Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“Hang on, okay? Hang on.” He saw the backs of his hands and realized he’d put them up. “Let’s see if I can make this easier. What’s rent for her room, like six hundred? Six fifty?” He began to feel into his pockets.

“Nine.”

“Christ, nine ? Okay, okay, wait.” He pulled a billfold of twenties from his back pocket, then smaller denominations from the front of his jeans, balled up and crunchy. “I’ve got…one — one twenty…one thirty…seven. A hundred and thirty-seven. Dollars. For you, from me. A gift.”

She did him the favor of taking it.

The next morning, Jack’s studio looked like the set for a movie or TV show, the pieces of house laid out the way he’d have them in the gallery. The movers were coming that day for the walls. Really they were blocks, but Jack thought of them as walls, and lining the space of the gallery, they’d look like walls. He was still packing them in felt and tarp when the buzzer rang. Four guys and a couple of mattress carts.

When everything was loaded, he took a cab to the gallery and met them there. He’d wanted to ride in the back of the truck, but the muscle men told him no, there wasn’t room, what if one of the blocks fell over. “I’ll fall you over,” Jack muttered, but hailed a taxi anyway.

At the gallery the staff left him alone to set everything up. Even the little receptionist out front he made leave. He listened to her heels clack across the hardwood of the lobby and out.

Then he mixed the plaster, rigged the explosives. Peering at angles through the walls’ windows, he adjusted the furniture inside. He turned over a chair he’d welded himself, broke a ceramic dish into the ground. He brought out a stuffed animal, a tiger he’d found in their building’s playroom. The one found object in the space. With a good pull he tore a leg off and let the stuffing cloud out of the stump.

Around lunch he got a falafel and carried it to the park, tahini sauce dribbling out the foil. He sat on a bench near the playground, a school group shrieking. It was a cool day for playground weather but their little bodies kept hot, running and jumping and swinging. Jack watched them and wondered how anyone could doubt that human beings came from monkeys. At the slide, kids at the bottom end scooted up the wrong way to go again.

He’d been up front about not wanting children, and Deb had been afraid to tell him in the beginning. But then, life, and she was having one, they were, and it surprised them both how it changed him. Most infidelities happen during pregnancy, when the woman is a whale and cries all the time. Maybe that isn’t true but you did hear stories, eight months along and the husband out the door. With Jack it was never that way. When Deb was sore and bloated and soft in places she hated being soft, when her whole body felt like meat and when she was most afraid, that was when he had loved her best.

There was a small, pretty Mexican woman watching him from the bench nearest his. She had a fat blond cherub bouncing in her lap. The women at playgrounds were all sitters. A few reminded Jack of the Latvian woman who’d been their nanny after Deb’s maternity leave with Kay and before Simon was big enough to be in charge after school. Jack was proud they’d gone so long without succumbing to a caretaker.

The pretty Mexican had begun to glare at him. Jack balled up his foil and headed back to the gallery, remembering that there were rules about grown-ups in playgrounds, how long men without children were permitted to sit.

At six o’clock Nicky came. “ ’Sup, boss?” Lanky Nicky in his hoodies and caps, his videographer, twenty-four and twice arrested for vandalism, both times with Jack to bail him out. Today he wore a shirt that boasted TEIAM PLAYER, which Jack wouldn’t get until later. He had his equipment bag heavy on one shoulder, a skateboard and a tripod in his arms.

Nicky was a shy kid and quiet most of the time, qualities Jack found common in street artists, which would have surprised people but shouldn’t have; the art required them to disappear. And Nicky disappeared well behind a camera. That was what Jack liked about him.

Nicky set the tripod where Jack told him. He gave a thumbs-up when they were rolling and Jack fingered the detonator in his hands. “All right, steady.” He’d done a number of practice runs at the studio, but still there was no guarantee that the walls would break along the right lines, that the impact wouldn’t subtract too much or too little.

He’d wanted to save the explosions for opening night, for an audience, but the safety people wouldn’t let him unless they were behind glass, which showed how little they understood.

There was a slight lag when he pressed the button before plaster shot off in all directions. Clouds of it got into his clothes, into his lungs, would have gotten into his eyes but for the goggles. Good he’d had the extra pair for Nicky.

They went section by section, stopping to set up the next shot, a new angle.

They waited for the dust to settle.

The air puffed and swirled milky around them. Particles sank into small heaps on the floor. The rubble was good. He’d keep that. Jack thought the walls had all gone off without much problem. A piece by the window on block #3 had not blasted all away, but it looked okay that way, maybe better. That was one thing he liked about the blasts, how they allowed for happy accidents.

Even with the goggles, Jack’s eyes had watered. He went out to the lobby to breathe.

There he took a sheet of letterhead from the receptionist’s desk and wrote a note. NO ONE MUST TOUCH THE DEBRIS. He tucked the page into her keyboard, between the keys.

Nicky was at the window, reviewing footage by the blue light of the dying day.

Jack came up behind and looked over his shoulder. “What do you think?”

Nicky frowned. “How do you want to project these?”

“A few screens in back. Have it on a loop. I don’t want anyone to see it until after they’ve been to the house.” Yes, from blocks to walls, Jack had built a house that day.

Deb’s cold sore bloomed, and the rest of her lip chapped. Not a natural chap but the kind she did to herself, biting and bothering, an adolescent habit that had made it past adolescence, past gnawing her toenails and cracking her back. The lip hurt, but not in a way she minded. Anyone who’d danced had an unusual patience for pain.

“They’re just impenetrable to me. I don’t know when that happened,” she called from the slipcovered couch. “It’s like, if I say jump, they say, you know, no. They lie down.”

At Ruth’s, she had no choice but to face her mother’s kid, herself. Ruth lived in a junior one bedroom downtown, in an apartment complex that made it seem hard to get to, and with each visit Deb startled at the number of photographs laid out, how the place seemed always to become more a shrine. There, on the bookcase nearest the door, was Deb, age five, performing a handstand stoically against a wall at home in Tenafly, and at nine, eating frozen custard on the boardwalk at Point Pleasant when her father was still alive. A pink-tulled sweet sixteen was under way on the mantle over the television, all her ballet friends posing beside pizza and sparkling cider in Dixie cups, Deb with horrible aqua eyeliner and a mouth full of braces. Her career at City Ballet was born atop the CD changer, where she was beaming backstage in red and blue for Stars and Stripes, and died with The Nutcracker in the carousel frame between two wicker chairs, the season she’d danced Marzipan. Beside that a rickety wood-veneer liquor cart collected not bottles but Simons and Kays at all heights and ages, enough for a flip-book.