Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  During dinner, they have thoroughly discussed Emily’s finances, and Marcus’s flat refusal to take a cut for his role in the Whack drama, and her decision to give Hart half of everything she takes in. Marcus has given up trying to convince her that a third would be enough. She insists Joe Whack would have wanted them to split it, and Marcus has to admit this is probably true. “I want to be like Miss Mackenzie,” she says, “who knew that the right thing to do was give half her fortune to her brother’s widow.”

  Thanks to the payment from Dr. Wrzeszczynski for four Whacks—Emily gave him a deal, before the paintings hit the market—Emily’s bank account is fat and happy. And when she had dinner with Wrzeszczynski and his wife on Java Street, they presented her, as part of the transaction, with an eight-by-ten view camera once owned by Stieglitz, who was a friend of Mrs. Wrzeszczynski’s father. Emily thinks she might start collecting old cameras to use in her “Disappearing Brooklyn” series. One of Dr. Wrzeszczynski’s patients is a prominent Manhattan editor, born in Greenpoint, who comes over twice a year on the L train to have his gums attended to, and Wrzeszczynski thinks he might be interested in doing a book. Emily has an appointment with him next week, right after she sees the financial planner Anstice recommended.

  “Marcus, are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  She pours more champagne for each of them and says, “Isn’t it funny about the two thousands?”

  “The two thousand whats?”

  “Years.” Her voice is dreamy, over-champagned, and slowly, as if in a trance, she cuts herself a third piece of pie and drops a spoonful of ice cream on top of it. “The twenty-first century is not really working, is it? I mean—we’re about to hit 2003, and we’re actually going to call it two thousand and three. It’s as if we used to say one thousand nine hundred and ninety nine. Like when you write out the amount on a check in words.”

  “You mean it’s time to just call it three.”

  “Exactly. It is now two. In a little over a month it will be three. That is all we need.”

  “So simple.”

  “So economical. Even elegant.” Emily almost eats a bite of ice cream and pie, but doesn’t. “Let’s make a pact,” she says. “Maybe we can start a trend. Like everyone lighting just one little candle. You light one in Honesdale, I’ll light one here.”

  They clink glasses. “To three.”

  “To three.”

  “What did you think of your last Trollope evening?” Emily asks.

  “Miss Mackenzie, or the group?”

  “Group. I feel the need for some gossip.”

  “It was funny without Luther and Lamont.”

  “Yeah. I hope Italy will help.”

  “The Elliot thing wasn’t good.”

  “No. It wasn’t good.”

  “I still don’t know what to say about that. Maybe it’s one of those things that there is no right way to think of, and the best way to deal with it is to forget it.” Marcus smiles. “So here’s another thing. Did you notice the way Pat insisted the next book has to be Ralph the Heir?”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t she sound maternal? I think she’s pregnant.”

  “Get outta here!”

  “You wait.”

  “You’re so full of it. The oracle of Honesdale.” Emily props up her head in one hand and looks at Marcus through half-closed eyes. “Tell me about Honesdale, Marcus. Tell me a story. Tell me more about your dog.”

  “You already know about my dog.”

  “I know her name was Phoebe, she was killed when you weren’t there, your father buried her in the woods.”

  “That’s all there is to say.”

  “Is it?”

  Marcus wants to say that he knows his father used to be her husband. He can’t believe he hasn’t said this yet, and he has a feeling she knows he knows. But does she know he knows she knows? During their long discussions about the Whacks, the legalities, and the amount of money Emily should share with Hart, she has never once called him by name: He is him, he is my husband, he is my ex. Mr. X, Marcus thinks. X marks the monster. Or does it?

  “Yes,” he says. “That’s all there is.”

  “Then let me tell you about my dog Harry.” Emily rouses herself and sits up straight in her chair. “Harry was my first dog. My parents always had cats. I love cats. But I told myself I wouldn’t have any for a while. I had just come to New York. I saw myself as a solitary predator, sneaking up on the city and taking its picture. A woman with a camera, not a woman with a cat, much less a dog. No ties. Then I met Harry over at the Pet Pound, and I fell instantly in love with him. It was so strange—like Swann and Odette. He wasn’t even my type. I was a cat person who looked into the eyes of that scruffy little mutt and became a dog person. Converted in an instant, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I became a Harryite.” She sighs. “So. Then I got married. No—then I got Izzy. And then I got married. And one evening my husband had to walk Harry because I was sick in bed with the flu. Very bad. I had such a high fever Izzy refused to sit on my head. So my ex took Harry out. A rainy night. And when he came back he said Harry had been hit by a car, he was walking him off the leash, the dog ran into the road, he was dead. He took Harry over to the vet to be—you know. Cremated. He asked if we wanted the ashes, and he said no, that was okay, we didn’t want the ashes, he thought it would be too upsetting for me.”

  Marcus doesn’t say anything. While Emily talks, he has been sipping steadily at his champagne, and he has just passed quietly over into drunkenness. But he is listening, and he has no trouble sorting out the he’s in the story.

  “I never saw him again. And I always—this will sound terrible—I always kind of wondered. My ex didn’t like Harry, and Harry didn’t like him. Harry bit him once. And he said I spoiled Harry, but what he meant was I paid more attention to Harry sometimes than I did to him. And that was true, I know, partly because—because that’s sort of the way I am, and partly because Harry was more interesting. He was. He was a highly unusual dog. Marcus, are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Good. So I wondered. And then one night, a couple of weeks later, we were in Kasia’s, eating borscht. There was a couple at the next table, and the woman kept staring at my husband. Finally halfway through dinner, she said to him, ‘You’re the one whose dog was killed. You had him off the leash.’ She turned to her husband. ‘I told you about this guy—do you remember? Had that little dog running wild down Bedford Avenue? Big surprise he crosses against the light and a car gets him.’ Her husband goes all apologetic, he says, ‘Oh, my wife, this is her thing, dogs off the leash, she goes crazy,’ and his wife goes, ‘Hey! It’s against the freakin’ law, isn’t it? And you see what happens? That dog was on a leash, he’d be alive today,’ and so on. My husband gets upset, he says, ‘That dog was always fine when he was off the leash, he was completely reliable, that was the only time.’ He has tears in his eyes. But the woman wouldn’t let up. Her husband was mortified. Finally we had to leave.”

  Marcus is gripping the stem of his glass much too tightly. He sets it down. “Is that true?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “It’s a sad story. Isn’t it?”

  Marcus says it is, but he isn’t feeling sad. He is feeling grateful that he has been given one more indication that maybe he is not, after all, the son of a heartless, psychopathic, murderous beast. That his father is not a sort of taller, older, differently disturbed Elliot C. He thinks of all the things he could tell Emily in return, things he feels sure she would like to know. About Summer, and the pies and cakes piling up on the kitchen counter, and the scary years after Grandma Mead died. The day he realized he had read nearly every book in the Honesdale Public Library; about Tamarind and the sonnets and Summer’s blue mittens, and the time when through the window of his cabin he saw a hawk, in midair, snatch a smaller bird out of the sky and bear it away in its great claws.

  But he doesn�
��t say anything else, and after a minute, Emily says, “Can I tell you one more?”

  “Sure. About what?”

  “It’s something I’ve never really talked about, and I don’t know why I am now, except that—” Emily downs the rest of her champagne in a single gulp, like someone in a movie trying to gather the courage for a brave statement. “I’m drunk. And you’re leaving.”

  “So what is it, Em?” Marcus asks gently.

  “My husband,” Emily says. “I think a lot of people wondered why I ever married him. I’ve wondered it myself. He was in some ways not a very nice man. He was cynical, and sarcastic, and sneaky. But, Marcus—” She smiles like someone smiling bravely through a bad case of flu. “I married him because I loved him. That’s the simple truth. He was a rotter, but am I the first woman to love a rotter? It dwindled away after a while, of course. He did everything he could to kill it, and by the time he walked out on me, I think I was something like 78 percent over it, but I was still a wreck. He left an old shirt behind, and I slept with it every night for a month. I didn’t give up the shirt until I got Otto.”

  The dog hears his name, and comes over to where they are sitting. Emily puts her dish of apple pie and melting ice cream on the floor for him.

  “I’m not good at admitting it,” she says. “I’ve never even said it to Gene Rae or Pat. It was too embarrassing. They thought he was such a jerk. And he was. I knew that. God, how he used to lie to me. About everything, anything. Just for the hell of it, I think. Or as if he just hated clarity, as if life were some peculiar experimental film. I almost had myself talked into the idea that I never loved the guy, but way back deep in my mind somewhere I knew that wasn’t true. Like if you tell yourself, ‘You know, you’re not actually a human, you’re a dog,’ and you could come up with a bunch of doggish characteristics in yourself that you’d observed so that it kind of made sense? But you’d still fundamentally believe you’re a human. So of course I knew he was a rat, but it didn’t matter.” Then she inhales deeply, as if she has just opened a window and leaned out. “And that’s my second sad story, Marcus. And that’s all I’ve got.”

  She knows I know she knows I know, he thinks, and he is aware this is the time to acknowledge that. He doesn’t know what to say, but she is looking at him as if she expects an answer. He suddenly feels very young: This is his stepmother talking about his father. His stepmother is a glamorous photographer who is about to turn thirty-seven, wearing a black miniskirt and high heels. If it weren’t for the divorce, the three of them might be sitting here eating Thanksgiving dinner together. There might even be a little kid at the end of the table calling Emily “Mommy.” His half brother or sister. The imaginary sister he used to dream about when he was a kid, but years too late.

  He looks at Emily, who has a sad, faraway look in her eyes, and wonders if she is thinking the same thing. Her eyes, he observes for the hundredth time, are very beautiful, even in the dim light where they have changed color like the river does, from blue to gray. As he stares at her, she turns her head and looks at him so intently that he begins to feel uncomfortable. It’s a moment full of various nameless emotions he can’t recognize—as if a piece of music has started up that seems familiar but that he can barely hear. Slowly, he arranges his face into what he hopes is a smile. He can’t say what he knows he should say. Instead, he says, “But now you have Otto and Izzy. Who are not rats.” He knows it’s dumb, but Emily doesn’t seem to think so.

  She looks down at Otto, who has licked the plate clean and is gazing up at them expectantly. He has ice cream on his whiskers. “It’s true,” Emily says. “I have Otto and Izzy. And did I tell you I’m adopting a kitten? You know how Otto loves cats. Gaby and Hattie said they have an adorable little tortoise shell.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Actually, they have two. Siblings.”

  “So of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Anna and Ada?”

  “They’re boys.” She smiles at him. “I’m thinking maybe Leon and Noel.”

  “Excellent.”

  “And how is Willie?”

  “He’s doing better.” Elliot Cobb’s rottweiler ended up at the Pet Pound, and Marcus has been talked into adopting him. He has had him for a week, and he’s not sorry, though Willie is difficult. A challenge, is how Hattie put it. Obviously an abused dog. Willie has mournful brown eyes that follow Marcus around the room. He stands next to Marcus looking up at him appealingly, but when Marcus tries to pet him he backs away. If Marcus approaches him too quickly, he snaps. He whines in the night. “When I took him to the park this morning with Rumpy and Elvis, he actually sort of romped a little, and he slept on the rug next to my bed last night.”

  “Those are good signs. The poor thing. He’ll be all right.”

  “I think so.”

  “You know, I’m really drunk, Marcus.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Maybe you should go.”

  “Yeah. But first I have to give you this present.” He takes the bag he has stowed under his chair and hands it to her. “I’m sorry I didn’t get around to wrapping it. Things have been sort of crazy, with Willie and everything.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Should too.”

  “Well, maybe. And I have one for you.” Emily gets up, wobbling a little in her high heels, and retrieves it from her desk.

  His present to her is a copy of Thomas Trollope’s memoir, What I Remember—a pretty little calfskin edition with marbled endpapers. “Wait,” he says. “Get this.” He opens it to page 137, and points, and Emily reads aloud: “Our mother’s new puppy, Neptune, was a frisky Newfoundland.” She gives a squeal of joy. “I knew it! And guess what, Marcus. I have a DOG for you. I figured now that you have a dog again, you might like it.”

  It’s from the window of a groomer in midtown Manhattan, and under the word is a box full of petunias. Emily has put the photo into an antique frame she says was another fruit of her insane shopping spree.

  “It’s an excellent DOG. One of your best.”

  “I really wanted to buy you an iMac, but I figured you’d get mad. Or would you? If you won’t, I will. It would make me so happy to do that. I could have it shipped to you in Honesdale.”

  He grins suddenly. “I wasn’t going to tell you. I was going to E-mail you. I’m getting myself one, through Saul.”

  “Get outta here!”

  “It’s true. I had a little windfall.”

  The windfall is Summer’s Whack, which Tamarind FedExed to him. Wrzeszczynski says it’s one of the best. “I think he was just starting when he painted this,” Wrzeszczynski said. “Before he got so sick. I think this is a very early Whack. It has such freshness, such spontaneity. And it’s funny, too—the burned toast.”

  Marcus has done his own deal with the periodontist—a Whack for a Mac, and then some. Marcus figures it was a dumb move—he should have waited for the right moment, sold it through Ptak or at Sotheby’s and made a killing. But he likes Wrzeszczynski and wanted him to have it, and he wants the money now, not in a year. There will be the new roof, and he’d like to put a deck on the back of the house, overlooking the woods. When he told Wrzeszczynski all this, the periodontist looked at him curiously and said, “You seem so young for all this responsibility,” and Marcus didn’t know how to say he doesn’t feel particularly young, and he doesn’t feel particularly old either. He feels the way he has always felt.

  In Honesdale, he thinks, he will live like a dog. The hand stretched out, or not. The romp on the lawn, or not. The walk in the rain or the nap by the stove. Present tense.

  “Marcus?” Emily says. “Will you really E-mail me?”

  “With annoying regularity.”

  “I suppose it’s silly to say I’ll miss you.”

  “No,” Marcus says. “It isn’t. But—hey, Em. Remember how I told you that if you walk in a straight line, you’re really walking in a slight curve, so that if you go far enough you’l
l end up where you began?”

  Emily smiles. “What goes around comes around?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I hope that’s true,” she says.

  “You will not hope in vain.”

  “Still, it sounds like a lot of walking.”

  “Get yourself a good pair of walking shoes. Don’t try to do it in those heels.”

  She accompanies him to the door, where they look at each other for a minute, and then she leans over and kisses him on the forehead.

  19

  Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

  It’s very late on the night after Thanksgiving. Emily Lime is sitting at her desk drinking a cup of tea. Earlier, she had dinner at Vera Cruz with Pat and Oliver, and over cheese burritos and guacamole they told her that Pat is indeed pregnant, the baby is due in June, they need more space, and would she consider trading her loft for Oliver’s penthouse?

  Emily is too excited to sleep.

  She has been making lists.

  She has figured out how she will arrange the penthouse, what furniture will go where, what she will have to get rid of, what she will try to palm off on Pat and Oliver. She has made a tentative list of the antique roses she will grow in pots on the roof: the Gallicas, damasks, albas, eglantines. She has balanced her checkbook and drawn up a budget for the year three, fast approaching. She has jotted down ideas for Christmas gifts for her family.

  Now, at one in the morning, she can’t think of any more lists to make.

  The only thing left is to think about is Marcus, and she takes her tea over to the window to do so—Marcus—trying to picture him in Honesdale. His red truck is parked in the driveway of the gray farmhouse. The house will be dusty, spidery, and cold after being closed up all these years. Have he and the dog walked down Spring Hill Road to see the cows? And where did he have dinner? And is he asleep now, with Willie on the floor beside his bed?

  Emily checked on the Web and found that the distance from North Third Street in Brooklyn to Spring Hill Road in Honesdale is exactly 111 miles, a fact she desperately wants to share with Marcus. Life, she fears, will now consist of things she wants to share with Marcus. And by the time she does they will be stale, boring, trivial—no longer fascinating little facts and numbers and what did you think of today’s crossword puzzle, and the joke a little girl told her at the Pet Pound. If you cross a cat with a parrot what do you get? A carrot. She imagines Marcus’s small down-turned smile, which will not come through in an E-mail.