Thy Neighbor (6 page)

Except that my head is still like that boulder I read about. Rolling down. I've always got to pick it up again.

“Tell me about your Dad,” she says, and smiles gently.

“I hated him and I wanted to be him,” I say. “Pretty tired stuff.”

“Maybe, but tell me anyway.”

“What do you want to know that I haven't told you already?”

“I don't know. Something surprising. Something that no one else knows.”

She is sitting up now on her elbow looking down at me intently.

“You're no different than anyone else, you know,” I say a little angrily. “Everyone wants to know why he did it.”

“But I don't mean that. I mean the opposite.”

“The opposite of what?”

“Of the devil.”

“He wasn't the devil. That's my whole point.”

“I know, but you haven't said that.”

“That's
all
I've been trying to say.”

“Yes, but you keep circling back to the same place.”

“What do you mean? What place?”

“I don't know. Hardness, I guess. His demands. His expectations. Your differences.”

“Well, that's the way I remember it.”

“That's the way you let yourself remember it. But there's more.”

“Oh, really? And what makes you so sure about that?”

“Because if there weren't, you'd stop trying. Case closed. But you keep going back because there's something else still there and you need it?”

“So now you're a shrink. Is that it?”

“Don't make this about me.”

“Don't make it about
me
, you poser.”

“Poser? I've never said I was anything other than what I am. You're the one who's posing. You can't even be honest with yourself. You don't know how.”

She flops down on her back and sighs loudly.

We lie in silence like this for a while, both staring up at the ceiling, both hurt, but both working inside ourselves, waiting for the conflict to ease. We can't part this way and we know it. We're both too desperate and, despite whatever I say, we are both way too much in need of the therapy we came for.

After a long time, she says:

“I'm sorry.”

She waits longer, then tries again for a way back in.

“He had soft eyes, you said.”

To this I manage a strangled:

“Yes.”

We are in the most fragile place we ever go to now. One false word and the quiet will flail beyond salvaging.

“There,” she says. Carefully, leadingly, placing her finger above the wound, but not touching it.

Still more silence. Then, finally, I say:

“Raspberries.”

I almost want to laugh at this, and if I weren't so fucking maimed and terrified, I probably would.

But she gives no sign of anything. She just waits.

Clever girl.

“He loved raspberries.”

She nods very, very slowly, but says nothing.

So I go on.

“I remember being very young. We were sitting on the couch side by side watching TV one night after dinner, and we were eating bowls of raspberries with grenadine.”

I stop again. I'm going to make her sit for this. See if she can improv and get it right. Squeeze out the confession.

But she's better at this than I am. Not even challenged.

She's so still. Electrically still, like a sound that's too low or too high for me to hear but that registers anyway, somewhere, on my skin or on hers, or between, and she knows she can linger, balanced palpably this way, encouraging, for as long as it will take.

And that's the right word.

Encourage, to make brave.

Why is this little, little thing so hard to say? So hard to remember?

We were eating raspberries. So what?

She'll be disappointed when I finish. There's nothing there. But it's all I can think of.

It's what she wants, so I'll give it to her.

“We were eating and watching the TV, and then I happened to look down at what was on my spoon, and I saw a small white worm curled inside one of the berries, wriggling.”

I hang on this, still hoping she'll trip, say the wrong thing or interrupt, and then I won't have to go on with the rest. But she doesn't. She waits.

“I hated insects then,” I say, feeling it now, coming strong, the picture running on its own. “I still do. I couldn't believe that there was one in my food, and alive, too. I felt sick at the thought that I'd already eaten one.”

Monica smiles uncomfortably, her face squirming with the ick of it.

“I thought, how many worms had I already eaten in all the time I'd been eating fruit? It was horrible. I was probably six or something at the time, the age when discoveries like that are catastrophic.”

Monica nods vigorously.

“Around that same age, I once found a spider on my pillow, and for years after that—really, years—I wore socks and a tracksuit to bed every night, my logic being that how could you ever know what was crawling over you while you slept? I'd lie there all night sweating my balls off, but I couldn't bear to sleep uncovered. That's how bad it was.”

I'm rolling it out now, blabbing, as if we'd never argued, and there's no stopping me.

“Anyway, I looked up at Dad, probably with those saucer eyes that kids get after they've just bumped their head on the coffee table but before the pain has gotten through—you know, like they're looking at the parent to see if they should freak out—and I said, ‘Dad, there's a worm in one of my berries.'”

We both laugh at this and shake our heads. Kids.

“I was full-on ready to pop,” I say, “just rigid with it. And I figured he was going to say something harsh, like, ‘Don't be a baby, Nick.' You know, shame me into eating it, like it was at the bottom of a bottle of tequila or something.”

I pause here, the laugh having fallen out of the story. My voice goes serious and deep.

“But he didn't.”

Monica's face falls, too, listening.

“Instead, he said the most soothing thing he ever said to me. And, believe me, I know, it's going to sound really lame and pathetic—like,
Jesus, Nick, if that's the best you ever got, no wonder
—but, well, I don't know, it just worked, and I guess I've never forgotten it.”

I hang on this again, wondering, should I make this part up? Lie to her because the truth is so embarrassing? But I'm not quick enough for that, and she is really listening. Her knee is digging into my thigh painfully. She doesn't realize.

“He said,” I say, leaning away and shifting her, “‘They think the berries are good, too.'”

I smile at this and Monica does, too.

“And then he smiled at me, and he looked right into my bulging, horrified eyes with those soft eyes of his, and—”

I choke here and cough to cover the catch in my voice.

“Like I said, I know it sounds like nothing. But it wasn't. Because it wasn't just
what
he said. It was
the way
he said it. It was bigger than just the words. It was his tone, so sure and so calm.”

Monica's eyes are darting across my face, from mouth to eyes and back again, guiding me to finish.

“That was really it, I guess. He was telling me that there was nothing to be afraid of. And the way he did it, with this combination of knowing and helping me to understand, it made everything okay instantly.”

I say this again to the wall—“Everything. Instantly.”—and Monica puts one fingertip on the forked vein of my forearm, where a drop has fallen. There is nothing on my face.

“I believed him,” I say, “because he was who he was. Because he was my dad.”

Her eyes are pulling me, and I let them. Her hand has burrowed into mine.

“He took this huge fear and disgust and worry and he just made it disappear. And no one has ever done that again. No one ever could.”

It is very late,

And you are sleeping.

I watch over you in the dark,

So that nothing,

Nothing can harm you.

Precious girl.

Perfect girl.

Can you know how much I love you?

Will you?

When we meet at last, as lovers,

Will you know me?

In the shadowed light,

Will you see me in my eyes,

And yourself there, too?

Will you take me as your savior?

Your protector?

Your father, man of dreams and

Eye of God?

Will you?

And for now?

For now,

Will you believe in

What you have not yet seen?

Yes.

I think you will.

With faith and my words,

Set down for you,

What is between us will grow

And live.

Our secret.

In mind.

Sleep well,

My dearest love.

And I will come again,

Tomorrow or the next day.

Soon.

One day I will wake you with kisses,

And you will spend the day in my arms.

6

Another note from Pinko today.

It's been a while since the first one. So long, actually, that until today I'd written that one off as a fluke, or a prank that Dave had lost interest in. I wouldn't at all put it past him to have gotten a sample of my handwriting and found a way to Photoshop it to the purpose.

The pink paper (a pointed choice, I think) has Dave's sophomoric sense of humor written all over it. He's always thought that a guy who wears anything but earth tones is a flamer, and ever since my college rose period, he's never ceased giving me shit about my wardrobe. Not that I've stopped wearing the finer shades now and again, mind you. I wouldn't let the jibes of the behemoth who shopeth at Big and Tall dampen my palette any.

But, having given it more thought, I've pretty much scratched the prankster Dave theory, mostly because Dave couldn't write a poem—not even a serial killer's paean to suburbia as slaughterhouse—if his useless lifestyle depended on it.

He could have cribbed the lines from somewhere, true, but I don't think he'd even know where to look. Plagiarism does take some finesse with a search engine, which cuts Dave out of the running as surely as a rock-solid alibi. I mean, we're talking about the guy who honestly believed for most of his adult life that the winged goddess of victory got her name from the sporting goods company, and not the other way around.

I found the latest poem in the mailbox, again on pink paper, mixed in with all the other junk mail: the Valpak of supermarket coupons, a preapproved offer for a credit card from Sinkhole Bank, a J.Crew catalog (surprise, surprise), and a solicitation from
Taurus
magazine, telling me I'm only ten weeks (and five human growth hormone injections) away from my dream torso.

This latest installment of the lost verses was hidden among all that pulp, and I might have missed it and tossed it, had it not been wrapped around the one and only envelope I search for every week.

Yes, indeed. That would be the thin one with the perforated tabs and the parent company logo that looks more like a parking ticket than a paycheck, and practically shouts: “Cash me, ya broke fuck, and for the love of God, buy some toilet paper!”

There it was. A measly four hundred and seventy-five bucks, and this—God, what can you call it?—this sick-making, pedophiliac's scrawl. This is really not funny anymore. I don't know what to think, unless this is somebody's payback for my spying. Maybe one of the nabes found a camera and somehow traced it back to me. But who? Who would do this? Who could?

There's always Jonathan Katz, I suppose, but that's a long shot. He and his wife, Dorris, were living across the street next to the Blooms, but they split up about two years ago, and now it's just Dorris and the brats in situ, Miriam, ten, and Isaac, twelve. I've had cameras in there for a while now, predivorce and after, but even if Dorris finally noticed one of them and made the connection (highly unlikely), I still don't see either of the Katzes as the type to plot or pull off Pinko's style.

Dorris is far too stupid, for starters, a prime specimen of what they used to call the Jewish American Princess, or what the JAPs themselves called a Kugel, as in pudding, as in tasty dish, but brain like a warm dessert.

Jonathan, meanwhile, a pediatric neurosurgeon, poor bastard, is so bitter about the size of his alimony and child support payments (think GNP of Burundi and you're probably in the ballpark) that I bet he'd love the idea of someone posting “Keyhole Exploits of a Divorcée” on XTube. (When I do share my footage, by the way, which isn't that often, as a legal precaution I blur out the faces and any singular household items. But still. You never know who might recognize that cluster of three moles just below Dorris's left armpit.)

Even so, as the TV detectives say, I don't like Dr. Katz for this one. He just doesn't have the motivation. Besides, how many neurosurgeons do you know who have the time, much less the chops, to toss off the likes of “Childe Bride: Bluebeard's Last Seduction”—or whatever you wanna call this “material” I'm getting?

Okay, sure, it's possible, remotely, that Katz is the William Carlos Williams of the criminally insane, but I'm gonna take the under on that. Call it a hunch.

He's since moved to greener stomping grounds, anyway—Twin Pines, wouldn't ya know—and now resides not far from Dave. I'm sure he's rolling in his newfound bachelorhood, happy as happy gets.

And yet, boy, does that man have a pair of lungs. Whoa. And a tongue to match. I'll say that for him. And her, too. I had my cameras in that house for the whole last year plus of their trip down the nuptial toilet—one in the family room, one in the bedroom, and one in the en suite bath—and, Jesus, talk about scenes from a fucking marriage. Holy crap.

You get a couple of Sephardic Jews going at it with all the wrath of the old religion behind them and the pitchfork of the gender wars out front, and it gets nasty in ways that the less ethnic peoples among us just can't wrap our vanilla minds around. Let's just say that, when it comes to spousal abuse, the silent treatment never made it past the Alps, and a good old-fashioned Mediterranean beat down is for the birds when you've got the right vocabulary.

Sticks and stones would have been a relief and, I'm here to tell you, names can definitely hurt you. Not a word went unshouted between these two. Shrieked, actually, at a pitch that isn't even human anymore. My ears are still ringing with it.

I can't believe it lasted as long as it did. I was exhausted just watching. He'd be standing there in nothing but his golf shoes and a jock strap and she, completely starkers (as usual), would be sitting at her dressing table screaming the laundry list of his failings in high C and gesticulating so wildly with a hairbrush that it made me clench my jaw and the cheeks of my ass until they cramped.

Scary, scary shit.

That ended, finally, with him fishtailing so furiously out of the driveway in the white Caddy at three a.m. that there were skid marks halfway down the block. They left the rest to the lawyers, I'm assuming, or the good folks at AT&T, because I never saw the Escalade with the MD plates in the driveway again, though I was privy to a few choice hang-ups on the bedroom extension.

Yeah. I was well wired for them when that action went down, and as with Dave, I came to mostly regret my intrusion. But I stuck to it nonetheless because, like I said before, even all those years after Mom and Dad's deaths, it was still the only thing on offer that was louder than the voices in my head, and I needed it.

I rigged the Katzes the way I rigged everyone after Dave and, ironically enough, under the fiscal auspices of Dave as well. He paid for most of my equipment, unknowingly, of course, but uninquisitively, too, so I can't really feel that bad about fleecing him.

Turns out that liquidity and the good sense (or density, I can't decide which) not to ask questions are possibly Tubbo's only two virtues, and I made efficient use of both. He's the silent partner behind my network.

But he doesn't ever miss a few thou here and there, so who's stealing? Hell, he forks it over willingly, practically foists it on me, because he feels soooo sorry for me, the inert, emotional pygmy of his childhood acquaintance who's, yep, broke again.

He says he's come to love me like a brother. Brothers in death till death, he calls us.

Fucking 'tard.

The technology has evolved a lot since I placed my first Trojan horses at Dave's, so the cameras I have at Dorris's place are the size of ballpoint pens, and the mics are even smaller.

For the install I hired an underworld techie I met through my drug contact Jazmin. You remember her? The dumb cunt who can't even spell her own pseudonym but who gets me the pills that can tame me? Yeah, her.

Anyway, this guy Damian does stash-house surveillance for Jazmin's kingpin connection, and he'll do spy cam plants for anyone else who can afford it. His day job is doing service calls for the local cable and satellite TV company, so he can get access to pretty much anyone's house without arousing suspicion, and he's willing to rig whatever you want while he's there.

That's how I've done all my rig-ups in the past seven years, and that's why I say it'd be pretty damn unlikely that anyone would locate my equipment. This guy's a pro. Precision stealth motherfucker. He could just about slip a camera into your molar while he was Frenching you, and you'd be none the wiser. He's that good.

I doubt
I
could even find my own equipment.

Dorris the porous hasn't got a chance.

The woman really is the bimbo to beat all bimbos.

She's good-looking, I'll grant, in an Anne Bancroft in
The Graduate
kind of way, but she's not blessed with the sultry voice. She's a Trotsky, no mistaking, and a trophy wife of a certain tarnished class raised up by a subspecialist's income to sit in the catbird seat. She was maybe one step above someone you'd have found at Jack Gordon's with her thong in a tree, except she married well.

And she does have a body, true enough, albeit one with a sell-by date that's coming up fast. She's forty-two or -threeish by now if she's a day, and not taking the best care of her skin.

She slathers herself with baby oil and cooks herself into a prune on her back patio every afternoon between Easter and Halloween, or any other time it's even vaguely warm enough to bare her nipples to the elements.

Like I said, the lady isn't a big fan of clothing when she's at home.

And
that
no one needs cameras to see. Every horny kid in the neighborhood has peeked through her hedges on a dare and lathered himself blind at the sight of those dugs.

And why not, I guess.

As Dorris herself likes to say, “If you got it, show it.”

And she means it in more ways than one, because much the same could be said for her temper.

Those poor kids are like pound puppies, cowering and practically piddling themselves whenever they spill a glass of milk or grind a corn chip between the sofa cushions or commit whatever other victimless crime kids are prone to. The slightest misstep and Mommy Dearest blows her top like a tone-deaf Wagnerian having her fingernails extracted. Your average shrew is a lap cat by comparison.

Fucking hell, what a noise.

Now that Jonathan is gone, I guess she's got no one else to vent her jilted harpy's spleen on, so the kids take the brunt of it and tiptoe around her as best they can, taking refuge at the worst of times in a makeshift hedge fort they've built at the end of the yard.

If Dorris is in glass-shattering high dudgeon over something—say, a piece of expressionist artwork splattered on the coffee table with a paintball gun—those kids will hide outside even when the weather's fucking Siberian.

I've seen them there on single-digit days crouched and bundled, bouncing on their haunches and blowing on their hands like a couple of street urchins.

I feel sorry for the little varmints. I mean, it'd be downright Dickensian if this weren't Shangri-La La Land and they weren't wearing Dolce down jackets and Bollé ski goggles while playing miniature billiards or whatever other obscenely overpriced novelty game they've managed to cadge out of Jonathan because he left them.

Honestly, can they really take you seriously at Child Protective Services if you make the call from your iPhone while riding around your front yard in your motorized miniature MG?

Still, I'm half tempted to intercept them on their walks home from school and shove them each a pair of earplugs and some Vicodin.

“Here,” I'd say, “these are for you. Crush up the pills with the back of a spoon and slip 'em in her Slim-Fast every morning. Put the squishy things in your ears and wait. That should turn down the volume considerably.”

But they're surprisingly resilient, as kids so often are. They seem to bounce back and laugh and go on bumbling around, doing the same boneheaded things that threw Dorris over the edge in the first place.

And the parental guilt? Wow. Presents keep rolling in, one upon the next, as if the ongoing storm
of the divorce could be drowned out by a bribe.

Which, I guess, to a point, it can.

Except nobody's greasing Dorris. Or not as far as she's concerned anyway. Sure, she buys herself some goodies for the odd night on the town, when she can get a babysitter and when she can wind herself up enough for another turn as a would-be mantrap. But the rest goes to the upkeep of the house and the kids, both of whom are in private school. That's near on thirty grand a pop right there, per annum.

But even if Dorris did have a slush fund for purses and jewelry, I don't think she's really in party mode anyway. She's looking at a pretty leathery, lonely old age if she doesn't turn things around soon, and that's not the kind of pressure that puts you at your best on the singles scene.

I've seen her at the Swan with all the other desperate cougars trying to snag another benefactor for the long, slow slide into retirement. Otherwise, in a few more years, when the alimony payments expire and her face has gone the way of all pumpkins, she'll be working as a hostess at the Capital Grille just to make ends meet.

Time's a-wastin'.

She tried the hard sell on me one night by the bar when she was so drunk that English had become a second language and I was so drunk that I actually leaned in to take her up on her offer. Thank God I pulled back at the last second, having caught an unmistakable, gorge-rising whiff of Eau de Early Old Lady. It was just the barest hint, but, man, I couldn't do it. It was like some primitive species-propagating voice in my head was saying, “Dead ovaries. Dead ovaries. Plow elsewhere.”

But I feel sorry for Dorris, too. I really do. I can't help it. Because when she's not yelling at the kids or tying herself to the bed frame so she won't raid the fridge in her Ambiened sleep, she's sitting at that vanity naked doing soliloquies that would tear the heart out of a cyclops.