by Maggie Estep
“What a terrible thing to say. Most people tell me I’m too thin.”
“No. You are not. You are fine.”
“I’m fine?”
“Don’t fish for compliments, it’s an unpleasant tendency.”
“In me?”
“In cellists.”
This makes her blink. I’ve genuinely stumped her this time.
“Mark Baxter, it’s possible that my attraction to you is waning,” she says after a long pause.
Now it is she who has stumped me. Do I care? I might.
“All right then, let us go eat,” I finally concede.
She sniffs a little then elegantly rises from the floor in one fluid motion. She is a slender lioness. Or maybe an antelope. Though frankly, I loathe animals.
As we amble to the bank of elevators, more than a few of our fellow students look at us. I’d like to think they’re considering Julia fortunate to have gained access to me, but in truth they are probably wondering at her sanity and pitying her. But that is fine. People thought Glenn Gould—to whom some have compared me—unbearably eccentric. I begin to steer us toward the trusted hideous diner we frequented recently, but Julia is taking it upon herself to turn our luncheon into a major event. She insists we must go elsewhere. I’ve had little sleep in these last days and my resistance is low. I go along with her plan.
We end up at what appears to be a dismal hole in the wall. A man with large horrible earrings seats us at a tiny table and foists menus upon us.
“This is the best meal you’ll have all week,” Julia informs me. She’s in a strange haughty mood now and I’m slightly frightened. Though I hadn’t realized it, I do not want her to abhor me.
I order some sort of deranged braised tofu product that proves to be edible. I take care not to dwell on Julia’s plate, which is smothered in seaweed, a thing I have difficulty even looking at. Before my mother was put away, we went to the ocean several times. My mother loved water. She taught me to swim, and I wasn’t opposed to this activity until seaweed became entangled in my hair. I have a keen sense of smell, and long after my mother had carefully shampooed me, I could still smell the lingering grotesque odor. I do not like seaweed at all.
Julia is uncharacteristically quiet throughout the meal. Attempting to entertain her, I tell her an anecdote about young JSB, who, in his quest to hear great musicians, undertook the long journey from Luneburg, where he was living, to Hamburg, to hear the great organist and scholar Reinken. After staying longer than planned, Bach found himself with almost no money as he journeyed home. He was quite starved and stood outside an inn, taking in great breaths of the cooking smells emanating from that establishment. As he stood, forlorn and hungry, someone threw two herring heads out the window into the rubbish pile. As JSB proceeded to feast upon the fish heads, he found a Danish ducat hidden in each head. With these newfound riches, he was able to buy himself a fine meal and travel several more times to Hamburg.
The anecdote earns a small smile from Julia. She then sighs deeply and says, “Oh, Mark.”
I’m not sure how to interpret this, so I ask for the check and pay the bill.
We proceed back to Juilliard.
“You will come help me?” I say as we head to the elevators.
“I thought surely you’d be delighted if I left you alone,” Julia says.
“No,” I say simply.
She looks at her watch. A small delicate gold watch. She frowns.
“Please, Julia,” I say, surprising myself.
“For a short while,” she agrees.
I feel relief wash over me. Julia has, remarkably, helped my concentration immensely. With her curled on the dirty carpet of my room, I am able to make the gods fly through my hands in an astonishing way.
We return to my room, which, at Julia’s insistence, I’ve taken to leaving unlocked. I am feeling lighthearted but anxious to get back to work as I throw open the door and find Wanda there, lying on top of the piano.
“Please get down, that is not a strong instrument,” I say, alarmed.
Julia is standing in the doorway, looking confused.
“Hello, I’m Wanda,” the vixen says, extending her hand in Julia’s direction while remaining prone on the piano.
“Wanda, please, get down now,” I say, trying to sound authoritative.
Wanda shoots me a hurt look. Julia continues to stand in the doorway with her mouth slightly open. Wanda slowly slinks off the piano. She is wearing a red dress and a strange yellow coat. Her hair is pulled on top of her head, with strands of it spilling down over her shoulders. She is wearing high-heeled sandals. She is a beautiful woman but I loathe her.
“Julia,” I say, turning to the cellist, “this is Wanda. I’m not sure what she’s doing here but she’ll be leaving soon. Please don’t be disturbed.”
To her vast credit, although Julia clearly is disturbed, she nods slightly then walks into the room, removes her light jacket, and sits down cross-legged on the befouled carpet.
Wanda is very confused by this.
“I have work to do, Wanda,” I say, relishing the opportunity to turn the tables on her.
Wanda is apparently at a loss.
I loved her once. But that emotion left abruptly the other night.
“I don’t have time to be toyed with anymore,” I tell her, surprising myself.
Wanda actually blushes. She looks on the verge of saying something, then suddenly walks to the door.
I follow her into the hall. “You were cruel to me,” I tell her.
“I was just playing with you, Mark. I never thought you minded,” she says, shimmying closer to me.
“I minded, Wanda. I told you I minded.”
“Oh,” she says, dejected.
“Well I don’t care,” she says petulantly.
“That’s nice,” I say.
She is perplexed.
“You should go now,” I say gently.
“Apparently,” she says, shooting a dirty look toward my practice room, “I can see now why you don’t have time for me.”
“The cellist is helping me work.”
“I’m sure.”
“I realize it’s difficult for you to believe.”
“Oh fuck you,” she says then. She turns and walks down the hall.
She has a lovely rear end.
I go back into my room. Julia is now curled into a ball on the floor.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
She looks up and smiles. “I’m fine. You’d better get to work. You have seventy-one hours before the competition.”
I stare down at my watch. She’s right.
I sit on the piano bench and am just clearing my mind when the phone chirps in my pocket. I hadn’t realized I’d left it on. I hesitate. I do not recognize the number on the caller ID. It is probably Wanda. All the same, I risk it.
“Yes,” I say into the phone.
“Mark, this is Ruby. I need to know when we can have another lesson. I can’t wait a week.”
“Oh?” I say, reflecting that the gods are certainly toying with me now. All three of my women in the space of but a few minutes. “I’m sorry, Ruby, but as I mentioned to you, I have a competition in three days. I’m afraid our lesson will have to wait. Besides, you can’t possibly have practiced much in the space of two days.”
The Wench launches into some crazy story that I’m at a loss to fully understand. It appears that her friend has died and she has been arrested. How exactly our lesson is meant to fit into all this, I’m not sure, but the fact remains I haven’t the time for it now.
I humor Her Royal Stubby Fingeredness for several more minutes, and finally, after promising her a lesson four days hence, I bid her a good afternoon and turn the phone off.
Julia is still curled on the floor.
I look to the ceiling and then to the girl. I get up from the bench and then crouch down at Julia’s side and stare at her. I touch her cheek.
She smiles.
Ruby Murphy
They’ve got me in one of those narrow interrogation rooms one sees depicted on TV A desk. Two homicide detectives: a sinewy black woman and a nasty Dominican guy. They’re not even pretending to understand how I got planted down in the middle of all this. And I’m getting more than a little worried. My stomach is churning and only the surrealness of it all keeps me from completely losing my mind.
It’s getting grimmer and grimmer—until Ned appears.
“Our perp is regaining consciousness at the hospital,” he tells the detectives. “I need this witness over there.” He motions at me.
As I get up to follow Ned out of the wretched little room, the detectives look embittered over Ned snatching me from their jaws.
Out in the hall I see Coleman sitting on a bench. He seems exhausted and defeated. He looks at me with a hangdog expression. “Lady,” he says, reaching to touch my arm, “you know, don’t you, that I didn’t know none of this about Frank, right?”
I shrug at him.
“What am I going to do with that horse of yours?” the cowboy asks, fanning his hands out in a helpless gesture.
“He’s not my horse,” I say regretfully. “I’m sure he’ll get taken from Ariel and sold off. Seized by the government,” I say, looking at Ned, who nods.
“Somebody gonna have to pay me a boarding fee, though,” the cowboy grumbles.
“You’ll be taken care of,” Ned says in a clipped voice.
Coleman shoves his hands in his pockets and looks down at his feet.
I follow Ned outside to his car. He tells me to put my seat belt on. I do as I’m told.
“I didn’t rescue you just because you needed rescuing,” Ned tells me as he noses the car into traffic. “I’d like to see how our friend Miss DiCello responds to you. Sort of use you as bait.”
He looks over at me for a second. “Of course, now you’ll truly hate me.”
“Not hate,” I say. “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing, really. Just stand there while I ask her some questions.”
“That’s it? Stand there?”
“That’s it.”
“I can do that,” I tell him.
I sense he’s got more to say, but he keeps it under his hat.
X
IT’S STRANGE to find the previously always poised Ariel DiCello in a pastel hospital gown. She is strapped down to her bed and a cop is standing guard nearby. There’s a bandage over her forehead. She’s propped up on a bunch of pillows, her hands folded into her lap, and she is staring at them as if they surprise her, like, while she was unconscious, a team of renegade surgeons cut off her own hands and put these in their place.
Ned pulls a chair up. I stand behind him.
“So. Miss DiCello. Can you tell me what happened?” Ned starts out, innocuously enough.
Ariel stares. Then, after a moment, puts a hand to the bandage on her head. Eventually, leveling her pale marble gaze at me: “You did this.”
Both Ned and I look at her, expecting more. But that’s it.
“She did what, Miss DiCello?”
“She brought it on.” Ariel points at me accusatorily “Another scar. From a horse.” She pauses. Then: “This was a horse,” she points at her existing scar, “threw me and stepped on me when I was nine. I nearly died. And of course, I was scarred for life,” she says bitterly. “Now, because of you, it’s happened all over again.”
“You were trying to kill your own horse,” I say, barely containing my rage.
“That doesn’t matter,” Ariel says, at which I hear Ned turn to ask the cop if she’s been Mirandized. She has.
Evidence of this appears right on cue: A suave-looking guy in a pricey suit introduces himself as Ariel’s lawyer. Asks for a few minutes alone with his client.
We oblige and go out into the hallway with it’s Band-Aid-colored walls.
Ned confers with the cop. I sit down in an orange plastic chair attached to three others just like it. I have fallen into some sort of time hole reverie when Ned comes to sit in the chair next to mine.
“She’s cracked,” he says in a soft voice.
“What?” I say, snapping to.
“Ariel has cracked. Against her attorney’s advice. Admitted pretty much everything we suspected.”
“Little Molly.”
“Right. Injected her with a lethal dose of methamphetamine.”
“Because of what I told her?” I ask, feeling sick. “She hired me to confirm her suspicions about Frank and Molly and then she killed that poor woman.”
“Basically, yes.”
I stare at Ned.
“She met Frank when she hired him to electrocute one of her horses. A gray gelding. Horse was crazy and never lived up to his breeding. Ariel is apparently some sort of horticulture nut. Pumped pretty much all her assets into the development of some kind of flower.”
“The hybrid orchid,” I say numbly.
“Right. And she got into a financial hole. All she had left were these horses her father willed her. Evidently, she’s got issues with horses in the first place. So she didn’t have any qualms about hiring someone to whack a horse. She hired Frank. Then dated him. Then started losing it when he took up with Molly.”
I just keep staring ahead. Stunned. Sick. Sad as hell.
“You okay?” Ned asks, tentative.
“No.” I shake my head.
“Can I help?”
“No. Can I go home now?”
“Can I give you a ride?”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t. I’ll see about a car service,” I say, standing to walk over to the nurse’s station.
A stiff, gray-haired nurse directs me to a phone booth. I make the call.
Ned is still sitting there in the orange chair. His hair is hanging in unruly strands and his glasses are all the way at the tip of his nose.
“I’m gonna go,” I tell him, motioning vaguely, feeling as weird as he looks.
He nods his head. “Right,” he says. “I’ll probably have to be in touch with you about things, you know.” He looks up at me.
“Yeah.” I stare at him for a long second, then turn and walk down the hall to the elevator. The elevator doors whoosh open and an orderly wheels an empty stretcher off. I want to hop on the stretcher and get wheeled into oblivion.
I push through the revolving door and find a small Sikh guy standing on the sidewalk, in front of a navy sedan. “Car service?” he queries.
I get in the car.
The driver turns around to look at me. “Why sad, lady?”
I shrug. This seems to trouble my driver. Who nonetheless turns back around and pulls ahead into traffic.
Eventually, he pulls onto Stillwell Avenue. I pay him. Get out. Walk into my building.
“Finally,” a voice calls from the top of the stairs, and I crane my neck and find Elsie there, wagging a finger at me.
“Hey,” I greet the small woman.
“You’re alive?” She squints at me, almost seeming disappointed.
“I am,” I confirm. “And you’re out of the hospital.”
“Yes,” she says, indicating her chest, which looks considerably smaller. “You come in here.” She motions me inside the bright yellow kitchen.
Ramirez is enthroned at the table, bedecked in his traditional wife beater and boxers. “What the hell you been doin’, lady?” He scowls at me.
“Nothing,” I say.
Elsie pulls a chair in next to Ramirez’s, sits down and looks me over head to toe.
“Are you all right?” I ask Elsie, hoping to distract her from interrogating me.
“I’m gonna be okay. And I’m suing,” she adds, delighted. “What I want to know is what the hell you been doin’ with yourself,” she says, making it clear I’ve got to give a thorough accounting.
I give her a thumbnail sketch of the last twelve hours, starting with Oliver. My two friends bow their heads in sadness. I tell them the rest of it too. The unbelievable rest of it.
Ramirez makes disgruntled clucking sounds in his throat. Elsie’s eyes are big and full of wonder.
“So the blonde was crazy.” Elsie seems thrilled. I think that, as a species, small, dark-haired women like Elsie and me are always happy to find confirmation that elegant willowy blondes are sociopathic basket cases.
“The blonde was more than crazy, she was a murderer.”
“She’ll plead insanity,” Elsie muses.
“I’m sure,” I agree. “And she might not be lying. Listen, I’ve got to go look in on my cats,” I tell my neighbors.
“You don’t trust me?” Ramirez scowls.
“I trust that you fed them, yes,” I counter.
“Baby, come back over in a while. You shouldn’t be alone.” Elsie touches my arm.
I try to smile at her, then retreat to my place, where both cats are planted at the door, indignant as hell at my prolonged absence. I immediately lie down on the floor and let them bump their heads against my hands and hair. I stay like this for a long time.
The phone rings. I let the machine get it, but when Jane’s voice comes on, I pick up. I tell her the latest.
“Are you finished now?” she says, sounding angry.
“Finished what?”
“Attempting to change yourself by having life-threatening adventures?” Jane says, doing her best impression of a shrink.
“I didn’t deliberately get into this mess, you know.”
“You think you can erase everything by putting yourself in danger.”
“I do?”
“Sure.”
“What do I want to erase?”
“Well, Oliver’s illness and now his death. Before that your heartbreak from Sam moving out. There’s no eradicating those experiences. They mark you. You can’t remove them.”
“Are you done?” I ask her.
“Quite,” she says.
Stinky chooses this moment to let out a wail of complaint, signaling I should get off the phone and pay attention to him.
“I’ve gotta tend to my cats.”
“Come over later? We’ll go to yoga? Four o’clock class?”
“I dunno,” I say. “Maybe. Probably. Oh, hell, okay. I’ll see you at three-thirty.”