The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [48]
Charlotte had drunk too many cups of coffee. Her hands were jittery. Squeezing her eyes shut, she massaged her temples. Silvery spears of light flickered as a series of wildly dissonant, dizzying images sped through the darkness. First she saw the trustees’ dinner at the museum, the Brickmans’ fifteen-room duplex, their two houses at the Vineyard, and Rita’s $78,000 Birkin bag. Then she caught a glimpse of the women in that Russian village, still hauling pails of water around on wooden poles; of Amy Webb’s mansion and $350 silk underpants. Opening her eyes, she remembered Vicky’s $14,000 cocktail suitcase and Darryl’s 12,000-square-foot apartment. Finally, she thought about John, the homeless man, commuting to a street corner from his shelter every day, and the hulking black man pounding on his steering wheel while he waited for his scissors.
For more than thirty years, Charlotte had gone out of her way to avoid thinking. Thinking implied that something might be thawing inside, like the tingling that she’d felt in her toes when Pavel was talking. Thinking triggered questions and doubts. Charlotte couldn’t afford the luxury of either. Pavel had been furious on Friday night when she had implied that there might be similarities between life in Russia and New York.
There were similarities. It wasn’t just the chasm that separated the unimaginably rich from everyone else; “the haves from the have yachts” as Vicky snidely put it. It was the murderous, suffocating rage that had inspired the black guy to write the word “BREATHE” on his windshield. Nobody could breathe anymore.
Last summer, she’d had to deal with this one woman who literally couldn’t breathe; who was so allergic, so “sensitive,” to everything on the face of the earth, Charlotte had to hire an environmental consultant just to choose the freakin’ fabrics. Then she’d brought in an acoustician, too. The woman was so “sensitive” to noise, she insisted that the sound of slamming car doors, fourteen floors below on Park Avenue, was giving her migraines. Lowering the ceilings and installing duct work for the air-conditioning system had been another nightmare. “I don’t want any insulation, no fibers, nothing that might get into my lungs!” the woman had shouted. When she’d also demanded that they find a way to pump pure oxygen into the apartment, it was the engineer who’d finally shut her up. “You wanna blow this whole fuckin’ dump sky-high, lady? Go ahead and put in your oxygen.”
Tom, the masseuse, had a theory that the allergies were part of what made these women feel special—that they were fragile and needed to be handled with as much care as their precious antique furnishings. Charlotte suspected that the allergies were just another symptom of rage. “Rage isn’t an emotion,” her shrink had once claimed. “It’s an attempt to hide from emotion. To avoid sadness issues.” Charlotte herself had no time for sadness. Sadness was for the weak. For “victims” who blamed everyone but themselves for their unhappiness.
But in July, an old client had told her about a visit to the shrine of some Sufi saint in Iran. “Please do not worry yourself,” the guide had gently warned her client before ushering her towards the silent chamber. “Everyone who enters this room cries.” Her client had laughed until she sat down on the bare stone floor, closed her eyes, and began to sob, uncontrollably. “It was the strangest sensation,” she’d said to Charlotte wistfully. “Like being embraced by this aura of absolute goodness. I couldn’t help myself.”
At the time, Charlotte had thought that the shrine should have a patent pending. No more anger management, Buddhism, Botox, panic rooms, antidepressants, compulsive shopping or painkillers. Just a shrine set aside for her clients to sob or