The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  He pushed open the door and stepped out into the hallway where the pool smell grew even sharper. He took the elevator downstairs, did not nod at the security guard. When he’d exited the building, he realized he was still holding the striker. Could he stomach returning inside, to that meditation room? No. Just the idea caused an acidic filminess to rise to his throat. Instead he headed home, past the Duane Reade, past the cell phone stores, gripping the striker as he went. He paused at the Starbucks. He had to pee. But when he ducked inside he saw a group of men as old as him, all with giant backpacks and greasy hair. They looked like they had nowhere to go. Two of them were waiting by the bathroom door.

  He could pee at home.

  He left the Starbucks and went back to the building. Down to the basement. Silence in his head. He put the singing bowl striker next to the meditation bench. Lily’s voice, thank god, offered up not a single word of praise or of rebuke. He went to the bathroom and peed. He washed his hands and his face.

  He was so hungry. There were a few rolls he’d saved for the birds on top of the fridge. He swallowed three rolls down. He should never have stopped eating gluten. What a yuppie-tenant thing to do. Here, in the present moment, the bread did not hurt his stomach. It was simply delicious. The sound of his own chewing filled his ears.

  * * *

  —

  By the time the doorbell rang, Martin was full and calm again. Pumpworks Tony, maybe, was outside, with a question about the demo work. He took a minute to shake off any residues of panic, and then he opened the door. Caroline. “Good morning, Martin,” she said, in a wobbly singsong tone. “I was—”

  “Yeah?” Martin said.

  She bit her lower lip.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I wanted to talk to you,” she said, her eyes so wide that for a second Martin was convinced she was there to accuse him of stealing the JCC’s singing bowl striker.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She tugged at the collar of her dress like some invisible starchy ruff was constricting her breath.

  He tried to make his voice less gruff but not too soothing—not blue-tile-pulling gentle, maybe closer to sorry-UPS-didn’t-drop-off-your-package mild: “What did you want to talk about?”

  “Ruby told me about the woman in the foyer this morning.”

  “Uh-huh,” Martin said. “And?”

  He waited for her to declare that he had been too harsh. He had ignored his privileged position. He had failed to act with empathy, compassion. Under his stare she quickly looked away. “Forget it,” she said.

  Still she stood there.

  “Did you need something else?” Martin asked.

  “The terrace door.” She spoke with so much hesitation she almost seemed to be improvising her demand. “The door’s jamming. I have the party tonight. I want my guests to be able to go outside, if they want. Though I guess it’ll be cold. It might rain. But the view is so nice. People always want to go outside.”

  “You’re supposed to call and leave a message,” Martin said. “You know that. Leave a message about the door jamming and I’ll fit it into my schedule.”

  “Okay,” Caroline said. “You’re right. I should have left a message. My grandmother’s been sick. I’m all over the place. I’m sorry, Martin.”

  The apology softened him. “Well. I guess I can take a quick look now.” Martin grabbed his toolbox, which he’d left by the door, and stepped out.

  “Now?”

  “Is now not good?”

  “You’ll just look at the door, right? Because my room is a really big mess. Just piles of old childhood stuff. You know, I’m usually in my apartment in Brooklyn, so I don’t really clean my room in my dad’s place. It’s embarrassing.”

  And a further softening in him. She was embarrassed that her room was a mess. Few people in the building ever had enough respect for him that they might express self-consciousness over a messy room. Perhaps all those afternoons he’d watched over Ruby and Caroline continued to exist in some messy room inside Caroline’s mind. And unexpectedly he and Caroline were smiling, like old friends who had recognized each other on a street in a different city.

  “I’ll just look at the door,” Martin said. “I should be able to get a small job like that done fast. I’ll go upstairs with you.”

  She seemed about to say more, but then he pressed the call button for the elevator and she fell silent again. “How have you been?” Martin asked as they waited.

  “Oh,” Caroline said. “I’m okay. How about you, Martin?”

  “Mostly, when people ask how I am, I answer that I’m old.” Martin shrugged. “How are your folks?”

  “Also old. I mean, I don’t think of them that way, but my dad’s always telling me he’s getting ancient. He’s talking about retiring, actually, and moving to Portugal.”

  “Wow,” said Martin.

  The elevator at last arrived. When they stepped inside, Caroline turned a key under the button that said PH. The doors closed. “Where will you go?” Caroline asked.

  “What?”

  “When you do finally retire. Will you stay in the basement?”

  “The new super will live there. The apartment comes with the job.”

  “Right. I forgot. So where will you move?”

  “We’ll figure it out, I guess.” Inhale. “We’re saving up still.”

  “You know what would be legitimately hilarious? If you got an apartment in this building! And just stayed here!”

  Exhale. “That would be very funny.”

  “I know nobody here would want to lose you. Everyone would miss you so much, Martin.”

  The doors opened on the fifth floor. Pumpworks Tony stood before them, reeking of men’s body spray that smelled like aerosolized metallic bathroom cleaner and the cheapest cologne squeegeed out of the armpit of a T-shirt. He waved wildly and shouted to Martin about needing to talk.

  “There’s this weird pipe in 5A,” Tony said. “You wanna check it out before we move forward with it?”

  Martin said okay, in a second, he had a quick job to do first in the penthouse. The doors closed just as Pumpworks Tony tried to say something more about the pipe.

  “Wow,” Caroline said as the elevator began to rise again. “That was the worst-smelling body spray ever.”

  Martin didn’t really like Pumpworks Tony’s smell either, but now that Caroline had called him stinky, he felt a new fierce loyalty. He wanted to tell Caroline that her penthouse apartment wouldn’t even exist without Pumpworks Tony. Before the penthouse was built, all the water that flowed through the building was first pumped up to a large water tank on the roof. The tank was used both for water pressure and fire safety. But when the penthouse was constructed, the tank that had been fine before, now wasn’t high enough above the penthouse plumbing fixtures to meet the New York City plumbing code for water pressure. They brought in an engineer to make the forces of gravity and city code align. The only options were to raise the five-thousand-gallon roof tank or to install pressure pumps, which was the choice the engineer made.

  Pumpworks Tony was the guy who had installed those new pumps. In some way Pumpworks Tony was responsible for the water Caroline drank and washed with and defecated into for years, years, which meant Pumpworks Tony had contributed directly to her being alive in the world, and Caroline didn’t know and Martin didn’t tell her because dramatizing the story of two water pumps seemed impossible and if he opened his mouth to narrate such a tale, later Caroline might go to Ruby and say, “So, your dad went on and on to me about water pumps and water pressure in this weird, like, quasi-parable way?”

  The elevator opened up directly into the penthouse apartment, with its vaulted ceiling, its hardwood floors, its leather couches and swivel chairs. They stepped out together and Martin immediately pulled the turquoise shoe covers out of his toolbox and over h
is sneakers. He tried to say, in a jaunty tone, “And what are you up to these days, Caroline?”

  She twisted her hands. “Well, this will sound like complete fiction, but my marble sporks are kind of taking off.”

  “Sporks?”

  “A friend of my dad’s . . . It’s a long story. But they were featured in this pretty big design magazine. So, these days I’m in the studio making sporks.” She looked a little sheepish. “It started as this kind of comment about disposability and eco-devastation? But then people actually wanted the sporks as, I guess, ironic decorative objects. Which is . . .” Her eyes darted nervously down the hall, to the closed door of her messy room. “Ironic, I guess.” She blushed. “It’s always a little awkward to say the spork thing. I actually really believe in the project. I wish I knew a way to make it sound more professional and less twee.”

  “Or quirky,” Martin said.

  “Yeah.” She smiled at him. He tried to focus on the smile and not his own vexation. Sporks. She made them in a studio she paid for with her trust fund. Her father’s rich friends bought them, displayed them. He counted his breaths again.

  “I showed a few to my grandmother and she thought they looked like human bones. At least that’s less quirky, right?” And Caroline laughed, a small sound. Her gaze kept flitting to the messy room, as if she was afraid he would march down the hall in a class-warfare rage, rip open the door, and reveal the true extent of her disarray.

  The thing was, Caroline had all the right to make and sell eco-devastation-fighting sporks. If she didn’t need to work in some more traditional way, why should he expect her to do so? Anyway, it wasn’t his job to cogitate on this crap. He said, “I’ll look at the door now.” That was his job.

  He went past Caroline, to the glass terrace door, which was, indeed, jammed. Martin examined it closely although he longed to just gape at the view from up here, an expanse of water towers and spires and roof decks and sky. The sun behind a thin streak of clouds. Something was wedged in the door’s upper track, or maybe in the roller. He worked the door back and forth carefully, not wanting to damage any part of the terrace. Whatever crud was jammed in was still not revealing itself.

  The wind rose. A flock of birds on the breeze. Once he had seen a hawk land on that water tower over there and his heart had stopped—not in a translucent-chest heart-attack way, but in a way that had to do with wonder. A couple dozen buildings away was Central Park. The owl was there somewhere, probably thanks to eco-devastation. Those birds of prey had learned to make the city and its rats work for them. You could sit out here and see all sorts of birds riding thermals of warm air, rising on their own invisible elevators.

  Back to work, Martin! You can fix this terrace door in three easy steps.

  The Lily voice again.

  If you can fix a jammed door the door is yours, that is how it would be in a real utopia, in a real utopia the super wouldn’t exploit the voice of the dead to think the thoughts that he can’t let himself think on his own because his own voice is too quiet, too soft, too accommodating, he’s so good-natured they all think, not knowing that he’s only that way because if he acted out, if he shouted at Caroline over her little sporks, it would only confirm what they hoped was most true in him, he was a beast, he deserved his position in this world, he deserved to be exploited, I mean, that temper they would say, no wonder he’s living down there, he deserves it, troll under the towering bridge, so best behavior, Martin, best behavior.

  He turned back to the door and very carefully lifted it. A stone, round and flat and smooth, the culprit of the jammed door. He kicked it out of the lower track, bent down, and picked it up. Caroline was on the couch in the living room, crouched over her laptop, a cup of coffee in her hand. She was typing furiously. When he showed her the stone she said, “Oh, wow. Thank you, Martin. I really appreciate it.” The words rushed.

  “No problem,” he said.

  “That’s all I need here. You can go.” Her blush had vanished. This was more familiar: The supercilious command. The sense that he was in the way.

  “Cool,” Martin said. “I’ll get out of your hair now.”

  He must have sounded surlier than he’d intended, because Caroline said, “I hope I didn’t mess up your schedule with this. I’m sorry I didn’t leave a message like I was supposed to.”

  “It’s okay.” Martin should say a nice thing now, so she’d stop wincing like he was mad at her. “I appreciate the strings you pulled for Ruby. It sounds like a cool opportunity. The museum.”

  “It’s better than cool.” Caroline put her laptop aside, her eyes widening again. “From what I’ve heard, it’s just this incredible behind-the-scenes experience. My friend Annabel did it and she got to retouch this habitat diorama with, like, a flamingo on the horizon. She helped build crates for dinosaur fossils. She loved it. It’s an amazing internship.”

  “An internship?” The stone in his hand felt warm. “You mean a job.”

  “Internships are jobs, Martin.” Her hands fluttered up like doves. A gesture of exasperation, of impatience, but if he focused on the dove image, not so bad, so yeah, he must do that, he must focus on the dove image and not on Lily’s voice, which said, Martin lifts the stone and throws it right at—

  “Does this internship pay?” Martin asked, holding the stone, but not not not throwing the stone.

  “I don’t think so. But the point is, it’ll help her get a better-paying job down the line.” She lifted her cup of coffee and took a long sip and here was Lily: Delicious organic coffee beans, harvested from sustainably robbed workers.

  “An internship,” Martin said.

  “Well, but you know the value of an internship like this one, Martin. Of course, there are problematic aspects. But that’s true of everything. You know an internship is a great opportunity.”

  “I’m not stupid, Caroline. I know those internships, even the ones that pay, pay . . .” He almost said pay shit, but he paused. Breathed in. Breathed out. “They pay almost nothing.”

  “Yeah, but some internships turn into paying jobs in hardly any time at all.”

  “She thinks it’s a job, you told her it was a job.”

  “It is a job.”

  He thought of Ruby, and the intruder this morning, and once again the stone felt so warm in his hand. He held the stone out to Caroline. He said, “Here. This belongs to you.”

  Caroline squinted like he had spoken in a language she didn’t know.

  “It was in your apartment,” he said. “It belongs to you.” Martin realizes he needs to get rid of the stone in three easy steps, one, two, three! And Martin stepped forward. He envisioned himself dropping the stone into Caroline’s cup of coffee. No, no, he could never do such a thing. But then his fingers were uncurling and before he could grab it back, the stone was rolling, pulled by that demon gravity, and then the stone had dropped. It dropped into Caroline’s cup of coffee.

  The coffee sloshed out over the sides of the mug, droplets sliding onto Caroline’s lap, down the skirt of her dress. She jumped to her feet, like the liquid had scorched her. The mug fell to the floor and broke into many shards. Caroline looked like she might cry. But a second later she said, “My fault. Don’t worry about it. I’ll clean this up. You can leave, Martin.”

  He had vowed never to hit his child the way his own father had hit him. He had not struck Caroline. And Caroline was not his child. Yet still he felt like he had broken a vow. Everything had been controlled and full of mindfulness and full of thought and now, thoughtlessly, this. A stone dropped in a cup of coffee.

  “I’m sorry,” Martin said. “I’m so sorry. That was an accident. My fingers slipped.”

  Caroline was many things, but she was not a total idiot. She drew her shoulders inward. They both knew it was not an accident. Still, it was important to act like it was, important to pretend, so that nothing else shattered in this moment. �
��They called me butterfingers when I was a kid,” Martin said. “I always was dropping the ball.”

  The super grovels. The super lies.

  “I made this mug a long while ago,” Caroline said, looking at the shards. “With a celadon glaze.”

  “Can I at least help you clean up?”

  “I told you, don’t worry about it.” Now Caroline looked at him. Her voice reverberating like the singing bowl, she said, “You’ve done enough. Thanks for all your help.”

  AFTERNOON

  8 The Top of Theodore Roosevelt’s Head

  An internship.

  A free-MetroCard-college-credit-what-you’re-not-in-college-well-you-can-take-home-the-leftovers-after-certain-functions-and-fund-raising-events-you-will-share-your-desk-with-Francie-who-comes-in-M-W-F-and-leaves-specks-of-cottage-cheese-all-across-your-limited-supply-of-Post-its-on-good-days-the-specks-will-look-kiiinda-like-stars-on-bad-days-feminine-discharge-and-Francie-is-a-sophomore-in-school-college-university-yes-will-ask-you-what’s-your-major-every-week-and-even-if-this-doesn’t-turn-into-a-job-it’s-such-an-opportunity-looks-fantastic-on-a-résumé-even-while-your-sweaters-pill-and-molt-and-turn-to-dust-an-opportunity-did-we-mention-it’s-an internship.