Still As Death (7 page)

OLGA LEVITCH POURED the steaming water into her teapot and waited a few minutes for the tea to steep. While she waited, she planned her day, mentally traveling through the rooms of the museum, starting her cleaning at the top of each room and working her way toward the bottom and out the door. When the tea was ready, she poured it into her thermos and went to get her cleaning cart. Though it was only five
A.M.
, she could tell that it was going to be another hot day, and she craved something cool and relaxing. The Impressionists, she decided—she would take her tea break with the Impressionists.

It was her favorite part of the day, when she put aside her cleaning supplies and sat down for those delicious twenty minutes to drink tea and look at the art. After twenty-seven years, she knew every painting in the museum as well as her own face in the mirror. It was why she had kept the job, despite the low pay and the early starting hour. Actually, she liked getting to work at five. In those dark hours before the staff started arriving, before the museum’s doors opened to the public, she could pretend that she was at home in her grand palace, that all the art was hers, to be looked at as she pleased. As she dusted, she could make believe that she was caring for her own collection,
that the paintings all belonged to her. It was something about America that she found interesting, this idea that you might be able to own a painting yourself, that you might be rich enough to live in a house that looked like a museum. Of course, she had gone to the Hermitage when she lived in Moscow, and she remembered feeling proud that her country owned such beautiful things, but she had never wanted to actually own them herself. That was what America did to you. It made you want things. And when you couldn’t have them, it made you sad, sad about something you never should have wanted in the first place.

She started out in the basement, in the cavernous stone room that housed the museum’s collection of Egyptian antiquities. The room gave her the creeps, and she tried to clean it as quickly as possible. She hated the stone arches that were big enough for someone to hide behind, the recessed corners that lay in shadow even when all the lights were on. And a number of the pieces had been taken upstairs for the exhibition so it seemed even emptier than usual.

She vaccumed and swept, then went around quickly, dusting display boxes and glass. The art down here had never made much sense to her. It was interesting, of course, and very old, but it wasn’t beautiful. It didn’t make her happy or sad or relaxed or energetic or any of the things that the works in the upper galleries did.

Olga would never take her tea break down here.

It was now nearly seven and the museum was coming alive for the day. She took the elevator up to the first of the second-floor galleries and started cleaning, stealing only cursory glances at the Flemish paintings housed in that room.

She had just finished and was packing up the cart so she could start on the special galleries when she heard footsteps in the hallway below. She crept over to the balcony and looked down to find Harriet Tyler, the collections manager, walking quickly toward the staircase.

Olga maneuvered the cart out into the hall just as Harriet came up the stairs. She started when she saw Olga, one hand flying to her hair, and she gasped out loud.

“Oh, hi, Olga. I’m sorry, you startled me.”

“Hello,” Olga said, pushing the cart past her. It had been kind of fun scaring her, seeing the look on her face. She allowed herself a brief moment of anger in the elevator. Staff members sometimes did come into the museum before seven when they opened the main entrance, but it hadn’t happened in a while and today she had been looking forward to being alone for her tea break. With everything she had on her mind, why couldn’t she have had the morning to herself, just for once? It was always the way, just when she really wanted to be alone, someone came in early and foiled her. Of course, they usually seemed surprised to see her too.

The one person whom she didn’t mind seeing when she came in was Mr. Keane. She and Mr. Keane understood each other, she decided. She could tell he liked being alone too, and when he came in early, he made a point of not talking to her, as though he knew that just hearing words from another human’s mouth was enough to ruin those quiet, perfect mornings. If she happened to pass him on her way to the supply closet or on the stairs, he would nod to her but never say a word. It was like they had an understanding, though neither of them had ever spoken of it, and if they ran into each other during the day, he was always very polite and would say, “Good morning, Olga” or “Good afternoon, Olga.” She liked Mr. Keane.

As she started on the top-floor gallery that housed the museum’s collection of twentieth-century art, she tried to put aside her anger but found it hard with the Picasso and those other strange paintings staring at her. Those awful faces reminded her of the secret police, they way their eyes looked when they questioned you. “Where were you last weekend, Mrs. Levitch?” “What has happened to your husband, Mrs. Levitch?”

She sat down for a second to get her breath. She had been happy, and now she was thinking about the bad times, about the time before she had come to America. She took a deep breath and tried to calm down, but there was no way around it, her morning had been ruined.

For the next hour, she went about her work, trying to lose herself in the familiar routine, and it was nearly eight by the time she was ready to go over to the annex. She moved quickly through the staff offices, vacuuming and emptying the wastebaskets. Sometimes, she liked to look through the staff members’ desks. It was interesting what she had found on occasion: photographs of people Olga knew weren’t their spouses, bottles of liquor, letters that had been hidden at the backs of drawers. Olga never took these things; she didn’t want anyone to know that she went through the desks. But she liked knowing about them, liked holding the information, as though it were a valuable and perfect coin she could decide when to spend.

At nine, she decided to take her break. She got her thermos and went into the cleaning supply closet to get her biscuits. Ever since she’d worked at the museum, she’d kept a tin of shortbread hidden in the closet for her morning tea break. The buttery Danish cookies were one of her only extravagances, and she lived in fear of one of the other staff members taking them, thinking they were for public consumption. So she kept the tin hidden behind the extra rolls of toilet paper, her delicious little secret, a spot of luxury in her working day.

She got her three cookies out of the tin and was just about to go back to the galleries when she heard someone out in the hall by the entrance to the storage areas. Not wanting to have to engage in small talk, she opened the closet door a little so she could see into the hall and waited, standing against the door so she couldn’t be seen.

It was a couple of minutes before she heard footsteps coming out of the storage area and stopping by Harriet’s desk. She watched the hallway, being careful not to make any noise, until the footsteps had receded again and the hallway was empty once more.

Olga took her cookies and thermos into the gallery. It was very interesting the things you saw early in the morning, she thought. It was really very interesting indeed.

JEANNE ORTIZ LAY BACK on the couch and studied the nude body of Trevor Ferigni as he bent over the stereo, putting on a new CD he said he wanted her to hear. Personally, she hated his music—odd, clanging metallic stuff by bands with ridiculously surreal names—but he was so excited about it that she couldn’t deny him the pleasure of playing it.

Trevor—or Trev, as his friends called him—was a nineteen-year-old sophomore from California who wanted to be a musicologist and had taken a women’s studies course from her last spring because his mother wanted him to. Jeanne tried not to think about that too much.

She hadn’t planned on anything happening, not with this one, but he had started it. Of course, if anyone found out, that fact wouldn’t matter in the least, but she knew it to be true. He’d made an appointment to see her and when she’d asked him how he was doing, he’d acted really upset and told her about his family, the Berkeley professor parents who were divorced but lived three blocks from each other so that the kids could go back and forth, his six-year-old stepsister, Electra. He’d wanted to come east for college, he’d told her, but he’d never realized he would be this homesick.

That first time she had just listened, then given him the name of the health center and told him to ask to see a counselor there. The next time he came to see her, in tears again, she had told him to come to her house for dinner that weekend. She had made chicken with rice, given him a few glasses of wine, and assumed she would send him on his way feeling a bit better, feeling as though he had a surrogate parent in Cambridge. But as it turned out, he’d been fun to talk to, and they had had more than a few glasses and ended up in bed together. He had kept drinking wine, and at some point she had realized he was flirting with her. Feeling the old buzz at the idea of an illicit encounter, she had asked him whether he had a girlfriend or—she’d hesitated, giving the question an edge—someone he was “seeing.”

He’d smiled and said no, then added, as she’d known he would, that he did have a crush on someone … older. His blush was what had made her take the next step. She had been expecting to be his educator, a role she usually relished, but it turned out that Trevor had taken advantage of the lax rules of his Berkeley households and had been sexually active since he was fourteen. His various partners, he’d told her, had included some of his mother’s friends. He’d stayed in town over the summer, partly because of her, Jeanne feared, and they’d gotten lazy, going out to dinner once or twice and even walking through the yard on a Sunday morning.

“You know, now that school’s starting again, we have to be more careful,” she said, almost shouting over the music.

“What?” He was bopping around, unashamed of his young body, which was a little on the skinny side, his tan legs slightly bowed. Jeanne found it incredible that he was so immodest. She’d been brought up to believe that bodies and windows were to be covered at all times, and her own adult practice of nudity was a completely self-conscious thing. She dressed the way she did and paraded nude in front of her lovers to make a point. But to Trevor, it came very naturally, something that both delighted and intimidated her.

“I said, we have to start being careful again.”

“I don’t want to be careful. I’m not in your class anymore.”

“That doesn’t matter. You still are a student, even if you’re not
my
student.”

He kept dancing around but didn’t answer her.

“Trevor?” Her voice sounded a tad shrill, much too maternal for her taste. “Did you hear me?”

“Yeah.” He closed his eyes, waving his arms in the air like a cheerleader. The music raged behind him.

“I have to get going,” Jeanne called out as he pretended to play the drums. What she really meant was, “You have to get going.”

“Come on, not yet.” He stopped dancing. “Let’s smoke a joint first.” He went over to his backpack, which was leaning up against her front door, and took out a baggie and some rolling papers.

“No, I have a meeting.” She’d smoked with him only once, but she knew it had been a huge mistake. “Besides, I don’t really smoke pot. That one time was just, you know, because you were.”

“Is that right?” He raised his eyebrows at her. “And the sex is the same thing, huh?” There wasn’t any menace in his words, but something about the way he said them made her wince. She stood up and wrapped a chenille blanket from the couch around her naked body.

“No,” she said weakly, “it’s not like that. You know that.”

“I guess,” he said. But he looked hurt.

“Come on. I really have to get going.”

“So, can’t I hang out and listen to the rest of the album? It’s so rocking.” He flashed her a smile, and she had a sudden vision of what he must have looked like as a five-year-old boy.

“No. I need to lock up and it’s not a good idea for you to stay here.”

“ ‘Not a good idea’? We’re not committing a crime or anything.”

“I know, but … I could get in trouble.”

“Only if they find out.” He raised his eyebrows at her and she felt suddenly afraid. This one was different. There was something about him that was just too confident in bed and at the same time too emotionally involved. Was he in love with her? She didn’t think so. But
there was something he was getting from this relationship that he was going to want to keep on getting, and she felt her stomach buzz a little with uneasiness.

“All right,” she said, giving in, looking forward to the feeling of checking out, of not worrying about Trevor and his intentions for a little while.

Jeanne’s mother had always told her that she had no discipline, that she’d never get anywhere because she couldn’t make herself do things she didn’t want to do and couldn’t stop herself from doing things she did. She’d always considered that she’d proved her mother wrong. She had gotten somewhere, made a success of her life. Obviously she had overcome what her mother had called “the devil” in her. But as she watched Trevor roll the joint, then light it, she reflected that perhaps her mother had been right.

SWEENEY WOKE IN THE NIGHT, wide awake, alert to the sounds of the bedroom, the deep even breathing coming from Ian’s side of the bed, the low, intermittent rumble of traffic, the indeterminate sounds of the city. Between the light coming in the window from the nearly full moon and the streetlights outside, she could see nearly all the details of her bedroom. Washed of color, her belongings looked both familiar and strange, different versions of themselves. She sat up, and the General, who had been curled up next to her head, rose too, blinked twice, and rubbed against her, asking to have his ears scratched.

She had been dreaming, and something in her dream had startled her awake. Searching her memory and not coming up with anything, she swung her legs around, sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, and then got up and padded into the kitchen, the General at her heels. He sprang onto the counter, rubbing against the half-empty bottle of red wine next to the sink and looking expectantly at the bag of cat food against the wall.