Prayers For Rain Part 11

"Huh?"

"Tenets," I said. "Tenants are people who live in your building. Tenets are principles, articles of faith."

"Right. That's what I said. Tenets and principles and, you know, the little sayings and ideals and philosophies we hold on to to get us through the day. Karen didn't have any of those. She just had David. He was her life."

"So, when he got hurt..."

She nodded. "Hey, don't get me wrong, I understand how traumatic it was for her." Her back had picked up a sheen of perspiration that made her skin glow in the afternoon sun. "I was filled with sympathy. I cried for her. But after a month month, it's like, Life Goes On."

"That would be a tenet?"

She looked over her shoulder to see if I was f.u.c.king with her. I kept my gaze even and empathetic.

She nodded. "But Karen, she just kept sleeping all day, walking around in yesterday's clothes. Sometimes, you could smell her. She just, well, she just fell apart. You know? And it was sad, broke my heart, but again, like, Get Over It."

Tenet number two, I figured.

"Okay? I even tried to hook her up."

"On dates?" I asked.

"Yeah." She laughed. "I mean, okay, David was great. But David David is a is a vegetable vegetable. I mean, hel-lo! Knock all you want, n.o.body's home anymore. There are other fish in the sea. This ain't Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet. Life is real. Life is hard. So, I'm going, Karen, you got to get out there and see some guys. A good lay maybe would have, I dunno, cleared her head."

She looked back over her shoulder at me as she pressed a b.u.t.ton on the treadmill console several times and the rubber belt below her feet gradually slowed to the pace of geriatric mall-walker. Her strides became longer, slower, and looser.

"Was I wrong?" she asked the window.

I let the question pa.s.s unanswered. "So, Karen's depressed, she's sleeping all day. Did she miss work?"

Dara Goldklang nodded. "That's why she got s.h.i.+tcanned. Blew off too many s.h.i.+fts. When she did go in, she looked wrung-out wet, if you know what I'm saying-split ends, no makeup, runs in her stockings."

"Heavens to Murgatroid," I said.

"Look, I told her. I did."

The treadmill wound down to a full stop, and Dara Goldklang stepped off, wiped her face and throat with a towel, drank some water from a plastic bottle. She lowered the bottle, lips still pursed, and locked eyes with me.

Maybe she was trying to get past my clothes and the car she thought I drove. Maybe she was looking to slum, clear her head via the method to which she seemed accustomed.

I said, "So she lost her job, and the money started to run out."

She tilted her head back and opened her mouth, poured some water in without her lips ever touching the bottle. She swallowed a few times, then lowered her chin, dabbed her lips with a corner of the towel.

"She was out of money before that. There was something screwy with David's medical insurance."

"What kind of screwy?"

She shrugged. "Karen was trying to pay some of his medical bills. They were huge. It wiped her out. And I said, you know, a couple of months not paying rent is all right. I don't like like it, but I understand. But the third month, I said, you know, she had to go if she couldn't come up with it. I mean, we were friends and all-good friends-but this is life." it, but I understand. But the third month, I said, you know, she had to go if she couldn't come up with it. I mean, we were friends and all-good friends-but this is life."

"Life," I said. "Sure."

Her eyes widened to coasters as she nodded at me. "The thing is, life, right? I mean, it's a train. It just keeps moving, and you have to run ahead of it, okay. You stop to catch your breath too long? It runs you over. So, sooner or later, you have to stop being so other-centered and Look Out for Number One."

"Good tenet," I said.

She smiled. She walked over to the ugly chair and lowered her hand toward me. "Need help getting up?"

"No, I'm fine. Chair's not that bad."

She laughed and her tongue fell over her lower lip again, like Jordan's when he'd drive for a layup.

"I wasn't talking about the chair."

I stood and she stepped back. "I know you weren't, Dara."

She put a hand at the small of her back, leaned into it as she took another sip of water. "And the problem," she said in a singsong, "lies, ah, where, exactly?"

"I got standards," I said as I walked to the door.

"About strangers?"

"About humans," I said, and let myself out.

6.

The inside of Pickup on South Street, David Wetterau's fledgling film equipment supply company, was a warehouse littered with 16-millimeter cameras, 35-millimeter cameras, lenses, lights, light filters, tripods, dollies, and dolly tracks. Small tables were bolted to the floor and s.p.a.ced out twenty feet apart along the east wall, where young guys worked on checking in equipment, while along the west wall, a young guy and a young woman rolled a mammoth, crane-shaped dolly along tracks, the woman sitting up top, working a wheel that rose from the center like one you'd find in a truck driver's cab.

The employees or student interns, both male and female, were a collection of baggy shorts, wrinkled T-s.h.i.+rts, canvas sneakers or battered Doc Martens with no socks, and at least one earring each glinting from heads that were either submerged under mountains of hair or had none at all. I liked them right off, probably because they reminded me of the kids I'd hung out with in college. Low-key dudes and dudettes with the fever of artistic ambition in their pupils, motor mouths when they got drunk, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the city's best used-record stores, used-book stores, used-clothing stores-just about any purveyor of secondhand goods.

Pickup on South Street had been founded by David Wetterau and Ray Dupuis. Ray Dupuis was one of the guys with shaved heads, and the only thing that separated him from the others was that he seemed a few years older and his wrinkled T-s.h.i.+rt was silk. He propped his Chuck Taylors up on a scarred desk that had been hastily placed in the middle of all the chaos, leaned back in a ratty leather office chair, and spread his arms at the lunacy around him.

"My kingdom." He gave me a wry smile.

"Lotta work?"

He fingered the fleshy, dark pockets under his eyes. "Uh, yeah."

Two guys came bounding through the warehouse. They ran side by side, pacing themselves, even though they seemed to be running at top speed. The one on the left had what looked like a combination of a camera and metal detector strapped to his chest and a heavy belt around his waist with bulging pockets that reminded me of a soldier's ammo and supply belt.

"Get a little ahead of me, a little ahead of me," the cameraman said.

The kid on the outside did.

"Now! Stop and turn! Stop and turn!"

The other kid put the brakes on, then spun and started running back the other way, and the cameraman whipped in place and tracked him.