“Nail there,” Gregor said again.
Lida put the nail through the cluster of lacquered leaves, and Gregor pounded at it with the overlarge hammer. Then she put another nail up, and he pounded on that, too. Pounding made him feel good. Besides, if this was Donna’s idea, Gregor felt an obligation. Lida was right. Donna was a nice child, with child as the operative word. She was twenty-one and a student at the Art Institute—the top floor apartment, just above Gregor’s own, having been bought for her by her father when she had the “crazy” idea of moving into Philadelphia to go to school—but in Gregor’s mind Donna was inevitably a “girl” and not a “woman.” She behaved like a girl. She had snow fights with eight year olds in the street. She rode a skateboard to her bus stop in the summer. She seemed sexually as innocent as an Amish virgin. Like a fairy-tale heroine, she had more trust in the benevolence of the universe than she had in the law of gravity. And she had decorated the whole house, or at least the side of it that faced Cavanaugh Street. The building looked like a gigantic Christmas present, wrapped in ribbons and tied with bows.
The last nail was in. Gregor stepped back, nodded at his handiwork, and said, “There. Now Donna Moradanyan won’t be disappointed.”
Lida stooped down and came back up again with a bowl. She must have left it on the floor while she fiddled with the wreath. Gregor hadn’t noticed it.
Lida plucked at the Saran Wrap stretched over the bowl’s top and said, “This is for you. That’s what I came to bring. It’s stuffed vine leaves. I see you all the time, eating at that Ararat restaurant—”
“They have very good food, Lida.”
“I’m sure they do. But they’re not home, Gregor. I thought you’d like something to eat at night. I know you eat at night. You did that even as a child. And I kept thinking of you coming back to this place, with nothing in the refrigerator but a bottle of diet soda, just like my niece Andrea, and I thought—well, you can guess what I thought.”
Gregor could guess. He’d given up eating at night during Elizabeth’s last illness, but he thought saying so would make the conversation awkward. He didn’t want that. He picked up the bowl and motioned Lida through his door, stepping back to give her room.
“Look at me,” he said. “Do I look like I’m starving?”
“You look like you could take off twenty pounds,” Lida said, “but that’s just heredity, Gregor. My sister’s second husband had it. Once he was in the hospital with gallbladder and sick for three months, and he didn’t lose an ounce.”
“Ummm,” Gregor said. He wouldn’t ask her why she thought someone could “have” heredity, the way they had a cold. Doing that would just set her off on one of her lectures, and Gregor had been listening to Lida’s lectures since they were both four years old. He motioned her into his apartment again.
“Don’t you want my vine leaves?” Lida asked him.
“Of course I want them. I just want you to stop worrying about me starving to death. I’m not starving to death.”
“You ought to be starving to death,” Lida said. Then she smiled a little and passed by him.
For the first time, Gregor was acutely aware that his apartment was not only bare, but eerie. A bad motel room would have had more personality. The foyer was the worst of it—no pictures on the walls, no occasional table for the mail, not even an umbrella stand. Fortunately, Lida seemed to have no interest in spending any time there. She passed through as fast as she could walk, right into the kitchen. Gregor’s relief was immense. The kitchen didn’t look so much like a place the Bureau would have raided in their search for a serial killer,
Of course, the kitchen wasn’t perfect, either. By the time Gregor got there, Lida was rinsing out a pair of coffee cups—but it was obvious, from the way the doors of the cabinets were firmly closed and the papers on the table had changed position, that she had been looking around. And finding him wanting. Now she was making new coffee, in the percolator instead of out of the jar, and scrubbing his cups as if they’d been caked with mud slime instead of just covered with dust. Gregor sat down at the table to watch her work.
“So,” he said, “you came up to see Donna Moradanyan.”
Lida stopped her scrubbing, stared into the bottom of the cup, and went back to scrubbing again. “Yes, I did. I come to see her every week. Her mother asked me to.”
“Her mother’s worried about her living in Philadelphia?”
“Oh, she’s not worried about Cavanaugh Street.” The cup was as clean as it was going to get—cleaner. Lida put it down on the table and picked up the other one. “It’s the rest of Philadelphia that bothers Marie. And the Art Institute. It bothers me, too. It’s not like it used to be, Gregor.”