Across the river, the city with its lights twinkles like Christmas, and the sky above it is a deep, dark blue. From the penthouse, she will be able to see the sun rise as well as set. The sun comes up in the kitchen, Oliver says, and the big thunderstorms start in the bathroom window, over Queens, and move west through the bedroom to the living room. How strange that she will be upstairs tending her roses and watching her kittens grow up while he and Pat raise a child here where she has lived so long. What she can’t understand is how Marcus could bear to leave. Emily knows this odd little corner of the city is one of the things that sustains her, every bit as much as her friends do, and Otto and Izzy, and Noel and Leon, the new kittens, asleep in a tangle on her bed. How much will Marcus regret it all? How often will he think about her, and the park, and Rumpy and Reba and the Trollope group? “You guys were pretty tight,” Oliver said at dinner. “You’re really going to miss each other.” The poignant thought has occurred to Emily that she and Marcus will miss each other a lot, and then after a while they’ll only miss each other a little, and after a while they’ll stop.
There could even come a day when she won’t think of Marcus at all. Her SCARUM file will crash and die. The snapshot of little Marcus in his number 7 sweatshirt will fade away, and the photograph of his doorbell with MARCUS MEAD printed over it will be lost. She won’t arrange his name at odd moments into inspirations like SCRAM, MAUDE. She will have forgotten who gave her Thomas Trollope’s memoirs. She’ll be a solitary old lady with a faded blue zipper around her wrist, wearing sensible cotton housedresses like they sell on Manhattan Avenue. “Remember Marcus?” Gene Rae will ask when she stops by with a bag of Polish cookies and pictures of her grandkids, and Emily will think: Marcus. Marcus? Marcus who?—and she’ll have a vague memory of a boy with strange green eyes who used to walk her dog. Then she and Gene Rae will eat cookies and drink tea and talk about Proust, how maybe he was right, that we love only what we want and can’t have.
But maybe after a while we stop wanting.
Thinking of cookies makes her hungry, and Emily gets up and looks in the fridge. There is a piece of Anstice’s apple pie left. She sits down at the kitchen table to eat it. A postcard from Susan Skolnick is propped against the salt shaker. On one side is a picture of a pine forest with a patch of blue lake and GREETINGS FROM THE LAND OF A THOUSAND LAKES. On the other side, it says: Here I am. The lake hasn’t changed. I’m trying to figure out how to do this. I’ll let you know when I get settled. Thanks for your help. Happy Thanksgiving. Susan.
Emily took the card with her to show to Oliver and Pat at dinner. “What kind of help?” Pat asked.
Emily shrugged. “I didn’t tell her she was crazy to go.”
“She was a strange bird.”
“I ended up kind of liking her. I guess we’re friends now. If she invites me up to Maine, I’ll go and visit.”
“You’ve heard about Luther and Lamont moving to Italy?”
“Yeah, but so far it’s just a twinkle in their eye, I hope.”
“Luther’s eye, mostly. I think he thinks he can keep a lid on Lamont if they live someplace where he doesn’t speak the language.”
“Lamont will be fluent in Italian in about two weeks.”
“Fiona’s been cat-sitting at their place, and she wants to sublet. She’s also interested in taking over the Tragedy. I hear they’re trying to work out some kind of a deal.”
“I can’t think about this. It’s too horrible. And I won’t believe it until I hear arrividerci from Luther and Lamont’s own lips.”
“That would devastate the Trollope group. First Marcus, now the L’s.”
“Jeanette will be back in the spring. And Dr. Wrzeszczynski and his wife are interested in joining.”
“Really? Maybe Anstice and Dr. Demand will join, too.”
“They’ll have to get out of bed first,” Oliver said.
“Who knows how that will work out? It is fraught with difficulties.”
“Speaking of difficulties,” Oliver said, “get Anstice to repair the bathroom window. And frankly, at the rent you’re probably going to be paying, I think she ought to put down some new tile. And fix up the kitchen a little.”
“We’ll see. I really like it the way it is.” Emily knows she won’t change anything: shabby linoleum, broken tile, leaky window. She has lusted after it for so long, it would be like marrying the man of your dreams and making him get a nose job.
“You’re such a romantic.”
“I’m not,” Emily insisted. “I’m a stodgy stick-in-the-mud, probably well on my way to becoming an old fart. I hate it when things change. I’m so relieved you guys aren’t moving to the suburbs or someplace after you have a kid.”
“Raise little Kizette in the burbs? Be serious. We’ll never leave.”
“Kizette?”
“If it’s a girl. Prague if it’s a boy.”
“Promise you won’t move to Mineola or someplace? Larchmont? Fort Salonga?”
“Promise.”
“I’m afraid for this neighborhood. Remember the old days? The pigeon flyers? The lace curtains? The Polish graffiti?”
“Em?” Pat put her hand over Emily’s. “They’re all still here.”
“Yeah.” Emily knows it’s true. Just that afternoon, when the light was leaving, she watched two flocks of pigeons wheeling in the air, crossing each other, and as they angled down, the dying sun caught the underside of their wings, turning them to gold, like leaves swept up by the wind. The sight gave her such comfort she almost wept. “But they’re going. You know they are.”
“The crack vials all over the sidewalks are gone, too,” Oliver reminded her. “And the boarded-up stores no one would rent. The garbage dump. And no one has been mugged around here in a long time.”
“I know, I know.”
“Things change, Em. They have to. And sometimes it’s okay.”
“I know. Like Anstice says, they used to treat migraines with powdered stag horn dissolved in mead. Now it’s Lou Reed and sumatriptan.”
“And Samuel Johnson used to crusade against the word fun. He thought it was vulgar.”
“And they used to preach about Elvis in churches.”
Emily turned her hand over to squeeze Pat’s tiny hand, and reached out for Oliver’s. They sat for a moment, connected—like a séance or a prayer group—before they returned to their chips and guacamole.
Before they left, she told them she’s decided to go to Hugh Lang’s poker game next Friday, and they looked at her—Pat with her little rabbity grin, Oliver with his big loose-lipped one—as if she had just given them a wonderful gift.
It has begun to snow, a few random flakes that, surprisingly quickly, become a thickening veil. Emily finishes her tea, yawns, and goes back to the window. The roof opposite, lit up all night, is covered, and the water tower has a white hat. One of the kittens—Noel, she’s pretty sure—leaps off the bed and stalks over to the sofa where she is sitting. He jumps up and kneads her lap, then settles down, purring, and, together, they watch the snow fall on the city out of the deep blue of the night sky.
I cannot pretend that the reader shall know, as he ought to be made to know, the future fate and fortunes of our personages. They must be left still struggling. But then is not such always in truth the case …?
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Katherine Florey for her very helpful early readings of the manuscript, and especially for the legal advice. To James Bloomfield for the migraine cure. To Williamsburgers Judith Maniatis for introducing me to 11211, Jane Schwartz for her continual inspiration, and Doug Safranek for the pickles. And of course to Noodles, Zipper, Eggy, Duster, Miko, and the incomparable Duke.
And thanks to the BARC (Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition) shelter and to Peter Caine: the book owes a lot to them both.
I am also grateful to the following websites, of which I made liberal use for palindromes and other bits of wordplay. I recommend them all as delightful ways to while away far too
many hours:
www.palindromes.org—Jim Kalb’s Palindrome Connection
www.wordways.com—Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics
http://realchange.org/pal/index2.htm—The Palindromist
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by Kitty Burns Florey
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9342-5
Distributed by Open Road Distribution
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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