Audrey’s Door (30 page)

T
he tenants closed in around her. Cold hands and loose skin. Her feet weren’t touching the floor anymore. She felt herself being carried back into 14B. “Soooop,” she moaned, as they walked the fifty-foot hall. Their hands were soft, as if they’d never washed a dish or lifted a bag of groceries. But like a game of light as a feather, there were so many of them that they each only needed their fingers to hoist her up over their heads. “No. Peeeease, no.”

Into the dark den to find rippling bits of clothes and chopped cardboard and Wolverine, all laced with her blood. Tiny red ants circled the hole in the floor. “I’m-get-you,” she said. “Even if I have come back an haunt-you.”

“My dear,” Loretta answered. “We’d be delighted!” They laid her on the floor next to the air mattress. Her feet felt cold and stiff, like ice. So did her hands.
She was shivering even though she was sweaty and hot. Loretta and Marty stood over her, while behind, the rest cleared the smashed old door from the room, then piled more moving boxes in its place. To her left, someone returned the grisly rebar to the side of the piano, along with a shiny red toolbox.

“We can’t have you calling Romeo!” a man in a blue Armani suit from the early 1960s announced, then shoved her cell phone into his pocket, while an old woman unplugged her laptop and packed it under her arm, and another collected her soiled pants and shoes, so her only clothing was Clara’s sweat suit.

Marty held her wrist with shaking fingers while looking at his watch. She was convulsing now, and she didn’t dare take a deep breath. Her chest felt like it might split open.

“How much did you give her?” he called into the crowd.

“Nobody ever died from a little insulin. I take it every day,” a woman with coarse, dyed-black hair and more gold necklaces than 1980s Mr. T. answered. Marty pumped the plastic mattress with air, then helped Audrey on top of it.

“Oh, stop touching the girls, you dirty old man,” Loretta teased.

“Hear, hear, Marty Hearst! Don’t play with the girls; you don’t know where they’ve been!” Evvie Waugh shrieked, then slapped Marty on the ass with Edgardo’s cane. The sound was sharp, nearly wet, as if it had cut open Marty’s thin-skinned ass:
Whhhack!

Marty grimaced. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. Loretta clapped. “Hear! Hear!” And then the rest were clapping, too.

In the commotion, Franics’ mask came loose. Audrey gasped. His face was badly scarred. Something had broken the bridge between his nostrils, and it had healed wrong. One side was closed over with skin, and the
other had opened up too wide. His left eye was missing, and its socket swelled with infection. It was as if the man had smashed his own face through a window, and then, instead of cleaning it or going to an emergency room, had covered it with gauze and never looked at it again, even while it itched and festered.

“Monsters,” Audrey whispered, as the others looked upon his gore, and laughed, clapping all the harder.

“Boo!” Francis shouted, then peered down at Audrey as she convulsed: “BOO!” The tenants kept clapping, only they were jeering, too. Galton leaped across the den, waltzing with an imaginary partner. “BOO!”

In the commotion, Marty leaned too close. She flinched, thinking he might kiss her. Instead, he rubbed his lips against her ear and whispered so fast that she had to replay his words a few times before she understood them. “HoldonOkayHoldon!”

Then he stood and announced to the others, “Someone get her a blanket. She’s gone into hypoglycemic shock.”

Audrey closed her eyes. Her heart clenched and unclenched. She tried to think of calming memories, to slow down its beating. Her old apartment with Saraub. His hands on the back of her neck. The rooftop design of the Parkside Plaza.

“What-sa matta with her? Why doesn’t she have blankets? Is this another homeless?” the woman holding her laptop asked. “The homeless
never
work, they’re too stupid.”

“—I thought we told Edgardo no dirty girls. Didn’t we say that? An architect. A career girl, no attachments. That’s what we said,” Evvie answered.

Audrey drifted, closing her eyes. Chest clenching, she couldn’t catch her breath.

“—And what did he bring us? A psycho or something? Isn’t her mother in the loony bin? She gives me the craziest fucking nightmares!”

“—I like them. I haven’t been to the Film Forum in thirty years. Nobody here ever dreams anything new.”

“—I’m glad Edgardo’s gone. I didn’t care for his accent. I only like Castilian Spanish. Besides, we should get Irish to clean,” the doctor with the kind face announced.

“—It’ll work this time. I could tell the second she took the tour. The Breviary likes her.” This from Evvie.

“—Shaddup! It likes me better than any of you!” Loretta shrilled.

And then, something heavy on Audrey’s chest. It was soft and relieved her shivering. Jayne’s pink comforter.

“—Do
you
think it’ll work this time, smarty Marty?”

“Yeah, smarty Marty! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” Loretta screeched.

Marty cleared his throat. She recognized his voice without having to look because it was ripe with contempt. What was more remarkable, they knew it, and didn’t care. From the way they interrupted and shouted, not one of them held another in regard. They’d known each other since they were children. Half of them were probably siblings or at least distant cousins. It occurred to her that after more than eighty years in the same building, without ever having kids or getting jobs, they played the role of children, and The Breviary their parents, in the oldest dysfunctional family in New York.

“She knows what she’s doing,” Marty said. “The Breviary could get inside the others, but it was like using a pencil to build a house. The tools weren’t right. Even when they offered a sacrifice, they couldn’t get their doors to open. She will.”

“Who will she sacrifice?” Evvie asked.

“Romeo!” Loretta cried. “I knew I liked that darkie!”

“It’s all about proper tools,” Marty muttered. He sounded like he might be near tears. “None of us were equipped. Not even Jayne. Just this one.”

“You’re the tool, Marty Hearst,” somebody shouted, and they all started hooting again. The sound grew distant as they headed back down the hall.

“—Where’s my Mr. Frisky? Mr. Frisky!” Loretta asked.

“—I could kill that stupid cat…” This from Evvie.

“Im nadda tool. You cant useme. Not gonna kill my boyfriend I’ll kill you!” Audrey mumbled, but by now they were too far away to hear.

“—My apartment is so full of red ants I had to move up to 14A. When are we getting a new super?” Now Galton.

“—I ate your goddamned Frisky, and Toto too,” Evvie announced.

Their voices trailed. The last to leave turned out the lights, and everything in 14B went dark.

A
t first, she chewed her lip to keep from falling asleep. Tasted salt. Tried to frighten herself by imagining Schermerhorn with her in the room. Knew logically that she had to escape but did not feel the urgency. Shaking too hard. Too tired: her chest was a tightened fist.

Insulin. She wasn’t diabetic, and two hypodermics of the stuff didn’t sound safe. What propelled her was the possibility that she might die. With some of the larger strips of her own torn clothes, she tied her kneecap into place to keep it from floating. She blacked out a few times as she tightened the cloth, but the insulin dulled the pain, and she finished the job.

Hands pulling, legs bent, then straightening, like a frog trying to swim on dry land, she dragged herself out of the den and down the dark hall. The pain in her knee
was bad enough that she wished she had the strength to cut it off.

The floors began to hum.
Momma?
a child’s voice called.
Is that you?

“Stop,” she whispered as she took another lunge.

In the bathroom, she heard the tub faucet glug. “Please, no,” she said as the hall floor, at once carpeted and bare, soaked her (Clara’s) sweatpants with bathwater.

Too tired to keep going, she stayed on the ground for a while. Twenty minutes. Kept her hands down over her head so she didn’t have to see, and pretended it was quiet. When the shaking relented, and her heart muscles loosened enough for breath to come and go without a fight, she tried again. Crawled five more feet. Then took another break. Counted back from fifty. Wasn’t ready. Counted back from one hundred, and started crawling again.

She remembered happier days, even as Clara’s children gurgled. She thought about the itchy wool bedspread that Saraub loved, and the crumb-ridden remote control lodged within their futon’s deep fold. The time she and her mother had robbed the 7-Eleven of Slurpies and hot dogs, then eaten them in the back of the Chevy. On an empty stomach, Ball Park Cheese Dogs make the best meal in the world. Of her work, and her desk, and the view from the top floor of Vesuvius, and all those pretty things she’d planned to build inside New York’s holes.

In her mind, she was already scooting down the emergency-exit stairs on her bottom. Crawling out the lobby, unseen. Calling the cops on these fuckers and incriminating them for Jayne’s murder. The hope was a bubble in her stomach, self-contained, unsinkable. That was all she needed, to make it those last five feet.

There was light through the keyhole. Light! Oh, how she loved light! She wanted to live so badly. To feel wet grass with bare feet, and build cities. To marry Saraub,
and fill their house in Yonkers with children, and grandchildren, and tire swings. She wanted to run from here so fast that she flew.

She counted back from three, then ten, then twenty. With a grunt, pushed her feet against the slanted floor, and stood. Her knee screamed. “Ooooowwwwww,” she whispered, as tears rolled, and her nerves came to life—a pinching, throbbing suit of skin. Still, she clasped the gilded wood trim, then the glass knob. Breathing fast but quiet, she twisted the handle. It did not turn. She pulled it. Pushed it. But no. It was locked from the outside.

She looked out the peephole. A black eye with a thin layer of cataract peered back at her. Then the figure stepped away, and she saw that it was Loretta Parker. She waved her index finger back and forth.

“Dirty girl!”

D
ays passed. The sun rose, then set, then rose, like a stop-motion camera. When she was thirsty, she slurped water from the sink. When she was hungry, she rationed the leftover Chinese food she’d ordered with Jayne, and when that was gone, just like back in Hinton, she got weaker.

The pile of boxes got smaller. The door got bigger. The humming walls lulled her into a place between sleep and waking life, where around one corner there was a pretty house in Yonkers, and around another there was Schermerhorn, leaning over a tub full of sleeping cherubs while his ghost wife, Clara, screamed.

The thing in her stomach filled the crevices of her body. When she looked in the bathroom mirror, she didn’t see her own reflection. Only a black-eyed sil
houette that did not quite stand erect. So she broke the mirror, and even broke the chrome toaster, too.

Hours, days, or maybe weeks later, Martin and Loretta returned. Wearing their dusty wool suit and Claudette Colbert silk, they were a mad couple in frayed finery, like ghosts from the
Titanic.

Marty carried a sandwich and glass of red juice on an antique pewter plate. He bent down and placed it at her bare, crusted feet. She didn’t remember how they’d gotten here, whether she’d been sleeping or awake. She didn’t know for how long they’d been standing over her, either.

“I don’t know why we’re bothering. We’re not gonna keep her for a pet,” Loretta groused, as Marty set down the plate. Her sausage-tight gown was slit down the ass, revealing soiled satin panties full of holes.

Audrey smelled the food. Her mouth watered. She peeled back the bread. Tuna and stale mayonnaise. It had been left out, so its sides were yellowed. Still, she took a bite. It was the best sandwich she’d ever tasted. Her eyes shone with gratitude. Her stomach gurgled, and for few seconds, stopped hurting. She ate slowly, chewing every bite again and again, to make sure it stayed down. The flavors—salt, tuna, sugar, fat—were so crisp that they snapped. And then, something sharp. She bit hard. The temporary crown in the back of her mouth broke in half.

“Ah! Wha—?” she cried, just as Martin coughed, and her tongue traced the outline of the thing that he’d sneaked into her food.

“What? There something in that? Martin did you put something in that?” Loretta whined as he bent forward to inflate the deflated mattress she’d been sleeping in and whispered in her ear quick and pleading with rancid dog breath: “Please!”

“Marty, did you put something in the food?” Loretta
asked. “She thinks she’s so pretty but she’s not. I could dye my hair brown, too.”

Audrey shook her head. Said something that sounded like the old, high-maintenance Audrey, before The Breviary. “I don’t like Wonder Bread. It’s all corn syrup.”

Loretta narrowed her eyes. She bent down, and her dressing gown ripped along its side seam. Flesh bulged. Either she didn’t notice, or she didn’t care. “Well, la!” she said, pointing her hip to the left, “Di!” the hip went to the right, “Da!” the hip jutted back again.

They left. The sound they made as they clopped down the hall was peculiar. A
clack-clacking,
like their bodies were becoming harder than flesh. They were changing into something spiderlike, just like Schermerhorn.

Audrey finished the sandwich, and felt the most grounded she’d been in days. The most like herself. She waited an hour. Maybe two. She couldn’t tell. Was afraid to take Martin’s present out of her mouth. She didn’t want the apartment to see.

She limped down the hall. Her knee was better—the ligament had reattached, but it still wasn’t healed. Same dirty clothes. Hair so greasy it was wet. She spit out half her crown, along with the small brass key. It fit into a knee-height hole at the edge of the door and unsprung the lock. Then she put the key back into the side of her cheek and opened the door.

In the carpet were sandy bits of ceramic and a lampshade. Jayne’s ashes? No, Hula Girl’s remains. Tears welled. Guilt gnawed. “Jayne,” she whispered, then kept limping.

The fire door to the stairs creaked. She squinted, as if to diminish the sound, then began hopping. Cold metal against her feet. She leaped two steps with the left foot, then swung the right leg without bending it. Panting. Panting. The sound of her breath echoed in the metal chamber.

Slap-swing-slap-swing!
How many floors? She didn’t know. The farther she got, the more she allowed herself to hope.

Slap-swing-slap-swing!
The lobby! But then, she looked through the small wire window built into the fire door and saw the tenants. They were out there. Sitting on the antique couches in the former church altar where Schermerhorn’s body had once hung. Chatting with each other in old cocktail dresses and faded black suits. Was it Monday again already? Cocktail night for the unemployed? They were drinking Manhattans with cherries. Thirty of them. Maybe more. She was crestfallen, like needles in her stomach, poking holes in a thousand places, until she remembered: there had to be an exit through the basement.

She climbed down one more flight and shoved open the fire door. The basement stank something terrible. Red ants, everywhere. Scampering things, too. Her feet got wet on the peeling, gray-painted cement floors. But at least the lights were on. In her dark apartment, she’d missed light so much. You imagine such terrible things in the dark.

She scooted through the hall, leaning against the wall for balance. There were doors on all sides. A pile of garbage bags lay straight ahead.

She looked for EXIT signs, but didn’t see any. Ants scampered each time she stepped. In her mind she dissected them; pulled their chitin inside out, then made them disappear. Made the place smell like roses. Made the air sweet as hash. The visualization worked, and she kept moving.

She pushed open a door on the left. No window to climb through, just a cot and green wool blanket. A dresser with a photo of Edgardo and a portly, brown-haired woman. His wife? And next to that, a photo of a green-eyed brunette standing knee deep in snow. She
looked like Audrey, only younger and angrier. Stephanie. So, none of it had been a lie. And where was he, Edgardo? Even if he’d been fired in a hurry, he wasn’t the type to leave his things behind.

She tried the next door. Locked. The next. Locked, too. The next, storage. Three rusted bicycles. The old-fashioned, reclining kind from the 1800s. A weathered Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit. A moldy cigar box. A pair of wooden skis. And in the corner, the trappings of the old Episcopalian Church. Crucifixes, chalices, wooden idols of Madonna and Child. Stone carved Archangels Michael and Gabriel. The former banishing Lucifer from heaven, the latter heralding the joyous news of man’s redemption. Full of cracks and missing limbs, they were heaped together like junk, and covered in more than a half century of grime.

She shut the door and kept walking to the end of the hall. The stink was overwhelming. She swallowed down her bile and gimped farther. Yes, this place was awful, but at least it wasn’t 14B.

She got to the end—the source of the stench: garbage. Grocery bags filled with kitchen offal, black Hefty bags, white toilet-room bags, and random crap piled fifteen feet high. Up above was the opening for the trash chute. A nest of red ants swarmed above the dross. Over the last few days or weeks or months, the tenants must have tossed their garbage as usual, but no one had carried it to the curb. It figured that behind the mess, she could see the red gleam of an EXIT sign.

“Oh,” she moaned. “Oh, screw you,” she said to God, or herself, or, most likely, the tenants of The Breviary. Then she did a strange jig. Her hands flailed limp wristedly, her head shook back and forth, and she hopped on her good foot.
Rats! Literally!

When she was done, she sucked up her courage, along with her bile, and lifted the first bag. It made a wet,
slapping sound as she separated it from the pack and flung it to the side of the hall. When she lifted the second bag, something squeaked. She would have mistaken the sound for a human scream if she hadn’t seen the big-eyed brown rodent. (Rat or mouse? She hoped the latter, but guessed the former, judging by its thick, ribbed tail.)

She scooped five more bags. She was getting there. She smiled at her accomplishment, and imaged the tenants’ faces when they discovered that she was gone. Or better yet, when the cops showed up.

But then, something brownish pink peeked out from two plastic West Side Market bags. She took a double take. A triple take. A human hand, and on its fourth finger, a copper ring.

“Oh, no,” she cried. She took a breath, turned away, then turned back and pretended that it was not Edgardo at all. It was a mannequin, the kind you use to sew clothes. But even as she lifted another bag, she remembered those tears in his eyes, and the way he’d tried to keep her from moving into 14B, all as penance for Stephanie, who would never know how much her father had loved her.

The smell was coming from him. His body had rotted. Ants chewed. Other things, too. With a few more grunts, she lifted the rest of the bags in her way. The path to the door was almost clear. Only one thing left to move.

“Sorry about this,” she said, then closed her eyes, and pretended he was a doll. Shoved him with her bare foot. His skin made a splatting sound, but didn’t give. Full of gas and rot. So she bent down and dragged him by the underarms. His neck rolled, and she gagged, then swallowed fast, because she didn’t want to lose the only lunch she’d eaten in a week.

His skull was cracked from temple to jaw. The cut was uneven, and the skin around it was torn as if by
something barbed. A rebar, she guessed. Her rebar. The tenants. They’d murdered him, then tossed him in the garbage. What a bunch of shits.

She heaved him aside, then lifted one more bag. Then free! She twisted the handle. Didn’t believe it. Tried again. Had enough energy, this time, to slam herself against it. Then pulled the key out from her mouth. It didn’t fit.

The steel door was locked.

Could she go back and get the rebar, bash the dead bolt? No, the door was metal. The echo would carry through the trash chute and send the tenants charging.

The stench prevented her from wallowing. She started back. Climbed the stairs. Up one flight. Quiet as a mouse.

She considered making a run for it through the lobby, but with her weak knee she wasn’t fast enough. Better to wait until they were gone and sneak out. So she waited by the fire door as the hours passed. One? Two? No watch by which to tell. The tenants danced and drank. And drank some more. Spilled their booze on the old altar, laughing gaily, maniacally, like the lone survivors of the Third World War.

She counted them: forty-seven. Wondered if any had left their apartment doors open. Remembered—yes!—some of them might have phones. She climbed the stairs. Up, up, up. Thought the best way to start would be on fourteen. Easier to hide if she heard someone coming. She crept up the stairwell to fourteen and saw that her luck was in. The doors all down the row were open.

She started with 14C—Loretta. She walked down its long hall. Slip-slide was the sound her feet made. On her way, she stopped and peered inside the master bedroom. Stacks of china dolls lay on the queen-sized, canopied bed, their cheeks dotted with red circles of blush. Period costume cowgirls, Spanish dancers, Victorians with
watching eyes that might goggle closed if you laid them down to sleep. She quick counted seventy-two dolls, which probably meant that they, and not Loretta, slept on a proper bed.

She didn’t see a phone, so she kept walking. Into the den. More dolls. This time they hung from fishing-line nooses nailed to the ceiling. Their bodies made a curtain between the den and hall and she had to push them aside to get through.

In the center of the den, she found a half-built door made out of broken white porcelain that had been glued together and covered with blinking dolls’ eyes. The door was only three feet tall, and pieces of it had fallen and shattered.

Next to that was a pink princess phone. She picked it up. “Huh!” she sucked in a breath of awful surprise. No dial tone, just ringing, and then a message. “The customer needs to contact accounts payable. Thank you…. The customer needs to contact…No emergency services in this area…”

She hung up.

And then, she hadn’t seen. How hadn’t she seen? Loretta was sitting at the turret. Drool caked her chin. Her bare feet were bloody, and beneath them were the crushed porcelain faces of more dolls. “Wrong apartment,” she said, then resumed crushing, like an Italian peasant stomping grapes. “You live in 14B. Don’t forget, stupid.”

Slip-slide.
Audrey headed back where she’d come. Into the main hall, the kind old doctor who’d shot her full of insulin now lay on the red carpet, nude. His hand covered his privates like a fig leaf over a statue until he waved at her and revealed the hoary mess. She looked away. Was he there at all, or was she mad?

14D. Evvie Waugh.
Slip-slide!
The hallway walls were mounted with dead animal heads. Only, they hadn’t
been treated with chemicals, and were slowly rotting. The order went like this: moose, bear, badger, panda, bald eagle, gorilla, chimp, and the shrunken African head of a human being. Their skin had all been stuffed, and their eyes replaced with black aggie marbles.

In the middle of the den was a claw-foot tub, in which Evvie, wearing a green velvet dressing robe, reclined with a pile of pillows and a copy of
Decline and Fall.
The tub was Clara’s, of course. Propped against its side was Edgardo’s cane. So many trophies.

“Wrong apartment. Party isn’t until tomorrow night. 14B. You’re the host of honor,” Evvie pronounced, then returned to his book.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, then turned and started out.

14A.
Slip-slide.
Down the hall. All the doors open. Everything empty. Everything dingy. Dried, bloody handprints marred the hallway walls. The low ones belonged to a child, but they got bigger the higher they went. It occurred to her that the prints might all belong to the same person, over a span of fifty years.

Slip-slide.
Into the den. The walls were adorned with red smiley faces, and she didn’t think it was paint. Not a stick of furniture, except for an old rotary phone. She picked it up. Heard the sound, and at first did not believe it.