by Sara Gran
He sniffed at the biscuit and looked up at me with his big watery eyes, but he didn’t take it. Instead he stiffened his back and shoulders and snarled at me, baring a row of yellow plaque-covered teeth. I dropped the biscuit and ran home.
When Ed got home I told him what had happened.
“Well,” he said, “I told you not to mess around with strays.”
Ed didn’t believe that just because something was alive, that meant you had to love it.
I didn’t OBSESS ABOUT the incident with the cigarette. I didn’t make much of the book. Ed had forgotten easily enough. So I’d twitched. I’d slipped. I’d spasmed. It was summer and with the sun so bright it was hard to think about demons, hard to think about pain.
But two weeks later, at the Fitzgerald house, I had a little twitch again.
I had decided to become an architect when I was twenty. I had moved to the city when I was eighteen, to go to college, and I started with a major in art. I was in love—with my school, with the city, with the snow. I had come from a southern suburb where every star was brightly visible at night and the thermometer never dropped below fifty. I had spent eighteen years in continual boredom. Then when I was twenty my father and Noreen had died and left me nothing. Everything that could have and should have been mine had been eaten up by Noreen’s fur coats and facial treatments. I went through the labyrinthine process of applying for financial aid and as part of the deal, got a job in the Department of Architecture office. One thing I noticed about the architects was that they dressed a hell of a lot better than the art professors. And they drove better cars. And they seemed a lot more likely to have spouses and even children, too. So I switched to the architecture program. After graduation I worked for one of my professors for a year, then moved to a big firm for a few years where I never even met three of the four partners, and then on to Fields & Carmine, where I had been for the past three years.
The Fitzgerald house was my largest project to date. I had high hopes; if all went according to plan I had a chance at an A.I.A. award and maybe a spread in Design Monthly, plus recommendations from the Fitzgeralds and their rich friends. If all went well, then the larger plan, to open my own firm, could be accelerated by years.
The job reminded me of Michelangelo’s line about sculpting a block of stone; he chipped away everything that wasn’t David. The Fitzgeralds, a nice millionaire couple my own age, had bought an old Victorian mansion in a run-down part of town. Even with an unlimited budget they couldn’t find the space they wanted anywhere else. The huge Victorian had been converted first into three apartments, and then divided up further into a twelve-unit rooming house. You could get lost for hours imagining who had roomed there, but never mind. The task at hand was to turn the rooming house back into a mansion. I was working with a team of designers, decorators, plumbers, electricians, painters, air-conditioning specialists, woodworkers, and carpenters, and we would chip away all the divisions, additions, and ornament that weren’t the Fitzgeralds’ house.
On a Wednesday morning I stopped by on my way to the office to see how the work was coming along. No one else was there. It was only eight-thirty and the workers wouldn’t come in until nine or ten. The house was chilly inside. Only a few streaks of light filtered in through the shuttered windows. It was quiet and smelled like dust and plaster. I walked through the first floor. Half the rooming house partitions were torn down. They hadn’t started to clean up yet and rubble was piled around empty door frames and steel beams. Eventually all the walls would come down and the first floor would be like a loft within the house—kitchen, dining room, living room, all in one open space.
I climbed the stairs, avoiding the thick dust on the mahogany bannisters. The house was filthy. My footsteps echoed off the endless yards of white drywall. Upstairs we would rebuild the original bedrooms, four of them, for a nice balance of openness and privacy. It would be great when they had kids. For now, each bedroom was still split into two lonely cubicles. A few odds and ends from the house’s previous incarnations were still lying around: a yo-yo with a broken string sat in one corner; a stained brown tie hung over a hook on the wall; one worn black shoe lingered in a hallway.
Everything looked fine. I walked down to the first floor and was about to leave when I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. A red glass doorknob on the living room door.
I could swear it hadn’t been there earlier. In fact, I could swear I had never seen one like it. I had noticed a few pretty, clear cut glass doorknobs around the house, and even one that was violet. Nothing special. But a smooth ruby red glass doorknob, without a scratch or a chip—I was sure I had never seen one like it before. In this sad white house here was a perfect round of red.
I want it, I thought. I took out the small tool kit I carried in my purse, released the tiny screws from the steel base, turned it out of its hole, and had the doorknob off in two minutes. I stuck it in my purse and left.
I didn’t give it another thought until half an hour later. I was waiting for a train to take me to the office when I realized with horror that I had stolen a piece of my clients’ house. What if I was found out? What if the Fitzgeralds noticed their doorknob missing? My career shot to hell over a doorknob. I thought about throwing it out. I knew I should bring it back.
But I did neither. I wanted it, and I kept it.
At home I installed my beautiful new ruby on the bathroom door. Ed came home later that evening, after I was in bed, and didn’t see the new doorknob until the next morning. I told him I picked it up at a design showroom. We stood in front of the bathroom door, still in our underwear. He scrunched his brow.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you think it goes?”
“Yes,” I said. “It goes perfectly.”
He frowned. “It’s red.”
“I know. That’s what I like about it.”
“It’s bright. Don’t you think it’s kind of bright?”
“We’re keeping it,” I said. Ed looked at me, a question written on his face. “We’re keeping it,” I said again, and went to the bedroom to dress.
I WAS on my way to work that morning when a black limousine, the size of two sedans, took a corner too close to the curb and splashed me with water from the gutter. Without thinking I walked up to the dark tinted driver’s window of the car, now stopped behind a line of traffic, and tapped on the cold glass. No answer. I tapped again, hard enough this time to rattle the glass in its frame. A driver in a suit and plastic-brimmed cap rolled down the window. He had pink skin and copper hair pulled into a narrow ponytail, with a copper mustache to top it all off. He scowled at me.
“Yeah?”
“You should apologize,” I said.
“What the fuck?” spat out the moustache.
“You should,” I repeated, “apologize. Now.” I leaned my face into the window and breathed in the leathery smell of the clean car. The driver had two choices now; apologize or push me out. He made a face and cursed under his breath.
“I’m sorry,” he finally spat out, dripping with sarcasm. “I’m sincerely fucking sorry. Now get out of the car.”
I stood back up, and he rolled the window closed. As the glass came up I saw my reflection. Distorted in the glass my hair looked longer and darker, my skin smoother, and my lips as red as the ruby doorknob.
WE WERE on the crimson sand by the blood red sea. Her name was still spelled out on the sand.
“You’re mine,” she said. She licked my cheek with a tongue as stiff and wet as a snake.
I looked into her eyes. “You’ll never leave?”
“Never.” She wrapped her arms tighter around me. “Never never never.”
“Why me?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Instead she smiled and licked my nose in a thin straight line from bottom to top.
When I woke up I could still feel the damp trace of her tongue on my face.
ED AND I had another fight the next morning. Lately I hadn’t been as neat and orderly around the ho
use as usual, which drove him up the wall.
“Amanda, please,” he said. He was looking at a pile of yesterday’s clothes, left on the bedroom floor. He was standing in the middle of the bedroom in socks, underwear, and a pale blue oxford shirt, scowling at the clothes.
Usually I would have picked them up and put them in the hamper where, after all, they belonged. This morning, though, I didn’t want to put the clothes away. No reason. I just didn’t want to.
“Yes?” I said to Edward. I was still in bed—or rather back in bed, having woken up, gotten a cup of coffee, a cigarette, and an ashtray, and returned. So I would be a little late to work. Big deal.
“Amanda, these clothes!” He was clearly irritated now, shifting his weight from one foot to another, torn between falling a minute or two behind schedule and dealing with the vital situation at hand.
“What about them?”
Ed scrunched his face and looked at me for a long anxious moment. He looked ridiculous, and it was hard to hold back a giggle.
“Oh, FORGET IT!” he said, and picked up the clothes himself. Not wanting to delay his schedule any further, he let the matter drop. I was sure it would be picked back up again when he came home that evening.
THE CONNECTIONS slowly began to knit themselves together. One bright summer morning I was sitting at a conference table looking over plans for Linda Marcello’s cottage for the umpteenth time. Linda Marcello was a longtime Fields & Carmine client. We were renovating her summer cottage upstate. Linda was difficult; she wanted light in the shade, she wanted a dark brown room to feel “airy,” she wanted a terrace with no visible means of support. I was daydreaming about being outdoors, at the park or maybe the beach. My hand, moving to point out a walk-in closet, brushed against hers. When our skin touched I saw Linda in her cottage, in the brown room that wasn’t airy at all, sitting on the brown velvet sofa. I saw it as clearly as a movie rolling before my eyes. She sat on the sofa doing nothing, waiting for her husband to come home. He was due home hours ago. The boredom was excruciating. She looked around the room. What had she been thinking, with the brown? It could drive a person crazy, this room. She would have liked to go out but he wouldn’t be happy if he came home and she wasn’t there. Then the movie stopped and a new film started; I saw Linda again, ten years younger, in a cozy, cluttered white-walled apartment with two other young women. They were laughing and drinking wine—I couldn’t make out all the words, but it was the kind of bonding /complaining conversation that young women have when they talk about men. They had all wanted to marry rich. Linda had.
The entire episode had taken only a second. Linda had no idea. Now I knew just the right thing to say.
“Did you see the paper today?” I asked. Linda shook her head. “The Marsha Merkon case finally closed. You know, the model, I mean former model, who was married to the head of Bluechip Securities.”
“Oh really?” Linda turned around and looked at me with great interest—the first time, I think, she ever looked at me at all. This was one of those big divorce cases with enough money and lurid accusations involved to make tabloid headlines on slow news days. I knew that Linda would have been following the case.
“Yep. She got twenty million. And you know she’s not even fifty. Now she’s got twenty million dollars and her whole life ahead of her. You know what she said?”
“What?” Linda asked.
“That she would have divorced him no matter what, even if she hadn’t gotten anything. That she felt younger than she had in ten years.”
“Huh,” she said. She was smiling now, her eyes almost as bright as they had been back in that shabby little apartment with her girlfriends. “You know I met her a few times, at parties. She wasn’t at all like the papers made her out to be. She was a very nice woman. In fact, we talked about having lunch sometime.”
“Well, this is probably a good time to call her,” I said. “You can take her out to celebrate.”
“Or she can take me out, with her twenty million,” Linda said, laughing.
The next evening, paying for two steaks, touching the butcher’s hand, I saw a clean, warm house where he lived with his wife and two young sons. The man who sold me my morning coffee, I saw a few days later, hated me. He hated all of us, going to our easy jobs in cushy offices while he got up at three in the morning to serve us our precious fucking coffee.
This new vision waxed and waned over the rest of the summer, and I was never sure what to make of it. More often than not, I ignored the snapshots that burst to life before my closed eyes, I dismissed them as fantasy—I had always daydreamed a lot.
I didn’t tell Ed about it. He was a devout agnostic, and believed anything that smacked of metaphysics or the supernatural was mumbo jumbo.
THE GERMAN shepherd continued to ignore me. Every night he sat outside the train station, waiting, and didn’t recognize me when I arrived. Ed knew the dog too, and reported that when he came home each night, two or three hours after me, the dog was still waiting. Ed would stop and pet the big fellow and he recognized Ed as he always had—it was only me whom he didn’t know anymore.
“WHERE HAVE YOU been?” It was James Cronin. A Monday afternoon at Fields & Carmine. James had the desk next to mine and we had never gotten along. With James everything was a competition; now he wanted to start about who took a shorter lunch.
“The coffee shop,” I told him, “getting a hamburger.”
“For two hours?” James asked, raising his eyebrows.
I rolled my eyes at him. “What two hours? I left at one and now it‘s—” I looked at my watch. Three o’clock. That couldn’t be right. I bent down to look at the clock on James’s desk. They jibed. Three o’clock.
My mind took a step backwards and then forwards, trying to make sense of the situation. I had gone to Pete’s for a burger, then to the magazine stand on the corner, then back to work. I had looked at my watch on the way back and seen five to. One hour.
Impossible. But here I was. James was looking at me with his big gray eyes. I felt as if the ground underneath me was no longer stable but tilting, one way and then the other. My mind stopped to rearrange itself. I went into an emergency mode where the first thing was to deal with James Cronin.
“Oh, yeah, I did leave at one,” I told James, as if I hadn’t said it a moment before with an entirely different tone. “I had some errands.”
I turned and sat down at my own desk. I went over the hour—no, two hours—in my mind again. First I had gone to the coffee shop for a hamburger. There was the usual waitress, the tired brunette. While I ate I read the newspaper, which I left in the coffee shop when I was done. Then I went to the magazine stand on the corner, down the block. I looked through a few women’s magazines before I picked up Architectural Record. There was a little piece on my firm in the New and Noteworthy column. Of course we had a copy at the office but I wanted to show Ed. I checked my watch, twenty to two. Plenty of time. I flipped through a few women’s magazines, a guilty pleasure. And then:
“Hey, hey. You can’t read those here. Buy or don’t buy. No reading.”
I turned. It was the man running the shop.
“Well I AM buying, I’m getting this and I’m deciding about these others.” I was angry, but only for a second or two. Ridiculous man. How could people know what to buy if they didn’t look first? I thought of the utter absurdity of the situation: a man who was talking customers out of shopping in his store. Probably went home every night wondering why he didn’t sell more magazines.
And then again: “Buy or don’t buy. Come on, lady.” I would have walked out but I had been looking for that magazine for a week now, it was mostly sold by subscription and wasn’t easy to find at a newsstand. I went to the counter.
“You know you’re very rude, how is a person supposed to shop without looking around first?” I paid with five dollar bills and two quarters.
“You don’t like it, get out. I don’t need this.”
I got angrier. All I wanted wer
e a few magazines and here was this abuse. “I am getting out, and I won’t come back.”
I turned and left. I heard him behind me: “Fucking bitch.”
I ignored him. What a nut. How does a person like that come to run a business? I lit a cigarette and smoked a few drags. I was still angry, even though I was embarrassed about it. It should be beneath me, taking this moronic woman-hater seriously.
I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes left. If I walked the long way back to work, took the streets instead of the avenue, that would fill the time nicely. I could smoke another cigarette and relax. Stressful morning, trouble with the electricians at the Fitzgerald house, and now this ridiculous fight with a stranger. I was about to step into the street when a woman rushed by, or maybe a man with long hair, lightning fast, and almost knocked me down. I stumbled, and then caught myself. Fucking messengers.
And then a dip. I had closed my eyes for a second, a blink in anticipation of being hit by the messenger. I closed my eyes and there was a dip, a dip or a drop out of consciousness. I had a cigarette in my hand, the air smelled hot and dirty on the street corner, the messenger rushed by, I lost my balance, stumbled and then, I could just barely remember it, I saw black and lost the feeling of my feet on the ground.
It passed as quickly as it came, and there I was in front in the magazine store on the corner. The cigarette was gone. Of course you don’t usually remember putting out a cigarette, not at a pack a day. That’s twenty times a day you put out a cigarette.
