Sara Majka - Cities I've Never Lived In - Stories

Eli’s room was empty. I climbed the ladder in the closet, only to find the attic cleared out, too. I had expected to find it the way it had been, with the macramé, the open boxes.

Inside the crawl space, the painting was gone. I reached around but didn’t find it. At the end of the space I saw another door, similar to the one I had just gone through. It also had knife marks. This door opened onto a staircase going down. At the bottom, a door opened inside a cabinet. I climbed through and found myself in the back of the antiques shop.

At first, I thought it was just a secret stairway, and that everything else was ordinary, but the light was different. It had been overcast when I watched Gretchen leave, but now light diffused through the room, as if the building had been covered in opaque plastic sheets.

I sat at the piano, and played as I had in high school. Then I stopped playing, and wandered through the aisles of furniture. At the end of one I saw a painting: another child done in the same manner, this time a little girl in a white dress. She looked like me as a child. Her hair was like a bird’s, chestnut colored, spare at the temples. Everything had been painted still and flat except the eyes. They were brown and filled with worry. I sat on the floor near the painting, feeling close and knowing I wouldn’t get any closer.

When Eli finally came back to Portland, I told him what I had found. He asked me which way I’d left the shop. The way I came in, I said. It hadn’t occurred to me there was another way to leave.

He shook his head. He had gone a different way — out the front door and up the steps. It was a mistake, he said. He explained that he moved forward in a way that he wasn’t meant to.

He asked about the apartment: When I got back in after being in the shop, what did I see there? I mentioned the ashtray where I had put Gretchen’s cigarette. He said little things like that were going wrong. The cigarette would still be burning. He said he had tried to thread back, going through the cabinet, up the secret stairs to the attic, and down into his closet. But then he no longer understood which way he should go to undo what he had done. When he realized this, that he was lost in a way he couldn’t understand, he threw a book against the wall. Later, the dent was gone.

I could have walked out the front door, but I didn’t. I left the painting in the shop and climbed the stairs, went through the attic, down to his room, through the hall, down the stairs, back to the street, threading through the house the only way I knew how. I ended up in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the shop I’d just been in. Henry stood outside, setting out a chair. He waved me over.

His face looked softer, like worn cotton. When I asked if he remembered the piano, he said, You were hardly Mozart.

You remember.

He sank into the chair. You weren’t Mozart, Eli wasn’t Ansel Adams. Then he waved his hands. What does it matter, Mozart and Ansel Adams, the way you guys were back then. Better than Mozart. I should have kept the piano. I sold it to a couple in Acadia and I kept, what, probably something pewter. I don’t even know what I kept.

Does that answer it? he said. Did you find what you needed to? I would have kept you, too, as it were.

Kind old man, Eli said. Sometimes I think he was put there just for me. And what good did it do?

Eli had been back in Portland a few months. I had seen him working in an open kitchen and drinking at bars with friends, but this time I arrived to find him drinking by himself. We sat at a table near a window covered with a brocade curtain. The window looked over a grassy triangle; the paths were lit with lamps.

When I told him about going into the building, he leaned back in his chair and traced the top of his glass. He nodded, asked questions, circling the glass the whole time, but his composure began to break when he asked which way I had gone back. Then he sounded like a child asking and aware of that; another part of him sat there watching the vulnerability from a distance. Once, when we were in high school, he had walked in on my mother standing over the dining room table, yelling. My little brother and I sat there, quiet. There was a dish of peas with pearled onions at the center of the table. Butter was melting over the top. One of our tarnished spoons stuck out of it. I reached for the spoon and my mother threw the bowl against the wall. Then she turned to Eli and asked what he was looking at. Most people, when anger is directed at them, will shift in response to the anger, but Eli stayed with me, that same look on his face.

He said, I made so many mistakes. It was as if I was a different person watching myself make mistake after mistake.

We went out to the green across the street, as if the space — the low light, the fog, the shelter of the trees — made us invisible. We walked past a statue of a man on a horse. Eli sat on the top of a bench and got out a cigarette. I leaned against his legs and said, Henry still keeps camera parts for you.

In high school, things changed, he said. I needed money to get somewhere. So I went down and took a few things, small things, and sold them in New York.

No, he said. Many things, I took many things. Not from Henry’s shop. I never stole from Henry. But the other shop. I kept taking things.

Mostly Henry dealt with reputable vendors, but sometimes he had to deal with other people. Eli went through Henry’s records until he found one of these people. He called him, said that his grandmother had died and he had some jewelry. His mother was waitressing that night, and his sister hadn’t left her room. He took an empty backpack, went up to the attic then down to the shop. From under a glass display, he lifted hundreds of dollars worth of jewelry.

The man in the city had eyes like marbles. He paid in cash. He inquired politely about Eli’s grandmother. Eli tried a second time; when he went down to the shop the case was full again. He took the batch to the city. The man said, The pieces you gave me last time were worth more than I’d thought. I should give you a little extra. They were sitting on opposite sides of a desk. From the drawer, the man took out a stack of bills and slid it to Eli. Do you have more? the man asked. All the jewelry was spread in front of them. Eli didn’t understand the precariousness of his position until then. Eli told him he had a painting he would consider selling. Quite old, he said. He described the painting. The man was interested. Eli walked out intending never to talk to him again.

But one night the man called the house, though Eli had never given him the number. Eli recognized his voice at once, the way it layered and withheld. I am inquiring about the painting, the man said. If you decided to sell it.

No, Eli said, my family decided to keep it.

I have to admit I’m disappointed, the man said. I had wanted to see it. It sounded intriguing, and potentially quite valuable. It could be worth more than the jewelry.

There is a family attachment to it, Eli said, almost whispering, trying to keep calm. He could hear his mother in the kitchen, talking to a friend. She had just brought home pizza. He hung up the phone, standing in the dark of the foyer, his hand still on the receiver. She came out of the kitchen, Is that you? What is it? Is everything all right?

He told me that he left for Europe the next week. That he left the painting in the crawl space. That when he returned for his sister’s funeral, he found — as I had — that it was gone.

The man, I said.

Eli shook his head. There were those knife marks, he said, even before me. Someone knew about it. It might not have been him at all.

I remembered the vague light through the windows. The emptiness outside. I thought of someone coming in from that. For a moment I believed him; then I noticed he couldn’t look at me.