“Never mind,” Gregor said desperately. “I get the picture. I’m in a little bit of a rush.”
“If you really hurry, you’ll get there just in time,” Joey told him. “The show is due to start in two minutes.”
2
THE TALL BROWNSTONE WHERE Gregor Demarkian now had the third-floor floor-through apartment had once been a tenement, but it had been gutted and remodeled and turned into condominiums long before Gregor had come back to Cavanaugh Street to live. As a symbol of the transformation of the neighborhood, however, it was fairly weak, and that in spite of the fact that each of the four apartments had its own marble fireplace. Many of the other tenements on the street had been gutted and turned into single-family townhouses, like Lida Arkmanian’s. Lida Arkmanian’s upstairs living room window looked directly into Gregor’s living room window. Lida Arkmanian also had a downstairs living room window (and, therefore, a downstairs living room), but that was the kind of thing that made Gregor feel a little dizzy. Lida Arkmanian with two living rooms and eight thousand square feet. Old George Tekamanian with a closet full of shirts from Ralph Lauren Polo. Sheila Kashinian with three mink coats. They had all been so poor growing up, and so isolated. They had all been so convinced that nothing much was ever going to change.
Gregor left Ohanian’s and walked up the street, stepping carefully because the pavement was beginning to ice up. All around him were signs that Donna Moradanyan had been at work. The front of his own building was wrapped in green and red ribbons with a glowing menorah in every window that faced the street. The front of Lida Arkmanian’s building—which Donna would have decorated—was more deliberately Christmassy, with bells and angels and cherubs nestled into clouds that seemed to be attached to the brownstone facing a fairy wish. Up the street a little farther, Donna had gone more deliberately Jewish, with glowing menorahs everywhere and a few Stars of David thrown in for good measure. Judaism being a religion that placed a great deal of stress on the commandment Thou shall not make unto thee a graven image, there weren’t a lot of symbols for Donna to use, but she had done her best. Gregor saw the set of open scrolls one of the yeshivas downtown used to symbolize the Torah and a couple of Israeli flags. Donna was one of those young women young men of Gregor’s day would have called “a game girl.” He stopped at the steps to his building’s front door and contemplated the multicolored tinsel with which she had hung the scraggly evergreen bush that grew against the banister. She had topped it off with another Star of David.
Gregor went up the steps and let himself into the foyer of the building, not even bothering to reach for his key chain. There was a lock on this door. All four of them had keys to it. Gregor was the only one who thought they should be using those keys. The rest of them—even Bennis, who was a sophisticated woman and ought to know better—just left the door unlocked and went in and out as if they were living in the crime-free pastures of an Iowa farm. Gregor checked out the wreath on old George Tekamanian’s door—evergreen and holly berry and a lot of shiny tinsel—and then looked over at the mail table. It was empty, meaning that Bennis had picked up his mail along with her own and taken it upstairs. Gregor sometimes wondered if she steamed open the envelopes with official-sounding return addresses on the envelopes—Federal Bureau of Investigation, Archdiocese of Colchester, New York State Department of Corrections—but he’d never had the nerve to ask her.
He climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing, shifted his grocery bags from his right arm to his left, and knocked on Bennis’s door. Old George Tekamanian had the apartment on the ground floor of this building. Bennis had the apartment on the second floor. Gregor had the apartment on the third floor. And Donna Moradanyan and her two-year-old son, Tommy, had the apartment on the fourth. Donna decorated the doors to all of them. Bennis’s door had a big silver bell with red metallic ribbon tied into a bow on the top. Donna knew better than to stick Bennis with anything religious.
Gregor knocked again, louder this time. The door opened and Sheila Kashinian stuck her bleached-blonde head through the crack.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, when she saw Gregor. “We were wondering where you were. We were only doing all this for your sake.”
“Doing all what for my sake?”
But Sheila had already retreated into the apartment. Gregor left his grocery bags on Bennis’s hall table and went straight into the living room. The living room was crammed full of what had to be all the women and half of everybody else in the neighborhood. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian took up the couch, and Sheila in her high stiletto heels and overwhelming jewelry took a perch on one of the couch arms. Old George Tekamanian had the club chair. Father Tibor Kasparian had the red canvas director’s chair Bennis usually used for work. Bennis and Donna were sitting cross-legged on the floor. There were other people there, too—Gregor saw June and Mary Ohanian crammed together into a kitchen chair pushed off to one side—but Gregor was already tired of taking inventory. He got the point. He stood at the back of the room and watched while Bennis’s oversize television screen went from temporarily black to brilliant blue, showcasing a sprightly older woman in a tweed skirt and pearls.