Authors: Chase Novak
And here Arthur comes, his arms open for a comradely embrace, his stout belly pushing at the middle button of his suit jacket, his cuff links winking in the overhead light. He puts his arms around Alex, pats him manfully on the back, and says, “Be well, old friend. We’ll talk in the morning. And please make my apologies to Leslie—but I have to get home. Rhonda and I have tickets to
Phantom of the Opera
tonight. I have zero interest, but Rhonda is young and she wants to see it. She actually thinks it’s an opera.”
“Okay then,” Alex says, suddenly ravenous. He has a vivid vision of steak tartare as he walks his old friend to the door.
Between the arrest, the pending civil suit, and the tone of Leslie’s e-mails and telephone calls, Cynthia feels compelled to leave her life in San Francisco and come to New York to look in on her younger sister. Cynthia is not the worrying kind, but there is no ignoring the tone of her communication with Leslie. After being installed in her own suite of rooms and putting her clothes away in the George III mahogany serpentine front chest, Cynthia wants to take care of Leslie’s increasingly vexing grooming issues.
There is reason to believe that word about Leslie has circulated throughout the dermatologist community in New York, but Cynthia is quite certain that within the vast network of skin-care specialists in the city—Hungarians, Russians, Koreans, licensed and unlicensed—someone will be able to give Leslie at least temporary relief through electrolysis. Leslie’s experience in Slovenia has made her reluctant to see an Eastern European, and as luck would have it, Leslie finds on the Internet a woman named Lu Park who has a skin-care business in a walk-up building four blocks east of Leslie’s house. This time, hoping to avoid a repeat of Leslie’s experience at Dr. Ryan’s—Leslie blamed it on her own embarrassment about her condition, a somewhat flimsy excuse that Cynthia decides not to prod—Cynthia gives Leslie a double dose of Xanax, rendering her rubbery and practically speechless. The hair removal, which takes a full five hours and which Leslie basically sleeps through, proceeds without incident.
It is left to Cynthia to pay Lu Park, a woman in her forties with girlish barrettes in her dark hair and hands that feel as hard as wood. Lu Park asks Cynthia, “She your sister, right?” And when Cynthia says yes, she is, Lu Park shakes her head and says, “Two other women, big pregnant, same problem. Both come here.” She counts the money angrily as she speaks, as if there is not quite enough there to compensate her for her troubles.
The next day, Leslie is still exceptionally groggy from the sedative. Her skin looks red and feels burned and it is an easy decision to give work a miss and stay home with her sister. Over a late breakfast of French coffee and croissants, Leslie, her voice low, her words slurred, finally confides to Cynthia about her visit to Dr. Kis.
“I’ve never been so scared in my whole life,” Leslie says.
“How could you go to such a quack?” Cynthia says while at the same time admiring the pattern on the Spode coffee cup.
“Not such a quack, was he?” Leslie says, patting her distended middle. “We tried everything and everyone, and Dr. Kis is the one who succeeded.”
“Dr. Kis? Honestly his name?”
“We really didn’t even know that much about him, to tell you the truth. But I thank God for him now.” She pats the great hump of her stomach again.
“I remember when we were kids,” Cynthia says. “I was the one who wanted babies and you were always the one who said you would never let that happen. Now look—I’ve got two cocker spaniels and an apartment full of antiques, and the way it looks now, I am never ever going to be a mother. And you! You’re bursting at the seams.”
“When you’re married to someone, you want to please them.”
“He’s married to someone, he’s married to
you,
and I don’t see him pleasing
you.
”
“Go fuck yourself,” Leslie says. The words ring out like gunfire, and in the miserable silence that follows, Cynthia’s face colors and Leslie feels waves of shame and astonishment. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know where that came from. That was nuts.” But even as she says this, the sisters both have a pretty good idea where it came from—the same place Leslie’s sideburns came from, and the same place that launched the attack on ruddy Dr. Ryan. Leslie is in catastrophic hormonal imbalance.
“God, Leslie, I’m the one having her period and you’re the one acting crazy. And by the way, I don’t suppose you have any supplies on hand. I didn’t come fully equipped.”
As if to silence herself and prevent any new outbursts, Leslie fills her mouth with what remains of her croissant. It feels very unfoodlike in her mouth, as if she has taken a bite out of a pillow. To moisten the wad of unsweetened pastry, Leslie takes a large swallow of coffee, and the introduction of the hot liquid causes her to choke. Holding on to the edge of the table, she coughs without restraint, as if she were alone, or not entirely human. She sticks her tongue out and expels food from her mouth—Cynthia is shrinking back now, shielding herself with her pale rose damask napkin—but even ridding herself of the croissant and coffee cannot quell Leslie’s coughing, and before long she has made herself sick, and she vomits up the early bites of her breakfast as well as remains of last night’s dinner, little chunks of chicken floating in a broth of bright yellow bile.
“Leslie!” Cynthia says, as much in admonishment as concern.
Leslie’s eyes are glassy. Her mouth hangs open. She brushes her fingertips across the little mound of sick that quivers on her lovely Spode breakfast plate. And then she places her fingers in her mouth, sucks them dry.
“Leslie, stop! What are you doing?”
Leslie looks as if she is about to answer. Her mouth opens, but no words come out. Just a low moan, an
ahhhh
that rattles in her throat like a pebbles in an empty can. She pushes back from the table, starts to get up, and tumbles hard from her chair onto the floor, where she writhes, moaning, drooling, her eyes wide, frightened, and unseeing.
“Leslie!” Cynthia cries. She kneels beside her sister and tries to soothe her by patting her shoulder, stroking her hair.
Blanca, the housekeeper who works there three mornings a week, comes into the room with a large bowl of fruit and, seeing Leslie on the floor, her legs thrashing, her shoulders hunched, lets out a cry of sympathy and distress. After placing the bowl on the table, Blanca hurries into the kitchen and calls Alex’s office, and after a few delays and misunderstandings, she is at last connected to him.
“Mrs. Leslie is sick,” Blanca says to Alex.
“I’ll be home in minutes,” he says to her. The offices are not far away; most often Alex doesn’t bother with the firm’s car service, and this time he runs the ten blocks between his office and his house. Normally the little jaunt takes ten minutes; today he makes it in three—he cannot recall ever moving so quickly, so effortlessly, not even in the full flush of vibrant youth. He feels as if he is propelled forward by a turbine engine. Other pedestrians step out of his way and turn to watch in astonishment as he speeds past them.
“Where is she?” Alex asks Cynthia as soon as he walks in.
“She’s in bed,” Cynthia says. As Alex goes past her on his way to the bedroom, Cynthia tries to stop him by placing her hand on his arm. “She’s sleeping.”
Alex pauses, looks at Cynthia’s hand on his arm. His nostrils dilate as he detects the faint aroma of her menstruation. The smell; the unexpected, alluring delicacy of her fingers and her painted fingernails; the sound of her breathing; the scent of her scalp; the out-of-balance nervousness of her posture; her eyes—all of it come together to create a sudden and overpowering rush of desire. Never, even as a teenager drunk to the point of lunacy on his own hormones, has Alex felt so helplessly swept into the vortex of lust.
“You’re really a very beautiful woman,” he manages to say.
“Alex, that’s actually sort of creepy.”
He smiles. He agrees with her. Yet he reaches for Cynthia, catches her wrist. He has a vision of entering her, of licking her flesh, of pulling her limb from limb, and the vision is so real and so unsettling that his legs tremble. Yet he maintains his grip on her.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he announces.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, and you better not,” says Cynthia, and in the years to come she will have ample opportunity to wonder if she ought to have said something stronger and put up a more spirited defense when he drew her roughly to him and pressed his lips against her mouth. Yet in the moment, she is severely weakened by not being quite able to believe Alex is serious about all of this—there is something so
clobbered
in his expression—as well as by her desire not to create a scene, and he is able to achieve his kiss, a rank, moist, and unwelcome thing.
“Hey!” Leslie shouts, standing in the archway dividing the morning parlor from the library. She is wrapped in a blanket. Her eyes blaze. “Leave him alone!” she cries, and with that the blanket falls from her, revealing her heavy pregnant middle and expanses of raw reddened skin where the fur has been removed—yet even here little bits of stubble have begun to reappear. Leslie pulls Alex away from her sister and savagely slaps Cynthia in the face with such force that Cynthia ends up on her back.
“Not me!” Cynthia manages to scream. It looks as if Leslie is going to strike again, and in a panic Cynthia rolls away from her. She hits the legs of an end table, and an old China trade vase shakes, totters, and finally topples over, striking Cynthia on one side of her face, cutting her deeply.
“He’s mine!” Leslie says, her voice a metallic growl. She lifts her hand in preparation to bring it down hard, but her gesture is frozen in midair, and she looks to one side, as if she has heard something troublesome. “Oh!” she says, grabbing at her naked crotch.
Five months and three weeks into her pregnancy, Leslie’s water has broken. Clutching her stomach, she climbs off of her sister, and looks beseechingly at Alex, who is now wrapping her in the blanket and leading her out of the room.
“Blanca!” Alex shouts, “
una ambulancia, por favor. ¡Rápido! ¡Ahorita!
The baby is coming!”
He meant to say
babies.
They are expecting two, but in fact there are three, two perfectly formed, a boy and a girl, and the third twisted, deformed, a hideous mixture of bone and gel, a muddle of matter, with something of a mouth in it, something that looks like an eye, a hand. Eastview Hospital has the experience and the technology to deal with premature babies, but some babies are not meant to be, and the doctors and most of the nurses there know how to whisk away the occasional monster that will not live, or should not live, and, above all, should not be seen by the mother. Or the father. Or anyone else. They are horrible genetic mistakes, and the world must be free of them. The lives of those so hideously unfortunate can be snuffed out like a match—it is so simple, and the life it would otherwise have to endure would be so painful and hopeless: the tiny little murder is really an act of charity.
The doctor tending to Leslie is neither Kosloff nor Yost nor any other doctor she has seen at Turtle Bay Obstetrics and Wellness. He is a young, good-looking man—something of the ski instructor in his build, his floppy blond hair—who whistles while he works. For the two of Leslie’s babies who might survive, there are incubators on hand, but once the boy and girl have been cleaned off and their airways cleared of Leslie’s viscosity, it becomes apparent to the obstetrician and the nurse that there has been a miscalculation. The twins, a boy and a girl, are very much alive, with beautiful, shiny heads of hair; they don’t need incubators or any other kind of medical intervention. They need their mother, and the doctor and his nurse swaddle them and hand them over to Leslie, who, despite her exhaustion, is smiling happily, and reaches for them in a gesture of pride and possession as old as life itself.
Each of them has the same birthmark, a little red squiggle on the right hand. Adorable!
The second nurse comes back to the delivery room. Her name is Amelie Gauthier, a French Canadian, about forty years old, scrawny, fiercely religious. She tucks her twinkling gold crucifix under the top buttons of her uniform, and when the doctor gives her a questioning look, she purses her lips and briefly nods, indicating that the inconvenient matter of the third child has been dealt with and that nothing further on the subject needs to be said. The doctor looks at her questioningly again, to make sure that all is understood, and Nurse Gauthier looks away.
F
or a long time, for as long as he can remember, this child has feared the night. What worries him is not that there might be a ghost lurking in the darkness, or a skeleton or a one-eyed icky thing or a zombie or Freddy or Jason or any other kind of Halloween monster. And yet, when the last of the light has disappeared from the sky and he is in his room, his thoughts become increasingly fearful. He thinks of being chased; he thinks of being caught. He hears footsteps coming up the stairs to the third floor, where his room is next to his sister’s, his twin, his best friend, his only friend. He thinks of harm coming to her. He hears voices, he hears barks, he hears squeals. But worst of all is when things go quiet and the silence of that house makes him wonder if all the world outside his door has vanished.
No; that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is when he falls asleep and he dreams of saber-toothed tigers and other flesh-eating animals. Sometimes in his dreams he sees them from a distance. Sometimes they are close by. Sometimes they chase him and he escapes, sometimes they catch him, and sometimes the creatures are right over his bed and in the dream he opens his eyes and looks right in their faces.
No; that isn’t the worst part either. The worst part is that there is no one whom he can tell these things to, and no one to protect him. The worst part is the faces of those creatures are the faces of his parents. The worst part is he knows that in some way he cannot put words to, some way that has yet to fully reveal itself, the dream is true.
“Do you know where that old baby monitor is?” Alex asks Leslie as they share a midnight snack. Naked, they sit in the kitchen, the table lit by a single bulb.
“Why do you need it?” Leslie asks, her voice deep and sensual, fully relaxed from their lovely time in their bed.
“I was thinking of putting it in the cellar,” Alex says.
“Oh no. I don’t think that’s a very good idea. I don’t want to hear what goes on down there.” Her plate is empty now; she wets her finger, dabs it in the juice and the salt.
“No idea?”
“Of?”
“Where that old baby monitor is. I thought it was in one of the closets in the master bedroom.”
“Why would we keep it?” Leslie asks.
“It seems like someone had been poking around in there.”
“I’m sure we threw it away,” Leslie says, reaching across the table and helping herself to a piece of gristle Alex has left on his plate.
Their voices are tinny, scratchy, as they come through the beige plastic grillwork of the old plug-in baby monitor. And he can hear what they say only when they are relatively close to the box he has sneaked into his bedroom. His mother is first to speak.
I’m tired. What about you?
I’m all right.
Are you feeling sexual?
I wasn’t until you asked.
Adam’s hand reaches quickly down and turns off the speaker, which he has set up next to his bed. He knows what is coming next. He has heard it before. Once. And once was enough.
In the morning, Adam slides the baby monitor far under the bed and waits for his door to open.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” his mother says. She is dressed in jeans, a turtleneck sweater; her thick luxuriant hair is pulled back. She looks so happy today. Her lips are dark red; her teeth icy white.
“Good morning.”
“Hi,” Alice, his twin, says. She is already in the hall with their mother, dressed for school.
“Hi, Alice,” Adam says. He pulls the covers back, climbs out of bed. He is a delicate boy, with a bit of prettiness in him. His limbs are long and thin, his hands look as if they might be suitble for coaxing Chopin out of a baby grand. He is a pensive boy. Friendless except for his sister, he takes no pleasure in sports or in any other pastime that calls for more than one person. He likes chess, but his only opponent has been a computer program. Alice won’t play. She is artistic, dreamy, and has no interest in games in which pieces are captured and thrown into a box. He says he wants to be a doctor, and Leslie sometimes thinks that the first person Adam will ever touch will be laid out on an examination table.
Leslie loathes doctors, and her antipathy is shared by her husband, but far be it from either of them to discourage their son. “Whatever you do, we’ll always be proud of you and always love you,” they say to him.
Adam gathers his clothes and sets out for his little private bathroom. He is meticulous in his grooming habits, maybe even a little compulsive. It has crossed Leslie’s mind that Adam might be a little OCD, or be suffering from some underlying condition that makes him unnaturally concerned with cleanliness. But sending him to a shrink, or to anyone else to whom he might open up and reveal his home life, is out of the question, unfortunately.
Just one of the many avenues toward normal life that has a gigantic
DO NOT ENTER
sign strung across the entrance.
Look what I found!
What is it?
Taste it.
I’m not tasting it. Not without you telling.
Oh, big strong man.
Laughter. Much, much laughter.
Come on, you big furry cocky crazy guy, taste it.
If this is cat I’m going to kill you.
It’s not cat.
It looks like cat.
Sniffing noises.
What is this?
I told you it wasn’t cat.
It’s actually quite good.
Duh.
And then—oh, not, not this again—the sound of eating, chewing, tearing, gulping, coughing, hacking, snarling, ravenous, unhinged, mad, mad eating.
Volume down. No, Adam can still hear them. Power off. Monitor under the bed. It occurred to him today that if his father or mother came in and found the baby monitor while he was asleep they might kill him. For real.
“Are we going to get a new dog?” Alice asks her mother the next morning while they wait for Adam to come down for his breakfast.
“I think so, sweetheart,” Leslie says.
“It’s too sad,” Alice says. “I don’t want any more pets.” She has her notebook open in front of her and she draws in it with a number 2 pencil.
The waffles rise from the toaster and Leslie puts them on a plate and brings them to Alice.
“I know, baby, it’s hard to lose a pet. But most of these poor things come from the pound. They were going to put them to sleep anyhow.”
“Ginger didn’t.”
“Ginger came from one of those awful pet shops that I think should be against the law.”
“Then just maybe no more pets for a while,” Alice says. She is long and lean like her brother, but without the alarming delicacy. She is hardier, more emotional but also more confident. She, too, is friendless, but she gives no outward signs of loneliness or even shyness. She is a world unto herself. She wears her thick hair in braids and she loves to run, jump, and climb. When her parents take her to the park to let her burn off some energy, it makes them proud to see her fleetness, her grace and dexterity, though there is always a moment when she dashes out of their sight and they wonder for a few terrible moments if she is ever going to return, if she has perhaps figured things out and decided to make a run for it.
“What are you drawing there, sweetie,” Leslie asks.
She steps behind Alice and looks over her shoulder at the notebook. Alice has made an amazingly lifelike drawing of Gray Guy, a cat that was in their possession a few weeks ago. Gray Guy sits with his square head cocked, his skinny tail wrapped around his ankles. He has a multitude of long whiskers and his eyes are at once mysterious and vacant.
Alice feels that her artwork is private but she cannot resist the desire for her mother’s approval and she looks up at Leslie hopefully.
“That is fucking amazing,” Leslie says, despite her many promises to herself to watch her language around the kids. “May I have it?”
“Sure,” Alice says with a shrug. She tears it out of the spiral notebook, and Leslie puts it on the refrigerator, secured by a magnet shaped like a hamburger.
At that moment, Adam walks in, scowling.
“When can we stop being locked in our rooms at night?” he asks, an unfamiliar edge in his voice. He is usually such a good boy.…
If walls could talk. The old Twisden house had been slipping into delinquency and disrepair for quite some time, but now the slippage has become more of a headlong plunge. Leaks, cracks, drafts, and all kinds of mechanical malfunctions go unrepaired. Furniture is torn, stained, broken—and much of what has survived has been brought to auction. Likewise the once prized paintings of the various Twisden ancestors—the ministers and sea captains and industrialists and surgeons and puffed-up arbiters of New York social life that had been for years peering down at the twins from their gold-leaf frames—have disappeared now, one by one, and are presumably hanging in the corridors and drawing rooms of arrivistes, people with the means to bid on the artifacts of someone else’s family history, their own backgrounds being either unsightly or nonexistent. The helpers that once kept the house running so smoothly have similarly disappeared, one by one, until, recently, the last of the domestic employees, a housekeeper, had her employment cut from two days a month to no days a month, and the house immediately fell several quick levels on its way to complete chaos, like an elevator car hanging at a severe tilt from one fraying cord.
Despite the house slowly slipping into a state of ruin, Alex and Leslie keep careful tabs on Adam and Alice. Now that Alex barely shows up at his office and Leslie has not worked in publishing in several years, they both have time, a great deal of time to devote to parenting. One of them normally walks the twins to school each morning and whoever does not have the morning shift is there in the midafternoon, waiting for the kids across the street from Berryman Prep, twelve blocks north of their house. Both Alex and Leslie prefer to wait as far from the school as it’s possible to be while still remaining visible to the twins when they emerge from the castlelike doors of the prestigious and pricey school. They don’t want to socialize with the other parents and the nannies who are also there to collect their charges, don’t want to engage in any idle chitchat, don’t want to swap gossip about the school or the neighborhood or the mayor or global warming or some great new restaurant or the Cy Twombly retrospective at the Met or the latest shake-up at Lincoln Center, and with even greater vehemence they do not want to enter into a stream of sociability that might suddenly bring them to the shores of what to them is the Land of the Worst-Case Scenario—an invitation to a playdate, a birthday, or a dinner party. In fact, they dread invitations the way a criminal might dread a subpoena or a search warrant.
It goes like this: The twins emerge from school at 3:00 p.m., cleaved to each other almost as tightly as they were in the womb. Their eyes are cast down, their gait is labored, as if shyness and a desire not to be noticed are strapped to their backs like rucksacks. Simultaneously, they gaze up, just to make sure that their mother or father awaits them, half hidden by the bulk of a parked car or the shade of a London plane tree. They cross the street and move quickly toward home, stopping for nothing but red lights and traffic. Though the twins are athletic, they must struggle to keep up with their mother, whose stride is long and graceful and who always seems to be two or three steps away from them and whose gaze is constantly shifting, her glance as sudden and sharp as the snap of a finger as dogs walk by on their leashes and squirrels leap from branch to branch. But when Adam and Alice walk with their father, their efforts to keep up with him are futile and they must remind him that they are half his size and hope that he will slow down and allow them to keep up. He looks startled, and for a moment it appears as if he is going to be angry, and then that moment passes and he swoops them up in his arms, both of them, and carries them as if they weighed nothing, nothing at all. His strength is amazing.…
Once they are home, their schedules are as unvarying as the wind-up tune of a music box. They are each given a glass of low-fat milk and a protein bar. They are allowed one hour of television. They are allowed one half hour of video games. They clear places for themselves on the dining table and dedicate themselves to their homework for at least two hours. They play with their father, who likes to roughhouse, which is almost always a great deal of fun but now and then it gets out of control, and one of the twins ends up hit or scratched and must bite back tears. At six thirty, the family watches the news on TV, and at seven, dinner is served. Lately, these evening meals have settled into a pattern of utter sameness—pasta wheels in a sauce of butter and salt for the children, roast beef for the parents.
When they are called to dinner, the twins do not want to be rude or risk hurting their parents’ feelings, but the truth is that the prospect of sitting at the table and watching the adults consume beef so rare that it is more blue than red and swims in a pool of what Alex and Leslie call gravy but that Adam and Alice see as blood is really more disturbing than the prospect of being sent to bed with no dinner at all. But every time, the meal is gotten through. They are served dessert. Homework is checked. A silence settles over the house; the ticking of the grandfather clock is as loud as nails being pounded into the lid of a coffin.
It is November and the darkness comes quickly, as if night is a garrulous old man who cannot wait to tell his terrible story, and with the darkness comes Adam’s and Alice’s bedtime or, at least, their exile.
Adam lies in the darkness of his room with the receiver of the baby monitor resting on his stomach. It rises and falls as he breathes.
Nothing is being transmitted. All he can hear is the whoosh of electricity, like wind blowing through his parents’ bedroom.
Then he hears their footsteps. At first he is startled, thinking they are coming to his room. He pushes the monitor under his covers. But he realizes that what he has heard is their footsteps approaching their own bedroom, and he disentangles the twisted wires of the monitor and places the speaker once more on his stomach.