The Waiting Room (2 page)

It was an ugly building, old and rotting, the red brick was a streaky dark brown, most of the windows were gone. Raised letters in the cement over the front doors read "THE MILFORD," though the
F
and the
0
had weathered away nearly to nothing, so the guys I worked with started calling it "The Mill Road," which they clearly thought was interesting and catchy.

We had to stop work after the second day when a man they sent through the building to look for
tran
sients found a body in an eighth-floor apartment. No one got upset about it. The body had been there, we were told, for quite a long time. It was mummified, in fact, because the apartment was dry and cool and faced north, so sunlight never touched it. One of the guys I worked with, a fat man named Lenny who had a red tattoo on his left arm which read "RASPUTIN EATS IT" ("I don't know how it got there," he told me. "I was in this whorehouse in Louisiana, and when I woke up, there it was—I never did find out who this Rasputin guy is.") said that they were always finding bodies in old buildings. "Usually they're winos, you know. Your bums and your basic trash. Sometimes they ain't. Sometimes they're guys the mob's gotten to, and sometimes they're these old farts who keep on living in a place even when the rats have run off."

The body they found was the body of a young black woman who was dressed in a long black silk dress and white mink cape, as if she'd been planning an evening on the town. She was sitting in a kitchen corner, knees up, head down, left hand in front of her knees, clutching her right wrist. She was holding a purse that turned out to have a couple of hundred dollars in it. She had the purse in a strong death grip in her right hand. ("I tried to take it from her, you know," said the guy who found her. "But I could tell—she didn't want me taking it, so I let her have it a little while longer. ")

"Junkie," Lenny said.

"Yeah?" said a guy named Allen, who was also fat, though not quite as fat as Lenny, and who wore sleeveless T-shirts no matter what the weather. "D'joo see her, Lenny? D'joo see her?"

Lenny confessed that he hadn't seen her, though he wished he had, and that's when the foreman came over and told us to go home, that he'd call us when we could start work again.

~ * ~

It was while I was on my way back to my apartment for a long, relaxing shower and a shave to get ready for my date with Leslie that I saw Abner. Leslie and I had a "talk-it-out" evening planned: dinner first, at a quiet Italian place on East 81st Street, then a long leisurely walk down Fifth Avenue, then back to my place. We were having some trouble then and we had agreed to try to get to the bottom of it. I was walking on Second Avenue near 38th Street; he was across the street, coming out of a little Greek restaurant, and was swiping at his chin with the back of his jacket sleeve. "Hey, Abner!" I called, because I recognized him right away. Hell, I hadn't seen him for nearly twenty years, but he had the same quick, stiff walk, the same
I'm watching you over my shoulder
look that he'd had then, when he was going on and on about his cousin Stacy. He's kind of an odd-looking guy; his brow is low and heavy, his hazel eyes deep-set, his nose long and straight, his lips large. And though he should, by all rights, look Neanderthal, he doesn't. His girlfriends in high school invariably described him as "poetic-looking" and "intense." I always thought "poetic-looking" and "intense" meant
screwed up.
I'd say that described him then, and describes him now, although, I'll admit, it's a vulnerable, lovable kind of screwed up. I think I've always felt
protective
of him, like he's some nerdish little brother whose ideas of the world around him are naive at best and self-destructive at worst.

He looked in my direction when I called to him. He stopped walking, his mouth fell open, and he stared wide-eyed at me.

"Abner, it's me," I called. "It's Sam Feary!"

He ran off, east, toward 39th Street. I watched him, flabbergasted, and when he was out of sight, I whispered, "Christ, same to you, fella," because, of course, I had no idea of the mess he'd gotten himself into.

~ * ~

Lenny told me, when we were called back to the building on East 80th Street, that the black woman they'd found huddled in an eighth-floor kitchen had been there for years, that when they'd lifted her up off the floor she'd started to fall apart, "first her arms, you know, 'cuz they tried to pick her up by her arms, and then her legs, 'cuz they tried those, and then they'd got her by the back and didn't hold her head up so it fell off . . ."

"Gimme a break, Lenny," I said.

"No," he protested, "it's true. Course, I'm not saying that her arms and legs and head fell right off, plop, onto the floor, but they were hanging there pretty loose, you know—"

"Name your sources," Allen cut in. He reads lots of newspapers.

It took Lenny a couple of seconds to figure out
what Allen meant. Then he said simply, "Cops, two cops."

"Which two cops?"

Lenny shrugged. "Cops got names?" he asked. "Two cops I heard talking, that's all."

Allen grimaced. "It's pretty disgusting," he said, which surprised me because he looked like the type who'd find nothing at all disgusting. Then the foreman came over and told us we could start earning our pay again.

~ * ~

We were sent up to the eighth floor. It was the foreman's idea of a joke because the building was going to be blasted, which meant that practically all the work had to be done in the basement, on the foundation.

"Gotta rip out the wiring up there," the foreman said with a wide, shit-eating grin.

"What the hell for?" Lenny asked.

"'Cuz the city says so," the foreman answered. "Gotta rip out the fuse boxes in all those apartments up there and save 'em--" He stopped; he could barely keep himself from breaking into a laughing fit. He went on, "Comes straight from the mayor's office, boys."

So we tromped up to the eighth floor, which I thought was okay—ripping out fuse boxes was lots easier work than hammering away at cement foundations. And of the three of us who got sent up there—Lenny, Allen, and me—only Lenny let on that he'd rather be somewhere else.

"Yeah," Allen said, "like on the moon, Lenny?"

"Florida," Lenny said. It was late February and very cold, and Lenny talked often about going to Florida.

When we got to the eighth floor, Allen asked, "You guys know which one it was?"

Lenny nodded sullenly to the right. "Must be that one down there," he said.

An apartment door was standing open at the end of the hallway. Around it, on the floor, plaster dust and chunks of plaster that had fallen from the ceiling—it littered the hallway everywhere else—had been swept into several neat piles.

Allen said, starting for it, "Dat must be da place," and Lenny, staying put, said:

"No reason we got to start there. No reason we got to go in there at all, Al."

"Allen," said Allen, "not 'Al'!"

Lenny ignored him. "No reason we got to be up here, either, you ask me. That limp-dick foreman wants some fuse boxes, we can get 'em on the seventh floor, no reason we got to be up here."

Allen was halfway to the apartment now, and walking quickly, nearly swaggering, so the hammer and chisel and half-dozen screwdrivers on his utility belt swayed left and right.

It smelled of antiseptic in that hallway, Lysol, I guessed, because the smell had that cloying bitter-sweetness to it, and, underlying it, the smell of flies.

"Stinks," Lenny grumbled. "Smells like garbage up here."

I called, "Let's go down to seven, Allen, okay?"

He stopped, looked back, grinned a flat, macho kind of grin: "No dead black woman's gonna keep me from doin'
my
job!"

To which I said, "I'm very impressed, Allen."

Lenny grumbled yet again that the hallway smelled like garbage, and added, "How's anybody know she didn't have some kind of sickness? You know, like Legionnaires' disease, or . . ." He stopped, thought a moment, went on, "Like Legionnaires' disease" —stopped again and shook his head slowly, eyes closed.

I called to Allen, "We're going down to seven, Al."

"Allen," he corrected, glancing around at us.

"Sure. Macho Allen. We're going down to seven."

The image he made in that hallway, his body stiff and still, left arm up slightly, right arm straight at his side, legs apart, feet firmly planted on the floor, and a window at the end of the hall letting dull February afternoon light in, was of an oversize plastic replica of a man, like a prize in a cereal box, caught in lazy clouds of white plaster dust.

"C'mon," I called to him, "let's tell that limp-dick foreman"—I liked Lenny's phrase—"to put it where the sun don't shine."

And Lenny, who despises euphemisms, no matter how unsubtle, corrected, "Up his freakin'
ass!"

Allen said nothing. He continued to stare at us, that flat, macho grin on his mouth, clouds of plaster dust swirling fitfully around him.

I turned toward the stairway to the seventh floor, glanced back at Lenny. "C'mon, Lenny," I said.

"Somepin's wrong," Lenny whispered.

I started down. I said, "He won't stay up here alone, Lenny," and I heard, "Yes, he will." I looked back. The stairway wall was between me and Allen; I could see only Lenny. I guessed that Lenny was still looking at Allen, asked, "Did you say that, Lenny?" and he said once more, turning his head very briefly to look at me, "Somepin's wrong, somepin's real wrong!"

I took a long, slow breath. I called to Allen, "We're going down to seven, Al. You can stay here if you want."

And I heard, "He will."

"Somepin's wrong, Jesus Christ, somepin's wrong!" Lenny whispered.

I asked him, "Did you say that, Lenny?"

He turned to me. "Jesus, Jesus!" he whispered. I could see fingers of plaster dust in the air around him and I said tightly, urgently, "Come on, Lenny," and started back up. I stopped a couple of stairs from the top, reached for him.

He screamed.

I cursed.

And I heard his scream shut off abruptly as the plaster dust around him grew thick and smothering and he struggled for his breath within it.

He stumbled through it to the stairway, lurched forward. I reached, caught him.

Then the plaster dust began to settle and Allen appeared at the top of the stairs, cheeks puffed out like a blowfish, face red. He took several stiff, quick steps down, sat heavily, and let his breath out. I continued to hold on to Lenny, who was hacking up plaster dust and trying to curse at the same time.

Allen said, through intermittent coughing, "I felt it coming, you know"—cough—"in through that window, that little"—cough—"wind, and I thought" —cough, cough—"Shit,
it's so damned"
—cough--
"dry up here this stuff s gonna be everywhere,
so I thought I'd better . . . come back—"

Lenny cut loose with several very loud, coarse coughs, then cursed mightily.

Allen glanced at him. "He okay?"

"Sure," I said, "why don't we go down to seven?"

"I think we'd better tell that foreman," Allen said, "to stick it"—cough--"where the sun don't shine."

"Up his freaking ass!" Lenny said.

But we never did. We went down to one, found the foreman, and told him there were no fuse boxes on the eighth floor. He shrugged, "Course there ain't. You think the riffraff around here's gonna leave stuff like that?" And he laughed.

"Up yours," Lenny whispered, but not loud enough that the foreman could hear him.

Two days later, the Milford fell, reluctantly, after the fourth load of dynamite was touched off.

~ * ~

The trouble Leslie and I were having—which hadn't gotten resolved the night before because we were both unwilling to broach it out of fear, I think, of where it might lead—had to do with her father, who stayed with her in her loft apartment on East 73rd Street. He was a quirky middle-aged man with a number of ailments plaguing him.

We were lying naked in my single bed, pleasantly exhausted from lovemaking, and had been engaging in light conversation that I hoped would eventually lead to more lovemaking. After a while, the conversation turned somehow to her father: She said, "He's not easy to handle, but he's fun most of the time."

And I said, "Maybe he should be somewhere that he can be taken better care of, Leslie."

Leslie riveted me with a cold stare and said, "He's my
father
, Sam. He's
family
, and from where I come from we take care of our own."

"So do we," I protested feebly. "It's just that—"

"I never realized you could be so uncaring, Sam," she cut in. "I don't know why I never saw it before. I'm glad I see it now."

"Hell, I'm not uncaring. I was just making what I thought was a rational suggestion."

"Oh, rational, smational! That's just a euphemism for
let's do what's expedient. Let's shuffle the old folks
off
to where they aren't going to be such a bother
—"