String Tension 1979

by Dylan Landis

It’s March, eleven degrees below freezing. West Tenth Street is fucking desolate.

Rainey Royal parts the velvet drapes of the townhouse parlor and ices her forehead on a windowpane. When she releases the red curtains and turns back toward the double parlor she sees Radmila, who may or may not still be her father’s girlfriend, waiting by the Louis Quinze sofa with expectant eyes.

“Just fling yourself down,” suggests Rainey. She has promised Radmila a portrait. “Be your most sensual self.” She takes her sketchbook from the Biedermeier secretary desk and sits cross-legged on a bergère.

Radmila arranges herself on the sofa. She is a sniffling odalisque in an old sweatshirt belonging to Rainey’s father, Howard, who’s at the piano. The sweatshirt has a splotch of bleach over the heart. Radmila’s hair, extravagant with distress, climbs the cushions and crawls down her clothes. On the wall above her hangs an oversexed interpretation of Rebecca at the Well, in which Rebecca’s low-cut frock seems about to creep below her left nipple. In this painting — so tall and heavy in its frame that it was bolted to the studs when Howard’s mother, Lala, first married and moved in — Abraham’s servant Eliezer, who seeks a bride for Abraham’s son, Isaac, stands so very close that the virginal Rebecca has to lean away from him to avoid, like, frottage. 
Rainey uncaps her Rapidograph with a delectable click. “You know, if you took your top off, it would look kind of classical.”

Radmila strips off the sweatshirt. Howard keeps pounding on the piano. Radmila thrusts her breasts at the ceiling cherubs. They ignore her too.

“Howard,” says Radmila. The piano gets louder. She raises her voice. “At least say we give her your name.” Radmila has gotten preggers, seemingly all by herself, gauging from Howard’s interest.

The drawing is to be a birthday present. It’s a blind contour. That means Rainey can’t look away from the model, nor lift her pen from the page. In other words, the artist must trust her eyes.

Her father makes up a little song, variations on his name, drizzling his fingers up in the high notes. “Howardina, Howardette,” he sings.

In the other bergère, Tina’s studying. Her gaze bores into a blue textbook. Next to Tina, you’re a centerfold, Howard told his daughter once. They were twelve then. He must have thrilled to that viola back of Tina’s, because he even named a composition for her, later: The Tina Temptation.

Now they are nineteen, and Tina lives on the top floor. Here she is in black sheep pajamas, ignoring them all with the single-minded focus of a scholarship pre-med at midterms. From the dark heart of the oven come top notes of chocolate, sweetening the smoke that hangs over the parlor. This is Rainey’s other present to Radmila: the cake.

She begins to draw. Radmila stretches like a woman awaiting her demon lover. “I mean give her your last name, dahling.” Radmila is Romanian, Hungarian, someplace exotic — Howard calls her a Gypsy; there might be no correlation. She had a full scholarship for classical flute at the Manhattan School of Music. Then Howard found her playing in the park on Sundays for change and introduced her to jazz, and then she dropped out and moved in. Now she’s due in five months and infected with Barbie Brain. Let that be a lesson, Rainey thinks to herself.

Howard releases a flock of frenzied notes; they lift off the keyboard, swarming. “Maybe,” he says, “you’d like to fuck me up the ass with a hot poker, next.”

Rainey tells her father, “Hey, you agreed to this kid.” She leads her Rapidograph into the blind alley of a knee crease and shoots an eyeball message into Radmila’s brain. Run, it says.

The doorbell rings. Radmila doesn’t flicker. Tina stirs as if from a dream.

“I agreed we’d make beautiful babies. That’s an abstract truth.” Howard pumps the syllables on the downbeats. “I also agreed to get rid of it. That’s concrete. Howardsdottir — get the damn door.”

“It’s your dealer, you get it.”

The doorbell chimes again. Howard stops playing. The hiss of radiators rushes in to fill the quiet. Tina shakes off her afghan, twisting up her long caramel hair as she walks to the foyer. Radmila lunges for the afghan, which Tina salvaged from the Spanish Harlem walkup where her dead Catholic grandmother raised her, and sarongs her half-naked self.

As for the man lying face-up on the floor at Rainey’s feet, he hasn’t stirred. Who knows if the door chime penetrates his traveling mind? His name is Gordy Vine, and his white-blond hair streams across the Aubusson. Only the cigarette between his fingers looks alive.

The dealer is a new dude. A stripling. Boyish, his face a meadow, the dealer stands with Tina in the arched doorway as if posing for a marriage portrait: a tall, fair man with a new haircut and a watchful, pretty wife, her only adornment the crucifix at her neck.

Rainey likes him. She likes the pink of his high, freckled cheekbones, and the fine supple wool of his trousers. She likes the gleam of his shoe leather. When has anyone worn dress shoes in this house? He’ll be coming from his real job, Howard has told them. He is an analyst at Merrill Lynch. What is that, Rainey asked, and Howard said helpfully, an analyst is a grunt.

Tina goes to the sofa this time, freeing up a chair, and snugs in next to Radmila, who deals out a bit of the afghan. The dealer looks at Rainey, finally. She falls through blue wariness in his eyes, through cold, clear water, then deeper toward a sunless bottom. She thinks he might nurture a secret hurt there, like dark rabbity moss.

Howard steps forward, his arms extended in welcome.

“Ah, King Jupiter.” He folds into a Shakespearean bow.

“Jesus H. Christ,” says Rainey.

“Don’t call me that.” Her father looks aggrieved. “It’s his name.”

She can’t stop herself — she laughs. “What’s his wife’s name?”

Howard says, “You’re the most welcome man to enter this house in a fool’s age. Let’s have a taste, shall we? A taste and a toast.”

Rainey heads to the kitchen, but she can’t resist. “Hey,” she says. “If you marry me, can I be Queen Jupiter?” But King Jupiter is watching her father, who’s trying to splice himself between Tina and Radmila on the sofa. It’s like trying to part the waters.

“Radmila, git,” he says, but Radmila cocoons herself more tightly against Tina.

In the kitchen, a timer ticks on white Formica, tightly wound. Rainey gets the chilled champagne. She lays the bottle on a tray, adds five of Lala’s Waterford coupes and carries it all, clinking, back to the parlor.

King Jupiter remains in the parlor doorway, one ear cocked toward the staircase. From the top floor comes the distant sound of acolytes practicing — a swanky clarinet, a maniacal violin. He sniffs hard: chocolate air. “Double Dutch Intrigue Cake,” Rainey says, and sets the tray on the coffee tale. 
Then she pulls her hair back, lifting her chest to high heaven.

But it’s the blade of light glancing off her mother’s diamond ring that seems to catch his eye. “You can have cake,” she teases, “if the guy you stole that name off doesn’t get you first.”

King Jupiter studies Rainey as if considering whether to buy her. Then he utters a gorgeous word. “It’s Ashkenazi. Jupiter.” He looks down at Gordy Vine, who is stoned and has left his body behind like a dropped coat. “You sold tickets, Howard?” he says. “Went through Ticketron?”

Tina glances at him, then lapses into her book.

This room is full of such tenuous blessings. Every day, Lala gazes at her granddaughter with clueless love from a portrait over the hearth, diamonds distending her earlobes. She left Rainey the house, and left her also Howard, who is to run the house in trust till Rainey turns twenty-six. Trust. It seems a lousy word for anything involving Howard. Or money. Or, what the hell, trust.

“I don’t play to a crowd,” King Jupiter says, though he steps closer to the coffee table, and Rainey wants to drape herself across him like a scarf.

Howard peruses him with wizened eyes. “Crowd? This here is a well of loneliness, baby. Show me a room that violates the fire code and I’ll show you a crowd.” He looks amused. “Sit yourself down. Have some Champs.” He gives Radmila an instructive prod. Radmila bites her lip and sits tight. On her lap now are pieces of a flute she’s assembling, three bright knuckled tubes.

In six years, Rainey will own the house. She will make them all leave. Gordy, the acolytes, Howard. She goes over to King Jupiter and stands an inch too close. He smells like morning, like when you cut school and take the ferry just to see water from a boat.

“We all live here,” she says patiently. With the toe of her Ked she nudges Gordy Vine. “He’s trumpet,” she says. “And this is Tina. She’s my best friend. She’s pre-med.” Rainey can hardly remember a time when she did not know and love Tina Marie Dial. She leans into the dealer. Since they are going to marry and all. “And that’s Radmila, my dad’s girlfriend. Electric flute.”

King Jupiter speaks low into the spot on Rainey’s neck where every morning she dabs tea rose oil, the scent her mother left behind. “You got ’em reversed,” he says.

Outside on the street, or maybe deep in her brain, a car alarm begins to wail.

“Reversed how?” If she shakes him, maybe something ugly will fall out, like a cockroach from a curtain fold. Her voice turns harsh. “You think the one with the flute is pre-med?”

The car alarm is muffled by the drapes, but urgent, relentless. Sometimes this happens during rehearsal, and eventually Howard sends an acolyte out to write DICKWAD across the windshield in lipstick, which comes off only with rubbing alcohol, paper towels and grief.

Tina says, “I can’t study here.” She tries to rise, but Howard grips her book.

“Your mind is a laser. You’re fine.” What an asshole. He says, “Radmila. Scoot the fuck over. Jealousy won’t get you tenure.”

In the painting, Eliezer, who really should step back, dangles near Rebecca’s loins a string of beads. But that’s wrong. In the Bible, he gives her bracelets and earrings, which she runs home to show her mother: Rainey looked it up. Eliezer has ten camels packed with this shit — gold, jewels and raiment, which means designer clothes.

“Reversed how?” Rainey demands, pressing into King Jupiter now with a breast. It’s a high-burner breast — it can melt anyone.

She has missed something, but what? Is it the timer? Maybe the cake is on its own now. How do you confuse best friend and girlfriend? Howard leaves Radmila frantic for love. “Seven years,” says Radmila, “I have fucking tenure.” That accent! He relished it once. He keeps trying to knee his way in, and Tina wears the heavy-lidded look of a mother dog harassed by puppies.

King Jupiter unsuctions himself, astonishingly, from the breast. He walks to the piano and brings his fist down on the keys. The piano is furious. From the piano innards comes an angry clanging as from a union of radiators.

“Jesus God, man.” Howard turns toward the sound so fast he pitches into the coffee table. Radmila cringes. “That Steinway is signed,” says Howard. “Putain de merde.”

“My time is money,” says King Jupiter. “Putain,” he adds, tasting the word.

Radmila scoots over and tugs at Howard, crooning baby, baby, so he can drop between the two women and be soothed, a forty-three-year-old bearded minotaur sunk into down-filled cushions.

Revived, Howard spreads his knees wide and clamps a hand onto Tina’s thigh. “Peace, King. Let an old man have a taste and get you paid.”

King Jupiter looks down at the coffee table and withdraws from his shirt pocket a test tube.

As for Tina’s thigh, it sparks like a welder’s torch. Rainey can feel it. “Tina hates that,” she informs her father. “Tina is not a piece of meat.”

“Doctor Dial, a piece of meat? Mercy no.” Howard pulls his hand off the hotplate that is Tina’s leg, blows on his burning fingers to cool them, and untwists the champagne’s wire hood.

King Jupiter says, “I want a clean surface, Howard.” He squats at the table, his wing tips emanating light, and holds the test tube as if the white powder inside might detonate.

Tina and Rainey have been talking without talking since the sixth grade. They do this now. Tina leans in and lifts the tray with the glasses, and Rainey, kneeling by King Jupiter in her holey red Keds, reaches out with an arm and sweeps the table clean of everything else like a windshield wiper. Jazz magazines, a hash pipe, rolling papers, a box of reeds and the full Cinzano ashtray fall softly around Gordy’s legs and onto Lala’s Aubusson.

King Jupiter whips his hand up as if to slap Rainey’s face, then freezes it inches from her skin. But Rainey doesn’t blink. She picks her father’s pack of Kools from the mess on the rug and lights one. Two things make her proud in this world: what she achieves, which is her art, and what she denies to others, which is satisfaction. She’s not giving him a damn thing.

“Disobedient daughter,” he observes.

“If only you knew,” says Howard proudly.

One radiator bangs, another hisses. Tina sets the tray back down and stands the glasses up. Howard pours champagne in sibilant streams. Does he hear it too, this accidental jazz?

King Jupiter now pulls from his shirt pocket a Popsicle stick. “What did you mean,” says Rainey, “I got ‘em reversed?”

In the kitchen, the timer buzzes. Rainey starts, but King Jupiter’s hand restrains her. His touch is light, yet strangely, the hand is a clamp. His skin speaks to her skin. Don’t move, it says, and, in a whisper, If one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Bewildered, she stays. Chocolate molecules swirl, distressed.

“Nirvana has corners,” says Gordy. The cigarette is dead in his fingers, the ash long.

King Jupiter releases her arm. “I didn’t reverse shit,” says Rainey. She decides the cake can wait another minute. Champagne seethes in the glasses as Howard slides them across.

“Sound waves bounce around in there, man,” says Gordy.

With the Popsicle stick, King Jupiter quarries out a tiny mound of coke onto the table in front of Howard. “Well, if that’s your truth, Daughter,” King Jupiter says, “you hang on tight.”

But he is so wrong! Tina is just studying. Radmila is girlfriending just as hard. Radmila is working harder at girlfriending than any chick should have to work. Radmila is ignoring Howard’s hand, the one now back on Tina’s thigh, at a hundred miles an hour. Any faster and she will crash and burn. Her ovaries will explode like tiny wrecked Ferraris. Six years ago, when Rainey’s mother split, Radmila was the one who taught Rainey how to filch cigarettes and ones and sometimes even fives from the purses and packs of the acolytes, because Howard had so many chicks around the place playing excellent jazz and giving excellent blow jobs it was all just sitting around on the fifth floor asking to be boosted.

Radmila was cool then. Everyone was cool then.

“Timer went off,” says Tina.

“Could you maybe extricate yourself?” says Rainey. “Check the cake?”

Tina tries, but her leg is collared by Howard’s hand. She wavers, glances at Rainey, sits back. Radmila laughs, a dark utterance in her nose.

Howard pulls Tina’s book over. “Extremes of Life.” He looks pleased. “My memoirs.”

King Jupiter plugs the vial and sets it down. “Seven hundred buckaroos, huh?” says Howard, as if he’s just spotted it. King Jupiter takes a straight-edge from his pocket and unwraps it. Rainey finds her footing and starts to rise, but he touches her wrist and funnels liquid paralysis through her veins. 
“Extremes of Life,” says Tina patiently, “refers to the beginning, and the end.”

Radmila bounces around to face her. “You study that?” Tina nods. It seems to decide something for Radmila. “Toast, to the beginning,” she tells Howard.

Last night Howard and Gordy played till four and came home with one chick for the both of them. Radmila sat on the floor outside Howardland, the blue bedroom, and cried. But why? There’ve always been girls. Sober, stoned, sliding needles into pretty veins, playing sorrowful clarinets and straitlaced cellos. On school nights, when Rainey was young, they veered into her pink room and told her how darling she was. They gathered needles and corks to pierce her ears. They crashed on her floor and shared their cigarettes. She grew up on the jazz of girls: electric violin, vomiting, singing, sobbing, and the fucking of whoever happened to be sprawled in Howardland under those glowing, greenish plastic ceiling stars. Her mother. Gordy. Howard. Radmila, who outlasted them all. What got to her, last night? She could have just gone in.

“Don’t be so predictable.” Howard wraps Tina’s fingers, then his own, around a champagne coupe, a shape molded on Marie Antoinette’s left breast — that would be, Lala once confided knowingly, the larger one. Lala ordered Taittinger by the case, but Rainey’s pouring Freixenet. 
Tina, eyes narrowed, responds to Howard’s grip like a cat held too tight.

Rainey feels twilight purpling behind the curtains; she feels one cake darkening in the kitchen, another charring behind her ribs. “Daddy. Tina wants you to let go.”

King Jupiter, dicing up the coke, slides her a thin, metallic glance.

Radmila lifts her glass. “To our baby, a musical genius.” Christ, she ticks louder than the kitchen timer. “To me,” she persists, “because I refuse abortion.”

King Jupiter stares right through Howard, razoring the coke crossways now like a chef decimating a toe of garlic. He has what Rainey’s mother used to call knife skills.

“Good for you,” says Tina softly to Radmila.

Rainey brightens. What a great little broadcast from the core of Tina Dial, who believes in Our Lord Jesus Christ, yet because man is fallen, she sins with a vengeance, and judges no one, and these are things Rainey loves about her. The first day of junior high, she fell in love with Tina, a bully in tight bellbottoms who concurred that shifting into the Pearl Drops tongue move when men teachers looked their way was a stellar use of seventh grade. Tina lied with precision about the one thing she wanted to hide, which was living with her one-legged Puerto Rican grandmother, and Rainey lied with conviction about the one thing she wanted to hide, which was Gordy Vine and the night visits, and words were not required.

But now Tina has no love for anything but becoming a doctor.

King Jupiter deftly arranges two lines on the glass tabletop before Howard.

Howard takes from King Jupiter a tightly rolled bill. He relinquishes the glass to Tina as if it were his beating heart; and Rainey sees Radmila sail through the walls of the house and down the street, across the Hudson, over the chemical plants of New Jersey, never to return.

When Rebecca, who proved her kindness by watering all ten camels, left her mother’s home to marry, her people blessed her. Specifically, they said: Let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them. What precisely would that look like? When Rainey possesses her enemies’ gates she will line those suckers up in her basement like so many brass headboards.

Her father snarfs up a long white scar. He switches nostrils and vacuums up the second. He is beautiful, biblically so, his face just ragged enough to intimate the kind of suffering bound up with jazz, lust, and a direct line to God. Soon his fingers will drum on the table, reporting back from the interior of some complex tune, twisted as DNA. That’s some shit, he will say, gazing with rapture at the ceiling cherubs.

But he doesn’t say it. Instead Rainey watches him bind a hank of Tina’s hair around one fist, and ease her head close so that her ear is fastened to his heart. Then he turns to Radmila, the rolled bill jutting from his nose. He is the Minotaur.

“I’ll toast you, girl,” he says, “if I can suck champagne off Tina’s long sweet toes.”

“Howard.” Tina’s voice is a warning shot.

He releases her instantly. “What, baby? Did I hurt you?”

“Pay up, Howard,” says King Jupiter. Tina, rubbing her scalp, shoots Rainey a high-speed telegraph. I don’t like this, the telegraph says. I swear on the grave of my grandmother. Rainey gets it — Tina doesn’t want Howard. She manages him. Everyone manages him.

Rainey nudges King Jupiter with her whole self. The nudge is slow, sensual, generous. Why doesn’t it register? “I didn’t reverse anything,” she says.

When King Jupiter stands, he leaves Rainey on her knees in the pale, wilting garden of the Aubusson. He snaps his fingers, hard as castinets. “Dinero,” he says.

“Oh, yeah.” Her father starts bopping to music that only he can hear. “Howardsdottir,” he says kindly. “White envelope. Nightstand drawer. Do me a favor.”

Radmila crooning: “A family, Howard — toast to that.” Rainey ascends to one knee. She will get the envelope. She will rescue the cake. She will toast Radmila and this fetus to whom she is so intimately related they could share makeup tips, and even makeup.

“I got a family. You don’t listen,” says Howard, and that is true. “Don’t you have limits, baby? Try this — I’ll toast you if I can suck champagne off Tina’s fat pink nipples.”

Rainey, half risen, stops moving.

King Jupiter bends low and speaks into her hair. They seeing see not, he murmurs. And hearing they hear not.

Whatever that means. But Tina’s nipples. They are, in fact, fat. Howard knows this how, exactly? Tina is private about her lady places — that’s the dead grandmother. Tina gets into her nightie with her back turned. Best friends for years, though, you spied on sleepovers. You marveled at nipple differences. 
You seeing, saw.

I swear on the lives of all the saints. This telegraphed from Tina: long pajama’d legs crossed on the Louis Quinze, Extremes of Life open across her lap, plowing furrows of text.

Rainey picks up the vial.

Hands swim toward her slowly, but Rainey is in dream time now. She plucks the stopper, tips the vial over Tina and Howard’s barely-touched glass, and raps it sharply on the rim.

And the vial is emptied, and the wine made bitter. No man may buy or sell now, save that he has the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Her father leans out of his seat, braces himself on the coffee table, and smacks her.

Never has he done this. She feels like she is three, and she feels like a woman. The vial flies from her hand and cracks on the marble hearth. Salt is on her tongue, and the ruins of her cake scent the air. It is thrilling, not to have cried out.

King Jupiter says, “I’ll be wanting that cash immediately.”

The razor gleams between his fingertips. Rainey looks up at him from the floor. He drapes raiment upon his flesh and strides among beings who shuttle, blind as salamanders, along the streets of the city.

Her father spits syllables at her. “My bitch daughter will get your money.”

Rainey scrambles to her feet. Her cheek flames. She faces Howard, unashamed. Tina’s face flames too; her finger is stabbed to some kind of list, a list with bullets. Ways of being born, reborn, dying, who the fuck knows. Radmila begins her incantation: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Baby, I’m sorry. But it is too late for that. Her glass, too, is full of abominations.

“Don’t think you won’t regret this,” Howard tells Rainey. But he is here on borrowed time.

As Rainey climbs the stairs she hears him. “Dude,” he says, placating, “what’d you cut this shit with? Procaine? Chalk?” Her father’s body is not and never has been a temple. “Lemme jew you down a little.”

He sleeps in his dead mother’s room, the big blue one on the second floor facing the leafy sunlight of West Tenth. The four posts of the bed prick the air, dangerous as thorns. A storm has whirled briefs and T-shirts everywhere, but left neat stacks of sheet music intact.

Rainey opens the nightstand drawer. It’s scattered with plastic stars. Years ago Radmila puttied them to the ceiling, where some still remain. A shooting star foretells luck, Rainey knows, but a star that falls straight down — what does that signify?

Signs and symbols float up at her from the drawer. Kool, Bayer, Trojan, Vandoren — those are reeds; and in the detritus of the life her father lives in the dark a white envelope glows.

From below comes Radmila’s shriek. “I live here, you son of a bitch.”

Rainey extracts the envelope, shedding greenish stars. Seven hundred buckaroos, belonging to whom, exactly? She hears Gordy’s slow, reluctant tread on the stairs, and on the floor she sees Radmila’s big suede purse, a time capsule from early Beatles. Rainey picks it up. Under the flap are coin slots, and a white comb strapped in by elastic. Behind a plastic window, a little boy smiles.

Wherever he is, he isn’t here.

From the stairs, Gordy calls: “Raineleh? Everyone’s waiting.”

Hidden behind the broad canvas pocket that lines the purse is another, just as wide but with a gusset for depth and a zipper for security. Here Radmila stashes her dowry — the tens and gold earrings she filches from Howard’s take-home girls. Rainey sewed that pocket in. She was what, thirteen? She can set zippers and sleeves with her eyes shut. She puts the envelope in the pocket. Zips it closed. Drops the purse back onto the floor.

On the stairs, she shoves past Gordy, then skirts Radmila, who sits on the bottom step, weeping, wearing the sweatshirt now and rocking herself like a child.

In the parlor doorway she stops. Her father gapes at her from the sofa. King Jupiter has found Gordy’s mute, and studies Rainey and her empty hands through its rubber eye.

Then he throws the mute. Hard, not at her, but at the painting above the sofa. The mute hits Rebecca in the face, denting the canvas, then drops and lolls on the Aubusson, circling itself, going nowhere. On the sofa, Howard and Tina look out at him from under raised, protective arms.

“You’re fucking with me,” he tells Howard.

Howard slowly stands, leaning on Tina’s shoulder. He looks like he could use a daughter about now. “Daddy — ” says Rainey, but he walks right past her and heavily climbs the stairs.

Tina gathers up her book. King Jupiter turns on her. “Sit you there, girlfriend.” A theater of sound plays overhead. What might be a nightstand drawer smashes into what might be a wall. Coins clatter and roll.

“What if it’s gone?” Rainey saunters through the parlor like a woman in red stilettos, though one Ked is untied. She stands near King Jupiter at the piano.

“Gone?” He touches her arm. Feeling chosen, she lets him lace his fingers through hers. “Money is never gone.” He turns her hand and sets her ring glittering. “It is only transformed.”

Upstairs her father shouts: “Where’d you hide it, Gypsy?” She hears the thud of sailing clothes hitting the stairs. “Whore of Babylon,” her father shouts. “Third-rate flutist.” A spray of coins and Maybelline clatters in the foyer: a hurled purse.

They watch Howard reenter the parlor, stretching his fingers. “King, I’m at your mercy. I’m good for a check. Or I can hit the bank Monday. Hey — don’t lean on the instrument.”

“He won’t take a check, Daddy.” She touches King Jupiter’s white cuff. They can be partners. She’ll be the saucy one who talks too much. He’ll pack that Popsicle stick and the tube.

“I accept alternate forms of payment.” He twists her hand into the air. The diamond of Rainey’s mother shoots light through them all.

Tina speaks as if from Rainey’s mind. “She’s not giving you that.”

“Her cooperation is not required.” And to Rainey: “Take it off.”

“I did not reverse them,” she whispers. His vice on her hand tightens.

Howard says, “That’s worth four thousand bucks, King. I owe you seven hundred. Give us till Monday.”

Tina says, “Plus it’s stuck,” and that is true.

“The finger ain’t.” He whomps Rainey’s hand on the piano lid, hard.

It’s the most interesting thing to happen in this house in a fool’s age, even if it hurts. 
I was eyes to the blind, he tells her, his face close to her face. Then electricity lifts the roots of her hair, by which time, it’s over: switchblade, flick, slash. The finger remains attached, but slightly less so.

“She’ll give you the ring,” her father shouts. “Rainey, please.”

“I know,” says King Jupiter. “She’ll beg me to take it.”

The pain is the pain is the pain. Who said that? The pain is the biggest thing in the room, it is a rose with razor-petals. It shrills in her brain at the exact pitch of high B flat from her own eighth-grade flute. That pathetic instrument! When she was twelve and cutting school with Tina, she would brag to the boys in Central Park that she played jazz flute, when all she played was scales. Tina looked fifteen, and Rainey sixteen, and the boys were old enough to drink.

That pain. Instinctively she tries to tourniquet her bleeding forefinger with her other fist, but he’s pinned her hand to the piano.

“Skin deep,” says King Jupiter warmly. It is the same tone her father used when she would bring him a skinned knee and he would say, mysteriously, Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door. King Jupiter says, “Twist the ring off while the blood’s wet.”

Howard is shrieking like the person in The Scream painting, only not making a sound. When he gets control of his face he says, “I’ll pay you eight hundred Monday morning.”

King Jupiter ignores him. “Twist,” he says. “Next one goes through the bone.”

She twists. The knuckle is slippery but it’s still a manhole cover.

Man, her blood is gorgeous on the lacquered piano lid. And from up here on the ceiling she’s riveted by the sight of Tina, who ambles up on their little group like a disinterested cat while King Jupiter watches with eyes in the back of his head.

Upstairs, a file drawer glides and slams. From the ceiling Rainey sees herself lean into King Jupiter. “Tell Gordy to look under J,” she says dreamily. “For jagoff.”

Her father says sadly, “Howardsdottir, don’t make it worse.”

“Don’t call me that.” She has knife skills, too. She has awesome fucking knife skills.

“You might get us some Crisco, Howard,” King Jupiter says. “Before we try surgery.”

Her father bolts from the room. Rainey, on the ceiling, listens as the townhouse keeps playing its particular improvisational jazz — Radmila crawling after the disgorgements of her purse, knees bumping the floorboards; the cake, in the oven, skulking and smoking; the kitchen crashing and shattering as Howard pillages the cupboards.

“That needs Mercurochrome,” says Tina calmly.

“I said: Sit you down, girlfriend,” says King Jupiter.

Tina goes on, as if this were an actual conversation, “Did you sterilize that knife?”

It turns out that a person on the ceiling can say anything. “Maybe your daddy was a putain de merde too,” says Rainey. Her father was a kid in Paris; he can still say the most egregious things in French. “Maybe you were the great disappointment of his life.”

“Who are you trying to hurt?” says King Jupiter.

“From the time you could walk, right?” says Rainey. His grip makes her fingers go numb. “Oh, I bet it sucked, being you.”

The knife flashes, growls. A long, blond ellipse appears in the piano lid.

The piano lid is a virgin, a pristine surface upon which elbows do not lean, beer bottles do not rest, magazines do not collect. Amazed, Rainey stares at the gouge. It is the crescent moon, which, waxing, portends intention, and, waning, surrender.

King Jupiter calls into the kitchen, “I think you spared the rod with this one, Howard.”

Her father emerges. When he spots the damage, he looks at first like a man who has decided never to speak again. But then he wails. He is a raging prophet, his thurible a can of Crisco.

Radmila, holding her things in the parlor doorway, sputters at the carnage — whether the piano’s or her own Rainey is not sure.

“Jesus H,” says Rainey. The pain still sings soprano and her blood has browned on King Jupiter’s white shirt cuff. “You’d think the piano bleeds worse than me.”

“Actually. It doesn’t.” Tina slithers partway between King Jupiter and the piano. She has to grind her hips to do it and she looks right up at him through those long flamenco eyelashes of hers. Tina can be hot. She tells him, “That piano is stronger than you are.” Rainey is struck by the sweetness of Tina’s breath, as if her mouth might taste delicious. Tina is putting her life in the way of Rainey’s mother’s diamond. Or is it Rainey’s father’s piano?

“You can’t hurt it,” says Tina. “There’s twenty tons of string tension in there.

“Wake up,” snaps King Jupiter, and Rainey’s father, as if awakened by thunder, thrusts out the oily blue can from across the grand piano. King Jupiter says, “Slide it over,” and Howard, holding the can in mid-air, trembles.

“Not on the piano.” He jerks the Crisco back.

King Jupiter lets Rainey wrest her hand free. Her blood tastes like pennies.

“Howwwward,” says King Jupiter slowly, across many notes, as if calling to a child he is about to whip.

Her father plants the Crisco on the piano. Rainey dips her bleeding fist into the open tin. The lard feels creamy and cool. She lets her hand bathe in it.
“When did my father tell you about string tension?” she asks Tina.

Radmila steps into the parlor, rustling and cursing. In one hand she has her flute case and purse, in the other a knotted Hefty bag. She is radiant with snot and tears. “You. Mister Drug Dealer,” she says. “You should get him where he lives with that knife.” The power and the glory, if not the kingdom, shine in her face. She looks at King Jupiter with such intent that Rainey wonders, not for the first time, what she has missed. And then she sees it. The knife has moved. It is an inch from Tina’s eye.

“Check her flute case,” says Howard quietly. “Lift the lining.”

“I did,” says Rainey quickly. “It was the second place I looked. After her purse.”

Radmila flicks Rainey the finger. But why? She’s seen every one of Howard’s women leave this house, one way or another.

Rainey taps Tina on the arm, though Tina is not looking, not with a knife to her eye. “What else did my father teach you?” She does not ask: How many minutes alone in a room, a room with a bed like a beating heart, does it take to impart the physics of string tension?

No part of Tina moves.

“Hey, King,” says Howard. How do you distract a cobra? He tries. He walks to Radmila where she holds her belongings and kisses her, hard, on the mouth.

It is the bacio della morte. “Take her, why don’t you,” says Howard. “Chain her to the radiator. Make her earn her keep.”

Radmila scrapes out a sound like a gate barking closed. Tina says, “Howard, shut up.”

King Jupiter lowers the knife. The light in his eyes changes. He walks to Radmila and looks her over, touching the tip of his knife to the fine meter that is the tip of his tongue.

“The ring came off,” says Rainey. “Pay attention.” She holds out an emerald-cut diamond ring. It was an engagement gift from her maternal grandfather, Marty, to his betrothed, Sophie; thence to Rainey’s mother, Linda, when Linda decided to escape Howard, and thence (in a fit of maternal remorse) to Rainey. Marty has declined to meet Rainey, ever. He is Jewish, extremely, and she is not remotely Jewish enough, because of Howard. She is nothing, really.

“It’s yours,” she sings, and holds it up, but the light has died in the facets, smothered in both lard and blood, and besides, he isn’t looking. He is deep into an appraisal of the disbelieving Radmila.

“Deal,” he says. “Wrap it up and I’ll take it.”

He is not talking about the ring.

Rainey has one piece of advice for Radmila. It remains the best advice she’s ever given. “Run,” she says clearly. But Radmila is stalled, riveted by the last act of a bad play.

“Take a joke, man,” says Howard. “Rainey, give him the goddamn ring.

Rainey comes up behind King Jupiter and takes his hand — as if they were lovers, as if his fingers belonged on her lips — and presses the ring to his palm. He lets it drop to the floor, so that she lunges after it. “Jokes elude me,” he says. He takes Radmila’s arm, denting her flesh, and shunts her toward the foyer. Tina drifts their way like a translucent sea creature, but Rainey gets ahead and flattens herself against the front door.

Gordy shouting from upstairs: “I got seventeen dollars from pockets and shit.”

Tina touches the dealer’s arm. She opens her palm. Something glints there. She talks even lower than he does, but he won’t look. “My grandmother’s crucifix,” she murmurs. Rainey keeps her eye roll to herself. “It has great meaning,” says Tina.

And here we stand with our jewels out, Rainey wants to say. You, Eliezer and me. And whose seed, Rebecca’s or Radmila’s, will possess the gate of their enemy?

Meanwhile, eighteen feet from the painting, Radmila has become an insect. She grapples with one sticky, spidery strand, then another, entangling herself until she too feels that strange, liquid paralysis. “Kill him, Howard,” she says. “What are you cowards staring at?”

“He’s got a knife, sweetie,” Tina says, and Rainey thinks she has never heard such tenderness in Tina’s voice.

The cake is fighting for its life too, that much is true. This cake has turned hard without adult supervision. Rainey can smell it, the dark crust, all the sweetness burned off. Inside, though, there might still be soft, delicious bits.

The knife is small and sharp and quick. It is a stiletto, illegal to carry, illegal to own. It merely glints through Radmila’s hair, but there it is, chewing on light from the foyer sconces, which were gaslights in 1888 when the townhouse was built. Rainey steps aside. Tina does the same. King Jupiter opens the front door to a dark street, admitting an icy blast. He steers Radmila and her thumping baggage down the steps to a car that idles, shadowy, at the hydrant. The night sky releases a soft mist with no irony whatsoever.

“Don’t,” says Howard, though no one does anything but shiver in the shock of cold.

“Don’t what?” says Rainey. “We could rush him.” Tina looks at her, waiting. Rainey thinks, Knife, and Tina nods, barely.

The rear car door opens from inside and Radmila’s body locks in refusal.

“He’s a twerp. He won’t hurt her,” says Howard. He drapes an arm around Rainey’s shoulders and she feels him shaking from cold before she jerks it off. Radmila looks back up at their little group. Her face is pale as a pearl in the dark. “For all we know, she planned it,” says Howard. Radmila looks straight at Howard, spits on the sidewalk, then folds herself into the backseat with her flute case and purse. “Making off with him. Christ, my poor piano.”

King Jupiter opens the trunk and places the Hefty bag inside. He gets into the backseat after Radmila. Noiselessly, the car pulls away. Up and down the block, bluestone sidewalks peak crazily over frozen tree roots.

In the warm foyer, Tina says quietly, “That finger needs Mercurochrome and stitches.”

Rainey takes Howard’s bomber jacket off a hook in the foyer. Her father is now tearing his hair over the piano damage. In his jacket pockets are Kools and a yellow BIC lighter, keys and a bunch of bills. Jammed in a sleeve is a thrift-shop ruby cashmere scarf, a gift from Rainey’s mother. This jacket could nurture her for days.

Tina watches her, then takes her own white down jacket off the hook. 

And this is one more thing Rainey loves about Tina, how she doesn’t talk if she has nothing to say. Like right now, how Tina simply follows her out the front door, no Where we going or Bye, Howard or I have to just…No words, just some sticky blood. 

On the stoop, Tina sighs, her breath swirling white and vanishing into the dark. Rainey taps two Kools out of the pack. She feels Tina’s hand in the pocket of Howard’s jacket, fishing for the lighter. Then Tina offers up a flame in the chalice of her cupped hands.

Rainey hands her a lit cigarette. They walk west. The night is still, and midnight-dark, and cold enough to snap in half. Every townhouse they look up into has a parlor. In every parlor hangs a chandelier. And beneath those crystals, who knows, a King might even now be chopping up little cicatrices of coke.

On her right hand, Linda’s diamond has changed. It is heavy, a glass doorknob, still mired in Crisco. She tried to give it up and it flew back. Maybe, if she wears it hard enough, other things will fly back. Radmila, her mother, Tina — maybe Tina will tell Howard to drop dead.

Those stars! Rainey remembers walking into Howardland balancing a tray for Mother’s Day. She was a kid, maybe twelve, the tray heavy, coffee lapping the two cups, and Radmila and Linda Royal sat up in bed with their tops off under those pale plastic stars, talking and smoking, magazines across their laps. They looked happy. It was strangely not confusing. To apply the stars, Radmila had dragged the bed aside and hauled the ladder up from the basement. Howard laughed and wouldn’t help. Rainey handed up one star at a time, first dabbing on putty with an ice-cream paddle, and when the putty ran out Radmila said Go get the toothpaste, and that held fine too, for a while.