The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  She could give and take, just like that, without even thinking about what her gifts and thefts might do.

  “You’re too far away from her, Caroline,” Andy said. “Get closer to Evie. No, no, move a little. We want the skyline to show up behind you.”

  “Should I step forward?” Caroline asked. “Back?”

  And now, at this moment, the stone in Ruby’s throat seemed to dissolve. She eyed the sloping wall and called to Caroline, “You should definitely step back a little.”

  Ruby had meant it sarcastically. She’d tell herself later, for her own sake, that she had meant it sarcastically, or at least that she had never guessed she’d at last be taken seriously. The words were only designed to show Caroline that Ruby’s anger was real and present and solid. She’d assumed, just as she had in the motor room, that Caroline knew where she stood. That Caroline was aware of the dangers around her.

  But Caroline’s face lit up. She smiled graciously and stepped backward. It was slippery up on the roof, because it had rained, and she cried out in surprise as she lost her balance and fell backward.

  * * *

  —

  Later, when Ruby remembered Caroline’s fall, she could swear she had heard Lily’s voice starting to count. “One, two, three, four.” Like a new game of hide-and-seek had begun. Ruby, standing there on the roof, had not closed her eyes but had covered her ears.

  A LATER DAY

  17 RUBY’S MUSEUM

  Martin migrated.

  It was not so hard. A few difficult weeks. Caroline was in a bad place. A broken ankle and shoulder, plus some spinal issues. An intense regimen of physical therapy. He and Debra left New York, and Martin knew he would not see Caroline again in his life. “I’ll visit maybe,” Neilson in 3C said, but Neilson in 3C would not visit. Still, Martin said, “That will be nice.”

  They went south, which was strange, but Debra was able to get a job at a library in a college town in Georgia, where a close friend of hers from high school, who could no longer afford New York’s rent, had moved. She helped supervise college volunteers for a new adult literacy program. And Martin found a gig repairing things on the campus. There was a lot to fix. The hotter weather seemed to break stuff down faster. And there were different pests. Brown recluses. Spiders that could kill. Once, possums in a roof, with possum babies. Rent was not free, but because of his maintenance work for the university, Martin was able to take several free classes there every year. He took a biology class and dissected a rat. Its heart was smaller than he might have guessed. He took a drawing class and drew birds. Their eyes, he realized in sketching them, were even bigger than he’d thought.

  He had fought so hard against what would happen if they lost their apartment, against the threat of his own life turning to dust, but they were not fringe people, as he had feared. That was what was surprising. Now he saw how much of his fear was a trick of faulty comparison, how he hadn’t been able to see the full context of their situation. They were okay. “Middle class.” Thanks mostly to Debra, of course, and her education. He had been fortunate there and fortunate that she was so flexible. Martin had begged Debra to leave the city with him after Caroline fell off the roof and onto the next building’s. She could have died if she’d been angled a little differently. That almost-death, on top of Lily’s actual death, was too much. The whole city felt haunted.

  “The whole city,” Debra said, “what whole city? You barely leave the neighborhood. We could just move to Queens and you’d think you were in a whole new cosmos.”

  “I want to leave,” he said. “Please, Deb. What about how burned out you feel?”

  “Well,” she said. And she closed her eyes. Maybe she was thinking about her panel, about how she’d done just what she’d feared—shared the anecdote about the Dungeons & Dragons questions from prisoners, and joined in the crowd’s laughter because she was too tired to do anything else.

  “Please, Deb,” Martin said. “Let’s leave.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  After Caroline’s fall, Martin had stopped hearing Lily. She did not voice-over his day or intrude into his mind. She was gone.

  This was good from a long-term consider-your-sanity standpoint.

  But also sad.

  In addition to free classes every semester, Martin got a staff discount for membership to the college gym. Meditation classes, led by one of the gym’s yoga instructors, took place every Wednesday night in a room covered with blue mats. The meditation classes had only a few regular attendees: two biology PhD students, one undergraduate Martin had never heard speak, and Martin himself. There were no singing bowls, and the yoga instructor used a daily calendar called “Enlightenment Hacks” as inspiration for her opening remarks. “Carpe diem,” the instructor said once. “Seize the day.” Martin no longer felt the same solace in these mantras. A single day nested a great many dangerous things. You never seemed to seize on to the right ones. Or at least Martin didn’t. Maybe in his old age he would learn better what to seize, what to let drop. Some stuff was already dropping from him without his realizing. One night, when he couldn’t sleep, he tried to take out the map in his mind, to link up as many of the tenants in the old building as he could. But now he found it was impossible. 7A had once seen the Yorkies of 3D pissing into the flower bed of impatiens she loved, although 5C felt impatiens were rather populist, or was it 8A who thought that, or was it 6C . . . Everything unraveled very quickly, seemed unsubstantial and silly as fuck, and in the end he could only repeat in his mind, like a new mantra, landfills landfills landfills, until he felt there was no solid ground beneath him.

  They lived on the second floor of a condominium building.

  It was a bit unnerving.

  Sometimes after dinner Martin would call Ruby, who still lived in New York City and worked nights. It was always good to hear her voice and now, when they talked, he never worried about his heart. One afternoon, a couple of years after he and Debra left New York, she called him. He was with some guys trying to get a bat out of the engineering building. He stepped aside to take Ruby’s call.

  She said, “He has a new show coming up, Dad. Of his photos.”

  “Oh,” Martin said.

  “The first since the accident.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He got my address somehow, and he sent me an invitation.”

  A show. With the photograph of himself in it, maybe?

  “Are you okay, Dad?”

  Martin looked at his reflection in a window and he stood up as straight as he could and remembered how he had hollered his stories in the boiler room, hollered over the sounds of the machines, and he said to Ruby, “I don’t care. Just don’t tell me any more about it. Not a word.” But then he said, “Are you going?”

  “To his show? No, of course not. I’m not even curious.”

  “Oh, come on, Ruby.”

  “I should get ready for work,” she said. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I promise.”

  * * *

  —

  After she spoke to her father, Ruby got on the subway, closed her eyes, and thought about Andy’s show. Of course she wondered if he would display the photographs from that day. Photographs of her father, maybe, or photographs of her, her face shielded by the rhino head. But she especially wondered if there would be a photograph of Caroline moments before her fall, standing next to Lily’s cousin, who had disappeared during the chaos that followed the accident and whose “story,” as captured by Caroline, remained untold.

  But now they might all be in the show together, frozen on film, Lily’s cousin and Caroline and her father and Ruby and the rhino head. A kind of family portrait that nobody but Ruby would recognize as such.

  Her stop. She got off the train, climbed the stairs to the surface. She was meeting friends for dinner before work. But she h
ad a little time.

  Even though she worked on the Upper West Side now, commuting most evenings from her apartment in Astoria, it had been years since she had walked past what had once been her father’s building. She avoided the street. But when she’d heard about Andy’s show, something in her had shifted. She wanted to test the limits of her own guilt, or maybe the limits of her own ghosts. She walked right up to the entrance of the building. A new awning now, this one navy blue and lit by the same wrought-iron lantern. They were no impatiens in the tree pit, but big-petaled flowers she didn’t recognize. New shrubs out front by the door, chained down in their pots. The street smelled the same—like a wet towel. Like some secret spore-ish life might start growing across its surface at any second.

  She walked into the foyer.

  Under her feet, beneath her sneakers, was the place where she’d been raised. She tried to envision the basement. Her room with the steam pipe going through it. The couch with its windmills and cows. The laundry room. The garbage room and the boiler room and the elevator-motor room.

  But all she could imagine now were those familiar spaces turned dark and fantastical, full of sleeping birds, overrun with pigeons and pigeon shit, with mice and rats. She imagined stepping into the basement apartment and finding the floor thick and soft, carpeted with guano. Would it smell like shit? Or old orange peels? An owl. Maybe there would be an owl nested in the dark of the motor room and a whole flock of pigeons gathered in her room, and rats moving freely all over, darting between the motor room’s wheels, which would be webbed through with the homes of busy spiders bursting silken threads out of the microscopic spigots in their asses. How intricate those webs would be.

  If she wanted, she could stand here and wait to see the new super, emerging to hose down the sidewalk. The new super would look at Ruby and see a stranger, someone who did not belong there. Or maybe it would be Rafael who would come upstairs. He had stayed at the building as a porter the last she’d heard. Perhaps his daughter came from New Jersey sometimes to visit him at work. Perhaps she sliced vegetables on the cutting boards her father had rescued from the garbage room.

  Or 2D would emerge. Ruby had never returned the dress or the shoes, and just as she had guessed, 2D had never noticed they were missing. Nor had she reached out about any damage to the table. Ruby had given the dress to Goodwill, but she kept the shoes. She never wore them but she was glad that they existed in her closet, like shiny napping beasts.

  Kenneth still lived in the penthouse apartment, even though Caroline now refused to set foot in the building, said she had flashbacks of falling whenever she stepped inside. John had told Ruby this when she’d run into him on the subway some months back. Caroline no longer spoke to Ruby. After Caroline’s grandmother had died, Ruby had texted her. I am so sorry, Caroline, she wrote. I saw the obituary. Very beautiful. Caroline never replied. Well, what had Ruby expected? A sad-face emoji? A thanks?

  Ruby waited a minute longer inside the foyer. Someone pushed open the door from the lobby. A nanny with a double-decker stroller, two little kids inside. “Oh,” Ruby said. “Let me help.” She held open the lobby door and the nanny smiled her thanks.

  The lobby door was open. If Ruby wanted, she could slip inside. It would be easy.

  But she stepped back. She took a breath. She went outside. It was supposed to storm. She hurried on to meet her friends.

  Her father thought she should get out of the city. He said it was bad for her stress levels to take two subway lines to the Upper West Side every damn day and move around all those memories. He said she should just leave. She could even stay with them for a while. “Your mother would be happy to see you more,” he said, “and I would, too.”

  His idea of the order of things had shifted around. What it meant to make your own home, what it meant to show the world you could stand on your own two feet—all of that had loosened. He just wanted Ruby to live closer. But she couldn’t leave, she told her father. She did not mind her roommates, at least not most of the time. And she liked both of her jobs.

  “You can get jobs like those anywhere,” he said, and she had to tell him, trying not to sound condescending, that he simply did not understand the true nature of the work.

  * * *

  —

  At night, she had the Museum of Natural History all to herself. Of course there were other guards, maintenance staff, scientists. But when she was given a designated area, that area, from late at night until morning, was her own.

  “Is it like those Night at the Museum movies?” her mother asked. “With haunted mummies and the dinosaurs come to life and whatnot?”

  “Have you heard voices?” her father asked.

  It was not like those movies. It was not haunted or very cinematic. The museum at night was the most peaceful place Ruby had ever been. What she liked best about it was the way it shut out all the nocturnal city noise. She could not hear the nightlife or the parties or the homeless people crying for change from church doorways. She just heard her own breath.

  There was a lot to guard in the museum of course, a lot that someone might want to steal. Gems and ancient farming artifacts and the rib bones of dinosaurs and meteoric bits. But of greater concern to museum officials was the risk that something might go wrong in the building, damaging the objects within. A leak might damage the hide of a significant beast. A mouse might chew on a wire, causing a short circuit, a fire. A big part of Ruby’s job was to keep an eye out for signs of breakdown.

  Often, though, nothing much was going on. Then she would think about Caroline and Lily and it was like they were right there, standing before her again. In the museum at night, memory was revealed to be nothing more than a feat of mental taxidermy. The salvaged skins of long-gone moments were draped over the structure provided by the present. The hours were weird. Her sense of time and of debt sometimes became scrambled.

  “Is it your dream job?” her father asked her once. Ruby had laughed at the stilted way her father said dream job, like he was switching into a different language. Her dream job? No. But the job gave her the mental space to dream.

  Of course, that didn’t change the fact that this job was not what she had fantasized about when she thought about working at the museum. She was not restoring the dioramas or strategizing content for new educational exhibits. Her roommates sometimes asked if she was hoping to work in the museum in another capacity one day, was there mobility, and she’d say, “Oh, yeah, I’m hoping it might open some doors for me higher up.” But she said this only because it was an easier story to share than the truth—that she was not looking to open doors in her career quite yet. She was looking only to open the doors inside her own self, to see what she might be hiding, what she might have to state or make.

  Well, maybe that wasn’t all the way true. Shortly after she’d run into John on the subway, he had sent her an e-mail. He said a friend of his, an art therapist, had seriously injured her arm while snowboarding and needed an assistant a couple of afternoons to help with the slide projector and art supplies, and yeah, he most certainly remembered Ruby telling him she didn’t want him to be her career counselor, and he most certainly respected her decision to spend hours gazing into the belly button of the blue whale or whatever, but maybe this was something she could do on top of that, during the day, and couldn’t they maybe be pals again? She ignored his e-mail for a little while. Then she asked for his friend’s contact info. Now, a couple of days a week during the late afternoons, she helped conduct “dialogue-based lectures” about art at a few different seniors’ centers. “Dialogue-based lectures” turned out to mean getting very old people—mostly very old women—to look at slides of paintings and talk about their memories and sometimes to collage or draw pictures of those memories. Ruby was a contract worker, assisting the art therapist who was some years older than Ruby and who wore beautiful shawls and who was also a contract worker. Ruby would set up the slide projector and
then cast images onto a white wall. Mostly, the art therapist was in charge. She stuck with the Impressionists, those luminous crowd-pleasers. But sometimes she let Ruby choose slides and lead the discussion. Whenever Ruby put up an image from a Hopper painting of a naked woman alone in a room, all the old women had much to say. “I once had a room like that!” “I once had boobs like that!”

  No matter what paintings they showed and discussed, at the end of the session some of the women would clasp Ruby’s wrist on their way out the door and thank her. They did not remind her of Lily, although she wanted them to. Still, the more the women clasped her wrist, the more aware she became of the weight of her own tenderness on the earth. Afterward, she always wanted to go back to her room to work a little before her night shift. One of her roommates had a job at a shoe store and, vaguely aware of Ruby’s “diorama thing,” now brought Ruby old shoeboxes for shoes she could never afford. Ruby had begun to paint the backs of these shoeboxes. The Bethesda Fountain. The garbage room. The roof. She wanted to begin putting something three-dimensional inside the boxes, but she wasn’t there yet. And anyway, they seemed too small for what she imagined. She was trying to think of them as prototypes or sketches, plans for something bigger when she was ready. She didn’t want to rush herself.

  The guard job offered her the fuel and the quiet she needed to think. Something about wandering around all sorts of extinct and endangered animals made her stop worrying too much about whether her own dioramas would look or sound stupid to other human beings. At night, in a half dream, she still could plan her own large-scale exhibits, which she would sketch out during her breaks. She would imagine each of the displays populated with a moment from her past. She had a vision every now and again of the end of the world. Some sort of apocalypse, but a gentle one. There would no longer be any documentation of debt. Everyone would have to move away from New York. But she would stay, manage to survive alone in the city, in the museum. She would use the material she found there to build, finally, her dioramas.