Bebe approved. She had decided that Nora had made a conscious decision to fade into the background of the museum, not that Nora was accustomed to fading into the background wherever she went. Nora’s concession to variety and color was a scarf. She had dozens, maybe hundreds, of scarves. It had made her birthday and Christmas easy for Charlie, who was the kind of terrible gift giver who, when they were first married, had given her craft-show jewelry made of papier-mâché and small appliances that had limited use. Bebe always referred to Nora’s scarves as “schmattes,” which was as close as she ever came to acknowledging own her origins as a fit model in a low-end sportswear house, whose showroom, ironically, had been just a few blocks from the museum.
“Do you know Bob Harris?” Nora asked when she passed Bebe’s office on the day that Bob called her.
“That super-rich guy? I don’t think I’ve ever met him. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to, but I’m pretty sure I would remember if I had. Why?”
“Just wondering,” Nora said.
“Here’s what I keep wondering about, cookie,” Bebe said. “How come we can’t get rid of that hobo outside?”
“Hobo. Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time.”
“Why can’t we get someone to move him along?”
“The Constitution? The right of the people to assemble? Free speech? The sidewalk?”
Bebe made a sound of dismissal and disapproval not unlike the ones Charity sometimes favored. The man who sat on the sidewalk near the museum entrance said his name was Phil, but who knew? When Nora had contacted the city about him after the museum first opened, when he was out on the street with a lugubrious mutt of some indeterminate kind, she’d been handed from office to office until finally she gave up and called the local church shelter and got someone smart, with a sense of humor, who recognized the sign he had then, which read PLEASE HELP WITH DOG FOOD HE’S HUNGRY. “Not to worry,” the woman said with a throaty chuckle. “He’s not really what we classify as homeless. Call the ASPCA about the dog. They’ll make him leave it home.” Nora had had one of their security people work overtime to keep an eye out. As it turned out, Phil picked up his blanket, his sign, and his dog as darkness began to fall and took everything to a battered Subaru Outback parked in a spot reserved for vehicles with commercial plates, which the car actually had. The security guy had friends who were cops, and one of them did a computer search and found out the Outback was registered to a P. J. Moynes, who lived in a two-family house in Queens that had been carved up into apartments.
“You are a complete fraud,” Nora said the following week when Phil appeared in his usual spot.
Phil laughed. “You, too,” he said. His sign now read A SANDWICH IS ONLY THREE BUCKS. Two women stopped and dropped a dollar bill into his big red cup. Phil put his finger to his lips as the women moved away. “If you don’t tell on me, I won’t tell on you,” he said. “How’s the jewelry biz?”
“It’s a museum,” Nora said.
“Tomato, tomahto,” Phil said. “I hope you’re happy now. My poor dog is cooped up in the house all day instead of getting fresh air.”
“Where can you get a sandwich for only three bucks?” Nora said.
“You need to relax more,” said Phil. “You’re too literal-minded.”
“That’s what my daughter says,” Nora said.
“Smart girl,” said Phil.
It is necessary to raise the monthly charge for parking from $325 to $350. Please remit on November 1 accordingly.
Sincerely,
Sidney Stoller
As the weather grew colder and the days shorter, as Nora moved the sweaters from basement closets to bedroom bureaus, the atmosphere on the block seemed to darken. One evening, taking Homer out for the last walk, she had stumbled on something on her front steps, and, as she righted herself, Homer stepped forward gingerly to sniff at a small bag with a knot at the top. Someone had left discarded dog poop on her stoop. With two fingers Nora put it in the trash can. She looked up and down the street, but there was no one in sight. “Yuck,” she said aloud, and Homer looked up solemnly.
It had also begun to feel as though the parking lot was more of a curse than a blessing, as though the men on the block had sold their souls to some devil of convenience. “We let Nolan in and everything went to hell,” George said jovially one morning. It was another reason Nora couldn’t bear him; there was no one like George for saying something lacerating in a hail-fellow voice.
First the Lessmans had come out to find the windshield of their car shattered. There was a good deal of speculation about what had happened, although George had immediately said, “Let’s not fool ourselves, folks,” and gestured toward the windows of the SRO. Linda Lessman said that their insurance company had refused to pay until the adjuster had determined whether it was a “spontaneous event.”
“Like spontaneous combustion?” Linda said, her fists on her narrow hips. “Are there numerous instances of windshields just shattering into a thousand pieces?”
After that, there was the junker of a car with stickers for Carlsbad Caverns, the Sierra Club, and Ralph Nader that had been abandoned in front of the curb cut leading into the lot, so that all the cars within were trapped and effectively held hostage. That was bad enough, but Jack Fisk, who had once had what he habitually called “juice” with city government, now no longer seemed to wield the same power. When the junker had first appeared Jack had snapped his fingers at the others as he stood in his blue chalk-striped suit on the sidewalk: gone, like that, he’d promised. But it wasn’t until three days later that a tow truck had snagged the car’s dinged front bumper with the hook. “I hate working this block,” the tow operator said to Nora as Homer sniffed at his front tire and then lifted his leg in a casual arabesque. “It’s a nightmare getting in and out of here.”
“It’s about goddamn time,” Jack Fisk had shouted when he saw that the junker was gone.
Sherry had told Nora that Jack’s firm had a mandatory retirement age of sixty-five; after that, your name moved from the equity-partner column on the left of the letterhead to a column on the right for what were called “senior counselors” but were understood to be the over-the-hill guys. “They call it the obituary column,” Sherry said.
“Yikes,” Nora said. It was early on a Sunday, just past nine, and Nora was still in her running clothes. Sherry was carrying a bag of bagels.
“Oh, it gets worse. Guess who dreamed up the idea for mandatory retirement when he was a Young Turk?” Sherry nodded down the block toward her husband’s back.
“Yikes,” Nora repeated.
There wasn’t even anyone to complain to about the problems with the parking lot. It was owned by a ghost, a man none of them had ever actually met. Sidney Stoller: that was how they made out their checks, sent to a post office box and due the first of the month. Every time she ran into an old man on the block, Nora imagined it might be Sidney Stoller, finally come to call, but as far as she knew, it never was.
“Please can we go back to the old garage?” Nora had said the week before as she and Charlie read the inside sections of the Sunday New York Times, the ones that were printed early.
“Why? Because the lot is twenty-five dollars more now? I know you weren’t a math major, but even you can figure out that that’s still a net savings.”
Nora lowered the book review. “There’s no need to get nasty,” she said. “The parking situation on the block is causing a lot of bad feeling. Not to mention that now all of you are being ordered around by that idiot George.”
“What is it Rachel always says about you? You’re so judgy. All I know is I’ve got a lunch in two hours in Stamford,” said Charlie, pushing back his chair and not looking at her, “and if Ricky has me blocked in, there’s going to be more than bad feeling.”
“It’s Saturday, Charlie. Ricky doesn’t work on Saturday
s.” But of course that wasn’t true. Ricky worked whenever anyone needed him. Sherry Fisk had once called him at home on a Sunday night when a pipe in her basement was spewing water all over the floor, and a half hour later he was downstairs, his toolbox and a Shop-Vac on the steps, taking care of business.
Obviously Jack Fisk had forgotten all about that. He’d come out one morning to take his car from the lot and found Ricky’s van blocking him in. Or at least that’s what he said. It was only a day after the junker had finally been towed, and Jack was still in a bit of a rage, which was more or less his natural condition. When he finally tracked Ricky down at the Rizzolis’, where he was fixing a garbage disposal in which a teaspoon was thoroughly jammed, Ricky tried to argue that Jack had room to get around his van, which made Jack only angrier. “Don’t tell me I can get around you,” Jack screamed while Ricky stood with rounded shoulders on the stoop. “It’s not my goddamn job to get around you. It’s your job to stay out of my goddamn way.”
Sherry had apologized to Nora for her husband. “Predictably, of our two sons, one has a volcanic temper, and the other is so conflict-avoidant that if you ran him over with a tank he’d say, Oh, sorry, I was in your way,” she said sadly. “Andrew and his wife want to have kids, and I suggested that before they do, he try anger management classes.”
“What did he say?” Nora asked.
“What always happens when you suggest a man take anger management classes?”
“He gets angry?”
“See, and you’re not even a therapist,” said Sherry, who was.
Linda Lessman, who always saw the world in black and white, which Nora imagined must be a useful quality in a criminal-court judge, unless you were a defendant, had once said she didn’t understand why anyone who was a therapist would put up with a man like Jack. But Nora had always tended to see most things in shades of gray, and she had noticed that logic and marital relations often seemed at odds with each other.
Nora also understood the genesis of Jack’s immediate rage: in her experience, nothing made a man angrier than being told that he couldn’t drive like NASCAR. She remembered one terrible day when Charlie had been trying to get the car into a tiny street space on the way to an open house for a co-op apartment. It had taken so long that Oliver, whose toilet training was a bit dicey well into kindergarten, had wet his pants. When Charlie zoomed away—because the space was far too small, Nora had been sure that if you’d used a tape measure you would have discovered their car was a good foot longer than the space was—Rachel had made the mistake of saying, “Aren’t you going to try again, Daddy?”
That had been one to remember.
And so it went on the block, mishap by misadventure. After the broken windshield, the junker, and Jack’s tantrum, a transformer blew in a Con Edison grate and the entrance to the lot was temporarily blocked while it was repaired. Charlie, Jack, George, Harold Lessman, the oldest Rizzoli son, and two of the guys who lived in the SRO were standing that Sunday morning at the edge of the hole the utility workers had made. Nora had stopped to look into it when she was out with Homer. The improbable guts of New York lay exposed below her in the kind of filthy trench she imagined you could find anywhere from Lexington Avenue to Wall Street. Peering into the hole made by the Con Ed guys, Nora thought it was amazing that anything held together at all, that water came out of their taps, that power went into their outlets, that their houses didn’t all tumble to the ground. The dirty little secret of the city was that while it was being constantly created, glittering glass and steel towers rising everywhere where once there had been parking lots, gas stations, and four-story tenements, it was simultaneously falling apart. The streets were filled with excavations and repair crews, the older buildings sheathed in scaffolding cages.
“Scaffolding,” Charlie had muttered one day not long ago. “That’s the business I should have gone into. If I owned a scaffolding firm I’d be a rich man today.”
“A lot of salt damage,” she heard the older of the SRO guys say now as the men clustered around the hole. Despite what they had all believed when they moved onto the block, most of the SRO guys worked, the kind of journeyman jobs that once used to allow for a small apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and now only provided for a room with a hotplate in a single-room-occupancy hotel. Rumor had it that Sidney Stoller owned the SRO, too, but no one had ever been able to determine if that was true. There was no point in looking at the deed; there would surely be some corporate title obscuring the name of the true owner. All real estate in Manhattan now seemed to change hands under the cover of an LLC. No millionaire ever sold his duplex on East End Avenue to another millionaire. It was always Blair Holdings LLC to Sadieland LLC, or such like, the names of children being popular covers for the true identities of their parents.
Down the block the men were squatting at the edge of the hole, desk guys pretending they knew what it took to work with their hands. Nora remembered how contemptuous she had once been of couples who drove in the car with the two men in the front and the two women in the back. The men and women on the block now did the same when they got together to talk. The women were talking about people, the men talking about things. It was why so many of the men prospered on Wall Street and in the big law firms, where things could be turned into money and people were interchangeable and even insignificant, and there were hardly any women running the show. The night before, she and Charlie had gone to have dinner with Jenny and the man with whom she was currently sleeping, and Nora and Jenny had decided that they were giving boy-girl seating up because Charlie and Jasper spent the entire evening talking to each other, and Nora and Jenny the same, which was fine with everyone involved.
“What does Jasper do?” Nora had asked Jenny in the kitchen.
“He’s a cabinetmaker. Also a voice-over actor and a dialect coach.”
“Promise me he’s not also a mime. Anything but a mime.”
Jenny put cheese and grapes on a platter. “Would I sleep with a mime?” she said.
“You slept with that circus clown.”
“That was a long time ago. And I was really drunk.”
In the car on the way home Nora said to Charlie, “You seemed to get on with him.”
“He’s a smart guy,” Charlie said. “He’s kind of wasted making kitchen cabinets but, hey, who am I to talk. Jenny’ll have a nice kitchen, and he’ll get whatever. I wonder if he charges less if you’re sleeping with him while he’s doing your kitchen.”
“Wait, I knew she was redoing her kitchen, but I didn’t know the guy she was dating was the contractor.”
“She’s your best friend. How come you don’t already know this? And is ‘dating’ a term that ever applies to Jenny?” Charlie had always found Jenny’s promiscuity threatening, as though it were a communicable disease, as though Nora were going to have breakfast with Jenny and then give a man she met in the coffee shop line a blow job in the restroom.
“My best friend is seeing the man who is redoing her kitchen,” Nora said to Sherry Fisk now, not meaning to say it aloud until she’d already done so. “Seeing. Sleeping with. What do we call it now?”
“I bet it will be a great kitchen,” Sherry said.
“You have to do something to make a kitchen renovation bearable,” said Alma Fenstermacher, who had stopped to join them. She stared for a moment at the scrum at the end of the street, then walked on, perhaps, Nora thought, to attend church. Alma seemed like the sort of person to attend church on Sunday.
“Why do I like her?” Sherry said. “I shouldn’t like her. She’s so—”
“Perfect,” Nora said. “You can tell her closets are always tidy. See, tidy—that’s a word I’ve probably never used before to describe anyone, but it’s perfect for Alma. She’s a throwback to another era, before we wore workout clothes all the time and used profanity. She’s perfect and yet she’s perfectly nice. It’s impossible not to like h
er.”
The Con Ed truck rumbled down the street, and the men at the lot entrance began to disperse. “I have to tell you, I’m grateful for this,” Sherry said, gesturing down the street. “At least it gives my husband something else to obsess about. This whole thing with the parking lot is a metaphor for his entire life right now. These guys have no life except for their jobs. So without their jobs they have no life. Jack gets out of bed mad and goes to bed mad. I think he’s mad in his dreams.”
“Yikes,” said Nora again, but she couldn’t help nodding.
Nora thought Charlie’s dissatisfaction with his work and therefore his life had begun to grow with his fiftieth birthday two years before. She had hosted a dinner for twenty at an expensive restaurant they both liked, but her husband had so much to drink that he started to sob during Oliver’s toast (“And it wasn’t even that good,” Rachel said the next day) and fell asleep with his mouth open in the back of the car on the way home.
Charlie was an investment banker. It had become enough to say that, at parties, in conversation. No one really knew what that meant except other finance guys, and they liked the fact that they spoke a secret language that others, especially women, couldn’t understand. Nora had made it her business to listen carefully to the long, discursive stories he told at dinner about deals, firms, personalities, possibilities, but it was all too boring. At a certain point simply pretending to listen, looking attentive, nodding and umming from time to time, seemed like enough of a sacrifice. So Charlie would say, “You’re not going to believe this one…” and Nora would go elsewhere in her mind: replacement of the living room drapes, bong in Oliver’s bedroom drawer, press for the upcoming exhibit. She’d gotten good at it: Charlie would say in the dark at night, “Remember that deal I told you Jim and I were working on?” And Nora would say, “Yes, of course,” and start umming again, and he’d be content.