by Marian Thurm
There wasn’t.
He found himself wishing he drank, or did the kind of drugs that made you high, high enough to lift him from the pitch-dark place he currently inhabited and could not—no matter how strenuously he tried—figure out a way to abandon.
Some nights he collapsed on the rust-colored leather couch in the den watching bad news on MSNBC, and once he fell asleep at his desk, his head on the keyboard of his open laptop, foul-smelling saliva trickling from the corner of his mouth into the crook of his bare arm. That time, Stacy discovered him there at six a.m. and led him back to bed, whispering gently into his ear all the ways in which she loved him.
Often it seemed she knew just the right thing to say, and it was good to be able to count on that. And also on the Xanax that he now took multiples of multiple times a day, never mind what Dr. Avalon would have thought.
Lying to his shrink was a new low, no doubt about it.
~ 25 ~
Happily, through a friend of Jefrie’s, they had been able to find a two-bedroom rental on the Upper East Side that they could actually afford. They would be relocating only a couple of blocks east of the Park Avenue apartment they were being forced to leave behind, and yet, in certain painful ways, it would feel as if they were worlds away. In the meantime, in the few weeks remaining before the first of the month when they were scheduled to move, Stacy would have to endure numerous visits from the Varushkins—the wife and grown daughter of the contractor who would be taking over their condo. The first time they arrived—both of them in mink on a mild December day—Oksana, the chunky, sixty-something wife, swept through the front door of Stacy’s apartment with a very small dog tucked under the sleeve of her coat. It was, Stacy learned, a teacup Yorkshire terrier, and it was wearing a sparkly silver bowtie around its undersized neck. Oksana introduced herself and Albina, the thirtyish, bejeweled and heavily made-up daughter whose face reflected her own. She lowered the dog, who was named Totoshka, onto the parquet floor in the foyer, where he immediately peed.
Vague apologies were offered, and while Stacy ran off to the kitchen to get some paper towels and the odor-and-stain remover she used on the floor on the very rare occasions when her cats might have strayed from the litter box, the Varushkins helped themselves to a tour of the apartment. Stacy caught up with them in the master bedroom, after she’d cleaned up Totoshka’s mess. The two women were poking around inside her walk-in closet, and Totoshka was curled up on her bed, relaxing against a silk-covered decorative pillow that Roger’s mother had once given her.
“I think I saw a dust bunny or two in there,” Oksana noted as she stepped out of the closet. “You really should tell your housekeeper it could use a good cleaning before we move in.”
“We don’t have a housekeeper,” Stacy said, and carefully removed Totoshka from her bed. Her two cats, she knew, were cowering in terror behind the shower curtain in the kids’ bathroom.
Oksana frowned. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I mean, who does your cleaning for you?” Although she was closer to seventy than she was to sixty (which Stacy had discovered on the Internet with a couple of clicks of her mouse) and boasted a pair of hefty legs, she was dressed like her daughter, in a foolishly short black skirt, and a dangerously low-cut scarlet satin blouse that displayed more of her breasts than anyone might have wanted to see. Both Varushkins wobbled uncertainly in what Stacy and her friends would have referred to in college as “fuck-me pumps,” the sort which she herself had abandoned at about the time she became a mother.
“I don’t understand what you mean when you say you don’t have a housekeeper,” Oksana insisted, and she and her daughter stared at Stacy, both of them looking baffled.
The thought of this woman and her family setting up shop here and taking over her home—and Roger’s and their children’s—made Stacy want to weep. But would it have been any more palatable if Oksana were a different sort of person, someone smarter and better dressed and just a little more gracious? Well, probably not. Still Stacy would have gotten at least some satisfaction out of saying, Honestly? Just the thought of you moving in here makes me want to kill myself.
“You look upset, everything okay? You all right?” said Albina, who, like her mother, had necklace upon necklace draped around her—Stacy counted a half-dozen long gold chains adorned with good-sized diamonds, some reaching almost to her waist, and also a couple of strands of pearls, and she remembered the armfuls of silver bracelets she herself had worn long ago. But thin silver bracelets were one thing, she thought, thick gold chains another.
She shrugged off Albina’s question, and ushered the Varushkins into the master bathroom.
“You know, I wanted to ask you,” Oksana said, “how come it’s almost Christmas but there’s no tree in the living room?”
“Yeah, how come?” Albina said. “And is this marble? Because we only like granite. And why didn’t you put in a Jacuzzi?”
“We’re Jewish,” Stacy murmured. She looked around for Totoshka, who was nowhere in sight. Maybe, she thought, he was contemplating leaving the Varushkins behind and getting home to Brighton Beach on his own.
“Jews don’t have Jacuzzis?” Oksana said.
“Jews don’t have Christmas trees,” Stacy said.
“Says who? That’s ridiculous—everyone has a Christmas tree.”
“I don’t think so, Mom,” said Albina. “There are a hell of a lot of Muslims in this country now.” She flipped the light switch on and off several times. “That’s kind of an ugly light fixture you’ve got up there, no offense.”
“I agree,” Oksana said. “Thank God Daddy’s a contractor and can whip this place into shape for us.”
What Stacy imagined was a whip-wielding guy in work boots and carpenter’s overalls ferociously ripping out all the carefully chosen tiles and faucets and showerheads and his and hers double sinks that she and Roger had taken some pleasure in during the three years they’d lived here. (Not that she couldn’t have lived without all those expensive things—it was just stuff, after all, though stuff she liked to think reflected her good taste.) Three years that had whizzed by as Will learned to walk, both kids outgrew their diapers, made friends beyond the walls of the apartment, and learned to read.
She’d never, not once that she could remember, allowed anger to get the best of her, and so she pretended now that Roger was entirely innocent, that he could not, in any way at all, be held responsible for their downward tumble.
There was good luck in this life, and there was bad, and no family—no matter how smart and deserving they might have been—ever got through life without bumping up against the darkness that was out there. It would be wrong, wouldn’t it, to regard her family as special, as if they deserved better than any other in this world. This was what she tried to accept, and she thought she was doing a pretty good job of it.
She heard Oksana say that she wanted to take another look at the kitchen, and as the three of them walked out into the hallway, Totoshka strutted toward them, one of Stacy’s bright pink disposable razors clenched between his lips. He dropped it at Oksana’s feet and wagged his tail.
“He just loves to go through people’s things,” Oksana said. “Hope you don’t mind.” She swept him off the floor and brought him along with them into the kitchen, where she and Albina nodded approvingly at the Sub-Zero refrigerator and all the other stainless steel appliances Stacy had burnished with a special spray cleaner just before the Varushkins arrived, wiping off the kids’ fingerprints wherever she found them. As if she’d wanted to impress Oksana, wanted to say, Look at the beautiful things in this beautiful home I’m handing over, against my will, to you and your possibly mobbed-up husband.
And then there were the washer and dryer in the small utility room off the kitchen—more stainless steel that gleamed impressively. Oksana opened their doors and slammed them shut carelessly.
Take it easy! Stacy wanted to say, but what did it matter, she realized a moment later; what did she care how Oksana handle
d her things? Let her slam the doors as hard as she wanted. Who cared if they broke off their hinges, or if the $2,000 dishwasher (which Stacy would have loved to take with her but which was too big for the new apartment and would have to stay put) overflowed because Oksana added too much Cascade, or the edge of the granite counter chipped after she dropped a dinner plate on it? Who cared what Oksana did?
They trooped into the living room now, where the roller-coaster Marshall and Clare had given Will for his third birthday stood in all its green-and-yellow plastic glory, a big monster of a thing that seemed to swallow up a good portion of the room and would not be moving along with them to Third Avenue—no matter how hard Will and Olivia begged—when they decamped to the new apartment.
“Seriously?” Albina said. “A roller coaster?”
The kids were on separate playdates this afternoon with pals in the building, but Stacy could still hear their delighted squeals as they rode tandem down the single slope of the roller coaster, Will seated between Olivia’s legs in the car, her arms around him protectively, the two of them just thrilled to death.
S
He watches his beautiful, tired children struggling, at the end of the afternoon, with their slightly overcooked turkey burgers around his mother’s oval dining table, and thinks, Don’t you want to see them grow up? Don’t you want to see how lovely Olivia will turn out to be when she hits fourteen or fifteen (her eyes that arresting color close to his own, her hair light as his in childhood), and, someday, what profession she will choose for herself? Her IQ has tested at 148—doesn’t Roger want to see her make something of herself? And what about Will, who, at three and a half, already knows how to read? Didn’t his pre-K teacher at his new school already tell Stacy that Will is exceptionally bright? Not to mention one of the most popular (how funny is it that a three-and-a-half-year-old could be described as popular?) kids in his class, sought after by everyone, even the girls, for playdates after school. Though maybe a little overly exuberant at times, he’s a charmer, and always has been, pretty much since the day he turned five months old and laughed joyously for the very first time, his face reflecting what Roger and Stacy immediately recognized as the baby version of joie de vivre.
Will’s given up on his turkey burger now and is crunching a little too quickly on the handful of potato chips he scooped out of a glazed orange serving dish shaped exactly like a catcher’s mitt.
Roger puts his hand on Will’s wrist and says, “Slow down, boy, slow down, okay?” because he’s worried that his son might choke.
He’s a born worrier, absolutely.
~ 26 ~
Even before they’d settled as comfortably as they could into their new apartment, Roger and Stacy found themselves in Memorial Sloan Kettering, sitting in a small waiting room, biding their time before they donated blood. Clare, whose tumor had returned, would be undergoing what had been predicted to be a marathon surgery next week, and she would likely be in need of several transfusions during the operation. Though Roger’s B negative blood was not a match and he would be donating to a stranger, Stacy’s was O negative, the universal donor, and her blood would, they hoped, go straight to Clare.
The only other people in the waiting room with them on this Monday afternoon just hours before New Year’s Eve, were a trio of nuns in traditional black-and-white habit. Instead of counting their rosaries, two of the nuns were texting or e-mailing on their BlackBerries, and the third was plugged into her iPod, listening to God knows what—maybe it was Beethoven’s “Pathétique,” Roger speculated, but then again, maybe it was Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Goode.” He hated being here, hated thinking of his sister in such terrible jeopardy, but had to smile at the thought of a nun, especially one dressed in her wimple and scapular, silver cross hanging from a black cord around her neck, grooving to Chuck Berry, pretty much the inventor of rock ’n’ roll. He leaned over in his seat and whispered into Stacy’s ear, and both of them stared at the nun for a moment, hoping she would give something away, just a hint of what she was listening to. But her eyes were closed now, and classical music was a good bet, Roger decided. Or better yet, some otherworldly thirteenth-century Gregorian chant about the End of Days.
He and Stacy had already filled out a lengthy questionnaire about their medical history, and now he was being summoned by an RN into a small private office, where she took his temperature by sticking a thermometer into his ear, and told him to relax.
“Ever given blood before?” she asked him. Though a plastic badge on her uniform indicated her name was M. Crookendale, she was a small, dark-skinned woman with a whiff of an accent.
Roger could hear a child’s voice whining out in the waiting room. “I wanna see the 3-D version, NOT the regular one!” the kid insisted.
“My sister is very sick,” Roger murmured.
“Oh, so sorry,” the nurse said. “Have you been tattooed in the past twelve months?”
“What?”
“If you have, you won’t be able to give blood today.”
He thought of the tiny heart, just an outline, actually, that Stacy had tattooed on her wrist. (She and Jefrie and another friend had gotten matching ones together when they were in college, but years later Jefrie had paid to have it removed with a laser because her partner, Honey, found it trailer-trashy.) . . . Roger thought of how disappointed in him Stacy had to be, though she would never have said so. When the moving van came for their things last week, and Thomas, his favorite doorman, had asked if they were leaving the city, Roger had hung his head, embarrassed to admit that their new home was on Third Avenue—where the sullen-faced doormen wore ill-fitting uniforms and sauntered leisurely from their station to the heavy glass door that led to the inner lobby of the forty-two-story high-rise. The apartments there, with their narrow galley kitchens and plastic-coated cabinets and linoleum counters, and tiny bathrooms with shower floors made of textured concrete, were nothing to write home about. But Stacy kept reminding him how lucky they were to be able to stay in the city, how lucky they were that Jefrie’s friend had gotten them in there, and Roger wasn’t going to argue with her. Thomas, who wore white gloves and a well-pressed uniform that hung on him perfectly and was ever the professional, always addressing Roger as “Sir,” and never failing to open the door for him, shook his hand gravely as he and Stacy and the children had made their way through the elegant marble lobby—with its coffered ceiling graced by a flock of winged putti—and out the door for the last time. Roger had resisted the urge to turn and take one last lingering look over his shoulder at what they were leaving behind.
“In the past twelve months, have you had sexual contact with, or lived with, anyone who has had active viral hepatitis?” the nurse asked.
Roger shook his head.
The nurse continued to read from a sheet of paper in her lap. “Have you ever had a positive test for the AIDS virus? Have you ever used illegal intravenous drugs, even once?”
No. And no.
“If you are a woman, have you, since 1977, given or received money for sex, even once? Or, if you are a man, have you, since 1977, paid to have sex with another man, even once?” the nurse asked matter-of-factly.
Roger had to laugh. “I just want to make it clear that I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a woman.”
“Oh, no problem, I didn’t mean to suggest that you were. It’s just that I’m required to read everything on this questionnaire to you,” the nurse explained.
Stacy had apparently been led into a small office next door, and Roger could hear her laughing now.
“Best of luck to your sister,” the nurse said. She asked what kind of cancer Clare had. When Roger told her, her face turned grim, but she said nothing.
In a few minutes, when they were finished, he and Stacy met in the hallway between the two offices, and immediately Stacy said, “Hey, did I ever tell you that I received money for sex, just this one time, back in the late seventies, when I was in middle school?”
“Bad girl,” Roger sa
id. He smiled at her. “I hope you at least put the money to good use.”
“Damn straight I did!”
It was chilly in the large room where the two of them gave blood, and Roger accepted the cotton blanket that was offered him as he arranged himself in the fake-leather recliner where he would be spending the next half hour. He looked away when the needle, which was more painful than he’d expected, was slipped into his vein. Stacy was in a recliner on the other side of the room, and they waved to each other. They had lost their home—correction, he had lost their home—but, inexplicably, Stacy didn’t seem to hold it against him, or, if she had, she’d soon forgiven him. Last week when they were unpacking in the new apartment, he overheard her voice rising, with what sounded like genuine enthusiasm, as she told Olivia and Will how lucky they were to be sharing a room with bunk beds. Bunk beds! How cool is that! he’d heard her saying. Never mind that in the old apartment the children had each had a room of their own, a room twice as large as the new one they were sharing. They were babies, three and five years old; what, after all, did they know or care about the dimensions of a room? Stacy asked him. But he cared, he whose responsibility it was to provide the best of everything for his family.
Stop it! Stacy had said to him. We have a roof over our heads and it’s a pretty good one. Get over it!
But he couldn’t get over it—not what he’d done to his family, not what he’d allowed to be taken from them. Waking up in the new apartment for the first time, he couldn’t get his bearings, couldn’t endure the view directly into the stranger’s apartment that faced his bedroom window. He wanted to kick himself for having taken for granted the beautiful glimpse of the Empire State Building from his former bedroom window, the views of the glittering East River from his dining room.
His family, or at least Stacy, had grown well accustomed to those views, and to the life that accompanied them, a life that offered the luxury of always having more than enough money. Substantially more than enough. But now, because of his failures, his shortsightedness, his inability to predict the future with any degree of wisdom or accuracy, there was the worry of never having enough.