The Sky Below (17 page)

I tilted my head, reading the words over and over. When I got home, before I began my Fleur work for the evening, I spent a bit of time online. Research can be so helpful.

 

For the next two weeks, while the house cured, I went to work every day and did my job, chin up, shoulders straight.
I bought a new tie, a black one with a brown stripe. I sent my mother a pretty card with a note in it—
Thinking of you, maybe Janos and I will come down in January.
I sent Caroline and her boyfriend, Carsten, in Berlin, a box of Harry & David special pears—
Thinking of you, maybe Janos and I will come over in February.
I arrived at work on time, and if I was still there at 6:00—the days were getting noticeably shorter—I closed the blinds until 6:24. I barely glanced at the river for the rest of the day. I did not go to Brooklyn.

On the way from the train to the office, and the office to the train, I passed the motley row of newspaper boxes, some free, some that asked for coins, yellow or red plastic, black or forest-green metal, all dinged up and huddled together on the corner like day laborers waiting for work.
The Hudson Times
box was never empty, though the box didn't ask for any coins. There had been no snow yet this year, just a cold that seemed to deepen every day like dye setting into fabric. I carried my Metrocard inside one of my big black flipper gloves so I could get at it as fast as possible while exposing a minimum amount of flesh.

I wore two pairs of socks and my indestructible old Doc Martens. My injured finger had healed, but the red patch on my arm hadn't gone away. It was joined by another, behind my knee. I was starting to look like a leopard. My toes ached sometimes, and my elbows, and the back of my neck, as if I'd been marked by a bad tide. Suddenly my hair seemed ridiculously
Teen Beat
and foofy, so I took Sarah's advice and got a haircut at the barbershop down the street from work. The barber's name was Ted or Fred or Sal. He cut hair like he was shearing a dog, and when he was done I could have been any guy, in any office, in any town. Cut that short, my hair barely looked red, or any color for that matter. It was like a distant reflection of hair. My face, without the foofy waves, looked bony. With my head shorn, I could see that my hairline was receding. “You're a fine young man,” said Sal or Ted or Fred. “Give her a kiss
for me.” He winked. I wasn't sure if he was being sarcastic or not—
young man? her?

When I got home that night, like any night, I did my yoga stretching routine, microwaved a frozen hijiki burger, watched a few minutes of the news, and put my plate and fork in the sink. I did my Fleur homework. I knew the drill: there had to be vengeance and life-threatening situations and disguises and triumph in tattered dresses, blah blah. The tired women on the subway wouldn't have it any other way: the bloody
Stolen
girls, clothed in torn lingerie and framed in stars, were their heroes, and there were certain obligations that adhered to telling those heroic stories. It was like tending the temple of a powerful goddess and her muses.

Since I didn't need it anymore, I threw away my tube of Bedhead Manipulator and did the jobs I was supposed to do. I turned out pages for Fleur after dinner, went to bed early, drank black coffee in the morning, tidied the lives of the dead all day, let the gathering fall wind bite my ears and scrape my shorn neck on my way to the train in the dark. I acted like a man who knew his place, a penitent, a messenger, scurrying from temple to temple, tie flapping. And at last the house was unwrapped again, sitting immaculately imperfect, scruffy, mine in November's darkness.
FOR SALE BY OWNER
. With a bit more time, just a bit, I knew I could figure it out.

 

I sat in the spindly gold chair next to the magnificent divan. Fleur held the flash drive in the immobile curl of her left hand. I read the new pages aloud to her. Sex, death, sex, death, sex, death, priceless pearls scattered on terrazzo, a shot rings out, Miranda races through the corridors by night, the vial tucked between her milky white breasts, sex, death, sex. Death.

Fleur nodded. “Good,” she rasped. “Good boy.” The ax blade of her face rested amid the gold and silk; under the web of expensive throws, she was tiny but alert. Today her eyes were bright. She turned her head to look at me. “So.”

“What?” I kept my voice and expression neutral, like an amanuensis, a lowly scribe. As if I was afraid of her. Which I was.

She flicked her sharp gaze over my face, my newly shorn hair, my hungry soul. I reddened, keeping quite still.

“Something,” she said. “The extra money—it's not for your art.”

I looked at the floor, at my feet in the heavy Doc Martens, the purplish scuff on the toe of the left one—what was that?

“And it's not enough,” she said. “Right?”

I nodded, not lifting my head.

She laughed. “It never is, my boy.” She pushed herself upright among the layers of shining fabric. The points of her sculptural gray hair fell smartly, expertly to her jaw line. Her
s
's weren't sliding so badly today; they almost held their outlines. “Is it love?”

I nodded again. “I think it might be,” I mumbled. But it wasn't love. It was payback.

“Hmmm,” she said. “Love.” She said the word as if she'd never heard it before and was testing out the sound of it. “That's a mistake. Never throw money at love. Look at Elizabeth Taylor—not a happy woman.”

I wasn't sure what Elizabeth Taylor had to do with it, but I nodded anyway.

“I liked your hair better the other way,” said Fleur. “You look sad now.”

“I am sad,” I said softly.

“Why?”

I shook my head. “I can't talk about it,” I said, even more softly. “But Fleur—” I glanced up. She was regarding me coolly. “Fleur—”

With the side of her face that could smile, she smiled. “It won't be enough. You understand that, don't you?”

“I know.” I ran my hands over my scruffy, reddish scalp, loosened my tie. I sighed. I was careful not to look at her as
she reached beneath the pillows and extracted three envelopes—maybe the entire divan was made of money, maybe she kept all her money in there, somehow I wouldn't have put that past her—though I caught her eye and ducked my head shyly when I took them. She was right that it wasn't enough, but then again, it might be. I had learned a thing or two from the
Stolen
girls. I tucked the money into the breast pocket of my suit jacket, patted it. I grinned and then leaned over and gently kissed Fleur on the forehead. “Thank you,” I whispered. She had a delicate, flowery scent, surprisingly feminine. Like a rose. Was that why she had named herself Fleur?

She closed her eyes. “
De nada,
” she said. “Leave. I'm tired now.”

I plucked the flash drive from her hand and saw myself out. Because it was my birthday in a few days, I picked up a beautiful pair of swans, one silver and one gold, each about three inches high, with onyx eyes and swooping loops of neck, from one of the inner living rooms. The swans were heavier than they looked. They pulled at my coat pocket as I rode the elevator down to the ornate lobby, but when I put them on my windowsill at home they were perfect, silver loop of neck lovingly overlapping gold loop of neck, as if they had just glided over to greet each other.

 

By contrast, the glass jar with the holes punched in the lid wasn't very heavy at all. It rested easily in my coat pocket, visible to the few other riders on the dreary subway only as a slight lump. It could have been a jar of homemade jam. Of course, three in the morning is sort of late to be bringing jam to a friend, but this was New York. Some people surely ate jam in the wee hours, spreading it thickly on homemade bread, laughing, listening to cello music and entwining pinkies. That would have been much nicer than what I had to do, which was slink down Love Lane and then Pineapple Street in
the cold, dark night, hop the old iron gate without making any noise, crawl like a thief across the dirt to the house's foundation, ease the jar out of my pocket, unscrew the lid, and shake it firmly—though my own hands were shaking, gloveless and raw—and then, nearly gagging, reach inside and push the termites out. For some reason, the critters didn't want to leave the jar. They had Stockholm syndrome or something. I knew there were about eighty of them in there (not cheap, either, let me tell you, not easy to come by), so I shook and shook, holding my breath, trying not to make a sound.

The house was quite dark, unwrapped, and silent in a way that felt as though no one was home. But that bastard Carl—he could be in there with a flashlight and a shotgun, awake. Prepared to shoot on sight. The things we do for love and our destiny! Fleur had been right. When the jar was empty, I stood up to go. But as I rose, a searing pain struck me at the knees and elbows, as if I'd been hit with an iron bar. I gasped. Was it Carl, invisible? The house was still and silent, Carl-less. I took a deep breath. The pain passed, mercifully, and I hurried out of the small yard, back over the gate without a sound—
G, the night shadow,
and once again, I was a strange kind of thief, actually
adding
something to the house, not taking anything out of it—and up the street. The terrible pain haunted me all the way home, and I felt it whispering through my joints as I fell asleep, chilled and exhausted but hopeful, in my own bed. I felt sure that I had bought myself some time. Two, three weeks, maybe a month.

That's when I began blackmailing Fleur in earnest. I was an impatient, jealous lover, still young in so many ways. Foolish. And I was nervous. I thought the termites had betrayed me, because the house, when I checked on it, remained peculiarly ordinary and unchanged, as if it had been enchanted. The old glass in its windows was placidly wavy as usual, like still lakes. No fumigation tent. Once, when I had crept closer
than I should have under cover of night, I saw Alice dancing with her mother in the living room. The curtains were open. Brightly lit inside the house, the two of them were pogoing away to some song I couldn't hear. They looked so happy. Alice's mother's dreads swirled in the air and bounced around her shoulders; she grabbed Alice's hands and they jumped up and down together, laughing. If things had been different, fairer, I could have told them that I knew just what that was like, that I had thrown my head back and danced with my mother once too, but of course I couldn't do that. There was a canyon between where I stood on my side of the sidewalk and the living room where they danced. I wiped away a tear.

The next day, I explained the situation to Fleur—how hard it had become for me to keep our arrangement private; how embarrassing and potentially legally complex it would be if it came out; how easy it would be to pick up the phone and call her editor; how obvious it would be to anyone who came to see her, considering the current state of her health, that she wasn't really writing these books, not to mention the evidence on my computer at home and on the flash drive in my pocket at that very moment. I patted my pocket. (I had another flash drive, which was sitting on the windowsill in my apartment, between the copper Buddha and the Steuben starfish. I wasn't an idiot.)

All of that was true, but I was banking on something more subtle, more psychological, the reason she had asked me in the first place: Fleur, née Rebecca Sharp, would do anything to go on being Fleur. Honestly, I think she would have paid more, even. She had no intention of allowing anyone anywhere to see her like this; I had no doubt that her plan was to drop dead one day and have the last laugh on all the suckers who thought they could get the better of her. The worst thing I could have said, the ace I had up my sleeve, was that I'd quit if she didn't give me what I needed. Fleur didn't trust many people, and she'd spent months grooming me, allowing me in, inch by
inch. She didn't have the time, the strength, or the coherence to start training another young man to be her prosthetic writing arm.

While I waited for her reply, I reminded myself that I was fully prepared to produce my ace, and that I was prepared to make good on it, to walk away from the table. I hadn't slept well the night before; I still felt teary. I didn't, under any circumstances, want to cry in Fleur's sanctum sanctorum. Who knew what would happen to me if I did that? The smiling side of her face frowned. “How much?”

“Forty-five thousand.” I didn't say, For this book. And forty-five for the next one. And so on. We would cross that bridge when we came to it. I felt giddy, surreal. I couldn't believe I was doing this, yet I felt that I was finally demanding some of the respect I deserved, that I was acting like a man for once. Why should they all get to bleed me just because they'd caught a break with fate? Carl's grandmother was the one who did the work for that house. I was the one churning out the pages for Fleur. I had started writing the books as a lark, but life was more serious now, I was getting older, and I hadn't thought when we started that nearly two books later I'd still be crouched on that spindly chair next to her magnificent divan, building her already considerable fortune. Ghostwriters make a lot more money than what was filling up my freezer. Invisibility is expensive. Fleur knew that.

Or, it seemed, she must have, because she nodded grimly. “Gabe,” she said, “could you put that throw, the one with the fringes, around my shoulders? It's freezing in here.”

It was boiling in the room. I disentangled the fringed white cashmere throw and settled it around her, up to her frail chin. She smelled so sweet, like a grandmother. Though she was the wolf, of course. I sat back down in the spindly chair, my hands on my knees. This is the moment, I thought. Breathe. Breathe. The world is going to turn one way or the other.

“Hand me that computer.”

I picked up the platinum laptop from the floor and handed it to her.

“Give me my glasses.”