Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

But when he arrived and called the number he was given, a woman’s voice told him, curtly, that Hart no longer lived there and no, she didn’t have a new number for him. As it turned out, though, Hart wasn’t hard to find—he had emigrated across the river, and was renting a place on Crosby Street. He was the proprietor of a small gallery, trendily located in Chelsea, that specialized in what Hart called “the aesthetic of blood,” including the work of the soon-to-be-famous wound-painter Selma Rice.

  A big surprise was that Hart wasn’t sorry to see Marcus. His son’s sudden appearance in his life seemed to amuse him—a son who, as he gleefully pointed out, had failed to take his advice, and now look at him. “Did I tell you to get out of that fucking backwater, or what?” he asked, more than once. He was still a smoker, and his voice was a rasp, like a saw that needed sharpening. “But did you listen to your old man? Huh?” He cuffed Marcus on the shoulder. “But hey, kid, I’m glad you turned up.” Hart put Marcus up for a night on the couch in his shabby apartment, and gave him an old but warm tweed overcoat, a couple of shirts, and a pair of leather gloves that needed repairing. They were all too big on Marcus, a fact Hart enjoyed (“Jesus Christ! My son the twerp”). Marcus endured his merriment in exchange for enough money for a security deposit on an apartment and a month’s rent. Hart had not, in fact, changed much, except that he looked older and was actually willing to part (condescendingly, chuckling, with a couple of remarks about losers) with some of his money.

  They went out to dinner in a bar at the top of the World Trade Center—champagne in an ice bucket, and the city like an open jewel box far below. Marcus gazed down at the view, which was both sublime and frightening, while his father launched into a tirade reminiscent of the long-ago night at Mario’s Olde Italian Inn—people are jerks, illogic rules the universe, the art world is stupid and venal, etc. etc. Marcus let his father continue talking until Hart’s steak arrived. Then, after a suitable interval as his father attacked the meat and Marcus worked on a vegetarian mushroom-and-pastry thing that reminded him pleasantly of his mother’s cooking, he asked one of the questions he had come to New York to hear the answer to.

  “So, Pop—why didn’t you ever marry Summer?”

  Hart looked up from his steak and surprised him by actually answering. “I’m not the marrying kind, son.”

  “But you married that other woman.”

  “You know what her name was?” His father smiled. “You’ll like this. Emily Lime. Get it?”

  But Marcus wasn’t listening. “So if you aren’t the marrying kind, why did you marry her?”

  Hart’s smile dissolved into a frown, as if the question truly puzzled him and he was actually searching for some kind of self-knowledge. He gazed off into space for a minute, sipping his champagne, and then he said, “I’ll tell you the truth here, Marcus. I think I thought I could become the marrying kind by, well, by getting married. You know—walk like a duck, talk like a duck.…” He shrugged.

  Hart’s face was sneer-free, and his words seemed sincere. Not for the first time, Marcus wondered if his father was all that bright. He remembered Tamarind once saying to him, “You know I loved your mom, but sometimes I wonder how in hell those two managed to produce you.” She added that it would be hard to believe Hart was actually his father if Marcus weren’t a kind of elfin version of the old man, a description that made him cringe but that he knew was accurate.

  The two of them chewed for a while in silence. Marcus ate his mushroom tart slowly, trying to make it last. He wondered why Summer had never aspired to be a chef, and imagined her rich and happy working in a place like this, messing with mushrooms and pastry, instead of poor and melancholy, schlepping around her house, killing the hours until she could start cooking dinner. The thought was painful. If Summer hadn’t died. If Summer were alive now. He could bring her to New York, send her to cooking school, see that she got a job and was happy. All through his adolescence, mooning around the house and prowling through the woods and reading and watching TV, he had thought his mother was so difficult, so hopeless. Maybe she wasn’t, maybe she was easy, like a chess prodigy or a musician. She could only do one thing, but it’s a thing you can make a living doing. Why didn’t he know that then? Why didn’t anyone?

  “My turn, then, laddie,” Hart said suddenly. “Another question. What brought you to Williamsburg?” He pointed his fork at Marcus. “And don’t tell me it was the zip code.”

  Marcus considered. There was no way he would tell his father he had moved there because of him. “It was, actually, the zip code.”

  “Let me get this straight.” Hart wore little half-glasses on the end of his nose, presumably so he could see his steak when he sliced into it. The steak, which Hart had ordered rare, reminded Marcus of the paintings he’d seen in his father’s gallery—raw, oozing, lurid, brutal. “You own your mother’s house. Right?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. Sort of.” He hadn’t been back to the gray farmhouse since Summer’s funeral. He tried not to remember how he got high in the men’s room at the funeral home on some reefer Tamarind, mercifully, slipped him. He really didn’t remember much else about that day except that the weather that had killed his mother had thawed, and the cemetery was a mess of mud and slush, and his father didn’t show up. “I owe some back taxes. But—yeah. Basically.”

  He wanted to keep it vague, didn’t want Hart to suggest that he sell the place and pay him back the money he’d just given him. Marcus had his own plans for his life, his money, and his mother’s house.

  But Hart didn’t pursue it. He asked, “So you couldn’t live in the drab, boring, jerkoff zip code of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, whatever it is—”

  “18431.”

  “OK. I see. 18431 isn’t numerically interesting enough for you.” Hart’s face was amused and expectant, as if Marcus was about to provide the punch line to a great joke. Marcus could have told him some ways in which 18431 was, numerically, extremely interesting, but he knew Hart didn’t want to hear them. And of course it was true that, interesting or not, 18431 was very far from the palindromic beauty of 11211. “So you’ve got to move to 11211. Is that what you’re saying, son?”

  “Well, I could move to 10001, over in the West Thirties, but I can’t afford to live in Manhattan.”

  “Ha!” Hart’s laugh burst out. “You couldn’t afford to live in Brooklyn if I weren’t staking you.”

  Marcus sighed. “Right, Dad, but I figured I could only squeeze so much out of you.”

  Hart looked at him with what seemed to be approval. “That’s my boy,” he said, and sloshed the rest of the champagne into Marcus’s glass. “Drink up, son. This is a historic moment. Damn it, I haven’t seen you since you were—what?”

  “Ten.”

  “Ten. And now you’re—what?”

  “Nineteen and a half.”

  “Holy shit. You look about fourteen.”

  Marcus knew this was true.

  Hart finished the steak, removed his glasses, pushed his plate back, and signaled for another bottle of champagne. “So did you ever go back to school, or what?”

  “Nope. Never did.” Marcus had almost reached the point where he thought it might have been a mistake to stay out of school all those years, to escape the horrors of Honesdale High, simply because no one noticed he wasn’t there. Maybe people needed to endure things like that. Maybe it’s a kind of refiner’s fire, it normalizes them.

  “They never made you go to school?”

  “Apparently, once I got off the radar of the Wayne County Board of Ed., I never got back on.”

  “Holy shit. So you’ve never been past sixth grade?”

  “Fifth. I’m probably one of the few people who doesn’t have that dream where you’re late for a final exam you haven’t studied for.”

  “So what the hell were you doing all those years? After I left your mother?”

  Marcus doesn’t bother to correct his father’s version of events. “Not much,” he says. “Eating Summer’s cooking. Reading.
I read all the books in the Honesdale Library. The only problem was I had to go there after school hours and on Saturdays so the librarians wouldn’t get suspicious.” He doesn’t tell Hart about his winter in the woods, when he abandoned Summer to live on his own way up near Damascus, working in a gas station, feeding a family of raccoons, sleeping long hours, reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. He would never tell anyone—he could barely admit it to himself—that he’d left home because by the time he was a teenager her oddities were getting to him, and that he even felt a certain sympathy with Hart and his absences.

  Hart, who had drunk two scotches before dinner and most of the champagne during it, was sloshed. He lit a cigarette, having some trouble with the match, and then his sneer reasserted itself. “So what are you going to do now? Write your memoirs? Memorize the phone book? Rob a bank?”

  “Probably not, Dad,” Marcus said evenly. He had already noticed that Williamsburg seemed dog-heavy, and contemplated a pet-sitting/dog-walking business. He ate the last bit of mushroom, considered picking up the plate and licking it, decided not to. “Probably something else.”

  Now, as he walks the fragrant paths of the Botanic Garden, Marcus counts up the times he’s seen his father since he’s lived in Williamsburg. He’d seen him one more time that first year. Then three times in 2001, not counting a maudlin phone call from Hart right after 9/11 that makes Marcus cringe when he thinks about it. Now this would be their fourth meeting in 2002. The encounters are increasing by one a year, a fact he finds dismaying.

  Another reason to get out of town.

  A little before four o’clock, he leaves the Shakespeare garden, where he has been contemplating a hefty stand of Rosmarinus officinalis with its inevitable rosemary-for-remembrance quotation from Hamlet. He walks across to the Japanese one, recently renovated, but which (in its autumnal guise) is still very much as he perceived it when he first took the Number 43 bus to see it nearly two years ago: elegant, spare, and—in spite of its mannered precision and air of absorbed cultivation—a magnet for the wild creatures Marcus continues to miss in the brick-stone-asphalt world of Brooklyn. There are turtles on a rock, koi in the depths, brown ducks riding on the khaki water, rabbits on the grass, an occasional snowy egret perched on the faded red torii gate. Just the sight of them eases his mind, the way a romp in the park with Rumpy and Elvis can do. Or a Scrabble game with Emily. He smiles, thinking of her and her damned aquifer, and he’s still smiling when he hears the crunch of leaves and looks up to see his father coming down the path. If Hart only knew he was thinking with such affection of Emily Lime, whom he is about to be paid ten thousand dollars to murder.…

  As it turns out, however, Hart has only nine thousand four hundred on him.

  An emergency came up this morning, he says, and he needed some cash.

  Marcus had expected his father to either not show up, or show up with no money at all and an excuse. Instead, there are ninety hundred-dollar bills, plus a short stack of twenties—all of it stuffed into an envelope that once held Hart’s Con Edison bill. Marcus is stunned. He sits on a bench in the pavilion, which is deserted except for a spider in one corner poised in an enormous web. His father looms over him, leaning against the frame, looking as if he wishes he had a cigarette, while Marcus counts the cash. The bills aren’t fresh, the way a bank would hand them out, but wrinkled and tattered, as if Hart has been saving up for his ex-wife’s murder for years, a hundred at a time. As he counts, Marcus feels a creeping chill of fear: Hart is not a man who fools around with money. The idea is suddenly real that, to his father, this cash is not a used pick-up truck, as it is to him; it is the broken body of Emily Lime at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Marcus finishes counting and looks up at his father. Hart needs a haircut, his leather jacket has seen better days, and he’s compulsively biting his bottom lip.

  “No other way, eh, Dad?” he asks quietly.

  “Of getting what I need?” His father jerks his head. “Sorry. No.”

  “Can you tell me—?”

  “Nope. It’s complicated. All part of a little agreement I made with my ex-wife.” He smiles down at Marcus. “Grown-up stuff, kid. Don’t ask.”

  “You couldn’t just—”

  “Nope. Everything’s locked up tight.”

  “But—”

  “Hey!” Hart bends toward Marcus and holds his hands in the air, stiffly, as if he is held back from grabbing his son by the throat only by the presence of a Botanic Garden employee chugging by in a cart on the path behind them. “Listen to me, you little twerp. Are you going to do this or not? I can take the money back, you know. I’m trying to be a good father to you for once, but I can find other things to do with my hard-earned cash.”

  Marcus sits there with the envelope in his lap. He has just taken money from his father in exchange for the promise to commit a murder. Is he now going to meet the same fate Phoebe did? A quick death, followed by burial in an unmarked grave? Then his mind shies away—there’s no proof his father killed his dog. Marcus looks out over the water toward the red gate, which is a copy of one in Japan that stands in the sea at Miyajima. He knows that the inscription on it means “spirit of light.” He usually admires the gate, but today it looks to him like a gallows. “No problem, Dad,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

  “You’re not fucking with me, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then.” Hart straightens up and his frown smoothes out, leaving only a yellow-toothed smile. “That’s my boy.”

  Marcus sits there for a while after Hart leaves, watching the spider. For a long time, it doesn’t move, and he wonders if it’s dead. Then, with sudden and surprising speed, it starts scuttling toward Marcus, and Marcus pockets the wad of money and heads home.

  13

  oh! cameras are macho!

  “We should mobilize,” Gene Rae says. “Take back our neighborhood. Five rapes in this neighborhood in two months? I say we should fight.”

  “With what?” Emily asks her. “Guns?”

  Gene Rae—eyes narrowed, gazing into space—considers this. She is sitting, with Izzy on her knee, on the sofa Emily found on the street years ago and covered with a chenille bedspread from the Salvation Army. Against the white bedspread, Gene Rae is vivid, with her frizzy red hair and startling blue eyes. She wears turquoise sneakers, and her earrings are long silver chains with silver cats spinning on the ends. Her yellow sweater stretches over Roland the fetus, now past his seventh month. “No,” she says finally. “Guns are dangerous. I mean, I personally would welcome the chance to pick this guy off with a little .38, but—no.”

  “No,” Emily echoes, feeling enormous relief. She is willing to cope with the Williamsburg rapist simply by not going out alone at night, though she knows that if Gene Rae comes up with some other way, she will go along with it. Gene Rae once said, “Every woman should know how to use an electric drill,” and Emily got herself one, learned how to use it, and has never been sorry. But a gun is different.

  “But something,” Gene Rae says. “Something besides cowering behind our men, Emily! I can only go out after dark now if Kurt is with me. How degrading!”

  “I feel okay with Otto.”

  “Right. Men and dogs. Has it come to this? That women have to come in third, behind men and dogs?” She takes a sip of cocoa. “Not that I have anything against men or dogs. I mean, I have one of each with another one on the way. But.”

  Gene Rae often ends a sentence with the word “but,” especially when she’s with Emily. They have known each other for so long—since high school, and then they went to college together—that they can read each other’s minds. Sometimes they just sit together for long minutes, thinking, occasionally nodding at each other. They do this now, while Izzy circles around Gene Rae’s knee and walks down her leggings to her sneakers, where he pulls happily at the laces with his beak.

  Finally Emily says, “Well,” and Gene Rae says, “Yeah.”

  They sip their cocoa.

  “So are y
ou on vacation yet?” Gene Rae asks.

  “After this week. Sophie and I have to finish the fall cleanup at the Ramseys.”

  “They’re the ones with the turtle sculptures?”

  “Yeah. She can’t seem to stop buying them.” Victor and Tilda Ramsey have divorced, and Victor’s new wife, Siena, who is an astrologer to the rich, has an idea that in a previous life she was a turtle. “I’m sure she’s spent a fortune.”

  “They sound kind of cute.”

  “One was cute. Two were cute. Even three were still almost cute. Fourteen is a little scary.”

  “That’s a lot of turtle.”

  “We’re always tripping over them. And they’re a magnet for pigeons. At least we don’t have to clean off the poop, the maid does it.” Emily sighs. “I hate to see fall come, in a way. I love having all the free time, but I’ll miss those posh rooftops.”

  “‘Margaret, are you grieving,’” Gene Rae quotes, “‘Over goldengrove unleaving?’” They were literature majors together.

  “I am, Genie. I’m getting old.”

  “If you are, then I am, and I’m not, so neither are you.”

  “That seems reasonable, I admit, but still—I’ve been feeling sort of over the hill lately.” Emily reaches for a Mallomar. Gene Rae brought the cocoa, milk, and cookies with her, knowing Emily’s slender larder can’t support the nutritional demands of pregnancy. Mallomars sit proudly at the tip of the Personal Food Pyramid Emily and Gene Rae concocted long ago, just above apples, poached eggs, chicken peanut curry, tomato sandwiches on toasted Wonder bread, Cherry Garcia ice cream, and celery stuffed with cream cheese. “These are so fabulous.”

  “They’re great when you’re pregnant, because they like being washed down with lots of milk.”

  “My mother has a new boyfriend,” Emily says.

  “Your mother is so completely cool for her age.” They are silent again, reading each other’s minds, and then Gene Rae adds, “I often think you and St. Francis of Assisi would be perfect for each other.”