TEN
1
An uncle arrived in town unannounced and expected to be entertained. I thought it would be a day; it turned out to be two and a half. I found myself beaming these thoughts at him: “Isn’t it getting to be time for you to move on? Aren’t you homesick by now? Wouldn’t you rather explore the city on your own? Doesn’t it ever occur to you that I might have other things to do?” He was not receptive.
A few minutes before I left to take him to the airport, I got a call and an ultimatum from a client: No more excuses, not one word—do the work now, or send back the advance. I said I’d do the work now. I took my visiting relative to the airport, came back, and sat down at the word processor. It wasn’t that big a chore, I told myself—pointless to make a trip downtown just to tell Ishmael I wasn’t going to be there for another day or two.
But in the water of my bones and bowels there was a tremor of apprehension.
I pray about teeth—doesn’t everyone? I don’t have time to floss. You know. Hang in there, I tell them; I’ll get around to you before it’s too late. But during the second night a molar that was way, way in the back gave up the ghost. The next morning I found a dentist who agreed to take it out and give it a decent burial. In the chair, while he gave me shot after shot and fiddled with his equipment and checked my blood pressure, I found myself thinking, “Look, I don’t have time for this—just yank it out and let me go.” But he turned out to be right. Oh my, what roots that tooth had—and it seemed to be a lot closer to my spine than my lips. At one point I asked him if it wouldn’t be easier to go in from the back.
When it was over, another side of his personality emerged. He became a Tooth Policeman, and I had been well and truly pulled over to the curb. He scolded me, made me feel small, irresponsible, and immature. I nodded and promised and nodded and promised, thinking, Please, Officer, give me one more chance, set me loose on my own recognizance. Eventually he did, but when I got home my hands were shaking and the gauze pads that came out of my jaw weren’t pretty. I spent the day gobbling pain-killers and antibiotics and drinking myself silly with bourbon.
In the morning I got back to work, but that tremor of apprehension was still singing in my water.
“One more day,” I said to myself. “I’ll be able to get this in the mail tonight, and one more day won’t matter.”
The gambler who puts his last hundred on odd and watches the ball hop decisively into slot 18 will tell you he knew it was a losing bet the instant the chip left his hand. He knew it, felt it. But of course if it had taken one more hop and landed in 19, he would cheerfully admit that such presentiments often prove to be wrong.
Mine was not.
From the head of the hallway, I saw an industrial-sized floor scrubber parked outside Ishmael’s half-open door. Before I could get there, a middle-aged man in a gray uniform backed out and started locking up. I called to him to wait.
“What are you doing?” I asked, somewhat inelegantly, when he was in range of a normal tone of voice.
It didn’t really deserve an answer, and he didn’t give me one.
“Look,” I said, “I know it’s none of my business, but would you mind telling me what’s going on here?”
He looked at me as if I were a roach he was sure he’d killed a week ago. Nonetheless, he finally worked his mouth a bit and let a few words through: “Getting the place ready for a new tenant.”
“Ah,” I said. “But, uh, what happened to the old tenant?”
He shrugged indifferently. “Got evicted, I guess. Wasn’t paying her rent.”
“Her rent?” I had momentarily forgotten that Ishmael was not his own caretaker.
He gave me a doubtful look. “Thought you knew the lady.”
“No, I knew the uh … the uh …”
He stood
there blinking at me.
“Look,” I said again, floundering, “there’s probably a note in there for me, or something.”
“Ain’t nothin’ at all in there now, ‘cept a bad smell.”
“Would you mind if I had a look for myself?”
He turned back to the door and locked it. “You talk to the management about it, okay? I got things to do.”
2
“The management,” in the person of a receptionist, couldn’t think of any reason why I should be given access to that office or anything else, including information of any kind, on any subject, beyond what I already knew: that the tenant had failed to keep up with the rent and had accordingly been evicted. I tried to unnerve her with a piece of truth, but she rejected scornfully my suggestion that a gorilla had once occupied the premises.
“No such animal has ever been kept—or ever will be kept—on any property managed by this firm.”