Flowering Judas(18)

The landing was clear of debris of any kind, which made him feel better. He went downstairs a flight and found that that landing was not. There were two tall stacks of what appeared to be plumbing fixtures—the faucets for a bathroom, maybe, or for a kitchen. Some of the faucets were brass, so Gregor opted for a bathroom. Or maybe many bathrooms. There were a lot of bathrooms in the house he and Bennis had bought at the other end of the street.

“It’ll be fine,” Bennis had said when they did it. “We’ll fix it up a little and then we’ll be practically next door to Donna and Rush.”

“Right now we’re right across the street from Lida and Tibor.”

“We’re not exactly moving to California, Gregor. We’re still going to be on Cavanaugh Street.”

Gregor went down another flight, and that was the ground floor. He could see the line of mailboxes in the little vestibule between the inner and outer doors. He could see the rub of faded paint against the blank wall that was on the far side of the stairway. That was the problem with condominiums. You needed everything to go right, or they didn’t get kept up.

He thought about that sentence for a moment, and then decided that he wasn’t ever really awake until he had made it to the Ararat. Then he went around behind the stairs and knocked on old George Tekemanian’s door.

“It’s open,” old George said.

Gregor pushed at it. It wasn’t only not locked. It was not latched.

Old George was sitting up in the enormous leather lounger chair that took up the middle of his living room, pounding away on a laptop he had placed on a tray table. The laptop, the lounge chair, and the table—all the way across the living room—that the laptop was supposed to go on had all been given to him by his nephew Martin, and they were all so expensive, they looked like if you scratched them, they would bleed money.

Old George looked up as Gregor walked in.

“You shouldn’t leave your door unlocked like that,” Gregor said. “I keep telling you, you only think it’s perfectly safe here.”

“It’s perfectly safe here, Gregor. Nothing ever happens on Cavanaugh Street, except when Sheila Kashinian has one of her fits and throws Howard out into the street, and then he goes over to the church and wants Father Tibor to give sermons on the sanctity of Christian marriage. I remember Howard Kashinian when he was a boy, just like I remember you. He was an idiot even then.”

Gregor went around to the side of the chair and took a look at the screen of the laptop. Old George was on Facebook.

“What’s ‘Mafia Wars’?” Gregor said.

“Tcha,” old George said. “You really have to keep up with the times. It’s a game. I can go all day on games, lately. That’s what happens when you get old. You drift.”

“You’re been drifting lately?”

“I think I’ve been bored,” old George said. “It’s all well and good for people to tell you you ought to keep busy, but the fact is you get to where your knees don’t really work right. Then what do you do? I’m not going into one of those nursing homes Angela keeps talking about.”

Angela was old George’s nephew Martin’s wife.

“I didn’t know you and Angela were still fighting about nursing homes.”

“She doesn’t call them nursing homes,” old George said. “She calls them ‘assisted living facilities.’ That’s really what she calls them. Can you believe that?”

“I think she’s only worried about your being here on your own.”

“I’ve been here on my own since Maria died. Well, all right, Gregor, not in this apartment. I appreciate the apartment. I tell Martin that all the time. I appreciate all the things. I don’t know what I did with myself before I got on the Internet.”

“You balled socks in the mechanical sock baller and shot them across the room,” Gregor said. “You broke lamps. I was here.”

“I’ve got better aim now,” old George said. “I wish everybody would just stop worrying about me. I can’t see myself moving out to live with Martin and Angela, either. They’re very nice, Gregor, but they’ve got small children. Family is a wonderful thing. But it ought to live in its own house.”

“There was all that about Sophie Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “That wasn’t even that long ago. She’d been living on her own, too.”

Old George did something decisive on the keyboard and then began to shut the computer down. “Sophie Mgrdchian,” he said, “was a damned fool. And I knew her since she was a child, too. We were children together. Well, no, all right, she was a child and I was, what do you call it these days. I was a teenager. But you know what I mean. She was always a damned fool. I’m not about to let somebody I don’t even recognize come in here and stay in my house.”