Sliver

by Ira Levin

  Kay brought her into the kitchen’s white fluorescence, and bending, squinting, teased silk loops over satin pea-buttons. Vida stood pinching her fingertips. Felice, having sniffed Vida’s stockinged feet and been patted with the heel of a hand, crouched at her seafood feast.

  “Beautiful embroidery . . . India?”

  “China. Shit. Do you have Krazy Glue?”

  “No, sorry.” She looped a button. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Some dinner at the Plaza,” Vida said. “A lot of speeches . . . The Governor’s going to be there. Isn’t it awful? Sheer? I spoke to him! In the elevator a few months ago! He had a big plant he got at the street fair on Third Avenue. . . .” She breathed a sigh. “To think of him laying there all that time getting poached. That’s what whosit on Channel Five said, poached.” The blond-capped head turned. “I hope he wasn’t a friend of yours or anything. . . .”

  She smiled, looping a button. “No, he wasn’t,” she said.

  “Poor guy . . .”

  Felice went into the foyer, sat down, began cleaning.

  “I knew Naomi Singer,” Vida said, pinching a fingernail.

  She looped a button, squinting.

  “We took a course at the Y,” Vida said. “Rape defense. We walked back together a couple of times. You been there? On Lex?”

  “To a few concerts,” she said.

  “They give all kinds of courses. It’s a Jewish one but anyone can go.”

  She said, “She must have been one unhappy lady. . . .”

  “She didn’t act that way,” Vida said, “but I guess they don’t always. She was like bubbly on the outside. She had your kind of looks, dark hair, oval face. Not as pretty. Shorter. From ‘Baaaston.’ Where are you from?”

  “Wichita.”

  “I’m from everywhere,” Vida said. “My father’s a major general in the Air Force.”

  Looping a button, she said, “The Times didn’t say what was in the note. . . .”

  “The Post had some of it,” Vida said. “She was depressed. About everything. The environment, racism, nuclear weapons, you know. And there was a guy in Boston she’d broken up with, he was in it too.” She sighed. “She sure scared the pants off Dmitri.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She nearly hit him,” Vida said. “He was polishing the—you know, the rods that hold up the canopy. He was the porter then, Rafael was the super. She landed right alongside him. He had blood on him. The building gave him a week in Disneyland, him and his wife and kid, all expenses paid.”

  “Not so bad,” she said, looping a button.

  “Oh, they’re not chintzy here,” Vida said. “They better not be, with so many people popping off. Who’s going to want to renew?” She shook her head, sighed. “‘Horror High-Rise . . .’ Yikes. I feel like I’m in a Jamie Lee Curtis movie.”

  She looped the top button, smiling. “Okay, Jamie Lee,” she said, stepping back, “go say hello to the Governor. You look terrific.”

  A paisley-wrapped package on the mailroom counter was addressed calligraphically to her, from someplace called Victoriana on East Eighty-ninth Street. About the size of a shoebox, fairly heavy, the Art Nouveau label expensively printed. She wondered who and what as she rode up in the elevator with the goateed man on twelve and a middle-aged Japanese couple who got out on sixteen.

  “Who” was Norman and June, Norman’s handwriting big and round on the heavy cream card embossed with Diadem’s logo: Clear skies, bright stars, good luck. We love you. Norman and June.

  “What,” in a roll of plastic bubble-wrap and deep blue tissue paper, was a magnificent brass telescope, two sections opening out to eighteen or twenty inches, stamped near the eyepiece with a Liberty Bell, the name Sinclair, and the year 1893.

  Feeling like Ahab, she watched a tugboat pushing a barge upriver, a white yacht heading down. Cars moving on the Triboro Bridge. The windows of high-rises, telescopes on tripods standing in some of them. Her knee was rubbed—Felice on the windowsill, purring.

  She went with Roxie and Fletcher to the flea market on Twenty-sixth Street, bought a pair of pewter candlesticks; to a revival of Annie Hall and Manhattan, a Chinese restaurant.

  She read a good manuscript. Got a cut and a rinse. Lunched Florence Leary Winthrop at the Seasons. Another man sat where Sheer had sat. She attended a production meeting.

  Her at-home day that week, Wednesday, was a stinker, rain drizzling down on the brown park and gunmetal reservoir, on the Jewish Museum’s pinnacled slate roof, on brown gardens between black roofs of midblock brownstones. A great day, though, for being at home—even when it meant crawling through Florence’s arrow-strewn pages of typing and serpentine handwriting.

  A great day too for doing the laundry, she realized as Susannah scrubbed bloodstains from Derek’s riding jacket; no wait for the machines. The clock said 3:25. She left Susannah scrubbing and worrying, got the stuffed laundry basket out of the linen closet—Felice came into the foyer to see what was doing—gathered towels from the bathroom and kitchen, Tide from under the sink, quarters from the Mickey Mouse mug.

  When she carried the overstuffed basket with the box on top into the white-tiled laundry room, Pete whatever with the reddish-brown hair turned from one of the dryers opposite the door and stood looking at her, something yellow sliding from his hand to his laundry basket. She said, “Hi,” going to the side of the room and clomping the basket onto the end washer. Near the other end of the line red lights gleamed on a humming washer with an empty basket on it.

  “Hi!” he said, his voice tile-sharpened. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” she said, sorry she hadn’t fixed herself up a little even if he was twenty-seven, tops. “You?”

  “Fine,” Pete Henderson said. “Are you all settled in now?”

  “Just about.” She smiled at him smiling that dynamite smile, in a green T-shirt and jeans—and turned aside, opened the tops of two washers. Taking the filters out, she said, “Isn’t this super equipment? Everything’s first-rate here.”

  “It was supposed to be a condo originally,” he said, turning to his dryer.

  “Lucky for me it isn’t,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  She put the box aside and began unloading the basket, the colored things into one washer, the white into the other. “I wonder how come it was changed?” she said.

  “I guess the demand changed.”

  “Still,” she said, “once they’d made the investment . . . Who owns it, do you know?”

  “Uh-uh. All I know is MacEvoy-Cortez, where the checks go.” He sighed a resonant tile-bounced sigh. “You sure got a whale of a welcome. . . .”

  She said, “You can say that again. . . .”

  “Aren’t those reporters incredible? I suppose they’re decent people to begin with, but boy, they sure wind up—piranhas. Like in James Bond. Eat anything.”

  “He was going to write a book about television,” she said, putting a pair of jeans in with the colored, “the different ways it’s affected our lives. I wonder if he was going to include that, turning reporters into piranhas.”

  “Did you know him?” he asked, turning.

  She worked at a handkerchief snagged on a shirt button. “Slightly,” she said. “We’d been introduced.”

  “It sounds like a good subject,” he said. “I watched all the time when I was a kid; now I just rent movies once in a while. Was he going to include the way VCR’s have changed things?”

  “I would think so,” she said. “He didn’t go into details. We only spoke a minute or two.”

  “It must have made it worse for you though,” he said, “having met him.”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “It did. Definitely.” She put the shirt in one washer, the handkerchief in the other.

  “I talked with him a couple of times about the weather. You know, in the elevator. And I read his book on computers.”

  “I did too,” she said, turning. “What did you think of it?”r />
  He stood silent, frowning. “It was all right,” he said. “I thought it was well written but—it annoyed me.” He looked at her. “I’m in computers,” he said. “There’s no reason to get paranoid about them; they’re machines, that’s all, machines that process data quickly.”

  “He didn’t get paranoid,” she said. “There are real dangers inherent in them.”

  “He exaggerated them by a factor of about ten,” he said.

  She turned. Hand-over-handed the yellow-flowered sheets from the basket down into the white. “What do you do?” she asked.

  “I’m a free-lance programmer,” he said. “I do consulting for different companies, financial mostly, and I’ve written some games that have been marketed.” The dryer door closed. “You?”

  “I’m an editor,” she said. “At Diadem Press.”

  “Would you like a snack? Or a candy bar?” He was going to the vending machines at the other side of the room, looking at her over his shoulder.

  “No, thanks.” She smiled at him, turned. Sorted the last towels and washcloths.

  Coins dropped in a slot. “They’ve got catnip here, did you know that?”

  “Go on,” she said, “I didn’t.” She opened the spout of the Tide.

  “Dog chews too. How come no parakeet seed?” A machine hummed; something fell.

  Powdering a trail around the colored things, she stopped midway and righted the box, turned. Looked at him coming across the room tearing at a bag. He smiled at her. “I saw you buying litter in Murphy’s,” he said. “Saturday morning.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I was with someone,” he said, “so I didn’t say hello.”

  She smiled, turned. Trailed out more powder.

  He leaned against the humming red-lighted washer, two away from her. “Male or female?” he asked.

  “Female,” she said. “A calico.”

  He tore open his bag of potato chips.

  “Where are you from?” she asked, circling the box above the white things.

  “Pittsburgh,” he said. “I’ve been here five years now. In New York, I mean. Three in the building.” He reached toward her, offering the open bag of chips, his vivid blue eyes looking at her.

  “No, thanks,” she said, smiling, pushing the spout on the box closed. She turned, put it in the basket. “I’m from Wichita,” she said. “I’ve been here—ye gods, eighteen years now.”

  “I knew you were from someplace in the Midwest,” he said. “From the way you speak. It’s nice.”

  She looked at him picking a chip out of the bag. “Thanks,” she said.

  Put the filters into the washers. Shut their tops.

  “Get out your gas mask,” he murmured, looking beyond her. She smelled Giorgio as she turned.

  The stocky black-banged woman on eight stopped in the doorway, beneath the videocamera, in dark glasses, amber beads, a black long-sleeved dress. Behind her a man wheeled a bike into one of the elevators.

  They nodded to her and said, “Hi.”

  She nodded; went to the vending machines, black high heels clicking on vinyl. Giorgio challenged Tide and Clorox.

  Pete sniffed the air, smiled at her. She smiled, plugging quarters into the coin trays. He straightened from the washer—its lights had gone out—and went to the dryers. Coins dropped in slots across the room; machines hummed, things fell.

  She homed the trays, studied the glowing selector buttons.

  A woman came in and went sniffing and frowning to the washer Pete had leaned against—a plump black-haired woman in a red blouse and purple skirt, brown scuffs. She took the basket from the washer, opened the top.

  “You timed that perfectly. It just went off.”

  The woman turned to her. “Eh?”

  “Just, went, off,” she said. “Now.” Sliced with a hand. “Off.” She pointed at the washer.

  “Ah, sí,” the woman said, smiling. She pulled matted laundry out into the basket. “Sí, veintecinco minutos,” she said. “Exactamente. Veintecinco minutos.”

  “Twenty-five,” she said.

  “Sí.”

  “Thanks.”

  She touched buttons; the washers rushed to life. She took the box from the basket. “Not yet,” Pete said, alongside her with his basket of clean clothes, glancing toward the hallway.

  She searched around for something until Giorgio, champion over Tide and Clorox, went into an elevator and the door had closed.

  “She must have a pipeline from the factory,” Pete said as they went into the tan-painted hallway.

  “It’s Giorgio,” she said. “Talk about too much of a good thing.” She touched the button between the doors. The indicators above showed 2 become L, 4 become 5.

  The stairway door at the right of the elevators opened and Terry in a wet black rubber raincoat came into the hallway. Smiling at them, he went into the laundry room. A man came out of the bike room in a wet yellow poncho, a foam helmet in his hand. He closed the mesh door, nodded at them.

  They nodded.

  He wiped a hand over damp blond curls, shook it at the floor.

  “Still coming down?” Pete asked.

  “Worse than before,” the man said—fleshy-looking, in his mid-thirties.

  The left-hand elevator door slid open.

  “Would you?” Pete asked, coming in after her with his laundry basket. “Thirteen.” She touched 20, 13. The man in the poncho touched 16.

  The door slid open at the lobby and a round-faced elderly woman in a navy hat and raincoat came in; nodded, turned, touched 10.

  They rode up in silence. The woman got out.

  “Nice seeing you again,” Pete said, smiling at her as the door slid open on thirteen.

  “Same here,” she said, smiling at him.

  The man in the poncho got out on sixteen.

  She stood holding her box of Tide.

  Glanced at the videocamera up in the corner.

  Got out her keys as 19 above the door became 20.

  She had a few friends over that Friday night—Diadem people and Roxie and Fletcher. They praised the apartment, Felice, and Roxie’s falcon; took turns with the telescope, sipped vodka, soda, white wine; talked about takeover rumors, the Middle East crisis, the spring list.

  “That’s a beautiful light,” June said as they ate. “Is it yours?” Everyone looked up at the ceiling light—the ten or twelve of them and she too, sitting around the living room with their plates of chicken and salad, glasses of wine. “It’s the building’s,” she said, on a cushion by the coffee table. “Everything in the place is first-rate. It was planned as a condo but there’s a mysterious owner who switched it to rental. Nobody knows who he is; he hides behind a law firm downtown. Supposedly he’s a pain in the ass but in my book he’s right up there with Santa Claus.”

  “This chicken is great,” Norman said.

  “From Petak’s,” she said.

  “Someone must know who he is,” Gary said.

  She sipped wine. “The brokers who manage the place don’t,” she said. “They deal with the lawyers.”

  “Well, it’s not surprising,” Tamiko said. “Let’s face it, the building hasn’t been getting dream publicity.”

  “This goes back to when he bought it,” she said.

  “From Barry Beck,” June said. “I never thought I’d be sitting here. Did you, Norman? We fought against this building.”

  “We’re active in Civitas,” Norman said. “It’s an organization that tries to preserve the area and keep it from being overbuilt. There were two beautiful brownstones on this site. We lost the battle but we won the war—against slivers, at any rate. They were outlawed a month after the foundation for this one was poured.”

  “The construction is certainly first-rate,” Stuart said. “I haven’t heard a sound from next door and there were people going in there too. My building’s a new rental and I can hear my neighbors pushing their phone buttons.”

  “If it was built to condo standards,” Tamiko
said, “why did he turn it into a rental?”

  “That’s what I wondered,” she said, going around refilling wineglasses. “It bugged me. I spoke to Jo Harding in accounting—she invests in real estate—and she said the rental market up here has been softer than the condo market for years. So I called the woman who showed me the place and buttered her up a little. She’s the one who said he’s a pain in the ass, and she only knows he’s a man because the lawyers call him a son of a bitch. Felice! Get down from there! Now! He pesters them about the maintenance, blackballs prospective tenants for no logical reason. . . . Fletcher? Just a bit? He acts as if he lives here, but why would he live in a three-room apartment? He’s got to be worth at least fifty million. Wendy?”

  “He could have a pied-à-terre here,” Stuart said, “and live in six other places.”

  “I suppose so,” she said, pouring wine into Wendy’s glass, “but she gave the sense of a full-time nuisance.”

  “Barry Beck probably knows who he is,” June said.

  “Or the contractor, a man named Michelangelo,” Norman said. “Beck sold it when it was still unfinished.”

  “I’m not that interested in pursuing it,” she said, refilling Gary’s glass. “I’ll assume he’s a nut and let him have his privacy; I’m grateful to him. Will everybody please take some more chicken?”

  He sat staring. Waggled his head, slack-jawed.

  Tried to laugh.

  You had to keep your sense of humor, right?

  That she should be the first one in how-long-had-it-been to look the gift horse in the mouth and ask questions, that her bosses should steer her instantaneously toward Michelangelo . . . There had to be a laugh in there somewhere.

  “Pain in the ass” and “son of a bitch.”

  Har-dee-har-har.

  He watched her bringing in the strawberry mousse, putting it on the dining table. Wondered if he might be caught someday.

  Of course he might. How come he hadn’t considered the possibility before? A Columbo clone at the door: “I hate to bother you but could you possibly let me have a couple of minutes of your time? I’ve got some questions here about the deaths in this building. . . .”

  Relax. Stay cool. She wasn’t going to pursue it. Hadn’t she said so?