We Are Not Ourselves (62 page)

“Where are you working this summer?”

“I came home to help with my father,” Connell said nervously, “but I don’t think I’m up to playing nursemaid. You know?”

Mr. Corso looked at him in silence for a few moments. “What makes you think it’s okay to drop the ball like this?”

“My mother’s bringing someone in,” Connell said nervously. “It’s the best thing for everyone.”

“Your family is good people,” Mr. Corso said with a slight growl in his voice. “You don’t have a clue yet what that means in life, do you?”

Connell looked away. Another silence followed.

“Those guys you debated with. Do they have summer jobs?”

“More like paid internships,” Connell said. “At blue-chip companies.”

“Do you want to work?”

Connell guessed that was why he was sitting across from Mr. Corso, though it wasn’t clear until now that that had been his purpose. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I need a job.”

“Can you do
real
work?”

Mr. Corso drummed his fingers on his desk. The tips were fat, and the nails were neatly trimmed. Another silence followed, in which Connell felt the hair on his arms and bare legs rise in the air-conditioned office.

“Sure.”

“The super of a nearby building on Park called to offer summer relief jobs to our graduating seniors. Doorman, porter.”

He fingered through a pile on his desk and pulled out a piece of paper as if he’d known where it had been all along.

“Does this guy have a son?” Connell asked.

Mr. Corso chuckled. “Poor kid’s only ten. They’re starting the application process early these days.”

Connell tried to hide his embarrassment at being offered this job. “You want me to go break the news to him that you can’t buy your way in here?”

“Better keep that under wraps,” Mr. Corso said, folding the paper into thirds and handing it to Connell in an official manner. “If you do a good job, we should be able to make this a regular tradition for—what—five more summers at least? Maybe beyond if the kid gets in here. We’ll call it the Connell Leary Memorial Fellowship in honor of your deceased athletic career.”

77

C
onnell was stationed in the basement, beside one of four service elevators, where he waited for the buzzer to ring and the indicator to light up and tell him his fortune. Gate shut, he shot up to the proper floor, to shuttle nannies to the laundry room and shareholders to the little fiefdoms of their storage cages.

There were some Albanian guys down there with him—college-aged but not in college, or a little older. Connell saw in the snappy way they spoke to Mr. Marku that they had ambitions to make it up to the lobby. Some of them were rough-looking; others, the more recent immigrants, didn’t speak English all that well. He knew he’d have had a better shot at promotion than any of them, if only he trimmed his unruly hair and shaved his scraggly goatee, but he didn’t care. He was just passing through, and he was pretty sure Mr. Marku had taken one look at him and known he’d felt that way.

He was summoned by a gorgeous au pair. While she moved her employers’ sheets to the dryer, he fantasized about going in and seducing her, then stopping the elevator between floors and having sex in it. After he’d returned her upstairs, he stood on the landing imagining the bedrooms on the other side of the door. He went down to the basement and sat in the chair thinking about her, until he rose and headed to the stall in the locker room. Sadik interrupted him, banging on the door, and he didn’t finish.

He put the garbage can in the elevator and went to the top floor to do a run, dumping the contents of their cans into his own. Ancient Mrs. Braverman on the twelfth floor opened her door and handed him a Coke from a mini fridge filled with them. She seemed to remain alive for the
sole purpose of bestowing little gifts on the porters. The strange tenement squalor of her digs disconcerted him, the old abandoned furniture, the peeling wallpaper. There was none of the splendor he saw in other apartments, the slabs of stone stretched across kitchen islands as big as docks on a lake. She had kids but they never visited. Money was not a guarantor of dignity.

His presence surprised Mr. Caldecott in 10B when the latter opened his door to toss his garbage bag into the big can. Mr. Caldecott hurried out of there. Connell felt like a Peeping Tom a flashlight had settled on. The feeling wasn’t unfounded: even the proudest of porters from time to time did what Connell had done the previous day, when, once he’d taken it to the basement, he’d gone through the garbage and paper recycling, in search less of salvageable goods than of documentary evidence of the power the shareholders wielded—bank statements, work memos, eye-popping receipts, all the marvelous details of their lives.

In the afternoon, the building settled into a postlunch siesta and he leaned against the painted brick wall next to the service elevator to read
Invisible Man
. Instead of a brilliant campaign against Monopolated Light & Power, he was stuck with severe stretches of hallway intermittently punctuated by feeble fluorescence. The elevator car contained the only source of incandescent light, a single exposed bulb. For a few minutes he placed the chair directly in the car, but he lost his nerve the first time he heard footfalls down the hall.

Officially, he wasn’t supposed to be reading at all. The activity was tolerated as long as it wasn’t comfortable. And so he stood for hours on the threshold of the elevator and stashed the book when he heard someone approach. Whenever Mr. Marku passed—he was in a generous mood that day, announcing his presence with a stagy, whistled tune—Connell trained his gaze on the light-up panel like a laboratory monkey waiting for an experimenter’s stimulus. One time, though, Connell didn’t lose the book quickly enough. Mr. Marku didn’t give orders or ask questions. He just announced what Connell would do, as though he possessed powers of psychic intuition. “You’ll go outside and sweep the perimeter,” he said. “Then you’ll go to the store and get me a Marlboro Lights hard pack and a six
pack of Heineken.” (The first time Mr. Marku told him to buy beer, Connell said he wasn’t old enough, and Mr. Marku replied—accurately, it turned out—“When they see you in that outfit, nobody asks questions.”) “When you’re back you’ll start on those fire stairs.” No one ever used the fire stairs, but Connell had mopped them three times already that week. There were four sets to mop, sixteen flights each. They never gathered any dust.

78

I
t was an unusually warm night. The musk of the flowers she’d planted rose up as she walked from the car. Sergei was standing at the back of the house, smoking under a clear, star-filled sky. She greeted him awkwardly, unsure of whether to invite him in, as he could come in on his own when he was finished. It almost seemed he had been waiting for her.

She went upstairs. A while later, his quick, hacking cough announced his presence inside. It was strange to hear a man in the house when her husband was in the bed next to her. Since Sergei arrived, she’d been able to sleep through the night. She wasn’t even bothered by Ed’s nocturnal ravings anymore; she just stayed in bed with a foothold in sleep and let him walk around the room.

She heard Sergei climb the stairs. She lay in bed awake listening to the quiet voices and laugh track from his television, and his own occasional muffled laughter.

It was a mystery what happened in Sergei’s room after he closed the door. She’d gone in when he wasn’t around and found little more than was present when she’d first turned the room over to him. There was the television, the radio, the armchair, and the side table. There was a small stack of Russian volumes in English translation, a Russian-to-English dictionary, a bottle of aftershave, and the suitcase he lived out of. And there was the bed, of course.

From deep within her, she felt a tremor of unwelcome desire rumble up. She lay there trying to ignore it, but it seized her attention so thoroughly that she felt a buzzing in her fingertips, the room became stiflingly hot, and the sheets lost their softness and scratched at her skin. Even though she
knew she shouldn’t, even though it felt like a betrayal, even though Ed was sleeping next to her, she began to touch herself, something she hadn’t done in years, and she didn’t stop until she had brought herself off with a little involuntary cry that sounded vaguely mournful to her ears, after which she lay taking quick, dry breaths and feeling a tingling lack of satisfaction. An attempt at a second round produced no results.

79

C
onnell hadn’t heard Mr. Marku coming, and when he looked up from the book and saw him standing there, he let out a strangled yelp.

“Come to my office,” Mr. Marku said. Connell rose to follow him. “First, tie up those newspapers.”

When Connell entered, Mr. Marku was staring at the wall-length aquarium.

“You read a lot,” he said.

Connell nodded nervously.

“You’ve heard of Camus’s
The Fall
.”

He suspected a trap. Mr. Marku always dropped his bombs at the end of a shift, when you had little time to react. Connell was in Mr. Marku’s doghouse for coming in late on a seven-to-three shift on a Saturday. He had thought that Mr. Marku never slept, that he had cameras trained on every entrance and exit, until he figured out that Sadik had ratted on him. The guys built up capital however they could.

“Yes,” he said, “but I haven’t read it.”

Mr. Marku was proud of the year he’d spent at Iona College before family responsibilities forced him to drop out. More than once he’d mentioned that he’d planned to be an English major.

“It’s a parable of hell,” Mr. Marku said. “The devil is this bartender.” He just waved his hand. “It’s too much to get into.” He knocked a smoke out of his pack and lighted it in the windowless office. “You’ll come in Wednesday at six forty-five in the morning.” He handed him a bundle of folded clothes. “You’ll wear this doorman uniform. You’ll shave.”

80

A
s Bethany backed out of the driveway, Eileen saw Connell coming up the hill. Most nights he came home after midnight, and sometimes, when he didn’t have to work the next morning, when the sun was rising. Eileen rolled down her window.

“There’s chicken in the fridge.” She expected him to wave and keep walking, but he stopped.

“Where are you going?”

She turned to Bethany, who took her hand and gave it a squeeze.

“Out for a while,” she said. “There are potatoes too. Just put one in the microwave.”

•  •  •

When she came home, Sergei was waiting in the kitchen, sipping from a cup of what looked like coffee, but it could have contained vodka for all she knew.

“Hard work today,” he said.

“Is everything okay?”

“In Russia, even, I don’t work this hard.”

“What’s up? What happened?”

“Is no good to talk about it.”

“Is Ed okay?”

“He is asleep.”

“That’s good,” she said.

“I don’t mind to work hard,” he said. “But he is very hard work.”

He said it with a whistle that indicated a certain professional appreciation. She nodded in solidarity.

“He wipe shit on walls in bathroom,” he said. “I clean it up. Between tiles. Is all gone.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You mind if I . . . ?” He had taken out his pack and already had a cigarette in his mouth. He was flicking the lighter absently.

“Let’s go outside,” she said.

They stood on the patio and he lit the cigarette. She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. He pulled on his cigarette and looked at her. Behind it his eyes smoldered. He was stocky and his hair was thick where it wasn’t sparse. He stood in the middle of the patio but seemed to take up much of its space.

“You want?” he asked, extending the pack.

“No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”

“Try,” he said. “One time. Is very relaxing.”

She had never had a cigarette. Aside from the pure brain-dead imbecility of subjecting yourself willingly to an avoidable carcinogen, she had always found them vile, noxious, smelly things—except for a brief period in high school when she loved a boy who smoked and she was intoxicated by the aroma mixed with his cologne and sweat, and the taste of it in his mouth and the rush she got when she kissed him just after he’d had one. But the memory of watching her mother smoke had permanently soured her on them. Her stomach turned whenever she saw a full ashtray; she imagined being made to eat it, butt by butt, and gagging on the ashes.

“Fine,” she said, and she took a cigarette from him. Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren’t that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they’d been had found release through a necessary valve. She reached her hand out for the lighter, but he just took his own cigarette out of his mouth, lit hers from the flaming tip of his own, and handed it to her.

“You have to light it right,” he said.

She took a few breaths without disturbance. Sergei told her to take a deeper puff, and she did so, looking at him for confirmation. He was smiling an amused smile. Her lungs filled with heat and she fell into a loud cough.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said.

“This always happens,” he said.

“Usually to teenagers,” she said. “Not to fifty-four-year-old women.”

“It happened to me,” he said smoothly. “You are not fifty-four.”

“I am.”

“You may have fifty-four years”—he was gesturing in an inscrutable way that she assumed would have conveyed more to a Russian native—“but you are not fifty-four.”

She blushed. “I think I’m done with this,” she said, dropping it and stepping on it. It was nearly the whole cigarette, and her embarrassment made her kick it behind her toward the house.

“You work very hard,” Sergei said, continuing to smoke. “My wife has no job for thirty years.”

“Thank you,” she said, absurdly. Talking to Sergei made her uneasy. At first she thought it was the language barrier, but now she was beginning to think it was something else, a tension rooted in the strangeness of having a man living in her house.