The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  But it was important she not disappoint the fish, too. She tossed a few pinches of fish food into the tank and the fish immediately began to feast. She sank into the couch, not even removing the rain-damp mustard-streaked skirt. She was exhausted. On top of the Lucite coffee table, 2D had placed three gigantic vintage pool balls, a red vase, and a candelabrum. It was a beautifully styled coffee table. And the fish were both so alive, full of frantic to-ing and fro-ing. They didn’t seem to notice anything other than their own movements. They really were spectacularly relaxing. She watched them until her adrenaline slowed. Was this a form of meditation? She stopped watching the fish and began to watch her breath, as if her own inhalations were some strange shy animal. Finally, she fell asleep.

  9 thanx martin Gr8!1

  It was almost four, and Martin still hadn’t heard from Ruby. He had spent his day playing many roles besides a worried father. A rat killer (one caught behind the wet garbage). A garbage hauler (wet trash dragged into the alley). A courtyard sweeper (bird nest, yes, and also used condoms tossed from a window).

  But mainly—in the hours after he’d done the stupid thing, dropping the stone in Caroline’s coffee—he had been a translator, a go-between for the mostly immigrant crews and the building’s inhabitants. Here is when the men will enter your doorway, 3D, and at this time, 2C, the Romanians may cross your threshold, and yes, 7C, trust me to schedule the strangers who will be here to redo the ceiling of what will be your child’s nursery, and uh-huh, 4B, the bedbug dog has been here but not for as long as we expected, Bedbug Scott said the dog was fatigued, was exhausted and traumatized by an especially bad infestation uptown, no, far far uptown, no worries, everything will be fine, sorry, 2A, the exterminator is coming not today but next Friday, right, that’s right, you’ve got it!

  Booming his voice, loud and boisterous when the crews came in, so they’d know to trust him as one of the guys. Lowering his voice with the tenants so they’d feel respected.

  In between saying the things he had to say in the ways he had to say them, Martin checked his phone again and again. He’d sent Ruby messages all afternoon. How was interview you okay look your mom told me what happened hey just message me when you get this let me know.

  He had not heard back.

  He had heard many times from the birding e-group, though, about the owl in the park. And he had heard many, many times from Neilson in 3C about the drain. But zero messages from his daughter. Well, she was an adult. Probably she was fine, and when his heartbeat sped up, he needed to stay in the glistering present moment.

  Still, despite all his attempts at staying present, by the midafternoon Martin found himself huddled in the garbage room, next to the motor room, checking his phone repeatedly.

  A text from text-averse Debra, a real rarity. conference going ok not much free food also forgot to say before told R you would take her out for dinner she seemed BLEAK.

  A blurry photo of the owl in a tree, being dive-bombed by blue jays. E-birders he had never met responding in utter reverence: wowowow, what a majestic, beautiful shot, I hate jays, beautiful.

  Neilson: hey M, r u on yr way drain is still clumped full would really like to shower sometime today if that’s not 2 much 2 ask haha?

  Neilson wrote texts the way he probably thought kids Ruby’s age wrote texts. A guise of youth. But Ruby’s texts were almost always grammatically correct. He’d one hundred percent hear from her soon. Maybe she’d gotten back and he hadn’t noticed? He went into the apartment and checked her room. Nobody. But her sketch pad was there.

  He picked it up. There was the drawing from the early morning, a plan for a diorama of Lily’s old apartment. A rectangle on the page and inside, a sketch of Lily surrounded by her stuff. The sofa with pulls on the fabric from Lily’s series of cats. The three-speed box fan. The piles of books. On top of the drawing, Ruby had written, TOOOOO SENTIMENTAL O WELL. She had begun to draw Lily, it looked like, sitting on the couch, but only had a thin outline of hulk.

  Martin took out his phone.

  Where are you? he texted Ruby. Am very worried.

  He needed to do something about the way his shoulders felt, like the entire weight of the building above him was pressing down. The weight of all those tables, all those couches, all those other people and their own worries. But he still had work to do. He texted Neilson back: Be right up.

  thanx martin Gr8!1

  * * *

  —

  When Neilson opened the door for Martin, he said his shower drain was still clogged and he’d had to wash with dirty water pooling around his feet after his run, and while he appreciated the difficulty of Martin’s job, he just couldn’t help but notice that there did seem to be a certain lack of efficiency to the way Martin ran things, he’d been holding back saying these words because they were by this point old friends, but honesty was necessary for friendship, too, right, and Neilson knew efficiency experts and perhaps he could put them in touch with Martin, or the building’s board, or Frank at Sycamore Property Management, because these efficiency experts were really very very good.

  Neilson flipped his hair back over his shoulder. Something was going on with him. He was pissier than usual. Martin said, “Efficiency experts. Neat. Okay.”

  In the bathroom, Martin placed a paper towel at the side of the tub. Then he looked down at Neilson’s ornamental chrome plate that served as the tub’s pop-up stopper handle. He needed to remove the slender cotter pin that connected the chrome plate to the stopper. With the ache in his back, it would be less painful to lie down in the tub to remove the pin than it would be to twist his head and hunch over the chrome plate. The tub had looked dry, but after lying down Martin realized there was a thin layer of dampness on it. The moisture plastered his shirt to his back. Best not to think of Neilson’s gross hairy feet in here, right where he was lying.

  Once he had removed the chrome plate, he pulled the cotter pin so he could get to the handle to activate the pop-up drain stopper. Then he hauled himself up so he was kneeling in the tub. He removed the handle and now he had the overflow pipe right there. He put the augur in the drain and got the drill motor spinning, down through the overflow, down through the trap. He began fishing out clumps of Neilson’s hair, placing the clumps on the paper towel.

  What do you do when those hair clumps are so stuck in there? An e-z solution! You—you—Martin—you did not let her in, you did not deliver the news of my death kindly, I’ve tried to hold this back all day long but listen, you did not make an effort, you let her walk down the street, a basic courtesy to tell the family with compassion, and in this you failed, in this as in so many things, as bad as the worst of the tenants in that moment though it breaks my heart to say so, as if she were not human, don’t get me wrong, I had issues with her, I called her sometimes that sad moron of a cousin because of her general problems with the ole drugboozesex trifecta, you heard me time and time again say how my family was scheming always scheming yet without imagination, still, they are my family, and you acted like the worst of the tenants the worst, you’re mad at Neilson for seeing her as a bundle of blankets but you saw her as a human without history, how we would play together as kids, me and my cousin, creating tents out of blankets and chairs, like your daughter did as a kid, too, sometimes, and the way you dropped that stone, I saw, into the coffee, oh, it will be bad, Martin, bad the way sweet Ruby is going, how she looked at you, not like you were a human she didn’t know, but like you were a human who should know better, I’ve been thinking about the arc of systems and the arc of the nest falling, those eggs, how you do what they say, you just do what they say, how she looked at you, and where is she now, anyway, where is your daughter now?

  He was on his back again, reconnecting the ornamental chrome drain operator, trembling a little, when Neilson walked in. Martin sat up in the tub, his elbows jammed against the sides.

  “Yuck,” Neilson said, looking at the drain
hair. Then: “Martin. Are you okay?”

  Martin was coated in sweat that kept dripping itchily down his spine. It made him feel like his actual nerves needed a deep private scratch, the kind people usually reserved for their butts. He was exhausted and he stank, and there was Neilson.

  “I’m done here,” Martin said. “We’re all good.”

  “Do you want to meditate? Before you go? You look like you could use it.”

  Neilson did not own a singing bowl. So Martin, feeling his own nervous heat, nodded.

  In the living room, Neilson had set two cushions on the floor, their shams embroidered with spiraling golden thread. When Martin sat down on his cushion, his knees cracked. Neilson sat down, too, his legs folding nimbly and silently, in a way that reminded Martin of the blue heron he’d seen in the park by the boathouse.

  “Are you ready to start?” Neilson asked. “If so, put your phone away and breathe through your nose.”

  Martin closed his eyes. Phosphenes behind his eyelids, moving here and there, like birds, like fish. When you closed your eyes too tightly, you stimulated retina cells and made your brain believe that you were seeing light. Who had told him this? Ruby? Lily? Neilson? Their voices blending in his mind with the force of their confident fact-giving. How much they all knew. How much they all wanted him to know they knew.

  He closed his eyes even more tightly.

  Behind his eyelids now, the shapes of falling pink tissues.

  He shouldn’t say anything. He shouldn’t say a word.

  Whoops. But here was Martin, clearing his throat. “Why did you tell me there was nobody in the foyer, Neilson?”

  Neilson’s eyes opened.

  “This morning,” Martin said. “You called. And you said there was just a bundle of blankets in the foyer.”

  “There was.”

  “There was also a person.”

  “Well,” Neilson said, “I just looked out of the corner of my eye and then I hurried inside. I had to keep my heart rate up for my exercise regimen. The whole thing’s a waste if you aren’t operating at a consistently aerobic pace.”

  “So you didn’t look at the blankets long enough to know.”

  “To know what?”

  “If there was a person under them.”

  “It’s not my job to know that.”

  Martin looked down at his shoes. He had forgotten to put on his shoe covers when he walked in here. A big mistake. Not hearing from Ruby—and the thing with the birds and the brooms—and the stone in Caroline’s coffee—and the intruder this morning—all of it was getting to him. Throwing him off his deferential-’n’-distant game.

  “Didn’t mean to criticize you,” he said to Neilson. “Let’s meditate.”

  “I told some friends about you, you know.” Neilson shifted forward on the cushion. “I said I meditate with my super. They said you were maybe the only meditating super in all of New York!”

  Just a dancing bear of a bearded dude, that was Martin! And yet he knew Neilson was sharing this anecdote as a way to make amends. So Martin smiled and said, “I bet I’m not so rare. It’s a big city. Probably there are other supers who meditate.”

  “You think so?”

  “Some of them are probably in child’s pose under a busted pipe right as we speak.”

  Neilson did his polite laugh before closing his eyes again. Martin waited a second. Then he took out his phone. No messages.

  “Isn’t it hard to meditate with the phone out?” Neilson asked, eyes open again. “I sure as hell couldn’t do it. Karla was always checking her phone. Drove me nuts. Not why we ended things, of course. Well, not the only reason why. But a distraction. Right? I used to say to her, why do you have to mediate the world like that?”

  Martin put the phone back in his pocket.

  He envisioned Neilson’s big white feet with dirty shower water pooling around the toes.

  Then they both began to meditate in earnest. Martin and Neilson breathed in through the nose. They breathed out through the mouth. They breathed in, and out, and in, and then Neilson intoned, “Let us take a moment now to awaken fully and efficiently in our inward vision, to sit with ourselves as we are and without judgment and with our hearts also full of mindful loving-kindness.”

  A big-hearted inefficient dancing bear of a bearded dude that Neilson spoke of to his friends.

  A sideshow freak.

  A character in the stories Neilson told at dinner parties.

  Wide-eyed, mindfully alert, Martin farted into the golden-threaded cushion.

  It was a very quiet and definitely accidental fart—too much gluten today, all those damn rolls—but once it had sallied forth into the container of 3C, once it was far too late to call it back, Martin didn’t regret it. He hoped Neilson smelled a slight stink in his nostrils as they flared out with his mindful inhalation. And then? Maybe Neilson would laugh. When the smell reached his nose. And Martin would laugh. And whatever had caused Martin to drop the stone in Caroline’s coffee, whatever was curdling up the good and respectful impulses in Martin—that would vanish, leave his mind and heart. If Neilson would only acknowledge the smell Martin had made. If Neilson would only laugh.

  But Neilson did not react. Maybe he remembered that this had happened before at the JCC group class. Maybe he was just trying to spare Martin any embarrassment. Except Martin was not embarrassed. He wished Neilson wouldn’t assume he was ashamed that he had farted on the gold-threaded pillow. Had his phone buzzed just now? But okay, he must focus.

  Martin allowed himself to sink a little farther into his breath. His heartbeat slowed. Whatever grease might be clogging his arteries was now melting away into lotus-shaped grease droplets, whooooosh, there was his healed heart, a baby-new blood-pumper. Breathe in, breathe out.

  He had made a definite smell.

  The way Ruby had turned to him, scrunched her nose just a little, holding that stupid broom. An unpaid internship. And Caroline hadn’t thought to tell her. Hadn’t seen why it would matter. And breathe. Breathe in, breathe out, just breathe, everyone suffered! Compassion for all! Even Caroline and Caroline’s family, they suffered. Hell, Caroline’s grandmother had given a lecture or two at the JCC on her experience of suffering. Martin’s parents had said their parents and grandparents never wanted to talk about their time during the pogroms in—where? Somewhere near Kiev, Martin’s dad would say vaguely. He said his parents liked to pretend like they’d fitted in seamlessly in America, and Martin figured out that meant no stories of the past. Stories always had seams, they always had stitches and pieces that didn’t quite connect. Besides, Martin’s dad had said, nobody really cared about their stories. Martin had figured out what that meant, too: His grandparents were poor and everyone around them had some trauma, wherever they had come from. Having some trauma was called being alive. They wouldn’t think to write an article about it and insofar as they gathered, nobody would ask them to give a talk. Without social capital, Lily screamed in his head, it’s not a narrative, it’s only a thing that happened to you! So: No tales from Martin’s family. Only hurtling forward into the future until your body turned into dust motes.

  There were so many different types of dust in the building, especially in the apartments under construction. Plaster dust, cement dust, limestone dust, paint dust, cobweb dust, fiberglass dust, the dust of the dead, too. Lily’s dandruff floating around somewhere, probably, still. Dandruff was dead skin cells, right? Ghost cells people shed all the time. Maybe Lily was talking to him through her dandruff, which remained in the building, zipping around. Little phantom scalp flakes delivering telepathic messages through Martin’s skull. Or possibly he was just going insane.

  His phone had not buzzed. He was pretty sure.

  How Caroline had drawn her shoulders in.

  Here was the thing. He could feel compassion for Caroline, who was really just a kid. But feeling
compassion for Caroline did not erase these facts: Caroline was having a party tonight. Caroline could tell her father that Martin had been horrible to her, that he had dropped a small rock into her cup of coffee causing her to drop the entire mug, hot coffee scalding her legs. Kenneth had power over Martin and even if he decided he would not complain to anyone about Martin’s rudeness toward his daughter, even if everything went Martin’s way, even if he spotted the owl in the park, even if he found out Ruby had got a decently paying job, even if Debra’s conference panel led to tons of donations and a promotion and erased her feelings of burnout, even if Lily had not died on the toilet, and even if someone else had been the one to let in the construction people who were right now tearing up the bathroom in which Martin had seen the specific pale blueness of her corpse—even if all those things had or had not happened? The party upstairs tonight would be Caroline’s party. The party upstairs tonight would never be Martin’s party, or Ruby’s party, or Debra’s party, or Rafael’s party, or Pumpworks Tony’s party. It always would be Caroline’s party and it would be Caroline’s guests vomiting in the lobby and it would be Martin cleaning that vomit up and those were the present-moment facts, no changing them.

  But what made today the day those facts felt like shards of glass in Martin’s feet?

  If he’d only been wearing the shoe covers when he walked into 3C.

  Neilson nickered like a horse. This happened sometimes when Neilson was immersed in his breathing. He seemed to channel some inner equine state and his exhalations went near whinnying. Dude was in the I’m-a-pony-man-galloping-through-the-green-fields-of-my-deeper-consciousness zone while Martin cheated himself out of calmness by thinking about his beleaguered ancestors and working himself into a frothy anger. Neilson’s eyes were still closed, the crepe-thin skin of his eyelids unwrinkled, and Martin closed his eyes again, too, tried to settle back into the now, but now, oh, now he could only envision the smug smile on Neilson’s face and his mostly wrinkle-free eyelids, and so the next time Neilson did the nearing-nirvana nickering thing, Martin answered by farting again into the gold-threaded pillow, less experimentally this time, this fart warm and noisy, practically explosive, definitely ranker than the earlier one.