The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  The jitters ease. It has something to do with cloud, but also something to do with Judah. When Nancy is not sitting on his lap, he seems more regular.

  “Coming on four,” I say. “You guys were going to watch the storm? It’s OK if I join?”

  “Sure,” he says. “I’m going to make some coffee, and then go dumpster dive while we wait for it to build up. You cool with that?”

  I’m amazingly cool, alone with Judah. “Do you have cream?”

  “Some that might be expired in the fridge,” says Judah and steps into the kitchenette.

  In Judah’s living room, all of the furniture matches. The picture frames, the entertainment center and the coffee table, each of them is made of the same plasticky reflective material. My friends are generally richer than I am, because I know them from the White School or through Nancy and Brookline. One thing I have learned is that rich people do not necessarily have matching furniture. What they have is old furniture. Nancy has a secretary, which is a kind of a desk, which is worth a hundred thousand dollars. Her grandfather had it stolen by the Nazis and then it was returned through some complicated process that involved Israel and an auction house. Now, her dad pays the electric bill on it, grumbling. Through Nancy, I know the term nouveau riche. I decide Judah’s father must be nouveau riche. That you don’t make old money from shooting porn is an idea which makes sense. I’m collecting data.

  Judah’s hips are level with the countertop pass-through that separates us, his flannel mostly unbuttoned. I try to think of how you’d describe his body if he were a piece of art; my art history teacher might say, hyperreal, but that is when it is a painting, when it is a statue in a museum in Rome. Ropy, perhaps. Long-muscled. He turns suddenly and catches me watching him. He has a more of a man’s body than Paul.

  “Something wrong?”

  I shake my head, unembarrassed, cloud smoothing everything over, and step away from the kitchenette.

  On one of the living room shelves, there is a red glass bulb which is either a way to smoke drugs, an art object, or a piece of soft-core pornography. Everything here is like that—impossible to tell is it is filthy, or clean as Mr. Bubble. For example, there’s a wall-sized art silhouette of a man and a woman touching. They have too many arms between them, an extra leg. On the sofa, there is a naked girl doll, plastic and smooth. Or, also, there are film canisters labeled in permanent marker Audition (Probe), Dayan Roza, Niagara Falls ’84.

  A haze has descended over the space, like Vaseline on my lenses, but certain things tug at me, seem sharper. Is it cloud making me see this way? I try to recall if I’d had these same sensations on the walk home from the loft party. What it feels like when I think back is that there was something left dangling in the evening, and that I’m meant to find it, and pluck it.

  On the bookshelf, there is a cabin photograph from Jew camp, the matching t-shirts emblazoned with the words fun-fun. The boys grin. Judah is there, and Paul. It’s only a couple years ago, but I can see the difference between now-Judah and his high school-senior self. The ears sticking out, the rutted skin. I imagine how sad it would be, the only child of an old, bad man, roaming these soft-carpeted halls on school vacations.

  Judah reappears with two cups of coffee and the creamer under his arm. He sets down the cups, opens the carton, and makes a face.

  “Black is fine,” I say replacing the photo.

  I have been in the apartment twenty minutes and still Paul and Nancy are not here. Gladys is hovering over the coastline, is growing tired of moving so slow. Soon it will be crazy to go outside. I am alone with Judah Cohen at the edge of a hurricane, and maybe that could be fun.

  You have to suit up for dumpster diving. Judah hands me a pair of plastic grocery bags and shows me how to wrap them around my hands like gloves. He’s brought elastic bands to secure them—they are girls’ hair elastics, the kind with the pink plastic bobs you loop over each other to hold the tie in place. Nancy wears that kind sometimes, to be funny.

  He holds my wrist while he loops the hair ties over the plastic bag. I crinkle as he leads me down the silent hall to the garbage room. I see there are no actual dumpsters in this episode of dumpster diving, that like everything in Longwood Towers, trash picking here is going to be genteel. Judah removes each of the lids, peers inside, and then motions me over. What is in our garbage at home? Egg shells, the foil wrappers from my mother’s birth control pills, half-burnt smudge sticks which failed to chase away the ghosts. Or else, it is SpaghettiO cans and Van de Kamp’s frozen fish sticks and paper wrappers from Arby’s.

  Judah shakes each of the two garbage cans and then digs in.

  Here is what is strange about the garbage of the rich: it includes no food. There are coffee grounds and tea bags and reams of discarded typing paper, but there are no half-eaten toaster waffles, no apple cores. The rich probably eat oranges peel and all. The rich probably do not eat.

  “What are you looking for?” I ask.

  I’m still seeing hazy, but the sense of a tug I’d felt in Judah’s living room has sharpened. There’s a thing I must locate. Claim. I need to find it.

  “Someone threw out their Christmas wreath before Christmas even. This perfectly good doll. Yesterday, I found a griddle and an alarm clock. People just get a new one if the littlest thing is wrong, but you can fix almost everything.”

  “That’s the best thing you’ve ever found?” I ask. “A waffle iron? A wreath?”

  Judah shakes his head. “The best stuff in probably in the penthouses.”

  “We should look.”

  “I wish. You need a key for those elevators.”

  “I didn’t know penthouses were real things,” I say, pushing. “I mean, actual.”

  Judah considers me, then strips the bags off his hands and stands up. “You scared of heights? I have an idea.”

  The highest point in the building is in Tower A. All four towers have the same number of floors, but because of an anomaly in the foundation, in the bedrock, tower A is in fact taller. Judah explains this while leading me down to the lobby. It’s a separate elevator for each of the towers, a key to get off at the penthouse. To get to Tower A, we’ll need to cross the roof from Tower B, and to get to Tower B, we need to go through the lobby.

  Judah buttons and tucks his flannel before the elevator opens. I notice the way the ladies and the nurses smile at him, as if he were still a ten-year-old in corduroys instead of a tattooed dealer. The doorman looks up as we cross.

  “Getting pretty hairy out there,” he says to Judah.

  I look through the revolving doors. The rain cuts across the glass front of the buildings; something big and bright—an escaped Frisbee or a part of a lawn chair—clatters past.

  “True enough,” says Judah.

  Where is Nancy? A normal person you’d say the storm held them up, the downed wires, but Nancy’s not a normal person. She once walked three miles to buy a pack of Princes. One of the seven times she had sex was with her boyfriend in his hospital bed. Things like storms do not stop her.

  Tower B is the only tower without a penthouse. On the top floor, there’s no key access because it’s just regular apartments, but that means you can swing out the window onto the fire escape and walk along a wrought-iron platform until you reach the ladder to the roof. Judah goes first, into the pelting rain and rising wind. My turn. I let loose a whoop as I lean out the window. I reach for the platform with my toe. The iron railing is slick. I let go with my left foot and for an instant, I’m dangling, loose in the wind. Below, the trees thrash; the pavement glistens. Then Judah’s got a grip on my arm, on my other arm. My feet find the ladder. My lip is banged up, my palms scraped, but Judah tugs and I haul and we land on the roof. We’re on solid matter.

  Below the lip of the building, there’s a temporary shelter from the wind. We lie still for a few breaths, me trying to catalogue which sensations are cold, which wet and which pain. In the far distance, the sun still pierces the sky, but above our heads, purple cloud
s lower and lightning slices the gathering darkness. It’s pretty majestic. Judah touches me on the shoulder, shoots me a grin, and then points off across the tar expanse.

  “You ready?”

  I smile back at Judah. He hitches up his pants and I follow him over the rain-slickened rooftop. The door to Tower A is wedged open with a cigarette-filled pineapple juice can. A cinderblock configuration near the door looks like a makeshift room or sitting place. Someone, obviously someone young, spends a great deal of time up here. We duck into the stairwell. Whatever I’m after, I feel I’m nearing it.

  Judah salvages a barely smoked butt from the landing, shelters in the doorway. He examines the filter, which like the others, is imprinted with lipstick marks, and then lights it up. “Interesting.” The cinderblocks, which are scrawled with sharpie, bear poetic, but not necessarily meaningful messages: make the thing matter. All heart experiment. Nothing and no one and never.

  “The whole towers,” says Judah, “the whole time I’m growing up? There’s only one other kid. Penthouse, just the girl and these two maiden aunts. It happens that we’re both in the courtyard. Or she’s by the fountain or in the lobby asking has her aunt’s paper arrived. Never, she never says word one to me; maybe ten years, riding the same elevator sometimes, and she never makes eye contact.”

  “She’s pretty?”

  “Sure, in a snotty way. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years. I guess I figured she went to college or moved to Switzerland. Something. Anyway—” he stubs the cigarette, and I let the rooftop door swing closed. In the sliver of light through door crack, we feel our way deeper into the building. “When I was a kid, the roof was her space. She staked her claim. And unless her two old aunts write graffiti and smoke French cigarettes, I’m guessing she’s back.”

  The stairwell gives onto a hallway. At one end of the corridor is a door which is ajar. Music leaks from the room, the smell of cigarette smoke.

  I nod in the other direction. “This way,” I say. I sense my nerves returning, the cloud wearing off, but still the thing beckons.

  Judah follows me across the carpet until we reach an incinerator room. We open the door. In front of an empty blue bin is the thing we’ve come for: a penguin wearing a lampshade on its head. The penguin has a lampshade on its head because it is a lamp. An old blue-and-white pattered cord emerges from the bird’s rear. Both Judah and I consider it, and then we look at each other to see if what we are observing can possibly be true, but it seems it is. The penguin lamp is beautiful. Also, I think immediately, it is known to me.

  Never, in all the years I rely on it, will the sense become specific. It tugs on me; it pushes me away. Here, it says of a video clip and not here. I can place an image in a window; I can select a typescript, but always, it’s this sense of knowing, which comes from elsewhere, from beyond the bounds of my experience, as if it’s borrowed from some other mind. From the beginning, though, in the penthouse incinerator room, I know to trust the sense.

  I step forward at the same moment Judah does, but his stride is longer than mine and he seizes it before I have a chance. My foot nicks the garbage can and there’s a shallow, echoey crash.

  We listen. A moment passes without any other noise and we nod at one another and retrace our steps back to the stairwell. That is when I realize the problem. There are no stairs down. The staircase ends here, on the penthouse floor at a concrete landing without egress. Judah thinks I’m going back to the roof. Above us, debris clatters in the wind. I think of the slick ladder to the fire escape, of the double risk of climbing down, feet finding rungs by feel. We whisper heatedly, me pointing to the elevator, him shrugging and shaking his head. The record reaches the end of the track. “I can just meet you down there,” says Judah, but when I dart back into the hallway, he follows.

  I press the elevator button, and then there is an attenuated pause. We wait, in a stranger’s hallway. The needle lifts from the record. Judah watches the apartment door, listens to the movement within. The elevator is taking an absurdly long time, the movement of pulleys slowly becoming audible. Ding. It arrives with a shuddering halt, the creaking of chains. Judah and I look at each other in the moment before the elevator door opens.

  “Aunt Beatrice? Aunt Delilah?” a voice calls from within the apartment. “Sidwell? Is that you?”

  We step into the elevator as we hear the sound of heels crossing a large and cavernous apartment.

  “Aunt Delilah?”

  A very thin woman, college-aged, appears in the door to the apartment. She is beautiful, a slash of black bangs across her forehead, and her cheekbones and chin sharp. In one hand, she dangles a burning cigarette. In the other she holds a tool of some kind, a chisel perhaps. She smiles, in a way less friendly than confused, and then she sees the penguin and her face contorts. “That’s mine,” she says.

  Judah and I freeze.

  “Give that back to me. I made that.” She steps forward, just as the elevator door closes. Behind it, we sink into the falling floor.

  “Fuck,” says Judah. “Fuuuuuck.”

  “I know,” I go. “Fuck.”

  And then we are laughing, and for the night, at least, I know something’s clicked for us. Judah’s a man-slut, and a crackhead, and he’s twenty-something years old, but he’s something else, too. I think: even Nancy doesn’t know this thing about him, the little-boy-in-an-empty-tower thing. And, anyway, if she’s so concerned, where is she? When is she even coming? Meanwhile, I’ve come down from my cloud high, and George’s Folly is a bust, and I’m glad I have someone like Judah who could hook me up.

  Seven

  Brookline & The Fenway

  1988

  An eerie light is breaking through the hall window when we arrive at the door to Judah’s apartment. I think: maybe Nancy and Paul have made a dash for it, but no one is waiting for us when we come in. Judah plays his messages: two hang-ups, and then a girl I don’t know’s voice.

  “Hi,” she says. She pauses for a long time, audibly swallowing. “So. Same deal as always. I don’t know. She went to go send in an order form, and now the storm is breaking, and I’m not sure—I don’t even know why I’m calling, but—”

  Andi. It has to be Andi. She sounds like she’s never heard of lying, like her heart looks the same inside and out.

  “Listen, forget it,” says the girl on the machine. “Everything’s fine. I’m just being stupid.”

  Judah presses the reset button and the tape spools back. “She gets pissed off when I help her. And then she calls me for help.”

  “Why?”

  “Excuse me, but girls. It’s a thing of a certain kind of girl who needs to be thought of as badass, and then can’t deal with how it goes down.” He glances at the doll on the sofa, which disconcerts me. “It’s old business. She wants to be a kid when it’s convenient and an adult when it suits her.”

  I nod; there is information here, important things; the thing with the doll.

  “Not that I’m not an asshole, too. I’m a total fucking asshole.”

  I shrug. “So, does that mean you’re going to go? Or not go?”

  Judah peers at the window, points. Outside, the evening is sharp and calm. There’s a tree down across the train tracks and the air is dead still, but in the distance, heavy clouds still threaten.

  “Is the storm over already?” I ask. “The TV said it was so slow-moving.”

  “Must be the eye,” says Judah.

  “How long does an eye last? Could we make a run for it?”

  “Half an hour? Five minutes? Probably varies.” He shrugs. “We could sit tight, smoke a little weed, relax. We could chance it.”

  I feel the clamping of my throat, the creeping worry and hunger. And also thrill, dashing through the attenuated sunshine. I lay out the situation to Judah with my cloud supply, but he’s not holding. It’s all at the crack house. So we’ve both got our reasons.

  “We could make it,” says Judah. “The Fens is close—”

  I think
of leaving a note for Nancy. My feeling from earlier, the thing trying to climb out of me, resurfaces. Say whatever is lingering from the loft, there’s also me, heading out into the storm with the guy Nancy likes. You could say, it’s me having the better night.

  Anyway, I don’t end up leaving a note, but Judah flips the bolt so it stays open, so they can get in if they ever show. I can see it’s a practiced gesture, that he’s often leaving his door ajar for a girl, that he often comes home to find some teenager in his bed.

  Judah doesn’t exactly have a real parking space. His dad, who is in LA on a film shoot, leaves behind his Brougham in the apartment’s designated spot. But it’s next to a pillar and there’s a gap big enough for a compact if the driver pulls the mirror in and backs up super slow. Judah’s ’74 Saab is the shittiest car I’ve ever been in.

  “My dad wants me to buy something American,” says Judah. “Something new. A Jeep.”

  The fabric interior has peeled away from the ceiling and passengers have carved various things into the crumbling foam beneath. I settle my book bag in the seat well in front of me and read the writing: I see kids’ names I recognize, Armand and Josh and Dina. Judah is like an ambassador from the world of grown-ups to our teenaged kingdom, trafficking in drugs and dirty acts and adult concerns.

  The front seats have safety sensors to tell if there’s actual ass on the cushion, and if there is, the car won’t start unless the seatbelt sensor is also triggered. Judah explains, though, that the belt sensors are broken, so the car knows you’re there, but it thinks you aren’t wearing your seatbelt and won’t fire the ignition. I have to boost my pelvis into the air at the precise moment Judah turns the key. Judah’s brought the penguin, and once the car is started and I return to my seat, he gingerly places the lamp in my lap. I want to keep it, to not give it back, but I know I won’t be able to argue. It does calm the unsettled feeling the object gives me, to hold it in my lap, to examine it.

  “What is this made out of?” I ask him. The penguin is crafted of some familiar-unfamiliar material. Judah pulls out from the underground garage. Now we’re on the street, you can see the wind damage that’s been done, telephone wires bowing toward the ground, lawn furniture in trees. The lights are dead at the intersections. There is no wind, not a single other car on the roads. We raise arcs of rainwater as we turn onto the J-way.