Janet told Happy all this one morning, for no good reason other than to let her know, without having to tell her directly, that she, Janet, was available for seduction. This tactic felt very grown-up to Janet, until she actually employed it, at which time it suddenly seemed childish—but Happy hadn’t noticed; she was lost in thought. About something else, Janet assumed, until she said, “And she does what on stage?”
Abashed, Janet hid behind her hair and told her again.
“Very interesting, Janet. Very interesting.” Happy’s hands folded, as if in prayer, and found her chin, and her eyes drifted off to a corner of the ceiling as she evidently thought things through. Janet felt the stirrings of hope—could it be that Happy, too, was a lesbian? Or thought she might be? This wasn’t what Happy said, though, when she spoke; she said, “You and your friends are absolutely right, Janet. President Tennyson is being unfair, keeping this valuable speaker from visiting campus.”
“Really?” Janet said.
“Perhaps he hasn’t heard of free speech? Or perhaps he simply doesn’t respect the needs of young women. At any rate, Janet, your sex lecturer will be coming to campus, I promise you that.” She opened her desk drawer.
“What do you mean?”
“An anonymous donor,” Happy said, opening a checkbook and clicking open a ballpoint pen, “is about to bring your Sally Streit to Equinox College. Here.”
She tore out a check and handed it to Janet. It was made out to CASH and it was for five thousand dollars.
“Bring that to the bank in Unionville. I’ll call ahead. Bring me the money. I’m going to put a stop to this obstructionist nonsense.”
“But how—”
“One of my crew will drive you.” And she unhooked a walkie-talkie from her belt loop and summoned a man to the house.
Janet didn’t know what Happy did with the envelope of hundred-dollar bills she handed her half an hour later, but somehow it was delivered to Reeve Tennyson, and a visit from Sally Streit was announced for the middle of November. As for the money’s origins, Janet swore not to tell. Her friends didn’t even know she was working for Happy—that had been her little secret, hers and Happy’s. And now they had another, even deeper one.
The students rejoiced, of course, at the news that they had won—though Janet did sense a bit of disappointment among her friends when the next day’s protest was cancelled. In bed, April said, “I wonder if Sally’s gonna show everybody how to do this—” But her voice seemed to wish that it was still complaining. “At least,” she reasoned, when their sex was done, “we’ve still got Glenda.”
Now, impulsively, Janet leaned over to Dave and said to him, “Dave, sell.”
“What?” He hadn’t been washing glasses or polishing the bar, as he usually did; he’d been standing there, watching her drink, watching her think.
“Sell your bar,” she said. “To Happy. She’ll let you work here. It can be the same, except you’ll have the money.”
Quietly panting, he leveled her a bloodshot look. “Are you working for her, Janet?”
“No,” Janet said. “Well, yes. Yes, but she didn’t tell me to come to you. I’m just—I just want you to do the right thing. It’s better for everybody.”
She felt, very powerfully, the force of his gaze; she felt noticed, as if by an animal in the woods. He didn’t answer, so she took another swig of the wine.
“Dave?” she said.
It seemed to snap him out of it. “I’m not selling,” he said, wiggling his jaw back and forth.
“She’s not so bad.”
Now he did pick up a dirty glass from the bar, and wash it, or start to. After a moment he just dropped it back into the water. He said, “You should go.”
“Dave?”
“Seriously, Janet,” he said, lowering his head down to the bar and resting it on crossed arms. “Seriously, get out.”
She slid off her stool and took a step back. “Okay,” she said, and she left.
When she was gone, he drank the rest of her wine, his own lips covering the place where hers had been. It was stale and sour and made his headache worse, and when he was finished he dropped the glass on the floor.
* * *
If April and the guys were disappointed by the relative dearth of protestable issues, their interval of disappointment was to be mercifully short. Ruth was awakened early the next morning by the sound of machinery outside her bedroom window, and rose in the semi-dawn to see a gigantic motorized claw climbing over the curb a few houses down, in front of the Equinox Inn. She reached for her glasses. Yes, it was real—it was scaling the little infilled hillock that separated the Inn from the sidewalk, and now it sat idling mere feet from the stone foundation.
And here came a dump truck—a huge one, the size of a small house. It too rumbled up over the curb, and crushed a bed of hydrangeas, their spindly branches bearing a few last red and orange and brown leaves. Its massive rear fender clipped the wooden sign that bore the Inn’s name, and the wood splintered, and the sign was torn in two.
Of course she had seen the yellow caution tape that had surrounded the Inn; everybody had. There was yellow caution tape all over Equinox, in front of every third building in town. She had seen the windows and light fixtures being removed, and the workmen carrying hunks of metal and coils of wire out through the front door. What did she know? It looked to her like a building under renovation. Not anymore.
The arrival of a towering crane, its wrecking ball cinched in place against its yellow neck, erased all doubt. They were tearing the thing down.
Ruth reached for a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt, and the telephone all at once. It looked like the college library would be closed this morning.
16. A hole in the ground
They stood—the citizens, new and old, of Equinox—on the sidewalk, just outside the yellow caution tape, under the tired eyes of a couple of potbellied state cops, their hands on the butts of their service revolvers. The citizens’ faces were turned toward the clapboard walls of the Equinox Inn, the oldest continuously operating hotel in central New York, upon which the instruments of destruction advanced with grim slowness, as if in a dream. Upon some of the faces—those of some lifetime residents of Equinox, and of a few of the more sentimental students—tears appeared, and were wiped away with trembling hands. Other faces registered awe, or apathy, or excitement. Newcomers, whom everyone had seen around but to whom nobody had much yet spoken, gathered in a little cluster across the street, on the front lawn of the college. If you passed by them, you might have heard their curious voices discussing what architectural wonder Happy might be planning to erect in its place—to them, clearly, this demolition was merely a natural step in the process of improvement that they had been promised in their full-color real estate brochures. And over at the south corner of the property, where the caution tape was wound around a giant sycamore, its branches near to bare, stood a wedge of twenty or so protesters, flanked by more cops, with Ruth Spinks at their apex, chanting:
Hey hey! Ho ho!
Happy Masters has got to go!
Ho ho! Hey hey!
The Equinox Inn has got to stay!
But it had begun to rain, and the police, saps twitching in their hands, were keeping them far from the building; and the noise of the machines was drowning out their words, which anyway had already been dulled by repetition.
Those voices at once fell silent when at last the wrecking ball was loosed from its moorings and swung into the northeast corner of the Inn. The clapboards and plaster imploded underneath it, a crashing squeal like the gates of hell swinging open. The rain gutter dangled from the drooping roofline, and blown-in insulation snowed to the ground. Some people gasped, somebody screamed. The newcomers, across the street, gently applauded (and what, Ruth would later wonder, were they applauding exactly? Progress? The obliteration of history? The ascent of Happy? And she would decide, with a sigh of disappointment, that it was merely the spectacle of technology, the force of man’s wrat
h against his own creation, that had so delighted them) until somebody yelled at them to knock it off.
The view through the hole was like a dollhouse cutaway; framed prints still hung on wallpapered walls, a frosted-glass shade still concealed a ceiling bulb.
Janet Ping stood by herself in a purple raincoat, the hood covering her face. Her friends were with Ruth, but she had avoided them, preferring to remain here, at the opposite side of the house, where there was not yet much to see. She had been awakened out of a very pleasant dream, which lingered in her mind, and in her loins. She had never been inside the Equinox Inn, and never would.
The mayor slouched on the sidewalk, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. It was apple season, generally his favorite time of year, but today his face bore the signs of unhappiness and advancing age. A careful reconnaissance would have shown him to be glancing at Ruth in evident shame, and Ruth glancing at him in evident frustration, but never at the same time. In time, he turned around and went back, head hung, to his orchard.
Reeve Tennyson was watching from his office. He was worrying about Sally Streit, about Happy Masters, and about his future. He pressed his nose against the cold window, leaving a grease stain that his assistant, Ellen, would rub away in irritation while he was at lunch later in the day.
Dave Dryer did not leave his apartment over the bar. He was lying on the sofa, last night’s video game still playing its demo mode on his television, an empty bottle of whiskey on its side on the floor nearby. He was not asleep, neither was he fully awake. He was drunk for the first time in six months and feeling the intensest pain he had experienced in two years. His hand cupped his mouth and his face was swollen like a plum. Though he did not yet know it, some vessel in his mind was full at last and had begun to slop over.
Happy Masters, meanwhile, was most definitely asleep. Foam plugs filled her ears and a black satin mask covered her eyes. Her lips were formed into a gentle smile, the smile (you might insist, if you saw it) of a child.
The wrecking ball again sliced through Equinox Inn, and splintered hunks of timber and dusty wallboard tumbled to the ground. Soon, the near side of the Inn fell away with a hideous rip, like a peal of thunder. Onlookers jumped when it hit the ground; a sudden gust lifted and tossed their damp hair. As if awakened from sleep, the protesters resumed chanting, an alternate verse this time—
Dolly, Dolly, leave our town!
Equinox is sacred ground!
Dolly, Dolly, leave our town!
Knock some other building down!
—but their hearts, it was clear, were no longer in it. The Inn was lost. The battle was over. The crowd of newcomers, their confidence restored by the triumph of the machines, continued their polite applause.
“I bet there’s a body in here,” Jennifer Triesman could be heard to say from among the dejected.
“Or something,” April Cort replied. “Evidence that needs to be destroyed. Something that proves she killed Glenda.”
“Better watch what you say,” Ty warned. “I’m sure she has spies.”
“She can fucking try to kill me if she wants,” Jennifer spat. “I’m not afraid of her.” She waved her arms in the air and raindrops sprayed off of them. “Come get me, bitch!” she shouted.
The rain began in earnest then, and the crowd began to break up. Happy had never showed, disappointing both the protesters, who had hoped to jeer at her, and the newcomers, who had hoped to get to be her friend. A few people slipped and fell in the mud. Other people helped them up. Everyone went back to school, or to work, or home.
By day’s end, all that remained was a hole in the ground.
* * *
But the previous night, something else had happened. Two students up late studying at the Hayao Shinohara Memorial Library stashed their backpacks underneath a desk, stole out into the dark, and indulged in a bit of mashing on a bench underneath the famously sheltering eaves on the woods-facing side of the building. The air was cool, there was a drizzling rain, and they huddled together with their hands inside one another’s sweaters, keeping warm.
What happened next became a matter of some contention, since one of the two women didn’t fully regain consciousness until the middle of the following day, and even then remained confused about what she had seen and heard; and the other had been nearly hysterical with worry over her friend. However, it seems clear that the women’s injuries were caused by falling bricks, and the bricks had most definitely come from under the eave that protected them from the rain. The student who was hurt less severely in the accident remembered hearing a sort of scraping sound from above—a squirrel, she recalled thinking—and being startled by a downpouring of dust. Mere seconds later, the bricks fell, injuring one student’s shoulder and arm, and knocking the other one quite unconscious.
The less injured student, however, claimed to have seen a figure in black stealing away from the library, a thin man in dark clothes and a mask that covered the face. When asked how, in complete darkness—for the light that usually illuminated the bench in question was burned out, which is why they chose this particular one in the first place—she was able to detect the presence of the mystery man, the student was unable to answer, other than to insist that he was real, and that she had definitely seen him.
But Equinox students tended toward paranoia, out here in the isolation of a small town, and so the campus police, after taking her statement, chose to ignore this portion of the story.
As it happened, Reeve Tennyson’s mid-semester meeting with the board of trustees was the following afternoon.
* * *
The old ladies occupied one entire side of the conference table. Before each of them, arranged on identical miniature willow ware trays, lay a small plate of ginger snaps, a ramekin filled with red globe grapes, and a steaming cup of tea. At this moment Reeve (who slumped alone on the opposite side) was cursing the work-study girl who had prepared their tea, for a little white tag hung over the edge of each cup, and the ginger snaps were thick and soft, and the grapes, against his specific instructions, were seeded. One of the five old ladies had tried a grape, and her eyes had widened in horror, and she had daintily removed the offending clot of seeds and placed it underneath the rim of her saucer, and none of the rest of them had touched a thing since.
Reeve wasn’t sure which old lady that had been—the short one with the dye job, of course, he had seen her do it, but he didn’t know their names. Yes, yes, he knew the names, but not which trustee each belonged to. Perhaps the short one was Mrs. Pearl, and the tall one with the mannish shoulders was Mrs. Jensen, and the corpulent old bat with the perm was Mrs. Kenilworth, and the black one with the white afro was Mrs. Peterson, and the wide-faced one with giant ears was Miss Chast. But probably not. Shorty, Manny, Fatty, Fuzzy, and Dumbo. Those were their names, as far as Reeve was concerned.
It was Fatty whose voice broke the uncomfortable silence. She said, “Let me get right to the point, Mister Tennyson. I told you there were two issues that demanded immediate attention. Let us tell you what they are, and you may address them.” She spoke in a grand falsetto, like some grande dame of yore, but the accent was pure Buffalo.
Reeve surprised himself by answering, “I am gratified by your expediency.”
“First,” said Fatty, ignoring him entirely, “there is the incident, to which we have just today been made privy, of the crumbling library that nearly killed two innocents.”
“Yes,” Reeve jumped in, “yes, and we’re taking care of that as we speak, I’ve called a building inspector to come and—”
“I beg your pardon, Mister Tennyson,” said Fuzzy, “but you are interrupting Mrs. Jensen.”
“Sorry.”
Fatty—that is, Mrs. Jensen, it now appeared—shook her head, as if brushing off a mosquito, and went on: “Thank you, Jeanette. As I was saying, Mr. Tennyson, the crumbling library. You may call off your building inspector, we have already found one independently, and he will be making his assessments tomorrow.”
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br /> “Oh,” said Reeve.
“The five of us happened to have dined yesterday with Mrs. Masters, and it was she who provided his name and telephone number. And an excellent dinner, might I add.”
“The fois gras!” yelped Dumbo. “It was très yummy.”
“And a lovely house,” Manny said with a near-smile.
“Lovely,” echoed Shorty.
“Um,” Reeve said, “and what was the, er, occasion? For your visit to Happy?”
Fuzzy fielded this one, with stentorian articulateness. “The future,” she barked, “of this institution.”
“That’s right,” Fatty interjected, wresting control back from Fuzzy, whose narrow face registered a dignified irritation. “Since she arrived here some months ago, she has become concerned that Equinox College is on the wrong path. That, if we wish to continue on to the twenty-first century—”
“We’re already there, Dear,” Shorty observed.
“Thank you, Flora, that’s very informative, but as I was saying, if Equinox College wishes to remain a force for the education of American women now and further into the twenty-first century, then changes will have to be made.”
“Of what sort?” Reeve asked, full of dread.
“Business training, for one,” Fuzzy interjected. Her deep voice, penetrating eyes, and excellent posture seemed to admit no other possibility. “Statistics show that our students earn, on average, far less over the ten years following graduation than students at comparable institutions. These women are the architects of tomorrow, Reeve. Our endowment depends on them.”
Shorty said, “So true, so true.”
“And Happy offered her help, I assume?” Reeve had to ask.
“Mrs. Masters suggested to us,” Dumbo clarified, in the voice of a very small frog or toad, “that she contribute a significant amount of money for the business education of women. She would like to expand her new work-study program. She would like to hire new teachers.”
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