The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Novel (6 page)

For a moment, Eve had no idea what he was talking about. Then she remembered. “You mean the puppy?” She looked around but the dog was hiding.

“ ‘You mean the puppy?’ ” Donald repeated, his tone dripping with mockery. “I mean whatever thing it is that’s introduced another set of—albeit rudimentary—brainwaves to this space. They’ve completely thrown me off. I’ve had a killer time getting through.”

“I’m sorry. I had no idea she’d present a problem.” Eve explained about the hockey boys and their untimely exit. “She needs a home. Please don’t be difficult about this.” Donald paused, and Eve thought her bid for sympathy had worked.

“It’s not enough that I departed the world at a young
age.…” He began what promised to be a classic tirade, which would inevitably include references to rejections from various literary magazines and non-wins of prizes. Several minutes later he concluded, “… but then I opened my home to you as well. And now this.”

Eve wanted to remind him that it was a real estate broker who’d “opened his home,” and that without her, he’d never finish his stupid stories. But she was feeling generous after her successful afternoon, so she opted for conciliation. “No doubt about it, you’ve faced more than your share of injustices. So why don’t we do a little dictation now? About ‘The Handbag That Swallowed Midtown’ or whatever.”

“I am not fooled. And I am not mollified. But luckily for you, I am eager to get back to my work.” Donald’s narcissism made him an easy mark for a gambit like this. “We’ll get back to the mutt later. But for now, let me prepare myself and we’ll begin.” Several moments of silence followed, during which Eve found the notepad she’d been using for their work. She placed it on the bar and waited. Finally, he began. “The glove was thick and snappy, like a surgeon’s. It stretched and loomed, high above Gotham.…”

As she scribbled, Eve wondered if the story was as odd as it appeared or whether she was taking it down wrong. The words on the page looked at each other as if even they knew they didn’t belong together. She was just about to interrupt when the puppy made a noise. The sound began in the back of her throat, a low, pained murmur. Eve stiffened.

Donald, of course, was unaware of anything but his own brilliance. “… The glove’s fingers are bulbous, dangling ominously above the Chrysler Building.…”

“Hang on a moment—”

The dog’s mewling grew more pained and intense. Eve knelt down on the floor, trying to tune out Donald and soothe her.

“I know, I know, you’re in a new place and it’s scary.…”

“… The citizens of New York look up to the sky, wondering if the glove came from Bloomingdale’s.…”

“Donald, please. Give me a moment.”

Eve reached out to pet the dog but she leapt away, hitting her head on the coffee table. Her yelp filled the room.
“Arauuu!”

“Oh, sweetheart. Let me see what’s wrong—”

“—The glove is expanding, as though someone is blowing into it. Now it covers Central Park, now the Upper West Side—”

“Shhhh.”

As Eve reached out again, the dog threw her neck back like a coyote under a full moon. There was a dramatic pause before she let out a heartbreaking yowl. Perhaps it was a delayed reaction to losing the only family she’d ever known, if four sloppy, thoughtless boys counted as family.

“Arauuuuuuuuuuuu. Arauuuuuuuuuuuu.”

“Quiet, doggy, now—”

“—The glove is beginning to block out the sun, shadows fall darkly on the island—”

“—Donald—”

“Arauuuuuuuuuu.”

“—Everyone is running for a taxi—”

“Arauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.”

“—But the taxis have all turned red—”

“Arauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.”

“—Red, the color of death—”

Eve sat down heavily on the floor, covering her face with her hands. There was absolutely nothing, she decided, as wretched as the particular loneliness wrought by the wrong sort of full house.

T
he little pearl-faced clock on the nightstand read five-thirty in the morning. There was just an hour and a half until
Smell the Coffee
. Eve’s arm itched; something was tickling it. She opened one eye and saw the dog, curled up next to her in a tight ball, her breathing deep and rhythmic. How had the tiny pup even gotten up onto the bed? Surely it was too high. Yet here she was, sleeping deeply, presumably exhausted from her fit the previous evening. Eve looked at the dog’s trusting chin resting on her forearm and felt a tug of affection. She disengaged herself carefully and stumbled toward the kitchen to make coffee. Cup in hand, she gazed out the window at the buildings across the courtyard. The light was just starting to come up, a thin sapphire front pushing away the blackness across the east.

It was funny that Eve should be getting up at dawn; when Penelope had lived in New York, as she’d dreamily confided to Eve, she’d never come home before it. The city of her youth had been a place of literary salons and poetry readings, cigarettes and jazz. She and her friends would hop from the Café Carlyle to the Stork Club, then down to the Village, to someone’s loft or basement, during long nights fueled by liquor, intrigue, and repartee,
returning home only when the first rays of sun hit the slate sidewalks. The night simply hadn’t been long enough to contain their revelry.

These images danced in Eve’s mind as she hunted through the dim kitchen for something to nibble, but the breadbox and pantry shelves were empty. Quite a contrast to the bright
Smell the Coffee
studio with its bouillabaisse bounty.

“Bouillabaisse? What an odd thing to ponder.” Donald’s salutation was like a stone thrown in her pool, sending a series of ripples outward, fragmenting her daydream.

“I made bouillabaisse yesterday. A giant pot of it. Mussels, fish, everything. You should have seen me.”

“You’ve taken up cooking?” heaved Donald with a sniff. “Girls in my day would have killed anyone who tried to stick
them
in the kitchen. It is the lowest kind of women’s work. Putting your mind on hold to feed the stomachs of the patriarchy, offering sustenance to others while your soul starves—”

“I was only cooking because it was part of my interview. The food person was out. The real point is, I wrote my first television script and, in case you’re wondering, it went quite well.”

“I see,” he said. “How nice that
your
writing career is taking off.”

At six forty-five, Eve held up the leash. “Ready for a walk?” The dog stirred, blinking. Eve hooked the leash to her collar. Together, they crept softly down the stairs to avoid waking Mrs. Swan and the other neighbors and outside into the cool, hushed morning. They walked several blocks, Eve scanning the buildings, wondering, as always, if any of them might have been Penelope’s. She’d never mentioned where her apartment was, nor had any of her old papers contained the address. It seemed she’d thrown almost everything out from her old life. But each time Eve passed a townhouse or tenement, she tried to picture her mother there, looking out a window or sitting on the stoop, as the locals so loved to do.

Before long, the moment that Eve had been dreading came: the dog’s sudden pull out to the curb and ominous squat. Sure enough, contractions began, and suddenly, there it was in all its reeking banality. Eve had thought raw fish was bad. But there was absolutely no doubt about what she had to do: Dog owners who didn’t clean up after their charges were considered the lowest of the low around here.

“You’ve done your job. Now I must do mine,” Eve said to the dog as she fished out one of the crinkled plastic bags Mrs. Swan had provided. She squatted down next to the blight, holding her breath. She looked up at the sky and began to tap the ground with a bag-enclosed hand, hoping to find her target without having to actually look at it. A couple of punky girls in heavy black eyeliner, who looked like they’d been out all night, walked by arm in arm, giggling at her. After several attempts, Eve’s fingers went from the unforgiving hardness of concrete to the sickening yield she sought. With a clawing motion, she picked up the mound and, still holding her breath, sprinted like an Olympian to the nearest trashcan, the dog struggling to keep up on her short legs.

At six minutes before seven, she placed the puppy carefully in an old leather tote and pushed open the door of the diner. She saw Vadis’s hand go up from a nearby table.

“Hey.” The combination of Vadis’s olive skin and wide-set pale eyes—gifts from her Colombian father and Swedish mother, respectively—made her stand out even in New York’s diverse population and drew admiring glances from a couple of nearby diners.

Eve half leaned in for a cheek kiss, but when Vadis made no move, she pulled back. “Thanks for coming all the way downtown,” she said. “I could have come up to you.” She sat down, gingerly placing the bag on the floor next to her chair.

“Nah, it’s cool. I have a meeting in Soho at nine-thirty,” said Vadis. She went back to scrolling through her BlackBerry’s reams of contacts. No doubt about it, she was part of this town. Vadis
was a real New Yorker. And she was the one who’d insisted that Eve could be—and should be—one, too.

It all started almost three months previously at the reunion of the Ambrose Aesthettes, the club for art history majors at Ambrose College. The college dedicated to creating “the women leaders of tomorrow” lay just outside Columbus, but the girls had gathered in New York to attend the opening of Inez Montoya’s play,
Recognition
. Over dinner afterward in the theater district, the other alumnae shared their own stories of triumph: Several ran their own businesses, one had won a genius grant, another had adopted a pair of Mayan twins, and still another had just celebrated her marriage to a minor member of the English aristocracy.

Eve couldn’t bear to admit she worked for her father—and lived in a condo several doors down from his amid the electric green hills of Rolling Links, a golfing community just outside of Greenwich, Ohio. It was every bit as claustrophobic as it sounded. More so, because most of her relationships were with the sons of Gin’s law partners and golfing buddies, a singularly privileged and feckless set. Especially her most recent boyfriend, Ryan, who ran his father’s company, which involved selling drainage systems to farmers, and who’d lately taken up the topic of marriage.

But Eve had been so deep inside this life for so long, she had no idea that when she surfaced, when she finally had occasion to pop her head out of her little gopher hole, her contemporaries would be so far down the road.

After dinner, Vadis asked if anyone wanted to meet her friends for a nightcap in the Village. Eve, more than ready to drown her sorrows, was the only one who wanted to go. They made their way through a deserted brick courtyard surrounded by weathered tenements to a door in the back. Vadis wrapped her hand around the doorknob and gave it a twist. Eve wondered what on earth was going on; it looked like they were about to barge into
someone’s private home. But when the door opened, out floated the sounds of a rollicking bar.

“Former speakeasy,” said Vadis over the music. “No sign.”

They claimed a back booth. The sepia walls around them seemed to hold the smoke and secrets of a century, while the names carved into the battered tables hummed with the spirit of countless departed drinkers. A sudden wave of déjà vu made the hairs on Eve’s forearms rise. She’d never been to New York before, let alone this bar, so why did it feel so familiar?

“You missed your turn back at the restaurant. To tell everyone what you’ve been up to,” said Vadis, sipping her wine. “Though I get the feeling that was no accident.”

You never could get anything past Vadis. Eve was tempted to make something up, something about writing a novel or designing clothes, but she decided to come clean. She took a long pull of bourbon and told her friend about living between sand traps on the fairway and working for Gin.

“And now he’s upping the ante,” said Eve. “He wants me to go to law school, and as long as I agree to work for him for five years, he’ll even pay for it.”

“Are you going to take him up on it?” Vadis asked.

“I guess. I mean, I’ve dug myself in a bit of a trench. After twelve years of paralegal, what else am I really cut out for? Plus, it’s not like there are a lot of options in Greenwich.”

Vadis signaled to the waitress for another round of drinks. Then she touched Eve on the arm in a way that indicated she was about to say something important. “Just say no to law school.”

“And yes to …?”

“I dunno. Moving here maybe?”

“What?” said Eve.

“There’s no better place than New York for starting over.”

“What would I do? Where would I live?”

“Do a
job
. Live in an
a-part-ment
.” She strung out the last word as if talking to a child. “Not that hard, you know. Thousands
of people do it every day.” She shrugged out of her leather jacket. “I could help you. You could be my project.”

Eve was about to probe this idea further when Vadis’s friends descended on them: three young men with intricate facial hair and tiny round eyeglasses and two women in long bohemian scarves and ruched suede boots. They piled into the booth and Eve listened with curiosity and not a little envy to their clever banter, peppered with references to politics and books and
The New York Times
, most of which she didn’t understand. Their world seemed wide, their prospects vast. Everyone burst into laughter at a joke told by the young man sitting next to Eve.

And something clicked inside her. The courtyard, the unmarked door, the tables with the initials. “Is this place called Chumley’s?” she asked suddenly.

“Yep,” confirmed everyone, helping themselves to another round of beers from a tray going around the table.

Eve hugged herself, looking around the room as the story came back to her.

Her mother had celebrated a birthday here. Penelope had lovingly recounted an evening at a place called Chumley’s—a so-called “secret bar”—with a big gang of her friends. She’d met most of them through her job as a reader for a literary agent in Midtown. Carol and Robert were also readers, the three of them becoming fast friends over the enormous piles of manuscripts that dotted the office. Most of her other pals were writers, editors, or artists. They had become the family that she’d longed for growing up in their clammy little corner of Ohio, she’d told Eve. They’d made her feel part of something larger, of the world itself, of her very times.