79
Connell hadn’t heard Mr. Marku coming, and when he looked up from the book and saw him standing there, he let out a strangled yelp.
“Come to my office,” Mr. Marku said. Connell rose to follow him. “First, tie up those newspapers.”
When Connell entered, Mr. Marku was staring at the wall-length aquarium.
“You read a lot,” he said.
Connell nodded nervously.
“You’ve heard of Camus’s The Fall.”
He suspected a trap. Mr. Marku always dropped his bombs at the end of a shift, when you had little time to react. Connell was in Mr. Marku’s doghouse for coming in late on a seven-to-three shift on a Saturday. He had thought that Mr. Marku never slept, that he had cameras trained on every entrance and exit, until he figured out that Sadik had ratted on him. The guys built up capital however they could.
“Yes,” he said, “but I haven’t read it.”
Mr. Marku was proud of the year he’d spent at Iona College before family responsibilities forced him to drop out. More than once he’d mentioned that he’d planned to be an English major.
“It’s a parable of hell,” Mr. Marku said. “The devil is this bartender.” He just waved his hand. “It’s too much to get into.” He knocked a smoke out of his pack and lighted it in the windowless office. “You’ll come in Wednesday at six forty-five in the morning.” He handed him a bundle of folded clothes. “You’ll wear this doorman uniform. You’ll shave.”
80
As Bethany backed out of the driveway, Eileen saw Connell coming up the hill. Most nights he came home after midnight, and sometimes, when he didn’t have to work the next morning, when the sun was rising. Eileen rolled down her window.
“There’s chicken in the fridge.” She expected him to wave and keep walking, but he stopped.
“Where are you going?”
She turned to Bethany, who took her hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Out for a while,” she said. “There are potatoes too. Just put one in the microwave.”
? ? ?
When she came home, Sergei was waiting in the kitchen, sipping from a cup of what looked like coffee, but it could have contained vodka for all she knew.
“Hard work today,” he said.
“Is everything okay?”
“In Russia, even, I don’t work this hard.”
“What’s up? What happened?”
“Is no good to talk about it.”
“Is Ed okay?”
“He is asleep.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“I don’t mind to work hard,” he said. “But he is very hard work.”
He said it with a whistle that indicated a certain professional appreciation. She nodded in solidarity.
“He wipe shit on walls in bathroom,” he said. “I clean it up. Between tiles. Is all gone.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“You mind if I . . . ?” He had taken out his pack and already had a cigarette in his mouth. He was flicking the lighter absently.
“Let’s go outside,” she said.
They stood on the patio and he lit the cigarette. She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. He pulled on his cigarette and looked at her. Behind it his eyes smoldered. He was stocky and his hair was thick where it wasn’t sparse. He stood in the middle of the patio but seemed to take up much of its space.
“You want?” he asked, extending the pack.
“No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”
“Try,” he said. “One time. Is very relaxing.”
She had never had a cigarette. Aside from the pure brain-dead imbecility of subjecting yourself willingly to an avoidable carcinogen, she had always found them vile, noxious, smelly things—except for a brief period in high school when she loved a boy who smoked and she was intoxicated by the aroma mixed with his cologne and sweat, and the taste of it in his mouth and the rush she got when she kissed him just after he’d had one. But the memory of watching her mother smoke had permanently soured her on them. Her stomach turned whenever she saw a full ashtray; she imagined being made to eat it, butt by butt, and gagging on the ashes.
“Fine,” she said, and she took a cigarette from him. Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren’t that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they’d been had found release through a necessary valve. She reached her hand out for the lighter, but he just took his own cigarette out of his mouth, lit hers from the flaming tip of his own, and handed it to her.
“You have to light it right,” he said.
She took a few breaths without disturbance. Sergei told her to take a deeper puff, and she did so, looking at him for confirmation. He was smiling an amused smile. Her lungs filled with heat and she fell into a loud cough.
“Don’t laugh at me,” she said.
“This always happens,” he said.
“Usually to teenagers,” she said. “Not to fifty-four-year-old women.”
“It happened to me,” he said smoothly. “You are not fifty-four.”
“I am.”
“You may have fifty-four years”—he was gesturing in an inscrutable way that she assumed would have conveyed more to a Russian native—“but you are not fifty-four.”
She blushed. “I think I’m done with this,” she said, dropping it and stepping on it. It was nearly the whole cigarette, and her embarrassment made her kick it behind her toward the house.
“You work very hard,” Sergei said, continuing to smoke. “My wife has no job for thirty years.”
“Thank you,” she said, absurdly. Talking to Sergei made her uneasy. At first she thought it was the language barrier, but now she was beginning to think it was something else, a tension rooted in the strangeness of having a man living in her house.
“I didn’t want to have job past sixty,” he said, finishing his cigarette and stepping on the butt. They went back inside. Sergei sat at the table glancing at the newspaper while she put dishes away.
She didn’t hear him on the stairs, and her back was to him when he entered, but there was no mistaking that Ed had joined them, because her stomach seized in nervous anxiety. She heard the clicking sound he made when he was trying to get words out, like the distress call of a bird.
Sergei put down the paper and gave him a long-suffering look.
“Why don’t you sit and I’ll make you some tea,” she said.
“My,” Ed stammered, and the clicking became more desperate.
“Ed, honey. Please.”
Sergei held up a hand to silence her. He gestured for Ed to take his seat as he rose and passed out of the room. She heard his heavy footfalls on the stairs and unconsciously poured the water out of the kettle she’d been heating instead of filling the cup she’d set out. The steam rose from the sink. When she’d caught herself, there wasn’t enough left for a full cup.
“Look what you made me do,” she said.
Ed calmed down once Sergei had left the room. He sat where Sergei had been and shook his head, continuing to click, but in a softer way, like a cooing bird. “No,” he stammered, quietly.
“It’s okay,” Eileen stood behind him and rubbed his back. “It’s okay.”
“Mine,” he said.