Waxwings

by Unknown

  Turning back, chastened, into the hall, Tom had an out-of-the-body experience, or something uncannily like it. From a distance of ten feet or so, in the gloaming he caught a distinct glimpse of himself, shoeless, unshaven, in wrinkled denim shirt and baggy corduroys. His woolly-headed avatar was heading upstairs to his sanctum on the third floor, the hog. That room was the only one in the house with a normal supply of natural light.

  So up he goes—off to spend another day in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

  Well, of course she’d moved out. Having seen what he’d seen, Tom would’ve moved out on himself. The condo was Beth’s message to him, and he understood it perfectly; every syllable made sense. She’d given him a sideways glimpse of his own bloated self-absorption, and he was shocked but grateful. His first thought was to phone and tell her about his discoveries—how he saw it now from her point of view, and how . . . But show was better than tell. He’d show her. Going down the stairs, he was light on his feet, brimming with energy and purpose, riding the surge of his enthusiasm like a surfer on a steep Hawaiian wave.

  On the half-landing, he stopped in front of the offensive window. The dimpled lozenges of colored glass were impossible to see through, and the fussy trelliswork of lead mullions took up half the entire window space. The seventeenth-century Puritans had railed against stained glass, seeing it as man’s vain attempt to divert God’s all-seeing gaze with tawdry art, and suddenly Tom found himself of one mind with Cromwell and Cotton Mather. If a brick had been handy, he’d happily have pitched it through the bloody thing.

  More light!

  After dark, the condos of Belltown became a dense aerial honeycomb of illuminated rooms, each boldly exposed to the gaze of the others. Though the windows were routinely fitted with featherweight ivory venetian blinds, they were rarely closed, except in bedrooms late at night. At any one moment you might see people with bodies already in perfect shape working out on home treadmills and exercise bikes; Web sites blooming on computer monitors; familiar movies playing out on jumbo-sized DVD screens; pizzas arriving in white cardboard boxes; intense, gesturing figures, like maestros conducting imaginary orchestras; physical intimacies between men and men, women and women, and sometimes between men and women. After the public preliminaries of sex in Belltown, and there was plenty of sex in Belltown, the scene was more likely to fade to black at the turning of a dimmer switch than it was to go white with the rude closure of the blinds.

  Since everybody took turns being observers and the observed, the condo-dwellers took pride in the increasing refinement of these nightly performances. Whatever compelled them—love, grief, health-maintenance, pulling an all-nighter at the terminal, or hanging out with a friend—was done with a keen awareness of the watching audience, so that in Belltown even raw unhappiness took on a shiny professional finish.

  Seeing the lighted rooms, a newcomer might think that he—or, statistically more likely, she—was watching Belltown “life,” but these radiant tableaux vivants were more like commercials for the product than the product itself. You could measure their effectiveness in bottom-line terms: the price of a Belltown condo was rising by a steady 35 percent per annum, thereby comfortably outperforming the market and running slightly ahead of the blue-chip standard set by waterfront property on Lake Washington. So the flirtations, treadmills, pizza deliveries, and rare scenes of abject despair all helped to add to the wealth of the Belltowners, most of whom were now paper millionaires.

  In the southwest-corner apartment on the eleventh floor of Belgrave Pointe, Finn’s venetian blind was squinched tight shut, but the rest of the condo was on display in the multi-screen extravaganza. The casual viewer would probably miss the toys strewn across the living-room floor and the nest of cardboard boxes in the far corner, seeing instead the twin powder-blue couches facing each other across a low glass-topped cane table, where a dozen white roses stood in a water jug beside an open laptop and the New Millennium issue of Vanity Fair. Seated on the couches were two women, one dark and curly-haired, the other a razored blonde. Between them, a bottle of Blanc de Blancs had been broached, but the level of the wine had sunk only an inch or so past the top of the label, and they’d moved on to mugs of blackcurrant tea.

  “He’s losing it,” Beth said. “It’s totally unlike him. Totally.”

  “Is he on medication?” said Debra Shumaker.

  “Alka-Seltzer? Ibuprofren? He’s got a phobia about doctors. He hasn’t seen one in years.”

  It had been a delightful surprise to find Debra waiting for the South elevator. They’d both been on staff at the P-I, when Beth and Tom and Debra and Joel had sometimes gone out to dinner as an awkward four-some. Debra, newly divorced, now worked at Oroonoko.com, a women’s adventure-travel site, and had a studio apartment on the fifteenth floor, though Beth had yet to see it. The flowers and wine had come with a card: “To the best days of our (single!) lives, Love D.”

  Tom and Joel should have found something in common—they were both teachers, after all—but were like oil and water, with Tom always trying to talk to Debra, and Joel to Beth, so that conversation between the women was hopelessly fractured by the men’s needy, attention-seeking interruptions. “They have to strut their stuff,” Debra had said after a bad evening at the Dahlia Lounge, and Beth had instantly seen the two husbands as a pair of gobbling turkey-cocks with spurred legs and scarlet wattles. That was the last of the dinners.

  “I remember that window,” Debra said. “ I liked it.”

  “Me too. It used to sort of sprinkle the light through the house . . . I was shocked.”

  “What was he thinking of ?”

  “Goethe.”

  “What?”

  “When I went to pick up Finn, he had this creepy smile on his face, and all he said was ‘More light!’ Goethe’s last words. Except they weren’t. I got to learn all about it. According to Tom, what he actually said was something like ‘Can you open the shutters, please?’ but they shortened it down to ‘More light’ after he was gone. Can you imagine? It’s dark outside, this frigid wind’s howling through a gaping hole in the side of the house, Finn’s shivering in a Pokémon T-shirt, the guy from Glass Doctor’s on his cellular, trying to locate a bigger sheet of glass, and I’m getting a tutorial in German poetry.”

  “Oh my god, that’s so Joel—”

  “He’s into Goethe?”

  “No, the Great Man thing. They all do it when they go into hypomania—obsessing with celebrities, like Hitler, or Jesus. With Joel it’s FDR. He did his master’s on the New Deal, so he’s the ultimate know-it-all on Roosevelt. He knows the first inaugural speech by heart. It used to scare the shit out of me, hearing that the only thing I had to fear was fear itself.”

  Perched on the couch, bare feet tucked under her haunches, she sipped at her tea like a shy chickadee at a feeder. “Joel has this favorite armchair. He’d pretend it was a wheelchair and trundle around the room in it, smoking an imaginary cigarette. In a holder. Joel hates to smoke—I had to quit when we first started dating—but when he was manic, he’d puff and puff on this make-believe cigarette until he was actually wheezing.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Maybe now, but it wasn’t funny then. You know, most of the time he’s the decent, self-effacing high-school teacher—and Joel’s good. The kids love him, and they stay in touch long after they’ve left Garfield. He’s always getting e-mail from history majors in college—he’s still critiquing their term papers, and sending them reading lists. Oh, as a teacher, he’s just adorable. But every year, around the beginning of summer break, like he can frickin’ schedule it, he turns into Godzilla.”

  Her voice was sandy, dry, midwestern, with the ring of the family farm in it. Outside her P-I cubicle, she’d hung a South Dakota vanity license plate (DEBRA!) to announce just where she was coming from. One of her assignments had been to crank out “The Dish,” Friday’s showbiz column, a scattershot recital of Hollywood splits and pairings, lawsuits and breast-cancer scares, billion-dolla
r contracts and spells in Arizona rehab clinics, quarried from press releases and the supermarket tabloids. Beth, who sometimes had to fill in for her, never quite managed to catch the column’s trademark tone, the artful mix of dizzy fandom and jaded weltschmerz that came effortlessly to Debra. Listening to her now, Beth thought, It’s “The Dish”—she’s doing “The Dish.”

  “He swells right up. He literally gets bigger. You can practically see him grow. Then he stinks the place up because he’s too preoccupied with running the world to bother taking a shower. Does Tom get to the point where he needs no sleep at all?”

  “Sleep’s never been Tom’s problem.”

  “Because that’s another big sign. When Joel’s high, he goes two, three days without a wink of sleep. I’d get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and he’d be sitting in his stupid wheelchair, puffing away, and lecturing me about the Brain Trust—all these great minds, like his, right? It didn’t sound insane, and it wouldn’t sound insane to you, not if you didn’t know. The history lesson from hell.”

  “I’ve had a few of those.”

  “You know that spooky look they get behind their eyes? When they seem to be telling you ‘This isn’t me’? There are two people there. One of them’s plumb crazy, and the other’s just heart-breakingly sad, like ‘Please: let me outta here!’ ”

  No, Beth thought; that’s not Tom—that’s never been Tom. What he suffers from is lifelong blind self-involvement, and that’s culpable. Tom didn’t deserve the exoneration of mental illness. To feel good about the condo—and Beth loved its bare, clean, uninfected space—she had to be certain of his maddening brand of sanity.

  “I’ve been there, Beth. You’ve got compassion fatigue—”

  Debra hiccupped, quite loudly, and Beth looked up to see that her face—always so sharply defined—had gone soft and wobbly. Shoulders quaking, she said, “Oh, fuck it. Sorry.” She bared her teeth in a ruinous grin that fell apart as soon as it was framed, then wiped her clenched fist across her eyes. “I don’t give a shit. Honestly. Now I’ve lost a fucking contact—no, I got it . . .” Slotting the lens back under her lid, she was shaken by another temblor. First she seemed to be having a fit of the giggles; then she began to make a low whooing noise like a distant train whistle in the night.

  Still unused to the basic layout of her new life, Beth got up too quickly, painfully barking her shin on the corner of the table, knocking her glass over. Wine pooled on the tabletop as, hobbling slightly, she reached the far couch and gathered her friend clumsily, self-consciously, into her arms. “Debra? Deb?”

  She seemed lighter than Finn, all air and bone, like a beaky fledgling fallen from its nest.

  “I never cry,” Debra said. “Ever. It must be something I ate.”

  “Poor baby,” Beth said, just as she’d say it to Finn.

  “Hey, coach, you get to cry next time. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  It was a very Belltown tableau—the blue couch, the fair woman cradling a dark one in her lap—and would ordinary have drawn no one’s attention. The interesting feature was to the right, where a boy in pyjamas had flattened himself against the short dividing wall that ran between the kitchen and the living area, his hair showing as a ragged splotch on the white paint. Standing stock-still with his back to the wall, his throat stretched taut, the small figure looked less like a boy than a spider, a black widow, ready at any second to scuttle out from his hiding place and bite.

  Carved gargoyle pumpkins left over from Halloween collapsed and rotted in the December rains, their crumpled faces turning to soft mush. Strung along porches, on bare cherry trees and ink-black cypress hedges, Christmas lights twinkled fiercely in the sullen dusk of noon. Santa, the obese clown-god of the winter solstice, now reigned. Santas walked the streets, clanking bells. They stood, moulded in plaster, in front yards; padded and perspiring, they worked the malls; they were stencil-painted in store windows, and rode illuminated sleighs on suburban rooftops. With his drunkard’s cheeks and Abrahamic beard, Santa was patriarch and prodigal, half Jehovah, half Falstaff. Tom thought of him as the dad from hell.

  Though not a believer, Tom did miss the baby Jesus in the all-purpose bacchanal known as “the holidays,” meaning Chanukah, Kwanza, the Wiccan Yule, the end of Ramadan, the arrival of the 1999 Beaujolais Nouveau, and, more afterthought than centerpiece, the virgin birth in Bethlehem. In the ubiquitous din of seasonal music, herald angels, mangers, shepherds, and magi lost out to the honky-tonk-tonk of sleighbells and red-nosed reindeer. Tom’s NPR piece about the grotesquery of Saint Nick in America provoked his largest stack of hate-mail yet.

  With the Nasdaq promising to pass 4,000 by the end of the holidays, even the worst restaurants were booked-solid with office parties. The GetaShack party was held aboard The Spirit of Puget Sound, rented by Steve Litvinof for a moonlight cruise to Poulsbo. In the event, there was no moonlight; a full gale was blowing in the sound; the boat never left the dock, where it lay, lurching, sometimes wildly, through the festivities. Yet the evening was held to be a wild success when Steve, in his usual black silk suit, clinging to a pillar like a toper to a leaning lamp standard, made the surprise announcement of a three-for-one stock split. After delivering a stern homily on “sustaining shareholder value,” he waved a champagne flute at his whooping employees, and said, “To Y2K. And to our new frontier. Next year, we cross the Mississippi. March, we open in Chicago. June, Philadelphia. September, Boston. We got a busy millennium on our hands, guys, so Happy Holidays, because they’re going to be the last holidays you’ll see before we hit my old home town, New York.” The small ship gave a sudden jounce, and four young women from Editorial lost their footing, made a grab for each other, but landed among a herd of shambling techies. “And you can cut that out,” Steve said. “Leave the office sex to Amazon. I got a basic piece of math for you. Y2K equals 24/7.”

  Meanwhile Beth, who’d been doing some hurried math of her own over the last sixty seconds or so, realized that she was gazing at Steve with such a wide and silly smile that she had to raise her hand to wipe it from her face.

  Tom braved the leering Santas, hideous music, and combat-hardened shopping grannies to buy presents for Finn: a box of magic tricks, an electronic walking dog said to possess artificial intelligence, and a host of five-dollar bibelots and tchotchkes for stocking-stuffers. Sheltering from the rain under the wind-torn awning of an antique shop on First, he noticed in the window a Victorian glass paperweight—a limpid globe housing a surreal butterfly of many colors. Beth, he thought, and went inside.

  “Baccarat,” the clerk said.

  “What?”

  “It’s Baccarat, the butterfly. Quite gorgeous. Are you a collector?”

  Given a credit-card slip, Tom registered the price for the first time, and it was just short of astounding, but it was too late to pull out now and he signed with a flourish. When the woman was packaging it, in a silver cardboard box and a fuss of tissue paper, it occurred to him that perhaps he was no longer obliged to buy a Christmas present to be delivered to a condo in Belltown . . . “It’s for my wife,” he said.

  “Lucky lady,” the clerk said, handing him a stiff, rope-handled brown paper bag that might have held a ball of lead.

  The wrapped parcels on the back seat of the VW looked to Tom like virtue itself, and he drove back to the house feeling that he’d escaped the holiday battlefield with honor and was owed the just reward of the good soldier—guiltless hours under the lamp with a book, and a bachelor lunch of toasted cheese and a bottle of warm Bass. His rosy mood was barely tarnished by the discovery that his usual parking spot under the sycamore was occupied by a scrofulous pick-up, once white, now rust, and that a man unknown to him sat on the bottom step of the porch, evidently awaiting him. He found a space thirty yards ahead of the truck, and walked back, laden with his parcels.

  “Belong to you, mister?” The Asian-looking man gestured at the house with what seemed to be deep sorrow, and for a moment Tom t
hought he must be the bearer of tragic news.

  “Yes?”

  “Nice place. But need work.” Glancing up and down the street, the man said, confidentially, “Green on roof.”

  “Moss,” Tom said crossly.

  “Moss!” the man said, echoing Tom’s accent and pronunciation like a mynah bird. “Moss!”

  Was this some kind of derisive parody? Tom looked at the guy, trying to stare him down. His Mariners cap was worn back to front. Hair sprouted thinly from his upper lip, less a moustache than a tentative pubescence. He was encased in a voluminous sky-blue Gore-Tex jacket, apparently brand-new but far too big for him and incongruously sportif—a riddle of zips, toggles, and Velcro flaps, the sort of garment designed for anally-retentive weekend mountaineers. It hung on the man like a rustling tent. He was all skin and bone, except for the twin swags of fatty flesh above his eyes, which gave him an expression of sleepy woe.