A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [93]
On the third floor Ted noticed two boys sharing a cigarette in a doorway. Another lay asleep under a straggling assortment of laundry: wet socks and underwear pinned carefully to a wire. Ted smelled dope and stale olive oil, heard a mutter of invisible activity, and realized that this palazzo had become a rooming house. The irony of finding himself smack in the midst of the demimonde he’d tried to avoid amused Ted. So here we are, he thought. At last.
On the fifth and top floor, where servants once had lived, the doors were smaller, set along a narrow hallway. Ted’s elderly guide stopped to rest against a wall. His contempt for her yielded to gratitude: what effort that twenty dollars had cost her! How badly she must need it. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry you had to walk so far.” But the woman shook her head, not understanding. She tottered partway down the hall and rapped sharply on one of the narrow doors. It opened and Ted saw Sasha, half asleep, dressed in a pair of men’s pajamas. At the sight of Ted her eyes widened, but her face remained impassive. “Hi, Uncle Teddy,” she said mildly.
“Sasha,” he said, realizing only then that he, too, was breathless from the climb. “I wanted to…talk to you.”
The woman’s gaze jumped between them; then she turned and walked away. The moment she rounded a corner, Sasha shut the door in his face. “Go away,” she said. “I’m busy.”
Ted moved nearer the door, flattening his palm against the splintery wood. Across it, he felt the spooked, angry presence of his niece. “So this is where you live,” he said.
“I’m moving someplace better.”
“When you’ve picked enough pockets?”
There was a pause. “That wasn’t me,” she said. “That was a friend of mine.”
“You’ve got friends all over the place, but I never actually see them.”
“Go! Leave, Uncle Teddy.”
“I’d like to,” Ted said. “Believe me.”
But he couldn’t bring himself to leave, or even really move. He stood until his legs began to ache, then bent his knees and slid to the floor. It was already afternoon, and an aureole of musty light issued from a window at one end of the hall. Ted rubbed his eyes, feeling as if he might sleep.
“Are you still there?” Sasha barked through the door.
“Still here.”
The door opened a crack, and Ted’s wallet bounced on his head and dropped to the floor.
“Go to hell,” Sasha said, and shut the door again.
Ted opened the wallet, found its contents untouched, and replaced it in his pocket. Then he sat. For a long time—hours, it seemed (he’d forgotten his watch)—there was silence. Occasionally Ted heard other, disembodied tenants moving inside their rooms. He imagined he was an element of the palace itself, a sensate molding or step whose fate it was to witness the ebb and flow of generations, to feel the place relax its medieval bulk more deeply into the earth. Another year, another fifty. Twice he stood up to let tenants pass, girls with jumpy hands and cracked leather purses. They hardly glanced at him.
“Are you still there?” Sasha asked, from behind the door.
“Still here.”
She emerged from the room and locked the door quickly behind her. She wore blue jeans, a T-shirt, and plastic flip-flops, and carried a faded pink towel and a small bag. “Where are you going?” he asked, but she stalked down the hall without comment. Twenty minutes later she was back, hair hanging wet, trailing a floral smell of soap. She opened her door with the key, then hesitated. “I mop the halls to pay for this