Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  In between folders marked GAS BILLS and MEDICAL STUFF is a thin one marked LEGAL, and inside it is a multi-page document headed STATE OF NEW YORK: DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE. He has an unsavory desire to read it straight through—Docket No. FA-96 04587553F, Statement of Income, Marital History, Judgment File—but in his first quick perusal he sees a page headed “Schedule C: Personal Property to be Retained by Wife pursuant to Paragraph VIII of Agreement dated July 16, 1997.” The list reads:

  washing machine and dryer

  1985 Volvo

  54 novels by Anthony Trollope, “Everyman” edition

  74 oil paintings, three notebooks of drawings, two pastels:

  work of artist Joe Whack

  Marcus sits down on the floor, dazed, and stares at it. His first thought is the Joe Whack painting of the toaster and safety pins Hart gave to Summer, which is still hanging on the wall in the gray farmhouse. He’d forgotten all about it.

  His second thought is: What a shit. At a time when Hart was making plenty of money, this is all she got. She probably couldn’t afford a lawyer, probably in her Emily-ish way didn’t even quibble: Sure, whatever, let’s just get it over with.

  He gathers his wits together, finally, and produces his third thought: Whack. It must be Joe Whack. His work must have become valuable. Posthumously, he has been discovered. Somewhere, somehow, somebody wants Whack. Hart knows this, Emily doesn’t.

  Emily has seventy-four Whacks.

  He looks vaguely around the loft. Where the hell are they?

  He is putting the document back when another one catches his eye. It is badly typed on flimsy paper, and it is headed JOINT TENANCY AGREEMENT, dated March 14, 1995. Feeling slimy, Marcus peeks at it. It is written in legal gobbledygook that sounds to him like a parody:

  “Notice to whomever it may concern, now and hereafter and in perpetuity,” it begins, and goes on to say:

  the artist herein named and whose signature is below, I, Josef Whack, do hereby transfer the property that comprises my life work, namely 74 paintings, 2 pastels, and 3 notebooks, to Tab Hartwell and Emily Lime, which they will own jointly now and forever, to do with what they wish, and in the event of the death of one of them, the works of art in question, namely said paintings, pastels, and notebooks, become the sole and exclusive property of the other.

  The document is signed by Josef Whack, Emily Lime, and Tab Hartwell and notarized with a signature that is barely readable but looks female, Polish, and in a hurry.

  In the event of the death of one of them. If Emily Lime’s dead body is found at the bottom of an elevator shaft, Hart will get back the Whacks he gave up, plus pastels and notebooks. But if Emily Lime’s death is averted, Hart will own nothing but his own twisted soul, and Emily could be a wealthy woman. Or at least a wealthier woman. Or is a Joint Tenancy Agreement some kind of binding lifelong covenant that Marcus doesn’t understand? Do Emily and Hart, bizarrely, still own the paintings together, as if they were a child in joint custody?

  But—again, the vital question—where are the paintings?

  Marcus returns the document to its folder and closes the file drawer, ignoring the urge to wipe off his fingerprints. Then he exchanges a few “pretty boys” with Izzy, pets Otto until the dog starts to get wild, and lets himself out. He has to wait for the elevator, which is above him on the sixth floor. The elevator makes Marcus nervous. Whenever he takes Otto out, he’s always terrified that, in his zeal to get to the park, the crazy little guy will fling himself over the edge.

  Marcus leans out into nothingness to pull on the cable and he looks up the open shaft, where he can see the dark steel cube that, Emily has told him, Anstice is planning to replace with a regular elevator, one with numbered buttons and automatic doors. Anstice can’t bring herself to do it yet, because during the time it’s being worked on (conservative estimate: a month) she will have to walk up to her sixth-floor loft. And until the building achieves legal status, nobody says she has to do it.

  Marcus moves back, well away from the shaft, knowing that if he looks down he will see the bottom of the long vertical tunnel where he has told Hart that Emily’s body will lie in a broken heap. He leans against the wall and squeezes his eyes shut, and into his mind comes the image of a body at the bottom of the shaft, and it’s not Emily’s, it’s Hart’s.

  Finally, the elevator grinds into action, descends noisily, and stops in front of him. He wrenches open the door and sees Anstice and Dr. Demand, each of them wearing the pleasant and elaborately neutral look worn only by people who have just sprung guiltily apart.

  “Oh! Well! Hi, Marcus,” Anstice says. She is wearing what appears to be a nightgown under a quilted Chinese jacket. “Nice to see you. I’m just going down to get my mail.”

  “Hi,” Marcus says, nodding at them both. “I stopped in to see Emily, but I guess she’s not home. Her buzzer doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Oh, right,” Anstice says vaguely. A smile hovers around her lips. “Those damned buzzers, always wimping out when you need them.”

  Dr. Demand hauls on the rope, and the elevator starts to descend. “I had to deliver something to Anstice,” he says. “A small dental complication.” He glances at Anstice and shrugs, looking suddenly helpless. “Something minor, but, you know, major.”

  “It was so nice of you, Doctor,” Anstice says, and the smile breaks out.

  Dr. Demand gazes at her, then turns with an effort to Marcus. His face is bright crimson above his nattily knotted blue tie. “Great weather we’re having, eh?”

  “Pretty good, Doc.” The elevator is agonizingly slow. Even on a cool autumn day, the smells of cinnamon and cloves linger in the building, permeating the elevator. There is an awkward pause, which Marcus figures it’s his turn to break. He says, “Running into you like this reminds me I should probably do something about that broken tooth.”

  “Ah—yes.” Dr. Demand visibly struggles to remember the tooth. When Marcus chipped a piece off a year ago on a frozen candy bar, the dentist said it wasn’t serious, not to worry unless he lost some more of the tooth, which is one reason everyone goes to Dr. Demand.

  “Snickers bar,” Marcus prompts him.

  The dentist’s face lights up. “Second bicuspid in the upper right quadrant? I still think you can wait on that, Marcus, but if it’s bothering you, give Renata a call and make an appointment. I’ll be glad to take another look.”

  “Will do,” Marcus says, and the elevator lands, with a little bump, at the first floor, and they all file into the lobby.

  Anstice says, “Well—guess I’ll get that mail,” and Dr. Demand says, “Guess I’ll be off to pull some teeth.” But neither of them moves.

  Nor does Marcus. He stands there, suddenly struck by an idea. “Anstice,” he says.

  She wrenches her gaze away from Dr. Demand. “Hmmm?”

  “I wonder if I could talk to you about something.”

  Anstice gives him her full attention, genuinely surprised. “Sure.” She looks at Dr. Demand, back at Marcus. “You mean—now?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, if you’re not too busy.”

  “No, no, of course not. I’m just …” She looks down at her feet for a moment—she is wearing what Marcus believes are called mules—pink ones—and then seems to pull herself together. “Sure. That’s fine.” She holds out her hand to the dentist. “Thanks, Dr. D. For stopping over and everything.”

  Dr. Demand takes her hand, and Marcus turns away for a moment, hands in pockets, whistling a little, so that they can exchange the kind of look they seem to want to exchange. Anstice and Dr. D. Well, well. He doesn’t know what to think. He is aware of the usual combination of boredom, bafflement, and envy, but it’s like distant hoofbeats, going someplace without him. When wolves howl, he thinks, they sing in harmony, like a barbershop quartet, each wolf on a different note. The songs of whales, on the other hand, are intricately structured, and they come and go like pop tunes. For a couple of months, they sing the same song, then it changes.�
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  “I’ll be seeing you, then, Marcus,” Dr. Demand calls. “You and your bicuspid.”

  When Marcus turns, the dentist is going out the front door, with a jaunty wave, and Anstice is looking blissed-out with an overlay of puzzlement. “So—Marcus? You want to talk to me about something?”

  “Well, yes—I do.”

  Marcus looks around the big, bare, industrial lobby, as if a conference room might present itself—maybe a room hung with rugs, a hookah in the corner, where spice merchants in turbans once gathered. Anstice smiles apologetically as if suddenly remembering that she is well brought-up and that she is wearing a nightgown and mules and a quilted red Chinese jacket. “Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

  “Yes,” Marcus says, with relief. “Tea would be great.”

  They go back up in the elevator in silence until, at about the. fourth floor, Anstice blurts out, “Oh, all right, then, yes. Yes, we are seeing each other. I know it’s—well, I mean I know he—okay.” She takes a deep breath, her bosom heaving, tears in her eyes. Marcus stares at her, stunned. No, Anstice! There’s no need to do this! “He has a wife on Long Island. Betty. We all know that. And three little kids. Okay. But this is real, Marcus. This is it. This isn’t a fling, or—”

  They arrive at her floor. Marcus opens the door.

  He has no idea what to say.

  He stands aside and lets Anstice precede him out of the elevator and follows her down the hall to her loft. They go in—his first impression is cats. She turns to him. Her eyes are wet, pleading. “I am not a home-wrecker!”

  “Anstice,” he says, putting out a hand and touching her red Chinese sleeve. “I have a lot on my mind. You don’t have to worry about what I think. I don’t think anything. Really.”

  They look earnestly at each other for a moment. Slowly, Anstice reaches into her pocket, removes a lace-bordered handkerchief, dabs at her eyes. Then she sighs, and her little smile returns. “Okay,” she says. “Thanks, Marcus. You’re a very nice person.”

  She goes off to put on the kettle, and Marcus sits down in the striped wing chair. Sun pours through the window; the river in the distance is pure blue. The cats come over to sniff at his pant legs. He counts five, and then a sixth emerges from under the desk—a tiger cat who jumps to his lap, kneads briefly, and curls up there, purring. Marcus is aware that Anstice’s loft is beautiful and perfect, but he takes it in no more thoroughly than he took in her romance with Dr. Demand. The Whacks, he is thinking as he pets the tiger cat absently. Where are the Whacks? He has no idea how he will ask this question, and he has no way of being sure Anstice will know the answer, but she is where he has to start because, at the moment, she is all he has.

  Anstice returns, with a silver tray bearing a teapot, two mugs, and a plate of molasses cookies. She has changed into large white pants, a matching sweater, and fluffy red slippers, which Marcus finds himself staring at. “Well,” Anstice says brightly. “What’s up, then, Marcus?”

  Without thinking twice he blurts out the whole story before the tea finishes steeping: Hart, murder, money, snooping, Whack—it all tumbles out in a rush while Anstice sits opposite him nibbling on a cookie. All he wants is to get rid of it, to lay the story down for someone else to deal with, and as he talks he wonders if he has ever done this before, and he can’t think of a single time. It’s probably a huge mistake, Anstice will either think he’s nuts or she’ll call the police. But he can’t stop himself, doesn’t want to stop, wouldn’t stop if he could. He finishes with the Joint Tenancy Agreement, quoting its flowery language, and then he pauses for breath and says, “So I wondered if maybe you know where those paintings are. Since you were Whack’s landlady. And you’re Emily’s friend. And I don’t know who else to ask.”

  Anstice is chewing, and when she finishes she pours tea for them both, takes a sip, and sets the mug back down on the coffee table. “You actually saw these documents? This joint tenancy thing and also the divorce decree? There’s no doubt that she owns the paintings outright? I mean, the divorce agreement gives her the paintings? For sure?”

  “It seemed to. It looked pretty official. Unless a joint tenancy agreement is—you know—perpetual or something.”

  “And am I losing my mind, or did I just hear you say that Tab Hartwell is your father?”

  “He’s my father.”

  “And he asked you to kill Emily for these paintings?”

  “Yep.”

  “Holy shit.” She puts her hand to her chest and takes a deep breath, like an actress in a melodrama. But it seems perfectly appropriate. Marcus feels like doing the same thing. “Okay,” Anstice says. “Give me a second here. I need to think.”

  Marcus picks up his mug and sips some tea. He’s a little shaky. He was so nervous about snooping at Emily’s that he couldn’t eat breakfast. He touches the cat on his lap, feeling the powerful purr under the fur. If you could harness purring, he thinks, you would solve the energy crisis. An endlessly renewable source. All you have to do is pet them or give them some chicken. Sometimes you just have to talk to them in that funny voice they like. Or catnip—with enough catnip the average cat-loving community could take care of all its energy needs. Marcus looks out at the river, which is still the intense marine blue of an autumn afternoon. A red tugboat is chugging by. Life, he is thinking. Life is—

  He puts his head back against the chair, afraid suddenly that he might, mysteriously, start to cry.

  “Okay, then,” Anstice says. “Two things.” She is holding up two fingers, and she ticks them off as she speaks. “One: the storage closet down the hall. Two: Wrzeszczynski.”

  Marcus sits up straight. “Wrzeszczynski?”

  She nods, smiling, ticks off the two fingers again. “Storage cupboard. Wrzeszczynski,” she says, and smiles so hard it turns into a laugh. “I believe this whole thing is going to be very beautiful.” She stands up. “Let’s go.”

  Marcus lowers the cat to the floor. Anstice grabs a set of keys from a hook by the door, and they go out into the hallway, to a door at the end. On it is a brass plaque, a match to the one on the door of her loft: STORAGE, it says in precisely incised letters. There is also a discreet little burglar alarm box. Anstice punches in a code, there is a double beep, and she opens the door with a key. “My junk room,” she says, and they walk into a room that’s about the size of Marcus’s apartment. It’s lined with built-in cupboards and shelves, some of them padlocked.

  “Down here.” They walk through to the far end, where a tall window lets in hazy light. They pass a rack of garment bags (“Clothes from my thinner days,” Anstice says. “Can’t bear to get rid of them.”) and a tower of cardboard cartons labeled AGNES’S KITCHEN STUFF (“Grandma Mullen’s cook’s batterie de cuisine. Ditto.”) and a collection of engraved silver urns (“Various family cats, R.I.P.”), until they get to a row of six cardboard cartons. Each one contains a dozen or so canvases, showing only their backs where the canvas is stapled to the stretchers.

  “Ready?”

  He is not, actually. “These are all Whacks?”

  “To my knowledge, yes. Whacks are pretty unmistakable. Ever seen one?”

  “Just one. Once. Long ago. It was some toast, as I recall, with safety pins and a broken cup.”

  Anstice chuckles. “Bingo! That’s a Whack, all right. I’ve been thinking that it’s hard to believe anyone would want these, much less pay big bucks for them, but given what’s passing for art over in Manhattan, I guess it’s not so crazy. Do you ever go to the galleries? Hilarious!”

  “Could we—”

  “Oh. Sure.” She gestures. “Be my guest. Take a look.”

  The canvases are all the same size, and they are not very big. It takes him a few minutes, but Marcus pulls each one out of its box and looks at it. There are indeed seventy-four of them. In the light from the window, their drab grays and off-whites take on an eerie glow, and the occasional jolt of color is startling. Each of them is a semi-abstract still life similar to Summer’s toast and pins.
There’s an empty jar with a spoon in it on a table with what appears to be a postcard. There’s a crumpled tissue, a paper clip, and a wine bottle. A wristwatch, a golf ball, and part of a birdcage. Candy wrapper, milk bottle, bit of carpet. Book, transistor radio, oil can.

  “It’s always three things.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Anstice says, with an emphasis on the Oh. “Part of the general weirdness.”

  “There should be some pastels, too. And notebooks?”

  Anstice goes to a shelf and pulls down another box. Inside are three notebooks. Leafing through them, Marcus sees endless pencil drawings of the sorts of things Whack painted—he pauses at a particularly beautiful and detailed broken cup that must be the one in Summer’s painting. The two pastels are pressed flat in a folder: both portraits, both recognizably the same man, though in one he is young and, while not handsome, at least full of vitality, his cocky gaze aimed straight at the viewer. In the other he is wasted, sick, his eyes cast down as if he’s just heard his death sentence.

  “Christ.”

  “That’s Joe.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “I don’t really know. If it wasn’t AIDS, it sure looked like AIDS. It could have been cancer. Could have been a combination. He was from the Midwest, somewhere. Michigan? Arkansas? Someplace like that. I don’t think he had any close relatives, and as far as I know his only friends were Hart and Emily. There was some kind of memorial service for him here, but I didn’t go. To be honest, I didn’t much like him. Nobody did, really. He was a surly bastard, and he refused to have any animals.” She picks up a painting—candy wrapper, milk bottle, carpet—and carries it closer to the window.

  “It’s funny. I haven’t looked at these in years. They aren’t as bad as I remembered. Not that I know much about it. But they have a point of view, at least, don’t they? I mean, they’re not bland. And the guy could paint, I’ll give him that.” She puts the painting down, picks up another. “Jeez. I’ll buy one if Emily gives me a decent enough price,” she says, and laughs. “Who woulda thought it? I’ve been living down the hall from a gold mine.”