by Amy Bloom
When I got back to the beach, a little sorry that I was now soaking wet with only a hunk of chicken to show for it, I was able to take a closer look. This wasn’t any cut of chicken I’d seen before. It had no recognizable shape and the bony stuff was way too big. When I unsealed the bag, it didn’t smell like chicken either. In fact, it didn’t smell like anything I’d ever smelled before.
I stuck it in a plastic bag I found in a trash can at the edge of the beach. I carried the bag up Church Street, wondering what to do. Making a meal at this point was off the table, so to speak. Partly because my hunger was getting edged out by curiosity. Biology wasn’t only my major at Yale—I’d loved it since I was a kid. I’d absolutely be hunched over a lab counter right now if I hadn’t had that little hiccup with the voices in my head and the collusion of the Yale Board of Trustees, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the Satanic Monks of Aquitaine to deprive me of my undergraduate position.
As usual, Harry had a great suggestion: go to the post office and send the bag of meat to my old faculty adviser in the Yale Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
It was a major hike to the post office, which was on the Yale campus. But when we got there, I realized I needed a box to put the bag in. And an address to write on the box, and the money to pay for postage. I had none of these things. Harry berated me, saying any normal person would have no difficulty managing this situation. The more he yelled at me, the harder it was to think, so I started yelling back at him, which is always a mistake.
I’m a guy people try to ignore, so I can tell you this is a surefire way to get a little attention. Definitely the wrong kind.
This got me pretty anxious, so I clamped my hand over my mouth and just kept walking. Pretty soon, I realized I wasn’t all that far from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology itself. Part of me, I admit, just wanted to chuck the bag full of slimy meat into a trash can and walk back to my house under the tracks. But something else pushed me along. Maybe to prove to Harry that I was capable of completing a project even if I hit a snag or two.
When we arrived, I thought about the lady at the desk near the faculty offices who scheduled time with the professors. I was hoping she didn’t remember me when I handed her the bag and told her my old adviser might find the contents interesting. I prayed she wouldn’t say something like, he’s in his office, just go on back and say hello. Especially after that last class when all those insects were jumping out of the specimen containers and trying to eat my flesh.
No worries there. She took the bag, dropped it on her desk, and told me in so many words to hit the pike. I didn’t give her my name, but I had a plan. Wait about a week, then call the professor. Surprise! It was me that brought in the sample. What the heck is it?
And that’s what I would have done, only I never got around to calling, because a few days later the New Haven Register had a headline that said, “Homeless Man Delivers Human Remains to Yale Professor.”
I was freaked out of my skull for a few minutes, too freaked to read the newspaper article. But when I did, I learned that neither the chopped-up person nor the chopper-upper had been identified, though an anonymous source close to the case assumed both were homeless people who got into a conflict while drunk, drugged-up, or crazy—or all of the above. Street people driven to unofficial body disposal was not unprecedented, apparently, especially when somebody ODs and panic sets in.
The question of who would pass along a chunk of said chopped-up person to a Yale biology professor was still open to conjecture.
I looked up and saw a transit cop approaching with his German shepherd. When they kept on walking, I glanced at the giant train schedule on the wall, wondering how far I could get with the little money I’d hidden away. Then I wondered if they’d even let me on the train, or what I would do when I got to wherever I was going. It had taken me a long time to find and perfect my house under the tracks and establish my activities of daily living. How was I going to start over?
Maybe I could just tell the cops what I knew, I thought for a brief second. No way in hell, said Harry, without hesitation. He said, you’re the guy who talks to invisible people, and now you’re going to accuse a fancy chef of serving selections of vacuum-packed Homo sapiens to our local sea life?
These are the kind of debates I get into with Harry all the time, and I have to admit, he’s usually right. But before I could concede to his argument, there was the guy again coming into the station from an arriving train.
I tried to disappear into the wooden bench, but he saw me and stalked right over. He didn’t have what you’d call a happy face. He sat on the bench, holding his Jamaica tourism bag in his lap.
“I’m terribly disappointed,” he said, watching the busy parade of train passengers.
“About what?” I asked.
“I can hardly promote a revival of the crustacean population if people are going to tamper with the food stock.”
“I get that.”
“Our work must remain confidential. I told you that. I thought you understood.”
“Absolutely. Understood,” I said. “Nobody’s gonna hear anything from me.”
Those lifeless blue eyes suddenly seemed very much alive. “Too late,” he said softly. “There will be consequences.”
That was when Harry decided to whistle for one of the German shepherds. The dog came over to us, dragging along a transit cop. The cop started to give me his usual polite but firm request that I vacate the premises, but the dog had different ideas, sniffing like crazy at the Jamaica tourism bag. The gray-haired guy tried to sneak away, but the hair along the dog’s back stood straight up and it lunged at the guy.
“What’s in the bag, sir?” the cop asked, pulling back on the leash.
Harry, by this point, was getting a little shrill and, despite all his talk about keeping our own counsel, started screaming about hacked-up people and sous vide bags and crab food, sounding about as looney as a person can sound.
People around us began to scatter and another cop rushed over. The gray-haired guy said something like, “Enough of this nonsense,” and tried again to walk away, but the German shepherd clamped his teeth down on the bag and held on.
By now, the transit cops were shouting things into microphones mounted on their shirtsleeves, and other cops were appearing out of nowhere; one of them grabbed my upper arm, even though I wasn’t trying to go anywhere. He unfolded a sketch of someone’s face and compared it to mine. It must have been a good match, since he wrenched both hands behind my back and stuck on a set of handcuffs.
They also cuffed the gray-haired guy, but he had his eyes locked on mine. He looked pissed, for sure, but something new was there. A kind of astonishment. A stunned disbelief.
And, for the first time, the whole world could see me.
Callback
by Sarah Pemberton Strong
Audubon Arts District
I didn’t become a plumber because I like lying on my back in crawl spaces while fiberglass insulation and mouse turds fall on my face. I didn’t become a plumber because I like getting sprayed with black drain water, either. I became a plumber for the money, and because I like certainty. Plumbing’s not an ambiguous job—the pipe either leaks or it doesn’t, the toilet is clogged or it isn’t. Money and certainty and the satisfaction of a job well done.
I had to keep reminding myself of these reasons as I turned onto Audubon Street. I was on my way to a new customer’s house, and it was going to be hard to make a good first impression given that I was still covered in fiberglass and dirt and smelling of eau de drain. Once upon a time, being a woman plumber had seemed both transgressive and sexy: think girl driving a truck, think big pipe wrenches, think buff upper arms. But after spending half the morning lying under Lamar and Francine Bowman’s rotted pipes, I felt about as transgressive and sexy as a bucket of dirty water. I smelled like a sewer and I had a bad case of the creeps from accidentally grabbing a dead mouse when I reached for my wrench. I’d been wearing
rubber gloves, but still. And to make matters worse, the Bowmans were broke, so when I wrote out the bill I charged them only half of what I usually do.
“Isn’t that illegal?” Charlotte asked me once when I confessed I gave discounts to poor people. “And besides, how can you tell who’s poor, anyway? Some people are millionaire skinflints—while they’re alive everyone thinks they’re paupers and it’s only after they’re dead that—”
“I can tell,” I interrupted. Charlotte has probably never even driven through the Bowmans’ neighborhood, not even with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. “Besides,” I said, “it’s gotta be less illegal than redlining.”
Charlotte hates it when I talk like this. Part of my appeal to her is that when she’s with me she feels like she’s slumming, and if I start going all analytical on her it messes with this. To shut me up that time, she poured me a drink. It was Charlotte who taught me to appreciate extremely good whiskey, which is a problem in that she’s no longer my girlfriend and I’m too much of a cheapskate to buy it myself. I also have a rule about drinking alone—I don’t. But as I sped away from the Bowmans’ that day, it occurred to me for about half a second that I might stop by Charlotte’s condo and ask her to let me take a shower. A shower and a splash of her famous Scotch to take away the feeling of having picked up a dead mouse. She lived right in Audubon Court and I knew she’d be there. Charlotte works from home, doing some kind of stock trading from her bedroom. She lies on her bed and looks up at this enormous projection of her laptop screen on the bedroom ceiling and talks on the phone and makes about a zillion dollars an hour. You can tell Charlotte is rich just from the way she talks to people, even if you only happen to overhear her ordering coffee in a Dunkin’ Donuts. Except Charlotte would never go into Dunkin’ Donuts. She only drinks Willoughby’s.
The idea of using her shower was pure fantasy, though. In the first place, I was too filthy—she wouldn’t have let me into her bathroom, which has white fluffy everything—and in the second place, there wasn’t time. I have a thing about being late—I’m not. Ever. It’s OCD, I know, but it’s also one of the reasons I don’t have to advertise. I looked longingly up at Charlotte’s window as I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, which is what we call the illegal cut-through on Lincoln with the private footbridge arching across it, and I kept going. I’d rather be dirty than late. I turned the corner and parked, then appraised myself in the rearview mirror. Dirty hair, stained hoodie. Spattered jeans, cracked steel-toed boots. I ran my fingers through my fiberglassy hair. I look good in my work clothes, actually, if you like women who look like scruffy teenage boys, but I didn’t smell so hot. I did a hasty cleanup, scrubbing my face and hands with a few baby wipes. Then, hoping I smelled more like baby fragrance than old drains, I went to the door.
Most of the big houses in this neighborhood have been converted into law offices or therapy practices, but not this one, a gorgeous three-story brownstone. And judging from the single nameplate, the Lancasters had the whole place to themselves. The door knocker was a big brass affair that probably weighed as much as my tool bag, and I heard it echo through what must have been a cavernously large hall inside. There was a long wait, during which I banged the knocker again.
The woman who finally answered had a bath towel wrapped around her head. She was wearing a leopard-print dress that looked painted on, though her face put her somewhere in her fifties. She was holding a mascara wand in one hand and her expression said that although she was annoyed at being called to the door in the middle of getting dressed, she was too well bred to say anything about it.
Rich. Very. You can tell, I thought again. Then I said, “Mrs. Lancaster? I’m the plumber. Nicky Biglietti.”
If she was surprised to see a female plumber, she didn’t show it. She invited me in and I followed her through the enormous entrance doors and down the hall. The brownstone’s ceilings were a good twelve feet high, and the walls were covered with big, imposing oil paintings in fancy gold frames. Beneath them, lots of antique furniture that looked like the real deal was strewn about.
I followed Mrs. Lancaster up a curving flight of stairs. The way she carried herself reminded me of Charlotte—she took up space like she knew the space liked her taking it. You could practically see the air molecules stepping aside to make room for her. It’s a money thing, I think. I followed her through the master bedroom, past an enormous boat of a bed that might have been teak, and finally reached the bathroom door.
“We had a plumber in here just a month ago,” she said, stepping aside, “and now the sink’s clogged again. She looked at me and smiled. “I couldn’t be shedding that much hair, could I?”
I glanced at the towel on her head. “I don’t know,” I replied, “I haven’t seen your hair.”
She reached up and pulled the towel off. Dark gold locks, still damp, fell down around her face and rested on her shoulders. I thought for a second about touching a curl. Her hair was thick and wavy and smelled somehow of damp grass.
“Well?” She caught my gaze and held it. I wasn’t expecting that, and I looked away.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just the plumber.”
She turned away too then, and her stockinged feet padded out of the room. A moment later I heard the sound of a blow-dryer.
The clog in the drain was hair all right, but something else too. When I pulled my snake out, a thin line of gold was tangled around the end of it, a necklace impossibly knotted up among a tangle of drain-colored hair that might have once been her shade of blond. There was a pendant strung on the chain, a gold heart with one small, clear stone set in it. It looked like the kind of necklace a teenage girl would wear, not a woman in her fifties, but on the other hand, Mrs. Lancaster was doing the leopard-print dress pretty well, not to mention the eye contact. I rinsed off the tangle of hair and chain, and when I did, little flickers of rainbow fire shot out from the jewel in the pendant.
I stuck my head out the door and called to her and the sound of the blow-dryer stopped.
“Look what I found,” I said, holding up the necklace as she came back into the bathroom. “It’s not every day I get to fish a diamond out of a drain.”
She looked at the pendant without touching it. I couldn’t say I blamed her. There were still bits of rusty hair tangled in the chain, and the whole thing looked mousy and sad and wretched. She examined it and then she touched her own hair. Now that she had dried it, it was the pale gold color of a little girl’s. A very good dye job can do that. She ran her fingers through her hair and the smell of her hair gave way to the scent of her perfume—something with musk in it, the real kind.
“You found that pendant in my drain?” she asked.
I grinned. “I bet you didn’t even know it was missing.”
She took her bottom lip between her teeth for a moment. “I didn’t,” she said. “Especially since it isn’t mine.” And she turned and walked out of the room.
I’m not dumb but it took me the whole time I was putting away my tools and wiping down the sink and washing my hands with some of her very nice sandalwood soap before I figured it out. I don’t suppose there’s a good way to find out you’ve been cheated on, but if there is, the plumber fishing another woman’s diamond pendant out of your bathroom drain isn’t it.
I found her in the kitchen, writing a check.
“I left the necklace on top of the toilet,” I said. “Maybe you can flush it down—accidentally, of course.”
She looked up at me and by this time she’d got her smile back on. Not unlike diamond light, that smile.
“You’re a quick study,” she said. “Have you ever been married?”
“No.”
“Cheated on?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll have a drink with me.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to because it was a command, not an invitation.
“Bourbon all right?” she asked.
“Scotch, if you have it.”
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br /> “Of course I have it.” She opened a kitchen cabinet. “I knew,” she said with her back to me, “that there were others. One after the other. But what I didn’t know,” she turned back toward me and handed me my glass, “is that he’s been fucking this one in my bed.”
I took a pull of the Scotch. It was even better than Charlotte’s. Mrs. Lancaster knocked hers back in a gulp and poured another, then went to the refrigerator and held her glass under the ice maker.
“I’m divorcing him, you know,” she said.
“Did you just decide this?”
“No, no. It takes me forever to decide anything. But this time I’ve had it.”
I swirled more of the Scotch around in my mouth and inhaled. Wood smoke and leather, very smooth, and something sweet I couldn’t place yet.
“I should have done it years ago. It’s my house and my money. I don’t need him. And he doesn’t need me, clearly. Not when there are so many lovely young grad students running around.”
“He’s screwing his students?”
“Not his students. Richard’s too smart for that. Nothing quite against the rules, nothing to interfere with his endowed chair. Nothing except me, maybe. But he’s married to me, unfortunately, and that was perhaps not so brilliant on his part, but he’s a brilliant man, my husband. Oh, yes. A brilliant gentleman and a brilliant scholar. It’s too bad nobody listens to me—I’ve been saying things for years. But now I have evidence. Unless I’m just inventing the whole thing, of course. Out of spite. The whole thing.”
Maybe it was humiliation and anger that was making her voice slide all over the place. Or maybe she was getting sloshed. I didn’t say anything. I was just the plumber. She looked at me as if considering something, and then she leaned toward me and her hand came up and pulled gently at the collar of my shirt. I don’t blush easily, but when her fingers grazed my neck I did. It was the scent of her. Then her hand came away again, a bit of pink fluff between her thumb and forefinger.
“You have a piece of cotton candy on you,” she said.