The Waning Age

by S. E. Grove

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by S. E. Grove

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE.

  ISBN 9780451479860

  Version_1

  FOR MY BROTHER, OLIVER

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1: Natalia

  2: Natalia

  3: Calvino

  4: Natalia

  5: Natalia

  6: Calvino

  7: Natalia

  8: Natalia

  9: Calvino

  10: Natalia

  11: Natalia

  12: Natalia

  13: Calvino

  14: Natalia

  15: Natalia

  16: Calvino

  17: Natalia

  18: Natalia

  19: Calvino

  20: Natalia

  21: Natalia

  22: Calvino

  23: Natalia

  24: Natalia

  25: Natalia

  26: Calvino

  27: Natalia

  28: Natalia

  29: Natalia

  30: Calvino

  31: Natalia

  32: Natalia

  33: Natalia

  34: Natalia

  35: Natalia

  36: Natalia

  37: Natalia

  38: Natalia

  39: Natalia

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “THE ALL-IMPORTANT EMOTION OF SYMPATHY IS DISTINCT FROM THAT OF LOVE. A mother may passionately love her sleeping and passive infant, but she can then hardly be said to feel sympathy for it. . . . Adam Smith formerly argued, as has Mr. Bain recently, that the basis of sympathy lies in our strong retentiveness of former states of pain or pleasure. Hence, ‘the sight of another person enduring hunger, cold, fatigue, revives in us some recollection of these states, which are painful even in idea.’ We are thus impelled to relieve the sufferings of another, in order that our own painful feelings may be at the same time relieved. . . . But I cannot see how this view explains the fact that sympathy is excited in an immeasurably stronger degree by a beloved than by an indifferent person. . . . Sympathy may at first have originated in the manner above suggested; but it seems now to have become an instinct, which is especially directed towards beloved objects. . . . In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend each other, it will have been increased, through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

  —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)

  1

  NATALIA

  SEPTEMBER 27

  The Landmark Hotel on Third Street off Market has four glass doors speckled with mercury and the portico is high-relief painted gold. The entrance gives the impression of a gilt mirror rescued from a duchess’s castle. Inside, the walls are white marble, the lobby chairs are rose damask, and the carpet looks like the polar bear population of the Arctic, scythed and steamrolled. In the atrium the marble spills from walls to floor, making a cold white bowl beneath the crystal lid of the ceiling. Hotel guests and tony San Franciscans come to the atrium for lunch or tea, to hear the lone cellist who sits beside the potted palms on most afternoons to play Beethoven or, if the weather’s foul, Schubert.

  I almost never go to the atrium, because I clean rooms on floors seven to ten. Even if I could afford the macarons, the spiced chocolate, the flowered tea, and the sugared almonds, I wouldn’t eat there. I don’t like the company.

  Case in point, the epic meltdown I’d been called down for. He was huddled on the floor of the men’s room off the atrium: tanned, broad-shouldered, and only a few years older than me by the look of him. He wore a navy linen jacket and cream-colored pants in summer wool. The shoes, ocher suede, had a quatrefoil on the leather sole. I recognized the brand. One shoe would have cost me two months’ wages. His knuckles were bleeding from where he’d pounded ineffectually at the marble. He was turned toward the wall, but I had caught a glimpse of his face when he flung it over his shoulder to shriek at us. Even brows, dark brown like the wavy hair; shadow on the jaw and dimpled chin; red, red eyes, wild as a hunted animal’s, bulging and stricken. Taken all together, he was an allegory of vanity on a precipice. Then again, terror distorts faces. There was no telling what he might have looked like had he been calm and quiet.

  I took a step forward to see if I could find out.

  “Are you sure, Nat?” Olsen asked me. “I could just call the police.” Olsen is one of the security guards. He’s solid but he’s new. He hasn’t had to deal with too many of these yet.

  “Nat can handle it,” Marta said confidently, shooing him away with wide hands. She has too much faith in me, but it’s true that I have practice.

  “I’ll give it a shot.” I raised my eyebrows at Marta. “Better if we can spare him the trip to San Quentin.”

  At this the kid turned around and screamed, “Put me in San Quentin! Put me in San Quentin if it will keep them away from me!”

  “Hey,” I said, taking another step forward. I knelt down on the cold floor a yard from his feet.

  “Stay away from me!” he screamed, throwing a terrified glance over his shoulder. He was trembling, his bones rattling against the marble.

  “My name is Nat,” I continued. “You don’t know me. You’ve never met me before. What’s your name?”

  He stared at me, eyes wide. He didn’t say anything.

  “See? I’m asking your name because we’ve never met. If you knew me, you would know my name, and I would know yours, right? What is it?”

  “Troy,” he said, turning away, his voice abruptly two octaves lower. It had a grated sound from all the screaming.

  “Ah, Troy,” I said. “Like the city, right? Hector and Achilles. Horses. Long speeches.” He didn’t budge. “You’re right,” I decided, changing tack. “Way too literary for the moment. Troy, let’s talk about what’s in this room.” I looked around like I was taking inventory of a freight car. “There’s two bathroom stalls, two urinals, two sinks, two mirrors. Two people on the floor—you and me. Two people standing—Marta and Olsen. Hm. Lots of twos.” He followed my commentary, his eyes darting warily around the room. “Very hard floors, which you know already, and rather dim lights. We used to have brighter lights but the men complained about what it did to their complexions.” I opened my eyes wide as if asking a three-year-old a question. “Do you know where we are?”

  Troy blinked his red eyes. He looked at me suspiciously. “A hotel?�
�

  “Yup.” I nodded. “We’re in the men’s room on the ground floor of the Landmark. The atrium is right past that door. Were you having lunch there?”

  “Ye-es?” The first part was a statement, and the second was a question.

  “Were you by yourself or were you with someone?”

  Troy crumpled. It always happens at some point, when the fear begins to ebb. His shaking grew more violent, but his eyes were soft. He wrapped his arms around himself. “My mom,” he whispered.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Frances Peters,” he said.

  I had to lean forward to hear it. “Great. Frances. And what is she wearing, do you remember, so we can find her more easily? We don’t have a loudspeaker in the atrium, worse luck.”

  “She has brown hair,” he said helpfully.

  “Okay, Troy.” I nodded to Olsen, who gave me a pair of raised eyebrows before heading out the door. “Can I put this on your shoulders?” I showed him the hotel blanket I was holding. He nodded. “Olsen is going to get her,” I said, to keep talking as I hung the blanket over him. “She’s the only other person who’s coming through that door. No one else. Just you and me, Marta and Olsen, and your mom.”

  He nodded dumbly. His teeth were chattering, so I put my arm around him and tried to rub some warmth into his shoulders. He leaned against me. His cologne had citrus and cedar in it, and his hair was damp from the sweat. He felt as fragile as a bird.

  “One time a couple months ago,” I went on conversationally, “someone dropped a cuff link in the left-hand sink. Remember, Marta?”

  Marta rolled her eyes. “Do I ever.”

  “They took the entire sink apart. Faucet, bowl, pipes. This place was a mess. You should have seen the contents of the pipes. Jewelry. Buttons. Money.”

  “Two bullets,” Marta added.

  “Yup. Even bullets. People do some strange things at the bathroom sink.”

  He shifted slightly so he could look at me sideways. His lower lip was trembling with cold. “Why are you being nice to me?” He forced the words out in a whisper.

  It was a good question. The easy answer—because I work here and I clean up messes—was only partly true. And wouldn’t help to distract him. “I have a kid brother,” I said, “and he makes me practice being nice, like exercise for ogres. Ten-year-olds can be very demanding.”

  The door had opened when I started speaking, admitting Mrs. Frances Peters. She wore a raw silk suit and tasseled loafers. All the surgery made her face look slightly misassembled, like an experiment with spare parts. Ultra white. But she had the same dark eyebrows as Troy and the same long jaw. She studied her trembling son impassively. She looked as maternal as a rusty table saw.

  “I know all about demanding ten-year-olds.” Her voice was cold metal. “Get up,” she said to Troy.

  I stood and helped Troy to his feet. “He’s going to need an arm on the way out,” I said to Spare Parts.

  “He can have your arm,” she replied. “Troy earned this.” She frowned, and her dark eyebrows strained together like leeches caught in concrete.

  I looked at her. Troy beside me didn’t even flinch. He was used to this. I debated for a moment and then wrapped my arm around Troy’s waist. “Let’s go,” I said. “Put your arm on my shoulders.”

  He draped his arm shakily over me; then, as we started moving, he clung to me like a lifeboat. We followed the imperious backside of Mrs. Frances Peters out into the atrium and into the shiny lobby and through the glass doors to the curb, where Olsen had a cab waiting. I folded Troy into the backseat.

  “Hey, dulce,” I said to him quietly, leaning down into the cab. “I’m going to need the blanket back.” He was staring straight ahead, still shivering like a man caught in a blizzard. “Troy,” I said.

  He looked up at me. “What?” he whispered. His pupils were still dilated with fear, but the light in them had changed. Through the flurry of the blizzard I could see a flicker of warmth.

  “Aw, shucks,” I said. “Just keep it.” I stepped back and Olsen closed the door.

  “Hey,” I said to Spare Parts. She stopped near the trunk of the car. I stepped closer so that I wouldn’t have to shout over the traffic. “If he’s too much trouble, you could always sell him. I hear the prisons pay top dollar for boys under twenty.”

  She stared at me, the contempt gathering in the lines of her face. “You insolent tart.”

  I stepped closer. I felt Olsen’s hand on my arm and I shook it off. “Tell me more. I still got lots to learn about insolence.”

  Olsen took my arm again and tugged. “Skip it this time,” he said quickly.

  “What is your name?” Troy’s mother asked coldly.

  “Natalia Peña. What are you going to do, Mrs. Frances Peters? Report to my boss that I peeled your son off the bathroom floor after his spectacular and completely avoidable crash? I’m sure she’ll be horrified. Just maybe not at me.”

  She looked hard at me for another moment, and then her eyes filled with lazy amusement. She chuckled. She rounded the car and got in, and the cab took off.

  2

  NATALIA

  SEPTEMBER 28—AFTERNOON

  Olsen had a point. Sometimes I do throw spitballs at the Landmark guests. Maybe even a little north of sometimes. But believe me, they always deserve it. And my supervisor never gets wind of it, because no one ever seems to care. When you’re well and truly moneyed, insults from a hotel cleaner brush off you like confetti.

  I figured Peters would ignore me in the manner of her predecessors, and Troy would be the same as all the other crash cases: splattered everywhere like raw egg, then cleaned up and gone for good.

  I was wrong on both counts.

  The next day there was a box and a bouquet waiting for me in the supply room. Marta was waiting for me, too. “You will not believe this,” she said.

  I dropped my bag on the Formica table and looked at the flowers. They were pretty. Chrysanthemums, tuberoses, and irises. Marta handed me a piece of ivory card stock embossed in gold with the letters TP.

  “You read the card?” I looked at her. “Who does that?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe I thought it was for me.”

  I snorted. The writing was in a light, uncertain hand. Dear Natalia, Thank you for helping me yesterday. I will never forget your kindness. I am sorry to have been so much trouble. Yours, Troy.

  “Huh,” I said.

  “He was handsome,” Marta announced.

  “Not really. His eyes were crazy bloodshot.”

  “You have very high standards.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Marta, I’m not interested in some rich brat.”

  “I didn’t think he was a brat.”

  “What’s in the box?” I asked, to distract her. I opened it. The blanket had been laundered with something that smelled of bergamot. Wrapped in tissue paper on top of it was a copy of Homer’s Iliad with another handwritten note. Dear Natalia, Hector—always Hector over Achilles. What do you think of Penthesilea? Yours, Troy. Beneath the signature was a phone number. The book looked expensive. It wasn’t in Greek or anything, but it was old. “Huh,” I said again, just to be original.

  “What?” Marta asked.

  “Guess he remembers what we talked about in the men’s room.”

  Marta looked at her watch and stood up. “When he comes to the hotel, you should say yes.”

  “Yes to what, exactly? Yes, I’d be happy to scrape you off the floor again?”

  Marta gave me a long look. “This one is different, Natita.”

  She was right, but not in the way she thought.

  * * *

  —

  Until three p.m. I washed sheets, I made beds with perfect corners, I picked up and threw out all manner of indescribable discarded things on bathroom floors, I scrubbed toilets and sinks and
tubs, I rearranged flowers, and I kept my nose down. Just like I do every day. Then I said my good-byes to Marta and the other cleaners and walked three blocks to the BART, avoiding a pair of hopped-up crazies who were fighting on the corner of Mission Street over the carcass of a cat. Two men, their faces wild, stretched into contortions of rage and terror. From six feet away, I could smell the mildew and urine and the lingering cloud of fear they’d taken—bitter, sharp, rancid. As I passed them, two cops moved in, taking them apart with no more trouble than trash collectors tossing bags in a truck.

  Fear is cheap. The Landmark crowd can buy better, though it amazes me how often they slum it. But for most people, fear is all they can afford. I get it: sometimes it’s better to feel something, even something bad, rather than nothing at all. It’s supposed to feel like a nervous flutter, a thickening of the senses, a thrum of anxious anticipation. It’s supposed to feel a little scary and a little exciting. It’s supposed to feel familiar.

  I’ve tried it a couple times. The first time, I saw a six-foot spider eating the contents of the refrigerator, and the second time, I was convinced that Cal—kid brother, almost eleven—had fallen from the upper-story window. There was no third time. When the drops are good, they’re not supposed to make you afraid of made-up things, but, obviously, the drops I could afford were not good.

  When Mom was alive she used to buy us some good times on birthdays. Seven hundred dollars an ounce, last I checked. At the back of the medicine chest she saved some top-quality peace of mind for emergencies (five hundred an ounce). But that’s all gone now, along with her. Maybe nothing’s changed. Happiness and tranquility weren’t cheap five hundred years ago, either. Bought with the blood and sweat of serfs, with the bondage of entire peoples, with the darkness of mines and the poison of mercury. Different form of payment now, same high cost. And what do you know, orphanhood doesn’t make them any cheaper. As my pal Raymond Chandler says, “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” An accurate misuse of the line, since Mom’s death did pretty much sink my chances of feeling anything. I couldn’t even afford to be glum for the funeral.