Two of a Kind

by Yona Zeldis McDonough

  “Go,” Jake croaked. “Go now, before I hit you back.”

  Oliver took a last look at his best friend, maybe his only friend, curled up on the floor like a shrimp. Then he clattered down the stairs, flung open the front door, and got the hell out of there.

  NINE

  The intercom in Andy’s apartment sounded with an insistent buzz. “Maybe that’s Jordan,” Christina called out as Andy went to answer it. “I told her to come up if I wasn’t down by six thirty.” She was crouched on the floor of Andy’s study, straightening the new rug. It had just arrived today and its sophisticated colors—grays and black enlivened by unexpected bursts of citron and teal—really warmed this austere room. Andy did not reply, but when he walked back into the room, he said. “No, it’s not Jordan.”

  Christina did not ask anything else; it wasn’t her business. She got up and began to experiment with the placement of the lamp. The buzzer sounded again. “Now, that must be Jordan.” It was getting late and she needed to be going. She and Jordan were going to have a quick dinner—never mind that all Jordan’s dinners were quick—before they headed downtown to see an off-off-Broadway production for which Misha had gotten tickets. Once more, Andy went to answer the intercom. When he returned, he said, “Jordan’s on her way up.”

  “Good.” Christina straightened up. Now the door to the apartment buzzed and Lucy, Andy’s housekeeper, went to answer it. Christina heard Jordan’s voice saying hello, but there was another voice too. Had Jordan brought a friend? She hoped not; Misha had only given them two tickets.

  Then Jordan herself came into the room, bun crowning her head, long skirt swishing around her delicate ankles. But who was with her? The woman was blond, and looked to be in her thirties. She was attractive in a predictable sort of way. She wore a low-cut magenta dress and high-heeled black pumps. Glitzy jewelry exploded from her wrists and throat. “Jennifer Baum, Christina Connelly,” Andy said. “And this”—he turned—“is Christina’s daughter, Jordan.” Jennifer walked over to Andy, letting her fingers, with their shiny pink nails, rest lightly on Andy’s wrist. Mine, the gesture seemed to say. Don’t touch.

  “I’m wrapping things up here,” Andy said to Jennifer.

  “We were just leaving now anyway,” Christina added. She did not want it to seem like she was intruding on their date—because it clearly was a date.

  “Nice to have met you both,” said Jennifer without any enthusiasm whatsoever.

  “Nice to meet you too,” Christina lied.

  When they were in the elevator going down, Jordan shifted her bag—it looked so heavy, Christina fretted she’d hurt her back from lugging it around all the time—from one shoulder to the other and said, “I don’t like her.”

  “Why not?” Christina asked.

  “You don’t like her either,” said Jordan.

  “I didn’t say that. You did.”

  “I can tell, though, Mom. You didn’t like her and I want to know why.”

  “I don’t dislike her,” she said when they reached the lobby. “I just thought she seemed a bit cold. Also—overdone, if you know what I mean. All that . . . pink.” Even though she had no claim to Andy herself—nor did she want one, she told herself—Jennifer’s possessive gesture had riled her.

  “She’s perfect for him, though.”

  “What makes you say that?” Christina asked. They had walked through the lobby and left the building, heading toward the subway station on Lexington Avenue.

  “Isn’t it obvious? He’s obnoxious; they deserve each other.”

  “Oh, he’s not so bad . . . ,” Christina said.

  “Mom! He’s awful.”

  “Well, right now, Mr. Awful is helping to pay the bills.” She still had not heard back from the Haversticks and was now feeling like she was not going to get the job after all. The knowledge gnawed at her late at night and early in the morning, when she should have been sleeping.

  Throughout dinner—a macrobiotic place of Jordan’s choosing that offered five kinds of seaweed—and during the performance, Christina’s thoughts kept wandering back to Jennifer. How old was she anyway? She had that well-tended Upper East Side look: expensive highlights, bleached teeth, an even, applied-by-spray-bottle tan. Added to that were the nails, the clothes, the whole glossy package. Christina discreetly looked down at her well-cut dark linen skirt and silk shell; she’d thought the outfit looked understated and tasteful when she’d put it on this morning. But right now she felt rumpled and drab. Then she chided herself for devoting this much time to a subject so superfluous. Misha had gone out of his way to get these seats; the play, a new work by an up-and-coming Irish playwright, was interesting and provocative. Christina willed herself to pay attention. Still, the image of Jennifer’s arm on Andy’s was stubbornly etched somewhere in her consciousness and it would not be easily erased.

  • • •

  First thing the next morning, Christina was at the Sarnells’ to oversee the delivery of eight dining room chairs. “Just put them over there, please,” she instructed the men carrying them into the house. She tore the protective paper away from the first chair. The fabric was pulled taut across the seat and finished nicely underneath. She had never worked with this particular upholsterer before, but Tara Sarnell had insisted on using him. Well, so far, so good. She continued unwrapping all eight chairs, lining them up on the far side of the dining room as she went. Then she saw it. The pattern—gold fleurs-de-lis on a maroon background—was not consistent; on six of the chairs the fleurs-de-lis faced up, but on the remaining two, it faced down. “The fabric hasn’t been put on right,” she said, trying to control her annoyance, and, yes, panic.

  “What are you talking about?” said the man; he was young with heavily tattooed arms and a bushy black beard.

  “Can’t you see?” She pointed. “Here the design element faces one way, but on these chairs, it faces the other.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I’m just delivering them.” He crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Just a minute,” said Christina, and she pulled out her phone to call the upholsterer. She was just leaving him a message when Tara Sarnell came home.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “He came so well recommended.” Christina said nothing but prayed the upholsterer would call her back—and soon. “There must be a reason,” Tara was saying. “Maybe you didn’t tell him that all the flowers needed to be going in the same direction.”

  “Any decent upholsterer would know that,” Christina said. “It’s so obvious it doesn’t require an explanation.”

  “Evidently it does.” Tara’s voice was frosty.

  Christina fumed all the way home. The upholsterer called when she was halfway there, and said he would send someone to pick up the chairs the next day. Fortunately there was enough fabric left, but he couldn’t guarantee that he would have them done in time for the big party the Sarnells were hosting at the end of the month. Given how long he had taken to get these done, Christina highly doubted it. And Tara Sarnell was blaming her, as if this whole mess were her fault. Just as she was putting the key in the lock, she got a call from yet another client, who said she would have to delay an upcoming job. And there was still that client who was behind on her payments.

  She dropped her bag, and went straight to her desk where a pile of bills seemed to reproach her mutely. How was she going to pay them? Without telling anyone, she had begun pulling things from her own collection—her stash, as she liked to think of it—and selling them. There were a few pieces of sterling silver hollowware, quite ornate, she’d stumbled on during a buying trip to Canada, a small but beautifully rendered Art Nouveau bronze figurine, a Wedgwood vase in a haunting shade of blue. One by one, she brought these treasures to a dealer she knew in Manhattan; he always gave her fair prices. It hurt her to pillage her own rich storehouse, cannily and patiently accumulated in the nearly two decades
she’d been reclaiming the artifacts of other lives and weaving them into her own. There was no choice, though; she needed the money.

  In her flush of enthusiasm about Andy Stern’s job and the one she’d hoped to get from the Haversticks, she’d turned down the offer in Greenwich. Now, staring at the pile of bills, she wondered whether she’d made a mistake. “We’re sorry you won’t be joining us,” Alice McEvoy, the head of the firm, had said. “Let me know if you change your mind.” If nothing new came through by the end of the month, she just might do that.

  She got up, too anxious to sit. Rubbing the knot of tension at the base of her neck, she began the familiar ritual, the one she thought of as taking inventory. This consisted of a walk through her house to both check its present condition and see what needed repairing or freshening. Her office, with its one pink lacquer wall, zebra-print armchair, and tightly packed shelves with hundreds of books—art, design, fashion—from which she sought inspiration, was looking a bit overstuffed. She would set aside a couple of hours to edit and prune. In the kitchen, she saw a loose tile near the stove; in the dining room, she decided she could use a new centerpiece for her table. As she walked, her tension slowly dissipated; she liked to reacquaint herself with these rooms on a regular basis; she had lived in them all her life.

  When she was a little girl, she lived on the lower floors with her parents; her maternal grandmother had lived above them. Christina remembered nothing of this time. Her mother had died when she was barely a year old and her grandmother shortly after. Then her aunt Barb had moved into the upstairs apartment; that was where her memories began. Barb had never married, but she had rarely been alone either. She’d cycled through a series of roommates, and the occasional boyfriend had moved in too; Christina remembered a policeman named Frank who had a bristling, black crew cut and a barking laugh. Her father hadn’t liked the idea of Frank’s living there—You’re not married; it’s not setting a good example—but he hadn’t liked much about the way Barb lived. Her collection of teapots—all of which Christina now owned—her bed covered in its explosion of frilly pillows, the dozens of framed photographs that hung on the walls or clustered on the surfaces. It’s like a goddamn gift shop up there, her father would fume. But he needed Barb and so he had put up with all of it. Eventually the policeman moved on and her father’s irritation simmered down.

  Christina had bathed in Barb’s excess—of spirit, of things. She knew she had developed her own love of objects at Barb’s side. They had spent weekends at flea markets and yard sales on Long Island, in New Jersey and Connecticut. Barb taught Christina how to collect: furniture for her dollhouse (also found at a sale), old perfume bottles, printed handkerchiefs, compacts, and evening purses.

  After Christina’s father died and Christina went off to Vassar on scholarship, Aunt Barb moved downstairs and rented out the apartment above to an ever-changing cast of friends. Sometimes the friends were behind on the rent; Barb always let it go, though Christina knew this would have driven her father not so quietly mad. Good thing he did not live to see it, or to see Barb’s indifferent approach to home maintenance and repair. The roof developed a leak; she simply placed pots strategically around the top-floor rooms to catch the drips; the backyard had gone wild, lush with crazy, sprouting weeds she considered flowers. Neighborhood cats strolled by, drawn by the dishes of food she regularly set out.

  When Christina married Will, they both thought that the move into her family home was a temporary one; Christina was anxious to escape so much about her working-class upbringing, including the house where it had taken place. But when Jordan was born, she had a change of heart. If they stayed on Carroll Street, Barb, now retired but still brimming with energy, could take care of the baby. Christina began to put her own stamp on the house, redoing the kitchen, reconfiguring the space. Then Barb had died and Will too, and how glad she was that she had hung on to the house. It was her anchor, her shelter, her past, and her future. She would never leave it. Never.

  Christina left the bills in a neat pile and went outside to bring the trash barrels to the curb. The sun was setting and there were wild streaks of pink and gold when she looked west. When she turned back, she was startled by the elegant, dark-skinned man standing by the stoop to her house. Where had he come from?

  “Ms. Harris?” he asked in a British-inflected accent. He wore an expensive-looking suit and his black hair, shining with gel, was combed back from his face.

  “Actually, it’s Connelly.” To her father’s unending irritation, she had never taken Will’s last name.

  “My apologies.” The man inclined his head. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

  “That depends,” she said cautiously. He did not look like he would ask her for money, but his appearance, like his cultivated manner, could just be part of whatever scam he was running.

  “I’m here about your house.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “It’s a lovely house, a fine house. The finest on the block.”

  “Thank you,” she said, softening a little. The steps still needed work, but the house did look good, with the carefully tended planters, now filled with zinnias and marigolds, and the fresh coat of shiny bottle green paint she’d applied to the doors. The brass mail slot and doorknobs, both flea market finds, were polished to a hectic gleam; the glass in the windows sparkled.

  “I’m actually interested in purchasing it,” he said. “Or rather, not me, but my clients. You may have seen them—the Sharmas? I know they’ve been by a couple of times.”

  “I think I have,” she said. “He wears a turban and they have a little girl?”

  The man nodded. “They said they had seen you and were afraid that they might have offended you. That’s why they didn’t introduce themselves.”

  Christina remembered the way they hustled into the waiting car. “The house is not for sale.”

  “I know,” said the man. “I checked to see if it was on the market before I approached you.”

  “Then why are you here?” She was beginning to get annoyed.

  “Because I have a very good offer.” If he was aware of her annoyance, he gave no indication. “My clients are prepared to offer you a very good sum for this house. And they would pay in cash—no banks, no brokers, no commission. Just an easy exchange—their money, for this house.”

  “It’s still not for sale,” she said.

  “But I haven’t told you the price.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  He looked at her almost pityingly. “You might want to at least consider it,” he said. “You won’t get an offer like this again.”

  “Why this house?” Christina asked abruptly. “There are better houses in the neighborhood, even on the block. Bigger, more valuable . . . If your clients can pay cash, why would they choose this house?”

  “It’s Mira.” He smiled. “Mrs. Sharma. It’s a whim of hers. And Raghubeer likes to indulge her whims.”

  Christina did not smile back. “Well, you can thank them for their interest, but the answer is still no.”

  “For now,” said the man easily. Nothing seemed to ruffle his smooth feathers. He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a card. First he wrote something on the back and then handed it to her. Christina’s hands remained by her side. “It can’t hurt to take it,” he said, his voice soft and coaxing. She accepted the card only because it seemed rude not to. The name Pratyush Singh was engraved in elegant black script on the heavy vellum stock. Below it was a telephone number and an e-mail address, but nothing else.

  “Thank you for your time, Ms. Connelly,” he said. “I hope I’ll be talking to you again.” Then he turned and began to walk at a leisurely pace down the block.

  She waited until he had gone before she turned the card over. The number he’d written on the back—three million—was nothing short of astonishing. The house was not worth that much, even in this inflated market. Christina sa
nk down to the stoop—the bottom step was the most deteriorated—and considered for the briefest of moments just what such an amount would mean to her. Then, tucking the card into her back pocket, she mounted the stairs.

  When she reached the top step, she spotted Charlotte, who had come outside to look down the street. Seeing Charlotte was never a pleasant experience and today Christina didn’t think she could rise to the challenge of being civil. Fortunately Charlotte’s antipathy made it unnecessary. She glared at Christina before stepping back inside, and seconds later, her door closed—a little more forcefully than necessary—and the sound of the lock turning in the tumbler could be heard. Opening her own door, Christina was so relieved not to have to talk to her that she didn’t even register the insult.

  TEN

  Andy met Christina at the door and immediately offered her a glass of wine. Although she didn’t usually drink on the job, she bent her own rule and said yes. She was actually a little nervous; they were meeting to discuss how to handle what had been his late wife’s home office. A small room off the kitchen, it held a desk, a chair, a computer, and a couple of shelves of books. Christina had seen it only once, but she knew Andy had left everything exactly as it had been when Rachel died. She also knew that any discussion about it would require sensitivity and tact.

  “White would be lovely,” she said, putting down her bag and following him into the living room. The ebbing light on the river had turned the water a dark, metallic blue; she stood, rapt for a moment, until she sensed him behind her and accepted the glass he held out.

  “Cheers,” she said, tapping the rim to his; at the same moment he said, “L’chaim.”