by Jeremy Bates
He knocked, three times, loudly. The silver skull ring on his middle finger added a sharp wrap sound, like a bone striking wood.
Wendy opened the door and gave him a winning smile. “Don! Thanks for coming.”
“I can never say no to beer and pizza,” he said.
She ushered him into the living room, which was impersonal, like a prison cell. The walls were practically begging for a picture. They probably wouldn’t even mind a ratty poster. The sofa was the only piece of furniture. It sat alone in the middle of the room, like somebody wondering where all their friends had gone. Cardboard boxes were piled high on the floor. Don didn’t blame her for not unpacking them. After all, she had only just moved in this morning.
“I didn’t think you were going to come,” Wendy said, still smiling at him. “You seemed hesitant when I invited you earlier.”
“Not at all,” he lied smoothly. “I was probably just thinking about the novel I’m working on.”
“You’re a writer?” Her eyes bugged out of her head with admiration. “I’ve never met a famous writer before!”
“Well, I’m not really famous. Writing takes a lot of practice
Buddy slammed the keyboard without finishing the sentence. The dialogue wasn’t right. It was stilted, fake.
He deleted the last few lines, rewrote them, deleted them again, tried a third time.
Still crap.
“Bullshit!” he said, shoving himself to his feet and pacing back and forth in the small room. For the first time since he’d sat down two hours before, writing had become an effort again.
What happened to his muse, his creative juices?
He thought he knew.
Up until that point in the story, everything he’d written had actually happened. Seeing the moving truck out his window. Bumping into Dil outside the building. Checking her up on Facebook. Hell, he’d practically rehashed the newspaper stories about her verbatim.
Nevertheless, now he was back to making shit up. And that was no good. It wasn’t real.
“I need more material,” he muttered to himself.
Buddy glanced at his wristwatch. It was a bit past seven o’clock. Not too late to still go by Dil’s place? He didn’t have to stay long. Just have a look around, bullshit a bit, get the material he needed to continue writing tomorrow…
Decided, Buddy yanked off his tie, his dress shirt, his pants, tossing them all on the bed. He rolled a stick of deodorant beneath his armpits, then pulled on a pair of jeans and a white tee. In the bathroom he splashed cold water on his face and brushed his teeth.
Back in the bedroom, he closed the laptop lid, plunging the room into darkness. He went to the living room, which was equally dark save the eerie glow from the television. He padded quietly across the floor so as not to wake his mother. He thought about slipping on shoes but decided there was no need. He was only going down the hall. He collected his keys from the deal table, then his wallet too, in case he had to pay for the pizza. He stepped into the hallway and sneezed four times. A fifth sneeze tickled his nose but retreated. He closed and locked the door, then went to Dil’s unit.
He knocked.
“Coming!”
A moment later the door swung inward, and Dil stood across the threshold, all dark hair and big black eyes, wearing nothing but a smile and a white terrycloth towel.
“Buddy!” she said. Then, addressing his roving gaze, she added, “I was just about to have a shower. What’s up?”
“I’m feeling a bit better and was wondering if you still want to have a beer?”
“Definitely!” she said. “But I’ve already had a couple, so you’re going to have to catch up.”
“Do you want me to get some more? I can—”
“No, no, I bought a whole case from that supermarket a block over. How convenient is that? I think I’m going to love New York. Come in.”
Buddy followed her inside and looked around, amazed. Her place was like nothing he’d imagined; in fact, it was as if she’d been living here for months, not hours. There were laminated prints on the walls—Van Gogh, Matisse, Rousseau—books on the bookshelf, a vase of flowers on the coffee table, a basket of fruit on the kitchen counter, two potted palms bookending the sofa. A scattering of candles, all lit, perfumed the air with a vanilla scent.
“You’ve been busy,” he said.
“I just finished, and I smell like a pig. I still need that shower. But make yourself at home. Beer’s in the fridge. I won’t be long.”
She disappeared into her bedroom.
Buddy went to the kitchenette. Through the glass-fronted cupboard doors he could see stacks of plates, bowls, mugs, glasses. They made his cupboards seem barren in comparison. He opened the fridge and found it bursting with food. Eight bottles of Carlsberg lined the door shelf. Another six or so shared the crisper with a bunch of celery, a bag of baby carrots, and a variety of leafy green vegetables.
Buddy made a mental note of all this—when it came to writing, the devil was in the details—then retrieved a beer. He twisted off the cap and took a sip. Next to the basket of fruit, he noticed, was a wood knife block from which protruded seven handles. He withdrew a seven-inch cook’s knife and turned it over in his hand. Stainless steel, hollow handle, well-balanced. He replaced it, already wondering how he could incorporate it into his story.
Buddy returned to the living room. He shuffled through the magazines on the table. Seventeen, People, National Inquirer. A large picture frame stood beside the TV, displaying four individual prints. They were all of Dil and what appeared to be family. No friends, no dead ex.
He went to the bookcase, reading the spines of the books. There were a lot of romance novels by authors he’d never heard of, a few cooking books, and some biographies.
Buddy decided he’d load Wendy’s bookshelf with horror titles instead, maybe even add some true-life crime. Hint at her homicidal side.
Whistling gaily—his mood had done a full one-eighty from what it’d been after his blow up in Gino’s office—he went to the easel in the corner, on which sat a blank canvas. No, not blank, he realized. Dil had sketched a pencil outline on it. So was she an artist? Another great detail. A killer with an artistic side. How could he work this into the story? Maybe Don finds drawings Wendy did of her ex-boyfriend, sick, gruesome ones celebrating his death?
Goddamn! Buddy thought. This was so much easier than staring at a computer screen and making everything up. It was all laid out right before him.
The door to the bedroom opened and Dil appeared, now wearing a red satin robe over a matching slip, the hem of which stopped a little above her knees. She unwrapped the towel from her head and shook her dark, damp hair out, so it cascaded over her shoulders.
Buddy felt an awakening in his groin and mentally doused it with cold water. He wasn’t there to get laid. Research. That was all. Then he was gone.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
“Good color on you.”
“Not me, Buddy!” she said, closing the robe and tying the sash. “The apartment. Not bad, huh? It was just so sterile, cold. I need a homey place.”
“You draw?” he said, indicating the canvas.
“I paint—oils. I sketch the picture first in pencil. That’s a spot in the country where I liked to go to.”
“Yeah?” he said. “What did you do there?”
“Just sat around. It was quiet, beautiful.”
“You went by yourself?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Do you have a spot like that?”
“Where I go to be by myself? Not really.”
“Not really?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I go to the roof.”
“This building’s roof?”
He nodded. “If you continue up the stairs one more flight you come to this little storage room. There’s a door that leads to the roof.”
“We should totally bring some chairs up there! Make a chill-out zone. Hey, I know this is out of the blue, but do yo
u smoke pot?”
“Pot?” Buddy repeated, surprised. “No, not for a while.”
“I thought everyone in New York did?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Well, whatever, do you want to? I brought some from Kentucky.”
Without waiting for his reply, she went to the kitchenette, opened the freezer, and produced from behind a box of frozen blueberries what must have been an ounce of marijuana in a Ziploc bag.
“So?” she said, holding it up for him to see.
“Sure,” he said.
“Awesome! Now where did I put it?” She opened the cupboard below the sink. “Ah!” She set an electric coffee grinder on the counter and plugged it into a wall socket. “Way better than scissors.” She dumped a few green-brown buds into the grinder, clapped the top on, and twisted it. The whirling blades made a hungry buzzing sound. After a few seconds she removed the top and tapped the finely ground marijuana onto the counter. “Neat trick, huh? My ex taught me it.”
“Were you guys together long?”
“Four years or so.”
“He’s still in Kentucky?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Yeah, he’s still there.” She’d taken a pack of rolling papers from the Ziploc bag, stuck two together in an L shape, and was now in the process of rolling a massive joint.
“Why’d you break up?”
“I don’t like talking about him, Buddy. He was an asshole, and he totally screwed up my life. I shouldn’t have mentioned him.”
Buddy was watching her closely. Anger, definitely. But where was the remorse? The sadness?
Dil must have felt his eyes on her because she looked up from the joint and held his gaze.
Buddy smiled, finished his beer, and got another from the fridge. “You want one?” he asked her.
“Yes, please,” she said.
Buddy twisted off both caps and set her bottle on the counter. She licked the strip of glue on the paper, then lit the joint with a yellow Bic lighter that had been amongst the apples and oranges in the fruit basket. “Man,” she said, exhaling toward the ceiling. “I’ve been waiting all day for this.”
She took another toke, then handed the joint to him. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and inhaled deeply, watching the cherry flare. He held the smoke in his lungs for all of two seconds before lurching forward in a fit of coughs.
Dil giggled. “When was the last time you smoked?”
“College,” he managed, passing the joint back.
“What subject did you take?”
“Finance.”
“God, why would you take that?”
Buddy chugged a mouthful of beer to soothe his throat. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“What do you do?” she asked. “Wait, let me guess. You work at a bank or something?”
Buddy frowned. “How’d you know that?”
“Lucky guess,” she said.
“I’m serious.”
“Come on, Buddy. You studied finance. You wear a suit. Where else would you work?”
“I could have been a manager somewhere, like at a travel agency.”
“Well, a manager of a travel agency’s not what came to mind. A bank did. Here.”
They passed the joint back and forth a few more times, Dil doing most of the talking, before she tapped it out in the sink.
“Anyway,” Buddy said, gripping the counter. He definitely felt the effects of the pot: woozy, giddy, relaxed. “I don’t work at a bank anymore. I was fired today.”
Dil’s eyebrows went up. “Fired?”
“I called my boss a cocksucker.”
“Shut up!”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling at the memory. “Then I tossed a photo of his daughter across the room.”
“You did not.”
“Yeah, I did. Fucking gnome deserved it.”
“Why would you ever do that?”
“He passed me up for a promotion.”
“So you called him a cocksucker and busted a picture of his daughter?” She seemed like she wanted to laugh but held it inside instead. “Shoot, Buddy…that really sucks. Fired…wow…” She chewed on this for a moment, then added, “Hold on, we need some music to lighten the mood.” She went to a stereo system that sat on a low table beneath the window. Buddy watched her, noting the way the thin fabric of the robe hugged her thighs, her butt. She scooped up a handful of CD cases and shuffled through them. “Do you like Michael Jackson?”
Buddy didn’t but said he did.
Dil slipped a disc in the stereo and pressed Play. A moment later the opening drumbeat of “Billie Jean” blared through the speakers. She turned down the volume slightly. Then she moonwalked into the middle of the living room, her feet sliding magically over the floor.
The spectacle was so absurd Buddy chuckled.
“What?” she said. “This is how I walk.” She moonwalked to the bookcase and grabbed a romance novel, which she pretended to read. Then she moonwalked back to him, looking over her shoulder to make sure he was paying attention.
“Not bad, huh?” she said, grinning. “When I was in grammar school, my best friend used to have these really waxy floors in her basement. Every time I went over to play with her, we’d practice moonwalking. I could do it better if I had socks on.”
“It was good,” he assured her.
Dil picked up her beer, then clinked it against his. “Cheers, neighbor,” she said.
“Cheers,” Buddy said—even as a voice in his head told him to stop dicking around and get down to business. He needed material for the book.
After all, he wasn’t going to write an entire chapter about the two of them standing around getting high in her apartment.
Nevertheless, before he could think of a suitable question, Dil opened the fridge and said, “Hey, do you remember that scene in Ghostbusters when Sigourney Weaver opens her fridge and it leads to a different dimension? How trippy would that be?”
“I had a dream like that once,” he told her. “But my fridge didn’t lead to a different dimension. It led to hell.”
“Holy shit, Buddy! That’s not trippy. That’s freaky. Did you see the devil?”
“In my fridge?”
“In your fridge in your dream.”
“I don’t remember. I think I just saw flames.”
“Well, that’s still freaky. Are you hungry? I’m starving.”
“Didn’t you want to order a pizza?”
She made a face. “Oh, right…”
“You don’t want to?”
“Do you?”
“Up to you.”
She shrugged. “It just feels like a lot of work.”
“A lot of work?”
“Do you know any pizza numbers off by heart?”
“No.”
“Well, that means we have to find the number for one. Then we have to call them and tell them what we want on it.”
“That’s not that hard.”
“Yeah, but then you have to give them your address, and they always repeat it like three times, spelling out everything. Then you have to wait like thirty minutes, maybe longer, for it to arrive. Then you have to pay the delivery guy. And you have to leave him a tip. I hate leaving tips. He’s going to know I’m high. No—forget it. I’m not calling.”
Buddy mulled that over. “I guess it is a lot of work, isn’t it?”
Dil’s eyes lit up. “What about a cake? Do you want to bake a cake?”
“That’s way more fucking work than ordering a pizza.”
“Come on, let’s make one! It’ll be fun. I bought flour and sugar and everything today too.”
Dil went to the pantry cupboard to gather what they would need. After a moment, Buddy joined her.
While they went about mixing the ingredients together in a large glass bowl, Buddy contemplated the surreal course the evening had taken. A couple hours ago he’d wanted nothing to do with his psycho-killer neighbor
, and now here he was in her kitchen, blitzed out of his mind, listening to Michael Jackson, and baking a goddamn cake.
Even so, Buddy had to admit he was having a good time. In fact, he couldn’t remember when he last had this much fun.
When the cake was in the oven baking, he said, “So what do we do now?”
“Lick the spoon, obviously.” Dil held up the large wooden spoon they’d used, which was covered in gunky chocolate cake mix.
“Forget it.”
“Didn’t your mom ever let you lick the spoon when you were a kid?”
Buddy shook his head. “My mom was a progressive liberal actress. She thought a woman cooking and baking and cleaning and all that crap was too nineteen fifties.”
“An actress!” Dil said. “Was she in anything I would have seen?”
Buddy shook his head again. “Just some real old stuff before I was born. You wouldn’t know it.”
“Did she used to live in LA?”
“That’s where I was born,” he told her. “My dad was a production assistant. He met my mom on the set of one of her movies. They got married and were pretty good together until he was busted sexually assaulting some underage actress. He went to prison. My mom and I moved to New York to live with her sister. She didn’t work because the child support she was getting was enough for both us to live on. When I turned eighteen, and the money stopped coming, she mooched off her sister while I went to college. I didn’t see her much after that until she had her stroke.”
“Oh, Buddy…”
“Her sister put her in a nursing home. Medicare covered the first hundred days, but when that ran out some administrative asshole said they had no permanent beds free and she had to leave. Her sister didn’t want to take her back, so I moved her in with me.”
“Does she still live with you now?” Dil asked, surprised.
Buddy nodded but didn’t say anything more. The memories were bringing up all sorts of emotions he didn’t care for. And what the hell was he doing telling Dil his goddamn life story? This was exactly why he hadn’t wanted anything to do with her. He was getting too close. She was going to think they were friends or some shit. She would start coming by. Soon they’d be fucking BFFs…
