Page 101 of Playworld

Shel didn’t bother to knock on Millie’s door. He had a key, and once inside he found her in the middle of the living room, and when she turned to look at him, it was as if she’d been startled by a stranger. Her mouth was fixed in a grimace nearly clownish, her cheeks smeared with mascara. He suddenly felt the seriousness of what he was about to propose.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“You have to come with me. Right now. We’ll leave together.”

“For where?”

“California.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I have enough money to get us set up. My father has a business out there. We can go tonight.”

She bunched his coat’s lapels in her hands, then cupped her lips with her palm and began to cry again. She shook her head. “I can’t,” she finally said.

“Yes, you can,” Shel said. “If you don’t want to, that’s something else.”

She pressed her face into his shirt and sobbed and, after several minutes, calmed down enough to breathe softly. She wiped her eyes on his chest and sniffled. “Describe it for me,” she said after a time.

“California?” He smiled into her hair, smelling her scalp. “I’ve never been. I’ve only seen it in the pictures,” he confessed.

“Tell me what it’s like anyway,” Millie said.

He held her very tightly now. “It’s a desert but fertile. Like an oasis. The air is dry. There are palm trees and houses built on cliffs, and the mansions have lawns like fairways. And there’s the Pacific, which seems bigger than the Atlantic somehow and is even colder. And you see movie stars everywhere.”

“At the laundromat and the gas station,” Millie said.

“It’s like Olympus,” Shel said.

“We’ll dine on ambrosia,” Millie said.

“Does that sound like someplace you’d want to live?”

She was silent for a time. “That sounds like a place to start over.”

Her ear was to his shirt, and she then pressed her palm to his chest, patting it several times. When she looked up at him, she managed a smile.

“Be ready by seven,” he told her.

She nodded, forcefully, and then he kissed her goodbye.

It was Friday, payday, and Shel decided not to tell Mr. Patelson he was quitting for fear his check would be withheld, though he did ask for it at lunch—he was going on a trip this evening, he explained, he needed to visit the bank ahead of the weekend—a request Patelson obliged. On his break, Shel hurried to cash it, withdrawing all his money as well, and then took the subway to Penn Station, where he bought a pair of tickets to Delaware. He would meet Millie’s father and properly ask for her hand. He was certain he had enough money left to buy a car. He was dreamy that afternoon, imagining their upcoming trip, their drive together across the country and then working for his father until he got a start in movies. It was a fairy tale, he would admit, not only in the happiness of its ending but also because it began with great risk.

Just past four, Patelson approached him with several thick folders of sheet music. “Can you drop these off with Mr. Stockmeyer? The violinist.” The address was only several blocks from Shel’s apartment. When he glanced at his watch, Patelson added, “I’ll let you go a bit early.”

On his way home, Shel decided he’d deliver the music after packing, which he did quickly and efficiently, taking only his best clothes and leaving the rest behind. He considered the apartment. The couch was a drab green. Over his dresser, a gilt-edged mirror, its glass smoky with age. He considered his reflection. How he hated his full cheeks—they made him look younger than he was. After he and Millie had fled, would hefinally feel like a grown man? He grabbed his suitcase and the folders, ran through a final checklist, touched his coat’s breast and side pockets—money and tickets—turning a million things over in his mind, so that it was only after he came down the stairs and entered his building’s small lobby that he noticed the three men waiting for him.

One leaned against the building’s front door. He wore an eggplant-colored suit and pressed his foot’s sole against the door’s glass, mindful of the street over his shoulder. The second man, also wearing a suit, had a neck so wide it seemed to begin at his ears. He softly stepped behind Shel to block the stairwell. The third man, who moved directly into Shel’s path, was in every measurable dimension so much larger than all of them that for an instant Shel felt, proportionally, like a child. He had a boxer’s nose, at once craggy and wide, its bridge flat and broad as an anvil.

“Did you get our note?” the giant asked.

Shel swung his suitcase at his head, flinging the folders after the bag connected so that the sheets seemed to explode in the small hallway, a great flutter of pages that served as enough of a diversion to get him all the way to the man at the door, whom he grabbed by the lapels and then hurled away from the exit, toward the other two men, and for the split second that he pulled at the handle he thought,Free.Only to be yanked backward by his collar and land so hard the wind was knocked from him. The sheets scuffed and crumpled beneath his back, still floating down as the men’s first kicks and punches landed. Like the sheet music, they too were now on the ground with Shel, the giant’s knee on his sternum, his gloved hand gripping his throat, while the thick-necked one laid his shin across Shel’s biceps. The third man remained at the door, keeping an eye out. “You’re good,” he said to the pair, and when the giant brought his gloved fist to his ear there glinted between his fingers three silver circles, flat as the heads of nails and bright as ball bearings.

“If you don’t move,” he said matter-of-factly, “I won’t miss.” His eyes followed Shel’s face to draw a bead, his raised fist was cocked by his ear, and he wheezed once, patiently. Shel bridged and bucked with one last burst. “Keep still,” the giant said, almost coddling, like a doctor before pressing a needle to a vein. Shel relaxed, his jaw went slack, and the blow came so fast that at first it almost didn’t hurt, he was for a secondunsure he’d even been hit. Though the sound, like a vase breaking, were his teeth, he realized, the pieces falling against the back of his throat so that he gagged, swallowing the bits of several while his tongue swam in blood. He opened his eyes to another blow, the plink that followed like a small rock through a pane, the giant’s fist back by his ear as Shel gargled, tears streaming from his eyes, his tongue’s tip, as the man paused, running along the ridges of his ragged cuspids and incisors while his assailant once again forcefully wheezed. He twisted Shel’s head side to side for a quick inspection, the action slinging the slurry from his mouth. “One more,” he whispered, squeezing the unhinged jaw so hard that Shel’s lips puckered. Followed by a deep crack, as of lake ice splitting, and then the blackness of the water beneath.

The horror came not when he woke in the hospital and saw Patelson and his wife pitifully gazing upon him, or when he considered his reflection in the mirror moments later, his puffed jowls from his broken jaw grimed with bruise. Nor was it when he learned all his money had been stolen. Even in the handful of weeks after his dental surgery, the cost of which Patelson absorbed (“Robbed making a delivery for me,” he’d tell customers who came into the store while Shel healed), he didn’t feel the full weight of his loss until he returned to Millie’s apartment. The elevator opened and he paused in the car as if he’d pressed the wrong floor. He walked down the hallway aware of his footfalls, as if he were a thief trying to move silently. Above her doorknob, the lock cylinder was missing, and when Shel plucked this a draft blew through. He knelt to peek through the hole, he saw a window open inside. He turned the knob, and the door opened. He entered to discover all the furniture gone, the apartment vacant of any trace of anything. Even the floors were without a scratch and shined brightly, like a blackboard wetly erased. In the front hall closet there were not even hangers. In the bedroom, which also had a view of the river, two pale squares above where the headboard used to be, from paintings—or were they photographs?—whose subjects he could not remember. The cracked window whistled with the wind. He entered the bathroom. Did it still smell of her? Or was the lingering scent—chalky, waxy—of her makeup and powders and perfumes? In the mirror he considered his reflection, gaunt, his face thinned from weeks of being fed through a straw. It was like the dream he sometimes had ofseeing himself as if he were a stranger and finally having the fleeting sense of what he actually looked like to someone else in the world.

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