Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Fascinating, Marcus thinks. Hart only lived with the family on and off until Marcus was ten, and then he left permanently. Yet he and his father share certain tastes, like this one. Has he inherited the taste for avocado omelettes, for unsalted peanuts, for the color brown, for Victorian novels, just as he inherited his father’s strange greenish eyes? Or had these tastes simply rubbed off on him during those brief times together?

  “I’ve been thinking lately about changing my last name to Summerson,” Marcus says, after they have discussed the weather, Hart’s arthritis, and Marcus’s shirt, which Hart says looks like it came from the Salvation Army and Marcus says no, it’s from a thrift shop on Bedford Avenue. “Like Esther in Bleak House. Marcus Mead sometimes sounds to me like the hero of a romance novel. I’ve also considered Marcus A Sucram. Marcus Sacrum. Or Marcus Dame—how about that? Or Marcus Edam. Or Marcus Made. Does that sound cool or weird? I can never decide.”

  “Don’t think so much, Marcus.” His father leans back in his chair. “You’re only twenty-one. Just relax and enjoy your life. Think when you get older.”

  “I do enjoy my life. I think I enjoy my life more than anyone else I know. Or almost,” he says, thinking of Emily. Their omelettes arrive, and they both tuck in. “So come on, Dad, what would you have named me?”

  “What?”

  “Well, if you didn’t like Marcus. I mean, what did you like?”

  “I hate names,” Hart says. “I hate the whole concept of names. So would you if your parents named you Tab. After some flaky movie star from the Fifties.” He resumes eating, shaking his head sadly. “I’ve never really come to terms with my name.”

  Marcus read in the paper recently that five million Americans suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He wonders how they got that figure and if they counted his father.

  “Movie star and recording artist, Dad. Don’t forget Young Love.” Marcus thinks his father looks about as unlike a Tab as it is possible to look. He’s more of a Thorndike, or a Wolfgang. A Heathcliff. Some saturnine, dark haired, bushy-browed kind of name—not a blond one like Tab. “And Tab Hunter’s real name was Andrew Arthur Kelm, anyway. AAK!”

  “People should be called by their social security numbers,” Hart says. “Just call me 067. Tell you what—drop the zero. I’m your father.”

  “Tab might come back into style, like Chad did after the election. They’re both sort of paper names. I mean, names relating to paper. Though of course Tab also relates to typewriters and/or computers.” He doesn’t say it also could be short for tabanid a horse fly, from the Latin tabanus. Or tabloid. Tab Lloyd. “Tab Hunter is kind of a funny name, when you think of it,” he says. “You picture somebody who’s a novice at the keyboard looking all over trying to find the tab key.”

  His father stares at him. “Are you serious?”

  “No.”

  “I mean about Chad. Chad became a popular name after the election? Is that true? Do you know that for a fact?”

  “I read it in the Times.”

  “Jesus.” Hart sits shaking his head for a minute. Then he says, “Christ.”

  “What’s this world coming to, eh, Pop?”

  Dad and Mom, he often thinks: my first palindromes. Pop. Sis. Hah! Family life is crawling with them!

  Hart signals the waitress for more coffee, and when it’s poured, creamed, and stirred, he says, “I invited you to brunch for a reason.”

  “Because I’m your son.”

  Hart briefly closes his eyes, opens them. “Well, obviously, Marcus, if you were a complete stranger I probably wouldn’t have invited you. I wouldn’t even have known your phone number. Also, I invited you because human beings have to eat food. If we were constructed differently, I might have invited you to gnaw tree bark in Central Park, or hook up to a hose at the gas station. But because you’re my son, and because it’s necessary to eat food periodically or die, I invited you to brunch.”

  “And yet, despite these two compelling reasons, there is apparently still another one.”

  “Correct.”

  Hart lifts his coffee cup and sips. Marcus hears from Hart three or four times a year. He hopes his father is about to—finally—say something about money. Hart used to be hard up, but now he has plenty of cash and Marcus could use some. His dog-walking and pet-sitting gigs don’t pay badly, but everyone is cutting back on stuff like that. Luxuries, he thinks, and imagines the lonely unwalked dogs, the unpetted cats left for the weekend with a box of kibble and a filthy litter box. Even when he does bring in decent money—some months are better than others—it doesn’t seem like much. He puts half of everything he earns into his account at the Greenpoint Savings Bank. Thirty thousand dollars is what he needs for what he intends to do, and the account is growing much too slowly.

  He eats some more bits of a avocado. He’s tired of the egg part, but feels he could eat avocados forever. The avocado diet. Could man live by avocado alone? And why doesn’t avocado alone? And why doesn’t avocado add an eat the end when it turns plural, like tomato does? And potato? He remembers another article in the paper. A woman named Elvira Surito, of Los Altos, California, claimed she cured her arthritis by telekinetically transmitting her negative energy into the eggs of her neighbor’s chickens. The neighbor was suing her. He would share this amusing anecdote, except that he’s sure Hart’s reaction would be to stare at him and then change the subject.

  Hart sips, swallows, gazes absently at women who walk by. He is in no hurry to reveal why they’re having brunch. Marcus admires his father’s silky tweed jacket, which he wears with jeans over a blinding white T-shirt, and entertains himself by imagining Hart saying, Son, you’re twenty-one now, and it’s time you had some responsibility for the family fortune. The words trust fund dangle in his mind, with stock portfolio and holdings close behind. He waits, happily, while his father drinks coffee and looks pensive and ogles women. Finally, putting down his cup, Hart says, “I want you to do me a favor.”

  Accept this check, son …

  “Okay. What is it?”

  Hart purses his lips and looks down at the tablecloth. His face actually flushes, something Marcus has never witnessed before. He has the feeling Hart is giving himself a pep talk, steeling himself. “Well, the thing is, I’ve got a little problem. I’m flat broke.”

  “Broke?”

  “Broke. As in no money.”

  “Broke.”

  “You’ve got it. I’ve had some business reversals, and I’m broke. And kind of in debt. A bit. You know how it is.”

  Neither of them speaks for a while. Hart continues to sip coffee and look at the people passing. A woman in a short and very tight skirt goes by, her ass swaying. She has very good legs. Marcus wonders why he doesn’t respond to such things. Nor does he respond to the man with her, a smooth Latino dude with a chain bracelet on his hairy arm. He can see they’re an attractive couple, easy to look at, but he has no desire to touch, kiss, stroke, fondle, unclothe, or fornicate with either one. He’s wondered so often why this is that this time it flits quickly to the back of his mind, leaving the bulk of his brain free to process his father’s news.

  Hart has no money.

  Hart had plenty of money when Marcus first looked him up two years ago. He was running a thriving art gallery. Some of Hart’s money-making artists have since abandoned him like Selma Rice, the wound woman, and Merlin Wolf, the dead bird guy; Marcus has seen notices of their shows at other galleries. But it’s hard to believe Hart’s little empire is over. Hasn’t he been some kind of art big shot all his life? Or has he? Marcus has very little idea, really, what Hart has ever been or done. And why is Hart telling him this? He isn’t the confiding type, and he doesn’t like to admit failure. Things must be desperate. Marcus has a sudden horrible thought: Is Hart going to touch him up for a loan?

  “Well, that’s interesting, Dad.”

  Hart sets down his coffee cup and says, “I wondered if I could get you to kill Emily Lime.”

  “What?�
�

  “My ex-wife. You know her—you said you walk her dog.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know her. I mean, I don’t know her well,” Marcus fibs. Kill Emily?

  “Presumably you have a key to her place.”

  “Well, yeah. I go in and out. I don’t actually see her that often. I just pick up the dog and take him to the park when she’s not there.” He feels the need to keep talking so Hart won’t. “I actually sort of forgot she’s your ex-wife,” he fibs further. “To me, she’s just one of my customers.”

  “Good.” Hart puts on a look Marcus recalls from his early childhood: the self-righteous smirk he wore whenever he told Marcus he was leaving but he’d be back real soon and they’d have some good times, they’d go fishing, they’d go to the zoo. “It’s better that you don’t know her very well. Then it won’t bother you so much.”

  Marcus tries to take this calmly. His father has always been given to clumsy joking, making sarcastic, sometimes outrageous suggestions with no real intent behind them. He’s going to assume this is a joke, too. “I have a few vices, Dad,” he chuckles. “But I don’t kill people.”

  “Even for money?”

  Hart isn’t looking at him, he’s gazing across the street, he’s lighting a cigarette, he’s blowing smoke up toward the sky.

  Of course it’s a joke.

  “Dad?”

  Hart swivels his head slowly and looks at him. “Even for quite a lot of money, Marcus?”

  “Emily Lime seems like a nice person …”

  “Yes, but don’t forget, she’s also the reason I left your mother. So deep down you hate her. You can never forgive her for—”

  “You didn’t even know Emily when you left Summer.”

  “Not technically, but I left Summer so I could find the kind of woman Emily was in those days. Younger, smarter, thinner. Less of an oddball. I was looking for an Emily, and when I left Summer I found one.”

  This is a pack of lies. Marcus knows perfectly well why his father left his mother. But lying is one thing and paying someone to murder your ex-wife is another. Could Hart really be this despicable? Of course, the world is full of people who pay people to kill people. Well, not full, but certainly well equipped. It’s in the paper all the time. There was just that case in Colorado. Montana? Someplace out west. If Hart is serious will he keep asking people until someone says yes?

  “Are you serious, Dad?”

  “I’m afraid I am, Marcus. It’s not something I want, of course. In an ideal world. But I think we’re pretty aware that this world is far from ideal.”

  His father is serious. He’s either serious, or he’s playing some sort of game. Or he’s stark raving mad. Whatever the truth is, Marcus realizes he shouldn’t alienate him. He studies his father’s saturnine face and, to calm himself, obsesses on the word for a minute. Saturnine has nothing to do with Saturn the Roman god of agriculture, who has always sounded quite pleasant, even noble. A civilized god, married to Ops, the earth goddess—another nice one. Summer could have named me Saturn, he allows himself to further digress, and tries to picture himself with that name. Saturn. Name of a car. Saturn Mead. Made as runt. Aunt dreams … Saturnine refers to Saturn the planet. Which for some reason is supposed to be cold and distant—well, it is, of course, both those thing. It’s planet, after all. Hart’s saturnine face is handsome, though he’s “not aging well,” as people say. He’s only forty-eight, but there are deep lines around his mouth, and they don’t look good on him. Him black hair is getting very gray ditto. He squints. And he says, “What?” a lot, and turns his head so his left ear faces out, as if he’s losing the hearing in his right.

  “So why do you want Emily Lime to be dead?” Marcus asks.

  “I’d rather not reveal that at this early stage of negotiation,” his father says, like someone in a movie about hostages or the Mafia. “You let me know how you feel about it, and then we can talk details.”

  “I see. Sure.” It’s important to say he’ll think about it, so that Hart has to wait for an answer. But he needs to ask one question. “Can you just tell me this, Dad? How much money? What are we talking about here?”

  “Hard to say, really, but I figure at least two hundred.”

  “Two hundred?”

  “Thousand.”

  “Two hundred thousand.” Marcus takes a deep breath and asks, cautiously, “Dad? Where are you going to get two hundred thousand dollars?”

  “From Emily’s death. It could be more. I’d give you twenty-five percent.”

  Marcus wonders if his father has lost his mind. Emily Lime pays six hundred dollars a month for a scruffy loft in Williamsburg, in a building that until recently housed a spice-importing firm. It still smells of mace and cinnamon on a warm day. It doesn’t even have screens on the windows or a sink in the bathroom. Emily Lime sometimes has to make him wait a week for his dog-walking money because she’s so strapped. She can’t make a living from her photography, so in season she does manual labor for a gardener. She hauls pots and bags of soil and rosebushes and flats of perennials up to roof gardens in Brooklyn Heights. Marcus has lowered his dog-walking rate from fifteen dollars an hour to ten for Emily because she’s so hard up.

  And because he’s so fond of her.

  “Well, that kind of money is certainly tempting,” Marcus says, cautiously, the way he might humor an escapee from an asylum before he tries to get him into the van.

  “I thought it might be. That’s why I asked you.”

  Marcus would like to reach across the table and stick a fork into his father’s windpipe, a knife into his heart. His father wrecked his mother’s life and—in a roundabout way—was responsible for her strange death. His father thinks his son is the kind of person who would murder someone for money.

  “Do you understand me, Marcus? Are we on the same page here?”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Marcus says. His stomach lurches. “Basically, I think we are.”

  “And Marcus.” Hart’s face is cold, distant, grumpy, mean. And suspicious. “I have to see the body. You understand? I have to have evidence—”

  “Wait, wait,” Marcus holds up a hand. “You’re getting ahead of me here. I need to think about this.”

  “What? Oh, right, think about it. Of course. I didn’t expect an answer right this minute. But let me know by—let’s say the weekend, will you? I’d like to set this in motion. It will take a while to realize the money.”

  “Do I get a deposit?”

  “Ten.”

  “Thousand?”

  “That’s all I can lay my hands on right now.”

  “You’re going to give me ten thousand dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well.” There is no way this preposterous statement can be true, but Marcus raises his eyebrows and purses his lips in a look that says he believes it. “I’d sure like to buy a pick-up truck.”

  “That would just about do it. Get yourself a used Toyota or something.”

  “Right. Just what I was thinking.”

  “Or hold out for the big bucks—a couple of months, tops—and get yourself a fancy SUV.” He smiles at Marcus across the table, showing yellow teeth. “Or whatever you like.” The smile stays as is, but the eyes get a little plaintive at the corners. “I know I haven’t been a good father, Marcus. Here’s a chance to make it up to you.”

  “Gee, Dad.”

  “Better late than never.”

  In a flash of memory, Marcus sees his father’s eyes welling up with tears as he explained that Marcus’s dog phoebe had been hit by a car and was now buried in the woods. Even then, in the midst of his grief, Marcus wondered how Hart managed the tears. Onion juice? “Well, I really appreciate this, it’s definitely interesting,” Marcus says.

  Sad fatherliness is immediately overlaid with greedy hope. “How interesting?”

  “I’ll let you know by the weekend.”

  “Let’s get out of here then.” Hart pays with cash, and leaves a stingy tip.

  Horribly, w
hen they stand up, he holds out his hand, and Marcus has to shake it.

  He watches his father cross Wooster Street, heading east toward his apartment on Crosby, holding his rolled-up Times like a club. He adds three bucks to the tip. Then he goes into the men’s room and scrubs his hands with soap.

  3

  Egad! no bondage!

  Emily pays six hundred dollars a month for fourteen hundred square feet on the fifth floor of her building on North Third Street. The slum floor, she calls it; the fifth floor is the South Bronx of 87 North Third, the sixth floor is Central Park West. The lofts on the sixth floor have been renovated into pristine white spaces with sanded floors and new combination windows and air-conditioning units and nice bathrooms.

  Emily wouldn’t live on the sixth floor if you paid her.

  Actually, that’s not true; she would if someone paid her.

  But she wouldn’t pay the two-thousand-dollar-plus rent to do so, even if she could afford it. She thinks the sixth-floor lofts are banal, boring, pretentious, untrue to the spirit of Brooklyn in general and Williamsburg in particular. What she covets, however, is the penthouse, which sits on the roof above the sixth floor like a treehouse. The penthouse is a gem. Anstice, her landlady, whose vast loft takes up half of the sixth floor, got tired of rehabbing. So, like the lofts on Emily’s floor, the penthouse has never been renovated. It was added on in the sixties and looks it. It has ancient faded linoleum in the kitchen and a cruddy little bathroom and a badly sloping floor in the bedroom and it’s not even very big, about half the size of Emily’s place.

  But it’s all windows and sunshine, or windows and darkness and city lights, or windows and rain and lightning. Nothing obstructs your view of the river, and you can have a garden on the roof. The place combines the grandeur that comes with the view—river, skyline, and the kind of sunsets only a seriously polluted city can provide—with a certain faded and rakish charm. Oliver Czerech lives in the penthouse, and he has no plans to move. But because Oliver’s girlfriend is Pat Shapp, one of her best friends, Emily gets to visit it from time to time, which partly satisfies her—it’s such a pleasure just to be there—and partly feeds her desire to possess it.