Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

“So how’s Sophie?”

  Emily looks with happiness at Marcus’s sleek hair, green eyes, and bright blue sweater, the one she especially likes, with the hole in the sleeve. How is it that Marcus always looks exactly right? So perfectly himself. Always so Marcus.

  “Sophie’s good. We were looking at a guidebook to Greece. She’s going next week. The more I looked at pictures of that blue water and those little white villages, the more Mojitos I needed to drink.”

  “You should go with her.”

  “Right. And Otto should go with Reba to Las Vegas and play the slots.”

  “Come on in,” he says. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  Her heart sinks: It’s true, then. She follows him inside, wondering what he will be like when he’s living in Honesdale in his old house, mowing the lawn, calling the plumber, cleaning out the gutters. It seems an odd life for a twenty-one-year-old person. Shouldn’t he be in college? Or bumming around Europe? It’s one more thing she has never asked him: Why he is a dog-walker in Williamsburg, why he is doing with his life what he is doing. Why he always seems like someone who is vacationing on earth but is a little bit sorry he ever left home. If he moves away, her questions will never be answered. Letters, phone calls, even an occasional awkward visit—it’s never the same, and she knows it. The gloom threatens to re-descend.

  “Take a seat,” Marcus says. “Can Otto have a biscuit?”

  Otto, who has flopped on the rug, leaps up. “Is the Pope’s dog Catholic?” Emily asks. “You said the B-word, Marcus. There’s no way you can’t give him a biscuit.”

  Otto takes his biscuit and chomps noisily. Emily doesn’t see Marcus’s living room very often; their Scrabble games and weird little dinners are usually at her loft, because of the animals and the river view. His place fascinates her in the same way Marcus does: It’s true to itself, is the only way she can put it. The room she is sitting in contains very little: Marcus’s comfy chair with its batik pillow, a less comfy but still okay chair for guests, a coffee table made from a wooden crate, and—because Marcus is thrifty and also believes in patronizing the public libraries—one bookcase. Emily has looked at Marcus’s books many times; when she and Gene Rae were in college, their motto was: By their books ye shall know them. But Marcus is as unknowable from his books as he is from anything else. Six dictionaries, several poetry anthologies, a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, In the Shadow of Man, a couple of mysteries, a shelf of obscure novels by Eastern European writers, two Oulipo collections, a stack of phone books, and a whole shelf of Victorian novels, heavy on Gissing and Eliot, including the fourteen Trollopes he has read since he joined the group.

  Today the place looks different. “Is your spare, minimalist decorating ethic a little sparer than usual, Marcus?” she calls out to the kitchen. “Something seems to be missing.”

  “I took a load of stuff to the Salvation Army this morning.”

  “Oh.” Now he will tell her. “Just weeding things out, or what?”

  “Live lightly on the earth.” No, he won’t, not yet. “Do you want tea?”

  “No, thanks. I just had tea with Susan Skolnick.”

  “You did? How is she?”

  “You heard?”

  “Yeah, everyone is talking about it.”

  “She’s okay. She didn’t get charged with anything. She’s got a black eye and a horrible-looking cut, but she seems all right. I guess. I hope.” Away from Susan’s kitchen table, Emily isn’t so sure. Maybe Susan is in shock. Maybe her idyllic vision of Lake Schoodic is a crazed reaction to struggling with a rapist and pushing him to his death. Should Emily have talked her out of it? Called 911? Stayed to look after her, even though Susan quite blatantly wanted her to leave? “The whole thing is heart-damping,” she says, a word she learned back in college from Coleridge, and that seems particularly expressive.

  “Yeah, but—” Marcus sticks his head around the kitchen doorway. “I don’t want to say what I want to say.”

  “I know.” They look at each other. “It’s wrong to be glad of anyone’s death.”

  “Lamont will be upset. They were sort of pals. Or something.”

  “Lamont will be upset that he was pals with a rapist.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gene Rae panicked. She said she was going to buy a gun. I wonder if she did.”

  Marcus brings his tea and sits down in his chair across from the Daily News front page. “I wish I had an update on that,” he says.

  “You could call her.”

  “No, I mean the dogs. Seamus and Goalie. How are they doing? There ought to be a hotline you can call.”

  “1-800-CELEBDOG.”

  “What a great idea. Isn’t it? Somebody could make money with that idea.”

  She can’t stand it another minute. “Marcus? What do you want to tell me?”

  “Ah. Yes.” He leans back in his chair, smiling. “Emily, Emily, Emily,” he says. “Something very good could be happening. But first tell me what you know about Joe Whack.”

  “Joe Whack?”

  “The same. You remember him?”

  “Of course I remember him. He lived downstairs from me. He was a painter. He—Marcus, why do you care? What’s with Joe Whack? He’s been dead for something like six years. Seven years.”

  “Do you know what he died of?”

  “Haven’t a clue. He was wasting away for as long as I knew him. He was hospitalized for the last month or so. We—I went to visit him. He was a skeleton. He wasn’t really responding. Then he died. It was horrible.”

  She hasn’t thought of Joe Whack in a while, but now she remembers him in the hospital bed, she and Hart on either side. He was unconscious. His breathing was loud. That was all he was: the sound of breathing, the up and down of his wasted chest. Once, he opened his eyes briefly and moaned, and Emily went running for the nurse, and when they got back he was gone. Hart was holding his hand.

  “Emily?” Marcus’s voice is gentle, wary, as if he’s going to ask her a trick question. “You have his paintings, don’t you?”

  “What? Yes. There’s a bunch of stuff up in Anstice’s storage closet. Why? Do you want one? Take one! Take two! I have no use for them. They’re up there gathering dust, and they can gather dust forever, as far as I’m concerned.”

  She is upset. She doesn’t want to talk about Joe Whack, whose dying moan stays in her mind along with the thought of Elliot C.’s broken body on the sidewalk, the gash across Susan’s face, Marcus mowing his lawn in Honesdale, the blank space in the air across the river. Why does life, with all its beauty, have to be so cruel?

  “Would you mind if I showed them to someone?”

  “Who on earth wants to see them?”

  “You know Wrzeszczynski, right?”

  “Wrzeszczynski the periodontist? Of course. Everybody knows Wrzeszczynski. He has a very nice TIME. Dr. Demand bought him one, years ago.”

  “He’s a big Whack fan.”

  “Joe has fans? How can Joe have fans? He was a recluse. He didn’t like to show his stuff to anyone. He hardly ever tried to sell a painting, just piled them up. This is ridiculous, Marcus! I don’t know what Wrzeszczynski said to you, but it’s all bullshit.”

  Emily has devoted even less thought to the paintings than she has to Joe Whack—those odd little still lifes, meticulously painted but drab and slightly absurd: collections of disparate objects on bare tabletops. Hart left them behind when they got divorced. And why not? She couldn’t imagine anyone wanting them, much less Hart, who probably filled his new place with the sickening paintings of dead things that he favored. The garish watercolors by the severed-limb guy. And the work of the wound-art woman, who became famous and, no doubt, made Hart a fortune. “What? He wants a Whack? Great. He can have the whole lot for fifty bucks.”

  The thought of the Whack paintings is making her irritable. Everything is making her irritable. What she really wants to do is go home and climb into bed with Otto.

  “Emily.” Ma
rcus comes over and crouches down beside her. He takes her two hands in his. “Listen to me. Those paintings are worth money. A lot of money. Wrzeszczynski is a collector. So is his friend Sztmkiewcz.”

  “Ziggy Sztmkiewcz, with the restaurant?”

  “Yep. And he’s not all. There are others, and not only here. There are collectors in Poland. There’s a woman in Paris, Wrzeszczynski says, and a guy in Czechoslovakia. Some of these people are seriously rich, and they’ll pay good money for a Whack. They had no idea there were more Whacks. And you’ve got seventy-four of them.”

  “How do you know how many I’ve got?”

  Marcus flushes. “Anstice let me into the storeroom.”

  “What? When? Why?”

  “She heard from Wrzeszczynski that he’s interested and remembered that you’ve got a bunch of them. I just kind of … happened along. I was there. Somehow I got involved.”

  But Emily isn’t listening. She has finally taken in what Marcus said, that the Whacks are worth a lot of money. Well, maybe it’s true. Who ever said the art world wasn’t crazy? But then she thinks of Hart. Aren’t they his? She tries to remember what their agreement was. It was so long ago, and she didn’t care, she just signed things. The paintings meant nothing to her: She didn’t even keep one to hang on her wall. She remembers that she wouldn’t have even agreed to hang on to them if Anstice hadn’t offered her storage space.… She vaguely recalls carting them up there and leaving them, their faces turned to the wall, and being glad they were gone. “I don’t know if they belong to me or not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Emily stares down at Marcus’s hands, which are wrapped around hers. The backs of his hands are scattered with fine black hairs. There are black hairs on his knuckles. His wrist bones stick out. She observes the effect of Marcus’s bright blue sweater sleeve against her bright red sweater sleeve. She remembers Anstice’s words, that she and Marcus could live together in perfect felicity, and feels the familiar pang of sorrow: Marcus is leaving. When is he going to tell her that? Or isn’t he leaving, after all? Or isn’t he going to tell her? Like his father, will he just go out for Thai and never return?

  Marcus is waiting. “Joe gave the paintings to me and my ex-husband jointly,” she says. “Or something. One day when he was getting really sick but was still functioning we all went to this notary at the bank in Greenpoint and signed some sort of document. I don’t know if it was legal or not, it was just a thing Joe typed up. Then when we got divorced I agreed to store the paintings upstairs in Anstice’s closet. I don’t remember any of this very well.”

  “You have copies of these documents?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “Let’s go over to your place. Let’s look at them and find out.”

  But Emily doesn’t want to move. She’ll go home and look at the documents in question, which have resided unexamined in her filing cabinet all these years, and they will show that the paintings belong to Hart. Hart will sell them and become rich. She’ll be poor all her life. Thanksgiving is coming; she has nowhere to go. And then Christmas, that blasted holiday that is the scourge of the poor. Yonder peasant, who is he? He’s Emily Lime.

  “Emily?”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “I don’t have any faith in this, Marcus.”

  “So what? Let’s go anyway.” He smiles. “Says Marcus, what do you do? You do what Marcus says.”

  “That is such an old one.”

  Still smiling, he holds out a hand. Emily sighs and—only because he is Marcus—lets him haul her up out of the chair. They walk over to Emily’s, Otto tugging ahead on the leash as if he knows something good is waiting for him there.

  16

  He lived as a devil, eh?

  (Late November 2002)

  A week before Thanksgiving, Marcus takes the subway into Manhattan and rings the bell at Hart’s place on Crosby Street. He hasn’t been there since he first came to New York, when Hart gave him a place to sleep, an overcoat, and some rent money. Back then, Crosby was a sleepy little street off the beaten path between SoHo and Little Italy, where a couple of struggling antique shops wavered precariously between the remains of rows of tenements. Hart’s upstairs neighbor used to hang her laundry from the front window, and it was not unusual to see a rat sneaking out of a Dumpster. Now the buildings on either side bear LUXURY LOFTS signs, with information about square footage, Euro kitchens, and wine cellars. Hart’s building is a rotten tooth in a mouthful of glossy caps, hanging on by a thread, and it is obvious that the dentists are panting, ready to pounce.

  Marcus doesn’t expect Hart to be awake yet—his father was never the early rising type—so he is surprised when Hart answers the door promptly, and realizes he’s probably been up all night. At least he looks like he has. He looks, in fact, even more than usual, as if he hasn’t slept for a week.

  Hart greets Marcus with a combination of disapproval and barely suppressed agitation. “What’s this about, anyway?” All Marcus said on the phone was that he had some news for him.

  “Let’s walk up to Starbucks.” Marcus figures a public place will be best for breaking the news. “I’ll buy you a coffee.”

  Hart is immediately suspicious. “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you about it when we get there.”

  They walk the block to Starbucks in silence. Winter is in the air, and the city seems clean and fragile in the cold. Marcus knows he will miss New York with all its lofts and rats and crazies and dangers and comforts. But this is not something he can think about now; he has given notice to his landlord. Thanks to the booming Williamsburg rental market, his apartment has already been rented to a pierced young artist couple, starting December first. The Salvation Army, in the person of a hulking Pole who spoke no English and who carried everything out single-handed and usually one-armed, has removed all of his furniture but his bed. Marcus has packed one suitcase and seven boxes, and wrapped the double-dog Daily News in brown paper.

  He is planning to leave on the day after Thanksgiving.

  Beside him Hart shivers; he has come out in his shirtsleeves. Marcus—who has the provincial idea (for which he has been ridiculed by, among others, Lamont and Luther) that when you go to Manhattan you dress better than you do in Brooklyn—wears the old tweed overcoat he got from Hart two years ago. He is also wearing his brown hemp shirt, and real shoes, not sneakers. Hart occasionally glances down at his son, but Marcus refuses to meet his eyes, which he knows are puzzled and probably angry.

  He is in no hurry to tell Hart what he has to tell him. His father is not a temperate man. Marcus sees himself frantically explaining the tangled legalities while Hart is trying to strangle him with his bare hands.

  Marcus and Hart both order the Colombian special of the day, and they both add cream and lots of sugar. His father, Marcus knows, has always used caffeine and sugar to wake himself up; back in the Honesdale days, the coffee would be waiting, along with homemade raisin scones or a hot stack of buttermilk pancakes, when Hart stumbled downstairs at noon. Summer used to brew it in a special Italian machine with a row of buttons and dials that looked like a cockpit. Marcus has never been much of a coffee-drinker, and he only likes it if it’s milky and sweet enough so it tastes like hot coffee ice cream. Their motives are different, but—like their eye color and food tastes—it annoys him that it comes down to the same thing, and that anyone observing them as they take their tall paper cups to the milk-and-sugar station would think Like father, like son.

  Marcus waits until they have doctored their coffees, scoped out the tables, found one in the window, and are sitting at it, and then he says, “So I didn’t do it.”

  Hart takes a sip of coffee. “You didn’t do it,” he says calmly. “Well, it’s not Thanksgiving yet.”

  “And I’m not going to do it.”

  “Really.”

  “Really.”

  “Then give me back my ten thousand dollars, you little punk.”
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br />   Marcus reaches into his pocket and brings out a wad of bills with a rubber band around it. “Nine thousand four hundred.”

  Hart sets down his cup and takes it. His olive green eyes burn into Marcus’s. Time stops in Starbucks. Nothing breaks the sudden silence, not even the whoosh of the coffee machines or the tapping of laptops. Their coffees sit on the table between them, weird twins. Finally, Hart says, “You little twerp,” and lets out a massive sigh that sounds like he’s been holding his breath for a long time. The laptops start up again, the murmur of conversation. “You chickened out.”

  “You could say that. You could also say, if you knew anything about the law, that if you’d had Emily Lime murdered, the paintings would have gone to her next of kin. In this case, to her mother out in California.”

  Hart looks at him blankly. “What are you talking about?”

  “She owns them. You gave them to her when you got divorced.”

  “I didn’t give them to her! She was just storing them. We own them jointly!”

  “Sorry.” Marcus shakes his head. “Wrong.”

  “Give me a break. What are you, a lawyer or a fucking dog-walker? What about Joe Whack? He wanted us to own them together! He typed up a document, and we had the damn thing notarized! Don’t a dead man’s wishes mean anything?”

  “Dad. You gave up your claim. It’s all there in black and white, signed and witnessed.”

  “Shit.” Hart frowns into his coffee, then pulls himself together and glares at Marcus. “Do you want to tell me where you get all this legal expertise all of a sudden?”

  “I’ve seen the documents.”

  Hart pounds his fist on the table, but softly, and he lowers his voice. “I’m asking you how do you know all this? What the hell do you know about the legal issues involved?”

  This is the hard part. Marcus pauses before he answers. “I went to the lawyer’s office with her. The same guy who drew up the divorce agreement. Lenkiewicz. He confirmed it. The paintings belong to Emily.”

  “Lenkiewicz. Jesus. Joe’s lawyer.” Hart slumps back in his chair. “You told her?”