The Secret Society of Demolition Writers

by Marc Parent

  It’s weird how I can’t remember that much about the rest of the day. It was a kind of black hole, quiet and still, maybe what Sunday is like for people who observe the Sabbath. I think the sun set at some ungodly hour, although since it was early March I was probably wrong about that. Jessamina knew Jesus’s cell number and we called but we got no answer, not even a machine. We called every hour, and then every half hour after lunch. Around six it started snowing, and I went out and got sandwiches. What kind of weird kid wants an American cheese sandwich with nothing on it? That I remember. “Mustard?” I asked. “Lettuce?” But she just shook her head, the corners of her mouth turned way down. She finished Alice and I gave her Through the Looking Glass. We were both reading in the dark and when I got up to turn on the overhead light she was bent over the dictionary, squinting at the small print.

  “You need glasses?” I said.

  “What’s a jabberwocky?” she said, turning the thin onion-skin pages of the OED.

  “No one knows.”

  “What?”

  “He made it up. The word, the thing. It’s whatever you think it is.”

  “That’s stupid. Are people allowed to do that, just put words in books even if they don’t know what they mean?”

  “If they want.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair. It’s, it’s, it’s confusing. And it makes you mad. Like what if I’d been alone and I hadn’t been able to ask anyone and all this time I thought it was a word that meant something and I was just too stupid to know the word?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m not reading this anymore,” she said, and when I looked over she’d fallen asleep again, her mouth open and her eyes skittering back and forth beneath the thin veiny skin of her eyelids.

  Jesus, I was tired of sleeping on the floor.

  “I gotta go to school,” she said when she woke up the next morning, dull-eyed. “I got to go home.”

  “Do you know which stop you are on the subway?”

  “I’m not a baby, you know. Of course I know what stop on the subway. I’ve taken the train home a million times.”

  “I’m going to get coffee. You want the same thing as before? Then I’ll take you on the train.”

  “I can go by myself.”

  “My ass,” I said.

  It’s hard for me to remember now, but in college I never paid any attention to what was going on out in the world. I didn’t have a TV in my room and I never read the papers. Now it’s like, if I miss one issue of People magazine I have to go have a manicure just so I can catch up. We all say we have to watch Access Hollywood for work because if the editor-in-chief says she wants, say, a Gwyneth layout we’d all better know what the Gwyneth thing is at the moment, because one shot that’s so last-year’s-Gwyneth and you’ll be working for a suburban shopping sheet. But we just watch Access Hollywood because we want to. If any of us were in serious relationships maybe we wouldn’t watch so much. One of the young assistants had a boyfriend who loved to watch Access, and she was so shocked when it turned out he was gay. Duh. Duh. Duh.

  The closest thing to following the news I did in college was to look at the tabs as I walked past the newsstand near Café No, which was a good thing because there’s no telling what would have happened if I hadn’t seen Jessamina’s picture on the front of the Daily News, almost life sized, with the headline WHERE IS SHE? It was the first time I’d bought a newspaper in three years, since the Michael Jackson trial. I took it into Café No, ordered a no-foam latte, and sat at a table with my insides bubbling up so that I thought I might have to use their skanky restroom.

  Jessamina’s mother’s picture was on page three. She looked like Jessamina, only smaller all over. A picture of Jesus was next to her. It wasn’t flattering. I think it was at the beach; his shirt was off and there was a horizontal line mid-photo that might have been the line between the sand and the water. His hair was all over the place, which would have made him crazy if he hadn’t been dead of twenty-three stab wounds that Jessamina’s mother had inflicted, the cops said, before she turned the knife on herself, which is a pretty gentle way of saying that she stabbed herself right through the heart. Sometimes I think about that now and I still can’t get my mind around it.

  The papers said Jessamina’s mom had been in and out of the hospital for psychiatric treatment and that her own mother, Jessamina’s grandmother, said she’d even had electroshock and some sort of water therapy that sounded pretty sketchy to me, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s therapy. The papers said that there had been a domestic dispute on Saturday because Jessamina’s mom—her name was Mercedes, of all things— thought that Jesus was cheating on her. And now they were testing all the blood in the house to see if she’d killed Jessamina, too, because Jessamina had just disappeared into thin air. Maybe she was dead, maybe she was kidnapped by drug lords, maybe she was wandering around with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  Jessamina’s grandmother said she was an honor student at St. Martin de Porres and that she read all the time.

  I stayed an hour at the table, had another latte, ordered Jessamina’s hot chocolate, and read my horoscope. (I’m a Gemini, the astrological sign of the bipolar. Which, by the way, was what Mercedes happened to be. Bipolar, not a Gemini. In and out of the hospital, on and off the meds. Mercedes, we could have hung out. I wonder when your birthday was.) My bottom line was pretty simple: I sure as hell didn’t want to be involved. COED CAUSED MURDER-SUICIDE. Yeah, right. I finished my coffee, went to the corner, and called the TIPS line number at the bottom of the newspaper story. I’m a decisive person when I need to be. I was the one who made all the arrangements when my mother went catatonic on me after the accident. I took care of business even though I was just a kid, really. Until she married El Shrinko II. The sequel is never as good.

  “The kid you want in that murder case is standing by this phone,” I said. I didn’t want to make it too easy for them, figured it would take at least a few minutes to do whatever they do to trace a phone number and to get somebody there. And when I bundled Jessamina into her coat and took her down the freight elevator, I didn’t go outside, just stood there shivering in the delivery entrance and pointed across the street. “Your grandmother is coming to get you,” I said.

  “You called my grandmother?” She was half-asleep and so confused, blinking in the sunlight for the first time in two days.

  “Sort of,” I said. “She’s coming. Just stand over there. But do me a favor. Do Jesus a favor. Don’t tell them where you were.”

  “Don’t tell who?”

  “Whoever,” I said.

  She sort of tottered across the street like an old person, her arms wrapped around her midsection. I’m not totally inhuman. I stood in the doorway watching until a black-and-white rolled up and the cops put her in the back. The next morning the paper said she’d been wandering the campus for two days, hiding in the library. I didn’t read it until nearly nighttime because I took two Ambien and slept for eighteen hours. I had terrible dreams about playing tennis with a guy who kept firing aces past me but wouldn’t let me give up. When I finally went outside there was a foot of snow on the ground. It looked like I had dreamt it while I was sleeping.

  It snowed a couple of weeks ago, and that probably made me remember, too, and then I was on the treadmill at the Health and Racket Club and I looked up at the TV and there she was, talking to the newswoman from Channel Four, the Korean one who talks with her hands and has really bad Chiclet teeth. It was one of those lame anniversary pieces local news loves, ten years since blah blah blah. The newswoman said it was a story of tragedy and triumph, and she asked Jessamina what she did during those terrible days when she walked the streets without knowing that her mother had committed this senseless crime. (Apparently no one really believed Jesus had been unfaithful.)

  “I read mostly,” she said quietly. “I’ve always loved reading.”

  And with one of those TV aha smiles the newswoman said that that must be true b
ecause Jessamina had graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English from a prestigious college, where her tuition was paid by a childless millionaire garmento who had been touched by her story at the time and had paid for Choate as well. And now she was studying for a master’s degree and teaching first graders to read. Cut to Jessamina reading aloud with a bunch of kids in uniforms around her in a circle, only one or two staring shamelessly at the camera, and what is she reading but Alice in Wonderland ? This stupid newswoman doesn’t even know how perfectly the whole deal turned out!

  You have to picture: I had had a really bad day. I don’t give a good goddamn about belts and I’ve written almost two thirds of a novel and I’d had a meeting with an editor at a small house that does edgy books. I never expected to walk into his office and get sideswiped by the New York small-town thing. If you actually live in a small town you might find it hard to believe, but the weird thing about living here is that it turns out you already know most of the people you meet. Like you go to have lipo and the doctor is the brother of someone you prepped with. Or the woman at the next locker at the health club was two years behind you at college and you can tell by the way she looks at you, especially when you’re naked, that she remembers every story she ever heard.

  So I go in to see this editor and we simultaneously flash on New Year’s Eve three years ago, when we wound up in a men’s room together doing X and one thing led to another and we had really bad sex on the toilet. Of course we didn’t know this going into the meeting because we’d never even exchanged names. I took one look at his face as he took one look at mine, and I knew I was doomed.

  “There’s not a lot of heart in your work,” he finally said after all the weird preliminaries. And I just went off.

  “Heart? Excuse me? Have you read Leonard Briskin and Ted McArdle? The last McArdle had a disemboweling on page ten and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.”

  “We published that book,” he said.

  “And you’re Briskin’s editor. He couldn’t find his heart with both hands.”

  “He’s not a woman. Readers have a certain expectation when they read a female writer. They expect a certain emotional resonance. And we all feel here that the father-daughter incest thing is a little tired.”

  “Greek mythology cornered the market?”

  “It’s just not for us.”

  “What if I write under a pen name and pretend to be a guy?”

  “Women’s books are the ones that are selling.”

  “With heart.”

  “With heart.”

  “I have to say, it would be a hell of a lot easier for me to get myself some balls than some heart.” As I said it I could tell by the look on his face that this was a story that was going to make the rounds in the small town called New York, and Selena was going to be major-league pissed because she hooked me up with this guy and wants to sell him a book herself. But she’s got heart, or at least can pretend to, so maybe it’ll be okay.

  In some weird way seeing Jessamina on TV, sitting with the kids, waving her dance hands around, badly dressed but well groomed, took the curse off, made me feel like I wasn’t such a zero after all. I kept waiting for her to tell the interviewer who taught her to like Alice, but maybe she was still keeping her mouth shut, still protecting the woman who’d slept on the floor and bought her corn muffins and taught her to use the OED. I have to say, for the first couple of weeks after she went off in the cop car that day I stayed as far under the radar as I could. It got cold in my room one night in early April and I ruined a good pair of tweezers trying to bleed the radiator myself. I was nice to Gus just in case he suspected something. He suspected something because I was nice, but then he just went with it. I even went down on him once or twice.

  Then last week I was on the A train going home because I only had $18 in my checking and the ATM wouldn’t spit out less than $20 and I didn’t have enough in my purse for a cab. (Note to self: call Mother.) But one of the girls, the idiot who does the fact checking on captions, left a fare card in her out-box, so I took it and used it to get home after we closed the June issue. I hate the train, but it’s better than walking, especially in boots with stiletto heels (taken from the shoe cupboard, thank you very much, retailed last season for $520).

  I was reading the new People and I didn’t look up when the doors opened at other stations. I guess that’s why I didn’t see her until she wanted me to. I didn’t see her until she got out of her seat and stood in front of me, almost toe to toe with my boots. Hers were those cheap waterproof fake leather ones you can buy at the Going Out of Business shoe stores on Broadway, the ones that don’t go out of business.

  The train was slowing down for a station and the other passengers were looking up at her, maybe because she really had gotten very pretty, with her big dark eyes and smooth, mocha-colored skin, or maybe because they’d seen her on television the week before. Her nails were long and she had a fresh French manicure; you could tell by looking at her hands that that was where she put her money. I don’t even want to tell you about the look on her face. It was so terrible it paralyzed me, so that the smile that started when I recognized her died before it really began. For just a minute I wondered whether she had a knife. I know it’s crazy, but I wondered whether she had her mother’s knife, whether she’d been saving it for the occasion.

  But there was only a book in her hand as she leaned toward me and said loudly, with a sound like spitting, “Puta!” Then she moved towards the doors as they opened, but turned and cried over her shoulder, in case I needed a translation, “Whore!”

  “I speak Spanish,” I said to myself, but I said it aloud. I’d learned it from the housekeeper in Palm Beach.

  People were looking at me, and two teenagers down the car were laughing. So at the next stop I got off the train, even though I was twelve blocks from my building and there was ice on the sidewalks and slush at all the corners. I’ll tell you, it is a bitch to walk that far in stilettos, and I will never take the train again, so help me God, as long as I live.

  Ashes

  AFTER SILENTLY COUNTING TO THREE, Banks throws his naked body out of bed. He’s already on his feet when he feels the cold bite his prick. He doesn’t bother looking down but stands rooted to the freezing floor, his muscles bunched into a knot, his breath misting the air in front of his face.

  Fifteen minutes later, he’s showered and dressed. He leaves Janice sleeping and walks outside to his car. Along the roadside in Somerville, snow is piled a yard high, though only the top few inches are fresh and white; these he cleans off his windshield with a gloved hand.

  While the engine warms, he sits behind the wheel staring at a photograph in a clear plastic frame bolted to the dashboard: his father standing in a driveway, grinning beside a red and white ’58 Corvette, lug wrench in hand, sleeves rolled up and grease smudged on his muscled forearms. A man about the same age Banks is now. A married man with a job and a pretty wife and a five-year-old boy, who are not in the picture. The car, recently waxed, gleams under intense sunlight. His father looks proud, happy. The grin on his handsome face says there’s nothing that can’t be fixed; anything can happen, the grin says.

  It was Banks, aged five and a half, who discovered his father’s body hanging from a beam when he wandered into the garage looking for his Wiffle bat one morning. That’s what his mother—understandably perplexed that he could ever forget such a thing—continues to insist. But Banks himself has no memory of that day; in fact hardly any memory of his father at all. If not for the photograph on his dashboard he might almost believe that he’d never had a father, had never seen a red and white ’58 Corvette with his own two eyes. Sometimes it feels to Banks as if the photograph on his dashboard is what he has instead of his father. He never grows tired of looking at it as he drives from job to job through the streets of Boston and the outlying suburbs. He finds the picture of his dad reassuring company but also somehow suspenseful, expectant, as if one day it might just start to talk to him
.

  WHEN THE ENGINE’S warmed up, he’s on his way.

  He checks his clipboard. Two installations in the morning and three in the afternoon. At Dunkin’ Donuts, he fills his commuter mug with hot black coffee, then catches the traffic report on the radio. There’s an accident on the expressway, so he decides to go through Harvard Square, take Mass. Ave. to Storrow Drive, and Atlantic into the North End.

  The curving, narrow side streets are still unplowed after yesterday’s snowfall, and the slush is inches deep. His tires hiss through the muck like sizzling fat. He slows down, the speedometer dropping to twenty, then to ten. Small islands of dark tar scattered with road salt appear through the grime-streaked windshield. And Banks remembers the night, twenty-five years ago, when he stood with his mother on the roof of their house in the North End, releasing handfuls of his father’s ashes into a stiff breeze. Hearing the salt crunching under the tires, he imagines that it’s his father’s ashes he’s driving over, that this was where they’d landed, whitened and crystallized in the cold.

  THE SECOND APPOINTMENT of the morning is an apartment complex on Boylston. Banks knows the building. He figures the job should take twenty minutes, thirty at most, then he’ll get a sandwich and a coffee refill before starting the afternoon.

  In the lobby, the doorman phones up to the apartment. He turns away from Banks as if conducting top-secret business. When there’s no answer, he stretches his dark upper lip over his teeth and sighs. “You sure you got an appointment with Mr. Martin?” he asks skeptically, still holding the phone to his ear. The nickel buttons on his gray uniform jacket are pressed flat against the bulbous stomach underneath.