When Del had entered the lab that morning, she had taken her notebook up to the nursery to inspect its newest addition. Del had tapped her fingers on Apollo’s tank and had watched with relief as his black shovelhead dipped low. He was still alive. His tail rose, and he struck his fangs against the glass. A rattle wouldn’t crown Apollo’s tail until the first time he shed. The tail was powered like a heart, an involuntary muscle beating out of fear, a little maraca playing on diamond skin.
As the tour ended and the class funneled out of the hall into the yellow heat of the park, the black girl walked up to Del and poked her hip.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” She smiled. “I liked your questions.”
“What I want to know is if the rattlesnake loses its rattle, like you said, then basically it will be exactly like a bull snake. Am I right?”
“Physically. But you forget that the rattlesnake still has venom stored in its glands.”
The girl nodded anxiously and rushed to her next question. “Won’t bull snakes mate with rattlesnakes, then? Could they, I mean?” She grinned in embarrassment, pushing her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. “If they don’t know.”
“They know. They know to keep clear of each other.”
“But,” the girl said impatiently. “Then if rattlesnakes can just lose their rattles because of traffic, why can’t the bull snake just grow a rattle? And then, why don’t bull snakes make poison too? I mean, why only copy the skin? Why not get what really hurts?”
“These are excellent questions,” Del said, lowering herself on her knee and placing a hand on the girl’s shoulder. She had never been good with children, but when she met a smart one, usually the oddball outsider, an inexplicable wave of affection swam through her, which she assumed must be the closest thing she ever felt to a maternal instinct. “You should consider a career in biology when you grow up. We need smart researchers like you.”
“Oh, no, I could never do that,” the girl gasped, backing away from the threat. “I’m going to be an actress. I definitely want to do movies. I want to be a Hollywood star at least by the time I’m your age.”
As the girl sprinted off to join her classmates, Del wondered if she were the only person left in America who did not dream of the fame that comes from imitating others. Even the indigenous bull snake pretended to be a rattler. Del had married an actor. Why did fulfilling a dream in this country always mean becoming someone else?
She made her way through the lab door in the exhibition hall, passing Abrams in the long hallway to the break room. He stopped her with an uncharacteristic greeting, which unnerved her before she noticed the visitor behind him, a thin smiling woman with woolwhite hair tied unevenly in a bun. “Sarah, this is Delphine Kousavos. She’s on staff here. She attended Columbia.” The visitor’s face brightened, and they shook hands. “Sarah Isely is a visiting researcher at your alma mater. She wanted to see some of our collection.” Del was about to ask her what she was researching, but Abrams grabbed the woman’s sleeve and led her away, unwilling to waste any more time than necessary in demonstrating his kindness to the subhuman slaves of his department.
The clock in the break room struck noon. Kip cut a tuna sandwich in half and offered her the smaller portion. His red pompadour was slicked above his forehead like an upturned hat brim, but the fluorescent overheads turned his freckles a corrosive green.
“No thanks,” she said to the sandwich. “And we’re never trading tour groups again.”
Kip reached into the Whirlpool refrigerator stocked with the antivenom and pulled out a can of orange soda.
“Were there any lookers?” he asked.
“They were twelve, you asshole.” He shrugged, choking on the sandwich hanging from his teeth. “Who was that woman with Abrams, anyway?” she asked.
“Researcher. Something about poisons being used for medical testing.” Kip pointed to the morning newspaper spread across the table. “I just read that a couple got married on top of Mount Everest this week. Can you believe that? The first time in history. They took their oxygen masks off for the five-minute ceremony, and the groom started hallucinating, saying he didn’t know where he was. They had to keep him from walking over the edge.” Kip put his hand to his mouth and mimed an invisible oxygen mask. “You know what he should have said to her at the top?”
“It’s all downhill from here,” Del replied, predicting the punch line while searching under the newspapers for her notebook with the lawyer’s number copied in its pages. When she looked up, Kip was holding his sandwich meaningfully between his fingers with a hurt expression on his face.
“I love you. He should have said I love you and that they were going to be happy together and nothing would ever come between them. God, isn’t anything sacred to you? Are you really that cynical? Poor Delbert.”
“You really are an asshole,” she said. She slipped out the back door, stood in the shade of the department’s dumpster, and dialed Frank Warren on her cell phone. After she introduced herself, he broke down the first, necessary steps of proving a marriage to the INS. “You and your husband need to know as much about each other as possible,” he told her, as she copied his words down on paper. “They will ask the most intrusive questions in the interview, so try to memorize simple things. The brand of shaving cream he uses. Where you first met. I’ve done this job for fifteen years, and you’d be surprised what couples don’t know about one another. And please, Mrs. Guiteau, keep a photo album. No one likes unsentimental couples. Not even the U.S. government.” That was the first time Del had ever been referred to as “Mrs.” She repeated it to herself, as if to commit a new taxonomy to memory.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WILLIAM WALKED THROUGH the midtown Flower District with a slow stagger to reduce the clinking noise in his backpack. He had wrapped the contents in newspaper to avoid chips, but the stoneware vase was knocking against the silver nineteenth-century mantle clock. The dinner set kept jangling at the bottom of the bag. He slowed past the stalls selling birds of paradise, dripping azaleas, and palm fronds, careful not to get his feet caught in the green hoses that lassoed across the sidewalk, suddenly yanked by gardeners into trip wires. One fall and the entire inventory would be worthless, and then what?
The pawning of Jennifer’s antiques had begun a month ago. Checking a bank balance that had dipped into three digits, William had promised, rolling an ivory sculpture of the god Orissa into a bath towel, that he would only sell one or two items, the least prominent and most unappreciated in their time together as husband and wife. He had found two Chinese women, black-market dealers, who ran their operation behind a plant store devoted to exotic cacti. These twin sisters, or at least they both had the same lipless mouths underneath their matching red visors, were willing to pay in cash at a hefty discount in lieu of his providing an authenticity certificate. “Very nice,” one would say, with eyes that consulted the other, “but hard to sell. We give you three hundred dollars.” Once or twice became once or twice each week, and even William had been astounded by how many things looked missing in the apartment, as if they had been burglarized by a picky thief. And maybe, he could swear, it had. Maybe when and if Jennifer returned, divorce papers in hand, he would be long gone to Los Angeles having to perform the minor acting role of crime-wave victim by phone. “Wasn’t the alarm set? Did you check the door to the patio? What are you waiting for, call the police!” At first he felt guilty for selling Jennifer’s collection, unrolling the goods for the Chinese sisters to inspect before they dropped each piece into a velvet drawstring bag. But with each new extraction, as the amount looted become more obvious to the apartment, his sense of blame diminished. Jennifer must have known what kind of financial trouble he would be in, how desperate life would get. Did she imagine he would sleep surrounded by all of those riches and find work at a restaurant or folding jeans at H&M? He needed money to live.
The cacti that usually guarded the storefront in unwelcoming sp
ikes were gone. The doors didn’t budge when William tugged the handle. Caving his hands against the window, he peered into the deserted space. Sunlight spilled across the empty wood floor. He could see all the way to the back room where two sisters should be waiting with their lockbox of cash, but only the bare butcher’s table remained.
“Not possible,” he wheezed.
The midget shopkeeper next door shook a spray bottle at him. “They gone. Left.”
“Have they moved? To another location?”
“They close. Gone. What you looking for? You want plants?”
“Clocks?” William replied, about to unzip his bag to show the items weighing on his back—maybe all flower shops in the West Thirties were black-market fronts, maybe all nurseries doubled as antique dealers. But William thought better of it, kicked the door, and stumbled toward Seventh Avenue. He tried to calculate how much of the money he had saved. The amount did not seem near enough. His stomach lurched as he passed through his least favorite part of town, Herald Square crowded with Macy’s shoppers who always looked enraged even as they swarmed the walkways with their bulky department store bags. The soles of his shoes stuck on the concrete in the afternoon heat, and he walked in a daze, only coming alert as he passed beautiful women stepping into idling town cars and young men with cheekbones fluted like architectural eaves and with no doubt dependable erections even after several shots of tequila. They reawakened him the same way someone lost in a daydream was snapped back into reality by sharp spoken words. William used to love New York because of all the forced interactions on the street, the sordid, disparate occupants of the city meeting each other without any defenses, stepping together through their afternoons. Now it seemed as if his eyes were only attuned to those rare inhabitants whose lives were ruled by luxuries he could no longer afford. That was the hell of his psychology lately—the editing down of the world to its most glamorous and irretrievable parts.
When he returned to the apartment, he opened his backpack and repositioned the objects on their shelves, briefly acknowledging their fragile beauty as if for the first time. He stood for a while staring into the silent living room, wondering where Jennifer was and why she hadn’t called to tell him when the papers would be signed. He had not made communication either, for fear she would remember that he still took up space in her apartment and would make good on her threat to kick him out. The quiet of the room with its French sofas and slender end tables—all of Jennifer’s new money attempts at a WASP pedigree—felt like chaos waiting to break. A joint would have killed the panic, but he resisted the urge to phone his dealer, a headphoned NYU student with a toolbox of small ziplock bags packed with the turbo-hydroponic pot he grew in the neon greenhouse of his closet.
In the evening, when indoor lamps collected their light in faint halos before night finally settled, he considered the one backup he had left. Friends. Friends with money. He still had that to depend on. He dialed Joseph’s number.
“It hurts to wait around, so I’ve decided that I’m going to do it. I’m moving.” William mustered enough enthusiasm to make the statement sound optimistic. The result was that he sounded like he was reading the words. “I truly believe it’s the most mature decision to make at this juncture.”
Joseph responded with a shrill whistle.
“Are you sure? I really don’t think you’ve thought this through. I can’t believe things won’t get better.”
“They will get better. They will when I’m out of town. I don’t have much of a choice. I’m getting to a point where I’m out of luck here. Out of options. I sit around all day in my ex-wife’s apartment wanting things I no longer have any chance of getting.”
“Maybe you should go in and talk to Janice.”
“I have talked to Janice,” he said furiously. “You don’t know how bad it’s gotten.”
“Then try something else.”
“It’s too late for that, Joe. I’ve only done one thing for the past ten years. And if I have to submit myself to a day job, I’d rather do it someplace else, where everyone I know can’t watch me fail. It’s too embarrassing. Oh, people would just love that, wouldn’t they? Nothing would make people happier than finding me waiting on them at some shit restaurant.”
“Don’t get paranoid. Just calm down. How about we meet for a drink? Hairy Bishop?”
William hadn’t meant to say what was running on overdrive through his mind. He wanted to stick to the script of asking Joseph for a loan, but the curiosity got the better of him. “Be honest. Are you getting any work?”
“This isn’t a competition,” Joseph replied coldly.
That sealed it. He breathed harshly into the receiver. “I know it’s not. I’d be happy if you were getting work,” he lied. “You can be honest.”
“Well, a few commercials maybe. And then there’s some kind of project in development. I don’t know what will come of it. I’m still deciding.”
William’s fingers contracted around the phone in a slow strangle, and his top teeth dug into their lower orders. It hadn’t occurred to him that Joseph’s options were so vast that he could actually decide which roles to take.
“Congratulations,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll get that beer with you.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got to plan a good-bye party. One last celebration in this awful apartment that I don’t even own. But here’s the catch. It’s a charity event: Help William Asternathy Get to California. Sounds fun, right? It’s a hundred dollars a head and if you can’t find it in your heart to pay, then fuck you. Beer will be complimentary, of course.”
“You can’t,” Joseph moaned in horror. His friend’s innate snobbery always seemed to come alive in moments of William’s desperation. “I won’t let you. I thought you didn’t want to make it clear to everyone how bad off you are. Christ, if you need some money . . . ”
But William couldn’t ask now. He couldn’t take money from another man who was succeeding precisely where he failed. It was one thing to live off of the cash supplies of rich friends who hadn’t earned their wealth and quite another to accept a donation from someone who had beaten him at the game he had played with delusional intensity for the span of his adult life.
“I can take care of myself,” he said. “You just wait for the invitation. Then I’ll be out of here, and the whole town will be yours.”
“You’re not leaving. You’re just upset. This is the only place where you can—” but William hung up before Joseph could finish. It was pure insanity to think that anything would change for him. Insanity was Manhattan at sunrise with barely enough cash to pay the fare home. Insanity was the sunrise beyond that one, and the next, and again one more without a single decision to break the pattern. William walked to the bedroom to go to sleep early. He felt a rush of comfort in realizing that he had at least made a choice.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ALEKSANDRA AND JOSEPH sat on the floor of her hotel room with the lights off, the curtains closed, and the chain engaged on the door. Even in this quiet refuge, she seemed on edge, pausing when she heard footsteps in the hall and periodically turning to stare at the traces of light that broke underneath the curtains. Joseph watched a housefly crawl across the thick carpet, a black zigzag along the knotted threads.
This was their second meeting, arranged again through Janice. Joseph had wanted to ask his agent exactly what Mrs. Andrews had to offer him. But involving Janice now seemed like a betrayal of Aleksandra’s trust. When he left the hotel that first afternoon, she had said, “I will explain more the next time you come back. It’s hard for me to talk about it. But please, promise to come.” There had been a weight to her eyes, sincere and yet filled with urgent worry, which had forced him to agree.
He waited five days expecting the call, but when it arrived and Janice gave him the time, his stomach dropped, his throat hardened, and he almost decided to cancel. Aleksandra Andrews had something horrible in her life, he could feel it. He knew very well what the face of
a person with a terrible secret looked like. It was the face of someone who does not seem invulnerable to the simple negotiations of a day. He had learned over the years to control that face whenever he encountered it in the mirror.
In the elevator up to her room, he had promised himself to make no promises to Aleksandra Andrews. Just to listen. There was no danger in hearing her out. He calmed himself, exhaling three long breaths outside the door to 706. When he entered, he found her sitting on the floor in the darkness, her knees drawn up to her breasts. The rims of her eyes were swollen, and when Aleksandra first looked up at him, a small tremor shot through her tiny frame, bunching her shoulders and arching her neck. The birthmark disappeared against the redness of her skin. She gave a nervous smile that did not entirely reassure him, but he sat down anyway across from her on the floor. Then she stood up and chained the door.
Joseph asked her straight out, “Why were you at that meeting?” Aleksandra had warned him that it was difficult for her to talk, but she began relating the kind of story that perhaps could only be told to a stranger. Her words weren’t the product of memorized recitation. They often swam hurriedly as if trying to grasp the next fragment, then suddenly disintegrating as if she were weighing them for accuracy. She often stopped to bite her upper lip mid-sentence, and in those cracks of silences, it was as if her courage might disappear into them, might just dissolve, leaving Joseph to stare into the shadows her eyes made.
“Our dream came to an end in 2001, or my dream really,” she began. “Because Ray was having nightmares well before that. We were happy once and doing quite well. You see, we were living on electricity. We were getting rich off power. It never occurred to me there was anything wrong in that.”
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