Audrey’s Door (9 page)

Daniel’s voice mail beeped. Saraub didn’t leave a message with him, either. He’d been going out with Daniel a lot lately, and it was starting to hurt his liver. More importantly, his wallet had gotten a lot thinner. So he dialed the only other person he knew would be happy for him.

“Hello?” Sheila asked. She had a slight British accent, because that was where she’d gone to prep school.

“Mom?”

“Saraub!” she cried. “How are you?” He kept in contact with his cousins and siblings, but hadn’t talked to Sheila in almost a year. He’d brought Audrey to meet her only once, and that meeting had gone badly. Sheila had referred to her as “that farm girl” all night and suggested that their dinner was unnecessary because the relationship was clearly a fling, before he settled down with a nice girl like Tonia. Despite all that, he’d hoped that over time his best girl and mother would learn to get along, but when Audrey got home that night, she’d locked herself in the bathroom and run the water until dawn so he didn’t hear her crying. He’d realized that it was finally time to put his foot down.

“How are you?” Sheila now asked. He had to admit, it was nice to finally hear her voice. Also, and this thought did not illustrate his finest hour, he could always use that trust fund. He’d been burning through his cash lately. Hardly a single meal cooked at home. Turns out, eating alone is depressing.

“I’m good, Mom,” he said. His head wasn’t though. It felt like a splinter had lodged in his cranium, and was slowly working its way out.

“Oh, Saraub, I miss you! Your uncle will be so happy. We’re celebrating Ganesha tonight. Just in time. Will you come?”

“We celebrate that? Wasn’t it last month?”

“It’s a new thing. For good luck with the business. Would you come?”

He pictured their cook efficiently dropping pappa-dam in hot oil, cooking rotis special, just for him, and he grinned. Homecoming. He’d missed that apartment. For one, it was so big he could stretch out on the rug in front of the television. For another, it was on the thirty-sixth floor. So high up that the air was actually clean, and his stuffed nose always miraculously cleared. “I’ve got news, Mom.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line, and he realized that she thought he was about to announce his engagement to Audrey. She probably had no idea that it had already happened, and unhappened. “I’m not sure I want to hear…” she said.

“Maginot Lines,
Mom. I might get a green light. Like, fifty percent chance they’ll finish the funding and distribute it in theatres. A real, feature-length movie. Can you believe it?” He was so excited he hopped up from his chair. Crumbs came with him. He really was a slob. No joke. For a neat freak, Audrey had put up with a lot.

“And now, which one is that?” she asked.

He reddened. “The movie about natural resources. I’ve been working on it for three years, Mom.”

“The hippy thing—your young-life crisis.”

He made a fist and squeezed. “Right.”

“Well, that’s wonderful! But don’t be too hard on Servitus. We’ve got half our stock invested. They paid for
your college. And that beautiful wing at the Met, too.”

“I know,” he said, though it seemed like crappy timing to bring it up, just now.

“Only company that’s up this year. Thank God! Anyway, this is wonderful news, dear. We can celebrate tonight. I’m so happy you called. I was just thinking about you because I don’t have any recent pictures for the refrigerator. What do you want to eat? I’m about to give Innocencia the list. I thought puran polis—you like them, yes?”

He nodded, still wiping the crumbs from his backside. It occurred to him that he’d been down lately because normally he washed his clothes after wearing them. Working at home this last month had come at a bad time. He needed to be around people. “Dinner sounds great. What can I bring?”

“Wonderful! I’ll set an extra place. So much to catch up on. Did you know your two cousins took over the business? It’s still Ramesh and Ramesh, of course.”

He smiled. Better news than he’d hoped. It meant his mother and aunts had sold their shares, and likely, each eldest son, except for Saraub, was now a partner. Which also meant that he was out of the rug business for good.

“Great news. I’ll bring red wine. How’s that?” Saraub asked. He walked as he talked, feeling energetic for the first time since Audrey left. Feeling good. He started picking up clothes off the floor. Maybe the worst of it was over. Maybe that first two weeks after she left, when he hadn’t shaved or brushed his hair, were in the past. Hell, maybe he was even ready to start dating again.

“Yes. How about a nice Bordeaux? Two bottles. Oh, and Whiskers is good, but he’ll be happy to see you. No one ever scratches his ears.”

Saraub by now had piled his clothes into a heap on the kitchen table and was deciding whether to carry them
to the Laundromat two blocks north, or burn them. “Okay. Two Bordeaux!” He was surprised by how well all this had gone. It was as if they’d never fought. And why had they fought? Over Audrey? It all seemed so ridiculous now. He’d built Sheila up in his mind as unreasonable, but maybe it was Audrey’s influence that had done the damage.

“Six o’clock for cocktails. Seven for dinner. But come earlier if you want.”

“Great!”

“Oh, and one more thing, darling. I’m only setting one extra plate.”

Saraub’s pulse throbbed in his temples. “How’s that?”

“Only you.”

He took a breath. Thought about telling her he wanted to come home for a night, and have a meal cooked, and be loved, and safe, and treated like he was special. He thought about telling her Audrey was gone, and he was the most down he’d ever been in his life. “You know that won’t work, Mom,” he said instead.

There was a long silence. He counted to ten. The silence continued. Always a game with her. Always about winning, because she was so sure she was right. His father, when he’d been around, had softened her. After he died, she turned into a frightened, clinging person, and even for his younger sisters, home stopped being home.

“I should go,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you my good news.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Come for dinner. I miss you. And we should talk about your trust fund, too. I’ve added to it, but I haven’t put it in your name. Tax reasons.”

He winced, and remembered now, why they’d stopped talking. It hadn’t just been about Audrey. “I miss you too, Mom. Take care of yourself, and call me if you need me.” He didn’t say good-bye; he just hung up.

When he got off, his head was pounding. The apart
ment was veiled in a layer of filth. He shoved the clothes from the table, so they landed in a heap on the floor. In the kitchen, he mixed a large, crusty bowl with flour, milk, and eggs, and fried it in butter so that it resembled a huge pancake. It tasted like the stuff inside a horse’s feedbag, but some syrup did the trick, and soaked up the acid in his stomach. When he was done, he looked around the home he’d made with Audrey, with its empty space where a piano had been, and punched another hole through the wall.

M
onday morning, Audrey woke with a start. Her alarm clock read 3:18. She jumped up from the air mattress. Her throat! The man! The swarming ants!

Heart pitter-pattering, she rubbed her eyes and spun around the room like a windup toy. Her body was wet. Was it blood? Was she dead? No, it was sweat. Her black cotton trousers were soaked through. She felt uneasy, ashamed. A dream?

And then her cheeks turned crimson. Something was really wrong. Her thighs itched, and were too hot. She inspected the coat she’d slept under, and the wet mattress, and her crotch. Her breath came fast. She didn’t want to believe it. She hadn’t done this since Hinton.

But the smell. The heat. Oh, God.

The piano bench was askew, so she righted it—exactly hip distance from the keys. Her ballet flats were scattered, so she placed them next to each other, then on
top of each other, then next to each other, then willed herself to drop them. The muscles of her face contracted into quiet sorrow. Saraub. The nightmares, and now, good grief, she’d pissed the bed!

She took a breath. Then another. One! Two! Three! Four!

(And Mami makes Five!)

She swiped the air mattress with a wet rag, peeled off her pants, and headed for the shower. Her wrist ached. Something sore and tight. She looked at it, then sighed with disappointment: she’d been so out of sorts last night that she’d fallen asleep wearing her watch. Its knob had worn a welt into the bone there. She unclasped the steel band and freed her inflamed skin, then glanced at the time. 10:05
A.M.

What!

She scrambled to the turret. Chiaroscuro shadows rushed as she ran so that the stained-glass birds looked like they’d been freed and were crashing against the walls. It was so dark in here—how could the sun have risen already? But when she got to the window, she saw that her watch was correct. It was midmorning. She’d slept twelve hours for the first time since…her hash-smoking days back out west. Down below, college kids rushed toward Columbia University, and throngs of Manhattanites disappeared into the sooty mouth of the 110
^th
Street subway.

The alarm clock, she realized, was dark. Why had she thought it read 3:18 A.M.? She picked it up and found the problem. Its wire had been severed. Not cleanly sliced, but ragged, so that pieces of copper hung loose like Shredded Wheat.

A rat? A lot of rats? She
hated
rats!

She started for the bathroom—a quick shower. Saw that even after an entire night’s sleep, the bags under her green eyes had deepened. She ran the tub, since
the shower didn’t seem to be working. Brown water glugged. A red ant crawled out from the drain, and she smashed it. She really hated ants. Always had. Then she remembered the thing she’d forgotten: she had an eleven o’clock status meeting. Big day. Huge, career-making day. And she was really late.

She raced. Found the only business attire that wasn’t wrinkled—a black skirt, white polyester blouse, and clashing turquoise pumps, then reached for her jacket inside the double-doored den closet.

She would have missed it if she hadn’t bumped into it. The sound was pretty, like the light footsteps of small children (One! Two! Three! Four!). Boxes scattered. They didn’t bounce against the hardwood floor, or roll. Instead, they skated.

The empty cardboard boxes from her move. About twenty of them. They’d been recorrugated into new shapes; doubled-up triangles, squares, and rectangles, and were taped together end to end with clear packaging tape. Leaning against the far closet wall, they formed a solid, six-foot-by-four-foot rectangle. At the center edge of the rectangle was a circular cutout. A hole for a handle…This thing was a door!

She ran her hands along the side of the structure. Sparks of electricity ignited in her fingertips like touching dry ice. The materials were shoddy, but the construction professional. The various shapes fit perfectly, like a jigsaw puzzle, and each one buttressed the next. They’d all been turned inside out, so their writing (PALMOLIVE, SERVITUS, PFIZER, HAMMERHEAD, UNITED CHINESE EMIRATES) didn’t show.

She remembered a snippet of her dream. The man in the closet, and her mother’s accusation:
It’s a bad place, where you live
…. and something else, too. Something about Hinton that she couldn’t quite remember: a mirror layered with ants, down a muddy hole.

Who had built this door? Edgardo, playing a mean prank because he’d gotten fired? One of the neighbors? Saraub? Clara? The man from her dream?

She sighed. But her sharp box cutter lay on the piano, its blade open. Her arms hurt, and so did her back. Even her legs ached. But it’s hard for your watch to dig a welt into your wrist when you’re sleeping soundly. A truth she preferred not to admit was now too obvious to deny: a professional had done this thing.
She
had built this thing.

She took a deep breath and turned away from the closet. Its evidence was too unsettling. Sleepwalking. Strange dreams, sleeping in front of a television instead of in a proper bed. Moving into a haunted and crumbling apartment like a modern-day Miss Haversham. These decisions were pathologically stupid. No doubt about it: she was turning into her mother.

Audrey’s lower lip got quivery. But no. She wasn’t like Betty! Why couldn’t she ever give herself credit? She’d gotten herself to New York. A scholarship to Columbia University, for Christ’s sake! Everybody knows those programs aren’t easy. It’s like being a doctor! She paid rent once a month, and on time. When Saraub got cut off, she’d been the one to draw up a budget so they’d been able to afford orange juice and winter coats. She’d been the one to keep him from taking an office job, so he could push forward on
Maginot Lines,
too. So yeah, she’d peed her pants last night. But that didn’t make her crazy.

As for the boxes and alarm-clock wire, she’d just been sleepwalking. Growing up, she used to sleepwalk all the time. Pretty reasonable, given the circumstances. Whose subconscious wouldn’t run from Betty?

She sighed and put her hand to her throat. Sore. She knew what she had to do next. An unpleasant but unavoidable necessity. She needed to find a shrink. Fast.
Because Saraub wasn’t around anymore, and there was nobody left to catch her if she fell.

Then she looked at her watch, which she’d put on the other wrist: 10:30. “Cripes on a cross!” she shouted. How the heck had she just wasted an entire half hour? She opened the door and fled.

While waiting for the elevator, a tubercular-skinny old woman with a yellow, spray-on tan peeked out from 14C, the apartment next door.

“Hi, darling,” she said.

Audrey startled. It took her a second before she realized to whom the old lady was speaking.

“Hi!” Audrey said. The arrowed, ivory button pointing down was carved, not stamped, and time had worn a finger-shaped groove into its center. She pressed it again.

“A lot of unpacking, sweetie?” the woman called. Her face shone, pasty and slick with what looked like cold cream. Something about her was off. It took Audrey a beat before she figured it out: plastic surgery. The woman’s pale, paper-thin skin was without wrinkles, though she had to be at least eighty-five. Her cheekbones were preternaturally high, and her chin was too sharp, as if its bone had been sawed to a point. The effect wasn’t pretty, but insectile—a praying mantis. Even her eyes were wrong. They were too wide for her narrow face, and as Audrey looked more closely, too perfect in their roundness, like a doll’s. Man-made holes like slits in fabric. Audrey couldn’t help it. She gasped. The woman looked inhuman.

“I said, a lot of unpacking?” the woman repeated, slower this time, like maybe Audrey was simple.

“Uh-huh,” Audrey answered. She tried not to look at the woman, then couldn’t help looking, and imagining the surgery. Skin sliced open, pulled tight, stapled closed. Bone and flesh separated like strangers.

The woman opened the door wider. Audrey blinked, then blinked longer, but both times, she saw the same thing. The woman wore an aged and yellowed dressing gown. Nineteen-twenties vintage silk—something Jean Harlow might have strutted through an old gangster movie. It fit her like the clear plastic casing butchers squeeze over sausages. Her saggy arm flesh disgorged from its short sleeves, then hung all the way down to her wrinkled elbows. Oh, Audrey hated wrinkled elbows worse than knuckles. They were like giant gerbil babies!

“You building something in there?” the woman asked. Audrey saw now, that her eyes were clouded with cataracts. Partly this was reassuring. Maybe half-blind, she didn’t realize she’d gone overboard on the surgery.

“What do you mean?” Audrey asked. A few floors down, the elevator hummed.

The woman smiled. “All that hammering about last night.”

Literal hammering?
Audrey wanted to ask,
Because I don’t remember that so well.
Instead she said, “Sorry if I kept you up.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, sweetie. Everybody here builds. We all try our hand, but I know you’ll be the best,” she said. Then, with one useless eye, she winked.

The elevator pinged, and 14 lit up. Audrey got inside and pressed “L” just as the woman planted her bare feet on the hallway carpet. All that money spent on a wrinkle-free face and a liposuction-skinny body, but her toenails were yellow with fungus. “Don’t be a stranger!” she called.

Audrey nodded, too shocked to speak. The metal cage closed, separating her from 14C’s strange beast. “Leaping Jesus!” she muttered, as the car plunged.