Esmerelda

Looking back, I realize the first time my wife Kim got into it with Esmerelda must have been at her company Christmas party last year, at the Furnace Club. If you have never been there, imagine Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick chatting over cigars and billiards, fiddling with their pocket watches, discussing philanthropy and union-busting. It is a place for American royalty, decked with crushed velvet and chandeliers like asterisms, humbled by decades of social progressions and the collapse of big steel into welcoming the hoi polloi. On that evening, they even opened their doors to an unemployed artist: me.

I drank rum and eggnog over by those plush billiards tables, talking with Peter Gorski and Yafir Parveen and poor old Trevor Brannigan. They were all allies of my wife—especially Brannigan, who mentored Kim and promoted her when Jack Jennings died of throat cancer, but who now himself suffered the same disease.

I liked all the men my wife worked with, though none of them would ever amount to much, other than Brannigan, who would not be able to enjoy it much longer. A circle of little consequence, I admit—some also-rans, a dying guy, and me—but dressed in our Christmas black tuxedos, we were gentlemen nonetheless, and I was enjoying myself.

They asked me about my painting, and I replied at length as if I had been painting. They liked me, because they liked Kim. They liked her in New York, too, which is the headquarters of the advertising and public relations agency she works for. People walked by me all night, insinuating it might be our last year in Pittsburgh.

"Kim's getting the call up."

"Hey, Ed, bite the Big Apple."

It was all rumor that went well with the drinks. I could go to New York. Or I could stay. This crowd of Kim's got very worked up about geography (that is, geography as caste system: New York was Brahma, of course, while Pittsburgh was Shudra at best) and time, as in, this was the greatest time in history and must not be squandered. We hadn't even begun the final year of the 20th Century and people were already talking about the new millennium as if it would be a mystical event. But to me it was all one wide, slow river, and I didn't get worked up about what might lie around the next bend. I'm open-minded, I suppose. I sipped my drink.

Kim came over, flustered and red-faced, and through a forced smile, insisted we leave. She was tired, she said.

Back home, she threw her shoes against the wall, peeled her dress off in the middle of our bedroom floor, and anger-combed her hair for what seemed like forever. I noticed a deep scratch on her left earlobe, with a streak of dried blood.

"What's that?" I asked her, pointing to it.

"Nothing." She combed and combed.

"It looks like something."

"Well, it's not."

Had she been in a better mood, she might have said what she usually does whenever we disagree about something: "Never trust what an artist sees."

Fair enough. But of course, I hadn't seen Esmerelda. Didn't know she existed.

 

I moved to Pittsburgh in the mid-1980s after I graduated from the University of Nebraska, where I earned (barely) a BFA in studio art with an emphasis in painting/drawing—a two-dimensional man in a three-dimensional world. My college girlfriend of four months said Pittsburgh was a place for artists and we should go live there for a while. The woman (an unpublished poet from Kansas who wrote nifty stanzas about our lovemaking) and the prospect of going to a city with hills was enough to convince me.

I would hate to describe the conditions under which we lived, but when you are young, such things scarcely matter, and in any case our routines bespoke a gritty, romantic flair. We got jobs at a commercial laundry. In the mornings, we would pull hot hotel linens out of giant driers in the basement, punch out by two, go to a cafe or bar to smoke cigarettes and share a beer, then go home and make love. In the early evenings, if it wasn't raining, we would go to the North Side or the Strip District, where I would sketch passersby and the environs in charcoal, graphite, or ink. I immortalized listless men with ungroomed mustaches, attractive women with tired faces, and abandoned buildings where wild vines choked yawning bays of smashed windows and collapsed chimneys. I took inspiration in the city's steep hills, the goat-trail streets with potholes and cracked sidewalks. Occasionally, on my days off, I would rise early to ponder the dimly lit South Side corner taverns, where former steel workers who once nursed breakfast beers after their night shifts at J&L could not break the habit now, even though the mill was gone. I sketched everything, converting my favorites to larger canvas paintings. My lover scratched out poems in a little notebook she carried.

I figured out how to make extra money: We would go up to Mount Washington, which overlooks the rivers and the Triangle, and do charcoal drawings of the city below, then sell them to tourists for ten dollars or whatever they might pay, which we would spend on drinks. On a good night, we'd go home buzzed and do the deed loud and heedless, with all the windows open.

The cityscapes I sold were easy, fast, and spiritless, but my portraits were magical and important, I felt. I knew how to capture a soul. I believed one day I would be recognized, perhaps renowned.

"I want you to paint me naked," my lover said one evening after we shared too many drinks.

This I did in oils, working as if in a fever. She posed on our bare kitchen floor, with surly detachment on her lips and, in her eyes, a smoldering eternity I did not know she projected until I captured it. In the morning, she was hung over, abashed. "Too much wine," she said. "Bare-Assed and Hammered on the Linoleum. There's your title. Burn it."

A few weeks later, that painting and two others of mine were accepted for a show at a South Side gallery no one ever visited. An obscure weekly no one read covered the show, gave me a whole paragraph, and declared I showed "a kind of vision." The next day, I learned someone snapped up my nude for one hundred dollars. I was out of my mind with happiness.

I wanted to do another painting of my girlfriend right away, but she told me I had exploited her and, in any case, painted her breasts wrong. That evening, she became morose, standing in front of the bathroom mirror for the longest time. At bedtime, she slept with her back to me. In the morning, she complained of vertigo and called in sick to work. When I came home, her things were gone. On the counter, a hand-scrawled poem:

Impugned in oils
Sold like a whore for a week's rent
Seen as he sees me, I die

I never saw her again.

Now alone, my money situation deteriorated. I was eating one meal a day, usually a peanut-butter sandwich and tea. The days got cold, and when I left the laundry at two, I saw few tourists. At night, I wanted only to stay home and keep warm. I tried to paint nudes of my vanished lover from memory, out of spite, if nothing else. But her visage faded.

Then, one late afternoon, I lingered on Mount Washington, not long before sunset, drawing cityscapes and making absolutely no money, when a policeman approached me. By his side, a distraught young woman clutched her hands and sniffled. The policeman said she was the victim of a purse-snatching moments earlier. "Do me a favor, buddy, take her description of the guy and draw him for me. I'll pay you something."

That's how I met Kim, who was starting her career at the time. She was handsome, trying to hold onto her dignity in a new city that had abused her, and I felt sorry for her. Are you hurt? I asked. No. Anything valuable taken? Money and identification. The cop, impatient, scolded me: "I'll ask the questions—just draw." She described the thief, and I drew for her approval what turned out to resemble a miscreant Keanu Reeves with acne.

"That's pretty much him," Kim said, her first-ever critique of my work. "Wow."

I decided Kim was in fact beautiful. It was November. Pittsburgh was dark, cold, and strange, ever-more distant from any normal life I knew, but this Kim had an intelligent mouth, wise eyes, respectable brown hair, good clothes. Her embarrassment and anger over her predicament came from a place of intense civility and reason. No mere wounded animal, she was somebody, and I sensed in her a nurturing captaincy.

It began to snow while we were standing at the overlook. When the cop finished jotting down his report, he took my drawing with him—he never did pay me—and I asked Kim if I could buy her a cup of coffee. To my astonishment, she said yes. We took the Incline down the cliffside, the only two people aboard, and as the car descended from the low clouds, chased by snowflakes, I looked at her and the dazzling city lights below and felt, quite suddenly, anything was possible. What can I tell you? I fell in love.

Thus ended my greatest artistic period.

 

The first time Kim came home all beaten up was Valentine's Day, two months since the earlobe injury, which she never did explain. I cooked Beef Wellington and a sweet potato pie. She was late. An ice storm started earlier, and I worried Kim might have plowed the Acura into a tree. I opened a bottle of wine, set out two glasses, and waited. Minutes later, headlights slashed across the front window. Kim threw the door open, and I thought, yes, she crashed the car. Her silk blouse was torn at the collar, her hair a mess, and she had a fat lip. She slammed her purse on the foyer floor.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said. She stomped up the stairs to our bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

Kim grew up in a wealthy Philadelphia family and earned degrees from Virginia and the Wharton School at Penn. Since I have known her, which is nearly 15 years now, she has always wanted to talk about everything. I can't recall a subject on which she did not have an opinion or a situation in which she held her tongue. Not that she talks too much. On the contrary, she has a pleasant demeanor and a sense of humor. If you get right down to it, her mouth made her successful. She has been promoted six times in the past five years and only Trevor Brannigan was above her in the Pittsburgh region. Her money bought our house.

"What's wrong?" I asked her, knocking on the door. "What happened to you?"

"Go away!" she shouted.

I waited there for a moment, thinking she would open the door, but she didn't.

"Kim," I said. "If you don't answer me, I'm calling the police."

"I got in a fight," she said.

"Come again?"

"A fight!"

"What do you mean, a fight?"

"A fistfight!"

Something, a shoe perhaps, crashed against the door.

 

In the morning, after Kim left for the office, I watched Good Morning America and did the dishes, then crossed the icy street to Wesley's house and took up my usual seat at his kitchen table, my back to the corner wall, with a view of his backyard and its vast garden, barren in winter. In season, he grows tomatoes, vegetables, and too many varieties of flowers for me to count. He and his wife Ruth were high school sweethearts. She's a tenured math professor at Carnegie Mellon, no time for plants. Wes worked as a shift manager at a rolling mill in Beaver County, which closed 12 years ago.

"How ya doin," he asked me. Like most native Pittsburghers I knew, his questions ended with a downward inflection, not up, making it sound more like statement than query. Squat and thick, a cinder block of a man, progressively fleshy, he handed me a cup of coffee, sat down next to me. "You watch the Penguins last night."

I told him I did, though I had not. We drank coffee, read his newspaper, not saying much until the others arrived.

Griffin, who lives at the end of the block, let himself in. His wife Carmen is the weekend weather anchor on one of the TV stations and, during the week, produces industrial videos for local companies. Griff, whose huge and majestic nose has been broken twice in long-ago bar incidents, used to work as a supervisor at a construction company but fell from some scaffolding three years ago and wrecked his back. He hobbled in, served himself some coffee.

Trip came in shortly afterwards, a clunky cell phone at his ear, arguing with his wife about a delivery of supplies. They own a mail-order diet-shake company, but Betsy does most of the work, because she has an MBA and Trip doesn't. He spends most of his time trading stocks on his PC, has doubled his portfolio to $5,000 in the past six months, he claims.

"Tell him hell no," Trip yelled into the phone, scratching his stomach. "Betsy... tell him... tell that guy hell no." He listened for a while, his face bunching up in anger, finally drooping in defeat. "You decide," he said and hung up.

We played breakfast poker, as was our custom, 25 cent antes. The pots would grow to a few dollars. After several hands, two of which I won, I announced, "Kim got in a fight."

"With who," Wes asked, dealing.

"Some woman she works with."

"What about."

"No, I mean a fight. They punched and everything. In Kim's office. They knocked over chairs and a potted plant. Kim thinks people down the hall might have heard."

Griff said, "Get outta here." He threw two quarters onto the table.

"I'm serious."

"Who won," Wes asked.

"I don't know. I'm pretty sure Kim didn't."

"Who's the woman."

"Esmerelda something. I don't know her."

"Did Kim fire the bitch."

"Different department. She can't fire her. She's worried she'll get fired."

Wes scratched his mustache. "How the hell do you throw down at the office without anyone noticing."

"I don't know. Kim said it was all very fast. Then she sat in her office with the door closed for about an hour. She didn't look good when she got home."

Griff laughed. "You're a liar."

"I wish."

Trip said, "Anyone lays a hand on my wife, it's clobberin' time. Dude or woman, I don't care."

This made me feel guilty, to be sitting there in the kitchen with my friends, instead of out there clobbering Esmerelda, whoever she was. I didn't have long to think about it, however.

Griff said, "My big maple cracked like a mother last night, in the storm. You guys wanna come over and help me chainsaw it. I'm not supposed to use power tools on oxy."

Trip seemed to like his hand, didn't want to put down the cards. "Gimme an oxy and I might," he said.

 

The old tree split down the middle, about halfway up the trunk. The fallen section barely missed the back of Griff's house. I didn't own a chainsaw, but everyone else brought one. Griff let me use his and brought out a six pack of IC Light for us to drink while we worked. He sat on his deck and pretended to boss us around. "Watch your peckers," he said.

I enjoyed using a chainsaw. Cutting up the fallen part was easy. The mortally wounded section still standing, however, with its bare branches stretching skyward in (I imagined) futile agony, presented a challenge. Trip climbed it, as high as he could, like some arthritic tree sloth, and tied a rope around the splintered trunk, so we could pull it toward the open yard and away from the neighbor's fence. Trip climbed down, and he and I pulled the rope while Wes made sawdust fly with the chainsaw, standing atop a step ladder. The tree came down where it needed to, with a crash. No one died. Only a spiky stump about six feet tall remained. Wes went at it, carving off two pieces until the stump stood only a few inches tall.

It warmed up. We took off our jackets, cut everything into smaller piles. Griff brought out another six pack. He nursed his first can—I guess he really was on oxy. "Stack it nice," he said, blowing his monumental nose into a rag.

I decided to goof around. Feeling adept with the chainsaw now, I hacked away at one of the sections of trunk Wes toppled earlier, each little squeeze of the trigger like a dab of paint with a fan brush. The guys were all doing their thing, talking about the Penguins, flashing their hairy butts while they bent down to gather wood, and didn't pay much attention to me.

"Hey. Griff," I said. "This remind you of anyone?"

He walked over and gazed at the bust I carved, a crude maple head, so rudimentary it might not have been identifiable as representing a human were it not for the gigantic nose.

"Holy mother," he said, laughing. "It's me."

 

Over the next few weeks, Kim suffered more run-ins with Esmerelda. I learned more about her—her name was Esmerelda Gaba, lead media buyer. She was a local, a "Yinzer bitch," as Kim called her, educated at Slippery Rock (a telling detail, in Kim's opinion). One day, as they passed in the hallway, Esmerelda shoved her into the wall, knocking down a plaque. Kim told me this while I worked under the porch light out back, using my new Stihl to create a bust of Abraham Lincoln. I accidentally lopped off one of old Abe's ears.

Another time, as I notched grooves in the mustache of a Teddy Roosevelt, Kim told me how Esmerelda criticized her throughout an entire planning meeting, making her look bad in front of her colleagues, and how she slapped Esmerelda in the face afterward in the break room. Kim had a swollen eyebrow and a little cut where Esmerelda hit her back—with her fist. No witnesses. Kim insisted the company must not be brought into the conflict, despite my arguments. "You're the boss, I guess," I replied.

She pursed her lips, crossed her arms. "When are you going to stop this racket?" she asked. "These corny busts, they're beneath you. Why do we have an entire room for your paints and canvases? You never go in there."

"Not true," I said. But it was true. It had been a few years, as a matter of fact. I felt bad because Kim supported my art. On our wedding night, she cradled my face in her hands and told me she didn't know she had a soul until she saw my paintings. Now I wish she never said it, because in neglecting my painting, I neglected her soul, too.

A week later, she came home upset yet again—I was starting to get used to it— but it wasn't because of Esmerelda. Trevor Brannigan, she said, died. I held her while she sobbed. He had been a true mentor to her. From what I understood, his final weeks were ugly. Probably, we would not be moving to New York now. Probably, Kim would get Brannigan's job. That was Okay with me.

At Brannigan's funeral—Saint Mary's on the hill looked apocalyptic, decapitated by low clouds and packed with mourners—I saw Esmerelda for the first time. Kim pointed her out as people took their seats. She sat a few rows behind us, to our right. I stole a look.

She was about Kim's age, a little younger maybe, a wisp, small-chested, adorned in a silk blouse the color of cream, earrings like pomegranates dangling from her pierced lobes, which were icy pale, punctured with auxiliary diamond studs. Her eyes were walnut-brown, sleepy in their gaze, too big for her face and utterly striking, hooded by mannish brows and dark eyeshadow. Her hair was dyed a vengeful red, teased and boastful, while her bangs like saw teeth guarded her tall forehead. Her nose, long and elegant, ended with a bump, which beckoned like a baker's confection. Her cheeks glowed slightly with blush, and I noticed the tiny shadows of pockmarks, faint scars from her youth. Her cockled lips suggested a secret, oddly menacing and tumid in shiny, pinkish lipstick. She was unsmiling, and yet the corners of her mouth showed a sardonic permanence, little curlicues at each side, setting me adrift in my mind into some strange wilderness of abandon. For the first time in years, I longed to paint.

The priest spoke of death and life everlasting, and I listened, dutiful, holding Kim's hand. When the service concluded, Esmerelda was already gone.

Later, as Kim slept, I went into my studio, waved away cobwebs, dusted off an unused canvas, and placed it on the easel. I stared at it for the longest time. I grabbed a brush, tried to go back to that wilderness in my mind. I couldn't do it, though. I went to bed.

 

Spring came. Everyone talked about the "new economy," the runaway stock market, the dawn of a new age. I read an article about how all the computers might crash when the new century came, how airplanes would fall from the sky and so on, which gave the passage of days a weird, last-days-of-Rome vibe. Kim dismissed such prophecies. She tried to explain the "dot-com revolution" and "paradigm shift" that was "transforming the Pittsburgh ecosystem," telling me about her technology clients while we brushed our teeth in the morning, or ate in restaurants, or laid in bed after sex. I couldn't follow the logic. Pittsburgh looked about the same to me.

New York named her interim chief of the local office but was taking forever to make a final decision. The run-ins with Esmerelda stopped; both were on their best behavior because, I guess, a visitor from the home office lurked most days. Kim was a nervous wreck about it. She wanted that job. She wasn't sleeping well.

Meanwhile, my pals brought me blocks of wood, chunks of old tree trunks they pilfered from abandoned lots and trash-strewn ravines between neighborhoods. One time, Wes disappeared all day in his pickup truck, meandering through the ghost towns lining the Monongahela east of us, and came back with a bed full of fat oak, maple and black walnut.

"Do me a Terry Bradshaw," he said.

I did, working from old photographs, taking my time over the course of a week, mostly with the chainsaw, but also with a new set of small chisels with a range of blade shapes—flat, bevel, edge—for the fine details. Wes got a little weepy when he saw it, this chunky visage of his football hero from the city's glory days.

Later, Wes came back with an old buddy of his, a retired engineer. "I'll give you a thousand bucks to make me a Bradshaw," the guy said.

So I did.

Then that guy's friend paid me to do a Rocky Bleier. By June, my phone started ringing. Strangers said, "Are you the chainsaw artist?" Strangers said, "Have you ever done a Roberto Clemente?"

This was not long before Kim's parking-lot incident with Esmerelda.

 

I see people haunted by disappointment: The mill closes, or your back is ruined in an accidental fall, or the world simply leaves you and your meager talents in the dust. When it happened to me, in the early years of my marriage, I felt no shock or sudden collision with misfortune, only a numb letting go, giving up, final confirmation of a long and unhappy suspicion: I was no one, I would not be renowned.

Her career flourished. We bought this house in a hilly fringe neighborhood between blue-collar decrepitude and well-to-do gentrification. We attended company parties, shopped for furniture, knew our wines.

After one of her promotions, Kim asked me to paint her portrait. I was nervous. I had never painted her. She dressed in her nicest business clothes, made herself gorgeous for me, and sat still for an entire Sunday afternoon while I worked. Somehow, I made her look like a prison warden.

"It's nice," she said, a devastating blow. "Is it finished?"

The next day, after she left for the office, I revised. I tried to make her younger, softer, and changed her business clothes to a sexy, floppy-collared turtleneck beneath a warm wool coat, grey heather in color. I added snowflakes, falling from a darkening sky, and a hint of the city lights in the background, glowing from below as they did in my memory.

That night, Kim cocked an eyebrow. "What's this?" she asked.

"Just like the day I met you," I said.

"You preferred me when I was a nobody?" She opened a bottle of wine, poured a glass for herself, but not for me, and turned on the evening news.

The next morning, I vowed to fix things, but only stared at the easel, could not make myself begin. I stomped out, slammed the studio door. I fetched the paper from the driveway. My neighbor Wesley, taking out the trash, waved to me. "Whatcha doin," he called over. We didn't yet know each other well, back then. "Want coffee," he asked. We shook hands. His friends came over. We sat at his kitchen table. "You play poker," he asked. I said no, not really. They explained, we played, and I won four dollars. The boys needled me, called me a ringer. We switched from coffee to beer.

I stopped going into the studio after that.

 

What happened is Kim and Esmerelda argued in a planning meeting for a company outing to celebrate a record quarter of revenue. Their bad feelings for one another were bottled up thanks to the parade of visiting brass from New York, but on this day, New York was not there, and the acrimony leaked out. Kim suggested the symphony, but Esmerelda argued for a Pirates game, and the other executives agreed with Esmerelda. Kim was offended, and when the meeting ended, she told Esmerelda, privately, "Go to hell." To which Esmerelda replied, "I'll show you hell." Kim walked away.

It was quitting time, a rainy, murky evening, and Kim took the garage elevator to the tenth level. As she fired up her Acura, Esmerelda stepped out of the elevator car and approached her. Kim rolled down her window, said, "What now?"

Esmerelda answered with both hands, grabbing fistfuls of Kim's hair. They yowled at one another. Kim tried to get free. She swung wildly with her fist, struck Esmerelda's cheek. She ripped a button from her enemy's red blouse. Esmerelda let go, went to the front of the car, kicking it. Kim put the car in gear. She confessed, to me, of yelling, "I will kill you!" She pulled forward, bumping her nemesis. Esmerelda jumped out of the way. Kim peeled out.

All the way down, Kim said, she kept looking in her rearview mirror, expecting Esmerelda to follow her in her brown PT Cruiser, which Kim calls "that turd wagon." No PT Cruiser was spotted, and upon inching past the rising gate arm at street level, Kim felt some relief. But there, on the sidewalk, dripping wet from rain, Esmerelda pounced, wielding what appeared to be a chunk of old brick. Kim's driver-side window disintegrated into glass pebbles. Kim sped away, and heard Esmerelda call after her: "See you Monday, dead girl!"

Kim told me this story as she guzzled her wine, wiped away her angry tears, picked glass pebbles from her frizzled hair, her abused scalp still angry red.

"This has gone far enough," I said. "I'm calling the police."

"No," Kim said. "I'll call New York."

"And say what?"

"I'll get her fired."

"Then she'll really come after you. She should be in cuffs."

"Ed, no. Stay out of it, for God's sake. I'll talk to Myra."

"Do it right now, then. Right this instant."

She disappeared into her den, closed the door. I could hear her talking but couldn't make out the words. When she came out, she said, "I'm flying to New York."

"Why?"

"It's time to give Myra a push. One flight left tonight."

"What did you tell her about the psycho?"

"Nothing. I'm going there to talk about the job. It's time to be assertive. They've been screwing around, I'm tired of it. They want leadership, I'll show them." She went to our bedroom, pacing, rummaging through her narrow closet.

"Kim, you were assaulted."

"I'll get the job, and then I'll deal with the wicked witch myself."

"It's the weekend."

"Myra said we could do breakfast at Sabarsky. The weekend is better."

"Do you want me to go with you?"

She dismissed me with a wave. "And when I do get the job, we're moving out of this crappy neighborhood. Where's my overnight bag?"

"I like this neighborhood," I said. Hearing my own words, I never felt more pathetic.

 

Kim drove my Camry to the airport. "Please get the window in the Acura replaced," she said. She left me standing in the driveway in the dark and drizzle. I felt emasculated, insulted. She didn't want my help beyond the running of errands. She held me in low regard. I did not like how Kim simply declared we would move to another house. I didn't care, but maybe I did. I was too mad to garage the Acura.

Needing company, I crossed the street to Wes' house, let myself in, as I am always welcome to do. Wes canoodled with Ruth on the couch. They were watching the X-Files.

"Get yourself a beer," Wes told me. I went to their fridge and came back with three ICs, passed them around. "Nothing for me," Ruth said, so I kept two of them, sat down in the La-Z-Boy. "Cheers," I said, downing a can in one go. My hand shook a little.

Ruth asked about Kim, and when I replied she was traveling for business, she said, "Last weekend, we had the best conversation about telecom stocks. She said you two have done so well with them. I wanted to talk more about it, which ones she favored. We're all-in on mutual funds, but they seem to me not aggressive enough in this market."

"Huh," I said.

"Which ones do you have. The telecoms I mean."

"I'm not sure," I said, opening the second can. "All of them, maybe?"

Ruth watched me drink and after a moment of reflection, stood up. "Well, it's been a long week," she said. "I'm bushed. You boys have fun solving the world's problems." She kissed Wes on the mouth, kissed my cheek, and disappeared down the hallway.

Wes took a long slug from his beer, then asked me, "You remember Ben Hudek."

"Maybe," I said, going back to the fridge for another can or two.

"You did him the Mean Joe Green."

"Oh, yeah. Sure."

"Well, guess who he's friends with."

"Mean Joe?"

"No, better. Sal Camisso."

"Who is?"

"You dumb ass. He owns Blitzburgh Brewing. And all those food companies."

"Oh." I kept drinking.

"Camisso saw the Mean Joe you did for Ben. He loved it. Ben said the guy's gonna call you."

I shrugged. "Okay. He wants a Mean Joe, too? A Bradshaw maybe?"

"Jagoff. All of them."

"All of who?"

"All the famous ones. Franco, Swanny, Stallworth, Rocky, Bradshaw, and the whole Steel Curtain. For the plaza outside his brewery. That's what Ben says."

I belched. "No one called me."

"Ben only told me today. Camisso is gonna call you."

"Okay." I was empty again.

"Geez," Wes said, "are you hearing me. You're being pretty dense for a guy who just hit the jackpot. Have another beer, why don't you."

I did. I thought about Kim and my extraneous role in my own existence, how nothing I did mattered, how my deepest-held opinions carried no weight with my beloved, how I was her butler, her sex toy, her errand boy, her chef, her pet, her thorn. By the time I left, I was drunk. Wes fell asleep on the couch. In his front yard, I stumbled and fell sideways into their Spirea bushes, and it's possible I took a little nap there, because when I sat up, it was still dark, but my clothes and hair were wet from drizzle and the soppy, poky branches, and I needed to urinate in the worst way.

I rubbed my face. Someone stood outside my house.

A small woman, on tiptoes, peered into one of our windows. She skulked out of view, around back and then returned, my direction, and I knew, even before the thin glow of the single light above the garage revealed her, it was Esmerelda. Blue jeans and dark rain jacket, moving commando-style, stealthy but not fearful, she astonished me with her audacity. Her pale face and stringy red bangs, glistening with mist, paralyzed me with wonder. She was small and ferocious, quiet as a virus, peering into our front window. From her coat pocket she extracted what appeared to be a small paper bag and a lighter. She hesitated, then went back to the driveway, considered Kim's Acura, circled it, poked her head into the broken window on the driver's side. She opened the bag and shook the contents into Kim's car. She wadded up the bag, chucked that into the car, too. I did nothing.

Then she got into her PT Cruiser, parked halfway down the block, and drove away.

After a few moments, I walked over to the Acura, peered inside. There, on the leather seat, wet with rain because I got drunk instead of moving the car into the garage as I should have, rested awful chunks of a large dog's feces.

At least, I hope it was dog.

 

In the morning, I found her in the phone book, Boggs Street address. I knew that neighborhood. Mount Washington. Money. I drank a few cups of coffee, took some aspirin. I knew what I had to do but couldn't make myself go. At noon, I showered, made the bed. I heard moans of gusty wind, looked out the window. The tree branches pantomimed a warning, or a lament, or maybe derision. The sky looked like rain.

From my chisel set, I selected a small edge knife, stuffed it into my windbreaker pocket.

With the Acura defiled, I walked a few blocks, caught a bus. At Station Square, I rode the Monongahela Incline up to Mount Washington, its car crowded with conventioneers—dot-com guys, judging from their conversation. They brandished cameras, unlit cigars, wore polo shirts with company logos on the breasts. One of them wore a New York Yankees cap backward. He asked me, "You live here?"

"I do."

"Where can we find some girls?"

They all laughed.

At the top, they lingered at the overlook, some of them gawking at the rivers and office towers below, others checking out the stately homes and apartment buildings there on Grandview. I headed up Wyoming Street, relying on memory, thinking Boggs to be the next cross street. It wasn't. The sidewalk steepened, and as I trudged up the long hill, block by block, my hangover nagged me. The neighborhood changed. Row houses on both sides, jammed together in various degrees of disrepair. A motley dog behind a chain link fence in a tiny front yard yapped at me. In one picture window, a large statue of Mary faced outward, surrounded by candles. An old car on blocks, precarious on this hill, sported a Teamsters sticker on the back window. An old woman in a housecoat and slippers sat on her porch, so close to the sidewalk I could almost touch her. Cigarillo dangling from her lips, she nodded at me. "Anthony," she said. I plodded on, the grade steeper now, sidewalk broken and uneven. Maybe I was lost.

When I finally reached the top of the hill, where Wyoming Ts out at Boggs, I stopped to catch my breath. On one corner I saw a gas station with only one pump, newsprint blowing across the tiny parking lot, and on another, a video-rental shop. Next door, a narrow shotgun building promised Cocktails. I pulled the scrap paper from my pocket, double-checked the house number. There it was, across the street, one building down. A two-story brick commercial building, shabby, probably 19th Century, narrow and deep, abutting an alley. Not what I expected.

I saw retail space at the street level and what looked like an apartment or two above it. I jaywalked across the intersection, no traffic. I couldn't find a door leading to the apartments, only the storefront, with papered-over windows and a cardboard sign: Boggs Street Grocery.

A bell over the door jangled when I entered the spartan room, one bank of fluorescent lights overhead. On the back wall there were two doors, side by side, both closed. I saw a vintage display cooler with a couple cans of Coca-Cola and a sixpack of Sprite. A young woman with long hair and teased bangs sat in an old swivel chair behind a folding table.

She drummed her fingers on a small metal cash box. "What can I do ya."

Two shoe boxes sat on the table next to her. They contained a few candy bars, some taffy, and a couple sticks of beef jerky. A baby-blue telephone and a full ash tray cluttered the top of a filing cabinet behind her.

"I'm looking for someone I think lives in this building, but I didn't see a doorbell or staircase outside. Are those apartments up there?"

She looked at me with suspicion. "Just one. You know Ez."

"Esmerelda? Yes, Esmerelda Gaba, that's her."

She frowned. "What's it about."

"She works with my wife. Does she live here?"

"Just a minute," she said. She reached behind her and grabbed the phone, punched in a number. "Ez," she said. "It's Nel. Guy here for you... Don't know..." She lowered her voice. "Says you work with his wife... Normal I guess... Chubby, sounds like he's from nowhere." She asked me, "What's your name."

"Ed," I said.

"Ed," she said into the phone. "Okay." She hung up. "It'll be a minute. You want a Snickers."

"No thanks." I fiddled with the chisel inside my coat pocket. This was insane.

After a few moments, the door on the right side of the back wall opened, and there stood Esmerelda at the bottom of a staircase. She was so small. She wore blue jeans and a T-shirt without (I couldn't but help notice) a bra. She wore her red hair up in pins and had bunny slippers on her feet. She gave me the once over with those dark brown eyes. I swallowed hard. "Ms. Gaba," I said.

"Hey good-looking," she said.

"I'm Kim's husband."

"I know who you are."

"You came to my house last night."

She laughed. "What."

"I saw you."

She folded her arms. "Did you. How'd I look."

"This isn't funny."

"Kim sent you."

"No."

"She did. Of course, she did."

I took my hands out of my coat pockets, did not want to feel the temptation of the chisel. The woman behind the table lit a cigarette and leaned back in her chair and looked at me like she was watching television.

"Not much of a store," I said to Esmerelda.

"Giant Eagle's down the hill, hottie," she said.

"You live upstairs?"

"Give the man a prize. My great grandfather built this place. What can I do for you, Ed. Appreciate the visit, but I spend Saturday afternoons reading, and you've interrupted me."

"Yeah?" I felt completely hapless. "What are you reading?"

The woman behind the table blew smoke and laughed. Esmerelda laughed, too. "Oh, Poe of course. And sorcery books. Spells and voodoo. That's what you want me to say, right."

"I want you to say you'll pay for her car window."

The bell over the door jingled. A policeman entered, handgun strapped to his side. He smoothed his gray mustache. "Hey Nel, hey Ez," he said. Glancing at me, he nodded. "Sir."

"Hey Pete," Esmerelda said. She gave him a hug.

"Bobby in there," the cop asked.

"Of course," Esmerelda said. "Is this Saturday or what."

I would rat her out, simple. I cleared my throat.

"Owes me 20 bucks," the cop said. Then he went through the other door, on the left. Smoke wafted from inside. I heard music, people talking, laughing. He closed the door behind him, and Esmerelda gave me smug little look.

"What is this place?" I asked.

"Where you from, Ed."

"Nebraska."

She laughed. "Okay. Come see. What do I care."

She led me by the arm through the door on the left. The reek of cigarettes and old beer overwhelmed me.

"Make yourself at home," she said.

The room, long and narrow, was ringed with noisy video machines. Men and women sat on stools, pushing buttons, smoking, sipping from beer glasses. Some called out to Esmerelda; she acknowledged them in pet names: Munchy. Honey-Ass. Stomp. Led Zeppelin played from a boom box in the corner.

"Those are poker machines," I said.

"Sharp eye," Esmerelda said. "Pull up a stool. Give one a spin." She kicked aside some squashed cigarette butts with her bunny slipper.

"This is illegal."

She laughed.

"You own all this?"

"I own the building. The machines are owned by some very special people."

Across the room, the police officer chatted with several other men. The cop lit a cigarette. Everyone was drinking beer, but the cop refrained, only smoked and laughed at someone's joke.

Esmerelda asked, "What does Kim think you're supposed to do, exactly. I'd really like to know."

"She didn't send me. I want you to pay."

"Heard you the first time."

"I want you to leave Kim alone."

"Do you want a drink."

The walls were filled with posters—Steelers, naked Playboy models, Iron City beer—and crappy old paintings in ratty frames. One portrayed a vase with flowers. Another, dogs playing poker. All around, people smoked and gambled.

"You're a criminal," I told her.

"Maybe you need love," Esmerelda said. "Kim's a little frigid maybe. I can introduce you to Becky over there. She's got a sense of humor."

I jabbed my hands into my coat pockets, palms sweating, grasped the handle of the chisel.

"Little boy, give me a hint," Esmerelda said. "We have beer, we have poker, we have Becky. Name your pleasure. They'll stake you if that's the issue. What will it be."

I stammered. "Why... why are you doing this? Why won't you leave us alone? What did Kim do to you?"

She said, "I think the question is, what did she do to you."

"What's going to happen when Kim is your boss?" I asked. "You think I won't tell her what you did last night? You think I won't tell her about this place?"

Then I saw it. Over Esmerelda's shoulder, on the wall, partially obscured by one of the poker machines—a painting, in oils, of a young woman, nude on a tile floor, legs akimbo, eyes like eternity, a gaze with which to inveigle anything she wished, anything at all.

My painting. The greatest thing I ever did. A kind of vision, the critic wrote.

"Where..." I began, but I couldn't finish. I felt dizzy, as if tumbling around inside an industrial drier, the past and present all thrown together.

Esmerelda followed my gaze. "She's something, isn't she," she said. "You wouldn't mess with her. Hot stuff. Gets me worked up just looking."

When I didn't respond, she inched closer and touched my arm as a friend might.

"Did you know, there are old coal mines here," she said. "There's an abandoned shaft right below this building, they say. Not safe, this neighborhood. That's what some say. Big sinkhole waiting to happen. Swallow us up. But here we are. Been here a long time. Not going anywhere. The thing about Kim, the thing that kills me—she thinks she knows everything. She thinks nothing ever happened in this city until she showed up. Never shuts her mouth. I don't have to tell you, my Lord, you live with it."

I wanted to tell her. I wanted to say, That is my painting. Never in my life did I so badly want credit. I felt half-erased, like my feet were already gone, sinking down into the old mine shaft she mentioned. Soon I would be swallowed. The year 2000 would pass right over the Boggs Street Grocery, and me, too.

"Leave Kim alone," I said, squeezing my hidden chisel. "Leave her alone, or I'll..."

Esmerelda waited for me to finish. Her eyes narrowed, bored into me. I winced: The edge of the chisel blade pierced my own flesh.

Esmerelda put her hand on my shoulder, a bit of a reach because she was so short, so small. "Give it up," she said, with the weight of a colossus, the voice of a god.

 

At home, I cleaned the wound on my palm and bandaged it. The light on our answering machine blinked.

Hi Ed, this is Sal Camisso calling. You don't know me yet, but I know you. I saw your work, those busts you do, they are amazing my friend, amazing. You do that with a chainsaw? You're a maniac, a genius. Listen, call me back, I've got a big idea. Seriously, call me. I can keep you busy, believe me, and I'll make it worth your while. Sal Camisso. You drink my beer I bet. You've heard of me. Call me. Big plans!

The second message was Kim's. She rambled, her voice quavering with indignation.

I'm not getting the job. Myra told me. They're moving Jenny Wockenfuss from the Manhattan office to run Pittsburgh. She was born in Pittsburgh, I guess. Big freaking deal. And it gets worse. They want me in the Birmingham office. As in Alabama. I swear, I want to jump off this building. Listen, I won't be home tonight. I'm stopping in Philadelphia to spend the night with my parents. I really need to talk this through with them. What I'm thinking is, maybe I should quit. I mean, screw Birmingham for sure, and, screw Pittsburgh, too, maybe. I'll fly back Sunday night, don't know what time yet, but I'll call to let you know. Did you get the window fixed in the Acura?

I told myself all the worthless things. Try. Do not go gently. Instead, I went out back. I hoisted a block of wood onto my metal cutting table— Eastern Hemlock, scavenged by Griffin and Trip from an abandoned church yard in Beltzhoover. I gave the starter cord of the chainsaw my best rip—it roared to life with a pungent slap of benzene, cutting teeth screaming in their circuit around the silted guide bar. I would be memorializing washed-up jocks from now on, apparently. So, get busy. Something to show the Camisso guy. A Bradshaw, maybe. The outer edge of the wood, brittle and rotted from parasites, flew away like crusted dirt as I laid into it. Deeper in, the block firmed up and I felt the familiar, workable feedback from the saw. The outline of a head took shape. I began a face, flitched the crude slopes of a nose, gouged two craters from which I could, later, with a chisel, excavate the eyes. It was a woman. If I went much further, Kim might recognize the subject. I stopped.

 

I crossed the street to Wes' house, let myself in. Ruth nodded at me from the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine. She told me, "Wesley's out back." I found him in his garden, sitting on a tiny stool, pulling weeds.

"How ya doin," he asked.

"You busy?"

"What, like I have anything to do. Pull up some dirt."

I sat down in the mulch between his raised beds of cucumbers and tomatoes, crossed my legs.

"Camisso call you," he asked.

"Yeah. He left me a message."

"You call him back."

"Not yet."

"Geez, what's wrong with you. Don't you want the money. Do it and you'll be in the newspaper."

"Yeah, I'll call him."

Wes seemed satisfied by this. He threw the uprooted weeds into a bucket. He looked funny, in a way, so meaty, squatting on this little stool, gardening. I envied him, this peaceful man who spent his best years in front of molten metal and screaming machinery, who accepted his oblivion with such grace. He chucked a weed at me. "So, jagoff, what's on your mind."

Where to start? I hadn't mentioned Esmerelda in months, only talked about Kim in a superficial way. I never even told him I don't like sports.

"Alcohol," I said.

"Okay, I'm almost done here. We'll get a beer in a minute. Pirates game should be on by now."

His thickset hands, smeared dark with dirt, moved like a doting mother putting her children to bed. He patted the soil, brushed off leaves, straightened a leaning stem. He spied the tiniest hint of a weed sprouting nearby, and plucked it out, brooking no squatters.

His tomatoes were getting chunky, more red than green, not quite ripe. "I want you to look at this one," he told me, gently cupping a glossy, delicate orb on the vine, tilting it toward me. "Isn't she beautiful."