Trouble

by Jesse Kellerman

  Belzer chuckled. “You’re learning. Okay. Simon—I’m going to call him Simon for now, because Simón is too hard for me to remember. Let’s imagine what’s happening here. Iniguez is bereaved. He gets a call from this guy who tells him that he’s got rights, he can win money, he can take revenge. This shyster, Roberto Medina, I know this guy. I bet you’ve seen him, he’s got ads on every bus in the Bronx. Angry bastard. He does commercials on late-night TV. Screams a lot. I’ll say one thing for him, he’s fast. What’s it been, two weeks?”

  “Not even.”

  “Good turnaround. They must really want your dough. First thing, I’m going to talk to him. I’ll tell him what the DA told me, what the cops said, what this Eve Jones lady said.” He paged his secretary again. “Call this putz. Medina. Me-di-na. Roberto. Tell him I’m representing Mr. Stem and I want to schedule a time to speak with him ASAP. How about next week. Okay? Thanks.”

  Next week sounded nothing like ASAP, but Jonah kept his mouth shut.

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Belzer said, “they’re dick-waving. Any reasonable court will throw this case out in a second. To win money for wrongful death they have to show negligence on your part, and economic loss on theirs. Let’s remember the facts, shall we? The guy was unemployed, unstable, and wielding a knife. He was about to commit a murder. Everybody read about it. No judge, no jury in the world is going to punish Superdoc.” Belzer cracked open his water. “Now that doesn’t mean that they won’t try and squeeze you anyway. If they think you’re a pushover, why not? That’s what they’re hoping for, a quick settlement. If they’re made to see that we know the case is unwinnable, and that we’ll countersue their nuts off, I can all but promise you they’ll crawl back into their hole.”

  “What do I do.”

  “Nothing.”

  “I want something to happen,” Jonah said.

  “It’ll happen, all right? That’s what I’m telling you. Let me handle it. The first thing we’re doing is filing a motion to dismiss.”

  “What if that doesn’t work?”

  “It will.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “It will. There’s no case here, kiddo.”

  “What if there is?”

  Belzer sighed. “Like what.”

  “I don’t know, anything.”

  “You saw her crawling up the street.”

  Jonah nodded.

  “She had stab wounds.”

  “Yes.”

  “He tried to stab you.”

  “Ye—I—”

  “Okay, forget that. Lemme put it this way: you felt gravely threatened.”

  “…yes.”

  “Of course you did,” Belzer said. “Anybody would, and you know why? Cause it’s reasonable to feel gravely threatened when it’s late at night, and there’s a screaming woman, and the guy’s talking to himself, and he comes at you with a knife. We’ve gone over this. By definition you’re not negligent. Negligent is if he spits on your shoes and you smush him with a cement mixer. You acted to save your life and hers.”

  “I know.”

  “Then what are you worried about?”

  “I don’t like being sued.”

  “Nobody does,” Belzer said. “But it’s a part of life.”

  “Not mine.”

  “Welcome to the big leagues. You’re gonna be a doctor, you’re gonna get sued. Think of this as a crash course. Don’t worry about a thing. You look worried.”

  “I am.”

  “Don’t be. We’re going to nail em to the floor and varnish em. Get it?”

  “Yeah.” He got it; but that didn’t mean he had to like it. He felt bad enough as it was without having to let off salvos at Raymond Iniguez’s grieving family.

  He supposed this was the way it went: they pushed; you kicked. They cocked a gun; you shouldered a bazooka. American tort law didn’t leave much room for turning the other cheek.

  “Good,” Belzer said. “How’s life otherwise? School?”

  “It’s fine.” He’d skipped out early to come here. Tomorrow would bring a beatdown. “Stressful.”

  “Cheer up. Life ain’t so bad.” Belzer stood up. “My regards to your folks.”

  TOO RESTLESS TO go home, he got off at Union Square, wending through a loose crowd of demonstrators concerned about the upcoming election. Mixed in were several other causes, people objecting to everything from the administration to globalization, meat to SUVs, each cadre occupying its own fifty square feet. A pair of dreadlocked men ambled through the fray, hawking essential oils and hemp bracelets that smelled of patchouli. Jonah watched the skateboarders, watched a group of emaciated breakdancers in matching orange T-shirts that said BOMB SQUAD. He counted the people going in and out of Starbucks. He wandered south on Broadway and ducked into the Strand.

  He hadn’t been in in a while; he liked its tottering, womblike stacks. During his junior summer he’d done research at Rockefeller, and would come down to the store after work to stand at the back, plucking titles at random and reading until he got bored. One time he read all of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, three hours rooted in place. Afterward he felt bad and paid for it.

  Books—non-med books—reminded him of home. The living room of his parents’ house had floor-to-ceiling units packed with acidulated New Directions paperbacks, anthologies of Russian plays, presidential biographies, out-of-print treatises on secular humanism. His mother had a large poetry collection; at one point she had aspired to write. (Asked why she gave up, she said Because I gave up.) His parents had already read and reread it all. They kept the shelves stocked, Jonah knew, to inspire their children to a life of the mind—their own intellectualism having dwindled to support for public television and an epidemic explosion of magazine subscriptions. They got the Atlantic, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and The Economist. They got Cook’s, Harper’s, Granta, and American Art Review. They got National Geographic, Scientific American, and The New Republic. Plus his mother’s guilty pleasures (Us Weekly) and the annals of whatever hobby his father had taken up most recently (the Astronomer, lepidopterists’ quarterlies). Accumulating in heaps atop the japanned coffee table. Sometimes Jonah thought of his home as a clearinghouse for waiting rooms everywhere.

  To his chagrin, over the last two years, he’d come to fear and hate reading. One day, he’d return from the trenches and go back to books for pleasure. Assuming he wasn’t blind by then.

  “Jonah Stem. Shall I call a doctor?”

  He turned from a row of weathered military histories.

  Eve touched the small of his back. “Are you having a hypnagogic episode?”

  “I didn’t see you,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “This is the one place I miss most in the City; I stop in after work sometimes. Are you feeling all right?”

  “…yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “You look decidedly hang-dog.”

  “I’m…” He shook off the cloud, smiled. “I’m better now.”

  “Are you?”

  “Much.”

  “Good.” She squeezed his hand, then turned to the books. “Is this your secret hideaway?” She poked at the spines. “Which one opens the Batcave?”

  They left the bookstore and went east as though they had laid prior plans.

  The apartment was empty. Lance had left the remains of his dinner—a pizza, glazed over like a waxwork—along with a Post-it that read Eat me. Jonah checked the fridge and found nothing. He suggested the Yaffa Cafe. Or Café Gigi, or—

  She said, “Do you have a blanket?”

  They climbed the fire escape to the roof and spread Lance’s flannel throw across the tar paper. The sky was full of stars screaming to make themselves heard over the light pollution.

  She said, “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “Me too.”

  “I don’t know quite how to explain it,” she said.

  “Me neither.”

  “Then let’s not try.”

  He
nodded.

  She said, “Come here.”

  The blanket smelled like Pabst Blue Ribbon and designer weed. Jonah sensed the presence of people watching from adjacent windows as Eve knelt on his arms, unbuttoned his shirt, opened his fly.

  He closed and opened his eyes at four-second intervals, finding her reborn with each shutterclick. First the gloss of distraction as she found her rhythm. Then trancelike, swiveling, reading his naked torso. Then rapturous, her face waxing and waning: full and heart-shaped; gibbous in semi-profile; an ecstatic sliver. He reached for her breasts but she grabbed his hands, brought them beneath her skirt, slapped them against her. She seemed to like that, and he did it again. Salsa music and honking from the street below. Gravel in his hair. Far-off watertowers applauding. They were not alone. Eight million pairs of eyes watching them. The aurora of the Empire State Building, streaking jetliners, her finger between his lips.

  SHE SAID, “you see that?”

  “What.”

  “How many people live in that building, do you think?”

  “It’s…what. Seven stories? And let’s say five apartments on each floor. That’s thirty-five. And probably two to four people in each. Call it a hundred.”

  “A nice round number,” she said. “Good for percentages.”

  He nodded.

  She said, “Out of a hundred people in that building, think how many are going to the bathroom.”

  He laughed, stroked her nape. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Do, for a second. How many people are having intercourse. At least eight.”

  “Is that what you think when you walk down the street?”

  She nodded against his chest.

  “The world must look surreal to you,” he said.

  “Everywhere I go,” she said, “I wonder how many people are doing what at this very instant. In a hundred people, at least eight are having sex, and another eight are masturbating. A handful are eating, and an equal number are watching television. There’s overlap between those two groups. We could make a Venn diagram. Some are reading, some are ironing, some are taking a shower, and some are removing their contact lenses. Or swallowing an aspirin, or smoking. Some are dying and some are contemplating divorce. One is contemplating suicide. He might be committing suicide as I say this; he might have a razor against his wrist. And if a great hand came along and ripped off the exterior wall, exposing each little hole that people crawl into to do their dirty deeds, you and I could watch them like exhibits in the Museum of Human Frailties.

  “That’s what I think about when I see that building.”

  A silence. Jonah shivered.

  “It’s hot out,” she said. “Are you cold?”

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m always cold.” She plucked at her woolly sweater. “I have poor circulation.”

  “I’d tell you to get it checked out by a doctor,” he said, “but we don’t do shit. Go to an acupuncturist.”

  MUCH LATER, when they came down the fire escape and climbed back into his apartment, they became aware of noise coming from the third bedroom, Lance’s studio: a seven-second snippet of shower-singing, played over and over. Jonah raised his eyebrows at Eve. She giggled. “I think we should leave the maestro to his work.”

  “I’ll walk you to the subway.”

  At the , he said, “This time I’m not going to forget: your number.”

  “Would you believe I’m the last person in the Western world to go without a cell phone?”

  “That’s admirable.”

  “Cheap, Jonah Stem. Cheap.”

  She gave him her e-mail address. “Honestly, that’s the best way to reach me. I can call you when I get a moment from work.”

  He gave her his cell, his pager, his home phone, and his e-mail. “And you know where I live.”

  She kissed him on the chin. “I know where you live.”

  THE SAME SNIPPET was still going when he got back. He decided to give Lance five more minutes before telling him knock it off, bedtime. As it turned out, an unnecessary deadline: a loud crash, followed by silence, solved the problem.

  Jonah sighed and dutifully headed down the hall.

  In the studio Lance kept a hoard of top-of-the-line AV equipment, much of which currently resided on the floor in an incredible, disastrous heap. Lance, in full combat fatigues, smoked a Gauloise and scratched his chin. “You try and find one lens.”

  Jonah looked him up and down. “I thought you were antiwar.”

  “Ruby and I are playing laser tag,” he said. “You in?”

  Jonah thanked him, declined, and went back to the living room.

  “I need the break,” Lance said. “I’ve been busting my tail. The Internet is a thing of beauty, dude. My subscriber base is expanding by the minute.”

  “You have subscribers.”

  “Sixteen. Most are my friends, and one is my mom, but a couple are from Canada, and one guy’s in Kuala Lumpur.”

  “Get out.”

  “At a dollar ninety-nine apiece,” Lance said, “that’s thirty bucks a month for letting people watch me crap.”

  “Please tell me you don’t take the webcam in there.”

  “It’s part of my image. Honesty. That’s what keeps them tuning in.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I keep the view partially obscured. You can’t see my unit. You have to leave the viewer wanting more, it’s an elementary principle of the tease. A pinch of mystery engenders like nine hundred Troy ounces of fixation. It’s like my stepmom.” Edward DePauw’s current wife was a plastinated real-estate broker half his age, the very one who’d found him a penthouse after things went awry with Original Recipe Mrs. DePauw.

  “She knew where it was at,” Lance said. “Major cocktease, dude. She made sure she had the rock firmly in hand before she put out.”

  Jonah had his doubts about this theory, but nodded.

  “Which reminds me: my Mom’s got a new boyfriend, too.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He’s a count.”

  Jonah found this hilarious. “Does he wear a cape?”

  “For real, dude.”

  “Four, four husbands, mwa-ha-ha-ha.”

  “As far as I can tell he’s less of a spaz than the last guy. He offered to take us to see his castle. We’re going for Thanksgiving. Do you think he has a moat?”

  “Where is this castle again.”

  “Venice, I think.”

  Jonah pointed out that all of Venice had a moat.

  Lance beamed. “You’re so fucking wise, my friend. That’s why I love you.” He sat down on the floor and whipped out the raw materials for a joint. “You’re up late.”

  “I ran into a friend.”

  “Yeah, who.”

  “Eve Gones.”

  Lance nodded in a way that suggested no recognition.

  “You remember her,” Jonah said. “The woman from the newspaper.”

  “Oh. Sweet. She’s like a friend of yours, now?”

  “She came by to thank me,” Jonah said. “You let her in the apartment a few days ago, don’t you remember?”

  “I did?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  Lance put down his rolling papers, scrunched up his face. “What day are we talking about?”

  “Saturday. She said you gave her permission to wait here.”

  “I…I might have.”

  “Were you high?”

  “Was I high. Saturday, was I high. Was I—wa-hoa. Yes. Yes, I believe I was.”

  “How high were you?”

  “Fubar.”

  “You can’t remember if you met her or not,” Jonah said.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Doesn’t this cause you problems at family reunions?”

  “We don’t have family reunions, dude. My parents don’t speak to each other.” Lance licked and rolled his joint. “So she thanked you, that’s cool. A little bit of manners in our boorish age. Whad she d
o, fuck you?”

  “What?”

  “No need to yell.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  “Because you deserve it.” Lance scrutinized him. Then he leapt up, sowing marijuana seeds into the rug. “She did. She did, didn’t she.”

  In that instant Jonah understood what it was like to be clinically paranoid, to see conspiracy everywhere. Lance had been watching them, he was sure of it, through a satellite-spyware-privacy-wrecking technology heretofore restricted to the U.S. military, illegal in forty-seven states and Puerto Rico.

  Then he thought: it’s Lance.

  As if in confirmation, Lance said, “Duuude…,” said it in a googly-eyed way that made the whole thing ridiculous. Jonah expelled his held breath in a laugh, picked up his books, and headed for his room. As he closed the door he heard You fuckin wildebeest, I’m getting you another trophy.

  • 9 •

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK he saw Eve every night.

  He wandered, dazed, through his workday, obsessively checking his watch until they turned him loose. Crowding onto the subway; rushing down 14th; turning the corner to discover her on the front stoop or beneath the stunted elm. Up the stairs, grabbing at each other, five flights in ninety seconds, no prelude, no seduction. He never managed to get her fully undressed; she insisted on keeping her top on, which spiked each encounter with a dash of the illicit, like they were sneaking into an airplane lavatory.

  With Lance out, they exploited the apartment in full. The kitchen, the sofa, the hallway, the bathroom, the bathtub, the toilet, the coat closet, the editing studio: every square foot revealed its potential. Their couplings were architectural, fleeting feats of biomechanical grace that collapsed as they took a mutual breath and reached for another crooked knee, another arched neck, another greedy handful. There is no limit to the number of contortions available to two bodies with young joints and loose imaginations.

  They invented records and strove to shatter them: How Many Times in an Hour, How Far Will a Leg Go in That Direction, How Hard Can You Do That Before It Hurts, and then How Hard When It Hurts. At one A.M. she would kiss him and leave him to drift off for three and a half hours.