Chapter 1 Two weeks before the key is found
Pulling drinks at Starbucks isn't anyone's dream, but after seven weeks sleeping on a kind-of friend's couch, looking for jobs all over the city under creepy, edgy managers and guys who interview you in shorts, it can feel like a rope. Save up and you can pay for the doctor, and they pay for dental cleanings.
It messes up your feet. They give you these short little shifts, if they've got enough people working, but still after four hours the little drips from the steam nozzles get down through the vents in your shoes and the skin swells and gets soft.
There's this guy working there, his name's dean. He's got no plans for college and I figure he's 19 at the oldest, but he's got this thick, fine hair and these big white teeth. It's unfortunate, thinking about a guy you'd like to have sucking your toes while you know that your feet at this moment are covered in skin like the inside of tangarine peels.
The rule is that your not supposed to keep a cell phone in your pocket at work. I guess most of the people here just graduated from high school, and people like that tend to have a lot friends around their hometown. I guess, from the scene right outside the door when they get off shift, the teenage girls I work with get hundreds of messages a day and their phone would be ringing all the time after twelve. But once in a while Anton calls me at work about picking me up, or maybe Erin calls on a friday to see if I want to play squash on Saturday, and that's about it. My boss, or supervisor, or whatever, lets me keep my phone while I'm on shift. I don't know if the fact that she's two years younger than me and that supervisors are allowed to keep their phones has any weight, but I get to keep my phone.
That meant there were no tearful voicemails, no guilt about not checking my messages sooner, no timezoned waiting till next morning to return my dad's wife's call.
No, I got the call with water dripping on my feet, and some solicitous asshole wearing a fleece vest smiling over the pastry case at me preparing his lame flirtatious comment while his wife gets their two kids settled.
Anton was the first person I called, but Saul was the first one to show up. I don't blame Anton, or I didn't then, for failing to climb down out of his bucket truck to answer the cell phone in the cab, or abandoning his post out on the lines as soon as he got the message, but Saul answered emails for a living so he was less concerned about ditching out at a moments notice.
I was in that ugly ugly apartment, the one we had together, with him in the second bedroom, carpetting everywhere that we were sure they had never pulled up but just added another layer every few years. The floor felt soupy in every room but the kitchen where the vynil was scared and pitted and the pits filled with blackened grease no matter how you scrub.
Dark grease or no the kitchen has always been the most comfortable room in any house I've been in so that's where was, having an out-of-character smoke when Saul ran up the stairs.
"Oh man," he said, "oh man,"and rushed me, half stooping, his arms outstretched like he was rushing a pass.
I let him hold me, then. his touch was light and didn't press on any part of me. I liked it, liked that he didn't talk or say he was sorry, or whatever. The trouble with a dog would have been that it didn't understand. I let him hold me until my eye couldn't stop following a fruit fly in the sunbeam from the kitchen's lone window.
Pipe tobacco has a way of going out if you're not puffing away at it, the little cherry bowl in my left seemed to be petering out, I slipped back and put it back in my mouth.
"What do you want?" he said, grabbing both my forearms, still crunched down on the floor to face me while I sat in the chair.
It's the purest thing, a question like that. It wasn't the ideal moment for wish fulfullment, but it was the best thing that anyone could have said.
"Could you light this again for me?"
I hadn't wanted anything, really, it's just…this weakness of mine. I get anxious when I'm alone, sometimes, panicky, which is probably why I'm living with Saul in the first place, come to think of it. He hardly gives me a minute to myself. Which is how I like it. Saul's not loud or annoying, well, not usually. He's just this constant presence, drinking Pabst and smoking cigarettes and noodling around on the guitar. He plays well. He sings out of tune, but it's pleasant enough, in a Bob Dylany sort of way. Mostly he's background noise to me, and I try not to think about why he would possibly while away the hours with me, when he could be out there living, playing gigs, meeting girls. Actually I know why he spends so much time with me, and it makes me feel guilty, which I don't like, so I try not to think about it at all. Poor Saul. I wish Anton would try a little harder to make him feel included. But I shouldn't blame Anton. If anybody's inconsiderate, it's me, and if anything's wrong here, it's my fault. I just hate to be alone.
That wasn't the only reason I called him, of course. I did have an excuse. I'd have preferred it to have been Anton.
"She's crying again," I told him, feeling lame as I said it. I expected him to scowl at me, but his only expression was one of furrowed concern.
"Look, we can't keep doing this. I think I should talk to the landlord."
"And get them thrown out? That would hardly be a solution!"
"It would stop this. This is a problem. You can't even be comfortable in your own house!"
"And what about her problems?"
He walked across the room, which only took him a couple of steps. He fished out a pack of smokes, tapped one out (I have never understood why he does that) placed it loosely between his lips, and lit it. As he inhaled, he squinted out of the dingy window. He ran a hair through his hair, which was not brown, not blonde, and already greying. It fell back immediately into a heavy shelf, shiny with grease. Saul's hair was impossible. He never had taken much stock in appearances, and I had long ago given up trying to convince him of the social benefits good grooming had to offer. Shit, I was one to talk, anyway. The only body hair I really concerned myself with was that on my eyebrows, and about this, I was obsessive. I mused on this, sucking on my pipe. I often look as if I'm pondering the universes' riddles when I am in fact concerned soley with the mundane.
He sighed. I snapped back to attention.
"Does the crying bother you?"
"It bothers me." This was true. I found it impossible to do anything when I heard it. And I heard it all too frequently. Lately, it felt like any time I was alone in the apartment, it would begin, a dull wail followed by choking sobs. Sometimes they were muffled, sometimes not. Sometimes I would wake to it, and the sound would fill me with such dread that I would wonder, for the thousandth time, if the author of such profound grief could be human.
I used to think it was a child, until one rainy afternoon when I was carrying groceries up the narrow, putrid hallway, trying unsuccessfully not to touch the walls, as I was convinced that they would give me a disease. What was I afraid of catching? Poverty? Despair? Whatever it was, I was completely resigned to it now, and neither walls nor carpet nor kitchen bothered me. Or, they continued to bother me, but I had successfully squelched most feelings of fear and revulsion. I wasn't ahppy with it, but I'd accepted it. There's a lot to be said for acceptance. It makes everything easier, when you lead a miserable existence. I saw her in the stairwell. She wasn't shouting then, or pleading, as I'd heard her so often through the walls. She was just standing there, in the doorway, crying, and wearing a nightgown. Her face was unmade and her hair uncombed, and I felt somehow that it was obscene, so I turned away and continued up the stairs. A man brushed past me on his way down, so average I barely remember him. He was wearing blue jeans and a brown leather jacket, neither particularly new, and he was of average height, definitely under six feet, probably brown, thinning hair, probably medium build. I say probably because I am guessing, because I wasn't paying much attention. I didn't realize until I got into the apartment and put the grocery bag on the counter that she was crying for him, that the unassuming man on the stairwell was the reason I was up so many nights. He hadn't looked like anything. I couldntve picked him out of a lineup.
I wished I'd known in that moment in the stairwell, wish I'd looked closer, into his face, into his eyes. If I had, I would have something to picture all of those late nights, something besides her face, raw, pathetic, and streaked with tears.
"We could call the cops," Saul was saying.
I shook my head.
"They won't do anything unless she stands up for herself, and I don't think that's very likely."
"Well, what do you want to do? Find a new apartment?" He said this out of frustration, I knew, but it wasn't a real question. Neither of us could afford anything more that what we were paying for already, not unless it we got something even further out, in an even rougher neighborhood. My busride was already an hour. No way.
"I don't know," I admitted, "I don't have a solution. It's just driving me nuts."
He looked at me with frustration, but his expression immediately melted into sympathy when he saw the tears in my eyes. He hugged me again, a bit closer this time, and again, I allowed myself to enjoy it.
"Don't worry," he told me, "we'll think of something." His phone rang, and, with a sigh, he pulled away. He has a habit of screening his calls, so that I could read the name before he answered it, even if it was upside down.
"Anton," he said, sounding a bit more cheerful than I guessed he was, "hello."
