Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

Emily’s heart lurches. St. Francis of Assisi is what Gene Rae calls Marcus.

  “If only he weren’t young enough to be your son.”

  “He could only be my son if I’d been a teenage slut.”

  “You were a teenage slut,” Gene Rae reminds her.

  “Okay, if I’d been an unlucky teenage slut.” Emily sees herself with a little mound under her sweater, and inside it is Marcus. “I wasn’t really a slut anyway. It was just Jeffrey Norris and Neil Saltzman. Mostly.”

  “Mostly.”

  “Those were the days,” Emily says, but the remark is ironic, non-nostalgic. High school was the low point of their existence. Emily is happy to be a grown-up.

  But she’s still thinking about Marcus.

  He told her a few days ago about the paper route he had as a kid, how he used to go out on his bicycle in the misty early mornings, when it was still nearly dark, with his canvas bag of papers slung over his shoulder. No one would be out but him and the deer, who’d stand on the roadside in clumps, staring at him, and then, quick as a blink, vanish into the trees. Marcus is not very communicative about his life, and Emily hoards stories like this one, typing them into a secret file on her computer titled SCARUM. The image haunts her: young Marcus bicycling down a country road in his corduroy jacket and little cap—though she’s had to invent the jacket and cap, Marcus couldn’t remember what he used to wear when he delivered papers. The image seems emblematic of Marcus: his work ethic, his aloneness, his feeling for animals, and his ineffable cuteness.

  “So who’s your mom’s new squeeze?”

  “One of the attorneys at Foley, Levine, & Kirk. His name is Enrico. His wife died a couple of years ago. Mom says he’s got the most beautiful curly gray hair she’s ever seen.”

  “Sounds adorable.”

  “And he has two cats and a new puppy.”

  “I hope she snaps him up!”

  “It would be hard,” Emily confesses, “to go to my mother’s wedding before she comes to mine.”

  Gene Rae looks at her sympathetically, one hand spread across Roland. Emily’s inability to find Mr. Right is an old story. “Realistically speaking, Em, it is sort of hard to imagine you and Marcus walking down an aisle somewhere. Everybody would think he was the ring-bearer.” Gene Rae makes her voice high and squeaky, the voice of an imaginary crowd. “Where’s the groom? Where’s the groom?” She finishes her cookie, takes another. “Still, it’s a shame. In a weird kind of way, you guys seem like soulmates.”

  After Gene Rae leaves, Emily gives in to the urge to get out of her apartment and into the streets with her camera, while the light lasts. She walks up Berry Street, past the tavern Mae West used to live upstairs from, past the brewery, to Greenpoint, the Polish neighborhood that, if you walk far enough down Manhattan Avenue, evolves into a Hispanic one, places where it’s rare to hear English. This is one of Emily’s favorite walks, and she has already scoured these streets for BREAD, DOG, and TIME. She knows she won’t turn up any new ones, but she’s hoping to find something else. She has decided recently to expand what she is embarrassed to call her artistic vision by taking photographs of the neighborhood itself—fast, unstudied photos of Brooklyn’s joyful jumble. She hasn’t told anyone about it because it sounds so supremely uninteresting, but she finds herself getting excited as she walks along—not quite ready to shoot yet, just window-shopping.

  She knows every store by heart on Manhattan Avenue: the notions shop with its window of scissors and thread, the God Bless Deli, the Polish Wicca shop, the fishing tackle store, the store selling Eastern European housedresses. The tiny place called White Dream that features only white clothing. The beauty shops named by people with an imperfect command of English—Hair Crazy, Hair Fever, and her favorite, Beautiful Again, with its implication that everyone was once beautiful and will return to that state as soon as those split ends are taken care of. She walks by the market; canned salmon is on sale, and she makes a note to stop in on her way home. Canned salmon isn’t anywhere near the top of her food pyramid, but it’s cheap and good for you and tastes okay tossed in mayo with pickles à la Mrs. Buzik. Old Mr. Suarez waves to her from where he waits in line at the outdoor can redeemer with Eddie the Chihuahua. She passes the bad drugstore (large, chain, rude) and the good drugstore (small, Polish, polite), Mrs. Ronnie the Psychic, the gift shop with the handmade straw hens from Czechoslovakia in the window, and the produce markets with their outdoor bins overflowing with peppers and apples and cukes. Through the window of Dee & Dee she spots Hattie of the Pet Pound browsing through a rack of flannel shirts. Then, glancing down a side street, she sees the brown leather jacket and greased buzz-cut of Elliot C. going into the gym, and she turns away.

  Even a quick glimpse of Elliot casts a strange pall over the neighborhood.

  But then, when she crosses Greenpoint Avenue, she looks through her camera and is mesmerized by the beauty of it: Manhattan Avenue, stretching north to Queens, its colorful, improbable, crazy quilt of shops just touched with gold by the fading light. She snaps pictures from several vantage points until the light falls and fades, and tells herself that if she takes no other pictures today, this will have been worth it.

  Luther comes out of the liquor store, which is famous for its handsome Polish clerks and its dozens of brands of vodka. “Russian Vodka,” Luther says, opening the bag. “Something called Youri Dolgaruki. They were out of Krolewska. I’m going to make Cajun Kamikazes tonight. Why don’t you drop over? Around nine? But bring Otto. Or get Marcus to walk you over. No going out alone, missy.”

  “I can’t bring Otto.” She has brought Otto over to Luther and Lamont’s place in the past, and his attempts to play with the affronted Daphnes always break her heart. Last time, orange Daphne swiped his nose, drawing blood. She can still see Otto’s hurt, baffled face.

  “Then bring Marcus. The cats love him.” Luther chuckles. “Maybe because he’s not always trying to sniff their butts.”

  It’s too dark for more pictures. The magic light is gone. How fast it fades! Emily and Luther walk back along the avenue, toward home. “How’s everything?” Emily asks him. “How’s Lamont?”

  “Lamont. Lamont? Oh—La-mont. He’s fine, I hear. I don’t see that much of him nowadays. He has a new friend.”

  “Oh, Luther.” Emily knows he means Elliot C. “I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m sure he’ll get over it.”

  “I’m not sure of any of those things, Emily.” Luther takes her arm. “But I’ll tell you what. Let’s not fuck up a beautiful evening by talking about it.”

  They’re turning onto Lorimer Street when Luther says, “So what’s this about Marcus moving out of town?”

  Emily stops dead. “Moving out of town? Where did you hear this?”

  “I ran into him at the bank this morning. We’re just chatting, you know, and I say to him, ‘Hey Marcus, you ever thought of buying yourself a little house here in the hood? Because I heard Mrs. Buzik’s place over by the park might be available soon, she’s thinking of moving in with her daughter out in Mineola.’”

  “She is?”

  “Yeah, she’s not doing so well. Going in the hospital next week to have a toe amputated. And she’s talking about unloading the place.”

  “What about Trix?”

  “Going with her, of course. Can’t you just see Mrs. Buzik and Trix out in the burbs? Sitting by the pool, soaking up the sun? Trix can do her business on a lawn that has one of those FED BY CHEMICALS AND PROUD signs on it.”

  “So she’s selling her place,” Emily says. She can’t let Luther get off on one of his suburban-living riffs. “And so you said to Marcus—”

  “Well, of course, the trouble is, the building is such a wreck she’s not going to get much for it. But that’s where I figure somebody like Marcus comes in. He’s got his little nest egg going—he was depositing a fistful of cash this morning. Let me tell you, the kid is no slouch. He’s smart, he’s handy, he’s personable, he’d be a cool landlord, even at his
age. But then he tells me he already owns a place, in the boonies somewhere—I think he said Pennsylvania—his mother’s place.”

  “Honesdale, Pennsylvania,” Emily says, her heart sinking.

  “That’s it. Honesdale. Just south of Doohickey Falls and west of Bumfuck Center.”

  “I didn’t know.” Emily starts walking again, but her legs are rubbery. Marcus has told her about the little gray farmhouse, the pretty Victorian town. “I didn’t know he owned the house.”

  “Sounds like there was nobody else to inherit it.”

  Why hasn’t she realized that? Why hasn’t she ever asked him what became of the house? Why hasn’t she ever asked him the million questions she doesn’t know the answers to? She has no idea what he wants, why he wants it, who he is. Marcus Mead. His mother’s name was Summer, and she is dead, though Marcus doesn’t talk about what she died of. His father left when he was ten. Marcus had a paper route and a long period of no formal schooling. He had a dog named Phoebe. There’s a picture of him from 1991, with phone book and number 7 sweatshirt, squinting into the camera. He used to live alone in an unheated cabin. He’s the son of her ex-husband, he’s her dog-walker, he’s somebody Luther ran into in the bank, he has strange green eyes, he is fond of avocados and Trollope and numbers and words, and he doesn’t share her taste for Mallomars.

  He’s a cat, he’s a bird, he’s the crow who has learned to use a tool to get food.…

  “So I asked him why he never goes down there, and he said, well, one of these days he might, he’d like to set himself up with a truck and get down there from time to time and maybe even move there for good one of these days.”

  Emily stops again. “Marcus said that?”

  Luther gives her a strange look. “Well, yeah,” he says. “But just in a general kind of way. I mean, I don’t think he has any plans to do it any time soon.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s like—hey, who doesn’t get the urge to move to the country every once in a while?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s not going to find too many dogs to walk in a place like that. Sounds like the kind of place where they keep the dog in the yard and name it Bubba and only let it off the chain during deer-hunting season.”

  They turn onto Berry Street. Luther chats on about city life versus country life. Emily is silent. Why is she just realizing now that Marcus is an immense, panoramic, teeming, epic novel, stuffed with events and thoughts and feelings, and all she has of him is her pathetic, lovesick little SCARUM file: everything he’s let her know about himself packed into—what?—fifty lousy kilobytes on her hard drive. Readers Digest Condensed Marcus.

  She gives a little moan, and stumbles. Luther catches her arm. “Hey—you okay, Emily?”

  She leans against him, and he puts his arms around her—the vodka bottle bangs against her back—and the two of them stand on the corner behind the automotive high school, while Emily lets herself weep over Marcus Mead, who is someone she has absolutely no claim on. She is nothing to him but a temporary friend. He would leave her in a minute for a house in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. This is the hard truth. Marcus was all she had, and soon she won’t have Marcus.

  She searches in her pocket, finds an old tissue, and blows her nose while Luther stands there patting her back. Then she heaves a huge sigh. “Oh, Luther.”

  He tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear. “It’s a bitch, ain’t it, babe?”

  They walk on. Berry Street is just Berry Street, and the river when she glimpses it is aluminum gray, flat and dull. In the brewery yard, she sees half a dozen of the scrawny stray cats who live there, foraging in Dumpsters and sleeping in the open and producing endless litters, and Emily thinks she has never seen anything sadder or more hopeless. Brooklyn, she misquotes slightly,

  which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain …

  When they get to her door, Luther looks into her eyes and says, “We don’t ever need to say another word about this if you don’t want.”

  “Thank you, Luther.”

  “But on the other hand, if you ever want to talk about it, you can talk to me.”

  Emily nods, a lump in her throat.

  Luther holds up the bag from the liquor store. “Come on over later.”

  “Thanks, but no, I don’t think I will,” she says. “I have to work tomorrow.”

  She watches him walk away, handsome, heartbroken, but maybe distracted for a minute from his own troubles by the troubles of pathetic Emily Lime. Soon he will start wishing he could talk it over with Lamont, and all his own sorrows will come rushing back.

  Still, Emily remembers, she got some good pictures. Brooklyn is a dismal place, full of loss and betrayal, but it’s also beautiful.

  She goes upstairs to Otto and Izzy, and considers calling Marcus to ask him if he’s really planning to move away. But she’s afraid she will cry again if he says yes, and the horror of that is too much for her. Unrequited love. Is the word unrequited ever used except in that Victorian phrase? Or requited, for that matter? What kind of word is that? She remembers Johnny Eames in The Small House at Allington—the April selection of the Trollope group—whose passionate love for Lily Dale is one of the most famous unrequited loves in literature. The last sight Trollope provides of poor Johnny is when he is sitting alone in the dining room of the Great Western Hotel in London, moping over a mutton chop. The image has always seemed sad to Emily—all of them in the group felt bad for Johnny, who is a serious, decent young man. But now, in spite of herself, it makes her laugh—a mutton chop, after all!

  But she sobers immediately: Will Marcus even be at the next Trollope meeting? Marcus, she thinks. Marcus Mead. Dr. Maus came. Mama’s cured.

  She is sitting by the window watching the lights come on across the river and munching the last Mallomar—dinner of Mallomars and tomato juice is pretty good, she is telling herself—when the phone rings. It’s Gene Rae to say there has been another rape, a middle-aged waitress at Kasia’s was attacked in the doorway of an abandoned building on Franklin Street. Same guy, same hood, same mask, same knife, and she’s going out to buy a gun.

  14

  Deified

  Marcus waits until nearly noon before he lets himself into Emily’s loft with his dog-walker’s key. Otto comes running to greet him, and Marcus tussles with him for a few minutes, throwing the old red ball until he wonders, as he often does, if Otto really likes chasing it or if he keeps fetching it because he thinks Marcus likes to throw it. When they both get tired, Marcus perches gingerly in Emily’s yellow rocker and contemplates what he is about to do. So far he has only committed one crime—entering her apartment illegally—and it’s a crime he could probably justify with some lame excuse if she walked in on him. I had an uncontrollable urge to visit Otto. Emily would probably fall for that one, though no one else on earth would.

  But he is about to commit a much greater, utterly unjustifiable crime, and his only excuse is that it could save her life. And telling Emily Lime that her ex-husband, who happens to be his father, wants her dead is not something Marcus ever hopes to face. Half an hour of blatant snooping is infinitely preferable. Somewhere in her apartment there must be something that will shed light on what his father wants. Two things that Hart said on Tuesday have stuck with him: “My wife and I had a little agreement,” and “Everything is locked up tight.”

  These two sentences, of course, could mean nothing.

  The first could refer to a casual conversation, the second could be a metaphor.

  But Marcus can’t be sure until he looks, and that is what he is there to do. He wishes he didn’t have to, but what if Hart had asked someone else to do the deed? Emily could be dead by now, and the whatever-it-is could be in Hart’s pocket. My wife and I had a little agreement.… How, how, how could Emily ever have been Hart’s wife?
It’s beyond him, and he doesn’t like to think about it. He would rather think of Emily up on a roof somewhere in Brooklyn Heights right now, tying back vines and potting up tender plants and bundling rosebushes in burlap against the coming winter. It’s a cool, sunny Thursday morning—a perfect gardening day.

  The light is pouring in through the tall windows, and Emily’s loft is a pleasant place to be. Except for its size, it always reminds him of van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in Arles: colorful, plain, a bit eccentric—and poor. He hates it that Emily is so poor. He knows she isn’t eating much: She lives on eggs, apples, and canned salmon. She is appealingly slender, but one of these days she will be precariously gaunt, like a teenage supermodel. He had considered bringing over some groceries, leaving them on her kitchen counter with a note: I went shopping while you were at work. Hope that’s okay. Love, Izzy.

  But she would know it was him, even if he misspelled some of the words.

  Marcus wants the whatever-it-is to transform Emily into a rich woman, and tells himself he won’t leave New York until he figures out how to make that happen. Eventually, he gets up and goes over to Emily’s desk, which is a piece of plywood balanced on two file cabinets. Emily has devised a keyboard holder under the desktop: a scarred maple cutting board resting on two pieces of half-round molding that stick out below the plywood like arms. Marcus always smiles when he sees it: It’s primitive, sad, ingenious, and ludicrous, because the keyboard it supports is attached to a sleek and powerful top-of-the-line computer Emily bought during the Y2K panic with the proceeds from the sale of two BREADS and a DOG.

  The computer is seductive: He’s tempted to get on the Web and try to find the fiendish crossword puzzle site he heard about from Saul. But it’s too risky, and Izzy chooses that moment to screech “Pretty boy!” as if warning him away. Who knows what time Emily and Sophie will finish for the day, or how long it will take him to snoop through Emily’s possessions?

  Hating himself, he opens one of the file cabinets. He is surprised by its finicky order, which is worthy of himself. It seems to contain only information relating to her photographs: correspondence with galleries, receipts from photo labs, lists of what she sold and to whom and when. It’s in the second cabinet that he finds, instantly, what he knows instinctively he has been looking for.