“I’m sorry. That’s why I was able to respond so fast that night.”
Junie shook her head rapidly. “I don’t want to think about that stuff. The mornings are the only time I’m free from those sorts of thoughts.”
“Okay. Sure.”
She took a deep breath, and then sheepishly smiled. “I didn’t tell Karen and Stan about our museum trip.”
“Oh?” Pickle said with a blank expression.
“Yeah. It’s not that I intentionally kept it from them. More like they didn’t ask. Plus, it sounds like they’re dealing with a lot right now. They argue all the time. What’s going on there? I mean, do they even like each other?”
Pickle squirmed. “They’re married. All couples argue, right?”
“It’s worse than that. She yells at him … I feel sorry for him.”
“Oh, please. Stan can take care of himself. Try not to take it too seriously. It’s the way they let off steam.”
“I don’t know. I just stay out of the way.” She rubbed her eyes of sleep and gulped down her espresso. “But there’s something else: I feel odd around Stan.”
Pickle slumped further into his chair. He didn’t relish discussing the world according to Stan, Part One. But he decided to accommodate her. “How so?”
“Well, it’s weird. You guys are twins.”
Pickle chuckled. “Right?”
She smiled at her own obvious statement. “When I look at Stan, I expect him to act like you and kind of be you. And then he doesn’t, or isn’t. Hard to explain. But it’s unnerving.”
“Yeah, you’re not the only one who’s said that. But here’s the thing: You’ll get used to him. Just don’t expect too much, is all I’m saying.”
“Of course. Good advice.”
Junie leaned in closer to Pickle. “But it comes down to feeling more comfortable around you, Pickle. See, you took my statement that night.”
She stopped and began to fiddle with the collar of her robe. Pickle was aching for her to continue because he felt a compliment collecting in her head. “Go on?”
“That night at the police station, you seemed to say all the right words. I’ve been thinking about that since our museum trip and I guess I wanted to thank you.”
“It’s my job.”
“Well, you’re very good at it.”
Pickle wanted to shut this down. He didn’t want her to feel indebted to him. No. When Junie ultimately did come to him, it would flow from an impulse she couldn’t control. He imagined that first she would be curious about him, and he knew she already was. Then she would consider him a friend—they were close to that, as well. As a lover, casual at first would suffice. Then the most pristine love imaginable would blossom. This love would feel shocking, even catastrophic, like a tsunami pointed directly toward his heart. It would knock him down and wash him clean. It would feel pure. It would look gorgeous. It would sound fizzy. It would taste … well, something like that.
Pickle broke into his own fantasies. “Are you up for another Pickle McArdle New York City sightseeing extravaganza this week?”
“Sure. But don’t you have to work?”
Pickle pounded his chest in a mock ape gesture. “I’m a big shot—king of the asphalt jungle. I do whatever I want.”
“Okay, then. What do you suggest?”
He looked carefully at her hair, for what seemed like the thousandth time. “How ’bout the Frick? Wednesday morning?”
Junie clapped her hands. “Oh, I haven’t been there in such a long time. That sounds great.”
“Then plan on lunch afterwards. Maybe we’ll hit the Viennese café at the Neue Galerie.”
Footsteps clomped down the stairway. “Junie! Look what I brought you.”
Karen rounded the corner carrying several garment bags draped over her arms. She stopped and stiffened. “Pickle.”
“Karen?” Pickle responded tersely.
She tossed the bags onto Junie’s bed and then joined them to pour herself an espresso and have a bite of biscotti. The Doodles jumped off the sofa and scrambled around the corner, expecting something, anything.
“You’re early,” Karen scolded.
Pickle ignored the comment, looked Karen up and down, and gave a cat-whistle.
“Look at you. I feel honored that you dressed up for our meeting today. You look amazing. Doesn’t she, Junie?”
“She really does,” Junie agreed with admiration.
Karen bristled, and turned to Junie. “I brought down a couple of outfits I think you’ll love. When we go up for the meeting, why don’t you try them on and see if anything suits. Oh, and I’ve cancelled our dog walker—could you see to The Doodles today?”
“Of course. Stan’s going to work?” Junie asked.
“Yeah, and he’s getting his bandage off later this afternoon. Seems he wants to rejoin the land of the living, which is good, because the office needs him.”
This was typical Karen: railroading everything and everyone while pissing all over anything within ten miles. Reminding Junie of how indispensable Stan was? Completely unnecessary. And trying to lure her with fancy overpriced clothes? Utterly ridiculous. Not to mention reprehensible. Pickle looked at his watch and began to muscle Karen toward the stairway.
“It’s almost time,” he warned.
“Whatever,” Karen said.
They climbed the stairs in silence, his hand pushing at her lower back. Work, he saw, was already well under way. Plastic zippered shields hung from ceiling to floor. Construction guys milled about, chatting about the start of baseball season. All Mets fans, apparently.
Patrick arrived just as Stan emerged from the back bedroom and they all ascended to what would be Pickle’s lower level. As Karen reviewed the details of the electrical and plumbing specifications with Patrick, Stan and Pickle walked to the front windows.
Pickle sized up his brother’s navy blue Zac Posen suit and plaid bow tie. “So. You’re going in today.”
“Yeah. I’m sick of myself at this point. If I stay in this house any longer, I’ll start drinking again,” Stan said.
“You’ve been sober?”
“So far.”
“Karen too?”
“So far.”
“Huh. Will it last?”
“Who the fuck knows? Day at a time …”
“That’s what they say. But what’s the difference this time?”
Stan shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“I guess not.”
“I hesitate to say this, but …”
“What?”
“That girl down there.”
“Junie? What about her?” Pickle felt a tension build in his throat, like he was on the verge of a sneeze.
Stan perched on the dusty windowsill, then quickly stood up again and brushed off his backside. “It’s hard to pinpoint. She’s getting to me. I wouldn’t say in a good way, though Karen spins it like that. She’s been down there nonstop with some outfit or another. Dressing the girl up. You’d think it was Halloween, but for Project Runway. But here’s the thing: the girl’s down there. And I’m aware she can hear me when I walk around.”
“So?”
“Well, it’s an odd sensation—to know that someone you don’t know at all is in your house day and night. And she’s listening.”
“What do you mean, listening? How would you know that?”
“It’s a feeling I have. What is this girl doing in my house?” Stan said, shaking his head with disbelief. “Karen. She can really be so pushy.”
“Have you even talked to her?”
“Junie? Not really. Well, maybe a little …” Stan shuddered and opened the window a crack. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I feel clammy. Plus, I’m getting this blasted bandage off today and I’m a wreck about it.”
“Stan, that’s called progress—a good thing.”
As Stan walked away to join Patrick and Karen, Pickle stared out the window and tried to imagine having this view in just a few weeks. Loo
king across the street onto the second floor of another brownstone, pretty much the same as his, he noticed a woman in a pink T-shirt working at her computer at the dining table. The woman concentrated on the screen, picked up a cell phone, spoke about two sentences and then slammed it down on the table. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned. Took a swig of something red from a wine glass. Drinking in the morning? The woman shut the laptop and shoved it to the side. She lay her head down on the table. Eventually her shoulders trembled, and it became clear that she was sobbing.
He heard his name being repeated—Pickle—over and over as they discussed his future at the other end of the room. He looked in the direction of his name and saw Karen, Stan, and Patrick flocked together like agreeable geese, pointing to construction plans and walls not yet built. “Pickle wants this. This would be good for Pickle. Pickle needs …”
Pickle, Pickle, Pickle. The peppered “Ps” drove into his ears, beating inside his skull. His breathing became rapid and then bottomed out to where he could barely catch any air. White dots clouded his vision. He rubbed his eyes. The woman across the street was gone now and he wondered where she was. To the kitchen for more wine? To the bathroom to blow her nose and rinse her face? To the bedroom to shut out the world? Then, he saw her front door open. She emerged with four standard poodles. They were apricot—close to Junie’s hair color. Leaning with his head against the pane of glass, Pickle followed the woman, dragging the dogs toward Riverside Park. And he listened to the sound of his name from across the room.
For the twins’ seventh birthday party, ten children sat around a dining table covered with a grimy plastic tablecloth. Their mother could afford only one cake, so she’d split it in half and dragged each section to either end of the table.
For some reason, a few of the kids began reciting the nursery rhyme, “Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers.” Their mother picked up on the frenzy and roused the children into screaming the ditty at the top of their lungs. Pickle wanted them to stop, as did Stan. Both twins cupped their hands over their ears, tears streaming down their cheeks. Stan had his own reasons for breaking down—but for Pickle, he heard his birth name—Peter—being destroyed.
Pickle knew that Peter was a biblical person—a saint (whatever that was)—and had been crucified upside down. Apparently, Saint Peter didn’t want to be killed in the same manner as Jesus, who’d died, upright, on the cross. Pickle had toggled this story together from random Sunday-school classes his mother made the twins attend until she’d grown tired of getting up early every Sunday. Initially, Pickle had no idea who Jesus was either, though entire classes had been devoted to this Jesus person, who, it ended up, was the Son of God. But Peter! He was special—because not only was he Jesus’s friend, he was also an upside-down saint. But Pickle’s name, Peter, went to the devil on his seventh birthday, when he became known as a joke in a nursery rhyme.
“Pickle? Pickle? Pickle!” Karen was yelling at him. He looked up, confused.
“Do you want an elongated toilet?” Patrick asked. “We’re marking out the location of the door swing.”
Pickle strode over and stood directly in front of Patrick, almost nose to nose, and yelled, “How the fuck should I know? Do what’s right. And get this shit done in four weeks.”
Patrick jerked back, vaguely bobbing his head with lowered eyes.
Pickle heard a noise at the stairway. Junie appeared at the top of the stairs, dressed in an outfit Karen had worn to his apartment a few days before the accident on the bridge. He remembered because he’d removed it from her body himself and had thrown it across the room. Karen had screamed at him for not respecting her things. He told her it was just a dress, for God’s sake. They’d fought hard and then fucked immediately after.
He ran down the stairs, passing Junie. He could smell Karen’s perfume—musk—embedded into the cloth, now presumably all over Junie’s skin. Once he got out onto the sidewalk, Pickle sat on one of Karen’s planters. The woman from across the street was returning. The dogs seemed happy enough, no longer straining at their leads. Pickle looked up to find the sun, and then walked in the opposite direction.
17
THE LIPSTICK BUILDING, NAMED FOR ITS TUBE shape, glistened as spears of sunlight glinted off the imperial red granite façade. Karen and Stan stepped out of a cab and she shot a glance to the top of the building. What she wouldn’t give to be up there—in the blue yonder—flying with a sharp-eyed hawk, or just a flock of dumb pigeons. Birds found freedom when a warm wind lifted them away from the dangers on the ground. The notion appealed to Karen; she wanted to escape.
The meeting had dispersed quickly after Pickle’s tantrum. Patrick expressed dismay, doubting he could work for such a brute. Karen stepped in to placate him with assurances that she would act as a buffer. Stan wandered over to the front window to focus on anything but the discomfort of the drama that had just unfolded. These men. They behaved like a couple of temperamental musth elephants she was forced to herd with a ringmaster’s whip—trunk-to-tail and tail-to-trunk.
Karen had grown up with men, lots of them; they filed into her home every weekend. The high-stakes poker games began on Friday evenings after she and her sister, Betsy, finished dinner. They ended late Sunday mornings, just in time for the weekend lineup of football games, when the men would then ease back into sobriety.
While the men bet their money around the dining room table, Karen and Betsy lounged in the adjoining small den watching TV, which was always kept at a low volume so Karen could hear when her father called on her to provide something for the men. It was important that she remain obedient—vigilant, really—a girl who, as the oldest, was ready to do her father’s bidding, all so the poker games could flow without interruption. With the curtains drawn shut, night eased into day and back again to a longer night. No one seemed to notice and that was the point.
Karen learned from the men’s banter that for some reason aces were the best, kings the next, and so on down the line. But there was something called a royal flush that she understood had great power. A flush was a feeling of blood rushing to her head or water down a toilet and in a secret way, she enjoyed the contrary associations. Still, she kept her eye on the progress of the game, and noted her father’s knee under the table. When it jiggled a bit faster, this usually meant he was “up.” If there was no movement, he was “down.” Her father’s quiet legs, like stiff, uncooked spaghetti that could snap with little effort, kept Karen particularly on guard.
It was all so beautiful and perfectly choreographed, a timeless Ashton ballet. The cards, held in the men’s chubby fingers, spread out like wings of a preening peacock. Their gold rings weren’t on the usual ring finger (and so she assumed they were all bachelors), but on the pinky, with heavy chunks of metal swallowing small stones in the center that occasionally caught the light of the dining room drop chandelier. The men, even as they sat for many hours, remained in constant motion by gathering their cards into a stack and then re-fanning them throughout the game. This was how they dissipated their tension—by manipulating the cards, flicking the edges, placing them down on the table and stretching their muscled arms over their heads, cracking their knuckles, rubbing their hands back and forth. And always the laughter that sounded to Karen like boulders crashing down from a mountaintop, heavy and dangerous. These men were serious people, and the weekend was the most important time of the week for her father.
He called to her with a quiet whistle, like the whoop of an exotic crane. Karen jumped up in the middle of her B movie to provide fresh liquor for the men, whose glasses now held only thin slivers of watery ice, chinking at the bottom of the glass. Karen knew the alcohol by the tint: scotch looked like urine, bourbon looked like honey, and vodka like water. This was Karen’s expertise, and it was easy. All she needed to do was scoop up the glass, assess the diluted color, drop in a few cubes of ice, and then refill. Returning to the dining room, she placed the freshened drinks to the side of each man, having memorized
who got what. Once Karen knew she had the ability to stay ahead of what the men needed, it really wasn’t all that bad. Because the men, she came to understand, were fairly predictable.
Karen and Stan headed for the back door to their office suite. This discreet entrance allowed them to settle in before the dramas of the day pressed. They marched single file down the long hallway, lined on both sides with hundreds of tubes of red lipstick sitting on the chair-rail lip. Stan believed in continuity of concept—both macro to micro—inside and out. Indeed, every woman in the firm was asked to wear red lipstick as an homage to the building. To help facilitate this odd unwritten rule, the lipsticks were there for use, should anyone forget to bring their own.
Stan stood at his office door threshold, with one foot in the hallway, the other in his office. “What should I do first?”
“Sift through the emails. Suzie’s saved the ones you need to answer personally in a separate folder. Start there. Then we’ll have a staff meeting at two to get everyone up to speed.”
“Do I have to be there?” Stan pouted.
“Jesus, Stan, of course. You don’t have to say anything—just listen. And think about the Kinsey project. We have another meeting with them in a week. It’s a biggie and we want to lock it up. I put our bid proposals, drawings, and concept sketches on the credenza behind your desk. Come up with one more concept—over and above what we’ve already given them. And remember, you’re going to get that bandage ripped off this afternoon.”
Stan paused before he went into his office, and scrutinized the lipsticks that ran down the hallway. “Karen, have someone fix those—they look sloppy,” he said with irritation.
“Oh God. The cleaning crew must have done that.”
“Well, fire that crew!”
“Stan, these people are part of building maintenance. We have no control over them.”
“The hell we don’t. I’ll hire my own cleaning staff. I can’t walk into this chaos. Totally unacceptable—”
She slapped her hand over his mouth. “Done? Go into your office. I don’t wanna see you ’til two.”
Pickle’s Progress Page 12