Flowering Judas(16)

“Damn,” Howard said.

“What is it?” Marianne said.

The men trying to take the body down had dropped it.

It seemed to hover in the air for a second all on its own.

Then it just fell, a dead weight, into the grass and bushes below.





PART I

Damnation is simple.

—Vladimir Nabokov





ONE

1

If anybody had asked Gregor Demarkian if it mattered to him to feel he had someplace settled to live, he would probably have said no. Why should it matter to him? Being homeless would not be good, but he’d never been the kind of person to care about the messiness of his kitchen or the view from his balcony. At the moment, he didn’t even have a balcony, and he didn’t want one. He wasn’t sure what he did want. Not being liable to trip over stacked carpet samples in the hallway might be one thing. Not to find bathroom tile samples in the bathtub might be another. The bathroom tile “samples” were actually bathroom tiles, big ones, in all kinds of colors. There had to be hundreds of different colors, sizes, shapes, and materials for bathroom tiles. It was insane.

It was six o’clock on the first Monday in September. Labor Day. Gregor had managed to wrestle the bathroom tiles out of the bathtub so that he could take his shower, and now he was standing at the big window in his living room that overlooked Cavanaugh Street. Upstairs, Grace Feinmann was practicing, the faint sound of the harpsichord rippling up and down scales. Out on the street, nothing much was happening. It was a holiday. Donna Moradanyan Donahue had put up a big mural of Thirties-era workmen with big muscles outside Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, sort of in honor of somebody named Glenn Beck.

“No, she isn’t honoring Glenn Beck,” Bennis had tried to explain, a week ago, when Donna was first out there putting things up and getting her son Tommy to hammer nails. “It’s kind of a joke. Glenn Beck is the sort of person who sees Communists in his soup, or, you know—”

But Gregor didn’t know. He hadn’t known then, and he didn’t know now. Glenn Beck was somebody on television. He had tried to catch Glenn Beck on television. He’d never managed it.

He walked away from the window and headed toward the kitchen. Ever since Bennis had discovered coffee bags, he’d been able to make his own coffee in the morning. This was a good thing, since it turned out that Bennis needed to do all kinds of things in the morning, and getting the coffee wasn’t one of them.

He went through the swinging doors and found himself confronted by the kitchen table, which had cabinet façade samples stacked up on one side of it and handle samples stacked up on the other. Gregor was beginning to think you could put an entire house together from samples alone if you didn’t care if things matched. He picked up one of the façade samples and looked at it. Then he picked up another. He was sure there were lots of differences between them. He just didn’t understand why anybody would care. He really didn’t understand why Bennis would care.

He filled the kettle and put it on to boil. He took a clean mug out of the cabinet and put a Folgers Coffee bag in it. He put the mug on the table between façades and handles. Then he took it off and put it back on the counter.

The Post-it Note with the information for today’s meeting was stuck to the front of the refrigerator. It said: H. ANDROCOELHO, EIGHT. That was it. He had always been rather cavalier about the business part of what he did. He had a good pension from the Bureau and a solid wall of savings behind it. He didn’t need to worry about the details as much as he might have. Still. It had gotten to the point where his professional life was like a poem by William Carlos Williams.

The kettle went off. He took it off the heat and poured water over the coffee bag. Bennis left her tea bags to steep for twenty minutes or more. If Gregor did that with a coffee bag, he’d have tachycardia in a minute and a half.

He looked at the handle samples again. Some of them were actually handles. Some of them were knobs. Some of them seemed to move. Some of them obviously didn’t. How did anyone choose among all these things? Why would anyone want to put herself through this? Why not just let the contractor pick what he thought was practical and go with that?

Gregor came to again. He felt as if he were going in and out of fugue states. He took the coffee bag out of the coffee with a spoon. He threw the coffee bag into the garbage pail next to the sink. He wondered if, somewhere, Bennis had hundreds of samples of sinks that she’d gathered to look at before deciding which one would go into the kitchen of the new house.

Gregor took a sip of coffee. It didn’t help. He took another sip of coffee. It still didn’t help. He thought of H. Androcoelho, who was coming all the way out here from someplace in New York, on a holiday, to talk to him about something—and Gregor couldn’t remember it.