The Parallel Apartments (14 page)

Mère, now revenant, sighed.

“Burt's good to me, Mère,” said Livia, massaging her grandmother's other hand. “I know I've only known him a couple of weeks, but I feel like I've always known him. He opens doors for me. And for everyone else, too. And he has a good job at Centennial. He's in charge of vodka and cocktail mixes, and in a few months will get promoted to airplane nips manager.”

Livia left out a lot of things she liked about Burt. She also didn't mention that he had just volunteered and would be on his way to Fort Campbell soon—Mère would hardly approve of that. Mère was a member of the Texas Socialist Party—the original one—and did not exactly adore her country or believe in its leaders. She would regard going to war as an act not of courage and patriotism but of cowardice and mental density.

Mère opened her mouth and rolled her eyes back into her head.

“He will lash you to a wheel and force his member into you and then leave for Houston or Baltimore with your money as your body teems with demons.”

“Dammit, Mère,” said Charlotte, who had far less patience with her mother than Livia had for either of them. “You sound like the Pentecostals. Quit it. Can't you at least have a little compassion? He was nearly murdered by a madman. Now, that's a man you should be worked up over, Charles Whitman. Not Burt Moppett, who proposed on his knees to your granddaughter, because he loves her.”

Charlotte stood up. She looked at her mother and pointed at her daughter.

“Be happy for her.”

“Livia,” said Mère, “tell your mother I don't care to partner with her anymore.”

“Livia,” said Charlotte, “you tell your Mère that she can't quit, because she's fired.”

They were halfway home from Dr. Gonzales's when Livia's woolgathering evaporated.

She was stopped on East Forty-Fifth Street behind a large orange machine whose apparent function was to rhythmically cloud the air with poisonous farts of violet smoke while poking holes in the asphalt with a ten-foot pneumatic bodkin.

“What is that thing?” shouted Charlotte over the noise of the machine. “Get away from it.”

“I can't, Mother. We're stuck here until it moves.”

“Why did you come this way? I told you to take Thirty-Eighth.”

“Wasn't thinking.”

“Weren't listening.”

“Sorry.”

“Ask that man to let you through.”

A small, weary-looking, grandfatherly fellow wearing a fluorescent orange vest and a hard hat with a
RECUERDO 107.1 FM
sticker on it brandished a dusty
STOP
sign at them.

“No. I'm not going to bother him. He's busy and hot.”

“Then just drive on the sidewalk. Those pedestrians will let you through.”

“What's wrong with you, Mother? Have you been taking loony pills? Is that what Dr. Gonzales's diagnosis was? That you're nuts and it's giving you gas and a rosy glow? What's your hurry, anyway?”

Charlotte ignored her daughter. Charlotte got out of the car.

“Mother!” said Livia, as Charlotte slammed the door. “What are you doing? Stop it. A serial killer will snatch you off the street and chop you up and store your organs in a freezer.”

Of course it was not a serial killer that worried Livia, but the diaries.

Livia could not easily get out of the car on the driver's side without breaking her ankle on some roadwork swarf, so she tried to climb over to get out on the passenger side, and had gotten halfway over the gearshift when she realized by the panicked shouting of the road construction man that the truck was still in gear.

She was able to the stop the truck before anyone got awled, but by then Charlotte had disappeared down a side street guarded on both corners by dense, blooming magnolias.

A moment ago, she and her mother had been the same distance from the diaries. Charlotte could cover the twelve blocks to her house in ten minutes. If she had to, Livia would knock her mother down to get them.

V

August 2003

April Carole stood at the threshold of her efficiency on East Fifty-First Street, watching her friend Ryan pack the last of her belongings into baby-formula boxes salvaged from behind Fiesta Mart and tote them down to his F-350 pickup, in which he was about to make the last of six back-and-forth trips from here to April's new place at the Parallel Apartments over on Airport Boulevard.

“Don't forget my meds in the bathroom cabinet,” she said.

“Already packed,” he said. “Why do you take that stuff? You don't seem like you need it anymore.”

“If you saw what I was like without them, you'd wonder why I wasn't on them.”

“All that mental-illness stuff can be controlled by determination and sheer will. And exercise.”

“You just called me weak, passive, and fat.”

“I'm just saying that discipline can save you about a hundred bucks a month on crazy pills.”

“That's the same old AA bullshit. Why don't you quit
them
? You drink every day, anyway.”

Ryan did not respond.

April stared at Ryan, a classical composer and Liszt scholar, as he crawled around on his hands and knees picking up objects here and there. Guitar picks, transistors, coins, knobs unmoored from the many pieces of recording equipment that April owned or rented and that were now safely at the new efficiency, waiting to be wired together, powered up, and made ready to record the most sublime and charismatic undiscovered mezzo-soprano in the city, April Carole.

This was not her sentiment, but her father's. Her mother, Blaise, had no opinion of April's voice. Or anything, for that matter, at least since Bryce, her daughter and April's twin sister, had been beaten to death in a part of Houston Bryce should not have been loitering in, buying items she should not have been buying. Bryce left a two-year-old child, Harry, a blond whirlwind of obscure paternal provenance, who had been far more attached to April than he had been to his mother. April wanted him. So did Blaise. Her mother won, in court.

“Tough, your mother, a toughie,” Archie Carole had said to his daughter after he'd picked her up from Travis County Corrections, where she'd spent two nights for throwing a quarter at the judge after his decision to award Harry to April's parents instead of her.
“Tough.”

“I thought you were on my side, Daddy.”

“I am, and I'm on your mother's side, too,” he said as he fiddled with the reliably fallible air conditioner in the 1972 Coupe de Ville he'd bought with an unexpected oil-lease dividend before he got married.

“Harry's mine!”

“You're lucky you didn't hit that judge.”

“If one more person says that, I'll…”

“You could've put his eye out.”

“Please take me to my apartment. And tell your wife I never want to see her again.”

“Your mother lost a daughter, dammit, April, remember that,” said Mr. Carole. “So did
I
.”

April had hated Bryce. They were identical twins but didn't really look all that much alike. Bryce's blond hair was several shades more honied than
April's, Bryce's eyes were greener, Bryce's ears didn't stick out like side-views, Bryce's feet were two sizes smaller and two letters narrower, and her shape was not teratologically asymmetrical—Bryce was all airy wiggle, while April was a blackthorn cudgel. Bryce, in April's opinion, was prettier, smarter, sexier, and more talented (oboe)—all the things at issue in sibling rivalries of any intensity, anywhere, anytime. The girls grew up screaming at each other, lying to each other, hitting each other with closed fists. April focused this violence on Bryce only; Bryce, however, expanded her crimes to her parents, friends, eventually strangers, and, ultimately, Harry. CPS took the child away and gave him to her parents. After Bryce was killed and April took her parents to court, the judge suggested that since April and Bryce had been twins, there was every likelihood that April would adopt a similar attitude toward the child. It was seconds after this that a shiny 1988 quarter dollar sailed three inches from Judge Polemp's head and silently struck the blackish-red drapery that seemed to backdrop every goddam judge's bench in the land. He found her in contempt of court, an edict that sent her to jail, where they kept her meds from her until they let her out two days later.

“Looks like your wife lost two daughters,” said April, noticing on the sidewalk a chain of little children holding each other by the hand, all bell-wethered by a slender East Indian woman holding a leash attached to the lead child. If April was allowed to take one, she would bring home the tiniest of all: a roundish, red-haired little girl wearing a light-blue frock over which was draped a red superhero's cape. She—Montserrat, April would name her—was last in line, and seemed to have no interest in holding hands, and so was quite rogue, jumping and stomping and wandering, pulling behind her on a string a kind of miniature sulky filled with leaves and trash and a headless, Burtless Ernie. She turned and looked at April as they drove by.
Maybe I'll come back here one day and take you for myself, Montserrat. How hard could that be?

“I'm sad to hear you say that,” said Archie Carole.

“Maybe I'll just come get Harry and move away.”

“Stop it, now.”

“I want Bryce's Mini Cooper. You guys owe me.”

* * *

April didn't really consider stealing Harry. In truth she wanted not a child but a
baby.
She doubted she could bring herself to actually steal an infant, but still she made regular visits to mommy-baby gatherings around town, like BabyStock at Central Market once a month. She also visited maternity rooms around town. They seemed impossibly secure. The obvious solution was to have one of her own. The endeavor might even be fun.

The few carefully timed attempts to fertilize her eggs with the sperm of sympathetic and willing friends were unsuccessful. Before long, April was beginning to grow desperate. Desperate enough to start having sex with strangers, sometimes as many as four in a single day.

Soon her life was occupied by temp jobs, fertility sorcery, screwing, and scales, the latter two producing enough racket that her neighbors and landlady eventually harassed April into moving out of the Fifty-First Street apartment. Ryan was the noisiest lover so far. He was also the first of her friends she had sex with. April had since slept with him occasionally, but that was about to cease. That was going to be hard on Ryan: he was in love with April to roughly the same degree that she was not in love with him. He expressed his love by performing chores and duties for April, which routinely included vanishment whenever April brought home a new conquest. And April expressed her non-love by asking him to do more and more chores.

“April, what's this?” said Ryan, handing her a tiny whitish object he found in the grotty shag-pile carpeting.

“Wow,” she said, “haven't seen one of these in a lo-o-o-ng time. It's a good-luck charm. A piece of carved ivory. It came with more eggs just like it in a little ivory basket, but I have no idea where they are. They were in a plastic Easter egg I found tucked between two bricks lining the walk in the backyard at home when I was nine. It was December. No one even remembered putting it out there.”

April placed the egg in her mouth, and with her tongue tucked it up between her gum and cheek, where it found a natural cranny. She would swallow it the next time she was with a man—tonight, actually—right at the moment he ejaculated. April was cautiously excited. She had been turning more and more to occult rituals. The tiny egg seemed to be a gift from the gods, or whatever was in charge.

“Is that everything?” she said, testing the egg's security with her tongue. “Good work, man. Thanks.”

Ryan stood stiffly; he had been crawling around a long time.

“We still gotta clean this place and spackle divots and repaint.”

“I don't care about the damn security deposit.”

“I do,” he said. Ryan often took upon himself the neglects of others. “I'll take care of it when you're on your date. You do have one tonight, right?”

“Depends on whether you set up the futon at the new place. I don't like fucking on the floor.”

April also didn't like talking to Ryan about her other dates. It made her feel guilty for excluding him. But the fact was she didn't want to waste time sleeping with him. He was a proven failure. She'd rather take a chance with attractive, brown-haired, green-eyed, boyish strangers who blushed visibly in dark Sixth Street bars when she explained her plans.

“I set it up, sheets and everything,” said Ryan, a micaceous glint—hope?—in his eye. “Ready for immediate use.” It was an imperfect glint, though, dulled at the edges, as if it knew Ryan had Buckley's chances of ever being with April again.

“C'mon,” she said, looking away from the glint. “Grab my cat—she's behind the toilet—and let's go. I never wanna see this place again.”

She had found tonight's date, Christian, on Craigslist the week before. Pretty damn cute, and a freshman at UT, so she could probably count on some vigor. She demanded that Christian spend the week leading up to the encounter acquiring a clean and current bill of health. She demanded this of all her dates.