Small Town

One of the cushions from the sofa was halfway across the room, and he wondered how that had happened. A pair of mahogany tables flanked the couch — like the coffee table, they were from The Bombay Company, cheaply made but attractively styled. One held three hardcover novels between a pair of bronze bookends — Susan Isaacs, Nelson DeMille, and Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mister Goodbar, which he’d always assumed had some sort of totemic value for Marilyn. The other table, to the right of the sofa, held three little figurines of animals, Zuni fetishes from the Southwest. There was a bison carved from Picasso marble, a rose quartz bear with a bundle of arrows on his back, and a turquoise rabbit, all of them grouped around the white saucer from a child’s tea set. The saucer held cornmeal — except it didn’t, its contents had been spilled onto the table and floor, and the bison and bear were lying on their sides, and where was the little rabbit?

With the cornmeal spilled, he thought, maybe the bear had gotten hungry enough to eat the rabbit. Failing that, he supposed he’d find it somewhere in the chaos of the apartment.

Not for the first time, he contrasted Marilyn’s place with the last premises he’d tidied, the whorehouse on East Twenty-eighth Street. In all the months he’d been cleaning for them, they’d never once left a real mess. As a matter of fact, the parlor and the individual bedrooms were always surprisingly tidy. There might be some dirty dishes and glassware on the kitchen counter, waiting for him to load them into the dishwasher, and there were wastebaskets that had to be emptied of their unmentionable contents, trash to be bagged and taken downstairs. But the place was always sanitary and usually neat.

Well, wasn’t that the difference between your professionals and your amateurs?

He rolled his eyes, ashamed of himself. Marilyn was a sweetie, and where did he get off calling her a whore? Still, he could imagine her coming up with some version of the line on her own, a half-smile on her full mouth and an ironic edge to the bourbon-and-cigarette voice. Her self-deprecating sense of humor was one of the things he liked most about her, and—

Jesus, was she home?

Because her bedroom door was shut, and that was unusual. That might explain the extent of the mess, too. Her apartment was usually messy, she wasn’t the sort to preclean out of concern for the good opinion of her cleaning person, but he’d never before found undergarments in the living room, and she’d have at least capped the bourbon bottle and put away the little mirror.

Sleeping late, wasn’t she? Well, she’d very likely been up late. He’d let her sleep, hold off running the vacuum until he was done with everything else. If that woke her he could do the bedroom after she emerged from it; otherwise he’d skip it this week.

She didn’t have company, did she?

He decided that wasn’t too likely. The clothes in the living room were all hers, and the guy, whoever he might be, wouldn’t have kept all his clothes on while she took everything off. Somewhere along the way he’d returned from the bedroom, thoughtfully closing the door, and dressed and left the apartment, pulling the door shut. It hadn’t been double-locked when he arrived, he recalled, but that didn’t mean anything; Marilyn forgot to double-lock the door as often as not, whether she was at home or gone for the day.

He started to whistle — the same song, New York in June, he couldn’t get it out of his head — and went into the kitchen to get started.

He’d met her at an ACOA meeting, had heard her sharing wryly about her parents, and had assumed she was in show business. An actress, a nightclub chanteuse, at the very least a waitress who went to all the cattle calls, got roles in off-off-Broadway showcases, and had a card in the Screen Extras Guild. And maybe did voice-overs, because God knows she had the voice for it, pitched low, seasoned with booze and tobacco, coming across like honey-dipped sandpaper.

She looked the part. It wasn’t that she was beautiful. Her features were a little too strong for beauty, her facial planes too angular. It was more that she was totally Out There, her energy expanding to fill whatever room she was in. You noticed her, you paid attention to her. You couldn’t buy that, or learn it at Actors Studio. You had it or you didn’t, and she did.

“It’s all my Leo stuff,” she explained. “I got my sun and three or four planets in Leo, and maybe I should have been an actress, as much as I like being the center of attention, but I always had zero desire in that direction, and thank God, because what kind of a life is that?”

She’d been born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island, went to college in Pennsylvania, married young and divorced young, and had been living in the Village for a dozen years, first in a small studio in an ugly postwar white brick building on Greenwich Avenue, and, for the past seven years, in this brownstone floor-through on Charles Street.