Cobble Hill

by Cecily von Ziegesar

  They sipped their beers.

  “Hey, you know, I actually have a camera set up in a Macaw over at my place, like a surveillance thing? It’s connected to an app on my phone. I put it in over a year ago when Elizabeth… Never mind. Anyway, I know you only fed the cat that one time, because the app shows whenever anyone goes into the kitchen.”

  Shit. Roy scooted back his barstool. “I’m sorry.” He looked down at his feet. “I felt like a burglar in your house. And your cat hates me.”

  Tupper laughed. “He’s a one-person cat. He misses my wife. It’s fine. Doesn’t matter. I just wanted you to know that I know so you’re not carrying it around, you know?”

  For all his crisply ironed shirt neatness and insanity, Tupper Paulsen was a pretty nice fellow.

  “Where are you from? I mean, originally?” Roy asked. Mars? Uranus? What color was Uranus?

  “Maine,” Tupper said. “Elizabeth and I, we grew up together in the state of Maine.”

  Roy pulled his glass toward him. He waited for the story of Tupper’s sad wife and single surviving twin, but Tupper just went around the bar and poured himself another pint of Guinness.

  “Maybe the Hedgehog should be the Maine Lobster, to make it more personal,” Roy mused. He pushed his half-empty glass across the bar for Tupper to refill it. “Or a moose?”

  “The Moose. That really sounds like a sex toy.”

  “Can it make noises? Do moose even make noises?”

  “I think they huff and sort of bellow.”

  “Perfect.” Roy laughed.

  Tupper came around the bar again and sat down.

  “So, it’s just you and the cat in the house right now?”

  Tupper nodded. “That’s sort of the reason I had to rush away. I thought she was close. And that’s why I’m using the Macaw. I know it sounds creepy. It’s just so I know when she decides to come back.”

  Roy was confused. “So no one’s dead or anything awful?”

  Tupper laughed and drank more beer. “No, everyone’s fine.”

  “But your daughters’ room. All those sad pictures. The empty bed.”

  Tupper laughed again. He appeared to be drunk. “That’s Elizabeth’s work. She’s an artist. We don’t have any kids.”

  “I see.” A great weight floated off Roy’s shoulders, but he was no less confused. “So whose bedroom is it then?”

  Tupper huffed, mooselike, into his Guinness. “You really need to come down to the warehouse sometime.”

  Chapter 4

  Ted’s face lit up when he spotted Stuart.

  “Dad!” He burst out of the huddle of children and ran into Stuart’s arms. The other students shuffled over to their minders disinterestedly, or waited for their Hobby Horse teachers to lead them away.

  Stuart hugged him. “Thought I’d surprise you. I need to ask someone about something inside the school, and then we can grab a slice of pizza or walk over to Ample Hills for ice cream. Sound good?”

  Ted turned his freckled, pen-smudged face up to his father, his green eyes wide. “But Dad. It’s Wednesday. I go to the Brooklyn Stragetizer on Wednesdays and Fridays. Remember?”

  “Strategizer,” Stuart corrected. “Sorry man, I forgot.”

  He looked up and saw a pimply teenager wearing a faded Dark Side of the Moon T-shirt waving the red-and-black Strategizer flag, the signal that the group would be leaving soon. The boys lined up behind him were pale and scrawny, the kinds of boys who would rather play Dungeons & Dragons than soccer or basketball. Ted was doomed.

  “You go have fun. I’ll see you after.”

  * * *

  “Hey, sorry to bother you again.” Stuart closed the door to the nurse’s office and shoved his hands in his pockets. A tall, fat kid lay on the cot with his eyes closed, dried snot around his nostrils, one sneaker off, one sneaker on. There was a hole in the knee of his track pants and the knee was bandaged.

  Nurse Peaches swiveled around on her chair. “You find more of the fuckers?” she asked with a dimpled smile. “Sorry, Arnold. Excuse my French.”

  The fat kid snickered, eyes still closed. They seemed to have an understanding. Still, Stuart couldn’t exactly ask her about procuring weed with a kid in the room.

  “Uh, maybe.” He removed a hand from his pocket and ran it through his hair. “I know I’m being paranoid, but would you mind checking me again?”

  Mind? Peaches giggled inwardly. Stuart Little had no concept of the power he had over her. God, he was hot. Hotter than he was Monday. Hotter than he was in his twenties. There was a boyish forlornness to him that she yearned to mother in the most unmotherly way. Because she was a pervert. A pervert with a stockpile of lice combs.

  “Sure,” she responded, all business. “I’ll just check you with the comb.” She stood up and patted the back of her desk chair. “We shouldn’t need to use conditioner again unless there’s been some hatching action.”

  “God, I hope not.” Stuart walked over and sat down. He was trembling for some reason. Goose bumps appeared on his arms. Jesus. This hadn’t happened to him since ninth grade, when he’d had a crush on his math teacher. He’d bombed every test just so he could stay after school for extra help and be alone with her. Then one day in May she wore sandals to school and he discovered she had really gross feet. And just like that, he was over her.

  Someone was knocking on her office door. Peaches swiveled Stuart around protectively so that his back was to the intruder. “Come in.”

  “Oh, Arnold.” It was Arnold’s mom. She was over six feet tall and was wearing a knee brace. She sighed. “Clumsiness runs in the family.”

  Peaches went over and patted Arnold’s shoulder. He was unresponsive. “It’s all right. We enjoy hanging out.”

  Arnold’s mom nodded, one skinny eyebrow raised. “Sometimes I think he does it on purpose, just to see you,” she said in a loud whisper, shooting a glance at the back of Stuart’s head.

  Get in line, Arnold, Stuart thought. She’s mine.

  “Well, that would be sweet,” Peaches said. “But I think he’s just a bruiser. I’ve seen it before. My son was like that in elementary school. He grew so big so fast he had no idea how hard he’d fall or even where his feet were. I thought he’d wind up playing ice hockey or lacrosse. Instead he’s this six-foot, seventeen-year-old math nerd who barely goes outside.”

  Nurse Peaches has a teenage son? Stuart stared fixedly at the yellow thumbtack holding up her calendar. The month of September featured a depressed-looking bulldog wearing a red tutu.

  “I don’t know how you can possibly have a son in high school—you’re only twenty-five,” Arnold’s mom said. She didn’t seem to care one way or the other though.

  “Anyway, I’ll let you get back to…” She glanced at the back of Stuart’s head once more.

  “Come on, sweetness.”

  She frowned at Arnold’s still form.

  “He doesn’t have a concussion again, does he? Liquid diet with a concussion. That’s what our doctor recommends. Chewing and crunching stress the brain.”

  Arnold sat up. “I hurt my hands and knees, not my brain,” he protested. “Solid food, please, I’m starving.”

  Arnold’s mom clapped her hands together. “He’s alive! Hurry up and get your shoe on. We’ll go to the butcher and pick up some steaks on our way home.”

  As soon as they were gone, Peaches spun Stuart around in his chair. He loved it in her office. He’d gone into a sort of restful meditative state, listening to the distant clanking of the cafeteria staff and the rhythmic footfalls of children on the stairs. He could have stayed there all afternoon.

  “I think Arnold’s mom is right. They hurt themselves on purpose,” he said, staring straight ahead at Peaches’ pale clavicle.

  It wasn’t pale for long. “Ha,” she murmured. A hot, red blush crept up her neck to her face. She was going to molest him. It would be all over the news and she would go to jail. “Now, where were we?”

  “Lice check,” Stuart rem
inded her.

  She reached out and ran her fingers through his wavy dark hair, forgetting herself for a moment. “Lice check,” she repeated crazily, and then squatted down to open a filing cabinet and retrieve a comb.

  Stuart still couldn’t believe she had a big, high school–age son. Somehow it only made her more attractive. They’d both had their children early. She possibly even earlier than he.

  “Actually, that’s not why I’m here. I was pretending,” he admitted. “For Arnold’s sake.”

  Peaches stood up so abruptly her spine cracked. “Oh?”

  He’d come to seduce her. It was happening. It was really happening!

  Her eyes were so blue and bright, the dimples in her cheeks so ridiculously cute, Stuart was caught off guard.

  Remaining seated, he walked backward with his feet, rolling the swivel chair away from her a foot or two. He was about to bring up Mandy again. He needed some distance so he could think straight.

  “It’s about my wife,” he began. “I was wondering…”

  Fuck a duck. Peaches attempted to compose herself.

  Stuart coughed, jiggled his knee, coughed again. “See, pot, weed, marijuana is supposed to help with MS, right? But she doesn’t have a prescription yet, and I think she should try it. I thought maybe since you’re a nurse you might have some kind of connection? And like maybe you could hook us up, see if it helps?”

  Peaches smiled through her disappointment, distracting him with her dimples.

  “Sure,” she answered slowly. She had no idea where to get pot, but there was no way she’d ever say no. Maybe Liam could help. He’d told her about the kids who smoked weed through those little vape pen things and pretended it was just herbal apple fumes or whatever. She hadn’t smoked pot herself since college. She preferred wine.

  “My friend mentioned some ‘doctor’ who makes house calls. He can bring you whatever you need. I think he called him Dr. Mellow, but that can’t be his real name. I haven’t looked him up. I thought I’d ask you first.”

  “Sure, of course.” Peaches had no idea who Dr. Mellow was, but he sounded like the type of doctor all those cool arty people in the sixties like Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick would call when they’d almost OD’d on amphetamines and hadn’t eaten or slept in a year and needed some cocaine and a vitamin B12 shot just to stay alive. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She closed the gap between them and ran the comb through his hair just because she could, parting it on the side and combing it back behind his ears so that he looked like a little boy on picture day.

  “I’ll get my people to talk to their people and get back to you,” she said vaguely.

  Her school phone began to ring. She mussed his hair up with her fingers again and turned to answer it.

  “Nurse’s office, this is Peaches.”

  Stuart stood and rolled her chair up behind her so she could sit down.

  She sat, tilting her head and flashing her dimples gratefully up at him.

  The call was from the mother of another second grader with lice.

  “Grab a pen. There are four lice ladies you can contact. None of them do house calls and they’re all a hassle to get to, but they’ll get rid of them.”

  “Thank you,” Stuart mouthed silently, so as not to interrupt her call.

  And without any attempt to curb herself, Peaches winked in reply.

  * * *

  “Pot? Marijuana? Cannabis? Reefer? Herb? Mary Jane?”

  Liam blinked up at his mother from the mattress on the floor that served as his bed. He took off his round, wire-rimmed reading glasses, rubbed his eyes, and put them back on again. Had she really just asked him where she could buy weed?

  “It’s okay. I’m not trying to trick you or get you or your friends in trouble,” she said. “It’s for a friend. Or actually, a friend’s wife. She needs it for pain.”

  Liam shrugged. He was pretty sure Shy Clarke didn’t smoke weed. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He was going to be her tutor. He’d liked her for over a year and now they were actually going to talk to each other. He liked her so much he could barely look at her. He was going to have to get over that.

  “Seriously?” his mom demanded, about to go into one of her “I was semi-edgy in high school and you could be too if you just made the effort” gentle tirades. His mom was a good person, but she hated that he wasn’t a musician who wore holey black jeans and ripped T-shirts. She hated his neatly trimmed hair and that he kept his pants up with a belt. She hated that he liked salad and was home every night. She hated that when he asked her to test him with flash cards he knew all the answers. She still loved him, he knew that. It was his apparent conformity she hated. “You don’t know anyone?”

  Liam wasn’t about to rat out Bruce, whom he wasn’t really friends with anyway. Bruce was high seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and he basically supplied the entire high school with weed. He was a brute too. No one messed with Bruce, for fear of pissing him off. He was the El Chapo of their school.

  “Omnia… vin-cit!!” Peaches’ husband Greg’s boyish yowl resounded from the basement. He was adapting the Blind Mice song for his Phinney Collegiate music class, alternating between the recorder, harmonica, xylophone, and tambourine. They’d both been enormous Blind Mice fans when they met in college. Greg had seen the Mice button on her jacket and hit on her. It was what had brought them together. His basement studio was loaded with Blind Mice memorabilia.

  “Maybe Dad knows someone,” Liam suggested. “He is a musician.”

  “Maybe.” Peaches hadn’t even told Greg that Stuart Little was a parent at her school, worried that he would somehow ruin it. It was her own little nugget of fun, at least for now. “I gotta take the dog out.”

  While she was out, she wrapped the leash around one hand, took out her phone, and furiously googled “celebrity doctor, house calls, Dr. Feelgood, NYC” with the other. A lot of links came up. Most of it was porn. She remembered Stuart had said his name might be Dr. Mellow, but when she tried that, a series of links to masseuses and hypnotists came up. She scrolled through them. At the very bottom of the list was a website called Cobble Hill General with five-star reviews. “Wonderful,” the first review said. “Makes house calls.” “Brings you whatever you need,” said another. “Discreet.” No names were supplied, just a phone number.

  Peaches pressed call and leaned against an anemic, tilting tree on Union Street, allowing the dog to sniff the dusty mulch around her sneakers. The phone rang and rang until finally a recorded message picked up.

  “I’m out on call,” a cordial, deeply resonant male voice answered. “Please leave a brief message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Promise.”

  A tone sounded. Peaches hesitated. “Um, hello. My name is, um. I’ll just leave my number for now, I guess. I can explain more when you call. Thanks. Bye.”

  The dog was pooping anyway. She shoved her phone in her back pocket and looked away, down Union, toward the Gowanus Canal, to give the dog some privacy. When he was finished and had energetically kicked dirt over the poop, she pulled a bag out of her pocket and picked it up. Her phone vibrated and sang. It was the same number. It was the doctor.

  “Hi there.” His voice was warm and muscular. “Someone called from this number. How can I help?”

  What if he was a male prostitute? Peaches wondered, panicking. What if “bring you anything you need” was a euphemism for orgasms?

  “Hi,” she responded, trying to collect her thoughts. “I was calling… It isn’t for me, actually. It’s for a friend. His wife has MS and he wants to try giving her some… pot. But he doesn’t know how to get the right kind for her, and since I’m a nurse I thought… He just wants her to try it.”

  “No problem. Is there a time and a place that’s convenient for you to meet?”

  The drop-off: Peaches hadn’t thought about this. She hadn’t thought about anything, really. And what about paying the guy? It would probably cost a fortune.

/>   “Now?” Peaches blurted out. The dog didn’t care. But she didn’t want to meet him on some street corner in case he was a serial killer. She could wind up in pieces in the Gowanus. “There’s a bar on Sackett and Bond called Bikini Bottom.”

  “Love that place.”

  Peaches tried to keep the tremor out of her voice. “I can meet you there in five minutes. I have my wallet, but I don’t have a lot of cash.”

  “Give me ten minutes. I have a swiper thing. You can pay by credit card. I’ll send you a text receipt you can forward to your friend so he can reimburse you.”

  His instructions were so practical, capable, and normal. Peaches decided to trust him.

  She tied the dog to a bike rack outside the bar and told him to lie down. The bar was crowded and full of drunk people playing shuffleboard. Peaches sat down and ordered a beer. She wished she’d gotten Stuart Little’s number so she could tell at least one person in the world where she was and what she was doing and make sure he’d pay her back. The school had some sort of complicated online parent directory on its website. She scrolled around on her phone. Maybe it wasn’t that complicated. Grade IV. Mrs. Watson’s class. Ted Little. Mom: Mandy Marzulli. Dad: Stuart Little. Bingo.

  Hey. I’m in a bar, waiting for the Dr. Feelgood guy to deliver some stuff. I’m putting it on my credit card. Just wanted to let you know in case they find my body parts drifting in the Gowanus or something.

  Stuart texted right back.

  Yikes! Text 911 if u need rescuing!! Thank u, ur amazing. I’ll pay u back ASAP.

  It was tempting to continue the flirtstream with Stuart Little because Dr. Feelgood was late. Poor dog. Peaches was about to give up halfway through her pint when a silver-haired gentleman wearing a sky-blue linen shirt slid onto the barstool next to hers.

  “I have a large dog,” she growled at him.

  The man laughed. His face was tanned and healthy-looking. “Yes, I saw him tied up outside. How old is he? Fifteen? Twenty?”

  “Eighteen,” Peaches admitted. “On a good day.”