The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  The basic physics and logistics of wearing the head were unclear to Ruby.

  What was it like to own something your great-grandfather had killed, to be able to hold the skin of a beast and point to it as physical evidence of an ancestor’s human life? She didn’t even know in what sorts of ways her own ancestors had fled their own deaths. “They got out of Dodge!” was all her mother would say, Dodge presumably being the most official name she had for whatever vaguely Eastern European place they had left behind.

  Andy finished unwrapping the head. “Okay! You ready?”

  “How exactly am I supposed to wear that?”

  “So, technically, you won’t wear the head. You’ll lie down and I’ll place the head on your chest in such a way that your actual head will be concealed.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s like a magic trick. The camera creates the illusion.”

  “You’ve done this before.”

  “With my sister, once or twice. Just goofing around.”

  “Why didn’t you take her picture?”

  “I did, but I want to take yours.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She must not sound desperate. “How much?”

  The number he told her made her gasp audibly. It would cover her credit card bill for this month, and even some of her student loan payment. Andy smiled again, the same a-lot-of-cups-of-coffee smile. “You’re worth it,” he said. “Your body’s expressive, you’re fairly tall, you’ve got a long torso, proportionally speaking, and your features are symmetrical enough.”

  “That’s all I’ve ever aimed for in life.” She tried to smile back. “Symmetrical enough.”

  “My point is you could definitely model, like, in this cool unexpected way.”

  Which was definitely another line. Or an insult. Or both. How often it wound up feeling like both.

  “Actually,” Andy went on, “thinking about it as modeling is probably the wrong approach. It’s not like you have to be my subject. This could sort of be like an artist collaboration. I mean, if you’re interested. I won’t demand you put your name on anything.”

  A collaboration with Andy. The very thing Caroline had spoken of so longingly this morning.

  “Well?” Andy said.

  Ruby pointed to the rhino head. “Don’t you feel bad?”

  “About what?”

  “About your grandfather shooting one of the last black rhinos.”

  “My great-grandfather. Anyway, it wasn’t one of the last black rhinos when that my great-grandfather shot it. That was a long time ago. We can’t retroactively assign guilt, you know?”

  She stayed silent.

  “But if you want,” he said, “we could frame the piece as a kind of statement. Like an awareness piece. Like we treat these rhinos as aesthetic objects in the same way we treat women as aesthetic objects?” Andy scratched the tip of his nose. “I think that could actually be extremely powerful.” He removed the lens cap on the camera around his neck. “The head isn’t too weighty. I promise.”

  Maybe being that close to the rhino head would kind of be like existing inside a diorama for a few minutes. It would be weird. And she remembered that she liked weird. “Okay.”

  His cheeks rosy now, boyish. “Okay?”

  “Yes. Fine. I’ll pose for you with the rhino head.”

  And Ruby lay down, carefully as she could so that her skirt didn’t ride up. The floor was even colder than she’d guessed. Andy lifted the head and she closed her eyes as he lowered it on top of her. The rhino head was heavy on her chest, and dusty. She fought back a sneeze.

  “You look really great,” Andy said, and Ruby wished she could see his face, but the rhino head was blocking her view of him. “Amazing, really.” A sloshing sound. He was drinking again from the flask. “Ruby? This series will be a stunner.”

  “Okay.”

  “What I need you to do now is let your arms go limp. Pretend like you’re very weak. It’s just that it’ll be a better photo if you let your arms go limp.”

  She let her arms go limp.

  “Great,” he said. “Great, great, great.”

  It took him a long time to adjust the lens and to figure out a way to, as he put it, “make peace with the light.” After a while Ruby could hardly stand the silence or the shifting. “What do you know about rhinos?” she asked.

  “What?”

  Probably the bulk of the rhino head had muffled her voice. She said again, louder, “What do you know about rhinos?”

  “I know my great-grandfather shot one.”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t really know anything else.”

  “Not even from the Museum of Natural History? There’s a black rhinoceros diorama there.”

  “I never went to that museum much, except on school trips. And then we just looked at dinosaurs.” The camera started clicking. “My mother has a fear of germs, and my father has a fear of crowds. I hate him.”

  “Your father?”

  “Not to be, like, a Freudian cliché. My grandfather I loved, though.” Click. Click. Click. “That’s why the head is still here. He gave it to me.”

  “You seriously never saw it?”

  “Saw what?”

  “The rhino diorama. There’s three rhinos in it. A baby one and parents. It’s beautiful.”

  “I never really saw the draw of the museum, honestly. It’s a little phony? This whole concept of sanctimonious scientist-hunters. Conservation via killing. You’re still looking great, by the way, Ruby. Yeah. Keep your legs like that. Maybe turn the right ankle out a little? Yes.”

  She heard him swallow wetly and screw the flask shut again. The two sounds in concert created a new streak of fear inside her, sharper than the one she’d felt when she first stepped into his basement. Had her skirt inched up when she moved her ankle out the way he asked? She felt a little paralyzed, beneath the head. When she took a deep breath, the rhino head seemed to grow heavier.

  Unlike Andy, she had visited the black rhinoceros diorama many times. At first she had mostly paid attention to the rhinos themselves, the hulk of them, the way the baby rhino in the display stood slightly off to the side. But as she got older, she became more interested in the tiny birds perched on the rhinos’ backs. The red-billed tick bird, the sign next to the rhinos said. The birds liked to eat the little bugs that burrowed in a rhino’s skin. The birds had seemed kind of phony at the time, an afterthought of realism. But now, under the rhino head, Ruby found herself anticipating the whir of wings. Birds must have balanced on this very rhino head many years before, talons digging in to maintain their equilibrium. Perhaps whole flocks of red-billed tick birds lived on this rhino and fed on this rhino and shat on this rhino and mated on this rhino and scattered into the blaze of sky when they heard the shot, one day, from Andy’s great-grandfather’s gun.

  “You’re twitching a little,” Andy said. “Stay still. The light is dim here, so the exposure has to be long.”

  If she moved, she would come out a shadow, a ghost, a blur in every shot.

  “Think about something calming, Ruby, okay?”

  She thought about this rhino growing up in what the museum called, in the informational wall text, dry bush and thorn country. In this imaginary thorn country, she heard the shot of a gun.

  “Ruby. You just twitched again. Stay still. Or is that asking too much of you?”

  What informational text would she write about Lily’s cousin, if she and Andy found her? Would she write about Lily? Waves of warmth began to spread to her splayed legs and arms. Her right foot was asleep and she knew soon it would become tingly. The anticipation of the limb waking up was almost too much to bear.

  “Look,” said Andy, “these are all going to be unusable if you keep moving around like that
.”

  “I’m trying to stay still.”

  “I’m paying you to stay still,” he said, and something about that sentence seemed to wake a new life in him. His breathing shifted to a different, more jagged rhythm. He had another drink from the flask. She listened for him to say something else, but he didn’t. Instead he walked forward and knelt down next to her so that she could see his face again. The part of his collar that was sticking up no longer looked endearingly cockeyed but like some growth that had broken out of his neck, a tumor with the texture of a cardigan. His eyebrows were very straight and his mouth, too, held itself in a firm straight line. He took hold of her wrist.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m just going to try to rearrange you a little, so you’re more comfortable, so you don’t twitch. Okay? Just don’t move. It’s good for the photo.” He held her other wrist down against the floor, reaching awkwardly around the rhino head on her chest, so that his arm pushed against her chin. The sun cleared a cloud for a minute and light shone through the small basement window, waving back and forth on the wall, like hello hello hellooo. Andy’s whiskey breath wafted over the rhino head. Ruby stayed very still.

  “Good,” he said. “Like this. Don’t move. Okay? This is what’s needed for the photograph. Okay-okay?” He released her wrists. But he was still kneeling beside her. “I didn’t appreciate what you said before, Ruby. That accusatory tone you took against my great-grandfather.”

  “What?”

  “The way you talked about him killing the rhino.”

  The trick was to remember all the money he would give her. She should stay silent. Silent. Silent.

  She said, “But he did kill the rhino.”

  “Except it wasn’t one of the last rhinos when he killed it. I don’t think.”

  Neither of them budged.

  “You have to consider historical context, Ruby.”

  She tried to laugh at him in a large, guffawing you-are-an-idiot way, but it came out as something else. A small giggle. Childlike, coy even.

  One of Andy’s hands moved to her right hip bone. He pressed down on the place where the hip bone jutted out.

  “What are you doing?” she said. “Stop.”

  “I’m getting a sense of these textures, how they’ll photograph,” he said. “Polyester fabric doesn’t have pores, so it can’t breathe like other fabrics.” A hitch in his own voice. “But it feels like it’s breathing beautifully on you.”

  “Um,” Ruby said.

  “I mean,” he said, “it feels good. You feel good.”

  “Andy,” she said. “Stop.”

  It was as if he couldn’t hear her at all, he was so focused on recomposing this scene, and in his focus she felt his former friendliness decompose. His hand was still on her hip bone. She thought about the way his eyes had resembled birdless birdbaths upstairs. Maybe remaining motionless really was her best bet. But then his hand crept up under her professional skirt and her sleeping limbs awoke. “Stop,” she said again, and lifted the rhino head off her chest.

  Its weight pressed hard on her hands and her arms quavered. Andy’s hand kept creeping.

  But she found some reserve of upper-body strength, some power that had been fomenting unbeknownst to her. With a great grunt, she hurled the rhino head forward, at Andy’s own head. He cried out.

  The rhino head rolled over onto its side with a thud.

  Ruby’s chest now felt very light. The rhino head seemed undamaged. Andy moaned. He lifted his hand to his nose and it came away sticky red with blood. He gaped at Ruby. They were both breathing hard.

  “Stay here,” he panted. “We are going to have a real conversation when I get back.”

  “A conversation. Is that what you call trying to grope me?”

  “You can forget about getting paid.”

  He was already running upstairs to the first floor. A door opened and shut. She trembled all over. The rhino head had rolled on its side. Its glass eyes were still shrouded in dust. Its real eyes probably were dust. Despite the adrenaline flowing through her, she found herself stalled by the rhino’s gaze. The animal’s head was trapped in Andy’s basement, among all these old school papers and toys, as if it were not a rare thing at all, but as common as an old exam or childhood doll, and as easily forgotten.

  She should not leave it here any longer in its bubble-wrap shroud. They were both getting the hell out of here. She walked to the box of trash bags beside the basement’s boxes, removing a black garbage bag as if she was pulling out a soft tissue covered in aloe lotion. Next she rolled the rhino head into the black garbage bag. This would not be borrowing. But it would not exactly be stealing, either. This would be something else, what she was about to do. A sort of reclaiming. Art-making, maybe?

  Hauling the rhino head up the basement steps was difficult. She could hear running water—Andy was in the bathroom, wiping up nose blood Ruby guessed, snuffling quietly to himself, probably unable to hear her footsteps due to the outrage pounding in his own body.

  When she got upstairs, she placed the garbage-bag-swaddled rhino head inside Irene’s cart. She put on her coat and grabbed her bag and then pushed the cart through the entrance hall and to the doorway. It squeaked as it trundled forward, galumphed down each stone step, but Irene’s cart held true. She was on the sidewalk and pushing the cart past Andy’s brownstone and past other brownstones and she was at an intersection. The streets had changed. They seemed brighter, seemed like they might soon grow brighter still, even though it was now sometime in the early afternoon, and mounting illumination was against the usual order of things. Well, forget the usual order of things.

  She looked back once, sure she would see Andy running after her, but there was nobody behind her at all. A jogger with a stroller all the way down the street. That was it.

  What if she left the rhino head on the steps of the Museum of Natural History?

  Yes. Yes, yes, that. She would leave the rhino head on the steps of the museum, the way mothers in old novels left babies in baskets on the steps of a church, hoping someone would arrive who could connect to the infant, make up for the child a sweeter history, a clearer future. The rhino head and Ruby were almost there, almost at the museum.

  One of the cart’s wheels had become damaged during the descent down the brownstone’s steps. It twitched to the right when the rest of the wheels knew to move ahead. But Ruby kept pushing and eventually the broken wheel grudgingly aligned itself in a forward-moving direction. As she approached the museum, no one even gave her a second glance. And she was not surprised. She was only a woman with a shopping cart. The city was full of people just like her.

  At the museum steps, though, she paused. She gripped the cart. If she left it here, would someone think the rhino head was a suspicious package? Would they accuse her of something? The key was to act casual. She let go of the shopping cart—“Goodbye and good luck, rhino head,” she whispered under her breath—and drifted in what she hoped was an inconspicuous way over to a food cart.

  Lily, when she took Ruby to museums, would never buy her food from the nearby vendors. Tourist traps, she said. But today Ruby bought an overpriced hot dog. Even though she had no job. After what she’d been through with Andy and her bold rescue of the rhino head, hadn’t she earned it?

  Then she walked away from the museum, trying not to look back over her shoulder at the cart. When she was out of sight of the museum, she found a bench along the park and sat down. Gray clouds gathered overhead. She began to feast. Midbite, the hot dog’s mustard dripped onto her professional skirt, a big, ugly yellow streak surrounded by a spattering of smaller viscous drips. She imagined one of her old professors coming up to her, praising the way she had produced a tongue-in-cheek Pollockian imitation using nothing but condiments. “Are you perhaps crafting a pointed commentary on the artistic-industrial complex?” they might ask, and she would r
eply, “Yep, that is exactly it.”

  Despite her stained skirt and her joblessness, she felt good about taking the rhino head, about taking any sort of action against Andy at all. But then, after a while longer staring at the skirt, she imagined Andy’s hand bubbling up from under the fabric, and she felt very cold. Her phone was still off. She didn’t want to look at it. If Andy texted her, she knew she would be tempted to respond, and she liked the idea that their dialogue was over, that she would come out of the day with, if not lasting employment, at least the last word in something. She opened her tote bag and took out Lily’s book on dioramas. She read through it all, cover to cover.

  At last she stood from the bench just as the sky began to drizzle down rain. Students passed her, wearing big backpacks. School was out and she still had to feed 2D’s fish. It started to pour. She raced back to her father’s building. She had not run in weeks, although for a time John had tried to get her to lose weight by jogging around Prospect Park. Now that that was over, she had vowed never to go faster than a speed-walk. But here she was, sweating, heart pounding, hair again a mess. She ran through the lobby, up the stairs, up to 2D, jamming the key hard.

  The apartment smelled like fake pine trees and lemon soap. It was full of carefully placed furniture. A large taupe couch by the window. A brass bar cart. A gleaming glass table that had been showcased in a magazine’s feature piece on modern coffee table styling. (2D had left a dozen copies of the magazine in the laundry room, in a way that reminded Ruby of how her mother hung Ruby’s old drawings on the fridge. Which maybe made the coffee table 2D’s child?)

  And, of course, there was the fish tank. Ruby had imagined a whole school of darting fish, but in fact there were only two clown fish. A few instructions on how to feed the fish had been left near the tank and a note had been propped on top of the containers of fish food. Ruby thank you SO much, a lifesaver stunning heroine!!! Next to the note was an envelope labeled FOR RUBY!

  When she opened the envelope, there was no money inside. Instead there was a MetroCard with a Post-it note on it that said, To take you wherever you dream! There were also two Starbucks gift cards and another Post-it note that said, To give you the caffeine you need to get there ha ha! Tenants did this to her father sometimes, too: gave him gift cards for jobs he did, mostly for fancy restaurants in the neighborhood, a couple of times for pedicures. “They don’t understand that I would pay not to go to those places,” he told Ruby once. Oh, her father. She had disappointed him so much.