The Juror Read online

“Neurosurgery resident gave it to me.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “None of your business. He wants to be my boyfriend. And the skull wasn’t a bad idea. Better than flowers anyway.”

  “So do you like him?”

  “You’re an incredibly nosy creep.”

  “Yeah. I am.” He works the hinge of the skull’s jaw and makes the sound of a creaking door. “Yah—ah—ahh. So do you like him or not?”

  “How can I like him? He’s a neurosurgery resident. Do you know how incredibly boring neurosurgery residents are?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “If you have two hours to live, spend it with a neurosurgery resident, it’ll seem like two years. You can keep the skull, if you promise not to take it to school or anything. I don’t think it’s legal to own them.”

  “Wow. Thanks.”

  Juliet steps around to the corner of the house and fetches her bike from where she’s hidden it. She says, “Yeah, well, I thought your warped little brain would enjoy that.” Again she asks Mom, “So what’s this news?”

  Oliver jumps in. “She got three red spots.”

  Juliet doesn’t get it.

  “That’s it, that’s true,” says Mom. “Three red spots.”

  “And she’s got more coming,” says Oliver.

  Juliet, palms upward: “You have measles?”

  Both Oliver and Mom grinning. The skull also enjoying this. Then Mom makes her announcement. “I sold three pieces.”

  Juliet’s jaw drops. “Annie.”

  “To a very influential collector. Who has visions of…” She waggles her fingers. She can’t find the word. “God, superstardom for me.”

  Juliet, her mouth wide open, lets fly a shriek. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

  “Ssshhhh!” says Mom.

  “Annie!”

  Mom’s got one hand on her hip, and she sashays that hip. “Twelve thousand dollars in my pocket.”

  “ANNIE!”

  Juliet jumps up and down in place. Hops close to Mom and grabs her cheeks in her big hands and smushes them together so Mom’s lips push out like a fish.

  “ANNIE! THAT IS SO… FUCKING… UNBELIEVABLY….”

  “Shh!” says Mom.

  Mom puts both her hands up for a high-ten slap. Juliet pounds at them with her fists. So excited she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Mom, laughing, grabs her wrists to restrain her, but Juliet pulls her arms free and then scoops Mom into an embrace. Pummels her back. So much taller than Mom, she’s draped over her, banging away at her back and then quitting that and squeezing her. She winks at Oliver and stretches out her long long arm like a tentacle, and takes his neck and starts strangling him, forgetting that she’s already killed him today.

  THE TEACHER sits half-lotus in his old one-room schoolhouse. He fixes on the representation of salagramas that he’s painted on the shining wood floor.

  The pyramid of red disks.

  He draws a breath. Puraka.

  His breath runs down the spiral corridor of his spine, down along the road that Black Elk called the red road, down to the dark pond and the spreading white cypress tree.

  Rechaka. The breath is released.

  He draws another breath. Puraka.

  One of the red disks begins to float in front of him. A crimson globe, as light and small as a thistle, and inside of this globe is his father. His father is drunk. He’s sprawled on the rug in what they called the “wreck-room,” in the basement of the house in Bay Ridge. He’s singing the “Cinta di Fiori” by Bellini. In his lyric baritone, with white spittle at the corners of his lips.

  The Teacher breathes out. Rechaka. The globe wobbles, floats off.

  Another globe comes floating by. He looks in.

  He sees himself in the kitchen of that Bay Ridge house. Havoc of heaped plates, moldy food. He spreads mustard on a slice of Sunbeam Round Bread. In the fridge he finds some old salami. He tears away the edge that’s going bad—the warped rind. When he turns, he notices that a roach has crawled onto the bread and is hip-deep in mustard. He moves his hand slowly till it hovers above the roach. Then he snaps his wrist and snatches it, and holds it up between thumb and forefinger, delicately. All its mustard-yellow insect legs running like hell, but it’s not getting anywhere.

  Rechaka. He dismisses this vision.

  He breathes in. Another globe floats up.

  His mother, shrieking at the bathroom door, kicking it. The door flies open. His father is taking a shit, and he’s got an open volume of Thomas Aquinas on his knee. Says his mother, “So now what, Princessa?” His father gets up. A teardrop-shaped turd falls from his ass as he rises, and drops onto the toilet seat. With his pants wrapped around his ankles he steps forward. He tries to spit in her face, but he misses. He smiles at his son, and shuts the door.

  The Teacher, with his breath, arranges all three disks into a pyramid, two low and one high. He fusses with their alignment until the geometry seems immaculate, unassailable.

  Then he inhales them.

  He rises.

  He plays his messages. Sari. Sari again. Sari a third time.

  He goes to the console and summons up channel one, Annie’s kitchen. He listens. Her visitor, the doctor woman, is still there with her; they’re chatting away, and the Teacher’s schoolhouse is filled with their laughter. It’s good to be with them. The Master travels all day without ever leaving his house, says Lao Tsu.

  Annie and her doctor friend are talking about Zach Lyde.

  ANNIE’s appalled. “The shirred? No. Not the shirred.”

  “Why not?” says Juliet. She’s still laughing. “That’s such a sexy number. You look so sexy—”

  “Juliet, will you stop it? I don’t want to look sexy. This man is my potential patron. He is not a potential…”

  “What?”

  “Boyfriend. Whatever.”

  “Oh no. No of course not, Annie. He’s only gorgeous, thoughtful, rich as Croesus. Doesn’t approach your standards. Though it is sweet of you to consent to this mercy-date with the poor—”

  “This is not a date! Not. A. Date. And besides you left out self-confident and funny and you didn’t say anything about his cheekbones.”

  “All right! That’s the way! You’re wearing that shirred thing, girl. And don’t be shy with him—”

  “I’m not shy.”

  “You are.”

  “I’m private.”

  “You clam up.”

  “I don’t babble to men, that’s all.”

  Juliet laughs. “Babble? You call it babbling?” She slurs the word babble. It’s evident to Annie that her friend is far past exhausted. She sits in the kitchen rocking chair, chattering and pushing Oliver’s Lorna Doones into her mouth—taking ratchety little rapid-fire bites. She’s overrevving. When she reaches for her cup of tea she lunges.

  “It’s not babble, Annie, it’s an art. First you say something to puff up his ego. Then you say something alluring, something to draw him close to you. Then with a sly little subtle stab you puncture his balloon. Then you stroke his silly ego again, then you push him back, pull push pull push pull push till you’ve got him, by this method, spinning in circles and dizzy and staggering and falling at your feet.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then tell him you’re sorry, you do admire him but he can never be more to you than your patron—and Annie, you have to let me listen in when you do this or I’ll kill you, my darling,” and Juliet breaks out into more gales of laughter.

  “Hey Jul?”

  “What?”

  “When’s the last time you slept?”

  This is a poser for Juliet. “You mean sleep sleep? Not just closing your eyes for a minute while you’re doing a tracheotomy? Well, I don’t know. What’s today?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “It is? No.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Well then, I know I slept for a few hours Monday night. Not so
long ago.”

  “Jesus, what are you doing here? You’ve got to get to bed—”

  “No I had to come. When I got your message. I mean, Annie, what’s incredible is that you never stopped dreaming, you wanted to make art and you did it and you struggled, you kept at it and now finally—”

  “I kept at it because I’m insane, Juliet.”

  “You call Slivey yet? You quit your job?”

  “I can’t quit my job.”

  “You can!”

  “This could go up in a puff of smoke.”

  “It won’t! You can be making your boxes tomorrow.”

  Annie laughs. “Not tomorrow anyway. I’ve got jury duty.”

  “Oh God, I forgot. How’d that go?”

  “Fine, boring. The lawyers asked me a ton of questions. They picked me.”

  “For what?”

  “Some trial. I thought it’d be something different for me to do, you know? But now, I mean after this, I mean, now it’s just a total pain.”

  “Get out of it.”

  “Too late now.”

  “Get out of it.”

  “Juliet, you got to get some sleep, honey.”

  “Naw, I’m going to the movies with Henri.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I’ll take your bratty kid if he wants to come.”

  “Depends on who’s driving.”

  “OK. Henri’ll drive. But listen, Annie, I want to tell you what happened last night.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not the only one with adventures.”

  “What happened?”

  Juliet has this expression, which precedes all conversations about sex—her lips thinning out and then a mischievous flutter of her eyes. She lowers her voice. “Where is he?”

  “Oliver? In his room. He can’t hear us.” Annie leans close. “What?”

  “Last night. About two o’clock last night, got called down to the trauma bay. Gunshot wound. Supposed to be a fourth-year resident there but he never showed, I think he was sound asleep somewhere, so I was in charge. Unless I wanted to wake the attending, which I never want to do. So anyway, they wheel this kid in, this black kid, he’s about twenty I guess. He’s wide awake. He’s feisty. He’s gorgeous.”

  She pounces on a swallow of tea. Then she says, “Guess what nurse was working with me?”

  “Henri?”

  “Sometimes they let him rotate with me now. They’re scared of what I’m like without him. So it’s him and another male nurse. I cut the kid’s pants off with the trauma scissors. He’s not wearing any underwear. The wound’s in his thigh. Entrance here and the exit here—pretty clean, simple, kind of dull really, except who’s looking at his thigh? Annie, he had the most beautiful cock you’ve ever seen in your life. Not so big really but it was like… like what’s that smooth black stone, what do they call that?”

  “Onyx?”

  “Is that it? OK. But I mean it had these two gnarly veins, like, like vines… and it’s lying there against his thigh pointing down at the wound, and it’s throbbing a little? And it’s like, like it’s flared out near the head like a cobra, like a sleeping cobra—”

  Both of them blush and tilt their faces and laugh wildly, but Juliet’s still worried that Oliver might overhear, and she puts her finger to her lips. “Shhhhhhh.”

  This draws another fit of laughter.

  “And Henri, he didn’t know whether to look at that cock and drool, or watch me to see if I was gonna screw up. But I was damned if I was gonna screw up. I went around to put the IV in this kid. The kid says, ‘Shit. That’s for when you’re too old to eat, right? When you don’t got no teeth.’ And he says, ‘I got teeth. I can eat. Eat you right up. What’s your name? My name’s Richard.’

  “And he’s got these incredible white teeth and I’m a little weak there and I say, ‘Let me get this in, Richard.’ He says, ‘Get the doctor.’ I say, ‘I am the doctor.’ He says, ‘Oh shit. You? Oh shit! I’m a dead man.’ So then I started cleaning the wound, and he says, ‘What do you think of that sucker?” And I say, ‘Looks like you got in trouble doing something stupid, Richard.’ And he says, ‘When I get ahold of the motherfucker did this to me? Gonna wheel him in here in a bag. And you gonna unzip it, Doc, and you gonna just pour him out.’

  “But I’m only half-listening to him, because the thigh seems a little swollen and I’m starting to think about an expanding hematoma, which means there’s a block and the blood is pooling up in there somewhere. I put my hands on his thighs, because sometimes you can feel the tension. And there is all this tension under my fingers but, Annie, this guy is really muscular, rock hard, so I don’t know, maybe it’s just muscle. I have to compare the tension with the tension in the other thigh. So then I’m holding both of his thighs and he’s looking down at me and he’s saying, ‘You know what, Doc? You got a nice touch, Doc’

  “But I already knew that, Annie. Because while I was holding him? His cock was starting to—”

  “No!” hisses Annie.

  “It was! I mean it was, it was, it was just rising up as I watched, and it was so beautiful—that cobra thing… that, thatwingspread, you know?”

  For a while they wheeze with laughter.

  “And I, I was watching it and it was watching me back, and I looked up and Henri was watching too, and Richard had this big grin and he had his hands behind his head like, like, like this—”

  She leans back and laughs straight up at the ceiling for a moment. Then she says, “But I was hell-bent I was going to finish this examination. So I kept my hands on his thigh, I kept examining him, and that cock kept bobbing, bobbing up, and I was blushing, you know how I blush? I think I was probably, like purple, and Annie, I was so excited, I just wanted to gobble that thing up. And then he reached down and put his hand right on top of mine. And I let him do it. He says, ‘What’s your name, Doc?’ And I looked up at him and I said, ‘Hematoma.’ He says, ‘What? That’s your name? Hema Toma? What’s that mean?’ I say, ‘It means you’re going to surgery, Richard. Goodbye, Richard.’

  “And I shipped him off to surgery, and they did a fasciotomy and I’ll never see him again.”

  OLIVER now wishes he hadn’t listened. Hadn’t lain there in his Mom’s bedroom on the cool wood floor with his ear to the wood, eavesdropping on Juliet’s story. It’s got his head all twisted up. He’s at his desk now trying to do his math but the thoughts keep slithering away.

  Of the ballerinas in the Marina City Ballet, four are older than 16, 35% are 10–16, three are 7–9, and one is a black, weaving-and-bobbing cobra with one eye, and all the ballerinas gather around it and try to gobble it up….

  And he’s thinking again of what Juliet said about that guy’s cock, about its wingspread, how beautiful it was—and his ribs ache.

  She’s too old for me. She goes out with really mature older guys, wingspread guys, what would she want with a kid like me?

  But maybe the money will help. If Mom gets really rich I can buy a house next to Juliet’s place on North Kent Road, a whole house just for parties, and everyone will come because I’ll be the son of Annie Laird and I’ll have a Harley and a private lacrosse field out back, and even Laurel Paglinino will come, but I’ll make her go away, I’ll make them all clear out so I can be alone with Juliet….

  Jesus. It’s stupid and immature, this line of thought, but it’s runaway, it doesn’t care how dumb it is, it goes where it pleases….

  “Oliver!”

  “Uh?”

  “Come on, get ready.” Mom comes up the stairs to fetch him. “You can finish at Mrs. Kolodny’s.”

  That wakes him up. “Wait! You said I could spend the night at Jesse’s!”

  “Yeah, well, I’m sorry. Jesse’s mother doesn’t want you. You’re too much of a brat. Mrs. Kolodny’s it is.”

  “Mom! No!”

  She leans close to him and cups her hands over her mouth and drops her voice to the register of a ball-and-chain phantom. She intones, “Mrs. Kol
-od-neeeee’s.”

  “Mom. You’re messing with my head here, right?”

  She gives him a quick drumroll of little slaps on the top of his head (she always gets in this big-sister mode when she’s been hanging around Juliet). She says, “You swallowed it, though, didn’t you? In fact Juliet’s going to take you and Jesse out to the movies and then you spend the night at Jesse’s. All right? A date with Juliet? Your true love? Now get your ass in gear. I’ve got my own date.”

  “Thought you said it was a business meeting.”

  “Oh, right. Yes. Business. Strictly. Hurry.”

  ANNIE gets twelve yellow red-throated cattleyas. Annie gets dinner at L’Auberge Conques. The wine is a Domaine des Comtes Lafon Chardonnay, but it’s the chocolate ganache that does her in. Also the sharp tangy wind on the way out to the car after dinner, the moon hurtling through clouds, Zach Lyde’s easy elegant laugh as he fumbles through twenty keys on his key chain. Also the smell of his linen jacket as he holds the car door open for her.

  They drive, and Zach Lyde’s elegant car fills up with Vivaldi.

  At a corner near Katonah, Annie sees in the headlights a goat resting its chin on the uppermost rail of a wood fence. It glowers at her with its subtraction pupils. It seems to tilt its head to the passion of Vivaldi’s two violins. A sudden wind-hoop of leaves rolls before the fence, wobbles, scatters. The world is filled with such unexpected shivers of beauty, how did it ever seem drab to her?

  She asks Zach how he started collecting art, and he tells her:

  “Down near where I work, on Maiden Lane? There was an old crumbling cinderblock wall, and I used to walk by it every day and then one day something caught my eye. I went over and checked it out. It was a city. Built into a hollow space on the wall. This, it was like a tiny acropolis built out of clay, with tiny clay columns. And tympanums? And flights of clay steps running up and down? Sitting in that wall. With city graffiti all around it, and posters for rock bands, My Sister’s Dead Cock or whatever, and garbage, you know, beer cans shoved in the chinks of that wall—and then that perfect city.

  “So I went and found out who’d built it. A homeless man who hung out on the steps of a church. I found him a home, I found him some patrons, I found him a gallery. He’s insane, he’s still insane but now he doesn’t have to hustle for meals or a bed. He can just build his cities. Most of which nobody will ever get to see.