Peter Spiegelman
Red Cat
The story of siblings is the story of childhood,
Experienced separately and together, one tree
Twisting in different directions, roots and branches,
One piece of land divided into parcels,
Acres and half-acres, parts of a subdivision,
Memories carved into official and unofficial versions.
1
I’d seen him angry plenty of times. I’d seen him dismissive, contemptuous, reproachful, and mocking too- and, more often than not, I’d seen that bad karma pointed in my direction. But in the thirty-four years I’d known him, I’d never seen my brother quite like this before. I’d never seen him scared.
David ran a hand through his ginger hair and knocked it from its slick alignment. He rose from my sofa and whisked imaginary dust from his spotless gray trousers and paced again before the long wall of windows. I shook my head, as much from the surprise of him turning up at my door on a Monday morning- or, indeed, any time- as from what I’d heard.
“Jesus Christ, David- on the Internet? What the hell were you thinking?”
He stopped to look out at the rooftops and at the sun, struggling up an iron January sky. Reflected in the window glass, his face was lean and sharp-featured- fairer-haired, lighter-eyed, more sour and lined than my own, but still too similar. At six feet tall he was barely an inch shorter than I, but he seemed smaller than that now. His smile was tight and bitter.
“Is this your usual approach with prospective clients- to interrupt their stories so you can exercise your own disapproval?” He flicked at a speck of nothing on the sleeve of his suit jacket.
The irony of him complaining about my disapproval was lost on David just then, but I fought the urge to point it out. Nor did I comment that he wasn’t so much telling his story as wandering around the edges of it. I knew it would be futile. Unsure of what to do with his fear, and unused to discussing it with anyone, least of all with me, David was falling back on more familiar and reliable behaviors, like annoyed and patronizing. I’d seen clients go through it before; fighting didn’t help.
David turned and made an elaborate survey of my loft- the kitchen at one end, the bedroom and bath at the other, the high ceilings, cast-iron columns, bookshelves, and sparse furnishings in between. He pursed his lips in disapproval. “I haven’t been here since it was Lauren’s,” he said. Lauren was our younger sister, and still the owner of the apartment. I’d been subletting the place for the past five years. “She did more with it,” he added. I kept quiet. David wandered to a bookshelf and eyed the titles and smirked.
“Do people still read poetry?” he said. “People besides you, I mean.”
I sighed, and tried to bring him back to at least the neighborhood of his problem. “You exchanged names with this woman?”
His smirk vanished. “First names only, and not our real ones. At least, the one I gave her wasn’t real. I called myself Anthony.”
“And she…?”
“Wren. She called herself Wren.”
“But now she knows your name- your real name.”
David smoothed his hair and smoothed his steel-blue tie. “Yes. When I think about it, it wouldn’t have been difficult. My wallet was in my suit jacket, and my suit jacket was in the closet or on the back of a chair. She could have gone through it while I was in the bathroom. I should have been more careful about that sort of thing, I suppose, but I assumed we both wanted anonymity. That is the point, after all.”
“The point of…?”
David lifted his eyebrow to a familiar, impatient angle. “The point of the websites. The point of using words like ‘casual’ and ‘discreet’ in your posts.”
I nodded slowly. “You’re pretty familiar with the conventions.” David looked at me and said nothing. “By which I mean: I assume it wasn’t the first time you’d used one of these sites.”
“It wasn’t.”
“How many-”
He cut me off. “How is this relevant?”
I drained my coffee mug, rubbed the last smudges of sleep from my eyes, and counted to ten. “I don’t know what’s relevant and what’s not. I’m still trying to get the lay of the land.”
David sniffed. “Suffice it to say, there were other sites and other women.”
“Were they all one time things?”
He walked back to the windows. A few sooty snowflakes were drifting down onto Sixteenth Street. David watched them drift. “Some, and some were three- or four-time things. Wren was four times.”
“None of the other women-”
“None of the others ever called me on the phone, John. None of them has shown up at my house. So can we drop them and stick to Wren?” His voice was shaky.
“You saw her four times, over what period?”
“Two months maybe.”
“From when to when?”
“From October to December. The last time was about six weeks ago.”
“When did the calls start?”
“New Year’s Day. She left a message on my office voicemail.”
“And since then?”
David turned toward me. Beneath the flawless Italian tailoring, his arms and legs were stiff as wire. His normally ruddy face was paper white. “In the past two weeks I’ve gotten four more calls at the office, three on my cell, and three at home. Four days ago she dropped by.”
“Does she say what she wants?”
“The two times she’s managed to get through to me she’s said she wants to meet again. She doesn’t seem to get the point of no.”
“She doesn’t say anything more?”
David examined his cuticles intently. “She says plenty more. I’ve saved a couple of the messages; you can hear for yourself.”
“Maybe you could give me a preview.”
He sighed impatiently. “She demands to see me; she won’t be dismissed or ignored. It’s a whole Fatal Attraction shtick. And she makes it clear that she knows where I work- not just my office number, but what I do and where. She mentions Ned, and threatens to call him if I don’t get in touch with her.” Ned is our brother, the eldest of the five of us. With our uncle Ben’s retirement the previous June, he’d also become the managing partner at Klein amp; Sons- the head guy at the merchant bank our great-grandfather started a few generations ago. Which also made him David’s boss.
“How are you supposed to get in touch with her?”
“The same way we arranged things before, by e-mail.”
