Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories (26 page)

“No,” you say. Her back is bad tonight, more than usual, which is why it was supposed to be a quiet night in, not worrying about lumpy movie theatre seats, or hard chairs in the pizza place, just the couch and the heating pad she needs. “I’ll go get a cloth.”

“Wait,” she says, “just use these.” She hands over the orange and white napkins that came with the pizzas. “Don’t bother going all the way over there. Stay here.”

You get it. The kitchen is over by Tim’s space, near the door. You’ll have to go past him to get there. For the first time you realize that maybe Lesley is rattled by him tonight, too. You start mopping up.

Lesley slides awkwardly onto her knees on the area rug, picking up the crusts and crumbs that spilled off your plates. She’s moving so painfully. “You shouldn’t be doing that,” you say.

“No,” she agrees, but carries on.

You pick up Tim’s pizza box. “It feels like they didn’t even eat any.” You flip it open and it looks like you’re mostly right. Someone’s eaten all the outer crust and toppings off, leaving the entire soggy white middle crust underneath, redded over with the remnants of sauce. Maybe
that’s
what they fought about, Tim snarfing all the toppings. A word floats into your brain out of nowhere, half-heard and half-remembered.
Pizza-face
, said a woman’s voice. It was part of the fight at the door, the part you hadn’t registered before. This makes you smile.

“Gloria.” Lesley’s voice is tight. She has opened the box after you put it down, to throw the crumbs in. The crumbs are still in her hand as she stares in. Now you see what you didn’t before. What’s in the box is flat and round and wet, but it’s smaller than the large you ordered, not the twin to yours and Les’s anymore. And it isn’t sliced, like pizza.

What’s in the box isn’t pizza. It’s something bad and it’s something to do with the girl, and you don’t let yourself think any further than that. This is your mundane life, not a horror movie. Your mind won’t go there.

“Glo, this is bad,” Les’s voice is really strained.

This time it’s your turn to deny. “Don’t,” you say. “He couldn’t have done anything. We were sitting right here. Right
here
.” But you realize now that Tim never said his date had
left
. He just said she was
gone
.

But you know this is
not
how young pretty women get murdered. It’s supposed to happen in dark alleys, or on remote pig farms. It doesn’t happen at eight-thirty at night in an urban loft while two aging lesbians eat pizza twenty feet away
in the same goddamned room
, and watch Peter O’Toole and Alec Guinness playact in their Arab robes and hope the roommate keeps the noise down to a dull roar.

Lesley reaches into the pizza box and picks the thing up out of it. The not-pizza thing turns slowly as it dangles between her fingers, and it’s as bad and worse than you thought. It’s flesh, limp like fabric. You can’t make out details, nor do you want to, but your mind fills them in. It’s the girl’s face, stripped off her skull. Pizza-face. Oh Fuck. Lesley drops it back into the box, breathing hard.

Your brain won’t go all the places it needs to at once. This much you know: with the two of you studiously ignoring him, Tim has already had an hour to do what he wants.

You have trouble wrapping your brain around the thought: Tim did this. Not just to his date, but to you. He brought the box over to show off, and to send a message.
This is what I can do.
Implicit in that is a message about what you
can’t
. You both need to get out of here, right now, both to notify someone and to escape him. But to leave, you’d have to go through his space and past the kitchen and bathroom and who knows what other horrors lie there. Also, you do not have a way out of here with Lesley, who needs assistance to walk. And you are not going anywhere without Lesley.

But it’s Lesley who acts. She rises slowly and grimly, like a swell on the ocean.

“TIMOTHY!” she thunders.

His head pops up above the back of his futon across the big room. He smirks, knowing he’s achieved an effect.

“DID YOU DO THIS WITH MY GOOD SCISSORS?”

The smirk fades into a look of surprise. Lesley’s in full-volume teacher-voice now. “I WANT THOSE SCISSORS OVER HERE RIGHT NOW AND THEY’D BETTER BE SPOTLESSLY CLEAN!”

Tim’s head disappears again. You gasp and hold your breath. Will Lesley’s teacher-tone just set him off again? How many times can a grenade go off in one night?

“Grab the phone,” she says quietly and urgently to you, while Tim isn’t quite looking. He’s now in the kitchen, running water and rubbing at something.

You look blankly at Les, your mind whirling. “Just get through one minute at a time,” she says. “Get the phone,” she repeats.

You try to go there, grateful not to have to think back, or ahead. The phone. It’s a cordless, and hardly ever where you want to find it. “The phone,” Lesley says again, looking at the end-table where it usually sits within her reach while you and Tim are at work. It’s not there. “Where is it?”

You have to think back for this. You remember. “It’s charging.” It started beeping when you phoned for pizza. You also can’t help but remember something else: that this was when Tim was still getting along with his date and they both chimed in on the order. You start to shake and try to get back into this minute and only this minute. Where is the charger? In the kitchen. His end.

Tim reappears with the big shears in hand. It is not a sight that gives comfort. He approaches.
Oh God what was she thinking?
He’s going to hurt you both because you know what he did. He made sure you knew.

“There!” he says. “Happy?”

Lesley, like she doesn’t know enough to be afraid, grabs the scissors right out of his hand. He’s half-turned to go.

“Timothy!” Lesley says warningly.

Big, aggrieved sigh, like a kid. “Whaaat?”

“If I go into that bathroom, is it going to be a pigsty? Because if I go all the way over there with my sore back, and it is, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

He snorts. “You can’t walk. You need a bedpan. You can’t do anything.”

He’s summed it up. This is why he could be obliging about the scissors. He’s in charge of everything else. Les is, or seems, oblivious. “And you better not have made a mess of Glo’s nice clean kitchen!”

“It’s a whole fucking week since Gloria cleaned, you stupid cow!” he yells back.

“Then it’s your turn now,” Lesley says calmly. She shoves the pizza box at him. “And keep your goddamned messes off our side of the loft! What have you been told about that?”

Tim pulls the limp, fleshy mess out of the box, takes a bite out of the middle of the forehead, and spits it at Lesley. Then, as he stomps back to his zone, he turns and hurls the entire pizza box through the bathroom door.

You don’t know how, or if, this will end. It feels like it’s been forever since it started, but it’s maybe been only another hour. Peter O’Toole is still on the screen, anyway, though you and Lesley aren’t making any pretence of watching anymore. Tim is restless in his end of the loft. He doesn’t seem to know, either, what happens next. You all know what the standoff is. If he leaves, you and Les will contact the authorities. If you try to leave, he has to do something about you. Until then, you’re all trapped in this limbo. You’re frightened, but also pissed off that he hasn’t thought it through, that you’re all stuck like this. He still has his music on and sits on his futon swiping through his ipad, where he can see you and Lesley and the door. You notice that somewhere along the way, he has taken the phone from the kitchen.

From where you sit, it looks like an ordinary Friday night again, as long as you don’t think about what you can’t see from here. And, since Lesley told him off about the mess, it’s played like an ordinary Friday night, almost like you’re all pretending nothing has happened. It’s too surreal.

Not everything is frozen in time. The Diet Coke you guzzled earlier with your pizza is killing your bladder now. You can’t hold it anymore, and you say so to Lesley. “I don’t want to go in there, but I have to. Think he’ll let me?”

She shrugs. “When you gotta go, you gotta go,” she says, trying a supportive smile. She squeezes your hand.

Tim’s head pops up when you walk as nonchalantly as you can over there. He glances at the phone, beside him on the bed, just to make sure. For your part, you try not to look at anything but the bathroom door. If only you could all pretend nothing had happened. Smears on the floor and the furniture over here catch your eye, though, and you know that isn’t possible. The worst of it is probably around the next dresser, or in the kitchen. You’re glad the bar-height counter and stools keep the floor out of view for now.

Once in the closet-sized bathroom, added by the developer as an afterthought, you close the door, wincing at the splayed pizza box and its contents ploughed against the far wall, under the sink. And suddenly, it’s just you in the tiny room, gasping at what’s been dumped in the shower stall. It makes you gag and almost vomit in the sink. You can’t look.

And now you’re certain: none of you is getting out of the loft. It’s an almost calming thought, because it seems right punishment for your failing to stop it. Tim’s date didn’t make it out, why should you?

You still need to pee, more than ever, and you turn to the toilet while avoiding looking at what doesn’t even look like a person anymore. But even then, you don’t pull the shower curtain to hide her—it wouldn’t be right. She shouldn’t be put out of mind like that. You’re ashamed that right now you can’t remember her name.

When you’re peeing, you hear Les’s voice, sharp. “Tim!” There’s a long scraping sound. “Gloria!” she shouts urgently. You stop, mid-stream, jump up, dripping onto the floor, and immediately try to push the door open, but of course you can’t. The handle turns, but he’s pushed a wardrobe in front of it. Lofts don’t come with closets. “Tim!” You pound on the door. “Lesley, are you okay?”

So he has thought it out. He’s just been waiting for you to move.

“Kill yourself already,” you hear Lesley say. “You know you’re going to.”

Then— “Glo—”

It’s cut off by another sound, and this time you know it’s the sound of a fist on flesh.

You yell and pound. You go berserk, bouncing off the door in your own panic. It’s a long time before you stop to catch your breath. And then you hear something—a faint voice, way off.

“
Lesley
!” you scream.

Yelling to each other, she tells you what you need to know. Tim has tied her to a radiator in the other end of the loft, in your bedroom area. He hurt her some, enough that she probably couldn’t move even if she was free. She won’t tell you more, because it doesn’t seem to matter now. Neither of you is getting out of the loft.

“Did he leave?” you call.

“You could say so,” she says. “He’s on his futon.” After a second’s pause, she adds, growing fainter, “He used the good scissors.”

Despite everything, you actually laugh at that.

It’s hot. You finally remember that the bathroom has a window, head-height, that you open, but it’s tiny. You’d never fit through it. You wouldn’t even have fit through it twenty years ago. It overlooks the alley, but no one’s out there now. It’s a garment factory on the other side. No one coming to work now till Monday. First break at 9 a.m. when all the immigrant Russian workers go out to the alley to smoke.

Monday. You holler out encouraging things to Lesley while you rummage around the little cupboard in here. She doesn’t answer, but you know she’s saving her strength. You can make it to Monday, and she can too. And if you’re too weak to speak for yourselves, you can drop out a note.

The only paper, though, is t.p., which will flutter away in the breeze. Then you see the pizza box. Miracle of miracles, it’s the one with the receipt for the order still taped to the lid. Yours and Les’s phone number, address, everything. You could add a note on the cardboard. But a grungy pizza box in an alley won’t attract any attention, so you need something else.

And then you see it. For real this time. It’s spilled out on the floor under the sink like an abortion, a couple of feet away from where it used to belong, on the body in the stall. You very, very gingerly reach out, with a tentative finger and spread the flesh out on the tile.

It is her face. It looks wrong, but still real. It’s disturbing, which is what you want. Someone will see this. Someone will point and stare. Someone will call out to others. It will attract attention, disrupt the shift, result in authorities being called. Someone will look at the pizza box, and then, someone will come to investigate.

You’re suddenly struck by what you’re about to do. You didn’t help her. But surely she’d help you if she could. You stroke the skin of her cheek lightly. Then you put her in the box, and force the box out the tiny window, praying.

You tell yourself you won’t think about how it could all go wrong. You should have waited to shove the box out on Monday morning. Stray dogs sniffing it out, an early snow that covers it up, or it simply lands without spilling its contents.