Square in the Face (Claire Montrose Series) Page 2

  What Claire wanted was the fresh-caught tuna served with aioli, but even though she knew that aioli was fresh-made garlic mayonnaise, she didn’t know how to pronounce it. Did you say all the vowels? Unfortunately, none of the other people sitting at her table had ordered it. Claire compromised. “The tuna.”

  The waiter nodded and scribbled without saying anything, so Claire remained unenlightened. His gaze moved on to Tabitha, who was seated next to Claire. He added a few dozen more teeth to his smile, taken in by Tabitha’s jet black hair and tip-tilted eyes. “The tia pila,” Tabitha said. Handing her menu back with a snap, she continued the monologue the waiter had interrupted. “So they won’t fund the segment on the death camps unless I can get footage. But how can I get footage without any funding? The whole thing’s circular, but they just won’t see it.”

  Tabitha was a documentary filmmaker who specialized in war - specifically its effects, not on the main combatants, but on women and children. (Of course, as a war ground on, it wasn’t unusual to find that the person holding the gun was a twelve-year-old, or that a camp follower had scavenged a weapon and turned it on the enemy.) Lately her beat had been extremist Muslim conflicts, and unfortunately, she had a number from which to choose. Disguised behind a floor-length black chadoor, her blue eyes covered by a screen of mesh, Tabitha ventured into the field with a tiny camera hidden in the voluminous folds of her headscarf. Because she was an American infidel who risked stoning or a headsman’s sword, she also kept a revolver strapped to her ankle and a stiletto tucked in her bra.

  Unfortunately for Claire’s self-esteem, Tabitha was typical of Dante’s old friends. They were all vivid, fascinating and more than slightly exotic. Claire sat silent, listening to the play of conversation around her as it touched on war, politics, dance, theatre, art. At one point, Dante gave her shoulder a squeeze, but it didn’t make her feel any more sure of herself. What was Claire Montrose - who one year ago had never been farther east than Boise, Idaho - doing in New York City, eating food she couldn’t pronounce?

  The answer was that she had sneaked in when no one was looking. Six months earlier, she had inherited a mysterious oil painting from her great aunt. After gathering up all her courage she had gone to New York City, taken her painting on the rounds of auction houses and museums. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dante had offered to look at it.

  Later Dante had admitted to Claire that he had instantly fallen in love with both her and her painting of a woman in a ermine-trimmed yellow jacket. The little painting turned out to have been looted, first from its original owners by the Nazis, and then by Claire’s great aunt’s U.S. Army boyfriend. Haunted by the thought of the thousands of Jews whose deaths had allowed both Hitler and Goering to amass enough art for a dozen museums, Claire had turned over the money from the sale of the painting to the World Jewish Restitution Organization. It was only at the insistence of her elderly roommate - herself a concentration camp survivor - that Claire had kept just enough to give a few things to her family and free herself from the drudgery of Specialty Plates.

  The waiter took Aryeh’s order and then departed. Aryeh, who was sitting next to Tabitha, was an Israeli artist who referred to his works as “installations.” They seemed more designed to shock than to beguile. His latest was a pig, freeze-dried whole, which had then been sliced by a laser beam into one-sixteenth-inch segments. Reassembled in the order they had held in the original pig, the slices were displayed in formaldehyde, each one dangling from a piece of fishing line. Visitors were invited to agitate the Lucite box in which they floated and watch the weird and somehow lifelike way the whole thing rippled.

  Next to Aryeh was sara (she insisted on lowercase), a publishing executive who had just returned from a solo trek in Nepal. She wore a black dress the size of a postage stamp and heels high enough to make her a good three inches taller than Claire’s five foot ten. Claire wondered if the air was better up there.

  Ant was seated next to sara. A silver ring pierced his right eyebrow, and the white tablecloth hid his kilt. His shaven head showed not a trace of stubble. How much work did it take to maintain, Claire wondered. Had he shaved off his five o’clock head shadow before joining them for dinner? Ant played lead guitar in the band Muck. Claire had never heard of Muck - but the way Dante’s friends talked about it, she felt as if she should have.

  The four of them were now engaged in an animated discussion of Aryeh’s and Tabitha’s newly remodeled condominium. Only in New York could an apartment encompass more than two floors, and it seemed as if this one had at least four. Claire gathered that the basement housed a triple-width Italian marble lap pool lined with Spanish tile, and on the third floor was a screening room that seated sixty. At one point, Dante rolled his eyes in Claire’s direction, but still, she felt intimidated just hearing about it.

  To Claire, the four were representative of Dante’s old friends from Harvard, the kind of people who climbed Everest and spontaneously flew off for weekends in Paris. They had grown up using Mommy’s charge card at Bloomingdales, and Daddy was either on Wall Street or a senior partner at a white shoe law firm. The one time Claire had ventured this theory, Dante had gently chided her, reminding her that his family had made its money in the bakery business, and that their success had come only after years of hard work. Dante was the anomaly, though. Most of his friends had been born with the benefits that only old money, the best education, and family connections could bring. Now they knew people - or sometimes even were people - Claire had only read about in People. When she was around them, she felt herself receding behind her face, while always maintaining an interested expression.

  “How are you enjoying our fair city, Claire? Do you miss Oregon?” sara was all sweetness, but Claire noticed how she continued to pronounce the state’s name as Ory-gone instead of Ory-gun, even after hearing Claire say it the right way. Sara specialized in ghostwritting celebrity books, and, Claire had quickly figured out, had once dated Dante. Even though her left hand occasionally grazed Ant’s pate, Claire sensed an undercurrent of jealousy from sara’s direction whenever Dante leaned over to whisper in Claire’s ear. Claire could see herself through the other woman’s eyes. Some creature from the piney woods who hardly wore makeup.

  “I like it here; I like it there.” She realized her words unconsciously echoed the rhythm of Green Eggs and Ham, one of Rainy’s favorite Dr. Seuss books. Once a week, Claire spent an hour struggling to teach seven-year-old Rainy to read at one of Portland’s inner city elementary schools. Rainy was one of four siblings who had one mother and four different but equally absent fathers. “Oregon has things that New York doesn’t. Then again, I went to MoMA today, and that’s not an experience you can duplicate in Portland.”

  There was a pause while Tabitha and sara exchanged a sideways glance. Sara speared a pumpkin ravioli and then leaned forward. “Claire, you should know that the acronym is pronounced ‘Mohma.’ Not ‘Mama.’” Her smile didn’t reach her pale eyes. Dante shifted. Out of the corner of her eye, Claire saw him shake his head slightly, but sara’s too-intent expression didn’t change. “So what does Oregon have that New York City doesn’t?”

  Dante squeezed her shoulder. Claire could have launched into a list for the rest of them, one that would have started off with the word ‘friends.’ She could have talked about living in a green lushness cradled by forested hills and snow-capped mountains, of being less than a two-hour drive from the ocean, the mountains, the desert. She could have talked about the different pace and attitude. Instead she put on her own false smile and added a country twang to her voice. “Oh, you know, sara, maybe Oregon’s not much different than here. We just got more pine trees, pickup trucks and poverty. That’s all.”

  Even Ant laughed.

  URBSTD

  Chapter Two

  Claire stepped over the foot-wide dog dish that lay on the porch. Emblazoned in gold script along the edge was the word “Duke.” Charlie had gladly paid the extra dollar to have it personalized
when she bought the dish at Portland’s Saturday market. She said it was cheaper than a burglar alarm - or a real dog. Claire put her key in the lock, picked up her suitcase and pushed the door open with her hip.

  In just a few seconds, a tiny white-haired woman bustled into the living room. “Clairele! It’s so good to have you at home again!”

  Charlotte Heidenbruch - Charlie to her friends, which was pretty much anyone - opened her arms wide. Claire put her bags down just inside the door and gave her roommate a hug. It was impossible - given that Charlie was a foot shorter and nearly fifty years older - but for a moment Claire swore her feet left the ground. Then again, Charlie was the star of her Self-Defense for Seniors class.

  “Careful there, Charlie.” She straightened up. “You don’t want to break anything.” Claire wasn’t sure which of them she was referring to.

  “Come back into the kitchen and tell me how is your flight? New York City? Your lover?” Charlie pronounced it luffer. Even at seventy-nine, her Marlene Dietrich accent and casual European acceptance still drew men to her.

  “The flight was okay.” Claire had tried to lose herself in a paperback mystery, hoping to forget a recent 60 Minutes episode that basically demonstrated most airport control tower were run by ancient computers far less sophisticated than Claire’s digital watch. “And Dante’s - well, Dante.” After the awful dinner with his old college friends, he had spent her remaining time in New York trying to make it up to her. They had stayed up well past midnight the night before, eating Chinese takeout in bed and watching kung fu movies on TV. When a piece of mu shu pork had escaped her chopsticks and landed with a plop on her chest, one thing had led to another. They hadn’t gone to sleep until after three. She and Dante had barely made it out of bed in time to make it to the airport. Claire smiled to herself as she followed the older woman.

  Charlie’s house was about the same age as she was, and both were well-maintained. There was fresh white paint on the high-ceilinged walls, and a touch of coral on Charlie’s lips. The kitchen was modernized with stainless steel appliances, just as Charlie wore, not an old lady’s polyester pantsuit and twenty years out-of-date shoes, but a rose-colored cotton knit tunic and pants accessorized by her trademark pink tennis shoes.

  “And will you tell me anything about New York, Clairele?” Charlie picked up an already open bottle of red wine. She refilled her own glass then poured one for Claire. The affectionate “le” ending was one of the few things Charlie had kept fifty years after leaving her hometown near Stuttgart, with a two-year stopover in a concentration camp. The country and the language had been left behind, but the green embroidery of the camp tattoo on her arm would never fade. Strangers who heard the way she talked sometimes insisted on knowing what she was, but Charlie’s answer was always the same: she was an American.

  “Times Square looks even more like Disneyland than the last time I was there. Artificially shiny and colorful. But I guess it’s better than porno theaters.” Claire took a sip from her glass, enjoying the bite of tannin that spread over her tongue. “Something smells good.”

  Charlie took a cast-iron pan from the cupboard and set it on the gas stove. “I’ve roasted a chicken, so I thought to sauté onions, red bell peppers and mushrooms for the side of the plate. And of course rosti. Does that sound good?”

  Claire’s mouth watered. “Let me help. How about if I cut up the vegetables? You’re the only one who can make rosti right.” Rosti, a dish taught to Charlie by her Swiss grandmother, was like the most perfect version of hashbrowns, brown and crisp on the outside, tender in the center of every strand.

  By the time they sat down to eat, Claire was starving. “Did you eat any good meals in New York?” Charlie asked as she set a plate in front of Claire. Although she kept a trim figure, Charlie liked to talk about good food as well as prepare and eat it. Claire had read that the concentration camp inmates had been so hungry that they boiled weeds for soup, and she could imagine how such a hunger could not be sated, even after fifty years.

  As she savored a mouthful of roast chicken, Claire thought about the food she had eaten, both alone with Dante and with his friends. “We went out to Chinatown for dim sum. You know, I’ve read about dim sum, but I’ve never actually eaten it. It was great.” Dante had ordered a half-dozen little plates of Chinese dumplings - pork, chicken, shrimp - from the passing carts. Tiny Chinese women dressed in black pants and white shirts piloted the carts through the close-set tables filled with people all talking at once in what Claire supposed was Cantonese. The noise had been nearly deafening, but the tastes had made up for it. Plump sweet shrimp, sharp ginger, greasy and flavorful pork - every treasure wrapped in a bland dough wrapper. When they finished eating the waitress counted up the empty plates and charged accordingly. “You know what I liked about it? It made me feel like, yes, I may be thirty-five, but there are still great things out there that I haven’t tried yet.”

  Charlie shook her head, her tone gently chiding. “Clairele, if you think you are old, then what does that make me?”

  Claire set her fork down on her empty plate and let out a deep breath that bordered on a sigh. The quiet of the old house enfolded her, allowing her to relax as she never really could in New York, with its constant background hum of horns, sirens, and tires having intimate congress with potholes.

  “You still haven’t told me how things are with Dante.”

  “He talked a little bit about us getting married.”

  Charlie divided the last of the wine between their two glasses. “And that is not what you want?” Charlie never judged, which was why people revealed themselves to her.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. Maybe we’re too different. I think that’s what his friends think. Especially the women.”

  “Women can be territorial. And it is what is underneath a person that counts.” Charlie closed her eyes for a moment. Her skin was so translucent that Claire could see the delicate blue threads of veins in her eyelids. She wondered if her friend was thinking of Richard, the young husband lost to the camps. Charlie had only spoken of him a handful of times in Claire’s hearing. Was it that Charlie no longer remembered him or that she remembered him too well? And then there was their son, the child whose name Charlie never uttered, as if she were afraid to draw him into the world again.

  The thought of Charlie’s long-lost son made Claire remember her promise to Lori. She stood up from the table. “I need to call Lori.”

  Charlie’s faded blue eyes opened and she regarded Claire from the distance that nearly eighty years on earth had given her. “She told me about her son, how something was wrong in the marrow of his bones. He is - how old?”

  “Three.”

  Charlie closed her eyes again. Her mouth jerked down to the left, once. Claire thought again of the boy who had been just a year older than Zach when he was pulled from his mother’s arms forever. But Charlie had somehow found a way to go on. If Zach died, could Lori do the same?

  Chapter Three

  Even from the outside, it was clear that something was wrong at Lori and Havi’s house. The curtains were drawn, their porch was dotted with a week’s worth of rolled-up newspapers, and an empty yellow recycling bin lay overturned in the middle of their dandelion-speckled lawn. If she hadn’t seen Lori’s maroon Honda Accord parked in the driveway, Claire would have driven right on past, still looking for the neatly kept-up ranch house she remembered from previous visits.

  Taped on the front door was a sign written on notebook paper in Lori’s distinctive backward slanting cursive. “If you’ve just been sick, are sick, or feel as if you might be getting sick, please visit another time.” Claire raised her hand and knocked softly.

  It was a different Lori who answered the door, too. Instead of a designer suit, she wore Levis and a plain black turtleneck. Without saying a word, she pulled Claire inside the shadowed hall and hugged her fiercely. “God, I’ve missed you!” Claire had the weird feeling that Lori was comforting her, and sh
e wondered just how bad things were.

  Lori pulled back without meeting Claire’s eyes. Her voice was fast and breathless. “Oh, Claire, the gal they hired to replace you, she’s driving me up the wall. She has some new weird symptom every day. She itches or the air conditioner is giving her a stiff neck or she needs her karma readjusted. I could live with that, except she wants to tell me about everything in detail. I can’t escape. She follows me into the break room or even the bathroom, yak, yak, yaking. And now that he’s been promoted, Roland’s worse than he ever was. He’s taped warning signs all over the coffee machines to make sure we don’t make any good coffee in them. He found out that it’s written in the coffee supplier’s contract that we have to use the state-supplied coffee. You know, the stuff that tastes like it was brewed in an ashtray? He’s been checking out the freezer, even sniffing people’s mugs, looking for illegal Starbucks.” Lori still had not paused for breath. She was like a speeded-up, bad imitation of herself.

  Fearing that her friend might drown in the torrent of her own words, Claire gave her another hug. “Ssh, ssh,” she whispered in her ear. A black cat with one white foot walked in the half-open door and wound around their legs before jumping on the couch in the darkened living room.

  Lori pulled away and turned to close the door. The daylight caught her face, revealing a paper construction of hollows and shadows.

  “And Zach, Lori? How’s Zach doing?”

  Lori’s voice arced higher. “Okay. He’s okay. Right now he’s sleeping.” Her eyes got wider and she blinked them rapidly. She turned and started down the hall to the kitchen. “Speaking of coffee, would you like some? I’m practically living on the stuff. I’m thinking of seeing if I can just buy a case of Vivarin.”

  They both came to a stop in the kitchen doorway. The sink was filled with dirty dishes, the counter littered with wrappers from McDonald’s and Burger King. The red tile floor was dotted with dried spills, as well as a green rubber duck, a Speedy Gonzalez Pez dispenser, a child’s blue suede tennis shoe and a squirt gun. The refrigerator, decorated with children’s crayoned drawings, had been wrapped length-wise with silver duct tape, so that it looked like an odd outsized present. Claire only had eyes for her friend.