5 #2
SHUT UP!
That was a high-pitched, not entirely human voice, and it came from somewhere inside the apartment next door.
“That,” Arthur said, turning his head toward the door to the right of theirs, “is Helen’s bird. Terrible thing. Greasy. She
loves it to death, though. If it gets too loud, just bang on the door and she’ll give it something to destroy and shut it
up. Everyone’s down there already.”
They seemed to have no choice but to follow as Arthur guided them to the far end of the hall. There was the implication that
they were late to whatever it was they didn’t know they had to be at, which was a new horror that was now part of Stevie’s
life.
“That’s me,” he said, pointing to a door on the left. “Eight A. Knock if you need anything.”
Directly across from Arthur’s door was one erratically garlanded in silver and gold in a kind of drunk spiderweb pattern.
On the floor in front was a jute doormat that read KEEP THE HO-HO-HOS IN CHRISTMAS, with a cartoon Santa sticking his butt into view.
In the middle of the door, just under the doorbell, was an engraved plastic sign that read: PARTY CLOWNS NEEDED: APPLY WITHIN.
“Ignore that,” he said as Nate and Stevie stared. “That’s just Benny. Come on in.”
They were led into 8C, at the end of the hall on the right side. This apartment had the same layout as the one Stevie and
Nate were staying in but had an entirely different feel. This was not empty and minimal, with bare floors. There was caramel-colored
wall-to-wall carpet, heavy forest-green drapes, a large sofa pointed at the television—lots of big, family furniture, too
many wineglasses and too much china, and a small model of a 747 that had landed on a sideboard.
“Got him!” Arthur announced. “Them. Both of them. This is Nate Fisher! He’s one of Diana’s authors. And this is his friend . . .”
“Stevie,” Stevie prompted. She had already been forgotten.
A man, tall and bald, with blue-framed glasses and piercing blue eyes came out of the galley kitchen. He had a red cravat
tied around his neck, under a blue sweater. Up until that point, Stevie thought cravats weren’t real, but here was one in
the wild.
“Arthur! Buone feste! What can I get you to drink? Prosecco? A Negroni?”
He was joined by a woman, probably in her late sixties or early seventies, with a perfectly coiffed bob that almost matched
the carpet in color, a red blouse with tidy neck bow, and black trousers. A small pearl bracelet hugged her wrist.
“This is Lance and Mitzi,” Arthur said. “This is their apartment.”
“Auguri!” Lance said. “What can I get for you two? A Pellegrino? Virgin Negroni?”
“Christ,” Mitzi said under her breath. Then, a bit more loudly, “My husband thinks he’s Stanley Tucci. We also have Coke.
Do you want some Coke?”
Stevie and Nate nodded numbly.
“Lance, get the kids some Cokes and give Arthur a glass of red wine. You know that’s what he drinks. Have some cookies.”
The kitchen bar counter was overladen with trays of cookies and cakes. They were beautiful—tiny cannoli, delicate gingerbread
men with frosted faces, glistening sugar cookies, rainbow cookies, thick chocolate chip wedges.
“Helen made all these,” Arthur said. “She’s a retired pastry chef. She’s very good.”
“I’m better than good,” Helen said.
The person who seemed to be Helen was sitting in a recliner by the kitchen bar. She was possibly in her seventies. Her skin
was extremely fair and softly wrinkled. It looked thin, with lots of visible veins and fine nicks and scratches on her arms.
She was wearing an oversized T-shirt with dancing cupcakes on it, flowing black pants, and Crocs. Her thinning blondish-white
hair was cut to chin length and swept across her forehead to one side, pinned in place with a hairclip shaped like a butterfly.
“You should start with gingerbread,” she said. “It’s got a good bite. Make sure to try it.”
“Come in,” Lance said, urging Nate and Stevie farther into the room. “Everyone wants to meet the famous author.”
The apartment had been heavily decorated for the holiday, with a real tree (Stevie could smell it from the doorway, and the nostalgia was intense).
It had been decorated uniformly in silver and gold balls.
A crooning voice came out of the speakers, singing all about silver bells.
The room contained about a half dozen people in distinct small groups or singly on sofas and chairs and in corners.
There was an air of a festive hostage situation, like they had all been summoned and now were trapped with cookies and a fake Italian man.
There was a family of three on the sofa—a man and woman, both maybe in their forties, flanked a young girl.
“These are Mitzi and Lance’s next-door neighbors,” Arthur said, “Andy and Margo Lopez, and their daughter, Luna.”
Andy and Margo had a glow about them—an almost literal one, that suggested that many skin products were in use in the house.
Andy had a wide, friendly face and a muscular build, beefily filling out a polo shirt that was one size too small, definitely
by choice. Margo’s long brown hair was frozen into a rigid wave. She wore a cream-colored matching jogger set and had long
acrylic nails in a pale pink with silver edging. As she smiled, she revealed a set of large teeth that were so white they
almost seemed like they had gone transparent.
“Luna loves to read,” she said. “We wanted to make sure she got to meet you.”
Between them, clutching a phone in a coffin-shaped case, was a teenage girl with jet-black hair chopped into a shaggy mullet.
She wore a tiny red-and-white kilt and a distressed black sweater, along with a black Santa hat with the words HAIL SANTA written in deep purple glitter.
Luna looked up from her phone, fixing a heavily lined and perfectly cat-eyed gaze at Stevie and Nate, but said nothing.
“And over here . . .” Arthur waved a hand in the direction of two women sitting together on a love seat by the windows. One
was short, with olive skin and delicate features, dressed in a navy-blue jumpsuit.
“This is Imogen and her wife, Sophie Cardwell. They moved in a few weeks ago. They’re here from London, while Sophie is on
Broadway in Macbeth!”
He indicated the tall Black woman who sat with a stately bearing, perfectly aligned. Her hair was closely shorn, and she had
large, luminous eyes. She was wearing a burgundy-colored silk tank top with a coordinating pair of flowing pants, and she
smelled like lilacs after a springtime rain.
“Nice to meet you,” she said. Sophie spoke in a rich, English-accented voice, with big round vowels—a magnificent vessel of
a voice, designed to go great distances in the most elegant way possible.
“Oh, Sophie’s been in so many wonderful things,” Arthur said. “Sophie, did I mention that I actually saw you in Blithe Spirit in London . . . that would have been, oh, how many years ago . . .”
“Three,” Imogen said. Her accent was not English—it was broad and North American. Canadian, maybe.
“And you’re a writer?” Sophie said to Nate. “So young! How clever of you! What have you written?”
Whenever anyone asked Nate what he’d written, he looked like someone who’d suddenly found themselves in an interrogation room with the lightbulb swinging overhead. He said nothing at all until Arthur called out to someone across the room.
“Elliot!” Arthur called. This was directed to a younger man, maybe in his early twenties, just over six feet, with long, lank
dirty-blond hair, who was sitting on the piano bench and idly looking through a book of still photographs from Italian films.
He wore a loose-weave cardigan over an artfully threadbare T-shirt, through which Stevie could see some kind of medallion.
The silver-blue rinse of his jeans had the faded air of expense.
“This is Elliot,” Arthur said. “He’s a writer too! He’s writing a book. Oh, it’s so nice to have everyone here.”
“It’s not everyone,” Luna said.
Her mother gave her a soft elbow of warning.
“Diana’s never had one of her writers stay here before,” Arthur went on. “I always hoped she would, and when she said you
were coming we decided we had to have a little something. And it’s so nice to have a little something. We used to have them
all the time, didn’t we, Mitzi?”
“Before the place went to hell,” Mitzi said.
“She’s joking, of course. Mitzi and I are on the co-op board. We love to have a community spirit around here, and we . . .”
A goggle-eyed black inkblot of a dog rushed past, feverishly chewing.
He dropped the delicious object near Stevie’s feet.
It was a roach. Mitzi let out a low howling noise and descended on it with a paper towel like an avenging Valkyrie thundering from the sky with her sword, but the dog was too fast and snatched it back up.
“Snacks!” Mitzi yelled. “Snacks, no! Goddammit. Snacks!”
Snacks continued to munch with the satisfied air of a gourmand.
“That’s the third one today,” Mitzi said, waving toward her dog, her bracelets clanking at her wrist. “I don’t know what I’m
going to do. I’ve called building management twice this week. I’m going to go over there and kill her.”
“It’s terrible,” Arthur said. “Terrible.”