Justin Kramon (25 page)

Prince stepped around the sofa arm and pushed Sylvan to the ground. He landed behind the sofa with a loud thump, and Finny worried that he’d hit his head again. She sneezed twice in the cloud of Prince’s cologne.

“Judith,” Prince said now, “could you
please
tell this ball boy to leave?”

“Stop it, Prince,” Judith said. “Stop hurting him, okay?”

“What am I supposed to do?” Prince said, turning to Judith. “I come over to my girlfriend’s apartment and I find some scrawny little penis-pulling matchstick trying to get into her bed.”

“You’re mixing metaphors,” Sylvan pointed out. “How can a matchstick pull a penis?”

“I never invited you over, Prince,” Judith said. “And I never said we were exclusive.”

“I’m hurt by this,” Prince said.

“So am I,” Judith said.

“Me, too,” Sylvan added from the floor.

“I would just leave, Sylvan,” Finny told him. “I really think it’ll end up better for you in the long run if you’re the one to walk away.”

“I thought of that,” Sylvan said, using the back of the couch to help him onto his feet again. He’d wiped most of the blood off his chin, and now there was just a faint red smear around his lips, like he’d been drinking tomato juice. “But it’s like I told you over Thanksgiving—I need to stand up for myself. I love Judith.” He turned to Judith. “I love you,” he said again, for her benefit.

“You don’t have to do this,” Judith told Sylvan. “It’s silly.”

“It’s worth having this brute beat on me a little if it helps you see how much you mean to me.”

“I’m not a
brute,”
Prince said, and then shoved Sylvan again. It was enough to set Sylvan off balance, but soon he regained his wobbly stance behind the couch.

“That’s it, Prince,” Judith said. “If you touch him one more time, I’m not talking to you. Ever. I mean it.”

“You hear that, you giant penis?” Sylvan said to Prince.

“Stop
it,” Finny told her brother. “Stop taunting him.” She walked over to Sylvan and put an arm around him, intending to help him out of the room. She wanted to get him away from the apartment, away from Judith and Prince and this absurd scene.

But as they walked toward the door, Sylvan hesitated in front of Prince. For a moment he looked like he was going to toss out another insult. But instead he spat on Prince. Finny couldn’t believe it. The spit splashed Prince’s face, and a small gob of it landed in the crook between Prince’s neck and his shoulder.

“What the
fuck?”
Prince said. His hand flew to where the spit had landed, as if he were swatting a mosquito. When he felt the wet spot on his shoulder, Prince’s eyes widened. And then, without warning, he swung at Sylvan.

Finny saw the blow coming. Her perceptions were startlingly precise. It was as if she were watching the world at some slower speed than normal. She saw Sylvan duck out of the way. She heard Judith gasp. She saw Prince’s enormous fist coming toward her temple.

A shock of lights, a roaring noise, a moment of explosive pain.

Then everything went black.

Chapter
26
Finny’s Convalescence

She woke with the cloying scent of Prince’s cologne in her nostrils. Her head felt like it was locked in a vise. Where was she? She heard some banging, someone in another room calling, “Medics! Open up!”

Then she recognized the gray sofa she was lying on, the television across from it. She saw a woman folding laundry in the apartment across the street. Sylvan was standing above her, saying, “Fin? Are you okay, Fin?”

“Bags,” she said.

“What?” Sylvan said.

Finny was trying to say that she’d left her luggage in front of the door, and that was why whoever was banging couldn’t get in, but she couldn’t seem to form the words. She was too tired. And it felt like someone was tightening the vise on her head.

“Where’s Judith?” Finny asked.

“She took the gorilla into the other room. He kept saying he was sorry, and wanted to stay and make sure you were okay. But Judith wouldn’t let him. You scared us, Fin. You were out cold for a second.”

“You’re an idiot,” Finny said to her brother.

“I’m sorry, Fin,” Sylvan said. “I really didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I just didn’t want to back down. I’m sure that’s what he expected.”

Finny sneezed. “Ow,” she said.

Then the paramedics burst into the room. There were two of them, wearing orange vests. One of the men had a large belly and, in his tightly cinched belt and vest, had something of the look of a trussed turkey. The other man was extremely thin, his face pocked like an orange peel, and his vest was so large on him that it billowed when he walked. They were rolling a metal gurney that clanked in the small room. Judith was behind them, trying to peer around at Finny.

“Okay,” the fat medic said in an unnecessarily loud and deliberate voice, like he was speaking into a megaphone. “Please tell us where the body is.”

“You’re okay,” Judith said, seeing that Finny was awake. Finny could hear the relief in Judith’s voice. Then Judith told the medics, “It’s not a body; it’s my friend.”

“I’m fine,” Finny said to the paramedics. “Really.” But when she tried to sit up, the screws tightened on her head and she had to lie back. “I just need a minute.”

But the fat paramedic shook his head. He was bald, and had a triangle of orange hair on his chin, a silver hoop earring in his left ear. “You are coming in to get checked out,” he informed Finny in his megaphone voice.

Then the thin one piped up, “Why don’t you just give her a minute, like she said?” His voice was actually deeper than the heavy man’s, and there was a sandpapery roughness to it. He had a couple days’ worth of stubble on his face, and his black hair looked unwashed, oily.

“You better go in and get checked out,” Sylvan said to Finny. “You look like you might be getting a black eye.”

“Then the toughs won’t mess with me at Stradler,” Finny joked.

“Seriously, Fin,” Judith said from behind the paramedics, “you should go.”

“All right,” Finny said. “Sure. Why not?” Her head really did hurt.

“Okay,” the fat paramedic said, “we will
now
load you on.”

“Do you have to announce everything?” the thin one said.

They helped her onto the gurney, and started to push her out of the room.

“It’s not going to make it around the bend with her on it,” the thin man said. “I can see from here. There’s no point.”

“The procedure is to try once before we make adjustments,” the heavy one said.

“You and your procedures,” the thin one said.

As predicted, the gurney couldn’t make the turn with Finny on it, and the men had to pick it up and tilt it.

“We will first tilt to the left,” the heavy paramedic said.

“You need to tilt right,” the thin one said. “The hallway turns right.”

“The procedure is left first, then right.”

The thin man rolled his eyes. The gurney swayed. Finny felt seasick from being tilted left then right. But she didn’t complain. She didn’t want to make the tension between the two medics worse.

“You need to go
with
the turn,” the thin one said. “It’s obvious.”

“Obvious is not necessarily right,” the fat one said.

“Are you crazy?” the thin one said. Then he looked at Finny. “Will you verify this guy is crazy?”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones,” the fat man said.

But the thin one went on, “Everything is rules, rules, rules. We had an old lady say sayonara the other day because fat Joe over here insisted Broadway was the shortest route to the hospital. Who takes Broadway through midtown in an ambulance? What are we, a fucking tour bus?”

“Sticks and stones,” the fat man repeated.

Finally they got Finny around the turn and out of the apartment. Prince must have left, because Finny didn’t see him during her trip to the elevator. Downstairs, as they were loading her in the ambulance, Sylvan said, “I feel so awful, Fin. That punch was meant for me.”

“Don’t worry,” Finny said. “I think I can take a punch better anyway.”

“I’m sorry!” Judith called to Finny as they were closing the ambulance doors.

“Don’t take Broadway,” Finny told the paramedics.

Finny spent a woozy night in the emergency room, getting poked, prodded, x-rayed, and blood-tested, shuttled from room to room. She was exhausted because of her long flight, the time change, and probably also the punch she’d taken. She fell asleep a couple times, and they had to wake her, telling her it was bad to sleep if she had a concussion. During the night she found her mind playing tricks on her because of the fatigue. At around two in the morning she realized you could rearrange the letters in
concussion
to spell
unconscious
, if you added a
u.
This seemed an urgent discovery, and she wanted to alert one of the nurses to it, but no one seemed to care. She attempted to notify a doctor, but this only caused him to believe she was
suffering
from a concussion, which prompted more tests, more hours of sleeplessness.

Then the doctor told her everything was okay. He let her sleep a couple hours in a hospital bed. In the morning, when they discharged her, Sylvan and Judith were in the waiting room, their eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. Judith’s hair was coming out of her ponytail, and her face looked puffy, as if from crying. Or maybe because she’d taken a nap.

“You’re
not
going back today,” Judith said.

“I have to,” Finny said. “I have class tomorrow.”

“It’s one day,” Sylvan said. “I’m sure you can make it up.”

“People are adding and dropping classes anyway,” Judith said. “Just come back and rest. I called my parents and told them you had a fall last night. They said we could stay at their place. It’ll be more comfortable for you. Come on.”

“Do it,” Sylvan said. “For your health, Fin. I’d feel awful letting you go back the way you are.”

“Are
you
coming?” she asked her brother. She wasn’t sure what his status with Judith was.

“I have to go back to Boston,” Sylvan said. “But call me tomorrow, okay?”

Finny agreed—more for her brother’s sake than hers, since she could see how guilty he felt.

Sylvan got on the subway. Judith paid for a cab to the Beresford for Finny and herself.

Inside the apartment at the Beresford, Judith told Finny, “You’re going to stay in my room. Don’t even
think
of protesting. You can go rest now. My dad is at his bridge game, and my mom is at a meeting. I’m going to get your bags from my apartment this afternoon, and I’ll be back by the time my parents get home for dinner.”

Finny lay down in Judith’s bed, and the next thing she knew it was five-thirty in the afternoon. She got up and looked outside at the darkened streets. Then she picked up a copy of
The New Yorker
magazine Judith had in the magazine rack by her bed. Finny started to read a long article about spices, thinking of Laura’s boyfriend, Gerald, but almost immediately her head began to feel like it was getting screwed into the vise again. She put down the magazine and lay back on the bed. In a minute she picked it up again, and read the first line.
Gregory P. Mark is not the sort of man you’d expect to find in a police lineup.
But then Finny’s vision went blurry, and she felt like her brain was about to pop out of her skull. Several more times she tried to read, and each time the headache came back worse than before. Finally she dropped the magazine back into the rack.

There was a light knock, and the bedroom door opened. “Hey,” Judith said. “How are you feeling?”

“Weird,” Finny said. “I can’t read anything.”

Judith looked concerned. “Well, maybe you should eat something. You haven’t eaten all day. My parents said we could have dinner early.”

“Sounds good,” Finny said. “How’s my eye look?”

“Not bad, actually,” Judith said. “I’ll give you some cover-up.”

Judith’s parents turned out to be not at all as Finny had imagined them. Because of Judith’s stories of her father’s trysts, Finny imagined a well-dressed, confident man. But the man who appeared in the dining room was neither of the above. He had a hunched posture, pinched features, and spindly legs that emerged like stalks from the running shorts he wore to the dinner table. He was soft-spoken, with a funny nervous way of talking. He asked Finny how she was feeling, and before she could even answer, he began to mutter a train of almost unintelligible courtesies: “Yes, yes, very good, thank you, nice to meet you, great, great, how lovely …”

Mrs. Turngate, on the other hand, was an authoritative woman. She had short dirty-blond hair, which she kept in a spiky style Finny was used to seeing on high schoolers. Judith had clearly inherited her wide jaw from her mother, whose flat cheeks and sharp little nose appeared the way a ship’s hull might look if it were approaching you while you were swimming. Mrs. Turngate’s features were like a clumsier version of Judith’s, and they put Finny in mind of how thin the line is between beauty and strangeness. Mrs. Turngate wasn’t a particularly large woman, but next to the stuttering Mr. Turngate, she was impressive with her straight posture and jutting bosom. She wore only gray clothes. Even her shoes and earrings were gray.

“Charcoal is my shade” she said when Finny commented on how well-coordinated her host’s clothes were. “Once I learned that, I have never worn anything else.”

Finny thought it was an odd look, but of course didn’t question this distinguished woman’s tastes. Mrs. Turngate asked Finny again how she was feeling after her fall, and Finny said she was doing much better. The cover-up that Judith had applied completely masked the bruise.

They sat down to dinner, which Judith’s mother had prepared. She said that it was meat loaf and vegetables, though to Finny it appeared as several indistinguishable gray mounds. They ate with heavy silverware, off the kind of china that feels light and breakable but that Finny knew to be very expensive. Their dining table—made of a glossy chocolate-cherry-colored wood—must have been twelve feet long, but they sat gathered in the middle, like animals huddled in the cold. Behind Mrs. Turngate there was a foggy modern-looking painting that heavily featured the color charcoal-gray Instead of wine, everyone was served a glass of cranberry juice in the gold-rimmed glasses Finny had seen at the party where she’d run into Earl.