3

Worked Up

I was born in Venice Beach and raised in Santa Monica. And, while there were a lot of things about southern California that I didn’t like—the lazy way that people talked, earthquake drills, strip malls, pastels, stage three smog alerts, Eagles reunions—I always loved the ocean. The thick, salt-laced scent and the continuous whoosh of the waves always worked like a tranquilizer on me.

The Hudson River wasn’t the Pacific Ocean, but the Pacific Ocean wasn’t walking distance from the Space, so I was willing to compromise.

On stressful days, even blisteringly cold ones, I would walk to the piers, close my eyes and listen to the water lapping at the wooden supports. The result was an instant, almost Pavlovian sense of well-being. I’d feel the way I did as a kid, when Sydney and I would stand on the beach and watch the sun set over the dark, rolling waves.

I couldn’t get to the river fast enough that day. My hands balled into fists, I clutched my bag as though it were a poorly designed life preserver and slammed my feet into the sidewalk.

Before I expected it, I saw the thick gate that shrouded the few remaining piers, the intermittent signs that read Area Peligrosa. Area Unsafe.

When Yale had first moved to New York as a seventeen-year-old, gay men used to sunbathe on the Peligrosa Piers, as he called them. You’d know it was spring when those tiny basket shorts cropped up on the Peligrosa Piers. They were more reliable than crocuses . . . Prettier, too. During the sticky, fragrant summer nights, the men would return, making Area Unsafe a well-known double entendre.

Not anymore. Some of the piers had been dismantled to make room for the big gym complex with its bowling alleys and family restaurants. Others, like these, crumbled into the river like old corpses. Only the signs remained, with some of the fence corners cut and folded back, historical evidence. Unsafe. I shivered a little. So many ghosts. So much bad luck.

 

I’d been walking along the river for about fifteen minutes before I saw the construction site. There was an Area Peligrosa sign on the fence in front of it. And, even though the fence corner had been cut and folded back, I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to crawl under it.

Three tall stacks of concrete blocks bounded the area, the farthest edge of the farthest pile touching the end of a rusty, sad-looking trailer. Faded red letters stretched across the trailer, reading Shank’s Dredging and Construction, and a broken RK AND RIDE sign was propped up against it, even though there was nowhere to park and nowhere to ride.

Perhaps it was the sign that drew me in. Who would ever park a car in this place? Who would ever ride away from it, knowing they had to return?

Or it could have been the construction company’s name. Shank’s, as in butchered body parts.

I knew these should have been reasons to leave—warning signs, literally—but they had the opposite effect on me. No one’s here. No one will be here. No one ever, except you.

I crawled under the folded-back fence corner.

On the other side, I stood up and took a few steps toward the trailer.

I couldn’t quite hear the water—I was still several car lengths away from the river, and the trailer seemed to block out sounds. To the left of the trailer was a huge rusty bin that was nearly overflowing with broken chunks of cement. I wondered when they’d been dumped there, and by whom.

I crept closer, saw some dead, brown weeds shooting through the concrete, then a few deviant, crumbling cement blocks and, finally, the oily green water of the Hudson. Placed neatly next to the bin like a spectator’s seat was a smooth, rectangular block of cement with a blue chalk scrawl of 1/3/00 across the top. More than thirteen months old. No one will be here . . .

I sat down on the block. An icy gust flew off the river and bit at my face, but with the hood of my coat still up, I didn’t mind. No one ever, except you.

 

My father left home when I was five years old, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s more a voice than a face to me—a loud laugh in the hallway; a hoarse, angry whisper in my parents’ bedroom; a tinny mumble on the other end of the phone, asking Sydney for help. Picturing him is difficult, but if I clear my mind and close my eyes really tight, I can sometimes see his profile.

It’s a purely mental exercise—not emotional at all—because I really don’t feel one way or the other about him. Fact is, if Dad hadn’t left, Sydney would never have written her first book (PMS: Post Marital Survival ) and become instantaneously famous among self-help enthusiasts. She’d still be a social worker. He’d still be spending most of her salary on twelve-packs of Mickey’s BigMouth. So it’s probably best he got out when he did.

That said, I used to be crazy about him. One of my happiest memories was the time he’d taken me on the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier. When our cage turned upside down, I’d laughed instead of screaming like the other kids. And he’d patted me on the arm and said, “That’s my brave girl.”

Funny how I could remember the Ferris wheel ride as if it had just happened, but I couldn’t remember the day he took off. Especially since, according to Sydney, I’d been the first one to notice the note he’d left on the kitchen table.

Listening to the sound of the river, I closed my eyes and tried to picture Dad. The hair was easy. It was long and dark and shiny; he usually wore it in a ponytail. But the features were blurry, and the eye color was a complete mystery. I knew they were brown, but were they amber colored like Nate’s, or were they darker? My own eyes are pale green, like Sydney’s, so they were of no help.

I’m losing Dad, I thought. It depressed me more than it should have.

I pressed my palms into the freezing cement block. The water sound was nice. I’d concentrate on that, block out everything else. Nate had once taught me how to meditate. It wasn’t the type of rules-driven meditation that you learn at weekend retreats in upstate New York mountain towns. It was just an inner chant that his acting teacher had come up with in order to relax the class before scene work. Breathe in, breathe out, it went. Think of anything. Think of nothing. It sometimes helped if you said the words aloud, so that’s what I did, over and over and over . . .

“Relax, princess,” says the man in the Pinto. “Stop moving.” But I can’t. There’s no crown in the car. Not in the front, not in the back. The vinyl seat is hot, sticky on my bare legs.

“Where is my crown?” I say.

“Where is my crown?” he repeats, his voice a squeaky imitation of mine. “Princess needs a crown . . .”

His hand clamps the back of my neck. It’s big and rough and feels like it’s made of sandpaper. He starts to laugh, and his laugh is big and rough too. “Princess needs a crown,” he says, still laughing. “That’s funny, princess.”

Stop, I want to say. But I can’t. My mouth opens and closes. He squeezes tighter. Pinches my skin between the stubby tips of his fingers. He jerks my head back, then down, like you’d do with a big doll.

I’m looking at the floor beneath the dashboard. “No crown for prin-cess,” he sings.

On the floor I see a coiled rope. Next to it I see a roll of thick gray tape. They remind me of two snakes—a mother and her baby.

“I have something else, though. Something else princess can wear . . .”

I try to scream, but still nothing comes out. I am a doll. Can’t move. Going to get broken.

“You can wear this on your neck.” He holds something up to my eyes. It’s silver mostly, but he’s holding it so close that I have to blink to see what it is.

It’s a long, sharp knife with a black leather handle.

I’m wondering why I can’t cry, can’t yell, can’t move when his hand isn’t over my mouth and he’s only holding my neck. I’m thinking maybe he’s magic. Maybe I’m under a spell. He whispers, “Little bitch.”

His breath smells of beer, which reminds me of Dad. I wish he was Dad, because Dad wouldn’t say that, wouldn’t hate me like this. Dad wouldn’t, I think, as he presses the cool side of the blade to my throat, then shoves my head down farther . . .

I opened my eyes, breathing fast and shallow. Some meditation exercise.

I understood now why I’d blocked the memory for so long. It had nothing to do with the knife or the rope. It was the dry calm of the voice in my ear. And it was how I couldn’t move.

Here’s how I escaped: A pigeon wiped out on the Pinto’s windshield. The stranger loosened his grip and dropped the knife and said, “What the fuck?”

Saved by a kamikaze pigeon. Finally, I’d managed to open the car door and run home.

No, I don’t open the door. I stare at the flattened feathers. At the bright smear of blood. I don’t move. I can’t.

“What the fuck?” He leans across me, opens the door, pushes me out. My knees hit the concrete. “My car, my fucking car, fucking bird.”

“Fucking bird,” I whisper as I run and run and run. “Fucking bird, fucking bird . . .”

With the memory echoing in my brain, I didn’t quite notice the sound at first. But then it became clearer, more defined. It was a scraping. The scraping of a heavy object across a floor. After a few seconds, I realized it was coming from the trailer.

Rats, I decided. But rats didn’t scrape, they scurried. Besides, this sound was much too heavy for rats, even big rats. The scraping got louder and culminated in a thud on the concrete between the bin and the trailer. It’s not rats. Instinctively, I jumped to my feet, tightened my grip on my bag and backed up. Soon, I’d made my way behind the bin and had almost reached the fence. I stopped for a moment. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see the whole space between the bin and the trailer. But there was no more sound. Maybe I imagined it.

I used to imagine things a lot when I was a kid—monsters under the bed, snakes in the kitchen cupboard, Dad’s car outside our apartment. Grandma said I was special and intuitive; Sydney said I was making things up to get attention.

When I tried to tell them that a pigeon had saved me from a strange man who thought I was a princess and tried to kill me, even Grandma wasn’t buying it. “If you didn’t want to go to your Brownie meeting,” she said, “all you had to do was say so.”

Sydney added, “You’re too big a girl to be making up stories.” After a while, I began thinking that Sydney and Grandma were right; I really had imagined the whole incident. What if I had?

No. I was saved from a murderer by a damn pigeon, and I am not hearing things. It was probably a homeless guy. A homeless guy dragging something around. And now I am going to leave him alone. I got up and walked back toward the fence.

But why didn’t I see the homeless guy earlier? I looked through the trailer’s windows. It was empty.

I turned around again, made myself stare at the big space between the bin and the trailer.

Two people stood there, a man and a woman. He was facing the water with his back to me, his dark hair cropped so close it looked like a shadow. He was a tall man in a long black trench coat; she was smaller with blond hair, wearing a red dress. She wasn’t wearing a coat, even though it was freezing. Her dress had short sleeves.

She must be cold in those sleeves, I thought. They were bending over, pushing against something that I couldn’t see.

I could hear it scraping the concrete, though. And when they straightened up, I saw it: a pale blue ice chest. Small, to be making such a scrape. Prettier color than the water . . . a clean, shiny blue.

Both of them bent over again, and pushed it hard. I heard a dull splash, and as they stepped back, I saw the white lid sinking into the Hudson. Not so clean now. Not so shiny . . . Why am I watching this?

For a long time, they both stood there, staring at what they’d just done. The woman’s bare arms and back seemed to shake violently, though the rest of her body remained perfectly still.

“Crying,” I said. The woman didn’t move, but the man spun around fast and stared at me.

The bottom half of his face was covered by a thick black scarf, but I wouldn’t have noticed it had it been visible. He had a smooth forehead, black eyebrows. But the eyes . . . Where did you come from where did you?

The irises were, literally, mirrors. The fading sunlight refracted off of them, made points of light on my black coat. For a second, they seemed to transform into two laser beams.

“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered. “I am insane.”

Heart pumping, fingernails digging into my palms, I held my breath and ducked under the fence. On the other side, I walked fast, but I refused to run. I crossed Tenth Avenue, headed east on Fourteenth. It’s okay. Too much emotion in one day. Weird things happening. Dead Man’s Fingers. Cops in the classroom. Safety lectures, bad memories. Hermyn told a joke. You’re worked up. You’re not crazy. Not insane. Just worked up. But where did they, where did he . . .

Maybe Shell had slipped something into the box office coffeepot. Maybe the egg salad had been bad.

I passed a group of laughing teenage girls. One of them, the one with the pierced lip, looked like a vampirette from a cheap seventies movie; another had a snake tattooed on her forehead, but they all looked real. None of them had mirror eyes.

Whatever it is, it’s wearing off.

I had noticed something else, though, something harder to dismiss. I took a deep breath and tried to forget about it. Breathe in, breathe out. I opened the box office door. Think of anything, think of nothing.

Still, it stuck in my mind. More than once during the walk, I’d heard footsteps—and breath—moving closer and closer to my back. But each time I turned around and looked, no one was there.

 

En Henry was brushing his teeth one morning after twenty-four hours on ecstasy when he saw Christopher Marlowe’s ghost levitating behind him in the mirror. “Write movies,” the ghost intoned. So En, who was then called Stephen, lopped off the first five letters of his name (for numerological reasons), swore off both acting and ecstasy and vowed to write what he called the “Great American Screenplay.”

Far as I knew, he had yet to complete a scene, but he was working towards it. In the past year, En had taken up yoga, bought a computer and joined several online dating services catering to writers.

When I returned from my break ten minutes late and closed the door behind me, the first thing I saw was En Henry’s headless body propped upside down against the wall beside the filing cabinet that held the subscription order forms.

“Oh, God, no.”

En’s quavering voice said, “Namaste,” and I realized that I was looking at neither the aftermath of a brutal murder nor some kind of waking dream. It was only a yoga position.

En’s head was thrown back, his chest resting lightly on the floor. He appeared to be balancing on his forearms.

“What the hell is that supposed to be?”

“It’s the scorpion, man,” he said through his stretched throat. “Speaking of which, did one happen to crawl up your ass and die?”

“Sorry, En. I’m just tired.” I removed my coat and hung it on one of the hooks near the door. I shouldn’t have been shocked. Ever since his bathroom epiphany, En worked only evenings and warmed up for “human-on-human contact” by holding a yoga pose in the subscription room for several minutes.

Roland was on the ticket office computer checking for orders on our brand new Web site, thespace.com. He did this every night after the window opened, in the desperate hope of filling half the theater. “Sorry I’m late,” I called out to his back. He didn’t even turn around.

“Hearing aid’s down,” whispered Argent, who was sitting at a desk and thumbing through a book of sheet music, a fat pink highlighter in her hand.

“Why are you whispering?” I asked.

“I don’t want to bend En’s aura.”

Yale sat cross-legged on the floor, his back up against Argent’s desk, reading the latest Post. He winked at me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s almost over.”

“What’s almost over?”

“Valentine’s Day.”

“Oh, right.” I knelt down on the floor next to him. “Did you drink any of that coffee that Shell made?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Did it make you feel . . . I don’t know . . . funny?”

“No. Why? You sick?”

I thought about telling him what I’d seen, rehearsed it in my head. Well, to tell the truth, I was at this construction site, and I thought I saw this couple materialize out of nowhere and push a very nice ice chest into the river. The guy turned around, and his eyes almost burned a hole in my coat. That ever happen to you before?

No, I decided. The best thing to do was forget about it and calm down. And if I saw anything like it again, I’d get the name of a good, cheap therapist. I was pretty sure En was seeing one.

“Just a little queasy,” I said. “Probably the egg salad.”

“You really should try eating a vegetable every once in a while.”

“Yes, Mother.” I tried to think of real, nonthreatening things, like En’s yoga poses, Daniel’s fish, Hermyn’s joke about the four-door grape. Yale had gone back to reading Liz Smith’s column, and I sat down next to him and stared over his shoulder until the words ran together.

Argent flipped on a table lamp as twilight soaked in through the windows. It was after five, and ticketholders and purchasers would soon start to arrive. Then, at seven, the play would begin and there’d be nothing left to do but field complaints.

The play, No Tears for Addie, was a musical version of As I Lay Dying and a total disaster. Audience members had been storming out of the theater, usually during Addie’s big number (“This Dang Mortal Coil”), and demanding their money back. There wasn’t much we could say. No one in the box office could stand it either, except for Shell, who desperately wanted the part of Dewey Dell.

Until today, I hated listening to complaints, but now I couldn’t wait for them. I wanted angry subscribers storming the window. I wanted them in my face, looking for a fight, irritating me back to reality. I wanted to look into their unfamiliar but human eyes through the streaked glass and say, without fear, “No refunds.”

Instead, I found myself gazing out the subscription room window, trying to make out the details of shadows at the reaches of the courtyard, wishing I’d never have to open the door and leave the box office again.

“Shell and Hermyn off tonight?” I asked Argent.

“Mmmm hmmm,” she whispered. “Hey, that’s great about Hermyn’s engagement, huh?”

“It sure is.” I closed my eyes, listened to the soothing squeak of Argent’s highlighter and En’s deep, nasal breathing and tried to relax. But the only thing I could really hear was my own pounding pulse, which seemed to drown out every other sound in the room. I hoped it wouldn’t bend En’s aura.