The detectives ask if Michael has heard from Devor.
“He owes me an email,” says Michael. “If that means anything to you.”
“Poor email etiquette—check.” Ryan marks an invisible notepad.
“Why does he owe you?” says Quinn.
“Oh it’s stupid,” says Michael. “I pitched an idea for the Nøøse magazine. This excerpt from the book I’m trying to write.”
“Book, huh?”
“A monograph, really. Long essay. Not even a book.”
The detectives repeat the word monograph. Quinn licks cream cheese from his lip. He says, “What’s it about then, this monograph?”
“Nothing. It’s not really . . . it’s not even really a thing.”
“Like Seinfeld?” says Ryan.
“What’s the deal with pants?” says Quinn. “That kind of material? If so, you’ll need a better pitch. What do they call it, an elevator pitch? My cousin Donald did one. The genius thing was the book was about elevators. Photos and such: artful, tasteful. Nothing crass like you might imagine.”
“He sell it?” asks Ryan.
“It’s the irony of the whole thing” says Quinn. “He kept showing up at Random House, but he never did manage to get into the elevator.”
After leaving the detectives, Michael walks south to Union Square. The streets have been cleaned since the other night, but he still spies the occasional leaflet caught in gutter or tree branch, still senses the presence of the protesting mob. He went to Gettysburg once, and the feeling he had there was something like this. Not ghostly exactly—nothing supernatural—but this feeling that the land itself, or in this case the concrete square, has some kind of violent essence, that it carries, in the wind that moves across its airspace, a faint echo of war chants.
Before heading down into the subway, he calls his mother. He only calls his mother from loud public places so she’ll have trouble hearing over the background noise and won’t keep him on long. She’s grown impatient with inconvenience in her early old age, and maybe also a little deaf. He’s returning an earlier call. His mom wants to know when he’ll be getting into town. His sister answers.
“Hey brother,” Rachel says in the husky voice that never fails to surprise. Even Michael, a smoker, is appalled by her habit, chain-smoking on their parents’ porch, coughing phlegm into a designated soda can. He sometimes pictures the version of his sister from before he left home, a pigtailed middle schooler with a whistling gap between her front teeth. They’ve never known what to call each other, these distant siblings, separated by geography, age, and social class. Brother and sister is something they’ve settled on, comfortably balanced between the irony of its Green Acres formality and the intimacy of an in-joke. Michael doesn’t like it. Let’s call each other by our first names, he always wants to suggest. Let’s see each other as more than improper nouns.
“Hey sister,” he says.
Michael spoke to both parents on the day of the murder, struggling through that awkward first stage of condolence, the pauses and half thoughts, a conversation laced with silent ellipses. He can’t go through that again, and maybe Rachel senses this, because she just says, “It sucks, huh?”
“Yeah,” he says. “It really sucks.”
She asks when he’s coming home and he says he’s not sure. He asks how she is and she says that she’s fine, that her boyfriend’s fine, that her job’s okay.
13.
Donnell’s had a nice day cooking for Jackie and watching Sex and the City reruns on TBS, which have been censored for basic cable—no nipples or cuss words—meaning they can watch together without him feeling awkward or having to answer uncomfortable questions. Not like the time he took her on the SATC bus tour, and one of the stops was a West Village sex shop, and Jackie, then eleven, asked, “Dad, what’s a butt plug?” Now thirteen, she gets most of the show’s innuendo, and they both find the dubbed replacements for the censored swears hilarious, Carrie saying runt when she’s really saying the C-word.
Father and daughter sit at opposite ends of the couch to buffer against accidental touch. Jackie’s still in the no-physical-contact phase he keeps hoping will pass so he can wrap her in hugs when she comes home in tears—about what, he has no idea, she won’t say—instead of watching her scurry past to her room where she stays until dinner. Occasions for bonding are scarce, so he takes what he can, in this case, sitting four feet away, Jackie adorably looking to dad for approval before allowing herself to laugh at Samantha’s more vulgar witticisms.
The two have been growing apart since the Great Tampon Incident of last year, when Donnell, not wearing his contacts, saw one sticking from Jackie’s purse and mistook it for an oversized spliff. He reached in to confiscate the product and she screamed. She’s been spending more time at her aunt’s in the Bronx since, and last week, she begged to be transferred to California to live with her mom; she was obsessed with the state after bingeing the final three seasons of Mad Men. She became enraged when Donnell asked if her mother was aware of this plan, because of course Dani wasn’t, and would never approve.
Jackie’s mother certainly loves her, and showers her with affection on her biannual visits, but Dani’s made clear that there’s no room in her daily life for a daughter. She’s too busy wallowing in self-pity because she hasn’t booked a commercial in years, let alone a pilot, and now the only auditions she gets are for wizened old hookers
