Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “What? Marcus, I’m cooking my egg!”

  “I know, but humor me. I’m compiling some statistics. You know. What people do. Where they put their—you know—money. Or whatever.”

  “Marcus? Is there a problem? Do you need cash?”

  “No no no! Emily, this is all theoretical. Just tell me quick, before your egg overcooks. Let’s say you need—oh, whatever—fifty thousand bucks.”

  “Fifty thousand? Why would I need that much money?”

  “It doesn’t matter. For the purposes of my inquiry, let’s just say you need it. What would you do?”

  “I wouldn’t do anything! I have no way of getting that kind of money! I’d have to ask my mother. Or my brother Milo. He could take a second mortgage on his house or something. Or Anstice. I suppose I could go down on my knees and beg. But I just never would! This is a stupid question. I don’t even like to think about it.”

  “But just—I mean, you don’t have anything you could sell, you don’t own anything valuable?”

  “Marcus, no! I don’t have anything! Just my Nikon. My Hasselblad. My dog. You know what I’ve got.”

  “But—”

  “Listen, I want to do my egg now. I want my dinner. Can we talk about this later?”

  “Sorry, Emily. Sorry. Okay. I’ll see you around eight.”

  “You are getting so peculiar,” Emily sighs, and hangs up.

  Marcus finishes his tea. Hart is obviously insane. But meanwhile, he’ll pick up ten thousand at the Japanese pavilion, money that his father owes him, fair and square. All those years of poverty, living with Summer while their small bank account dwindled away. Delivering papers. Working at a gas station. Hart owes him for all those cold afternoons pumping gas.

  With that much money, he can go home.

  His goal has been to save thirty thousand; Hart’s ten will put him over the top.

  Aside from Tamarind’s occasional visits, Summer’s house in Honesdale has been vacant for more than three years. He knows it needs work. And he has to have a vehicle. And some money to live on until he gets the house in shape and can start to earn a living. He has an idea that he’ll work for the little old-fashioned railroad down there. Or learn to train dogs, or teach himself to cook. Marcus doesn’t worry about earning a living: If he can make money in Williamsburg, he can make money in Honesdale. What he worries about, increasingly, is leaving Emily.

  But he doesn’t think about that now. He sits down with that morning’s Times crossword—Saturday, the hardest—and, though he finishes it off in fourteen minutes, he enjoys doing it: Like the tea, it’s soothing. Then he cuts an avocado in half, removes the pit, salts both halves and eats them from their shells with a spoon. When he’s done, he puts on his coat and heads out to Emily’s.

  He stops at the Syrian deli on Berry Street. Elliot C. is at the counter, buying cigarettes, and Marcus is jolted by a visceral revulsion at the sight of his brown leather jacket, dyed blond hair, and arrogant little body. Cigarettes in New York City are now $7.50 a pack. He hopes Elliot C. will go broke buying them and also get emphysema. Then he’s vaguely ashamed of himself. He has no reason to dislike this person. Elliot C. turns, looks Marcus in the eye, smirks, and goes out without speaking. Marcus picks up the tomato juice and pays for it, feeling as if a cruel, wintry wind has blown through the place.

  Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, he thinks.

  And so does everyone else’s.

  11

  Eve damned eden mad eve

  (Mid-November 2002)

  Emily comes in from a photography session and checks her Emails. There are five. The headings are:

  Emily, your dog can be smarter!

  Eddie Bauer pre-Christmas Outerwear Sale!

  Work at Home for BIG $$$$$!

  Emily Limo! Your Mortgage Has Already Been Approved!!

  Thanksgiving? London? Mom? California? Guilt? Help?

  The last one, she knows immediately, is from her sister Laurie telling her that she’s thinking of not going to Berkeley for Thanksgiving. She and Jonathan want to go to London and see some plays, and what does Emily think about all of them meeting up at Mom’s for Christmas instead?

  She E-mails her sister that she has already decided to fly out only for Christmas this year, not Thanksgiving, and reassures her about the lack of necessity for guilt: Mom’s new beau is helping her make the Christmas fruitcakes, so it’s serious—she probably won’t notice whether her kids are there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Groundhog Day. Emily cc’s her brother on the E-mail, puts in a wash, and then curls up under her quilt with Otto and Miss Mackenzie. But she’s distracted from the book by the need to contemplate her life.

  Emily is tired of being poor.

  Her sister Laurie, two years younger than she, is a senior curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing in sixteenth and seventeenth century English needlework, and Laurie’s husband Jonathan is a pediatrician with a large practice. Emily’s brother Milo is a building contractor in Ann Arbor, married to a well-known novelist who teaches at the university there. Both her siblings will offer her money for a plane ticket to California at Christmas, and so will her mother. She will debate whether to accept it from one or the other of them (and make things easy on herself), or scrape together the money (as she usually does) by a creative combination of late rent, a maxed-out Visa, frugal eating, and hope. Hope is not entirely illusory; Dr. Demand has bought photographs from her on four of the eleven Christmases she has lived in Williamsburg. But hope is also, as Emily Dickinson and the posters in the Hallmark shop have it, the thing with feathers, and it can soar into the air faster than Izzy does when he hears a ringing phone.

  In the end, she knows she will pay for her own ticket.

  But what she will do about gifts for everyone is another question.

  Last year, when she made fudge for her family and begged them not to give her presents, they all got together and presented her with a check so large she couldn’t bring herself to cash it until Milo flew to Brooklyn in March and escorted her personally to the bank. The year before, she suggested they all draw names: She drew her mother and gave her three pairs of striped socks and a loaf of home-made bread; Jonathan drew Emily and gave her the rare antique “Hummingbird” pattern quilt that she is presently snuggled under with the dog.

  Outside her windows, she can see an occasional aimless snowflake. The air was brisk when she was out with her camera, and now her life seems as bleak as the view. The woes of the world are so many, and they come to her at random: the hole in the skyline, the hopeful unadopted cats at the Pet Pound, the memory of her father’s sudden death and her mother’s weeping, in the night, the Greenpoint winos with their brown-bagged bottles, her sister’s two miscarriages, the story in the morning paper saying the average teenager reads two books a year. Her own life is aimless, precarious, stalled. The old Volvo was ailing today, so she took the subway to the Village. She didn’t find much—an ugly TIME from a billboard, a possible DOG on a peeling wall on West Fourth Street, another nice TIME with a truck parked in front of it so she couldn’t get a good shot. She just had time to walk Otto before it started getting dark, and now the river and the skyline are dimming against a smoky sky. The rhythmic chug of the washing machine performs its whiny three-note noise, the start of a Strauss waltz, against the Bach cello suite on the CD player. The CD player, she reflects, was also a gift—from her mother, for her thirty-third birthday. And so were the Bach cello suites.

  She looks around her loft, suddenly appalled.

  How many of her possessions has she actually bought and paid for?

  There’s her big maple bed, a castoff from Laurie. The pretty little rag rug on the floor next to it, which Lamont found in the trash and mended and cleaned for her. The wall of bookcases Anstice had made for certain selected tenants the year she gave them a marginal rent raise and then felt guilty about it. The coffee table and rocking chair Emily found on the street and painted yellow. The funny little p
ink lamp: She and Pat both spotted it at the Salvation Army, and fought over it, and Pat bought it for two bucks and ended up giving it to her anyway. The kitchen table she made herself out of a piece of plywood, some oil cloth, and a set of fancy legs from her mother’s attic, and the four chairs one of Sophie’s clients begged her to take away when she was remodeling her kitchen. Izzy, found on a rooftop, and Otto, given to her by Hattie and Gaby after Harry died and Hart left her. Even the washer, chugging away, is a relic of her marriage—her divorce settlement consisted of the washer, the dryer, the car, the Trollopes, and the junk upstairs in Anstice’s storeroom.

  The snowflakes are gathering in greater numbers, like crowds surging onto a subway platform at rush-hour. Winter is coming, which means not only cold and dark and the occasional snow or slush but also freedom from her gardening job and time to do more photography. Given the unprepossessing elements of her life (no money, few prospects, wealthy siblings, unrequited love), she realizes she has no right to be as happy as she actually, usually, is. Her failures nag at her, but they are unchangeable elements of her existence, and she tries to accept them, as she accepts the polluted air of Williamsburg and her size nine feet. With an effort that is partly physical, inhaling deeply through her nose and exhaling through her mouth the way she learned in a yoga class she took years ago at the Greenpoint YMCA, Emily banishes her bad mood to the furthest, dimmest cellars of her mind.

  She’s just finishing up Chapter Three of Miss Mackenzie (“This was the first occasion in her life in which she had gone to a party, the invitation to which had come to her on a card, and of course she felt herself to be a little nervous”) when the phone rings. Izzy, as always, squawks and flies to her head. Otto, asleep beside her, wakes up and gives the bird his what-a-jerk look. (What does he think? That it’s for him?) Emily considers ignoring the phone, but it could be Marcus, who has been elusive: After he has walked the dogs, what does he do all day? She hasn’t seen him since they went to the polls together on Tuesday, when he entertained her with choice presidential quotes, like “A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls,” cracking up all the English-speaking Williamsburgers in line. The Saturday before that was her triumphant Scrabble coup, when she clobbered him with aquifer on a triple word. Emily smiles, remembering his pathetic comeback with squire, using a blank and wasting an S for a measly fourteen points before going on to beat her in the next two games—but narrowly. Suddenly she misses Marcus desperately, and remembers that she wants to tell him, among other things, her discovery that “two plus eleven” and “one plus twelve” not only have the same answer but use exactly the same letters. On the fifth ring, she picks up the phone.

  “Hello—is this Emily Lime?” a man’s voice asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, hi Emily, my name is Hugh Lang, I’m a friend of Pat and Oliver’s.” He begins talking too fast. “Well, not a friend exactly, I’m the father of a couple of their students at Taggart, but we have, actually, become friendly over the last year or two, you know, they teach my children, and so I have a certain amount of contact with them.”

  Emily says nothing, and there’s suddenly a huge silence in her apartment. The cello suite is over. The washer has stopped its waltz and is waiting to have its clothes transferred to the dryer, which she should get up and do, but Otto has started his gentle snoring again, and she hates to disturb him. She looks out the window, thinking Everything is dark except for the lights. The lights in New York never go out, and the sky is never allowed to get black. Anytime, anywhere, in New York City there is someone awake, with a light on, a concept that is both comforting and worrisome. The city never sleeps. But maybe it should, maybe it should turn out the lights and get some shut-eye for a change. Somewhere out there, she thinks irrelevantly, is the Williamsburg rapist, the man in a mask and a hood who forces women at knife-point into alleys and to the roofs of abandoned buildings and down to the desolate wasteland by the river. His last victim was one of the Kent Avenue hookers, just two days ago—she also got her face slashed. The one before that was the young Polish girl who used to work at the Pink Pony Thrift Shop. After her rape, Emily heard, she went back to Krakow.

  “Hello?”

  Emily says, “Oh. Yes.”

  The man on the phone continues. “So they mentioned that you play poker, and I was wondering—well, you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find poker players in this city! You can find people who do every damn thing—you know, niche things—like my next door neighbor is a Greek acupuncturist who plays the bagpipes—but poker players are hard to find, for some reason. So I was wondering if you’d like to join our little game? Friday nights? Usually at my place—for obvious reasons. I mean, I’m single, so I have no—I mean, I’m not single, I’m divorced, actually, but my kids aren’t here on weekends. What I mean is we do play poker here most Fridays, and we’ll be playing this week, I’m on the Upper West Side, Amsterdam near Ninety-fifth, and if you’d like to come, that would be great. We play nickel-dime-quarter, a friendly game, none of us are sharks or anything like that, but we’re pretty good, not amateurs, there are usually five of us, sometimes six, but we could use a new face, some fresh blood, and I think you might find it’s quite a lot of fun.…”

  Hugh Lang’s voice trails off. Izzy, on her head, is murmuring softly, and Otto’s snore rumbles against the inside of her left arm. She knows she has to speak, and though she knows what she will say, she is reluctant to say it. She doesn’t like to lie, and yet she doesn’t want to tell the truth, either, which is that she has no interest in Hugh Lang’s poker game or in Hugh Lang, that she is mildly angry at Pat and Oliver for having given him her number, and that she hopes he will never bother her again.

  She takes a breath and says, “It really does sound delightful, and I’d love to come, but I’m afraid I can’t. Friday night is my—” she hesitates for only a moment “quilting night.” She looks down at her black and red quilt and smooths a seam that was meticulously stitched by a woman named Melicent Harris in Pennsylvania in 1845. “My quilting bee,” she corrects herself. “Every Friday. Seven o’clock sharp. We’re a very dedicated little group.”

  “Really.” His voice is deflated. “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, me too. It’s a shame, but—well, there you are. Isn’t it weird how everything is always on the same night, so that you never really get to do anything?” She doesn’t wait for him to answer. “I do appreciate your thinking of me, though.”

  This is a sentence that, she hopes, indicates she wants to hang up now. He gets the hint, and after a few more stilted exchanges they say good-bye. She immediately feels awful. What crazy Yogi Berra thing did she just say? Everything happens at once so you can’t do anything? Her only consolation is that Hugh Lang probably found her such a dingbat, not to mention a transparent liar, that he is relieved she didn’t agree to join the game.

  Remorse makes her energetic, and she eases herself out from under Otto and puts the clothes in the dryer. The washer and dryer, combined with the poker game, remind her of her married days, when she and Hart used to play poker with Joe Whack and Jeanette Jerome, the Jeanette whose loft Elliot C. is subletting while Jeanette is in London for a year, on sabbatical from her job teaching American literature at Brooklyn College. It was a pathetic poker game. Joe was really sick then, and Hart was a mediocre player who became sullen and offensive when he lost a hand. Emily was so busy trying to keep everyone happy that she couldn’t concentrate, and so Jeanette always took all their money, gleefully quoting Hemingway’s strategy—“Never call, always raise or fold”—as she raked in the chips. But Emily loved those poker nights anyway, and it occurs to her that she would, actually, enjoy very much playing in a poker game exactly like the one Hugh Lang just described.

  She stops, suddenly, with her hand on the dryer knob.

  What is wrong with me?

  It’s such a familiar question she doesn’t even bother to grope for an answer. She stands holding the
knob, contemplating the zipper around her wrist. She does her deep breathing. Think of something nice, she instructs herself, and she shuts her eyes and lets her mind travel back to 1977, the day Elvis died. Her mother wept on her father’s shoulder, her brother Milo put on an old Elvis album, and her parents slow-danced together to “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” while their children watched, entranced, swaying in time to the music. Emily was eleven.

  Feeling better, she starts the dryer.

  Then she pours herself some tomato juice (left over from the Scrabble session), puts on the second CD of the cello suites, and returns to Miss Mackenzie, who in the course of Emily’s evening goes to Mrs. Stumfold’s tea party, is called on by the handsome Mr. Rubb, spends Christmas at the Cedars with Lady Ball and her eligible son, and attends a dinner party in London. Miss Mackenzie makes Emily ashamed of herself. But, as Marcus reminded her at the polls, President Bush once memorably declared, “The future will be better tomorrow.”

  Emily snuggles up with Otto, feeling sure that this sentiment, while stupid, is probably true.

  12

  No! it is opposition

  Marcus gets to the Botanic Garden early, so he can take a walk before his father arrives and transforms it from a green and beautiful refuge into a place of bad memories. So far, Marcus has only good memories of the garden, which he discovered soon after his move to Williamsburg in the fall of 2000, when he was nineteen, and had only a hundred dollars in his pocket. He was drawn to Brooklyn by the presence of his father. Broken and motherless, Marcus was too realistic to expect to find family, connection, or roots, but he was also vulnerable enough to want something that at least resembled those things. And he needed money. Hart, he heard from Tamarind, was still some kind of art dealer, with a gallery of his own, and he was married and living in a loft on North Third Street.

  Marcus figured he must have improved since the Honesdale days.