Rock, Paper, Scissors Read online

  The last time he saw the apartment was many years ago. It’s in a narrow, indistinct redbrick structure squeezed between two taller buildings, the tallest of which is now apparently equipped with balconies. Small trees have been newly planted on each side of the street. A woman carrying a child strapped to her chest leaves the playground across the way. The playground is also new. A fire station used to be there. He remembers the constant howling of the sirens when he was very little. Then it’d been razed, leaving an empty space where local kids hung out in great, squealing flocks, and where he and his friends built a fort made of boards (and one summer, in this fort, they’d smoked their first cigarettes, which they took turns stealing from their fathers). But the building looks the same. The windows haven’t been replaced. There’s no intercom. Even the door with its chipped blue paint is the same. Thomas shoves it open with his foot and steps into the stairwell. A steep stairwell adorned with something that was once a wine-red runner—now so filthy it’s nearly black. The wood creaks under him, the timer light clicks off. He locates the light switch and continues up to the fourth floor accompanied by the ticking of the timer light. As children, he and Jenny couldn’t reach the switch, so they had to feel their way forward in the darkness. He puts his hand on the railing. The hand recognizes each turn, each crack, each unevenness. The pungent odor of rot and mothballs is so familiar that he doesn’t even notice it at first. But suddenly it nauseates him. His father’s apartment door is open.

  Jenny’s sitting in the dark on the edge of their father’s unmade bed, staring at the wall. The curtains are closed. The floor is strewn with papers, clothes, overturned lamps, and shards of glass. The air is thick with dust. A dresser has been knocked over, and the arm of a shirt sticks out from one of its drawers. Thomas enters the living room. There’s more light here. The television is missing, and so is their father’s record collection. The coffee table is also gone, as well as the silverware—the hutch is open. A dish with a flower motif, which belonged to their grandmother, has fallen to the floor and cracked down the middle. An apple core lies beside it. He goes back to the hallway and closes the front door. The nasty odor of decay wafts from the little kitchen. The apartment has been empty for probably a month and a half. Jenny stopped by only once after their father was arrested, to water the plants. But someone else has clearly been here. Thomas goes to Jenny in the bedroom. She’s still sitting on the bed, now with their father’s pillow in her lap. He squats before her. “Come. Stand up. I’m taking you home.” “Someone broke the lock,” she whispers, running the back of her hand across her mouth.

  “It doesn’t matter, Jenny. Stand up.” He takes hold of her hand and tugs on it. But Jenny won’t stand.

  “What have they taken?” she asks.

  “I have no idea. There’s nothing here.”

  “The coffee table and the television,” Jenny whispers.

  He clutches her arms and hoists her forcefully to her feet. “We’re going now. C’mon.” She sniffles. Leans heavily against him. He wraps his arms around her, embraces her. She smells of warm, spicy perfume and nervous sweat.

  “Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s over. He’s dead, it’s all over. We don’t need to worry about anything.”

  “Oh,” she moans, “oh, oh, oh. I’m so tired. I’m so tired.” Thomas guides Jenny through the living room, where several wilted cacti with long, gnarled limbs are collecting dust on the windowsill. Now he notices an armchair lying on its side. It’s been slashed, and he can see the gray lining inside. In the stacks of paper on the floor is a photograph of their mother. “The toaster,” Jenny says, tottering out to the hallway. He picks up the photograph and puts it in his pocket. Jenny’s already in the kitchen. He follows her. A swarm of tiny flies buzz lethargically in the sink. The smell is unbearable. Something indefinable and gelatinous has formed a green stain on the kitchen table. Jenny braces the toaster under her arm and gets to her feet. She stares at the floor as though turned to stone. Thomas shakes his head. “No. Don’t do that. C’mon,” he says, brusquely. “You’re coming with me.” And she actually follows him, but when they reach the hallway, she pauses again and slides her hand along the dark brown wall. “See,” she says. “Here it is.” She takes his hand and guides it across the cracked paint, and he can feel the inscription that Jenny etched into the wall the evening he’d gone to the emergency room. Thomas is stupid. She laughs suddenly and loudly. Then she slides to the floor with a thump and begins to sob. He doesn’t have the energy to console her. He leaves her there and returns to the bedroom, where the smell is less offensive. He rights the overturned dresser and opens the drawer, the one with the shirtsleeve poking out. Inside he finds their father’s threadbare sweaters, his socks bundled in pairs, and a few pairs of underwear. The air is thick with dust and stale, stuffy heat, combined with the stink from the kitchen, sour and abominable. He checks the other bedroom, still furnished with bunk beds plastered in stickers, the ones they’d slept in as kids and also when they were older, when he was much too tall to sleep in it and had to curl into a fetal position. Standing stock-still, he regards the fading green wallpaper and its minute white vines. All the sleepless nights he laid waiting for their father to come home. Jenny’s uneasy sleep, her getting up and pawing around on the floor looking for her pacifier whenever she’d dropped it. Her whimpering. And then the relief he felt when he finally heard the key in the door, and Jacques’s heavy footfalls crossing the wooden floorboards, on the way to the kitchen for a beer. This was followed by the smell of cigarette smoke billowing through the apartment. He can almost smell it now, can almost hear their father rummaging in the living room. Then he’s overcome with dizziness. He staggers across the room and parks himself on the lower bunk, dropping his head between his knees. “What are you doing?” Jenny stands in the doorway, her raised eyes moist with tears. After a moment she sits beside him. The thin, stained mattress slumps under her weight. She begins to hum. Then she says, “Look, my little goldheart!” She sounds like a five year old. She runs her index finger over the sticker. “And the angel and the purple smiley face Aunt Kristin gave me . . .” Something seems to move at the outer edge of his vision, but when he turns his head there’s nothing. He stands. “Let’s go,” he says, panic-stricken, grabbing Jenny and towing her along, but she won’t come with him, she wants to return to the bunk bed. She says, “Stop it, Thomas,” and goes limp, holding onto first the bedpost and then the doorjamb. But he tugs, pulling her all the way into the hallway. Just as she’s about to stumble over the doorstep, he punches the door and kicks it. “Fucking hell,” he shouts, “Fucking piece of fucking shit!” He kicks at the door again. “Piece of shit!” Kicking harder, the wood snapping. He yells, “I hate this shitassfucking place!” He’s hot now, he wants to set fire to the entire building, he wants to choke the life out of Jenny; he kicks the door again, buckling the frame, anger thundering through him.

  “Thomas,” Jenny whispers.

  “FUCK!” Thomas roars. The neighbor’s door opens and an old woman sticks her head out. “I’m calling the police!” she cries in a shrill, thin voice. Jenny steps toward her. “But it’s just us, Mrs. Krantz. Thomas and Jenny, Jacques’s children, you remember us, don’t you?” Thomas balls his fists and breathes heavily, clenching his teeth. Mrs. Krantz hesitates.

  “You scared me.”

  “Jacques is dead,” Jenny says.

  “Jacques is dead? Jacques O’Mally?”

  Thomas starts down the stairs. He hears Jenny speaking in a low voice, suddenly clear and normal, almost ingratiating. “Mrs. Krantz, have you heard any strange sounds coming from the apartment recently? It looks like it’s been burgled. Have you heard anything suspicious?”

  “Burglars?” Mrs. Krantz stutters nervously. Jenny continues, “Yes, it’s awful. Have you heard anything? Can you remember seeing or hearing anything?” Thomas can’t stand Jenny constantly repeating herself. Mrs. Krantz, he notices, has come all the way out into the hal
lway. She’s wearing a hairnet over her wispy, curly hair.

  “Have you heard anything coming from my father’s apartment?”

  “I don’t hear so well,” Mrs. Krantz says, tugging on her long earlobes. “Everything gets worse over time, everything, everything. It’s hopeless . . .” She squints and points down the stairs at Thomas. “Is that your brother? I remember him.”

  “But you haven’t heard anything?”

  Mrs. Krantz shakes her head. Thomas’s legs itch. If Jenny says “have you heard anything” one more time he’ll scream. Then he’ll murder her.

  “We need to go right now, we have things to do,” he says curtly. “C’mon, Jenny.”

  “It was so nice to see you again,” Jenny says, offering her hand to the old woman.

  At last Jenny totters down the stairs, the toaster under her arm. Mrs. Krantz waves her bony gray hand, and Jenny waves back. Thomas is already outside in the sunlight, his cigarette lit. His pulse gallops. A thin layer of cold sweat covers his back and belly. Instantly he’s drained. The sun hammers down through a blue sky, blinding them; they sit side by side on the stoop, overwhelmed by discouragement and exhaustion. Jenny steals the cigarette from Thomas and takes a deep drag. “You don’t smoke,” he says, grabbing it back. “Can you believe Mrs. Krantz is still alive?” Jenny says. “She was such a loathsome bitch, a mean, nasty, wicked bitch. Remember that time she claimed we’d tortured her ugly mutt?” Thomas nods, but Jenny continues, agitated. “Just because we were friendly enough to walk the dog when she was sick!”

  “I remember, Jenny.”

  “Remember how he beat us that night? And now here she is, being all nice to us. The loathsome bitch! I should have punched that pig right in her face.” Thomas looks at Jenny. She looks angry. Then comes a faint smile and a moment’s life in her green eyes. He smiles tiredly. She squeezes his arm. A bus drives past, spraying them with dirty gutter water, but they remain seated. The afternoon sun is getting lower. For some time, they are quiet. School’s out and kids are scurrying cheerfully down the street. The boys tease the girls, the girls tease the boys. Bodies hopping and dancing and running and jabbing and slapping and pinching and gesticulating. A red-haired girl leaps onto the back of a skinny boy. Thomas suddenly feels rinsed and cleansed by the loud and happy cries of laughter from the herd. Then he remembers they’re not allowed to be here. They don’t have access to the estate. When he stands, his left foot’s asleep and his knees are stiff. Only now does he notice how cold the air is. “Don’t tell anyone we were here,” he says, squeezing Jenny’s arm.

  He walks with Jenny to the station and takes the bus back to the store. It’s almost completely dark now. Maloney’s done with the accounting. The shipment arrived today after all, and now it’s in place. The chandelier’s yellow light makes the store seem smaller and cozier. Annie’s on her knees sorting something in a cabinet, Peter’s leaning against the ladder blowing an enormous bubble with his chewing gum, then it pops in his face. He seems more stooped than usual. Thomas drops into a chair in the office, sighing. “Have a pastry,” Maloney says. He’s sitting with his legs propped up on the table and riffling through a catalog. He pushes a plate filled with cream cakes toward Thomas. Thomas pokes at a strawberry with his teaspoon, then sets the spoon down. “Someone was in the apartment. Everything was ransacked.”

  Maloney peers up from his catalog. “Junkies?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe it was a while ago.”

  “But it looked recent.”

  “How could you tell?” Maloney sets his feet on the floor and inches closer. His gut bumps against the edge of the table.

  “There was an apple core on the floor. It wasn’t dried up, it was fresh. Only a tiny bit of brown.”

  Maloney leans all the way back in the boss’s chair: one long, fluid motion. “You sound like an amateur detective. Some kid could’ve tossed an apple core there, especially in that neighborhood. Don’t you think you should close the book on your father’s story?” A strip of Maloney’s stomach is visible between the elastic of his pants and his shirt, which has slid up.

  “He never did a goddamn thing for you while he was alive, and I’m sure it’ll be the same now that he’s dead. You look like someone who needs a drink. We can ask Annie to lock up.”

  They sit at the bar. The bar wraps around them in a very safe and inviting way. Thomas is on his second martini, while Maloney slurps the last of a piña colada. The girl behind the bar smiles at them under sharply trimmed, bleached bangs, and the music is just their style—as if she knew precisely what they liked. And now they’re acting kind of goofy, unrestrained. Thomas has nearly forgotten about the break-in and Jenny’s naked, frightened face. His glance lingers on the girl’s eyes, which are dolled up in black. Are they blue or gray? Maloney says, “Maybe Peter’s gay.” And Thomas says he thinks Peter’s a virgin. “But the kid’s twenty-two years old, for God’s sake.” And Thomas says, “You can’t talk about anything but sex.” “What about you?” Maloney answers, and then Thomas’s cell phone rings for the third time—he’s ignored it until now; it’s Patricia. “I need to take this,” he says, pushing the door open and stepping onto the sidewalk as he grapples with his cell. Cool wind whips at his face.

  Patricia’s already home, she says, it’s past 8:00, and they’d agreed to have dinner. Did he buy wine? Bread? Chicken? Vegetables? Thomas stabilizes himself against the wall with his left arm. “I’m coming,” he says. “I’m taking a taxi right now. I’ll bring Chinese. And beer. I’m sorry, hon, I lost track of time.”

  “I don’t want Chinese,” Patricia says angrily, “and you sound trashed.”

  Maloney isn’t at all happy that Thomas needs to go, but he doesn’t even stand up when Thomas gathers his things and pays the bill. They say their goodbyes. Maloney calls out, “See you later!” Thomas trudges up and down the street, but there’s no available cab. Through the steamy glass door he can see Maloney seated among a group of younger men and women, whom he’s already begun to entertain with wild gesticulations. Out here it’s cold as hell. Thomas heads toward the wider boulevards, buys beer and cigarettes at a deli. He’s freezing and shivering, and finally a taxi pulls along the curb. It’s a pleasant ride through the city. I love the lights and the darkness, he thinks, lights and darkness, and just like that they’re at the door of his building. It’s all too quiet here, he thinks. And I haven’t bought any dinner, I can’t go home without any dinner. Thoughts like flies and stinging insects: Where are my keys? An apple core, the stench in the kitchen. If she doesn’t want Chinese, I need to go all the way down to the tapas place, it’ll take at least fifteen minutes.

  When he balances through the door with a tall stack of takeout containers resting on the palm of his right hand, he drops his key and is almost dumb enough to bend down and pick it up and thereby drop the containers with all the food, but he manages not to. His head’s buzzing. He licks his lips, a raspy dryness in his mouth. The long hallway is high-ceilinged, painted white. He hears Patricia approaching from the living room in her bare feet. She pauses a few feet away. “Sorry,” he says, forcing himself to smile. “It’s been a strange day.” She tilts her head. The light lands on the left side of her face, the high cheekbone, the ear. “I was wearing a dress, but I took it off.” She tosses her hair back, lifting her chin. “I thought we were going to have a nice evening.”

  With his back he pushes the door shut, then sets the containers on the low table under the mirror.

  “And we will, won’t we?”

  He catches a glimpse of himself, ruddy-faced, bags under his eyes. Then he advances toward her, and reluctantly she falls into his embrace. “You smell like alcohol,” she says into his neck, “and I’m hungry.”

  She’s wearing something that looks like pajamas, but he’s not certain they are pajamas. Silk that hangs loosely from her, no doubt very expensive. Patricia spends a lot of money on clothes. Patricia wants a baby. Patricia’s ambitious, but she wants a bab
y. She crawls onto the sofa and bites into an artichoke heart. She raises her beer to her mouth and drinks. Then, shifting herself, she points at the tapenade. She’d like some of that, too. In the blue armchair Thomas sits arching forward, longing for a cigarette. But then he’d have to go all the way down to the street, and that wouldn’t be the best thing to do right now; it’d be downright rude. He shovels some lettuce into his mouth and bites into a hunk of bread, realizing that he hasn’t eaten anything since lunch. When Patricia’s full, he eats what’s left in the containers, and when he’s emptied the containers, he leans back, lethargic and sleepy. Patricia, apparently no longer angry, asks how his visit to his father’s apartment went. He can’t muster the strength to tell her how it looked, so he tells her about Mrs. Krantz instead, trying to make it sound light and funny. “Her voice sounds like . . . like some screechy kid pissing in a potty.” Where that came from he doesn’t know, but Patricia smiles, her eyes growing friendlier. “Did she sound like the screechy kid or the piss hitting the potty?” she asks. Thomas returns the smile. Staring into each other’s eyes, they are in harmony, everything they have together is in that moment, a fraction of a second. Then Thomas glances away. “I have no interest whatsoever in going to the funeral. I’m considering not going. Why should I go? For whose sake?”

  “For Jenny’s, I guess.”

  He doesn’t answer that.

  “Do you think your aunt and Helena will go?”

  “No. But Jenny’s probably invited them. I can’t deal with Jenny either, for that matter. All of this means nothing to me, I don’t want to be involved.”

  “But Thomas. Isn’t it best that we go, get it over with? At least then you’ll never regret not going.”

  “But I can regret that I went,” he says, standing. The city glimmers in the darkness, under a yellow half-moon. Patricia sighs and collects the containers.