Authors: Sarah Langan
“I’ll write you a check. First, last, and deposit?” she asked in one breath, like if she didn’t draw her pen fast enough, another homeless New Yorker would barge through the door with more money and better credit.
Edgardo frowned.
“I want the apartment,” she repeated, then joined him at the window overlooking Central Park. A tiny red ant crawled across the glass, and he smooshed it with his thumb. Down below, ducks bobbed under the small waves of the Harlem Meer, and joggers sprinted along the reservoir. If she squinted, she could even see the Parkside Plaza renovation on 59
th
Street.
Edgardo tapped his cane. Once. Twice. Three times. Four. He was stalling. She was about to offer him a C-note bribe (it was all she could afford, unless she started turning tricks), when he finally spoke: “They want someone with your job. That’s why you’re here. Someone who can build things this time. Last one, fine voice, but no good with her hands.”
She beamed. “I’m a real professional. It’s very profes
sional. A career. I’m not home during the day making noise or having part—”
He cut her off. “—But I like you, you see? You stupid, like my Stephanie.”
“What did you call me?”
His eyes watered again. She decided maybe his tear ducts were broken. “They want it a secret. I could lose my job. But I should tell you.”
Her stomach sank. Lead water mains. Asbestos-filled walls. Rats. She’d have to share the kitchen with fifty Chinamen. Well…still might be worth it.
“There was an accident,” he said.
She cocked her head. An old lady fell out the window. A neighbor’s malnourished pit bull developed an appetite for human babies. Whatever. For the last example of Chaotic Naturalism in the world, she could handle tag-team serial killers in tights.
“You heard about her. The woman and her babies. Happened in July. The bathtub?”
“I just finished school—architecture,” she told him. Barely scraped by. Between Saraub and her final project,
using negative space to define boundaries in domestic environments,
she was still recovering. When she woke up in the mornings lately, she had a hard time getting out of bed, and not because she was depressed. She was exhausted.
“I haven’t even seen a movie in three months…It’s been hard. I broke up with my boyfriend. That’s why I’m moving.” She heard herself, and decided she ought to make some friends instead of burdening random building superintendents with her problems.
Edgardo’s knobby walking cane
tap-tap-tapped
as he limped to the center of the den, where the floor buckled by about two inches. A piece of it had broken to reveal a rotted support beam. Something heavy and damp (an old-fashioned wet bar?) must have rested on it for years and years. “Well, you didn’t miss
this
story,” he said.
Edgardo, my friend, you overestimate me,
she thought.
To get her attention, he banged his cane hard against the warp in the floor in four quick strikes:
Whock!-Whock! Whock!-Whock!
Then he cleared his throat. “The last tenant was fighting with her husband for the children. He lived in…New Jersey. A McMansion, you know? They go up overnight, as big as this whole building. Me? I’d rather live in a sewer. But the fights. Very ugly, the fights. The neighbors complained when he came.”
Audrey nodded. “McMansions are designed by halfwits. You know, they waste twice as much energy as houses with plaster instead of drywall? The American family keeps getting smaller and its houses keep getting bigger…It’s actually a very lonely way to live.”
Edgardo waved his knobby cane at her. “Not the point! The point is she was wrong fit for The Breviary. That’s why the rent is low. The board wants to be able to pick the right kind of tenant—no one like her ever again.”
She nodded, but couldn’t help but smile. Down the hall, the kitchen door was open. Sure, whatever he was about to tell her was a doozy, but you could fit a six-person table in there!
“The Mami, she drowned her babies in the bathtub. Then she slit her wrists and climbed in with them,” Edgardo said.
“Oh, boy,” she said.
He banged his cane on the rotten floor to get her attention, then showed her his clenched fist. “Four babies and Mami.” He lifted his thumb. “One!” Then he lifted his index finger. “Two!” His middle finger. “Three!” His fourth finger, which she now noticed was adorned by a handsome copper ring. “Four!” Finally, his pinky, so that he was showing her his open palm. “And Mami makes five! All dead, right here.”
Her heart sank a little, then rested in her stomach, and then—oops!—landed in her shoes. She
had
heard about this. The story had been on the cover of every newspaper for days:
MOMMY KILLER, TRAGEDY STRIKES ON THE UPPER WEST SIDE, DISTRAUGHT HUSBAND BLAMES CITY FOR NOT ACTING ON ABUSE COMPLAINTS.
She thought about that, and now she knew why the prewar bathroom tiles had been replaced with ugly white monstrosities and a half Jacuzzi from Home Depot: water damage. “No,” she groaned.
“They repainted and tore up all the carpet. Didn’t even resell the old—what was it—claw-foot tub. They had it destroyed,” he offered, like he’d decided to soften the blow.
“How awful,” she said.
He winced, so that his sun-damaged skin pruned along his eyes and mouth. “Yes. Bad. Worst part: her husband was on his way that morning. He was going to take them. Got the…the custody.”
Audrey looked out the window. The sun shone bright, but strangely, this place didn’t gather much sunlight. She sighed. So her luck wasn’t in after all. Surprise, surprise.
Unexpectedly, Edgardo cupped her shoulder. He was shorter, so he had to reach. Maybe not tuna on his breath. Maybe sardines. “All people have dark side. A nice lady like you, best you never meet yours. You find a place where I live. In Queens. Is better for you. I rent this to a yuppie. They don’t notice if it’s haunted. Don’t have gravitas to know. You…” He eyed her in a sympathetic way, and she understood that the way he’d winked at her in the elevator really had been paternal. “You’ll notice.”
She sighed. If she didn’t find a place soon, she’d miss the October rentals and would have to pay another month to stay at the Golden Nugget Hotel through November. She’d be a fool to turn this place down. Still, those kids.
Queens,
she decided. She’d find a short-term studio out there, get some rest, and after a few months, figure out her next step. This breakup with Saraub might be temporary, so why sign a yearlong lease? Yes, this place was amazing. She could spend her life studying it. But that didn’t mean she ought to live in it. A terrible thing had happened here. Something so bad it was bound to have left a stain. She was about to tell Edgardo she’d decided to take his advice when he added: “Better you find a nice man. Girl like you should be married. Have someone to take care of you.”
Her reaction was immediate, like flinching when someone jabs. “I’m taking it,” she said.
He frowned and shook his head a few times, mumbling something under his breath:
Gringo?
Then he closed his eyes. “Okay. First floor, Apartment C. They’ll interview you, and they have paperwork.”
He didn’t wait for her to follow when he clopped out of apartment 14B. As they rode down the elevator in their separate corners, she wanted to let Edgardo know that she appreciated his concern. Instead, the doors opened, and they parted, in silence.
O
n the morning of the move, Audrey packed fast. There wasn’t much to take: a rolling suitcase full of clothes and a prickly cactus named Wolverine. She was leaving in an hour, and she didn’t plan on coming back.
Life at the Golden Nugget was a downer. Prematurely aged hookers with bad hygiene (obviously) trolled the street corners, and the vendors who sold chick-pea samosas also sold crack. Their empty, blue-stoppered vials clogged the gutters like Harlem’s answer to fall leaves. You get what you pay for, and this hotel was the cheapest place in Manhattan that didn’t charge by the hour. She might have found her tenure here more disquieting if she hadn’t spent most of it in bed, catching up on her sleep. Four weeks later, she was still exhausted.
She traced the letter “S” along the nightstand with
her finger and wondered: was she depressed? She shook her head. No, her life had just moved too fast since she’d moved to this city, and her body needed time to catch up. She’d had a single weekend between graduation and the new job. Looking back, she probably should have taken some time to travel, or at least get a haircut. But she’d been too excited. Vesuvius was one of the best firms in the city. Besides, this was a recession; architects weren’t getting hired, they were getting fired. She’d been lucky to get the offer at all. The
Daily News’
front page last week had proclaimed the death of new construction, and the illustration below it had been a hairline-fracture-cracked tombstone that read:
N.Y.C.
1524–2012
REST IN PEACE
In this economic environment, only a fool would take vacation.
She noticed then that the red light on the hotel phone was blinking: a message. Her stomach turned. Saraub. Most of her stuff was still in boxes at his apartment, and this morning he was supposed to oversee the movers on his end while she waited at The Breviary. It was sporting of him to help. But that was Saraub: a pathologically good sport.
She lifted the receiver to her ear. It beeped like it was alive. At first, he’d given her the space she’d asked for, but as the month came to a close, he’d called more often, and the pretexts had gotten increasingly lame: “Do you want all your clothes, or just your fall stuff, so when you come back to me, the move won’t be so big?” and, “Are you eating right? You know how you get when you miss breakfast,” or her favorite, “Do you know where my Frank Miller comics are at?…You better not have tossed them, because they’re collector’s items!”
He’d shown the patience of a saint until last night. She’d called to make sure he was set for the move, and after a little small talk he’d erupted. “You’re really leaving me after everything we’ve been through? Can we talk about this? CAN WE PLEASE FUCKING TALK ABOUT THIS?” he’d yelled.
With the men in his family working abroad, Saraub had been raised by the shrew quartet—his mother and three aunts. They’d taught him early never to raise a voice or a hand against a woman. When he got mad as a teenager, his mother had cried and pretended to be frightened. Not surprisingly, until Audrey came along, Sheila Ramesh had won every argument. To this day, when he was pissed off, he drank neat double shots of Wild Turkey at Blondie’s Bar, or waited until she wasn’t home and punched something. It had only recently dawned on her that those eye-level round smudges on the white-painted walls in his study alcove were evidence of his fists.
So, when he’d raised his voice for the first time that she’d known him last night, she’d understood that something was brewing. One month after their breakup, they were about to have their first knock-down, drag-out. As soon as she figured that out, she’d hung up fast, like the phone was radioactive.
Now, the phone continued to beep in her ear. But she’d signed the lease at The Breviary. Even if she wanted, there was no turning back. So she hung up, then wiped her eyes, because they were wet.
Out the crud-covered window and a few stories down, horns bleated. The diesel fumes from trucks making their Manhattan produce deliveries darkened the air. Farther north, along the Marcus Garvey Housing Projects, families wearing their Sunday best headed off to church. They walked in groups of three and four. A pair of girls, twins she guessed, wore sailor dresses with matching straw bonnets.
Unbidden, she imagined her children with Saraub. Dark-skinned towheads with wise little eyes. She’d dress them in something obscenely adorable, and they’d complain it was child abuse. “Matching corduroy overalls?” she’d shoot back. “If that’s your biggest problem, I win mother of the year.”
As she watched, her grin faded. In her mind, the concrete sidewalk rose up like a boil until it burst. It swallowed the happy family, and like a wave, dragged them down underground. The trees and buildings, idle on a windless day, would make indifferent witnesses, and steel trucks would honk without cease, as if it had never happened at all.
Would the grown-ups go first,
she wondered,
or the kids?
Or did that matter, because eventually, this city swallowed everyone?
She closed her eyes, ran her thick, scarred fingers along the window. She’d been imagining holes a lot lately. Partly it was a real fear, partly it was the obsessive-compulsive disorder—she got ideas in her head, and couldn’t evict them until they were ready to go. Over the years, she’d learned to control her disease, and took some pride in the fact that not even Saraub had ever guessed that her meticulousness was actually a pathology.
If she patted her left thigh and needed to even it out and pat the right, she did it so slyly that only someone looking for it would notice. Wrinkled knuckles reminded her of tiny baby rodents, so she never looked at people’s hands, and when possible, kept her own in loosely curled fists. When she’d felt compelled to scrub the bathroom floor two times (or maybe three) while living with Saraub, she’d done it with the door closed and run the tub so he’d thought she was taking a bath. When she had bad thoughts, like imagining poking out Saraub’s baby nieces’ eyes with her fingers, or having gross sex with homeless smackheads, she’d learned that trying to expel them from her mind only gave them strength. Instead, she let them fade, like bubbles in a
bath. Until now, all that had worked. She’d passed for normal, and, all in all, was probably only half as neurotic as your average New Yorker.
But these holes lately had proven stubborn. The more she ignored them, the stronger they got. She even dreamed about them: a yawning black mouth that gnawed her toes, then her feet and legs and arms, until she was a cripple. A flopping trunk, useless and terrified. And then the hole consumed her entirely, and she was nothing at all. Just a shadow—a dark stain left by the woman she’d once been. In her more paranoid moments, she got the idea that the images were portents of things to come.
The disease, and the fact that she never got treatment for it, had made her departure from Omaha all the more surprising. She still didn’t know how she’d found the courage. It might have been Betty’s hospitalization that had jolted her into action. She’d figured: now or never. Then again, maybe it wasn’t Betty at all. Sometimes you get so tired of living in your own skin that you’ll do anything to peel it off. Even the hardest thing: change.
From the day she’d arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal four years ago, New York had tried to spit her back out. She’d met with a thick-accented Corcoran Real Estate broker whose dyed black hair had matched her imitation Chanel Purse. (Chinel! The label had exclaimed, like it was excited to meet you.)
As soon as Audrey eked past the credit test, Chinel! took her to the East Village: “I’ve got some efficiencies on Avenue A. Ya’ll LOVE it there!”
Chinel!’s three-inch heels had gone
crack!-crack!-crack!
like kids’ cap toys, while beside her, Audrey had tried not to crane her neck and gawk at the finely crafted stone peaks of the old tenements on East 3rd Street. They saw three places, all of which Chinel! had
promised cost less than $800 but magically turned out to be at least $2,100. A month!
“You can’t get no cheappa than two grand,” Chinel! had exclaimed with exasperation at apartment number four, like Audrey was insulting her hospitality. The place was a fifth-floor walk-up that smelled like mice.
“You don’t understand. I can’t afford this,” Audrey had answered with tears in her eyes. Her whole life, she’d scraped. As a kid, she’d stolen Coffee Mate creamer out of motels, like “milk solids” was a food group. In college, she’d ladled slop at both cafeterias, just so she could afford the textbooks. To keep the grad-school application checks from bouncing, she’d skipped the sweet air for a month. Never once had anything come easy. Never once had a rich uncle died, so baby could wear a pair of new shoes.
“So take out anotha school loan! That’s what all the kids do. Me, I live farther out. But you can’t commute that fah. This is the best deal you’ll get.”
The tough, callused pads of Audrey’s feet had rubbed against cheap linoleum because the soles of her special-occasion-only loafers had been worn to a thin layer of rubber. She hadn’t changed her fancy corduroy jumper since the bus transfer in Pittsburgh, and as they’d entered each small, stuffy studio, she’d learned the hard way that the concentrated sweat dried to her underarms smelled a lot like piss.
Audrey sighed. She’d been in the city less than six hours, and already, she wanted to take the next bus back to Omaha. But by now her old job at IHOP was filled, and someone else had rented her tiny, black-painted studio apartment. She was alone, and home was gone.
Chinel! clapped her hands together like she thought they were going to make a deal, and Audrey had wondered:
Why did I think I could pull this off?
She didn’t know how to buy a Metrocard, or read
a subway map, or fix a blown fuse, or apply for a job other than at IHOP. She was weird Audrey Lucas, who hadn’t learned to balm her lips in high school, so in the winter, they’d bled. Not to mention the maxi pads. It was too humiliating to even
think
about the maxi pads. She hadn’t known about table manners, either. When she got to the new-student banquet at the University of Nebraska, she’d rolled her flat chicken cutlet like baloney and eaten it with her hands. Even the shit-booted farm kids had hooted their amusement. Weird Audrey Lucas: she raised herself, only she didn’t do a very good job.
Chinel!’s cell phone had jingled to the tune of Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” She’d looked at its lit-up screen, then at Audrey, like she was trying to figure out which was worth her time. She grudgingly picked Audrey and dropped the phone back into her purse.
Maybe it was something in this New York air. Dirty, but dignified, like tarnished copper. Maybe it was Audrey’s semiretarded busboy at IHOP who’d forgiven her two-hundred-dollar hash debt, and pressed five fatties into her palm for the road. “Shit on a stick: Columbia University! Forget about that stuff with your mom. You’re going someplace. Write me sometime, even if I don’t write back. I’m proud to know you, Audrey Lucas,” Billy Epps had told her. She’d looked down at her black Reeboks before thanking him, because the kindness had been so unexpected.
If a nice guy like Billy Epps could think she was worth something, why was she letting tacky Chinel! get her down? Who was this woman to con her out of an education, a new life, just so she could make a quick buck on the signing fee?
Audrey made her decision. She wanted this new life so much she could fucking taste it. Sure, she might not be special or smart or tough enough. But not this way.
She wasn’t going to let this fake-pursed phony be the bitch who took her down.
Chinel! beckoned toward the dingy, nonworking fireplace with shellacked red nails: “Look at this, sweetie. A real prewar detail.”
Audrey didn’t move, and Chinel! came back to retrieve her. Blood rushed to Audrey’s face: hot and salty, like liquid fire. “I booked this appointment from Nebraska! You told me you had apartments in my range! You told me no problem!”
“Hun-ee,” Chinel! clucked, then rolled her eyes. But when she looked at Audrey, whatever she saw there changed her mind. She smiled crookedly, a real smile, like suddenly the game was over—nothing personal—and they could part friends. “I had you pegged all wrong. I thought you was the daughter of a rich man when you said you was going to Columbia. Forget the East Village. It’s Neva-Neva Land. Do ya-self a favor and go to stoodent housing up in Morningside Heights. They’ll find you something cheapa.”
Audrey didn’t bother saying good-bye, or even shaking hands. She left Chinel! in the dirty walk-up. After a thirty-minute search up and down 14
th
Street (she refused to ask for directions because—Dammit!—she could do this!), she found the crosstown L. It was only after she held to the metal strap, and the subway roared through its noisy tunnel, that she smiled. She’d never guessed she had it in her to yell at another person. Better still, yelling felt pretty stinking good.
After that day, she kept fighting. And scratching. And working. And learning the little things, like why dental floss was good and the creepy old men on 113
th
and Amsterdam were bad. And then one morning, she looked in the mirror, and discovered that she’d lost her sad-sack slump. Her hair wasn’t greasy anymore. And her smile happened to be kind of pretty. For the first
time in her life, she looked happy. New York was where she belonged.
Even grad school worked in her favor. Turned out, she had real talent. If she’d been any good at reading people, she might have recognized the envy of her fellow students, and even a few of the teachers, whose snipes had not been intended to encourage but to undermine. But after growing up under Betty Lucas’ thumb, the subtleties of academic pettiness flew right over her head. Nothing stopped her, or even slowed her down.
By the end of her first year, the department chair selected her to help design New York-Presbyterian’s Pediatric Wing. Instead of shared bedrooms, she suggested small, alveoli-like rooms in clusters of three along the edges of the building, so the really sick kids still had their privacy, but they also got a view. Her design won the New York Emerging Voices Award in Architecture. That summer break, even though nobody else in her class landed so much as an interview for an unpaid internship, she had her pick of firms.