The Murderer Next Door

by Rafael Yglesias

  “Scared?”

  “About becoming a mother. She has no family to help her, she’s counting on your support.”

  “What has that got to do with moving next door? There are other buildings in the neighborhood!”

  “Not like yours,” Ben scolded gently, shaking his finger. “It’s easily the best building in the Village. I think it’s the only prewar building with three-bedroom apartments. And certainly the only one with formal dining rooms, eat-in kitchens, and maid’s rooms.”

  I suppose in any other American city, Ben’s little speech would have been considered the talk of a lunatic. Because he was a New Yorker, I merely considered it faintly ridiculous. Mostly, I wanted to laugh at the discovery of his true motivation and at the exposure of my own self-centeredness: he wasn’t a pathetic, lonely man who wanted to be closer to Stefan and me; he was a real-estate snob.

  “If we don’t get into your building, we’ll be forced to move to the Upper West Side. Ugh,” he groaned. “Wendy’ll be totally isolated up here—all her friends live downtown—and I’ll have a terrible commute. I can walk to work now, go on my bike. It’s really not fair. Ten B is a perfect apartment for us.”

  I cocked my head, astonished, unable to formulate my reaction.

  Ben sipped his coffee, peeking at me over the rim of the cup.

  “I don’t know what you’re worried about—you think we’ll have you babysit? That we’ll be over all the time? What? What’s your worry? I’m sure we can make an arrangement that will alleviate your concern. It’s the toughest co-op board in the Village. We’re not gonna get past them without a strong recommendation from you and Stefan.”

  “Does Wendy even care? Does she—”

  “Look, don’t kid yourself. You’re the most important person in the world to her. She loves you. Nothing would make her happier, nothing would calm her more about having the baby. It’s not why I want to live there—I won’t bullshit you about that. Frankly, I could do with a little less of you and Stefan.”

  He hates us, I realized, shocked. His small eyes darted up and down from me to the coffee, unable to hold my glance, not because he was embarrassed, but because he felt only contempt and dislike for me. I had the reaction of an egomaniac, I’m afraid. I had never liked him, it’s true, but I’d assumed he liked me. Strangely, I was hurt. Hadn’t I made a great effort with him? I felt I should have been rewarded. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I heard myself say, and now everything was crazy, inside out.

  “I want to know what possible objection there could be to us moving next to you?”

  “Well, you say you see too much of us—”

  “We don’t have to get together any more often than we already do.”

  “Isn’t that unrealistic?”

  “I want that apartment,” he said, rubbing behind his glasses furiously. The lenses jiggled. When he stopped, his small eyes were bloodshot, the pink eyes of a huge bald-headed mouse. “I’m not raising my child in a cramped shithole. You and Stefan have rooms coming out of your ass that you don’t need and you expect us to huddle together like Puerto Ricans.”

  Of course I wanted to get up and forget about him. Despite my strong feelings for Wendy, I almost did. And yet, I had to put up with him for her sake. I stared, unable to speak, my emotions churning in a pointless swirl from the opposition of these tides.

  “Look,” Ben added, after a few moments of silence from me.

  “If it bothers you both so much, why don’t you and Stefan move?” He smiled after this, pleased beyond measure by his logic. Got you there, his look seemed to say.

  I gave in and convinced Stefan to write up this experience to the madness of New York real estate and to the anxieties of insecure people facing parenthood. It was presented to Wendy as a surprise cooked up by the three of us—ironically, she told me she was angry at Ben for committing her to spending her money without asking her. She forgave him, she reported, because he said he had done it to please her, so she could be near me.

  I thought I learned a lesson from this. Dumb, submissive, and thick-tongued though Ben might appear to be, he was determined to get his way. I fumed for months at having been tricked and cornered. Even Stefan, soft and sweet Stefan, was cold to Ben for a long time.

  The night they moved in next door we made dinner for them and listened politely to their excited talk of how they would redecorate. Ben was puffed up. He kept saying, “This is a really classy apartment. You know,” he commented to Stefan, “you and us and one other family are the only Jews in the building.” Ben had triumphed. He was happy.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I’ll be honest: I hated him. I didn’t suspect anything else about him other than his crude selfishness, but that was enough. I lay in bed and couldn’t get my rage out of the way. I got up, went to our little gym, and tried to exhaust myself on the machines. I made herbal tea. I considered starting smoking again.

  I hate not being able to sleep. Sleep has always been my consolation, a possession that cannot be stolen. I succeeded in ending my insomnia by promising myself something. I’m ashamed to admit it even now. Even now, when it no longer matters.

  I promised myself that once the baby was born I would encourage Wendy to leave him.

  A FEW MONTHS LATER THAT ANGER WAS OVERWHELMED when Naomi visited me in New York.

  “A very scary thing is happening,” she said in her brash voice, a jazzy trumpet, not at all frightened. “They think I may have bone cancer. I’m here for tests at Sloan-Kettering.” She told me this in a suite at the Pierre Hotel. She wore a long print dress made by Indian women in New Mexico and her frizzy bush of hair was longer than ever and completely white. With her burned skin and wild hairdo, she could have been mistaken for a medicine man. Her brown eyes, as warm and clear as when she was young, searched my face with concern. You might have thought she was telling me I had the disease. What is she looking for? I wondered.

  “I see,” I said, sounding cold, although I simply didn’t know how to respond. “When are the tests?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I’ll go with you.” And that sounded reluctant, although I meant it as a consolation.

  “You don’t have to. There’s no point. You’d just be waiting outside.”

  “I want to!” In an effort to get the right emotion out, I shouted this and sounded scared.

  “Okay,” she answered gently. “Joshua also wants to take me.” That was her son. “You can keep each other company.”

  There’s no point in stretching this out. I don’t have the heart to remember each wrenching pull: when the doctors did the surgery a week later, they looked inside, and closed her right up. She’s riddled with cancer, the internist reported to Joshua and me. The sun had murdered her. Naomi had had skin cancer, he said, which could have been treated if caught early. Once under the skin, it spreads with glee. She was doomed.

  Joshua leaned into my arms, crying. The doctor seemed embarrassed by the display. I was numb. I closed my eyes to rest them from the dismal sight of the hospital waiting room. In my head there was Naomi, years and years before: young and beautiful, naked but for the bottom of her bikini, lying on her sandy beach in Maine, her breasts full of life for Josh, her heart big enough to love me and Sam and all her crazy, self-indulgent friends.

  Three months later, shriveled and ghastly, she died. There was not only a funeral, but two memorial services, one on each coast, an exhibition of her collection of feminist papers—there were many ripples of her good deeds. I resented them all. I knew what Stefan thought of my reaction, that I was possessive, wanted Naomi all to myself because I thought she was never really mine.

  Of course I had a last time with her, in the hospital, when only the core of her still lived, behind those now-hollowed eyes, deep and brown and yet—incredibly—not scared, but busy, busy with the problems of life: “Are you happy?” she asked.

  “Yes.” I hated that question.

  “I’m leaving plenty for Joshy and to the collection. I’
m assuming you’re okay on that score.”

  “I am.”

  “I’m also setting up a women’s shelter in Bangor. I want you to run it—”

  I resented her for this, for pushing me, even at the end, to be like her. I couldn’t be like her. “No,” I said, my eyes filling, not with sadness, but frustration.

  “It’s not just for battered women, but for all kinds of problems. They really—”

  “I can’t do it.” I wanted her to stop. She was forcing me to reject her when all I wanted was to embrace and say good-bye. “I can’t leave my life here in New York.”

  “None of the poverty pimps will be able to do the job you could. To them all the pain is academic. Consider it. I’m willing to emotionally blackmail—”

  Damn me, I couldn’t hold it in: “I don’t give a shit about saving the world. I don’t feel guilty that I got lucky and escaped. There’s no button for you to press. Quit trying to find it. You saved the wrong girl.”

  “Don’t say that.” For the first time since her illness, I saw something that hurt her, not the exhausting agony of death, but a living pain. “It’s bullshit.” Her voice choked a little. “In the end, I know you’ll do the right thing. You need me out of the way. You need to come to it yourself and not have me nag you.”

  “Okay,” I said, lying. “Okay, I will. Soon as you’re not looking.”

  I hope you believed me, Naomi. I’m sorry, sorrier now than ever; that I spurned your last gift, which I mistook to be an obligation, and was really my only hope of rescue.

  WENDY HAD HER CHILD TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS AFTER Naomi’s death. One cycle of the moon. One circuit of a soul about the earth, perhaps? In my deepest dreams, she came back to me.

  Certainly, Wendy hoped I would feel that way. Stefan forced me to go to Wendy’s hospital bed (I hadn’t wanted to, I was sick of them) and she put her hand out—banded with the ID bracelet—over the railing, fingers arched, grabbing the air between us. “Moll,” she said. “Before they catch us. Come and look.”

  Newborns don’t seem real—they are aliens that become human in our arms. We make them by how we hold them, by what we give them. I was scared of the creature she showed me: a tadpole, unshaped, a challenge. I was very glad I didn’t have to spend nine months sensing such a thing inside me.

  “They don’t let babies stay when there are visitors,” Wendy explained to Stefan, who had asked why she was worried about being caught. She glanced over at her husband. Because Ben stood in the corner of the room, dressed in a hospital gown, I briefly mistook him for an orderly. “Ben, are we agreed? Can I ask her?” Wendy asked.

  I didn’t pay attention to their talk. My eyes were stuck on the alien, feet and arms spastic, eyes blind to the world. My head was drowning in death and the pointlessness of life. I saw nothing worthwhile about birth.

  “Moll.” Wendy grabbed me so hard it hurt. “Moll, I want to ask you a favor.”

  I must have said all right. I may not even have looked at her. I was mad, I guess, mad with grief.

  “I want to call her Naomi. Because we’re Jewish, I can’t name her after you, and I hope you don’t think it’s, I don’t know, presumptuous. But I wanted to call her Naomi.”

  I cried. And I couldn’t stop. I cried for so long and so hard, I began to choke. Wendy hugged me. I sobbed more violently. Stefan shook me and urged me to drink water, but I couldn’t calm myself sufficiently—I coughed it out. “She’s hysterical,” I heard Ben say, and I suspect Stefan was tempted to sedate me, but the reminder that I was putting on this exhibition in front of Ben forced me to regain control.

  Naomi is a solemn little girl. Sometimes I think that’s because she heard so much unhappiness come out of me her first day on earth. It felt as if all the unhappiness I had ever known was wrung out, exorcised.

  The next morning, grief was gone. There was life to be cared for. I helped Ben set up the nursery in the morning and spent a long lazy afternoon with Wendy. We cheated on the hospital rules. I hid in the private bathroom when feeding time came around so that I could see the baby again, in a calmer state, I hoped.

  Wendy scooped her out of her see-through bassinet and offered: “Do you want to hold Naomi?”

  For a moment, hearing her name, I felt I would cry again.

  “Come on,” Wendy urged, and shuffled in my direction—the episiotomy caused her to move gingerly. In her mother’s arms Naomi seemed more human. Her eyes, though still blind, peered at the movement of my face and her restless movements were quieted.

  “Make a basket,” Wendy said, and I made a cradle out of my arms. Wendy gave her to me. Scared by her fragility, I tensed up, arms rigid as boards, my neck so tight I was sore until I got home and stretched out the kink on the machines. Wendy laughed at me, delighted by my awkwardness. “She won’t break,” she assured me. Nevertheless, I was relieved to give Naomi back.

  Later, I regretted that I hadn’t held her longer. It was odd how persistent my remorse was. All through dinner and the evening, I was sad, disappointed by my reaction. I told Stefan and he said, in his maddening, reasonable tone, “You’ll get used to holding her. It’s not an automatic knowledge. It’s not instinctual. Good mothering can be learned.”

  “She’s not my child,” I said.

  “Yes…?”

  “You made it sound like she’s mine.”

  “How did I do that?”

  He was being a shrink. I clammed up. Stefan often complained that I held my emotions in, yet his response to my loud and bitter grief over Naomi’s death had been almost panicky, and now his reaction to my yearning for the baby Naomi seemed patronizing, dismissive. He didn’t want to explore or live with either of those feelings. Makes sense, I told myself. Why would a man be attracted to an emotionally cool woman and then want her to become volatile? The complaints were phony: he liked my repressed self.

  THAT NIGHT THE MEMORY OF MY INCOMPETENCE WITH the baby alternated with my disappointment in Stefan: rocking back and forth between the two kept me up, unsettled. Well past midnight, after another session in the gym, I wandered into the kitchen for a drink of water and looked across the courtyard to Ben and Wendy’s kitchen. An air conditioner dominated the bottom half of the window (Ben hadn’t wanted to spend the money to install it in the wall below) and short curtains covered the top half. Their lights were on. Wanting a better view, I went into what had been our maid’s room. We had converted it into a country pantry to match our country kitchen, paying through the nose to install old wood cabinets salvaged from a Vermont farmhouse, and replacing the old frosted-glass window in the bathroom with clear glass. Wendy and Ben had made more modest changes in their maid’s room, modifying it into a laundry, but the old-fashioned window had been preserved. Their laundry was improperly vented or maybe too small; always hot, they had to keep the window partly open during the winter, closing it for summer air-conditioning. To my surprise I saw Ben—or rather, his naked legs—below the obscuring frosted glass.

  I knelt down to see more. I did so without considering why and I still don’t know why.

  Ben was naked, except for red panties. Presumably they belonged to Wendy. The fit was grotesquely tight—the panties had rolled themselves into a thin line running up the crack of his buttocks. He was bent over, searching for something in the dryer.

  I was thrilled. Embarrassed also, but only at what he was doing, not by my surveillance. He turned sideways—I could see only the lower two-thirds of his body—apparently studying what he had removed from the dryer. I guessed it would be a bra, but I was distracted from my reasoning by his erection.

  His penis had gathered all the meager fabric about it, wrapped like a mummy. Wendy’s panties had been brutally converted into a soft frilly jockstrap.

  He grunted.

  That startled me. Worried I would be seen, I shut off the light. For a moment he seemed to have noticed. His legs turned to face me. I ducked below the window line, a soldier peering out from a trench.

  Obviously he could see
well enough through his frosted glass to notice our light. I had turned it on when his back was to me, but he was sideways when I flipped it off, and he would have noticed the change.

  His body lowered. I caught a glimpse of a bra hanging loose at each elbow before I dropped flat on the floor to hide. I could hear nothing. I didn’t know how I could determine when it was safe to rise. Finally, I decided to crawl backward until I was out of his line of sight.

  From the relative safety of our hall, I peeked around the door—Ben was gone. I was thrilled. My heart pounded, I felt the excited guilt of an adolescent doing mischief. I wanted to laugh. The thought of him in panties rummaging for a bra was hilarious. It was great gossip, the kind of thing I would be eager to tell Wendy, only—

  Worry about Ben’s weirdness set in slowly, after my bout of glee. What did it mean? Was he gay—no, I knew enough from Stefan’s idea of chitchat that cross-dressing was under a different heading in the textbooks. Anyway, I wouldn’t have believed in Stefan’s explanation. I don’t worship Stefan’s Freudian gods—that’s what they’ve become for many bright people, a faith sometimes held obstinately in the face of facts. Almost weekly Stefan first argued against, and then was disheartened by, the mounting evidence that everything from autism to migraines was caused chemically. I had no doubt that some people were born bad, just as some were born with an arrhythmic heart. Psychiatrists, as good priests do, can help flatten a hill in the road that’s too steep for even good drivers—they cannot cure nature.

  I was up until dawn considering my situation. There were many options, more than you might notice at first glance. I imagined all sorts of grand scenarios. Tell Wendy, she confronts Ben, he admits it, she throws him out. Confront Ben myself, he breaks down and willingly leaves. Or Wendy forces him to seek treatment, he becomes a better person, or at least less obnoxious. I guess my poor reasoning was due to lack of rest. I fell asleep for only a few hours before Stefan woke me with a reminder that I had promised to help Ben and Wendy bring the baby home. Bleary-eyed over coffee, the obvious truth hit me: what I had seen was harmless, laughable, probably no odder than the fact that I was spying. Did wearing panties walk ahead of peeping in the perversion parade?