Their zip code was almost number one on the list of the wealthiest in the country and her Father didn’t make anything and her Mother didn’t do anything and their apartment wasn’t gigantic but it was unnecessarily lavish and velvet and they used too much and threw away too much and, worst of all, didn’t care. How many tropical islands could they visit and still ignore the rampant poverty just over the resort fence? Her parents weren’t bad people but they were living in a self-righteous delusion that they deserved everything they had.
She had tried to alert both of them separately to the injustice of their position but neither would fight and they individually referred to her, as if rehearsed, as their most prized possession: the thing that money could not buy. She knew what her parents meant by this, the love they were expressing, but she also knew they were poisoned with some disease of wealth that had turned them into half-people with coffee machines and cash registers where their hearts should be.
Heather knew she was infected by this too and fought to control her gnawing need to shop and spend and get a treat for doing ordinary things. And so it was that by the time most people moved out of the building and the trucks came, she had resolved to overcome her powerful impulse towards comfort and luxury and accept all the inconveniences of construction as payment due on their unearned life. She even resisted being a brat and didn’t join in the daily though well-founded complaints of her Father, which was difficult for her since it was so annoying to be checked out all the time by that Worker at her own front door.
It was too embarrassing to tell her Father anyway and she knew her Mother was oblivious as usual because once when they were looking for a package and the Doorman was gone, Heather had suggested that they ask the Worker out front and her Mother had no idea who she was talking about. Heather clarified that he was the only white one and even though his silvery hair was cut so short he looked bald, he wasn’t and had the smooth skin, strong jaw, and clear blue eyes of a young man.
She couldn’t tell her Mother that she wondered about him more every day, where he was from and what he was like and how could it be that he was the handsome one and was doing ten-hour shifts for the last two months to renovate their mansion and her Mother didn’t even see him? Maybe, Heather thought, her Mother would have remembered him if he had looked at her the way he looked at Heather, especially the one or two times their eyes had met and she’d felt as if she were naked in the street.
No doubt it would have bothered her Mother as it did Heather at first. It had annoyed and then outraged her, making her think of all the entitlements of men and how they didn’t have the right to just look at women and disrupt them that way. But he was only looking at her, wasn’t he, and had never looked at her Mother and over time Heather knew he saw all of her somehow.
He was out there every day as far as she knew and she couldn’t tell her Mother that she wondered on the few days he wasn’t if he had forgotten about her. She couldn’t explain that it didn’t bother her at all anymore and that most nights she thought about their slight interactions and imagined him or her sense of him and realized that his looking at her, and even more his trying not to look at her, gave her a warm ache in her stomach that moved all the way down.
She wanted to talk to him. She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t like her mother, that she saw all people and knew that he was horribly forced to behave like a servant. She wouldn’t condescend to him like some spoiled private school heiress who got to live there with everything. She could only guess at the deprivation and circumstances that brought someone to that point in their life and she wondered if he was intelligent and what his voice sounded like and if she could ever do anything for those who lacked. She could never tell her mother that she would be whole one day because she would act with her heart and give everything away, including herself if necessary, so that someone could benefit from their years of effortless accumulation. What she really wanted to do was tell the Worker that she saw him.
“Is my Mother home yet?”
Bobby heard the voice and knew who it was and couldn’t believe she was so close. He looked up, unable to answer, and saw the wind blow her hair into her mouth and watched her pull it away from her full lips with one perfectly bent finger. He finally managed to say, “Not yet,” and probably stared too long before remembering he should make a smile for her, but she took it and smiled back and walked inside after a moment with her skirt bouncing high against her ass.
Bobby relived every second of their interaction that night. It had so many parts and they had both behaved even better than he hoped they would, with her not just talking to him but inviting him as a co-conspirator in her plan to do something bad while her Mother was away. He tried not to spin the event any further but his imagination took him to her bedroom where she had invited him and he could see himself pushing into her and feel she was like his Mother’s kimono inside.
A week earlier it had been Halloween and Bobby knew that he could not wear a mask but he liked it when adults did and hid their dumb faces and he especially liked Heather dressed up like a kitten, a black dot on the end of her nose like she’d leaned into a screen door. He stood up as she walked towards him that day because his back was hurting from working hard enough to never lose his job. Still, his body was calm and his muscles relaxed naturally when he saw her. It was possible, he thought, that they were getting used to each other. He decided that day as she walked by all in black that there was only one real test and that was for her to speak to him and prove herself worthy by stepping away from her world and begging to be in his.
And now that she had actually spoken to him, he was so happy and surprised and harder than ever. He had been hoping to will it or compel her but as she spoke, she seemed under her own power, not his. Heather was something different for sure, something even more than he could understand before. Was it possible now that consuming her was something less than he wanted? Her death in his hands would be exquisite and Bobby had thought it was both their destinies but he suddenly saw it for what it was: temporary. All of the pictures in his mind changed and he now wanted her to come to him on her own and he could barely wait until the next morning to see her as it was, so what would happen if she were truly gone?
Five
THE BREAKSTONES’ STREET WAS clogged with traffic at all hours due to the construction, which, along with the mounting garbage bags and falling leaves, provided cover for Mark for those tense minutes the next day when Heather came and went. He didn’t know what he was doing there exactly other than being at the ready to come to Heather’s aid and of course to get some kind of proof, not to throw in Karen’s face but to share with the police. He knew he had to do something when he saw his daughter and the Worker twice that day, sliding by each other silently like figurines on a medieval clock.
Karen had remained in a pout and Mark knew to be sweet and apologetic as if he had drunk too much at a party. She was unaware as they went to bed that night that Mark saw himself loosening the scaffold or cutting the 220-volt wiring in the wet basement or, the most intriguing, luring the Worker up to their apartment and shooting him because he had been harassing his daughter, ask anyone, and had broken in with a kitchen knife, which Mark would place in his hand after the fact. Mark was able to sleep finally, but only when lulled by repeated scenes of the Worker’s death, usually by choking him with bare hands.
After a few days Mark confided to his assistant that he was job hunting and asked her to help hide his strange schedule. He had started to watch his own apartment building for two hours twice a day and saw that the Worker’s ritual encounters were sloppy and obvious to all except his daughter and that the construction crew seemed as wary of him as Mark. They commuted together, packed in rusty pickups with Jersey license plates, but always made the Worker crouch in the truck bed. They socialized and laughed a few times a day with coffee and cigarettes, except for the Worker, who was rarely in the penthouse where most of the work happened and who had all the worst jobs and wasn’t eve
n invited to lunch.
The intensity of Mark’s surveillance didn’t waver, fueled by both his need to protect Heather and his fear of being seen. He knew he should at least rehearse an excuse if Karen or Heather or a neighbor or these people on their street, the tourists, nannies, deliverymen, school kids and women in yoga pants, possibly saw him. But they didn’t see him and Mark’s vigilance was rewarded that day when, on her return from school, he saw Heather speak with the Worker.
Heather had initiated the exchange and it was brief and seemed as stunning to the Worker as it did to Mark. It didn’t matter what the two had talked about, or if they already knew each other, or how shy the Worker’s response was. All that mattered to Mark was that his daughter had stuck her innocent hand into this flame with a friendly smile and that the Worker hadn’t seen Mark at all.
The only thing that stifled a complete panic was Mark’s gut sensation that opportunity had declared itself. His calculations were instant. Here was an aging, unskilled, and probably uneducated day laborer, barely hanging on to the fringe of society, without a union or money or any protection in what was an extremely hazardous workplace. It got colder and grayer as Mark watched Heather eventually go into the building and he waited, shivering for another two hours until the crew knocked off and the Worker got in the truck.
Mark thought about going to an Internet café so that he could research where to buy a gun without leaving an electronic trail on his phone or computers, but he thought when was the last time he’d seen an Internet café and decided he would just go to the library first thing in the morning. He figured that the only practical idea was to hire a private guard like the billionaires did, to watch and protect his family.
When he finally went in, Mark hugged Heather and smiled at Karen and thought he would ask his boss to recommend a reliable, discreet security company. He went to bed thinking he would do that in the morning although he knew now he did not want to seek anyone’s help, in fact, he did not want questions of any kind and he fell asleep easily that night, exhausted at having reached a resolution.
Mark’s dreams that night were so vivid, he wasn’t sure if he was asleep. He would see himself climbing the outside of their building, using the ladder of the scaffolding and he would look out over the neighborhood towards the treetops of the park, then the other direction, a spire of a church and Park Avenue, a yellow blur of taxis. Then, after that, he would peer into Heather’s bedroom. She was gone so he would look into his own bedroom window and see Heather on their bed facing the ceiling in only socks, cut open like a deer, bloodless on their white chenille duvet.
This was strangely not horrific to him and he found himself in the room at the foot of the bed as her mutilated corpse spoke to him, her face alive and normal. She said something like “Daddy, why did you do this to me?” That was exactly what she said, and on what seemed like the third repetition of this dream, he knew it was a dream and woke himself from it, anticipating that perhaps he might never want to sleep again.
Mark did not believe in the supernatural or in giving any prophetic qualities to dreams. He knew this image was merely an expression of what was on his waking mind and the interpretation was hardly complex. He knew it meant that he was afraid for Heather’s life and should something happen to her, even she would know he was responsible. As he sat in the hallway outside the door of his daughter’s room, trying to strike her ghostly accusations from his mind, he became aware that the dream might have another meaning. What if Karen had been right? What if his mind had been overrun with the irrational? What had he really seen except another man, and God there were so many who wanted his daughter?
He refused to believe the disgusting things Karen had suggested but maybe she had put the thought in his mind and maybe he had gotten carried away and maybe that dream had happened because in the past few days there were no other thoughts allowed. He wasn’t abnormal, he knew that. He wasn’t jealous of those men, not in that way, and he couldn’t imagine someone penetrating his daughter but he certainly didn’t want to be her lover in place of them. He only wanted her to be his daughter the way she was now and never stop. Mark understood he had to let go of Heather and let her grow up and that he had to accept whatever their relationship became because that’s what parents did. He knew that it would break his heart and that was normal.
Karen could not shake the big argument with Mark. She felt guilty at first, knowing that she had started things with her insecure guesses at his thoughts and she had merely been defending that stupid mistake when she lashed out. He hadn’t lost his job. He wasn’t having an affair. It was only a misunderstanding between them and she was really kicking herself for not keeping her feelings to herself under any attack, yet he seemed so crazed and in the end maybe he needed an excuse to express his real feelings too. It was cruel, what Mark had said, but it confirmed her belief that he saw absolutely no value in what she did. But it was also good, what Mark said, because after years of being appreciated less and less, she was awakened to the fact that she should do more for herself.
She also needed more people in her life. Being mostly with strangers had kept her in her head too much and she was frequently anxious and scattered. She had always wanted close friendships but now she saw that her whole life, some sense of competition had brought out people’s worst behavior and most social interactions were shallow and boastful on all sides. Karen hoped that finding a confidante would be possible now that the ladies were all equally humbled by their rebellious teens, sexless marriages, food obsessions and real estate woes.
The day after the big fight with Mark, Karen remembered a mother at the school who had disappeared when her daughter had chosen the diving team over debate. Karen had always liked her, and she had always been friendly with funny stories she got from her husband, a high-profile divorce attorney. Karen called under the guise of a possible shared fundraiser to cover travel expenses for the underprivileged girls in their daughters’ respective activities. She was nervous as she dialed and made up a name for the nonexistent event, her professional mind awake after all these years, rejecting puns on “splash” and “resolution” before arriving at “The Competitors, a Celebration!” They had lunch that day and neither shared much but Karen enjoyed being one of those people who talked about movie stars and celebrities, especially their private or romantic lives, with judgment and disgust.
The day after that, Karen got a job at a hospital thrift shop on Second Avenue, as a volunteer of course, but five hours, five days a week, and she had a key to the front door. The benefits of working were immediate because the rest of the all-female staff, many of them cancer survivors, were older or looked older, so that men who came in, usually to buy a Burberry, angled for Karen’s attention and flirted the minute their wives weren’t looking. The store benefited as well, since Karen became their biggest patron after two days, indulging her long-trained eye for luxury, especially the used couture fashions for which her relative youth and exercised body made her the sole customer.
Karen left the clothes, plus the jewelry and luggage she’d acquired, in the back of the store and tried them on during her breaks, considering if they needed tailoring and when she could wear them and how well a suitcase went with her new, old look. In this ritual, she suddenly appreciated her privacy, wondering why she had done so little for herself for so long and knowing that Mark had no idea how lucky he was. She was thin and viable and just as glaringly mismatched to his ugliness as the day they’d met.
Barely a week had passed since Mark had yelled at her and his attempts to apologize were no more convincing than his recent kindness. Heather might have bought his sunny smile but Karen could see the cracks in the corners of his mouth and the dark circles around his eyes that revealed his frustration. She lay awake in bed that night and felt for him and how small he’d become as he marshaled his waning potency against imagined enemies.
She might just do that fundraiser and Heather’s sense of charity might be piqued enough to chair the
student committee. Karen was so pleased that her friend, soon to be one of many, thought it was genuine genius and that they should have dinner and plan it with her husband, the divorce attorney, who could be helpful in so many ways. While Karen smiled to herself in the dark, Mark woke with a start, sweaty and afraid, and she rolled over without sympathy, certain he was suddenly aware that she was strong and getting stronger; her mind sharpening on its own, coming up with ideas without effort, big ideas.
The next morning Mark showered and went to work, glad that he had a routine and happy to do his job, especially since he was exhausted and had to fight off moments of nausea every time that horrible dream flashed in his mind. He needed to run but didn’t have the energy. Everything had been on his mind; the Worker, Heather’s face, and of course Karen’s judgment, and he now considered that he was deliberately thinking about these things to avoid the real crisis. It was true that his job was in flux and his apartment being renovated but his discontent preceded these events and he looked out his window to the Manhattan skyline littered with skeletal steel and cranes and took in its loneliness. One day Karen had just stopped laughing at his jokes and noticing him at all and Heather had become his audience.
Mark sat there, sipping watery office coffee, wondering what else there would be in life after raising this child. Had he sacrificed his happiness for theirs? Willingly of course, but he and Karen were now far apart and most men would be thinking about a clean start with half their money and another woman. Heather had witnessed their misery and was old enough to understand a divorce would be for the best. Still, despite all the machinery of civilization devoted to splitting up and moving on, Mark couldn’t imagine the strength needed to actually do such a thing.
Heather, the Totality Page 6
