Solos
A Novel
1
Step on no pets
(October 2002)
Emily Lime is walking up Bedford Avenue. She is wearing black jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that just covers the blue zipper tattooed around her right wrist.
The tattoo is something she deeply regrets.
It doesn’t seem right that because of a little Mexican weed and the incredible discount offered by Diane the Tattoo Monarch, she made a decision at age nineteen that resulted in a wrist zipper she will have to live with for the rest of her life. Someday she will be a doddering old crone in a nursing home with a zipper tattoo. Admittedly, it’s a beautiful, deep blue zipper, the dainty tracks neatly done, the pull falling slightly to one side the way a real one might. No one would say Diane is not a genius. But hardly a day goes by when Emily doesn’t wish it weren’t there. On the subway, she always studies the ads for laser tattoo removal and wonders if having it taken off would be as painful as having it put on. She has decided it probably would, and instead has taken to wearing cuff bracelets over it. She has three—a beaded one she made herself, a leather one she found at a craft show in McCarren Park, and a silver one she bought when Dr. Demand gave her the check for her last BREAD photograph.
Today the sleeve of her T-shirt does the trick.
It’s a warmish day at the end of October, as warm as June, but fall is in the air. Emily has just gotten over a bad cold, and it’s her first day out. She still has the cough, but she finally feels normal after almost a week moping around her loft, drinking seltzer and looking out the window at the tugboats on the river and the puffy white clouds over Manhattan Island. The sky is brilliantly blue. Emily’s dog Otto walks jauntily at the end of his red leash, his tags ringing like bells. They both love this walk up Bedford—a walk Emily has taken almost daily for eleven years and Otto for six.
They pass the sushi place, the Mexican restaurant, the video store, the Syrian deli, the Polish bakery (whose BREAD sign Emily has photographed a dozen times), the new baby shop that has a pair of studded black leather booties in the window, and Marta’s Beauty Salon, whose faded pink-and-green sign has probably not been retouched since 1966. They pass Mr. Suarez, with his Chihuahua, Eddie, in his pocket and a shopping basket full of soda cans. They pass the Pink Pony Thrift Shop with the WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND sign on the door, and the used-book store and its new café, where they can smell the hot apple cider all the way out on the sidewalk. The smell seems exactly right, a perfect match to the brown leaves on the ground and the V of geese overhead and the signs in the drugstore window advertising Halloween candy.
Emily is on her way to the park, where Otto can be let off his leash to run freely in the dog enclosure. This is the best part of Otto’s day, and Emily is glad she can take him herself. All the time she’s been sick, she’s had to have Marcus take Otto out at ten dollars a run. Her cold cost her over fifty dollars in dog-walking fees. Plus another hefty chunk for the long-distance bills she racked up when she began to feel well enough to talk on the phone but not to go out. And eighty dollars for the tweedy sweater she shouldn’t have ordered off the Web from Eddie Bauer to cheer herself up, but did. All that is nothing, of course, compared to the debt of gratitude she now owes to Anstice, her landlady and friend, who is much too good to her, and who knocked on her door every day with various practical gifts: Nyquil, more seltzer, a New Yorker, a DVD of Watership Down, a pint of home-made applesauce from the Greenmarket, and a pot of chicken soup she made herself from her late grandmother’s late cook’s recipe.
Emily also owes Anstice the rent.
As she hoped, Marcus is at the park with his Saturday morning crew: Rumpy, Chipper, Elvis, and Reba. Marcus beams when he sees her. “You have risen!”
“Yes,” she says. “Still coughing, still a little stuffy, but basically I am healed.” She inhales deeply through her nose. “See?”
“Impressive. When did you get better?”
“I began to feel almost okay last night. I had the most wonderful day yesterday. I curled up with Otto, and Izzy perched on my foot and unraveled one of my socks, and we all watched Watership Down.”
“Sounds like heaven.”
She smiles at him because she knows he means it literally: For Marcus, heaven is animals. Marcus looks not unlike a cute animal himself. He has just had his hair cut very short, and it’s like soft suede against his narrow head. His ears, like his chin and his nose, are small and unassuming. Emily’s friend Gene Rae once said, “There’s something very woodland creature about Marcus,” and she was right. Marcus has the face of a squirrel, or a chipmunk, including the luminous, watchful eyes, which are, however, the green of cats’ eyes, and show a rim of white below the iris, giving him a misleadingly lazy, lustful look. Today he’s wearing a T-shirt that was once olive but has faded so that his eyes and shirt almost match. Emily, who never tires of looking at people, regards him with delight.
“The world is a new and beautiful place.” She means since her cold cleared up, but she also means that it just is, reliably, on a daily basis.
Marcus looks alternately at her and at the dogs in his charge. “Check out Elvis,” he says. Elvis is leaping around friskily with a branch in his mouth. “Who would believe that dog is twelve years old?” Then he looks back at Emily. “Do you want to play Scrabble later?”
“I can’t today. I really can’t. It’s so beautiful, I have to go out and shoot.”
“Shoot where?”
“I don’t know exactly. I thought I might drive out to Long Island. Northport, maybe. Or Centerport.”
Marcus nods approvingly. “As long as it’s a port.”
“Yes, or a fort.”
“Or a court.”
“No, I really mean it. There’s a town called Fort Salonga right near there.”
“There is? On Long Island? There’s a park in Africa called Salonga.” Marcus always knows things like this.
“Isn’t there an actress or somebody, too?”
“I don’t know.” He never knows things like that.
When Emily takes Otto off his leash, he rushes over to Elvis and Reba, whom he loves, and the three of them run around together, barking crazily. Emily and Marcus lean against the fence and watch the dogs. Mrs. Buzik is sitting on the broken bench with her ancient poodle, Trix, at her feet, and a man Emily doesn’t know is there with a big rottweiler who keeps nudging Rumpy with his nose.
“Go on, Trix,” Mrs. Buzik says. “Go on and play with your little pals. Get some exercise.”
“How’s she doing, Mrs. B.?” Marcus asks.
“We take it one day at a time, Marcus. One day at a time. Both of us.”
“She looks good, though.”
“She’s a poodle. It’s her job to look good.” Mrs. Buzik takes a flowered handkerchief out of her pocket and holds it in her hand. “But She’s been okay. No incidents lately.” Her mouth opens wide, and she sneezes loudly and wipes her nose. As always, Emily is impressed with the perfection of Mrs. Buzik’s denturs, which look better than any real teeth she has ever seen. “There. I knew I was going to do that.”
Emily has recently stopped saying “God bless you” when people sneeze, but often feels bad about the skipped beat it leaves in the rhythm of the conversation. So she says, “I hope you’re not getting a cold. I’m just getting over a real killer.”
“There’s something going around, I hear,” says Mrs. Buzik. “I’m praying I don’t get it. That’s all I need.” She leans down to the dog. “Go on, Trix. Get out there and play. It’ll do you good. Get the bowels moving.” Mrs. Buzik lives alone in a particularly dingy fake-brick-fronted house on Driggs Avenue, which she owns but on which, according to her tenants, she hasn’t done any maintenance in at least ten years. No one can figure out if she’s very rich or very poor. She is an unfathomably old woman who, like her house, must have once been stunning: deep-set dark eyes, a fine long nose. She still gets up every morning and puts on eyeliner and mascara and blue shadow and red lipstick, and winds up her sparse hair in a colorful scarf. “I’m just waiting until Miss Priss here does her business, then I’m off home. My daughter is coming over to take me to the market. My neighbor told me they got canned salmon on sale, ninety-nine a can. I like to mix it up with mayonnaise and those Greek pickles.”
Rumpy and Chipper have found a stick, and Rumpy is trying to get it from Chipper. Marcus looks vigilant: Rumpy is unpredictable. Their struggle takes them close to Trix, and she gets up, looking offended, and moves under the bench, but the activity has apparently given her the idea because she squats and starts to do her business.
“There she goes, Mrs. B.,” says Marcus.
“What a relief,” Mrs. Buzik says. “I thought we’d be sitting here all day.” She stows her hanky in one pocket and takes a plastic bag from another.
“Here, I’ll get it.”
“Oh, Marcus, you don’t have to do that.”
“I insist.”
In one graceful motion, he takes the bag from her and scoops up Trix’s business. Then he ties the ends together, pivots, and tosses the whole thing, underhanded, into the trash can.
“You’re a saint, Marcus.” Mrs. Buzik gets up stiffly. Trix looks suddenly animated, sniffing amiably at Reba, who has flopped down near her. “See? She feels better. Come on, then, Trix. Let’s get going.”
“So long, Mrs. Buzik,” Emily says. “Don’t get that cold.”
“Have you ever tried those Greek pickles? They’re a lot cheaper than the Polish. I get them at that deli up on Manhattan, by the church. I take the bus up there to shop, or my daughter drives me. They got the bargains. A dollar fifty-nine for a big jar. They’re good with the salmon.”
“Sounds delicious,” Marcus says. “Though I’m not much of a pickle man.”
“Just like my husband, may he rest in peace. If he ate three pickles a year, I’d be surprised.” Mrs. Buzik winks at Emily, exposing a wrinkly oval of lavender-blue shadow. “Men!”
They watch her hobble away, her bright scarf bobbing, the dog plodding along beside her. The man with the rottweiler snaps his dog’s leash back on and, wordlessly, they leave.
“Jeez. Friendly,” Emily says.
“He’s a friend of Lamont’s.”
“Is he a Tragedy Club person?”
“No, he’s the guy who’s subletting Jeanette’s loft. I think he’s probably just shy.”
“You say that because you’re a saint, Marcus. He didn’t even talk to his dog. He’s probably one of those guys who buys cheap generic dog food and forgets to keep the water bowl filled.”
“Nah, Lamont said he’s okay. I forget his name. Ted or something. Bob. Jim.” He pauses. “I wish I could remember. I hate forgetting people’s names.”
“You have such a thing about names.”
Marcus nods soberly. “Yeah, I do.”
Emily likes Marcus’s obsessions because she shares so many of them—names, area codes, zip codes, anagrams, palindromes. She wonders if it can possibly be true that Marcus moved to Williamsburg for its palindromic 11211 zip code. She says, “Ask Lamont at the party tomorrow.”
“I will.” His face brightens. “I’m giving Lamont that picture of Daphne I took last summer when I was sitting for them. Remember? The one where she’s curled up in the bathroom sink?”
“It’s adorable.”
“I put it in a frame.”
“He’ll love it.” Emily jangles Otto’s red leash. “Well, I should get cracking if I’m going to get to Fort Salonga.” She has a brief coughing fit, during which Marcus looks at her with concern. She shakes her head and flaps her hand in the air the way coughing people do when they want to convey that they’re all right even though they seem all wrong. Then she calls, a bit hoarsely, “Hey, Otto! Let’s move on out of here.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m okay. I need a bottle of water.”
“Good luck today. I hope they have a lot of bakeries and stuff. Watch repair shops.”
“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.”
“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.
Times