The Party Upstairs

by Lee Conell

  “She didn’t make it sound like an accident.”

  “Has Caroline told anyone else about the stone? Other than you?”

  “I don’t know. She told me she wouldn’t say anything to her dad.”

  Martin put the binoculars around his neck.

  “Do you think you’d be in big trouble if she said something?” Ruby asked. “Would you get fired?”

  Earlier in the day, he would have wanted to change her voice, take that wobble out, but now he was glad to hear it. It helped his own voice regain its paternal qualities, to become strong and powerful again, re-fathered. “We’ll be fine,” Martin said. “There’s nothing to worry about.” But this voice maybe was too strong, too paternal, and the exchange sounded less real, more like acting.

  “I need to get out of here,” Ruby said.

  “You want to look for this owl in the park with me?”

  “An owl in the park?”

  “I told you about it this morning. Remember? It’s supposed to be nearby.”

  She tilted her head to the side. Like a robin listening for worms, for disruption in the dirt. He waited. The Lily voice stayed silent, too. And then Ruby nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “What am I doing otherwise? I’d just be hanging out in the basement, waiting for Caroline’s party to start.”

  “Looking for the owl is better.”

  “Yes,” Ruby said graciously, in a dream-come-true, winning-all-the-awards way. “You’re so right, Dad. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  They headed toward the main path of the park, winding down Terrace Drive. Cold out, but not freezing, the sky gauzy with purple-blue clouds and the sun just starting to sink. According to the people on the birding e-group, the owl should be near the Ramble, an especially woodsy area of the park, where the rarer birds and crazier people often went to sing to themselves. The owl had last been spotted just past the Bow Bridge. But Martin and Ruby didn’t head right for the bridge. First Martin leaned in to look at the hedges near the perimeter of the park. He raised his binoculars to his eyes. The chill pricked at his fingertips, exposed in his fingerless canvas gloves. “There’s a white-throated sparrow,” he said. “By those two trees? You can tell by the yellow marking around the eye.”

  “So why don’t they call it a yellow-eyed sparrow?”

  “Ha ha. Can you see the bird?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you see the marking?”

  “Not really.”

  He held out the binoculars to Ruby.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I believe you. About the marking being there.”

  Of course, they both knew it wasn’t a matter of believing, it was a matter of seeing, of spotting the specificity for your own damn self. But Martin let her comment go and they stayed motionless together, watching the sparrow. Sparrows found homes all over the city, of course, not just in the park. They turned street signs into perches, built nests in the tubing of traffic lights. Still Martin found himself watching the more common birds—the pigeons, the sparrows—as if they were rare. With the rarer birds there was a pressure to appreciate their presence in that moment. The sparrows and the pigeons were not just abundantly beautiful but abundant. It was easier to look on them and to feel real soaring awe as opposed to the heavier, guilt-tinged am-I-supposed-to-be-feeling-something-more awe.

  Still, how much would it rule to see that owl? It would redeem this shit day, somehow. Stupid Frank from Sycamore and his stupid Frankian threats. He wished he’d farted way harder on Neilson’s pillow. He wished he’d eaten those pigeon eggs that Ruby destroyed and farted the gas from the pigeon fetuses on the most golden pillow Neilson owned.

  Compassion! Okay! Empathy extended to all life in this moment of time! He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about the internship.”

  Ruby crunched her sparkly shoes on the dry leaves.

  “What about working at a coffee shop again?” Martin asked. “A different coffee shop? Or a restaurant? At least temporarily?”

  “Everything I do is always temporary. I guess I’m looking for something a little more serious, maybe.” Her phone buzzed in her bag. She swallowed. She said, all loud like she was talking to someone hiding behind a tree, “I want a job that’s more real. John was always telling me the coffee shop thing wasn’t real.”

  Martin started to speak, then stopped himself.

  “What?” Ruby asked. “Are you going to tell me something passive-aggressively Zen? Are you going to say that nothing is real? That the temporary is the only constant? That coffee is as real as anything else?”

  Martin lifted the binoculars to cover his face. Actually, he had been going to ask her if she thought what he did was real. But the words got snagged up in his windpipe and he coughed. He pretended to spot movement low down in the leaf litter. “See that?” he said. “Some sort of thrush, I think.”

  “Can we keep walking?”

  It was so quiet out. Later, in the warmer part of spring, noisy warblers filled the yellow forsythia bushes lining this path. Nothing like that now. In the silence that descended between Martin and Ruby, Martin wished for warblers and their calls. He wished for the Lily voice, even—but she never showed up when he was outside the building.

  When they reached the pond, Ruby saw something in the reeds and said, “Look.” The bird just feet from them. A black crown with long white plumes extending from the back of its head. It was the first bird she’d spotted before him in a while. A surprise upwelling of paternal pride like a barometric pressure shift inside his lungs. A change in the atmosphere created by his own deep, joyful exhalation.

  “It’s a black-crowned night heron,” Martin said.

  Having in his head the exactness of the name somehow made the bird itself seem more exact. Easier to notice its markings, the place where the feathers turned purple gray, the green muck from the pond on the webs of its feet. The night heron began to extend its neck toward the water. Martin reached for the binoculars, intending to hand them to Ruby, but the bird must have noticed the movement of his arm. It took off.

  “Cool,” Martin said in a happy, hushed way. Ruby put her hands in her coat pockets. In the reeds in front of them floated a pair of mallards. A rustling sound from the bushes. A bird, a rat, a mugger? Nothing emerged, but Martin said, “Let’s keep moving.” The streetlights had switched on and were reflecting in the dark water behind them, like glowing columns from a ruined temple lodged in the bottom of the man-made pond. Or like the streak of white on the great horned owl’s throat.

  No owl yet.

  They passed benches and birch trees and very few people and kept walking until they reached the much-filmed Bethesda Fountain with the bronze angel statue in the center. “I saw a bunch of starlings here the other day,” he said. “Screaming at each other over a hot dog. They’re my least favorite bird. They’re not even native.”

  “Nothing is native to the park,” Ruby said. “It’s man-made. They razed one of New York’s first middle-class black communities to build Central Park. Lily told me that.”

  “What do you mean, she told you that?” Martin looked up hopefully. “Like, recently?”

  “Well. Not super-recently. Obviously. Maybe a couple of years ago?”

  He scratched the back of his neck.

  “What is it?” Ruby asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Sometimes I hear Lily’s voice,” he said. “In my head.”

  “You hear her voice?”

  “Just in my head.”

  “Like, a grief thing?”

  “I guess.” Martin looked away. “Her voice is really clear.”

  “I wish I could hear her voice like that,” Ruby said.

  “No,” Martin said. “You don’t.” A group of tourists passed them, holding their phones up in the dimming light. As they go
t farther away, their silhouettes faded, until only the glow of their phones could be seen.

  “Dad,” Ruby said. Then, very gently: “You were telling me about the starlings.”

  “Right. So, the starlings were released in the nineteenth century by the American Acclimatization Society.” Martin tried to speak a little more loudly, like a tour guide. “I learned all about this from the birding e-group. Basically, these people decided they wanted Central Park to contain every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. And starlings show up in one of the plays as some metaphor for mimicking abilities. So it’s this beautiful plan, right?”

  Ruby’s phone buzzed again.

  “Except then the starlings spread across the U.S., taking over all the tree cavities where other birds had nested.”

  “Let’s keep moving, Dad.”

  “Am I being too Dadly, with my facts?”

  “No, no. You’re allowed to be Dadly. You’re my dad.”

  He wanted to hug her. He was her dad.

  “I see something!” Ruby cried. She pointed to a tree. A still and hulking shape. The owl? The breeze blew and the shape moved. Not an owl at all. Just a black plastic bag caught in a tall ginkgo. Featherless but flapping hard as the wind picked up. He thought Ruby would look disappointed, but she smiled. She said, “Lily used to call those garbage birds.”

  Lily. Something about the way she said the name, the childish nostalgia, made Martin suddenly angry at and worried for Ruby. What gave her the confidence to cry out like that, to be so sure she’d spied something alive and special? Her phone buzzed once more.

  “You can check your phone,” Martin said. “I don’t care.”

  “You sure? I thought this was some sort of sacred father-daughter bonding endeavor.”

  “We’re not at the movies or anything.”

  Ruby looked at her new messages. Her breathing went so deliberate, so regular, it was almost as if she were rearranging her own respiration, figuring out a pattern of breathing that would best display calmness. It seemed fake to Martin, this calmness, like a mask for some new horror.

  He could be Dadly. He had her permission. He reached for her hand and took the phone from her. “Stop,” she said sharply.

  Too late. He’d turned the phone around so that he could see its screen.

  The last message she’d received was a photograph. Of him.

  Of Martin.

  Of Martin alone in front of his building, his beard in pixel form a little burlier than in mind’s eye, more grizzled. No pedestrians obscured him. It was a clear, clean shot, as if the photographer had lined up the phone so that the other people walking down the street were relegated to the sides of the photo, forming its borders. A pile of garbage bags clumped in the background. The innards of Lily’s apartment. Martin was hosing off the sidewalk around the garbage bags. His arm, moving, a partway blur. His back was stooped, but he held his shoulders like he was trying to hide that hunch, an undercover Quasimodo. His eyes unfocused, sad. The photographer had zoomed in so much, Martin could make out the streak of plaster on his hat.

  Beneath the photo, a series of messages. He scrolled down.

  This your dad, right?

  The super at the building where Caroline grew up?

  has your eyes.

  He was nice. I asked him if there were open apartments in your building.

  Think I might use this pic for my next show . . . Good composition, right?

  What do you think of the composition, R?

  No words from Ruby, not on the screen, not in person. He scrolled up to the photograph again. Why was he always so worried about his translucent chest? He looked old and crusty, like his whole self had been filmed over with layers of dust and grime and shit.

  “Dad,” Ruby said. “Give me back my phone.”

  “What is this?”

  “It’s you.”

  “You know what I mean. What is this? Who sent you a photo of me?”

  She switched her weight from one foot to the other.

  “Who sent you a photo of me?” he asked again.

  “This boy I kind of know. He takes pictures of homeless people. Addicts. Fringe people, he calls them. He puts the pictures in galleries.”

  “Do I look like that? Like a fringe person?”

  “No,” Ruby said, very quickly. “He only took this photo of you to screw with me. He thinks I stole something from him.”

  A fringe person. It did not take much. A hurt back. A plaster-streaked baseball cap. If he threw the phone down, would it break? Would Ruby cry out?

  “He’s just a stupid boy,” Ruby said. “He’s trying to intimidate me. Forget it. It has nothing to do with you.”

  Martin shook his head. “This is exactly why I didn’t want you to move home. I’ve got enough adult babies in my life with the tenants.”

  “You’re being a jerk, Dad.”

  “I’m being honest, finally, is all. You’re a grown child, Ruby. This is embarrassing.”

  Ruby turned away. No face to her, just tangled hair and voice. She said, “I’m glad I let her in.” She paused. In that stupid dress, in those stupid shoes, it seemed she paused for theatrical effect, not fear, not shame. “The woman. I buzzed her in and I’m not sorry at all.”

  “Who?” Hoo, hoo, hoo. He tried to think about the owl.

  “Lily’s cousin.”

  The woman from this morning.

  “She clearly left the building pretty soon after I let her in, so don’t get all pissy at me.” Ruby looked up at the garbage bird. “I just didn’t think it was right. You were like, oh, Lily’s cousin, great, back to the gutter with you. It was disrespectful, Dad, what you did. It was gross. To the woman and to Lily, too.”

  There was a rat in the bushes. A rat like any of the rats in the building, but outdoors, so it was fine, it wasn’t Martin’s problem. Still, as it scuffled nearer, he thought of its scent trails. He’d read about them in the rodent-trapping how-to book. Rats produced little bursts of urine to remember where they had been, where they had safely traveled. It would feel good to put traps down now. He wanted to catch this rat, to bring down his foot right here, to end its trail of piss and memory.

  Finally Martin looked at his daughter. “Well, great work.” He clapped his hands, the sound dulled by the canvas gloves. “What a hero you are.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be a hero,” Ruby said. “I was just trying to do the right thing. I was trying to behave like a human being. Unlike you.”

  It was ridiculous the way a feeling now could look expensive. A certain kind of righteousness was like wearing diamonds. But he saw it for what it was, the morality she was parading around in, thinking she was being fancy, while no, nope, she was dressed in something cheap, something worthless.

  “I was wrong before,” Martin said. “You’re not acting like a child. It’s worse. You’re acting like a tenant. You’re acting like an entitled trustfundian fucktard.”

  Which was ranked number one in Martin’s worst insults for a person. Definitely his chest was translucent now. Pure glass.

  “Dad.” Ruby’s voice cracked.

  He said in as measured a tone as he could manage, “Go.” He handed her back her phone. “I need you to leave me alone right now. Go play with your friend Caroline.”

  Ruby’s face went dark, then seemed to empty out entirely. She walked away, back up the path they’d come from. Martin did not allow himself to follow her. He did not allow himself to move at all.

  NIGHT

  12 THE CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS OF THE STREETLAMP

  Hahaha ok I get what you are doing

  you not responding Ruby . . . ???

  wanna hear where I will put this picture in the show?

  yr dad will be placed next to this guy I took photo of this guy named dennis

  wanna hear about what dennis d
id Ruby to end up without a place to live

  where is rhino head

  also look please understand

  it is My invaluable heirloom

  when I say heirloom not just some diamond loony tunes shit that the evil guys steal

  and it’s seen as like a caper

  it’s not like that it has emotional weight to me

  Ruby?

  I know you are there

  it’s not like that listen

  it is from my grandfather he left it to me

  my grandfather was the only one in my whole family w any goodness

  was v kind to me encouraged me to pursue art

  said it was brave and not being a pussy at all but the opposite

  ask Caroline she knows this story too and what the rhino head means

  to me

  he was a good man, Ruby. surely someone you love has been lost right

  and left you something

  even just memories

  then imagine if you let someone into your home and then that someone takes that thing/memories and won’t tell you where it is hidden

  soOoOoo

  where is it.

  come on that was a fucking moving metaphor thing right.

  haha

  I know you see this.

  here’s what dennis did.

  let me tell you about the man your dad’s photo will be next to

  * * *

  —

  When Ruby left Central Park, she planned to return to 2D. She intended to rip the blue dress off her body and hang it back in the closet. It would look, dangling there, like a thing that had never been touched. She would kick off the shoes and put on her own shoes once again. She’d watch the fish for a while. Then Ruby would take her cell phone and drop it in the fish tank. And see what happened next.

  But when she got to her father’s building—the specialty bulb she’d installed was glowing—she found herself strolling right past it, as if she didn’t grow up there, as if it were just a building like any other.

  She needed to keep moving forward.

  She walked past corner delis and shoe stores and Fairway, past a concrescence of brown bananas in a crate. She walked past a woman looking for bottles, a black trash bag tied like an apron around her waist. She walked past brownstone after brownstone with basements housing who knew what animals. Where was she headed? She began to realize it in her thoughts after she’d already begun to realize it in her feet. The Hudson River.