Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Marcus said nothing, just poked his fork into his lasagna. He felt a vague anger beginning to stir in him. He wanted to get up and go—but go where?

  “I’ve got just one piece of advice,” Hart said, serious again. Now, if anyone looked at them, they might think this handsome, earnest father was impressing upon his small son the importance of studying hard and doing well in school so he could get into a good college someday. “Get out as soon as you can. I’m serious. Summer’s a nice person, and there was a time when she wasn’t so—” He twisted a hand back and forth in the air as if the gesture would tell Marcus everything. “Let me just say that things were different. But now, frankly, all I’ve got to say is—well, you’re my only son, my only child. At least so far. And I want you to take this seriously, what I’m about to say.” He tapped Marcus on the arm three times, as if he were casting some sort of spell. Marcus drew his arm back. “Leave,” Hart said. “Don’t let Honesdale be your downfall. Don’t be like the kids I see down on Main Street, hanging out at the pizza parlor talking about the sex lives of rappers and movie stars.”

  Marcus had never been to the pizza parlor on Main Street. “Okay,” he said.

  “Get out as soon as you can, and go as far away as you can go. Do you understand me? It’s important.”

  “Yeah,” Marcus said, rubbing his blue sweater where his father had touched it.

  Hart stared at him a moment. Then, narrowing his eyes, he said, “I think you do, sonny. I think you do. You’re a smart kid. But somehow—” His voice slowed down, and he nodded his head a little with each word, a habit he had. “I just. Don’t. Have. A lot of confidence—” Here he changed direction, and shook his head from side to side. “That you’ll do that.”

  Marcus shrugged. He wished his father would become so disgusted with him he’d just go away—leave, leave, leave. He noticed Hart’s half-chewed olive was still on the tablecloth, looking gross, and his gaze drifted past it and back to the fish tank. He could feel Hart looking at him, then heard him give another loud sigh. “Well, it’s your life.” Hart drained his glass and wiped his mouth with his napkin, which he threw on his plate among the grease and tomato sauce. Marcus wondered how the restaurant would get the red stains out of the white napkin. Then he asked, “Can we go now?”

  The next day, Friday, the weather suddenly warmed up, the sun came out, and Marcus asked for a quarter so he could walk into town and get the Times. Hart gave him a ten and asked him to pick up some shaving cream and a quart of orange juice, and then stop at the bakery and get half a dozen cupcakes—a surprise for Summer when she got home later. And keep the change, he said.

  Marcus would always remember how beautiful the day was, and how pleased he was that his father took the time to think Summer would like cupcakes. How he had walked to Honesdale in a Summer-ish haze of sentimental optimism. Maybe his father, for all his strange talk, wasn’t such a bad egg. Maybe he even regretted last night, wanted to make it up. He’d been drunk and a little weird, is all. Maybe the cupcakes showed Hart wasn’t bothered any more by Summer’s weight. Maybe the shaving cream meant he wanted to shave before she got home. And maybe the gift of the change from the ten meant he did have confidence in Marcus as a responsible boy, that maybe he didn’t consider him the jerkoff weirdo he always said he was.

  Marcus did the errands in a leisurely way, picking out a blue gel shaving cream he thought his father would like, and checking the date on the orange juice. He chose three chocolate and three white cupcakes, all of them with stand-up frosting and colored sprinkles, and enjoyed the way the bakery woman put the cupcakes into the box, alternating brown and white in a checkerboard pattern. He smiled at her, and she said, “Well, aren’t you a nice boy!” The sun was so warm that on his way home he sat on a bench basking in it and looking at the headlines on the front page of the newspaper: DEMS CHALLENGE BUSH ON HEALTH CARE. NEW HAMPSHIRE VITAL TO CLINTON, AIDES SAY. DID INTERNET KILLER LEAVE PAPER TRAIL?

  In a way, he understood what his father had meant—he knew there was another world out there. He told himself he would start reading the paper like a conscientious home-schooler, and discover for himself what that world was all about, instead of just diving into the crossword puzzle and tossing the rest in the recycle bin. DID INTERNET KILLER LEAVE PAPER TRAIL? He said it over to himself. He had not the tiniest idea what it meant.

  Walking home, he wondered if his mother had arrived yet. He wanted to hear about Grandma Mead’s funeral. He would have liked to go—partly out of a morbid desire to see what a dead body looked like, but more because Grandma Mead’s death was unreal to him. He had a hazy idea that his mother’s tears, the details of the death and burial, would help him believe it, and that that was a necessary thing—your grandmother’s death shouldn’t be something that passed over you without consequence, like winter sunlight or a newspaper headline. And at the back of his mind was a worry that, with her death, Grandma Mead’s checks would stop coming, and they would have to depend on Hart to take care of them.

  Summer’s car was in the driveway. Marcus hurried up the road, humming a little, skipping on every fourth step as was his habit, and when he neared the house he could hear his mother’s voice raised in what sounded like hysteria. “You’re lying!” she said, and then said it again, and then she cried out what sounded like, “Dig her up, damn you! Just go and dig her up!”

  Marcus stopped in his tracks.

  “Dig up the fucking dog, damn you! Dig her up, you lying son of a bitch!”

  He dropped the bag and began to run.

  When he entered the kitchen, Hart was standing on one side of the table, Summer on the other gripping a carving knife in her clenched fist. She was still wearing her black winter coat, and her hair was tied back. Her face was distorted and red. She looked like no one he knew.

  “I want to know what you did with her,” she said, raising the knife. “You dig her up and let me see her, or get out of here.”

  Hart backed away, his hands palm out in front of him. “Hey hey hey—calm down, Summer. Just calm down. If you don’t believe me, that’s your business, but I am not digging up a dog I just spent half an hour digging a hole to bury. Are you crazy?”

  “Show me where you did it! Show me the grave! I’ll dig her up myself.”

  “You’re out of control! Calm down and just accept it. It was a terrible accident. These things happen.”

  Marcus’s voice split the air. “Where’s my dog?”

  They turned and saw him, and Summer’s face crumpled. She put down the knife and held out her arms. “Oh, Marcus. Oh, my baby. She’s gone, sweetie. Phoebe is dead.”

  Marcus didn’t move. He stared at his father until Hart ducked his head, waved his hand uneasily, and said, “It was an accident. It happened just after you left, Marcus. She ran into the road, and a car hit her. Didn’t even stop, the bastard. It was over in a second.” Something resembling tears came to his eyes, making them brighten. “She didn’t suffer, son,” he said, blinking. “I buried her out in the woods. I didn’t—well, I didn’t think you should see her.”

  “The woods.” Marcus’s mind stuck at the words. “The woods. She hated the woods.”

  “It seemed the best thing.”

  Summer’s face returned to its mask of rage. She gave what sounded like a strangled scream. “You’re lying,” she said to Hart through gritted teeth. “Do you think I don’t know when you’re lying?” She picked up the knife again. “Take me to where you buried her or get out of here and don’t ever come back.”

  Marcus didn’t feel queasy as he always did when his parents argued or his mother cried. His mind was empty of everything but Phoebe. Phoebe. Her spotted fur and floppy ears and polite little bark and muddy paws and big laughing grin with teeth like a tiny ivory mountain range. What had she been doing when he last saw her? Dancing around the door, wanting to go with him. “I can’t take you with me into town,” he had said. “We’ll go out when I get back.” And his father had smiled at them both and sai
d, “It’s a beautiful day out there,” and then Marcus had left, basking in his father’s niceness and gloating over the stupid ten-dollar bill from which he would get to keep the change.

  He turned and walked outside. Behind him, he could hear his mother’s voice—shrill and out of control, but tough, unwavering. The sun was still shining; he stood for a moment, feeling it warm his face. He saw that the carton of juice he dropped had opened up and spilled, an orange smear against the dirty snow, but it had missed the newspaper and the cupcakes. He picked them up, and went inside as his father was backing out of the kitchen. “All right,” Hart was saying in a placating, singsong voice. “Whatever you say, Summer. I’m out of here. Like I really need a fat, hysterical madwoman in my life.”

  Marcus put the box down and went to his mother, and stood with his face pressed to her soft front, her arms around him, until they heard Hart stomp back downstairs with his suitcase and his computer bag. Then he came down again, grunting, with a box of his books. Marcus went to the window and looked out. His parents’ cars—the blue Volvo wagon, the white Toyota—rested side by side, like shabby old friends.

  Hart went through the back door and walked down the steps. He was wearing his Armani suit. He put his stuff in the trunk, lit a cigarette, and stood in the sun, smoking. He didn’t look back at the house. Finally, he tossed the cigarette into the snow and got into the car. Marcus watched him drive off, and when the Volvo was out of sight he remained at the window thinking maybe Hart was joking, or lying, and when he went up to his room Phoebe would be there, curled up asleep on the bed.

  But he decided not to go upstairs just yet, because maybe she wouldn’t.

  Marcus made his mother a cup of coffee and set it in front of her with two cupcakes on a plate—one white, one chocolate. Then he sat down at the kitchen table. His mother was a stone. She sat across from Marcus in silence, staring at nothing, her eyes hot and burning, for many long minutes, before she drank the coffee and ate the cupcakes.

  7

  !Ah, Satan sees Natasha!

  Near the end of 1991, the gardening year over, Emily was happily collecting unemployment as a seasonal worker. Her boss, Sophie, always traveled in the off season, this year to Bali. Dr. Demand had bought another photograph, a fairly new TIME, as a Christmas gift for his partner, Dr. Wrzeszczynski. Emily’s pictures were being considered by a gallery in the Village—she expected a verdict soon after New Year’s—and she was busy taking more pictures, teaching Izzy to say “pretty boy” and Harry to come, sit, and stay. She had flown out to Berkeley to have Thanksgiving with her mother and sister and brother, leaving Harry and Izzy in the care of Anstice; in return she had agreed to stay in Williamsburg for Christmas and look after Anstice’s six cats.

  As the days grew shorter and colder, she began to wish she had a nice warm boyfriend to share the mattress with her and Harry.

  It always surprised people who knew Emily that she had trouble with men. When she was younger, she had assumed maybe it was her big feet or her funny-looking ears that were the problem, but she had begun to suspect maybe it was something about her attitude.

  “I think he got discouraged,” Gene Rae told her when her last boyfriend, a law student named Peter with melting brown eyes and a dog named Louie, broke up with her. “He told Kurt that sometimes you seemed to forget his existence.”

  “I really liked Peter,” Emily said mournfully. “Of course I forgot his existence sometimes! But just on a situational basis, like when I was in the darkroom or reading. In a cosmic way, I loved him.”

  “I’m not sure that was clear to Peter.”

  “And anyway, I thought women were supposed to play hard to get.”

  “Is that what you were doing?”

  “No—I was just being normal! But if he thought I was neglecting him, why didn’t he see that as a challenge?”

  “Maybe he did,” Gene Rae said. “At first. But nothing changed, and so he got discouraged.”

  Emily sensed behind these comments a long heart-to-heart with Peter, and sighed to disguise the fact that she resented this. “Well then, I’m glad he’s gone, Gene Rae. He could have tried harder.”

  “Emily! He did try harder! But you didn’t try at all.”

  “But I didn’t know anything was wrong!”

  She called Peter and explained to him that if he had had a problem with her attention span or her reading habits or something, he should have let her know instead of writing her a stuffy letter saying, “I have needs that are not being met, and so frankly, although I really respect and admire you, I just don’t see a future for us.” On the phone he told her that maybe she was right, he could have handled it better, but it was a pointless discussion anyway because, actually, he had found someone else.

  “Does she meet your needs?”

  “She adores me.”

  “Peter, I adored you!” Emily wailed.

  “Oh, Emily,” he sighed. “No you didn’t, sweetie. You really didn’t.”

  Emily had no idea what it all meant. She had had a boyfriend with beautiful brown eyes who made her laugh and was fun in bed and whose dog got along with her dog, and then suddenly she had an ex-boyfriend who respected and admired her.

  “You probably need to meet someone as self-sufficient as you are,” Gene Rae said.

  “Do you really mean self-absorbed?” Emily asked.

  “No, that’s not it. You’re not self-absorbed at all, you’re the opposite. You’re more interested in other people than anyone I’ve ever met. You just don’t really focus—you know? And the things that do absorb you … well, it’s hard to define exactly what I mean. You’re—” Gene Rae gestured helplessly. “You’re just—”

  Emily found she was on the verge of tears. “I sense the word oblivious struggling to come out.” She struggled to keep in control. “Or clueless. Some word like that.”

  “That’s not quite it,” Gene Rae sat for another minute, lost in thought. Then she said, “But it’s close, baby. You know I love you to death, but—it’s pretty close.”

  Emily resolved to be less clueless, to focus better on her next boyfriend. Focus … meaning what? She had a general idea, but when it came to particulars she drew a blank.

  Christmas in Williamsburg would be quiet and solitary; most of the people she knew were going out of town. It would be just her and Harry and Izzy making their own holiday cheer in the loft, phone calls to Mom and Milo and Laurie on Christmas day, a quart of eggnog with some rum in it.

  In preparation, she arranged twinkly lights around the windows. She bought a four-foot blue spruce from a young couple who came all the way from Vermont to set up outside the subway entrance on North Seventh Street. She decorated the tree with strings of popcorn, paper cutouts, and, on top, a star she made from cardboard, gold paint, and the spangles from a broken bracelet she’d never been able to fix. To her mother and siblings she sent photographs of the Manhattan skyline at three different times of day. She gave Gene Rae and Kurt a picture of their dog that she took secretly and put into a homemade frame. She made cranberry bread for Anstice to find on her return, and painted a little picture of Harry with Izzy sitting on his head (not a real-life situation) for Luther. She baked dozens of Christmas cookies to take around to people in the neighborhood, like Gaby and Hattie and Marta and Mrs. Buzik and the guys in the pigeon-feed store.

  On the late afternoon of Christmas Eve, as she was coming home from the deli, she ran into Joe Whack in the elevator. She was looking forward with pleasure to her dinner, which was going to be a simple and early one of rum-and-eggnog, along with slices of the fruitcake her mother had sent. The fruitcake was the good kind, dark and moist and mysterious, full of dried fruits and nuts but sans citron. Her mother made a dozen of them weeks ahead, doused them with booze, and left them to stew in their juices, then packed them up and mailed them to her far-flung children and relatives and friends. Emily had been eating this fruitcake as long as she could remember, but it was only recently that she had discove
red the delights of washing it down with rum-laced eggnog. The combination, she thought, not only required no cooking but would console her for being alone on Christmas Eve.

  Then in the elevator Joe Whack invited her to a party.

  He was a painter, and that was nearly all she knew about him. Except that he was the only person in the building who didn’t have at least one dog or cat. Anstice preferred to rent to what she called “animal people”; they were more honest, reliable, kind hearted, and generally lovable, she said. Joe Whack had a beagle named Bouncer when he moved in, then it turned out he had just borrowed Bouncer to get the loft. Anstice had no way of proving that or, indeed, of getting rid of him even if it was true. She had asked him to get at least one small cat, but he said he was allergic to cats, and he couldn’t have a dog because he was living on the edge and he couldn’t afford dog food.

  He did seem, even to Emily, to be living on the edge.

  His clothes weren’t ragged, exactly, but they seemed old, cruddy, and few. He had a scraggly beard to match his patchy reddish hair. It was said that he painted compulsively, and his loft was stacked with canvases, but either he never tried to show his work or no one would take it on. Anstice had seen some of his paintings and said they were weird, monochrome still-lifes of oddly assorted objects. The one Anstice remembered depicted the edge of a frayed carpet with a crumpled candy wrapper and a milk bottle. “He doesn’t seem to get out much,” she said. Anstice didn’t like Joe Whack, and would love it if he became a success and moved to Tribeca or SoHo. Emily had no opinion about him, except that, observing his emaciated frame and bad complexion, she wondered if he was entirely well. And she noticed that whenever he was in the elevator with her and Harry, he kept his distance, smiling nervously, as if Harry was a piranha. Otherwise he was wanly friendly. But today he was almost effusive.