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“New Heaven”

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by Leslie Parry

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Photo by el Buho nº30

 

I was twenty-seven years old and working a dead-end job in the city when I discovered that my grandmother, who’d died young in 1955, had been a nymphomaniac too.

My great-aunt Nancy told me when I was home in New Haven for Christmas. I’d volunteered to pick her up from the train station after lunch. When I arrived, she was standing at the curbside, ankle-deep in the mud-spattered snow, smoking the same fruity, gold-paper cigarettes that had set our guest bed on fire twenty years ago. She was hard to miss: four foot ten, frail and whippet-faced, wearing striped galoshes and an oversized ski jacket with a fluorescent lift tag still on the zipper. From the smell of her, she’d been drinking double martinis since breakfast.

She slammed the car door and knocked ice on the floor mat. The holly sprig in her hair had wilted on the train. She unzipped her jacket and smiled a bright, boozy smile. “Patricia, darling, you’re red!”

“What? No, I’m not.”

“Why are you out of breath?”

“Because I hurried. Sorry I kept you waiting.”

I ran my fingers through my hair and started the engine; I eased the old Pontiac out onto the road. Nancy rolled down the window and lit another cigarette, then said, almost under her breath, “Just like your grandmother!” which alarmed me because my grandmother had been very glamorous and cosmopolitan, and I was sitting there in jeans, no makeup and a camouflage hoodie I’d bought at the army surplus store downtown. Also, the real reason I was late was because I’d made a quick detour to an old friend’s house—Andy Starling, from my twelfth grade English class. All day long I’d had this insatiable craving for New England–style sex, in Andy’s big oak bed with the quilts piled on top of us and his black Lab sleeping on a braided rug by the fire. I’d been thinking about it the whole ride up from the city: knocking on the red door of his house, being greeted by the homey smells of pine needles and pumpkin pie, his little nieces running underfoot in their velvet and plaid and Andy leading me upstairs in his cable-knit sweater, where he would present me with a tumbler of spiced eggnog and a condom that tasted like candy canes. But when I got there, he was still in his sweatpants and grubby college T-shirt, drinking his first cup of coffee and flipping through an L. L. Bean catalog on the kitchen counter. The house was overrun with family, all of whom seemed to be suffering from a cold, and as it turned out, he was sleeping on the couch so his aunt and uncle could take the bed, so we ended up doing it in the garage, up against the old station wagon, where the air stank of gasoline and paint thinner and smears of peanut butter on the rattraps. Afterward I asked about law school and how his fractured arm had healed after the rugby tournament, and by then I was late. I pulled on my jeans and said, as I did every time, to look me up if he was ever in the city, and he said yes, of course, but I knew I wouldn’t see him until Easter. He was practically engaged to some girl at Brown.

“What do you mean, my grandmother?” I asked Nancy.

Nancy flicked the ash from her cigarette. “You know Alice,” she said with a bored wave of her hand, as if my grandmother were a friend of ours from finishing school and had made a foolish decision about a dinner menu. “Alice had needs. I can’t keep count. First it was the boy at the pool, when we were girls. Right up until the last one, that actor. The girl was addicted.” She pinched her eyes. “It was a tonic for her.”

“Atomic? What, like a bomb?”

“No, not a bomb, a balm. It made her feel better.”

“Oh,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

We drove in silence back to the house. I’d known little about Alice. She’d been, at my age, a fledgling concert pianist and a fur model for the Sears Roebuck catalog. When my grandfather had returned from the Aleutian Islands, they’d married and moved to Connecticut and had my father. All I really knew of her were a few artifacts: the Steinway piano, still tuned and polished in our living room; a famous conductor’s baton on the mantelpiece; her photos in the family albums. As a girl I’d studied her sultry pout and firm, stockinged gams. I hated that she’d been pretty, not because I was plain but because somehow in her death she’d been made unreal to me, a shimmery blue figment of an old wartime film. Growing up, I understood that if someone homely died, it was a shame, but if someone beautiful died, it was tragic.

While Aunt Nancy hugged my parents and air-kissed my sister, I stood behind on the porch, kicking a stump of snow. How could she tell about me? No hickeys, no kiss-swollen lips, no scent other than a lingering whiff of my taxed peach deodorant. As she shed her coat, my nephew, Ari, brought over his spider book and explained to her the difference between endoskeletons and exoskeletons.

When I was his age, my parents told me that Alice had died because the pills got to be too much for her, and I’d heard, through after-dinner whispers, that she’d had affairs. For a long time I’d resented her, not just for her sophistication but because no matter how many operas I attended or Edna St. Vincent Millay poems I read during my lunch hour, no matter how many peep-toe pumps I owned or sonatinas I played, I couldn’t understand what she’d done. My dad had just been a little boy napping in pinstripe pajamas and a coonskin cap when, on the afternoon of his fifth birthday party—at the very moment that the Lone-Ranger-for-hire was raising his thumb to the ivy-wrapped doorbell—my grandmother, seated on the edge of her bathtub in a Seconal-induced haze, fired a bullet into her right temporal lobe at the age of thirty-five.

***

We had goose for dinner. It was burned.

I picked at a wing, distracted, listening to Aunt Nancy’s martini glass travel back and forth from the table to her tongue with impressive alacrity. I worried now that everything would be obvious to her, every last tawdry detail, but when I sneaked a glance her way, she was absorbed in lighting her cigarette with a nativity candle.

“Patricia.” My sister Gail turned to me with a tart smile. “How’s that little job of yours?”
“Yes, tell us about it,” said Jonathan, her husband, sniffing uncertainly at his wine. “I hear a lot of famous people started off slaving in the mail room.”

I ground a shred of skin between teeth. Gail thought of herself as downtown and liberal but referred to everything between Manhattan and San Francisco as “flat and poor.” She’d been known to spend a hundred dollars on fingerless cashmere gloves in the dead of winter, show off her collection of cheese labels at parties and gush about writers like Tom Stoppard and David Mamet—even though once I heard her say, “You must see the new one by Mam-ay—it’s brill.” As for Jonathan, he was a weenie. He pronounced my name Pat-ree-see-a and always seemed to have a booger clinging for dear life to a bough of nostril hair.

I loved Ari, though. He was examining the bones on his plate with a science-kit magnifying glass.

“What’s your job, Tricia?” he asked.

“I answer fan mail for a talk-show host,” I said. “A comedian.”

“What’s a comedian?”

“Someone who tells jokes.”

Jonathan cleared his throat disapprovingly. “Actually, Ari, in ancient Greece, komos meant ‘to revel.’ Aristotle believed that comedy evolved from Dionysiac celebrations in the countryside.”

Ari blinked.

Nancy signaled my father for another drink. I did the same.

I saw Gail scowl over a forkful of flaccid green beans. She believed I was going to end up like Nancy, dotty and wasted and alone, the kind of lady who showed up to every MoMA matinee and talked her way through it, who in lieu of a purse carried a shopping bag full of old newspapers and cheese sandwiches. Gail, meanwhile, was destined to be like Alice, cultured and beautiful and mysterious. The whole suicide thing didn’t seem to bother her. Secretly, I suspected she was proud of it; she probably thought it made Alice deep. I imagined her telling the story at one of her cocktail parties, with arch, fabricated gravity, hoping it would impress the guests, leave them curious and jealous. That’s all Gail wanted in life, it seemed: to make other people jealous, even if was only the kind of morbid jealousy that came from hearing about another’s suffering.

While Jonathan continued to prattle, I pushed my chair back from the table and walked upstairs to the bathroom where it had happened. I sat on the edge of the tub. There had to have been a hole, and I wondered who had plastered and smoothed it, who had brushed the broken tile into a pan while my grandfather sat blank-faced in a dark room downstairs. I ran my hands over the grout, searching for a discoloration, a mismatch, a sign. Anything to tell me how it ended, how it hurt, even as I tried to imagine how it ever began.

***

Even though they’d both been blond-headed girls with aquiline noses, Nancy and Alice hadn’t looked alike at all. A childhood crib sickness had left Nancy stunted and bow-legged, as well as partially deaf in one ear, so she was always listing forward during conversations, pushing out her powdery earlobe with two tremulous fingers. While Alice had been a girl about town, playing concerts and dining at supper clubs, Nancy had worked as a typist and part-time swim coach at the Y.

I found her in the guest room down the hall. I sat down in a chair that no one ever sat in and watched as she unpacked her presents and pulled the browning holly from her hair.

“Do you like being here?” I asked. “In this house?”

“Of course I do, Beetle.” Nancy blinked for a moment at the sprig, as if she couldn’t figure out how it had gotten there, then set it gently on the dresser. “Your parents always make it so lovely.”
I looked around the room. It was a lonely room, a forgotten room, full of things nobody wanted but everyone felt too guilty to give away. “You don’t mind having to use . . . that bathroom?”
Nancy cranked open the casement window and lit a cigarette. “It’s also the room I gave you baths in, remember?”

I nodded, but mostly I just remembered her scurrying back and forth the night of the fire, filling her hot water bottle in the sink and then flapping it out over the smoking duvet.

“What’s pecking at you, anyway?” she said.

I wasn’t sure how to talk to her about Alice; I never had before. “When you said the pool,” I began, “and the actor . . . back in the car . . .”

She pushed her ear toward me, nodding. “Yes, he still lives around here. Over in Prospect Courts. Schneider? Schwartz? I can’t remember. The one with the red bandana. I see him around once in a while, but we pretend we don’t recognize each other.”

“But why did she do it in the first place? The men, I mean.”

Nancy took a slow, ruminative drag on her cigarette. “Alice couldn’t express herself very well. With other people. Do you understand?”

I zipped my hoodie against the chill. “But she seemed so popular.”

“She intrigued people,” Nancy conceded, blowing smoke out the window.
“What about you?”

She laughed, then coughed horrendously into the back of her hand. I couldn’t tell if the spit was tinged with wine or with blood. “Oh, Beetle,” she said, wiping her hand on her sweater. “I had better things to be.”

Immediately I heard Gail’s retort in my head, Yeah, drunk! and felt angry at myself for thinking it. Nancy and I were the second daughters, the single daughters, the daughters everyone was polite to but nobody was interested in. I thought of Gail in her Tribeca loft, leafing through samples of bamboo and granite, her feet propped up on a stack of Taschen photography books. Then there was me, on the nights I was too tired to prowl the city and spend money I barely had, coming home to my walk-up in Queens, stopping at the bodega under the subway tracks to buy store-brand tampons and a screw-top bottle of wine. The landlord’s son, Donnie, a nice guy with a flattop and paint-stained sweatshirts who still lived at home, would stop by every few weeks to fix my radiator, and we’d end up doing it on the futon in front of his bewildered dog, Socrates.

“What about you?” Nancy crushed her cigarette into an Altoids tin and fumbled for a fresh one. “Don’t you have a nice young man?”

“I don’t have time to date right now, Aunt Nancy.” Which wasn’t exactly true. At work I mostly forged autographs and scrolled through e-mails from starfuckers and conspiracy theorists. But I loved the rush of passing under the glittering mosaiacs of Rockefeller Center, even if I promptly rode the elevator to the basement. I loved the six o’clock happy hour at the oyster bar down the street, where there was always a crowd of hammered ad men licking lemon juice off their thumbs and talking basketball. Their cheeks were flushed from the winter chill and the martinis and the electric razors they kept in their filing cabinets. I loved their tribal bellowing, the stirring smells of Old Spice and sweat and scotch, the way they loosened their ties and leaned into me so I could feel their hard-ons pressing through their chinos. I loved drinking and flirting and slurping those icy, spicy shellfish; the electric charge of a careless hand on my knee; the rough, heated groping in a taxi back to Gramercy Park. I hadn’t thought anything was really wrong with it, at least until now.

The desire for sex was familiar to me, had been since I was about twelve. All day I’d be thinking about it. Some days I lusted after black-rimmed glasses and Converse sneakers. With those boys I got to be the peacoated college girl in love with Sylvia Plath. Other days it was broad shoulders and Celtic tattoos and the raw, sweet smell of construction sawdust. Then I wanted to be in an apron and seamed stockings, on my hands and knees on the kitchen floor. Other times it was Brooks Brothers tweed and Connecticut lockjaw, pipe smoke and yacht shoes, the trace of oyster juice on strong, pretty hands. Then I was the golden-haired debutante in her triple-tailed stole, smoking a cigarette and drinking a Manhattan, fingers glossily bruised by the rhapsody of the Steinway.

***

“Andy, hi. It’s Tricia.”

“Oh—uh. Hey, there.”

In the background I could hear plates being scraped over the kitchen sink, a kid bashing a sleigh bell against the counter, women’s voices, slurred and chirpy.

“Can you come over?” I whispered.

He sighed. “It’s Christmas Eve.”

“Just say you’ve got to pick something up. Stocking stuffers. Anything.”

His stubble crackled against the mouthpiece. “One sec!” he called, muffled, to someone in the kitchen. A door clicked shut—the pantry door, I guessed—and then I heard him sit down on something heavy and gravelly sounding: a bag of dog food?

“Sarah’s here,” he whispered.

“Santa?”

“No. Sarah. My girlfriend?”

“Oh.” I could hear her laughing in the background, throaty and rich.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“Yes!” I said, too quickly. Then, “No.” I leaned forward and buried my face in my knees. “I don’t know anymore.”

Someone picked up the phone downstairs and started dialing.

“Hello?” Andy said. “Hello, Trish?”

I heard my mom on the other end, punching numbers obliviously while complaining to my dad about the electric meat carver. Quickly I hung up, my palms wet.

She passed me on the stairs afterward, carrying a basket of reindeer towels up to the bathroom. “Who was on the phone?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Wrong number.”

***

After dessert, Ari and I booby-trapped the living room with plastic tarantulas while Gail and Jonathan dressed for a night out. My parents were in the den, wrapping last-minute gifts and watching the Christmas Story marathon on TNT. I could hear them down the hall, laughing in tandem like a couple of stoned teenagers.

Ari ogled the stack of presents beneath the tree. “I like coming to New Heaven,” he announced.

“New Haven.

“My mom says New Heaven is a ghost town, though, and then sometimes I don’t want to go.”

“Don’t worry, buddy, there aren’t any ghosts here.” But even as I said it, I shivered uncertainly. I sat down at the piano and paged through my grandmother’s book of sonatas. Her penmanship was feminine but crabbed and anxious. I thought about the piecemeal memories my dad had shared of her: how sometimes she played in the middle of the night without realizing she’d wake anyone until one of the neighbors phoned up and told her to can it already; how she alphabetized the linen closet and spice cabinet contents and lost her temper when he put red pepper under P instead of R; how she would always let him stay up late when they had guests—usually other musicians—and he’d fall asleep on the window seat in a haze of smoke and argument, to the crackle and swell of record after record, until he heard her pearls clacking softly together as she carried him upstairs in the darkness.

Dad emerged from the den and wandered through the living room, pausing to kiss the top of my head. “Why don’t you play the Clementi? I haven’t heard that in a while.” He sifted through a stack of mail on the table. “Has anyone seen the orange scissors?”

“I can’t play that one!” I snapped. “I don’t know why you always think I can.”

“I remember it from your recital.”

“Apparently you don’t remember how I ate shit halfway through it.”

He found the scissors on the sideboard and pointed them at me. “Hey. Don’t be so fra-jee-lay, okay?”

I scowled. Gail popped her head in. “Hey, P? Jonathan and I are headed out to this thing at the Coleman-Liversways’. You know the Coleman-Liversways, down in Darien? I went to school with Larissa? Anyway, they have this big to-do every Christmas Eve.” She turned and looked at herself in the mirror above the fireplace. Her voice was small. “Do I look okay?”

She was wearing a black-bandage minidress that showed off her legs. I walked over and snapped off the tag, not even wanting to look at the size. Or the price. “A knockout.”

“Thanks,” she said, fluffing out her hair. “God, where’s Jon? I just want to get this thing over with.”

I sat back at the piano. Sometimes I wondered if Gail had ever had an orgasm in her entire life.

Ari sidled up to me and said, “Do you want to play my Gameboy?” He handed me a sheet of wrinkled notebook paper. It had a square and two buttons drawn on it in pencil. I stared for a moment.

“Um, okay. How do I play, again?”

“Push the start key.”

“Oh. Of course.” I tapped my thumbs against the paper, tilting sideways and pulling back like I was driving a racecar. Ari looked over my shoulder, chewing on the leg of his tarantula. “You’re doing really good.”

I nodded, concentrating on the blank, crooked square in front of me. I felt bad for snapping at my father. He didn’t talk much about his childhood—always told me in a comforting way, “Oh, Peanut, that stuff was so long ago, I hardly remember,” and I believed him because nothing could be worse, more unthinkable, than my father’s unhappiness. But then, a few Christmases ago, we had gone to see a performance of the St. Matthew Passion at Sprague Hall—some of his students were in the choir. Mom and I had left after the first hour, but he’d stayed for all three. “Wow,” I’d joked as we made our way through the parking lot, “he must really love those freshmen.”

“No,” my mom had said, opening the door to the station wagon. “That was his mother’s favorite.”

When we got home, I’d gone up to my room and cried.

My father had every excuse to be a fuckup, and yet he’d worked harder than anyone to build a normal life for his family, even in the house where his mother had died. I knew I couldn’t be as good a parent as he’d been to me. After all these years, my parents were happiest when they were doing dumb stuff together: bird-watching, going to the car wash, perfecting their enchilada recipe. There were times I felt guilty that after everything they’d done for me I couldn’t follow their lead. I also felt sad, in a way, because Ari was pretty much the coolest person I knew.

“Tricia . . .”

“Hold on, buddy, I think I’m winning.”

“But Tricia, there’s someone on the porch.”

I stood up and squinted through the curtains. It was Andy, in his old plaid hunting jacket and Red Sox cap, shivering in the snow.

***

We grabbed a drink at an empty bar near campus. Now that Andy was close to me, the panic that I’d felt earlier had distilled to a fine, voluptuous buzz. It was cold out, which made me want the warmth of another body even more. I leaned into him, smelling his wet wool sweater, his coconut chapstick. I put my hand on his thigh and felt the hard clench of his quadriceps through his jeans. My skin prickled with heat.

He pulled away.

“What?” There was a shimmer of tension in the air between us, a weird tweak of nervousness in my stomach. On the ride down, he’d asked about Gail and Ari and my parents, how things were faring for me in Queens, but now he was hunched over his beer, not quite meeting my eyes.

“I think it’s better if you don’t call the house anymore,” he said quietly.

“I’d try your BlackBerry, but it’s never on.” Maybe it had been, though, and he just hadn’t picked up? In any case, I hated waiting.

“That’s not what I mean.” He took a long pull of his beer. “This whole thing is messing with my head. You show up whenever you’re in town, and I like it, I do—I like you—but it’s really not good for me. Especially with Sarah in the picture now.” He blew air up into his soggy curls and stared at the ceiling. “I just feel like a complete asshole, you know?”

“You’re not an asshole,” I said automatically. But inside me, the hot bulb of desire wobbled on its axis, threatening to spin out, break apart. Was I getting dumped? Without even being in a relationship?

I turned to the bartender and ordered another rum and Coke. He was a good-looking, fox-faced thirty-something with a doo-wop pompadour and rolled shirtsleeves that showed off his tattoos. He called me “sweetheart” when I thanked him. Why did that always get me? Something in my body ticked as I sized him up. Townie. Musician. Smoked Lucky Strikes. Daddy issues. Liked to screw to Roy Orbison.

“I want to start thinking about her,” Andy was saying. He didn’t look at me, just talked across the bar as if he were having a conversation with the well vodka. “I’m lucky to have her. She’s driven. And pretty. And she listens to me.”

“Listens to you, like, she’s obedient?”

“No, like when I talk, she really listens. She pays attention to what I have to say.” He gestured meaningfully with his hand, which was trembling, just a little. “I don’t want to jeopardize that.” He paused, then sneaked a glance my way. “You know?”

His eyes, gray-blue under dark, hooded brows, looked so wounded, so young. I couldn’t believe any of this was because of me. This was Andy Starling, after all, who’d helped me with my Shakespeare homework during study hall, who drove me home from the Sutcliffes’ party when I’d had too much wine, who used to come over with Teddy and Vince to play football on Thanksgiving—even got Gail to play after she’d stayed in her room all day with the Smiths cranked up to hide her purging.

Now I pictured me and him, the good-guy lawyer, with a nice house on the Sound and a little boy just like Ari. And I wouldn’t be answering fan mail but doing something real and important. Maybe I needed a new tactic. Maybe I could be that devoted woman who couldn’t get enough of one guy, the kind of woman who would be dancing with her husband to “You’re Still the One” at their diamond anniversary party.

I took a swallow of rum. “Am I not girlfriend material?”

“How would I know?” Andy sucked the foam off his teeth. “We’ve never even gone on a date.”

It was true, although he’d asked me once, a long time ago. But I didn’t want to see a movie and have a polite conversation. I didn’t want to go shopping for furniture or become regulars at a corner café with some blunt, aloof name like Drip or Buzz. I didn’t like the whole theater of it. It felt so transparent, rehearsed, and I could never keep track of what I was supposed to say or not say in order to get what I wanted.

“It’s not like I haven’t tried,” he said. “To get to know you.”

“What do you mean? You’ve known me your whole life!”

“I don’t think so, Trish.” He shook his head. “It’s like there’s something in you that doesn’t want to be known. So why should I even try?”

I couldn’t think of what to say, just mumbled something about having to pee. My feet seemed detached from the rest of my body as I slid from the barstool to the floor. In the bathroom I looked in the mirror and was alarmed to see watery smudges of mascara under my eyes. Was I crying? Over Andy Starling, of all people? Frantically I rubbed the makeup away with the edge of a coarse paper towel. An ache expanded in my throat and behind my eyes. Jesus, I thought. How could I be in a real relationship when I felt like this about a fake one?

I sat down on the beat-up toilet seat and peed dejectedly, my elbows on my knees, black tears on my knuckles; I thought back to all the reckless decisions I’d made. That tattooed girl from cue cards I’d dry-humped in the green room. The intern last year, only nineteen (God, what a creep I was), who took me back to his dorm room after the office holiday party and asked me to give him a hand job while he watched Suspiria. A dude in the parking lot at the Harvard-Yale football game when I was a teenager, who made me call him “Cipher” and kept a handgun on the floor mat of his Falcon. The Hasid with the gorgeous cheekbones who got me stoned in the bathroom of a midnight coach to New Jersey, then fucked me so hard against the wall that we broke a framed poster for Lackawanna County and afterward I had to wash the blood from my hair in the small aluminum sink. I knew I was never going to be the skinniest, the fittest, the best-looking. You could drive yourself crazy with that stuff, when most guys didn’t really mind that much anyway. Sometimes I wondered, though, taking the train home late at night, if the man I’d just slept with had thought I was any good or if he was comparing me to girls he once had really loved.

I blotted my makeup and washed my cheeks with the gritty soap from the dispenser and tried to think of what I could say when I got back out there: talk about Wagner’s Ring Cycle, maybe, or the five-table restaurant in SoHo where the chef hunted and killed his own game. But when I emerged, Andy was already gone.

So I had a few more drinks. Then, at closing time, when the blinds were drawn and floor swept clean, I had sex with the bartender in one of the vinyl booths. Everything was brisk and efficient, the way he unbuckled his belt, unhooked my bra. “Good King Wenceslas” was playing on the radio. I lay back, shivering, even though the room was steamy and smelled like hamburger. I didn’t care anymore. I was that salty roadhouse girl with too much eyeliner and too little skirt, the kind of girl who could hustle at the pool table, who called people “sailor” and “duke” and knew every song on the jukebox by heart.

“Oh, god,” he panted, pounding in rhythm to “on the Feast of Ste-phen.”

“Oh, god, say my name.”

“Wait, what is it again?”

But I didn’t need to ask. It was already over.

A few minutes later, when I walked out into the cold, the bell jangling forlornly behind me, I felt worse, and, because of that, I strangely felt better.

***

I didn’t have money for a cab, and no one at home would be awake to pick me up, so I started walking across the Green to Whitney, bracing myself against the wind coming in off the water. I felt a thin, airless trickle of snot on my lips, a soreness between my legs, a tightness around my eyes where the tears had dried. That was it, I swore to myself. The sweaty rockabilly was the last one. I imagined me and Andy, eating white clam pizza at Pepe’s after a night at the symphony, watching our son thrill over geodes at the Peabody Museum, holiday weekends up in Newport, where we’d swim during the day and watch BBC dramas at night after takeout Chinese and gymnastic sex. Maybe I’d leave Queens and come home here, to the Gothic, autumnal blight of New Haven. Maybe I could make a life for myself here. Yet weaving in the wind up the moonlit hill, under the howl and thrash of the trees, I felt impossibly alone, a ghost lost in a ghost town.

A car slowed down beside me. “Pat-ree-see-a?”

I looked over to see Jonathan leaning out the passenger window of the Range Rover. Gail, in the driver’s seat, barked, “What the hell are you doing? It’s got to be fifteen degrees.”

I almost would rather have walked. But my hands were stiff and numb, my ears burning. I got in the backseat, grateful for the civilized whir of heat and the squeak of tight, toasted leather beneath me. I slammed the door, and they resumed their conversation.

“Could you believe that ring?” Gail snapped on her turn signal. “I really thought she’d marry someone more attractive.”

“He seemed like a nice enough fellow, although he did talk about sports a lot.”

“And now she teaches kindergarten—how perfect. It’s like school only bred us to be hostesses and housewives.”

I knew it was best to tune out Gail’s rants of superiority, especially when we were back home, but I had to interrupt. “What’s wrong with being a teacher?” I asked. “Dad’s a teacher.”

“Dad’s a professor. I’m talking about a woman who has two master’s degrees from Princeton and she’s teaching five-year-olds.” Her chandelier earrings chimed as she shook her head in disgust. “It’s like a cop-out, you know? All that education, all those awards, and these women really just want to breed, so they surround themselves with children.”

Jonathan squeezed the back of her neck.

“Stop it,” she whined.

“Honey, why do you always let them get to you? Not because they wrote ‘Gail the Whale’ in your yearbook?”

“Someone did that?” I asked. “Who? Larissa?”

Gail’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror to meet mine, then drifted back to the road. “Whatever,” she grumbled. “Like you would get it anyway, Prom Queen.”

***

On Christmas morning I woke up with a headache. I rolled over and checked my phone, but there was no message from Andy, no texted apology or missed call. I went downstairs and mixed myself a Bloody Mary, then stood at the kitchen window, listening to “Russian Sailors Dance” on my iPod, with its violent, almost sexual crescendos that made my body hum and my mind disappear into itself. But somewhere around the pizzicato I kept paging back, not wanting it to end, obsessive, panicked, until my mom came in and tapped me on the shoulder and said it was time to open presents. I sat in the living room with everyone else and went through the familiar rituals: the apples in the toes of the stockings, the pink plastic tumblers of champagne. But the whole time I was looking for the blinking red light on my phone, running my thumb over the trackpad, waiting for the sorry validation of a robotic ping. Afterward, while the family scattered to shower and dress before our annual chilaquiles binge, I pulled on my coat and stepped outside.

“Where are you going?” Ari called after me.

“On a treasure hunt.”

“Me, too?”

“No, buddy. You stay home and help Grandpa, okay?” But as I started down the sidewalk, I heard his footsteps behind me, quick and crunching.

“Ari.” I turned, feeling the heat pop in my cheeks. “What are you doing?”

He squatted down and examined some paw prints in the snow with his magnifying glass. “Looking for clues.”

The drinks had made me lightheaded and numb. I closed my eyes against the cold winter sunlight and smelled the woodsmoke piping from chimneys. “Fine. But just till the end of the block, okay?”
He slipped his hand into mine. “I wish you were my mom.”

“Your mom’s cool, though. Well, kind of.”

“I always have a funner time with you, though.”

“Yeah, I hear that a lot.”

We walked to the corner of Canner Street, where I had a good view of Andy’s house. He and Sarah were drinking hot chocolate in the front yard and helping his nieces with their new pink bikes. So here was the girl from Brown who was sleeping in my big oak bed against Andy’s rugby-sculpted shoulders. She wore heeled boots and jeans and a turtleneck sweater. She looked like a hundred other coeds who ate a lot of yogurt and kept biblical to-do lists and got her hair highlighted every three weeks even though she was already blonde.

The pain I felt then was unlike anything I recognized; it floated outside my body and burned in its center, so I seemed both weightless and leaden. I couldn’t even form words; every reflex in me was gone. The world had shrunk down to a single, Chaplinish aperture—the far end of a toy telescope—where Andy stood with his easy, self-effacing smile, those blue and amused eyes, that JFK Junior hair. And I was being forced to watch him steer a little girl on her bike down the salty slope of the driveway, as much as I wanted to look away.

“What are you doing, Aunt Tricia?”

“I don’t know, buddy.” I sighed. “Just looking for clues.”

***

I walked Ari home and continued alone to Prospect Courts, a dreary ranch-style complex with rusted clothesline poles and a cement-slab garden. I tried to remember the name of the actor Nancy had mentioned the night before, the one who’d known my grandmother: Schneider, Schwartz? I stared, dazed, at the row of corrugated tin mailboxes. All I could find was a Mr. Paul Schweiberger, who lived in 2X.
The plaque on his door read, in mock Greek lettering, Come on Inium to My Condominium. A faded pinwheel sprouted from the flower bed and turned arthritically under the drip of icicles. I pushed the buzzer and waited.

“Early bird!” someone crowed on the other side of the door. I heard the drag of a chain and the pop of a lock. The door opened, and a man, probably in his early seventies, leaned into the light. He wore a green gingham shirt with a red tie and a tack in the shape of a treble clef. He dropped his ready smile and blinked at me, perplexed.

“I’m Patricia Winterhalter,” I said and paused. “Alice Winterhalter’s granddaughter?”

His face went very white. “Merry Christmas,” he answered, although he didn’t sound too merry about it.

“I just wanted to talk to you, really quick. I’m sorry, are you on your way somewhere? I know this is weird.”

He cleared his throat and looked around, as if he were confused by his own foyer. “I’m having guests in about fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll take five.”

“Are you drunk, Miss Winterhalter?”

“No,” I said, wondering if I smelled like Bloody Mary mix or if my hair was still matted and sticky from the vinyl booth at the bar.

He hesitated, then nodded, pulling open the door and gesturing for me to come inside. I scraped my boots on the mat and stepped into the woolly, dust-smelling warmth. His apartment was narrow and cabin-like, with hickory panels and harvest-gold carpeting and a parakeet in a bell cage by the window. A single bowl of cashews waited on the coffee table. All around I saw pictures of him on stage, in costume. He’d been both delicate and virile, like Laurence Olivier, and I had to imagine that my grandmother would have found this thrilling. I took a seat on a springless sofa between two aspidistras, unsure of what I wanted to say.

“Can I get you a refreshment?” he asked.

“That would be great. Thanks, Mr. Schweiberger.”

“It’s Paul.” He went to the credenza and poured two mugs of warm Pepsi. He handed me mine and sat in the opposite chair.

“My aunt said you were . . . close to my grandmother,” I began.

He nodded and crossed his legs, tugging at the crease in his pants. “In a way.”
I took a sip. “You were her lover.”

He laughed: a rich, liquid baritone. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m in theater. Musical theater.”
“Oh.” I set the mug down. “I’m sorry. I thought—”

“She loved men, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure she was trying to convert me. I’m sure she thought she could.”

“But you were friends.”

“Yes, for a few months. And then she . . . well, she died.”

“Was she depressed?”

He seemed surprised by the question. He paused, frowning at the fizz that leaped like fleas from his drink. “She always told me she’d rather feel miserable than feel nothing at all.” He bit his lip. “It’s hard to say. She was very medicated.”

“Did that have something to do with her death?”

“I wish I could tell you.” His lip trembled. “But who can know why she did what she did?” He looked away, out the window, to where the icicles dripped sluggishly from the gutter. “Alice was always looking for something to transform her. I think that’s why we understood each other.”

“I’m sorry.”

He turned back to me, his eyes damp and full. “You have her smile. I’d know that smile anywhere. It’s what made her luminous.”

“I do?” And I smiled again, big and aching and sure; I couldn’t help it. The parakeet climbed its tinny rungs and cheeped.

“And I hear your father’s a professor now, is that right?”

“Anthropology,” I said.

“He was always a good boy, so smart.”

“You knew my dad?”

“I was there when it happened.”

“You mean at the birthday party?”

He sipped his Pepsi and looked out at the ice. “I was the Lone Ranger.”

***

When I got home, my father was stretched out on the sofa, reading the spider book to Ari. “Hi, Peanut,” he said, looking up as I passed.

I sifted through the sheet music by the piano and found the Clementi sonatina. I creased open the pages and pulled up the bench. The first leaping notes, the frolicking arpeggios of the right hand, sounded clumsy, lopsided, while my left hand plunked stiffly through the bass like the legs of a rodeo cowboy. It was awful, a honky-tonk crabwalk, but I kept going, measure by measure, while Dad whispered to Ari and tortillas fried in the kitchen. I smelled the snapping oil, the bubbling beans, the cigarette smoke drifting from an upstairs room.

I thought of what Paul had told me about that day, how he was reaching for the bell when he heard the shot. The door was unlocked. He ran upstairs. “You can’t believe how much there is inside of us,” he said, “and how quickly, how far it will travel. It was everywhere, a whole mess of it. There was even brain on the toothbrush.”

I slowed and turned the corner to the second movement, the andante, the waltz, a moody, feminine interlude before the palsied jitter of the vivace. This was my favorite, mostly because there was one sound, the half note F, that came as a surprise. When I was learning to play it, I often thought it was a mistake, that Clementi hadn’t transcribed it properly or maybe I’d just hit the wrong key. It was a strange, atonal aberration that kept the arrangement from being too pretty, too predictable. Just one bead of grit, and then the mournful, marching swell of those descending dyads, curving down the staff like a cluster of double pearls. As I halted through them, trying to match the rhythms of both hands, Gail came in with wet hair and no makeup, wearing her pajama pants and ratty old Black Flag shirt from high school. She didn’t say anything, just sat next to me on the bench, following along and turning the pages so I didn’t have to stop.

It was Paul who had taken my father out of the house that day. It was Paul who had stayed with him in the backyard, playing cowboy and Indian, until the sheriff and the coroner had come and gone and Alice’s body had been taken away in a bag. Afterward, still in his Lone Ranger costume, he’d wandered back upstairs, not entirely believing what he’d seen. He pushed open the door and saw Nancy there in her party dress, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the stains from the floor.

There was something wrong, something different about the house, he noticed then, but what was it? Through the window he saw a yellow balloon escape and charge, swooning, into the ether. He saw the boy alone at the picnic table, eating a piece of cake in his pinstripe pajamas. And then he recognized it. Silence. It was the first time in the house he’d heard no music playing. There was only the horsehair brush drawing pink circles on the tile, the slosh of water in a bucket, and the sound of the sister’s hands washing the last of a lost mind away.


parry_leslie_2012

Leslie Parry is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Cream City Review, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in Chicago.

 

 


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