by Brad Parks
At the top of the drive was Masticatoria itself. It had clearly seen better days. There were places where the roof had lost its terra-cotta shingles. One of the stone chimneys was falling down. Another appeared to have become a well-populated squirrel nest. Ivy covered many of the windows. Things that should have been straight hung at odd angles.
The joint had an uninhabited feel to it. There was just no way some blueblood would allow the family manse to fall into such disrepair. Either it was abandoned or it was now the happy abode of the Munster family.
Still, I had come all this way. It would cost me nothing to knock on the door. I pulled my car to the top of the driveway, which ended in a massive half circle—for turning around four-horse carriages, no doubt—parked, and walked up a set of marble steps to a front door that was at least twelve feet tall. I grasped an enormous brass knocker, which let out a spine-tingling creak as I brought it toward me, then let it drop.
A heavy thudding sound echoed through the inside of the house. I thought that would be the only sound coming from this enormous and empty mansion before I turned around and called it a night.
Then, surprisingly, I heard footsteps.
* * *
The man who answered the door appeared to be about my age, about my height, and about my skin color. But that is where our similarities ended.
His hair looked like it hadn’t seen a pair of scissors in a decade or a comb in twice that long. His beard could have been used to hide a week’s worth of foodstuffs—and, for all I knew, it was. He was wearing a threadbare T-shirt over a torso that was more bone than muscle and a pair of jeans that were torn from long wear, not in any kind of fashionable way. He was barefoot. His body odor preceded him by several arm’s lengths. But other than that, he seemed harmless enough.
“Hi, can I help you?” he asked in a friendly way.
Yeah, I wanted to say, could you please, for the love of my olfactory nerves, take a shower? Instead I went with: “Hi, my name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. This is going to seem like an odd question, but is your last name Jorgensen by any chance?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Are you … Klaus Josef Jorgensen by any chance?”
“People call me Quint,” he said.
Quint, as in Klaus Josef Jorgensen V. He was not exactly the lockjaw I was hoping for. He looked more like a body double for Tom Hanks’s character in Castaway—after he’s been on the desert island eating nothing but coconut for a couple of years.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “This is some place you got here.”
“Used to be. Now it’s a real dump, huh?” he said, still grinning.
“No, no, that’s not what I meant.”
“Yes it is,” he insisted, and his smile went even wider, as if he was proud of it. “I wish I could sell it, but my trust explicitly states I can’t. Seems like a waste to let it sit empty, so, well, this is where I live. Think it could use a touch-up or two?”
He was obviously joking, so I went along with it. “Well, maybe the trees could stand a bit of trimming.”
Suddenly the smile went away. “Trim? Never! We need those trees to sequester as much carbon as possible! Come on, dude, get with the program!”
I looked at him closely to see if he was kidding. He wasn’t. Not even slightly. Was it possible the heir to whatever remained of the K&J Manufacturing fortune was … a rabid environmentalist?
“Right,” I said. “Right, of course.”
I was trying to come up with something intelligent to say about global warming when he said, “Want to come in, dude?”
No, I want you to learn how to groom yourself, I almost said, but opted for: “Sure.” Then, before it sounded too self-conscious, I added, “Dude.”
Then I walked over the threshold of Masticatoria. As a reporter, I’ve been in all kinds of houses: the homes of hoarders, where there are nothing but thin trails of open floor between piles of stuff; the homes of OCD sufferers that smell like the inside of a Lysol can; the homes of collectors, who decorate their entire abodes with stamps/butterflies/purple unicorns or whatever their fetish happens to be.
But I had never been in a place quite like this. Every room was huge, beautiful, ornate, opulent—and empty.
So my brief tour of Masticatoria included a trip through the (empty) foyer, down an (empty) hallway, past an (empty) library, and into a sitting room where there was nowhere to sit except for a few bamboo mats that had been arranged in a circle.
“Take a load off,” he said, pointing to one of the mats. He caught my incredulous look, which I wasn’t quite quick enough to hide, and added, “I’m not really big into furniture. It’s a waste of resources.”
“Yeah, I think I saw something like this on the Home and Garden Channel once,” I said. “They called it ‘barren chic.’”
I chose a spot that I deemed to be upwind from his aroma.
“So what can I do for you?” he asked.
“Well, I’m doing some reporting about a neighborhood in Newark that’s near where one of your family’s factories used to be,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me: what has become of K and J Manufacturing?”
“Oh, wow,” he said, then launched into a version of the company history that was a bit more detailed—and a bit more sarcastic—than what I had read in the history book. But it ended in the same spot: Klaus Josef IV had mismanaged K&J into the ground and then died a brokenhearted early death. All that was left of the family fortune, Quint said, was the house—minus the furniture, which he gave to a museum—and something he called the 2077 Trust.
“The 2077 Trust?” I asked.
“It continues paying me a set amount a year until 2077, at which point I will turn a hundred and, the trustees assumed, either be too old or too dead to care.”
He cast a sly glance to the left and right. “I tell the trustees all I do is sit around and smoke pot all day. And I always send them e-mails at four A.M. so they think I’m partying all the time. But the truth is, I’ve made all sorts of money that I’ve hidden from them. I’m currently invested in several very promising green-energy technologies. But you can’t print that, because it’ll ruin my fun.”
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll make that last part off the record.”
“Whatever, dude. Anyhow, I don’t mean to be rambling. Why do you even want to know about this stuff?”
I was so thrown by what I was witnessing—the scion of industrialists living as a barefoot hippie in a decomposing mansion—that I couldn’t even come up with a subtle way to phrase what came out next:
“Well, to be honest, I think something left behind by your family’s denture-making operation is somehow surfacing and making people in the neighborhood sick.”
“Really?” he said, like this intrigued him. “What are you thinking is the culprit? Do you know?”
“Thiocarbanilide.”
Thinking back to the professor’s rather grim warning—“severe overexposure may result in death”—I imagined that merely uttering the word would elicit a shudder from him, as if saying, “You’ve got thiocarbanilide poisoning” was the chemical equivalent of saying, “You married a Kardashian.”
Instead, the face Quint made under his beard was more curious than menacing. “What kind of symptoms are these people reporting?” he asked.
I ran down the litany of problems, from the flu to broken bones. He was already shaking his head.
“That’s not thio,” he said, as if it were his friend and he was defending its reputation.
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m a Jorgensen. When I was a kid, we used to sit around at the dinner table talking about chemistry the way other families talked about the weather. Thiocarbanilide decomposes when left open to the elements, so it’s hard to imagine any of it still being around after all this time. Besides, it’s organic. I’m sure it would kick your ass if you tried to eat it for breakfast, but there’s no way it could cause the kind of stuff
you’re talking about.”
I had taken chemistry in my sophomore year of high school. I remembered very clearly that Myra Merkle sat in the front row of that class. I remembered very little else about it.
“If you don’t believe me, you can look it up,” Quint continued. “Look, I’m not saying K and J didn’t leave something down there that’s making people sick. I’m just saying it’s not thio.”
“So what would it be?”
“Who knows? Could be anything. If you want, I could think about it, call some of my environmental people.”
“You have environmental people?” I asked. Too bad he didn’t have deodorant people.
“Well, yeah. My trust requires that I donate a certain amount of money each year, but it doesn’t say where. That money was made by some industries that made the Earth a pretty dirty place. It seems only right to give it away to people who are trying to clean it up. So I give it all to a variety of small environmental groups.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“To be honest, I’m mostly just in it for the protests. I do love a good protest,” he said, allowing his mind to drift off for a moment, doubtlessly to some picket-toting sit-in of yore. Then he snapped back to and concluded, “Anyway, when you donate fifty, a hundred grand a year to these small groups, they tend to pick up the phone when you call. Let me kick it around with them.”
* * *
As tempted as I was to sit around and swap decorating tips, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. And, besides, Quint’s stench was starting to make my eyes water. So we exchanged contact info and I made my way out of the odd netherworld that was Masticatoria and back into the real one of Madison, New Jersey, where people viewed their trees more as landscaping than as carbon-sequestration devices.
It was after six o’clock, a perfectly acceptable hour for a reporter not on deadline to end his working day. It was also a time when, having now fully shaken off the effects of the dread mystery flu, I was getting a little hungry. So, knowing that my hometown of Millburn was just a few minutes away, I called a very familiar phone number and said five words I knew I would probably come to regret: “Hey, Mom, what’s for dinner?”
My mom is a retired schoolteacher who still cooks like she has a family of five to feed. My dad is a retired pharmaceutical executive who tells her to cut it out. She seldom listens, and I occasionally avail myself of this fact to get a home-cooked meal in my stomach.
Of the three Ross children, I am the only one to have stayed in the great Garden State, though none of us went terribly far. My brother, Tyler, is a lawyer for a big firm in Washington, D.C. My sister, Amanda, is a social worker in Philadelphia.
None of us has produced offspring yet, but my parents remain forever hopeful. Tyler was married but childless. Whenever my parents asked him when he and my sister-in-law planned to have children, Tyler would tell them, “We’re thinking about it.” To which my father always replied, “Well, son, you know you have to do more than think about it, right?”
Then there was me. Girls had been telling me I was “marriage material” since I was sixteen. Yet, here I was, at thirty-two, still stuck in bachelorhood. Not even dating exclusively. When my parents asked if I ever thought about having children, I made vague noises without words attached to them. The fact was, future generations of Carter Rosses were not in my immediate or even intermediate plans. They were like the promise of more-energy-efficient cars: forever five to ten years off.
Given the disappointment that was their sons, my parents’ great hope for grandchild production had become Amanda. After a series of boyfriends who seemed never to last very long, she had finally gotten serious with this guy named Gary. He was a New Jersey state trooper, and while this gave me endless amounts of material for ribbing—about their uniforms being inspired by Nazis, about the whole racial-profiling thing, about that racing club some of their troopers escorted down the parkway a few years back, and so on—the truth was I had always been impressed in my dealings with New Jersey’s cops. There were a few rogue idiots who occasionally gave reporters like me a lot to write about. But generally they were top-notch professionals. And Gary was, all teasing aside, a heck of a good guy.
So when Amanda announced she and Gary were getting hitched, it was a cause for great celebration—and then, at least on my mother’s part, obsession. Ever since the engagement, Mom had been treating mother-of-the-bride duties like it was North Africa and she was General Patton. In a tank. And now that the wedding was this coming weekend? She was no longer recognizing the Geneva convention.
Hence, I was barely inside the door before my mother started with:
“I’ve been thinking about the rehearsal dinner. Cocktails start at five, which I think is too early, but this is Gary’s parents doing the planning for this part, so I didn’t get a say. But it would be nice if we all went over together. If we leave here at four forty-five we should get there in plenty of time. So why don’t you plan on being here by four thirty on Friday?”
“Hi, Mom,” I said. “How are you?”
“And you’re sure you’re not bringing anyone to the wedding? It’s not too late you know. There’s an empty seat at your table.”
From somewhere inside the house, my dad hollered, “Trish, would you leave him alone?”
“Bill, he’s the only one without a plus-one. It’s making the seating unbalanced,” she yelled back, as if I weren’t there. She turned her attention to me and said, “What about your friend Tina?”
Mom always referred to Tina as “your friend Tina.” She always said the “your friend” part with this hint of collusion, like Tina and I were really deeply in love and not telling anyone, and Mom was steadfastly keeping our secret. It was clearly wishful thinking on Mom’s part. She and Tina had met several times and they always hit it off fabulously.
“Sorry, Mom. That’s not happening.”
“She’s such a nice woman and it would be so lovely to have her at such an important family gathering,” she continued, as if I hadn’t just spoken. “You just have to let me know by Thursday. That’s when I have to give the caterer a final count.”
“Mom!” I said sharply enough to get her attention. “Tina barely even talks to me anymore. We’re”—I waved my arms in a frustrated gesture—“not going to any weddings, okay? Not someone else’s and certainly not our own. So get Tina out of your head. She’s out of mine.”
Mom acted like she still didn’t believe me, but nevertheless she said, “Well, maybe you’ll meet a nice girl at the rehearsal dinner on Friday night. Maybe Gary has a cousin or something.”
I hadn’t told my parents about Kira yet. When I was a teenager, I learned not to give my parents too much information about my romantic life. I think there was a time in early adulthood when I started telling them more—after all, they couldn’t ground me or take away my car anymore—then, after a little more time, I realized I had actually had the right idea when I was a teenager.
My parents tended to act as if our time together were a White House press briefing and I was the president. They would keep peppering me with inquiries until I finally stepped away from the podium and told them I wasn’t taking any more questions. So I had learned that the less they knew when it came to relationships—call that area of my life domestic policy—the more time they would spend asking me about work, friends, or other subjects that might be called foreign policy. And, ask any president except perhaps the second George Bush: foreign policy is always easier to talk about.
Every once in a while my dad would try to pull me aside and, man-to-man, ask me if I was getting any “mud for my turtle”—or any number of other colorful euphemisms for The Act. But I wasn’t fooled: he was going to report back to Mom a sanitized version of anything I said.
So I just deflected any more talk about my romantic life all the way through dinner, a delicious and suitably WASPy meal of tuna casserole, baby spinach salad, and couscous. We were just finishing up when my phone rang. Before I could think abo
ut the ears around me, I answered it with, “Hi, Tina.”
Mom just beamed.
Then came five more words I knew I would come to regret, this time not from my mouth, but from Tina’s: “Hey, wanna grab a beer?”
* * *
I somehow escaped the Ross ancestral home with only minor prodding about the nature of Tina’s call or the implications of her invitation. It probably helped that this was one time I wasn’t being intentionally obscure: I really didn’t know what Tina’s agenda was.
As I drove, I found myself daydreaming that she was finally going to drop all her walls and say she was ready to give our relationship the shot it deserved. Right. And then we would fly with a flock of unicorns to a magic palace in the sky where the friendly king would insist we spend the rest of our days having sex and eating bacon.
No, there were four real possibilities. One, she really was trying to reestablish platonic, friendly relations (surely a doomed effort, given our history and chemistry). Two, she was merely pretending to be friends, and was in fact sneakily renewing efforts to entice me into being her sperm donor (which I wasn’t game for). Three, she was horny and looking for another booty call (which I promised myself I would resist, with the caveat that I was incapable of doing so). Or, four, Tina being Tina, I never really would figure it out; and we would continuing drifting on a round-the-world ocean current that kept us moving in the same waters a few feet apart (which seemed the most likely scenario).
And maybe, eventually, I would figure things out well enough with Kira that I could decide, once and for all, to launch myself into a different stream. At this point, Kira was still too new to make such bold decisions. To change metaphors, it would be like deciding to transfer to the college of a girl you’d just met.
Per Tina’s instructions, I went to 27 Mix, a favorite Newark watering hole of ours. She was already there when I arrived, seated at a table against the wall. She waved when I entered, not that it was hard to pick her out. It was a Tuesday night at a time when the after-work crowd had thinned and the college crowd hadn’t arrived yet. Plus, she was still in the same outfit from earlier in the day, the one with the long boots and the short skirt. The only difference was she had let her hair down. A man tends to notice the hottest woman in any room, and on this night—as with many others—that woman was Tina.
