thinking about Tab Hartwell.

Her ex-husband is still occupying her head after coming into it the night before while she was cooking dinner. She cut up broccoli, put it in the steamer, and remembered that Hart would tolerate broccoli only if it had lemon juice squeezed on it. In her mind she said to herself, as she had so often said to him, “Damn it, I forgot to pick up a lemon.” Emily is mulling over the night Hart left. It was a warm September night, and he went out to pick up Thai food. Both terrible cooks, she and Hart took their take-out seriously, especially Thai. They discussed for quite a while—ten minutes, maybe even as many as fifteen—whether to call Thai Café or Planet Thailand. Finally they decided Thai Café had better chicken peanut curry. Hart preferred to phone in the order and then go pick it up to avoid tipping a deliveryman. It was seven thirty when he left, not yet dark.

“Get that table set, Roderick, I'll be right back,” he said as he went out the door.

Roderick was their imaginary butler.

They'd ordered the curry, some vegetarian panang, and a couple of spring rolls. By eight thirty, Emily had found the chopsticks, set the table, poured herself a beer, and stared out the window for a while at the dark green river. The sky was turning rosy pink, laced with shards of purple. She skipped through the
Times
crossword puzzle (the Tuesday puzzle, so easy it was hardly worth doing), finished her beer, looked at the clock, and called the restaurant.