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“I"m sorry, Jacob. Giorgio"s at Il Ghiotto now and you know he"s—”
“Not going anywhere,” I replied. “Yes, I know.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Actually I found a little town up north, and I"m thinking of working there for a while.”
“Near your brother?”
“Yeah. He"s maybe going through a relocation process himself. We might both end up here.”
“That sounds nice.” I could hear him muffle the sound of the phone while he directed kitchen traffic for a minute. “I"m sorry. I"m back.”
“How"s Hannah?”
“Ready to have that baby any minute. Maybe I"ll relocate with you. It will save me from her temper. I"ve got to run, Jake. I"m being paged by a patron, damn it.”
“Do I need to stop by there for my key?”
“No, I left it with
the ladies
.”
“Oh shit,” I said automatically. It was either that or make the sign of the cross and spit. “I owe you.”
“Hell
yes
, you do.” He hung up.
“What?” Dan turned to look at me briefly. “Who do you owe?”
“Phil left me a new key at my manager"s office. He let Sander in to get his things.”
“At least he"s out of your life. Do I need to point out that you"re on a disturbingly familiar road in St. Nacho"s with this JT, who can"t even be seen in public with you but sneaks out of your room at four in the morning?”
“Will it stop you if I say no?”
“No. Isn"t it time you found someone who will stand by your side and not on either your neck or behind the big sign that says „Door Number Three: I"m heterosexual/bi-curious/ashamed, but I don"t mind getting my dick sucked"?”
“I hear you.”
“Then
listen
for a change,” Dan griped.
I bit back a hasty reply. He was right, of course, which made it suck much worse than if I could have told him to shove off.
“You have so much to give someone. I sometimes wonder if we haven"t spent our lives trying to walk along an imaginary balance beam, with Dad on one side and Mom on the other. It"s not okay to spend our lives in the framework of their mistakes. Value yourself, Yasha. And for that matter, I need to trust myself. I"m not going to turn into Dad, and you need to stop living in fear like Mom.”
“I"m not living in fear.”
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“No. It"s worse than that. You"re living in her shame. From her lack of self-esteem.” Dan gripped the wheel, and I thought I felt him punch the gas. “If nothing else, honor her memory by not allowing yourself to be a doormat.” I gazed out the window for a while. Family vacations. Gotta love them.
Are we there yet?
Night had blanketed the city while we were still en route, but it was early enough that we walked among the dog people and those who were disembarking from public transportation and heading home from work.
The first place we went after we parked the car on the street in front of my building was the liquor store on Melrose, down Gardner Street. You couldn"t ever, ever go to the building manager"s apartment with nothing in hand. Usually I loaded up with treats from Il Ghiotto, but since I no longer worked there, I thought a quick trip to the local liquor store and behind the glass where they kept the expensive stuff was in order. I had the key guy open the cabinet and get me a bottle of Laphroaig single malt.
“I don"t know why you"re doing this.” Dan shoved my hand out of the way when I got out my wallet to pay. “I got this. I want to see this person who has you scared to ask for the key to your own damn place.”
“Madeline is nice. Laverne is the scary one. I wonder if I should have them wrap it.”
“You"re kidding.”
“No.” He"d see, and then he"d know.
It was on the way back that I began to really perceive the city. After Nacho"s it seemed deafening. Traffic rumbled along Melrose like the steady rush of floodwaters, a grinding, honking wall of noise that disoriented me. Sirens wailed in the distance. Music played from storefronts. People gathered in knots like talking, laughing, brightly colored birds, looking for fun on a Saturday night. I couldn"t blame them, but after having the quiet hum of the ocean as a backdrop the previous week, it was like being thrown into a food processor. I already missed my pie ladies.
I missed the firehouse and the easy camaraderie of the men there, and I missed Nacho"s Bar. A helicopter flew overhead, and I used that as an excuse for why I had no idea what Dan had been saying to me.
“What?” I glanced up at him and caught his knowing look. “I"m sorry.”
“You didn"t hear a word I said.”
“No,” I admitted. “I seem to have my mind on other things.”
“Would those other things happen to be back in St. Nacho"s?”
“I"m afraid so,” I told him honestly. “It seems noisy here.”
“It is noisy.”
“And the smog is really something if you haven"t been in it for a while.
Although it made for a cool sunset while we were driving down.” St. Nacho’s 3: Jacob’s Ladder
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“There"s that,” Dan agreed. He was definitely not used to the city anymore either.
I felt a million miles from my heart. “For some reason I don"t remember why I live here.”
Dan frowned, then threw a reassuring arm around me. “Then it"s time to leave.
Let"s go beard the lion, shall we? It should come in handy having a Daniel around.” The best part of the visit with my landladies was Dan"s face. Madeline let us in, and I was immediately—once again—reminded of
What Ever Happened to Baby
Jane?
Lucky us. It was prom-dress day, and Madeline, having apparently won the coin toss, looked elegant and attractive in a fetching confection of lavender satin and tulle. Laverne, on the other hand, sat in a white wicker chair that was upholstered in vivid green-checked fabric, flanked by twin tables made of glass supported by white marble elephants. She was stuffed uncomfortably into a red silk and lamé number, looking part dragon lady and part…
Island of Dr. Moreau.
Madeline rattled on about how awful it was that Sander, whom she called
“that beautiful golden stud” had been such a “horrible, physically violent man.” She said it like
physically vah-ha-hilent man
while biting her lip. I swear I saw a droplet of drool trickle onto her breast.
This was followed by an uncomfortable silence during which Madeline presented Laverne with our gift. Laverne waved it away, toward one of the elephant tables, and motioned for us to sit.
There was nothing for it but to get down on the ground, because she didn"t have any other chairs in the room. Dan and I complied, sitting cross-legged before her like worshippers, which was exactly how she liked it.
Laverne clapped her hands, and Madeline brought her a pack of Dunhills, red box. Elegant as always. Then she pulled a big crystal ashtray from the space between her ample hips and the chair cushion. After she had placed a cigarette between her lips, she offered us one. Whether we both shook our heads, I couldn"t say for sure, because I didn"t take my eyes away from Laverne long enough to find out. Later I would explain to Dan about landing an apartment in the Norma Desmond Bates Hotel, as I called it, and the fact that it was fully two hundred dollars a month cheaper than comparable apartments, as long as you were willing to go along with the charade. These weren"t merely the building"s managers; they owned the place and had since it was built, if the story was to be believed.
I wished I could have seen Dan"s face when Laverne opened her mouth for the first time and a Harvey Fierstein voice came out like the growl of earth-moving equipment, but I still didn"t dare look away. Sixty-odd years of smoking and—
probably—shouting at her sister had taken their toll.
“You boys look like twins,” came the pronouncement.
“I"m quite a bit older,” Dan said carefully.
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Z. A. Maxfield
Laverne fixed him with her piercing gray eyes. “Do we look like twins to you?”
Ohcrapohcrapohcrap, the twin thing…
“Twins? Come on. You can tell me.” Dan handled Laverne like the pro he was.
He leaned in and said quietly, “She"s your mother, right?” Madeline gave a shocked gasp at this, but I could see Laverne was pleased.
“No, no. Gotcha, you dear boy. We
are
twins.”
“
She’s
older, by twenty-four minutes,” Madeline insisted.
Laverne let loose a string of smoke and profanity that would have singed our eyebrows if we had been sitting closer.
“Well, you are.” Madeline"s lip jutted out. “Older.” I wished for their sakes they had a normal sister. Who would be Olivia de Havilland? When all was said and done, like the Munsters, they needed a
plain one.
“I take it from your visit that you have something to tell us?” Laverne asked.
“I need to move. I"ll give you my thirty days" notice in writing before I leave.”
“I"m sorry to hear that.” Laverne gazed at me thoughtfully. “It will be sad to see you go. Madeline will be very unhappy. She enjoys the cannoli, Jacob, very much.”
“I"m sorry.” I looked down to where my hands squeezed my knees. “I no longer work at Il Ghiotto.”
“I see.” Another thin stream of smoke filled the air. “Yes, I see.” Then there was a silence, which seemed interminable until Dan spoke. “I"m going to hire a company to pack Jacob"s things and move them. Afterward someone will clean. We"ll be leaving now.” He got to his knees stiffly and pulled me up.
“Wait just a moment.” Laverne"s voice could strip stucco off the sides of buildings. I wouldn"t have been surprised if she"d asked me to kill the Wicked Witch of the West and bring her her broom. Instead she held out her hand politely, and when I took it, she said, “You"re a mensch. I"m going to miss you.” Laverne told Madeline to show us out, which she did, foaming toward the door in a lavender cloud and bubbling about how it would be a major disappointment to have one less so very attractive man around the place.
Dan was mostly silent on the way up the outside stairs and down the gallery to my apartment.
Former apartment
. It wasn"t home after everything that had happened there. Just before we got to the door, though, he burst out in wildly uncharacteristic, boyish laughter. He actually held his sides as he slumped against the wall of the building, and I thought, if nothing else, his reaction to the weird sisters was an unusual one.
“Jakey! When we"re old, I want to be exactly like that. I want to be a pasha in some tiny corner of the world we"ve carved out for ourselves. I want to smoke with impunity and wear silly clothes. I"m leaning toward a
Wild Wild West
theme. Fancy vests and long coats with aviator goggles.” Dan looked about fifteen years younger and laughed like he was directing the audience of a sitcom.
St. Nacho’s 3: Jacob’s Ladder
129
“Who
are
you?” This was
not
my brother Daniel.
“I want to build computers out of vacuum tubes and old typewriters and talk through funnels attached to long rubber hoses. Life can be so
fun
if you have nothing better to do with your time.”
I considered him carefully. It was entirely possible that he"d finally snapped, but if I had to guess, he was just enjoying a freedom from responsibility that he"d never experienced before, even as a kid. Maybe St. Nacho"s had gotten to him a little too.
I liked it on him
. “Don"t expect me to be your Madeline.” 130
Z. A. Maxfield
Chapter Twenty
My apartment depressed me. Sander had mown through all our things, dumping the contents of bedroom drawers, riffling through papers and mail, and scavenging in our media center. I noticed a lot of my least-favorite DVDs remained, but the James Bond movies were nowhere to be found.
The kitchen—which was untouched because he didn"t set foot there except to eat—was arguably worse. He"d left everything alone, but the bright white room was still exactly as I"d left it after our horrible fight—chairs turned over, one of the cabinet doors hanging drunkenly off its hinges where I"d grabbed hold to keep myself from going down, and blood spattered on the backsplash and countertop tiles. Where I"d fallen, there was a dark, damning stain. Suddenly I could hardly bear to have my brother see it.
He stepped past me and looked around for himself. “Dear G—”
“It looks worse than what it actually was.” I sagged against the door frame. “I had a head wound. Mostly bluster.”
He turned to me, white with shock. “You know how crazy that sounds?
Minimizing…this.” His gesture encompassed the whole grisly tableau. I could see right where Madeline"s little foot had slipped.
“Yes.” I stared at his mouth, which was easier, somehow, than meeting his eyes. It tightened to a thin, light line.
“You definitely need to seek professional help.” I nodded. “I understand.
“If you can"t do it with the group, then do it privately.”
“I will.”
The silence grew while he appeared to be making plans. Then he sighed. “Get everything you have that has any value. If you need boxes, I"ll get some. We"ll take what you can"t bear to lose and trust movers to pack and relocate the rest. I don"t want to stay here one second longer than I have to.”
“All right.”
“Do you have a phone book?”
“In the drawer by the phone,” I told him.
I didn"t want to step into the kitchen. I had good knives. Great pans. I stood in the doorway trying to think whether I had anything I had to take right away. Not from the kitchen. I went into the bedroom and grabbed a large duffel bag and threw St. Nacho’s 3: Jacob’s Ladder
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in the rest of my clothes and some toiletries I hadn"t packed when I"d left the first time. I took a first-aid kit, which seemed funny somehow.
I retrieved my zeyde"s old Swiss watch from the nightstand drawer and put it on. It didn"t work, but it didn"t matter. Once I had it with me, there was nothing left in the apartment I had any attachment to one way or the other. I found Dan in the kitchen, where he was just hanging up the wall phone. He had his wallet and iPhone out, and he seemed engrossed in making notes. I hated to interrupt him, so I hung in the doorway again.