The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  He stepped back. There was still one place he hadn’t looked. He dreaded searching that room more than he dreaded searching even the ninth-floor stairwell. A whole host of memories and terrible imaginings got kicked up every time he went in there. But he had to do it.

  Martin left the apartment and walked to the elevator-motor room.

  * * *

  —

  The motor room, all these years later, still felt like the most haunted part of the building, more so even than 5A. What if the girls had touched the machines at the wrong instant, or what if they hadn’t sung “I Am the Cute One” loudly enough? Martin, in his nightmares, had pictured it many times. Putting in the code, opening the door, finding the hurt or lifeless bodies of Ruby and Caroline. Was it unhealthy to be haunted by an almost-loss? An almost-loss left space for the imagination, which was usually more terrifying than reality.

  He entered the code into the number panel on the motor-room door.

  Nobody.

  But as Martin watched the wheels spinning in there, he felt like maybe someone was pulling them, like it wasn’t electricity that moved the elevators, but invisible spirits yanking on pulleys, pushing forward complicated gears. He called Debra but she didn’t pick up. She was at her banquet now, a party not exactly like Caroline’s party, but not all the way different. He needed to hear her voice, to see her face and to feel he was in the presence of a beloved clock, something by which he might properly measure time. His legs felt like stilts, sticks of bone and flesh that Martin could hardly balance on. How had he been stupid enough to run across the park? He managed to stumble out of the elevator-motor room, into the garbage room again.

  Could be what he feared most was not that Ruby would never move out of the basement, but that in staying the odds increased that she would one day find Martin, find him the way he had found Lily—dead and disgusting. Then she would have to go around for the rest of her days with this soul-knowledge of what her father looked like in death. The dark mess of his failing heart. To carry that image around like a painting hung off the ribs, always. He tried to breathe and couldn’t. His throat was parched. No rhythm of wet/dry now. Despite the rain earlier, the air seemed scorched, brittle. He sat down between two garbage cans. He breathed in deeply, tried to summon the image of himself full of strength, leaping between rooftops, bouncing back from even an eight-foot leap. But he was so, so tired. He closed his eyes, as though about to begin some brand-new meditation.

  Lily’s voice filled the garbage room. Martin, stand up. Martin Martin stand stand stand.

  He was supposed to be looking for the intruder. She was near, he could tell she was so near. The walls between himself and the intruder were thinning, close to dissolution. Between the apartments, too, the boundaries between one person’s home and the next—all seemed to waver. The walls in the place where he worked and lived were vanishing.

  14 RHINO HEAD

  Ruby spent a while in Riverside Park after texting Andy, watching joggers go past, and then, since she didn’t want to wait at home for the party to start and risk interaction with her father, she had gone to a Starbucks. If money wasn’t an issue, she would have gone to a neighborhood diner, but it was better not to spend what she didn’t have. So she let the gift cards guide her. She bought the largest and most sugary latte she could find on the menu, and a gigantic cookie, making fast work of one and a half gift cards. After waiting on line for the bathroom, she found herself a spot by the window and read Lily’s diorama book again—she had wanted it close by even after the non-interview, and still hadn’t taken it out of her bag. Then she fielded a few crazy texts from her mother. Dad said YOU LET WOMAN FROM MORNING IN??? R we will need to talk tomorrow but your dad works hard and you are making his life harder.

  I’m sorry, Ruby wrote, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  Mostly she looked out the window and tried to work up her courage. She was wearing a dress that didn’t belong to her, and shoes that didn’t belong to her. She had transformed herself into someone who could own her anger. This was not a grand gesture. She would see this act all the way through. She would make sure Andy deleted the photograph of her father. She ordered another latte. Some of the people around her were working on their laptops, but some, like Ruby, were clearly waiting for something to open up in the night, waiting for the dark to become more cavernous. At last, around nine thirty, when she decided she would be fashionably late, she slurped down the sugary dregs of her drink and headed back to her father’s building.

  There was nobody in the foyer. In the lobby, a couple of tenants were exiting the elevator, on their way out for the night, new people she didn’t recognize. They didn’t give a glance to Ruby. She stepped inside the empty elevator and pressed PH. The doors closed and as she rose to the penthouse, she practiced what she’d say to Andy when she confronted him. Under her breath she said, over and over, “Delete the photograph of my father or I will tell everyone what you tried to do. Make that photo vanish, or else.” She attempted a fierce smile in the elevator’s mirror. The smile seemed too stretchy, too tight, like dental floss. She put her hair into a ponytail to see if a stretchier-looking forehead might help balance out the smile’s proportions. It was no good. Only two floors before Caroline’s, she decided to take her hair out again, to let it fall down her back.

  Better. Looser. She unbuttoned her coat so the illusion neckline of 2D’s dress could be seen. The elevator rose up, up, up. Then the doors juddered open and Ruby was at Caroline’s party.

  Music was playing, or an almost-music that sounded like a group of monks stuck in a computer and desperately trying to Gregorian chant their way out—deep male voices punctuated by electronic beeps and trills and clicks and sometimes whistles. A clot of girls in gauzy dresses stood by the elevator, their fingers crooked around wineglass stems. Nobody she recognized. Ruby had to say “Excuse me” for them to part and let her step onto the apartment’s wood floors. She hated the first few moments of any party, when familiar faces had yet to register and her lungs struggled to adjust to the party’s altitude. She didn’t see Caroline.

  After hanging her coat on top of another coat, and her tote bag on top of another tote bag, she craned her neck and scanned the room, listening for the jangle of Andy’s tinny voice through the other voices striking her ears. “The screenplay,” said a girl, “parallels the perils of hookup culture with the economic recession.” Some guy rambled about the killing to be had in patent portfolios and some girl discussed job placement statistics and some other guy impersonated Werner Herzog or maybe that was just how he spoke. Ruby found the table with the wine and poured a glass of red.

  At the far end of the living room there was a table full of snacks—and John. He wore his usual: dark jeans, a button-down shirt. Leaning against him, muttering something into his ear, must have been his new girlfriend, the one in public health. She was cute, polished, pixie-cutted.

  Ruby did not want to talk to John or Miss Public Health, but she was suddenly so hungry that the migration to the other side of the room seemed worth it. Keeping her head down, she was able to reach the snack table without John noticing her. There was a stack of white paper plates on the table. At first she thought maybe they only looked like paper plates and that when she lifted one up, it would prove to be made of marble, part of Caroline’s Expendables series. But nope, the paper plate was just a paper plate. She avoided the snack table’s slices of apples, the healthy-looking crackers, the pomegranate seeds, and instead gathered up cheese cubes and cookies. Ruby ate the cookies first—they were incredible, crumbly with the weight of their chocolate chips—and by the time she started on the cheese cubes, the elevator doors had opened and shut and there he was. Andy had arrived.

  He immediately began talking with the dress-clot, but his eyes darted around with the frantic to-and-fro of a clown fish. This suggested, perhaps, that he was afraid. If she got close to him, she’d smell his fear, and some prehistori
c limbic-system sense of dominance would be activated in her. Maybe Ruby, on inhaling those fear pheromones, would really become strong and powerful and alpha.

  So Ruby walked right up to Andy, who separated himself a little from the dress-clot when he saw her. Around his neck was his camera. She inhaled in a nonmeditative way, and said, “We need to talk. Outside.”

  “You’re here,” Andy said.

  He did look a little scared, a little sweaty. She made herself as tall as she could. “Duh, I’m here. Thanks for letting me know, Captain Obvious.”

  Captain Obvious? She sounded like a preteen girl trying to figure out how to be just-toeing-the-line sassy to her mother. She didn’t sound confident or breezy or brave or fierce. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She could feel herself deflate. Andy seemed less unnerved now. His eyes stopped darting, settled on Ruby’s face. “Where would you like to talk?” he asked.

  “Outside.”

  “You said that already, Captain Obvious.” He smiled, disguising the contempt between them as a game, a flirtation. “But outside where? Outside the building? On the terrace?”

  “Yes. The terrace.” She had to gain back her edge. “Here. Hold these.” She handed Andy her wine and plate of snacks before he could protest. Then she walked to the hooks and shrugged on her coat. She took the snack plate and the wineglass back from Andy, tossed her hair over her shoulders, and slid open the terrace door. A gust of wind blew up the skirt of 2D’s dress, not in a completely Marilyn Monroe–ish way, but enough to shock and expose her a little. Ruby smoothed the dress down quickly. On the left corner of the terrace two women were smoking. Most of the guests were inside because of the cold, but the temperature drop somehow made the view more spectacular than she had remembered. A ribbon of bright lights.

  Andy stepped outside, too.

  Another gust blew past and Ruby’s hair flew behind her. She recalled what Andy had said the last time they were at Caroline’s party together, when they first met—how the wind out here sounded like all the female opera singers in this city belting out arias. Ruby took a sip of wine, then put her glass and snack plate on the ground. She thrummed her fingertips against the terrace railing, listening for those arias. “Well,” she began. But she’d forgotten what she had planned to tell him, all the operatics of her furious commands and threats.

  Andy said, “I’m honestly a little shocked that you would agree to meet me here.”

  “I’m not scared of you.” Another not-great comeback. I’m not scared of you made her sound like a deep-down terrified schoolkid in a horror movie. She tried the stretchy-fierce smile again. The two smokers glanced over at them.

  “Ruby,” Andy said, “I think we need more privacy.”

  “Don’t mind us,” one of the smokers said, and winked. But Andy hopped over the terrace railing, clambered down onto the roof.

  “I want to talk here,” Ruby called after him.

  “Well, I want to explore. Come on. You just said you weren’t scared of me, right?”

  The smokers both laughed. The woman with green hair said to Ruby, “He’s not un-cute.”

  Andy was already walking away from Ruby on the roof, circling toward the water tower. Ruby bent down, picked up her glass, and finished her wine in a few gulps. She put the empty glass back on the ground and picked up her snack plate.

  “You should go with him,” said Green Hair. “It’s really beautiful and quiet out there. Explore the roof.”

  “Go have yourself an adventure,” said the other girl, and the two laughed again, as if the word adventure was an inside joke they lived in together, some shared home where they could retreat to cackle.

  It would be nice to stay there and try to live inside a laugh with those women. Instead Ruby lifted the skirt of her dress up with one hand, holding her snack plate full of cheese with the other, hopped the railing, and followed the bop-bop-bopping motion of Andy’s puny head. He was moving toward the edge of the building. When Ruby caught up to him, Andy said, “It’s a view, I guess.” He gestured to the skyline, the lights blurred with mist. Then he put a hand on her shoulder. “Here’s the deal. The deal is I won’t press charges, despite the fact that you assaulted and robbed me after I invited you into my home.”

  Ruby stepped back so he wasn’t touching her. She placed her snack plate on the ground again and glanced back at the terrace. The smokers had gone inside. She said quietly, “You attempted—”

  “What? What exactly are you saying I attempted? Do you have a bruise? Any sign of damages? I’ve got a large welt on the side of my head.”

  “Because you attacked me.”

  “No. Because you threw an heirloom at me and then stole that heirloom. I can show you the welt if you’d like. Also I have lawyers on retainer. Do you have lawyers on retainer?”

  The tiny headlights in the distance moved very slowly. For a moment, she imagined herself in jail, her mother sadly lending her books. More of Ruby’s new boldness and resolve floated away.

  “You do not have lawyers,” Andy said. “But you have a nice dress, I see. And better shoes than earlier. Did you steal your outfit, too? Are you on some kind of spree?”

  “Where’s Caroline? If Caroline could hear how you’re threatening me—”

  “If you bring me the rhino head back, I won’t make any phone calls,” Andy said. “Not to law enforcement. Not to any members of any boards of any buildings. And I’ll delete the photographs I took of your father. I won’t use them in my shows or sell them, even though I could sell them. There’s a lot of pathos in those images, you know?”

  Something in Ruby felt knifed. Maybe this was what John had called a hate boner.

  “We can forget we ever knew each other,” Andy said. “We can forget each other’s names. Just get me the head of the rhino.”

  Get me the head of the rhino. Like some fairy-tale task issued by a despotic ogre. Which would make Ruby what? A hero. Or a beautiful and resourceful peasant. A secret princess.

  “I can’t get you back the rhino head,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  It began to drizzle. The silky skirt of 2D’s dress and the sparkly surface of 2D’s shoes became speckled with raindrops. She bit her lower lip. “The rhino head is gone, is why. It’s art. It’s evolved. It’s part of a piece I did today.” Her words didn’t seem to be changing his mind at all. He stepped close to her again.

  “It’s not art,” he said. “It’s property. I don’t know what dry-macaroni project you’re using the head for, but my grandfather left it to me and it’s mine.”

  Property. The word clarified things for Ruby again. What she had experienced in Andy’s basement was supposed to have been an exchange. He was here threatening her, and yet they’d had a deal! “How about me?” she said. “I mean, how about my money?”

  “Your money?”

  “You said it was an artistic collaboration. You said you’d pay me if you took my photograph. Well, you took my photograph. Over and over again. And you took a photograph of my father, too. So where’s my money? That money is my property.”

  Andy walked away from her and looked over the edge of the roof. They were on the side of the building that shared its wall with another, shorter building. The fall was long enough to seriously hurt. He turned to face her again and said, “You are not a model, Ruby. And you are definitely not an artist. I don’t need to give you anything, because you are a thief.”

  The wind picked up. Anger had warmed everything but her toes, which felt frozen in the sparkly shoes. Was she an artist or a thief? Could she be both? Tonight, at least, those questions seemed like part of someone else’s agenda. She didn’t care about the answers. She cared about the way the wind was growing stronger. She cared about how, when she lifted her hand to brush her hair out of her eyes, Andy flinched.

  As if she might be raising her hand to hit him.

  An astonishin
g thing to realize—that he truly was a little afraid of her.

  She took a step forward. “I want to get out of here,” she said. “I really, really, really want to leave Caroline’s party. But I’m not going to leave without being paid for my work and I’m not going to leave without a guarantee that you will delete that photograph you took and not bother my father or me again.”

  “Are you actually trying to bargain with me?”

  She took another step forward. Their bodies were very close.

  “Or are you throwing yourself at me again?” Andy said. In a high-pitched voice: “‘Oh, I’d just love to see your basement!’”

  “I never said that. And I’m not throwing myself at you.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  She thought about it for a minute before she reached for his left pocket. She said, “I’m taking your wallet.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m taking the money you owe me. You said you’d pay me if you took my photograph.”

  “You need a mint,” he said. “Your breath smells like cheese.”

  Why had she been worrying he’d push her? She could easily push him off the building here. He would fall onto the lower roof, hard and fast. He was little. She was taller and stronger than he was. She could lift him up. If he fell right, if he fell just the right way the ten feet down on that little neck—

  Wow. Yes. Definitely a hate boner. It felt good, powerful.

  Andy reached forward and gripped her wrist. She ripped her hand away, groped around in his left pocket, found nothing but some old rolling papers, a receipt. He stopped resisting, but kept his eyes trained on her. She pinned his left hand behind his back. He said, “Go right on ahead. Go on and steal my wallet. And see what happens next.”