Lazar called Saturday from the Lord Nelson Hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was pricey, he said, but in for a penny in for a pound. What does that mean? Mimi wondered but didn’t ask. He sounded almost cheery, as if the terrible joke Mimi’s father had played on him had snapped him out of his stupor. He was in the process of raiding the hospitality fridge in his room for tiny bottles of booze. He had rented a car and driven down the coast to where she wasn’t. And then he had driven back to Halifax.
“A very big lesson,” he said. “A very expensive lesson.”
Mimi kept her lips zipped. She was not going to apologize for what her father had done. But it seemed Lazar wasn’t looking for an apology.
He made Mimi laugh with his running commentary of what the hospitality fridge had to offer in the way of alcoholic diversion. It reminded her of when they first started seeing each other. How he was always explaining how things worked: how subways ran on the energy created by people on treadmills in gyms all over the city; how smog was necessary to hide the hooks that held up the skyscrapers. He would take her to obscure dives he had discovered, where the waiters knew him and treated him like a king and her, like the king’s consort. She could hear that same sense of wound-too-tight fun in his voice tonight. Then he sighed and she expected the worst. But he surprised her. Well, he had always been surprising.
“I have been crazy,” he said. “I thought crazy in love but perhaps, really, just crazy. No?”
She had a lump in her throat. Was this a setup?
“Are you still there?” he asked, his voice gentle. But she couldn’t speak. “If you have hung up,” he said, “I will just keep talking anyway and then tell myself we had this discussion and it’s, as you would say, all good.”
“I’m still here,” she said.
“Good, because I would rather talk to you than to myself, but I wouldn’t blame you for hanging up.”
Mimi swallowed hard. Was this a trap? “I’m sorry,” she said. “I…” But she wasn’t sure what she could add. She was sorry in a way and she wasn’t really sorry in another way, but she was confused and wary.
“You have no reason to be sorry,” he said. “This wild-goose chase was not your idea. And even if it was, I gave you no options.” He sighed. “Sophia has left me,” he said.
“You told me.”
“But I only told you half a truth,” he said. “It wasn’t because of you, Meem. It was because of me. I have been unfaithful for so long. I thought it was different with you. You know? Different. Ah, of course you know. Well, now I know, too. Crazy, hey?” She heard the sound of another cap being snapped open on another tiny bottle. “A slow learner,” he said, and chuckled sadly.
“Lazar,” she said. “It was fun-at first, I mean.”
He laughed again, a little drunkenly. “At first, yes,” he said, but not unkindly.
“I didn’t want to run away, but I couldn’t think of… You were so…”
“No, don’t remind me!” he said. “It is painful to think of the last couple of months. You were clever to go. You are a clever girl. A talented girl.”
Mimi could feel the tears coming, welling up in her. Relief and release from all that anger. And sadness, too. Sadness at the part she had played in this.
“You will not have to worry about me being a pest anymore.”
“Lazar, I-”
“No. It’s true. I have been a pest. But I have come to my senses, okay? And I am leaving NYU.”
Mimi was on her guard again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say. There were rumors in the department. My reputation was… how can I put this delicately?” He laughed. “I cannot put it delicately. Let’s just say, my reputation was catching up to me. So, to save myself the mortification of being dismissed, I have offered my resignation.”
“Lazar, I never said anything-”
“To the dean? Of course, you didn’t. You didn’t need to. I have no one to blame but myself. But all is not lost. I have found work.”
“You have?”
“I’m going to Baylor.”
“Where’s that?”
Lazar laughed. “A good question,” he said. “It’s in Waco, Texas. I have to learn how to say that. It’s Way-co, yes? I did not know this at first.”
“You’re moving to Texas?” Mimi tried to imagine Lazar in a cowboy hat.
“It’s the largest Baptist university in the world,” he said. “Me teaching in a Baptist university. Communication studies. I tell you, my world is… how shall I say this? Changing?” he said. “Yes, that puts a good spin on it. Changing.”
Mimi was shaking with relief. He was moving thousands of miles away. And she refused to feel guilty, and yet “You will be happy?” he asked. She wasn’t sure, but there did not seem to be any malice in what he was saying. “Because it is important to me, after everything, that you are happy. Well, a little bit sad. Yes?”
“Okay,” she said meekly. “But-”
“No but s, Meem. You be happy. That is good. And before I get too ridiculous, let me just say thank you for the good times and say good-bye, you delightful creature.”
And it was over.
Quietly he hung up. And she knew he would not call again. Which is when she started to really cry. She cried so much she thought she would drown the little house, and so she went outside. And then she heard the sound of a branch cracking.
When she spoke to him-the man in the trees, wherever he was-she felt as if she was in some bizarre off-off-Broadway play. The girl who talks to trees. She spoke without fear because, quite frankly, she had nothing left in her. She was emotionally exhausted. And if this monster dropped out of the tree with Jason’s mask on his face and a gleaming meat cleaver in his hand, she would have only laughed in his face.
She went inside and took her little vial of poisonous spray to bed with her. To sleep, perchance to scream.
Her mind drifted in and out of the elevator in the many-floored House of Sorrow. Ding! Regret. Ding! Denial. Ding! Outrage. But finally she dozed off, only to wake suddenly with the words “up there” clanging in her head like a fire alarm.
Up there?
She had heard someone say it. She could almost hear someone saying those two words in her head. “Up there.” For a moment or two she couldn’t figure out why the words seemed so jarring. Then it came to her.
Cramer Lee on the street outside the Hungry Planet, his eyes filled with concern.
No one’s been bothering you up there.
That’s what he had said. But there was a problem with that. A big problem.
She had never told him where she lived.
Was she crazy? Well, there was one way to find out. She flipped on her lamp and looked at her watch. Not even eleven. She crawled across the mattress to the chair where she hung her purse and looked through it until she found the business card with his phone number scrawled on the back. Then she flipped on the lights in the front room and sat at her desk. With the card in front of her, she punched in Cramer’s numbers. Then she leaned on the desk, her eyes staring straight ahead, willing it to be him who answered. It wasn’t. “Hello,” said a sleepy woman’s voice.
And Mimi pushed END. But it wasn’t because she had woken up Mrs. Lee, if that’s who it was. She terminated the call because of something very odd she saw before her on the wall. One of her father’s telephone numbers. A number he had etched over more than once and drawn an elaborate frame around. Beside it were the initials M.L. The number was the same one she had just called.