by Lee Conell
She had thought of the man with the beard, the look in his eyes. Andy had captured how unwanted he felt. And if Andy looked right at her now, as she was leaving John’s apartment, what would he see? She hadn’t replied to his message.
* * *
—
But now here Andy was again, sitting on this brownstone stoop, calling out to her. Best not to read too much into his sudden reappearance. The city just operated this way sometimes; you could have a day fueled by coincidences that lined up wearing the mask of fate, trying to fool you into thinking there was some secret order to your life. People from your past might present themselves at any moment, even at your most despairing needful times, but it didn’t mean anything special. She would refuse to find anything special in this now—Andy, calling her name after a depressing nonjob interview. She kept her voice casual. She said hi back. She pointed to the brownstone behind him. “You live here?”
He looked over his shoulder as if he were surprised to see the structure still standing. “This is my mother’s place, technically,” he said. “Though probably not for much longer. She’s hoping to sell it.”
Ruby had passed his block many times, since it was near the park, the museum, and the subway. But until this moment, the brownstones that lined this particular street had never been more than a two-dimensional façade off which her thoughts bounced in the same way light bounced off closed windows, illuminating nothing inside. Growing up in the city meant that huge swaths of streets appeared mostly unreal to her, sets designed to enclose her childhood.
“What are you wearing?” Andy was staring at Ruby’s rayon/nylon/spandex knit professional skirt.
She tried to smile brightly. “It’s deliberately frump.”
Andy nodded as if this were the right answer. “Do you want to come in for a minute? It’s a little chilly out.”
“Then why are you sitting out here?”
“I’m scouting for subjects, but so far, no dice. Too bad. This cloudy weather’s perfect.”
“I should probably head home.”
“Where are you living now?”
“I moved back in with my parents. In the basement.”
“Don’t look so embarrassed.” Andy’s voice had turned soft, soothing. “I know quite a few talented people who have spent some time living in their parents’ basement.”
“My parents live in the basement, too.”
“Your parents live in your parents’ basement?”
“Yes,” Ruby said. “We all live in the basement together.”
Andy tilted his head.
“My dad’s the super,” she said.
“Oh, yes.” He nodded again, a little too quickly. “I think Caroline mentioned that to me once.”
Maybe he’d known what she meant all along and had just been teasing her. Flirting, even. She imagined sitting down and reading to him from Lily’s diorama book. She shrugged her tote bag up her shoulder again. “I really should go.”
“Wait,” Andy said. “Would you want to come inside for a drink?”
“It’s kind of early, isn’t it? Barely afternoon.”
“If it’s after anything, it can’t be that early.”
“I need to get home soon. To feed these fish.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s really true.”
“I can’t give you a very brief tour of my place? It’s a unique real estate experience. That’s what my mother says. Maybe you might even know some potential buyer? It’s prewar. Also, the basement is amazing.”
“Now you’re definitely making fun of me.”
“No, I swear. There’s something really amazing in the basement. I want you to see it. You, specifically, would appreciate it, I think.”
“That sounds kind of like a serial killer line.”
“I guess it does.” And Andy laughed in a way that seemed more self-conscious than serial killer–esque, which was encouraging. The door behind him was open partway and the piece of brownstone insides that Ruby could see pulsed with biotic darkness. Maybe the brownstone contained life forms she couldn’t imagine, stalactites hanging from prewar ceilings, stalagmites puncturing prewar floors. The inside of the building looked, from out here, like a new ecosystem. And once she was inside, maybe she could tell Andy about Lily’s cousin, just as Caroline had wanted. Maybe they could track her down, comb the neighborhood for her. Andy could take the woman’s picture and Ruby could interview her, get her story. They’d write it up in a compelling little paragraph or two, like the wall text accompanying a diorama. If the woman made her eyes sad enough, or interestingly defiant, maybe she would go viral and find a home. Ruby and Andy would be do-gooders, equalizing the city’s injustices, humble heroes who were also, obviously, artists. Andy, grateful to her, would encourage Ruby in her future artistic pursuits, but not in the patronizing way John did. He would put her in touch with the gallery by the scare-quote bacon shop and Ruby’s own creations would be gazed at by everyone, people like Lily’s cousin wandering in off the street, people in silken lavender blazers, her father, her mother, Caroline. The whole of the city, maybe.
“Okay,” Ruby said. “Give me the tour.”
Andy smiled, stood up, and put his hand on the small of her back, guiding her inside. They walked into an entry hall that had nothing in it besides a coat hanging on a hook. The amount of open space startled her. In the apartment Ruby now shared with her parents, they were always fighting for an inch of room: on their couch, in their closets, in the kitchen. The space around their front door was filled with shoes and a bucket of umbrellas and coats piled up on a few straining hooks. The emptiness of Andy’s entrance hall felt, by contrast, like some cool quiet chapel.
Her phone buzzed in her bag. She didn’t touch it. “You live here alone?” she asked.
“Now I do. That’s why there’s not much by way of furniture. Especially on the first floor.”
The next room in the brownstone was large and contained only two objects. The first was a lamp with a white electric cord stretched taut over the hardwood floor, toward an outlet. The second was a shopping cart.
“That cart’s from Irene.” Andy stepped up to the cart, grabbed its handle, and rolled it back and forth until one of the wheels squeaked. “She kept all her belongings in here. After I sold the photograph I made of her, I gave her some of my proceeds. So she gave me her cart. She said with the money I’d provided, she wouldn’t need her cart anymore.”
“That’s amazing.”
“It was a little optimistic of her. It was only a few hundred bucks. But, you know, I guess she had the right attitude.” He shrugged. “Her story never quite blew up the way Mr. Jay’s did. Not sure where she’s at these days.”
Ruby walked over to the cart. Her phone buzzed again. “You can put your tote down,” said Andy, “if you want. And maybe check your phone? It’s distracting. Sounds like an animal trapped in the walls.”
She looked at her phone. Missed calls from her father, probably telling her he’d heard about the interview. A text from her mother, reminding her that she was so, so proud. The knot in Ruby’s stomach tightened until it felt less like a knot and more like a barb, something hooked. She turned off the phone, placed it in her bag, and then put both her coat and bag inside Irene’s cart. “Nowhere else to leave them,” she said, trying to cant her head playfully. “Do you not even have a coffee table?”
“There’s a little bit of furniture in my old room but only the bare essentials. Everything else is with my mother and her new husband. Upstate.”
“So why aren’t you upstate with your belongings? Or in some apartment here with your belongings? Why are you living in an empty house?”
“I don’t need all that stuff. It’s distracting. Clutters the visual part of my mind. And I might as well use this space if no one else is, right? Rent-free until it’s sold.”
> “How much would this rent for?”
“A lot of cups of coffee.” Andy smiled.
Ruby felt relieved by that smile. There was a kind of candor in it, this admission by Andy: he was rich. Maybe this honesty came from being a native of the city, from growing up knowing his role in the place. John, as a transplant receiving financial help from his family, was extra self-conscious about his function as a relative newcomer to New York, and about New York’s meaning to him. The city, for John, was still partway a symbol. It had sometimes been exhausting for Ruby to find herself a native of a place that was a symbol to her boyfriend. She wouldn’t have that problem with Andy should she decide to start something with him. She would have other problems with Andy, and maybe those problems would be more interesting ones. Imagine if they walked into Caroline’s party together tonight, laughing in near-unison, with their heads close, and imagine if John saw them? She didn’t want to hurt John, but after they broke up, he kept asking—in this irritating overly concerned way, in the way he probably talked to the first-generation college applicants at Hover Up—if she would be okay. Will you be okay, Ruby, no, really, I need to know, will you be okay?
Walking into the party with Andy would be an extravagant display of okayness.
Andy guided her toward another door, opened it. An empty room much like the one she’d just stood inside. The only difference was there was no shopping cart. Instead there was a rainbow tangle of wires sticking out of the white wall.
“My parents slept here,” he said.
What had happened to the wall? She tried to envision a bunch of wires crawling out of the wall of her own childhood home, like veins ripped free from skin. No wonder Andy wanted to sit outside on the brownstone’s steps. She felt a sharp pang in her stomach, and realized a moment later that the pang was not one of hunger but of sympathy. Although Andy wasn’t paying rent, it could not be easy dwelling inside the vacancy of the house where he grew up. Maybe that was why a flask sat squat and serene on this room’s windowsill.
When Andy saw what Ruby was looking at, he walked toward the window, and handed the flask to her like he was presenting her with a trophy. It contained some kind of whiskey that smelled more like iodine. “Mr. Calvin gave me that flask,” Andy said.
“Another one of your subjects?”
“Used to hang out on the church steps at Seventy-First. He decided he’d stop drinking one day. Don’t worry. It’s clean.”
She drank, despite her earlier protest about the time of day. Andy stood close.
“I heard about you and John,” he said. “You know, I’ve talked to his new girlfriend some. We were actually in some of the same classes at school. She’s not as smart as you. She’s in public health.”
“New girlfriend? Already?” She took another gulp from the flask.
“I thought Caroline would have mentioned it.”
“No. She probably thought she was protecting me.”
“That sounds like Caroline.”
“A new girlfriend in public health.” Ruby said the words slowly, experimentally. “I don’t even understand what public health is, really.”
“Well,” Andy said, “don’t worry about her.”
“It’s okay.”
“My whole grand point was just that John’s an idiot.”
She turned her face so Andy would not see how grateful she was for those words. “At least he’s trying to do good in the world,” she said, hoping that by defending John a little, she herself might seem less wounded.
“He’s doing good in the world for now, sure,” Andy said. “But do you know how many guys I know who work in nonprofits for a few years, then realize they won’t inherit their family’s money for a long while, and hop right into tech? Or finance? Or fintech?”
“How many guys?”
“So many guys,” Andy said. “But not me. Never me. For better or worse, I’m committed to my own stuff.”
Ruby sipped from the flask again. “I believe you,” she said, and found she meant it. She handed the flask back to Andy.
“Did you ever get a chance to see some of my photos?” Andy asked. “At the gallery? I gave you the address at Caroline’s party that time, right?”
“I saw them.”
Andy drank. “And?”
“And I think you have a good sense of composition.”
“Thanks, Ruby.”
“Sure.”
“That actually means a lot. Because I’m actually very concerned with meaningful arrangements of space.” He turned the flask around in his hand. “You think they’re exploitative, don’t you?”
“What?”
“I can tell that you think they’re exploitative. Caroline doesn’t, you know. It’s a question I’ve batted around with her because it’s a big concern of mine. She finds them, ultimately, honest.”
“I guess they could be honestly exploitative.”
“Is that a joke?”
She wasn’t sure. But she hadn’t meant to say anything cruel. She drifted toward the window facing away from the sidewalk. Here she could better see the backsides of a row of brownstones the next street over. Each had its own little quadrangle of garden space, some with wooden benches and wire chairs and clogged birdbaths black with city rainwater. “Are there any birds that you see out here?” she asked Andy.
“I only see pigeons out there.”
“Some really rare birds come through around Central Park. Like, birds that make people’s life lists. My father’s always telling me about some blue-eyed warbler-thrush thing that’s been spotted in the Ramble.” She took the flask back from him and swigged. “So what’s incredibly amazing about your basement?”
“I’ll show you now. Okay?”
Andy’s eyes had become the same wet dark color as the water in the clogged birdbaths.
A feeling like excitement flowered in Ruby’s solar plexus, petaled her ribs and thighs. Nobody had watched her in that unclog-me way in a long while. Andy really wasn’t bad-looking. And he wasn’t so much shorter than John.
“Okay,” Ruby said. “Let’s see this basement.”
They walked together down a black steel spiral staircase, a palimpsest of white shoe scuffs, marks of the movers coming and going, shifting big boxes on their shoulders. At a certain point Andy must have picked up a camera, because he was wearing it now around his neck, like a tourist in his own home.
When they reached the bottom of the stairs to the basement, he pushed open a large door and pulled a string. A bulb turned on, swinging back and forth, a bell ringing weak peals of light across the room. Old pipes ran above their heads, crisscrossing in places. Parts of the wall were peeling, and right beside the stairs sat a box of black garbage bags. Cool air and a metallic tang from the pipes filled her nose. Ruby smoothed down the professional skirt yet again. Her tights had bunched up a little around the ankles. Something about the tiny ripples in the fabric caused a small starburst of panic inside her chest, a feeling that made the excitement from moments earlier start to recede. What was she doing down here, in this strange basement, with someone she didn’t really know? Her phone and bag were upstairs. If she called out, nobody would hear her.
But she was being ridiculous. Andy was Caroline’s friend, was fine, wouldn’t hurt her. They had plenty of shared acquaintances. She was just having a kind of capital-E Experience, the kind she could tell an elaborately zany story about at the party later on. She was in a weird brownstone! With a weird boy! Who was probably richer and definitely more artistic than John—things John would pretend didn’t bother him, but which definitely would bother him. John would be jealous.
Plus—it was interesting in here. The basement in the brownstone wasn’t empty like the rest of the place. Stacks of cardboard boxes were everywhere. Some of them were duct-taped shut, but the majority were open and overflowing with old papers and yellowing photo
albums and even skinny doll arms and doll legs sticking up at funny angles, as if a whole shipload of Barbies were drowning in a scrap-paper sea. Some of the boxes were labeled in scrawls of Sharpie. Helen’s, said one, 5-7 gr. said another. Photos (Dakota), Photos (Andy), Photos (H.). Most of the boxes said nothing.
“The movers haven’t taken care of the basement yet.” Andy gestured to the boxes. “My mother isn’t sure if she wants to keep all these scraps. She’s still determining her true feelings about nostalgia.”
“Does it make you feel nervous?” Ruby asked. “Having all these mementos sort of fermenting beneath your feet?”
“Not really.”
“I feel kind of off just being in my childhood room again.”
“It’s just stuff.” Andy was now looking at a great hulking mass, enshrouded in bubble wrap, sitting on top of a pile of cardboard. “Can you guess what that thing wrapped in plastic is, Ruby?”
“Nope.”
“That is the bubble-wrapped head of a black rhinoceros.” Andy beamed. “That’s the surprise.”
A rhinoceros.
“My great-grandfather shot it a long time ago and left it to my grandfather. Who left it to me. Do you know there’s only about thirty of this particular type of rhino left in the world now? Maybe fewer. They’re going to be extinct one day soon. They might be extinct already.”
The bubble wrap seemed like it might start to move with the rhino’s breath. Ruby’s own breath changed the drift of dust motes down here. This basement wasn’t a set piece, wasn’t a diorama. It was a wrecked museum.
Andy tugged at the strap of the camera around his neck and asked, “Will you put the head on?”
“What?”
“I want to take your picture. Will you wear the rhino head?”
“Um.”
Andy must have taken that as a yes. He began to slowly unwrap the bubble wrap. The rhino’s glaucous, glassy eyes reflected the slightly swaying light bulb. Its nostrils were bigger than its eyes, and somehow more real.