by Ann Harleman
She turned on the night-light, pulled the closet door half shut. Then she returned to the rickety kitchen table, a last cigarette, brandy, worry, grief.
Four
Val threw open the door and stood aside for Nan to precede him. “Please! Enter!”
The loft was large and very clean. A Christmasy smell testified to the recent use of disinfectant on the bare scrubbed floorboards. In front of a wall of tall windows was a daybed laden with bright embroidered pillows. Val led Nan over to it. Breathless and a little dizzy (four flights of stairs! how long since she’d done anything like that?), she sank gratefully into its various softnesses. Val snapped on a pink-shaded lamp.
“One hundred and three square meters,” he said proudly. “Also, is studio.” He gestured to a half-open door behind him. Nan could see rows of canvases stacked face to the wall; the bracing smell of turpentine drifted past. “Ceiling, five and one-half meters.”
Nan looked up. The high ceiling was laced with pipes and ducts of various sizes, all painted a deep blue. Many-paned windows stretched from the ceiling almost to the floor. Nan liked the muted view of sky and brick through the wavy glass. The city noises, too, were muted, less insistent than at the Fred. The room’s warmth and rosy light enveloped her. She leaned back luxuriously among the cushions, then reminded herself of her mission. She’d accepted Val’s invitation to dinner with an ulterior motive: to find out how Deenie had died.
The door opened and a young woman entered, bringing with her a cloud of cold. There was a doily of fresh snow on her dark hair, a trembling bunch of yellow mimosa in one mittened hand. I should have brought flowers, thought Nan, struggling to her feet, the way we did in Bucharest, in Warsaw.
Val said, “My wife, Mel. Mel, I present you Mrs. Tice.”
To Nan’s surprise, the young woman’s cheek grazed hers, a brush of mimosa-scented cold. “Hey!” she said. “Sorry I’m late. I didn’t mean to blow you off.” Her voice was downright—Midwestern. Another surprise: Nan had assumed that Val’s wife would be Russian.
Mel and Val: their names, Nan noted, were as alike as they were—dark, curly hair; dark eyes; tall. Not a promising couple, Tod would have said: look-alikes don’t last. While Mel unwound her scarf and took off her black leather bomber jacket, Val became suddenly voluble. Mrs. Tice, he told his wife, was greatly recovering her injured knee; Mrs. Tice’s vnuchka, Jane, could not come tonight; Mrs. Tice had had no tea yet. Frowning, Mel bent over to shake the snow from her hair. The collarless black shirt she wore made her long white neck look longer, almost fragile—Alex-like, thought Nan. Then she noticed the many earrings (some of them little dangling skulls) along the edges of Mel’s ears, the brace of tattooed snakes heading for her collarbone. Nan dropped her eyes, lest her interest be read as old-lady horror.
Mel said to Nan, “How’re you feeling? Your leg, I mean, your knee—does it hurt?”
“It’s fine,” Nan said. In fact, Janeless for the first evening in almost a week, she was feeling like herself again—whatever that now was. Val’s appearance at the Fred this afternoon to invite her to Sunday dinner had been like a door opening onto a sunny garden. And tonight, leaving a contented Jane watching SpongeBob SquarePants with Consuelo, she’d stepped into Val’s taxi as if into Cinderella’s coach.
Mel said, “I married a bunbrain! Val—the least you could do is give Mrs. Tice something to put her leg up on.” She hauled a large wicker trunk across the room and set it in front of Nan, who protested, “Honestly, I’m fine.”
“Did you get a shot? Like, for tetanus?” Mel sat down on the daybed next to Nan and began prying off her boots. Her short black skirt pulled up to reveal a tattooed thigh, a dark pattern of what looked like ferns, under fishnet stockings. Nan foresaw an evening of successive revelations in the realm of body ornament.
“So practical, my Melochka.” Val stood looming over the two women, raking his already upstanding hair with paint-stained fingers.
“Oh, I’ve had all my shots,” Nan lied. “Anyway, it’s nothing. Val took good care of me.” She touched the bandage, a smaller one now, under her Hidden Assets.
“Further,” said Val, “I carry her in my taxi. So!”
Mel stood up. “Val made all this really cool stuff to eat. And I bought some vodka. You two hang. I’ll be right back.” She padded down the long room and disappeared behind a bright-printed fabric screen.
Now, thought Nan. Ask about Deenie.
But a sound started up behind the studio door, a sort of hollow crying, like someone imitating a baby. Val turned and crossed the room. When he opened the door, a black cat shot across the floor and landed among the cushions next to Nan. Its yellow eyes accused her.
“Clio!” said Val. “Iti syuda! Come!”
“I don’t mind. I like cats.” Nan put out a hand and received a look of weary disdain. “Why do you call her Clio? That’s not the muse of painting, is it?” She stroked the indifferent cat, whose thick black fur was pure delight.
“Nyet! Is muse of history. That is what a painter must need. Did you not had a classical education? But Americans have not.”
“Can I see your paintings? Will you show them to me?”
“Nyet. Another time, perhaps. At this moment I am out of love. My eyes are having mozoli—calluses?—at my lousy stuff.”
“Val is bonkers,” said Mel, coming into the room with a huge tray, which she set down on the wicker trunk next to Nan’s feet. She rolled up the sleeves of her shirt, revealing sturdy, unexpectedly muscular arms. “Last year he burned all his paintings—I mean all of them—and put the ashes in a jar. Then he baked pirozhki with the ashes, and ate them.”
She handed Nan a thimble-sized glass of vodka.
“Like this mythologous bird, you know?” Val said. “This fennis.”
“Phoenix,” Mel supplied, handing a thimble to Val.
“Drink!” he urged.
He raised his glass, and the two women raised theirs. They drank. The vodka’s warmth snaked through Nan. She held out her glass for more. “Wouldn’t the paint be poison?”
“I made him heave, right after,” said Mel. “Scarf and barf.”
“Was ceremony of reborn. After, I become surrealist and study English. Only after can I do this things. My Melochka, so practical—she does not understand.”
Val pulled up a chair for Mel, then sat down next to Nan on the daybed. They all served themselves, balancing plates on their laps. After more vodka came marinated mushrooms sprinkled with bright-green chives, pancakes rolled around a salty jellied filling, translucent wafers of red onion and radishes. They ate off thick, cheap china under the remote gaze of Clio. They drank kvass, chill and sour-sweet, a beer Val brewed himself. After a week of Burger King, the food and drink seemed heavenly to Nan. But she could feel a tension in the room, a net that held and shivered, entangling her yet buoying her up, like the tension at a family gathering. Val and Mel seemed to be watching her.
In new situations, HOWDY had advised, break the ice by asking questions. Nan asked the one happy couples like best.
They’d met two years before, in Moscow, where Mel was attending an international tattoo art convention for which Val was an official taxi driver; they’d married on the strength of six days’ acquaintance; it had taken another year to get Val out; Mel made her living doing body art—tattooing and piercing, “No scarring, I’m not into that” (Scarring? thought Nan)—and she and Val supplemented their income by housesitting. This was how they’d met Mrs. Horsfal.
Of course, Nan thought, Deenie would have instantly adopted these two.
She seized the opening. “I met her when I was thirteen,” she said. “We’ve been best friends ever since.”
Mel looked surprised. Her eyes met Val’s for a second, but she said nothing.
Nan pushed on. She told them about that first day in homeroom, two gangly scholarship girls whose uniforms hadn’t been made by the right tailor. They listened, rapt. She told them how, in freshman English, that fi
rst terrifyingly strange autumn, she and Deenie had had to memorize poems about Courageous Youths. The Spartan boy who soundlessly let a fox gnaw his vitals (a phrase that chilled Nan to this day) rather than … but she could no longer remember what outcome his stoicism had avoided. The Dutch boy—were all Courageous Youths boys?—who, walking along the dikes at dawn, had seen a hole. Unable to summon help, he stuck his finger into it, then (as the hole widened) his hand, then his arm, to keep the sea from swallowing the town. Still no one heard his cries. Finally he had to plug the hole with his body, and he drowned. The town was saved. Nan had raised her hand and asked, Why didn’t the boy put himself into the hole feetfirst? He would’ve made just as good a cork, and he wouldn’t’ve died. Sister Alma Gertrude had given her detention for being disrespectful, and Deenie, too, for laughing.
Mel passed a plate of tiny crescent-shaped pies that Nan recognized as pirozhki. Hand outstretched to take one, she paused.
Mel laughed, a wide-open laugh, revealing a tiny gold ball nesting on the tip of her tongue. “These’re okay. No ashes!”
The moment felt right, or at any rate, Nan thought, would not feel righter. Time to pop her question. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. About Deenie—Mrs. Horsfal.” She took a deep breath. “How did she die, exactly?”
Val’s eyes met Mel’s. Almost imperceptibly, she shook her head.
“The hospital wouldn’t tell me,” Nan said. “They only give out information to relatives.”
Mel looked surprised. “But aren’t you—I thought you were a relative.”
Nan had forgotten, for a moment, her alias. Improvising hastily, she said, “By marriage. That, um, that wasn’t enough.”
“Oh, by marriage. So, like, you’re not related to Mrs. Horsfal’s cousin?”
“Cousin? Oh … no. The one in—where is it? Africa?”
“He is living now in Maine,” Val said. “Is mending now from, how it is said?” He looked at Mel.
“Surgery. Like, gall bladder, or something.”
A shiver slid down Nan’s spine. Had her whimsical choice of alias created another fault line in the Plan? She tried to sound natural. “I thought he worked abroad somewhere. What’s his name? I’ve forgotten.”
“Walker Tice,” Val said, and Mel added, “He’s an old guy. At least, he sounded old. We haven’t met him. He’s gonna come down here and pack up Mrs. Horsfal’s stuff as soon as he recovers.”
Here was yet another danger. The Aged Cousin. Shaken, Nan sank back among the sofa cushions. There was a long pause in which no one spoke. The warm air held the fragrance of tarragon and garlic, the lamplight throbbed gently. Mel and Val were looking at her, their faces oddly intent. Nan leaned back, nearly closing her eyes, trying to seem as if she were merely savoring the pleasures of the meal. The mystery surrounding Deenie’s death had deepened; but it was not, after all, the right time to pursue the question that had brought her here. She assessed the silence. Again that tension, magnified now, as if something big had been left unsettled, some hurdle uncleared. Through her half-closed eyes, she saw Val and Mel look at each other. You go. No, you.
Finally Val said, “Mrs. Tice—”
“Nan. Please.”
“Nan.” It came out sounding like “none.” “Mel and I, we have the idea to, well, to help Jane and you—”
“It’s epic!”
“—for where to live.”
“A really phat idea!”
“Here in this our building—”
“This guy, he’s a doofus, but his place is cool—”
“We are sitting house for Mr. Nibbrig, he is bukhgal’ter—”
“—an accountant—”
“He wishes to, how it is said—”
“—sublet—”
“You and your Jane need not to remain longer in the Fred—”
“—and it’s cheap.”
|
Why are these strangers so kind? I should be asking myself that.
It was dawn. The radiators, clanking insanely, had woken Nan. She yanked off her sweat-soaked nightgown and went to stand at the open window of the little kitchenette. When she pulled the shade down it snapped, rattling, to the top. Sunrise stained the sky and the piles of snow, like unwashed laundry, that lay along the edges of the sidewalk. The three floors above the darkened Food Basket were lined with the windows that stared blankly at her. Windows of rooms like Nan’s.
Last night, leaving Val and Mel’s place with its warmth and light and heartening smells, she’d told them she needed to think about their offer. Yet, really, what could she do but accept? Looking out onto the street, she tried not to remember the garden of her apartment in West Seattle. Her calm and beautiful refuge. Gone now.
Behind her, in the closet off the living room, Jane stirred and sighed.
Why so kind?
Nan didn’t feel she was a good judge of character. Tod used to say, Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. Nan’s married life had offered little opportunity for bad judgment (apart from the lovers—and there, except for the Last Lover, she seemed to have been lucky). The State Department had made her decisions for her. Twenty-two years in the undistinguished middle ranks of civil servants (“simple serpents,” Tod had joked in the early years, before they realized he’d made himself too useful ever to be promoted) had left Nan unprepared for ordinary life. For nearly a quarter of a century she had not once had to find an apartment, deal with landlords, move her own furniture, care for her own child. Those years had not left her experienced, or even cosmopolitan. They’d lived in embassy “compounds,” “fraternization” with the locals (“indigenous populations”) was frowned on, “team spirit” (a code word, as in Nan’s schooldays, for conformity) was the order of the day. Wherever they went, they took the USA with them. She had traveled, but never quite arrived.
Val and Mel. Their kindness was offered in exchange for something, Nan told herself as the sun grew brighter above the Food Basket. Something they wanted from her. Though it could well be (she tried for optimism) something benign. And there was the Aged Cousin. A wild card. Bound to surface eventually, whenever he recovered from whatever ailment he’d been suffering from up there in Maine—
Suddenly she realized there was a naked man in one of the windows opposite. No shock, just: a window lit, a window dark, a naked body, another window; then, Oh! Gray on gray in the oblique early light, one hand holding back the curtain. She must have been looking at him for several minutes without registering it. No face—his head was cut off by half-lowered, half-closed blinds—just a torso from chin to knees, broken by the triangle of dark fleece at the crotch. As she watched, a hand delved into it. Looking down, Nan saw with dismay her own naked body, weakly gilded now by the first fingers of sun. Quickly she pulled down the shade.
He knows where I live.
Her own terror terrified her. In the hot, stuffy room, she felt encased in ice. Her skin burned with cold; her nipples were so tight they hurt. She went to her purse and took out her cell phone and held it in her hand. But who could she call? She had no friends here, no one who knew her. Fugitive that she was, she couldn’t even call the police. She had never, in all her life, felt so alone.
My God. I can’t do this.
Going to the back of the door to pull her robe off its hook, she heard with gratitude the chirp of Consuelo’s cleaning trolley’s wheels.
The kindness of strangers. What alternative was there?
|
The next afternoon Val came to get them in his taxi. Though they’d been there only five days, Jane burst into tears at the idea of leaving the Fred and Consuelo. While Nan packed their few belongings, Jane wept, her sobs escalating as Nan zipped up her scarlet parka, her howls filling the little elevator as they descended. In the lobby she flung herself to the floor on her stomach. Her back arched and her blue-jeaned bottom rose into the air, her small body a tent of grief. Consuelo, on her knees on the dingy olive tiles, held her and
rocked her back and forth. “Pobrecita! Ay, querida!”
I should be doing that, Nan realized. But when she knelt down beside her, Jane turned away, clinging to Consuelo. Sadness flooded Nan—where was the little girl who so loved her Nana?—but she found herself saying brusquely, “Let’s go, Jane. Val is double-parked.” When Consuelo looked up, a tear glittered in the downy dark hairs along her upper lip.
There was another bad moment when Val’s taxi stalled in the middle of the construction along the river. But the shouted curses and frenzied honking of the drivers behind them, so different from phlegmatic Seattleites, were somehow invigorating, like the rush of carbon-scented winter air when Val cranked down his window to shout back. “Chort!” he cried. “K chortu!” Snow began sifting down as they drove along the river, despite the sun, a giant orange-red sourball behind the cranes and backhoes. The water was a dull green, still as jelly. A lone figure stood looking down on it from the unfinished footbridge where the construction ended. They swung onto Westminster Street with a seagull, wings spread wide, gliding ahead of the car. The setting sun struck the windows of the Fleet Building and turned them into a grid of burning gold.
On the third floor of the old factory building on Elbow Street they passed scarred doors holding at bay the sounds and smells of other lives. Val carried their two suitcases; Nan, the large green garbage bag full of Jane’s recent acquisitions. Jane scuffed along behind them, dragging Squirrel across the dirty cement floor. Recovering from the stairs, Nan concentrated on moving normally, on breathing. What had she been thinking of, not to have looked at the apartment beforehand? The hallway offered peeling turnip-colored walls; an impression of general neglect (in the building’s entryway she’d glimpsed the quick clipped shadow of a rat); years of accumulated odors coalescing into a smell as dense and dark as fruitcake.