He stood at the sink and rubbed the goblets clean of potential water spots, the way he knew Karen liked, while she went into the living area to call for her car service to take him home. And he stewed. He’d not made any headway: to make an impression on Junie, to speak with her privately, to make plans. But perhaps more importantly, to get back on track with the brownstone renovation. Pickle was the twin who was always on the wrong side of some threshold. He threw the damp dish towel across the room. It hit the wall and slithered to the floor. Exhausted from an evening of defeats, he closed his eyes and shook his head.
Stan had been their mother’s helper in the kitchen; she appreciated the way he applied his obsessive fastidiousness to mundane housework. While the clatter of dish washing rang though their apartment, Pickle labored over homework at the dining room table. He was expecting a call from a boy down the street who’d asked for his notes on a test to be given the next day. Pickle was a good student—not brilliant like Stan—more workhorse, more dogged. But he was always prepared and classmates frequently called upon him to help out with assignments, a spirit of generosity his mother maintained had no intrinsic value. Stan, on the other hand, had a phenomenal memory, never wrote anything down, and was therefore useless to help anyone. This was part of his emerging savant brilliance and it delighted their mother endlessly.
The dish noise momentarily ceased when the phone rang. Expecting to be called to the phone, Pickle scooted his chair back, gathered up his notes, and made his way down the hall to the kitchen. He stopped just short of the doorway, still hidden from view.
His mother answered. “Hi, Paula. Sure, I’ve got time … Oh, I’m so sorry. What a shame. How does Bob feel about it? Well, at least you’re in agreement. Do you need me to go with you? Sometimes it’s easier if you’re with a woman, and I know Bob’s a bit squeamish. Okay, just let me know when and I’ll take a sick day. And Paula? You won’t regret this. I can honestly say, two are a burden.”
As he listened, Pickle’s knees turned to oatmeal. His legs buckled and he slid to the floor with his back against the wall. He felt slightly sick to his stomach. On any other day, he’d call for his mother to help him. But now, holding back the urge to vomit, he remembered that he should place his head between his knees. Pickle stared at the floor, as he listened to his mother continue to encourage her friend to have an abortion.
“The day of their birth? What a mess. I was hysterical. Out of my mind. Stan was already in my arms. He was enough. When Pickle came, I just screamed, ‘Put it back in—put it back in!’ Well, what are you going to do? Okay—talk tomorrow. Bye.”
Stan’s feet appeared. He gripped Pickle by the elbows, his hands still wet from the dishwater, pulled him to a standing position, and brought him back to the dining room.
Birth order, Pickle thought. It’s a bitch. He heard Karen come back into the kitchen and sensed her body near him. Pickle snapped his eyes open and stepped in front of her.
“Karen, we need to talk.”
She crossed her arms with defiance. “What, Pickle? It’s been a long day and I’m exceedingly tired. You have no idea what I’ve been juggling. Stan’s not coping well—”
“Fuck Stan,” Pickle said, his voice a steely whisper.
Karen rubbed her hands on her skirt fabric with impatience. “What? Hurry up. The car will be here in a few minutes.”
“Don’t you dare rush me, you little bitch.”
She backed away, knocking into a stool, and landed with her back against the opposite kitchen counter. Pickle stepped forward and pressed into her, forcing her to bend backward. He reached his arm around to the back of her head, and, holding on tightly to a clump of her hair, jerked her head further down to the counter. From a distance, they might have been attempting a tango dip.
Karen let a soft grunt escape as Pickle continued to pull at her hair. “Pickle, please. Junie’s downstairs—Stan’s in the next room.”
“Then be quiet. I’m just gonna talk to you.”
She tried to look at the floor.
“Look at me,” Pickle hissed.
She met his eyes. “Okay. Just let go of my hair. You’re hurting me.”
Pickle released Karen’s head and allowed her to straighten up. He arranged her hair—bringing the blonde wisps to the front of her shoulders, and then fluffed out her bangs. Karen’s shoulders relaxed and she added a few feet of distance.
“Feel better? You look good, Karen. Beautiful, actually. But you already know that. Now, here’s what we need to get straight. Who do you see? Do you see me? Or do you see Stan? Who am I?”
“Pickle,” she whispered.
“That’s right. And I’ve had just about enough of this shit.”
“What shit?”
“C’mon. Don’t play it that way. You’re too smart for that.”
She sighed, exasperated. “What do you want?”
“The brownstone. I want in. I’m way overdue.”
She began to object, but Pickle grabbed her arm and clamped his hand over her mouth.
“Don’t say anything. All that crap at dinner about Stan being held captive on the parlor floor? You may be able to spoon-feed that twaddle to him, but not me. The real question of the day is why the fuck I’m not living in the building I half own. This shit is going to stop today.”
Karen clawed his hand away from her mouth and pushed away from him. “It’s not that easy. These renovations have to be carefully planned—”
“Fuck the planning—you’ve been doing squat about it, and I’ve let this go on for too long.”
“I don’t know. I think the timing’s wrong, with Junie—”
“Jesus, Karen, listen up. The next time you speak any words to me, I wanna hear THE plan. I wanna hear that you’ve told Stan, and that you have your contractor lined up with a start date. All that good stuff you know how to do so well. I’ll give you four days. Not five. Not three. Four. So, today is Monday. Call me on Thursday at three. You got that?”
She jerked her head in a nod.
“I’m gonna say goodnight to Junie. Remember: Thursday. Are we clear?”
Karen stifled a cough and he took this as an affirmative response.
Pickle reached to an upper shelf, pulled down a half-empty bottle of vodka, unscrewed the cap and set the bottle in front of Karen with a bang. Then he placed a freshly washed and dried goblet next to the bottle.
“Drink up, Karen. Knock yourself out.”
Karen watched as Pickle went downstairs. Murmuring voices rose up through the radiator vents. The inflections sounded like plans, agreements, maybe the future. And then she heard a sound she realized she’d not heard all week—Junie laughing. Shortly, the downstairs front door opened and clicked shut.
Karen coughed and wiped moisture from her eyes with her hand. Then she dragged the warm tears across her lips. She tasted salt and noticed the dregs of red lipstick, leftover from hours before, now embedded into the heart line of her palm. She looked at the bottle and the glass and found herself pouring two fingers of vodka. Karen preferred her booze almost straight. She opened the freezer, removed one ice cube, and dropped it into the glass. The sound startled her, like an intruder. Her hands shook as she raised the glass up and smelled the liquor that supposedly had no odor. Then, with willpower she had rarely known herself to possess, Karen extended her arm and dumped the vodka down the drain.
10
KAREN WAVED TO HER CREW AS THEY TOOK their lunch in the noon sun. Multinational armies of men languished on the sidewalk along the perimeter of the building, speaking to each other in hushed native tongues. They laughed in bursts at private jokes she didn’t understand. Across the street, Karen looked up and saw a crane cantilevered off the roof as if it had no physical connection to the building. They always seemed to swivel just when she looked away—like a missed double play—like everything important in life.
She rode to the tenth floor and plopped her purse on top of some newly delivered Sheetrock stacked against a wall. Befor
e she spoke to her site manager, Karen would need to pull up her beauty britches. She dug through her purse and grabbed a small cosmetics bag, then touched up her lipstick, blotted excess nose oil, and spritzed on some perfume. Patrick wasn’t going to like what she had to say.
“I’m going to pull some guys off this job.” She spoke the words as a declaration, while he was still in motion—walking toward her. Karen had found that, when lowering the boom on a man, this approach was a fairly decent predictor of success.
Patrick stopped short and craned his neck in disbelief, and she felt satisfied that he was temporarily befuddled. “You’re kidding. What for? We’re behind schedule as it is. Nope. I don’t think we can do that, Karen.” He shook his head, as if he were the boss.
This was also a good sign: when the man said several sentences, all strung together, and then ended with a head movement. Karen made a point of remaining still and not countering his movement, which would be seen as weakness.
“It’s not negotiable,” she said.
“Why? This’ll completely screw up my schedule!”
Let the man become frustrated. “I’m sorry about that, but I wouldn’t do it unless it was urgent,” she apologized, without explaining.
“Well, I don’t know … is this a new job?” he asked.
“It’s gutting out my brownstone—the top two floors.”
“Oh, please. How can that be urgent? You’ve been living there for, what, a year? Why now?”
“That’s none of your business,” she said. Never let the man assume knowledge of your life.
Patrick dropped his empty coffee cup to the floor and stepped on it, twisting his construction boot. “Okay—go ahead. Lay it on me.”
The trick was, in a very short exchange of words, to make the man question the very nature of the business relationship he thought he understood. Karen was a master; she had him, and she dug in.
“It needs everything—kitchen, bathroom—basically soup to nuts. The plans are all set at the office. Stan and I designed both units when we did the first phase. I’d say you could get the demolition done in less than a week—then you’ll need about two weeks for the rough plumbing and electrical. I don’t want a day to go by without substantial work happening, and I need it to be in move-in condition in two months. Max,” she deadpanned.
He chewed on her words, then gave a wry smile. “That’s a lot of ‘needs,’ Karen.” He paused. “Does Stan know about this?”
She was at the point of play where she’d get personal, which was, she knew, what Patrick actually needed from the beginning. Some kind of confessional—better yet, a collusion, and at Stan’s expense.
“Patrick. You know very well that Stan’s never privy to the scheduling of our projects. But no, he doesn’t know. Not yet. He’s been a mess since the accident. So, before I do tell him, I need assurances that you’ll be all over this. I’ve just got to finish the brownstone.” She pushed out her lower lip and raised one eyebrow simultaneously. “I’m counting on you.” When placing the power back in the man’s palm, he’ll close his hand like a fist.
Patrick turned and walked to the other side of the room. He sat on a windowsill and looked up to the view, which she knew was the Deco spire of the Chrysler Building. Typically, men like to think about something phallic before they agree with a woman.
He shrugged in defeat. “Understood, Karen. But I’m reluctant to take any of my guys off this job. The clients are adding extras right and left.”
“Tell me about it. Give me options.” Now they were equals, and in cahoots. And the crazy thing was that she had to repeat this nonsense nearly every other day.
“Well, we have that crew finishing the small job in the Village. I was going to put those guys into 15 Central Park West just to speed that along. Gutting those four bathrooms—it’s become massive. But at least that client still has his apartment on the lower floor. I’m thinking I could send the Village guys over to you.”
“The Village job will be done in, what, three or four days. Right? That’ll work.” She’d given him his bone and allowed him to gnaw on it. Then it was easy: just wait until he came up with the solution, which Karen already knew was the correct option.
“Yeah, maybe sooner. We’re just about finished with the punch list.” Patrick scratched his beard with stubby blackened fingernails, thinking. “Send me a PDF of the plans. It’ll take me the week to organize and order stuff. We’ll load into the brownstone next Monday. I’ll get the dumpsters set for that entire week. We’re lucky because you own the whole building. We didn’t have to go through the DOB when we did the first phase, so let’s just act ‘as if.’ But Karen, you’ve got to give me ten to twelve weeks.”
This was to be her only concession. But she didn’t really have a choice because construction was like a weather system; it couldn’t be predicted from one day to the next. Pickle would just have to swallow it.
They walked to the elevator and Patrick thumbed the service button. Dust pushed through the bottom of the metal doors as the lift began to rise. When he walked into the blanketed shaft, Karen held the doors open for a moment longer. “We understand each other—right, Patrick?”
He dropped his head with deliberate weight, and she was gratified at speaking the last words.
As the doors closed, Karen pivoted on her kitten heel and walked to the back of the apartment, into a small room designated as a cozy study. She looked out the window and saw the crane pluck a piano from the sidewalk and lift it with pincers. It then prepared to maneuver the piano into an enormous window across the street, at the same level as her floor. Obviously, there was no way to get the thing up through the building. She found herself mesmerized by the sheer audacity of such a solution to someone’s personal need. That’s what life seemed to be reduced to, Karen thought. If there was a hole, a gap, any opening whatsoever—the effort would be made. Men.
The piano began to spin, and a man at street level screamed instructions into a walkie-talkie to the crane operator. Karen turned away. The scene made her woozy and she lost her balance. Suddenly she was on her hands and knees, heaving up her breakfast into an empty plastic paint bucket, conveniently within range. Her heart felt as if it might punch out of her chest and she had a familiar feeling of overwhelming and futile dread—that she was losing something she’d never owned. Karen hung her head and sobbed.
A plumber, working in a nearby bathroom, came running with a wrench in his hand. He stopped when he saw Karen, and waited about ten seconds as she continued to cry.
“Jaysus. Karen. What in Christ’s name’s wrong?”
Waving him away, Karen shoved the bucket across the floor. He leaned over to look into it, grimaced, then picked it up and headed back to the bathroom. “You take care, now.”
Karen kicked the door shut after him, slumped down to the dusty floor and splayed her legs out in front of her. She kicked off her shoes and they flew in opposite directions, the heels landing with sharp thuds. It was after the noon hour and Karen’s joints ached, as if in need of a lube job; she felt mentally barren and almost imbecilic. She crawled about ten feet across the floor to an enormous fireplace. It was new—never been fired—so she curled up inside it and could almost imagine the warmth of a benign blue flame. Her head found a nearby sack of dry cement for a pillow. Thoughts of Junie in the Volvo on the night of the crash came to mind, with her arms curled up around her head so no one would see her pain. Karen reached into her purse, turned off her phone, cradled her arms up and over, and rocked herself to nowhere.
The late-day sunlight warmed Karen’s face, waking her with a start. She looked around, slightly bewildered, and saw that the window across the street was now shut with curtains drawn, and she imagined someone playing Chopin mazurkas on a freshly tuned piano. Grit from the cement bag had adhered to her cheek; the granules had mixed with her sweat. She troweled off the slurry with her forefinger, dragged it into her mouth, bit down on the rough sand and swallowed. Vodka was on her mind.
Digging into her purse, Karen found her phone—4:30 p.m. She’d slept over three hours. Ten texts and one voicemail stared at her. Scrolling down, she saw that most of the texts were from Stan. No one left voice messages anymore—so she looked to see who it was from. Pickle.
Karen rolled onto her back as Pickle’s soft voice bounced against her eardrum. “I knew you wouldn’t pick up and don’t bother calling back. Just this: Thursday.”
She punched Stan’s cell number.
“Where the hell have you been? The office has been calling me all day. I didn’t know what to tell them. Karen, where have you been?”
“Dear God. Shut up already. Everything’s fine. I was stuck in the subway for hours and then I got something to eat. It’s been a rough day, Stan. I don’t want to discuss it, okay?”
“Whatever. I just don’t like getting calls from people in the office. I don’t know them. It’s uncomfortable for me.”
“Well, if you made an effort to actually introduce yourself to your employees, then that little problem would be cleared up. How’s Junie?”
“How the hell should I know? She’s down there, I guess.”
“Is she playing Mahler still?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” Karen mewled.
“Yes. She came up and asked for more CDs. I showed her what was left in the living-room cabinet. She cleaned the shelf out. Greedy little thing. Though I have to admit, her taste in music is impressive. When’re you coming home?”
“Calm down. Right now.”
11
PICKLE STROLLED NORTH OF THE APARTMENTS. He headed up Cabrini Boulevard until he got to 190th Street, turned onto Margaret Corbin Drive and approached the entrance to the Cloisters. The reassembled French abbeys rose in front of him, massive and earthy, with chiseled façades. Pickle visited the Cloisters often, but not so much for the twelfth-century museum—rather, for the unobstructed view to the Palisades cliffs across the Hudson River. Rounding the perimeter of the grounds, he headed toward the farthest bench and sat.
Pickle’s Progress Page 8