New Haven Noir

by Amy Bloom

  “Pardon?”

  “I could give you what you want.”

  “What are you saying, Lewis?”

  “Someone to hold,” he said. “I could give that to you.”

  She scrutinized him, her warm eyes cooling. “You should eat your dinner, Lewis.”

  “Don’t you see?” he said, gaining momentum, unable to stop. “Everything is coming together.”

  “I think I need to wish you a good night, Lewis.”

  She stood up quickly and clumsily, the thin fabric of her dress clinging to the thick, undulating ripples of her body. Staring at her unabashedly, he realized how close he was. Terribly close.

  “Please,” he begged, “don’t leave.”

  But she turned her back and snatched her purse, like she had finally caught a whiff of his freakishness. He set down the rattling sugar jar and stared at the stove. He hadn’t wanted it to come to this. But when he reached for the handle of the pan, he knew what he had to do.

  * * *

  Later, when the pan soaked in a sink full of sudsy red water, he realized that his foot had stopped hurting. It must be a miracle. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt such relief.

  The heat wave was still in full force, and his apartment was sweltering. Even so, when Lewis crawled into bed, he slipped under the covers. With a satisfied sigh, he nestled against the pliant, ponderous body beside him. Still warm, it yielded as he maneuvered under the shelflike bosom. That spot had always been his favorite, the place he had preferred when his mother had read to him all those years ago. She couldn’t read anymore, of course, but he could tell her the story. The same book, the same pages, as close as he was ever going to get.

  The Man in Room Eleven

  by Michael Cunningham

  Chapel Street

  The tenant in room eleven of the Hotel Duncan on Chapel Street has a lifetime lease, paid monthly, agreed to by the hotel’s long-deceased original owner.

  No one who is currently employed by the Duncan (a rigorously plain building of dun-colored brick) has seen the man in room eleven in at least twenty years, which is the tenure of the longest-employed of the maids. That sole remaining maid does, however, remember stories told by another of the maids, long gone, who claimed to have seen the man. She described him as courteous, reserved, and perfectly manicured, though he kept his fingernails longer than was the general custom among men. He sported a mustache so thin and precise it might have been drawn on over his upper lip with a pencil, and always wore a hat, even in the upstairs halls.

  That older maid (who died of a heart attack while cleaning on one of the upper floors) had said as well that he was a perfect gentleman, and a generous tipper. She was puzzled by, but grateful for, his request that his room never be cleaned. It was that much less work for her, after all, and the guests of the Duncan occasionally left their rooms in states of rather extreme, if conventional, disorder: the dark stains on the sheets, the moldy pizza slice that somehow fell behind the bureau and went undetected for weeks.

  The older maid (not long before she died) did claim to have been cleaning one of the rooms after its occupant had checked out, and to have found something too awful to describe. When pressed for details, she’d simply shaken her head, crossed herself, and said that it was gone, that she had gotten rid of it and that was the end of the story.

  The Hotel Duncan is hardly luxurious. It is, however, respectable, and relatively clean. It still books rooms overnight, like any hotel, but has become more prone, over the years, to guests who stay for longer periods: weeks, months, or, occasionally, years.

  They are mostly, but not exclusively, men. They often spend hours in the hotel’s lobby, which, though in need of renovation, is possessed of that timeless, neither-here-nor-there quality common to certain older, less prosperous hotels: the crepuscular eternity of deep armchairs among potted palms, Persian rugs that appear to be indigo and black in the dim light, the sporadic chiming of the bell as the elevator makes its extremely slow progress from floor to floor.

  The guests who frequent the lobby are various, of course, and each has a different story to tell, but if you speak to enough of them, a certain overall theme does seem to emerge. They are, almost all, currently waiting out the period that extends from one life to another. They have, most of them, left (or been expelled from) marriages, jobs, homes, institutions, or, occasionally (as one dapper, if tipsy, gentleman put it) have simply run out of the patience required of them to live as they’d been living.

  They are, almost all of them, waiting for a next era to begin. Hopelessness is rare among them, though few seem to have specific dates in mind, or to be possessed of a plan that extends beyond the vision of vaguely improved circumstances. They are waiting for a check to arrive or a divorce to be finalized; they are waiting for a niece or nephew to come for them; they are expecting a huge cash settlement from the company that rendered them unable to work.

  They languish there, in the lobby of the Hotel Duncan, as one of the several desk clerks (they are alike-looking as brothers—mild-faced, bespectacled men who might be forty or might be seventy) tends to hotel business, seated in the lobby’s singular pool of bright light (from its lone overhead fixture), behind the imposing old mahogany front desk.

  The man in room eleven never comes to the lobby. He never leaves his room, which is on the top floor, facing the street. Reclusiveness, however, is not a crime. The only disturbance he’s ever caused has involved a handful of New Haven citizens who, over the years, have complained about a man staring down at them from the window of room eleven, his face obscured by wispy curtains. Unless the laws of New Haven change, however, staring from windows at people passing by on the street below is not cause for intervention by the police.

  Still, several people have been sufficiently disconcerted by the man’s gaze that they have, in fact, called the police. Their complaints, though, not only fail to involve any actual assault, but those who call the police always find themselves unable to be specific about what, exactly, they believe the man to have done to them. They’re simply convinced that he shouldn’t be there; that he’s (as one Yale football player put it) “up to no good,” or (as reported by a woman who works as a cashier at the Rite-Aid) “he’s just sort of . . . creepy . . . I just feel like he’s doing something wrong in there.”

  The police consistently inform these people that citizens are entitled to look as if they’re up to no good (as long as they merely look that way), and that if there were laws against creepiness, a considerable portion of the New Haven population would be in jail already.

  The man in room eleven is respected by the management and staff, in large part because he pays faithfully, in cash, the money neatly inserted into an envelope he slips under his door at the beginning of every month, and because he requires virtually nothing of the hotel’s employees.

  He plays the cello, quite well, but never after ten p.m. He apparently keeps a snake, which creates no disturbance of any kind. The snake’s existence is apparent only because the boy who delivers the man’s daily meals (there have been different boys over the years but all are respectable looking, well dressed, if unknown to any staff member who lives in or near New Haven) leaves, along with the man’s food on a tray (ordinary food, chops and roast chickens and the like), a live rodent—a white rat, a hamster, a guinea pig—in a little cage, placed carefully beside the tray.

  The following mornings, the tray and the cage, both empty, always appear in the hallway just outside room eleven.

  The Duncan has its history of incidents, like any hotel. Even the Connaught in London, even the Ritz in Paris, has seen mortality do its work—how could it be otherwise, when so many come and go?

  At the Duncan, there was the sudden disappearance of the room service boy (many years ago, when the Duncan offered room service at all), with no notice; without so much as leaving his uniform behind.

  There was the porter (back when the Duncan employed porters) who came down in the eleva
tor (no one was ever sure from which upper floor), walked purposefully through the lobby to the front door, and did not appear for duty the next day, or ever again.

  There was the expression on the face of the man found dead in his room of a coronary occlusion. There was the single woman who’d said a cheerful good night to her two women friends, gone up to her room, and been found hung from the shower rod, by a silk stocking, the next day. There was the young man, stopping over on his way to Albany, who seemed to have been bitten, over and over, by . . . some small animal, probably a dog, though dogs have never been allowed at the Duncan.

  Such events are not unusual, not in any hotel.

  The only genuinely strange occurrence is a recent one, and it took place not inside the Duncan but on Chapel Street, in front of the hotel.

  A young woman, a junior at Yale, had been walking back to the campus rather late at night, having been at a party on Dwight Street. According to her friends, she’d been entirely herself when she left the party: cheerful, bantering, and only as intoxicated as it’s possible to become after imbibing two Miller Lites. It being Chapel Street, a mere few blocks from the campus, no one thought anything of her walking home alone.

  She was found less than an hour later, standing on the sidewalk in front of the Duncan, staring up at the building, frozen in place. She was alive, and unharmed, but remains catatonic three weeks after the incident.

  No one is able to speculate about why she’d stopped before the Duncan like that—it’s hardly a New Haven landmark—though a faculty couple who had just walked past the young woman on Chapel Street do claim to recall the sound of someone knocking on glass, from above. They did not look up at the source of the tapping sound (it seemed so clearly meant for the young woman), and in fact thought nothing of it at all until they read about the young woman’s hospitalization in a police bulletin on Yale’s website.

  The girl did briefly regain consciousness, in her bed at Yale–New Haven Hospital, the day after she was found on Chapel. She opened her eyes, but did not seem to be aware of her surroundings. She merely stared up at the ceiling of her room and said, “All those little teeth,” after which she emitted a hissing sound that, according to the attending nurse, did not sound quite like a noise of which the human voice is capable.

  She spoke so softly that the nurse, who was the only one present at the time, is not entirely certain that the girl said, “All those little teeth.” The nurse believes it might have been, “All those little teas,” which would probably have referred to the Master’s Teas held in Morse College.

  The latter version, of course, makes more sense. The nurse, however, is certain about the inhuman sound that followed the phrase; she says it resembled the hiss of a snake but was deeper and more penetrating, more like (according to the nurse) the sound of gas escaping from a valve.

  At any rate, by the time the girl’s parents arrived from Grand Rapids, the girl had lost consciousness again, and has not regained consciousness a second time.

  The girl’s parents have had her moved from New Haven to Grand Rapids. The doctors there are, as they say, guardedly optimistic. CAT scans have revealed nothing amiss in the young woman’s brain. There are, have always been, unsolved medical mysteries, and people who, like the Yale undergraduate, fall abruptly into catatonic states and sometimes return from them, just as abruptly, wondering where they are, assuming themselves to be still on the bus or in the room or wherever they were when they passed out of consciousness, days or weeks or months earlier.

  Still, if you find yourself walking past the Duncan on Chapel Street, it’s probably just as well to focus your gaze straight ahead, either toward the lights and joviality of the Study Hotel or the brutalist bulk of the architecture school, depending on which way you’re headed. There’s plenty to see on Chapel Street, at eye level.

  There are, after all, people who, for unknowable reasons, want to see things they’d be better off not having seen at all. These people seem simply to want to know that mysterious forces are alive and well.

  There are zealots of another sort too. You could probably think of them as religious, in their way, though the message they want to impart is different from that of street-corner Christians. This other body of evangelists wants us to know that hell and damnation are inevitable, that we do not go unwitnessed by the evil eye, that it’s only a matter of time until our final destination is revealed to us.

  So why take chances? There are, after all, unsavory presences at large in the world, and they sometimes manifest themselves in the unlikeliest of places. So, really, there’s no particular reason to glance up as you pass the Hotel Duncan. The man in room eleven has only proven dangerous to those who hear him tap on the glass, look up, and see . . . whatever it is that they see. It’s best to stare straight ahead, and go on about your business, especially if someone overhead, in the Duncan, seems to want to attract your attention.

  The Queen of Secrets

  by Lisa D. Gray

  Bradley Street

  On Saturday when my mom and Aunt V picked me up from ballet class, the last dregs of their argument stunk up the car like chitlins at Thanksgiving, thick and spicy. We were headed down Whalley toward Aunt V’s apartment, and while we waited for the light to change, my mom asked her, “Vanya, you did make the appointment for Thursday?” My aunt didn’t answer and her eyes slid across my mother’s face like a slap.

  I waited a few minutes before leaning over the seat and snapping on the radio. My aunt’s hand gripped the door handle, her knuckles bulging like little hazelnuts as we passed the empty playground. A drizzle sprinkled the window, making the swings, slide, and jungle gym’s bright colors all runny like in those French paintings at the museum. I love that place. All those paintings and beauty under one roof.

  “Sit down, Janelle,” my mother said as we pulled up in front of my aunt’s brick apartment building on Kensington.

  Before Aunt V lifted the handle to get out, she turned to my mom and said, “Yes, Olivia, Thursday. Night, Janelle.” She smiled at me and then she was gone.

  A huddle of boys shot craps against Aunt V’s stoop as they waited for their customers to creep out of the shadows. She stopped for a second and spoke to them before they moved to let her pass.

  “What’s Thursday?” I asked my mom.

  “I don’t recall anyone inviting you into the conversation,” my mom said, like she did anytime she thought I was minding grown folks’ business. I wondered what they’d argued about, but not for long, because my mom and aunt bickered one minute and laughed the next. “That’s how sisters are,” my mom would tell me after one of their melt-into-nothing arguments.

  * * *

  Tuesday, I was wiping the table and counter after dinner when the phone buzzed. I answered it on the fourth ring.

  “Hello. Hey Auntie, yeah, she’s here.” Aunt V’s voice sounded wavy. “Mom, pick up the phone!” I hollered into the family room, but I didn’t hang up.

  “Does she know?” my aunt asked my mother.

  “Of course not,” my mom told her in her I-don’t-want-to-say-I-don’t-have-time-for-this-but-I-don’t-have-time-for-this voice.

  “I want to tell her, O.”

  I wanted to keep listening but they might hear the TV. I was watching the news for my homework and it was kind of loud, so I hung up the phone then tiptoed to the door and cracked it a smidge. Mom was still folding clothes. Hills of socks, T-shirts, and jeans covered the coffee table in front of her. She had tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder as she talked and folded. “V, you were doing so well. What happened?” That was all I could hear because Mom’s voice got softer.

  I swept the floor, fed the dog, grabbed a Coke from the fridge, then headed into the family room hoping to catch more of their conversation. My mom was still on the phone and she lowered her voice, her eyes tracking me as I crossed the room to the sofa. I picked up the remote and sank into its fat brown cushions. The couch was my command station, like Captain Kirk’s on Sta
r Trek. The TV popped to life and my mom whispered into the phone, “Let me call you right back.” Mom didn’t say anything to me; she just hung up and climbed the stairs.

  * * *

  On Thursday, I got home from swimming practice just before four. I was late and hungry. Swimming always made me want to eat. A note sat on the counter next to a covered plate: Out for a bit. Home soon. Mom.

  I remembered Mom and Aunt V’s chitlin-funky conversation in the car and figured she must be with her or out with her friends. She did that sometimes, had a girl’s night. But six hours later she still wasn’t back and I was getting worried. I’d finished my homework and was balled up on the couch, TV on, a bag of chips on the floor. I flipped through Essence and half paid attention as Janet Peckinpaugh said, “The body of a man found at the Pond Lily Hotel several months ago has been identified and an explosion yesterday evening rocked a local women’s clinic. Details at eleven.” I changed the channel.

  * * *

  Vanya and Olivia were sun and moon, oil and water, opposites with nothing in common, but they’d been best friends since they were pinkie-hooking secret sharers. At fifteen, Vanya was what her sister and friends called a “goodie-goodie.” She’d won spelling bees and science fairs; she volunteered at the Hospital of Saint Raphael and earned straight As on most of her report cards. Sixteen-year-old Olivia, on the other hand, had managed to earn little more than a reputation. She skipped school, smoked cigarettes, and snuck into bars like Ernie B’s and the Oasis over in Newhallville. Olivia and Vanya were still as close as they’d been as girls and had had to depend on each other after their mother died in a car crash. Their worlds circled each other’s, in distant orbits held together by an invisible pin.

  It started the year their mother died. She’d picked them up from school, and as they drove down Dixwell Avenue the car skidded on some ice and spun around and around. The girls screamed and held hands in the backseat even after the car barreled into a tree. Everything turned silent and snow sprinkled the windshield where a spiderwebby crack now crawled. Their mother didn’t move. The girls tried to scramble over the seat to get to her, but they couldn’t undo their seat belts. Faces peered in the windows, voices called out to them, and then they heard the sirens.