Tips for Living

by Renee Shafransky

  Nervous, I retreated to my bedroom and began to dress, pulling my sweater on backward at first. As I grabbed my watch on the night table, I glimpsed The Role of the Muse in Contemporary Art by April Krim sitting at the top of my reading pile. The morning I received Hugh’s letter, I’d ordered it on Amazon. I’d remembered reading a review of the book, and I intended to learn how other muses dealt with betrayal by the men who immortalized them. I had devoured it as soon as it arrived.

  I didn’t want to end up like Dora Maar. Known as Picasso’s “weeping woman,” the sad, French-Croatian beauty with pencil-thin eyebrows and sensual lips was Picasso’s lover and inspiration for many years until he replaced her. She never had an intimate relationship with a man again. She gave herself to Catholicism. “After Picasso, God,” she said.

  They found Picasso’s artwork in her apartment after her death—gifts he had given her that she could have sold for a fortune but kept for sentiment. His portraits of her fetched “ooh la la” prices: Sotheby’s auctioned off Dora Maar au Chat for more than $95 million a decade ago. Proving, to me at least, that musing was a woefully undervalued profession.

  The bedroom door opened a crack and Grace poked her head in.

  “Nora?”

  “Coming.”

  I returned to the living room. Roche was checking out the titles on my bookshelf. He stopped and faced me.

  “Are you ready?”

  I walked to my desk. “I just have to find my keys.”

  “You left them by the sink, honey,” Grace said, disappearing into the kitchen.

  As I lifted my trench coat off the back of my desk chair, Roche strolled over. He insisted on playing the gentleman and helping me on with it. “We really appreciate your agreeing to take a trip downtown with us, Ms. Glasser.”

  I hoped he didn’t notice my trembling hands. I had nothing to fear, I told myself. Unlike my father, who dodged the police half his life. My father, who avoided jail but wound up living in someone’s basement after the divorce—he’d given what money was left to my mother and me. “I know people say lousy things about me, Nora. But remember, all I wanted was for you and your mother to have the best. Everything I did, I did for love.”

  My father, who bent down and held my face in his hands the day he moved out and said, “Here’s a tip, kiddo. A tip for living. This world is rough, and it’s going to keep throwing things at you. Don’t let them break your heart.”

  I tried to steady my fingers enough to button my coat.

  “I want you to find whoever did this, Detective.”

  I meant it.

  Grace handed me the keys as Roche opened the front door, gesturing for me to walk through ahead of him. But I lifted my father’s photo first. With the sleeve of my trench coat, I cleaned Nathan Glasser’s sad eyes of the specks of mud that hit them when I hurled my boot before. Then I set him down and went outside.

  “Don’t worry, Nor. I’ll be right behind you,” Grace called out. “You don’t have to say anything to anyone, you hear?”

  As I walked toward my Toyota, Detective Roche called my name and pointed to the waiting squad car with a county police officer behind the wheel.

  “Can’t I take my own car?” I croaked.

  “It would be more convenient if you came with us. We’ll arrange to get you home later; don’t worry.” He strode over and opened the rear door to the spot usually reserved for suspects.

  “Careful of your head,” he said, patting my scalp with his hairy hand as I ducked in.

  Whenever I saw the police make this gesture on crime shows, I imagined a warm palm placed protectively on the crown could feel soothing momentarily, especially for an innocent scared out of her wits, and maybe even for a serial killer like Ted Bundy. But in reality, it felt manipulative. Psyops for cops. “We are your friends. We want what’s best for you. We care.” A devious message from folks who hoped to lock you away for life or fry you in an electric chair. A hedge against a lawsuit if you hurt yourself.

  “Fasten your seat belt. We wouldn’t want you banged up if we make a sudden stop. Or hit a pothole,” Roche cautioned. “We’ve already seen some big ones this year.”

  “You might consider reporting them to the highway department,” I said.

  I could hear my father’s voice whispering in my ear. Don’t get cheeky, kiddo. This is serious business here.

  I buckled up, noting the car’s sickly sweet chemical smell, like the inside of a Port-O-San, and the stiff, uncomfortable back seat made of molded gray plastic. Probably easier to clean if anyone vomited, pissed, or bled, I thought, repulsed. What was that curious silver ring bolted to the middle of the floor?

  “What’s this metal ring for?” I asked through the security screen as Roche climbed in the passenger seat up front. The blue-black edge of a tattoo snaking along his collar line finally exposed the ruse of his country-squire look. He glanced over his shoulder.

  “Securing a prisoner’s leg irons,” he said.

  The remains of whatever bravado I’d conjured disappeared as we sped out of my driveway, the police radio crackling with addresses and codes. My heart began hammering. My hands resumed their shaking. My stomach churned. The scratch on my cheek even throbbed for a second. How had it gotten there? Then . . .

  Kathump!

  My head hit the car roof.

  “Damn pothole! You okay back there?” Roche asked.

  No, I wasn’t okay. I felt scared and alone. I wanted to call Aunt Lada and be soothed by her voice. But I was afraid she would hear how frightened I was, and it would worry her sick.

  “I’m good,” I said, and repeated it more for myself than for him. “I’m good.”

  From the Pequod Courier

  Letters to the Editor

  Dear Editor,

  Thanks to “Tips for Living” for bringing some levity to the struggles faced by average residents. You can tell Ms. Glasser is “one of us.” She probably drives a car that’s more than two years old. At least I doubt she owns a 7,500-square-foot summer home along with a Manhattan penthouse. Make no mistake about it: there’s a class war raging in Pequod, and I know who is winning. The greedy real estate developers who are profiting by polluting our wetlands and scarring our beautiful landscapes. The superrich Summer People who build giant vacation homes and then charter helicopters in their rush to get here and “relax,” inflicting deafening noise on the rest of us. Why is nothing ever enough for any of them?

  Tim McNulty

  Pequod, NY

  Chapter Eight

  Compared to Pequod, Massamat is a big city. Population over thirty-two thousand, according to the last census. But the downtown area was depressed. We were driving through a ghost town. At least on weekdays, you’d see some shoppers. Or young and old men in front of the empty display windows of vacant stores on State Street. They sit on graffiti-marked benches or overturned milk crates, smoking and shooting the bull while waiting for contractors to drive by and hire them as day laborers. Today everyone was at the discount mall.

  The financial crisis or prolonged recession or end of the great capitalist experiment, depending on your point of view, has made downtown jobs scarce while creating other employment opportunities. Some of Massamat’s formerly college-bound youth have been joining gangs and dealing drugs. The quarterback for the Massamat High School Mastiffs became involved with a gang and was arrested for selling Vicodin and meth. Last year saw three homicides—two of them gang-on-gang kills. The third was a gas station attendant shot during a robbery. The police suspected gang involvement there, too. Just 10.8 miles from Pequod, there’s a growing culture of violence.

  What if some of Massamat’s angry desperados rode over and shot Hugh and Helene in the course of robbing them? Or it could have been a gang initiation rite. Killing someone to become a member of the club. Maybe they’d slashed Hugh’s “artsy” self-portrait in a final gesture of contempt? It was possible, yes. Especially if Hugh had shown up on their radar because he was buying drugs. I’d kno
wn him to indulge in the past. Besides spreading through America’s suburbs like the plague in the last few years, heroin had become hip in the art world again, reprising the ’70s, when artists snorted in the toilet stalls at Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club. At least that’s what New York Magazine said. Maybe Hugh and Helene were using and abusing?

  I let my head fall back against the car’s hard seat.

  There were surely people besides myself with motives to murder Hugh and Helene. Killers with guns. In my muddled thinking, I’d failed to consider that if the unconfirmed report was accurate and Hugh and Helene were shot . . . well, I didn’t own a firearm. I wasn’t 100 percent certain how the police viewed me, but my own lurking, illogical doubts eased.

  We drove by city hall and pulled up to the new police station conveniently located next to the county court complex. Unlike the rest of Massamat’s traditional brick government buildings, the station was conspicuously modern—all black steel and dark, tinted glass. Some failure of the imagination had led to the placement of a large bronze badge “sculpture” in the middle of the concrete front walk. A good portion of the county’s boom-year tax dollars went here when property values rose: not to job retraining or after-school programs, but to law enforcement and monuments. The police budget was a hot issue in Pequod, too.

  Detective Roche came around to the back of the car, opened the door, and guarded my skull again. “Careful there, Ms. Glasser.”

  Flanked by Roche and our golem-size chauffeur, whose nametag read “Sgt. Klish,” I climbed the marble stairs of the massive precinct as if I already dragged a ball and chain. You are small and helpless and dwarfed by our power, the building said. The lump in my throat felt as big as a walnut. I entered the immense lobby with its floor made of black polished stone and a vaulted ceiling overhead, three stories tall.

  Metal detectors and conveyor belts blocked access to a glassed-in front desk. Likely bulletproof. The setup resembled a security gate at an airport, except there were no lines. I was the only passenger on this trip. For a second, I wondered if Massamat’s criminals took Sundays off. But the constant squawk of Klish’s hand radio told me the town’s gangsters were still busy on the Day of Rest.

  “I’ll take the phone,” Klish said gruffly. “Outer garments, purse, and shoes go on the belt. Empty your pockets of keys, lipstick. Anything metal. Deposit them in the plastic cup.”

  I removed my coat. “The scarf, too?”

  He flashed me an icy smile. “I said outer garments.”

  Give a former C student some authority and Klish is what you get. I did as he instructed and passed through the metal detector. An Asian officer with a big gray plastic wand met me on the other side of the arch. Pretending he was about to cast a protective spell made me feel less anxious for about a second. He waved the wand over my jeans and black cardigan, and it dawned on me that for weeks I’d been wearing nothing but black: black jeans, black Pilates pants, black T-shirts and black sweaters. Yet another symptom of my dark emotional state.

  When the officer finished, he directed me to Sgt. Klish again, who lorded over my belongings at the end of the conveyor belt. I refilled my purse, gathered up my coat and scarf and bent over to put on my black boots, vaguely aware of something fluttering to the floor as Detective Roche’s voice warned from behind.

  “Don’t forget this.”

  Straightening up, I turned around. Roche held out the cream-colored envelope I’d taken from my kitchen. I nearly snatched Hugh’s letter from his hand, but caught myself.

  “Thanks,” I said, casually taking the letter and returning it to my coat pocket.

  “The other shoe, Ms. Glasser.”

  “Huh?”

  “If you’ll put on your other shoe, we’ll get going. We’ve got room six. Best in the house,” he said. As if we were checking in to a five-star hotel.

  I slipped the boot on and followed Roche through a reception area—a less intimidating space decorated with local travel posters (“Moon over Massamat Harvest Festival”), potted plants and orange plastic chairs. The chairs were empty except for a Hispanic woman with a cooing infant on her lap. We walked down a long corridor next. No softness or warmth anywhere. Fluorescent lights, beige linoleum floors and bare white walls. Room six was also white. No windows. Just a gray metal table, three gray metal chairs and a gray metal door. A black electronic device sat on the table, likely a tape recorder. The mirrored wall behind the two chairs had a dark tint. One-way glass. My mouth was dry as sandpaper.

  “Have a seat here.” Roche indicated the single chair with its back to the door. “Are you thirsty? Can I get you any coffee? Soda? Water?”

  My new best friend.

  “Coffee would be great, thanks. Black is fine.”

  Roche picked up an intercom handset on the wall and asked someone to bring coffee to room six. Then he sat down opposite me. It was so quiet I could hear the nervous gurgling in my stomach. I noticed my hands were tightened into fists and opened them.

  “All right then. Let’s get started.”

  He flipped the switch on the electronic device and a little red light came on. He leaned forward and then instantly back, probably catching a whiff of my stress breath. After clearing his throat, he said, “Interview with Nora Glasser by Detective Lawrence Roche. November sixteenth. Massamat station. 1:47 p.m.”

  Then Roche paused and reached inside his jacket. He pulled out a folded copy of the Courier and laid it down on the desk with my recent Tips column faceup. I thought of my caustic remarks about Summer People, and gulped. My complaints about how they clogged exercise classes. Did he know Helene was in my Pilates class?

  Roche focused his dark, sly eyes on me.

  “Are you Nora Glasser of number three Crooked Farm Lane, Pequod?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ve been employed as a writer at the Pequod Courier for the last two and a half years, approximately?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hugh Walker is your ex-husband, Ms. Glasser. Is that correct?”

  I nodded.

  “I need a verbal, please.”

  “Yes.”

  “When was the last time you had any contact with him?”

  Was Hugh’s letter technically contact? It wouldn’t make me look good.

  Can’t you please try and let go of your rage at me? Hasn’t enough time passed?

  Unless the mailman read and memorized return addresses, there was no way the police could know the letter existed. I’d take that chance.

  “Just about three years ago.”

  “You haven’t seen him since?”

  “Well, I saw him. A number of times.”

  “Exactly where and when most recently, if you can remember?”

  “Outside the Pequod hardware store. This past Labor Day.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I was going in to buy some DampRid. He was coming out. He had two armfuls of tiki torches from the end-of-season sale.”

  “And you didn’t talk to each other?”

  It was the one time I couldn’t avoid Hugh. There might have been a witness. I had to tell the truth.

  “Actually, I misspoke. We did have contact.”

  “Oh?”

  “He said hello. He told me I looked great.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He asked me if I was seeing anyone.”

  “And did you respond?”

  I hesitated and wiped some moisture off my upper lip.

  “Ms. Glasser, did you speak to Hugh Walker?”

  “Yes. I told him to light up a tiki torch and shove it you know where.”

  Roche smiled slightly. “No, I don’t,” he said.

  My face reddened. “His ass,” I said, softly.

  “For the recorder, please.”

  “His ass.” Damn.

  “So, you were not on friendly terms.”

  “We really weren’t on any terms at all.”

  Roche eyed me steadily. He put his palms on
the table and spread his fingers. “Ms. Glasser. Do you know of anyone who might want to harm your ex-husband or his wife?”

  I relaxed a little, grateful we seemed to be moving on. “I have one idea,” I said.

  Roche slid his chair in closer and clasped his hands on the table. “Go ahead.”

  “A drug dealer. A dealer who felt ripped off or dissed by them.”

  “Are you saying the Walkers were drug addicts?”

  Was he trying to put words in my mouth? “Maybe not addicts. But I bet they got stoned a lot.”

  “Do you know that for a fact?”

  “No.” I’d said “idea,” not fact. Was he setting some trap? I felt light-headed. I tried to control my breathing. Mad. Sad. Bad. Glad. Bad.

  “Then what makes you think they did?”

  “It’s an artist thing. Hugh used to partake sometimes when we were together. Drug habits tend to get worse over time when there’s a lot of money. Hugh certainly had plenty.” Oh shit. That sounded bitter. I was not a bitter, angry woman. Or was I? I guess I did feel cheated by Hugh, but Roche didn’t need to know that.

  “I see,” he said, sitting back again and crossing his arms. “That’s interesting information, Ms. Glasser. We’ll look into it.”

  “I really think you should.”

  “Did he have enemies? Was anyone very angry about his treatment of them?”

  I was sure he meant me. I tried to think back, determined to come up with alternatives.

  “Well . . . I remember he thought his accountant did a lousy job on his taxes and fired him. But that seems pretty far-fetched.” Who else? Who else? “How about the housekeeper? The one who found them. Maybe they didn’t treat the help very well?”

  Roche nodded, paused for a few seconds, then uncrossed his arms and pulled on his chin. “I understand Hugh and Helene Walker bought their house at Pequod Point last spring. I can imagine you must’ve had some feelings about them moving here?”

  I shifted in my chair and Roche registered it.

  “It’s a free country,” I said. Now I sounded defensive. This was not going well at all. I noticed my palms were glistening with sweat. “I only meant . . .”