“What objects, what’s missing? How can you keep track of everything, you’re practically a hoarder.”
“Women,” said Milo wisely, “will always steal. It makes no difference how generous you are to them. They aren’t happy unless they can sneak around behind your back and pick your bones. I know what this job business is all about. You’re seeing someone, another man.”
Edie stiffened. “That’s preposterous.”
“Is it, now. You think because I’m stuck here, I don’t know what goes on.” The green eyeshade wagged at her.
“Ridiculous.”
“You married me for my money. Now you think you can frisk around, kicking up your heels.”
“I married you because you asked me to! What’s the matter with you, are you having side effects from those pills?”
“This all has to do,” Milo said, aiming his gaze just to the right of where she was standing, “with your pitiful need for validation. Your lack of any real rigor or discipline.”
Edie gaped at him. “Incredible.”
“I used to believe you were merely young and unformed. Now, strange as it is to say so at the moment, I see more clearly. There’s something insipid about you, my dear. Something that feels the need to attach itself to more established personalities and ingratiate yourself. So who is he? Now that you’ve sucked me dry, who’s your next victim?”
Edie was steadying herself now after her first shock. “I don’t believe anybody thinks of you as a victim, Milo. I certainly don’t.”
“Some greasy actor? Cameraman?” His jowls shook with rage.
“That is . . .” she gathered her nerve, “. . . an absolutely puerile thought process.”
If Milo had a reaction to this, she couldn’t read his eyes behind the green shade. He said, “Use caution, my dear. I am not without resources. The wounded animal is the most dangerous.”
This alarmed her, but she took care not to show it. “I think you’re simply in a foul mood from sitting around all day and eating the wrong things. If you’re constipated, it’s your own fault.”
Edie went to her bookshelf and retrieved the card with Jake Bialosky’s phone number. Milo was still in the living room; she could hear him coughing and fretting. Milo was keeping his study locked these days, even while he was home. Edie fit the key Amparo had given her into the lock. She let herself in and set the dead bolt. For extra protection, she propped a chair beneath the doorknob.
She used her cell phone to call Jake Bialosky. She reached his voice mail and he leapt into her ear, sudden and immediate, as if he were in the room. Edie stumbled over her message. “Hi, ah, this is Edie, ah, we met last week, how are you? Could you give me a call as soon as you get this? Your father’s having some kind of a fit.”
She hung up and listened for noises in the hallway, but the apartment was quiet. Her heart beat and beat. Had Milo gone crazy? Or maybe he had always been crazy. She switched on his computer. Its screen brightened. He had received a new e-mail, this one from someone with a camera held between her knees.
A light shone from beneath the door, then a darkness moved back and forth along it. Milo. He rattled the doorknob. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“I need a little me time, Milo.”
“Open this door.” He threw his weight against it, but the lock held. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. Aside from being, you know, insipid and pitiful and all that.”
A pause while he regrouped and sugared his voice. “Sweetheart?” He spoke into the door’s crack. “Can’t we just talk? I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. You’re right, it must be that medicine, I’m having a reaction.” He paused. Edie kept silent. “You know I don’t believe any of those things I said, how could I?”
“Which things, exactly, did you not mean?” She was clicking through the onscreen desktop, but these were mostly the files for his boring books.
“I was feeling sorry for myself. I don’t even remember. Please open the door.”
“I think I’ll stay in here, thanks.”
“I shouldn’t have accused you of infidelity.” He tried the doorknob again. The chair wobbled. “Although you do like attention, don’t you? You make this particular face when we’re out in public, this ‘Please gratify me with an admiring glance’ expression. Let me in and I’ll show you what it looks like.”
“Go away, Milo.”
“You’re a modern girl, aren’t you? You believe everything you read in your magazines, you want everything you see in television commercials. You dress yourselves up like tramps and then you expect people to take you seriously when you go to work and start ordering everybody around.”
Edie tried his Internet history. News sites, mostly, and some that might have been escort services, and a few more surprising ones that featured comic book characters and cute animal videos.
“Are you listening to me? I should have left you where I found you, out in the cornfields with the illiterate undergraduates. I brought you here, I introduced you to people you never would have met on your own in a million years, the very best artists, writers, thinkers. I hoped you’d fit in, or at least that you wouldn’t embarrass me. Did you even attempt to improve yourself? To do the kind of serious, first-rate research and scholarship that you claimed was your life’s goal?”
She didn’t want to believe anything Milo said, but what if he was right about her? What if she was ordinary? All those years spent reading and studying and grinding away at her thesis. Suppose she had no particular aptitude or talent, no thoughts worth thinking, let alone writing down? What presumption, what a waste of time and energy, what a fool that would make her.
“Shall we enumerate all the ways in which you’re a disappointment? You’ve simply traded one mediocre job for another. Now you will produce the televised pap which your students back in Cornville gobble up. You haven’t made a positive impression on a single one of my friends. They barely remember your name. And by the way, you’ve gained some weight.”
Here was a Skype account, with a history of calls to “Brenda.” Brenda? She heard Milo stamping around in the hallway, impatient because she wasn’t answering. She said, “Just how many dead wives do you have, Milo? I’m a little confused.”
He made a roaring noise and rattled the door again, then retreated down the hall. Edie tried Jake Bialosky’s number again, and again got voice mail. She punched in her sister Anne’s phone number and waited while it rang. Anne answered. “Edie? What’s up?”
“Do you think I’m fat? I mean, was I fat the last time you saw me?”
“What? You’re not even close to fat, if you were a supermarket chicken nobody would buy you. Can I call you back? Jenna’s ready for bed and she wants me to read her a story.”
“Okay.” Anne hung up. Edie called Jake’s voice mail again. “Hi, this is Edie again, I was really hoping to talk to you.”
Jake clicked on. “Hello? You still there?”
“Oh, hi. I don’t know if you remember me, but . . .”
“What’s going on over there, what’s the matter with Milo?”
Adrenaline was catching up with her and making her shake. “I’m not sure, well, he has an eye infection.”
“And it’s making him have fits? You mean, seizures? Did you call an ambulance? Do you need me to come over?”
“Not that kind of fit. More like, a tantrum. What, you’re in town? Aren’t you in the army? I locked myself in his study and he’s trying to break down the door.”
“I’m coming over.”
“Wait, I need to ask you . . .” Her phone buzzed. Anne was calling. “Hold on a minute, would you?”
Edie switched over to Anne’s call. Anne said, “Jenna’s looking for her tiara, she won’t get in bed without it. Whoever came up with the idea for princess merchandise, they really cashed in. I just wanted to say, I
don’t think you’re a bit fat. But you could do some toning exercises, things that strengthen the core, you know, Pilates, or some of the yoga classes. You must have a gym on every corner in that neighborhood.”
“I can’t stay on the line. Milo’s mad at me, he’s been carrying on about me getting a job. And some other stuff.”
Anne was asking what kind of job when Edie switched back to Jake. “Hi, Jake?”
“I’m just now getting into a cab.”
“Oh, good. But listen, I need to ask you, what’s your mother’s name?”
“It’s Friedman. Brenda Friedman. She remarried. Why? What’s Milo doing?”
Edie listened. She heard noises at some distance, the sound of heavy objects hitting the floor. She guessed Milo was in her study, laying waste to her bookshelves. “He’s around here somewhere.”
“If I can’t get into the building, I’m calling the police.”
“Okay, bye.” Edie hung up and typed in the number on the Skype account. A woman answered on the fourth ring.
“Myron?”
“No, this is . . . a friend of Myron’s. Is this Brenda?”
“What friend, where’s Myron?”
“He’s busy.” The throwing noises had stopped. Now he was whacking and hacking at things, most probably with the ceremonial Japanese katana sword that was on display in the dining room.
“You wait right there!” the woman told Edie.
A minute later the computer screen dimmed, then brightened. An old woman with unconvincing red hair stared out at Edie, looking her over. “Who are you?”
“I’m Mi . . . Myron’s wife.”
“No you’re not. The wife is some colored girl.”
“I’m the new wife.”
“Well I’m the old one. Ha.” Brenda’s neck and face were powdered with some flour-like cosmetic and her red lipstick was slightly off-center. Her head bobbed around on the screen in a disconcerting way, as if it was severed.
“Wasn’t there some other lady? After you? The one who—”
“Dead Debbie. The one who died at the dentist’s, they gave her too much gas. There was a big lawsuit. Dead Dental Debbie. We were all very sad about it. Ha. Does Myron know you’re calling?”
“No, I was just, you know, curious. I guess he didn’t tell you about me.”
“He mostly likes to call and talk about his latest too-big-for-his-britches big deal.” The head tilted and squinted into the computer screen, taking Edie in. “How old are you anyway? Since when did he start marrying children?” More of the squinting. “None of my business, but can he still manage a normal married life? If you know what I mean.”
“I met your son Jake. He came to visit.”
“Jake is a good boy. Like his brother. I tried to do my best. What’s that racket?”
Out in the hallway, Milo was using the sword to gouge and splinter the wood around the doorknob. Edie said, “We’re having sort of a fight, me and Myron.”
“Well let me talk to him. He needs to calm down, his blood pressure is way beyond stupid.”
“I’ve been trying to get him to ease up on the red meat and butter.”
“That’s good, that’s what you ought to be doing. He takes up with all these fast numbers who don’t know a thing about feeding a family.”
Edie’s phone chimed. It was Anne calling back. “Excuse me a minute,” Edie told the head. “Hi, did you get Jenna to bed?”
“Yes, finally. You got a job? A real job, I mean, not just teaching?”
“That is so insulting, why do you always have to devalue me? I don’t want to talk about this right now.” She hung up. “Sorry,” she said to Brenda Friedman. “My sister. She has these attitudes.”
“Is that Myron I hear carrying on?” Brenda asked. He was pounding on the door with his fists and bellowing.
“Uh-huh.”
“You should let me talk to him, he knows I don’t put up with that kind of foolishness.”
“Here he is now,” Edie said, as the door burst and gave way. Milo leaned on the door frame, gasping for breath. The sword point was broken off. His green eyeshade had worked its way up over his forehead, and his eyes were clotted with rheum. He turned his head from side to side, as if trying to find her. Edie stood, ready to bolt or crouch.
“Myron, for God’s sake, look at you,” Brenda Friedman said from the computer. Her red mouth made a disapproving shape. “Get a grip! You sit down right now before you hurt somebody! What happened to your eyes?”
Milo dropped the sword and sank to his knees on the carpet. Brenda said, “Sit up, I can’t see you very clear. What are you now, some man-of-action superhero type? Every new woman, it’s a new you. Then you get tired of yourself. You get tired of the woman. Myron! Talk to me!”
Milo hauled himself up to rest his chin on the desk. “Brenda, I don’t feel so good.”
“I’m calling 911,” Edie announced, as Milo clutched at his chest, turned beet-colored, and fell over backward with a crash.
“Myron, Myron!” A wailing noise from the computer. “Boychik! Why did you ever leave home?”
Jake Bialosky arrived just as the paramedics were wheeling the gurney with Milo’s body through the apartment door. Milo had been bundled and zipped into a heavy-duty black rubber bag for transport. A number of the seldom-seen neighbors had opened their apartment doors to observe his progress down the hall. Jake conferred with the paramedics, then touched Edie’s arm. “You okay?”
“Yes, thank you.” And she was, or she would be, once she got over being stupefied. She looked Jake over. “You aren’t wearing your uniform.”
“I was mostly trying to impress before,” he admitted.
“I guess you’re like, a man of action.”
“What?” Edie shook her head: never mind. “Did you need to go back in and sit down?” Jake asked.
“Not in there. I don’t think I want to have anything to do with the place.”
“Understandable.”
She would sell it all and move to somewhere cool and modern and clean. She would keep her nifty underpaid job. She would become the person she was meant to be all along. It was as if forces greater than herself had solved the problem of her existence. She turned to Jake. “Would you think it was terrible of me if I said I really could use a drink somewhere?”
He was studying her, making up his mind about her, or maybe remaking it. “My mom called me. I should call her back.”
“Of course.”
“Listen, maybe you could use some help the next few days. I feel kind of bad about, well, everything.”
“Me too,” Edie said, although she was pretty sure that there were things she might, in time, come to feel not bad about at all.
PRINCE
“There’s a dog that’s seen better days,” Sheila said. She was standing at the front window, eating her breakfast of peanut butter and toast. Ellen came up behind her to look. Sheila already had her coat on, and it was hard to see past her sister’s thick, corduroy shoulder.
“Where?” Ellen said, but then she saw the dog. It was standing on the sidewalk as if taking the air, or maybe it had no particular place to go. It was a largish, buff-colored dog with a plumey tail that curled over its back. It did not resemble any recognizable breed, and whatever its mix of ancestry, the parts had not meshed well. Its legs seemed longer in back than in front, its chest was too heavy, and its head, with its long, upright ears and narrow black muzzle, resembled a kangaroo’s. “It’s a boy dog,” Ellen said, pointing. “See?”
“Don’t be cute,” Sheila said. They watched as the dog took a few steps, then lay down on the sidewalk. “I expect it’s a stray. If it’s still around when it’s time for you to go to work, call me and I’ll call the dogcatcher. Don’t go out there. You never know about a strange dog. It could have rabies, it could bite you. It could have man
ge. You understand? Ellen?”
“Yes,” Ellen said. Every minute of every day there were things she was supposed to do and not do. That was Sheila. She’d worn out a husband and now she was wearing out Ellen.
Sheila turned away from the window and started laying hands on all the items she needed to leave the house: purse, keys, lunch sack, coffee mug. Although she took these same things with her every day that she went to work, there was always something hectic about the process, as if Sheila was afraid one of them might have escaped. It made Ellen nervous, and that made Sheila nervous, staring Ellen down with her severest eyebrows. “Did you take your pill yet?” Sheila asked her.
“Yes.”
“Don’t say yes if you aren’t sure. Let’s go look.”
In the kitchen, the brown prescription bottle was still in its place in the cupboard next to the sink. Sheila took the bottle out and set it on the counter. “We’ve talked about this. I’ve talked until I was blue in the face.”
Ellen understood that “blue in the face” was just a way of speaking. But it got caught in the drain of her brain, where it went round and round, blue in the blue in the blue in the
“Ellen? I have to get to work.”
Ellen took the glass of water Sheila had poured out for her, and the pill she held out, and swallowed it down. “There you go,” Sheila said. “Now you’re right as rain. You’re giving me that look again. Do not give me that look. When you get to work, I want you to talk to Mrs. Markey and the other people. I want you to make an effort. Smile. Just for practice, it doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Sheila was her younger sister, but she acted like she was the older one.
Ellen stood at the front window and watched Sheila back the car into the street. The dog was still there, in the middle of the sidewalk, looking around him like he was in the bleachers at a ball game. Sheila paused the car and tapped the horn, probably to try and get him to go away, but the dog just looked around some more, and Sheila drove off.
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