Extraordinary Adventures

  DAY

  SIXTY-ONE

  ONE

  It was already June. The air was getting thick and wet, and the sun was as harsh as a naked lightbulb in a windowless basement. Days were long. It was bright outside long after it seemed natural. He could smell people grilling chicken and steak and burgers. Gnats flew into Bronfman’s eyes; mosquitoes gnawed at his ankles. Palmetto bugs and silverfish skittered and slithered across the baseboards of his apartment. So hot, so sweaty. He took a shower in the morning and one at night, and would have taken a shower at lunch if he could. A hazmat suit would have been nice. Daily his mother’s condition declined. One day she hired a moving van, and when the two men and the truck arrived she told them that she wanted to go to New York City. “I want to travel in style,” she said, “with my sofa and all my hats!” He had to go over and ask the men to take the sofa back into the house. Bronfman had to cancel all of her credit cards after that.

  The hotter it became, the busier things were at Thomas Edison’s apartment. Cars were coming and going at all hours of the day and night. Bronfman watched from his window as the refuse of the world came and went. Not just Coco and his core group of friends but a host of people Bronfman had never seen before and never wanted to see again, representatives of a dark place Bronfman had only heard rumors of, a strata of society that operated in the shadows cast by shadows. There was not a single night he slept all the way through: a car horn, a heavy thud against the shared wall, whispers so menacing they woke him. He should have closed his window, but his place got so stuffy when he did. His air-conditioning was pitiful. It would have been worse if the sun hadn’t moved beyond the far units. He didn’t know where it had gone.

  Bronfman couldn’t say anything about it to anyone. He was afraid to. He didn’t feel quite as if he would be murdered. Even though he knew that people were getting murdered all over the place, he didn’t think he was one of those people, which was probably the way many of the people who actually did get murdered felt. But there were worse things than getting killed that might happen to him, lots of them, and for Bronfman they all had to do with losing parts of his body—one part, two parts, more. There was no part of his body that Bronfman wanted to be without, not even the last joint on his little finger, especially now, now that his parts were being seen and (many of them) touched by Sheila. So he shut up and endured the urban hellscape his neighbor had manufactured for him, just to be sure he kept all of his parts.

  Thomas Edison seemed to have disappeared. Bronfman rarely saw him anymore—only once, in fact, late one night wandering around the spooky fluorescent parking lot with his shirt off, jeans hanging low. He was talking on the phone to someone he was having an issue with. Bronfman could tell that he was having an issue by the way he was gesticulating, as if he were brushing clouds of gnats away from his face. Bronfman almost went out to say hello, but another man joined Thomas—just drifted out of the darkness. Bronfman had never seen this man before. He was large and solid and wore painter’s pants and a wifebeater. He held Thomas by the arms, and talked to him, clearly trying to calm him down. It seemed to work: together the two walked back toward the apartment building. Bronfman tried to move away from the window, but he wasn’t quick enough: Thomas Edison caught his eye. For a moment they saw each other, and in that moment both of them froze. But Thomas Edison didn’t nod or wave, he didn’t smile. He pretended not to have seen Bronfman at all, and walked back into his apartment with the strange man, where Bronfman heard a muffled conversation, the clatter of something metallic on the wood floor.

  And then one evening someone knocked on his door. He had come home briefly, just to change from his office clothes into the clothes he’d copied from the mannequin. He and Sheila were going to see a movie. He was almost late. Now this. A knock.

  His imagination conjured a crazed and desperate addict on the verge of pillaging his already pillaged apartment. Bronfman held his breath, made not a sound, and waited for him or them to go away, but the knock came yet again. Reluctantly, he went to face his fears.

  It was Coco. She was wearing what Bronfman had come to think of as her signature summer wardrobe: stringy cutoffs and a pink tank top with a smiley face ironed on smack in the middle of it. He was pretty sure she’d purchased the tank top at the thrift shop, and that it had once belonged to a nine-year-old. The edges of the smiley face were peeling, and the smile was cracking. But Coco was legitimately pretty. Beneath her tattered exterior was real beauty, just a shower away.

  He stood at the door; she stood on the stoop. She wasn’t wearing his hat, but he gave her a look—clearly distrustful, plainly dubious—indicating that he knew she had been, or would be again. That she had it.

  “Hey, Bronfman,” she said. She looked behind her, then to the left, toward Thomas Edison’s apartment, then over Bronfman’s shoulder. “How goes it, pardner?” Pardner! What pluck this girl had.

  “Oh, I’m fine, thank you,” he said. “And you?” He pinched the side of his thigh. Sheila said he sounded like a robot sometimes, and he was trying to humanize himself, bring a little ease to his interactions. He gave it a shot. “What’s up?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “not that much is up. This is kinda awkward. But can I use your bathroom? Tommy’s john—well, it’s … occupied. Constantly. If you know what I mean.” He knew exactly what she meant. It was where he nearly died.

  “Sure,” he said, stepping aside. She slipped past him. “It’s the first door on the—” But she had disappeared into the bathroom and closed the door before he had a chance to finish his sentence. She knew exactly where it was.

  It didn’t take her long. He heard the flush, heard her wash her hands and, presumably, dry them on the bath towel hanging from the shower rung before coming back out.

  “Thanks much,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” he said. Then, “You bet.”

  Coco didn’t appear to be in a hurry to go. She glanced lazily around the room, sighed, and wandered over to the lonely bookshelf against the wall, where there were no books at all, just the pamphlet from Extraordinary Adventures and his collection of ballpoint pens. She picked up the pamphlet and studied it, page by page, with the same distracted attention he had seen her bring to the fashion magazine.

  “Wow,” she said. “This is nice. Florida. I went there once, in high school. My ‘boyfriend’”—she provided the air quotes—“slipped me a roofie, and after that who knows what happened. But they told me it was a lot of fun. I got a terrible sunburn from passing out on the beach.”

  “Oh, my God,” Bronfman said. “That’s awful.”

  She shook her head. “I’m over it,” she said, and showed him a picture she seemed particularly to like, a pair of dolphins leaping through the foaming waves.

  “I’m going there,” he said. “Sandscapes. In just a couple of weeks or so.” Bronfman was hopeful. Hope was something Sheila had given him.

  This got her interest. “Fun,” she said. “Can I come?”

  She laughed. She was making a joke, the kind people make when they know that what they’re asking will never happen. She didn’t mean it, but it made Bronfman squirm, because he found himself wishing that she did mean it. He wished she wanted to go, even though he had no intention of taking her. Contradictory feelings confused Bronfman. He had yet to mention the beach to Sheila, and didn’t know when he would. He was waiting for the perfect moment. He was afraid that it would scare her if she knew that he was imagining a serious future with her in it, even if that future was only two and a half weeks away. But there went his brain again: against his will, he was suddenly, pointlessly, playing with the idea of inviting this woman he barely knew. His face flushed red, a primal physical response to this betrayal of Sheila, even this brief betrayal, this passing thought.

  “Ha-ha,” he said.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  “No, please,” he said immediately, surprising himself. Almost immediately, he understood why: the smoke would remind him of his mother
, the young, faraway mother he so missed. Perhaps that’s why he was drawn to this Coco: if his rule-breaking and seductive mother had been young in this day and age, perhaps she would have been someone like Coco.

  She lit up and blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. It rose like fumes from a dormant volcano. Then she fixed her gaze on him, gave him the once-over twice. “You look different. Have you been doing something? Pumping iron? Working out?”

  His soul lit up. “A little,” he said. “I mean, you know, not much.”

  “For the beach?” she said. “Or to protect yourself from the lunatics next door?” She laughed again, but this time it meant something completely different. Laughs were a language all their own. This laugh was serious; this laugh meant there were lunatics next door.

  He didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Neither. Just to stay in shape.”

  She turned away, picked up his jar of pens, selected one, clicked it, drew a line across the palm of her hand. “Hey, mind if I keep this? I need a pen.”

  “Sure, no, please. I have lots, as you can see.”

  She read it. “It’s from the Sheraton, downtown. Why would you stay at the Sheraton? A secret tryst?” She threw him a wink.

  “No! No, no. I didn’t really stay there. I was just walking by and went in and got a pen.”

  “I see,” she said, as if that made any real sense. She gave him an estimating glance. “You know, you’re a brave man,” she said, clicking the pen until it broke. She winced, and stuck it back into the jar. “Not to leave here, I mean, after what happened to you. Tommy felt terrible about it.”

  “He didn’t seem to at the time, but I’m sure that when he reflected—”

  “This isn’t his thing,” she said. “This whole meth adventure. It’s very temporary.”

  “That’s good,” Bronfman said. “From what I understand, it’s a dangerous and unpredictable business.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Leave. Go. Move far, far away to a place where people weren’t sticking their guns into your stomach.”

  Why didn’t he? Because she was right, that would have been the thing to do. He shrugged. “As long as I stay out of his place, I think I’ll be okay. And who knows if it’s better anywhere else.”

  “It’s probably better everywhere else.”

  “It sounds like you want me to go.” Because it occurred to him then that she had some ulterior motive for the visit. Maybe Thomas Edison wanted to expand his operations and needed this place to do it.

  But she shook her head. “You’re the king of King’s Manor, Bronfman,” she said, “IMHO. If you left, I think God would strike us with lightning and send a flood to wash us all away. You remind me of my dad. So upright, direct, honest. A rare commodity these days.” And on the way to the door she touched him on the elbow. He felt a static-electrical shock.

  “I know why I stayed,” he said. He knew now, for certain, a thing he didn’t know he knew until the words floated out of him.

  She stopped, turned, waited.

  “For Thomas,” he said. “To protect him. He asked me to stay. He said who knows who would move here if I left. I think that’s true. I’ll stay here until his ‘meth adventure’”—and, yes, for the first time in his life, Bronfman used air quotes—“is over. Until everything is okay.”

  She looked stunned. Or not stunned, impressed. “Exactly what my dad would do, under entirely different circumstances.” He lingered in her faraway gaze a moment longer until she broke herself away from whatever memory she was living in. “Well, see you, Mr. B.,” she said. “Thanks for the—you know.”

  “Yes,” he said, watching her go. She had lovely shoulder blades. They were so small, so delicate. “I’ll see you, too. Take it easy!” he added with a flourish. But by that time she was already gone, and even though he was certainly going to be late now, he stood there in the cloud of smoke she’d left behind, breathing in his lost, his precious, past.

  TWO

  This was something. He and Sheila had only been “seeing each other” (whatever that meant) for three weeks and four days, but he didn’t have to knock anymore when he went to her apartment. She told him just to walk in, so he just walked in. Sometimes they had no plans—nothing “to do.” Sometimes she would ask him to come over and said they’d figure something out or watch television or “whatever.” Whatever, with a woman. A new concept for Bronfman.

  Today he walked in and found her on the couch with a magazine. “Hey, you. I was about to order some pizza.”

  “That sounds great,” he said.

  “I’ll order more than we’ll eat, because you can eat pizza for any meal—breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It’s the perfect food.”

  “Totally,” he said. The word sounded foreign coming out of his mouth, Tunisian or Greek, but he thought that with practice he would totally get it down.

  The two large piles of wood were still in the middle of her living room. He had studied them on earlier visits and quickly realized what they were—furniture in the process of being assembled; the very beginning of the process, the point at which the pieces were dumped out of their boxes and onto the floor. But he hadn’t mentioned them yet, and neither had she.

  “It looks like,” he said—he wanted to tread gently, didn’t want to do anything that might hurt her feelings, but he felt more comfortable now, safe—“you’re having a little trouble putting those things together.”

  “Oh, those,” she said. She gazed at them. “Yes. Well, the thing is, I’ve put them together two or three times and taken them apart again.”

  “That’s interesting,” he said, though it was much more than that to Bronfman; it was peculiar and a little disconcerting. His own peculiarities he could accept and to some degree appreciate because he understood them, either how pointless or how important they were. But he hid them. He would never show anyone his collection of ballpoint pens. When someone appeared comfortable enough with himself to broadcast his individuality to the world, Bronfman steered clear of him. Now here he was on the couch with such a person.

  “Interesting?” she said.

  “That you would do that, I mean. Why would you do that?”

  Sheila was, with the possible exception of himself, the oddest person he’d ever met. She appeared to survive on tomato soup and buttered toast, slept until ten every morning, and her life goal was to binge-watch every series in the history of American television. She was almost done with Bonanza: 14 seasons, 430 episodes, beginning in 1959 and ending in 1973. Favorite character Hoss, of course. She would be ancient by the time she finished watching every episode of every series, but she had done the math and it was possible. It would be nice to be in the Guinness World Records for something, she said. It was difficult to ascertain when she actually worked.

  They had watched a couple of episodes of Gilligan’s Island yesterday, and watching, looking back and forth between her and the TV, he realized that Sheila was the perfect amalgam of Ginger and Mary Ann, a girl of wholesome openness with a wanton glimmer in her eyes. He didn’t tell her this, because he wasn’t sure what she’d think about it, and he was still moving cautiously in this new world where, remarkably, every day for the past four days he had kissed her. Every single day. Nothing calisthenic, but, still, his lips felt raw and tingly. And they were the color of mandarin oranges.

  “They’re IKEA,” she said. “That’s a table and that’s a chair. The directions are awful, of course. Impenetrable. Unsound. Infuriating and condescending.”

  “That makes sense. Because they are.”

  She turned to him. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone.”

  “Okay.”

  Her fingers pulled on a loose thread at the hem of her blouse until it snapped. She considered it with a thoughtful seriousness. “It’s hard for me to share parts of myself,” she said. “My dreams. Or my nightmares.”

  He nodded. She smiled at him and looked away, embarrassed. Th
en she returned to Bronfman and studied him, literally, as if he represented some calculus she needed to solve but couldn’t, however much she wished she could. She opened her mouth but stopped the next words from coming out. He could see her swallow them, recalibrate, start again.

  “Okay. Well, I have a dream, and my dream is to get the gig writing the instructions for IKEA. IKEA is my white whale.”

  “Really?”

  He had expected something different, and maybe she had, too. “White whale” made Bronfman think—not of Moby-Dick but of his third-grade un-sweetheart, Ellen, and her manatee. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “I’m rewriting the directions—the instructions. I’m going to send them to someone at IKEA and see if I can get the job writing the English version. Think about that, Bronfman. Think of the work. I’d have a job for life.”

  “Who are you going to send them to?”

  “That’s the rub,” she said. “No one is getting back to me. It’s probably a very in-house thing, you know, but nothing ventured … My grandfather was Swedish, but he never spoke it because of something terrible that happened to him there. I think it was pretty top-secret stuff.” But Bronfman wasn’t really listening. Already he was nurturing a newborn idea, watching it grow in a fertile and sunlit corner of his brain.

  He held her foot, and he held it tight. She seemed to like it when he held her foot. It was a sweet evening. They ordered in from a kind of gourmet-pizza place that had just opened called Maestros! Both of them liked the same things on their pizza—black olives, feta, sausage. Bronfman understood this as further evidence of their compatibility—a sign. You like feta, too? No way! And he liked how, when he ordered the pizza, the vaguely Italian guy on the other end called them pies. “What do you want on the pie?” he said. That made the pizza seem extra-authentic. It came; they ate. Half a bottle of red wine later, they fell asleep on her couch flipping between talk shows, and later—somewhere around three in the morning—they wandered in a purposeful stupor to her bedroom, where they fell on top of the covers, fully clothed, and began … wriggling, a call-and-response with their bodies, testing, probing. He had even purchased a package of condoms earlier that week, to be prepared in case something like this happened. And now it was happening. “Edsel,” she said, as if she were in a trance. “Oh, Edsel…” He remembered thinking that this was going to be the night—the night. But in the morning they woke clutching each other, still fully clothed.