Peter Spiegelman - Black Maps

“You’ve given up on the phone altogether, have you?” she asked, even before she’d crossed the threshold. She hung an arm around my neck and kissed my cheek. At just under six feet, Lauren didn’t need to stand on her toes to do it. Her face was cold from the evening air. She smelled like jasmine.

Jane Lu had been right about the resemblance. Lauren and I share our father’s looks: tall, slim, pale, with the same straight, black hair, the same widow’s peak, the same green eyes, set in an angular face, the same straight, prominent nose. Lauren’s hair was parted down the middle and pulled into a loose ponytail that reached below her shoulder blades. She was wearing a cherry red turtleneck, black jeans, and black loafers. Her black coat was slung over her arm, and on her shoulder she lugged a beat-up gray knapsack. Her briefcase. It looked full, and I figured she’d come straight from the office.

“Checking up on your tenant? What’s the matter, the rent check bounce?” I kissed her cheek.

“If you were just ordinarily rude, maybe ignored only three out of four phone calls, instead of every single one, you could save yourself these intrusions. Got a ginger ale?” She dumped her coat and knapsack, went to the fridge, and started rummaging.

“I’m working. In fact, I’ve got a meeting tonight and I need to go soon.” Lauren found the soda. She popped the top and took a long pull.

“Don’t worry, I’m not staying. I’m having dinner with Keith at that new place around the corner. I just stopped by to confirm,” she pointed at me over the kitchen counter, jabbing the air with her long finger to punctuate each word, “that you are coming to Thanksgiving dinner at your brother’s house.” She took another swig of soda and smiled at me over the top of the can.

I heaved a big sigh and shook my head. “Lauren, look, I appreciate the concern, and the invitation, but I’m fine, really. I’d just prefer to have a low-key day, you know? Let the holiday slip by, fly under the radar.” But Lauren wasn’t having any.

“ ‘Fly under the radar’? What the hell does that mean? You run fifty miles, eat some tuna from the can, and collapse on your bed? That was your last Thanksgiving, right? Sounds like a real blast.”

“Yet somehow more appealing than a day of being lectured to, or treated like a live grenade, or like something the cat coughed up,” I said.

“That’s what you’re expecting?”

“Because that’s what always happens.”

“Oh come on, Johnny-”

I cut her off. “You come on. I’m not in the mood to be improved just now, okay? So give it a rest.” But Lauren was undaunted. Her green eyes flashed, and her voice sharpened.

“I’m your sister, asshole; I don’t care if you’re in the mood or not. Your family’s worried about you, and we have a right to be. I mean, take a look at yourself. It’s over three years since Anne died, and you live like some kind of freaking monk. You work; you run; you work; you run. You never see your family, and besides Mike, I don’t know what you do for friends. And do you ever get laid anymore?” She shook her head. “I guess it’s better than the drinking, but isn’t there some middle ground?” I thought she was finished and I drew a breath to speak, but I was overly optimistic.

“And for the record,” she said more softly, “I’ve never been interested in improving you. I don’t give a shit what you do for a living, or where you do it. I just want you to be happy or, at least, accept the possibility of happiness.”

“Laurie-” I said, but she stopped me again.

“No one’s going to lecture, or look at you funny, I promise. We’re your family, John; we want to see you. Your nephews want to see you.” Lauren was relentless in the pursuit of her own way, willing to pull out all the stops. I saw where this was going and knew it was hopeless. I bowed to the inevitable.

“No mas,” I said. “Enough. I’ll come.” Lauren smiled. She liked nothing better than bending others to her will. I smiled back. “You think maybe that nephew business was a little over the top?” I asked.

“Hey, whatever works,” she said. She took a long swallow of soda and looked at me slyly. “So, I hear you met my boss.” It took me a moment to connect the dots.

“Jane Lu?” I asked. “She didn’t mention being your boss. She just said you two worked together.”

“That’s typical Jane, very self-effacing. But she is definitely the boss. She’s the hired gun the venture capital guys brought in, when they purged the old management team,” Lauren explained. My sister ran marketing and sales for a dot-com that had survived a near-death experience.

“And we’re damn lucky they did-she’s some kind of management genius. We were all pretty burnt out after the market collapsed, those of us who were left, and when the VCs told us they were cleaning house and bringing in some rent-a-CEO, we didn’t take it well, to say the least. Oh, they gave us this big song and dance about how great she was-MIT undergrad, one of the youngest ever out of Harvard B-School, cut her teeth at Goldman and McKinsey, brought a couple of biotech firms back from the brink, blah, blah, blah. We thought it was a bunch of crap. But six months later, there’s actually light at the end of the tunnel, and we would all pretty much run through walls for her-me included. And you know how jaded I am.”

“What did she do, put something in the water cooler?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s that we’ve had our first profitable quarter ever, and we’re on track to beat our year-end targets. Or that she rolls up her sleeves and puts in more hours than anybody else in the place. Or maybe it’s that she’s so fucking smart, it’s scary.”

“Wow. Tell me, are the T-shirt and decoder ring free when you join the fan club, or do you have to pay extra?” Lauren was not amused. She shook her head and grimaced, all to say, wordlessly, “I sometimes find it difficult to believe that an asshole like you is actually my brother.” Then she looked at her watch and headed for the door.

“Enough of your low humor. I’ve got to meet the hubby. See you Thursday. It’ll be just family, plus a couple of strays. I’ll tell Liz and Ned and everybody.” She slipped on her coat, shrugged her knapsack over one shoulder, and was gone.

By then it was time for me to get going, too, to meet Alan Burrows. I turned my phone back on before I left, and checked my voice mail. I had only one message, three hours old, from Clare. She wouldn’t be able to see me this week. With the holiday and all, time had just gotten away. She’d call Monday. Sorry. Somehow, I doubted it, just as I doubted we’d get together next week. And, I found, I didn’t much care. It was time to go.

Burrows lived in a skinny, brick-clad tower at the north end of York Avenue. Tiny cement balconies jutted from its upper floors like bad teeth, and the lobby was awash in veined mirrors and cheap marble. It was a rental building, the kind where the freshly graduated cram three or four to a one-bedroom apartment, and where the freshly divorced try to piece together new lives from the scraps of their old ones. A bored doorman pointed me to the elevators, even before he’d rung upstairs to announce me. I rode alone in a dim car that smelled like old food. Burrows stood in the open door of his apartment.

“This way, Mr. March.”

Burrows was a handsome wreck. He was fiftyish and tall, six foot three or so, and broad shouldered, but thick through the middle-a college athlete fallen into disrepair. What once were stolid, John Wayne good looks had blurred and buckled, and now all the mileage showed. His fleshy face was deeply creased, and the skin around his spent brown eyes was dark, and shot through with a web of lines and veins. Broken capillaries had left a small purple stain, like a brushstroke, on his cheek, and another in a corner of his long, thin nose. His blond hair was mostly gray, and was thinning badly. It was brushed straight back, away from his high forehead, and looked damp, like he had just gotten out of the shower. The collar of his pink button-down shirt was damp too, and his sleeves were rolled back over hairless forearms. He wore soft-looking, brown leather slippers on his feet. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his khaki pants. He stood aside so I could enter, and did not shake my hand.