Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

Everyone does these things.

You know what was a lie, then? Television was a lie. Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond, where married dads didn’t have sex with other women. Maybe they did and just never talked about it. Too obvious to get its own episode.

When she was little — Kay’s stories often began this way, with the old people in the room always shouting, “You’re still little”—but when she was little, maybe four years earlier, Deb brought home a DVD of The Little Mermaid from a peddler down by Battery Park. Only it wasn’t the version she’d seen before: Here the Ariel was blond, and her name wasn’t Ariel but Marina, and instead of Sebastian the crab there was a dolphin named Fritz. It was the original fairy tale, not Disney but Hans Christian Andersen, and in the end Marina turned to foam, was happy to turn to a clear, fine sea-foam so that she could float or buoy or do whatever sea-foam does near her prince. Kay had cried at the television, “Don’t they know kids are supposed to watch this?” (Adults loved that part of the story, that she’d said that.)

If that was a fairy tale, what was Seinfeld ? She knew she’d been watching something, not the truth, but not something entirely foreign. Life wasn’t like television, but did it have to be so different?

Stranger things happen. Stranger things happen than this.

So the girl was not answering. So what? That was like her, to blow a storm in from nowhere and then just disappear. How many calls back in winter had he let go off in his pocket? How many messages had he let sit weeks, unplayed, until one came in for work, something he needed? Only then had he cycled through the others— thirteen of them — the beginnings only. “Hi, I—” “I don’t—” “You never—” “What—” “People d—” “You sh—” How she changed! And came entirely around again, so that the second-to-last one was back to “Hi,” and the very last was nothing, was “………………………..” Jack had listened to them, had not listened, on the streets, so that it felt like nothing he was doing, so that it was like — what? — just walking, just going place to place.

And now — trying to lure him to her, that was what she was doing. So fine, if it was what she wanted. Confrontation. Maybe it was what he wanted. Look at what you’ve done — to children. She’d think she was getting her way, at first. She’d see him there, through the peephole, and think she won. That Deb had left him and that he’d come back to her, maybe that he needed her.

He took the train down to Astor Place and cut across on St. Mark’s, where neon from the shops and bars made brighter the night sky, would have made it almost day if not for the packs of people, nighttime energy the light could not break through. A little after midnight but still warm, the tourists out with their tiny backpacks, the freshmen from NYU just starting to make themselves sick drinking, many sets of legs that began at the hip, ended in towering heels.

He passed the hot dog place with the phony speakeasy inside. Fifteen-dollar cocktails, and who for? What Lou Reed wrote about wasn’t around anymore. Sally can’t dance. The whole strip was like one of those living history exhibits, commemorating an old war that was lost and over now, only nobody wanted to know it was over. Because it had been a sexy war and it was hard to let go.

Avenue C was quieter. The girl lived on the top floor of a six-story walk-up. She used to get scared and call him on her way home. Someone’s following me. Stay on until he goes away. Then: Stay on until I’m inside, until I feel better, it’s scary here, alone, I’m making tea, stay on. Stay on until.

He buzzed 6B, Garcia. Still the old tenant’s name on the number.

After a minute he buzzed again, but he didn’t have to wait. Another tenant, a small, deeply tanned woman, came out through the lobby, trailed by a leash and then an old husky. She held the door, and Jack took it, remembered having patted the dog once or twice. “Late night for a walk,” he said, looking down.

She smiled. “I spoil him.”

“Lucky dog.”

She walked away still smiling. Around forty. Tight jeans, tight ass. Probably never married.

The stairs he climbed a few at a time. He used to be better at them, was now winded by the fourth landing. Two more to go. He stood a minute to breathe outside her door.

Knocking.

She was out, or was asleep, or? The lights were on under the door.

He turned and looked up and down the hall, trying to remember where she kept the secret key — under one of the other apartment’s mats (less obvious, she said) — when he heard the chain slide open behind him.

There was the roommate, a short, stomping thing always in yoga pants. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“Arabella.” Her name was easy to remember because it was so at odds with the rest of her. “I hope I didn’t wake you.” The thing about those pants: he could never tell if they were pajamas.

She stepped back, crossing her arms, the upper parts rashy with chicken skin. “You know your way around.”

All the lights in the living room were on, and somehow it seemed they’d been on a long time. The TV, too, at commercial.

The girl’s room was dark except for the table lamp from IKEA he’d put together for her, shining into a mug of coffee that was cloudy at the surface, like a blind eye. Her makeup bag was turned over, glitter dusting the desk and colored pencils rolled halfway over the edge. She’d started wearing more makeup, toward the end. He remembered the last time, when he knew and she didn’t that it would be the last, that she hadn’t washed; he could tell by her hair, where it was matted and stringy.

The bed was the same, same sheets, unmade as ever, the comforter in a heap on the floor. And over the bed, that painting, one of those Chinese ones they peddle all over Times Square, her name in watercolors, letters shaped from flowers and birds: J*O*R*D*A*N. A gift from her parents the time they came to see the New York life she’d made for herself. He hated how it brought out what was tacky and juvenile about her. “But it’s pretty,” she’d said. She liked looking at it.

The overhead came on. “You can tell her I want this month and next,” Arabella said behind him.

He looked at her like who was the crazy one. “She isn’t here.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“Do you know when she’s back?”

“She’s with you.” Arabella shifted her feet. “You aren’t here for her stuff?”

He said, “No,” and clearly that was the wrong answer.

“That fucking — cunt.” She began unfolding and refolding the waist of her pants. “I don’t even. Monday she said she was going to the vet. ”

The guinea pig, Jack realized, was gone. The albino puff with red eyes that he’d tried to keep away from but that still got its little hairs on everything, had made Travolta distrust him before anyone else did.

“Look,” he said. “This has been a mistake.” Arabella was starting to sweat in front of him.

“But you have to know where she is.”

“No.” He moved in reverse and she forwarded. “I’m the last — believe me, she wants to talk to me even less than — least of all people. I mean, you don’t think she’d do anything, to hurt herself, do you?”

New rashes began to blossom on her chest and the rounds of her cheeks. “I could call the police.”

“You should.” Backtracking along the hall, arms out behind him. “I think you ought to call the police.”

“Yeah and I’m sure they won’t want to question you . The married boyfriend.”