A Town of Empty Rooms

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

To Robert, Jonah and Maia
With love

Part One

Chapter One

SHE DID NOT INTEND TO steal anything that day. Serena Hirsch was walking through midtown Manhattan on her lunch break; it was one week since her father had died, and it was her first day back at work. It was a bright April afternoon, and people were gathered in loose, happy groups outside, sitting on concrete walls and benches, turning faces to the cool pale light. Others seemed relieved, released from the confines of winter, certain of the damp promise of spring. Serena walked with the crowd marching down the sidewalk, hoping she would feel she was one of them again, but now the clear sunlight, the blaring cabs, and the groups gathered on the sidewalks all seemed to exist in some world that she did not inhabit. Her father was not part of this world anymore, and now, just back from burying him, she did not know how she belonged to it as well.

She watched people head down the sidewalks, clutching crisp bags from Saks, and she turned into the store. Customers walked politely through the golden, unearthly light. Everything seemed carefully arranged so as to create longing. Her own parents, middle class and both bitter and hopeful about it, had always viewed Saks with a kind of defensive disdain. “Thieves,” her mother had said. “How much are these things worth? Look at the markdowns during a sale.” It made the store seem perplexing and a little unsavory when Serena was a child, even as she admired the silk-sheathed mannequins, frozen in air, as she walked by the glass cases that held silver lipsticks that gleamed in white spotlights.

Sales. There was the theater of customers looking, buying; of salespeople coaxing; of the warm hum of life. There was the bustle of salesgirls tenderly applying makeup to customers' faces; there were the walls thick with leather purses. She walked. Customers leaned over glass cases and gazed at the watches, scarves, jewelry, inside. Serena
felt as though her body were walking by all of this, without her. “Our new Pearlessence lip liner is just right for you!” a woman said to Serena with great confidence. She was surprised the salesgirls were talking to her; their chipper greetings, their assurance, made her feel somehow released from commerce's usual rules.

She stopped in Fine Jewelry. Her father had liked this section, for he could point out appropriate jewelry that one could store for future pawning. He was not interested in how a diamond necklace might be purchased for a fancy outfit but in how it could be slipped into a pocket and carried to another country to be sold if America fell apart. This could, in his mind, happen at any moment. Once, when she was eleven, he leaned over the glass case and chatted, for a half hour, with a salesgirl. Serena remembered her name: Kathy. She held out a diamond bracelet, $1,298. “How would you rate the color and symmetry on this one?” he asked, in great seriousness, though he really had no intention of buying anything. “Will it hold its value more than this ring?” Kathy discussed clarity and depth. Serena's father listened intently and then suddenly said, “Thank you,” and headed off. Serena hurried after him, feeling a little bad for the salesgirl, but the briskness of his walk told her that he was embarrassed and didn't want the salesgirl to know that he couldn't afford to buy the item. “You,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder, “you will be able to buy these things, and save them, and you will know when to leave.”

She wondered what he would want her to buy today. It made her feel better, purposeful, to imagine this. There were bracelets and earrings and necklaces, the white diamonds, rubies, sapphires, unearthly, the hard, clear stones aglow in the pure light. She stopped and looked at them, all set out on wrinkled squares of black velvet.

“That's a beauty,” said the salesgirl. “Do you want to try it on?”

The silver bracelet was extremely smooth around her wrist. Serena touched the clear hard surface of the diamond. Its solidness was shocking, seemed the weight of all good things on earth; she wanted it. She leaned against the case trying to seem casual, as though she was the sort of person who, in fact, purchased these objects. The bracelet's price tag said $890. This price made her dizzy.

“Is this the price?” she asked, as though there could be another one.

The salesgirl nodded.

“It's beautiful,” Serena said.

At a certain point, standing here, she would be a potential consumer to be flattered, and at another point she would be a loiterer, and at another point, not too much farther along, the nice salesgirl would call security on her. Suddenly, Serena was aware, as she was aware of the fragility between life and death, the fine line between civility and criminality, as thin as the silvery threads on a spiderweb. Serena wanted the bracelet. Her mouth was dry. She was alive, and her father was not. She had not been ready for this wall to come down between them — as if anyone was ever ready — but she was also thinking about the fact that she had not brought him the success he had wanted for her, and their last phone conversation had, in fact, involved his threatening to call her superior to demand that she be given a raise. What could she offer him? She was trembling; she wanted to give this bracelet to him, wherever he was, hand it to him and say: “Here. Let's go.”

She would buy it.

Lightly, casually, she handed the company credit card to the salesgirl. “Here,” she said. What was she doing? It seemed that the walls were vanishing, that they were melting away like butter. She felt almost as though she were falling backwards, but she was only standing still. The air was soft, unreal with notes of vanilla, rose, and lemon from the fragrance counter. The girl innocently swiped the card. It was approved. The girl smiled, approving of her. She put the bracelet into a box and then into a stiff fragrant Saks bag with silver tissue flaring up the sides.

“Thank you very much,” the girl said.

Serena was startled at herself, embarrassed; she was about to tell the girl that this was a mistake, that she was not the sort of person who could afford this, but that fact was so deeply shaming there seemed no other choice than to walk out. Her throat tightened as she strode toward the door, and she closed her eyes, not knowing what would happen when she left with the bracelet. She stood on the crowded sidewalk, in the sunlight, blinking, her heart enormous.

IT TOOK HER THREE DAYS to rack up eight thousand dollars on the company card. She went into Saks again, Tiffany's, Bendel's, and she asked the salesgirls about the symmetry and clarity of the diamonds, tried to imagine what would be best to transport. “Something for a new outfit?” a salesgirl, Tania, asked her, and the disconnect between this assumption and her purchase was so profound that she bought a bracelet and a ruby ring, too. She walked out, her heart in her mouth, surprised each time the card swiped, but it made her feel better to leave with these items, made her, oddly, feel as though she was being good. Her father had been worried about the nation. It was late 2002, he had been outraged about Bush, his disregard for rules, and he had told her to prepare to go to another country if Bush started expanding the Patriot Act — she was, she told herself, buying diamonds to pack away to sell, the way her father wished his family had done. Plus, Earl Morton owed her, after that terrible health insurance plan, after not covering dental, for god's sake, after taking her ideas and not giving her credit, after asking her to pick up coffee again and again. He had laughed at her request for dental coverage one time too many; he had demanded she come back to work three weeks after giving birth; she had staggered back, leaking milk, so tired she was nauseous, missing her infants so deeply her skin ached. “It's America,” he said, tipping back in his chair, smiling as she held a clipboard against her chest, trying to keep the cotton nursing pads from slipping out of her shirt. “We all have to contribute.”

Now he was contributing. To her.

Her father had been overjoyed that she was at Pepsi, a Fortune 500 corporation, as though that implied that she would somehow absorb the riches that they created, but she spent the better part of her conversations with her father trying to make up what she actually did. Her father had ideas. “Pepsi should invent a juice drink with no calories,” he said. “Healthy. Tell them.” He only bought Pepsi products, and in large quantities, as though that would somehow increase her stature at the organization. She remembered him sitting in his garage, staring at his model train landscapes. Once he had started a landscape that was intended to show a large Pepsi plant and trains that would leave it,
bringing bottles of soft drinks to the cities beyond. He had searched far to find the tiny plastic bottles that would fill the trucks; he found plain ones and carefully dotted the Pepsi colors on the caps; in the window of a large office building, he put a tiny brown-haired figure, looking out the window, gesturing masterfully to the outside world. “That is you,” he said, proudly, and she went home and wept.

She hoped that no one would notice. Perhaps the money she spent would fade into the coffers of Pepsi, into the supply budget, the travel budget. She had seen the travel receipts, the first-class airfare, the lunches at Le Cirque and the Four Seasons; she saw the fruit baskets, the golf clubs that her boss Earl Morton sent to associates for the holidays, and this was okay while she and Dan had a fight every time the insurance co-pay went up? A part of her could not believe that accounting would notice. She marked it down:
Morton: Travel Expense.

During her childhood, her father was up at the first light, sitting at the table, flipping pages of the
Los Angeles Times,
but not reading it, as though trying to emulate what a regular person would do in the morning. He was searching for stories on Nixon, on the cover-up. “Republican fascists,” he muttered. Days when he found something particularly egregious, he brought out something from his bathrobe pocket — a surprisingly valuable silver key chain, or a 24k gold link chain. He kept something valuable on his person at all times.