I cringe back down, shaking, hoping he’s only seen the cat.
Then Chloe is there, pulling open the window with her blanket drooping, scooping Fluffy into her arms. “At least someone loves me,” she weeps, leaning out and cradling him, gulping night air.
They’re above me. I’m cringing in a dark, huddled ball. The light from inside silhouettes Greer snarling, pulling in Chloe and the yowling cat. His shape slams the window, but not all the way. There’s more shouting and weeping, and somebody throws something.
I cower, think in crazed, irrational panic that if Greer saw me, he’ll be mad and Joe will lose a good customer. He may even complain to Joe, who already knows I’m strange.
Most of all though, I think that this is what I’d hoped for this girl: have the inevitable fight and get rid of him. It’s what I begged Kim to do after her fights with Moore. Have it out, kick him out of your life!
Maybe four minutes pass, like a squall. Then it goes quiet in there.
I shift, crane, and dare to peek.
Chloe’s back on her bed, knees pulled to her chest, sobbing into her pillow, “Bastard! Son of a bitch!”
Is he there to hear or has he gone? She’s so drunk. Breezes gust; a white curtain flaps out above my head. I remember his hand closing the window just partway.
I want to tell her to close it and lock it.
Then I picture either Greer still there, coming after me…or Chloe hysterical, screaming to the police about a stalker on her fire escape.
Can’t, can’t…
I struggle with it, then give up and try to calm. At least she’s broken up with him. It will hurt briefly, then she’ll realize she’s learned a lesson.
The air has turned cold.
I lean my back against the brick wall, kneading a cramp in my left leg, realizing the insanity of how I’ve spent the past thirty minutes.
Not even close to saving Amelie.
Joe is right. Get a life for God’s sake.
Aching, I wobble down the fire escape. At the bottom I stop, and frown back up.
That open window bothers me. The white curtain lifts and flaps, like a surrender.
I breathe in and feel Greer’s glare; hope again it was just the cat he saw.
I head out trembling.
My phone says it’s not quite midnight.
5
Alex, surprisingly, has called while my phone was off. I call back. He sounds sleepy.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Maintaining,” I say nervously.
“I called at ten-thirty. Where were you at ten-thirty?”
“Holding up a 7-Eleven.”
“Very funny.”
“Almost ex-husbands don’t get to ask nosy questions.” I walk past a lone musician, slumped on a stoop with his head drooped over his guitar. Asleep or stoned, probably both.
“Have you gone back to sleeping and such?”
“No, but sweet of you to ask.”
The sarcasm slipped out because I’m still seeing Greer’s glare and shaking, but too bad. Alex makes these occasional guilt calls, knowing his role in our breakup. We were so good once; success made him bad. On the man-scale of zero to ten, he’d be a five or six, maybe even a seven. Plenty of women stay with men like him…he’s an aggressive attorney. The more successful he became, the more he fooled around.
“How’s Ollie?” I ask, mounting my stoop, keying open the door one-handed. I picture him sunk on his pillow next to his current flame, the almost-a-partner who reads briefs all night. Neither has burdened the other with talk of marriage. It’s a perfect match for as long as it lasts. We’ve become a cynical world.
“Oli-vi-a,” Alex drags the name out, “is not as colorful as you. Lawyers are boring.”
“She’ll hear you.”
“Nope, she’s at a deposition in Atlanta. I’m alone and minding it.”
I say nothing, clear the vestibule, and head up the staircase. Mahogany railing, old-charm building. When we split, I left the posh, rather sterile place we’d shared: fountain in front, fake Versailles lobby, rooms upstairs like big white cellblocks. My father, a successful historical novelist, left Kim and me the apartment I’m headed to. Previously, we had lived upstate. When my mother died, he grieved for a year, then moved us here when we were twelve and fifteen.
I think Alex is eating something. He’s as silent I am, in that way of his announcing that he’s really calling about something else. Finally: “We’re making progress against Moore,” he says. “I wanted you to know.”
I round the landing. “Lemme guess: the judge’s court calendar is jammed, the trial’s scheduled for the next century.”
Kim died from traumatic brain injury. She’d been drinking, and Moore says she fell. Not much to go on.
I key into my apartment, hearing Alex drone about pleadings, motions, and interrogatories.
“Can’t I just grab a bat?” I say, flinging my keys onto a table. “Beat Moore senseless?”
“You already tried something like that.”
“Didn’t use a bat!”
“C’mon, it’s late.” Alex sounds more tired. “Anyway, we’ve got a trial date. Four months from now and don’t yell. That’s fast, the judge owes me.”
Sure, the judge owes him. It’s a high profile case because Moore is high profile; the judge wants it and its headlines over. Still, I’m aware that wrongful death suits can take years to resolve. They’re civil, not criminal. I don’t think they’re civil at all, not when they’re really about murder.
Alex is now droning about the case’s frustrations. I listen and prowl, turn on lamps, stop to touch my father’s antique desk, stop again to stare in a mirror. My eyes sag over dark circles.
“Understand that Kim’s blood alcohol was .08. That’s bad, they’re using it, may even try to get the case dismissed. It’s not like O.J. with bloody footprints all over-”
“Okay, Alex.”
Just what I need after seeing the Chloe and Peter Greer ugliness. I still feel shaken.
“Sorry. I just want to prepare you for disappointment; prepare both of us. This is a weak case.”
I stay quiet, reach the kitchen. There’s an open bottle of merlot I left out this morning. A glass is next to it and I pour, sip; try to push down the sight of Greer’s eyes darting toward me.
“On the other hand there’s Moore’s past record of abuse,” Alex says. “Each time the cops were called, her bruises were worse and we’ve got the pictures.”
The pictures. I’ve seen the police photographs, they’re sickening. My gorge rises. “Nice of him to establish a pattern.”
Kim and Moore fighting fill my vision, eviscerate me to the point that I sink down to a chair, lay my cheek on my hand and close my eyes. She said it was worse when I wasn’t there to witness, but the bastard would beg and grovel, reel her back in. How many times did I implore her to leave him? I lost count and she loved him. He used to schmooze me too with apologies, promises to change. He was doing anger management! Making progress! I felt helpless, frantic.
Alex is still talking. I pull myself back up, and carry my glass to the bedroom. This night has been terrible.
“The photos alone are going to sink him.”
“Sink his charmer reputation, you mean. They won’t prove he killed her.”
I hear him sigh, long and frustrated. “Well…one thing at a time. At least we’ve got a trial date.”
“That’s nice.” I press my forehead against the cold glass of the window. Tears sting.
“Sound happier, please? I really hustled for this.”
“I’m just numb.”
“Understood. Listen, I cared about Kim too. My heart’s in this.”
“I know, I know…” Below, on West Fifteenth Street, street lamps light spreading linden trees. Across the way stretch near-matching brownstones like Chloe Weld’s. Awful images collide like a flipping kaleidoscope: Chloe fighting with Greer, Kim fighting with Moore.
Alex finishes droning ab
out interrogatories. His breathing has gotten heavier. Finally he says, “You planning on going to bed now or ever?”
“I guess.”
“Sleep is good. Try it, you’ll feel better.”
“Yes…. To sleep, perchance to dream.”
“What?”
“It’s Shakespeare. Good night, Alex.”
I disconnect.
From my desk, I pick up a photo of Kim and me, carrying a canoe to the water. It was late summer, a windy day. I was nineteen, she was sixteen and stumbling, goofing around on the rough terrain. She’s facing the camera, laughing, her long dark hair whipping her face. My head is turned to her, the worried, older sister, and I’m yelling, “Be careful! Be careful!”
Our Dad took that picture, two years before he died. We couldn’t bear to sell this place; it’s full of our family history. Mom had co-written some of their earlier novels; they’d traveled the world and collected antiques, fascinating things that still fill the shelves, the walls, the coffee table in the front room.
During my marriage, I sublet the place to a young professor, who left to get married. Lucky her, she still sounds happy. Alex and I dissolved before her lease was up, so back I drooped to this place, now my shrine of memories.
Sighing, I put the photo back on my desk, and stare at it. If Kim was the cheerier one, she could also be emotionally careless.
I turn and look at the wall, almost hearing her in the next bedroom, aged seventeen, passionately bouncing around reciting her Madge Owens lines from Picnic. She was desperate to win the role of Madge, and did.
Leaving Lincoln Center’s Julliard, she was so wildly thrilled that she flew out into Broadway traffic, and nearly got killed. I pulled her from the path of a speeding van and she hugged me, crying, “You saved me, you saved me!”
No…I didn’t.
I tried to, but she’d have just eight more years to live.
I drain the wine from my glass. Go back to the kitchen for another one.
Or two or three.
6
The Jungle, is what film location scouts call it. Regular New Yorkers call it one of the more magic green spaces in the city. At eight a.m. I stand, fighting jitters and a headache, half a block in from Sixth Avenue on West 28th. You can barely see the sidewalk, lined on both sides with walls of foliage blocking out traffic and noise. Palms, arborvitae, tall boxwood and clipped hornbeams; it’s surreal, walking through New York’s Flower District.
Healing, too, even if briefly. I drank too much last night and I’ve barely slept. It’s a relief that Joe’s wholesaler is too busy for me: he waved his hands, stressed and apologizing; he’ll get to me in minutes.
Take a Zen moment? Try….
There’s a bench between a line of orange trees, and I sit, gaze at honest-to-goodness oranges growing in the city…bright, bright, they are as they zoom and jostle.
I let it happen. On three hours of sleep my vision blurs, but whirling orange electrons are better than my dawn nightmare of Peter Greer and Brett Moore…sudden, vile-faced pals pushing Kim and me down the stairs. How vivid the dream was! I saw, again, the long, straight-down steps of Moore’s duplex, and on his lower landing, that huge iron Foo dog with Kim’s blood on its base. I wept and clung to her, dying; then Greer yanked me up like a rag doll, shouting how dare I spy on him, he was going to throw me off the fire escape, see me split my head open too-
“Got your list loaded,” I hear, and startle.
Nick Andreou stands there with his clipboard, smiling, apologizing again, flipping through pages and making checks. “Your first bunch is already in the truck,” he says. “Sure you want extra boxwoods?”
I blink, tell him yes, and stand shakily. Wealthy plant lovers with terraces and gardens have switched their interest from flowers to what looks good under snow. “Twelve,” I say. “Not too big.”
Nick asks me to pick them, so we leave the sunny sidewalk and enter his warehouse.
Squint: Jurassic Park minus T. Rex.
A banyan tangle reaches up to skylights two stories high. Ranks of greenery from tropical to winter-tolerant crowd passageways. There’s garden statuary, too: Buddhas and pagodas in garden settings…and I shudder, see again Moore’s snarling Foo dog. What’s strange is, I saw it plenty of times while they were living together…just not on the night Kim died.
But in my dream, over and over, I see her falling, crashing into it.
And now Greer’s been added to that dream? Crazy! I never should have gone to Chloe Weld’s – what was I thinking? Just a couple ending badly like a thousand others in the city….
That’s it, last night was the end. No more, must get sane; avoid booze, obsessing, and the rest.
I got off anti-depressants, didn’t I?
We pass a bubbling lotus fountain, move to ranks of ornate greenery, and I point. “Six of each.”
Nick wraps pink plastic ties around the boxwoods I’ve chosen: half of them clipped into spheres, the others tall and upright. Two assistants come with trollies. The potted plants are rolled through the store, to the back and Twenty-ninth Street and Joe’s truck, waiting.
Glancing inside its open doors to bamboo and cut flowers and palms already crowding, Nick Andreou grins. “Joe’s gonna need a bigger truck.”
“He’s doing well,” I smile, and thank him.
He goes back in. The men load the boxwood and slam the truck’s doors. I move toward the front to talk to the driver, and another man comes out; approaches me fast and I see, too late, his face.
It’s Greer, looking nasty.
I dash frantically around the front of the truck and into the street as a car slams on its brakes, horn blasting.
“Lady, for God’s sake!” a man leans out.
Shaking, I scramble up into the passenger seat. Joselito looks worried.
“What? Jesus, you see a ghost or something?” His cheeks are full. He’s eating his breakfast bagels.
“Thought I did.” Heart pounding, I crane past him to peer at the man coming toward us.
He’s passing the front of the truck now: just a stressed-looking guy in a blazer headed to the Twenty-ninth Street Garage.
Joselito squints and scowls. “He bothering you? I’ll break him in half.”
“No, false alarm….”
“Anyone ever gives you trouble, just let me know, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks.” I’m breathing hard, stunned that I just did the same thing that almost got Kim killed.
What is happening to me?
Joselito puts the truck in gear, and pulls into traffic.
For seconds, that man really looked like Greer. I wonder if I’ve become paranoid.
No, but getting there.
Self-destructive too….
Scratch any thought of cabbing back, or even quaint notions of walking the nineteen blocks south to clear my head. Joselito is a really big guy, six five, three hundred pounds and muscular. I stay right here with him as he navigates Seventh Avenue, talking about flowers for his mom battling diabetes and, excitedly, the Yankees.
At the store, he helps Joe unload. They’re both too busy for conversation, not that I’d dream of letting Joe know how I spent last night.
I wait on customers, jangly from sleep loss, my hands busy while I nervously scan the sidewalk. No sign of Peter Greer or Chloe Weld, but…why would there be? It’s early, maybe they didn’t even go into work. I also worry whether Greer actually saw me…or did he just see the cat?
A bad feeling builds.
By two o’clock I’ve almost rationalized: so what if he saw me? They broke up - what’s he going to do, come yell at me? Harass me for invasion of privacy or something? No, he’d just embarrass himself admitting to another paramour, risk gossip headlines, add to the “other women” list his wife is maybe keeping.
Then I remember Chloe threatening to go to his wife and employer. His features turned shocked, then violent. He raised his hand to her, but she ducked.
If she hadn’t been drunk,
she likely wouldn’t have said something so completely stupid; but she was drunk…and suddenly, it’s not just me I’m worried about.
My bad feeling deepens.
By six o’clock, well-dressed people pour out of the near subway, some stopping to buy, some heading to Régine’s.
No sign of Chloe or Greer.
Dusk gathers early on these September nights. I’m limp. Anxiety and sleep loss have ground me down. Several times today, Joe told me how tired I look. The strong coffee he brewed just made me more jittery.
“Hey, it’s seven,” he says, coming over as I wrap bouquets. He’s just turned on the lights under the awning. Street lamps glow against the mauve sky. “Go home. You’ve put in a long day.”
If he knew how long.
We spend a moment discussing the twice-a-week visits to Nick Andreou’s. Business is getting so good that Joe might need to restock three times a week.
“I think Joselito can pinch hit,” I say, wrapping carnations in cellophane. “He’s learned a lot, loves it-”
A shrill sound stops me.
It’s a siren, and then more sirens, police cars roaring into the end of the block.
My hand stops handing the carnations to a middle-aged woman but that’s okay because she’s turned, gaping at the explosion of activity. “Oh!” she says, joining others: a human school of fish veering, alert-eyed, moving toward the noise and roof lights spinning red. Unmarked cars arrive; plainclothes people go into…
Chloe’s building.
My body goes cold.
“The hell…?” Joe says, squinting.
They’re already stretching yellow crime scene tape.
“…go see,” I hear myself murmur.
On leaden feet, I head that way.
7
Bedlam.
Barricades of blue-and-whites, uniforms everywhere, radios crackling into the night. Before Chloe’s building thirty or so people have gathered; more come up behind them. “Get back now, will you?” a policeman says, spreading his arms. “Murder?” a broad woman carrying groceries gasps, and a young brunette says tearfully, “A friend went to check on her when she didn’t show up, didn’t answer her phone.”
Girl Watching You Page 3