Mark Costello - Big If

“Yes.”

“Now go in your house. Tell me what you see.”

“A music room upstairs, a glass conservatory. Fretted ironwork, a cage for a singing bird. A chest of drawers with room for all my keepsakes. I see Jerzy in the driveway with our daughter. I’m standing at the window, looking down. The year is twenty years from now. They hug. The car is packed. Our daughter is beautiful and golden-haired and Jerzy is so pleased. She’s going off to college, off to Yale. No, wait — she’s going off to Wheaton. She got dinged by Yale and wait-listed by Wellesley.”

“Breathe deeply, Lauren. Good. Just tell me what you see.”

“Jerzy’s hugging her goodbye and — wait, that’s not our daughter. Why’s he kissing her?”

“The house, Lauren, come back to the house.”

“I see a chest of drawers. Room for all my pretty things. I keep a gun in there. I go down and teach that tramp a lesson on the lawn.”

Motherhood was pressure(Kai would live on chewy sticks if Peta didn’t nark him every minute of the day); marriage was pressure, watching Jens slip off the edge, Peta feeling helpless, saying nothing; and then there was her job at Moss Properties, which used to be so fun, like being paid to shop with other peoples’ money.

Coming up I-95, Peta felt a headache hatching in the swivel of her eyeballs. She found a bottle of Excedrin in her purse and chewed a pill dry-mouthed as she drove. Peta had two jobs at her company, and this was the problem — she was spread too thin. Noel Moss, the dapper laird and heir at Moss Properties, marveled at her talent for the million-dollar sale. He said the way she had steered crazy Mitzi Hindenberg to a closing on the Tudor was a masterful performance, like a seasoned pilot landing a crippled jumbo jet on an icy runway, and he could only doff his cap in admiration. Noel called her the Realtrix, a play on dominatrix, a playful play Peta knew because Noel was more or less openly gay and certainly not flirting. Noel was grooming her for partnership, which Peta wanted badly, but the elder Mosses — Noel’s father, grandfather, and three uncles, hardshell Yankees to a man — were against it. Peta was a crack mansion-mover, they admitted, but she had never worked the other side of the family’s business, the lucrative if dreary realm of building management. The Mosses owned or managed under contract a healthy coastal empire of retail/office space, ten strip malls, six office blocks, a quarter million square feet of light industrial. The agents at these properties advertised the vacancies, dealt with bitchy tenants, got the carpets cleaned, rode herd on the supers, a succession of small pesterings for which the building agent received nothing more dramatic than the rent.

Noel had put it bluntly at a lunch in November to discuss Peta’s prospects for a partnership. “Managing these buildings is a crashing bore,” he told her. “It wouldn’t be so bad if the spaces themselves were pleasing or distinctive, but alas we’re talking Kmarts here, we’re talking sneaker stores. I’m almost ashamed to be profiting off such ugliness, except it’s so damn profitable and I’m so damn greedy. And that’s the problem, Peta. You are used to the grand, the exquisite, the historic. You have a gift, there’s no denying it. The question that my family has is, can you handle dull?”

Peta, eager to make partner, was sure that she could handle dull. She even welcomed dull — it would be a break from the pressures she was feeling, Jens, Kai, and Lauren Czoll. Noel proposed a test, a chance to show the elder Mosses that she could excel at being bored. The Mosses owned an office block in Portsmouth Harborside. The property was called the Dental Building, a two-story box of unconvincing brickface, plexi windows, white vinyl stripping, matching vinyl gutters, a smallish lobby with a potted palm.

“Manage it for us,” Noel had said. “Manage it sans drama and we’ll make you the next partner in Moss Properties.”

Peta had been managing the Dental since November. She had rearranged her schedule, carving out an hour at the end of every day to attend to whatever tedium the building might present. She toured the space with the super, Frank Horan, forcing herself to pay attention to Frank’s monologue on pest control and upcoming ventilation maintenance. She read the building files, reviewed the manuals on the water pump, the burglar alarm, the HVAC unit on the roof, and went through the bank statements on the operational accounts until she felt on top of every detail in the place.

Then the problems started, real tricks on the Realtrix. They started with a little thing, a single roofing nail Peta found in the parking lot one winter afternoon as she was coming in to hold her office hours. She held the nail in the palm of her hand and looked at the pavement. She saw another nail on the ground, then another and another, and realized that the lot was sprinkled with the nails. She told Frank Horan to sweep the lot, and wondered briefly why a roofer would have been in their parking lot, since there was no roof work scheduled.

Two days later, Frank Horan called her to the roof and showed her the HVAC plant, a big fan-and-pump unit enclosed in sheet metal. Frank pointed to the freon lines, coils up the side of the machine. Peta, squatting by the coils, saw marks like a dog’s jaws on the soft aluminum.

“Looks chewed,” Frank Horan said appraisingly, “but that’s impossible. No mouth could touch it, man or animal. Freon’ll maim you — it’s so cold, it burns. So maybe it was pliers or a hacksaw or a dull pair of pinking shears.”

Peta touched the torn aluminum. It was somehow terrible, a common thing destroyed. She looked up at the super. “Frank, what’s going on here?”

Frank Horan crossed his arms. “You’ll have to ask Mr. Moss.”

That afternoon, she cornered Noel in his office and demanded an explanation of the curious occurrences at the Dental Building. Noel closed his door and told her the story of a doctor named Soteer, a former tenant at the Dental, an MD-OBGYN, some part of whose practice involved, or had once involved, performing safe and legal abortions at various fully accredited clinics in New England.

Peta remembered sitting in Noel’s office at Moss Properties. Noel’s office was a comic place (the handsome oaken paneling, the oriental rug, the sea charts and the brass telescope on legs) — it looked like Nelson’s stateroom at Trafalgar — but it wasn’t very comic when he said the word abortion .

Noel poured himself a coffee at the sideboard. He said, “There’s a war going on apparently. I call it a war, the cops call it a war — you can call it anything you like. Doctors shot, nurses shot, clinics bombed and firebombed. But there’s also a low-level conflict, an endless war of nerves. Protesters haunt the doors of clinics, screaming at women hurrying in. The staff is harassed, every day, everywhere. They are followed to the movies, to the mall, to the dump. Pickets go up at the end of their driveways. Shouting and chanting all night long. Crank calls at five a.m., tapes of babies crying. The buildings themselves are sabotaged. People chain themselves to the doors or chain themselves to cars, which are towed to block the doors. Power is cut, water is cut. Butyric acid is sprayed over the ceiling panels, producing a vomit smell of Biblical intensity. Cutting the phones is a favorite tactic; another is flooding the phones with bogus appointments, booking weeks of doctor time for imaginary patients. Nerf balls in the sewer line create another kind of flood, but the goal is always this: to stretch the nerves until they snap, to make the normal impossible and vice versa.

“Soteer never saw patients or performed procedures at the property. He used the space as a hideyhole, a quiet place to do his paperwork. He was evidently followed there and our address appeared on some nutball wanted-poster website and the harassment began soon afterwards. First it was the roofing nails in the parking lot. Frank Horan swept them up, it was no big deal. One assumes the normal, after all. A roofer has spilled nails, sweep them up, it’s done. This is called sanity, by the way — the habit of understanding life’s little glitches as the unusual result of the usual phenomena. None of the tenants gave it any thought. Except for Soteer. He saw the nails and never came back. What does one conclude? Connected events — nails and Soteer’s disappearance? No, the nails are sloppy roofers and Soteer is just another rent-jumper, which is why God created the two-month security deposit. Then came the superglue in the locks. What does one conclude? Prankster kids. Made sense to me. I never liked kids. When I was a kid, jerking off to pictures of Gore Vidal, I didn’t like me. Now I like me and I still don’t like kids. Then came more nails and more nails. It was raining nails in Portsmouth. So I called my good pal the district attorney. He called his colleagues in the FBI, who recognized the MO. Violent splinter right-to-lifers, they said. So now I gather they’ve destroyed the HVAC. It’s a natural progression, in a sense.”