Gray knew his wife smoked an occasional cigarette on the sly. He also knew she would attach a story to the arm. “Oh, did you decide he’s married? Fuckin’ weirdo probably lives alone. Maybe all the guy needs is a night out with the boys.” Gray was good at providing temporary solutions.
“He’s not so weird. Do you see the way he dresses? Perfectly starched white shirts, rolled neatly and evenly to the elbow.”
“The way his arm dresses?”
“He has some wardrobe, I can tell.”
Shauna stood at the window watching the cigarette between two thick fingers; the smoke rose and coiled in a noose. She appeared mesmerized as if she were watching a genie’s bottle. “See—not between the tips, but between the fingers near the knuckles. Macho type. And, look at that watch.”
“A match. I need a match.” Gray was digging around. “Guess I could yell over to that fucker,” he muttered.
“You know what, Gray? He’s going to smell our stash after we light it,” Shauna said, her Playtexed hand on her hip. “Our smoke is going to go out our kitchen window and directly into his living room and up his nose.”
“Believe me, the cheese will get him first.” Gray looked under the couch. “Maybe we don’t like that shit coming over into our window. Second-hand smoke and all that. If you know where his apartment is, we should get the cheese out of the garbage and put it outside his door. A little something for our neighbor.”
“I do know. 21X.”
“There are no X’s.”
“I don’t know why I even bother to talk to you, Gray. You never believe a thing I say.”
“Let’s take a walk down the hall—for proof. I want all of this over in about three minutes, so we can start doing what we came here to do.”
The phone rang.
“Shit,” said Gray. “Don’t answer. Has to be a telemarketer anyway.”
“You know damn well who it is. Mrs. McCarthy.”
“You gave her this number?” They had left their cell phones at home in compliance with the vacation weekend rule.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“The old bag knows the origin of every fart, burp, and ounce of spit-up. That’s what she’s calling about now. She gets off on that shit—makes her life meaningful.”
“Hello, hi.” Shauna peeled off her plastic glove with her teeth. Gray could see her thinking in a bubble over her head: Maybe Audra was lying on her back—to prevent SIDS—but choked on her spit-up.
Mrs. McCarthy wanted to know where the rectal thermometer was, in case she needed it during the night. She always did a run-down of supplies.
Gray lit the joint.
Gray and Shauna were high and dry-mouthed, and went under the bed to their old spot. There must have been two-and-a-half feet under there, plenty of room to flap against each other like two fish caught in a net. Gray was used to Shauna’s milky scent now. It was as if her skin had just started to turn from nursing so her smell was a little off. Gray’s face was mashed between his wife’s legs when the phone rang again.
“The phooone—oh my God, the phone, Gray. Oh, God, something happened to Audra. I knew it. I knew this would happen. This is what we get for being selfish.”
Shauna turned herself over, practically twisting Gray’s neck, until she shimmied on her stomach and elbows out from under the bed and onto the parquet floors. “I can’t deal with another surprise,” she said on all fours.
Gray wanted to believe that Shauna was still under the bed with him, so he sent Shauna Number Two out to answer the phone. Gray and Shauna watched Shauna Two get to her feet and run out of the room in lanky strides. Gray thanked the original Shauna for not being so fucking responsible like Number Two, for putting him first in her life the way she should, for her devotion, and he began to kiss her.
The phone rang and rang.
Gray heard panic in his wife’s voice.
“Mrs. McCarthy? Mrs. McCarthy? Hello, hello, is Audra OK?”
If you would like to make a phone call, please hang up and dial again. Use the area code first.
Gray listened to his wife slam down the phone. “I can’t take this. I can’t.” She pressed *69 to make sure it wasn’t Mrs. McCarthy.
“I’d come out there and get you, but I’m paralyzed from the neck down. Your scissor legs. I told you not to answer—it would be nothing.” Gray didn’t get a response, but he knew exactly what Shauna was doing, visiting her Monk Man, lighting a candle, her face glowing like a fairy. How often had he caught her staring at the painting that had belonged to her father?
Gray stayed under the bed with the comforting smell of their mixture. For a moment, he drifted, too, and imagined Mrs. McCarthy holding Audra on her shoulder in a diaper, trying to get her to burp. It’s too cold for a diaper. It’s fucking November. She didn’t stop patting her back. Gray couldn’t stand the patting, couldn’t stand the old bitch’s spotted face, because the baby was limp and ashen.
“Gray, can you come in here?”
His fears were confirmed. Everything was different now. He was warned by his friends who had them, and warned by his friends who didn’t have them. Babies changed your life, they changed your wife. Your own mind could never relax. Because of the baby, things would never be the same. It went without saying.
“Gray, can’t you come in here?”
“No. Can’t you come in here and can’t we do what we came here to do?” What they would always do here, Gray reminded himself, mapping things out for them, because it was not in his wife’s blood to plan.
The apartment had become a very expensive mailbox since the baby was born; Shauna inherited it, but they still had to pay the maintenance every month, on top of the mortgage for the modest house, with charm, they had just bought in Larchmont. They never seemed to get the opportunity, or the energy, to use this place.
Gray realized they were slipping, turning into those Larchmont parents, the ones attached to running strollers who congregated outside Bradley’s on Sunday mornings with their giant coffees, discussing elementary school academia. Soon to come: Volvo wagon; a little back fat; loss of libido (for everything except golf and weekends in Stowe); play-dates; pushing your pre-K kids—now—toward the Ivies. Chicken nuggets. The only thing Gray felt he could contribute to his community, if he was included, was his theory that the women there had no breasts.
“Gray—”
The other depressing thing he thought of was that neither one of them was as high as they were ten minutes before. He crawled out from under the bed, grabbed the joint on the bureau, heard a strand of pearls drop and roll across the floor like marbles, and headed into the living room. Gray saw his wife sitting in some kind of yoga position, the candle on the floor in front of her bare folded legs. She lifted the candle, and he stuck the joint in the flame. He dragged on the joint and handed it to Shauna. They smoked until they were in a space where there was no baby.
Gray and Shauna made love, and now he was practically examining her, kissing her under the arm with eyes open, pressing his nose there, as if this is where he might find her. He could never pinpoint her exactly, and he was afraid this was how she kept him loyal, by keeping him tangled up, never giving him enough information.
The phone rang and it was as funny as a joke. They were too tired to stand so they crawled around on their knees, which gave the night a new dimension.
“Gray, I feel syrupy—oh—there’s that ring-ring-ring again. Sounds just like a telephone.”
Gray rested on his laurels, seeing his wife finally give up the new mother act, having a good time. It was possible. They would always come here and be this way.
“Persistent caller—maybe it’s The Smoker. He’s at the window and sees your iridescent ass,” he said.
Gray made it to his feet, walking as lightly as the first man on the moon, and stepped over to the telescope.
&n
bsp; “I bet if we put this in the kitchen we can get into The Smoker’s living room.”
This would distract his wife from the sound of the phone. He stuck his eye on the lens and started skimming. The phone rang and rang.
The ringing began to lure his wife out of her high, and she looked to Gray as if she were sleepwalking toward the sound. The joy of watching her a moment ago was already bittersweet. She was on a mission now, her pure white hand already raised in front of her, moving faster. When she got to it, she put her hand on the phone and it stopped ringing. “Good. It shushed. Must have been a telemarketer.”
Gray wondered how it could have been a telemarketer in the middle of the night.
Shauna stared at the phone. “Well, if it is Mrs. McCarthy, and it’s a problem, she’ll call right back—if I know her.”
They stayed in the same positions until enough time had passed.
“I’m going out there,” she said in a song. “I’m going to find that apartment just to prove to you there is a 21X. I’m so sick of you and your know-it-all ways.”
“Going out like that?”
He watched her walk out of the room and into the bed-room. When she returned she was wearing a sheer nightgown. She picked up the burning votive in front of her painting and cupped her hand around it as she walked passed him.
Gray admired his wife’s face over the candle’s flame, starry-eyed and provocative. She seemed to float over the floor. Had she morphed into a spirit? Sufficiently stoned now, it didn’t occur to him to stop her from drifting through the hallway in that transparent nightgown.
She pulled the front door open. The sound of the hinges reminded Gray of soft-spoken angels trying to squeak out a warning. She walked out of the apartment and through the hallway.
Gray carried the leggy telescope back to the living room. He made neat piles on the cocktail table, putting all the same magazines together—Psychology Today, Fortune, East Sider,
Parents, Vogue—and brushed off the dust. He left the dead roses in the vase. They had dried but still stood as straight as they had last spring.
Gray was startled by the sound of the phone ringing again. He felt relieved his wife was in the hall, so she wouldn’t have to be sentenced to this again. Sloppily, he pushed the couch away from the wall and yanked the wire out of the socket. That’s all it took. He should have done it before. Or silenced the ringer. Now, all he could hear was the faint sound of a siren from the street.
He vowed to take advantage of every moment tucked away, here, in their own clubhouse. One last spin with the telescope, a housewarming gift that had been meant for finding the Little Dipper in Larchmont. He’d promised himself earlier that he would try to find the woman who never slept. How nice it would be to see her again. Would she be dressed? Eating ice cream out of a bowl? Still high, he looked down into the lens. He searched the windows across the way, but he couldn’t seem to get the focus out of his own living room. He concentrated, thinking of nothing else at that moment. Gray, with the skills of an amateur pilot flying his first night solo, couldn’t find his horizon, couldn’t navigate, and couldn’t make a landing.
He turned his lens clockwise and counterclockwise still looking for the woman—but instead, he found a different image. The necks of two swans. One was so white and delicate, the other thick and shades darker. The image continued to blur because it was imbedded in smoke. His legs weakened as he realized he wasn’t looking at the building across the way but at the building in the back, through their kitchen, and the swans were the arms of Shauna and The Smoker, their cigarettes like two beaks yapping at each other.
What were they talking about? The Smoker would be getting off on Shauna’s breasts, her visible pink nipples, her starry ways. He tried to see his wife’s expression through the window. The tilt of her head. He could already picture her waltzing back into the apartment, smug, without an explanation, taking her yoga position in front of her painting.
Gray raised his head from the lens. He was dizzy and nauseated; maybe he needed to eat something, but there was no food in the place. He lay down on the floor but the position did not stop his head from spinning. He closed his eyes, trying to figure out where he was. On a cold platform near the ceiling? His body felt too heavy to keep awake much longer.
The sound of the phone ringing vibrated in the center of his brain. He thought of the old cliché and how true it was—so loud it could wake the dead. Gray broke into a sweat, thinking of all the possibilities. Aware of the floor now, he began to crawl toward the phone, toward the powdery scent of their baby’s head, but he fell on his back in great relief, remembering how he’d pulled the plug out.
He stretched out on the rug, still without clothes, meeting the placid eyes of the fish at Monk Man’s feet. He envisioned Shauna as a little girl, sitting on the side of her father’s bed, telling tales, relaying advice from the man in the painting. Gray remembered now what Shauna had told her father and how he had wished he could have been there to stop her. She had told him that Monk Man followed his craving, the darkness over his face. It freed him from the rules. Gray could see her skillfully taking the cigarette from her father’s unsteady hand, putting it to her lips, then back between his fingers, without him ever realizing what she had done.
DREAMING OVER THE MONONGAHELA RIVER
August 1911
Lawrence Zanerdelli walked toward the Coal Queen Harbor at the far end of McKeesport, the same route he walked every morning on his way to the mines. Tonight, however, was a sticky Friday in August, eight months before he would become known as Ty. He was dressed like a gentleman enjoying a smoke on his way to make a delivery.
When Lawrence reached the receiving dock, he pulled a piece of hardened brown paper from his back pocket. It was the kind used for beef patties at the butcher—a dealer in high grade, fresh, and salt meats. (The butcher ran a clean place, thoroughly sanitary in a first-class manner). The paper had been confiscated and then decoupaged by his wife, Edda. She pasted photographs, mostly of the actress, Mary Pickford, on the meat wrappers. After painting layers of shellac over them, she hung them to dry from the crystal droplets on their chandelier, fastening them with Christmas ornament hooks.
It was startling to see the miniature, stiff bodies hanging by their heads in the quaint dining room. Lawrence never really studied Edda’s craft, because his first concern had always been the wasted meat. Dr. Ramsay said to let her have her way.
Lawrence held the glistening Mary Pickford doll (Edda had a thing for the actress and tried to fix her own dry hair into the golden ringlets that Pickford was known for) and tossed it into the Monongahela River. It floated in the direction of a young couple bobbing in a rowboat with the oars tucked in, their feet in each other’s laps. They were an odd addition to the scenery, which consisted of small freight boats carrying mounds of coal. He took a last drag off his cigarette and stamped it out with the ball of his foot. Lawrence wore the same elegant brown shoes, similar to the wingtips that his father wore for special occasions. He wore them today to honor the brightest idea of his life, the one sitting in his pocket.
Even though smoke from the ovens blackened everything in town, the heavy air was an escape from the sour smell in his home due to Edda’s specialty—horseradish and pork knuckle. Lawrence was making his way out of the mines by working, after-hours, in his own five-and-dime store wedged in between a tavern and a miniature Russian church, which Lawrence referred to as “Onion Top Oska.” To make extra money, he sold tickets in the back of the store for transportation (he catered to a certain coal baron in Smithton). His secret stash was piling up.
Lawrence sat on the bench on the dock and couldn’t help looking at the woman in the boat, tossing her head back, giddy now, and wondered what it would be like to plant one on painted red lips. Instead, he pulled the envelope out of his pocket and kissed it. Holding it up to the sunlight, he traced the outline of a ship, a White Star Liner
and introduced her to the sulphur polluted Monongahela. “Queen of the Ocean,” he said.
The woman spotted him, and he waved the envelope at her. Her lace-up shoes were visible outside the layers and layers of her long, polka dotted dress, and he saw them as a sweet treat to be found by the tongue under so many layers of soft pastry. The man with her turned and looked, too, but Lawrence already had the envelope safely back in his breast pocket. He was thinking of the Ramsays, such fine people were Doctor Hugh, Mrs. Ramsay, and their daughter, Elizabeth. Mrs. Ramsay’s father owned the Eureka Brewing Company in Smithton. The family often traveled to London and New York City to visit relatives. One could only imagine. Before their last visit to New York, Edda had presented them with a shellacked “America’s Sweetheart” sprouting real hair. The silky locks were imbedded in a tiny head she must have cut from one of her old porcelain dolls.
The Ramsays were as gracious as they could be. When Lawrence arrives tonight to make his delivery, their housekeepers will be serving them dinner, arranging slices of beef in their dishes with sterling silver tongs. He had seen the wonderful extravagance on several occasions before, when he barged in on them out of desperation.
Sometimes, Lawrence ducked into Onion Top Oska to pray for God’s help. Surely, he wouldn’t know anyone in there. He was Catholic. What if he cried? The Zanerdelli circles under his eyes deepened every day, and Edda claimed her husband’s skin was being permanently stained by the dust from the coke ovens. The Ramsays were his saviors, all the understanding they had given him over the years, the coddling of Edda. Lawrence was honored to be the only one in these parts to sell them return trip tickets from London, on the most exotic ship ever built. He marveled at the fact that he would be using such a word all the time now—exotic.
The couple drifted. The woman looked calm now, her foot up on the edge of the rowboat in an unladylike manner. He could see her rich brown hair pulled up neatly away from her healthy complexion. He wished he could hold her in his arms and describe to her all the fine features of his “Queen.” Over forty thousand tons in all the right places. Potted shrimp for the first class. Meals served on the finest crockery. He pulled the tickets out of the envelope one last time before heading to the Ramsays and hoped the air would not discolor them.
This Side of Water Page 10