The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  Then he took a step forward toward the nest, lifted the broom a little higher. The birds looked back at him. He winced. And everything angry and hardened in her turned, for a second, soft.

  She was dressed for a job interview and she could do a job. “Let me get the nest.”

  “It’s not that I can’t,” her father said.

  “I know,” Ruby said. “It’s your back, your back hurts.”

  “Yeah,” said her father.

  “But my back is fine.”

  “Yeah,” said her father.

  “So,” Ruby said, and took the broom and took account of the small brightness of one pigeon’s left eye and then swept the broom over her head, and knocked the nest off the ledge. The pigeons flew up. The whole nest flew up with them into the air, hovered there for a microsecond, as if the fluttering of the birds’ wings were enough to lift it—then fell.

  Ruby half expected several eggs to roll out of the nest and crack open and, in fact, that was just what happened.

  7 The Striker

  The expression on Ruby’s face when she destroyed the nest was an expression Martin had seen his daughter wear just once before. It was a few months before she turned eighteen, and she had come downstairs from the penthouse apartment with a folder. Debra was at work, but Martin was on the couch, soaking his left foot in a bucket and watching TV. A British man was describing the way certain seabirds in Japan climbed tall trees to have “keen jumping off points for their spectacular flight.” Ruby sat down on the couch next to Martin and made what he’d later remember as a bit of a show opening the folder. There were two typed pages inside. Martin said, “What’s that?”

  She smiled a strange smile. “Caroline gave me an early draft of her college application essay to read.”

  “What, to edit? I thought they hired some fancy private counselor person for that.”

  “It’s not to edit. She wanted to clear it with me.”

  “To clear it with you?”

  “Just don’t tell her I let you see. Her dad would probably find some way to sue.” She held out the pages and, after he rubbed his hands on the rolled-up leg of his pants, he took the essay from her.

  “You don’t have to wipe your hands,” Ruby said. “It’s not some sacred document.”

  “It’s just a habit.”

  “It reminds me of a story Ms. Ramseur told us in drama class once,” Ruby said. “All these people were rehearsing a play and Bertolt Brecht was the director and this actor couldn’t get this scene right. Do you know Brecht, Dad?”

  “Not well but kind of,” Martin said. He’d definitely heard Lily call things “Brechtian” more than a few times.

  “So the actor is playing a worker in a factory I think, and the employer hands the factory guy something and the scene wasn’t right. There was something off. And Brecht calls in the woman who is cleaning the theater—”

  “The cleaning woman,” Martin said.

  “Yeah. And he says, ‘Excuse me, miss, but would you hold this?’ and he holds out a blank piece of paper. And the woman wipes her hand before she takes the paper. Which is when the actor playing the factory guy realizes what he was doing wrong when he was acting out the scene. He hadn’t wiped his hands when he was given the document.”

  How hard did the cleaning woman’s heart go, when that Brechtian motherfucker called her forward?

  “I only bring this up,” Ruby said, “because I don’t think you need to wipe your hands to hold Caroline’s essay. She’s not your superior, Dad. She’s your daughter’s friend.”

  “What happened to the cleaning woman?”

  “I don’t know. That wasn’t in the story.”

  “It wasn’t in the story.”

  “I guess she went back to cleaning.”

  “Did they give her a raise after that?”

  “I don’t know.” Ruby sighed. “The lesson was about the power of detail, not about the cleaning woman.”

  It wasn’t about the cleaning woman. Ms. Ramseur didn’t think to have them wonder about how the woman herself was probably wondering, when they called her over, if she was in trouble. Had she been accused of something? Had she lost her job? Nope. That woman lived on as a nameless example in how to accurately capture the working class for the rich people showing up to see a play.

  Martin handed back Caroline’s college essay to Ruby. Then he dipped his hands into the bucket of water where he was soaking his left foot. He got his hands nice and wet with toe water and then he reached out for Caroline’s essay and took it from Ruby without wiping his palms. “Is that better?” he asked.

  “Jesus, Dad.”

  He said, “I sure hope the cleaning woman found a new job.”

  “Could you just read the essay?”

  Some drops of toe water had blurred the ink, but it was all legible. My grandmother survived the Holocaust, Caroline’s essay began. Many of her immediate and extended family members died. Because of her experiences, she and my parents instilled in me from a young age the idea that the lines we place between us with regards to religion, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation are boundaries that obstruct what really matters. We are all human. We all suffer. Life is not easy for anybody. It is up to us each to try to make it a little easier for those less fortunate around us. Even as a child, I looked for small ways to make the world more equal to prevent such a large-scale tragedy from happening again, through seeing the potential and full human in everyone. For example, I played with the super’s daughter all the time as a child and my parents allowed her to sit in on some of my tutoring sessions and even paid for her to attend my art classes. (She is, by the way, extremely talented!) I also volunteered with Head for Hope and played a major role in organizing donations and designing posters for the See Me As You As Me Foundation.

  He scanned through the rest of the essay. No mention of Ruby again. Really, just a passing glance. So why did he feel like freeing his cramped foot from the bucket and kicking something?

  “It’s only a sentence, I guess,” Ruby said. “Caroline made a big deal about how she’d get rid of it if it made me feel used in any way.”

  “How nice of her.” Martin splashed his foot a little in the bucket.

  “Honestly, telling her it makes me uncomfortable makes me more uncomfortable than the actual sentence does.”

  “So you’ll just say nothing?”

  “I never realized those art classes weren’t free. Her mom always made it seem like this spontaneous trip.”

  “Well, I guess now you know they weren’t free,” Martin said. “Now you get to know that for the rest of your life.” Ruby stayed quiet. Martin read the essay again and said, “The grammar in this is awful.”

  “I think the grammar’s mostly fine,” Ruby said. “I didn’t notice anything, anyway.”

  “It’s awful,” he said. “It’s shit.”

  And the expression, the bird-nest-destruction expression, happened then. She had looked down as if she had ruined something. No—as if Martin had made her ruin something. His hands were still wet. He turned back to the TV and Ruby left the room. How those seabirds could leap, how they could climb.

  * * *

  —

  After Ruby left for her interview at the museum, Martin swept up the nest in the courtyard, head bowed low.

  The nest inside the dustpan looked like any other clot of building crap. The shells resembled plaster from a remodeling job. Martin took the dustpan, went inside to the garbage room, and dumped the pan’s contents into the trash. He had had a fight with Debra, he had seen his beloved pigeons’ home destroyed, he had made his daughter do his job for him, he had kicked out a woman related to someone he loved. Mired in the grime of self-pity, the super stands in the garbage room feeling sorry for himself, said Lily. The culture of grievances in this country is an unseemly stain, spreading fast! Wherever you
come from, rich or poor, there is suffering. The problem is the way we quantify that suffering, revel in suffering—tired of those pesky self-pity streaks? Try growing a pair. Martin tries not to listen to his own tiredness. Martin tries, Martin tries, Martin tries, Martin tries.

  A broken record of a ghost now. It wasn’t fair. His own dead parents and vaguely traumatized Eastern European ancestors had not haunted him in this way. But the Lily voice screamed in his thoughts: Martin tries, Martin tries, Martin tries. The words in tune with his own heartbeat. As his heartbeat sped up, so did Lily’s chants. He left the garbage room, went through the courtyard, unlocked the service door, and ran up to street level. The Lily voice never followed him out of the building, as far as he could tell. As soon as he stepped onto the sidewalk, he could hear his own thoughts again. He was breathing hard. He felt dizzy.

  He began to walk fast in the direction of the JCC, where a late-morning meditation class was about to start. Although he hadn’t been back since the time he’d farted during class, he had memorized the schedule in case he had an emergency need for mindfulness. Right now, running from a ghost voice, his heart walloping against his rib cage, the emergency seemed real. He moved as fast as he could without breaking into a run, passing banks, Starbucks, cell phone stores. A lot of the stores that had been here when he first moved to the neighborhood were gone, but Martin tried not to veer into sentimentality about it all. Utopia diner was still around, and the hardware store he liked, and one or two of the old Irish pubs. Anyway, even those places had been something else at some point, right? The small stores had once been the manors of rich nineteenth-century New Yorkers fleeing the dirt of downtown, and before those proto-yuppies showed up, there had been trees and trees and trees, plus some tribes who were about to get their land stolen fast, and before them, primordial muck, the greatest gentrifier of all time. He passed the Duane Reade where around Halloween many years ago, he had seen Caroline—then in her early teens—slip a pair of plastic cat ears and a tube of red lipstick into her bag. He’d barked out, “Hi,” down the aisle, and she’d looked up and smiled at him, guiltlessly, cheerfully. She had not put the cat ears or the lipstick back. He had not confronted her. But he had mentioned the incident that night to Debra and Ruby.

  “Why didn’t you stop her?” Debra said. “Jesus, Martin. Be the grown-up in the room.”

  “I’m not her grown-up,” Martin said. “She has parents.”

  “She only steals stuff from big companies,” Ruby piped up. “It’s this whole Robin Hood phase she’s got going. No day but today, steal from the corporate overlords, all of that. Sometimes she almost sounds like Lily.”

  “Never, ever tell Lily that,” Martin said.

  “It hurts the salespeople,” Debra said. “Not the corporation.”

  “I’m just saying, with Caroline, it comes from a good place.”

  “You don’t shoplift, Ruby,” Debra said, “right?”

  “I don’t shoplift,” Ruby said. “I know if I got caught, you’d disown me and throw me out on the streets or whatever.”

  “We wouldn’t disown you,” Debra said, and Martin said, “Speak for yourself, Deb.” He was almost positive he had been kidding and Debra, to affirm this, had laughed. But Ruby had not smiled back.

  The Duane Reade a whole block behind him now. Where had he been? Lost in his mind. Hearing not the Lily voice, but the voice of Rubys and Debras past. This was the problem. His thoughts could not stay zipped up in the now.

  He headed through the glass doors of the JCC, which had most recently been not a small store, but a gas station the center had bought straight from Exxon. A large security guard nodded at Martin and gestured to the metal detector. Martin put his ring of keys into the gray plastic bin, along with his wallet. The guard waved Martin through the full-body detector. Did the guard look at Martin and see a white-guy yuppie? Or could he tell by the streaks of plaster on his hat that he was some other species of neighborhood white guy? The guard handed Martin back his keys and wallet, and Martin said, “Thanks.”

  Then he took the elevator up to the community spirituality/reflection room, which was several floors above the pool but still smelled, very faintly, of chlorine. Eight other people were already meditating, their eyes closed, some of them perched on folding chairs, others sitting on pillows. He’d worried there’d be a tenant there, maybe even Neilson, but no, strangers all. This time, there were even a few people in cargo pants like Martin. While his heart still raced, Lily’s voice wasn’t in his head, so that was progress. Also, he hadn’t eaten any gluten. No farts to worry about, no stomach growls. He would be fine. He took off his shoes. His right sock had a hole in it, he saw now, and his calloused big toe stuck out. But nobody was watching. He got onto a cushion and closed his eyes. The chlorine smell made him feel like he’d just dived into a deep dark pool. If he got through this session, if he could just calm his heartbeat and slow his thoughts, he could swim through this day. And then it would be tomorrow: Ruby would have a job, Lily’s cousin would be forgotten, Debra would call him after her panel, full of relief and love and ready to come home.

  On his pillow, he counted his breath in cycles of five. A couple more people trickled into the room, but Martin registered them less as people than warm columns of air, changing the currents around his face. He opened his eyes again. The teacher, a thin man with scruff on his long jaw and no hair on his egg-shaped head, said, “We will begin with fifteen minutes of silent mindfulness meditation, followed by a group activity with a singing bowl.”

  A group activity?

  Martin tried to breathe himself back into the moment. But the group activity loomed. He had never had this teacher before. Who knew what ideas about enlightenment he had? Would they have to do an interpretive dance of their inner soul? Do trust falls while putting their childhood traumas into song? But he was not supposed to leap ahead like this in meditation. He must breathe. He must become the sole inhabitant of his breath. All morning, his thoughts had looped him forward and backward in time. His mind had become possessed by a voice from the actual past. What he needed was to be present. What he needed was to see the instructor’s head not as egg-shaped but merely pleasantly ovoid. He inhaled so deeply, air seemed to sluice through his body like liquid. He relaxed.

  But then a low, ringing sound filled the room, like an owl’s hoot combined with the dirgelike moan of old plumbing filling with newly heated steam. Martin opened his eyes. The teacher said, “We will now begin part two of our session.” He held out a gigantic shining singing bowl, intricately carved, and a rosewood striker with a leather wrap. He placed the bowl on a blue silk pillow filigreed with gold thread and said, “Please, repeat the following mantra after me: ‘I transcend anxiety. I transcend despair. Together we are present here.’”

  Everyone in the room repeated the mantra.

  The teacher explained that they would pass around the singing bowl atop its pillow. The person in front of the bowl would say today’s mantra, and when they were finished, they would strike the bowl with the rosewood striker. “No, no, I misspoke, we don’t strike the singing bowl,” the teacher said quickly. “The language we want to use now is ‘make contact.’ Each of us will have the opportunity to make contact with the singing bowl, and then pass it to the person on your left. Please keep up your breathing meditation while the singing bowl makes its way around the circle.”

  Martin was not sure he’d understood all the instructions, but everyone else in the room was nodding. A short forty-something man next to the teacher recited the mantra, loud and clear: “I transcend anxiety. I transcend despair. Together we are present here.” Then he struck the singing bowl, or made contact, or something. The sound rang through the room again. Everyone but Martin kept their eyes closed. At last the man opened his eyes and, balancing the singing bowl perfectly on the pillow, passed it along to an old woman with a delicate rash creeping up her neck. The neck-rash woman began to speak
: “I transcend anxiety. I transcend despair.” Martin should close his eyes. But he wanted to see how the woman struck the singing bowl. What if when Martin’s turn came, he struck it wrong, so it didn’t ring out, but only burbled? Everyone would think, There is a man who doesn’t know what he is doing. They would think, There is a pathetic man with one toe out of his sock, and he’s not even enlightened enough to make a singing bowl sing. Then they would think, This is a judgmental thought. I send love to this man. And brain waves of condescending love would start cresting in Martin’s direction.

  Martin sat five spots away from the teacher. In a few minutes, the singing bowl would be in front of him. How did people pass the singing bowl along without it falling off the pillow? That would be even worse than a faulty song—if he somehow toppled the singing bowl from the pillow, denting it in some crucial manner that robbed it of its acoustic gifts forever. Everyone’s eyes would open. The teacher would look at him. The others would look at him. Already his palms had gone sweaty. When he held the striker, it would slip from his grip. Butterfingers, everyone would think, reverting to their middle-school gym-class selves. He would turn this room of enlightenment-seeking adults into juveniles. He would ruin their quests.

  The neck-rash woman struck the singing bowl. The sound was less powerful than the teacher’s strike, but still there was a good resonance. How had she angled the striker? No! He wasn’t supposed to be watching how people angled the striker. He was supposed to be paying attention to his breath. The singing-bowl thing was a communal experience, not a competition. What if he forgot the mantra? “I transcend anxiety. I transcend despair. Together we are present here.” The words melded in his mind. He remembered his daughter destroying the pigeon nest and Lily’s voice screaming at him about a culture of grievance. His hands were shaking. When it was his turn to move the pillow with the bowl, the bowl would fall. The sound it would make upon falling would be the worst sort of song, the song of an old man who did not know his own damn self. His ignorance and shame would manifest as fatty deposits blocking his arteries—there was something lipid-like about shame—and he would have a heart attack right here, among strangers. Or he would cough and his heart would just slip out of his mouth and fall right into the singing bowl. What kind of sound would that make? Plop, probably. Just plop. Now it was his turn to recite the mantra. The man next to him held out the striker. Martin took the striker and then reached for the pillow with the singing bowl on top of it. He scooted it carefully along the floor until it was directly in front of him. It did not topple over. A silence had fallen. Everyone was waiting. Somebody cleared their throat. Was it him? No, the teacher. Martin could not remember the mantra. Something about anxiety, despair? Martin tried, Martin tried, Martin tried. Not the Lily voice, only the memory of the Lily voice, but that was enough. The teacher’s fingernails were clean and Martin’s were black. His armpits and his banged-up back had slickened with sweat. He stood. His knees cracked and his right foot hit the edge of the pillow. The singing bowl wobbled but did not fall. Nobody opened their eyes. They were all so swaddled in their breaths.