The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  “Yeah,” Martin said. “I’m pretty burned out, too.”

  But he knew in a certain light he was lying to Debra. Some different kind of exhaustion was in his bones. It wasn’t from pouring himself into his work like Debra did. It was from keeping himself so held back with the tenants every day, nodding exactly as he was supposed to nod, or keeping his face blank in a way that suggested only the most polite non-anger.

  Ruby sighed loudly. “I don’t think this is working, Dad,” she said. “I keep going on anxiety spirals about my interview.”

  Martin frowns with concern, Lily voice-overed, like a good dad not in the least aggravated or hurt by his daughter’s failure to appreciate the shining promise of the present moment, and why should he care if his meditation idea was a bust, he is not bound by the false narratives of his own ego, which is just a product of the consumerist society in which he lives!

  “Bad energy today, that’s all.” Martin stood, trying to relax his jaw. “We should try meditating again tomorrow, okay?”

  “I don’t know. I think I might actually feel more anxious now.”

  But Martin is a man of many plots, he knows soon the sun will be rising faster than one-two-three, which means the pigeons outside are up and cheeping for food, Martin’s a walking, talking self-help book of ways to cope with one’s own estrangement from labor due to the manner by which consumerism consistently compromises our species-essence, which—

  “Shh,” Martin said. “Jeez. A goddamn monologue.”

  “Huh?” said Ruby.

  He shook his head, tried out a smile. “I got another idea. Grab some bread, okay? There’s a few rolls on top of the fridge.”

  “Are you taking me to feed those pigeons in the courtyard?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I forgot. Pigeons are like your therapy dog.”

  “They’re not like dogs at all,” Martin said. “They can fly.”

  * * *

  —

  They left the apartment and walked through the garbage room, trash bags so full, they bulged over the edge of the plastic bins. Martin was used to the stink, and maybe Ruby was, too—or maybe she was pretending to be for his sake. She didn’t crinkle her nose, but she did dig her fingers into the old kaiser roll he’d given her. When they passed the elevator-motor room and the smell dissipated, she cleared her throat. “Caroline’s having a party upstairs tonight.”

  “Okay,” Martin said.

  “Kenneth just left on another vacation. She’s house-sitting for him.”

  House-sitting seemed like a fancy term for staying at her dad’s place while he was on vacation, but Martin didn’t want to argue. “How’s Caroline these days?” he asked.

  “She’s fine. Doing a lot more of her sculpture stuff.” An edge in Ruby’s voice. “And I guess throwing boring parties in her dad’s penthouse. I’m not even sure I’m going tonight. I don’t know most of the people she invites.”

  “You do what you want. Doesn’t matter to me if you go to Caroline’s party.” Martin pushed open the fire exit door. “All Caroline’s party means to me is that I’ll have to spend tomorrow morning cleaning beer bottles off the roof.”

  “Caroline would clean up the bottles if you asked.”

  Martin laughed.

  “She would. You’re kind of an authority figure to her. Once she called you the Guardian Angel of the Basement.”

  The Guardian Angel of the Basement. Just a stupid name so Caroline could pretend he wasn’t a human being employed by the building, but was rather some spirit watching over them, not out of the need for a paycheck but out of some higher celestial obligation. No way in hell Martin was an authority figure to her. Though yeah, Martin had often watched Caroline and Ruby on their playdates when they were small. He read them fairy tales or brought them to the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. When the three of them were out together, Martin had imagined people thought the girls were siblings, that he was the father of both of them, and that nobody could tell one of them lived in the basement and one of them would live, once construction wrapped, in the penthouse.

  * * *

  —

  It was even colder outside than he’d thought, but he was wearing a fleece vest and the air felt good, dignified, somehow, in its glacial bite. Too early for a lot of traffic or construction noises, for the roar of renovation. Although the sky was only just starting to lighten, his pair of pigeons made their alert thrumming throat sounds as soon as they saw him in the courtyard. He did not keep them caged up, of course, and they were not exactly his, even if he thought of them that way. Still, he was part of what sustained them, and that felt nice. Ruby handed Martin a roll. He tossed the bread at the birds and they left their perch to tear at it.

  Martin had killed pigeons many times. People often spread pigeon-prevention gel on their windowsills, which would stick to the birds’ wings. Then Martin would find wounded and disfigured pigeons flopping around the courtyard, too injured to be saved. There was nothing else to be done in those situations. The hawks and owls and falcons could only eat so much. When he wasn’t killing pigeons, he was often chasing them away. They liked to nest in the stone scrollwork around the awning over the front entrance. At night he sometimes had to step outside the front of the building with a big stick—a sixteen-foot-aluminum-extension-pool-cleaning pole, the pole duct-taped to a paint-roller handle, the paint-roller handle duct-taped to a broomstick—and try to discern pigeon shapes among the shadows in the scrollwork. If the pigeons slept in the scrollwork, they would nest in the scrollwork, meaning they would shit on the scrollwork, and on the awning, and on the heads of tenants.

  Luckily the pigeons on this ledge, the pigeons he fed, weren’t technically nesting on the building’s property but on the property of the Lutheran church next door. Martin could enjoy these birds the same way he could enjoy the birds in Central Park—as a spectator. In the time since Martin’s interest in birds had begun to develop, a whole dimension of the city that had been invisible was now radiant. Trees once filled with chirping noises were now filled with distinct melodies, with names. Cedar waxwing. Baltimore oriole. Fox sparrow. Once, a summer tanager. Often, mourning doves. And cardinals, bloodred and bold. But the other bird-watchers he’d met didn’t care for pigeons the way Martin did. Rats with wings, they called pigeons, as if the wings were not the essential difference, marking what would otherwise be a plague-pissing pest as something nearly fantastical, or at least gravity-defying.

  “How often do you feed this pair?” Ruby asked. She was shivering a little under the thin coat she’d thrown on.

  “Most days before the sun is up. They help me, sometimes, with the whole anxiety thing. I can tell them apart, too. See the one with the two black bars on its wings? That one’s more aggressive.”

  “Watching the aggressive pigeon makes you feel calm?”

  “I don’t know.” Martin looked away. “I just think they’re cool. The patterns on their throats. They’re beautiful.”

  If only they were not so beautiful, if only the plumage on their throats was not so iridescent. It would have made killing pigeons easier. A sudden rising anger in him. He had never told Ruby about those birds, their gel-weighted wings. But now he wanted to tell her what he had done to the birds in order to keep this job, for her, for her future stability, a stability she’d damaged with her academic choices. He wanted to tell her there were some kinds of debt she didn’t even realize she owed, debts no dream job would pay back.

  He hadn’t always felt this way about Ruby’s choices. He had been impressed she had gotten any significant scholarship money at all. But what had she done with it? Ruby had taken a mix of art history and literature classes, courses in American studies and creative writing and visual arts. She had to complete a final senior project, but the school had no majors or minors or any of that, part of their effort to encourage students, so said the pamph
lets, to become skilled at the challenges unique to the twenty-first century, to hone their minds to think outside of the box. Somehow Ruby had been increasingly drawn to creating frozen moments inside boxes, culminating in her final college project: Four elaborate shoebox dioramas featuring the dumpsters behind the campus dining hall. Each diorama showed the dumpsters in a different season—a reference, Ruby said, to Monet’s haystacks. She had sent Martin and Debra some photographs from the show and a copy of her artist statement. I am interested in the way dioramas generate stories while sidestepping traditional narrative forms of rising action and conflict. Instead, the diorama form immobilizes and captures a moment we recognize as part of a story larger than the form itself.

  Well. Okay. The words were pretentious, but the dioramas Martin found inexplicably joyful. He loved the miniature Cheetos bag she had made for the spring dumpster, orange tinfoil peeking out of the dumpster lid, catching the equinoctial light. The fuddled footprints of frat boys and squirrels crisscrossing new patterns in the snow in the winter diorama. In the autumn diorama, piles of dried leaves with perfectly crafted teeny-tiny lobes.

  Yes, he had been proud!

  But in the end, his pride and the partial scholarship and years of out-of-the-box mind-honing had not made a big difference. Her return to the basement felt to Martin like a failure not only for Ruby, but for himself.

  The pigeons gulped down the stale bread in big bites, their bobbling throats ballooned.

  Ruby flexed her hands. “Lily would say the weather is cold as a financial adviser’s heart.”

  Martin laughed.

  “I miss her so much,” Ruby said. “All those times she babysat me and read to me from her crazy manuscripts and ranted at me about the world.”

  “She liked to rant.”

  “We weren’t even related to her. It’s almost embarrassing, missing her this much. But she was just so there. You know?”

  Later he would think about how different the day would have been if he’d been brave enough to admit his grief to Ruby in that moment. If he had told her that some Lily remnant narrated his movements as if he’d become a kind of figment in her mind. If only they’d stood out there in the early-morning light a little longer, talking about Lily, how she’d felt like family in a way that had astounded them both. If only they had mourned together.

  But all Martin said was, “There’s this great horned owl in Central Park the people on the birding e-group keep talking about. I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “I’m not going bird-watching with you tonight, if that’s where this is going,” Ruby said. “I already tried meditation. My quota is one Quirky Dad Activity a week.”

  These important new forces of re-seeing in his life, reduced in Ruby’s eyes to Quirky Dad Activities. What if he called her dioramas “quirky” in that dismissive tone? He wouldn’t be completely wrong. But she would be completely devastated. His job, as Dad, was not to devastate her.

  “I think we should go back inside,” he said. “It’s cold. You’re shaking.”

  “So are you,” Ruby said.

  * * *

  —

  Just as Martin and Ruby kicked off their sneakers in the apartment, the landline telephone for work calls began to ring. Martin screened all the calls on that line, and he and Ruby both waited as the answering machine emitted its first long loud beep followed by the message itself.

  “Hello? Hi, Martin? This is Neilson, Neilson from 3C, ha ha, well, you know that. I’m calling about a potential situation? Hope I’m not waking you up, my man. Wanted to check in and see if you could check out my shower today. It’s clogging. Also, just returned from my early-morning jog and when I opened the foyer door, there were some blankets there? I mean, not just blankets but also a bundle of clothes and it looked like someone had been sleeping there. Do you maybe want to check on that?”

  Certain tenants in the building had a way of commanding Martin not through assertive statements, but through questions. It was one of the services they were paying for: they could order him around and feel as if they were benevolently giving him choices. Tenants in the building sometimes also underestimated his intelligence. To his credit, Neilson in 3C didn’t generally treat Martin like he was stupid, but he did treat Martin like he was extra-authentic, what Neilson sometimes called “a guy who does real work, with his hands.” Which was exhausting in its own way.

  Still, Martin was usually able to look past this, was able to feel grateful to Neilson for getting him back on a path of mindfulness, on working to lower Martin’s blood pressure. They had begun meditating together occasionally since shortly after Lily’s death. Neilson, thankfully, was no Kenneth. There was never any Manifest Destiny glaze to his eyes, only a slightly foggy look, which made his mindfulness guru act very convincing. It was nice, the way Martin and Neilson would sit on pillows together in 3C and breathe and chant. They’d each spent their adolescence as transcendent hippie white guys born in the mid-fifties, teenagers in the early seventies, and for a time they shaped their lives around the same cultural changes, dressed the same, maybe said some similar things about the nature of the world or the subjective construction of reality. The difference was that Neilson in 3C came from money and Martin in the basement did not. So Neilson had done his drugs and joined his family business and kept his hair long. And Martin had done his drugs and become a super and cut his hair short so plaster and dust wouldn’t get snarled up in it.

  But whatever their differences, both of them were still looking for transcendence. Neilson in 3C and Martin in the basement each wanted to perceive every present moment as something burnished, to see the radiant, radical, haloed beauty in right-nowness, whether they were checking their e-mails or washing their hands or descending into the subway. Before he began meditating with Neilson, Martin had tried taking a free evening meditation class at the neighborhood JCC. Neilson was there when he walked in, sitting with his eyes closed, a small smile on his face. Martin was the only guy in the room wearing cargo pants. Mid-meditation, he farted right into his pillow. A couple of people grimaced, but nobody in the class opened their eyes and nobody in the class laughed. If somebody had laughed, he might have laughed, too, might have stayed. But he stood up right in the middle of the silent meditation. His knees cracked. He left. After that day, he cut down on his gluten, which seemed like a yuppie-tenant thing to do, but what could he say, it had helped. Still, the idea of meditating in a group again made his stomach hurt with the force of a thousand buttered rolls. He’d been shocked when a few days after the JCC incident, Neilson approached him and asked Martin if he wanted to meditate in 3C sometimes, on afternoons when he had a break from work. “I don’t blame you for leaving the class early,” Neilson said, not bringing up the bodily function. “Sometimes it’s a tad overwhelming in there for me, too. I can even lead us in the meditation sometimes, if you want. I have a pretty nonjudgmental approach.”

  Of course Neilson in 3C’s voice as he left the message on the answering machine was the opposite of nonjudgmental. Was high-pitched, nasal, tinged with real alarm masquerading as deep irritation.

  Martin called Neilson back and, while Ruby listened, thanked him for letting him know about the blankets in the foyer and told him he’d see about the clogged shower drain later today. The call woke Debra, who wandered out into the living room, squinting at the overhead light. “Did Neilson see another mouse?” she said when Martin hung up the phone. “I heard his voice.”

  “No mouse,” Ruby said. “Only a human being. A homeless person in the foyer.”

  “Just some blankets,” he said. “Go back to sleep, Deb.” Martin kissed Debra on the temple. “Save your energy for your panel.” Then he went into the kitchen to drink down cold coffee that smelled like mulch. Ruby and Debra followed him. “Dad,” Ruby said as he poured his coffee. “Do you think you need help in the foyer?”

  “You’re not going up there, Ruby,” Debra said.<
br />
  Ruby touched Martin’s wrist. “I could go with you and see if anyone is there.”

  “Nope,” Martin said.

  “What if the person’s violent?” Ruby said.

  Debra smoothed down her hair, which had frizzed around her face. “I did hear a story at work last week from Alice? About how a super tried to kick out someone sleeping in front of the building. And the person stabbed him.” Debra eyes narrowed into what Martin thought of as her secret-sociologist look, a pained, almost Lily-like expression that appeared anytime she was suppressing some kind of observation on institutional failings.

  “He got stabbed?” Ruby said.

  Martin felt his heart speed up. Debra smoothed her hair again. “They think the stabbing person had a heroin problem. Some young kid around Ruby’s age.”

  “Why would you compare me to the stabbing person with the heroin problem?”

  “Not comparing!” Debra patted Ruby’s back. “Just saying. Not a fun situation for anyone.”

  “I won’t get stabbed,” Martin said. “You know that. I had to ask some guy to leave the foyer just a couple weeks ago and he went right away. It’s always fine. Nobody wants trouble.”

  “You’re right,” Debra said. “They’re just tired.”

  “Except for that stabbing guy,” Ruby said. “He seemed plenty awake. There should be a doorman. The people in this building are rich enough that there should be a doorman.”

  Martin swallowed his coffee, the cool of it thickening in his throat. A couple of people on the co-op board had recently brought up the possibility of hiring a doorman, but the idea had been shot down. Where would a doorman go? When you pushed open the front doors, you stepped into a small foyer with an intercom panel. There was room for someone to curl up on the ground, but no room for a desk and chair in the foyer. And the lobby beyond the foyer door was simply a long hallway, wood-paneled and beautiful, but too narrow. Expanding its size would mean decreasing the apartment size for everyone on the first floor.