Calling Mr Lonely Hearts Read online

  “Is there a problem?” Varick said.

  Had he spoken aloud? Shit. He was too fucking drunk. He rubbed at the row of studs over his right eyebrow—one of the piercings was getting infected, he could tell. Fucking cheap-ass piercing parlor over in some bum-fucked Kentucky town. He should’ve gone to his regular place.

  Varick was looking at him. Again, that smile, a smile that wasn’t quite friendly, but might be mistaken for friendly at first glance.

  Dillon didn’t see any sense in answering. He was pretty sure the guy wasn’t a fag. If he was, there was a four-inch pigsticker in his boot to let the guy know his true feelings about the matter.

  When the elevator clanked to a stop, Varick opened the gate and gestured for Dillon to step out. A giant number 7 was painted on the opposite wall.

  The institutional green paint job in the hallway was recent enough that Dillon could smell the fumes. Stopping in front of a door near the end of the hall, Varick flipped up the cover on the keypad beside it and pressed some numbers. When he was finished, he pushed open the door and stood aside.

  “Make yourself comfortable, my friend,” he said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Week 16 4/7

  “Just hold out your finger,” Roxanne said. “She’ll jump right on there.”

  She knelt down on the floor and held her arm out toward Del’s five-year-old stepdaughter, Wendy, who was worried about the bright blue parakeet on Roxanne’s shoulder.

  “Will he bite me?” Wendy said, inching closer.

  Roxanne didn’t care for most children, but she could feel Del and her husband, Jock, looking on. The bird was a present for the girl and, to tell the truth, Roxanne kind of liked her. Even though she was a stepdaughter, with her springy blond curls and hazel eyes, she looked remarkably like Del had as a child.

  “That’s some hostess gift, Roxanne,” Del said. “It’s just dinner.”

  “I’m sure I missed her birthday or something. Or it can be an early Christmas present, if you want.”

  Jock laughed. He was a lawyer, expansive and muscular in the way of former football players, with close-cut, dark hair and a broad, honest face that looked younger than his forty-something years. Though he was several years older than either she or Del, she liked the way he moved, with a confidence that spoke of utter control of himself and his life. (Fortunately, he didn’t seem to be controlling Del—Del put enough pressure on herself for the both of them.) He’d gone to Cincinnati Collegiate, a prep school that served the non-Catholic wealthy in town, then to Duke, and was a widower by the time he and Del got together three years earlier. It was Roxanne’s opinion that Del was way more insecure than she needed to be about Jock. Del had always been a worrier.

  “Here, baby,” Jock said, lifting Wendy into his arms. He touched Roxanne’s shoulder with his hand and the bird hopped onto it. “There’s your bird.” He moved his hand slowly toward Wendy and she reached out to stroke its back with a tentative finger.

  “You should name her,” Roxanne said, getting up from the floor.

  Del came over and put her arm around Roxanne and kissed her on the cheek.

  “What was that for?” Roxanne said.

  “Because you’re thoughtful,” Del said. She was very attached to Wendy, Roxanne knew, and Del had told her some minor horror stories about trying to win Wendy’s trust early on. But she also knew better than to have illusions about her own thoughtfulness.

  “You think about it, honey,” Jock said. “You’ll come up with a great name. Let’s put her in her cage and find somewhere for it in your room. Tell Miss Roxanne ‘thank you’.”

  He gently set the child down and slipped the bird back into its cage, where it immediately flew around and lighted, upside down, at its top.

  “Thank you for my upside-down bird,” Wendy said, looking up at Roxanne.

  “You’ll be a great friend for her,” she said. “You can tell her all your secrets.”

  Wendy smiled and threw her arms around Roxanne’s hips, then ran off after her father.

  After dinner, they sat in the Florida room at the back of the house. The long wall of sliding doors was open to the unusually cool September evening and Roxanne had her favorite shawl—black-dyed Peruvian alpaca woven tissue-thin—draped around her shoulders.

  “So, any juicy divorces you can talk about?” Roxanne said. She leaned toward Jock, who sat in the chair opposite hers. “Come on. I can keep a secret.”

  Jock raised an eyebrow, seeming to consider. Then he also leaned forward. “Let’s just say Bob Kohler’s not going to be buying up any more newspapers anytime soon. He’ll be selling off a considerable number of assets.” He leaned back and took a sip of his scotch. “But you heard it from somebody else.”

  “No, really?” Roxanne said. As an artist, she lived on the fringe of social-page society. People like the Kohlers had her sculptures in their homes—here and in Hilton Head or Majorca or Bermuda—and offices. But she preferred her life to theirs. If she became one of them, she knew she wouldn’t be able to work—she would be too distracted. Work and art were the only things that meant anything to her.

  “What is it?” Del said. She came into the room bearing a hand-painted tray laden with a pot of chocolate fondue and chunks of freshly cut pineapple and ripe strawberries. Roxanne watched her. Dear Del, who tried so hard to be the perfect suburban wife. She took everything so seriously; she had ever since they’d met in preschool at Our Lady of the Hills. It worried Roxanne sometimes, how Del seemed to be trying just a little too hard. Her parents weren’t wealthy, merely comfortable, and she had definitely married out of her league when she married Jock. Roxanne wanted her to succeed, finally. Right out of college she had married a guy down in Lexington, but he’d spent most of their two years together stoned and unemployed. Del definitely deserved better. Roxanne just hoped she could handle it.

  “Jock was just dishing on the Kohlers,” Roxanne said. “He’s so naughty.”

  Del put the tray on the low table in front of Roxanne and went to sit on the arm of Jock’s chair.

  “That’s my Jock,” she said, putting her arm around her husband’s shoulders and kissing his head. As she moved, the square-cut yellow pendant around her neck that Roxanne had thought was a citrine caught the light and she realized it was actually an oversized yellow diamond. “Naughty to the core.”

  Jock grinned. Even after a year of marriage, he was besotted with her, Roxanne could see. That was a good thing.

  While Jock was getting Wendy ready for bed, Roxanne sat at the island in the kitchen finishing a glass of wine and watching Del load the dishwasher. Del had designed the kitchen herself and Roxanne had helped her pick out the granite and distressed copper accents. Just a few months earlier, it had been featured in the Enquirer in a story about renovations in older Victoria Park homes. As far as Roxanne was concerned, Del and Alice were welcome to live in the area where the three of them had grown up, but it wasn’t for her. She would have felt stifled here. There were too many things to remember—good things as well as bad—and she didn’t need the distraction.

  “I probably should’ve had Alice and Thad over, too,” Del said. “Or, at least Alice.”

  “Why?”

  “I think she’s lonely,” she said. “She said Thad’s been out of town a lot. That’s kind of weird for a dentist, isn’t it?”

  “Alice can take care of herself.” It was true, despite the fact that Alice came off as needy to most people. But Roxanne had known her for more than twenty-five years. Alice was just a fact of life, like Rox-anne’s own black hair, which was lush and thick but tended to unruli-ness if she didn’t mind it, like the calluses on her fingers and palms from working with clay. Alice was just there. Alice called when she needed her, and sometimes Roxanne would answer, sometimes she wouldn’t. “I don’t think Thad wants to be home.”

  “What does that mean?” Del said, turning off the faucet. She took a dish towel and carefully wiped the water from around the faucet handl
es and the edges of the sink.

  “Well, they’ve been married seven years, and there’s that seven-year-itch thing,” she said.

  “That’s a harsh thing to say.”

  “Maybe,” Roxanne said. “But I think she’s taken things a little too far with that nose job and those Suzy Socialite clothes and those diets she’s always on. I love her, but she’s a freak. Sometimes, I think she’s channeling Michael Jackson.”

  Del struggled to hide a smile. “I think she looks pretty good. But maybe the stilettos at the grocery store are a little much,” she said.

  They both laughed.

  Roxanne had lunched with Alice just the previous Tuesday. Since her father had died and she’d come into her inheritance, Alice had seemed to turn away from her, which was, generally speaking, okay. She’d been obsessed for years with having a child, and for a long time had talked of little else. But she’d developed serious endometriosis early and the scarring was so bad she could never be pregnant. Roxanne knew it was probably unethical or unkind or un-something to not stick by Alice after the years of loyalty she’d shown her—loyalty that could never be repaid, so why should she bother, really?—but she found Alice’s drift into self-obsession too bizarre and too time-sucking. She almost told Del what Alice was up to now, how she’d gone as far as inventing a lover for herself to make Thad jealous, but she couldn’t bear how pathetic it all was. Why Alice simply hadn’t taken an actual lover was beyond her. Del would eventually find out for herself. Alice couldn’t keep a secret for long.

  “Do you think he’s screwing around?” Del said. “That would suck. She doesn’t deserve that.”

  Roxanne shrugged. She’d had a go at Thad five years earlier but he’d shied away, pretending he didn’t know what she was asking. In a way, she was glad he hadn’t bitten. He’d turned out to be a bore, as far as she could see. But she had her suspicions about him. Nobody could be that boring.

  It was a guilty habit, she knew, sleeping with married men. Like mother, like daughter.

  Jock came in carrying Wendy, pink and smiling, fresh from her bath. “Mommy Del needs her good-night kiss,” he said.

  Wendy leaned out and took Del’s face between her small hands and kissed her on the lips.

  “Sweet dreams, honey,” Del said. “Did you let Daddy brush your teeth? Two minutes, with the music?” She looked at Jock. “The dentist said it needs to be for two minutes, remember.”

  “Oh, yes. We brushed an extra minute just to be sure,” Jock said. He gave Roxanne a grin that said that maybe he was having some fun at Del’s expense, humoring her.

  “Good night, Wendy,” Roxanne said.

  She was charmed by the child’s animated, round features that gave her the look of a Mary Cassatt moppet. While she worked primarily in clay, she thought she might do a drawing of Wendy sometime—something especially for Del—or maybe of Del and Wendy together.

  Jock said, “Tell Roxanne what you named your bird.”

  Wendy blushed and hid her head against her father’s neck. She said something, but no one could make it out.

  “I don’t think she heard you,” Jock said, teasing. “Go on.”

  Wendy turned around and quickly said, “Roxanne.” She hid her face again.

  “Oh, that’s so sweet,” Roxanne said.

  Del laughed and Jock looked pleased.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Wendy waved to them, giggling, as he carried her down the hallway.

  Del and Jock stood in the open doorway to watch Roxanne walk out to her car.

  “You should come next Friday,” Roxanne said. There was an opening for another artist and his work at Gallery on the Square where she often sold her own artwork. “Maybe bring Alice?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t seen Thad in a while,” Jock said. “He’s a good guy.”

  “Maybe,” Del said. “We’d have to get a sitter.”

  “Or we could just leave her with the bird,” Jock said. “With her new name, it will be like having Roxanne here all the time.”

  For the briefest of moments, she imagined living in the picturesque house that towered over her—at five foot one, nearly everything towered over her—with Jock and Wendy and all the furniture and Del’s spectacular jewelry and the sleek foreign cars in the garage and Jock’s muscled body beside hers in the antique bed in the master suite. But then she thought of the mass of clay that was waiting in her studio at home, of what was waiting inside it that she, and only she, could free, and she knew that she had finally reached a point in her life where it wasn’t worth taking things just because she could. “Yes. Just like it,” she said.

  Roxanne liked coming home to her house in Kenwood. She parked in the driveway because the single garage was packed with her work—a few complete pieces, but mostly abandoned sculptures she couldn’t bear to part with. Her clients all imagined that she lived in some chic downtown loft. Nobody ever guessed that she had a place in the suburbs.

  The house itself was a small architectural treasure: a cedar-shingled Arts and Crafts-style bungalow with a long, deep porch and several original stained-glass windows. Iron-trimmed lanterns, also original, hung on either side of the front door. It was a friendly house, as unlike as it could be from the austere, blond-brick, postwar apartment building she’d grown up in on the unfashionable eastern end of Victoria Park. There, she had shared the lives of her neighbors (as well as her mother’s, and her mother’s many boyfriends) through beige, plastered walls. She much preferred to be separated from other people by grass and concrete and trees.

  She hung her wrap on the wrought-iron tree just inside the front door and locked the door behind her.

  Even when it was empty, the house was never silent. The water pipes groaned and the many windup clocks she’d bought over the years and put in every room ticked in competing rhythms, filling the air with a kind of busy energy, and, in the spring, there were the sounds of birds nesting in the chimney. But the sounds were ones she could live with—alone. They were a vast improvement on the noises of her childhood: the constant traffic outside the apartment, the muffled slamming of doors, the fat kid, Barry, from downstairs, who played his trumpet in the parking lot every afternoon after school, even when it was snowing. The sound she missed the least, though, was the sound of her mother’s voice with its ridiculous girlish lilt that she’d cultivated over long years of practice. Roxanne had learned to avoid that voice, beginning when she was old enough to make her own meals and snacks and let herself in and out the front door with a key that she kept on a string around her neck. But tonight, Carla—she could only think of her mother by her first name, the name by which she had been taught to call her since she was four years old—was on her voice mail.

  “Roxaaayenne, honey,” she said. “Chet and I are coming into town for a few days, but I don’t know if we’ll have time to see you. So don’t be mad if you see us out because it’s not about you, honey. It’s about Chet’s business. So please don’t be mad, okay?” Then she heard Carla talking away from the phone, telling her bichon frise, Twinkle, to stop digging in her purse. “By the way, honey, do you still have that black evening bag I lent you, sweetie? I’d like to—”

  Roxanne clicked “3” to erase the message.

  “Chet” was her new stepfather, a recent surprise. She hadn’t yet met him. Carla had long prided herself on avoiding marriage, and had even refused, at the age of seventeen, to put the name of the famously married music promoter she claimed got her pregnant backstage at an All-man Brothers concert on Roxanne’s birth certificate.

  There was a second message from a sometime client from Denver who was coming into town without his wife. She liked the image that she knew he had of her: a free-spirited artist who was generous about letting him into her bed and never made any demands on his time or emotions. Plus, he was cute and always made sure she was just as satisfied in bed as he was. But she was busy and wanted to get some work done. She erased his message, too.

  When she’d first bo
ught the house, it had had an enormous rotting sunporch tacked onto the back of it, but she had it ripped down, along with the house’s back outer wall, and built a studio with broad windows that looked over the two-acre-deep stretch of wood sitting beyond the backyard. It was almost midnight, but she felt the aching need to have tools in her hands and her fingers covered in clay. Work made her feel alive, and, after being with Del and Jock in their perfectly manicured house and having eaten Del’s perfectly prepared meal, and admiring their perfectly perfect child, she needed to spend some time not thinking and not admiring, but just being herself.

  In the studio she turned on all the lights so that the night outside the window disappeared and she was alone with her own image in the glass.

  But she wasn’t quite alone because the room was filled with clay figures, mostly birds, but several children as well, each paired with a bird of prey.

  When she first planned the series, she hadn’t known that she would make the children blind. But the first one’s eyes turned out smooth and blank, and she knew it was right. Several clients and interviewers had asked her what the blindness signified, and for a long time she told them that she didn’t like to read things into her own work, that she preferred that people discover their own meaning in it. But a few weeks earlier she’d glanced over an interview proof from a college alumni profile she’d been a subject of and was surprised to find that she’d finally given an answer:

  “They’re blind because there are some things that children should never have to see.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Week 17

  Alice let herself into the shadowed kitchen and turned the dead bolt behind her. Feeling like a teenager sneaking in after curfew, she leaned back against the door and listened to the muted sound of the television coming from the media room deep inside the house.

  Thad was still awake.

  She slipped into the powder room off the kitchen and turned on the light. In the mirror, her face, usually so pale, was pink and warm, heated by all the wine she’d drunk at the restaurant. Taking a lipstick—Tawny Rose—from her bag, she smoothed it on her lips, but instead of blotting it, she used a tissue to blur the edges. Perfection was the last thing she wanted. She mussed her hair, lifting and scrunching it with her fingers. She wanted to look used, a little rumpled and sensual, as though she’d just left her lover’s bed.