Well. Okay. The words were pretentious, but the dioramas Martin found inexplicably joyful. He loved the miniature Cheetos bag she had made for the spring dumpster, orange tinfoil peeking out of the dumpster lid, catching the equinoctial light. The fuddled footprints of frat boys and squirrels crisscrossing new patterns in the snow in the winter diorama. In the autumn diorama, piles of dried leaves with perfectly crafted teeny-tiny lobes.
Yes, he had been proud!
But in the end, his pride and the partial scholarship and years of out-of-the-box mind-honing had not made a big difference. Her return to the basement felt to Martin like a failure not only for Ruby, but for himself.
The pigeons gulped down the stale bread in big bites, their bobbling throats ballooned.
Ruby flexed her hands. “Lily would say the weather is cold as a financial adviser’s heart.”
Martin laughed.
“I miss her so much,” Ruby said. “All those times she babysat me and read to me from her crazy manuscripts and ranted at me about the world.”
“She liked to rant.”
“We weren’t even related to her. It’s almost embarrassing, missing her this much. But she was just so there. You know?”
Later he would think about how different the day would have been if he’d been brave enough to admit his grief to Ruby in that moment. If he had told her that some Lily remnant narrated his movements as if he’d become a kind of figment in her mind. If only they’d stood out there in the early-morning light a little longer, talking about Lily, how she’d felt like family in a way that had astounded them both. If only they had mourned together.
But all Martin said was, “There’s this great horned owl in Central Park the people on the birding e-group keep talking about. I haven’t seen it yet.”
“I’m not going bird-watching with you tonight, if that’s where this is going,” Ruby said. “I already tried meditation. My quota is one Quirky Dad Activity a week.”
These important new forces of re-seeing in his life, reduced in Ruby’s eyes to Quirky Dad Activities. What if he called her dioramas “quirky” in that dismissive tone? He wouldn’t be completely wrong. But she would be completely devastated. His job, as Dad, was not to devastate her.
“I think we should go back inside,” he said. “It’s cold. You’re shaking.”
“So are you,” Ruby said.
* * *
—
Just as Martin and Ruby kicked off their sneakers in the apartment, the landline telephone for work calls began to ring. Martin screened all the calls on that line, and he and Ruby both waited as the answering machine emitted its first long loud beep followed by the message itself.
“Hello? Hi, Martin? This is Neilson, Neilson from 3C, ha ha, well, you know that. I’m calling about a potential situation? Hope I’m not waking you up, my man. Wanted to check in and see if you could check out my shower today. It’s clogging. Also, just returned from my early-morning jog and when I opened the foyer door, there were some blankets there? I mean, not just blankets but also a bundle of clothes and it looked like someone had been sleeping there. Do you maybe want to check on that?”
Certain tenants in the building had a way of commanding Martin not through assertive statements, but through questions. It was one of the services they were paying for: they could order him around and feel as if they were benevolently giving him choices. Tenants in the building sometimes also underestimated his intelligence. To his credit, Neilson in 3C didn’t generally treat Martin like he was stupid, but he did treat Martin like he was extra-authentic, what Neilson sometimes called “a guy who does real work, with his hands.” Which was exhausting in its own way.
Still, Martin was usually able to look past this, was able to feel grateful to Neilson for getting him back on a path of mindfulness, on working to lower Martin’s blood pressure. They had begun meditating together occasionally since shortly after Lily’s death. Neilson, thankfully, was no Kenneth. There was never any Manifest Destiny glaze to his eyes, only a slightly foggy look, which made his mindfulness guru act very convincing. It was nice, the way Martin and Neilson would sit on pillows together in 3C and breathe and chant. They’d each spent their adolescence as transcendent hippie white guys born in the mid-fifties, teenagers in the early seventies, and for a time they shaped their lives around the same cultural changes, dressed the same, maybe said some similar things about the nature of the world or the subjective construction of reality. The difference was that Neilson in 3C came from money and Martin in the basement did not. So Neilson had done his drugs and joined his family business and kept his hair long. And Martin had done his drugs and become a super and cut his hair short so plaster and dust wouldn’t get snarled up in it.
But whatever their differences, both of them were still looking for transcendence. Neilson in 3C and Martin in the basement each wanted to perceive every present moment as something burnished, to see the radiant, radical, haloed beauty in right-nowness, whether they were checking their e-mails or washing their hands or descending into the subway. Before he began meditating with Neilson, Martin had tried taking a free evening meditation class at the neighborhood JCC. Neilson was there when he walked in, sitting with his eyes closed, a small smile on his face. Martin was the only guy in the room wearing cargo pants. Mid-meditation, he farted right into his pillow. A couple of people grimaced, but nobody in the class opened their eyes and nobody in the class laughed. If somebody had laughed, he might have laughed, too, might have stayed. But he stood up right in the middle of the silent meditation. His knees cracked. He left. After that day, he cut down on his gluten, which seemed like a yuppie-tenant thing to do, but what could he say, it had helped. Still, the idea of meditating in a group again made his stomach hurt with the force of a thousand buttered rolls. He’d been shocked when a few days after the JCC incident, Neilson approached him and asked Martin if he wanted to meditate in 3C sometimes, on afternoons when he had a break from work. “I don’t blame you for leaving the class early,” Neilson said, not bringing up the bodily function. “Sometimes it’s a tad overwhelming in there for me, too. I can even lead us in the meditation sometimes, if you want. I have a pretty nonjudgmental approach.”
Of course Neilson in 3C’s voice as he left the message on the answering machine was the opposite of nonjudgmental. Was high-pitched, nasal, tinged with real alarm masquerading as deep irritation.
Martin called Neilson back and, while Ruby listened, thanked him for letting him know about the blankets in the foyer and told him he’d see about the clogged shower drain later today. The call woke Debra, who wandered out into the living room, squinting at the overhead light. “Did Neilson see another mouse?” she said when Martin hung up the phone. “I heard his voice.”
“No mouse,” Ruby said. “Only a human being. A homeless person in the foyer.”