“The advantage being,” Giles proceeds, “that we can make them as wet as Baltimore is dry. Who’s for a martini?”
The gamble pays off. Midafternoon businessmen, at their core, are toddlers—dehydrated and cranky—and one man’s Hear, hear is pursued by another’s Amen to that, and in a snap Giles is tending bar, performing speed pours and carving lemon twists to fraternity-house hurrahs. In the midst of the debauch, he gestures everyone aside so he can shake to life a single Brandy Alexander and present it to the secretary like an Academy Award. Everyone applauds, the girl blushes, sunlight skims off the cocktail’s frothy top like a Hawaiian horizon, and for a moment Giles feels as if his world is once more ripe with potential.
11
ZELDA KNOWS WHAT to do. It’s a variation she’s done a thousand times before, at work, certainly, but also all throughout life when pressed by men. Get out of sight, and fast. She adopts the detached smile of a servant, takes hold of her cart, and wheels it about. But the floor is soapy and the carts rolls too widely, striking the trash can and upsetting it with a clatter that bangs about the room. Just emptied, thank heavens, but she scrambles to upright it. Dropping to her knees emphasizes her weight, invites ridicule. She tries to do it quickly. While kneeling, she hears a crinkling sound. She looks up. The man is holding the last thing Zelda expects, the dictionary opposite of his electric rod: a plastic bag of bright green hard candy.
“No, no. Don’t leave. You ladies seem to be chatting enjoyably. Girl talk. Nothing in the world wrong with that. You go right on ahead, I won’t be a second.”
The inflection isn’t southern but has a crocodile’s swishing tail. The man continues forward and for a flash it looks to Zelda that the man is heading for Elisa’s stall. Did Elisa see something in F-1 that Zelda missed? Elisa’s always sensitive to people shouting at her, but her behavior since fleeing F-1 feels different, almost like she’s stunned. Is this man here to drag Elisa away? Zelda hoists herself to her feet, another graceless move, and slides her hand across her cart for a weapon—the kettle brush, the squeegee. She knows about fighting, too. Brewster has more battle scars than her, but she has her share. This man tries to harm Elisa, she’ll do what needs to be done. Zelda’s whole life will be ruined, but she’ll have no choice.
Instead, the man deviates, placing the cattle prod and candy bag on the sink, and steps over to the urinal and begins to unzip.
Now it’s Zelda who looks to Elisa for help. If Zelda’s terrified eyes missed something in F-1, maybe she can’t rely on her eyes here, either. A man, taking out his thing, right in front of them? Elisa, though, is hinging her head left and right and up and down in chase of a suitable reaction. One thing’s for sure: Zelda can’t look at the man. Looking at him, in here, doing this—she has no doubt it’s a fireable offense. All the man has to do is report them, obscene janitors, to Fleming and they’ll be history. Zelda stares at the floor so hard she waits for her gaze to crack the tile.
Urine hisses into the clean urinal.
“Name’s Strickland.” The voice resounds. “I’m heading up security.”
Zelda swallows. “Uh-huh” is all she can manage.
She tells her eyes to stay put, but they stray and see a spurt of urine splish to the mopped floor. Strickland chuckles.
“Oops. Guess it’s a good thing you got mops.”
12
RICHARD WOULD MALIGN her secret sightseeing as a misuse of time, and he’d be right. Her own gasps distract her from her guilt. The linebacker high-rises, mountainous billboards, robot-shaped gas pumps, cheddar-colored streetcars! She feels a knot inside of her fray as if her box cutter is being dragged along it. The bus rushes past signs that stay lit through the daytime drear: WE INSTALL MUFFLERS, $1.00 VARIETY STORE, SPORTING GOODS, JOIN THE AIR FORCE. She rings the bell and gets off at a West 36th shopping district locals call “the Avenue” and lets stores begin jostling for her dollar.
She tries to chime hello to all she passes, especially women. Wouldn’t it be grand to explore the city with a friend who knew its secrets? Who could parry sarcasms about outrageous markups, what the bay-wind does to your hair, all of that? Who could draw from Lainie, and appreciate the special, secret vitality she’d felt during those seventeen months on her own? But Baltimore women are startled by her greetings and barely muster smiles. After an hour, Lainie feels lonely, doomed to outsider status. She gets back on the bus. A man walks the aisle, mistakes her for a tourist, and tries to sell her a visitor’s guide. Her chest reknots. Is it her hairdo? In Florida, beehives were the rage, but not here. She is suddenly, deeply unhappy. She probably needs a visitor’s guide. She buys one.
Baltimore, the guide scolds her, has everything required to satisfy an American family. What exactly, then, is her problem? Tammy would adore the Museum of Art. Timmy would love the Historical Society. West of town is the Enchanted Forest, some kind of storybook attraction. Photos show castles and forests, princesses and witches. The kids could hold their birthday parties there this summer. It’s perfect, except for the park’s so-called Jungle Land. Even the word jungle makes Richard set down the newspaper or turn the channel. They’d just have to be careful where they walked, that’s all.
One of her past strolls took her to the docks at Fells Point. She’s tried to forget this walk, but each morning the Spray ’N Steam sweats the truth out of her; she wonders if the Amazon boiled Richard to his rawest root. It had been a slate afternoon, rhythmed with the whap of ships against docks. She’d toed the edge of the Patapsco River, lifting her collar to her jawline. To get there, she’d gotten off at a bus stop usurped by a rag-clad hobo and walked through the broken bottles of the ugliest neighborhood she’d ever seen. There’d been a movie theater, too, and she’d nearly bought a ticket just to evade the ogling. But the marquee had been missing a few too many bulbs for her comfort, and the movie hadn’t sounded pleasant at all—a circus of souls, something like that.
It was a lonesome spot. No one would hear her if she spoke. So she’d told lies into the cold, lapping water until there were none left to tell: She was happy that her husband had returned. She was fulfilled. She was optimistic about the future. She believed every statistic in the City of Baltimore leaflet Richard had given her. Only twenty percent of Baltimore households, it had boasted, owned a car, and Richard swore to her that one day soon they’d own two. He was sick of his T-bird breaking down, he said, and he wouldn’t have his wife taking public transport while he was off saving the world.
On her way back to the bus stop, in the neighborhood she didn’t like, she’d skirted a city worker spraying off the sidewalk with a hose. How nice, she’d told herself, to see a municipality taking pride in its upkeep. She’d pretended that the washing didn’t dredge up stenches of dog urine, spoiled fish, moldering leaves, congealing sewage, saliferous puddles, scorched oil, bodily excretions. One last lie before heading home, one more wrinkle to iron out.
13
BERNIE LEADS GILES into what Giles hopes is a meeting room but is merely a vacant office inside which has been wedged a table and two chairs. Bernie doesn’t sit, so Giles doesn’t, either. It feels unconvivial after the smiles and handshakes of the waiting room, even as Giles reminds himself that, if he has a friend here, it is Bernie Clay, not those rich old men in the lobby slurping down his mixed drinks. Bernie was part of the vote that kicked Giles out of the firm twenty years ago, it’s true, but his heart hadn’t been in it, and Giles reminds himself of the futility of martyrs—Bernie’s family had to eat, too, didn’t they?