The Stager: A Novel (33 page)

At some point along the way, I find myself reflecting on, and then quickly agitating about, the fact that I am wasting my talent. Maybe not just my talent, but possibly my entire life. I was, at one point, a better-than-average artist. I could have really made something of myself. I always thought it was Vince, with his drinking and his apathy, that threw me off, but now I decide that what stood in my way was Bella. Call this irrational thinking, I know, I know, it doesn’t really add up; I can’t blame Bella for my decision to apply for that internship, to switch gears from illustrating to writing, to take the job at
MidAtlantic Home.
I can’t even blame her for my bad decision to have boarded that plane, although, sometimes, I do.

Yet she was, in some ways, responsible. If I couldn’t
be
Bella, I at least wanted to be more Bella-like, and in my mind, at the time, this meant I needed to be more wordsmith than furniture artist. You may say this is revisionist history, and maybe it is. But, then, maybe it is not. What history, I ask, is not revisionist? I’m told some people pay therapists more than two hundred dollars an hour to help them rewrite history, or at least to make it conform to the stories they want to tell themselves. What a waste! Those of us who are more self-realized are able to achieve enlightenment for free, paintbrush in hand. Behold, the giant rabbit of wisdom!

I’m not feeling so well, and I consider lying down again, but time is of the essence. Also, I’m in the midst of forming an uplifting thought, and they are so rare these days that it seems worth staying awake for, to savor: even if I’ve been reduced to digging through and making sense of the detritus of other people’s lives, somewhere deep inside this middle-aged, too-thin, bristly, somewhat damaged woman lies the spark of what once was, or almost was, a different me. Unfortunately, I can’t carry that thought much further, because I am under the influence of something very powerful. I feel like I was drugged. I’m not sure what day it is; it seems the sun has set, and the sun has risen. But how many times? Who can say? God alone knows these answers. Or maybe my iPhone knows, too. I look at my screen and see the date, but this doesn’t help, since I can’t remember what day it was when I began. Whatever day it is, it’s that much closer to the Sorkin-Jorgenson open house, which means I need to whip this place into shape
and
, at the other end of the spectrum, it’s definitely time to change those poor dolls out of their swimsuits and give them something new to eat.

Also, a completely unrelated thought: There is a very bad smell in this house. A new very bad smell. Or could it be a mutant strain left over from the original smell event, some speck of smell that has survived and has now gone rogue? This seems impossible, since I personally emptied the contents of the freezer and disinfected the inside, and a couple of smell-free days occurred in between.

Whatever the source of the smell, the headline is that it has gotten worse in the last twenty-four hours.
My God
, as the child would say, is not one bad smell in a house enough? I try to focus on smells. There are run-of-the-mill bad smells, from spoiled milk, animal excretions, trash left too long in the bin, soiled diapers, expired fruit. There are more extreme bad smells of the
Psycho
variety: corpses in the shower, the attic, or the bed. By now I know this house so intimately that I can eliminate these particular causes of the smell. Unless, like bad breath, the smell is emanating from within.

Could there be something beneath the floorboards, or perhaps inside the walls? Maybe something embedded in the drywall, or in the attic? The smell is so pervasive it’s going to be difficult to isolate, like trying to find the source of a pinhole leak in the hull when the captain’s bridge is underwater.

Another lucid thought emerges: A blind person is said to have sharp ears. Or a refined sense of taste. So maybe I should block my other senses to make the smell one more acute. Certainly it’s worth a try.

I look for a scarf to wrap around my eyes, but fail to find one among Elsa’s things. Quickly improvising, I use a pair of purple fishnet tights.

I press my body against the wall, wormlike, to guide myself through the house to isolate the smell. It’s a large house, and therefore a laborious process. In contrast to the first bad smell, which came from the bottom up, this one is oozing top-down. At least, that’s my working theory after the first blindfolded pass, but I’m not yet certain. Perhaps the thing to do is to eliminate one more sense? I push the tights up from around my eyes for a moment and—eureka!—the first thing I see, now back in the kitchen, is the child’s iPod, sitting on the table. I put the buds in my ears and figure out how to replay the song, and the “Flower Duet” is injected into my brain. I turn the volume up, pull the tights back over my eyes, and press my belly back to the wall to make my slow journey upward.

There are certain details of this portion of the narrative that are rather mundane, but suffice it to say that, after a lot of olfactory detective work, I wind up eventually back in Bella’s bedroom with a golf club in my hand. The process involves the conviction that the smell is in the still-unfinished portion of the attic, where luggage and excess artwork and old birdcages and the Wassily chair and various other superfluous objects from an overstuffed life now reside. Inside this part of the attic is a wall that presumably divides the storage area from the rafters and insulation, and I am pretty sure the problem lies within.

I go in search of a blunt instrument, but as it happens, this is not a DIY house. I can only presume, from the lack of tools, that when projects require screwdrivers, or lawnmowers, or things with which to break through wood, others are called upon to do the job. A golf club will have to do, and, thus armed, I go back upstairs one more time to the attic. Again I don my blindfold and earbuds so that I can better focus when it comes time to break through the wall at the precisely right spot, so as to minimize the damage.

Because I am, animal-like, attuned to my environs, even with my back to the door and my senses largely deprived, I know I am in the presence of others. Instinctively I bring the golf club over my head and into assault position and pull the tights from my eyes. The first thing I see is Lars.

Lars. My first flesh-and-blood Lars sighting. Blond and bloated Lars. Lars with glassy eyes. I can see, beneath the ruin and general disintegration, the bones of a very handsome man.

“What’s my chair doing up here?” he asks, walking toward it and squeezing himself into the seat. He barely fits; his flesh oozes through the slats.

“It’s just temporary,” I say.

“You’re holding my five-iron the wrong way,” he says. “What you want to do is move the right hand down a bit … Well, wait, are you right- or left-handed?”

I hear a cell phone ring, and Bella’s voice answers. I tense. Red alert. The same physical response I’d had that first night, many years ago, when we’d first met at the intern party. Bella is in the other room, and she doesn’t know I’m here.

“Nabila, I have to take this call,” she says. “It’s Amanda. She says it’s urgent … Of course it’s urgent. It’s always urgent. But actually she says we might have an overseas buyer willing to take the house sight unseen. Can you imagine?! Keep an eye on things for a minute, okay?” I hear her moving toward the staircase.

“I’m right-handed,” I say very softly, in case Bella is not yet fully out of hearing range.

“Okay. Move your right hand down about an inch … Great, yes, just like that. Now take the thumb of your…”

“For the love of God,” I hear Bella say from the landing. “Is he talking to himself? Nabila, please deal with him. Honestly, I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“No worries. Everything is under control, Bella.”

Nabila is on her way into the attic to retrieve her charge. She’s a footstep or two away, and I brace myself for the scream I’m certain will be forthcoming, not because I am particularly frightening, but because Nabila can be a little high-strung. But I guess the sight of me pales in comparison to the smell, because, instead, she doubles over and begins to gag. “Oh, dear Lord, there must be something dead in here.”

“Agreed,” I say.

Elsa hears my voice. “Stager! Stager!” she cries, as she runs in and throws her arms around me.

“Yuck! It’s horrible in here,” she says. “It smells like something dead.”

“Precisely,” says Nabila.

“Squirrels,” says Lars, still sitting in the chair.

“Squirrels?”

“Dead baby squirrels.”

This is a little creepy. “Dare I ask how you know the aroma of dead baby squirrels?”

“I don’t. I’m just speculating. I can’t actually smell anything in here, to be honest, but this happened once in my house in Sweden. The mother squirrel had a litter, then she went outside to get food and she never came back. The babies starved to death and died.”

“That’s so horrible! What happened to the mother?” asks Elsa. The child looks completely stricken.

“Who knows? Probably she was eaten by badgers.”

“Badgers? Do they eat squirrels?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure, but they eat rabbits. They ate a bunch of Dominique’s siblings.”

“My God! Really? How do you know?” she asks. I wonder if I ought to call Child Protective Services to keep her from having to hear any more about this bloodbath.

“He told me. But sometimes badgers and rabbits can be friends. Some of Dominique’s relatives are even badgers.”

“I’m really confused.”

“Life is complicated, Elsa. Sometimes it’s best not to think too much.”

“I think you should lie down,” Nabila says.

“Why? Do I look tired? I’m getting a second wind.”

“It’s true, you do seem better. Maybe it’s the medication.”

The girl’s face is screwed up in a mixture of pain and confusion. She looks, again, on the verge of tears, but fortunately she surprises us with a more academic inquiry.

“There are squirrels in Sweden?”

“Yes.”

“Are they scrawny, like the rabbits where Nabila is from?”

“No, they are very healthy. But we do have some interesting variations. We once had a red squirrel in our yard.”

“No way!”

“Yes. Well, not bright red, like the door, but a sort of orangey color. And once we had a squirrel with white spots.”

“No way! A spotted squirrel?”

“Well, not spots like polka dots, but more like white blended in with the brown. It’s not that unusual, really. I saw one in Maine once, too.”

“What if the smell isn’t squirrels, but Dominique? Or what if Dominique had babies? What if there are dead baby rabbits in the attic?”

“It’s not Dominique. And Dominique is a boy, so he can’t have babies.”

“But his wife can. But never mind, Dominique doesn’t have a wife, right?”

“Not to get too technical, Elsa, but you don’t have to be married to have a baby. We can talk about that someday. More to the point, Dominique wasn’t doing any breeding.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. That’s been part of his frustration.”

“Dad, what are you talking about?”

“Also, he missed his family.”

“Mr. Lars, you should really lie down,” Nabila says again.

“Enough with lying down! I’m wide awake!”

“Nabila, you can call my dad just plain ‘Lars’—right, Dad? She doesn’t have to say ‘mister.’”

“You can call me anything you like. You can call me a whirling dervish in Tretorns.”

Lars grabs the golf club from my hand and begins to poke at the rafters. “A hundred bucks says it’s dead baby squirrels.”

Lars fails to make a dent. The noise produces Bella, however.

There she stands, long legs in red heels, hair mussed yet perfect somehow, ditto for the ripped shirt and artfully crumpled skirt. With the cell phone still pressed to her ear, one hand on her hip, her eyes wide as she takes me in, she looks like a whimsical rendition of herself, playful and full of color. Bella Sorkin as rendered by Maira Kalman. Or perhaps I have imagined this improbable moment for so long that it has become in my mind a tangible thing, something you can frame and hang on the wall.

“Mom!” Elsa exclaims. Now she detaches from me and throws her arms around her mother’s waist, confused, or nervous, about her allegiance. “I’m so excited you can finally meet the Stager. Remember, I told you about her, how she used to be a journalist like you? Now she cleans houses.”

I’m prepared for anything at all. Bella could pull a gun from her rumpled pocket, press it to my temple, pull the trigger, and end the scene right here. I’m so terrified that, for a fleeting moment, I think that particular outcome would be fine by me.

Another possibility briefly occurs to me—potential outcomes are racing through my brain the way one is said to revisit highlights of a life while passing through the tunnel of death. Perhaps Bella will not even remember me. Although she has loomed so large in my own life that her memory has nearly destroyed me, it’s possible I have been but a blip on the crowded Bella Sorkin time line.

No such luck: from the way she’s looking at me, I think she remembers.

Lars seems oblivious to the explosive drama unfolding around him. He takes the golf club and this time, instead of just clutching it and jamming it straight up and down like a pogo stick, he pulls it back like he’s teeing off and somehow, still glued to the Wassily, he delivers a concentrated, powerful swing. Bits of rafter crumple, and splintered wood sprays down, along with fluffy pieces of insulation. A fresh blast of chill spring air instantly provides relief from the smell, and the light streams in.

“Light!” Lars says, redundantly. “I think I see the light!”

“I think he’s beginning to disambiguate again,” says Bella. “Nabila, please give him another pill.”

“I see the light, but I also see the light.”

“See? There he goes.”

“But I thought the pill is what’s causing him to disambiguate,” says Nabila.

“Then give him a different pill, for God’s sake. Just get him out of here. Take Elsa, too. She doesn’t need to see this.”

Then she turns her attention to me, like I’m the next appointment on her jammed-up calendar today: “So you are the Stager,” she says. “That’s just what I suspected.”