The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  With that lone nod to his competence, their meeting was adjourned.

  • CHAPTER 9 •

  FOUL MATTERS

  Florence Darkly’s skirting of poverty had always been contaminated by a hint of pretense. Throughout the string of punk jobs for which she was overeducated, she’d always known that in a pinch she could turn to Grand Man. Her grandfather had a parsimonious streak, but he was generous on birthdays, and open to well-reasoned appeals to make “good investments”—which is how Jarred copped a failing upstate farm that was starting to look a shade less wacky. Without Grand Man, she’d never have managed the down payment on the house, and at Adelphi she lied to co-workers about renting. Serving a population on the absolute edge, Florence was ashamed of the leg up. Advantage was separating. Having even limited access to wealth two generations away was like having secret powers. Those superheroes were always lonely.

  But this last July, her parents had organized a conference on fleXface, breaking it to all three kids at once that Dad hadn’t, after all, brought Grand Man and Luella back to Carroll Gardens simply to spend more quality time with his father during Douglas Mandible’s final years. Receiving the news with grim stoicism, Avery made a great show of concern for their parents, who were the real victims of fortune-go-blooey. Oh, no, what about that ranch in Montana? (The overdone performance usurped Florence’s traditional role as the considerate one. And it was a bit too easy for Avery to suppress Fuck, so much for that kitchen extension, given a lifelong affluence of which Florence could only dream.) Jarred spouted his standard bilge about governmental treachery; what the hell, he’d already snagged his farm. The great-heart legendarily oblivious to worldly prosperity, Florence alone was detectably dolorous. But honestly, someone had to find the annihilation of God knew how many millions just a little bit depressing.

  Suddenly becoming mortal should have made her feel closer to the others in her “community,” who’d never enjoyed surreptitious resort to a loaded old man in New Milford. Instead she felt frightened. It was hardly comforting to be all in the same boat when the boat was sinking. That whole helping-hand lark—turning to one another in times of tribulation—only worked when who was under the gun varied from week to week. It did not work when everyone had a crisis at once—at which point the community atomized into a large number of people in the same place, who wanted and needed the same things, and lacking the means of getting them might take what they required by deception or force. As the urban crime rate escalated across the nation, Florence marveled that it had ever been possible to walk down the road with a wallet, or to wear a fancy watch. Late in the day, she appreciated the miracle of civilization, whereby people paraded sacks of groceries, or jingled keys to a car, and were not immediately set upon. Even all those beggars in downtown Brooklyn: they were still asking.

  Real poverty is about doing what you have to do as opposed to what you want. So while Florence didn’t warm to her father’s suggestion that she take in her aunt from France, Willing’s forecasts were proving accurate: the mortgage interest continued to soar; her cost-of-living raises lagged behind roaring prices. Every trip to Green Acre Farm fostered post-traumatic stress disorder. She shunned ironing to avoid paying for the electricity. To skip showers, she cultivated the pirate-style bandana into a permanent affectation at work. For a time, Kurt had hung on at the florist; Asian tourist dollars spilled into Brooklyn, and restaurant bouquets kept the shop afloat. But news of muggings and racist gang murders discouraged moneyed travelers, restaurants suffered, and the florist closed. Kurt had missed paying his usual pittance two months running, and she couldn’t bear to say anything. Besides, even if her tenant improbably kept current, his rent had been set in 2027, and no longer covered his share of the utilities.

  She would have to replace Kurt with a relative who had “resources.”

  “I don’t know,” Esteban said quietly on the sofa, now duly repaired with duct tape. “Kurt’s an asslick, but he keeps to himself. Family—they butt into your business. Can’t see your aunt mousing around the basement, never saying a word about the tromping, yakking, and television overhead.”

  Esteban put a premium on privacy, since he kicked around the house all day. When he first lost his job with Over the Hill, he was almost relieved. On one trek he led in the spring, a ruined banker threw himself off the Palisades, plunging hundreds of feet and missing the Hudson River with a sickening crunch. Numerous other instances of older clients who’d lost everything scraping together the remnants of their savings to go out in style made leading expeditions stressful. It was hard enough to worry about elderly clients accidentally slipping down the mountainside without also worrying that they’d pitch themselves into oblivion on purpose. Over the Hill acquired a murky reputation, and no business could prosper long from a consumer base that was self-eliminating—not when said consumer base was both suicidal and broke.

  Thereafter, he’d picked up temporary kitchen work in Manhattan, also enabled by bargain-hunting foreigners, for whom whole meals cost less than a soda at home. (Some subsequent violence insensitive tourists were said to have brought on themselves—as by singing loud, snide renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while weaving drunkenly down Sixth Avenue.) Esteban hated the work; his people had served their time with piles of china smeared with Bolognese, and the grungy, invisible job seemed a generational demotion. Yet he hated idleness more. He’d stooped to loitering on corners for day labor, as his father had, but the competition was stiff, including from gringos, and when construction crews came shopping, he seldom got picked. Esteban had lost the hunched, I’ll-do-anything-and-ask-for-nothing quality evinced by his father’s generation of immigrants. He stood too straight. He looked people in the eye. He came across as a man who expected to be paid what was agreed on at the start, and who would raise a fuss if he were shafted. Who wants to hire that?

  “My aunt is a writer, or was, so she must value her solitude,” Florence said. “I don’t know her well, since she moved to Europe in the latter 1990s and only came back to the US for book tours. She’s incensed that novelists don’t earn royalties anymore, so for the last ten years she’s been on strike; even my dad doesn’t think it’s writer’s block. But she did swing through New York on general principle about three years ago, when you were away on an expedition. She and Willing went on a marathon walk to Manhattan, just the two of them—which surprised me, since my dad claims Nollie ‘hates children.’ There’s always been some friction between her and my dad, but I thought she was pretty cool—careless—when I was a kid. My dad was the play-it-safe sort; Nollie was the brave one. Mouthy, adventurous, always involved in torrid romances that blew up with a lot of shouting and breaking of stuff. She used to be a looker. Fit. But Jesus, she must be … seventy-three? Not the kind of woman you imagine becoming seventy-three.”

  “After Over the Hill, I can imagine anybody seventy-three,” Esteban said. “Everybody I see just pre-old.”

  “Including me?”

  “I keep waiting for you to turn sixteen”—he kissed her—“so that I can’t be done for statutory. Now, you really want to swap a timid, no-problem suck-up for a crazy old lady you’ve barely seen since you were twelve?”

  “I don’t want anyone in this house but the three of us. But we need the money.”

  She dreaded Kurt’s eviction. When she first took in a tenant, she hadn’t considered that, for landlords with a conscience, renting was closer to foster care than commerce. She couldn’t bear kicking someone out who had no place to go.

  Steeling herself in the kitchen the next evening, Florence knocked delicately on the door to the basement. She hadn’t laid eyes on Kurt since he’d missed the first rent payment. He must have been mortified. “Can I come down?”

  “Of course, it’s your house, Florence!” When she arrived downstairs, he was feverishly stuffing a pair of socks into the hamper. “Look, I’m super sorry, if I’d known you were coming, I’d have cleaned up.”

  “Cleaned up what?
” Florence said, scanning the Germanic order of his domain. The bedding was cornered and smooth. The carpet was thin and a strangely depressing off-blue, but it was spotless. A grainy scatter on the counter beside the stove only stood out because every other surface was immaculate.

  Kurt followed her line of sight, and immediately began sponging the counter. “Sorry,” he said again. “I’ve been learning to make tortillas.”

  An odd complaint for a landlord, but the basement was too clean. Aside from one bag of cornmeal and a canister of salt, the shelves above the kitchen unit were bare. On a hunch, she sidled to the small fridge, and sure enough: only a juice bottle filled with tap water and a crumple of margarine foil. “Kurt, you’ve got to eat better than this.”

  “Oh, I’m not that into shopping, and I put it off.” He was thinner. Sunken cheeks combined with the teeth to make him look ghoulish.

  “And it’s chilly down here!” Florence said. “It’s November. Some warmth bleeds from upstairs, but I told you to make free with the space heater. It’s very efficient, and I was assured it wasn’t a fire hazard. Also …” She sniffed. “I don’t mean to embarrass you, but that toilet needs flushing.”

  Kurt blushed, and did the honors. “I just know that, you know, water is …”

  “Pricey, but a necessity. I warned you this was an illegal tenancy, but that means I’m breaking the rules. It doesn’t mean you have no rights.”

  Kurt bent his head and clasped his hands. “Look,” he said to the floor. “I’m surprised you didn’t knock on the door a long time ago. You’ve been really, really decent, beyond the call. And I’ve been applying for jobs all over—”

  “So has everyone else,” she said gently, taking a seat at the small laminated table. “And since your job at the florist was part-time, I guess you don’t qualify for unemployment. Do you have any family?”

  “We’ve sort of, um, lost touch.”

  “The trouble is, I have family myself. An aunt, who’s coming back from abroad and needs a place to stay.” She left out the part about Nollie having “resources.”

  “I immense, immense understand,” Kurt said hurriedly. “I’ll get out of your hair like, tomorrow. And promise, soon as I’m back on my feet, I’ll get you that back rent—”

  “But where will you go?”

  “If you could lend me a tarp, I hear the encampments in Prospect Park are malicious,” he said with forced cheer. “Everybody singing, and playing instruments, and telling stories. Just like Woodstock! It could be a great experience. Something to tell the grandkids.”

  Florence thought reflexively, You’re not having any grandkids with those teeth. “That’s not what I hear the encampments are like. More like malicious in the old sense of the word. Central Park is even worse. And winter’s coming.”

  “There’s always, you know, city-subsidized … the projects …”

  “The waiting list for social housing is closing in on a million applications.” Florence was exasperated to find herself on the wrong side of this conversation, and tried to wrest back her rightful role. “But there’s always the city’s shelter system.”

  Though she’d rehearsed it, the suggestion was disingenuous. The shelters were overwhelmed. Lines in the morning were as long as the ones for the banks a year before. Adelphi tried to get the word out that all their rooms were taken by de facto permanent clients, even after the facility doubled the building’s occupancy by forcing more than one family to share the same small units—resulting in the kind of conditions that in the old world of investigative reporters might have produced a lacerating exposé. Staff couldn’t police the ban on food in the rooms and had given up. Rats and roaches scuttled through the halls. Toilets overflowed. Drains backed up. Meal portions in the cafeteria were stingy. Fights broke out over dinner rolls. And still they came. Yet who arrived had changed. The slept-in clothes were from L.L.Bean. The strollers were wide-bodied, with snap-up plastic covers for inclement weather and expandable side pockets for shopping and snacks; baby blankets were cashmere. These strollers once went for thousands, and more than one bedraggled foreclosure victim camping on the sidewalk had been mugged for their luxury transport. When she turned this type away, she often heard railing about how much they’d paid in taxes. If she informed this latest brand of homeless that they had to register with the DHS in the Bronx first, they weren’t having any of it, refusing to give up their places on line. Florence was accustomed to stories from the homeless about having once been nuclear physicists, too—occasionally from educated but unbalanced former professionals who’d suffered breakdowns a while back and dropped off the map, more often from raving fantasists. But the new homeless had been nuclear physicists in good standing just last week. If they were demented, it was with rage.

  Florence stood and raked her hair. Kurt would all too willingly shuffle out the door with his few belongings in canvas hold-alls and make his way to the park. But in comparison with the shelter, this house had space.

  “There is the attic,” she introduced reluctantly. “It’s not finished, but it’s big enough for a mattress and chest of drawers.”

  “Oh, man, Florence, no problem, and I promise, I’d be so quiet up there, you’ll never know—”

  Florence raised her hand. “You misunderstand. You’re six-foot-what? You’d die from a hemorrhage in five minutes. I was thinking we could put my aunt up there. She’s barely over five feet. You could stay down here. But only if you give me a hand clearing all the junk out, cleaning up the dust and mouse shit, and making the space livable. And you’ll need to accommodate more storage down here, for anything in the attic we decide to keep.”

  By asking him for favors, she was doing him one. Kurt had started to cry. Esteban was going to kill her.

  All that time in Paris, and I never had a proper garret,” Nollie said approvingly. Spruced up, woody, and aglow with strategically warm indirect lighting, the attic was cozy, although the new arrival was also being a good sport.

  Short and bony, Nollie dressed like a kid, in worn, dated jeans; red Converse All Stars; a LIFE’S TOO SHORT TO DRINK BAD WINE T-shirt; and an enormous, beaten-up leather jacket that looked to have been around the world twice. Her ponytailed hair was thin to be kept that long. Her face was lined, but it was easy to discern the acerbic, smartass younger woman she seemed to believe she still was. She moved with an abrupt, angular authority: she was used to getting her way. Florence couldn’t say her father hadn’t warned her.

  The septuagenarian clambered nimbly up the last three ladder rungs and slung the jacket onto the mattress. The sleeveless tee revealed the kind of arms that Esteban had mocked at Over the Hill: stringy and sinuous, with mean, hard-won muscles, but nonetheless sagging with the shriveled skin beneath the biceps that boomers tried so heartbreakingly hard to avoid. Standing in the middle of the attic, she clapped her arms at her sides, then raised them in an arc overhead until her fingers touched, barely missing the roof beams. “Check!” she announced. Florence didn’t get it.

  Nollie’s having arrived with scads of luggage was a pain, yet also an indicator that if she could pay for extra baggage, she must indeed have savings. Willing helped hoist the cases through the hatch.

  “I’ve got a few contributions for dinner,” their new resident announced, tossing Willing a bag. “But first I need to earn it. Shake off the flight.” With an impatient smile, she shooed them from the attic and retracted the ladder.

  In the kitchen, Florence unpacked the lavish gifts: sausage, acorn-fed ham, smoked horsemeat of all things, exotic French cheeses. They’d have a feast.

  “Fuck me, qué es eso?” Esteban exclaimed. The frame of the house had begun to quake, poom, poom, poom.

  Florence and Willing crept back upstairs and stared up at the ceiling. “What do you think she’s doing?” her son whispered over the rhythmic din.

  “Home improvements, already?” Florence puzzled. “It sounds like construction.”

  They shrugged and slunk back down. The pounding
lasted about half an hour—a very long half an hour—and proved especially grating for the fact that the pummeling was unexplained. “Christ,” Florence muttered. “What have I done to us?”

  In due course, Nollie reappeared downstairs, cheeks flushed, and wearing a fresher version of the same down-market uniform; she’d have passed herself off as in good trim for seventy-three if only she dressed her age. It was a generational blindness. Young people could pull off ill-fitting rags as stylish; Florence’s niece Savannah would look sexy in a paper bag. Past cohorts had understood that beyond sixty or so you compensated for the shabbiness of your birthday suit by cloaking it as nattily as possible. Grand Mimi wore silk brocade, stockings, and tasteful pumps for trips to the post office. But the following generation dressed badly first as a political statement, later out of indolence, and latterly from delusion. Boomers considered old age one more conspiracy to expose, like the Pentagon Papers.

  Florence gestured to the spread. “Nollie, this is so generous. But how did you get this stuff past Customs?”

  “Oh, it’s murder to get anything out of the United States,” Nollie said. “You can get almost anything in.” She flourished three bottles of red wine and a liter of brandy.

  They’d invited Kurt, already sliding from freeloader to family. His insistence on being helpful put an extra burden on his host; with a repast of cold cuts, there was nothing to do. Florence no longer merely worked at a homeless shelter; she lived in one, too.