“God is the definition of home.” The line, from an Emily Dickinson poem that Charlotte had read in college, was taped across the top of her office “dream board,” a collage of drawings, photos, swatches and other inspirational fragments. This call-to-action had given birth to her career ambitions. Ambitions that been whittled away and corrupted by her need to submit to her clients’ whims; to compromise and to constantly coddle and cajole. Charlotte was doing the devil’s work now, because nobody actually lived in the houses that she spent such obscene sums of money and time decorating. They were designed solely to inspire envy, monstrous amounts of envy. The sterility within these camera-ready homes reflected little more than impotence—the same impotence that prompted the poor to kill.
So Charlotte was cleaning house, so to speak. She was purging herself of that same amorphous, soul-shriveling rage. She was delivering a message, making a point. Greed wasn’t good. And marrying money wasn’t a shortcut. It was a dead end.
9
She’d arrived at the doctor’s office at exactly 1:45. Anna had begged to keep her company, but Charlotte had turned her down. Asking for comfort was a great deal more difficult for her than giving it. After filling out insurance forms and passing over her $20 co-pay, she’d been waiting for more than an hour in a dirty, beige lobby. No one had even had the courtesy to apologize or explain the reason for the delay.
Why were these rooms always so drab and depressing? She asked herself. How much did it cost to water a plant? To slap a fresh coat of paint on the walls? To smile? The sharp nosed, thin-lipped receptionist had barely grunted when Charlotte finally lost her patience and insisted on paging the technician.
When the woman leapt out from behind the lab door, scowling, Charlotte stepped back as if she’d been ambushed.
“Follow me,” the woman barked, as she headed down a long, dark corridor. Opening the door to a small cubicle, she ordered Charlotte to remove all her clothes and put on a paper robe. “Leave the front open,” she added, before slamming the door behind her. Charlotte was shivering as she lay in the dark on an examining table with her knees up. She didn’t dare move for fear of ripping the thin sheet of tissue that lay stretched beneath her.
The excruciating pains had started in college. It was Vicky who had taken her to the local emergency room and explained the symptoms to an intern. After two days of tests and no sleep, the pain had finally subsided.
“There’s nothing physically wrong with you,” the inept young doctor had told her.
“Nothing we can find, anyway. But I’d like to recommend the name of a good psychiatrist.”
Charlotte had tightened the belt of her robe, repressing a flash of anger. It wasn’t just the careless arrogance of the doctors. It was the unforgivable fact that her mother hadn’t even bothered to make an appearance at her bedside. She was down in New Orleans, celebrating some honorary degree that Tulane had given her father. As if he needed another honorary degree. Years later, when Dr. Greene had the gall to suggest that it might be her own rage, twisting up her insides and eating through her stomach lining, Charlotte had wanted to kill him.
A thin shaft of light pierced through the gloom as the technician re-entered the room. Squeezing a jelly lubricant all over the wand-like probe, she then placed a pillow under Charlotte’s hips. Charlotte had never felt so exposed, so out of control. As the cold, plastic probe delved deeper and deeper inside her, her helplessness triggered a spurt of pure terror.
“Stay still!” the woman hissed. “Or we’ll be here all night.”
For forty interminable minutes, she was subjected to the technician’s ruthless intrusions; to the clicking and stopping, clicking and stopping, as she photographed the shadowy depths of her womb.
Charlotte knew there was something in there. She sensed it. It was something ugly and vile. Made of her own hair and muscle, of bits of bone, blood and the tears she had never shed, it clung to her and grew, sapping her energy and sucking the air she breathed. Nothing could expel it. It had always hurt, this thing that grew inside her. It hurt so much that she imagined it was tearing her insides apart. When she smiled and politely asked the technician what she was seeing on the screen, the woman ignored her. It was only when Charlotte closed her legs and threatened to leave that she responded.
“I’m not allowed to answer your questions, ma’am. It’s company policy.”
“So when I will know the results?” Charlotte asked as the woman wiped the wand clean with a white towel.
“We send them to your doctor,” the woman replied coldly, handing her a wad of Kleenex. “But I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” she added casually. “Now please wait until I check the film.”
“What the hell did that mean?” Charlotte whispered to herself. “I wouldn’t worry too much?” Wiping the lubricant off her belly, she imagined the woman casually gossiping about her cancer with colleagues. When the technician stuck her head in the door and told her she could go, Charlotte struggled like a zombie through the motions of putting on her clothes and trembled. What if it is a tumor? she thought. How will I pay for it all? How will I work?
10
She was walking so fast towards the News Bar on 3rd Avenue and 23rd Street, she was short of breath. There had been something horrifyingly familiar about the experience of lying on that table; about the helplessness. Slowing down her pace as the first cramp snaked through her gut and the crowd jostled past her, a memory sprang up like a clown coiled up in a jack-in-the-box.
The family was in Barbados and her mother had offered her a swimming lesson. She was six. She could feel the burning sand beneath her toes as they ambled towards the promise of a cool blue sea. They were together so rarely that even though the sand burned, Charlotte refused to rush. When the pebbles on the shore cut into the soft soles of her feet and the waves loomed larger, she held more tightly to her mother’s hand and smiled.
“Just try and relax,” her mother had said, as she held Charlotte firmly beneath her small arms and together they bobbed on the crest of the waves. Charlotte wanted so much to give something to her mother; something that would make her proud.
It was just at the moment when her limbs began to unlock and she felt so light, so buoyant, she laughed out loud, that her mother let her go. And down she went, caught in the steel-like grip of cold, blue water. It had puzzled her, the strength of that watery grip, before the panic took hold and she opened her mouth to cry out. Later, on the beach, her throat stinging from retching up sea and sand, her mother had hugged her. “I told you to relax, dear,” she’d said with a grin. “That’s how you learn to float.” Charlotte had never put her head beneath the surface of the sea again.
Punching at the glass door as if to punch the memory back into its box, Charlotte entered the News Bar. After handing over her credit card to the cashier, she looked for a seat. Every computer was open. Heading towards the back of the room, she sat down, typed in the password for her latest hotmail account, and scrolled through endless junk mail. Yes! There it was. A message from [email protected]:
Subj: Vuitton Luggage
Date: 10/3/2009
To: [email protected]
Dear Coreen:
The luggage was custom-made at Vuitton in Paris. My price is firm. If you’d like to come by and take a look, I’ll be here Friday at 4. I’m at 32 E. 65th St. Why don’t you call me? cell: #917-655-7542 Best, Amy
Charlotte felt just the tiniest clutch of hope tug at her heart. Noting down the number before deleting the message, she exited and rebooted. She’d follow up with Amy from a payphone later.
11
“Cavolfiore, Charlotte. My mother told me I was born in a cauliflower. Can you imagine this?” Anna was sliding off the red upholstered barstool when Charlotte’s hand shot out and propped her up by the elbow. “I never forgive myself for leaving them, do you know that? I still send money home.”
Charlotte took a slow sip of her glacially iced martini. They’d been the first to arrive three hours
ago at the Temple Bar on Lafayette Street. And Anna had been talking ever since. Charlotte sat as still as a statue, afraid that the slightest movement might destroy the magic of the moment.
“I still have this little box on my night table,” Anna added, running her finger along the rim of her glass. “When I am depressed, I open that drawer and pick up the 500 lira piece that I landed with in New York. Fifty cents. It was all I had when my plane touched down, Charlotte.”
Removing her hand from Anna’s elbow, Charlotte nibbled a salted cashew. “Everyone thinks you’ve made millions, Anna. After so many years and so many famous clients.”
Anna choked and grinned. “I have nothing, Charlotte. Nothing. For twenty-five years, I have this golden angel on my shoulder. I think it is like this for everyone. There is a time in life when an angel looks over you. And then it is gone. But I am not jealous. Last week, I was visiting an old client in his apartment. Beauty was everywhere. On this one table, there was fifteen million dollars’ worth of priceless objects. Just one in your pocket and you would never have to work again.”
Charlotte grimaced. “How can you stand it, Anna? My clients don’t even know what they have. It infuriates me.”
Anna turned on her stool and caressed Charlotte’s cheek. “So what, cara? It is the memories I live on. Twelve years ago, I was the guest of an English lord. He had a passport like an accordion and treated us all to a trip on the Queen Elizabeth. Every night, we are with the Captain.” Taking a last sip of her third martini, Anna sighed. “And the parties in Capri? They were the loveliest in the world in the ’70s. And my trips to Nassau with my Texan client? Always in a private jet with such generous gifts. No, I have been lucky, Charlotte. So much luckier than my unhappy clients.”
Charlotte slid a fifty under her glass. “I wish I could see it that way, Anna. I really do. But my clients aren’t half as generous or interesting as yours.” Cajoling Anna off her stool, she pointed towards the door. “And now it’s time for bed, my friend. For both of us.”
Picking her way through the group of raucous smokers who stood on the sidewalk outside, Charlotte hailed a cab. Opening the door, she protected Anna’s head with her hand and guided her, gently, into the backseat. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said.
“Si cara, domani!” Anna replied with a stiff little wave of her wrist as Charlotte turned and began to walk briskly home. She’d had three martinis with Anna. Two was her usual limit. But sometimes she had to bend the rules. The cold, harsh air slowly sobered her up. She even stopped on Grand Street and raised her eyes towards the full moon. Like most New Yorkers, Charlotte never looked up. She focused on what was ahead or beneath her.
All great bars cast a spell, she thought, searching vaguely for a star. And it wasn’t just the alcohol. At the Temple, it was the comfort of darkness, the satiny gleam of polished woods, the glitter of glass bottles lined up like little soldiers against the bar. It was the illusion of order, she decided. That and the captivatingly odd but seductive combination of intimacy and anonymity. This is what had almost bewitched Charlotte into telling Anna about her missions.
The minute she walked into her apartment, she rushed over to her answering machine. No blinking red light. What did it mean if the doctor hadn’t called? Was he still waiting for results from the lab? Part of her wasn’t sure that she wanted to know what had been found on the sonogram. She’d lived with the pain this long, she figured, and it hadn’t killed her. But she had no appetite, no energy. All she wanted to do was to crawl into bed and sleep.
Hauling herself towards the bedroom, she grabbed a washcloth from the bathroom, soaked it in ice-cold water, and climbed in between the fresh, cool sheets. Worrying was useless. She’d have to think about something else. She’d think about Pavel.
Anna had seated her next to him at one of her dinners at home. “I’m not matchmaking, cara. I just know you’ll like him.”
Her friend was right. The two of them had talked nonstop, right through dessert. Charlotte liked everything about Pavel. He was stunning: tall and all muscle, the only man who had ever picked her straight up off the ground when he hugged her goodbye. Charlotte was not accustomed to being hugged. With a head of disheveled white hair and eyes as blue as anti-freeze, he wore a dark wool Brioni suit that fit so impeccably, it looked as if it had been born on him.
Unlike Paul, Pavel wasn’t just a nice piece of arm candy. Charlotte was in awe of the Russian’s recklessness, his resilience. The story of his success, or the story he chose to tell her, was full of gaping holes and mystery, of exaggerations that seemed almost as ridiculous as his realities and truths.
According to Pavel, since the Iron Curtain had come down in 1991, he had survived a burning building (his own), a sinking ship (also his own), the threat of being shot down over Uzbekistan, and other disasters too numerous to name. “This is why I have white hair, Charlotte. My white hair is the history of all of Russia since Glasnost.” But no one laughed more uproariously at his own disasters than Pavel. And she admired him for that, too. Everything about Pavel, including his physical size, made other people’s lives seem puny, insignificant.
“I’m warning you, Charlotte,” Anna had said to her later as they washed up the dishes in her tiny kitchen. “The only people in the world who can deal with Russians in business are Italians.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Charlotte had said with exasperation. “We get along famously.”
“Ah! But we Italians understand the virtues of being flexible with the truth. Americans don’t.”
“I do,” said Charlotte with a smile. “I know all about being flexible with the truth.”
Anxiously eyeing the numbers on her digital clock, Charlotte estimated the number of hours of sleep ahead. She’d tried television and hot milk. Now she was burning her way through James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime. Like a first-class surgeon pithing a frog, she thought, mulling over his brilliant dissection of a doomed love affair. It was two o’clock. If she fell asleep by three, she’d only get five hours. Every time Charlotte felt herself dozing off, her heart would race. Her eyes would pop open as wide as a child staring at a shark that brushes itself up against an aquarium window.
When her shrink had suggested that Charlotte’s insomnia might be a sign of depression, she’d agreed to try a cycle of antidepressants. But she was weaning herself off them. Charlotte suspected that the five-milligram pills were secretly stripping her of her identity; that the shrink was colluding in this conspiracy and that every time she swallowed a pill, another uniquely precious part of herself vanished.
Repositioning the pillow between her legs, she suddenly thought of the children’s room up at Rita’s house on the Vineyard; of opening a Dutch red enamel door to a room painted in blue and white stripes, the blue so translucent it seemed to glow from within and the walls of a nursery washed in the palest iridescent pink, a pink that shimmered like the inside of a spiral seashell. It was the optimism, the fearlessness, the certainty of color that astonished Charlotte. And this was precisely how she felt after completing her missions: fearless, astonished, joyous; as if the whole grey, desolate world had been drenched in buckets of pure, radiant color.
12
Rolling her neck to loosen the kinks, Charlotte lingered by the kitchen window and watched a cruise ship slip beneath the Verranzano Bridge. What was the name of that virus? The one that had hundreds of sunburned, drunken honeymooners retching all over the decks afraid to touch each other not to mention everything else from doorknobs to forks. All of these germs and viruses were getting nastier and nastier. Just like the world they’re mutating in, Charlotte thought, taking a last sip from her cappuccino.
Pulling on her old shearling jacket and pocketing the piece of paper with Amy’s cell phone number, Charlotte fumbled around in the hall closet. She was looking for her new Nikes. How long had it been since the last time, she wondered. Too long, was the answer.
It was all the schizophrenic struggling. The protecting, the serving, th
e listening. It was clients like Darryl and Rita, beeping, buzzing around in her head, bitching. And her mother calling. It was her credit card bills and waiting for news from the doctor. How much longer could she postpone the pleasure, the ecstasy that came with release? What if the woman with the Vuitton changed her mind? Tying the laces of her sneakers, Charlotte avoided looking near the fireplace.
Like ex-smokers who keep a single cigarette in plain sight, she was testing her will. Resisting temptation. The poker sat there, all gold and shiny, patiently waiting for the moment when she would finally give in. Closing the door and locking it behind her, Charlotte ran for the elevator.
13
Waiting for a break in the traffic, she crossed West Broadway and dug into her pockets for a quarter. Charlotte was hardly a fool. She knew that rich women were surrounded by more lackeys than most heads of state. They hated being alone. But the precariousness, the element of risk, even the danger of being caught, heightened the anticipation. Occasionally, when a tiny window of opportunity opened up, and Charlotte slipped through it to accomplish her task, she was convinced that she been anointed; that there was something almost holy about her missions. Five minutes later, she hung up the payphone and smiled. She’d left a message, confirming the rendezvous with Amy for the next day.
Feeling a surge of energy course through her veins, she began her speed walk. She was covering sixty, seventy blocks a day now. She had the pacing down to an art. It wasn’t about being the first to cross when the light went green; it was about being the last to slither and squeeze through the threat of solid red. There was no room for the fainthearted or the cautious on these marathons of hers. On a good day, speed-walking was a metaphor for life; a reminder that she knew exactly where she was going and refused to waste a minute getting there.
The Craigslist Murders Page 5
