The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  Ruby did not get the job at the Museum of Natural History because there was no job at the Museum of Natural History. Assisting in diorama maintenance and research, Caroline had told her. When, in the middle of her interview, Ruby found out what she was actually dealing with, she admitted she didn’t have the financial means to take a nonpaying position right now. The man interviewing her, very young and sweetly round faced, looked distressed. Ruby had to reassure him for almost half an hour that it was nothing that the museum had done wrong. She loved dioramas, she said, yes, more than almost anything, for reasons slightly beyond her own comprehension, to be perfectly honest, and she wanted dearly to step inside one, but she just couldn’t take a nine-to-five without pay, and no, of course, the MetroCard was a great benefit, just not enough for where she was at this time in her life. No, she wasn’t interested in the paid summer internship for college students. No, she didn’t need college credit. She had her degree. Nobody to blame, nope. Just a miscommunication. Understandable. These things happen.

  She exited the museum’s administrative offices.

  In front of the entrance to the Museum of Natural History stood an equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s chin jutted out and he gazed forward, surveying the perimeter of Central Park as if scrutinizing a vast unknown. His horse, on the other hand, seemed to be panting in a way that was less than dignified, bronze nostrils flaring, oxidizing horsey eyeball bulging out, equine stare directed not just downward, but straight at Ruby. Ruby tried to admire the horse—the physics of equestrian statues were tricky (she remembered from a class at school), requiring feats of balance and weight support. Roosevelt and his horse were flanked by a statue of a Native American man and a statue of an African man; both of these men were on foot, mere accompaniments to the rugged melodies suggested by the horse-mounted Roosevelt who loomed above them, seemingly leading them onward.

  The top of Roosevelt’s head was covered in thin spikes to keep pigeons from landing on it. Some buildings in the neighborhood had done the same thing: placed spikes near entranceways to keep people from sleeping there. Would her father ever be asked to install spikes like those? Would he do it?

  Of course he would do it.

  Her mother called. “Babe,” she said, “how did it go? Look, I can’t talk long, because I’m on the bus, and there’s traffic, and did you know there’s a rule now on Greyhound against talking for a long time on your cell phone? How did it go?”

  “Mom, you can text me if you can’t talk.”

  “I hate text. I need an actual voice. How did it go?”

  “What?”

  “The interview, Ruby.”

  “Oh, it was okay.”

  “Something went wrong. I can hear it. See, this is why I need to call. Even though the woman across from me is narrowing her eyes—yeah, I see you, lady, it’s my daughter on the other line. My only kid. Okay? Can you—”

  “Mom. I’m fine. Let’s talk later.”

  “Well, sure, if you really don’t want to talk.”

  Her tote bag was slipping off her shoulder, heavy with the weight of Lily’s book on dioramas. She shrugged it back up her arm. She said, “It was an internship.”

  “An internship?”

  “Not even an hourly wage. They said maybe after a few months it might turn into a job, but I can’t wait that long.”

  “Oh, sweetie. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. It was just a misunderstanding.” A few steps below her, a child hurled an entire pretzel to the ground. Ruby’s stomach grumbled. A fleet of pigeons descended on the food. “I haven’t told Dad yet.”

  “Well, he’ll understand.”

  “I don’t know. He already seemed kind of miserable today.”

  “It’s those birds. Do you know if he finally got that nest out?”

  Ruby glanced at the spikes on Roosevelt’s head. “Yeah,” she said. She sat down on the steps heavily. “He got it.”

  “Oh, thank god. He was really dragging his feet. I love your father, but he has a habit of projecting emotions on creatures who can’t speak.”

  “You mean animals,” Ruby said.

  “Well, I don’t want to make him sound like a child.”

  “Just say animals.”

  “Fine. Animals. So, if Dad’s sulking, too, that means you’ll need to cheer each other up. You guys should do something nice tonight. Go out to eat. Can you get him out of the neighborhood after work? Sometimes when he gets miserable like that, the only thing to do is show him the world is bigger than the building.”

  “It’s a big world,” Ruby said, scrunching her knees up to her chest to make herself smaller as a group of schoolchildren trotted up the steps.

  “And listen, you’ve got a whole afternoon ahead of you. You can use the time to apply to jobs, right? Or even to go to a résumé workshop at one of the libraries. There’s kids your age that go to those now all the time, Em’s told me. And you know, there’s a couple new coffee shops in the neighborhood that are probably hiring. Not coffee shops I’d go to, of course. If it costs more than two dollars, I say—”

  “I should have known it was an internship. I never look into things hard enough. I always romanticize. Like with the woman this morning. I wanted to let her in. I wanted to take care of her, so bad. I got into a whole thing with Dad about it.”

  “Let’s not confuse the issues, sweetie. Right now we’re just talking about you getting a job.”

  “I just feel really stupid, Mom.”

  “Ruby, no. You’re a smart girl. Woman. You know that. I’m so, so proud of you. Listen, shut up, give me one second.”

  “What?”

  “Not you, honey.”

  “Mom, if you need to get off the phone—”

  “I should, I guess. Your dad should meditate on Greyhound. The buses are silent places now, apparently. Don’t want an uprising. But if you need to call, then call, okay? Listen, lady, yes, I’m about to hang up. Right. On my flesh and blood.”

  Ruby ended the call. She wished her mother hadn’t said she was so, so proud. The extra so felt like a spike in her side, too vehement to be believable. She put her face in her hands. A woman descending the stairs said, “I thought the whale would just be, I guess, bigger?”

  “Bluer,” said the man by her side. “At least bluer.”

  “It was more, what’s the word, mottled?”

  “Well, that’s not the whale’s fault, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  Ruby needed to get off these steps. She should go home, apply for more jobs. But she couldn’t move. She sat on the steps and watched the crowd for a while, her tote bag on her lap, the contours of Lily’s diorama book visible through the cloth. Then she looked at her phone. Nadia had sent her a picture of a caribou. Something about this image inspired her to scroll through a whole series of the photos she had of herself and John, smiling in front of city park trees so gnarled the trunks seemed to be frowning. She took her time examining each photo for signs of discord. Then she took her time deleting the photos, one by one.

  “Basically the museum started because a bunch of one-percenters had too many hunting rifles.” Ruby’s head shot up. Lily? No, just a woman around Ruby’s age, sheathed in ripped black fabric. Lily wouldn’t say one-percenter anyway. Bourgeois swine is what Lily would say right now. No, that wasn’t right either. Lily, if Lily were here, would grab Ruby’s head and pull it close to hers and say something like, Ruby, get it together. My parents were not sweeties like yours, you lucky duck, my parents were emotionally abusive and yet even still, I learned to keep my head held high. Life will shit on you. The asshole of life is designed to shit on you, Ruby. This is called nature. This is called biomechanics. What you must do when you face biomechanics? Is you must not keep your head down, because you cannot dodge the shit. You must keep your head high, see the shit coming, accept the shit,
and help others get past the shit. Do you understand?

  Ruby stood up and headed in the direction of home, down Central Park West.

  Her father always told her he was glad they didn’t live on Central Park West, because the supers there had to deal not only with extra-entitled celebrities, but also huge rodent problems. “There are ancient rodent tunnels leading from the park into those buildings,” he liked to say, his eyebrows high.

  Ruby did not notice any rats now. But she did notice that many of the buildings were in the throes of reconstruction. Rusticated limestone bases, terra-cotta trim, stone-hewn cherubs, rams’ heads, and rosettes were covered in a protective mesh, through which scaffolding appeared in glimpses. The mesh turned the buildings into hulking phantoms. She went west, so that she was walking across a street between Central Park West and Columbus instead. No mesh here. This block was lined with prewar brownstones.

  Halfway down the block, a guy sitting on the steps of one of the brownstones called out to her.

  It was Caroline’s friend Andy. She walked closer. The same Andy that Caroline had wanted to call about Lily’s cousin, the Andy with whom Caroline wanted so badly to collaborate. He wore a camera around his neck. The collar of the shirt under his gray cardigan was half down, half up, which gave him the sartorial look of a friendly dog unable to coordinate the orientation of its ears.

  * * *

  —

  Ruby had met Andy once before, at one of Caroline’s parties, while lingering by a table crowded with cheese and wine. She was waiting for John, who was downstairs on a call with one of the boys he mentored who was anxious about an application deadline. She was drunk, and frank with herself about her own observations: Andy was much skinnier than John, she noticed, his chin rounder, his voice reedier. He told Ruby he was a full-time photographer, which she thought might mean he had a trust fund. But she must keep an open mind. How did Ruby know Caroline, he asked, and Ruby told him they’d grown up together. Tentatively, thinking about Caroline’s grandmother and her tight grip on Ruby’s wrist, she’d added, “Caroline is my oldest friend.”

  “So you’re a native of the city, too. Like me.” Andy’s mouth was waxy wet with cheese. “Almost everyone else here tonight is a transplant.” He gave a mock-theatrical sigh, and Ruby laughed, though she felt a tinge of guilt—John was a transplant. She hoped Andy wouldn’t ask her to go into detail about her background. She had just talked for a long time to a woman who described her job to Ruby as writing features on restaurants that sourced from local farms. When the woman found out Ruby’s dad was a super, she had begun railing at her about how her building’s super sucked. “He never fixes things,” the feature-writing woman had said. “He’s the worst. And he barely speaks English, I mean that not in a racist way, just if something is wrong he doesn’t even understand what I’m asking. It’s so frustrating.”

  Thankfully, Andy didn’t ask about Ruby’s parents. Instead he asked, “Are you an artist like Caroline?”

  She wasn’t sure how to answer, so she told him she’d taken a lot of art history classes when she was still in school, written papers on narrative stillness in the visual sphere. “I’ve always been really interested in the diorama form,” she said.

  “Interested?” In Andy’s half question, half echo, she heard how clinical her own statement must have sounded. Trying to overcompensate for that detachment, she’d actually seized both of Andy’s own thin arms and, in a moment of wine-fueled earnestness that might (she thought later) have been read as a come-on, said to him, “I don’t want to just make things for people to see. I want to change the way people see things.”

  At the time, Andy had hardly seemed to notice the arm grab. He kept his face very blank, so blank she could tell he wanted her to see the effort it was taking him to be neutral, to not roll his eyes. “You want to change the way people see things,” he said. “That’s awfully ambitious. Are you sure you’re not a transplant?”

  She dropped his arms and poured herself another glass of wine. “What do you photograph?” she asked.

  “I take photographs of people on the fringes. Homeless people and old people and drug addicts.”

  Ruby reached for more cheese.

  “Not exactly trendy subjects, fringe people,” he continued, while Ruby chewed. “Not exactly the kind of stuff you can buy for a trillion dollars and hang up in a bank. But I feel called to the work and I’m grateful there’s been some response. Can I get your number?”

  “My number?”

  “I’ll text you the address of a gallery where a few of my works are being shown.”

  She swallowed the cheese and gave him her number. Andy said, “It’s getting hot in here. Shall we step outside?”

  “Shall we!” Ruby said.

  “I definitely don’t speak with an English accent,” Andy said, “or whatever accent you’re trying to do.” But he was smiling at her. They walked out together onto the terrace. The city spread out before them there, like a carpet woven with a wild design of soft window glow and bright streetlights and moving headlights.

  Andy said, “Have you noticed when the wind picks up like that, and howls like that, it sounds like all the female opera singers in this city have climbed to the rooftops and are belting out arias?”

  This kind of lyrically charged statement was how certain people at Caroline’s party made small talk. Usually, Ruby ignored these people. But Andy was looking at Ruby eagerly, so she said, “That’s extremely poetic.” She thought the wind sound was more internal, like a head-howl, the harmonics of an interior monologue. She looked down, shuffled a small rock around with her feet. They started a little game, blessedly free of lyricism. She kicked the rock toward Andy, he kicked it back. Then she kicked the rock at a funny angle and it hit the terrace door, which was opening. John was opening the terrace door.

  He nodded at Andy when he stepped out, then put his hand on the small of Ruby’s back, so that when she turned, she was eye level with his jawline. He looked especially superhero-ish next to Andy, who said, in a too-loud voice, “Howdy, John.”

  “Hi, Andy, hi. Great to see you again. There are some friends inside I want you to meet, Ruby. They’re good people.”

  “That’s code for they’re important, serious people John thinks I should network with so I can stop working at a coffee shop,” Ruby told Andy, who laughed and said, “Enjoy that rat race.”

  “It’s not like I’m part of some corporate tech giant,” John said. “I work for a nonprofit.”

  “Ah,” said Andy. “Enjoy that noble rat race.”

  “Why did you try to make me look like an asshole out there with that networking stuff?” John asked when they were back inside. “Why am I a jerk for wanting to help you?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just a little tipsy. Let’s go meet your friends.”

  “Your teeth,” John said. “They’re purple.”

  “I don’t care.” And she really didn’t. Ruby met the serious people, smiling.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, after work, she had gone to the gallery, only a few blocks away from Mellow Macchiato, to see Andy’s photographs. The street had been mostly swept clean of actual three-dimensional homeless people, and now there was a bank, a shoe store, and a shop selling vegan cupcakes that tasted like cured meats. A sign outside the shop said, Try our new “bacon” flavor!

  Quotation marks in a food name made Ruby nervous. Still, she peered in and saw what looked like Billy the Exterminator pointing to a number of cupcakes in the display window. An exterminator in a vegan cupcake shop. She must have the wrong guy. She walked on.

  The gallery, to her surprise, was one Ruby had actually heard of, a place known for its roster of emerging artists. She had passed by before, though she had never gone inside. Museums felt easy to wander around in, but galleries had always made her a little nervous. There was a woman about
Ruby’s age inside the gallery, too pretty to look at directly, and a man wearing a purple blazer so gloriously silken Ruby guessed it would be called not purple but lavender, and another man whose round face seemed to burst over his turtleneck like an overripe peach. Nobody spoke. Ruby was a little disappointed—and disappointed in her own disappointment—to find that Andy’s photographs were, in their way, beautiful. The shopping carts full of garbage bags were always moving in or out of the frame in his photographs, the backgrounds were out of focus in a good way, and the lumpy faces and bodies of his “fringe people” were nicely composed. Some of the photographs were very grainy, as though taken with a camera phone and blown up, which lent a no-fucks-given artfulness to the portraits.

  Later, she looked Andy up online. He occasionally posted pictures with paragraph-long stories of the people he met, stories about their desperation, the things they’d lost, the past sky-high dreams they’d had for their present falling-down selves. Hopping from one link to the next, she discovered that one man, with a big beard and darkened eyes and a sad story about his regrets, his guilt, his abusive father, and his lost son—this man had hit a nerve with people. Donations had poured in. The man Andy had photographed was invited to a daytime talk show during which he’d cried and become exponentially more famous. He was given a house. In an interview about this man and his own work, Andy said, “I believe my images tell stories that make viewers see the humanity all around us, even in the places where that humanity seems most absent.”

  After Ruby and John broke up, Andy sent her a message while she was packing her clothes into old grocery bags. Caroline must have told him the news. How are you?? This is Andy from Caroline’s party in case you forgot. It has been a while huh Ruby.