“Cut the self-pity crap and just be proud of your daughter,” sweet old Lily in 5A, his “building mom,” used to tell him, with such sincerity that tiny veinlets surfaced on her wrinkled forehead. “It’s not Ruby’s fault the fever dream of free-market capitalism has corrupted the realm of higher education.” Lily had always tried to cheer Martin up by blaming his parental angst on the free market. Several months ago Martin had gone to 5A when 4A complained about a leak, and found Lily slumped over on the toilet. She was dead from a hemorrhagic stroke. There was a leak in Lily’s brain, it turned out, a blood vessel that had burst. She’d left the faucet on and when Martin saw her there, the running water had seemed to roar. Later that same day Kenneth in the penthouse had left five messages on Martin’s answering machine about a giant bird (“An eagle or owl or whatever,” Kenneth said, though Martin suspected a red-tailed hawk) dropping a decapitated and mangled pigeon carcass on his deck once again and could Martin clean the mess up?
It had felt almost sacrilegious to Martin, hearing Kenneth’s voice so soon after seeing Lily’s body. Lily had hated Kenneth. Before he moved into the penthouse, Kenneth had lived in 6A, the apartment above Lily’s, with his wife and daughter. “I feel the creepiest laissez-faire vibes oozing through my ceiling,” Lily had told Martin once back then, in the early nineties. “When Kenneth passes me in the lobby, he looks right through me. I’m an old woman, I’m rent-controlled, I’m invisible to him.”
“Maybe he and his family will move out,” Martin said. “Kenneth’s always complaining that 6A’s too small.”
“He’s waiting for me to die is what he’s doing. He wants to buy my apartment and create a two-story duplex with 5A and 6A. I’m sure of it. He’s got the Manifest Destiny glaze in his eyes. How can you let Ruby have playdates with his bratty daughter?”
“Ruby likes Caroline.”
“Ruby likes Caroline’s dolls.”
Kenneth must have gotten tired of waiting for Lily to die. Once some of his portfolio investments had paid off, he received permission from the co-op board to build a penthouse on the roof. After he and his family had moved into the penthouse in the late nineties, Kenneth didn’t sell their former apartment but rented it out to some sort of finance person. Time passed. Kenneth got stouter, Kenneth got divorced, Kenneth lost his hair. But he did not lose the Manifest Destiny glaze in his eyes. After Lily died, he did exactly what she had so often predicted. He politely kicked his renter out of 6A and then he bought 5A. Now he was in the process of constructing a two-story duplex, which he planned to keep for a while as an investment property. “My nest egg,” he’d told Martin with a wink the other day in the elevator, and Martin had thought about the pair of pigeons nesting outside on the courtyard’s ledge. Every morning, Martin fed those birds, hoping that one day he’d see their babies hatch. They were the closest thing he had to an investment property.
The opposite of mindful contemplation, probably, was contemplating another man’s real estate. Martin’s back had gone stiff, his knees creaked, and yet the older he got, the more nimbly his brain made wild leaps through time and space. He was supposed to be here, present, meditating next to his daughter, not thinking about Lily’s death or Kenneth’s apartments or the pigeons in the courtyard. He breathed in. He breathed out.
But then the heat pipe in the living room thumped and he remembered how the woman in 4B had recently complained about the thumping sound coming from 5B, which was caused by the private tango lessons the woman in 5B was taking with the woman in 2C, who had recently divorced the man who had once lived in 7D and who had lost his job in advertising just around the time Ruby graduated and was now in the process of selling his apartment to an heiress whose financial consultant lived in 6C and had complained recently about a leak caused by the attendant to the sick lady in 7C who poured grease down the kitchen sink, didn’t know any better, and who rode the subway from the Bronx every morning with the nanny in 3A whose young charges tried to poison with cayenne-infused chocolate the pair of yipping Yorkies in 3D, an act of pure malice that didn’t much bother anybody but especially not the attorney in 7A who had seen the dogs pissing directly onto the red-and-white impatiens she had asked to be planted in the tree pit outside the building, which were popular flowers with some in the building, yes, but others, like the real estate guy from Lyon in 6B and the financial consultant from Moscow in 8C, felt impatiens were tacky and populist and had tried to advocate for something more elegant, begonias, perhaps, and also wanted the green awning to be replaced with a burgundy one, but 9D had argued against both begonias and the burgundy color, mostly because he believed 8C was responsible for bringing in the new team of Russian elevator mechanics, who had, in the past, worked on missiles in what 7C was pretty sure these mechanics still called the motherland, and who 7C was also pretty sure were spies of some sort, a suspicion she had confided exclusively (she thought) to 3A, but 3A blabbered about it to the board members and her blabbering had backfired, so that now 7C was considered a paranoid woman, a possible isolationist bigot, and a loose cannon, which was probably true, since after the attacks on September 11, 7C had spent weeks in Westchester calling Martin about an oncoming toxic cloud headed for Manhattan and asking if he could double-check that the windows were all the way closed in the apartment, which was actually the same request made by 7B, who recently had maybe got bedbugs (they blamed the house cleaner) leading 4B (once the news got out) to panic and do laundry for six hours straight, which really pissed off 1D, because they had kids and the kids had soccer practice and 4B, whose child merely finger painted and did no competitive sports at all, was using all the machines, which 4B said was a necessary thing because didn’t 1D hear about the bedbugs in 7B and 1D said the bedbugs were just a rumor, the bedbug dog from Queens had come in and sensed nothing, but still the paranoia reached such a pitch that many of 7B’s belongings eventually wound up in the basement and Martin and Rafael, the porter, had had to drag armoires and mattresses and books and clothes out into the courtyard, and into the alley, and up the stairs for the garbage people to take away to waste transfer centers, to barges, to landfills, to landfills, to landfills.
Martin’s heart, that dumb, flawed blood hauler, made sounds like a garbage truck in his chest.
He had fucked up mindfulness again.
Martin must concentrate on his breath, must forget the many stories of complaint within this nine-story building. He must cool the hallways of his heart. No, not hallways. That was an apartment building sort of term. With the heart, you called them chambers. He knew all about the heart now. He’d googled “heart biological parts” after Lily’s death had increased the constricted feeling around his chest. His own dad had died young of a heart attack. Over the last year or two, even before Lily’s death, he’d begun to watch what he ate, gotten deeper into meditation, started bird-watching, all in the interest of lowering his resting heart rate. Of course, thinking too much about his resting heart rate seemed to heighten it again. He heard it now, his heartbeat quickening. He wanted to open his eyes, to stand up, to abandon his meditation bench.