Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (3 page)

But that night it proved difficult for Brewster to slide into his usual groove. No sooner had he finished dinner than a series of jarring hoots coming from the hallway prompted him to picture a crew of no-neck, slope-shouldered gym apes arriving on the scene to help their iron-pumping buddy set up house. A leaden-footed clumping to and from the elevator, a series of hollow booms, and loud clunks from next door put him further on edge. Next, the telltale heart of a boom box’s bass began an aggressive thumping, a beat to get the movers’ blood up, to whip them into even more energetic feats of furniture tossing.

It wasn’t until midnight that the noise subsided and the last boisterous goodbyes echoed the length of the fourth floor. Peace descended and Brewster took himself off to bed.

He woke to a high-pitched yelping, the hysterical yap of a puppy entangled in its leash. His first bewildered, wandering thought was,
But The Marlborough is a pet-free building
. He flopped over on his side and peered into the radiant face of the alarm clock. Three a.m.

The frantic cries abruptly ended. Or maybe he had only dreamed them. But then a hoarse bellowing started next door. Brewster sprang out of bed and padded into the living room, where an enraged bawling set his heart anxiously chugging in his chest. The sort of noise that a bull on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse might make, it definitely qualified as a 9-1-1-category din.

Brewster flicked on the living room light, picked up the phone, and was on the point of dialing emergency when everything suddenly went silent in his neighbours’ apartment. He pressed his ear to the wall. Faint sounds of movement could be detected over there, a series of sub-aquatic, muffled bumps of the kind that you heard swimming underwater in a pool.

He waited, minutes ticking by. Nothing. He unstuck his ear from the wall, perched himself on the edge of the sofa in uncertain vigilance. So what now? What’s the drill, the etiquette of reporting a disturbance after the disturbance has ended? Officer, those two were carrying on like crazed beasts over there. Sure, the zoo’s gone quiet now, but I think you ought to roust them out of bed, issue a stern warning that any more disturbances of that sort won’t be tolerated.

How would that fly with the cops? Well, he was pretty sure it wouldn’t, as you might say,
soar
. He would be written off as a pesky wing nut, a busybody prosecuting a feud with his neighbours.

Maybe he’d got it all wrong. Maybe what he’d heard was a housewarming fuck. The date of possession carnally celebrated. But no, that yipping had had a fearful, pleading note to it, had sounded just the way that girl’s face had looked
when her partner had been chewing her out for her lack of oomph with the mattress.

There was a time when Brewster would have shot over there to confront the situation head-on, but now he was a little more cautious, prudent. Besides, the current wisdom seemed to be that even though people had an obligation to report domestic disputes, they had no business trying to intervene in them. That was irresponsible and inflammatory, that was pouring gas on a conflagration. These days even the cops tiptoed onto the family battlefield with extreme caution, wary of getting blown off some wife-beater’s doorstep. So after considerable mental hemming and hawing, Brewster finally slunk back to bed, only to pass the rest of the night wide awake, alert for sounds of trouble.

Locking his door the next morning, he spotted the young couple entering the elevator. They were holding hands like honeymooners, a sight that lightened Brewster’s good-citizen’s conscience, but his relief was almost instantly replaced by a surge of annoyance at the loss of a good night’s sleep. “Hey,” he called out, “hold that elevator!” But just two steps short of the elevator, the doors slid shut on the smirking face of Mr. Muscles. The fucker had deliberately punched the button on him. Brewster was convinced of it. What was the message there?

Waiting for the elevator to clank back up to the fourth floor, Brewster wondered if Eva, who during the year he’d been seeing her had increasingly claimed the right to direct
the improvement of his character, behaviour, and demeanour, wasn’t right when she claimed that his face was an open book, that whatever he was thinking was written all over it. One glance at his mug might have been enough to alert the button-puncher he was about to catch some blowback for creating all that racket the night before.

Down in the lobby he ran his eyes over the bank of mailboxes. The super loved his label gun and had already replaced Mrs. Carpenter’s name with the names of the new occupants: Dina and Melvyn Janacek. At least if there was any more uproar
chez
Janacek, he wouldn’t have to risk challenging steroid-charged Melvyn face to face. He would be able to get his number from information, call him up, and read him the riot act. That is, if the Janaceks were listed. Maybe they didn’t even have a landline. A lot of people their age didn’t.

Bleary-eyed, he spent the morning plowing through first-year English essays. After several hours of scrawling extensive suggestions to his students on how to improve their essay-writing skills, tips that would be inevitably and blithely ignored, Brewster began to experience something akin to writer’s cramp, twinges of discomfort that went scurrying up and down the tendons of his right hand. Soon he was feeling discomfort in his left hand too, as if some instrument like a darning hook was plucking at the nerves. This defied explanation since he was not using that hand at all; it simply lay quietly at rest on his desktop.

His first class was at eleven o’clock. As he lectured, the joints of his fingers grew noticeably more painful, began to involuntarily, spasmodically clench and unclench. The students had spotted this bizarre tic and were obviously fascinated by it in a way they had never been fascinated by anything he had had to say about American literature.

At noon, the weight of the lunch on his cafeteria tray made him wince when he lifted it. By early afternoon, a dull, unremitting background ache had lodged in the bones of his hand, broken by sudden bursts of acute, electric pain, as if a file was sawing on them. The intensity of these symptoms worried Brewster; he began to wonder if maybe some sort of esoteric virus wasn’t running amok in his body. Deciding that he needed to see a doctor, he rang up the university hospital’s clinic. Somebody had cancelled an appointment and there was an opening at three o’clock.

After manipulating and probing his hands, the doctor asked a few impatient questions, wrote out an order for X-rays and a prescription for Tylenol 3, and told him to book another appointment. The receptionist was able to squeeze him in on the upcoming Friday. Brewster had the X-rays taken and the prescription filled in the hospital pharmacy, went directly home, swallowed two Tylenols, stretched out on the sofa, and watched his hands do a spastic dance on his sternum.

He had always prided himself on his high pain threshold, but that threshold seemed to have shrunk to a pitiful nothing. The medication was giving him no relief; the agony kept looping in his hands like some gruesome
CD
track programmed to endlessly repeat itself.

Turning on the
TV
, Brewster muted the sound and stared blankly at the screen. The local news was just concluding when he heard the Janaceks out in the corridor shrilly arguing over which one of them had been responsible for paying a bill. Their door clapped shut with a gunshot-like crack.

He lay there urging himself to get a grip, get his ass off the sofa, and hustle up something to eat, but anything besides lying there and riding out the pain felt beyond him.

Next door the dispute was escalating, the volume rising.

“Please, Melvyn. Please, Dina, not tonight, kids,” Brewster murmured. “Give it a rest.”

Melvyn was telling Dina how he was going to fuck her up but good if she didn’t shut her mouth. Dina was daring him to
Go ahead, big man. Do it, just do it
.

Melvyn did it. Something collided with the wall that separated the two apartments with enough impact to send Brewster’s print of Scafell Pike, a souvenir of a walking tour he had taken in the Lake District thirty years ago, crashing to the floor.

He snatched up the phone, dialed information. They had no listing for any Janacek at that address. He called the building superintendent but got no answer, only his voicemail. All avenues of redress blocked, he staggered to his feet and roared, “What in the name of Christ is going on over there!”

And received Melvyn Janacek’s prompt reply: “Mind your own business! Fuck off!”

He called 9-1-1. Ten minutes later the police arrived, a male corporal and a burly female constable. Brewster explained to the officers that he suspected Melvyn Janacek of bouncing
his wife off walls. With each bit of incriminating evidence he provided, the policewoman fondled the nightstick slung in her belt a little more eagerly.
God bless you
, thought Brewster,
you’re itching to use that billy club, aren’t you? Here’s hoping he tells you to fuck off too. Here’s hoping one thing leads to another and that he finds himself on the receiving end of a righteous smackdown
.

The cops left to question the Janaceks. Twenty minutes later they were back. The corporal informed Brewster that Dina Janacek had assured them that everything was just fine; she couldn’t guess what their neighbour had thought he had heard. Her husband hadn’t touched her.

“Well, I’m no expert on the psychology of this, but isn’t that typical of a victim of abuse? Isn’t that what women often do? I mean, protect the abuser?”

“I saw no indications of physical harm. Constable Ramage here took Ms. Janacek aside and questioned her privately and she repeated her claim that she had not been subjected to violence.”

“Okay, what about that?” Brewster was now appealing directly to Constable Ramage, hoping to get a more sympathetic hearing from a female ear. Stabbing his finger at poor Scafell Pike, forlorn on the floor and surrounded by splintered glass, he said, “If he didn’t toss her into the wall, what knocked that down?”

Constable Ramage hooked her thumbs in her belt. Brewster suddenly realized that now she was annoyed with
him
. “I have no idea. But there’s something else that came up when we were interviewing Mr. Janacek. He said somebody keyed his car. Said to ask you about that.”

“Jesus,” Brewster barked, astonished. “Why the hell would I key his car?”

“He said that you two had had a misunderstanding. Something to do with an incident concerning the elevator one morning.”

“The business with the elevator wasn’t
one morning
, it was
this
morning. Which means I had no time to key his car. How am I supposed to key his car after he drives off to work in it? Besides, I don’t even know what his goddamn car looks like.”

“Mr. Janacek said he didn’t take his car to work today. Ms. Janacek dropped him off at his place of employment in her vehicle. His vehicle sat here in the underground parking all day.” Constable Ramage paused. “You don’t need to know what his car looks like. He says the parking stalls are identified by apartment number.”

He saw he’d made a tactical mistake. Conceding that Janacek and he had had a problem over the elevator could be taken as an admission that they had a feud going. Brewster began to flex his fingers in time with the pain darting in them, wondered if it wasn’t impairing his thinking. Then he caught the corporal staring down at his hands and he realized those convulsive movements might be mistaken as a psychotic acting out his desire to get his fingers wrapped around Melvyn’s tree-trunk neck.

The corporal carefully cleared his throat. “We asked some of the other residents on this floor if they had heard a disturbance.” He paused. “Nobody had.”

“Well, what do you expect? Did you happen to notice how ancient they all are? Every one of them, deaf as a post.”

“They had no problem hearing me,” the corporal noted. “I believe I came in just fine.”

“Okay, forget it,” Brewster mumbled. “No skin off my ass. As far as I’m concerned, if this Ms. Janacek has a death wish, let her dream come true.”

“Sir,” said Constable Ramage, “don’t get huffy with us. We’re just doing our job. I advise you to lose the attitude.”

Her partner had another bit of advice. “And learn to cut your neighbours some slack. The world would be a better place if we all just rolled with the punches now and then.”

“Roll with the punches like that young woman next door rolls with them? Is that what you advise?” Brewster snapped.

“Here’s what I advise,” said Constable Ramage, thrusting her considerable bust aggressively forward. “I advise you to button it.”

“Fine,” he said. “It’s buttoned. Firmly and forever. I don’t give a shit if it turns into Baghdad central over there. Bombs can go off and you won’t hear another peep out of me.”

“You have a
good night
, sir,” said the corporal. It wasn’t goodbye; it was a warning.

“You too. Have a
great
night. It’s been lovely getting to know you.”
Good job, buddy
, thought Brewster.
Way to burn your bridges. The police will be hustling right over here next time there’s a problem
.

After the cops had left, he sank down on the sofa and gazed at his aching hands in disgust. They were too slender, too delicately made for a man his size. Entirely out of proportion to the rest of him. Over six feet tall, more than two hundred pounds, and yet here he was with a concert pianist’s hands dangling from the end of his arms. They weren’t hands
built to withstand much and he had repeatedly punished them in his youth. Now he appeared to be paying the price for that.

The hurt was burrowing deeper and deeper into the bones, flaring hotly in the marrow. Desperate, Brewster ran the kitchen sink full of cold water, emptied all the ice cube trays into it, and plunged his hands into the frigid bath. That numbed them momentarily, the briefest of reprieves, but slowly, bit by bit, the pounding resumed, wringing sweat from his forehead.

Now they were shrieking at him from the bottom of the sink.