Page Turner Pa (6 page)

"I know it's an important dinner."

"Okay, so long as that's clear. Anyway, not much other news from here, except—oh yes, I had dinner with Tushi last night. She has a new young man. A doctor."

"Handsome?"

"And twenty-seven."

"May we all be so fortunate as Tushi."

"Yes, she does look fantastic, considering her age. What?" A hand muffled the phone. "Listen, I'd better run. Accounting's been keeping an eye on my phone bills, if you can believe it. Last week they actually sent me a pissy memo suggesting that I should try to go easier on the overseas calls. Me, they send this memo to! As if there'd even be a company without me." Almost audibly, he shook his head. "And here I am, babbling on about how I'm not supposed to babble on."

Silence.

"Well, I'll let you go. You must be tired. When are you flying back?"

"Saturday, I think. I'm still not sure."

"It doesn't matter as long as you're back by the fourteenth." A pause. "You will be back by the fourteenth, won't you?"

"Of course. What do you take me for?"

"I just wanted to make sure.... Well, sweet dreams. I miss you."

"I miss you, too."

Another pause. "I love you."

"I love you, too."

"Good night, darling."

"Good night."

Kennington hung up. Over the course of the conversation something white near the curtain had caught his eye. Now, putting down the receiver, he went to see what it was. A piece of paper, folded in eighths, shone bright against the carpet. Unfolding it, he read, "Summit Printing, Inc." Then:

 

Dear Paul,

I have left your mother. I am in love with Muriel Peete from the office. We plan to marry as soon as we obtain our divorces. I'm sorry if this news comes as a shock, but I am 53 yrs. old and cannot continue living a lie...

 

After he finished the letter, he refolded it and put it in the breast pocket of his jacket. Then he pulled open the curtain and looked out onto the street. It was empty except for a boy walking two poodles. What the Germans call an ear worm had tunneled into his head, as always, some insidious ditty from his childhood. "Good morning, good morning, We've slept the whole night through ..."

And the whole night,
he thought,
it will play in my dreams ... if I sleep at all.

He let the curtain fall shut. The boy with the poodles turned the corner. On the glass, against which the rain slanted ceaselessly, the glare of a streetlamp illuminated five oily moons where his fingers had rested.

S
OPHIE DIED
that afternoon. This wasn't really such a tragedy, Joseph tried to convince himself. After all, she'd had a good life, had lived to be thirteen—old for a dachshund. Still, as he hailed a cab outside Dr. Wincote's office, a sensation of hollowness rose up in his stomach. His breathing got choppy. Safe inside the taxi, he had to loosen his tie. "Central Park West and Sixty-third," he told the driver, who made an efficient U-turn, scissoring his way through the clotted midday traffic. He was an older fellow—that is, older than Joseph—and his name was Manny Litwak. "Pretty rare you get a cabbie these days who speaks English," Joseph said.

"Most of the guys out there, they're immigrants," the cabbie answered. "Puerto Ricans, Russians."

"Yeah, the other day, I had an Oriental? I said to him, 'I need to go to White Street.' 'What street?' he kept asking me. 'White Street.' 'What street?' I tell you, it was like an Abbott and Costello routine."

They turned onto Broadway.

"White Street's down in Tribeca," Joseph added. "I've got a friend who has a loft there."

"I know where White Street is."

"Of course. I didn't mean to sound insulting. I'm not myself today because my dog just died. I'm on my way back from the vet's."

"Sorry to hear it."

"Thanks. It's strange, coming back empty-handed. And when I think that just an hour ago, I was riding downtown, her in my arms. My Sophie. She was thirteen."

"Pretty old for a dog."

"And then I had to pay the bill. Isn't it strange that even when something dies, you still have to pay the bill?"

The driver did not respond. Leaning back, Joseph found himself remembering the afternoon he and Kennington had driven out to the house of the breeder lady in Morristown, watched as she extracted Sophie from the wriggling mass of the litter: "like a furry worm," Kennington said later. That same week, he had moved into the loft on White Street, and Sophie had peed on the antique Bokhara, leaving a dark stain.

On Central Park West, the traffic eased. Because the driver knew the exact speed at which to coast in order to make all the green lights, they arrived at Joseph's building in a matter of minutes. Climbing out, he tipped too lavishly—payola for his need to confide—then stumbled toward the revolving door, where Hector, the handsomest of the doormen, awaited him.

"Afternoon, Mr. Mansourian," Hector said. "Everything go okay?"

"I'm afraid not, Hector. I'm afraid Sophie's passed on."

Hector's brow tensed, but it was the fabric braids glinting on his wide shoulders that captured Joseph's attention.

"Gosh, Mr. Mansourian, I'm sorry to hear that. She was a nice dog."

"Thank you."

"I know what it's like. A couple of years ago my mother lost her dog. Tidbit, we called him, on account of he was so small. It was very upsetting."

"Yes, it always is. You love them like children, you know?"

"I know, sir." With which regretful observation Hector pushed the revolving door. When he'd first moved into the building, twenty-five years ago now, it had amazed Joseph that people could be paid just to push revolving doors. Of course he hadn't understood then about unions. (Now he understood all too well about unions.) A certain grasping cynicism underlay the mechanics of New York luxury, he reflected, as the smooth and oiled gyre took him in, its brushed undersides scraping softly against the polished marble, ushering him through a multiplicity of reflections—like Alice through the looking glass, he sometimes thought. Then he was in the lobby. Ghosts of perfumes collided amid the dark wood veneers, the hard little pink sateen sofas and chairs that no one ever used—indeed, that seemed designed to repel use. And how many times had he passed through this lobby with Sophie, or with Kennington and Sophie, on the way back from the park?...but he didn't want to conjure Kennington right now. Funny that because Sophie had died, Joseph should find himself grieving Kennington's absence, when he was merely in Europe, as he'd been dozens of times before; would be coming back soon, very soon, in time for their anniversary. Twenty years, they told people, not mentioning, for the sake of discretion, the first five, during which Kennington had been underage. Meanwhile a second doorman, this one elderly, was ringing for the elevator, which was an old-fashioned one, with a little velvet bench on which Joseph had never once seen anyone sit.

"Afternoon, Sam," Joseph said.

"Afternoon, Mr. Mansourian."

"I'm afraid my dog has passed on, Sam."

"Has he, now?"

"She. Sophie was a she."

"A real crying shame," Sam said—a little mockingly, Joseph thought—and he opened the doors for Joseph to step through.

Silently the doors closed on Joseph's face.

Almost as soon as the elevator started moving, he felt faint again, so much so that for the first time in twenty-five years, he actually sat down on the little velvet bench. This turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, as the ride took all of forty seconds. Up onto his feet he hoisted himself, before continuing into the cramped corridor, where he undid the double doors with their triple locks. In the front hall a black-and-white checkerboard of tiles stretched to the shadowed living room. He smelled cooking, heard Mozart—both from other apartments.

Once safe in his bedroom, he changed out of his suit; checked his e-mail (there was none), checked his voice mail (there was none). And what next? He wasn't sure. A planless evening stretched ahead of him. Of course he knew better than to go into the kitchen, where on the other side of the swinging door Sophie's bright red dishes still sat, one half filled with kibble and the other with water in which little bits of kibble floated, bloated, disintegrated. Her toys lay idle in the dog bed. He'd noticed the blood when he'd picked her up to take her to Dr. Wincote. And then, in the taxi on the way downtown, she had died without drama. No, he decided, in the end it was better to steer clear of the kitchen tonight; better, in the morning, to let Maria remove "the effects" with that harrowing efficiency that was her hallmark, so that when Joseph returned from the office the next afternoon the apartment would be scraped clean of all signs of canine life; except from photographs, no one would be able to tell that for years a dachshund named Sophie had lived here.

Still shaking a little, he went into the living room, where he mixed himself a drink and put on a CD: the adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Then he sat down. He was wondering whether he should tell Kennington about Sophie. It was one-thirty in the morning in Rome, which meant Kennington would either be asleep, or out walking, or out at the bars; if he went to the bars, that is; if he did anything along those lines. And anyway, did the expected death of an old, sick dog really constitute enough of an emergency to justify a phone call in the middle of the night? Probably not. Probably better to call Tushi, who was in town. Or his mother in Queens. Except that Tushi was a cat person; his mother was dead. Ridiculous, that even after so much time passed, he should still want to call her. Another sign that he was becoming senile. Floating, bloating.

Or he could call someone else.

At the prospect, his fingers tingled.

From a side table, he picked up a magazine with a shirtless man on the cover; flipped through it; ran down the list of photographs and descriptions with his pencil, until he landed on one that he liked.

He reached for the phone and dialed.

To his surprise, a human voice answered.

"Good evening, this is Matt."

"Hello, Matt. I just saw your ad in
Advocate Classifieds.
I was wondering if you were free for an outcall."

"When?"

"Tonight, if possible."

"Give me your number and I'll call you back."

Joseph gave the number; hung up. Instantly the phone rang.

"Sorry about that. I've got to verify the calls. It's a matter of security."

"I understand."

"Anyway, my terms are two hundred for an hour, three hundred for two hours, five hundred for an overnight."

"An hour should be fine."

"I'm downtown. Where are you?"

"Upper West Side." Joseph gave the address.

"I should be able to get there in about twenty minutes. Oh, and you have to cover my cab fare."

"Of course."

"My name's not really Matt, by the way. It's Kenneth."

"Kenneth, I'm Joseph."

"Good, Joseph. Well, see you soon."

"Sounds good."

They hung up. Immediately Joseph switched off the adagietto. In his hall closet he kept a supply of cheap towels, which he now spread over the bed. Then he took a shower and dried himself before the mirror. And what did he see? A man who, at sixty-one, might have been an advertisement for the force of gravity, which pulls everything down, down. "Face or figure," he remembered his mother saying. "Every woman makes the choice." Only in his case it hadn't been a choice. Face had chosen him. In his clothes, he was a handsome man.

He put on his bathrobe, mixed himself another drink, then made his final preparations for the rendezvous, which consisted of putting his credit cards and passport in the safe, along with whatever small, tempting valuables happened to catch his eye. As an afterthought he slipped off his watch and put that in the safe as well. Finally he settled down in the living room and turned on the television. To his horror a dog food commercial filled the screen; he flipped past it quickly. On a Japanese soap opera, two women knelt on tatami mats and spoke earnestly. He could not understand a word they were saying.

After a while the buzzer rang. "A Mr. Kenneth to see you," he heard Hector call through the intercom.

"Send him up," Joseph answered, and went to wait by the front door. Above the elevator a familiar sprite of light climbed through the numbers, until the doors opened, and a tall, slightly weather-beaten young man in sweatpants and a leather jacket stepped out. "Hi," he said, holding out a thick hand. "I'm Kenneth."

"Kenneth, Joseph."

Joseph shut the door behind them. "This is a nice apartment," Kenneth said, taking off his jacket.

"I'm glad you think so. Would you like a drink?"

"A beer, if you've got one." Sitting on the sofa, he started untying his tennis shoes.

"One beer coming up," Joseph said, and almost automatically went into the kitchen. He was there before he knew it, confronting the twin red bowls from which, as he opened the refrigerator, he tried (and failed) to avert his eyes. Just as quickly he had fetched the beer and carried it back to Kenneth, who was struggling with a knot in one of his shoelaces. Finally he got it undone; kicked off the shoe.

Handing Kenneth the beer, Joseph sat opposite him, on the sofa.

"So where are you from, Kenneth?"

"Kansas City."

"Been in New York long?"

"About fifteen years."

"Ah." Joseph's upper lip twitched as he watched Kenneth pop the beer. "I'm from New York myself. Queens, actually."

"I don't know about you," Kenneth said, gulping from his beer, "but I'm kind of hot. Mind if I take off my shirt?"

"Feel free."

He yanked the T-shirt over his head. His chest was shaved, stubbly, tanned to a synthetic coffee color. "Very nice," Joseph said, as standing, he moved to run his fingers over the warm skin.

Kenneth stepped slightly back. "Mind if we take care of the money first?"

"Oh, of course not. Excuse me." Removing his hands, Joseph backed away, to the bureau, from the drawer of which he extracted his wallet.