Strange but True (25 page)

As Philip watches her tight, slender body stroll away on the sidewalk, it occurs to him that he has only a vague idea what flaxseed, Bikram, and Pilates even are. Still, he looks up at the two windows on the fourth floor and decides that he has a good feeling about living over this store. So what if the glass on the apartment windows has a thick yellow film on it? So what if the sills are cluttered with an assortment of sickly looking plants that remind him of the ones in his high school science classroom? There is something about this place he likes. And when there is finally a break in foot traffic, Philip lifts his hands to his mouth and shouts, “Donnelly! Donnelly Fiume!”

His eyes stay fixed on the dirty windows, but no Donnelly Fiume appears. As he waits for some sign of life, Philip glances down at the bright pink flyer in his hands:

Sublet Available

Immediately

Furnished
and
Pristine

Studio Apartment

Fourth-Floor Walk-up

Prime East Village Location

Must
be able and willing to care for my

loving pets
while I am out of town

$1,000 a month plus utilities

If the windows are any indication, this Donnelly guy had exaggerated about the pristine condition of the place, but it was nothing Philip couldn't fix with a bottle of Windex and a few rolls of paper towels. As far as the pets are concerned, the more Philip thinks about it, the more he likes the idea of having cuddly, loving animals around to care for and keep him company. After all, he doesn't know a soul in the city, so life is bound to be lonely at first. Besides, after wandering into two different real estate agencies today, Philip had been left with the impression that the best he could hope for would be a short-term lease on a cardboard box somewhere in Queens—
if
he was lucky. Both brokers told him the same thing: he'd need his last three pay stubs, a security deposit, first and last month's rent, as well as a letter of reference from his most recent landlord if he hoped to secure an apartment. Even if Philip did have the pay stubs, most of the money he made at the restaurant was in undeclared tips, so his checks would not impress anyone. As for a letter of reference, his most recent and only landlord was his mother. He doubted they'd accept a letter from her, not that she'd write a very nice one after what she had said to him yesterday.

Luckily, as Philip wandered along St. Mark's Place—where it seemed to him that a person could get anything he wanted, from acupuncture to tattoos to pizza to Thai food, all in a single stretch—he spotted the pink flyer taped to a street lamp. At the bottom, there were several small slits cut into the paper so people could tear off Donnelly's name and number. But Philip ripped down the entire sign and three more like it down the street, because he had already figured out just how competitive this apartment-hunting business was.

“Donnelly!” he shouts again when a full two minutes pass and no one appears in the windows. “It's me, Philip Chase! The guy who called about the apartment!”

This time a woman with a bright, multicolored scarf tied over her head appears. She waves to Philip then drops a balled-up towel down to the street. Philip extends his hands to catch it but chickens out at the last second, the way he used to during Little League games when the coach stuck him in right field. After the towel smacks against the sidewalk Philip picks it up and finds a gold key inside. He walks to the front door and lets himself into the small vestibule that leads to the stairs. The interior of the building smells like a church meeting room—a combination of weak coffee and old perfume, as well as a hardy dash of carpet deodorizer thrown into the mix. The slanted wooden staircase is covered with a threadbare, burgundy rug. The Pepto-Bismol pink paint is peeling off the walls in large, plate-size slivers. If I want lead poisoning, Philip thinks as he begins clomping up the stairs, I know where to come.

When he reaches the fourth floor, he hears what sounds like Judy Garland's voice singing about a trolley going
clang, clang, clang
, and a bell going
ding, ding, ding
. From somewhere else in the building—up one more flight perhaps—there is a faint chirping sound, though it doesn't quite register with Philip, since he is distracted by the music.

The door is open the slightest bit but he knocks anyway.

“Come in,” Donnelly's thin voice calls over the music. “I'm on the phone, dear. I will be with you in two shakes.”

Philip steps inside the cramped, cluttered apartment as Donnelly continues his conversation behind an Asian-style dressing screen with an assortment of scarves draped over the top. Other than that screen, the first thing Philip notices is the wall opposite the front door. It is plastered with row upon row of framed black-and-white head shots, like the kind Philip saw when he stopped in a deli at lunchtime to buy a bottle of water and a sandwich. He had recognized a few of the people in those photos—Tom Selleck, Martin Scorsese, Connie Chung. But the faces before him now don't look the least bit familiar, though every single one is personally autographed to Donnelly:

For my pal, Donnelly—Love always, Gaylord Mason

To the world's best backstage dresser! xoxo Sylvia Gassell

Thanks for making me look so damn good out there, Donnelly…

Kisses, Polly Bergen

Beneath the photos is a marble fireplace that must not work since the inside is filled with a hodgepodge of half-melted candles, the wax pooled and hardened on the floor around them. A few feet away, there is a dusty wooden bureau with a martini set and a record player on top, playing that Judy Garland song. To the left is a large suitcase, the hard vinyl kind nobody uses anymore. Just beyond is a minuscule kitchen with two stools tucked beneath a small counter, shelves instead of cabinets, an old gas stove, and a squat refrigerator with a large silver handle. Philip puts down the towel, then turns to close the door. There is a hinged piece of wood attached to the back, painted with a mural of New York City. Once closed, the door blends with the scene on the rest of the wall—taxicabs, hot dog vendors, fire hydrants, and all the rest. There is a Murphy bed, he realizes, folded up and concealed by the mural too. As cluttered and small as the studio is, this detail makes Philip smile. The place is far from perfect, but he is already planning on how he can make it more livable—washing the windows, bringing the plants back to life, dusting the furniture, shaking out the Oriental rug.

“Due to some unfortunate and unforeseen events in my sister's life,” he hears Donnelly say into the telephone behind that screen, “I need to sublet the place immediately.”

There is something distinguished about the way he talks. Philip noticed it on the phone earlier as well. Donnelly enunciates almost every consonant and vowel that comes from his mouth in a way most people don't anymore. It makes him sound regal and dramatic, as though he just stepped out of an old black-and-white movie. The way Philip imagines the people in those photos on the wall might sound if they started talking.

“No time for references,” he hears Donnelly say. “I'll know when I see you if I trust you or not. No, you mustn't come tomorrow. You have to see the place today or it will be gone. As a matter of fact, I have someone standing here right now, and I have five others lined up for later this afternoon.”

All this, and everything else he goes on to say, is verbatim what he told Philip on the phone: he is in a rush to find someone to take the apartment, because he needs to leave town and care for his ailing sister. He doesn't know if he will be gone only a few months or much, much longer. He has a lot of people coming to see the place. And finally, he wants two months rent up front in cash. Because of that last detail, Philip went to Citibank on the way here and took an advance of two thousand and change on the emergency credit card. He figured that if he liked the apartment he would need to act fast. Now he's glad he did. At least, that's what he thinks until he hears Donnelly say, “We will discuss the pets when you arrive.”

The pets.

Philip glances around the room, expecting to see a dog or a cat he hadn't noticed before, curled up on the floor asleep. But he doesn't see any such thing. At that very moment, Judy Garland stops clang-clang-clanging and the trolley song comes to an abrupt end. Automatically, the needle lifts from the record and goes back to the beginning. In the silence before the song starts up again, Philip hears the chirping sound—louder than before. He looks at a closed door against the back wall of the kitchen and realizes that it is not coming from upstairs as he had thought earlier. It is coming from in there.

Philip doesn't like this new development at all. Ever since he was a kid, he has been afraid of birds. He can trace the phobia back to one of his mother's anniversaries at the library. Her coworkers had a party for her, and among the many gifts she received was a small green parakeet in a cheap metal cage from that Polish woman his mother used to complain about. Nobody—not his father, not his brother, and certainly not his mother—liked the thing very much. But Philip detested the creature more than any of them.

He couldn't stand the sound of its scaly feet flitting around the cage.

He despised the way it screeched without warning.

He hated the commotion it made while flapping its wings.

Worst of all, Philip dreaded the times when it managed to bend the flimsy bars with its beak and get loose. The bird (no one ever bothered to give it a name) flew around the house, swooping and soaring, sending the entire family into a tizzy. His mother would gather Ronnie and Philip, and they'd hide in the bathroom beneath the stairs. Meanwhile, his father attempted to catch it by tossing a towel over its body when it flew by in a green blur. And if his father happened to be at the hospital when there was a jailbreak? Philip was sent to do the job. The best day of his life was when the bird flew out an open window and kept going. He can still see his mother slamming that window shut and saying, “Good riddance.”

“I need to go now,” Donnelly tells the person on the phone. “I will see you in an hour. I'll certainly try to hold the place, but I must warn you, it is going to be tough.”

After he hears the sound of the telephone being set back in its cradle, Philip turns to see the woman with the multicolored scarf over her head step out from behind the screen. She smiles at Philip then goes to the record player and turns it down. Philip is confused a moment until he realizes that it is not a woman at all. It is Donnelly Fiume. He is a short, slender man with skinny wrists and long fingers cluttered with colorful jewelry. As far as Philip can tell, he is not a transvestite exactly, or even a drag queen. Donnelly is just an older man whose features are unusually feminine, his clothing too. Spidery lashes frame his wide eyes; he has a slender nose, slightly bulbous at the tip, plump lips, and a narrow chin. He is wearing tight white pants and a shirt made to look paint splattered, as though Jackson Pollack had a go at it. Something about the scarf over his head gives him the appearance of someone getting ready to step onstage, or who has just come off. Philip has never been very good at guessing people's ages but he puts him at somewhere around seventy.

“All right, cupcake,” Donnelly says in that thin, overly articulate voice as he brings one hand to his cheek. “Let's have a look at you.”

Philip stands still, feeling self-conscious because he is wearing the same black jeans and denim shirt as yesterday. He figured finding a place to live ranked higher on his list of priorities than buying a new wardrobe.

“My, my,” Donnelly says after his eyes finish roaming up and down Philip's lanky body. “Aren't you the picture of the new kid off the bus? Where did you say you were from? Kansas?”

“Pennsylvania,” Philip tells him.

“Forgive me. I can't keep track of what everyone tells me when they call. So am I right?”

“Right about what?”

“That you just got off the bus.”

“Half right,” Philip tells him. “I moved here last night.” The word
moved
sounds strange coming from Philip's mouth—
escaped
would be more appropriate. “But in a car, not a bus,” he adds.

“Bingo,” Donnelly says. “I knew it. Tell me. Have you been to New York before?”

“A couple of times with my family at Christmas, and once on a school trip.”

“Well, you haven't experienced New York until you've lived here, dear. Edward used to have a saying.” Donnelly stops and stares down at the Oriental carpet, tapping his white deck shoe against the gray fringe at the edge. “What was it? Oh, yes. It was: New York is a nice place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit.”

“Huh,” Philip says and smiles, turning the statement over in his mind. He doesn't bother inquiring about who Edward is, since he plans to leave once he confirms his suspicions about what's on the other side of that door.

“Tell me the cross streets where you first stepped foot on the sidewalk here in town,” Donnelly says.

Philip doesn't know why the old guy wants this information, but he tries to remember anyway. Last night he parked in the garage at the Marriott, and this morning he got in his car out of sheer habit, and drove down to the Village since he'd heard Deb Shishimanian talk about it so often. “St. Mark's and First Avenue.”

Donnelly cups one side of his white face. “That has a nice ring to it. You see, I think it is crucial to remember these things in life. Someday when you look back, you can say, My New York story all started on St. Mark's and First.”

“Where did yours start?” Philip asks.

“Ah. It all began for me when I stepped out of a taxi onto Bank Street and Waverly. And what a wonderful beginning it was.” Donnelly looks toward the ceiling and seems to lose himself in thought for a moment before clearing his throat and getting back to business. “So what do you think of the place?”