“My sister’s taking the death pretty hard.” Thomas hears how formal he sounds—the death—but he can’t say “my father’s death.” He can’t say “my father.”
“Oh, Jenny with the blonde hair,” Maloney mumbles, chewing energetically. “I did bang her, though it was a long time ago now. But Annie? How could you think that? Ha! She’s gained weight, hasn’t she? Your sister? So has Annie for that matter.”
“She has to go to the apartment, she said.”
“Jenny’s so . . . emotional. Isn’t she? Tears and laughter mixed into one. It’s like she can’t quite control which emotions connect to which expressions. What is that called again?”
“Histrionic.”
“No, sensitive. It’s a charming character trait.” Maloney looks at him while cleaning his teeth with his tongue.
“It’s almost over, Tommy. When are you dumping him in the ground?”
“Tuesday.”
“I’ll come if you want me to. You haven’t touched your soup.” Maloney wipes his mouth with his napkin and drains his soda. With two fingers he lifts a leaf of lettuce from Thomas’s plate, then lets it drop. “I remember Jacques. His glistening gray suit. Was it grease? Was it greasy? Is that why it glistened?” He glances up from Thomas’s salad. “I’m coming to that shitty funeral, whether you want me to or not, okay?”
“Okay.”
They stop a moment to admire the show window, which they’re both happy with, before they enter the store. It’s 2:00 P.M. Customers are beginning to arrive. It’s already busy: Annie works efficiently behind the register, while Peter advises people, retrieves items from the storeroom, and crawls up the ladder if anyone wants something from the top shelves. Thomas feels a momentary pang in his stomach, a rapping in his soul, a delight for the store, for its bustle, for the fact that they actually own this place. That he’s made it this far. That he’s risen out of the shithole he grew up in. That the store’s actually successful, the employees, their employees, his shelving system (his own certain sense of style). That they don’t have carpet on the floor. Satisfaction for his satisfaction, oh, satisfaction for satisfaction. Because recently a kind of lethargy has crept into him, a certain undefined disquiet or boredom (is it boredom?). But at this moment a twinge, a pang, when he strolls through the store nodding at customers and warmly greeting the sweet visual artist with the studio around the corner; she’s looking for colored acrylics and can’t find the magenta or the ultramarine. He calls for Peter, and Peter immediately goes to the basement, and the visual artist smiles gratefully. Walk down the short hall, open the office door, get the rest of the accounting done before closing time. He’s just sat down to it when Jenny calls.
“Oh, Thomas . . .” He can’t tell whether she’s sniffling or there’s some other sound in the background. “Oh God, it looks awful here . . .”
“What looks awful?”
“This place looks AWFUL, Thomas.”
“Are you in the apartment?”
A strange sound emerges from her.
“Of course it looks awful there. What did you expect?”
She snorts hysterically.
“Call a taxi, Jenny, go home. I’m hanging up, and you’re calling a taxi. Okay?” He hears her sitting down on something soft and creaky. Must be the armchair.
“C’mon, Jenny.”
“I can’t.”
“You can’t what?”
“I can’t stand up.”
“But you just sat down.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can hear you.”
“What can you hear? You can’t hear anything! You have eyes in the back of your head, you spy!”
“You’re sitting in Dad’s moth-eaten armchair staring at the television.”
“There’s no television here anymore.” Her voice quivers. “Someone took the television, Thomas. The apartment’s been ransacked. Everything’s gone, everything. It’s so dusty here, so disgusting . . .”
“Of course it’s dusty. I’m hanging up now. Call a taxi.”
“Don’t you give me orders! You always give me orders. I’ve never been allowed to decide ANYTHING for myself. Always you. Or Dad. Or some other fucking stupid bastard!” Jenny breathes excitedly into the phone, seething. He has never heard her say fucking before. Now her mouth is close to the receiver, her voice dark and husky, thrusting the words: “They have ta-ken the tele-vis-ion, Tho-mas.”
Maloney enters the office. He glances curiously at Thomas. Thomas writes “Jenny, hysterical” on a slip of paper.
“I’m hanging up now. Bye, Jenny. Bye.” He hangs up.
“I need to pick her up,” Thomas grumbles. “I don’t know if I’ll be back today.”
He gets to his feet, snatches up his briefcase, and removes his coat from the hallway closet. Then he rushes through the store without saying goodbye to anyone, despite the inquisitive look Annie gives him. The glass door glides closed behind him. He lights a cigarette, hails a cab. Before the cab arrives, he gets Jenny on the phone again. Howling now and incoherent.
The last time he saw the apartment was many years ago. It’s in a narrow, indistinct redbrick structure squeezed between two taller buildings, the tallest of which is now apparently equipped with balconies. Small trees have been newly planted on each side of the street. A woman carrying a child strapped to her chest leaves the playground across the way. The playground is also new. A fire station used to be there. He remembers the constant howling of the sirens when he was very little. Then it’d been razed, leaving an empty space where local kids hung out in great, squealing flocks, and where he and his friends built a fort made of boards (and one summer, in this fort, they’d smoked their first cigarettes, which they took turns stealing from their fathers). But the building looks the same. The windows haven’t been replaced. There’s no intercom. Even the door with its chipped blue paint is the same. Thomas shoves it open with his foot and steps into the stairwell. A steep stairwell adorned with something that was once a wine-red runner—now so filthy it’s nearly black. The wood creaks under him, the timer light clicks off. He locates the light switch and continues up to the fourth floor accompanied by the ticking of the timer light. As children, he and Jenny couldn’t reach the switch, so they had to feel their way forward in the darkness. He puts his hand on the railing. The hand recognizes each turn, each crack, each unevenness. The pungent odor of rot and mothballs is so familiar that he doesn’t even notice it at first. But suddenly it nauseates him. His father’s apartment door is open.
Jenny’s sitting in the dark on the edge of their father’s unmade bed, staring at the wall. The curtains are closed. The floor is strewn with papers, clothes, overturned lamps, and shards of glass. The air is thick with dust. A dresser has been knocked over, and the arm of a shirt sticks out from one of its drawers. Thomas enters the living room. There’s more light here. The television is missing, and so is their father’s record collection. The coffee table is also gone, as well as the silverware—the hutch is open. A dish with a flower motif, which belonged to their grandmother, has fallen to the floor and cracked down the middle. An apple core lies beside it. He goes back to the hallway and closes the front door. The nasty odor of decay wafts from the little kitchen. The apartment has been empty for probably a month and a half. Jenny stopped by only once after their father was arrested, to water the plants. But someone else has clearly been here. Thomas goes to Jenny in the bedroom. She’s still sitting on the bed, now with their father’s pillow in her lap. He squats before her. “Come. Stand up. I’m taking you home.” “Someone broke the lock,” she whispers, running the back