The Parallel Apartments (9 page)

The waitress bent over to get a better look, but accidentally bumped the table with her bottom. All the ketchup towers wobbled perilously, and one of them uncoupled, sending both of its bottles clatter-clinking to the table.

“Oh,” said the waitress.

“Oh,” said Justine.

“Got it,” said the waitress. She picked up the bottles and reintegrated them as a tower.

Justine blushed—awesome, prickling hives—then hugged herself, squeaked, “Bye,” and went back to Franklin, who was standing next to their table throwing five-dollar bills at the dirty plates.

“Why would you embarrass me like that?” said Franklin, when they were on the street watching for cabs. “I swear you were hitting on that girl.”

“No, I was not.”

“Were. I thought you were going to mate. I mean, if you were inviting her into a just-the-three-of-us pah-tay, I'm all for it, but we both know you'd never—
Cab!
”

Franklin stepped onto Avenue A and waved with possessive vigor at a dented green gypsy cab. When it stopped, he got in by himself and slammed the door before Justine could follow. He rolled down the window.

“Maybe you two can go shopping for box cutters and mercurochrome together, Justine, huh, fuck me Jesus. Oh, by the way? You've got ketchup on your blouse or your top or whatever you call that.”

“Drive,” said Franklin, slapping the dirty Plexiglas behind the cabbie's head.

Within the soft hug of a warm cloud of cab exhaust, Justine examined her smutchy blouse. A fair amount of ketchup, enough for a child's hamburger, had found safe harbor between the third and fourth buttons.

Women do not walk nine semi-sketchy crosstown blocks bedaubed with vegetable gore. She briefly considered taking her blouse off, but remembered that neither do women walk the same dubious route with the boobs out, no matter how well brassiered. So Justine folded her shirttails up over the offense and headed west.

A souvenir shop soon appeared. Justine peeked inside. It was more like a slogan shop: personalized keychains swung from tippy, spinning racks, clever bumper stickers and anarchist patches and gender-identity buttons all but blacked out two walls, and from the open ceiling beams toon-illustrated nylon fanny packs swung like emergency oxygen masks on a depressurized airliner. Piled high on rough plywood tables were hundreds and hundreds of dirty, dusty photo albums. Tacked on the back wall were plain T-shirts in scores of sizes, styles, and colors.

Justine went in. She opened up a random album, denominated #9
KiTTEN'S
. Another album: #103
BEER.
And another: #30
FUNNY
. And #336
BUBiES
. #1061
LiTTLE KiTTEN'S
. #57
BEViS ‘N' BUTTHEAD
.

In #590
DEATH
Justine found a heavy metal–style picture of a muscled and freshly bloodied man in an Ostrogothic helmet holding a huge dripping sword and standing atop a low peak composed of variously diced and headless ex-warriors. A voluptuous red-haired vixen strapped into a suede war bikini clutched his thigh. A mustardy après-massacre fog wisped around them.

“Sir?” said Justine to the proprietor, who was busy eating a falafel while working a massive, creepy mangle that reminded her of a Stephen King story. “I would like this on that white V-neck. Medium size.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head and chewing. “Frazetta, best on baby-doll. Cuff sleeves, yellow color. See? Very chic.”

“Okay.”

Wearing her soft, snug new shirt, mangle-warm, Justine walked back to Mulda's, nearly drugged with adulterous ambition, and strode inside. The waitress had just left for the day.

Three weeks later, Franklin pled guilty to sexual contact with a minor, earning five hard years. The same day, Justine returned to Mulda's, wearing her Frank Frazetta T-shirt, found the waitress, Henriette, and told her that she needed her. Their affair began shortly after, and lasted until their four-month anniversary, when Henriette posted on the bathroom mirror a note saying she was going back to her husband in Neptune, New Jersey. Justine had not known she was married.

From the balcony railing Justine collected her Frank Frazetta shirt and a still-roasting pair of blue cotton-rayon sweatpants whose legs were enlivened by vertical racing stripes. The garment had been semi-stylish for about thirty minutes in 1990, and was now, she felt, fashionably inoffensive.

She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, and was not totally displeased. She removed her clothes and laid them at the end of the bed. It would be her library outfit.

The next day, on the second floor of the main branch of the Austin Public Library, at Eighth and Guadalupe, Justine signed the waiting list for the
public internet, then sat down at a long table, the other end of which was occupied by a skinny Hispanic girl partly hidden behind a yard-high Machu Picchu of dozens of dark red
Who's Who
s.

“Mary Martin?” sotto-voced the commandant of the internet terminals, a woman who reminded Justine of Susan B. Anthony as she had appeared on those old quarter-sized silver dollars, her sharp, pissed profile here renewed in three dimensions. “Your turn.”

The Mary Martin girl jumped up and sprinted to a terminal just being vacated by a towering Eastern Orthodox monk, his camouflage hi-top sneakers visible under his cassock as he walked toward the stairs. Less than ten seconds later, the girl sprinted back to Justine's table.

“No one writes to me,” she said, falling into her chair and flipping open another
Who's Who.

“Justine Moppett,” whispered commandant Anthony. “Term. 5.”

Justine sat down in front of the antique Dell computer. Google returned 650 results for “Quentinforce,” all pointing to the graduate program in literary criticism at the University of Texas.

Justine took the opportunity to google “The Banana Splits,” in whose otherwise-intolerable oeuvre was an episode quickened with the brief appearance of a fetching go-go girl who had once made an impression on Justine. But Google found nothing.

Justine sat down on the linoleum outside of Bass Lecture Hall and listened to the rumble of obsequious group chuckles that slipped under the door. Watchless as she was, Justine had no good guess as to the time, and even less of an idea how much longer Professor Quentinforce “Q” Johnsonson, PhD's lecture on semiotics in
Dr. Who
fan fiction was scheduled to last. At least she'd brought a bag of Andy Capp's Hot Fries to cure the munchies and pass the time.

She crunched. She wiped her orange fingers on her sweatpants. Her right leg was still sore and gimpy from her drive, but Justine felt strong, fearless. Even though the decal on her shirt was wearing away (the warrior's codpiece and one of the vixen's bare feet had disappeared), the indomitability it represented was still powerfully comforting.

“Screw
him
,” said Justine to the unpeopled hallway. She stuck a Hot
Fry between her lips and took a long, cigarette-style drag, and was about to exhale like Katharine Hepburn when her upper respiratory tract decided instead to reject the suspiration and cough dramatically.

The doors flew open and students spewed into the corridor as though Bass Hall had been under several atmospheres of pressure. After the room and hallway finally achieved equilibrium and the last of the students floated away, Justine held her breath to stifle the coda of her orange coughing opus, and peeked inside the deep, steep lecture hall.

A man whom Justine presumed to be Professor Johnsonson sat erect on a tall chair of the sort usually seen clustered around tiny circular tables in sports bars. Next to him was an identical chair, occupied by an old and worn Bit-O-Honey-colored leather satchel.

The professor descended from the chair like an eight-year-old climbing down from a jungle gym. When he alighted on the proscenium, he took his satchel, adjusted a pair of nearly invisible glasses, and then paused, motionless, between the two chairs, which he matched in height.

Justine could no longer hold it; she became a blare of coughs.

“Euk,” said the professor, jumping back like a challenged hamster.

“Sorry,” Justine managed to say after a moment. “Professor Quentinforce Johnsonson? Hak.”

“I am. And you are?”

“Justine Moppett. Husk.”

“Hm,” he said, producing a black comb that he used to expertly restore perfection to a shiny, three-inch pompadour that had become briefly mussed in the excitement. “Moppett.”

“Yeah. I'm…”

“You and I are not acquainted,” he said, holding his glasses a foot in front of his face and pinkering through them.

“Well, yes, we are,” said Justine, all at once frightened and uncertain; lighter by the weight of why confronting this terrifying fifty-six-inch over-degreed Wayne Newton was so urgent. Now she thought her shirt-warrior's lacunae were flags of her own weakness. She grew nauseated, aquiver with vertigo.

“Educate.”

“You mean…,” said Justine, sitting down quickly.

“Me.”

“I'm…”

“An alumna come to exact some form of vengeance.”

“…your…”

“A fanatic, with Uniball and my novel
The Ant Mill,
suggestively spread open to its title, begging for my valuable inscription.”

“No, a…”

“An abductee who has succeeded with the aid of an emery board in severing her bonds and escaping her captor, the dean of engineering, in room 217.”

“Not…”

“A stalker, convinced of our mated souls, with an invitation to a candlelit double suicide.”

“That's not…”

“An heretofore vagrant pupil, here to gruntle.”

“Your ex-…”

“A darkling mirage, courtesy of this morning's tipple of Laphroaig.”

“…child…”

“A sadistic doula of the earth, here to midwife me into hell.”

“I'm just here…”

“A sightseeing Midwestern dotard, separated from her bus.”

“More like…”

“An overgrown limbus puerorum, forever knocking about the University of Texas in blinkered rapture.”

“Warmer…”

“A tousled medium with a nagging missive from my tetchy ex-wife.”

“That last…”

“Another hypomanic independent researchess with a silly postulate on my Nixon-era activities.”

“Yes,” said Justine, loud. “That's really close.”

“Then I recommend you march over to the Ransom Center and entreat the library lady to show you the well-thumbed transcript of my statements to the S—”

“No, not those activities.”

Professor Johnsonson shifted his satchel from one short arm to the other, then stuck his hand into his narrow-waled sport-coat pocket, leaving his thumb out and hooked over the seam, a little pink sea horse hung up on a corduroy fence.

“Then, my lovely scholar, which? I have many secrets, you see, and they will be as such until I'm slabbed and bloodless and the rare-book vultures have started nipping at my archives. Of which this institution and its vampiric acquisitions board will receive not a fragment.”

Justine did not miss the punch on the first syllable of
fragment
that signaled the mercy stroke of the conversation.

The professor began to climb the stairs at the other end of the amphitheater.

“Sir, I met your wife, in New York.”

The professor stopped. He did not look at Justine. He resumed climbing.

“She told me some stuff,” said Justine. “Kind of crazy things—she was pretty bananas—so I came here to ask you if what she told me is true.”

He reached the top of the stairs.

“Did you,” said Justine, “in 1971,
really
return your adopted baby daughter to her birth mother, like a record with a scratch on it?”

He stopped again. He cleared his throat.

“I am impervious to blackmail, you depressive Patty Hearst.”

“Blackmail?” said Justine. “I just want to find myself.”

“Then I urge you to consult a guru, a member of the ill-bathed residuum who specializes in such searches. There are many, many gurus here in our little town.”

“You're mean. I hate you. I'm glad you're not my dad.”

Justine held her breath. She began to turn purple.

The professor took off his glasses and squinted through them as before.

Justine bared her gums, and the cords in her neck contracted.

Holding his glasses before him, the professor started to walk toward Justine along the shallow curve of the top tier of amphitheater seats.

Squeak, G-flat.

“Pity me,” said the professor, beginning to hurry.

Began the milky tears, the drool, the amplifying juggernaut whine.

“Stop.”