The Pirate's Daughter (40 page)

“And you expect to get your apartment back just like that, after two years?” Nancy snapped her fingers.

“Happens all the time in this city,” Wilson said. “Call it the Return of the Original Tenant.”

“A friend of a friend lives there now,” Nancy said. “Someone from the coven. Good luck getting her out.”

Wilson took the bus to Overlook and walked across the bridge. The neighborhood had the same medicinal-industrial smell, the same melancholy, forgotten feeling. Big trucks rumbled over the rutted streets, big men in plaid shirts and steel-toed boots behind the wheel.

When Wilson got to his building at number 12, he rang the bell and waited. Looking up, he saw unfamiliar faded red curtains hanging in the windows of his apartment. After a few minutes, a pale, skinny girl in her early twenties came to the door barefoot. She wore a long peasant skirt, an unusual green blouse, and big hoop earrings in her ears, as if she had read instructions in a book on how a witch should dress.

“Yeah?” she said. Her eyes, like Nancy's, were ringed with suspicious circles.

“This is going to sound a little surprising, but you're living in my apartment.…”

The girl frowned and listened impatiently as Wilson talked. He was the original tenant, he said, the lease was in his name, he'd been gone for a while overseas, and now he was back.

“Don't worry, I'll give you some time to find a new place. Take a month, even two if you need it. But by November I'll definitely want my apartment back.” Wilson thought this a generous offer. The girl slammed the door in his face when he was finished. He heard the bolt shooting home on the other side.

“Get the fuck out of here before I call the cops,” the girl shouted through the bolted door, and Wilson heard her hard footsteps going upstairs. He rang the doorbell again; she did not answer, then he went across the street and hid behind the Dumpster, where he waited for several hours, squatting in the fetid, rat-infested gloom.

Lights went on behind the faded red curtains about 7:30, and a full moon went up over the Rubicon District. An hour after that, the blond girl came out wearing a black scarf over her head and carrying a black leather backpack. Wilson crossed the street and went into the vestibule. He counted the tile bricks on the floor and found, beneath the third brick from the wall in the third row, his spare set of keys, sealed in a Ziploc bag, exactly where he had left them over two years before.

He unlocked the double locks on the front door and set the bolt behind him, went upstairs and undid the double locks on the apartment door, and went inside. He spent the next hour putting the young witch's belongings onto the sidewalk out front. There wasn't much: A closetful of clothes—long Gypsy dresses and cowled cloaks, strange lace-up bustiers, two S&M-type leather harnesses, one red, one black with a steel ring in the crotch positioned to fit directly over the vagina—the usual obscure CDs, makeup, tarot cards, a poster of Satan, and a seventies-era poster of a kittycat hanging from a bar with the logo “Hang In There, Baby,” which Wilson assumed to be ironic. The few sticks of broken-down furniture were Wilson's own, as were the towels and bed and sheets and television set.

The refrigerator was nearly empty, but Wilson found enough there to make himself a quesadilla and salad, and he watched a little television and changed the sheets and went to bed. The next morning, he was awakened by a fearsome banging and the sharp, piercing sound of a woman's voice screaming obscenities. He scratched himself, yawned, and went out to the landing window and took out the screen and stuck his head out. The girl stood on the sidewalk amid the pile of her possessions.

“I gave you a chance,” Wilson called down. “Two months was pretty generous, I thought. Now it's tough luck for you.”

The girl turned up her face, purple with rage. “You fuck!” she screamed. “You lousy fuck! I'm a witch, did you know that? I'll curse you, I'll cast a spell on you so your fucking little weenie falls off! You better run because when I'm through with you, your luck will be so fucking bad you will wish you had no luck at all!”

Wilson began to laugh so hard he couldn't stop himself. He closed the window and doubled over on the floor with the unrestrained glee of a ten-year-old who has just put a frog in his sister's bed. When he was able to stop laughing, he dried his eyes and went into the kitchen and made some coffee and two slices of cinnamon toast—the kettle and toaster and crockery were all his—and then he washed up and put on jeans and a T-shirt and set about looking for his books and his winter clothes and his pictures, which he eventually found dumped in moidering heaps in the basement. For the rest of the morning he worked on getting the place back together. At three in the afternoon a pickup truck came for the witch's things. Wilson watched out the window in the kitchenette as the witch and a tall young man wearing black leather motorcycle gear loaded the bed of the pickup. When they drove off, the young man stuck his hand out the window and flashed the finger in Wilson's general direction, but then they were gone, and it didn't matter anymore.

Sunday night Wilson stayed in watching television and soaking his
mildewed clothes in bleach in the tub. When he woke up Monday morning, he called a locksmith and had all the locks changed. Then he went out to look for a job. He was home.

Two months later, on a warm Friday night in late September, a nagging nostalgia brought Wilson out on the ferry to Blackpool Island. He wandered along the boardwalk with the Friday night crowds—the young toughs from Spanish Bend and their hard señoritas; the barrel-chested older men in shorts and sandals with socks, reading the sports pages on benches overlooking the sea; the quiet suburban kids from Glizzard and Point Broome lining up for the Tilt-a-Whirl—and around ten o'clock he found himself on the loggia at Bazzano's.

Like everything else in the city, Bazzano's looked pretty much the same. Wilson sat alone at a table beneath the lights and ordered a cappuccino and a shot of whiskey and listened to the wind from the ocean and the sound of the waves against the seawall, and a lump rose in his throat, a longing for something that he could not name. The bohemians with their beautiful lissome women came and went up the pier, and the fragrance of their foreign cigarettes and their laughter and their voices raised in song filled the air as pale stars glided over the dark silhouette of the city across the narrows.

Wilson watched and drank his cappuccino and sipped at his whiskey. He envied their lives, so free from convention and plainness—they were painters or musicians, they didn't have money, but they had talent and beautiful women and friends—then he looked at his watch, and it was midnight, and he asked for the check. He waited for a while and the check did not come and he turned and shot an impatient glance at the busing station. Wilson's waitress, a tall,
leggy blonde with a nose ring, lingered there involved in an intense conversation with a shorter dark-haired waitress who stood with her back to his table.

“Something familiar about that back,” Wilson mumbled to himself, then the dark-haired waitress turned and approached and sat down across from him.

For a long moment he didn't know what to say.

Andrea looked like a different person from the harried, quarrelsome career woman he had known, more like the fresh-faced ingenue who had come to the city eight years before, straight from grad school in the provinces. She was about thirty-two now and quite attractive in a sad, urban way, and her eyes were big and moist and expressive. Her dark hair was cut in a sexy 1920s-style shag, with strands curled carefully around her ears. There was no uniform for the wait staff at Bazzano's. Andrea wore a tight white blouse open a couple of buttons to show a lacy black bra, a black miniskirt, and black hose. Her lipstick, some undefined effervescent color, shone in the yellow light of the loggia.

“You're back,” Andrea said.

Wilson blinked, remembering their life together in quick, bright flashes.

“Aren't you going to say anything?” Andrea said.

“How are you, Andrea?” Wilson said at last.

“Doing well.” Andrea nodded solemnly. “How about you?”

“Do you work here?” Wilson said.

Andrea nodded again, her dark eyes fixed on his face.

“What happened to the Tea Exchange?”

“I quit,” she said.

“You were vice-president,” Wilson said. “Why did you quit?”

Andrea hesitated, glanced at the bohemians at the bar inside. Just then a young man with a ponytail climbed to a table beneath the tin ceiling, saxophone in hand. A second later he began to blow a slow, melancholy tune.

“It wasn't working out,” Andrea said in a voice that Wilson had
to lean close to hear. “After you left, nothing made sense. I got real sick of the grind and realized I was missing my life. I didn't do anything but work, you remember. Too many twelve-hour days. So I quit and I sold my condo in Pond Park Tower and I bought a little loft apartment in the Bend.”

“The Bend? You're kidding.” Wilson almost laughed.

“That's right,” she said, smiling for the first time. “Actually I love it there. I paint now, and there's plenty of light and space—” Then she stopped and looked away. “I can't really talk. I'm in the middle of my shift. I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink later at some after-hours place. Unless it's a problem for your girlfriend or your wife.”

“I don't have a girlfriend or a wife,” Wilson said. “There's just me.”

Andrea brightened. “Then you don't mind? We can catch up. I'd like to hear what you've been up to.”

“Sure,” Wilson said.

At 2:15, they caught the ferry to the Bend and went to a smoky little basement bar called the Last Word that had faux shrunken heads hanging from the ceiling and a 4:00
A.M
. license. They had a couple of daiquiris there, but it was too loud to hear each other talk, and the shrunken heads made Wilson nervous. Just after 3:30, they found themselves in the street again, the glimmer of false dawn in the sky.

“Not sure where we can go at this hour,” Andrea said. “Tony's is closed. The only other five o'clock place is the bar at the Orion Hotel, and that's such a scene.”

“Not the Orion,” Wilson said.

“I live just a couple of blocks away. Why don't you come over to the apartment for a nightcap?”

Andrea's version of a small loft apartment was the whole top floor of the old Castle Lock Building, redone by an architect she had brought over from Italy. There was a polished hardwood floor the
size of a basketball court, exposed brick walls, a million glass blocks, and a whole row of arched windows overlooking the lights of the Bend and the slips of the marina to the south. Half the place had been turned into a studio, and a couple of dozen big canvases lay propped against the walls: heroic nudes in bright colors, urban landscapes, an apple, a snake. Wilson liked what he saw immediately. On the easel now was a half-finished portrait of a woman wearing a long pink skirt, naked from the waist up.

“That's my new friend Pam,” Andrea said. “She has perfect breasts. Don't you think she has perfect breasts?”

Wilson studied the painting for a moment and had to agree, then he went around the room, looking at the canvases.

“Damn, you can really paint,” he said when he had seen them all. “When did you start to paint?”

Andrea shrugged. “I never told you, but I used to paint in college,” she said. “Actually I was going to major in art, but my dad forced me into finance. ‘Study finance,' he said, ‘paint on the side.' Of course all I ever did was finance after that, and I tried to stop thinking about art because it depressed me that I wasn't doing any.”

“Shit, these are great,” Wilson said, stopping at the painting of the snake. “I really like this one.”

“Some of them are O.K.,” Andrea said, and she blushed and went into the kitchen separated from the living room by a wall of glass blocks. She made two screwdrivers and brought them out. “Thought I had some gin and a bottle of tonic,” she said. “I don't. I've got vodka and OJ.”

“That's fine,” Wilson said. He took the drink, and they sat on the leather couch in front of the windows and drank for a minute in silence.

Andrea spoke first. “Where have you been these last couple of years?”

Wilson put his drink on the glass coffee table. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Try me,” she said.

“England, the Azores. But Africa, mostly,” he said. “Bupanda. I've even seen Lake Tsuwanga. Been down the Hilenga in a canoe.”

“That's something,” she said. “I used to have trouble getting you on a plane to Pennsylvania.”

“I know.”

“So what did you do in Africa? Grow coffee?”

“I was married.”

“Oh.” Andrea tried to sound disinterested. “And you're not married anymore?”

“No, it was a mistake,” Wilson said.

Andrea made a nervous move with her drink, spilled it across the glass-topped coffee table. “Oops!” she said, and went into the kitchen to get some paper towels. She came back with the towels and got on her knees and began to wipe up the orange juice, then she stopped. Orange juice leaked off the table to make a yellow puddle on the hardwood.

“Truth is, I got that job at Bazzano's because in a weird way, it reminded me of you,” she said in a small voice. “It was the last place I had heard from you. I've been there for almost a year and a half now, and I still try to imagine what table you were at when you called me. Or were you at the bar?”

“I was at a table on the loggia,” Wilson said.

“That's what I figured,” she said. “And you were with her, weren't you? Your wife. I could tell by your voice that you had someone waiting.”

Wilson was impressed. “Yes,” he said. “She was there.”