Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Marcus reminds her that he could be wrong, maybe it’s not the paintings his father wants. Or that Hart could be wrong, and they’re not really worth much of anything. Anstice says, “That’s where Wrzeszczynski comes in.”

  “I don’t really know Wrzeszczynski.” Wrzeszczynski is the periodontist who shares an office with Dr. Demand.

  “Never had your gums done, eh? Lucky you.”

  They stack up the paintings again, lock up, and go back down the hall to Anstice’s place. “Unfortunately, I know Wrzeszczynski only too well.” She bares her teeth, revealing pricey pink gums. “Well, maybe not unfortunately. If I hadn’t spent so much time in that office, I doubt that—well, you know.” She shows her teeth again, this time in the shy smile of the elevator. “So. Okay. Wrzeszczynski owns a Whack. Maybe more than one. But I remember that he bought one, because Joe told me one time when he paid his rent. This was back in—oy, let me think—probably ten years ago, maybe longer. I doubt he paid much for it. Anyway, I’ll give him a call. Maybe he knows something about their value nowadays. Or maybe he’d like to buy another one—who knows?” When they go in the door, the six cats come running, weaving around ‘their legs. “Sit,” Anstice says, and Marcus realizes she’s talking to him. “Have some more tea. And a cookie—please. You didn’t touch a one. Grandma Mullen’s feelings would be hurt. Agnes is probably having a heart attack in her grave.”

  Marcus sits down again in the wing chair, and the tiger cat repositions itself on his lap as if they’re old friends. Marcus realizes that his heart is pounding, and he is suddenly very hungry. He bites into a cookie. Anstice settles opposite him with a cordless phone. She hits a “memory” button and says into the receiver, “Renata, sweetie? It’s Anstice Mullen. I need Dr. Wrzeszczynski, if he’s there. I think it might be an emergency.” She winks at Marcus. “Thanks, doll.” While she’s waiting, she puts her hand over the receiver. “Hey Marcus? Why didn’t you just carry this story to Emily?”

  Marcus finishes his cookie. It is the best cookie he has ever eaten. “I didn’t want her to know Hart is my father.”

  “Well, I guess I can’t blame you for that. But shouldn’t she at least know that someone is gunning for her?”

  “How could I tell Emily someone wants to kill her?”

  Anstice looks at him reprovingly. “Jeez, Marcus, she’s not a child.”

  “No, but—” He has to struggle to explain, and he feels ridiculous, since Anstice and Emily are both so much older than he is. He hates feeling like a kid. “She’s—I don’t know, she’s sort of like an animal. I mean, innocent like that. Like this.” He scratches the head of the cat on his lap, and the cat rubs vigorously against Marcus’s fingers. “She lives in a world that just doesn’t have people wanting to murder her in it.”

  “Well, Marcus, most of us live in a world that doesn’t—Hey! Dr. Wrzeszczynski! It’s Anstice. How are you?” There is a pause. “Well, yes, but it’s not a dental emergency, it’s an art emergency. I hate to take you away from those lovely bleeding gums, but I just need you to answer one quick question. What’s with Joe Whack? I mean, what do you know about his paintings? My friend Marcus has just discovered a bunch of them.” Another pause, and Anstice listens, looking at Marcus the way people do when they’re on the phone. Her eyebrows go up, then down. From time to time she says, “Oh, really?” or “Wow,” or “Hmmm.” Marcus wants a second cookie, but hesitates. Anstice leans over, holds out the plate, and Marcus takes another. “Hmmm, wow,” Anstice says, and raises her eyebrows again at Marcus. “Well, that’s interesting. Sure, I think so. Just a second.” She covers the receiver and says, “Wrzeszczynski wants to meet you in an hour. Can you be there?”

  “What? Yes. Where?”

  “He’ll be there,” she says into the receiver. “What’s the—okay. Fabulous. Bye, Dr. W. Give my regards.” She hangs up and says, “He’s freaking out. He wants more Whacks. He says he’s waited for this moment for years—somebody to call him up and tell him there might be more Whacks in this world. He’s calling his friend Sztmkiewcz right now. Crazed Polish Whack collectors. God only knows what’s going to happen to the poor slob in his chair, probably lying there with his gums gaping open.”

  Anstice stands up and begins walking around the room, stepping around cats, her hands clasped at her bosom.

  “God, this is so exciting. Isn’t it? Marcus—are you sure we shouldn’t call Emily right this minute? I can get her on Sophie’s cell. She could go talk to Wrzeszczynski. I mean, do we have a right to leave her out of it, at this point?”

  “It’s not that I want to leave her out.” Marcus looks down, thinking, and sees that the legs of Anstice’s desk end in dainty paws. “I just don’t want to give her false hope,” he says. “I’ll do the legwork, find out what Wrzeszczynski knows, and pass it on to her. But I’m not telling her about Hart.”

  “God damn that guy, he should be in jail.”

  “Anstice, we can’t tell her. And that means we can’t tell anybody.”

  “No, no, no—you’re right. She doesn’t need to know that. I see what you mean about the animal thing, too.”

  “I always—” Marcus hesitates: He is often afraid, not without reason, that the things he thinks sound weird to other people. “I always think Emily is kind of like the last pigeon. You know, all the pigeons on the sidewalk fly away in a panic when a human comes along, but there’s always one that just stays where it was, pecking at the stale bread crust, refusing to be moved, refusing to give up. Trusting that nothing bad will happen. She’s like that, I think. So smart and plucky, and—well—sort of in her own world, but—you know—lovable.”

  “How very interesting.” Anstice sits back down. “You have no idea.” She stares intently at him. “And it’s true, you do have the most amazing eyes.”

  Marcus looks down in embarrassment at the cat in his lap, who is managing to sleep and purr at the same time. Anstice, seeing she has made him uncomfortable, says, “Would you like another cookie? I have tons. Lately, I can’t seem to stop baking things.”

  “No, thanks, really.”

  “Don’t be polite. Take one home if you want to. Take two.”

  Marcus takes two cookies and slips them into his pocket. Anstice looks pleased.

  “Okay, then, Marcus,” she says. “This is the thing. Don’t tell Wrzeszczynski exactly what she’s got. Just say there may be some Whacks out there somewhere—okay? And you want to know on behalf of a friend how they might be sold, what kind of prices they’re bringing. Is there a gallery that carries his stuff? Or could your friend deal with private collectors? Don’t say too much.”

  Marcus nods. “Where do I meet him?”

  “His house in Greenpoint, 120 Java.”

  He imagines the scene in which he breaks it to Emily that she owns something of immense value and is no longer poor. He imagines Emily wearing expensive clothes like Anstice’s and filling her loft with antiques and having caviar and champagne for dinner instead of poached eggs and leftover Halloween candy. This is an unexpectedly elusive vision.

  At the door, Anstice says, as if reading his mind, “It seems crazy, doesn’t it? And yet these things happen sometimes. Look at that guy—what’s his name? That friend of Lamont’s who had a piece of junk pottery that he wanted to get rid of, and he sold it on eBay, and it turned out to be rare Majolica and it was worth like fifty thousand dollars.”

  “I’ve heard about him. Fred something?”

  “Right. Total loser. But fifty thou! And that’s chicken feed compared to the Whacks.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Believe it.”

  They stand there looking at each other and then, spontaneously, a little shyly, they giggle and hug each other. Hugging Anstice is like curling up with a big down comforter, and it is also—he tells himself, with a shock—like hugging Summer.

  “Marcus,” she says into his shoulder. “You won’t—I mean, one of these days we’ll go public, but we’re not quite—you know.”


  “As far as I’m concerned, the elevator ride has already ceased to exist,” Marcus says, and as soon as he has left the building, this lie becomes true.

  Marcus walks to Greenpoint by way of the Three Flags Deli on Franklin (“MOWIMY PO POLSKU/SE HABLA ESPANOL/WE SPEEK ENGLISH”), where he kills a few minutes with an egg-and-pepper sandwich. Then he walks up Java Street, munching a cookie. Like most Greenpoint streets, Java is lined with remodeled brownstones. Wrzeszczynski’s place is squeezed between a faux-shingled Cape Codder and a pink stuccoed Italian villa. The house has kept its dignity, and then some: It’s a meticulously preserved triumph of mid-nineteenth-century rowhouse architecture, corniced and corbeled and bay-windowed, the pocket front yard surrounded by a curlicued wrought-iron fence, the door, at the top of a row of fancily molded concrete steps, a heavy oak beveled-glass wonder.

  When he rings the bell, there is a melodious peal, and then the door is opened by Wrzeszczynski himself.

  Wrzeszczynski doesn’t have the look of someone who has just rushed away from a bloody set of novocained gums. He is wearing a pristine white shirt with a silky gray tie, his Cary Grantish chin is clean-shaven, little wire spectacles sit firmly on the bridge of his long nose. Marcus is acutely conscious of the fact that not only is he wearing his grungiest jacket and the sweater with the hole in the sleeve from the Salvation Army, but that he is probably strewn with crumbs and cat hair.

  “You’re Marcus.” Wrzeszczynski’s handshake is trembly with excitement. “Come in.”

  Inside, it’s like a set for a PBS series about upper-crust New York society at the turn of the twentieth century: Oriental carpets, stately mantelpiece, graceful staircase winding up. Wrzeszczynski turns to Marcus and says, “I will show you my Whacks, and then we can talk.”

  Marcus follows him up the stairs. The wall is lined with small photographs in ornate gold frames. The subjects must be old-country ancestors: a stout woman and a black-bearded man in front of a farmhouse, a studio photo of a woman with a spit curl and a large hat, a fat baby in rompers clutching a stuffed horse, a bewhiskered man in uniform with a baton tucked under one arm like Field Marshal Montgomery.

  The upstairs hall is hung with paintings. “I have a lot of art,” Wrzeszczynski says, waving a hand. The gesture is almost dismissive, though the art seems impressive to Marcus; even the frames look expensive. “I collect many things. But come this way.” Wrzeszczynski has a faint accent, like an American actor might have in a movie where he plays a spy from some Eastern European country. “This is the Whack Room.”

  He leads Marcus into a back room on the second floor, a stark contrast to the rest of the house. Here, the walls are white, the molding has been removed, the floor is the bland blond expanse of an art gallery. Each of the four walls holds a painting: all, quite obviously, Whacks.

  There is nothing else in the room.

  Wrzeszczynski and Marcus make their way from painting to painting. A piece of cheese, a pack of matches, an empty green vase. (“This I bought in 1990, when Joe was just beginning this amazing series, when he was finding his true vision.”) A pencil, a large mottled stone, a set of keys. (“Slightly later, from the early nineties.”) A flashlight, a folded wallet, a bottle cap. (“Another from around the same time, perhaps my favorite.”) The last is somewhat different: a roll of film, a small opened book, and the edge of a mirror in which can be glimpsed, very faintly, part of a face.

  “And this one,” Wrzeszczynski says. “This one—the only known self-portrait.”

  He and Marcus stare at it together, and Marcus can tell that the dentist is choked with emotion. He’s almost afraid of what Wrzeszczynski will do when he learns about the two pastels. “Such a tantalizing piece,” Wrzeszczynski says, and then breaks down and has to wipe his eyes. “The poor man,” he says, shaking his head. “The poor, poor man. What a loss.”

  They stand there a few moments longer, and then Wrzeszczynski takes Marcus by the arm. “Come. We’ll talk.”

  Wrzeszczynski closes the Whack Room door softly behind them as if they are leaving a chapel containing the Holy Presence, and they go back downstairs to the front room, which Marcus has trouble calling anything but a parlor: velvet upholstery, marble tabletops, tufted chairs. From a decanter on a small oval table, Wrzeszczynski pours amber liquid into delicately etched glasses. He passes one to Marcus; his hands are beautifully manicured, with elegant, dentisty fingers. He wears a signet ring and a Rolex.

  “To Josef Wakowski,” he says. They touch glasses, and Marcus drinks, and everything is suddenly clear.

  “Wakowski,” Marcus says. “Joe Whack was Polish.”

  “A great, great Polish patriot and a magnificent artist. When he died, he took a piece of the heart of all Poles. I revere his memory more than I can say.”

  Wrzeszczynski downs the stuff in his glass and pours another, and tells Marcus the story of Josef Wakowski, who was born to wealthy Polish immigrant parents in the American Midwest. He traveled to Poland in 1970 as a fiery, idealistic teenager, inspired by the riots that led eventually to the fall of Gomulka. He went to art school in Warsaw, and later became a member of Solidarity, working with the movement until 1982, when he barely escaped arrest, made his way into France, and finally returned to America, settling in Brooklyn and devoting himself to his art. Every cent he could spare, however, he sent back to Poland, to his friends in the movement.

  “And he died,” Wrzeszczynski says, his voice breaking. “He died from the effects of the poison gas the Communists used in 1981. He was never well again. A long, slow, agonizing death. But he kept painting, right up to the end. Those,” he says, pointing upward to the Whack room, “they are memorials to life. To what is around us. To the small nothings that are what our lives are made of. To the beauty of the insignificant. To Poland. To America.”

  They drain their glasses—Marcus has no idea what he is drinking, except that it is fiery and strong—and then they sit in silence for a moment. Marcus tries to remember the man who picked up his father that time in Honesdale, waiting in the car with the motor running while Summer wept. He remembers, a few years later, his father telling him how unappreciated Whack was, how poor, how struggling. That must have been just before Whack found his vision and Wrzeszczynski found Whack.

  Wrzeszczynski takes a deep breath, smiles, and refills their glasses. “And now,” he says. “Please, Marcus. Tell me about these Whacks.”

  15

  No garden, one dragon

  Emily is obsessed with Trollope’s mother’s dog.

  Was he or was he not a Newfoundland?

  It’s a bright morning, she is done with gardening for the year, and she has to go to the unemployment office. Instead she is surfing the Internet. She has discovered that Byron was a Newfie nut and actually wrote an ode to his beloved dog, and that the faithful Nana in the original Peter Pan was a Newfie, but she has not uncovered a single fact about the Trollope family dogs.

  Nor did she find anything at the Brooklyn library, where she went to check out Trollope biographies. The library had one of Frances and three of Anthony, thick tomes full of interesting Trollopiana (Trollope at Harrow, a classmate said, was “without exception, the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met”), but no dog specifics. She was so frustrated after that wasted morning that she had to walk down the block to the Botanic Garden for what Marcus calls an RBI: Restorative Biophilic Interlude, and where the egret and the yellowing gingko leaves and the big jolly Hasidic families cheered her up. She sat on a bench in the Japanese pavilion leafing through a book she took out of the library about Anthony’s brother Tom Trollope, who lived in Florence, gave Anthony the plot for Doctor Thorne, and wrote his memoirs before he died peacefully at eighty-two.

  The various Trollope brothers are all over the place, but their mother’s dog is nowhere to be found, and Emily is ready to admit defeat, at least for the moment. She types one more desperately narrowed search into Google: “FRANCES + TROLLOPE + ANTHONY + MOTHER + DOG + NEPTUNE + NEWFOUNDLA
ND” and gets no hits at all.

  She sighs and logs off. Before the noon light bleaches everything out, she should get out on the streets, to photograph them for her new project, “Disappearing Brooklyn,” the memorialization of the neighborhood before it dies. Death is on the way, she knows. There will come a day when the Polish meat markets and the Hispanic delis will be replaced by fast food outlets. When bookshops won’t be called ksiegarnias, when trilingual signs like DRUGSTORE/FARMACIA/APTEKA will be taken down, and garish plastic DRUGMARTCO signs raised in their places.

  As she gets up from her desk, the phone rings.

  “Emily!”

  “Gene Rae!”

  “Emily, something horrible. Susan Skolnick was raped yesterday, right on her own rooftop.”

  “Oh shit.” Emily sits down hard, Izzy on her head. “How horrible. Is she okay?”

  “I think she’s okay. She was putting her key in the lock, and he comes along with a knife and forces her up the stairs to the roof. But listen to this. She killed the guy. She pushed him over the side. And it was that guy Elliot—Lamont’s friend? Who’s subletting from Jeanette? He pulled a knife on her, and there was a struggle, and he went over the side into the street. Did you hear the sirens? It was about six o’clock, just when it got dark.”

  “No. I got home late last night. Holy shit.”

  “The place was a zoo. Cops all over the place, ambulance, TV, newspapers. And the whole neighborhood, of course.”

  “And Elliot Cobb? Elliot Cobb is the Williamsburg rapist?”

  “Was. Four flights down—he apparently died instantly. They took Susan in for questioning, but they let her go. He was ID’d by two of the other victims, and the fingerprints on his knife matched what they already had. Plus, it turns out the guy had a record a mile long, including serving time for assault. Can you believe it? But didn’t he always seem like a creep to you?”