Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel

by Julia Pierpont

  And now—trying to lure him to her, that was what she was doing. So fine, if it was what she wanted. Confrontation. Maybe it was what he wanted. Look at what you’ve done—to children. She’d think she was getting her way, at first. She’d see him there, through the peephole, and think she won. That Deb had left him and that he’d come back to her, maybe that he needed her.

  He took the train down to Astor Place and cut across on St. Mark’s, where neon from the shops and bars made brighter the night sky, would have made it almost day if not for the packs of people, nighttime energy the light could not break through. A little after midnight but still warm, the tourists out with their tiny backpacks, the freshmen from NYU just starting to make themselves sick drinking, many sets of legs that began at the hip, ended in towering heels.

  He passed the hot dog place with the phony speakeasy inside. Fifteen-dollar cocktails, and who for? What Lou Reed wrote about wasn’t around anymore. Sally can’t dance. The whole strip was like one of those living history exhibits, commemorating an old war that was lost and over now, only nobody wanted to know it was over. Because it had been a sexy war and it was hard to let go.

  Avenue C was quieter. The girl lived on the top floor of a six-story walk-up. She used to get scared and call him on her way home. Someone’s following me. Stay on until he goes away. Then: Stay on until I’m inside, until I feel better, it’s scary here, alone, I’m making tea, stay on. Stay on until.

  He buzzed 6B, Garcia. Still the old tenant’s name on the number.

  After a minute he buzzed again, but he didn’t have to wait. Another tenant, a small, deeply tanned woman, came out through the lobby, trailed by a leash and then an old husky. She held the door, and Jack took it, remembered having patted the dog once or twice. “Late night for a walk,” he said, looking down.

  She smiled. “I spoil him.”

  “Lucky dog.”

  She walked away still smiling. Around forty. Tight jeans, tight ass. Probably never married.

  The stairs he climbed a few at a time. He used to be better at them, was now winded by the fourth landing. Two more to go. He stood a minute to breathe outside her door.

  Knocking.

  She was out, or was asleep, or? The lights were on under the door.

  He turned and looked up and down the hall, trying to remember where she kept the secret key—under one of the other apartment’s mats (less obvious, she said)—when he heard the chain slide open behind him.

  There was the roommate, a short, stomping thing always in yoga pants. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “Arabella.” Her name was easy to remember because it was so at odds with the rest of her. “I hope I didn’t wake you.” The thing about those pants: he could never tell if they were pajamas.

  She stepped back, crossing her arms, the upper parts rashy with chicken skin. “You know your way around.”

  All the lights in the living room were on, and somehow it seemed they’d been on a long time. The TV, too, at commercial.

  The girl’s room was dark except for the table lamp from IKEA he’d put together for her, shining into a mug of coffee that was cloudy at the surface, like a blind eye. Her makeup bag was turned over, glitter dusting the desk and colored pencils rolled halfway over the edge. She’d started wearing more makeup, toward the end. He remembered the last time, when he knew and she didn’t that it would be the last, that she hadn’t washed; he could tell by her hair, where it was matted and stringy.

  The bed was the same, same sheets, unmade as ever, the comforter in a heap on the floor. And over the bed, that painting, one of those Chinese ones they peddle all over Times Square, her name in watercolors, letters shaped from flowers and birds: J*O*R*D*A*N. A gift from her parents the time they came to see the New York life she’d made for herself. He hated how it brought out what was tacky and juvenile about her. “But it’s pretty,” she’d said. She liked looking at it.

  The overhead came on. “You can tell her I want this month and next,” Arabella said behind him.

  He looked at her like who was the crazy one. “She isn’t here.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “Do you know when she’s back?”

  “She’s with you.” Arabella shifted her feet. “You aren’t here for her stuff?”

  He said, “No,” and clearly that was the wrong answer.

  “That fucking—cunt.” She began unfolding and refolding the waist of her pants. “I don’t even. Monday she said she was going to the vet.”

  The guinea pig, Jack realized, was gone. The albino puff with red eyes that he’d tried to keep away from but that still got its little hairs on everything, had made Travolta distrust him before anyone else did.

  “Look,” he said. “This has been a mistake.” Arabella was starting to sweat in front of him.

  “But you have to know where she is.”

  “No.” He moved in reverse and she forwarded. “I’m the last—believe me, she wants to talk to me even less than—least of all people. I mean, you don’t think she’d do anything, to hurt herself, do you?”

  New rashes began to blossom on her chest and the rounds of her cheeks. “I could call the police.”

  “You should.” Backtracking along the hall, arms out behind him. “I think you ought to call the police.”

  “Yeah and I’m sure they won’t want to question you. The married boyfriend.”

  “Hang on, okay? Hang on.” He saw the backs of his hands and realized he’d put them up. “Let’s see if I can make this easier. What’s rent for her room, like six hundred? Six fifty?” He began to feel into his pockets.

  “Nine.”

  “Christ, nine? Okay, okay, wait.” He pulled a billfold of twenties from his back pocket, then smaller denominations from the front of his jeans, balled up and crunchy. “I’ve got…one—one twenty…one thirty…seven. A hundred and thirty-seven. Dollars. For you, from me. A gift.”

  She did him the favor of taking it.

  The next morning, Jack’s studio looked like the set for a movie or TV show, the pieces of house laid out the way he’d have them in the gallery. The movers were coming that day for the walls. Really they were blocks, but Jack thought of them as walls, and lining the space of the gallery, they’d look like walls. He was still packing them in felt and tarp when the buzzer rang. Four guys and a couple of mattress carts.

  When everything was loaded, he took a cab to the gallery and met them there. He’d wanted to ride in the back of the truck, but the muscle men told him no, there wasn’t room, what if one of the blocks fell over. “I’ll fall you over,” Jack muttered, but hailed a taxi anyway.

  At the gallery the staff left him alone to set everything up. Even the little receptionist out front he made leave. He listened to her heels clack across the hardwood of the lobby and out.

  Then he mixed the plaster, rigged the explosives. Peering at angles through the walls’ windows, he adjusted the furniture inside. He turned over a chair he’d welded himself, broke a ceramic dish into the ground. He brought out a stuffed animal, a tiger he’d found in their building’s playroom. The one found object in the space. With a good pull he tore a leg off and let the stuffing cloud out of the stump.

  Around lunch he got a falafel and carried it to the park, tahini sauce dribbling out the foil. He sat on a bench near the playground, a school group shrieking. It was a cool day for playground weather but their little bodies kept hot, running and jumping and swinging. Jack watched them and wondered how anyone could doubt that human beings came from monkeys. At the slide, kids at the bottom end scooted up the wrong way to go again.

  He’d been up front about not wanting children, and Deb had been afraid to tell him in the beginning. But then, life, and she was having one, they were, and it surprised them both how it changed him. Most infidelities happen during pregnancy, when the woman is a whale and cries all the time. Maybe that isn’t true but you did hear stories, eight months along and the husband out the door. With Jack it was n
ever that way. When Deb was sore and bloated and soft in places she hated being soft, when her whole body felt like meat and when she was most afraid, that was when he had loved her best.

  There was a small, pretty Mexican woman watching him from the bench nearest his. She had a fat blond cherub bouncing in her lap. The women at playgrounds were all sitters. A few reminded Jack of the Latvian woman who’d been their nanny after Deb’s maternity leave with Kay and before Simon was big enough to be in charge after school. Jack was proud they’d gone so long without succumbing to a caretaker.

  The pretty Mexican had begun to glare at him. Jack balled up his foil and headed back to the gallery, remembering that there were rules about grown-ups in playgrounds, how long men without children were permitted to sit.

  At six o’clock Nicky came. “ ’Sup, boss?” Lanky Nicky in his hoodies and caps, his videographer, twenty-four and twice arrested for vandalism, both times with Jack to bail him out. Today he wore a shirt that boasted TEIAM PLAYER, which Jack wouldn’t get until later. He had his equipment bag heavy on one shoulder, a skateboard and a tripod in his arms.

  Nicky was a shy kid and quiet most of the time, qualities Jack found common in street artists, which would have surprised people but shouldn’t have; the art required them to disappear. And Nicky disappeared well behind a camera. That was what Jack liked about him.

  Nicky set the tripod where Jack told him. He gave a thumbs-up when they were rolling and Jack fingered the detonator in his hands. “All right, steady.” He’d done a number of practice runs at the studio, but still there was no guarantee that the walls would break along the right lines, that the impact wouldn’t subtract too much or too little.

  He’d wanted to save the explosions for opening night, for an audience, but the safety people wouldn’t let him unless they were behind glass, which showed how little they understood.

  There was a slight lag when he pressed the button before plaster shot off in all directions. Clouds of it got into his clothes, into his lungs, would have gotten into his eyes but for the goggles. Good he’d had the extra pair for Nicky.

  They went section by section, stopping to set up the next shot, a new angle.

  They waited for the dust to settle.

  The air puffed and swirled milky around them. Particles sank into small heaps on the floor. The rubble was good. He’d keep that. Jack thought the walls had all gone off without much problem. A piece by the window on block #3 had not blasted all away, but it looked okay that way, maybe better. That was one thing he liked about the blasts, how they allowed for happy accidents.

  Even with the goggles, Jack’s eyes had watered. He went out to the lobby to breathe.

  There he took a sheet of letterhead from the receptionist’s desk and wrote a note. NO ONE MUST TOUCH THE DEBRIS. He tucked the page into her keyboard, between the keys.

  Nicky was at the window, reviewing footage by the blue light of the dying day.

  Jack came up behind and looked over his shoulder. “What do you think?”

  Nicky frowned. “How do you want to project these?”

  “A few screens in back. Have it on a loop. I don’t want anyone to see it until after they’ve been to the house.” Yes, from blocks to walls, Jack had built a house that day.

  Deb’s cold sore bloomed, and the rest of her lip chapped. Not a natural chap but the kind she did to herself, biting and bothering, an adolescent habit that had made it past adolescence, past gnawing her toenails and cracking her back. The lip hurt, but not in a way she minded. Anyone who’d danced had an unusual patience for pain.

  “They’re just impenetrable to me. I don’t know when that happened,” she called from the slipcovered couch. “It’s like, if I say jump, they say, you know, no. They lie down.”

  At Ruth’s, she had no choice but to face her mother’s kid, herself. Ruth lived in a junior one bedroom downtown, in an apartment complex that made it seem hard to get to, and with each visit Deb startled at the number of photographs laid out, how the place seemed always to become more a shrine. There, on the bookcase nearest the door, was Deb, age five, performing a handstand stoically against a wall at home in Tenafly, and at nine, eating frozen custard on the boardwalk at Point Pleasant when her father was still alive. A pink-tulled sweet sixteen was under way on the mantle over the television, all her ballet friends posing beside pizza and sparkling cider in Dixie cups, Deb with horrible aqua eyeliner and a mouth full of braces. Her career at City Ballet was born atop the CD changer, where she was beaming backstage in red and blue for Stars and Stripes, and died with The Nutcracker in the carousel frame between two wicker chairs, the season she’d danced Marzipan. Beside that a rickety wood-veneer liquor cart collected not bottles but Simons and Kays at all heights and ages, enough for a flip-book.

  “Maybe you could try sending them to somebody,” Ruth said in the kitchen.

  “I think that ship sort of sailed.” Simon had gone to a psychiatrist the year before, after what happened at the Best Buy. He’d come home complaining that the lady was half-deaf and smelled of vitamins. She’d told him he could talk about whatever he wanted, so Simon had talked about videogames.

  “So they don’t like to talk.” Ruth came out carrying a mug with a thumb rest and a handful of her pills. “Well, they’re definitely yours.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Deb asked as Ruth delivered the pills, then the mug, to her mouth, swallowing with a sharp backward kick of her head. “Really, Mom, do you have to take them like that?”

  “How am I supposed to take them?”

  “Nothing, just it’s dramatic.”

  “Deborah.” Ruth put a hand in the air, palm out, where it tremored and failed to make her point. “What is your problem? Say.”

  “I don’t know. It seems ridiculous all of a sudden. That I wanted to work it out.”

  Ruth sat and leaned her hand with the mug on her daughter’s knee. “What changed?”

  “Reading it? I don’t know, believing? And I want Kay to be able to tell me what she’s feeling. I don’t want Simon to think of me as a person who lets these things happen.”

  “You want to set an example. But everything’s black and white at their age. Give yourself a break. You’ll make yourself crazy. Not everything is so cut and dry.”

  Deb was thinking, why does everybody cry. Stupid to cry; what does it do? What does it get out? “Do you know, I keep thinking of what you told me, when you knew I was pregnant.” She meant the first time, when her mother had tried to talk her out of it. You’re twenty-six, Deborah. I’m old enough. He’s a married man. I don’t care. What about dancing? Dancing is who cares. Dancing over.

  “What did I say?”

  “You said, ‘What do you want a child for? You will never again know when it is safe to feel happy.’ ”

  “Sure,” Ruth nodded her small blond head. “Like having your heart walk around outside your body the rest of your life.” She stood and walked back to the kitchen. “Am I wrong?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t hear.”

  “No, you’re right,” Deb said louder.

  The refrigerator opened, tinkling bottles and jars inside. “So what about tonight? Are you going or what?”

  The kids would not come. They’d missed Jack’s shows before, been kept away from them because of content, things she didn’t want their young eyes seeing—nakedness, the suggestion of blood. So there had been a precedent for that. Ruth would call them around six to check in, see if they needed anything. And Deb would be home by eight.

  Of course, she had thought about not going herself. But she wasn’t going for him. She was going because she thought the girl might.

  —

  In the lobby of the gallery, people were starting to gather, bodies in black or white. Plastic cups of wine hovered, deep cherry and blond, catching the light. The warmer days were taking everyone by surprise, and the AC was not quite strong enough, so that the show cards were fanned and fluttered, made to produ
ce small currents. The receptionist girl was there by the door, her hair slicked back with dark grooves, bite marks from a comb’s teeth, the furrows deep and clean and even. Here, too, was art.

  Jack mingled.

  “I thought the show was called Bait,” said the woman from KIOSK, “like with an i.” They all said the same things. Jack laughed and touched their elbows, if they were women, refreshed their drinks if they were men. He laughed and looked to the door and continued to not see her.

  —

  Deb pulled out her phone, checked the time. Walking was taking longer than she thought it would, but she was in no hurry. Let him wonder. She knew how he got, wired, before an opening. So in a small way she was surprised, how this time he had gone through it alone, that he had not even tried to enlist her. Though if he had—she imagined the things she would have said to him, if he’d come to her now with that worry. Sorry, buddy. Not my problemo. You should have thought about that before. She would have especially liked that part, saying that.

  —

  “Hate to tell you this,” Stanley said. “I know Deb’s running late, but we gotta open up.” Stanley had been director at the gallery for more years than Jack had known him, and Jack had known him a long time. They stood shoulder to shoulder, facing out, Stanley’s eyes running inventory of who had come, how long the most important people had been waiting.

  “Oh, yeah,” Jack answered. “Sure, that’s fine,” and turned toward the room.

  For the first eight or nine minutes, only Jack would remember, the show was well received. Bayt was a home in no specified country. It could have been an Israeli home or a Palestinian home. It could have been in Iraq. It took people longer to realize that it could have been in America, too. The books flung from the upended bookcase were blank, and the art knocked from the walls, photographs of fields that Jack had taken years ago in Houston, were of no discernible nationality. The house was filled with things that could have come from anywhere. The target was from no place and every place, and so the enemy too.