by Dylan Landis
She clears her throat.
“Hey, I sent your slides out,” she says.
It’s only been two days. So it’s barely a lie. More like an elision of time, since she will still mail the slides. She will mail them. “I used Federal Express,” she says, unable to stop the story from traveling forward. “So she would have just gotten them.” Now it’s a lie. But barely. She’ll send them tomorrow. She’ll use FedEx for real.
“Her mother is a decorator,” Rainey tells Tina. “Her clients might buy my work. You know what a big deal that would be?”
“What a sweetheart,” says Tina. She means Leah, but she drapes an arm around Rainey for a moment and squeezes her shoulder. Leah looks sidelong at the two of them leaning into each other, Rainey blowing her smoke straight up at the night sky.
“When will she know?” Rainey asks.
“I don’t know,” says Leah. “A week or two?”
“We should meet back here. We should reclaim this place.” Rainey shivers audibly and pulls her denim jacket close. “Or it will always be the suicide museum.”
Who is we? thinks Leah. Is Tina part of this we?
Tina takes off her scarf and wraps it around Rainey’s neck. “We’ll come back in two Tuesdays and hit the jewelry like Rainey wants. It’ll be healing.”
“See, that’s why I love you,” Rainey says.
Why, thinks Leah, why do you love her? She knows why she loves Rainey Royal, who is both cruel and kind, who works with objects that belong to the dead, who can sweep her gaze across Leah’s white-box life and make her feel, if only for an hour, that she is the most thrilling person Rainey knows.
AS IT TURNS OUT, Helen Levinson does indeed have a slide projector. She has an assistant who makes prints from all the slides. She sends Leah back the little yellow box, again by FedEx, with a note.
Been using black roses and black tulips together—hard to find but stunning. Love this gal’s work. Can she compose in all white/cream with many textures? Fabric, paper, buttons, like in slides, but all white. If yes, can commission for two clients now. Have her call me. Love you, darling. My New York rep!
When they meet again at the museum it is even colder. Rainey wears Tina’s scarf and gloves.
They sit on the steps with their cigarettes, Tina, again in the middle, in a long down coat, bare hands jammed in her pockets. Leah fingers in her own pocket the yellow cardboard box of slides.
My mother loved your work, she will say. She hopes her voice won’t crack.
“My mother loved your work,” Leah says, and she pulls out the yellow box and holds it close on her lap.
“Tell me, tell me.” Rainey clasps her hands together in Tina’s purple gloves.
Tina looks at Leah with bright, expectant eyes. Again Tina and Rainey sit close for warmth, while between Tina and Leah there is a politeness gap of about twelve inches, the gap of two people who have a close friend in common, but not much more.
Rescue is a big deal, Leah thinks.
“Before I forget?” she says. “I wanted to tell you, I’m gone all day. At work. My dining table has nothing on it. Ever. If you wanted to use my place as a studio.”
To her amazement this falls into a silence with something hard at the bottom. It reminds Leah of the granite floor at the foot of the grand staircase.
“But she works at home.” Tina takes her hands out of her pockets and laces her fingers around her knees, despite the cold. She keeps them still, where Leah’s fingers would fidget for a cigarette. Leah thinks: They’ve talked about me.
“Yeah, I know. But if she wanted a studio,” says Leah. She tries to keep the edge out of her voice.
“Hello, I’m right here,” says Rainey. “I’m fine.”
Leah tries to look contrite. “Sorry,” she says. “It was a thought.” She remembers the envelope Tina passed to Rainey; she wonders if Tina, a medical student, could have given Rainey money or was repaying it—no matter, it was as if they were sharing a tank of air, passing the regulator back and forth.
“Your mother?” prompts Rainey.
My mother loved your work.
Leah takes a breath. “I’m sorry,” she says. “She showed prints to her clients. It just didn’t happen.”
Does Rainey look at her as if she can see Helen’s note, read the lines about black roses and white tapestries? It’s not possible. And yet Leah could swear that she does.
She waits for Rainey to say, Thank you for trying. Thank you for trying, Lee-lee.
After a moment Leah says, “I really tried,” exactly as Rainey starts to speak. They both stop, talk at the same moment again. Leah laughs. Rainey waits. Leah lurches on.
“My mother showed them to everyone, but it just—she said she’s sorry.”
Rainey nods. She holds out her hand, resting her arm on Tina’s knees. For a split second Leah thinks she is extending her hand in friendship. Then she understands. She relinquishes the yellow Kodak box.
Leah opens her mouth, but stops. She can’t think of a reason to ask for the slides back. The box vanishes into Rainey’s purse.
ONE YEAR LATER, ON the day Rainey buries her father, Leah will want to fix this, to seal things between them. Tina will stand as close to Rainey as a bodyguard. Leah will almost do it anyway, will almost say: We came so close last time—let’s send my mom new slides. But Helen might slip. She might give Leah away. Where were you two years ago, Helen might say. I was waiting for your call. And then Leah might see ice in Rainey’s eyes.
ARRHYTHMIA
Midnight in a house where strangers wander: Rainey’s door should be shut tight. But Tina, from the staircase, sees into Rainey’s pink room—blush walls, pooling fuchsia curtains. On rough nights, this room reminds Tina of the inside of someone’s mouth.
It’s every bit her business. She steps inside.
Lying on the canopy bed is a silver-haired man with long, curled toenails and a pregnancy gut. He is reading a battered paperback. A black French-horn case is parked on the floor. He looks comfortable.
Tina says calmly, “I don’t think you belong here, motherfucker.”
Tina herself has been installed in the hundred-year-old townhouse with Rainey and Howard since her grandmother died. Gracias a Dios, she got through medical school rent-free.
Now she’s a resident; she’s ob-gyn. She works eighty-hour weeks. She can nap standing up. She hallucinates flashes of light, which is happening now, after sixteen hours on her feet.
The silvery man dog-ears his book and swings his legs off the bed. “Apologies, sister,” he says. Tina sees he’s not as old as he looks, just stringy. “No need to yell,” he says.
“Am I yelling?” says Tina. “Who did you think was going to show up?”
Not quite meeting her eyes, he shambles toward the door and edges past her. “Apologies,” he says. He limps with his horn up the stairs toward the servants’ quarters. Tina’s own room is on the fifth floor, too. She has come home from the hospital several times to find one ropy musician or another rooting through her bureau drawers.
“Go down,” Tina says, “not up. Go home.”
The man looks over the banister at her. “I’ve played with Dollar Brand,” he says. “Don’t know who you are, but Howard Royal invited me. This is his house.”
“Not quite,” says Tina.
She has never heard of Dollar Brand. And she knows for sure this is no longer Howard’s house. She feels Howard’s time here is waning. Tina spent half her teenage life in Rainey’s pink room; she knew the worshipful young musicians whom Howard took in. She helped pack their shit up last year when Rainey turned twenty-five, took over as trustee, and threw them out while Howard roared.
Now Howard brings home stray musicians one night at a time, and chicks he meets at the clubs. Tina comes down for breakfast, and some sleepy bimbo will be all Hey, you know where they keep the coffee? It cuts her every time, but she keeps her feelings to herself. It seems to her that if you play jazz like Howard, you should live in harmony
with its godly source. But Howard’s godly source seems to vanish when he rises from the piano.
Anyway, he refuses to move out. He lives off Rainey’s trust. Rainey can’t evict her own father, can she? Rainey can’t even put Howard’s shadow, Gordy, in the street. Tina regards the listing shadows of the staircase and listens to the ragged footsteps. Howard, where would you go?
“You’re trespassing,” Tina calls, but already she hears the horn player padding toward his room.
WHEN RAINEY GETS HOME from Flynn’s she sits on Tina’s bed, because her own is polluted: long toenails. Now Tina will have to strip Rainey’s bed before she sleeps, and probably make it, too. She makes a flawless bed. She can iron the ruffles on a Sunday blouse and cook rellenos de papas and mango flan. Her grandmother taught her the domestic arts from her wheelchair.
Rainey says, “You think it’ll kill him?”
“It might,” says Tina. She closes her eyes and slips into a micro-nod over her unopened beer.
“You’re not helping,” says Rainey. “I’m not locking him out forever. I’ll let him back in when he calms down. So he can find his own place.”
Tina opens her beer and gives Rainey a long, waiting look. Next to her bed is a tiny window to which darkness cleaves. Tina leans over and pulls the string on the roller shade for privacy, and the room becomes a box.
“He won’t stay,” says Rainey. “Without his own key, he won’t stay.”
Tina swallows deeply, looking at Rainey over the bottle and saying nothing.
“You think he’ll hate me?” Rainey takes the bottle and drinks.
“Howard loves you to death.” Tina hesitates. “Does he have enough to move out?”
“He can give lessons,” says Rainey. “He can work like a normal person.”
“Howard’s not a normal person.” Tina tugs the bottle from Rainey’s hand. “He can’t afford the kind of place they let you put a Steinway.”
“Jesus, whose side are you on?”
“Yours,” says Tina promptly. She watches Rainey: cross-legged at the foot of the bed, carefully separating out a long, thick strand of hair like she intends to make something with it. They haven’t braided each other’s hair in years. Tina shivers. It’s chilly up here in winter. She has one of the dreary little rooms where servants once slept on creaky narrow bedsteads and suffered cracked windows in winter. Her clothes are in a nineteenth-century maple wardrobe, and her medical school textbooks are lined up on a battered desk she dragged in from another room.
Howard has the entire second floor. Sneaking down to see him is not easy. She has to get past Gordy and Rainey, who share the third floor. Tina has been sneaking in to see Howard, one way or another, since she was sixteen.
Now she is twenty-six, and Howard walks with a twinge in his hip, and sometimes when they meet in the shabby rooms of other musicians they lie on the bed fully dressed, and he holds her while she dozes.
“Maybe you should talk to him one more time,” says Tina.
To live like this, Tina has closed a door in her head so heavy no light can leak through. She finds she likes living in airtight, watertight compartments.
“I’ve tried talking. I’ll be supporting him and Gordy till they’re ninety.”
Tina considers this. She herself grew up taking care of her grandmother, while downstairs her mother lived with Tina’s sisters, and across the city, her father lived with a woman who worked in a courthouse cafeteria. Someone had to bathe the grandmother, dress her each day in dignified black. But Tina’s abuela kept her studying at the Formica kitchen table; she kept her sane. She exalted her to be a doctor when Tina was busy failing ninth grade. And what were her sisters doing now? They were married, making babies, laboring at stoves with saffron-scented steam.
“My future husband will love it,” says Rainey. “He’ll really want to stick around.”
Tina nods slowly. She has no future husband; she works too hard. Occasionally she’s afflicted by a tattoo artist, though he sees other women, and last month, when he took her to City Island, she fell asleep over fried clams. Tina will not let him tattoo so much as a bumblebee on her foot. She is a doctor. It isn’t funny.
Howard is not husband material, though he teaches her about life. And it is true that Howard drives Rainey’s boyfriends away with sarcasm and sexual innuendo, and it is true that Rainey has someone wonderful. She has Flynn, who years ago quit Juilliard for Howard Royal.
Then he quit Howard for medical school. Flynn is an oncologist now, a man who battles cells that simultaneously multiply and divide. Flynn is as delicate and lean as an egret, and his focus is quick and sharp like a bird’s, too.
Tina keeps the faith with Rainey in this one department: she ignores Flynn. She remembers how Flynn and Rainey used to stare at each other across the parlor, silent over Howard’s jazz. Meanwhile Howard would pin Tina with his gaze from the piano, and Tina’s abdominopelvic region would caramelize. It wasn’t just the way he made her feel seen; it was his hands on the keyboard—those strong, spread, prancing fingers.
“Oh, God. I’m scared.” Rainey takes the bottle from Tina and drains the beer. “ ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth,’ ” she says. “He always mocks me in Shakespeare.”
Tina pulls her folded nightgown out from under her pillow. She needs sleep, but she won’t undress in front of Rainey. When you change, her grandmother instructed, don’t look down, and she meant when Tina was alone.
“I’m not trying to save you from hurting Howard,” says Tina. She speaks slowly, feeling out which of her words are true and which just sound good. “I’m trying to save you from hurting yourself.”
TINA HOLDS RAINEY’S HAIR so she can throw up. She pours Rainey a shot of Jack Daniel’s for strength. But she won’t dredge up the yellow pages so Rainey can call an all-night locksmith. That Rainey has to do herself.
Howard Royal and Gordy Vine are out, playing an uptown club.
Tina falls onto her bed fully dressed. Screw the nightgown. She leaves Rainey waiting for the locksmith on the stoop, pretending to be a locked-out person and wearing Tina’s down coat and fleece-lined boots. Rainey’s own clothes are never warm enough. God, she can be such a waif.
Tina wakes when Rainey comes into her room. She hears her lay a brass key on the nightstand and feels her climbing into the twin bed. They have never shared a bed. Don’t snuggle, Tina prays. Rainey doesn’t snuggle.
“He let me keep the old lock,” she whispers. “Guess what it’s called.”
Tina makes a don’t wake me noise.
“A cylinder,” says Rainey. “Like on a gun.”
Tina feels she is falling. She lets herself fall. It’s glorious. An insistent ringing wakes her.
Not morning. Please God not morning. She lunges over Rainey for the clock. It’s only 4:45. She can sleep till 5:30. Ringing won’t stop. Doorbell.
“Help me.” Rainey sits up. “I’m going to throw up again.”
“Not in bed,” says Tina. The doorbell is a steady rasping ring.
“Tina, he’ll kill me.”
“Did you change the basement lock?” Maybe Howard’s key will work there.
“Duh.”
Tina hears a sound she recognizes in the dark from her rotation in the ER. It’s the irregular dental clicking of terrified patients: Rainey’s teeth are chattering. It sounds like a Teletype in old movies.
“I need Flynn,” says Rainey.
“You could call him,” says Tina, “but he needs sleep like I do.”
“What if Howard breaks down the door?”
“It’s unbreakable.” The door is a heavy wrought-iron grille with glass on the inside. Tina thinks of him outside in the frost and wants to be there, wants to put her hand gently on his arm: Howard, take it easy.
“You could let him in,” says Tina. “He might talk now.”
“I’m scared. I want him to call me. There’s a pay phone on Sixth.”
The bell rings and rings. Along with it, faint and dista
nt, comes a high-pitched metallic banging that could be keys slamming into scrolled ironwork.
Rainey hugs her knees. “Will you go down and talk to him?”
“Fuck no,” says Tina. “Wait till he calls.”
The doorbell stops ringing.
“If he calls, will you talk to him?”
“He’s your father, sweetie.” Tina’s words slur; she’s that tired. “Tell him if he calms down et cetera, you’ll let him in.”
“I can’t,” says Rainey. “You tell him.”
“Practice,” says Tina. “Just say it.”
Now the silence is almost as loud as the doorbell.
Rainey draws in a breath, holds it a few seconds, and says, “Did you ever go to bed with my father?”
“Are you seriously asking me that?” says Tina. “Seriously?”
“Well …” Rainey ducks her head, and her hair covers her face; she sounds like a little girl. “I just want to say it would be like cheating.” Tina stays dramatically silent. “I mean, sometimes I hear you on the stairs late at night.” Tina waits. “Creaking,” says Rainey. “It freaks me out.”
Silence from downstairs.
“And you wait till now to ask me? I get insomnia,” says Tina. “I drink some wine. I sit in the parlor. I would rather die than sleep with Howard. Nothing personal.”
She listens to Rainey think. She waits for Rainey to say, Yeah but I never hear the bottom flight creak, and she understands that Rainey is either filling in the missing creaks or counting them. In the quiet she drifts off for a second or an hour; she isn’t sure.
FOUR NIGHTS THAT WEEK Tina awakens to the banging of keys and the doorbell’s persistent shrill. It lasts about fifteen minutes, she thinks. She has no idea where Howard sleeps. She misses the smell of his sheets, the velvety irony in his voice. In the mornings Rainey, hollow eyed, says nothing. But the shopping bags she left in the front garden, holding clothes and money for Howard and Gordy, are gone.