by Lee Conell
“I’ll take care of it,” Martin said, conscious of Ruby next to him, watching.
“You said you’d take care of it before.” 2D’s eyebrows went up her forehead. Being around 2D and her fine raised eyebrows, Martin briefly became the sort of man aware of his own eyebrows, of the loose coils of eyebrow hair spiraling out in what Ruby, with her useless art history classes, might call wild rococo designs. Oh yes, my father keeps his eyebrows in the rococo style, she would say to that rich fucktard John when they got back together, because probably they’d get back together and all the practical skills Martin had tried to teach her in the meantime would be useless because they’d just hire someone, Ruby and that fucktard, they’d hire someone like Martin to replace their light bulbs.
He was very tired. He wanted to go to sleep on the floor, right where he’d found the intruder earlier. Had he mopped in there? He should mop up the foyer.
“Martin. I need you to promise. Today you’ll take care of the nest. Today.”
“Today. Yes. I’ll do it.”
“Perfect.” 2D lifted her hand, waved a little. “I’ll see you later. Amazing spying your sweet face again, Ruby. Thanks for all your help with the fishies.”
She jogged away. A few cars passed. Ruby said to Martin, “She’s a terror.”
“But you’re going to feed her fish.”
“I don’t have to.”
“You already said you would. So you’ll do it.”
“I won’t if it upsets you.”
“You will feed her fish, Ruby,” Martin said. “You said you’d do it, so now you’ll do it. And I’ll do what she said and destroy the pigeon nest because that’s how the cycle of favors works in this place. Which you should know. Were your eyes shut the whole time you grew up here?”
“Dad.”
“Let’s head downstairs.”
As they walked into the foyer, Ruby said, “You shouldn’t have to destroy the pigeon nest.”
“At least it’s better than what the penthouse people make me do to pigeons.”
“The penthouse people? You mean Caroline’s dad?”
They stood unmoving in the foyer. Ruby looked at her shoes. Old running sneakers. Was she picturing the footprints she’d leave at their apartment’s threshold without shoe covers, the film of dirt she’d bring in to the place where she’d grown up?
A part of him hoped so.
Ruby said, “You don’t have to destroy that nest.”
The pink tissues in the foyer seemed less like flower petals now than wet laughing mouths. He bent down and began to gather up the tissues. Ruby just stood there, arms at her sides. After a moment, Martin turned and looked at Ruby, and she, too, bent low and began to pick up the scattered tissues, to gather them quickly into her hands.
4 IN THE BASEMENT-BASEMENT
Before the intruder, the last person Ruby had let into the building without her father knowing was John. This was the previous July, shortly before she and John had moved in together. Her parents were out of town for their anniversary, a real triumph as it was hard for Martin to get away from the building. Her father had asked Ruby to spend the night in the apartment just to keep an eye out, in case something went wrong with the elevator, which had been finicky lately. He gave her the numbers of several elevator mechanics. As soon as he was out the door, she called John and asked him over.
John had gone to college with Caroline. Ruby had met him at one of Caroline’s parties in the penthouse, but he had never been to the basement before. When she brought him downstairs, they had only been together a few months. Before their first date, she had feared he was the worst kind of nonprofit worker, the rich boy with family money who displayed his paltry do-gooder paycheck as a badge of integrity, one that read, I could be a bro-cog working at a hedge fund, but instead I’m making a difference. But he wasn’t like that. He seemed to really care about the students he worked with at Hover Up. Sometimes when she slept over he would wake her in the middle of the night, unable to contain his worry that one kid wouldn’t turn in her financial-aid form in time, or that another kid’s scores might not make the cutoff for scholarship opportunities if he didn’t get math tutoring like John suggested.
Their sex, so far, had been playful and sometimes even a little goofy. The idea that sex could make her feel younger, more childish, and not more adult, was revolutionary to her. Maybe the unexpected playfulness was what made room for her to become so unexpectedly serious about John so fast. What Ruby wanted that day in July, very much, was to show John the place where she grew up so that they could have sex in her childhood bed. What she told him, though, was that she wanted to show him her childhood home and did he want to spend the night? He’d said yes in his soft but deep voice that reminded Ruby of the man who narrated many of the books-on-tape she’d listened to when she was small—a child’s version of The Arabian Nights, a whole series of Greek myths for kids. When John spoke to Ruby with his books-on-tape voice, he always left her feeling assured not only that he knew exactly what was going to happen next, but also that if something truly bizarre occurred in real life—if a goddess sprang out of a father’s forehead or if a woman turned into a nightingale—John would take it in stride and help Ruby do the same. He would make it seem that the magical or horrendous twist was part of a larger and wiser authority’s plan. Once, thinking of Lily, Ruby had even asked John if he’d ever done voice-over work. “Like, movie trailers?” he’d said.
“Or commercials.”
“I mean, I try to sell the kids I work with on the idea that they have, like, a future,” he’d said, and she’d said never mind.
When John arrived to see her childhood home, she’d met him upstairs, not just buzzing him in, but greeting him at the foyer like a doorman. She hoped she wouldn’t run into Lily in the lobby—Lily hadn’t met John, because Ruby worried that if she did, she’d look at him the same way she looked at Caroline, except worse. But no Lily in the lobby, nobody there at all. They took the elevator together to the basement. When the doors opened onto bright fluorescent lights and scuffed laminate flooring, John’s eyebrows curved in. Ruby watched as he processed the peeling plaster walls, the maze of ceiling pipes. He ducked his head into the hallway filled with garbage cans and crinkled his nose. Then he walked to the wall with a bank of dozens of glass electric meters for the upstairs apartments. Under the glass, tiny wheels spun. He examined this spinning with his head tilted as if he were taking in important specimens that needed to be classified. “I didn’t realize you grew up in the basement-basement,” he said to the meters.
“It’s not like I slept in the boiler room or whatever. I lived in an apartment. It’s right down the hall.” She pointed to the door labeled B.
“I guess I didn’t imagine what ‘basement’ would actually mean.”
Ruby had not yet been to John’s childhood home, but she had not had to imagine it. He had shown her photographs the fifth time they’d slept together. The house had a wraparound porch and curvy shingles and a picket fence painted periwinkle blue (“My parents aren’t white–picket fence people,” John had said proudly, as if the periwinkle shade made his mom and dad countercultural revolutionaries). It looked like the kind of house that had gables, not that Ruby was entirely sure what a gable was. She had had no pictures to show John in return. The basement did not photograph well. There was not a lot of natural light. Would he make a comment about that when they stepped into the apartment? No, he’d just look around, process the lack of windows, and say nothing. She would have to pretend to notice neither his processing nor his careful silence.
“Maybe we should go back upstairs,” she said. “This is a bad idea.”
“What?” He stepped forward, took her hand. “You’re being crazy.”
“My parents don’t know you’re staying here. They’re weird about things like that. They never even liked me having boys in my room when they were around.�
�
“Just a few hours ago you were saying how much it meant for me to come to the place where you grew up.”
“I don’t know.” Ruby squeezed her toes in her sneakers, listening for some kind of a snap of joint that didn’t come. “I think you were picturing something fancier? Like Caroline’s penthouse apartment?”
“You’re projecting on me right now.” John swung her hand back and forth, like they weren’t in the basement at all but were about to frolic in a field. “I think it’s really cool you grew up down here.”
“You think this is cool.”
“It’s like you had your own underground lair. Way better than a backyard.” He gestured to the electric meters. “Did you spend a lot of time watching these spin?”
“Not really. I just passed them every day. They were like lawn ornaments.”
“Electric garden gnomes,” John said. She laughed a little, and John pulled her to him.
Clearly, there was no going back upstairs. Anyway, to keep John out of the apartment where she grew up would in some way be to deny him access to a part of her she truly wanted him to see, to love. So she put on her most compelling crooked smile (“Your nineties rom-com girl-next-door look,” Caroline called it), and took John into the apartment. “My favorite part is the ugly couch,” she said, speaking a little too quickly. “With the windmills and the cows? Those kinds of prints were really popular after the war. People wanted to just go back to the farm.”
“False nostalgia,” said John.
“Exactly.”
“Still,” he said, “it looks amazingly comfy.”
“It used to belong to some tenant who moved out. No new tenant would be caught dead with this couch now.”
“I guess the building’s changed since you were a kid, huh?”
“Actually,” Ruby said, trying to sound offhand, “I had this idea where I’d do a Museum of Natural History sort of autobiographical diorama series of this building throughout the time I lived here? To show how it’s changed?”
“Are you telling me there’s been changes in New York City? I’ve never heard a native New Yorker address that before.”
“Okay, point taken. Maybe let’s look in another room?” They walked into the small kitchen with the new giant white oven. “We think that’s Angelina Jolie’s old oven,” Ruby said. “The super at this building with all these celebrities hauled it over here just for us when Angelina dumped it.”
“Amazing,” John said. “Incredible.” But his eyes seemed to drift to the wall behind the oven, to the tiny barred window that looked out onto the gray concrete of the courtyard.
* * *
—
The sex that night, in her childhood bed, was quiet. It definitely didn’t construct some sort of coital bridge between past or future or do whatever transcendent, transformative thing she had hoped the fucking there would do. John stroked her hair for a while afterward. The steam pipe, in the summer, was as silent as they were. Eventually John said, “It must have been kind of painful, as a child, to grow up feeling like a second-class citizen in your own home. In your own apartment building.”
“Well, it’s not ours or anything.” Ruby frowned. “We don’t own the actual building. Or even this apartment.”
“Don’t be so literal. The way you reacted when I came downstairs. I can tell there’s some deep-rooted emotional stuff there.”
“No therapizing tonight, please.” She tried to move back into that zone of playfulness, reaching toward John’s arm to grab a wattle of loose elbow skin. “What do they call this part of the arm?” she asked. “It’s like the scrotal elbow sack.”
He pulled away. “I just mean, Ruby, it must have been hard. The basement of the building doesn’t fit in with any of the other floors. You’ve got high-end real estate for a whole bunch of floors, and then you’ve got the garbage room. Right?”
She understood what he wanted now. If she couldn’t own good Manhattan real estate, she could at least own some of the inequality she’d experienced. She could at least own a solid upstairs/downstairs story to be trotted out at the appropriate times, like she was some Dickensian dungeon-scrubber. But she’d seen the people sleeping in the doorway of the church next door. The inequities in the neighborhood went deeper than anything she herself had experienced. She wanted to tell him that as a child she hadn’t felt as if the basement failed to fit in with the rest of the building. She had felt as if the basement made the building work and she was somehow part of all that working.
“I don’t know,” Ruby said at last. “When I was younger, at least, it was kind of entertaining living down here.”
“Entertaining?”
She told him about how after ten at night, after the laundry room and the garbage room were closed to the other tenants, and elevator access to the basement was cut off, her mother and father would take turns rolling her around in the laundry cart. She’d close her eyes and pretend she was in outer space—a special cosmic corner where the stars smelled like detergent and Saturn’s rings were thin sheets of fabric softener. She worried John would call her out on sentimentality. But instead he pulled her close. More silence. Eventually he said, “This bed is super–low down.”
“It’s made out of an old elevator box.”
“An elevator box?”
“Yeah. For elevator doors.”
“This bed we’re on now?”
“The mechanics threw it out when they installed new elevator doors and my mom thought it’d make a good bed.” Ruby laughed. She figured John would laugh, too, and then kiss her and then maybe they’d have sex again, better sex. But John only said, a few moments too late, “That’s really amazing.”
“Maybe not really amazing.”
“So your mom saw this thing in the garbage room and she basically repurposed it?”
“I don’t know if she’d put it that way. I was a little kid and I was getting too tall for my little-kid bed and, you know, she had just gone back to school, we didn’t have much money then.”
“She repurposed it,” John said.
“She was only trying to save money.” Ruby’s voice was so sharp it surprised her.
Again, silence.
“I’m sorry,” John said at last. “I feel like now I’m the one projecting something on you. God, I’m such a hypocrite.”
“No,” Ruby said. “Forget it.”
“At the Hover Up training, we give volunteers this whole unit on not superimposing their privileged value systems on the kids. And yet here I am . . .”
“No, no,” Ruby said. “It’s fine. No superimposing happening.”
“Ruby.”
“You’re right. In a way, she repurposed it.”
She buried her face in the dip of John’s chest, closed her eyes, breathed in and out slowly, hoping John would think she was asleep. He was not fooled. “Listen,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel . . .”
“It’s fine. I don’t feel anything.”
“Well, I don’t want to make you feel nothing.” He lifted her chin and kissed her. She opened her mouth obligingly. But instead of seeing John’s purposeful red face, she was seeing the apartment where she’d grown up, really seeing it: the cluttered coffee table her mother had rescued from the garbage room, the sagging couch with its starving cows, the abraded aquamarine tiles leading to their front door with its variety of padlocks.
Then after she’d imagined the padlocks on the front door, her brain started to move outside that door, and she was seeing things beyond the apartment, traveling along the hallway that extended from the front door, into the environs of the basement at large. She felt a powerful whirring all through her, felt the boiler going, felt the elevator-motor room, the pulleys and furnaces that ran a building. Water mains, water meters, all kinds of valves, three backflow preventers, steam pipes for heat, other pipes carrying electric w
ires, gas pipes, sprinkler pipes. She saw the black laminate flooring of the hallway, the off-white walls, smelled the dry sweet perfume of laundry detergent tinged with the wet too-sweet smell of garbage.
Was this what her father, newly New Age, called a visualization? Or was this something bigger, an actual vision of some sort?
Her brain traveled upward, then, to the lobby, full of mirrors, through the foyer, outside the wrought-iron doors, the sidewalk splotchy with gum and dog pee and coffee sloshed out of overfull cups. Ruby saw—even though he was in Montauk with her mother—her father, hair white, back bent, sweeping the sidewalk, sweeping the candy bar wrappers and the crumbled tissues and the small leaves of the honey locust tree, and John moved toward her, his tongue on her neck.
Okay.
She was here.
Back here.
Back here and John’s tongue was leaving long wet streaks of spit along her collarbone. She pushed him off her.
“You’re mad,” John said.
“No, no. I just feel a little funny.”
He took a strand of her hair and twirled it around his index finger. “Ruby?” John’s voice was low. “What if we explore the garbage room?”
“Explore the garbage room?”
“I mean, we might find stuff we want.”
“Are you saying you want to dumpster dive? In my building?”
“Kind of. My roommate used to all the time in college. Once, Alex found basically two tons of unopened Fritos.”
She took his hand and unwound her hair from his finger. “Weren’t you on a meal plan?”
“Either way, that food would have gone to waste.”
Ruby rolled over onto her back and looked up at the ceiling, at the steam pipe.
“Come on, Ruby. Please? Maybe we’ll find something neat. Something you might even use for art. You said you wanted to get into making, like, autobiographical dioramas, right? Maybe you’ll find something you can put inside a diorama. Trash can be really inspiring.”
He wasn’t saying her name, but she knew he was thinking of Caroline, who had returned about half a year ago from a dad-sponsored trip to Europe with shorter hair and a new focus: She had begun making marble sculptures resembling disposable objects. “Expendables,” Caroline called the series. As far as Ruby could tell, Caroline had never tried especially hard to be part of any sort of art scene—“I’m interested in friendship, not subcultures,” Caroline told Ruby once—but she had met some guy in Italy who encouraged her to think about incorporating a sustainability angle into her work, and something about this advice had set Caroline on a new, more dedicated path. She sent Ruby long e-mails about the Italian boy. He creates sculptures out of found trash and they’re beautiful but also I feel like they don’t exactly SAY anything other than la la la look trash has texture too? I argued with him that I don’t want to turn our waste into some other funny form. I want us to look hard at the integrity of the objects we throw away themselves. I guess something about all the cathedrals here made me realize also I’m interested in that fine line between the parodic and the divine??? It feels almost terrifyingly parodic to write that sentence to you Ruby but it’s really how I feel, I have this drive since I came here that I never had in college when I was making all those stupid sculptures of my own stupid hand and, well, you are my oldest friend and if I can’t be earnest and pretentious and self-deprecating in a letter to you O THEN WHO. PS We went to a quarry with the same marble Michelangelo’s Pieta itself is carved out of and I told my mom this and she asked if I was going to come back to NY a Catholic and was not even joking, ha ha, anyway I love you.