Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  It was a small mansion, a town house, late nineteenth century. Stefanie could not recall ever having seen it. Then again, she could not recall not having seen it, either. It was recessed, which is to say, had been built to abut the sidewalk at a time of wider sidewalks, carriage circles. There was a revolving glass door fitted into the original entry, and Times New Roman in gold bore the legend MoDACA: MUSEUM OF THE DECORATIVE ARTS OF THE COLONIAL AMERICAS.

  Stefanie pushed through into marble territory, warm halogen lighting, new-carpet smell. She removed her gloves and permitted herself to glance at her phone. Nothing doing.

  Damnit, Kathy, she thought.

  Now she was saying, “Hello,” to a wizened bat in a maroon wig. This hag, presumably a lifelong bulimic, was ensconced in a round brochure display cum info desk constructed from some sort of gleaming composite.

  “I have this,” announced Stefanie, presenting Glenn’s card.

  The old woman twinkled. A lacquered talon tapped the surface of the proffered item.

  Stefanie retracted the card. “Great.” She collected a sticker bearing the museum’s logo.

  Stefanie was applying the sticker and walking. She was thinking that at the very least the museum might have contrived to create an unpaid internship for someone young and possibly economically disadvantaged.

  Later, once she had viewed the re-creations of the twelve Virginia parlors the museum was apparently famous for and passed through a special exhibition of early Brazilian maps, Stefanie wanted to pee. A sign in one gallery indicated a staircase. Stefanie descended, let herself into a (surprisingly) dingy WC.

  There were two stalls. Stefanie chose the left.

  This was where it happened.

  Stefanie was wiping with a folded square of tissue. And there was a sound. It was a scurrying. Stefanie gasped and dropped the paper into the toilet bowl. She rapidly did up her pants. Could they have rats?

  It was too disgusting!

  Stefanie exited the stall. She was searching around the floor. For some reason she wanted to see this with her own two eyes. She stood still, looking, panting.

  Now it was perfectly silent. Stefanie waited. There was nothing.

  Stephanie approached a basin.

  She was moving her fingers through a weak stream and contemplating her own unlined forehead in the mirror when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, something.

  It was behind her, and at first she could not understand how it had gotten “up there.” This was her first thought, how had it gotten “up there.” Though, if she had been thinking clearly at this moment, it would have occurred to her that she was not observing an animal hovering in empty space, upon, as it were, the very air, but was rather seeing a furred face that, though small, hardly larger than a grapefruit, was supported by a substantial furred neck, a neck covered in the same glossy and wavy black fur that covered this small face, this lean frame that stood approximately the same height as Stefanie herself. It was, she might have thought if she had been able to think clearly, like a slight woman, a woman with an abnormally small head for her height, covered all in black fur. Though she was not sure if it was a woman. The face was flat, like the end of a stump. Its eyes were round and wet and black, and whether or not it had a nose, it certainly had a mouth, for now it opened this mouth, revealing a set of short, peg-like teeth, and behind these teeth a very red throat, and Stefanie, perhaps this was where she screamed?

  Stefanie regained consciousness before they were able to convey her to the hospital, and so she spent the ambulance ride chatting desperately with a paramedic named Aaron. She was doing a thing where she wanted to practice her game. (Aaron was twenty-eight and covered in small muscles, superclean, possibly gay, but perhaps just from Colorado, at any rate she was going to pretend.) They were talking about how crazy it was. That she must have slipped. But it was so lucky she had screamed. (Had she screamed? She had no memory.) Who would have found her otherwise? And was she showing any symptoms of a concussion? Her head was not tender anywhere. Just a bit tender. Well, they had called the ambulance, Glenn could cover it, might as well take her in. Just keep her a moment. Someone to come and get her.

  Stefanie was asking Aaron how he felt about his job, because this was fascinating, his job. Aaron said something about never a dull minute, and Stefanie, she did this thing, it was so unlike her, she said, “But what about a month, Aaron?” She said, “What about a year?”

  Aaron began doing something with packets, organizing them.

  Stefanie tried to let her muscles go limp. Her heart was racing. She could taste blood on the inside of her mouth. She thought about Aaron’s student loans. She thought about his limp dick and shaved chest, his shaved scrotum in the mirrored door of his bedroom closet, the lack of molding in a mediocre condo, drugstore toiletries, adult Ritalin and razor blades and a bong in the kitchenette. Aaron’s framed photo of a childhood dog with a face like a shriveled chrysanthemum. Stefanie envisioned Aaron kneeling before her. She brought the head of a hammer down full force into the center of his dirty-blond skull.

  In the hospital, Stefanie was saying something to her mother about how it smelled. It stank.

  Her mother, wearing a black fox-fur vest with extra tufts of fox around the armholes, nodded. She was seated in a chair, and she wore leggings, a pair of supple Fendi over-the-knee boots, her hair in a ponytail, unhurried makeup. But it was her mother who reeked, Stefanie meant. It was her mother who reeked of steamed skim milk and rabbit turds, her faithless genitals crushed together in the elastic hammock of her legwear.

  Stefanie said, “I would like to see you get raped by a pig.”

  Stefanie’s mother had the BlackBerry out and was peddling in some crucial announcement. Her eyeballs recalibrated behind spikes of dried mascara. “What, Stef?”

  “I said,” said Stefanie, but at this moment a doctor in a white coat entered.

  “Well, hello.”

  Stefanie let her head roll. She provided the doctor with what she believed was an excellent view of her upper teeth. She saw herself sever a magnificent slab of flesh from the doctor’s right thigh, rub her face in the sticky heat of this thing. All its sick oils and weeping would get on her; it would dry caked on, a mask.

  Stefanie gave the instruction slowly, precisely, in order that it not be mistaken. “I. Need. A. Knife.”

  Later it was termed an iron deficiency.

  The doctor prescribed some supplements.

  Anyway, Stefanie quickly realized that she could not talk like this.

  To be continued . . .

  Clare thinks she knows why she had not finished. The effort necessary to the illustration of the weird carnage to come—the psychotic eros, the final sex-murder scene with the father—seems monumental, stupid, entirely crippling now.

  Other students bit their lips. This is to say, in workshop. They stared at everything except Clare’s face. Eventually conversation coalesced around Aaron’s grooming habits. A long collective interrogation transpired regarding scrotal depilation, its pros, cons.

  Possibly the strangest thing about this was that Clare had had a choice when it came to submitting a story. There was another unfinished tale from this era of intense Elwilian productivity, fairly similar to the first except it was about a girl who wasn’t rich. It was, additionally, set ever so slightly in the future, describing an American summer that had not yet come to pass, a time that the real Clare was destined to spend mostly in bed. Given the story’s predictive nature, Clare preferred to show it to: exactly no one. Another fragment, it read:

  Alice

  By Clare Elwil

  Alice was not her real name. Her real name was Ali. It was not short for anything. “Just Ali,” she had quickly realized she sounded ridiculous, not to mention potentially poor, saying.

  Actually, she’d come to the city from Springfield, Massachusetts, from her mother’s home, and had put herself through NYU, incurring along the way the requisite staggering debt. A pathological mistrust of othe
rs had solidified along this way, too, though perhaps it had been there for a while. In high school it had been easy enough to think of it as minor shyness, to believe that it might’ve had something to do with the fact that others did not recognize the finer things, that at graduation, for example, boys stapled the severed tails of freshly slaughtered squirrels to their graduation caps in one corner of the football field just before the ceremony.

  In theory, she’d been wanting to major in something sexy like Italian; however, in practice she found herself mortified not just by the $800 totes favored by the spindly trust funders who attended the info session, but also by the muteness she’d experienced when so many interchangeable i-ending names (Leopardi, Marinetti, Pasolini) were presented after she’d expressed a desire to study Italian art and literature. It was something she could never quite come back from, the odd looks handed around among the participating graduate students and a youngish professor in a knotted cashmere scarf.

  When she majored in English, it was not something she regretted so much as something she did not have to make an effort in. She finished in three years. Strangely, the class that made the biggest impression was a poetry workshop conducted by an elderly Polish poetess whose main response to her verse was that she “might next time try to go a little further inside [her] own head,” though “Alice,” as she now constantly styled herself, could never manage this to the poetess’s satisfaction. She briefly dated a soft-spoken dyslexic fireman who lived on Staten Island. Then she moved to Greenpoint. Then graduated.

  Alice had very little difficulty getting her first full-time job, and to some extent this shocked her. It was after the tech bubble burst and from what she heard from her few acquaintances still laboring toward degrees, she was lucky not to be posting on Craigslist for work as a dominatrix.

  Alice drank as much water as she could on the train. Her biggest worry, she felt, for the next ten years, if she could just keep on doing so well as she had, would be getting anywhere near even remotely approaching fat. She kept this thought in her mind to prevent herself from thinking constantly about money.

  She worked.

  She rode a single train.

  Every week it was her task to compose a newsletter. The newsletter updated a select list as to the activities of the office, a foundation dedicated to the preservation of historic urban architecture. Alice herself was not energized by this cause, but she found it easy enough to talk as if she were on the morning of her interview. The woman in a turquoise sweater was named Marcy. Accompanying Marcy was a flat-faced man named Coop, some sort of partially retired architect. Alice launched into a monologue on caryatids.

  A little shadow crossed Coop’s face.

  They offered her minimum wage.

  Alice shared a railroad with a much older woman who had been living there for many years. The woman, currently in the process of marrying someone in Ohio whom she had met online, was seldom present. Alice was paying more than half the rent, she knew, particularly since the woman, who in her forties had repellent forehead creases that looked incised, made some quip about this being cheaper for her than storage. However, it was still comparatively a deal and for all intents and purposes Alice lived alone.

  The place was on a tree-lined street. A nearby mechanics’ allowed their aged pit bull to roam free, grayish teats dangling.

  Alice privately referred to this creature as Space Ghost because of its black head and white body. It was deaf, and blind in one eye, but had come to acknowledge Alice after she’d drunkenly fed it leftover pierogies from a foam shell. Sometimes Alice set a plastic-wrapped coupon circular down on the stoop and sat on it and the dog came and rested its huge decaying jaw on her shoe.

  “There, there,” said Alice.

  Alice, it had to be admitted, was spending a lot of time alone. She was letting her health insurance lapse, which she knew could be dangerous, but she was working pretty hard and pretty soon would be able to swing a little bit more, certainly, if she played her cards right.

  She had now been at the Historic Architectural Features Foundation (HAFF) for almost two months. You could feel the roiling force of New York summer heat preparing to unleash itself.

  Alice wore a lot of brights. She wore coral with white, bitter yellow with white. She read an actress’s advice about the dangers posed by financiers and overconsumption of salt. She avidly apprised herself as to the rise of so-and-so, designer to Mrs. Bush. It was 2002, and American morality was again ascendant, or so the press proclaimed. It was a time of stalwart renewal, faith, and swift justice. One day, walking south on West Broadway, Alice saw a man in his thirties in khakis bellowing wildly into a pay phone receiver: “WHAT YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND IS THEY WON’T STOP UNTIL THEY DESTROY US.”

  Alice made a rapid turn.

  She had canned olives, ketchup, and saltines for dinner.

  The office was still.

  Marcy was located behind a sliding-glass panel, and Coop apparently worked somewhere else and checked in remotely.

  It did not occur to Alice to ask questions about HAFF’s own finances, and even if it had she would not have done so. She was set up at the conference table with a whirring Dell and fed summary data via email attachments.

  Alice was often idle.

  At 10:31 a.m. on one Friday, Alice had already completed the newsletter for the week to follow. She was now a full five days ahead of schedule. At first she was pleased with this achievement and began typing up an account of her meager earnings and their destinies (rent, loan payment, Metrocard, utilities, credit card, food), but then she began to think of Marcy, who was as ever silent, a sweater-toned shadow behind the bluish partition. What if this was all only a test? What if Marcy was recording each of Alice’s keystrokes, what if it was known that today alone she had already devoted over twenty minutes to Tara Reid’s thoughts on self-realization, plus another fifteen to a search for “real cork wedges lace-up platform”? And then there were the 2.5 hours yesterday allotted to GeoCities research into the exploits of the three most popular girls from high school, clicking through eighty-eight photos of Justine Talbots superbly depilated in a cherry-red one-piece mid-jump on some frat’s backyard trampoline, not to mention pages by Jamie White and Jenny Hayes, their assorted infants and corgis and stoner babydaddies, everyone drooling in hoodies.

  Or the more than two hours she had squandered Wednesday pretending she might permit herself to consider deferment of her student loans?

  Alice cycled back through the week.

  The drive labored.

  If they fired her now, she might have to miss a payment, not to mention what would transpire in another two weeks, when rent came due.

  Alice was knocking on Marcy’s panel. She rapped, thrice.

  Alice’s heart was struggling around like a separate creature. The only thing that could save her now would be a full admission.

  She tried, “Marcy?” This was a squeak.

  She waited. She wanted to remember the phrase she had just moments earlier composed: Marcy, I’m so sorry to bother you. I just wanted to let you know how much I am enjoying this position.

  It reminded her of what she’d told the fireman, when he’d asked her not to leave her toothbrush in his sink-top glass, when he’d lovingly restored it to the front pocket of her backpack.

  But now the panel was actually genuinely moving, and it was going to be necessary to speak.

  Today’s sweater was chartreuse. Marcy peered out, stifling a yawn. “Yes?”

  “Marcy, I’m so—” Alice began to say, but now she could no longer remember her prepared statement. Somewhere on the street below somebody was leaning on their horn, and this was when it happened.

  There was a hiss. Actually, it was a hiss followed by a sort of gurgling, whispery echo, as of wet sand sucked down a drain. It was very close to Alice’s left ear. Alice heard someone mutter, “She doesn’t care.”

  At first, because it had been so long, you know, since, Alice concluded that it was Marcy wh
o had done the speaking. It took a few seconds to parse Marcy’s intent. Alice decided to ask, “Who doesn’t?” She said this softly. She did not wish to appear out of line.

  Marcy blinked. “Sorry?”

  There came a slithering rustle. “Tell hr nothing’s wrong, you have cramps.”

  Marcy’s lips were not moving.

  “Uh,” Alice was saying.

  “Tell.”

  “S-sorry, Marcy,” Alice stuttered. “I—uh—wasn’t feeling very well, and I just wondered—um.” She could go no further.

  “Oh, wow,” said Marcy. “You should take the day? I think it’s fine. See you Monday.” And Marcy shut the partition.

  Maybe it was luck, a piece of fortune, but the thing was really did she want to return to the apartment? A downstairs neighbor was home with a troublesome pregnancy and spent many hours with the phone on speaker, updating a female relation.

  Alice selected Union Square Park. It was not the cleanest but was free. She set her bag on her knees and withdrew New York magazine.

  In the section on parties, actors and R&B singers made a few patriotic assertions. Alice stared at the silk-wrapped breasts of one reality star.

  No need to think about it yet.

  Alice turned the page.

  It was an ad for GUESS jeans. A caption read: “FALL 2002, Death Valley, CA, Golden.” In the ad, a couple propped each other up atop a pile of boulders in distressed denim. They had presumably been photographed just moments before they were to die of thirst after their motorcycle crash.