The Parallel Apartments (15 page)

Christian would be arriving at April's new apartment at 10 p.m., while Ryan was still back at the old place, probably plucking tacks and nails out of the walls and razor-scraping the scum out of the tub and cleansing everything with C.C.R. and painting the walls with enough coats of an eggshell white so brilliantly opaque that everything the walls and ceiling had ever been witness to would be suffocated and forever sealed away. That's what April was imagining, anyway, as she surveyed her new apartment's freshly painted walls. One was already marred by a gouge, a dingy avulsion of sheetrock, probably from moving the futon. How much crap she'd moved over here! The most important thing, excepting her cat, was the delicate, nineteenth-century bassinet she'd found at the Marburger Farm Antique
Show. It was filled with CDs at the moment, but soon it would function, goddammit, as intended. April's desire for a child hurt like a cramp. But it seemed possible that the new digs, along with the little egg in her cheek, a fresh outlook, and a conquest of above-average cuteness just might do the trick. And, most important, she was ovulating.

A knock. April opened the door. Christian? Yes. Come in. Would you like a beer? Yes. Good, here. Thank you. Can I see your papers?

Christian, dressed in a tight black suit and tie that matched his slick-backed hair, and shod in brown spectators that matched the frames of his glasses, stood uncomfortably among the brutalist city of unpacked boxes, sipping the longneck of Mutter's Crystal Lager.

It was April's M.O. to get her conquest drinking, play Scrabble on the futon with him till he was amply besotted, then sweep the board from between them, land a wet kiss on his neck, and get to work. It was usually all over in three minutes, the conquest already at the gates of profound postcoital catalepsy. April would lie back with a pillow under her bottom, holding her vagina shut so that nothing could leak out before it had a chance to accost her egg. If there even was one at all.

She allowed Christian to stay all night, though she had to throw him out by nine the next morning, as Ryan was due over with the vacuum and an assortment of cleansers and the last of the last of the last of the objects April could not throw away. But she was too late: Ryan knocked on the door at 9:00, while April was still under the blankets with Christian, both in the altogether, if you didn't count the pair of waist-high tights they were sharing, each with a leg holstered into the legs of the tights, like someone with both hands jammed into a single glove. Christian had proved himself capable of multiple rebounds, and, as a reward, had been given the okay to engage in this particular kink.

April freed herself, tiptoed to the door, and opened it a crack.

“Go away!” she hissed at Ryan.

“Jesus, dude's still there? Or do you have a new guy in there? A morning roll?”

“Asshole.”

“You said for me to come at nine!”

“Come back in an hour.”

“Rehearsal.”

“Just leave the shit outside and don't come back.”

“Wait, April, sorry, I'll come back at ten, promise, I can skip rehearsal, no biggie. Need anything? Maybe some—”

“No.” said April.

“Sure? Anything?”

“Nuh-uh,” said April. “Well… wait.”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to go to my parents' house in Bee Caves—you remember where, right?—and ask my mother where my little ivory eggs and basket are. I bet she's got them. Bring 'em here.”

“Jeez, I haven't seen your folks since you snapped them off last year. I bet they hate me.”

“I doubt it. They always considered you a stabilizing influence on me.”

“You're kidding, of course.”

“No. Now move. I'll make sure Christian's gone by the time you get back.”

“Can we sleep together again one day? I've been reading up on how to increase my virility.”

“God, Ryan. You can be so pathetic.”

“Sorry.”

“And do not tell them anything about me!”

Ryan returned later, bearing the little basket of eleven ivory eggs.

VI

January 1988

Justine lay on the floor in the den in front of a hissing gas heater, playing with a puppy, a Christmas present from Livia. Livia and Charlotte were out driving around, hoping to find someplace open that sold canned black-eyed peas. In the months since Livia had begun dating Archibold Bamberger, he had convinced her that luck was a real thing, evident in every single action from the motions of quarks to the licking of stamps; that it was sometimes predictable yet never innocent, and could be influenced by the simplest things, like not picking up heads-up pennies off the ground or kissing something red if you saw an ambulance or forgetting to have black-eyed peas and bacon green beans on New Year's Day—especially New Year's 1988, which he said was pregnant with bon chance.

The idea of getting green-bean strands and bacon flecks stuck in her new braces annoyed Justine as much as they made her teeth hurt. She had not wanted braces, reasonably citing cost, pain, risk, and vanity, but Livia had insisted, and Justine had been in an orthodontic throe for three months now, almost all of that time spent in Austin State Hospital, where she had
been sentenced for a pseudo-suicide attempt the day she got her braces. Her teeth appeared not to have moved at all, yet hurt as if they had been twisted in their sockets like little Christmas bulbs. Justine suspected that the puppy, a pug named Dartmouth, had been a kind of peace pipe, to be regarded as the end of the braces discussion.

With the aid of a long plastic back scratcher, one end of which was an injection-molded hand in the posture of a claw, Justine tried to keep Dartmouth from getting close enough to get drool or other oral canine colloids on her new sweater.

Livia and Charlotte had been gone a long time. Justine expected them to barge in the front door at any moment.

Instead, a big, soft
knock-knock,
as though issued by someone outfitted in a furry panda suit, came at the door.

At the noise Dartmouth positively blurred with locomotive excitement, flinging slobber around the den, some of which landed in the open gas flames of the space heater and burst into terrible novae of steam. Dartmouth hadn't gotten the hang of barking, so he redirected all the energy that an ordinary puppy would have expended on barking into snuffling and tinkling and flinging slobber.

Justine, on the other hand, did not move. Ever since she'd been discharged from ASH two weeks before, she had answered neither door nor phone. Well, why would she? There was no boyfriend: Dick had dumped her before she'd been committed. The same day, in fact. So who would call? Shrinks? Right. Who would come by? Gracie Yin? Right.

The somebody knocked again.

She'd missed nearly eleven weeks of school and the only person to have called was Troy Bugler, a skinny philatelist and schoolmate not at all bashful about communicating his desire for Justine. So far he'd been pervious to rebuke, but just barely.

Another knock. Today was the last day of Christmas vacation. Tomorrow, school. No way was she going to spend even a single instant of her last few hours of freedom in dialogue with who-knows-who. New Year's Day should be spent alone, in private dread. So she continued to ignore the presence on the other side of the front door.

Some shifting outside. A sigh.

Maybe it was Duck Baby, the man who came by a few times a year to
do yard work, usually when he needed money to gamble. Charlotte would give Duck Baby ten dollars and then Duck Baby would “mow” the lawn by running around and stepping on weeds until they were no longer erect. Then he would run away. During the night, the weeds would recover and by morning would be fully upright.

But it was winter. Even Duck Baby would be challenged to find something in the barren yard to step on.

Another furry knock, more timid.

“Who is it!”

“Ah, it's ah, is Charlotte at home in there?”

A man's voice.

“She's out.”

Justine rolled onto her stomach and looked at the stiff, lacy yellow valances that covered the three eye-level rectangular windows in the front door. There appeared to be the shadows of two heads against the curtains.

The big furry knock at the door again.

“Hello, how 'bout Livia?” said the man. “Is…?”

Another voice, quiet, a woman's, apparently directed at the man, said: “I need to sit down, baby.”

“Just a minute,” said the man. “We'll sit you down in a minute.”

Justine stood up. Dartmouth was an unstoppable williwaw of incontinent excitement. She opened the door. A small woman, and a large man holding her around the waist with one hand. In his other he held a small, well-traveled green American Tourister.

The man, fifty or so, was covered with a black-and-red-checked-lumber-jack-style wool jacket. He was freshly shaved, but didn't look as though he shaved regularly—his skin was reddish, and textured a little like a neglected football, except where his whiskers would be: there his skin was papery and shark-belly pale. His eyes were green, similar in hue to Justine's, but not as luminous; his were more like the muddy antifreeze she sometimes saw puddled along curbs during cold spells. His hair was slicked back and his hairline curved along the same contours as James Garner's. He was tall and solid. He was handsome. An ineffable feature of his posture suggested that he fell down a lot, or walked into doors, or backed into tables, upsetting all the bottles and glasses and vases of bluebonnets thereon. He wore huge woolen mittens; Tribbles, almost.

The woman, in maybe her early seventies, was leaning on the man and holding his arm. She seemed frail, but frail in the way that a Panhandle dustbowl farmwoman who'd pulled a lot of carrot and made her own bobwire but had come down with pneumonia might seem frail.

Her big brown eyes were surrounded by lashes as thick and black as threads of melted pitch. Her gray hair was shiny and full, like the hair of middle-aged models in the AARP magazines that were the only things to read in Justine's shrink's waiting room. The woman's thin body shivered, visibly, even though she was wrapped up in an oversized white down jacket, weathered and grimy, lacerated with L-shaped slits, bleeding feathers. She wore white cigarette pants that looked to be made of oil-smeared typing paper, and gecko-green slingback platform shoes that revealed deep and wrinkly toe cleavage.

“Hello,” said the man. “I'm Lou Borger. I'm, ah, related.”

Justine looked beyond them. There were no cars parked on the street that she hadn't seen before.

“Hi.”

Dartmouth slalomed the six legs.

“Oh, and who are you?” said the woman in a cracked, quiet voice that made Justine think of the neighbor's big live oak that lightning had splintered the summer before.

“That's Dartmouth,” said Justine. “He won't hurt you. Anyway, we don't think he will. He's new.”

The man looked at Justine. She couldn't decide if his expression was sad, or nostalgic, or defeated, or one of relief, or some combination. Or maybe it was just his regular look, the one he wore whether he was knocking on people's doors or watching
Hollywood Squares
or what—after all, she'd never seen him before. Justine wondered what he thought of
her
expression.

The woman slowly bent down, still holding on to the man's arm.

“Hi, darling,” she said, allowing Dartmouth to sop her wrinkly, blotchy hand. “I'm Dot. Call me Dotty. Or Dot. All my best puppy dogs do.”

Justine watched Lou Borger watch Dotty pet Dartmouth. Dot slowly stood back up.

“Can I sit down, baby?”

“Okay,” said Justine, though it was unclear whether the woman had addressed her or Lou. “But Livia and Charlotte aren't here.”

“That's fine,” said Lou. “Okay if we wait?”

Lou led Dot over to the divan. She let go of his arm and allowed herself to fall into a sitting position. Lou put down the green suitcase, sat down beside her, and put his arm around her. Dartmouth sat on Dot's platform-shod feet. Lou continued to look at her with the same unclassifiable expression. No one said anything. The gas heater faintly
ush
ed.

“Happy New Year,” said Lou.

Usssh.

“Mm,” said Dot. “Tired. Long day.”

“You're Livia's dad, right?” said Justine.

“That's right. I sure am. I sure am. You're Livia's daughter?”

“Adoptive. I guess that makes you my adoptive granddad.”

“Adoptive, huh,” said Lou, who plucked off one of his large, silly woolen mittens and shook Justine's hand—her whole hand, thumb and all. “Well, hi.”

His palm was so rough and hard but his grasp so gentle that Justine felt as though her hand were sheltered in a warm little cavern. “Livia never told you about… getting me?”

“She did indeed. I posted you a letter now and then. I guess you never received them.”

“No. Figures she'd wouldn't tell me she talked to you.”