Page 70 of We Could Be So Good
He wakes up in the middle of the morning, achy and ragged. He wishes Nick were around to pet his hair. Around lunch, he runs out of orange juice, which is presently the only thing giving him a will to live. Before he can consider whether it’s a good idea to go outside in his current state, he already has his shoes on. He’s all the way down the stairs before he realizes he left his wallet on the kitchen table.
He sits down on the stoop and nearly cries. He just wants juice. He doesn’t even have a dime to call Nick from the pay phone, not that he’d really interrupt Nick at work to ask for juice. Probably. It’s just that juice is the only good thing in the world and now he doesn’t have any.
Across the street is a uniformed police officer. Andy wonders if he’d lend Andy a quarter or two. It’s not one of the regular beat cops, but a rosy-cheeked stranger who could play a kindly neighborhood policeman on a children’s television show—he looks like he keeps lollipops in his pocket for kids and spends his days helping old ladies cross the street. But Nick would hit the ceiling if he found out Andy was asking for favors from cops, so Andy doesn’t try his luck.
“Andy?”
Andy looks up and sees Linda carrying a paper sack. “Any chance you have orange juice in there?”
“Pigments, copper wiring, lug nuts, and plaster of paris,” she answers. “No juice.”
Andy doesn’t cry, which is an accomplishment. “Can I borrow fifty cents? My wallet is upstairs and I don’t have it in me to do those stairs twice today.”
“Flu?”
It probably is, and for some reason Andy doesn’t feel so bad about admitting it to Linda. “Yeah.”
“Jeanne just got over it.”
At the best of times, Andy can’t quite wrap his mind around the fact that Linda, with her copper wiring and paint-splattered overalls, is part of Emily and Jeanne’s world. The borders of that tasteful little bubble are more porous than he had once thought. But now, with a fairly significant headache, the fact that Linda Ackerman, Vassar class of ’55, is standing in front of Nick’s Barrow Street stoop seems almost mystically significant. If a girl who went to school with Jeanne and Emily Warburton could find her way to a pair of overalls and a paper sack filled with lug nuts, then maybe it isn’t so strange that Andy is here, too. Maybe Andy can be in this world in a way that isn’t temporary.
Linda shifts her sack to a hip and presses the back of her hand to Andy’s forehead. “Not that bad,” she says.
Andy wants to protest that actually he’s dying, thank you very much, but his throat hurts quite a bit, so he doesn’t.
She reaches a hand into the pocket of her overalls and gives him a dollar bill. “Get your juice, but when you come back, knock on my door so I know you’re alive. Otherwise, I’m calling Nick.”
Andy thanks her. At the corner store, he bypasses the frozen concentrate Nick usually buys and pays extra for a bottle of Tropicana. When he gets back to the apartment building, he stops at every landing and sits for a bit, drinking juice out of the bottle like a barbarian.
On the third floor, a door opens. Andy looks up and sees Mrs.Martelli peering out, a frying pan clutched menacingly in one fist.
“I heard someone out here,” she says, lowering the pan. “Thought you were a vagrant.”
“I’m a bit under the weather.”
“It’s the smoking,” she says, narrowing her eyes.
Andy is too tired to argue. “Probably,” he agrees.
“You smoke too much, then you turn out like me. I used to do these stairs four times a day with a baby in each arm and now look at me. I need to move in with my daughter on Long Island. Long Island!”
Andy refrains from pointing out that being able to climb any stairs at all at the age of approximately a hundred and fifty is pretty good. “You’re moving?”
“I’m selling the building.”
Andy hadn’t even realized that Mrs.Martelli was the landlady. “Why not just move to the ground floor?”
“Too loud.” She wrinkles her nose. “Also, I want the money. I’ll send my grandchildren to college.”
Andy wonders about the going rate for a five-story apartment building in this part of the Village, and also how many grandchildren Mrs.Martelli plans to send to college. The other day he called a real estate agent about putting his mother’s Upper East Side co-op on the market and learned it would go for what feels like an astronomical sum.
Mrs.Martelli snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Don’t die on my stairs. I’ll never get any money for this place if there are dead bodies. Do I need to walk you up myself?”
Andy assures her that no, she does not, and manages to haul himself up the remaining stairs in a single go. He barely remembers to knock on Linda’s door before collapsing onto Nick’s sofa, the glass bottle of juice still clutched in his hand.
***
One floor down, there’s a dog who loses her mind when her owner comes home, running in circles and letting out little yelps of delight as soon as she hears the key turn in the lock. Lying on the sofa, Andy can hear the owner try unsuccessfully to quiet the dog.
