Audrey’s Door (14 page)

“Oh shit!” Audrey cried.

“Exactly!” Jayne screamed.

Audrey was laughing so hard that her stomach hurt. “I’m embarrassed for you right now, just thinking about that,” Audrey said. “You just made me vicariously embarrassed.”

“Yeah. I’m embarrassed, too. Good thing it wasn’t
my nose or it could have been a lot worse. I don’t know if I was allergic to the coke or something it was cut with, but I bled for a while. Everybody tells you that can’t happen the first time. But it did happen to someone. It happened to me.”

Audrey flinched. This part wasn’t so funny. “Oh…That sucks.”

“So did his dry-cleaning bill.”

“He deserved it. You were too young. I hope he got E. coli poisoning and wound up in a hospital.”

Jayne snickered. “Fifteen isn’t that young.”

Audrey shook her head. “No Jayne, it’s too young. You were a girl.”

Jayne inspected her wounded knee, basking in Audrey’s concern. Then she clapped her hands together. “What’s your most embarrassing thing?”

Audrey shook her head to both sides, fast. Once, twice, three times, four. “I think I repressed it. I can’t remember.”

Jayne kicked up her good foot. “Come on! Don’t be a sissy. You’ve got one.”

Audrey sighed. Her smile faltered.

“Come on!” Jayne whined.

Audrey looked out the window. The collateral damage to the lit-up buildings on either side of the Parkside Plaza had been repaired after the explosion, but if you looked closely, you could see the difference between the old concrete seams and the new ones. She felt her neck. Smooth, unblemished skin. No one would ever guess she’d once been cut. “Okay. I’ve got something, but I’m not good at stories, like you. It’s not a story. And it’s not funny, either.”

Jayne’s smiled stretched ear to ear at the compliment. “Of course not! I’m a professional. Tell me!”

Audrey’s voice echoed in the apartment, and she had the feeling that something in the walls was listening.
“I was thinking about how young you were, and I remembered, I was pretty young, once, too. You ever go hungry?”

“All the time,” Jayne answered.

Audrey sipped her wine. Absurdly sweet stuff. The sugar alone would induce a hangover. “Yeah. It’s worse when it’s not by choice. It’s not like how they say, you know? You don’t get fuzzy when you’re starving.”

“Really?” Jayne asked.

“First it’s fuzzy, but then things clarify. Everything distills. You ache. Your fingernails hurt. You want calories so bad that even the air tastes like sugar. But it feels good, too. It feels like flying.”

“Like you’re high?” Jayne asked.

“Better, I think. Little instants of better when you’re not trapped in your body like everybody else. You’re free from it, and numb. Things you’d normally be sad about don’t matter. The rest of the time, it hurts. Like there’s this hole in you, that keeps growing…My mom left once, for six weeks. And I was starving like that. It was the worst feeling of my life.”

“Wow,” Jayne said.

Audrey had forgotten about most of this, but now, it all came back. Like a scab reopened, the pain was surprisingly fresh. She felt her throat as she spoke. “My mom is bipolar.” It still hurt to say this, even after all these years.

“I’m sorry,” Jayne said.

“Me, too.” Once again, she’d surprised herself. Her voice sounded bitter. Unkind.

“Anyway, the disease worked in cycles. I came home one day and found her tearing up the kitchen floor with a chef knife she’d stolen from a neighbor. A serious German number, sharp enough to cut through bone. She kept saying she was digging—she thought something bad was down there. In the hole. I remember
being so upset, but mad, too. I liked that double-wide, and we got kicked out for what she’d done. And I kept thinking, you know? Maybe it would have been better if she’d turned that knife on herself instead.

“She cut me with that knife. On purpose. Not deep or anything. It was more just upsetting. It was the first time she’d ever done anything like that, and she never did it again, either. But afterward, I hated sleeping in the same room with her. I couldn’t trust her anymore.”

She hadn’t thought about this in a long time, and she knew there was more to the story than she remembered. Something about the hole in the floor, and her mother’s ants. Something about her dream.

“It must have scared her when she saw the blood on my neck, because she ran off. Six weeks. That was the longest she was ever gone. I kept expecting her to come back, but she never did. Those asshole neighbors at that park didn’t share. I was so skinny my knees didn’t touch, and they never even offered their leftovers because they didn’t like my mom. She’d done stupid stuff like spray-paint their cars and steal their newspapers, and she slept with a few husbands. They wouldn’t forgive her for it. Really, they wouldn’t forgive her for being crazy. They were scared it might be contagious. Like one of those sick houses during the Black Plague in Europe. They nailed human skulls to their doors, so people knew not to come knocking. Everyplace we ever lived felt marked like that. Like a sick house.”

She leaned back, suddenly ashamed that she’d started this story. It was a real downer. Not remotely funny. “I stopped going to school—I’d enrolled that semester, passed into my junior year even though I’d missed tenth grade. I started working full-time instead. I told myself it was the freedom, but looking back, I think I was just ashamed. She’d abandoned me. Most kids, their parents care enough to teach them things, and show up.”

“So what happened?” Jayne asked.

“She came back. I still don’t know why I took her back after all the things she’d done. I’d moved by then, and the new place was pretty bad, but we didn’t stay long. We found another town. Except for when I ran away to college at U of N and she couldn’t find me, I took care of her for twelve more years after that…I should have left,” Audrey said, shocked by the words as she spoke them, and by her tears, too. She’d thought she’d outgrown self-pity. “I should have let her die. I’d have been better off.”

Jayne didn’t say anything. Audrey wiped her eyes. She thought about taking it back, but she didn’t. That dream last night, that sad girl. It was time to stop hating her. “So, that’s my embarrassing story. I got abandoned. A lot. Sorry it’s not funny.”

“That’s okay,” Jayne said. She didn’t seem shocked, like Audrey always expected people to be when she told them about how she’d grown up. But everybody’s got troubles. Even rich people in cashmere suits. Maybe they had OCD, or a kid with cancer, or couldn’t find love. Or they were the black sheep of their families for no good reason. It’s such hubris to think your problems are bigger than the person’s sitting next to you, just because they have the fortitude not to complain.

Audrey sat back. The night had gotten late. It was past eleven. She felt heavy, and tired. But good, too. She liked Jayne. “On the plus side, my growth got stunted, so I didn’t have to deal with having a period until college. Actually, I have no idea if I can have children.”

“That’s not funny! That’s sad. I’m so sad for you!” Jayne exclaimed.

“Are you trying to tell me that the coke thing is happy?” Audrey asked with a raised eyebrow. “Because it sounds pretty bad, country mouse.”

A beat of silence passed. Then two. Jayne laughed
first, and was quickly followed by Audrey. “It’s the hard-knock life,” Audrey said, and Jayne banged the floor with her crutch, and chimed in: “For! Us!”

And then, together. “It’s the hard-knock life!” They laughed hard and long. Tears filled Audrey’s eyes, and she wasn’t sure whether she was sad, or happy, but the release felt wonderful.

“We are
so
fucked up,” Jayne declared, and they laughed harder.

B
y glass two-point-five, they were loaded. The wine was so cheap that Audrey’s headache had already started. Her dried-out tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth, so she took another sip to set it free. On the television, Leno was reading nutty-but-true newspaper headlines—“Humans Raised As Cows Graze the Countryside!”—when the buzzer rang.

Audrey hoisted herself up on wobbly legs. The stained-glass crows looked like they were following her. Their red eyes shone especially bright. “Demon birds,” she mumbled.

Jayne waved her hand. “It’s Clara. She wants to raid your fridge. Chick was an orca. Like the woolly mammoth, I mean.”

“Whale.” Audrey simultaneously pressed talk and listen on the intercom. She could vaguely detect the doorman’s French-Haitian accent, but it was mostly
just static:
blah blah blah Mizz Lucas?
She had no idea what he wanted, but it could wait until tomorrow.

“Okay, good!” she said into the speaker, then staggered back to her chair and clawed a handful of string beans into her mouth. They were overcooked, and liquefied on her tongue. They were hot, too, and like everything hot and soupy, hurt the gums under her temporary crown. “Vegetables are bullshit!” she announced.

Jay’s guest was sweating through an act about terrorists with funny accents using canned city smog as a weapon. US 405 in Los Angeles had gotten another bomb threat this afternoon. No one was hurt, but the traffic jam caused two asthma-induced deaths.

Audrey glanced at the pull-down map of Los Angeles behind the man and admired the clean perpendicular roads that counterbalanced its jagged coast and highways. That got her thinking about changing the topiary on 59
^th
Street to something less symmetrical because unless they’ve got OCD, too many right angles make people nervous.

The comedian sprayed his bottle of Aqua Net, over which he’d pasted a SMOG label illustrated by a black death skull and crossbones. Not a laugh in the whole house. A fury rose inside her, and she wanted to reach inside the television and slap him.

“Amateur,” Jayne grumbled. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth like a megaphone. “Too soon!” she heckled.

“What is this, Beirut?” Audrey asked. “I don’t wanna live in Beirut.”

“Like the band? That song ‘No More Words’?” Jayne asked.

“No, that’s Berlin.”

“I don’t wanna live in Berlin,” Jayne said.

“Well, who asked you?”

They were laughing when the doorbell rang, and Jayne
hopped up in her lone high heel, leaving her crutches on the floor. “It’s Jay Leno!” she announced. “He needs me to save his ass.”

“You know, a boot would be better for your knee,” Audrey said.

“Better than Leno? I do
not
think so,” Jayne said as she hopped down the hall.

Still seated, Audrey scooted in her chair until she turned 180 degrees. “Are you answering my door?” she asked. “It’s very rude.”

Jayne’s face was pressed against the peephole. “It’s a guy. He’s really big. Like he could lift a car.”

Audrey’s ears got hot. “Brown skin? Short black hair?”

“Yup.”

Audrey got up and walked down the hall. Jayne stepped aside. She didn’t look through the peephole. She was afraid he’d able to see her eye.

“Audrey, you in there? I need to talk to you.” This time, he didn’t slur.

She turned and started in the other direction. Jayne hopped after her. “Are you going to open it?”

Audrey stopped and leaned against a wall in the hall.

Clack-clack!

He banged the knocker, and they both jumped. Then he used his fists:
Bam! Bam!
“Please. Let me in. It’s important.” The sound of his voice resonated in her chest. She wished she could be like the normal people of the world who, in her place, would probably not want to pee their pants right now or smoke so much hash they saw stars.

“Audrey!” he called again. She got the feeling he could see her through the wood. Right into the hall, and her eyes, all the way to the curved sockets of her skull. Into her thoughts. She touched her throat, and thought,
I’m wounded, and you know it. So why do you keep knocking?

She pressed her cheek against cool plaster. Jayne
leaned against the opposing wall and wrapped her arms around her waist like a lonely hug.

“Does he hit you?” Jayne whispered with the phlegmy rasp of a habitual smoker. In the gray light, her eyes shone bright and wet. Audrey understood then, why Jayne called men five times a day. She needed reassurance. She expected the worst from them because the worst was all she’d ever known.

Oh, Jayne, you poor thing,
she thought. She considered taking the girl’s hand in her own, but it wasn’t her way to touch other people, so instead she matched Jayne’s honesty with her own. “He’s never hit me, but I worry. He holds it in. I’m afraid he’ll burst. He used to hit the walls when I wasn’t home…There’s this place in his study nook with holes in the drywall from his fists”

Jayne nodded like, of course, she’d expected this. Weren’t all women afraid of getting hit? On the other side of the door, Saraub slammed the brass knocker into wood three times:
Clack!-Clack!-Clack!

Audrey looked down the drab hall and the doors that opened upon cavernous rooms. She remembered what Jayne had helped her forget: murder had happened here. New grout and Home Depot tiles didn’t change the truth: this was a bad place.

“How long have you been together?” Jayne asked. Her cheeks were boozily flushed, and runny eyeliner had congealed into black gook in the corners of her eyes. She acted late twenties, but looking at her in the harsh hall light, Audrey realized with some shock that she had to be at least forty.

Audrey looked down at her turquoise pumps and tried to forget the lines cut into Jayne’s cheeks like scored glass. Tried to see Jayne the way she wanted and deserved to be seen: fresh and young and fearless. “We’ve been together two and a half years…” she said.

Jayne answered in a whisper. “That’s a long time. I don’t know for sure, but I think he’d have done it by now.”

“Probably,” Audrey said. “But it’s still not a good sign.”

“If you love him, you should answer it.” Jayne fixed her eyes on Audrey, like she was willing her to be brave, because maybe she didn’t think she’d ever find love, but she wanted it for her friends.

“Bam!”
Saraub knocked again, but she could tell that he was getting tired, and the knocks were becoming less frequent. Soon, he’d give up and go home. And pretty soon after that, he’d move on and find someone else. It can happen like that, even when it’s the real thing: love dies all the time.

“I
should
answer it, shouldn’t I?”

Jayne’s dimples deepened. “Well, duh! He’s a total hottie.”

Audrey took a breath and headed for the door. She realized then, that if Jayne hadn’t been with her, she would never have answered the intercom. She would have stayed in this vast, miserable apartment, lit only by the light of the television, as she’d rearranged the furniture, or God help her, worked on that door, and the night had passed into day. And another day. And another. Until this mistake of an apartment became her prison. Thank God for Jayne.

As she pulled the latch on the door, Saraub banged once more:
Bam!

Then, suddenly, an old woman shrieked, “No subletting! I’m calling the police!”

This was followed by another raspy, feminine shout: “She’s not home. Leave her alone!”

And then a baritone: “What’s this, young man? You don’t live here!”

Audrey swung the door wide and wondered for a moment if she’d accidentally moved into an old-age
home. About ten residents were standing in the hall. Unlike at Betty’s loony bin, none had shoulder dandruff, or drooled. Instead, their hair plugs, wigs, and sprayed-over bald spots were coiffed into Claudette Colbert curls and dapper pomade comb-overs. A few clutched gimlet glasses filled with brown liquid and cherries—Manhattans? They wore cocktail dresses or dapper suits that had faded over the years, but were fine nonetheless. Their skin was pulled taut, so she could see the ridges of their skulls and blue veins. More surgery. Some of it was good, some of it, horrific. It was close to midnight on a Monday night, and these fossils had been having a cocktail party.

One of the old men was even wearing a white porcelain mask with holes for his eyes and nose, but no space for his mouth. She thought he might be recovering from a recent, drastic procedure. Galton—Jayne had mentioned him.

The old lady from 14C next door—Mrs. Parker—had traded her dressing gown for a sequined black cocktail dress that revealed dimpled chicken legs. Bad. Worse, her orange lipstick feathered along the skin of her upper lip. “No subletters!” she shrilled.

“I don’t like strangers. They give me terrible dreams,” Galton mumbled through his mask.

A tall man wearing a bow-tie tuxedo bellowed, “Siamese twins belong in Siam!” He banged what looked like Edgardo’s knobby cane…In a fit of senility, had he stolen from his own super?

“Shaaddup, Evvie Waugh, before I throw a drink at you!” Mrs. Parker shrieked back at him.

The guy closest to Audrey’s apartment crouched, so that his center of gravity was level, then raised his Parkinson’s-shaking dukes at Saraub like he was going to throw a punch. His face got so red that she thought it might burst: “You leave the little lady alone!”

Audrey’s eyes met Saraub’s, and they exchanged a single, half-formed thought:
what the hell?

Saraub lifted his hands above his head, open palms facing out. Sweat rolled down his thick, black brows, and he wiped it away with his raised shoulders. His wax jacket lay in a crinkled pile in front of her feet, where he must have dropped it.

Parkinson’s didn’t budge. Audrey feared that the stress would give him a coronary seizure.

“I’m sorry,” she announced to the cocktail party. “It’s fine. Please, it’s a personal matter. I hope we didn’t disturb you.”

Instead of backing away, the shaking old man inched closer, like he’d decided she was a battered wife defending her abusive man.

Evvie Waugh (14D?) lifted the knobby cane like a baseball bat, and got ready to swing. The sight was both terrible and ludicrous.

Saraub panted, and his eyes bugged. He hated getting in trouble, even imaginary trouble. “Really, folks. It’s fine,” she called out.

Jayne peeped her head from behind Audrey’s shoulder and waved at them. “It’s fine!” she agreed with bouncing, irrepressible delight. “We were having a girls’ night!”

Audrey put her hand on Saraub’s back and he lowered his arms. “This is my boyfriend”—she winced at the misuse of the word, but now wasn’t the time for fine distinctions—“I’m very, very sorry. We don’t usually fight…This won’t be a regular midnight show,” she said. “You can all go back to…. your party.”

“Boyfriend! Edgardo said she was single. I wasn’t expecting it. I don’t like surprises. Party’s over! My whole night is ruined!” Mrs. Parker screeched, then stomped back into 14C.

Evvie lowered the knobby cane. He, Galton, and a
handful of others followed Mrs. Parker back to 14C, where Audrey imagined they’d been having a Bengay orgy. They smelled like it. Thank God for soundproof, plaster walls.

“Just as long as you’re okay,” Parkinson’s announced to Audrey without ever looking at Saraub.

“Marty Hearst, she’s fine,” Jayne told the shaking man. Then she waved her hand at him like it was a broom, sweeping him away: “Skedaddle!”

Sheepishly, Marty Hearst dropped his dukes and retreated with the others. Drinks in hands, the rest of them meandered toward the apartment near the fire stairs.

“Good night, everybody,” Audrey called, then picked up Saraub’s wax jacket from the floor where he’d dropped it and entered 14B. Hopping at her heels, Jayne followed. Saraub brought up the rear and shut and locked the door behind him.

“Bananas!” Audrey announced.