The Next (7 page)

Thank you, goddamn bastard.

“The case of Nathan Ridges is, for all intents and purposes, dead. Not closed. Dead.”

I waited for him to continue if he chose to. He chose to.

“Nathan Ridges DJed in clubs—Splash, G-Lounge, Therapy, circuit parties, the whole gay shebang. He had no friends who knew anything about his private life. His father died in prison when he was six. His mother lives in Buffalo and hasn’t seen him since he was seventeen. I interviewed her. When Nathan came out, she dropped him off in Chelsea with two hundred bucks and told him never to contact her again. He dealt Ecstasy to supplement his income but wasn’t a major. He had no outstanding debts that anyone knows about and forty dollars in the bank. No boyfriend. No traceable love interest. In other words, he was murdered, but no one cares. Except maybe the landlord at first, till he found a new tenant. The file is not closed, but it’s one of those files that’ll get pushed to the back of a long, long line of unsolved.”

He paused. In the shadows, I could see by his eyes he was deeply concerned.

His voice dropped low in disapproval. “The city can’t throw out the case, but nor will they allocate any time or budget toward cases like these. They’re called
inconsequentials
.”

The way he said
inconsequentials
dripped with so much disdain it translated as injury rather than anger. Pain. A stab wound.

“I’m not supposed to be working on Nathan’s case anymore because there are no consequences to not solving it.”

“But you are.”

He nodded.

His eyebrows furrowed again, but tensely, as if he was trying as hard as he could to keep himself expressionless. And failing.

All at once I knew something about Nathan’s story was similar to Marzoli’s own narrative.

I glanced at Marzoli’s shoes.

Banana Republic.

Being around Johanna taught me to recognize a person’s income level, disposition, age, where they lived, mood, sexual proclivity, chosen industry, fucking blood type and smell of their semen by the kind of shoes they chose to wear. According to Johanna, Banana Republic was the choice of recent college grads who couldn’t afford better quality footwear but had to look the part, or lower middle income straight guys who had to please their ladies and had no clue Banana was a Gap subsidiary and therefore suffering from major dips in sales and compensating by substituting less than quality materials.

Marzoli was smart enough to know better and his sense of style deserved better, yet he was wearing Banana. He obviously made a fiscally responsible choice, which meant, that he was working hard for not a whole heck of a lot of dough. Any volunteer work was a time-suck he could hardly afford. The classification of an abandoned gay twink as “inconsequential” obviously gouged this sergeant in the gut. His whole demeanor, facial expression, and vocal tone reinforced that. I could feel a level of conscientiousness under his skin I’d never encountered in another so palpably. Certainly not in myself.

In the deepening shadows, a new person stood before me. A person whose perfection and drive was not a display of bravura like a captain who wears his medals on his chest just for the golden gleam and the blustery significance of vaguely-earned accomplishments. He was the end result of an abandoned, penniless, homeless kid who had to work exponentially harder than anyone else. His golden gleam was his intelligence, his thoroughness, and his determination. The perfection of his muscular body, beauty of his face, and the ruggedly tough demeanor…comparatively irrelevant fallout.

He was more of a man than I would ever hope to be. And I knew instantly at that moment how true that was. Had I been a different person in a healthier state of mind, I’d have been inspired. I’d have started setting goals instead of launching a self-loathing monologue deriding myself for my innumerable failures to exploit any single one of my advantages—my musical talent, my health, my looks, my brain, my…

Muffled piano music began to drop through the ceiling from the apartment above me. When the fuck did a piano plop itself above me?

“That’d be your new neighbor. He moved in today. ”

Marzoli looked at me with amusement, sensing how easily I would snap into irritation.

“Let me help you.”

He grabbed the broom from the corner and whacked the ceiling five times. The piano playing stopped.

“Have fun with that,” he said with a dimpled smile, winking at me.

Marzoli grabbed the sandwich and threw it across the room into my hands.

“Eat that. Fresca and Thai food ain’t gonna cut it.”

“Sergeant, what did you come here for?”

“I got it. Just make sure you call me if you see anything.”

What did he get? What was I supposed to see?

He opened the door to leave. But before closing it again, he paused and directed toward me a sustained look of enjoyment…or amusement….or…was that warmth? Had we connected like that? He froze time with those deep dark eyes. Jesus Christ. If he was a straight, he made me feel like a blushing teenage girl. If he was a homosexual, a blushing teenage boy. And, Lord, for those brief seconds I found myself not giving a flying fuck either way.

Stop looking at me. You ain’t got my number. You don’t even know me.

Marzoli finally lifted the lockdown of his gaze and exited.

I closed the door and exhaled.

The room’s gloom resumed, but not before battling the diminishing glow of the newness of all that just happened. Did the interactions with Marzoli have any more significance than fleeting novelty? Did I want more?

I felt a stirring on the other side of my zipper for the first time in a long while. I stuck my hand down my pants and touched my dick. There was precum on the head.

The hell? How in fuck could a male cause that?

Even my organ was stretching toward some new true north and lubing itself to ease the way. I’d had only two gay experiences in my life. Both were violent. Both were forced on me. Both scarring. This time, I was stimulated by tenderness from another man…and not…not forced to…

Running for the door…falling to the floor…Paul…gunshot…

The glow was gone. My apartment consumed me again. The sadness. The endorphin-mutilating self-criticism. Fuck. The slow viscous wave of grayness washed over me, but I was aware of a new sensation of not welcoming it. I could not stop it, but I wanted to. This was like finding a mud-caked penny on a sidewalk when you need two-fifty for the subway, but it was something.

I walked back to the window. The courtyard was now blackened by the wash of night, the winking eyes across from me mocking me with their secrets. I closed the curtain, then decided to leave just a five-inch opening.

What did Marzoli see? What did he mean by “I got it?”

Chapter Seven

There was a sharp, unapologetic rap on the door.

I stood next to the knob without turning it.

“Who is it?”

A buoyant voice replied, “Hi! It’s your neighbor from upstairs.”

“Who?”

“My name’s Ruben. I just moved into the apartment above you.”

“And?”

I was aware but hardly cared that with every annoyed word, I was creating the very first and most lasting impression this new neighbor would have.

Ruben continued sheepishly, “And…I wanted to say hi.”

His voice was so fucking upbeat. Lord. I opened the door.

“Hi!” it said.

Standing before me was a tall, blond haired kid with a pretty-boy face and black glasses. He wore a pretentious suit with a black tie and had a dapper Johnny-on-the-spot disposition.

Hellishly cheerful.

“How much did the landlord jack the rent?” I asked in deadpan.

Ruben took a short breath in, then recovered with his Mormon schoolboy chipperness.

“I’m paying twenty-five hundred a month.”

“He jacked it up a grand. You can file a complaint if you want to.”

“I’ve got a trust fund of, like, millions.”

He had to be new to New York, unless he just enjoyed making enemies.

“Anyway,” he continued, pushing his designer glasses up the bridge of his nose, “I just wanted to work out a schedule.”

“Schedule for what?”

“A practice schedule. I don’t want to bug you. I’m a musician.”

Oh, fuck. Musicians. Endless nights of pungent drafts of pot seeping down into my apartment.

“I play the piano. I’m going to Juilliard.”

Oh, fuck. Juilliard. Endless nights of neurotic chord repetition seeping down into my apartment.

“Well,” I began, measuring my knee-jerk feelings about this new curse to my life, “How many hours a day do you need to practice?”

“Three.”

“Doesn’t Juilliard have practice rooms?”

Suddenly Ruben’s demeanor switched from boyishness to a precocious, entitled, spoiled, son-of-a-billionaire brat. His arms crossed. His lips stiffened. His left eyebrow raised. Apparently, he had paid me the courtesy of faking the nice-boy role, but I’d abused it. Now I’d get the real Ruben.

“My piano is better,” he stated in a hostile, low voice.

“I work from home….”

“Three p.m. to six p.m.?”

His proposal had all the subtext of a statement rather than a question, as if to say he was designating this time slot as his practice time regardless of my preference. In other words, this chat was intended to be a warning more than a collaborative working out of schedules. To complement his proposal, he took his glasses off nonchalantly and wiped the lenses. His face was much more tough than it had first appeared, the eyes more shadowed, the jawline more blunted.

“Don’t play too loudly,” I said.

He rolled his eyes.

“What are you practicing at the moment?”

“Shostakovich. Just kidding. Debussy.”

The twirp smirked, as if I didn’t get the difference between a composer known for his sweeping Russian double forte passages and a romantic composer known for softer French pianissimo passages. That image of Holly Hunter having her finger axed off in
The Piano
suddenly flashed into my brain.

I responded, “Stick to three to six, and we’ll be good neighbors.”

I closed the door on the twerp.

We’re both assholes, and we both know it. Good goddamn grief.

Chapter Eight

My own piano sat against the wall, buried in debris. I began to remove the shit off it—the moldy sweater, the electronic power supply cords whose recipients had jumped ship years ago, thumbed paperbacks, discarded Starbucks cups. I lifted the keyboard cover.

My fingers drifted over the keys without pressing down. They hovered over F sharp two octaves above middle C. If I pressed down, the commitment to that one tone would cement the path that leads to the next, leading to the cementing of the next, and then the next. What if, at the end of the path, I churned out some uninspired, pedestrian, shitty song, reinforcing what a failure I’d become in a brand new way? That first note bore the weight of forty years of largely unsuccessful attempts at a career, the loss and disdain of a woman most men in Manhattan would give their left nut to hold at night, and the responsibility of finding out if the future had even the slightest bit of light in it.

My finger remained suspended above the keyboard, unable to commit.

Andrea Bocelli echoed through the window from the courtyard, mourning epically with exquisite tragedy. A fuck-lovely perfection I may never know. I turned to the window to identify which neighbor was responsible for this random choice of entertainment.

Mr. and Mrs. Perfect’s apartment was empty…oh wait…no. Mr. Perfect emerged from the kitchen dressed in a suit, his head cocked to one side as he propped an iPhone against his ear. He spoke in an assured and patient manner, casually glancing out the window, then sauntering toward the other side of the house. His undirected stride was paced to the rhythm of his conversation. He was alone. I guess the family went to play in the snow in the country without him this weekend. But Bocelli was not coming from his apartment. But then, from where was it emanating? I lowered my eyes…

The Princess.

She sat at her dressing table, fussing with the seams of her sleeves. She was dressed in a gauzy navy-blue dress interwoven with silver threads, her hair up in a tight bun. When I’d last seen The Princess, she wore no more than jeans and an American Apparel stretch t-shirt. Unless she got a significant six-figure bump in her salary, I had no idea how she afforded an exquisitely tailored couture dress as a single girl in her twenties living in the heart of Manhattan in a small studio apartment. Did she have a sugar daddy? Did a parent die? Did she catch the boss cheating?

The romantic vocal strains wafted lushly from a CD player near her bed, accompanying her application of makeup to her cheeks, her lips, and her eyelashes as she carefully contoured herself to the ideal of ladyhood, obscuring every blemish, covering any millifraction of imperfection. She finally reached up to her bun and removed a pin. Her long dark locks fell down past her shoulders. She proceeded to run her fingers through them, smoothing every last strand with her fingers, a concerned look on her face.