The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  “The building’s not big enough,” was all Martin said to Ruby. Then he stepped back into his sneakers, old New Balances jury-rigged with orthopedic foam insoles.

  Debra took Ruby’s arm. “We’ll watch through the intercom and if your dad needs help, if there’s a violent person up there, we’ll know.” Debra pushed a button on the wall and the camera on the intercom in the kitchen came to life. Right now the grainy black-and-white screen showed nothing but one of the foyer’s mirrors. Everything seemed quiet through the camera, but its scope was limited—it did not show the floor, so if someone were lying there, that person would still be invisible. “We’ll be watching and listening,” Debra said. “If anyone tries to stab you, babe, just give a shout!”

  “I’ll be sure to shout if someone stabs me.” Martin moved past them and out the door. Before he hopped into the elevator, he stood for a moment in the laundry room, which was closed to tenants at this hour, and breathed in the detergent smell. He hadn’t been nervous when he’d received Neilson’s call, but now he worried: What if someone violent was up there, and Ruby and Debra heard him get stabbed? Even with the static of the intercom, a stabbing sound would be a bad sound, a spurty sound. Not only would he be dying, he’d know his wife and daughter would be witnesses, traumatized for life, and Ruby already with so much debt—the therapy bills on top of that?

  Sometimes, in moments of great distress, Martin half believed his chest had turned translucent. He feared that if he took off his shirt, instead of old-man flab, there would just be a glass window, and behind the window a cage of ribs and inside the cage of ribs, a heart that everybody could watch sputter and clog and fail, like a dying animal at a zoo. As he rose up in the elevator, he could feel it happening. His chest becoming glass. Everything becoming fragile, brittle.

  * * *

  —

  When Martin enters the lobby, nothing seems in the least out of the ordinary!

  Shh, Lily, Jesus, you old lovely croaking girl.

  But yeah, she was right. Nothing in-the-least out of the ordinary. Though it was always a little weird, going from the scuffed floors of the basement to the terrazzo tile of the lobby, the gilded mirrors and cherrywood paneling that lined the hall. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had broken into the lobby. He went down the lobby hall. Through the locked glass door leading to the foyer, he saw not just a bundle of blankets but a woman, asleep, a gray gust of hair around her pallid face. Her worn puffy winter coat was the same pink color as the pack of tissues in her hand. Each time she breathed out, the trickle of snot caught in the groove under her nose moved closer to her upper lip.

  “Excuse me.” Martin pushed the glass door open, so it pressed gently against the woman’s arm. “Excuse me, ma’am, but you’ll need to leave.”

  The woman cracked open one eye. She lifted the pack of tissues and rubbed the plastic packaging against her nose. “I have family upstairs I’m waiting for,” she said.

  Martin glanced toward the intercom. Debra and Ruby would be able to see him but not the woman, who was still on the floor.

  “I’m here for Lily,” the woman said.

  His jaw felt too soft, as if the roof of his mouth might cave in. “Lily?” he said.

  “Yeah. I’m her cousin. I tried to buzz 5A and nobody answered. I’m waiting for her to get home.”

  Her voice sounded a little like Lily’s. For a moment, he wanted to let her in. He wanted to open the door to her. To lead her up to what had been Lily’s apartment. But of course that was impossible. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m going to have to ask you to—”

  Her face was reddening. “I told you I know Lily, Lily in 5A, I’m related to Lily in 5A, I’m Lily’s cousin.”

  “Lily is. Well.” Martin paused. “Passed.”

  “Passed? As in dead? You mean dead?”

  “Well,” Martin said. He swallowed. “Yeah.”

  The woman stood up, her legs wobbling. “I need to get in the apartment.”

  “You need to leave, ma’am.”

  “Your breath stinks.” She put a hand on Martin’s shoulder as if to push him aside. Her grip was very strong. “Give me the fucking keys.” She was yelling now. “Let me in.”

  “We’re going to call the police, ma’am,” Martin said. “My wife’s watching.” He pointed to the intercom.

  “I am watching.” Debra’s voice. Over the intercom, she was all sternness and crackle.

  “You’re trespassing,” Martin said. “We’ll call the police right now if you don’t leave.”

  The woman’s eyes moved to the intercom. She locked her gaze with the hole in its metal interface that contained the tiny camera. Martin listened for the long soliloquizing rage of Lily’s ghost voice. But nothing. Instead, the woman muttered a few curses under her breath.

  And then she stumbled out the door into the early light that shone so softly on her she seemed a little like a ghost herself.

  * * *

  —

  When Martin had found Lily dead, first he had called 911. Next he had turned off the faucet she’d left running. The floor was soaked. Lily’s cat, Mel Blanc, liked to sit in the sink, shedding her hair into the drain. “Keep Mel Blanc out of there before she clogs it up,” Martin once told Lily, and Lily said, “If I wanted something that would listen to me, I would have a dog.” The sink was still full of water and cat hair. He threw up into it.

  For a few days, the usual parade of complaints from tenants stopped. 4B adopted Mel Blanc. 7C left a long message on Martin’s machine about how Lily had been the only one to really listen to and not judge her theory about the elevator mechanics being spies. 2D said, “She always held the door for me, Martin, even when I could tell it was so much work for her.”

  In the immediate aftermath of Lily’s death, the building felt sad, but also more humane. People held doors and each other’s gaze, took the time to scratch 3D’s Yorkies behind the ears, lowered their voices and spoke almost melodiously about what was gone. In those moments, the building was not a seething mass of wants and demands. There was no pecking order. There were just souls. Souls sitting on sofas and inside apartments and souls fixing elevators and unclogging drains and souls holding doors for other souls. A kind of vision of the building in which, yes, Martin’s chest was translucent but it wasn’t a big deal because so was everybody’s. Everybody was a bit more see-through.

  Then the paperwork began. Kenneth bought Lily’s apartment, 5A, and hired an architectural firm to determine ways to combine 6A and 5A into one massive two-floor apartment linked by a glass staircase. Before the official demo crew arrived, Martin was tasked with removing Lily’s fridge.

  As Martin had rolled the fridge to the freight elevator, he tried not to think about the large quantities of oranges Lily kept in there, or the ice cream she had always offered him when he was upstairs for a job (“Mint mint mint!” she would sing), or the intimidatingly large bowls of sugary puddings she made, or the slabs of brie that she would not spread on anything, but would scratch at with her nails, eating whatever got stuck to her hands. Just a few months ago, she had held out the remaining cheese block to Martin, saying, “Do the fancy ladies in this building offer you cheese like this when you fix their sinks?” Then she had laughed and thrown the brie back in the fridge, where it stayed and got old, unwanted mold sneaking in. All over the cheese a host of flatulent microbes had clustered, farting more and more, until the smell escaped even the fridge, and Kenneth had breathed it in when he was showing some contractors around 5A and said, “No more!” and called Martin.

  “Martin?”

  Debra’s voice at the intercom.

  “Martin, are you okay? Is the intruder gone?”

  The intruder. Yes, that was the right way to think of her if he wanted to get through the day. Not Lily’s cousin. Not a woman he’d kicked out.

  “She’s gone,” he said to the intercom. “I’l
l be down in a minute.”

  He stepped outside the building and breathed in the cold air. The intruder was still in sight, walking slowly west, toward the river. The clouds hung around like wet wrung socks illuminated by a burning yolk of sun, and he had kicked the intruder out, he had done his job.

  * * *

  —

  When he returned to the basement apartment, Debra, exhausted, had already gone back to bed. But Ruby was still huddled by the intercom, glaring at him. Martin’s skin felt stung, like his daughter’s glare was made out of bees. Once there had been bees living in the water tower on the roof. They must have been attracted by the garden Kenneth had hired someone to plant around one of the penthouse’s decks. Martin hadn’t known about the bees, of course. He had climbed up to the top of the water tower, thrown his leg over the ladder so he wouldn’t fall, lifted a small hatch in the roof. He was about to climb in to check on the float switch when bees coated and stung his face and his hands.

  Now his daughter took his hands in hers, as though a kind gesture might distract him from the way she was glaring. “She’s Lily’s family,” Ruby said. “Why did you and Mom think it was okay to kick her out?”

  “She’s not the first person who I’ve had to ask to leave the foyer,” Martin said. “And you never complained so loud before. Think about that. You’re only upset because this woman looks like Lily.”

  “She doesn’t just look like Lily. She’s related to Lily.” Which daughter peered up at him now from the outer-daughter husk? One of the littlest Rubys? No, it was still just his current daughter, a grown woman trying to manipulate him into feeling guilty by summoning his memories of a younger Ruby, by trying to make him think he’d disappointed the purest kid side of her.

  “I kicked her out because that’s my job,” Martin said. He removed his hands from Ruby’s grip. “If I don’t do my job, I lose my job. Your mother gets that. Why don’t you?”

  “She wasn’t just coincidentally here. She was at our foyer, waiting for Lily.”

  “It’s not our foyer.”

  “Huh?”

  “You said she was at our foyer. But that’s not right.” He scratched at his beard. “The foyer doesn’t belong to us.”

  “It kind of does.”

  “Maybe you’re getting this household mixed up with your ex-boyfriend’s.”

  “John. You know his name.”

  “John owns a foyer, maybe,” Martin said. “But not you. Not me. We are a foyerless family.”

  “John didn’t own any foyer. His family home in Connecticut has a foyer maybe, but—”

  “Foyer,” Martin said. “Such a hoity-toity word. Is it French, do you think?”

  Ruby closed her eyes. “I never took French.”

  “What did you learn at that school?”

  She opened her eyes again. Ah. There was twelve-year-old Ruby. The sanctimonious and the sulky side emerging in tandem, a surefire sign of her adolescent self. “We could have brought her to the apartment for a little bit, at least,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah? And what would we do with her here? Keep her, like a pet?”

  “We would figure it out. We would find her some resources. Isn’t meditation supposed to help with compassion?”

  “I don’t need a lecture on compassion, Ruby.”

  “I’m not lecturing. I’m just saying—”

  “Shh.” He held up a hand. “Your mother’s trying to sleep again.”

  “You’re being inhuman. So is Mom. If you really cared about Lily, if you were actually sad, you wouldn’t have made her leave.”

  “Shut up,” he said. A long silence between them. “You have to be quiet because your mother’s trying to sleep. She’s nervous about her panel. Think about someone other than yourself. Okay?”

  She stood there, watching him like he had turned into a muted TV, a commercial she didn’t want to hear.

  Well, fine. He could mute her, too. He put on his noise-canceling headphones. He went to his meditation bench to watch his breath alone. He closed his eyes and their apartment disappeared entirely, and his daughter did, too. His heartbeat slowed. His face cooled. His breath was the only sound. It was like he was alone in a vast single-story building, or an echoing hallway, or a familiar chamber, dark, with its own steady pulse.

  2 RUBY AND THE TRUE DISGRACE

  When Ruby had worked as a barista, the line of customers in the morning often stretched out the door. At least once every single day, she would have no idea how she would be able to process the personalized beverage demands of so many people, the lattes and the cortados, the almond milk and the soy. Dizziness would overtake her, and for several breaths she could not see individuals before her, just a multifaced blob of early-morning want.

  The anger Ruby felt for her father after he’d kicked out Lily’s cousin was like that long line of customers, it had so many faces. It was dizzying, her rage; it seemed to portend a wide range of specific demands. Some part of her was angry because of how her father had dismissed the woman in the foyer, and some part of her was angry because of how he’d then dismissed Ruby’s own feelings, and some part of her was angry because her father always seemed to view any inkling of moral certitude she had as the misguided product of an expensive liberal arts education. How would she deal with each face of her anger right now? How would she give each component of her own rage the attention it needed? It would feel good to rip off the headphones her father wore, to scream into his face, which, unlike her anger, was singular, basically immutable. All her life, her father’s face had seemed unchanging to Ruby, even as the logical part of her brain acknowledged that his beard was now streaked with white and his wrinkles had begun to set.

  It was especially difficult to notice the wrinkles now, since he was acting like a little kid—moping on his meditation bench, playing pretend enlightenment the way some five-year-old would play pretend in the Kingdom of Make-Believe. Her father had pointed out that she had never been so upset at him for kicking someone out of the building before. And he was right about that. He had received calls about homeless people in the foyer quite a few times during Ruby’s childhood. A man would call and report that someone was sleeping downstairs, his voice suggesting that Ruby’s father had failed at his job. Or a woman would call, say she was sorrysosorry to leave a message at such an early hour, but there was somebody just outside the locked lobby door, and wasn’t that a security concern? Not only had Ruby grown up acclimated to such calls, she’d also grown up acclimated to the queasy guilt that followed them—thanks largely to Caroline, who not only had more toys, but also, seemingly, a stronger moral compass. Once, during a childhood playdate up in 6A, when they were in the middle of Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors and pretending to run away from the Nazi guards, Caroline abruptly stopped wheeling her arms around as if a new idea had occurred to her. She had plucked at the lacy white collar on her new denim dress and said, “My mom told me your dad kicks homeless people out of the building.”

  Ruby looked down at her own frayed jeans. She was near the end of second grade and something about all the emphasis on place value in math had made her newly aware of loose threads.

  “That’s very mean of him. Homeless people need our help. They have no place to go.”

  Ruby had said he was just doing what the people in the building told him to do, and Caroline had said that you couldn’t just follow orders or you got World War II. “My mom helps homeless people,” Caroline said. “She donates clothes that they can wear at job interviews.”

  It was time to change the subject. “Look!” Ruby said, pointing at a large stuffed animal. “A Nazi! A really big one! Run!”

  “A Naziiii!” echoed Caroline. “Run to the forest!” At peak drama in their games, the beauty mark on Caroline’s cheek seemed to throb. “Run run run to the forest, the Nazis don’t know about the forest there!” She gripped the cloth arm of her newest d
oll.

  Caroline’s parents gave her new dolls all the time. She owned dolls that could say “Mama” and dolls that could say “Hungry” and dolls that could piss right in your arms, and she had all the American Girl dolls, except for Addy, the black one, and Molly, the one with glasses. During their playdates, they sometimes made monogrammed pottery for the dolls using Caroline’s clay. If Ruby didn’t have clay on her hands, Caroline would let her not only hold the dolls, but also cover the doll bodies with her own to protect them from Nazis. Caroline was better at playing Holocaust-orphans-sisters-survivors than Ruby was. Even when they were pretending the Nazis were threatening to gas them, Ruby was always sort of smiling. Whereas Caroline could quickly turn stormy, sad. There was something fantastical about the scope of Caroline’s solemnity. Ruby loved watching her face. Even Caroline’s laugh possessed a keening at its core, a sense of rhythmic lamentation underneath her “ha ha ha!”

  Caroline’s grandmother had survived Dachau, but her grandmother’s parents had not. Ruby’s own maternal and paternal great-grandparents, who were also Jewish, had come over to New York alone, without family, from somewhere in Eastern Europe, but nobody was sure where exactly because of shifting borders. Her parents knew next to nothing about them. Maybe because Caroline could recite her grandmother’s dark history—give actual dates and names to the places where atrocities happened—she seemed more sophisticated to Ruby, more grown-up, even though Caroline was physically much smaller than Ruby. As a child, Ruby had often imagined that if they had actually been in a concentration camp together, she would have given Caroline some of her rations to keep her from getting too feeble to work. When she became jealous of Caroline, she enjoyed contemplating how she would save her from the death camps in an alternate universe. She thought about how she would shield Caroline’s body with her own whenever Caroline would hold up some new gorgeous jewel-eyed doll and say, “This is Samantha and she’s a lawyer. Okay, Ruby? She’s a very special lawyer for very sick kids and their parents.” A few minutes after she accused Ruby’s father of meanness against the homeless, she held out Jasmina. “Jasmina is a princess, but also she is a journalist. She writes about politics, and she tries to expose evildoing by using her words. Ruby, have you heard of Watergate?”