“Where my customers park their cars. In the busy season.”
“—yes, of course they do. So I’ll replace that sign, if it’s all right with you.”
“No population,” he said.
“Pardon me?” She brushed a strand of hair out of her full, pink face, healthy as a baby’s.
He said, “The sign on my land can’t have the population painted on it, Miz Masters.”
For once, she seemed taken by surprise. “Whyever not?”
Archie smiled. “Because,” he said, “I said so.”
Her face—quickly, almost subliminally—contorted with rage, and then just as swiftly righted itself. He almost laughed out loud.
“Well,” she said. “Fine. Perfect. I’ll have my men come take care of it later this week.”
“Your men?” he couldn’t help asking.
She leaned a bit closer, and the scent of her pushed toward him on the air. “Men,” she said, “tend to do what I tell them to.” Then she spun on the wet ground and stalked out of the orchard. He watched her all the way to the road—indeed, she turned to make sure that’s exactly what he was doing.
20. Hideous Happycrap
Ruth spent several days marching around campus with her inkjet bootprint, all that was left of the evidence, putting it on people’s desks, telling them something was fishy. She told, over and over, about the disappearing cigarette butts, and the missing dust piles, and the filled-in ladder depressions, and she explained about the integrity of the rain gutters and the impassivity of the building inspector, and how he didn’t even climb up on the roof!
The reaction was polite. A few people remarked that it was quite a conspiracy that she’d got her hands on, there—had she heard about the murder, too? A few, having been tipped off that she was at large, locked themselves in their offices and pretended not to be in.
And a few of these people—these doubters—were in fact her friends. Well—not friends exactly, but people she saw daily, people who liked books, people with whom she could talk. Some of them had eaten at her table, had walked with her along the lake, had accompanied her to lectures and readings and films. But they were not joining her on this particular trip. She had, in their evident estimation, gone entirely around the bend on this whole library issue. Only Pam Kulp, the graphic arts teacher, was on her side—that is, from the faculty. The students believed her, of course. And Jennifer Triesman. They had been meeting in the library evenings, in the conference room behind Ruth’s office, to use words like “Nazi” and “bitch” and “fascist” and invent nutty plans. Ruth didn’t enjoy these sessions; her aim was to bring legitimate forces to bear against Happy Masters, the forces of law and common decency, and convince the skeptical to join her. But the skeptical wanted none of it. Instead she got the hotheaded and the immature—a cabal of unappealing, ignorable people.
She feared it was a losing battle. Who cared about an old library? Even those who did, didn’t seem to mind the idea of a new one. Reeve Tennyson, sweating under his collar (and was this normal, at the end of October, in the middle of the year’s first flurry of snow?), seemed to sum up the general mood in his whimpering reply:
“Look, Ruth, here’s how people see it. There’s a rich donor who is offering to build a big new library, with more space for books, and study areas, and computers, and—”
“Computers,” Ruth couldn’t refrain from snorting.
“—and what you want to stick with,” he went on, holding up a hand, “is a building nobody likes, which is falling apart—”
“Bullshit!” she cried.
“—I’m just saying this is the way people see it, Ruth, which is falling apart and which you yourself have often complained is drafty and weirdly shaped, so that there’s hardly any room for the stacks, and it gets too hot because of all the glass, and it gets too cold because of all the glass. And here you’re coming to me”—he swallowed, quite loudly, and his adam’s apple climbed up over the knot of his tie and back down again—“and showing me a photocopy of a boot print and saying somebody is sabotaging the place.”
“That is exactly what is happening. If you had seen what I had before—there were pictures of depressions the ladder made, and a bag of the saboteur’s cigarette butts. Furthermore, I had—”
“Okay, then,” Reeve said, nearly squealing with discomfort, “say you brought along a bag of cigarette butts, too! Say you brought pictures of holes! Where does that leave us?”
She wasn’t able to respond.
“People think you’re a turning into a loon! Honestly, Ruth. Your theory, tell me if I have this wrong, is that Happy Masters has hired somebody to make the library look damaged, so that she can waste five million dollars on a new one. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “You’re Joe Shmoe. Does that make sense?”
She glared at him.
“It doesn’t even make sense to me! So what if she wants the library to look different. Nobody spends five million dollars of their own money for that, and if they do, it’s her funeral, not ours. We get a new library. You get a new library. Give up!”
She continued to glare. He studied his desktop, pressed his fingertips together.
“Who will design the new building,” she asked quietly.
“Her architects.”
Their eyes met over his now-folded hands. His eyes looked wet—allergy-wet, not crying-wet, though there was nothing here, as far as she knew, to be allergic to.
“I know, I know,” he said. “But it’s not a tourist hotel, it’s a library. They’ve got to be keeping that in mind. A library is different.”
A library is different, she muttered, stomping out of Crim Hall. Please. They were going to tear down her building and put up some hideous Happycrap—and then they would find some way to take even that away from her. She spent a day brooding—the snow had changed its mind and turned to rain, and slush lay all around campus in amorphous blobs, and nobody seemed to want to do anything. She sat in the library, nearly alone; even Janet Ping was missing, having resigned via letter, relieving Ruth from the responsibility of firing her. Janet’s work-study money was coming from Happy Masters now, and her loyalty was going to Happy Masters. A lost soul. Ruth hoped never to see Janet again—though she knew that of course she would, and that it was silly to feel betrayed by a twenty-year-old girl. She did, though; she felt betrayed by everyone.
And then it was the weekend. The temperature dropped again during the night, and all the slush and melted snow turned to ice, and two SUVs ran off the road, new people who didn’t know how to drive here. Out for a walk, she saw one of them wedged against a light pole, which leaned under its weight. Jennifer Triesman was busy hitching the giant car to her tow truck, manipulating the chain with bare pink hands. Didn’t she have gloves? Ruth wondered—but Jennifer seemed warm, even in her thin hoodie, as if some internal fire were enough.
Ruth kept walking, back to her house, down her walk—but then, on impulse, she detoured around the side, crunched across the yard, and found the muddy path down to the abandoned city park. There, she stood on the shore, looking out over the water, weapon of suicides old and new. In a couple of months it would be frozen, but today it steamed like a sheet cake, releasing its heat into the air. Geese wheeled over it, seeming, with their rasping cries, to disapprove.
Then she looked down, and saw a bootprint with significant wear at the toe and heel, and another one next to it. And in front of them, three cigarette butts.
She followed. The prints were recent—this morning, clearly. Post-freeze. They led along the lake’s edge, and down a seldom-trodden semi-path through the woods that divided the lake from the Archie’s orchard. Into the orchard she walked, trailing the bootprints between the trees. There, visible through his kitchen window, was Archie, drinking coffee at the table. He raised a hand: come in? No, she waved back, not now. Of course her mystery stomper had walked past mere hours ago—Archie had probably seen him.
She could stop a
nd ask, but she already knew.
The path continued through the woods and came out at a little lakeside shack situated on a tiny and sloppy private beach. An old German motorcycle was parked out front, and from the window of the shack emanated the faintly shifting blue glow of a television. There was a stoop that consisted of a couple of cinder blocks laid side by side, and in the snow before it lay a randomly scattered collection of cigarette butts: each had fallen into the mush and melted itself a small hole, which had widened, creating a little dark circle for it to rest in. Now all of it was glassed over with ice, like a museum display. It was almost lovely, so much so that she was going to step around it to get to the door—but then she didn’t have to, because the ghost of Thomas Crim appeared in the doorway with a fresh butt to add to the collection.
Kevin Russell, that is, in costume. The ripped white trousers and blouse and vest, the bleached tricorn hat, the face and mustache powdered to a creepy gray. He looked up, saw her, nodded. Only his eyes seemed alive. Then he flicked the butt into the yard, placing it with evident skill in an unmelted spot. He said, “Hi there, Mrs. Spinks.”
“Hi, Kevin. Halloween a couple days early this year?”
“Just getting’ ready,” he said. “Winter’s here, huh?” On his feet, untied, were two old work boots, halfway covered with white shoe paste, the rest of which half-filled a tin in his hand.
She leveled him a calm gaze. “What’s she paying you?” she asked.
He feigned ignorance. “For this?” Gesturing toward his costume. “Archie gives me forty bucks.”
“Not Archie,” Ruth said. “Happy.”
He leaned against the doorjamb and tugged a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of his flannel shirt. He knocked a bit of flour off the pack and pointed it at her. She shook her head no. He drew one out for himself and lit it. He said, “Hundred dollars a gig.”
She snorted. “That’s nothing to her,” she said.
He shrugged as if he didn’t care, but it was obvious from the set of his jaw underneath the mustache that he’d thought of that, too. He let out a little involuntary cough.
“I can give you a hundred and fifty.”
There—that threw him. It surprised her too. They faced one another across the cigarette-strewn yard.
Then, his eyebrows raised, Kevin stepped back, opened his door wide, and stood aside for her to enter. After a moment’s thought, that’s what she did, and the door shut with a loose-hinged clatter.
* * *
Around this time, Janet Ping was landing in New York. She hadn’t told anyone she was leaving, she just left. James had sent a car to pick her up and bring her to Syracuse, and now there was supposed to be one waiting for her at LaGuardia. It had been an unnerving flight on the tiniest jet she’d ever seen—the wings had had to be de-iced in this unseasonable cold, and the noise of the engines was deafening, and the woman sitting next to her had cried the whole way—but now that she was disembarking, now that she was part of the stream of travelers, she began to feel confident and happy. She had become a businesswoman, a person for whom things had been arranged. Walking up the ramp to the terminal, she glanced at her watch, not because the time mattered but in order to feel like someone the time mattered to. It felt as good as she’d hoped.
An expressionless man in a blue suit and hat held a sign that read PING. She approached him, said good morning; he called her ma’am, and demanded her bag. She handed it over—a large leather portfolio her mother had given her, for her drawings, but which had been enough for her weekend things—and they set off for the car. They passed through crowded corridors, their white walls bumped and smudged by countless suitcases, and rubbed shoulders with the gray mass of business commuters. They pressed together through a revolving door and onto pavement, where they dodged cars and shuttle buses, Janet struggling to keep up, her legs straining against her snug maroon wool dress. The driver led her across a tundra of cars to where his black Lincoln—or rather James’s black Lincoln—waited. He opened the back door and ushered her in, then took his place behind the wheel and guided the car through the airport’s confusion of access roads. At last they were free, and cruised along a highway that burrowed through seemingly endless rows of sooty townhouses and apartment buildings.
Janet had been to New York only once before.
“So…where are you taking me?”
“To your hotel, miss.” In a sullen, East-European voice.
She leaned over and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Earlier she had put on makeup and then washed it all off. She had never been good at it. In the end, she settled on a bit of lipstick, Happy’s shade of red. An homage. She imagined returning with her secret—having chosen the perfect gift—and this knowledge showing on her face, a lipsticked face that Happy had never seen before. And Happy gazing into her eyes, reading something new there, wondering what it was, needing to know, and taking her face into her hands, and kissing those lipsticked lips. Janet intended to return changed, grown-up, full of new knowledge.
“Is it nice?” she asked the driver. “The hotel?”
“I do not know,” he said, not without impatience. “It is in SoHo.”
“I’m sorry,” Janet said. “Is that—what is SoHo, exactly?”
“Arty,” he said simply.
“Okay.” Their eyes met in the rearview; his seemed to communicate something—she didn’t know what it was. Something they were both supposed to know. But Janet didn’t know anything about New York, really. She didn’t know anything, period. She calmed herself by chewing a stick of gum. The lipstick was rubbing off—she could feel it on her teeth.
They arrived. The driver helped her out and gave her to the hotel doorman, who directed her to the front desk. The floor, the walls, the counter were all black marble and pale beige light, like the future. The clerk—herself in black—was a girl not much older than Janet, and of such extreme, indulgent Asianness and austere beauty that Janet felt herself blush. The girl said that she had a message, and handed her an envelope along with her room key, a plastic credit card with a cluster of little holes punched in it. She took the elevator to her room, and in the elevator opened the envelope. Inside was a note card with James’s name embossed at the top. It read, Janet, welcome to the city! Call me when you arrive and are settled, and I’ll take you for a late lunch. Spare no expense with your room, use whatever you like, it’s on me. And then a telephone number.
The room was a disappointment at first—boxy, futuristic, more black marble facing a ceiling of plywood painted green. And the city outside surprised her—low buildings, and the river beyond, and a hazy forest of smokestacks that must be New Jersey—not at all cosmopolitan, as she imagined and remembered. But then she lay on the bed and the feeling of foreignness overwhelmed her, the luxury of being in someone else’s care, and her body felt warm and…sexy. And then suddenly she had to pee, so she did that, and when she was finished she called the number on the card.
“Janet! You’re here!”
“Yes, sir,” she couldn’t help saying.
His laugh was genuine—a little out of control, like a babboon’s. “Please, Janet, it’s James! You’re not a child, and I’m not your boss.”
“Okay.”
“How’s the hotel?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Well,” he said, “you’re an artist, I figured I should put you down there.”
“Yes, thank you,” she said, though she still didn’t know what this meant. Did artists themselves live here? And how did he know she was an artist? And was she, actually? At any rate, art was the furthest thing from her mind. She said, “Are you going to pick me up now?”
“Of course!” he said, again laughing. He seemed to find everything funny. It was a good quality in a person, she thought.
* * *
Right up until the end, it was the best day of Janet’s life. All the while, through the meals, and the walks, and the limousine rides, and the shopping excursions to
Bergdorf’s and Barneys and Armani and wherever else he led her, every moment was flawless and gilded as the gifts they bought Happy. It occurred to her that what she wanted in life—what she had always wanted in life, and never knew—was to be filthy fucking rich. To do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it; to exist in perfect calm and confidence, surrounded by beautiful things—that was what she desired. She fantasized ways to achieve this aim—moving, for instance, from work-study to full-time employment with Happy (which seemed more than possible, it seemed plausible, inevitable even!), and in the fullness of time taking over the company from her, then farming out the work to underlings. People talked about living the simple life, but you had to be rich to enjoy it—to merely exist in a world of your own making, and never worry about the possibility of its ever ending. She knew this day would end, that she would return to Equinox and continue her lonely life as a skinny art student with a big head—but not once did she feel that it was true. She felt like it would go on forever.
She drank wine with lunch (the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel, which she had read that children’s book about, and which she had always assumed was fictional), and wine with dinner (some high-ceilinged place in Tribeca decorated with video screens that displayed ever-evolving, mesmerizing abstractions), and felt pleasantly drunk all day without once getting tired or nauseated or cold. For the sun came out, and the air warmed to sixty, and all she needed to stay comfortable was the cashmere sweater James had bought for her at Barneys.
Yes, that James had bought—indeed, he bought her lots of things, a new gift every time they bought something for Happy, because, he said, “It hardly seems fair that Happy should reap all the benefits of your hard work.” They tittered like chipmunks at that one. After dinner, they went to an art opening at some former warehouse in Chelsea (“Let’s blow this joint,” James said, and it seemed so funny, so charming) before James’s driver returned them to the hotel, where they tumbled out of the car and into the hotel bar for what he called a nightcap. Janet had, for the first time in her life, a Cosmopolitan, which she ordered because it described how she was feeling. It was so good she thought she could drink a hundred more. “Don’t do that,” James warned with a chuckle, and once again it was incredibly funny, and they yukked it up enough to turn heads.
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