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“Open the door . . . slowly.”
Juana obeyed. He kept his knife out as they entered.
Mel found himself standing in a medium-size room with dirty white paint on the walls. A ragged red sofa stood against the left wall, and a TV with a hole in the screen was on the right. Juana locked the door and turned on a floor lamp. Mel sat down on the ragged sofa. There were used pipe screens on the coffee table and a shattered stem on the floor. Juana had been smoking and had run out of crack. With no more money to be had, she must have thrown the pipe down and hit the streets. Now she knelt on the floor in front of him. Her mouth hung open and he saw that her two front teeth were missing. Mel felt disgusted and threw the condoms he’d purchased on the floor among some other garbage. There was no way he was having sex with this broad. He would just get high and get out. Her brown eyes begged him to hurry. Mel felt a flash of sympathy and pulled out the envelope. He folded a matchbook cover and used it to scoop up enough coke to give her a snort in each nostril. He smiled at her and then took two blows himself.
“Pour me some beer,” he ordered.
By the time she got back, Mel had taken three more blows, and he was feeling real good.
CHAPTER TWO
It wa s Monday morning, and Adrienne sailed along Manhattan’s crowded streets on her way to work. She was wearing a navy blue linen suit with a matching cape and pumps. Her hair was combed into a smooth French roll that accented her slim face and hazel-colored eyes. Her signature pageboy had disappeared. Charlene did her hair these days, and she didn’t possess the skills to create any elaborate hairdos. Adrienne had tried to enter a beauty parlor once after the fire, and it had been a traumatic experience. Just standing in the doorway inhaling the intermingling scents and listening to the hum of several hair dryers had brought it all back. The hair salon had become a symbol of the selfishness that had cost her her baby. She had run from the doorway, hopped in a cab, and headed back to Dan’s house and his sofa, which had become her home.
Although Adrienne looked as spectacular as she always did on her way to work, she was so busy watching the woman and child in front of her that she didn’t even notice the appreciative stares of the men who passed. The little boy was about two years old, and the woman was walking too rapidly for him to keep up. Adrienne watched his stubby little legs moving as fast as they could to avoid being dragged by the woman who clutched his hand. I would never have forced Delilah along the street like that, Adrienne thought. I’m going to tell that woman to slow down. Just as she was about to move forward and say something to the woman, an inner voice stopped her cold. Who are you to lecture anyone about mothering?
After the coroner’s wagon had pulled away, she and Mel had both been taken to Jamaica Hospital. Mel stayed a week being treated for smoke inhalation. Adrienne was there overnight, undergoing treatment for shock and hysteria.
A few days after the fire, she and Dan had returned to the scene to see if anything could be salvaged. Debris was all over the lawn. Delilah’s charred stuffed animals, some clothing, and lots of papers and sheets. The pink floral sheets that had been on the bed had been a present to them from Debra when they got married. The piggy bank and everything else on the dresser was covered with soot from the smoke. If Adrienne touched anything, her fingertips came away black. The top of the television, which was sitting on the chest, had melted, giving it an unusually lopsided shape. A lump caught in her throat as she remembered lying in bed watching her favorite programs on that same TV set while snuggled in Mel’s arms.
The kitchen had been the least destroyed, although everything in it was unusable because of the smoke and water damage.
Adrienne opened the refrigerator. The food was undisturbed; the violence had wreaked havoc only outside its frigid home.
The closet. Oh, heaven help her. All of her books were burned, wet, or covered with soot. Mel’s two crates of albums from the seventies were soggy and stuck together. The door was open, and the volumes spilled out into the narrow hallway. The floors wer
e covered with burned carpet and broken and burned items. Adrienne had to climb on and over everything in order to walk.
There were no living room windows, if “windows” meant panes of glass. The heat had blown them out and then the landlord had boarded them up. The sofa and love seat were burned down to the metal frames. The lamps were merely twisted wire without any fabric at all.
Adrienne had wept inconsolably until Dan insisted that they leave.
At the funeral, Mel had murmured, “It’s all my fault,” over and over while holding his head between his hands. Sitting beside him in stony silence, she had agreed with him as he repeated the phrase over and over again.
Afterward, she had taken refuge at Dan’s apartment, unable to get out of her fetal position and off the sofa bed except to wash up. She’d also refused phone calls from concerned coworkers, and, most drastically, refused to see or talk to her husband. Once, Charlene patted her on the shoulder and said, “Come on, Adrienne. Please talk to Mel; he’s going crazy because you’ve shut him out. The two of you should grieve together.” Adrienne had just balled herself up tighter on the sofa bed.
Weeks later, she saw that the fault was not his. The blame lay with a woman who had decided to escape motherhood for a day. She could never tell anyone that she had left the house to get away from Delilah.
Adrienne had been overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and remorse. She had no home, no furniture, no clothes. Everything, including all of Delilah’s pictures, had gone up in flames. That was the one loss that pained her more than any of the others. One day, when she could stand it, she would ask her family and Debra to let her see the photos they had taken of Delilah. Adrienne had sometimes felt that years had passed since she had driven her car down a pleasant Queens street and made that right turn into a scene from hell. Then time would suddenly shift, and it would seem as if the firemen had blocked off 147th Avenue only hours before. With her eyes closed tightly, Adrienne would replay the events of that dreadful day again and again. Each time, she wanted to die. Occasionally she felt the presence of her brother or Charlene. “I’ve made you a cup of tea,” one of them would say. Or, “I’m going to work; do you need anything while I’m out?” Adrienne tried to pry her lips open to say “Thank you” or “I’m all right,” but the words would form in her brain, travel down through her head, and get stuck somewhere in the back of her throat. It was the first time since she had decided to stop singing that Adrienne was glad she was voiceless. No matter how hard she tried, she just could not find the words. After a pause, she’d hear footsteps walking away. She lay in a long state of denial before she could accept the fact that Delilah was truly gone forever. Adrienne’s world was dark and silent.
Adrienne had thought the grief and pain would never end. Mama and Daddy had come to New York in time for the funeral and stayed on for several weeks, but even their nurturing and praying had failed to get her off the sofa bed. It was only when Dan and Charlene threatened to start legal action to have her committed that she started thinking about the rest of her life.
Mel, his face ravaged from suffering alone and drinking too much, had cried when Dan finally let him in to see her. Adrienne could tell from the look in his eyes that she looked horrible, too. They held each other for a long time that first day. They agreed to stop talking about the past and to save for the day when they would resume their life together. That day was upon them.
Adrienne turned away from the woman and the little boy with the stubby legs and fled down another street. Her briefcase, which contained a copy of the News, a sandwich, and a plum, bumped against her right leg as she walked crosstown to Sixth Avenue. Mel accused her of trying to look like a big shot, because she carried the briefcase, but Adrienne felt that the whole world didn’t have to know that she was just a secretary. After walking six blocks, she decided the briefcase was going to tear her pantyhose, so she tucked it under her arm.
She reached the thirty-story rose-colored office building on Forty-sixth Street at 8:45 A.M. She didn’t see any of her coworkers on the way up to the twenty-fifth floor, and that was just as well. She wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Adrienne got off the elevator and paused to hold her electronic pass card in front of the sensor. After the door clicked, she walked briskly through the corridors.
Parton, Webster & Elliott was an advertising agency. Though they paid well and offered good benefits, it was still corporate America, and Adrienne found the atmosphere stifling and repressive. The fact that she had ended up in such a dead-end career was her own fault. She had dropped out of college to chase a musical rainbow.
The secretarial bull pens were called units. Each unit was set up for four people, and no attempt was made to match them in terms of personality or temperament. New hires were just shown to the nearest empty seat. Adrienne shared unit 6 with a nosy gossip named Sherry Ingles, a Jewish woman from Long Island who had been married briefly to a Puerto Rican. Sherry had been quick to inform Adrienne that she was not Hispanic and that the only reason she hadn’t changed her surname was because she had a four-year-old son who shared it.
Adrienne didn’t care one way or the other. There were two empty seats in unit 6, and she sincerely hoped that the company would start a hiring freeze before the seats were filled. Sherry was enough to deal with.
It was only after Adrienne sat down and booted up her computer that she remembered the company was getting a new president today. She wondered idly what the new boss would be like, and she picked up last week’s memo, which had an article from Advertising Age attached.
Parton, Webster & Elliott has completed a long overhaul of its management team with the appointment of 35-year-old Lloyd Cooper as president of a new division called PWE Multicultural.
Cooper, most recently V.P./Creative Director at the Chicago branch of Parton, Webster & Elliott, started his advertising career ten years ago as a summer intern with Lewis & Wyse in Chicago. “He has intellectual rigor as well as fresh energy, which is just what our new venture will need”, said CEO John Elliott.
