Bradstreet Gate: A Novel

by Robin Kirman

  “Police? Jesus.”

  “She’ll be all right. I’ll stay with her and, if need be, arrange for a lawyer.”

  “It really shouldn’t fall on you. Isn’t there somebody else?”

  “The boyfriend doesn’t seem inclined to help. I’ll try her mother.”

  “She won’t be much use either. Maybe I should come up.”

  “It’s really not necessary.” Already he could feel the danger: four years’ progress undone. A crisis like this had the power to achieve such a feat: he and Georgia intimately intertwined, when the week before, neither had anything to do with the other. “I think it’s better you don’t come. Let’s not, you know, make this into something.”

  “Isn’t it something already?”

  “Between us, I mean.”

  “Oh. I see.” The softness drained from her voice; he felt relief and regret at once. “Okay, Charlie. You say you’ve got the situation covered; I promise I won’t bother you again.”

  —

  Later that evening, while Alice was examined by the psychiatrist on call, Charlie went down to wait at a nearby coffee shop. It was a cheerless place: Naugahyde seats with stuffing showing, encyclopedic menus, placemats with advertisements for florists and funeral homes. Such joints were always lurking in the shadows of hospitals, providing meager sustenance to those expecting lab results or with a loved one in surgery. The atmosphere was less like a restaurant than a waiting room, a mixture of harsh lights and queasy stomachs, of boredom, and dread.

  Charlie’s belly growled. He hadn’t eaten since seven a.m.—half a bagel at his desk—nor had he given any thought to the work he’d left behind. Welch was expecting to hear his opinion on some new GPS software; he should have brought the relevant materials with him, but he’d forgotten them, as he’d forgotten about his suit at the dry cleaners, and about a dozen other details that helped make up the ordered, mature existence that he’d believed to be so solid when he’d woken up that morning. From his booth, he watched the city lights flash by in the windows of passing cars. His meal arrived: grilled cheese already cold, congealing into plastic.

  13

  The old shit Vasily was dead. Departed from this world, but still not quite done with her yet: now, from the beyond, Alice imagined, he meant to drag her to hell with him.

  In a matter of weeks everything that had been under her control suddenly was not, as though Vasily had spent each of his last breaths on curses—against her, especially, his most ungrateful niece. Not that Alice shared her uncle’s faith in curses. What she believed in, what life had taught her to expect, was that disasters refused to face her singly, so that she might, one by one, slap them down. No, instead for her, they stalked and hunted in packs, assaulting all at once and from all sides. Thirteen years ago it was the same: father dead, the move from Madison, puberty striking her like a disease. Then it had been farewell neat bright house, farewell to anyone who cared, farewell to a cute lovable body and a self she could just about endure, farewell childhood, farewell contentment.

  This time, though, it would be different; no longer an innocent of twelve, she’d more than doubled in age and strength and she would hold on to it—this elusive thing called happiness—until she, like Vasily, was swallowed by the grave.

  They were to bury him today at three o’clock. At Sacred Acres Cemetery in Cleveland, the same cemetery where Vasily had interred her father, two dozen Serbians would gather to mourn ostentatiously that most ostentatious man. Alice wouldn’t be among them. What was to mourn? Vasily had outlasted her father by more than a decade, and he’d deserved to enjoy not one cool breeze or birdsong or glimpse of sunlight more. So while, at this moment, relatives and assorted neighbors were gathering around what must be a grotesquerie of a casket, she was at a salon on Hudson for a wax.

  Rosy, the woman slathering the hot mixture on Alice’s most tender skin, didn’t speak English well enough for chatter. This was one of the reasons Alice went only to her: twice a month, without exception. Nick had also preferred hairlessness (no longer a preoccupation of her own, it seemed, everyone now wanted women childlike below the waist).

  She doubted Nick could expect as much from Mary, his new Amish sweetheart—nice Christian girls, at least, must still maintain their pussies in God’s image.

  And yet who could say for sure? Standards of innocence—like media platforms—were fast evolving lately, and it was impossible to trust in morals even among members of extreme religious sects—expecially a type like Mary, who’d test her faith, for fame and money, on a Rumspringa reality series Nick had line produced for VH1. That was how the pair had met, just another romance to emerge from reality TV—if not to spawn a spin-off, perhaps, Alice dreaded, a few mortifying lines in US Weekly or Page Six.

  Rosy ripped away the first cloth strip; Alice gritted her teeth against the pain. The room was cold and smelled of rubbing alcohol. She pictured her uncle, lying prone on a table like this one, while some poor creep prepared his body. Dead or alive, most bodies were vile, though few were as gruesome as that one in far-off Cleveland, waiting to be covered up with dirt.

  Farewell obese, brutish Vasily with the mole on his cheek, and, it turned out, a Ping Pong–sized growth on his kidneys.

  It must have been in March that Vasily had learned about his tumor, and about his limited future, if he had any, of illness and dependence. That would explain why he’d chosen such a moment to phone Alice, outraged at the neglect her mother suffered.

  “My sister can’t be safe to take care of herself. You need to be living at home.”

  “Peter can stay with her,” Alice had suggested. Out of community college for almost a year, Peter still had no job, whereas she was a contributing editor at three major magazines. Few writers had risen so far so fast: the death of Princess Di had occupied her talents from graduation until Monica, and in ’99 she’d been working on a profile of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, when John-John’s plane went down. “Our Last Aristocrats” ran as the Vanity Fair cover; from then on, most every story that she pitched was guaranteed the go-ahead.

  Vasily, however, didn’t bother with such details: “Peter is the boy and you are the girl; it is for you to stay at home.”

  No, she told her uncle, it was definitely not for her; she was her father’s daughter, finally, and meant to live as he’d intended her to: American and free. Americans didn’t abandon their lives to care for aging parents. They didn’t yield their twenties, that precious, most selfish decade, that brief time in which her ambitious countrymen must accomplish so much: build a career, attract a successful and stimulating yet reliable spouse, and, in the meantime, rack up experiences sufficient to console them through the next several decades of at least relative monogamy, part-time parental obligation, and whatever professional and personal stagnation would inevitably assault their impossibly high expectations. A satisfactory twenties was an inoculation against midlife crisis, and if Uncle Vasily had the first clue about the particular perils of affluent, modern, Western life, he’d have understood that her years of immersion in superficiality were in fact the most responsible course of action she could take.

  But Vasily was a chimp, like her brother, and instead of admiring her foresight, he’d cut her right out of his will.

  Three hundred thousand dollars was what Peter had been bequeathed, half of which would have been hers, had Vasily failed to call his probate lawyer after their little family spat. If only she’d known to indulge her uncle one month more—but she’d been unaware of Vasily’s affliction and irritated by her own: Amish Mary. So with Nick, as with Torsten before him, Alice felt she’d paid an absurdly high price for letting herself give a damn about a man—not including the money for her wax and manicure and what she’d shelled out at Scoop for the dress she planned to wear that night.

  At least her uncle’s meanness had settled a scheduling conflict for her—his funeral was on the same day as a party she’d been looking forward to, at the Mercer Hotel, hosted by the network that
had bought the rights to her Bessette-Kennedy story; that project, stuck in development two years so far, had one thing going for it—Nick was attached as a producer.

  That Nick hadn’t backed out of the job, that he’d agreed, moreover, to swing by the party later, suggested he wasn’t quite lost to her yet. From this cold table she would rise, therefore, to don her six-hundred-dollar Dior dress and reclaim a share of the happiness that had been stolen from her: Let the dead rest and, for the living, as she’d learned from Torsten, Das leben geht weiter.

  —

  Alice’s Jane Street apartment was on the lower level of a privately owned brownstone. The upstairs family was a nervous, meddling bunch—the husband, Bernie, often remarking on Alice’s late nights, the wife standing as a shield between her children and Alice whenever they crossed paths in the hall. Alice would have told them both to fuck off long ago if the rent weren’t quite so low and the space quite so charming, with its western view onto a patio and private garden. This evening, the colors of the sunset shone upon her walls as she kicked off her shoes and pressed the play button on her answering machine.

  Four calls, all from her mother, her tone increasingly strident. “Ingrate, sinner”: Alice could guess what her mother must be saying, though the words were Serbian and mostly incomprehensible. Leaving her mother’s voice babbling in the living room, she hopped into the shower to scrub the last bits of wax from between her legs. She spent the next three hours getting ready: taking a run and second shower, straightening her hair, applying makeup, and finally slipping into her dress and three-inch heels to teeter to the corner for a cab to Mercer Street.

  Walking alone into a party was a disagreeable experience: she hadn’t realized how much of a comfort it had become leaning on Nick, tall handsome Nick, towering together over the assembled guests. Tonight she spotted no friends in the crowd, though there were plenty of people she was obliged to greet: fellow writers and editors, a handful of producers she’d met through Nick, minor celebrities from indie films and stints on Law & Order.

  She searched among the glossy, perfectly tousled heads for Nick’s. After two turns about the room, she ran into Carter, Nick’s partner at their production company.

  He ordered her a drink, without her asking—vodka cranberry for the lady—trying to be suave, though she could see that he was nervous to be around her. Carter knew everything—he must have been Nick’s confidant in the last weeks, audience to the same romantic slobber that she’d been subjected to in their final conversations: Mary’s taught me so much. She’s helping me to appreciate, like, the meaning in everything.

  Well, if it was an education Nick was after, Alice could oblige him, too. The quantity of knowledge she had over Nick could occupy them for a lifetime. He couldn’t name ten U.S. presidents (once she’d dared him to try on the ride up to Bridgehampton: “Think of money, holidays—those are both favorites of yours”). The first love note she’d read from him had made her wince: Deer Sexy. But that “Deer” had quickly been excused for the Sexy that followed, as every subsequent stupidity, great and small, was forgiven as soon as he’d kissed her ear or pulled her up onto his lap. Enjoying sex was one thing Nick had managed to teach her. His style in bed—athletic, uncomplicated—might have seemed too vanilla for her before her time with Torsten but afterward, she’d found it a relief. After Torsten, frankly, she’d have forgiven Nick just about anything simply for calling her “Sexy” and appearing to mean it, rewarding her with a hard-on each time she searched his pants.

  —

  Her breath caught as she spotted him, her beloved, in skinny jeans and rumpled blazer, surveying the room from the entrance. Nick waved toward her and Carter. She clutched the railing of the bar; he was coming over, friendly, dimpled. Carter clapped him on the back, promising to catch him later, and she and Nick were left alone.

  “Those shoes look painful,” Nick observed. “Why don’t we go find a seat.”

  Putting her out of her misery: a promising start.

  They spent the next five minutes searching for an empty leather cube where they might get half comfortable, before giving up and leaning against the whitewashed brick wall.

  “You and Cart were talking before. Did he say something to you?”

  “That’s the gist of talking.”

  Nick hunched his shoulders and dropped his head, hair falling in his eyes; that gesture of embarrassment was one she’d seen a thousand times. Had she been too hard with him, mocked him too often—was that what had made him run away? She could smell his shampoo, the same scent that used to linger on her pillow. If only he would kiss her, she would not, not ever, make fun of him again.

  She smiled at him sweetly: “I’m sorry, I’ll be nice. Go ahead.”

  He tucked a lock behind his ear; his hair had grown longer since she’d last seen him, five awful, lonely weeks. “It’s about our show.”

  Alice held her smile; she didn’t want to discuss work. There was music playing, an open bar, colored, swirling lights. She studied Nick to see if he was high; then it would be easy to lure him off into the stairwell and from there, up to a room.

  “Thing is, lately Carter and I have taken on an awful lot and I’m feeling like it’s time to, you know ‘take stocks.’ ”

  She bit her lip, not to correct him. “Right, uh-huh.”

  “I’ve got to consider what our company stands for, what our reputation’s gonna be. Like, this whole Bessette thing, profiting from a person’s tragedy, I’ve got my qualms about it, ethics-wise.”

  This was all coming from Mary—obviously—the girl afraid of what might happen if Alice’s project ever actually got rolling, if Nick and Alice were to spend long hours side by side. “So what’s her plan for you, exactly, if you don’t mind my asking? Abandon all your projects that have issues—ethics-wise? And what’s left for you then, TBN?”

  “It’s not like that—though, for the record, Christian programming is booming.”

  “God no.” Stupidity she could abide, but not sanctimony, not prudishness, not from blissfully unrepressed Nick. “Listen, you want off the project, fine. I don’t give a damn about the project—what I care about is you, the free-spirited, perfect you that this girl seems bent on destroying.”

  She’d dared to stroke his arm as she uttered these last words; Nick scratched his elbow, knocking her hand away.

  “Alice.”

  Alice, he called her. No longer “Sexy.” She’d never felt such hatred for her own name.

  “I don’t want to fight,” Nick continued. “I know the kinds of stories you tell yourself so you can live with what you do. I was there, too, once…before.”

  Before her. She could feel the bile rising. Nick, her friend in fun, had come to join the ranks of the moralizers, strangers who, from the Patel story onward, felt the need to lecture her, to concern themselves with the state of her conscience. “You know, I missed a first-rate funeral for this.”

  Nick laid his hand on her bare shoulder. “You’re a good person: I really think so, you just haven’t figured out, you know, what’s like, intended for you—”

  “Intended? By who? Don’t start with all that, Nick. That shit’s too dumb—even for you.”

  Nick took a step back and slouched again, defensively. “I realize spirituality isn’t your thing, okay, but I don’t think it’s dumb to believe that we’re meant for certain destinies, or certain people.”

  “Is that the story she’s got you believing?”

  “Like I said, I know spirituality isn’t your thing.”

  “Yeah, okay, but enlighten me: I want to understand your girlfriend’s metaphysics. So is it that God intervened to bring you two together? In Mary’s universe, the divine being is like some giant reality TV producer?” She was speaking sharply, rapidly; Nick’s eyes began to glaze over. He never could handle a proper argument. Once the words poured from her, he’d do his best to wrap it up.

  “I didn’t come to fight, okay? Carter’s waiting for me at the bar.”r />
  “So Carter—was he part of God’s plan, too? Inspired to conceive his Amish schlock just so that you could be saved from sin by your messianic twat?”

  “Please don’t call Mary that.”

  “What, messianic? I lost a fortune ’cause of you. My whole fucking inheritance.” People had begun to stare; she was shouting, louder than was required to be heard above the music. “Was that also God’s fucking idea? For God’s fucking entertainment?”

  She peered up at Nick, into the charming face that she’d once trusted; red lights swirled across his cheeks and down his torso, scuttling off across the floor.

  Maybe faith was what she needed then: not in God or heaven, but in an existence at least less trivial than this party at the Mercer, free of tormenters like Vasily, Torsten, and now Nick, who’d taken turns pummeling her wounded spirit.

  “What about my soul?” she shouted, as Nick began to walk away. “What if you and all these other assholes and this whole bullshit spectacle have been arranged merely for the purpose of my redemption. Maybe I’m the one God’s really hot for—ever fucking consider that?”

  —

  A week later, she phoned Nick to recover the possessions she’d left strewn around his places in Bridgehampton and Tribeca: her old laptop, clothes, perfume, CDs. “Just throw them into a suitcase,” she instructed, and she’d do the same with his things. Her outburst at the Mercer had alarmed her; after Torsten, she’d resolved never to lose her balance over a man again. Just walk away, she told herself. Chances were Nick would come crawling back to her one of these days, anyway, just as Torsten had tried to do two years ago, and chances were, she would find Nick’s offer equally ludicrous. Once the spell was broken, she couldn’t believe she’d ever gone for Torsten, a brooding agoraphobic like her mother; soon she was bound to settle on a similarly unflattering view of Nick. Not hard to picture how she’d groan to remember those subliterate love scribbles of his.