It occurred to her that secrets were like a town sometimes, with their own social hierarchy. The Arrivistes sunning themselves at the top of the hill, having bootstrapped their way up into semirespectability. The Status-Seekers in the middle, trying to stay busy so no one will question them too closely. And at the very bottom, the Unmentionables, the things you tried not to think about, the memories you could barely admit even to yourself. They labored like a mutant workforce under the surface, toiling in the fuming, grinding infrastructure, pushing the millstones, loading up coal carts, digging deeper and deeper into the sediment, and occasionally hitting a vein and sending spumes shooting up into the Overworld.
Realizing she wouldn’t get back to sleep easily, she prowled back out into the hallway. From the master bedroom, Barry was snoring along obliviously like the distant surf. Everything’s going to be okay, he’d said. And she’d let that stand. Are you proud of yourself?
She noticed that the door to the vest-pocket study at the other end of the hall was half-open. A soft beacon glow spilled out. Her heart tripped on the off beat, thinking someone was in there. But when she cautiously pushed the door open, she found the room empty and the desktop computer left on. She went to turn it off and found a gray-blue grinning devil’s head on the Gateway screen, a window in its mouth asking, “Are you sure you wish to be released from the dark realm? Yes / No.” Jesus, another one of Clay’s games about creating your own world and then torturing its inhabitants like a malevolent god. She turned it off, wondering if Barry had pushed him too hard on this Bar Mitzvah business and given the kid an angry Messiah complex. The devil’s head scrolled away, leaving the America Online sign-on greeting in its place. Were they affiliates?
From outside, she heard a tiny chp-chp sound, like two wet marbles being tapped together. A woodpecker? A cricket? She’d always had an overstimulated imagination in the late hours, telling her younger sister, Carol, bedtime stories about headless horsemen and dismembered schoolgirls that scared both of them so badly they’d need to sleep in the same bed. She sat down in the chair, regretting they’d never regained that closeness. In becoming an instant grown-up after Mom got sick, Lynn had turned into one of the people that Carol had to get away from. And so she’d gone all the way out to Oregon to join a commune and then marry an architect and start a family of her own, having had more than enough of MS, her bossy older sister, and Riverside in general. Maybe she had the right idea, Lynn thought, making a clean break instead of stumbling back into town like the prodigal daughter.
Lynn looked at the clock in the corner of the screen and saw it was almost one o’clock, but still a few minutes before ten in Portland. Her nephews would be asleep, and Carol would almost certainly be dog-tired, but she needed to touch base with somebody. A kind of desperate loneliness had come over her, a yearning for connection without consequence.
The chair’s struts gave a little cry as she tucked a cold foot under her butt. Her fingers danced across the keys, entering her name and her secret password, Weegee, as the computer made that odd flickering sound like a fuse burning up, a reminder that they needed to get a DSL line one of these days. She hit the sign-on button and waited for the connection, the whine and squeal of electrodes shooting through miles of fiber-optic cable and branching out like vines across the country, searching for something or someone to latch on to. And just before that bright impersonal male voice announced, “Welcome!” she’d heard a light drizzle like someone pissing against the side of the house.
She froze for a moment, trying to find a benign explanation. An animal. Deer and raccoon go to the bathroom too. Why shouldn’t they do it right outside? Maybe she should’ve gone back for that bag of coyote urine this afternoon, to keep them away.
“You’ve got mail!” announced the voice on the computer, like the world’s most ambitious flight attendant.
She clicked on the yellow envelope and saw she had three messages from François at the gallery, probably wanting to talk about their lunch on Thursday and the most recent set of prints she’d sent him for the spring show. The immigrant laborer series from in front of Starbucks. She knew he was going to hate them. Too drab, he’d say. Too gritty. Isn’t this sort of 1930s social realism old hat? Where’s the cutting edge? Where’s the beauty for beauty’s sake? She had half a mind to beg François to postpone the show for a month. How could she think about work at this point anyway? It would be like trying to take a picture in the middle of a dust storm.
She clicked to open the first e-mail, and just as she started to read the words Union Square Cafe, twelve-thirtyish? a fierce rustling began outside. A thin gust blew into the room. Hugging herself for warmth, she got up to close the window, the floorboards giving a mournful sigh, as if there were a song trapped beneath them.
Wind slapped hard at the glass. She saw the ceaseless tumbling of treetops in the moonlight. A chill crept over her. The chp-chp was coming from right under the window. She shut it quickly and backed away. Easy there. Mike wouldn’t just show up at your house in the middle of the night. Would he?
The lunch proposal was where she’d left it on the screen, dutifully awaiting her answer. No, Mike wouldn’t dare. Larry Quinn said someone would talk to him. But there was still an undeniable presence in the vicinity. She’d felt it strongly right by the window, a stillness in the air, a coppery taste in her mouth that reminded her of this afternoon.
Enough. She was scaring herself. She hit the reply button and typed, “see ya then,” back to François, with what she hoped sounded like plucky confidence, and started to turn the computer off. But just before she clicked on the X in the upper right-hand corner, the screen winked. A slightly cheesy-sounding wind-chime sound issued from the speakers, and a small white space appeared in the left corner, signaling an Instant Message.
Stark black words filled in the top line.
I KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING
Her heart jammed. How would anyone even know she was up at this hour? Could he see her?
She started to rise from her chair. Then a second line appeared.
WATCH YOURSELF.
The whole room pulsated in time with her breathing.
In a panic, she blanked out the screen before fully registering the name of the sender. She couldn’t allow this to go any further. The threat was already stamped and burning in her head. She slowly backed away and knocked over her chair, as if a hand was about to reach out of the screen. “Good-bye!” said the ambitious flight attendant. She turned and ran, her bare feet thumping hard on the landing, sounding hollow spots below the boards. The master bedroom door was still half-open, and she dove in beside Barry, seeking refuge against his frame. Shivering in the dark, she realized that in her rush to get rid of the message she hadn’t considered how to track it back to its source.
Watch yourself. Something about seeing those small black letters against the plain white background made her think of bodies lost in a snowstorm.
She huddled in a semifetal ball, listening for further disturbances. But the great outdoors had fallen quiet again, except for that one owl hooting what sounded like “how true!” over and over. She tried to rest her head on his chest, but that special upholstered place where she could always hear his heart was no longer there. Instead there was just unyielding bone, as if the dimensions between them had somehow changed since she left the room.
“What’s going on?” he said, starting to wake up.
39
AS HE EMERGED from the beige-tiled thrum of the Holland Tunnel the next morning and saw the greasy clump of gas stations and hourly-rate motels packed tightly before him, Barry felt an odd mixture of nostalgia and chagrin. New Jersey: his natural state. He veered right onto the turnpike, catching a glimpse of the diminished Manhattan skyline across the river, and remembered that sense of predestination he used to have, that rock-solid conviction that one day he would carve out a place for himself among the skyscrapers and brownstones.
The Statue of Liberty oxidized at the edge of the h
orizon, and jets leaving Newark Airport slanted up into the sky, leaving faint trails of black fumes. On the car radio, 1010 WINS was reporting that American forces were about to begin gathering in Afghanistan.
Barry changed the station, feeling a small barracuda wending its way through his guts. Watch yourself. Something about using that bit of wordplay on a photographer made the threat even more palpable. The author had thought about it carefully, considered his options, and calibrated his words for maximum impact before hitting the Send button. i know what your doing. This didn’t sound like a harmless crank. This sounded like someone sticking a foot in the door.
So Barry had called in late for work this morning after asking Chris from Operations if there was any way to retrieve Instant Messages from a hard drive, and then set off for his hometown.
“We should just carpet bomb the bastards back into the Stone Age and then build a McDonald’s on the rubble,” said a young man’s voice on a call-in show.
Newark. Twelve years since he’d driven through town for his father’s funeral. New skin had formed over old bruises. Decals for the Newark Downtown Facade Improvement Project covered boarded-up tenement windows on Halsey Street. A new minor league baseball stadium sat beside the Passaic River, and a respectable new performing arts center stood in the heart of downtown. But on Central Avenue where his father’s deli once stood, a dusty old poster in an abandoned storefront window declared, THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE IN AMERICA WHO DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU. DON’T BECOME ONE OF THEM. VOTE.
So this was his point of origin. People who grew up just a few miles away in Nutley and Livingston would have to have a gun put to their heads before they’d admit to having ever set foot in Newark. But he’d never felt that way. He had a soft spot for the old men playing boccie in Branch Brook Park; the cherry blossom display; Bamberger’s afternoons with Mom; doo-wop twilights in front of the Diary Queen; La Traviata and Jimmy Rosselli wafting out of doorways on Bloomfield Avenue; the old court with the rusty hoops over by the Colonnade; Friday afternoon helping out at Dad’s deli; jars of fresh olives and cherries in brandy on the counter; Dad cooking kasha varnishkes for just the two of them on the stove in the back. And, of course, the apple tree that Dad had tried so hard to grow in their little dried-up backyard on Clifton Avenue. They were one of the last Jewish families left in their part of the North Ward. Dad had come up from the Prince Street shtetl and paid twenty-eight thousand dollars in 1953 for a two-story with an actual yard, so he’d be damned before he sold it for almost a third less after the ’67 riots. If I go now, when do I get my apple tree? he used to say.
So twice a week Barry got beat up for his lunch money on the way to Barringer High School, just across the street from the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. The only thing that saved him, day after day, was basketball. Other guys were faster, taller, more graceful. Other guys had better jump shots, better instincts, better elevation. But no one put in more hours at practice. No one stayed longer shooting fouls. No one dove for more loose balls. No one scrapped and hustled and took as much punishment. They called him Celtic because he was all blocky white-boy moves, skinned knees, and bruised elbows. He got his nose broken and turned his hamstrings into boiled linguini. But he kept going because no one had more faith that the hard work and long hours would pay off, that it was all leading somewhere, that sheer determination, force of will, and emotional intensity would be enough to lift him above the crowd.
It’s all right, I know how to do this, he thought as he parked in Don Frederico’s lot in the Ironbound District and cut the ignition. Don’t give up the high ground. He popped the front of the Pioneer radio unit out of the dashboard so it couldn’t be stolen and locked the bright-orange Club over his steering wheel.
The restaurant looked back to the glories of old Spain. Murals depicted bullfight scenes and conquistadors riding high in the saddle. Flamenco guitars strummed and castanets clacked on the stereo as the unlovely Passaic rolled outside the windows. His cousin Richie Marcus was at a table near the back, digging into a plate of seviche and wearing a gray knit sweater with a bold black zigzag pattern across the front.
He was a pudgy man in his early fifties with a shiny brow, thick rubbery lips, and a crimped black knot of hair on top of his head that made him look a little like a suburban samurai.
“What’re you wearing, Armani?” he asked as Barry sat down opposite him.
“Davide Cenci.” Barry flipped his lapel lightly, hoping his cousin wouldn’t recognize the name of the Madison Avenue tailor.
“Nordstrom.” Richie tugged on his collar as if it wasn’t quite wide enough for his neck.
“So, what do you say, Rich? You’re looking good.”
“You kidding? I’m turning into Dom DeLuise. I haven’t seen my dick since the Reagan administration.”
“Well, thanks for showing up on such short notice. I’ve been kicking myself for not staying in touch.”
“Hey, what am I going to do? My favorite aunt’s kid says he has a problem.” Richie shrugged. “I had to go see a guy anyway this afternoon, so I figured we could meet near the old neighborhood. Easier than Bloomfield for you.”
“How’s your daughter doing at Rutgers?”
Barry had decided ahead of time to just make glancing reference to the letter of recommendation he’d written to the dean of admissions on Chloe’s behalf.
“She’s dating a Dominican kid, and she wants to be an interpretive dance major.” Richie speared a scallop. “Isn’t that great? Remind me to celebrate by shooting myself in the head.”
Barry tapped his water glass with his long fingers, keeping time with the music. “Maybe she’ll learn flamenco.”
“The art of applauding your own ass. Just what she needs to go to college for.”
“And how’s the store?”
Richie studied the fish on his fork for a moment. “What can I tell you? The sporting goods business sucks. Sales are down for everything except guns.”
“Is that so?” Barry opened his menu nonchalantly.
“Yup, permit applications are up like four hundred percent since the Eleventh.” Richie popped the scallop into his mouth and started chewing on one side. “Beats me why anybody thinks having a piece is gonna save them from a plane crashing into a building, but what am I going to do, not take their money?”
Barry let that sit for a moment, as a pompadoured beige-jacketed waiter came over to read off the specials with a slight Castilian lisp. He’d had to think long and hard before he picked up the phone to call Richie, making sure this was the best of all the bad options. It wasn’t that he didn’t get along with his cousin, but even after all these years there was a kind of no-man’s-land strewn with explosives between them.
“You know what?” He handed the waiter back his menu. “I think I’ll just have a club soda for now.”
His cousin’s eyes narrowed, as if he’d just realized he might end up getting stuck with the check today. “You not hungry?”
“My stomach’s been bothering me a little lately.”
“Really?” Richie leaned across the table and lowered his voice as the light scent of shrimp wafted through the air. “Look, Barry, I know you didn’t come all the way out here to ask about my house or my family. You said you had a problem on the phone that I might be able to help you out with.”
Instinctively, Barry found himself looking around the place to see who might be listening. But it was still a bit before the regular lunchtime crowd came in, and the only other diners in the restaurant were a middle-aged black woman wearing a baseball cap that said “Impure Thoughts” and an old white guy with a matinee idol mustache and a green velour running suit.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to be shy with me,” Richie said. “I always knew you never wanted anything to do with my side of the family.”
“Come on, Rich.” Barry feigned exasperation. “You know what that was about. It wasn’t anything personal.”
Richie held his eye just long enough to
show he wasn’t wholly convinced. The truth was, Barry had always been a little skittish about his mother’s side of the family, even before Richie started acting as a front for Bobby “Gaspipe” Caglione’s crew, buying up real estate in Cherry Hill. Back when they were kids, he used to notice that the Marcuses never had any books in the house and spent all their time at the dinner table picking their teeth and ridiculing other people for not being as materialistic as they were. He remembered his father storming out of a Seder one year in disgust because he wouldn’t go along with a plan Richie’s father had to defraud the company that insured both their stores on Central Avenue after the riots.
“All right, fuck it.” Richie rocked back and wiped a hand down the front of his sweater. “Let’s just let bygones be bygones. What do you need from me?”
“I was thinking of buying a handgun.”
“Were you?” A hint of mockery played on Richie’s lips. “And why a handgun? Why not a rifle? You wouldn’t need a license for one in New York State.”
“You know, it’s not something I’d want to leave lying around for the kids to find.” Barry exhaled. “A pistol might be a little easier to keep out of sight.”
“I see. And have you talked to Lynn about this?”
“Not so specifically. But I think we’re both feeling kind of concerned about security these days.”
Sandi Lanier dead. His wife getting stalked by her ex-boyfriend. i know what your doing. Yeah, concerned was a fair word.
“So, what, are you having a problem with somebody?” Richie’s eyebrows peaked.
“You really need to know all the details, Rich? I’m just looking to buy a little extra protection for me and my family.”
The last thing he needed was word about this whole mishagas getting around the New Jersey side. He remembered Richie’s sisters bitching about having to drive into the city for their wedding at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park eighteen years ago and then standing around the reception making fun of Lynn for having only two bridesmaids.
The Last Good Day Page 28