Out of Time Read online

  And I could suddenly picture the antiques shop downtown and a woman with salt-and-pepper hair arranging marcasite pins.

  “I’d feel better,” I said, “if you asked her first if she wants the box.” I couldn’t believe I was saying it. I knew she would want it. Maybe she would send me bits of it in the mail, but she would want it just the same.

  “You ask her,” Letty said gruffly. “Now get it out of here before somebody sets a match to it.”

  I grabbed two neighborhood kids and paid them two bucks each to help me carry the box to the car. There was not another inch of room in the back of the station wagon, so I would start for home that day and not bother heading further north, as I had planned.

  Letty was still in the porch glider, watching. I waved to her as I closed the back door. “A perfect fit!” I shouted but she didn’t respond. I walked back to the porch, and she examined every step I took.

  “Thank you,” I said simply.

  “Don’t ever use my name,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  She stood up and smoothed her housedress. She patted her hair into place, even though I hadn’t noticed a wisp of it move.

  “If you write something about her, don’t ever use my name,” she said, more loudly and slowly, as if she thought I had a hearing impairment. “Letitia Best King. I’ll sue you if you do.”

  “Maybe we should sign an agreement,” I said, handing her a check for a hundred dollars, the original price I offered. She took it with some surprise and shoved it roughly into her pocket.

  “Just don’t use it,” she repeated.

  I turned to go but had one last question. “Your sister Bea,” I said. “What’s her last name? So I can contact her.”

  Letty laughed shrilly. “Don’t ask me,” she said. “It used to be Best. But I haven’t heard from her since 1967. Did I tell you that?”

  I nodded.

  “She could be married for all I know. She could be queer, too. For all I know.” She opened the screen door and it clacked noisily closed behind her. The front door shut firmly right after her.

  I sat down heavily on the porch steps. I could feel Letty’s eyes through the window. I could feel the moist heat of approaching August. I could feel the weight of history on my shoulders.

  Pretty soon I was driving south, out of town, toward Saratoga again. I was picking up speed, then slamming to a stop in front of a familiar house. I had a sheet of paper to give to the man on the porch, who was cleaning up the last traces of his yard sale. It was from the museum in Glens Falls. It acknowledged the gift of a collection of valuable wooden planes. The look on his face helped me endure the drive ahead.

  10

  I would have gotten into Manhattan late with nowhere to put the car and the stuff in it, so I ended up staying overnight at a campground outside New Paltz. I guess it was stupid not to stay in Saratoga, but the whole town made me feel manipulated and dishonest. The concern that Catherine would know I’d been unfaithful shot back and forth through my head all night, keeping me awake. We’d had a lot of discussions about monogamy versus nonmonogamy, and Catherine had made a strong case that the latter worked better in theory than in practice. So far, we hadn’t had reason to test our fidelity to each other. Catherine found it easier to be monogamous, because she was so busy, and I’d never entertained the thought of anyone else since we’d met. Till now.

  Maybe my restlessness was from the realization that I could never expunge myself of the guilt, because to do so would expose the crazy, inexplicable turn my life had taken. Or possibly it was just because I’d arrived too late again to make camp and had to deal with the discomfort of sitting upright in my car all night, with my mummy bag tucked around me in an unnatural way. I was suddenly afraid to get into it, afraid that this would be the time the zipper would break and I’d be locked in my car in a mummy bag. I realized later that my paranoia had gotten stronger the closer I came to Manhattan.

  I drove into the city in mid-morning, straight to Out of Time to unload the car. I hadn’t washed my hair in several days and my mouth felt gummy, but I was anxious for Margielove to see my purchases and knew they wouldn’t last long in a parked car in Manhattan.

  The store was closed. The gates were locked. Inside, the shop looked like it had not been open for a while. The merchandise had an appearance of neglect and sadness. I didn’t know what to think.

  I had keys, so I unpacked the car alone, as quickly as I could. As it was, I lost a few items to kids on the street, but that felt to me like more community service. I left the box of Lucy’s papers in the back and ripped the cardboard so thieves could see it was filled with things they wouldn’t want. Then I made a call to Margielove’s apartment.

  It rang ten times, maybe more. I dialed again, and this time it rang fifteen. A third time it rang twenty.

  I got back into the car and drove to her studio apartment on Seventy-ninth Street. She lived above a restaurant, with the neon sign from it shining directly into her front window, just like in cheap hotels in the movies. For the privilege she paid six hundred dollars a month.

  I buzzed a dozen times. I banged on the inside door. A neighbor came out of an apartment and told me she was calling the cops. “Where’s Margielove?” I shouted through the glass.

  “Who?” she must have said, but all I could see were her lips forming a small, puckered “o.”

  “Marjorie,” I screamed again. “Marjorie. Marjorie.” It was at that moment I realized I didn’t know her last name. It had never seemed important. She always paid me in cash, so I didn’t even have a check with her signature. “Wait a minute,” I yelled. “Please, one minute.”

  I raced out to the car, where I tore through the glove compartment for her registration. I couldn’t find anything but a stack of Baskin-Robbins napkins and some receipts from the George Washington Bridge.

  “I don’t know her last name,” I pleaded. “She’s a big woman. Dresses in bright colors. She lives in 3R.”

  “Oh, her,” the woman said, still not opening up the door, but talking more loudly so I could hear the muffled words, like someone talking through a blanket. “She hasn’t been around. I thought she was away.”

  It must have been exhaustion that kept me from going to the police. I went home instead, struggling with the box, pulling it behind me onto the elevator, almost leaving half the contents strewn through the lobby of my building. Inside, I collapsed on the sofa and ripped off my clothes to cool down. I played back the messages on my answering machine and listened to a strange man named Arthur Harris urgently asking me to call him. And then to Catherine’s impatient voice asking me to call her. And then to a series of hang-ups and a message in Spanish I couldn’t understand. I fell asleep and didn’t call anyone. I dreamt that Margielove had died. I dreamt that Lucy was running the shop. I dreamt that Catherine was very angry with me. And then I woke up, with the phone in my hand.

  • • •

  It was all sort of true. Actually, some of it was truer than the rest of it. The truest thing, and the most horrifying, was that Margielove was indeed dead.

  It was a typical New York accident. On her way to work, Margielove looked carefully down Broadway, waiting for traffic to break, then she crossed and was struck from the other direction by someone on a bike who never stopped. Probably had an urgent envelope to deliver to midtown, couldn’t take the time to help the woman he’d just flattened. The doctor at St. Luke’s Hospital had said it wasn’t the impact that killed her, it was the shock that started her cardiac arrest. She died before the EMS arrived, died right in the middle of Broadway, on the island there, where some other pedestrians had pulled her so she wouldn’t get hit again by an errant taxicab. The old people gave up their bench for her, and she lay there and died. I would like to say she never knew what hit her, but that doesn’t seem to be true. She had a pretty good idea.

  I probably would never have known this if she hadn’t had a lawyer. He was Arthur Harris from my answering machine. When he c
ouldn’t reach me, he called Catherine. I’d given her phone number to Margielove as a way to reach me in an emergency. When I woke up with the phone to my ear, Catherine was relating the story on the other end. There was just enough anger in her voice to wake me up.

  “Who is this woman?” Catherine demanded. “The lawyer said she was your employer. I didn’t argue with him. I knew there must be some good explanation.” She paused for a deep breath and for a response from me. “Is there?” she asked.

  “She’s my employer,” I said. “She was my employer.”

  Catherine was quiet again and extraordinarily patient, given the circumstances. “I guess you know,” she said, “I haven’t a clue to what’s going on here.” She cleared her throat. “I mean, when did you take a job? And why . . . why in the world has this woman named you in her will?”

  It was too many questions. I couldn’t remember when I’d taken the job. It seemed like a very long time ago, or no time at all. I started crying softly into the receiver. It was so unlike me that Catherine got scared. I guess it was that. Because she left school early that day and came straight to my apartment. I started crying again the minute she arrived.

  • • •

  It was hard to get Catherine to talk after I told her the truth about school. She faced me across the coffee table like a stone carving. Knowing something is up is very different from knowing what that something is. The extent of my lying became apparent to both of us. If it shocked me how devious I’d been, I can imagine how Catherine felt.

  I didn’t have to imagine, she expressed it.

  “Well,” she said, her voice catching on the soft roll of the “l’s,” “I can see what our relationship means to you.”

  “It means a lot,” I said, but knew she had no reason to believe me. “I love you, Catherine.”

  “All the lies,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s worse than being unfaithful.”

  I looked away. I thought I could never explain my unfaithfulness, too. Then she would think I was crazy.

  “I don’t understand why you had to lie so much,” the stone carving said. Catherine, I felt, had left the room.

  And Harriet had entered it. I could hear her voice faintly from the kitchen alcove. “You can get her back,” she said. “Believe me. Just tell her everything.”

  It seemed like sound advice, even considering that it came from Harriet. For that moment, I was sure that Catherine Synge, the historian of women, could forgive me anything if she knew the whole truth.

  “I wish I hadn’t,” I said. “I wish I’d been honest from the beginning. If you’ll listen now, I’ll tell you everything.”

  Catherine swallowed back her anger and disappointment. “It better be good,” she said.

  “Catherine,” I said, “I’m having this historical experience.” And by the look on her face, which softened from stone while I told the story, she must have thought it was pretty good indeed.

  • • •

  Margielove had left me everything. The store on Broadway, plus all of its inventory and cash. Her car. The contents of her apartment. Her checking account. Her savings account. Her CDs. I was the beneficiary of her generous life insurance policy. I went overnight from worrying how I would pay my rent each month to being well off. I could stop spending a dollar twice a week on Lotto.

  After she was dead, it became clear that I had been her only real friend. She’d talked about other friends, people who died of drug overdoses in the sixties or who wiped out on motorcycles in the seventies. But she had no one in her life in the eighties. It explained why she smiled at me sometimes for no reason, why she liked to stand behind the counter and watch me sort silver spoons. I don’t think she was in love with me, but was just as genuinely fond of me as I was of her. Every now and then, I caught her looking at me and she gave me a thumbs up or the peace sign. Now I didn’t know what I’d do without her.

  “I walked into a store, looking for spoons,” I told people, which was not true, but made a good story, “and I ended up with a business and a pile of money.”

  I didn’t know then where she got her money, how an ex-hippie had amassed a business and about 250,000 dollars in cash. Maybe someone had left it to her. Maybe she had made it selling drugs. I didn’t want to know. I decided I would just pay off my loans, live well, and revere her memory.

  She had left instructions with her attorney for a cremation and a modest service. We held the ceremony at her apartment, with “Sgt. Pepper” as the background music and a few straggly-looking bums as guests, who may have been her friends or may have been just street people looking for a free meal. We served coffee and junk food, mostly Twinkies, her favorite snack. Then Catherine and I packed her urn into the station wagon and drove upstate to Bethel, where we scattered her ashes in the field where the Woodstock concert had taken place. Then, in her honor, we spent the rest of the day browsing through antiques and junk shops. We bought a lot of silly stuff, like Beatles bubble gum cards and a John Kennedy bottle opener, before we headed back to New York, popping beers with our new purchase. Margielove, I know, would have liked it.

  11

  After I moved in Margielove’s things, my apartment looked like a junk store run by an eclectic collector who couldn’t decide if she wanted to live in the 1920s, the 1960s, or the present. But I felt I owed it to her to keep everything intact. I knew she’d left her possessions to me because I wouldn’t sell them, but would either keep them or give them away to street people. I decided to live with all of it for a while, a big jumble of the twentieth century, because I was feeling a bit lost without Margielove at work.

  I also decided to keep the store. I never really pictured myself as a shopkeeper. I assumed I’d be a novelist or a great literary scholar or both. I think it was something in Catherine’s voice that made me suddenly think I could run a store. She went with me, the weekend after Margielove’s cremation, to get the store ready to reopen. We unpacked all the merchandise I’d brought from upstate, dated and priced it. Catherine feather-dusted everything, because for some reason, though the place had been sealed like a tomb for two weeks, there was a fine layer of soot over everything.

  “Must have been in the air,” I said. “New York’s so filthy.”

  I was standing behind the counter, just as Margielove always had, trying to acquaint myself with her bookkeeping system, when I glanced up and saw Catherine watching me fondly as she brushed the tops of things with her duster.

  “You look good there,” she said. “You look at home, like you like what you’re doing.”

  And I had to admit I did. Maybe, I thought, maybe that M.B.A. wasn’t such a useless degree after all.

  “Have you decided what to do?” she asked later, as we were sitting on two of the pressed back chairs from upstate, splitting a turkey sandwich. “Do you think you’ll keep this place?”

  I watched her admiringly as she leaned into her sandwich, so neat and careful. Catherine, unlike most people I knew, never got a stray drop of mayonnaise on her mouth, never left shreds of turkey in the paper wrapping.

  “I like the idea of it,” I said. “But whether or not I’d be successful is another story. Small businesses fail all the time in New York. And they’re hard work. I’d never have time for anything else. Well, not that I do much of anything else, but if I was able to start writing again, there wouldn’t be time.”

  “If you don’t do this,” she asked, after her last bite, “what would you do?”

  “Go back to school,” I said. “I guess.”

  We looked at each other. I saw the smiling curve of my own mouth mirrored in hers. We were simultaneously thinking of my stacked up diplomas, my restless wandering from university to university, my hasty retreat from Columbia.

  “Well,” Catherine said, “I guess that settles it.”

  • • •

  Out of Time reopened on the following Monday, and business was about as slow as I’d ever seen it. Of course, it was raining, and things always move more slow
ly in the rain. I used the long lulls between customers to go through the ledgers again and to create a system that worked better than the one Margielove had used. If the auditors came to call, I wanted to be ready.

  It rained all week, one of those endless grey spans of time that New York is famous for. Each day was darker than the last. At the end of the week, at midday, it was so dark it looked as if someone had turned off the sun. There was a sudden fierce thunderstorm that made the lights in the store flicker a few times, then go out altogether. I went cautiously to the front door and locked it, tripping over a few baskets of things and the edge of the carpet.

  I heard a noise from the corner of the store, near the books, or maybe it was just my mind playing tricks on me. I groped behind the counter for a flashlight whose batteries were weak from disuse, and I sent a thin, eerie shaft of light toward the back of the store. There was nothing there, but it looked like some books had fallen over on a shelf. I went to investigate, my flashlight getting dimmer and dimmer until it only afforded me a small yellow dot of light. I shined it on the shelf where a book had collapsed onto its front cover, with others tumbling over in a domino fashion. I pushed them all upright, setting the culprit, which was called Central Park, slightly tilted to hold the rest in place. I didn’t bother to look at it further; I’d seen sentimental novels of the early 1900s many times before, always with names like Central Park or On Fifth Avenue. Just as my flashlight was fading for good, the lights of the store flickered on and off again, then on to stay. The rain had let up a little.

  I went to unlock the door. An older man whose umbrella had been turned inside out was huddled in the doorway under the awning. I urged him in out of the storm.