The Park Avenue Hovel, page seven

    They ate in the second kitchen, tucked by the back stairs, originally for the servants' use, being half the size or less of the main galley behind the dining room. She watched Gwen move from fridge to cabinet to table, fully at ease in the small space, admiring her hands and feet as she pulled a decent meal out of raw materials. Lunch cleared away, Adrienne left Gwen to get on with her errands and returned to her own room.
    One of the two on the top floor, her bedroom faced a long, narrow room that held a billiard table and bookcases, the full bath between her and the quiet woman, going through a divorce, whom she could only think of as 'the Mrs.' There was a clip beside the door for mail and internal communication, the number six discreetly attached to the wallboard above it; a deadbolt, obviously lately installed, above the heavy brass doorknob completed the feeling of privacy. She knew very well that Gwen had a key, as she had to every room in her house, but she had no desire to keep Gwen out. There were other people in the house, though, against whom she was grateful for it.
    Inside, the room had some of the character of a hotel, the furnishings all solid but slightly dated, the wallpaper not something she would have chosen. She'd hung posters and moved the desk and dresser around, leaving the big framed mirror in place but putting the bed under it, all changes she'd hesitated to make without her landlady's approval. Her reluctance had left her, however, when she'd watched Gwen and her younger brother haul an armoire out of one downstairs room into another and realized just how little the arrangement of the furniture mattered to either of them. Her new freedom in regard to decoration had not, she hoped, deteriorated into license, and the room had felt more hers after she'd stirred up some dust in it.
    A pile of books teetered on the bedside table, textbooks she'd retained mixed in with different required reading, and she spent a minute or two carefully wiggling the Chomsky free without toppling the whole mess. Full of other people's bookmarks, it was second or third hand, on loan. Finding her page marker, though, was simple enough: no one else had used old negatives to hold their place. Book face down on the bed, she held the strip up to the light, still unable to make out what the pictures were; another one of Lane's abandoned projects, put to good use.
    The tape deck clicked quietly, spooling through forty seconds of hiss before the real noise started; Adrienne drew the pillows and blankets up around herself, making a nest she settled into before easing back into the book. It was heavy going in some places but she tackled it willingly, storing points and ideas for future discussion, marking her own paths on the already well-trodden pages. Door locked, stereo on, she retreated into her cocoon, measuring her intellect and understanding against the length of the passages, pausing only to flip the tape when it jerked to an end.

Posted at Saturday, December 5, 2009 05:28 PM
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