Audrey’s Door (23 page)

Next to him, Wilson finally spoke. His voice was ragged with fury, and Saraub noticed that his eyes weren’t quite focused. The left pupil lazed farther toward his brow than the right. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that booze eventually gives you brain damage. “That McCaffrey guy should climb up on his cross already. There are winners, and there are losers, and he’s just mad he’s on the wrong side.”

Saraub met Wilson’s bloodshot eyes. “And what are you? A winner, or a loser?”

Wilson didn’t answer for a second or two, because his downhill slide had begun thirty years ago, and his kids and two ex-wives didn’t talk to him, and the apartment he rented in Jersey City was full of roaches, and Saraub was the only person this year to give him a job, and by now, it was pity, because his work was shit. “You don’t know your ass from your elbow. And these white wetback hicks from West Virginia you think it’s your job to protect are a bunch of nobodies,” Wilson said. “Worry about your own backyard. Worry about me.”

Tears of rage filled Saraub’s eyes. “What are you bothering getting up in the morning for, if you really believe that? Don’t you see where this is headed? Pretty soon the country’ll be bankrupt—we won’t be a coun
try. You think the rich’ll be happy about the trade they made when there’s nothing left, and their kids are sick from the factory fumes, because the EPA got disbanded? Nobody wants this, and everybody knows it’s happening, we just don’t know how to stop it. That’s how change happens—people like us, forcing it. We have to try, or else Rome falls. That’s the whole point of being alive. Like this plane, or the Empire State Building—it’s so stupid to build something like that, when chances are, it’ll fall. It’s so stupid to try to fly when your feet work just fine. But we keep doing things like that. We change our cultures, our lives, even our biology because change is how we survive. If we give up all that, just because it’s stupid, we’re not human anymore. We’re animals.

“It’s not about those farmers, or the people in West Virginia, who keep lobbying for more digging, even though they’re dying of emphysema. Or the power companies that burn less efficiently every year because they say they can’t afford to build new plants, even though the hurricanes keep getting worse, and we’re growing tropical mold in Mississippi. It’s about us.”

“You don’t know shit,” Wilson spit.

The plane picked up speed. Wilson’s grin twisted into a thin line. He crushed the can and burped again.

“You’re killing yourself, and I don’t like you enough to watch,” Saraub said. The words surprised him, but he was glad. It was a relief to finally say it.

“So point your pretty little eyes someplace else,” Wilson whispered. He lifted his crushed beer, then remembered it was empty. So he put it in the seat pocket in front of him. A nickel tip for the stewardess. Surely she’d be grateful.

Saraub realized then that he should have fired Wilson long ago. He should have confronted Audrey, too. But he’d waited too long, and both situations had gotten out of hand. The plane rolled faster. Next to him, Wilson
closed his eyes and dozed, or pretended to doze. The plane nosed up into the sky. Air bubbled beneath the hull, making him momentarily light, and he marveled at the miracle of the Wright brothers, as unlikely as civilization in the presence of barbarians. The engagement ring in his pocket pressed against his thigh. A hard, cold thing. Out the window, the rainy city of Washington got small. They ascended above the black clouds into more black. He couldn’t see anything, even though it was morning.

Suddenly, the plane jittered. He gripped the seat rest hard. The nose smashed against a hot-air front, and dropped. Fast. The overhead baggage compartments rattled open. Reading lights along the rows went dark, and emergency lights flickered throughout the cabin, an hysterical orange. Stowed things speared down the aisles and rained on heads; a red duffel bag, small suitcases with wheels, a Twisted Sister poster, some moron’s pet parakeet in a tiny cage. It was too frightened to chirp. He reached out to rescue it, but by the time his fingers were in the aisle, it was gone.

The plane kept falling. His skin stretched into a plastic grin like he was on a spinning amusement-park cyclone. One hundred miles an hour? Two hundred? The longer they free-fell, the faster they’d go, and there was no sense jumping without a parachute. The force of acceleration slammed the breath from his lungs. With each passing quarter second—who would have imagined time could pass so excruciatingly—he begged the plane to right itself, but it did not.

The matchbox cars and tiny houses got big again, and the plane dove nose first toward land. His mind spun through images in brief thousandths of seconds that did not register in his conscious state: the time he’d stolen twenty dollars off his dad’s dresser and lied about it. The first girl he’d screwed; a hooker named Vanity that his uncle hired as his high-school graduation present.
Maginot Lines.
If he got out of this, he’d make the best movie he could, and if that didn’t work, he’d make another movie. Because there’s never a good reason to give up what you love when life is this short.

His mind glimpsed still images of all the people in his life. His mother and sisters—who would take care of them? And then, it stopped skipping around, and settled on Audrey Lucas. He realized how lucky he’d been to have found someone to love.

The plane kept falling. Wilson startled awake, and turned to Saraub with an expression of bug-eyed terror. Something warm down below, as Wilson pissed his denim tuxedo. “Wha—” his mouth opened to say as the plane continued to drop.

Wilson’s urine heated the seat, the caged bird tried to fly, and Saraub thought about the note he should have left in Lincoln, just in case what had happened between them on that good night had not been a farewell, but another chance.
Come home,
the note should have read.
You’re the love of my life.

O
ff to work. Hi-Ho!

The hurricane turned day into night. Wind tore through the canyons between buildings and blew Audrey Lucas along the fissure-riddled concrete sidewalks. Leaking rain and packed commuters in merino suits lent an animal scent to the subway. Slowly, people separated from her like they were the sea, and she was Moses. The floor where she stood was red, and she thought the train was a living thing, bleeding and in pain, then realized it was the soles of her own feet, broken by the hula girl. They dried as the car wormed its way downtown, so that by Times Square, she’d stopped bleeding.

At Union Square, the Valium kicked in. The lithium, too. The people around her did not look or come any closer. She felt a little like the wounded chicken, waiting for the rest of the pack to peck her to death.

By the time she got to the office, the jet lag and pills
had hardened her legs like cement. She had to hold the sides of walls as she walked for balance. When she pressed the keypad numbers and opened the door, Bethy jumped out from behind the reception desk and hugged her. “We are SO sad for you!” she said.

The thing in Audrey’s stomach squirmed. It gnawed, chewing her soft tissue with sharp teeth. Pretty Bethy Astor with her rosy cheeks, pencil skirt, and two-thousand-dollar black Prada purse. Bird-brained Bethy, whose untested heart was cold as a stone. She went to charity balls for made-up afflictions like Shaking Leg Syndrome, but she’d never taken a subway, nor given a panhandler change. After a company-wide meeting, she’d announced, “Homeless people should just die instead of wasting everybody’s taxes.” Half her audience had smiled with glee because she’d expressed what they were too sophisticated to say.

A glory tour of Bethy’s most asinine declarations: “Black men are lazy. They like white women better because it raises their social status. Also, we’re SO much prettier” “Women shouldn’t work past thirty, because after that, their eggs rot, and their kids wind up retarded” “Men turn gay when their mothers are too needy” “Jews steal every time you turn your back. They start wars, too. Not in
my
daddy’s golf club. Christians only!”

The worst part, Bethy wasn’t capable of independent thought, which meant she was parroting somebody else. Her parents, or her private-school teachers, or her buddies eating half portabella sandwiches and finely chopped salads after a couple of sets of tennis at the Westchester Country Club, or the dipshit executives here at Vesuvius, who smiled in your country-bumpkin face, like you and your Indian boyfriend were the lone exceptions to their contempt for everything that was different.

Bethy let go and noticed Audrey’s oversized sweat
suit and glasses. “What an interesting new look,” she said. “Did you sew that yourself?”

“No, I didn’t,” Audrey answered. She imagined poking Bethy’s eyes out. The juice would run down her face. Not so pretty then, sweetheart. Daddy’ll have to buy some Venetian glass, Sandy Duncan style. Then she blinked and tried to chase the image away. Big brown eyes, and Audrey’s thumbs, digging in deep. As easy as making a fist. The sound would be a quick, meaty pop. Fluid would splatter while she screamed. The image subsided like drying tears, and she wondered numbly what mean, petty thing had crawled inside her, sowing poison.

“Do you need anything?” Bethy asked.

“How about a raise? Think you can swing that from your trust fund, Bethy? Because I could use a dentist,” she said. Bethy squinted in confusion like she had ice-cream brain freeze, and Audrey walked on.

At her desk, she found a bouquet of white lilies. A couple of the smaller buds were still closed, but two had opened to full bloom. Someone had cut the stems on a diagonal to keep them fresh, then placed them in a square, water-filled crystal vase. She’d never been given flowers before, nor owned a piece of crystal. It was heavier than she’d expected. The note attached read: “Sorry, kiddo. Chin up.—Jill.” Next to the lilies were two cards. One, a picture of a poodle without caption from the head of human resources. The inside read:

The second note was a Hallmark sympathy card. The outside was carnations, and in black letters the inside read: “Sorry for your loss.” Every member of the 59
^th
Street team had signed it.

She sat in her chair with an exhausted
thrump.
Could
feel her pulse moving slowly, like the blood inside her was clotting. Remembered vaguely what she’d done to Jayne’s lamp and her clothes. Was frightened by it. Could see that she’d become unhinged. But more than all that, she was angry.

She opened the drawer, took out a .05 width pen. Line by line, over and over she crossed out every signature on the card. Hungover Craig, who spent five hours every night at The Dead Poet on the Upper West Side, drinking his weight in whiskey, then farting noxious tear gas all day at his cube. Sniveling Jim and his excuses, who bragged about the original Lichtenstein
Girl in Bath
hanging in his Park Avenue apartment, like becoming a member of the downwardly mobile, useless class was a badge of honor. Jealous Simon. His designs were more soulless than a Gropius, and if not for his dad, he’d be working for Trump. Louis, Mark, Henry, and David, the incompetent quartet. They talked sports half the morning, went on coffee breaks half the afternoon, then whined about how nobody ever gave them a shot. Sorry, boys, you were right, layoffs are coming early this year.

She scribbled until all that was left was a black card, wet and heavy with ink. Then she pulled down all the things she’d tacked to her cube over the last seven months at Vesuvius. The David Hockney calendar. With her scissors, she clipped it into small pieces that fluttered into the garbage. Next, the
New York Times
article about her award. She folded it on itself before she cut, like making tiny snowflakes. Then the picture of her and Saraub at the Long Beach Boardwalk. After the hot-dog lady snapped the photo, he’d hoisted Audrey over his shoulder and charged toward the ocean as if to throw her in. She lifted her pen, and line by line, crossed out his face. Then her face, too. Then kept going until the gloss was gone, and the black seeped through the paper, an indelible stain.

Her phone rang. Somebody from the 59
^th
Street team, no doubt. Just like Betty had done, they were using her dry. Also like Betty, they wanted more. She imagined grabbing her scissors and snipping the arteries along their necks. Watching the blood gush, the surprise on their entitled faces. She’d get Randolph and Mortimer, too. Slice them up into little pieces, until they were a heaping carnage collecting flies on the office floor. Paint the walls of this entire building red. Then surprise fickle Saraub at his apartment. He’d betrayed her, and now she would separate her love from bone.

The phone kept ringing. She picked it up. Jill’s voice. “Audrey. Could you come by my office?”

Jill, with her phony concern, and her bullshit about not making partner because she was a woman. Maybe she just couldn’t hack it.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Yeah,” Audrey said, then hung up and stood.

Fuck Vesuvius. Fuck the rooftop memorial. Fuck the buildings, and cemeteries, and the plaques, and the lilies and cloying baby’s breath flowers that piled sky-high, and the mourners who exaggerated their grief because they needed to feel alive. Fuck the widows and their whining and the kids without parents, like the dead hadn’t always outnumbered the living. Fuck the holes all over this city, and in her life, too.

She marched, limbs like lead. Her thoughts were all regrets that moved too slowly to register. Valium clotted them like tiny strokes in her brain, so they sparked and died without reaching conclusion: Jayne’s hula girl, her clothes, her mother right now, breathing even though she didn’t want to, and most of all, 14B. It was doing this to her. It had to be.

Those rational thoughts died as the thing in her stomach suckled and grew. She pictured Jill. Arched brows and stink breath—drink a glass of water, lady! Imag
ined tearing her limbs away from her trunk, one by one, then setting what remained on fire. She bristled at the grotesquerie of such a notion, then reassured herself with the knowledge that she wasn’t alone. Surely The Breviary would understand.

Audrey stopped at Jill’s office. She squeezed her hands into fists and pounded the door open. The office was expansive. Ten times the size of Audrey’s cube. At first she didn’t notice Jill standing at the window. All she saw was the view; Ellis Island lit up against Hurricane Erebus, and little matchbox cars on either side of Manhattan’s veinlike highways. She imagined lightning striking the highest point, and setting the whole city on fire. Watching it come crashing down. The dust would be a nuclear winter.

There were tears in her eyes. She felt their coldness on her cheeks. These things she was thinking, she hated them.

“I need to talk to you, Jill,” she said. Her voice was a few decibels louder than normal conversation, but Jill didn’t turn, or even jolt in surprise. Her nose was pressed up against the glass window while down below, rough waves etched white scars in the water.

She hovered in her boss’ doorway, like she’d hovered so many times before, too frightened to speak or call attention to herself, just hoping that after a while, Jill would notice her. She lifted her index fingers beneath Clara’s glasses to wipe the tears away, then wondered:
whose sweat suit am I wearing?

She noticed for the first time that she was holding a pair of scissors. Their sharp twin blades, intended for thick construction paper, were about five inches long. She didn’t remember having carried them from her desk, but here they were in her shaking hands, their points exposed as if ready to stab. She dropped them as she stepped inside Jill’s office.

“I quit,” she said the same moment that the phone
rang and drowned out her words. Jill jumped, but she didn’t answer it or even turn away from the window. It kept ringing, shrill and jarring. It pierced Audrey’s ears and chest and mind. It woke her up, and the slopping thing writhed.

Tears returned. Maybe they’d never left. Her mother in the hospital with iron wings. Saraub gone. He’d abandoned her. This place she lived, The Breviary: it frightened her. She frightened herself.

She kicked the scissors into the nearest corner and tried not to look at them. Then patted her knees, squeezed her hands into fists, bit her lips, imagined the room in its many possible configurations: desk, chair, bookcase, leather couch, two standing lamps, Wallace Neff photos of old Hollywood glamour houses, fancy as Joan Crawford’s palace. In the end, she returned everything to where it now rested and decided how Jill had arranged it was best, and that reassured her. At least someone around here was good at their job.

The phone stopped ringing. Audrey cleared her throat and considered turning tail. Running out of the office, and the building, all the way home to The Breviary.

Jill turned, then jumped. “Audrey,” she said. “How long have you been standing there?”

Instead of her usual brown pantsuit, Jill was wearing jeans and a The Who concert T-shirt. The band’s logo, the Union Jack, was emblazoned across her chest, and above it in messy red pen, someone had written,
The Kids are Alright.
Beneath the flag, four names were etched in different-colored marker and handwriting, as if added over years:
Clemson, Markus, Xavier, Julian.

“I just got here,” Audrey said. “I need to talk to you.”

Jill gripped the side of her desk and slouched so deeply that she folded upon herself. Audrey surfaced from her own grief long enough to feel sorry for her. She looked exhausted. Then again, you reap what you sow: Who the hell has four kids these days, except an egomaniac?

“I need to talk to you, too. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about your mother,” Jill said. The shirt looked worn, like she’d bought it back in the nineties, when everyone else had been listening to grunge.

Audrey looked out the window. Those scissors. Holy mackerel. What had she been about to do? Kill her boss for sending flowers? “I had to sign the papers to turn off her life support. But I couldn’t do it. She’s still out there, in Nebraska. Trapped in that bed. My fiancé left me, too. I think I was going to tell him I wanted to get back together, but he left me in a deadbeat motel in Lincoln, Nebraska, before I had the chance.”

Jill blinked. Her face was pale. Audrey noticed for the first time that the items on her desk were organized in ninety-degree angles. Not a single pen askew. “He left you in a motel?” she asked.

“Yeah. The night after I had my first orgasm, too. I didn’t know they were real, did you?” she blurted this, heard herself, turned red, and lowered her head. But the talking felt good. Less like she was the member of a different species, viewing humans through glass.

Jill wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her eyes got wide. Then something unexpected happened. She laughed. The sound was a quick hiccup. “You never talked about that with anyone?”

Audrey shook her head. The scissors in the corner shone like an accusation, and before she had the time to think about it, she picked them up, and shoved them under a pile of drafts on Jill’s desk, so she didn’t have to look at them anymore. Jill noted this, but didn’t comment. “I don’t get out much,” Audrey said.

“You’re an island,” Jill answered.

“I don’t want to be. I’m trying.”

“You don’t have to be.”

Audrey sniffled. “Sure. I know.” If she looked at Jill sidelong, she didn’t think the terrible thoughts. The scissors didn’t fly up from under the pile and snip.

“Well, like I said, kiddo. Chin up,” Jill said. “I didn’t know you wore glasses.”

Audrey adjusted the black frames on the bridge of her nose. “My mother’s. She was an opera singer.”

Jill nodded. Then she made a strange sound, like a squeaking animal was trapped in her throat. She looked away fast, but not before Audrey saw her ruined expression. Pruned face, knit brows, tight grin just about to crack. Her pain was so deep that it radiated from her in waves.