Glass Houses(40)

The cab was pulling into Cavanaugh Street. He could see Linda Melajian standing on the steps to Donna’s front door with Donna’s Tommy in tow, talking to Hannah Krekorian. On Cavanaugh Street, Gregor Demarkian fit. It wasn’t that he was exactly like the other people who lived here, but they were alike in that one sense—the sense of being the first generation born in America, of having to earn their way to being American—that he needed in order to relax. He was never relaxed around Bennis, no matter how close they got, and he didn’t know if he ever would be.

He got out of the cab and paid the driver. He was three blocks from his own house, but he didn’t want to come up on it too soon. He really didn’t want to pull up to the front door only to realize that both his apartment and Bennis’s were dark. He stopped at Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store and bought a copy of The Inquirer and of the Ethniko Kirix. The Kirix was a Greek paper, but it carried Armenian news in its English-language section. He never bought the Kirix. He had no idea what he was doing.

He went back out on the street and started to walk home, passing the Ararat from the other side so that he didn’t get dragged in by somebody who wanted to talk about Bennis. He passed Holy Trinity Church. Its front facade was lit up and one of the doors was standing open. Tibor had become more and more convinced that there were some things on which the Catholics were entirely right, and keeping the church open all day and night so that anybody who wanted to pray could come in and do it was one of them. Gregor had given up giving lectures about safety and security.

He was on the other side of the street from his own house. He stopped in front of Lida’s and turned to look up at the flat stone exterior. Donna Moradanyan was pregnant, so nothing on the street was decorated, since she couldn’t get up a ladder to the roof in the shape she was in. Gregor missed the decorations. He missed a lot of things.

He looked up and up and up, becoming aware only at the last minute that he was keeping his fingers crossed. He uncrossed them. He didn’t like superstitions. He didn’t like irrationality. People who filled their lives with omens and talismans scared the hell out of him.

He looked up some more and saw that all the lights in Bennis’s apartment were on. He looked again and saw that all the lights in his apartment were, too.

What was more, he could see Bennis herself, moving in front of his own big picture window, back and forth, back and forth, as if she were pacing.

He didn’t think she was. Bennis never paced.





2


He got halfway up the stairs before he accepted the fact that he was a coward. He’d been in his share of shoot-outs. He’d even been in the army. There wasn’t a serial killer on earth who frightened him as much as Bennis did. He thought about stopping off at old George Tekemanian’s apartment on the ground floor, but old George was visiting relatives out in Bucks County. He thought of going all the way to the top and seeing if Grace was in and not practicing; but Grace was always practicing if she was in, and there was the chance that Bennis would come out onto the landing while he was still on the stairs. There had to be, there really had to be, a better way to do things like this.

He made his way up to his own landing and got out his key. He listened at the door, but if there was somebody inside, she was too far inside to be heard from where he was standing. He thought about Alison, who did not make him crazy like this. He thought about the fact that he knew that that meant that he was never going to be in love with Alison. He thought about the fact that he didn’t like the entire idea of being “in love,” since it seemed to have everything to do with emotion and nothing to do with common sense.

He put his key in the lock and turned it. He opened the door and stepped into his own foyer. He looked at his raincoat hanging on the coat tree in the corner. Then he heard voices floating down the hall to him from the kitchen.

“I didn’t really do anything,” Bennis’s voice was saying, “not in the sense of do, if you know what I mean. I went to Montego Bay and stayed with Liz and Jimmy for a couple of weeks. I went to Florence for three months and read Dante.”

“You had to go to Florence to read Dante?” That was Donna Moradanyan. Gregor would have recognized her voice if he’d been blindfolded and wearing earmuffs.

“Dante wrote in Florence,” Bennis’s voice said, “and he was in politics there. The Inferno is full of people who were alive at the time he published it. They were his political enemies, so he sent them to hell. This is the kind of thing that happens with great literature. You have to wonder.”