by Lutz, Lisa
“I’ll keep an eye on him for you,” Rae said.
“Don’t do anything, Rae.”
“I won’t. I’m just going to keep my eyes open. That’s all.”
Henry opened the car door and swapped places with Rae.
“I got an A on my geometry test,” Rae said to Henry.
“An A?” Henry questioned suspiciously.
Rae sighed. “An A-minus. It’s still an A.”
“Good job,” Henry replied.
“I need to tell you something private,” Rae then said, and leaned in and whispered something in Henry’s ear. He nodded in apparent agreement and then Rae shut the car door and waved good-bye.
Henry double-parked next to my car.
“If you need a place to stay, I have a guest room,” Henry said.
I was surprised by the offer. But pride ordered my response.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll just go back to Bernie’s. He’ll sleep on the couch if I ask nicely.”
As it turned out, I didn’t have to ask nicely. Bernie was nowhere to be found. I settled onto the couch and watched television all evening. At eleven P.M., bracing for Bernie’s return, I phoned his cell to gather his ETA.
“Hey, roomie,” Bernie said when he picked up the call. The background noise was the unmistakable chaos of a casino.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Tahoe,” Bernie replied, as if it were obvious.
“When are you coming back?”
“Why, do you miss me?”
“Not even a little,” I replied.
“Such a kidder,” Bernie said. “I’ll be here for a while. My luck is looking good. You back at the apartment?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Do me a favor and give me a call before you plan on returning.”
“What? I didn’t get that.”
“Nothing,” I replied, and hung up the phone.
That night I changed the sheets, took a shower without locking the door, and slept eight hours in what used to be my own bed.
For the next three days I barely left “my” apartment, knowing that this brief window of privacy would not last. I caught up on much-needed rest, decontaminated the apartment, and researched “John Brown”s on the internet, hoping to find the one I was looking for.
But all good things must come to an end. Thursday afternoon, without providing the previously-requested advance notice, Bernie arrived at the apartment with his overnight bag and groceries.
“Roomie,” he said pleasantly upon entering our home.
“Bernie,” I replied, trying not to cry. “I thought you’d still be in Tahoe.”
“I decided it was time to take a breather. Stay, Izz. Like I said, Me casa is su casa.”
“Stop saying that,” I replied, snapping just a bit.
“Izz, this place is big enough for the two of us.”
“It’s a one-bedroom.”
“In some countries families of eight share a one-bedroom apartment.”
I chose to discontinue this line of conversation. Instead I grabbed a bag of potato chips and a beer out of Bernie’s grocery bag.
“What’s with all the snack food, Bernie?”
“Poker game tonight. Are you in?”
Four hours later I was down two hundred dollars and a watch, which I’d thought I could parlay into motel money for the week. Bernie had apparently figured out my “tells” and shared them with his buddies.1
“I’m out,” I said after my fourth straight loss. “It stinks in here.” I got up and cracked a window.
I sniffed my own shirt. “I smell like a cigar.”
Bernie’s friend Mac pulled a bottle of cologne from his satchel and sprayed me.
“Hey!”
“It covers up the cigar smell. You’ll thank me later,” he said.2
“So, how long do you think this game will last?” I asked.
“Now that you’re out?” Bernie replied. “Until morning, probably.”
It wasn’t just the cigar smoke and the cologne and the wasted potato chips on the table and the volumes of empty beer bottles invading the apartment, but I looked around and knew that I couldn’t spend one more night under the same roof as Bernie.
“I got to get out of here,” I said, repacking my suitcase.
“See you later, kid,” Bernie replied, and then he went all in.
I didn’t stick around long enough to see whether Bernie won the hand or lost everything.
CHANGE OF ADDRESS
PART-II
Thursday, March 30
2300 hrs
“Is the offer still good?” I asked, standing in the foyer—looking humbled and forlorn, I’m sure.
Henry Stone nodded his head and opened the door for my entry. I brushed past him into his immaculate home.
“You smell like a cigar,” he said.
“And cheap cologne,” I added.
Henry showed me the guest room, emphasizing the shower. The guest room, like everything else in Henry’s apartment, had that five-star-hotel spotlessness. After Bernie’s place, there was something oddly satisfying about being in an uncontaminated environment. I showered and went straight to bed. I awoke eight hours later as Henry was leaving for work.
He poured me a cup of coffee when I entered the kitchen.
“Make yourself at home,” Henry said, although judging by appearances he didn’t make himself at home.
“Thank you.”
“I have just one rule—”
“Are you sure it’s just one? Because it looks like you have many,” I said.
“If you get arrested again, I’m kicking you out.”
“Fair enough,” I replied.
“And I have a few requests: Stay away from my neighbors—they’re clean, law-abiding citizens—and, uh, try to keep your snooping to a minimum. I don’t have any dark secrets, but I don’t like people going through my stuff.”
“When will you be home?” I asked.
Stone smiled. The question was not so innocent.
“I’ll surprise you,” he said, and left.
I couldn’t resist a tour of Stone’s house in his absence; I can rarely resist unsupervised tours. My previous visits to his residence included a break-in almost two years ago. I had assumed (for reasons I won’t get into) that he was involved in my sister’s “vacation,” and so I was searching for evidence. The remainder of my visits, approximately half a dozen, had been for Rae extractions, which occasionally included a beverage, but never had I actually had the chance for a leisurely search of the premises.
After three hours of uncovering well-folded linen, suits hung professionally in litmus-test order, a refrigerator devoid of any mold (other than the cheese variety), a collection of books that appeared to have been read, an assortment of CDs and vinyl that ranged from the Ramones to John Coltrane to Outkast,1 an office with one locked file cabinet that presumably held seven years of financial data, and a computer that, on careful scrutiny, had never visited a porn site, I made lunch. I even washed the dishes and put them in the dish rack.
I read the newspaper for the next hour and filed through Stone’s limited cable selection for two hours after that. As you might have concluded already, I have problems with activities beyond investigation, drinking, and participating in bizarre and doomed courtships. I routinely ignore my own character flaws, because usually there’s some suspicious behavior diverting my attention. But when everything is suspicious and I’m expected to fill my days the way a normal unemployed person might, there lies the problem.
DOCTOR WHO?
Friday, March 31
1630 hrs
At three-thirty P.M. there was a knock at the door.
“Rae, what are you doing here?”
Rae pushed me aside and said, “We don’t have much time.”
She then walked right up to the television and opened a drawer beneath it that I had somehow missed in my earlier combing of
the premises.
“Sit down,” Rae ordered me, and since I had nothing else to do, I obliged.
She popped a disc into the DVD player and sat down on the couch next to me.
“What are we watching?” I asked.
“Doctor Who.”
“Weren’t you watching that the other night?”
“I was watching an old one. It’s the new ones I want to watch.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“Henry will be home soon and he doesn’t let me watch it.”
“Why not?”
“I already told you. Because he says I can’t watch the new Dr. Who series until I watch all the classic ones.”
“That kind of makes sense,” I said, thinking that I wouldn’t start watching the fifth (and sadly final) season of Get Smart unless I had watched the previous four.
“No, it’s just cruel. Do you realize that the first Doctor Who was on the air in 1963? They’ve gone through ten doctors to date and there are over seven hundred episodes, most of which are super old. The ‘classic’”—Rae used sarcastic finger quotes—“series is so outdated. The special effects are a complete joke. You can’t take it seriously.”
“What’s the premise of the show?” I asked.
“There’s a doctor—”
“What kind of doctor?”
“He’s just the doctor.”
“But he has to be some kind of doctor.”
“If he is, they don’t say. Anyway, so the doctor travels through time saving the world from destruction.”
“And it’s the special effects you can’t take seriously?”
“It’s a really good show. At least the new one is.”
“Why do you have to watch it at Henry’s house? Why don’t you just rent the DVDs and watch at home?”
“I tried that, but then as soon as Dad hears the music, he comes into the room and watches with me. And you know how that goes.”
“I hear you.”1
“Besides, only the first season is available on DVD for the new series, but Henry has bootlegs of the second season.”
We simultaneously heard a key in the front door. Rae promptly pressed Play and handed me the remote control. She stared straight at the television, ignoring Henry’s entrance.
The theme music had an oddly familiar refrain, but I was distracted by the sidelong look Henry gave my sister. It was as if he was deciding whether to reprimand her. I thought few things could make a better peace offering to my mother than the Stone and Spellman show, so I grabbed my digital recorder and slipped it into my pocket.
Rae and I watched the first forty-five-minute episode of Doctor Who in complete silence, while Henry presumably cleaned up whatever invisible mess I had made. When the episode ended, Rae pressed the Stop button and I slipped my hand into my pocket and pressed Record.
THE STONE AND SPELLMAN SHOW—EPISODE 42
“THE READING RULE AND THE MUCOUS MYSTERY”
The transcript reads as follows:
RAE: That was so much better than the “classic” episodes [once again with the rude finger quotes]. The special effects in those old episodes are so cheesy.
HENRY: You’re supposed to use your imagination.
ISABEL: I want to watch the next episode.
[I reach for the remote.]
RAE: You can’t.
ISABEL: I think I can. Just press Play.
[Rae shakes her head in sad disappointment.]
RAE: You can’t. For every hour of television you watch in Henry’s house, you have to read for one hour.
[Rae walks over to the bookshelf, grabs a copy of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and opens it to the bookmark, approximately halfway through.]
ISABEL: Is this a joke?
RAE: I thought so at first, but no. You should choose a book on your own, before he decides for you.
ISABEL: Rae, I’m a grown-up. Henry can’t enforce this rule with me.
HENRY: Rae, do your parents know you’re here?
RAE: They’ve probably figured it out by now.
HENRY: Call them.
[Rae picks up the telephone and makes the call. I press Play on the remote control. Henry removes it from my hands and presses Stop.]
ISABEL: You can’t be serious.
HENRY: I understand there are few things that divert an undisciplined mind like yours better than television—
ISABEL: I think that was an insult.
HENRY:—but I need to maintain some rules in this house, or she would never leave.
[Henry picks up a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment from his bookshelf and hands it to me.]
HENRY: It’s just an hour.
[Ten minutes later: Rae is sitting next to me on the couch with her book as Henry prepares dinner.]
RAE: [whispering] Today, I checked Mr. Peabody’s snot drawer and all the tissues were gone. But then during class, he blew his nose again and put the tissue in the drawer.
ISABEL: [at full volume] Why are you whispering?
RAE: [whispering loudly] I can’t talk to him about the snot.
ISABEL: Why?
RAE: Because he thinks all collecting is the same.
ISABEL: I doubt he thinks stamp collecting and mucous hoarding are the same.
RAE: Shhh. But he thinks it’s the same if you keep extra cereal around and you keep your mucous around.
ISABEL: [loudly] Henry, do you actually think Mr. Peabody’s vile habit of saving his own used tissues is really the same thing as stockpiling unusual quantities of cereal?
HENRY: Are you ever going to get off that subject?
RAE: What I do and what Mr. Peabody does are completely different things.
HENRY: I’m not suggesting they’re in precisely the same classroom of abnormal behavior, but I do think they’re in the same school.
RAE: [to Isabel] See, I can’t talk to him about this.
HENRY: Isabel, are you recording this?
ISABEL: Yes.
HENRY: I’m going to confiscate the tape recorder.
[End of tape.]
After five pages of Crime and Punishment Rae pressed the Play button and we watched episode two of the first series1 of Doctor Who (2005, BBC), “The End of the World.”2
During a brief lull in the on-screen conversation, I said, “This show makes me want to get stoned and watch every episode back-to-back.”
Henry cleared his throat at the “get stoned” comment. He got two beers out of the refrigerator and handed me one.
“Perhaps this will do.”
“Thank you.”
“Try to keep the drug references to a minimum around a cop and a minor.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Shhh,” Rae hissed, her eyes like lasers on the television.
“The End of the World” ended and Rae checked her cell phone for messages.
“Got to bail,” Rae said.
“Where are you going?” Henry asked.
“To Ashley’s house. They’re ordering pizza tonight.”
“Call your mother,” Henry said.
“I’m not telling her about the pizza,” Rae replied.
“I don’t care about the pizza. Just let her know where you’ll be.”
“Oh, right.”
“Call her now.”
“You are so prehistoric,” Rae said while dialing the number.
Two hours later, after a dinner of salmon, wild rice, and kale, I washed the dishes while Stone dried and inspected.
“You missed a spot,” he said for the third time in a row.
“I really think medication would help you,” I replied.
“It might help you as well,” he replied.
“You really are oddly clean.”
“I know,” he said, as if this were his dark secret.
“And organized. Your sock drawer is unbelievable.”
“You snooped, didn’t you?”
“You even smell like soap.”
“No, I don’t.”
“A very nice soap, but soap. Yes.”
Breathing in the smell of Stone’s soapy essence, I felt kind of dizzy. I handed him the final dish and opened the space between us.
“Did you learn anything else about me today?” he asked.
“As far as I can tell you’re not that into porn.”
“Are you sure?” Stone asked sarcastically. “Men have very good hiding places.”
“I know all the hiding places,” I replied.
“Wow. You’ve had a busy day,” Stone said, scanning his home for signs of invasion.
“Relax,” I said. “I didn’t look all that hard. You’re just not the type.”
“What type am I?”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “You’re kind of like some alien life form.”
The mention of aliens reminded Stone and me that hours of Doctor Who awaited us. Since Stone, like an unprepared babysitter, was happy for any form of diversion from my usual diverting habits, he popped in the DVD and refrained from enforcing his alternating reading rule.
Snippets of conversation emerged in the midst of a series of close calls with the end of civilization.
Doctor Who
Episode 3: “The Unquiet Dead”3
“I had no idea you were such a geek,” I said authoritatively.
“Now you know,” he replied.
“Clever how you got Rae reading Dickens.”
“Isn’t it?”
Episode 4: “Aliens of London”4
“I need you to do me a favor,” I said.
“Other than giving you a place to crash?”
“Yes,” I said, turning to Stone. “The last time I followed John Brown, he parked in front of this building for about an hour. A woman came out to speak to him—”
“I thought you were done with this,” Stone said, pausing the alien image on the screen.
“I am done. But you’re not.”
I handed Stone a slip of paper from my pocket. “This is the address of where he was parked. The woman, Jennifer Davis, has since disappeared.”
Stone took the slip of paper. “I’m sure the police are investigating this matter.”
“Look into it for me,” I said.
“Why can’t you just let this go?”