“Sure, baby, sure. What happened to your ma’s piano? You sell it or something to buy this sweet little grand?”
“No,” I said shortly. My mother’s piano had been destroyed in the fire that gutted my own apartment three years earlier. “And don’t think you can make me forget what I’m saying by raving over the piano. I’m going back to bed. You can sleep or not as you please, but in the morning you’re going someplace else.”
“Oh, don’t look so ugly, Vicki. Victoria, I mean. It’ll ruin your complexion if you frown like that. And where else am I supposed to turn in the middle of the night if not to my own flesh and blood?”
“Knock it off,” I said wearily. “I’m too tired for it.”
I shut the hall door without saying good night. I didn’t bother to warn her not to rummage around for my liquor—if she wanted it badly enough, she’d find it, then apologize to me a hundred times the next day for breaking her promise not to drink it.
I lay in bed unable to sleep, feeling the pressure of Elena’s presence from the next room. I could hear her scrabbling around for a while, then the hum of the TV turned conscientiously to low volume. I cursed my uncle Peter for moving to Kansas City and wished I’d had the foresight to hightail it to Quebec or Seattle or some other place equally remote from Chicago, Around five, as the birds began their predawn twittering, I finally dropped into an uneasy sleep.
2
The Lower Depths
The doorbell jerked me awake again at eight. I pulled my sweatshirt and shorts back on and stumbled into the living room. Nobody answered my query through the intercom. When I looked out the living-room window at the street, I could see the banker heading toward Diversey, his shoulders bobbing smugly. I flicked my thumb at his back.
Elena had slept through the episode, including my loud calls through the intercom. For a moment I felt possessed by the banker’s angry impulse—I wanted to wake her and make her as uncomfortable as I was.
I stared down at her in disgust. She was lying on her back, mouth open, ragged snores jerking out as she inhaled, puffy short breaths as she exhaled. Her face was flushed. The broken veins on her nose stood out clearly. In the morning light I could see that the violet nightgown was long overdue for the laundry. The sight was appalling. But it was also unbearably pathetic. No one should be exposed to an outsider’s view while she’s sleeping, let alone someone as vulnerable as my aunt.
With a shudder I moved hastily to the back of the apartment. Unfortunately her pathos couldn’t quell my anger at having her with me. Thanks to her, my head felt as though someone had dumped a load of gravel in it. Even worse, I was making a presentation to a potential client tomorrow. I wanted to finish my charts and get them turned into transparencies. Instead, it looked as though I’d be spending the day hunting for housing. Depending on how long that took, I could end up paying as much as quadruple overtime for the transparencies.
I sat on the dining-room floor and did some breathing exercises, trying to ease my knotted stomach. Finally I managed to relax enough to do my prerun stretches.
Not wanting to see Elena’s flushed face again, I went down the back way, picking up Peppy outside Mr. Contreras’s kitchen door. The old man stuck his head out and called to me as I closed the gate; I pretended not to hear him. I wasn’t able to be similarly deaf when I got back—he was waiting for me, sitting on the back stairs with the Sun-Times, checking out his day’s picks for Hawthorne. I tried leaving the dog and escaping up the stairs but he grabbed my hand.
“Hang on a second there, cookie. Who was that lady you was letting in last night?” Mr. Contreras is a retired machinist, a widower with a married daughter whom he doesn’t particularly like. During the three years we’ve been living in the same building he’s attached himself to my life like an adoptive uncle—or maybe a barnacle.
I jerked my hand free. “My aunt. My father’s younger sister. She has a penchant for old men with good retirement benefits, so make sure you have all your clothes on if she stops by to chat this afternoon.”
That kind of comment always makes him huffy. I’m sure he heard—and said—plenty worse on the floor in his machinist days—but he can’t take even oblique references to sex from me. He turns red and gets as close to being angry as someone with his relentlessly cheerful disposition can manage.
“There’s no need to talk dirty to me,” he snapped. “I’m just concerned. And I gotta say, cookie, you shouldn’t let people come see you at all hours like that. Least, if you do, you shouldn’t keep them down in the hall talking loud enough to wake every soul in the building.”