by SK Dyment
At the sixth-floor apartment, Olesya’s phone is ringing off the hook from lawyers looking for Alaska. Camelia has been trying to get the deal through all day, and the other signer, Wanda, is the only other person in the Condo Owner’s business record that the lawyers have on file. They have the names of almost everyone who lives in the building, including the man whose dog was struck in the ass by the carpenter’s level that slid across his hall, but it is a group lawsuit, and Wanda and Alaska are the complainants at the helm.
Camelia is afraid to tell Rudy that this is the same Wanda who questioned her about her sexual orientation in the lounge of her hotel. Finally, she tells the lawyers to go ahead and find signer Wanda anyway, in order to at least get this thing on the board before formally approaching the residents with the offer. Camelia reapplies her lipstick and stares out at the Manhattan skyline from the B.F. Turner office tower, wondering if anything is ever okay.
Olesya steps out to a slide show on quilt-making at the library with Vim. She is convinced that a stay in a highway hotel would be more romantic than dealing with all the traffic running through her apartment. Vim has agreed with her.
Wanda presses a button and listens to the message on the answering machine from the lawyer for the Condo Owner’s Association telling her to call at once, just as Ben is taking a shower and scrubbing the grease from his arms. Wanda and Ben had planned to go out that night to a dinner theatre that is presenting a psychological play by Pinter called The Collection. Ben is looking forward to the interpretation as the actors are trained to circulate through the restaurant performing their modified lines. Interactivity occurs as the actors taunt the audience about their homo or heterosexual inclinations with a personal and unrelenting series of suggestions. Since it is performed while the audience is eating as well as moving back and forth between a salad bar and their tables, there has been some actual physical combat between audience and actor. Wanda thinks it sounds exciting—the dawn of a new wave in theatre.
She is also hoping that a night out is a good time to tell Ben what she has done to Rudy. Ben must know that Wanda has been trying to confess something to him, and that there is something else she has been trying to say since she said that she had fallen very hard.
Perhaps he thinks she means Gus. Gus has told Swan everything, and Swan has told Ben everything, after Swan and Gus moved upstairs to the less lesbian-oriented, more masculine suite, and Wanda moved back to Ben.
Wanda hears Ben showering and singing in a carefree way and dials the number for the lawyer. The lawyer tells her that Turner Corporation wants Olesya’s building inspected for any faults in its structure and that it wants to buy back each one of the units from the owners at between three-hundred and fifty and four-hundred and fifty thousand dollars, depending on whether they had one or two baths. Assuming the Owner’s Association feels comfortable with this amount.
Since the tenants, in most cases, paid less than one-hundred thousand for their original units, which they are still paying off in the form of mortgages to the real estate firm that handles the property, the mortgages will be covered and the remainder will be forwarded to the original buyers. Turner lawyers are trying to attach a caveat that insists fifty thousand of each Condo Owners windfall be donated to a charity to help the homeless, and Turner lawyers, who are much more talented than Alaska and Wanda’s real estate lawyer, are going to fight for it hard.
If the Condo Owner’s Association does not agree, they are going to withdraw the offer and re-propose at fifty thousand less a piece, with the money going to charities not under the tax-deductible names of each Condo owner but as a project of Turner Corporation.
Wanda is stunned. They want her, as one of the first initiators behind the Condo Owner’s protest, to sign papers to start the gears in motion. Wanda, and not Alaska, and not Olesya, who has run off to sleep by the highway. She allows Ben to listen to the machine.
“Not what we were expecting from Turner,” says Ben, towelling. His face reads as stunned as Wanda’s.
It is the first step in Turner’s radically new path at sheltering every citizen who seeks shelter according and in compliance to their needs, by enriching and stabilizing their home environment. In other words, Rudy is the new CEO of Turner Industries. In this role, he has lost total interest in the needs of the affluent, and he is phasing them out politely, just as he did his more difficult colleagues and those loyal to the old-style B.F. Turner. To Rudy, the thug methods are no more. Nibbling on avocado energy bars in the treetops of the Adirondacks, the Upper West Side seemed to half-crazed Rudy like an interesting place to start.
In the hallway, Natalia runs into Ben and Wanda, dressed for an evening out on the town. Wanda leans lightly on a cane.
She is about to sweep past them, to dutifully cross the city and drop a note at Didactic Motor Company, when Ben snaps his fingers, points at her with a grin and says, “Harley owner, am I right?” He has such a peaceful, otherworldly look to him that Natalia is startled and then ashamed to think of how she hated him for doing what she believes he is doing to Rudy. She feels as if they should be friends, and wants to talk to him, because she knows he was the boyhood friend that supported Rudy through his father’s death. Wanda’s body language is possessive.
Natalia hesitates, then hates Rudy for putting her in this position, and hands the message to Ben. She hurries into the elevator and disappears.
“It’s to me,” says Ben, “I didn’t know she even knew me. She came by Didactic Motors the other day….”
“Yes, I’ve seen her around. She’s always avoided the Condo Owner’s Association. I don’t know if I trust her.”
“How could you not trust her? She seems like a nice enough type.” The loungy-orange elevator lights indicate it has reached the bottom floor.
“Why was she by Didactic Motors? What does she say?”
“It’s not from her, it’s from … it’s from Rudy!”
Wanda turns away, knowing what it might read.
“Way to go, Alaska! You really fucked things up now. Now we’re really in it.” She retrieves her cellphone to page the lawyer Alaska hired to handle the threat-to-disclose. Then she realizes Alaska didn’t hire anyone. The money was to be directed through Didactic’s legal group all right, but it was to be split fifty-fifty between Wanda and Alaska, without anyone working at Didactic knowing anything about the deal.
“Ben,” she says, “I haven’t fallen at all. I’ve only just crawled out of hell. Ben, I’m a visiting demon. Ben….”
He smiles. “It’s okay, baby, just let me read the letter. Correction, a poem! The fuck-wad still writes poems.”
In a singsong voice that grows more and more alarmed and miserable, Rudy’s poem resonates though Ben’s soul, through Wanda’s bones and down the empty hall.
When power falls into your hands
A sleeping dreamer wakes and stands
He plans the vision dreaming gives
To build a house where freedom lives
Then looks about and finds the child
Of dreaming peaceful in the wild
Again withdraws blueprint and pen
Insistent life draws plans again
The beat of life and rushing crowd
Demand to live in shelters proud
You kissed me and you watched me act
Even my eye you did attract
And now betrayed with bloodless note
I promised Ben I’d cut your throat
My every move you put on freeze
And left me dying in the trees
The dream moves on, but without me
The sword swings now most grievously
Others move to seize my power
Built suffering from an ivory tower
As my single chance to change the pace
Of profit with a murderer’s face
Is now destr
oyed and under feet
As friends I trusted on the street
Forget my name and lock me up
Nothing has changed since we grew up
You broke your oath and changed our rules
Then took away my only tools
I will love you as I always did
Until my death, the no-talk kid.”
“Could he be referring to the lock-pick set we were looking for in the safe?” says Wanda.
“You blackmailed him,” Ben answers.
“Ben, it’s all okay now, everyone here is going to receive…”
“I know. I heard the answering machine. But not you … not unless you used the receipts that Rudy and I collected over the years, covered with his handwriting, even scribbled on with poems. I should have burned them.”
“I wanted to burn them when I realized what I had done.”
“Then it is only you who knows, and he thinks it is me. And you have got his email address and can set the whole thing straight.”
“Not quite, Ben. That’s not how this situation exactly works. Not unless we find Alaska.”
“Alaska?”
“And the baby.”
“What does Alaska have to do with it?”
“She has the email, all the information. It was her idea. She set the whole thing up, beginning…”
“Beginning with a deposit to Didactic, which would be screened by her precious legal assistants.”
“So that you would never know.”
“So that Didactic would launder extorted money as the first year of taxable earnings. Alaska was never planning to let our company go, not with that tax burde…..”
“A little blackmailing for a good cause isn’t the end of the world, is it Ben? You can always get another motorcycle company.”
“You, Wanda, can get some other company.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I prefer not to be with you, beginning right now, tonight.”
36.
JACKIE HAS BOUGHT the pickup that she told Vespa she would get in order to salvage her reputation. She has polished the chrome to a shine, patched all the bodywork, replaced damaged engine parts, and slapped on new brake shoes. Vespa is nowhere in sight. Jackie has even taken Mimi for a ride in the Squirrel she and Ben built together. She flies effortlessly over a meadow in Orange County, setting her down by one of the oldest wineries in America.
She has enjoyed the feeling of Mimi’s knees pressing tight against her hips. Although they decline a tour of the cellars, they buy themselves several glasses, smiling at one another on the terrace of a small restaurant. They are quipping, sipping, and eating a salad filled with walnuts, a gesture to the animal they have come to revere.
Mimi is extremely interested in the glider, wants to know how Jackie designed the complex series of cables that activate the three flaps on each side and change the rudder direction in the tail. Mimi looks into her eyes, and far from the caring, even doting affections of Vespa, Jackie sees the face of a woman who has been to hell many times, gotten to know the place her own way, and who even drops by now and again for a visit. Certainly Mimi is no angel, but to be fair, neither is Jackie, and Mimi’s tough-bird attention is a breath of fresh air to Jackie, who seldom spends time outside, sipping wine on a terrace with a woman who has been inside, like her. If Jackie were to put a word to it, she would say that in the company of Mimi, she is bewitched.
She has a feeling that if she should leave their table even for a moment and call Vespa to say she is coming back, Mimi will pick up her charisma and be gone. So, she sits, and she sits, and she enjoys Mimi’s informed questions, her devilish intelligence, and her speculation as to how much Jackie would accept in dollars in order to part with the Squirrel. She even forgets, as trees toss sunlight from their leaves and sparrows fill the air with chatter, that Ben, her dear friend, is half-owner.
Vespa is back from the hotel she slept in by the highway. Vespa sleeps until the proprietor taps on their window and tells her it is almost noon. “Since you are a girl,” he said, “I won’t charge you for the extra day.”
Vespa leaves on the recovered Norton Monocoque and heads instead back into town, stopping in Central Park to have lunch. By that time, Jackie and Mimi are trucking back into Manhattan, and Vespa is already back at the shop, reading a note from her brother.
“I have gone to see Swan at his hotel. I am then going to look for Rudy. All of the papers I had saved have been put to evil use and he is being extorted. He believes that I am blackmailing him, but I have betrayed no one.”
So what, thinks Vespa. A few years back, Rudy would have jumped at the chance to extort a millionaire developer. “Otherwise, I fear he has sent assassins already to kill me. Ben.”
They are always afraid of assassins, she tells herself. She looks about her, and wonders how many people have access to the motorcycle repair shop. There are many gloomy places in this shop where a childhood fear could lurk. Then again, Turner is a multi-million dollar conglomerate with a track record that is less than squeaky clean.
Vespa rolls the Norton Monocoque out of the shop, powers into traffic, and misses Jackie in her pickup truck by half a minute.
She is going to see Gus and Swan at the hotel. When she arrives, Ben is in the room, and Swan is reclining on the bed.
“Where is Arnica?” asks Vespa.
“With Alaska,” says Swan.
“I am being stalked by assassins,” says Ben.
“I know, I read the note. You two always thought that.”
“He might be right,” says Swan.
“I thought that too,” says Vespa, and she bows her head. “And where’s Gus?”
“Pissing naked in a fountain for Wanda, who is going to make a thousand perfect prints of him on black-and-white film stock and sell them to the world of art,” says Swan.
“He’s not around,” Ben clarifies, “because he’s with Wanda.”
“I don’t understand, what is the great fault in what she did?” Vespa asks.
Swan responds, “Besides the fact that Ben appears to have betrayed his first boyhood love?”
“Maybe she was jealous. She didn’t mean it to look like that. It’s hardly too late to set things right again. And shit Ben, Rudy was really into it, you know, he was no longer the same boy, the same man that we loved. Or that you loved. He was messed up, and he was cruel, a psychologically cruel man who threw me out of his apartment on my ass.”
Ben hands Vespa the phone, and dials in Olesya’s message retrieval code. It is something they have all memorized, because they were using it to receive calls from other people.
“Man, I don’t believe this,” says Ben. “I loved him, and you fucked him. Who would figure that?”
“We were young then,” explains Vespa, “and if he had cared about me I would have loved him as well.” She listens to the urgent-sounding lawyer on the phone, explaining Turner’s proposal to Wanda. “Okay, it sounds like Rudy’s initiative had nothing to do with Wanda’s games.”
“Are you kidding? She went to every one of the residents in the building, talking up the idea of a lawsuit, and now it seems she’s won.”
“Well, what has she won? Perhaps the lawyer was going to arrange a generous cut for her if the class-action suit had gone through. It wasn’t just from the kindness of her heart. But then a better thing came along, a sure ticket. Who could resist.”
His sister can see that Ben is heartbroken over Wanda’s bad behavior, she stumbles over what to say.
“All Wanda did was set up a little situation, without telling anyone else.”
“Except Alaska.”
“And that allowed her to receive a series of small gratuities for not revealing certain things that Rudy once wrote. It’s like the opposite of publishing his writing and then getting paid. She offered to not publ
ish his writing and get paid. What’s wrong with that? She’s been so lost this last little while. And it’s not something Rudy would ever have hesitated to do himself.”
“Unless he was breaking a blood vow.”
“Well,” says Swan, “we have to tell him it wasn’t you, Ben. It wasn’t you. That young woman, Natalia, she knows how to get hold of Rudy.”
“Oh no, don’t even think of it. I am not breaking into her apartment,” says Ben a little too fast.
Swan smiles. “I never imagined you would even know how.”
37.
WANDA AND GUS BROWSE the showroom of Didactic Motor’s crosstown competitor, and Gus decides to buy a Moto Guzzi, which Wanda insists was designed by a man called Gus. It is an 850 Le Mans 1, and despite himself, the styling and the masculine sound of the name delight him. Gus smiles at it, as if he has met a long-lost brother or a twin.
Wanda explains that it has twin carbs, a vertical twin engine, twin disc brakes, and a twin cradle frame. Gus, who spends more time statistically than the masculine median gazing in the mirror, sees himself in a streamlined windshield and allows his wallet to fall open in awe.
He feels that he is Narcissus, delightfully drowning in a pool, and Wanda has interrupted his reverie by pulling him by the roots of his hair from the water.
“It’s too bad you can’t drive this thing in the State of New York,” she says, hopping onto the bike. Gus stares at the thing, then stares at the woman straddling the front. Wanda kick- starts it and Gus puts on the helmet that he has purchased to go along with the look. Now, it is Gus who is lost in a blizzard, only the snow is more like morphia, and the storm is Wanda’s passion. Because of the volume of the motor, they both begin to shout.
“On the back roads!” Wanda laughs. “I’ll show you, and then you can write your license and drive here!”
“I should have got a license in Ontario,” says Gus. “Here I’m a motorcycling virgin. I Saint Joseph’d myself.” How stupid to have one and not be able to drive.
“Pardon me?” says Wanda.
“It’s an expression of Swan’s. It means I have never had an experience, specifically sex.”
