by Julia Glass
Out at the bar, theatrical deadbeat Dagger was on his first drink, warming to the subject of Gwyneth Paltrow as the perfect example of nepotism unbridled.
PEACE AND CALM RULED FOR NEARLY A WEEK. Never before had the last days of summer made the city feel like a place of such privilege. By day the air was almost dry, the sky ever blue. Nights felt clean, even chilly; often there were stars to be seen. A few leaves were fooled into turning at their tips, flashing like gold sequins in the perpetually soothing breeze that blew from the harbor.
As ordered, Scott went to the barber. “Your ears are quite handsome, you know” was Walter’s only response. The boy still wore his orange high-tops to work; Walter decided to ignore the issue of footwear. At closing time several nights running, Sonya showed up and lurked by the door. On Friday, Walter softened and told Ben to give her a glass of champagne. He tried not to be annoyed when he caught sight of her rolling her eyes at Scott in what he assumed was a mockery of his gesture. Whatever did Scott see in that arachnid creature? Was it simply that she was older, was that the allure? Walter tried to amuse himself by imagining Tipi taking Sonya for lunch at her country club.
On those nights, Scott went off with Sonya—Walter never asked where—and, as in the old, pre-Scott days, Walter and T.B. walked home by one circuitous route or another. Walter fell asleep alone in his own bed, but with the windows open to the velvety air, no earplugs, no need for Granna’s firm hand to keep his cool. Even the car horns sounded softer.
And then came Sunday. First, a child threw a plate of waffles on the floor, splashing maple syrup onto a pair of expensive purple suede pumps at the adjacent table; Walter soothed the wearer’s conspicuous indignation by picking up her tab. Another customer complained loudly that the Scottish salmon on his bagel had gone bad (it most certainly had not). Thereafter, no one ordered salmon in any form. By one, Walter was tempted to have a drink. He ate a piece of chocolate cake instead. This made him think of Greenie; but for his big mouth, she would still be there, nearly next door. What had he been thinking?
With Walter’s permission, Scott left early, in the lull between brunch and dinner, to go to his “guitar workshop.” Minutes later, Ben asked to have a word with Walter in his office. A case of wine had gone missing, and though he couldn’t be sure, he had to suspect that it had been pinched by Sonya (which had to mean Sonya in cahoots with Scott).
“She’s a bad influence, that’s my firm conviction,” said Walter. “But theft?”
Ben shrugged. “Just a suspicion. Needed voicing.”
“Have you ever seen Scott behind the bar?”
Another shrug. “Wouldn’t think twice if I had.”
“Ben, this is my nephew.”
Ben gave Walter a bland, impenetrable smile. “Just a suspicion.”
“Ben! Articulate, please! I love the way you never talk my ear off, but I need a little more to go on here. And please don’t do that what-the-heck thing with your shoulders again!”
“If I had evidence, I’d show you,” said Ben. “I don’t want to have a suspicion, not raise it now, then have you come to me later asking why. Whole story.”
Walter groaned. “Whole story. Great.”
Ben rose to go. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
“You do that.”
Walter laid his head on his desk. What should he do, install nanny cams at home and at work? How long ago had he last checked the shelf in his closet where he kept Granna’s silver flatware? When, in fact, was the last time he’d had occasion to use it? Whatever happened to entertaining at home?
The Bruce nudged his thigh.
“Here you go.” Walter took one of T.B.’s well-masticated phone receivers out of a lower drawer. Immediately, The Bruce curled up at Walter’s feet and began his ritual of licking and gnawing at the plastic.
“That does look like a good way to relieve stress,” said Walter as he stroked his dog’s neck, massaging the warm folds of skin around the collar. As he did so, he felt a small nub of something foreign at the edge of the leather. Probing with two fingers, he withdrew a tab of chewing gum and a minute rectangle of paper.
After flinging the gum into the trash, he held up the paper. It had been folded many times, down to the size of a thin matchbox, to be hidden inside T.B.’s collar, fastened there with the gum. (Another probing brought forth a second rubbery wad.)
“What in tarnation,” said Walter as he unfolded the paper. He thought of desperate pleas enclosed in bottles, flung out to sea. Were old people at T.B.’s nursing home being held prisoner against their will? (Anywhere in the Bronx would be prison to Walter.) Was this a cry for rescue?
Apparently not.
“Christ Almighty,” he said when he read the note.
Slick and all aquiver, Miss Urchin waits like a rainflower, You Boy Cock Red Lava God. Slave to your mountainous rumbling. She says pluck my petals NOW she says DRINK MY NECTAR till I am a prune, a dry hag, a she-shark in your molten ocean!
An extremely tiny pink photograph adhered to the paper. Walter held it close to his desk lamp. A vagina, an actual, wide-open, devil-may-care vagina. Walter groaned and dropped the note in the trash, then fished it out again. He stuffed it in his pocket. He bent over and pulled T.B.’s collar around his neck, feeling under its entire circumference. T.B. dropped his phone and looked up at Walter, concerned. Walter was hyperventilating.
“It’s okay, boy,” he said, though his tone was not consistent with the statement. How he would get through the evening without an aneurysm or a shriekfest, Walter had no idea, but get through it he would. And then, once Scott showed up at his apartment, well let the chips fall where they fucking might.
“YOU HAVE BEEN USING MY DOG AS A, what, a porn conduit?”
Scott looked dumbstruck. It was six in the morning, and he had just walked in. Walter had slept very little the night before, finally surrendering to his rage by taking a very long, very hot shower, dressing for the gym, and eating a large bowl of Grape Nuts. The heavy chewing was almost cathartic.
Scott leaned his guitar case against the wall. Nervously, he laughed.
“This is not funny. Or I don’t find it funny.” Walter held out the four sex-slave messages, all resembling eviscerated origami, that he had found by scouring the sea of clothing in Scott’s room. (He had almost hoped to find drugs; why not shoot the moon?)
Scott was clearly holding a private debate. Finally he said, “Those are totally private, Uncle Walt. Like you thought I was a virgin or something?”
“Please don’t insult me.” Walter threw the messages onto the coffee table. “Do you really have no idea how…repellent and perverse this is?”
“The dog can’t read.” Arms crossed, Scott had struck a sullen pose. If there had been a moment to choose repentance over defiance, it had passed.
“Listen, nephew of mine. I have put up with a lot here. Maybe I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, sharing my place with a Mick Jagger wannabe—” Walter heard Scott’s faint snort of derision.
“All right.”
Scott waited for a moment. “All right what?”
“I am just about fed up. I mean, I am fed up! How dare you laugh at me. I am suddenly feeling mighty sympathetic with your father!”
“Hey, man, I’m sorry we offended you, okay?”
The we put Walter over the edge. “That is it,” he growled. “You are out of here, young man. I will keep you on at the restaurant—though we will be having a good talk about that, too—but I want you to find your own place. Move in with Morticia Addams if you please, but forget about using poor T.B. as your envoy of lust. I simply cannot believe your lack of respect. Shame on you.”
T.B. cowered at the sound of his name in such an angry speech. He slipped down from the couch, retreating to Walter’s bedroom.
Scott stared at Walter, and then he sighed. “Suit yourself, man. We were just having the bit of harmless fun. You are one hypersensitive dude, you know that? I mean, I appreciate everything you’ve don
e for me, really, man, but you need to like, I don’t know, get laid more often yourself.”
Walter’s heart was beating with the cadence of a polka. He spoke not a word, went to the coatrack, and took down T.B.’s leash. “Come, boy,” he said quietly, aware of the ironies in his command. He would drop T.B. off at the restaurant and go to the gym from there. He picked up his workout bag, refusing to meet Scott’s eyes. Scott did not move from his post near the door.
“Are you actually going to, like, leave?”
To get out the door, Walter was forced to speak once more to his nephew, if only to say a courteous, cold Excuse me. “Take today and tomorrow off. You can leave your stuff in your room until you find another place to stay.”
The boy looked utterly deflated, though it might have been nothing more than an aftereffect of all-night sex with the repugnant Miss Urchin. On his way out, Walter read what he hoped would be the last idiotic T-shirt he’d ever have to face so early in the morning. On magenta cotton spandex, it read THE SWEDISH WOMEN’S VOLLEYBALL TEAM SLEPT HERE.
Charming as ever, Walter was tempted to say as he opened the door, but Granna warned him to hold his tongue. He had said more than enough for one miserable Monday morning.
At the gym, he increased his weights. At his office, he tackled several money matters he had been postponing. In the kitchen, he offered Hugo a modest but unexpected raise. For effry dark deed, trade a light one. After last call at the bar, he took T.B. for a marathon walk down to Battery Park City. At the marina, T.B. made no protest when Walter sat on a bench to listen awhile as the yachts conversed at their moorings. As they walked back north, the warm tranquil lappings of the river against the piers and the wooden rim of the city itself soothed Walter as much as anything could. When he arrived back in his apartment at two A.M., he found a note from Scott saying that Sonya would be taking him to Newark first thing in the morning, to catch a flight to San Francisco. He was heading home to “chill” for a couple of weeks before returning to New York. He’d get the rest of his stuff then. If you decide to fire me, that’s totally fair, but this whole thing just makes it clearer what my future is really about. I think you kind of get it, too, Uncle Walt, and I forgive you for blowing off the steam. I’m sorry I said that lowly thing about you not getting laid. I hope we’ll stay friends. High five to the B-man. I’ll call from Camp Werner if I survive the deprogramming stuff.
Walter was sad but not surprised. In fact, he suspected that Scott would not survive the “deprogramming stuff” to return to New York. Still, Walter would have rooted for Scott. Really, had mash notes under a dog’s collar been reason enough to evict the boy? In the end, Walter knew nothing about what it was to be a parent, let alone a grandparent who had to do it all over again because her own child had failed at the job.
He called Sonya’s number but (thankfully) got her machine. Channeling Granna, he wished Scott a safe trip and told Sonya she could pick up T.B. at the restaurant after taking Scott to the airport. Walter would rise early and work like a madman.
He slept heavily and got up at six. From the window near his bed, a forgiving, reinvigorating breeze swept through the room. Walter dressed and gave T.B. a hasty brushing. On the way to the restaurant, they stopped to share a bagel under the sumptuous greenery by the playground. “Let’s get fat, my friend, what the hey,” Walter said to The Bruce as they relished their respective halves of schmear.
The wide-plank floors of the restaurant had been newly waxed the day before; they gleamed softly when Walter turned on the lights. He opened every window, to admit the extraordinary morning, and turned on Hugo’s radio, opting for jazz.
Almost to Walter’s surprise, Sonya showed up. He turned his dog over to her without a word. He did not even meet her eyes. She was persona non exista to him, but he would not give her the satisfaction of mentioning Scott or of breaking his promise to the old folks in Spuyten Duyvil just because he wished she would fall through a hole in the ground.
When the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, Hugo was writing lunch specials on the blackboard. Oddly, Ben was in as well; like Walter, he had awakened early, filled with energy and a sense of purpose. He had decided to recheck his wine inventory. So there they were, all three men, in the kitchen together, Ben having just confessed to Walter that he might have made a mistake about the missing case of pinot grigio. He realized now that a large bridal shower, which took up half the restaurant on Saturday night, had asked him to set aside an entire case, so they wouldn’t have to order by the bottle. Man, but those girls had whooped it up. They’d tipped him like a king.
TWENTY
IT COULDN’T BE SNOWING; how in the world could it be snowing? Saga stood at the kitchen window and stared into the small sad yard behind Stan’s house. The ground was white, and the air appeared to be filled with the coiling currents of very large snowflakes. The window was filthy, its lower panes covered with paw prints and the smearings of eager noses, so Saga could not see all that clearly. Stan no longer let the dogs out back, because he worried that someone would report him to the Board of Health.
She had been staying at Stan’s, basically being Stan, since Friday evening. Stan was in Washington, at the nonprofit seminar. He called several times a day, and though she could tell he was a little anxious leaving her in charge, he was never sarcastic. Every time, just before saying good-bye, he thanked her.
And really, his thank-yous mattered. Being Stan was no picnic. It was harder work than Saga had thought it would be, even with Sonya’s help. Sonya stopped by every evening to help take the dogs on one long walk. Stan had “pared down” to six dogs for his absence, including a three-legged collie and a spaniely mongrel that cowered and peed every time something spooked him. There were also seven cats, one with a litter of kittens; a guinea pig with an eye infection; and a chameleon someone was supposed to have picked up on Saturday but hadn’t. Saga felt slightly ashamed that the chameleon gave her the creeps, but at night, after she turned off the downstairs lights, the lamp in its tank continued to glow. Its snakelike tongue would lash out, presto—always disturbing because the lizard’s facial expression never changed.
Scott, Sonya’s boyfriend, thought the chameleon was “genius cool.” He’d even wanted to take it out and hold it, but Saga told him she didn’t know if he should. (Now she wished she had let him do it, just so she could have cleaned the smelly tank.) They had come by together the evening before, and it was nice to have the extra help. While Sonya held and medicated the squirming guinea pig, Scott told Saga that he was moving in with Sonya but heading out to California for a little vacation first. “Do the family thing,” he said, the way you might say “Do my taxes” or “Do my hair,” as if it were shorthand for a task that everyone had to do at some point, more or less the same way as everyone else.
Saga wondered what it would mean, to her, to “do the family thing.” Right now, it meant acting like a deaf-mute in the presence of her warring cousins, just so she could keep her tentative place in the constellation. Being Stan was tough, yes (and the longer she stayed here, the more she admired him), but being Saga at Uncle Marsden’s house was, at this delicate moment, tougher still.
On the Fourth of July, after everyone had watched the fireworks from the porch, after a hugely pregnant Denise had gone to bed, Michael had announced that he’d closed on the Cute House. This was no surprise to Saga, who had gone to see it, as promised, with Michael, Uncle Marsden, and a real-estate broker. Aside from her uncle’s complaints that the ocean was out of earshot and the garden little more than a “vulgar profusion of forsythia,” there was nothing not to like. And, in a sneaky way, Michael had won her over at the fancy lunch with the snails and soufflés.
But that night on the porch, Frida and Pansy were not won over. They told Michael that they had decided they did not want to be bought out, that if Michael wanted to live in the big house, he’d have to rent it. This led to a stormy, teary argument, to Uncle Marsden trying to duck out for a wal
k, to Pansy screaming at him that he’d always loved Michael best, to Michael calling Pansy an ingrate, to…well, Saga had simply sat there, unable to move, as if watching a real war unfold.
It became an all-out cold war—Uncle Marsden and Michael versus Frida and Pansy—until, one month later, the twins were born. Both girls: Elizabeth, after Aunt Liz, and a flourishy name that Saga had a hard time remembering (Leonora? Isadora? Ramona?), after Denise’s mother. They came out from the city for their first visit in the middle of August. You’d have thought he was expecting royalty, the way Uncle Marsden behaved. Saga had never seen him clean anything other than the leaves of ailing plants, but there he was, down on his knees scrubbing behind the toilets, standing on a ladder sweeping cobwebs out of hidden corners they’d occupied for months or maybe years. He shook rugs over the porch rail, bleached countertops, and filled the house with flowers from his garden. Meanwhile, he moved the houseplants he knew to be poisonous into his salon of mosses, locking the door as if they might escape.
“Those babies aren’t even close to crawling,” said Saga.
“I know, I know,” he said, “but supposing the wicked old wind blew a geranium leaf into a cradle? Mother Nature is cruel!”
Saga decided to take his hysterical preparations as just that: crazy and amusing. After all, he’d asked nothing extra of Saga. But Pansy and Frida, who arrived a few hours before the royal family, did not find their father’s behavior funny at all. Frida had called a truce, and she’d made Pansy come along. Pansy spoke to Denise but not to Michael and hardly at all to her father. Uncle Marsden didn’t seem to care. He only had eyes for those babies. He couldn’t get enough of holding them—one then the other, the other then the one, as if they were old enough to guess at a preference—and Saga could see from the looks on both Pansy’s and Frida’s faces that they were feeling literally replaced, traded in for these two tiny, perhaps more promising girls.