Alternate Side Read online

  “Do you know an architect named James Mortimer?” Suzanne asked Nora. “I’m decorating a house that he designed, and when I said one of my girlfriends had been at Williams he said that you two were friends in college.”

  “We were,” Nora said.

  “What kind of friends?” Suzanne said.

  “What’s the house?” Nora said, instead of answering.

  “What can I say, a total nightmare. One of those hedge fund guys with a second wife bought two walk-up buildings downtown and had them razed to build something with eight bedrooms, a green roof, and a lap pool. Aluminum.”

  “Why would anyone want an aluminum lap pool?” Jenny said.

  “Not the lap pool, the house. Very modern, angular, the kind of thing that will wind up in some magazine. The wife was an art history major and thinks she knows what she’s doing. The only thing that’s keeping her under control is that I think she’s crushing on your friend James. I just hope she doesn’t sleep with him and blow the whole deal up. It’s a good job for me in a lot of ways. It will get a lot of attention, and they don’t care what anything costs. And working with James—”

  “I want a detailed explanation of how you’re going to furnish this place,” said Jenny, who had less interest in furniture than anyone Nora knew but wanted Suzanne to natter on about grass cloth and glass tile instead of James Mortimer, which was exactly what happened. As they walked out together, Jenny muttered, “Jesus, this city is like Mayberry. Everyone knows everyone else, especially the people you don’t want them to know. Especially James goddamn Mortimer.”

  “It’s fine, Jen,” Nora said. “How’s Jasper?”

  “Good. He’s auditing one of my classes.”

  “Really?”

  “The one on fertility and pregnancy in various cultures. He doesn’t have time to come to class, but he does all the readings and he says he even wants to do the paper. Can you imagine a surer way to kill a relationship? ‘Sorry, babe, but this is a B-minus at best.’ ”

  “Are you actually in a relationship?”

  “I think maybe I am. Isn’t that weird? What about you? You seem a little fried.”

  “I’m fine. I just wish someone would stop leaving poop bags in front of my house.”

  “That’s weird and creepy, and I say that as someone who has never even owned a dog. Is that the right term? Do we still own dogs, or is that, I don’t know, speciesist? And if I can’t say you own a dog anymore, does that mean we’re all officially insane? We are, aren’t we? Totally insane. I used to be a radical feminist, and the other day one of my students dismissed me as a straight establishment woman.”

  “Sometimes I think Homer owns us,” Nora said. “I don’t think we’d even live where we live if it wasn’t for Homer.”

  It was true: in a way, Homer was responsible for their life on the block. His arrival had dovetailed with a period when Charlie had believed that he was on the verge of becoming (pick one, depending on degree of intoxication) a top gun, a macher, a rainmaker, a big swinging dick. They were living in a nice-enough three-bedroom apartment, and with a big bump in the real estate market their equity in their place had doubled. Add a boom-year bonus, and Charlie became obsessed with the idea that they should have a place more conducive to parties, dinners. He’d actually used the word entertaining two or three times.

  But virtually all of the co-ops they looked at had a no-dog policy, and eventually their real estate agent had taken them to see the house. “No board approval, no financials,” she said to Charlie, as though they might be drug dealers, but the long vista of the second-floor double parlor answered Charlie’s vision of successful cocktail parties. They had had a party the second year they’d lived there, and the wife of a partner at a law firm, with whom Charlie did a lot of business at the time, looked around with a glass of wine in her hand and said with a sigh, “I’ve always wanted to live in a house exactly like this.” Charlie had expanded before Nora’s eyes, as though the woman had attached a bicycle pump and, one, two, three, created a chestier, prouder, bigger man.

  While Nora’s ambition was a thing so ephemeral as to be nearly nonexistent, Charlie had had a strong sense of what he wanted, although Nora thought life would have been simpler if his goal had had a title: judge, senior partner. Instead Nora had realized early on that he simply wanted to be somebody. Charlie’s father, an accountant who did the taxes of the locals in their smallish upstate town out of a basement home office with a separate side entrance, had an older brother who managed a steel processing plant, a towering figure among the Nolans, discussed as though he were a hair’s breadth from great wealth and stature. Charlie had realized that Uncle Glenn’s life, and not making an April 15 filing deadline for the principal of the high school and the chief of police, was what was desirable.

  Nora had met Uncle Glenn exactly twice, once at her wedding, another time at a family reunion. It was considered a great coup that Glenn, who was so very busy, had managed to travel from Pittsburgh to Albany. After his third vodka gimlet, he had told Nora that he had always wanted to be a writer, but that, “events being what they were,” he had been obliged to major in business in college. “And, well,” he added with the Kabuki modesty that his extended family frequently lauded, “it all turned out for the best.” Nora always suspected that his position was less than described, although enough for European vacations and a new Cadillac every three years, which at the time were definite markers of prosperity, along with a mink coat for the wife. But his legend was deep in her husband’s DNA. Nora wondered if that was one of the things Charlie had come to like about the block: that on the block he was known, valued, somebody.

  Nora had liked it there right from the beginning. Homer was young when they first moved in, and more tolerant of strangers, and, walking him, Nora met most of the neighbors. The Fisks had had the mastiff before the Rottweiler. The Fenstermachers had a standard poodle, a redhead called Elizabeth II, not after the queen, it emerged, but after Elizabeth I, who had herself been preceded by Charles. George had what he always described as a rescue pug, as though he were the champion of small, bug-eyed dogs everywhere. He often had two or three. They would dance around Homer on their pinpoint feet, wheezing and growling, while Homer looked out into the middle distance, his ice-blue eyes unfocused, as though thinking, “What are these things and why do they think I should acknowledge them?”

  Homer was an Australian cattle dog, mottled and spade-faced, with a solid body and stance that telegraphed what he was, a working dog with no nonsense about him. Rachel had started to whine about a dog from first grade, when it seemed every playdate and duplex apartment came with a Labrador. “That’s all we need,” Charlie used to say, as though dog ownership were like a second mortgage, or bankruptcy. Then he’d blown it at a barbecue in Pound Ridge given by one of the senior partners. The man’s wife bred dogs—“And looks every inch of it,” said Nora in the car, although the woman had been perfectly nice in that bluff, collegial, WASP way—and Charlie had looked down at the cattle dog peering up into his face with an intelligent gaze, the dog seeing in Charlie’s thick fingers an hors d’oeuvre possibly dropping, and said to his host, “Now, if we were talking about a dog like this, I would get a dog in a heartbeat.”

  Charlie had not noticed that Rachel was behind him, with the same glittery look in her eyes that Nora saw in people at the newsstand who were buying lottery tickets. That was how they came to arrive home from Westchester County six months later with a piglet of a puppy. Nora had been surprised at how attached she became to Homer, even when he needed to pee at the curb on a cold night, a little puddle that turned into yellow ice. Charity had been unpersuaded about Homer when he had first appeared, unpersuaded as well that Rachel and Oliver truly intended to take care of the dog in the way they both insisted they would. In this, of course, Charity was wise as she was in all else. “Lotta mess,” she kept repeating as the puppy pid
dled on the parquet. “Whole lotta mess.”

  “You’ve been to Jamaica,” Jenny said on one of their phone calls. “Dogs aren’t pets there. They’re feral animals who roam the streets.”

  So it had come as something of a surprise when Homer had become as singular and triumphant a figure in the Charity narrative as the twins had always been. Homer had found and killed a rat in the park. (Perhaps true, although Nora couldn’t think of it without shuddering.) Homer had leapt into the air and snagged a pigeon. (Sounded apochrypal, was actually accurate, as Nora discovered when she picked up a poop full of feathers the next day.) Homer was an object of desire for a professional football player in one of the high-rises, who had offered thousands of dollars to buy him. (Almost certainly embellished, although there was a pro player living in one of the nearby buildings.)

  “If she says that Homer dragged a couple of kids out of a burning building, are you going to keep agreeing with her?” Charlie asked one morning when Charity had insisted that it had not been Homer who had taken the block of Cheddar from the counter.

  (“Why does that man leave cheese out?” she asked Nora later, Charlie usually being referred to in the vaguest possible terms. When she had first interviewed Charity, Nora had asked if she was married. “Who wants that mess?” Charity had said with a snort.)

  “If it makes Charity happy,” she’d said.

  Charity, too, remained insensible of the bags being left on their stoop. One morning at the corner Nora had confided in Linda Lessman. “That feels like such a hostile gesture,” Linda said. “If someone was doing that to me I’d be tempted to let the court officers know.”

  “Thank you. That’s just how I feel. It’s not about litter. It’s a message, right?” Nora looked at the aged panel van double-parked up the street. “I’m going to ask Ricky if he’s seen anyone,” she said.

  That morning Nora had come out of the house and stepped right into an encounter between a traffic enforcement agent and one of Ricky’s guys, whose English didn’t extend to much beyond “Señora! No! Señora!”

  “Don’t Señora me,” the agent, a broad-shouldered woman who was wielding a pen like a deadly weapon over a pad of tickets, replied.

  Ricky came running down the block, waving his arms. “Oh, please, no,” he cried, looking from the double-parked van to the agent, who had the look of concentration on her face you usually saw in teenagers working on an essay in AP English. It was well known throughout New York that once the tip of a traffic agent’s pen had so much as touched the surface of the paper, there was no going back. Jack Fisk’s favorite line was “I know the mayor.” It never worked.

  Ricky had always been one of those skinny, ropy guys who never gained a pound, but his pants hung loose now, and it looked as though he was losing weight. Nora was sad to see it because she had once seen a different Enrique Ramos, the one they didn’t know on the block. She’d met him several months before, when it turned out the dishwasher wouldn’t drain, no matter how much she bailed water, and she’d been reduced to using the apple corer to try to unplug the downspout. Twice she asked Charity to get Ricky, and finally Charity said, “No one sees that man this week. His little boy is terrible sick.”

  Nora dropped the corer into the murky gray soup at the bottom of the dishwasher. “How sick?”

  “That thing, whatcha call it, Ollie had.” And here Charity made a sound as though she were trying to eject her own lungs.

  “Croup?” Nora said.

  “That one,” Charity said.

  “Tell me when you see him and I’ll give them my humidifier. That made a big difference. It’s down in the basement, isn’t it?”

  “Upstairs. Rachel use it sometime to open her pores, that kind of nonsense.”

  But Ricky had not appeared, and Nora decided to take the humidifier to him. It was too unwieldy to take on the subway. “The man can buy his own humidifier, the prices he charges,” said Charlie on his way into the office on a Saturday morning, apparently because some deal was falling apart.

  Nora still remembered that day as a disaster in every way possible. She had had a hard time getting the car out of the narrow opening to the lot, and had to be directed out by George, who was pleased as could be to have the opportunity to condescend. Then she had misread the signs, taken the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, and found it hard to find a place to turn and head back in the right direction. Construction in the Bronx had closed the exit her directions had given her, and the Indian man she asked at the gas station kept nodding and smiling, repeating “Grand Concourse,” until she realized she was actually on the road she had been trying desperately to find. She slid into a parking space in front of a bodega and locked the car while two teenagers with three inches of boxer shorts above the waistband of their jeans stared at the two feet between her car and the curb. She heard them laughing as she carried the humidifier in her arms. It was heavy.

  In front of her a man strode down the street, greeting the old people who sat in the shafts cut into the front of the apartment buildings, getting as much light and air as there was to be found on a side street in the South Bronx. A kid leaned out a window and called something to the man, and he waved but walked on. He was wearing a leather jacket and snug jeans, and there was a swivel in his walk, like he was hearing music in his head the way Nora often did during her walk to work, although she was certain she had never moved quite like that. Four older men were playing dominoes around a card table on the sidewalk, hunched in coats that were too heavy for the weather. They raised leathery hands to the younger man as he walked by.

  Nora said, “Twelve fourteen?” to a woman in a wheelchair with a New York Yankees blanket over her legs. The woman pointed at the man. “Follow him,” she said. Nora passed a sign on the next building that said NO LOITERING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The man in front of her bent down to pick up an empty beer can from the sidewalk and flipped it into a trash can at the curb. It wasn’t until she got to the steps of the last building on the block that he turned, and she realized it was Ricky—but a different Ricky, a Ricky at home, in his zone, not in uniform, not in character, or perhaps in his real character, a lighter, brighter cousin to the Ricky she knew, almost unrecognizable until he saw Nora Nolan standing behind him. The way his face changed made Nora sad, as though just by showing up she’d turned this buoyant character into the leaden facsimile he took downtown each day for work.

  “Missus, what are you doing here?” he said, taking the box out of her arms.

  “I’m sorry,” Nora said, only in that moment realizing to her dismay that there were lines between people as clear as the median on Park Avenue or the narrower one she’d almost run over on the Grand Concourse, and that you were supposed to respect them.

  “No, no,” Ricky said. “No problem.” But it was. It was a problem.

  “I heard your boy had the croup. And Oliver had the croup when he was five—it was just awful, that sound of him coughing, I remember staying up all night with him in the bathroom, with the shower running for an hour so the steam would fill the room. It was the only thing that helped, and then the pediatrician said, Get a good humidifier, a good one, not one of those cheap ones from Duane Reade, and we set it up in the room and I’m pretty sure that’s what got him over the hump, the steam all night long, so that all that stuff in his chest got loosened up—”

  “Rico!” yelled a voice from above them. “What the hell?”

  A woman was leaning out a window. Her arms were folded on the sill and she was hunched over them so that she had stupendous cleavage. Her mouth was as tight as her eyes were hot.

  “This is Mrs. Nolan,” Ricky said.

  “Nora,” Nora called, waving. “You must be Nita. I’ve heard so much about you.” Charity had told her that Nita was a home health aide, moving from elderly person to elderly person in the Bronx as each one died. Looking up at her flamethrower of
an expression, Nora wondered if she helped kill them.

  “You’re taking your sweet time,” Nita said.

  “I brought a humidifier,” Nora said. “My son had the croup. It really helped.”

  “Thank you,” Ricky said.

  “You deaf, Rico?” Nita shouted.

  “I have to go,” said Nora.

  “That humidifier really helped a lot,” Ricky had said when he came to fix the dishwasher Monday morning, the handyman Ricky now, not the man who had strutted down the street in a leather jacket. Nora should have minded her business. On the way home she remembered a story Cathleen had told once during their lunch group, about running into one of her high school nuns at the beach wearing a black bathing suit. A one-piece with a skirt, but still. Both the nun and Cathleen had been so embarrassed they’d pretended when school resumed that it had never happened.

  Nora had embarrassed that other Ricky, who was cool and loose, a swivel to his step, tight jeans and high-top sneakers. Ricky on her block didn’t dress that way, didn’t walk that way, didn’t even talk that way. He was all business, methodical and neat, or maybe that was just when he was on the job, the way his posture and clothes were different there. Nora remembered being at Charlie’s firm’s Christmas party and having one of the administrative assistants say that being married to Charlie must be a pleasure because he was so neat and organized. Nora had had to bite back a snort of incredulity. That Charlie apparently lived in the office with the big cherry desk, the matching credenza, the oatmeal-colored couch, the landscape on the wall. Perpetually messy Charlie lived in her house. Maybe it was the same with Ricky, no cap on the toothpaste, coffee cups with muddy dregs on the table, socks on the floor. Maybe that’s the Ricky Nita knew, but the one who worked for Nora never left a tool out, always used a dustpan and brush when he was done with a repair, even though Charity always stood there frowning, waving the DustBuster and breathing hard.