The Parallel Apartments (3 page)

Franklin hulked over Schedule E, dabbing an inappropriate shade of Wite-Out over his mistakes.

Justine gave up on the asparagus and began to saw at a handsome red bell pepper.

“Won't cut,” said Franklin, looking up. “That's because you didn't grow up with the right tools in the house. You didn't even have sharp knives. Know why? It's because there weren't any men around. Men like to have tools and sharp knives. I mean, I know you had razor blades, duh-right, but not paring, boning, slitting, cleaving, slicing, shaving knives.
Stabbers.
”

Justine scarcely ever thought about the old cuts on her arms and legs and stomach. But now all the knife-chatter in the room awakened them all at once. They seemed to hiss with the exotic pain that the original slices had produced.

“Aah,” said Justine.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Justine sawed; finally the bell pepper gave. Inside was another, much smaller, green, and rather deformed pepper, growing parasitically from a rib. Shiny, translucent, fetal. She wondered if maybe there was another pepper inside the little one, and then another, like matryoshkas.

“That's what a pure matriarchy is good for. Dull tools.” Franklin chuckled and belched. “Wait. My mistake. Wasn't your grandfather around for a while? Like just before you blew town to come to New York to whore and go to collage-college? Charlotte's husband? What was his name?”

Justine had not heard her mother's name spoken aloud in years. In Franklin's Brooklynese, “Charlotte” sounded like a sexual slur. And the mention of Justine's grandfather…

“Lou. I don't want to talk about them.”

Justine tore out the tiny deformed pepper.

“That blade'll barely cut water for chrissake, Justine. I'm not hungry anyway. Definitely not for what you're making. Hah, just kidding, looks great.”

Justine took a good whack at the little pepper. Instead of dividing, it shot out from under the blade, sailed out of the kitchen, and landed on the black leather couch.

“Please go get that; it might stain.”

Justine went to find the pepper, but it had disappeared.

“I can't find it.”

“Jesus, Justine.”

“Jesus yourself, Franklin.”

“The wit! Wooo! Did you get that from Lou or Charlotte?”

“Why do you care about my stupid family all of a sudden?”

“Because I was thinking about family in general, know why? Because of these documents here before me. We're not Married Filing Jointly and I can't claim Head of Household and I can't designate you a dependent and I can't designate a child who would now be nearly two, because she is dead. And plenty of other IRS reminders of family.”

“It wasn't my fault,” said Justine, though of course it had been.

“Yeah? It wasn't
me
that spent all their free time down at Ground Zero sucking in carcinogens and babycides.”

“I was—”

“Helping. I know. Like letting a little kid help you make breakfast. They put up with you for a while, but you were in the way, Justine. Did you know I couldn't claim Valeria as a dependent in 2002?
She didn't live long enough.
It would've taken a couple grand at least off of my AGI.”

“I knew you blamed me.”

“Maybe that's why a destitute twenty-year-old widow would adopt a one-year-old. For tax purposes. Isn't that how old you were when your ‘mama' adopted you?”

“Charlotte was twelve when she had my mother, and—”

“Twelve. Talk about precocious.”

“—almost thirteen, for your information, and Livia adopted me when I was thirteen months.”

“And Lou? I bet he was nine. Mannish boy. That's Texas for ya. Yee haw. Don't mess wuh Texas. Were they cousins? Brother and sister? Luke and Leia?”

Justine tore the wrap off two veal cutlets. She broke a couple of eggs into a metal bowl, and then into another poured some basil-garlic bread crumbs. “Fourteen. And they were in love.”

“I bet they sent Lou to an oil patch and Charlotte to some Panhandle gulag.”

Justine slapped a breaded veal cutlet into a cold skillet. “How did you know about the home?”

“I read minds,” said Franklin, who leaned on the woodblock with his chin in his hand, no longer interested in taxes at all. “Besides, what else would happen to a pregnant junior-high-schooler during the Cold War? Where's Livia now? How could your grandparents and your mother all have
pissed you off so much? What the fuck happened? Some kind of talk-show family horror? Oprah, Jerry, Geraldo?”

Justine turned red.

“Look. You never blush. Only when…”

“I know. But that's not why.”

“…there's fucking on your mind!”

Justine threw the other cutlet into the skillet. She turned the dial for the burner, but the automatic pilot light just clicked and clicked, refusing to ignite the gas. The rubbery musk of liberated methane swirled around them.

“Fuck you, Franklin.”

“C'mon, what happened? You caught your mother doing it with a cowpoke? A Mescan? A Neegrah?”

Justine grew cerise. Her cheeks hurt. She ripped out a kitchen drawer to look for a box of matches. She found one. It was empty. She threw it at Franklin.

“There's a lighter in there,” said Franklin, who didn't even blink when the matchbox hit him on a pinkie knuckle and bounced into the bowl with the beaten egg. “God, I love it when you throw. Turns me o-o-o-on.”

Justine found a tiny pink Bic lighter, tried it twenty or thirty times without success, and tossed it back into the drawer.

“I'm the only thing on fire in here,” he said, licking a finger and touching his forearm. “Ssssssssssss.”

“Don't, Franklin,” said Justine, breathing in deep the local combustible vapors. “I don't want to do anything.”

“Why?” said Franklin. “Perhaps you need psychoanalysis. Mein little Chustine. I heff unt larch Vienna sossitch for you.” He pushed aside his tax forms. “I vant to place it into yorn schnitzel.”

“Quit.”

Franklin giggled. He feinted, as though he was going to chase Justine around the island. She jumped to her left. He started to chase her for real.

“C'mon, little dogie. Lemme git some. Yee haw.”

“Franklin, quit.”

He stopped and reached across the island as quick as a bantamweight and hooked two fingers between the buttons of her blouse. She slapped at his hand until he let go, but not before he'd torn three buttons off and dislocated her bra, exposing a nipple.

“Damn you.”

“You know that's what I love about you. Those flat titties and big black nips. Like charcoal briquettes. Lemme squirt fluid on 'em and light 'em up. Rowr.”

He swept the bread crumbs, egg yolks, vegetables, knife, antidiarrheals, and tax forms off the woodblock. He climbed on top. Justine slipped on the yolks and fell hard. Franklin reached down and grabbed her blouse again. It came off completely when she began to scurry on her hands and knees toward the living room.

Franklin came after her. He chased her into the bedroom. He cornered her in the bathroom, picked her up, and tossed her over his shoulder. For a pasty little man, he was strong, with hairy forearms like stone beneath the half inch of soft, indoor, fluorescence-baked baby fat.

“Done snared me a one,” he said. “Gon' have me a lil' poke!”

Justine grabbed a rusting can of Barbasol off of the sink and hit him on the back of the head. A little dollop of shaving cream escaped and stuck to her wrist.

“Ow. You bitch. Yow.”

He squeezed her. He exhaled his playfulness. He carried her into the living room. She hit him with the Barbasol over and over. He pitched her onto the old black leather couch and got on top of her. He pinned her hands against the arm of the couch.

“Off.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“What if I do things against your will?”

“Stop, Franklin, please.”

“Guess how many men in the joint are there for spousal rape?” said Franklin, right into Justine's nostrils. “None.”

Franklin, both hands busy holding her down, had nothing but his teeth with which to remove her bra. He bit right through the little bow at the cross-your-heart juncture.

“There they are!” He licked at her nipples with his Kaopectate-dried tongue, a horrible gray lizard convulsing on her chest.

“Off me, you bastard.”

They both stopped struggling. Justine stared fiercely at her endless
boyfriend. Now was when he grew either genuinely angry or pathetically skunkish. He chose the latter.

“Justine, please? I'm suffering here. It's been ages. I'm like teak down there. Please? It'll be good. I'm so turned on I promise it'll be over in a second. Pleasepleasepleeee…”

“No.”

And, as if she'd consented, he reached down and pulled up her skirt. With her just-freed hand she covered her vagina. He stuck two fingers in her mouth. He tasted of bile and clay. The backs of her thighs were slick: egg. She was sweaty from fighting. The leather couch was still subtly tacky from the Armor All she had once used to clean it, after Valeria died.

Outside, it began to hail. Little white stones bounced off the window. They reminded Justine of Boggle cubes. Franklin stopped for an instant to see what the noise was. Then he looked at Justine with an expression of open desperation. Justine had never been able to ignore open desperation.

“Condoms,” she said.

“Justine, c'mon. Let's bareback. Let's make another baby. C'mon.”

“No. Put on your lambskins or get off me.”

“They're not convenient and they're probably expired. C'mon, it'll be quick.”

“Get off.”

“No.”

He reached down and violently pulled her hand away from her vagina, and, using his penis like a lobster fork, he managed to sneak it inside her panties and, ultimately, force his way inside her.

“Stop it! I do not want a baby! Ever, ever!”

She kicked him in the ass over and over with the heels of her Keds. He bucked and ground hard for a few seconds, and came. She felt no flood of pinguid warmth; Franklin had never been a copious producer.

“I hate you.”

“I hate you.”

“Get off.”

“I love you. Let me get hard again, one more choadload.”

“Take that thing out.”

Franklin put his head on her shoulder. He soon fell asleep. Justine listened to Franklin's breathing and the
tikitiktiki
of Boggle cubes. His heart bumped
against her collarbone. His respiration caught and stopped, as though he were breathing in and out a strand of yarn interrupted here and there with little knots. And his heartbeat—fast and regular, but each one followed by a tiny hiccup of arrhythmia. Justine wondered which of them would die first.

The following morning Justine went in for her shift at Midgie's. Next to the cabinet where the amber safety-cap twelve-dram pill bottles were kept was an unlabeled, unlocked drawer in which Midgie stored the morning-afters. Justine immediately dry-swallowed three and stole three dozen more. Each night, just before bed, she took another.

A few weeks later, while taking the trash out at work, a sudden nausea overtook her. The nauseas visited regularly for a full week until the day her period came, an atypically light spotting that stopped after a day. Her scalp hurt. Had she not been through this before, she would've thought she was merely dying. She wondered, with unexpected detachment, whether taking too much morning-after, rather than acting as a surety, simply canceled itself out. And, if not, why and how
she
had to be one of the small percentage for whom the pills did not work.

Later, Justine locked herself in the pharmacy's unisex employee bathroom, glanced once at the OSHA poster tacked up over the hand-soap squirter, sat down on the toilet, urinated onto an e.p.t. wand she'd stolen a few moments before, and waited with her thumbs pressed into her eyeballs for what surely must have been the required nine minutes. She opened her eyes, noted the inevitable, terrible smalt blue at the tip of the wand, considered having a good cry right there but decided to wait to go to the Ninth Avenue Dunkin' Donuts, where she did her best crying. She dropped the wand into the trash, where it landed prominently on a hillock of wadded brown paper towels, flushed, left the bathroom, returned to her register station, snuck some mifepristone into her red canvas Midgie's Pharmacy apron pocket, and left the store without a word to old Midgie, who had been busy all day crawling along the baseboards spraying ant trails with Pif Paf, and who wouldn't have paid Justine any attention anyway.

Justine had had several purgative, renewing wailings at this particular D&D over the last decade and more, and, for whatever reason, nobody ever
bothered her. Nobody ever asked her what for. Most New Yorkers knew, somehow, when to leave somebody alone. It was a most valuable privacy.