Rolling Rock, two bottles Horst has somehow overlooked, way in the back of the fridge. They go in and sit at the dining-room table.
“Here,” Driscoll sliding over a gray-and-burgundy envelope about the size and shape of an old floppy disc, “this is for you.”
Inside is a card on expensive stock with calligraphic hand-lettering.
“What’s this?”
“Oh I’m on some committee.”
“Looks like a big deal, who can afford a party on this scale anymore?”
Well, seems Gabriel Ice, who else, having as it turns out recently acquired Tworkeffx, which builds and maintains virtual private networks, has discovered among the company assets a special Party Fund which has been sitting for years in escrow waiting for something like this particular End of the World As We Know It.
Maxine’s annoyed. “All that time and nobody thought to raid the account? How idealistic is that? The crooks I deal with every day, not one—lame, idiotic, whatever—would have passed this up. Until fucking Ice, of course. So now he’s the genial host and not spending a nickel out of his own pocket.”
“Still, we could all use a wingding about now, even if it’s only the Alley’s biggest pink-slip party. It’ll be about the open bar if nothing else.”
AS LABOR DAY APPROACHES, everybody in the world begins calling in, people Maxine hasn’t heard from for years, a classmate from Hunter who reminds her at length how at just the right moment in an evening of irresponsible stupor she saved this person’s life by hailing a taxi, folks from out of town making their annual autumn pilgrimages into NYC, eager as any city-dwelling leafers headed the other way to gaze at spectacles of decadence, sophisticated travelers who have been away all summer at fabulous tourist destinations, back now to bore everybody they can round up with camcorder tapes and tales of fantastic bargains, travel upgrades, living with the natives, Antarctic safaris, Indonesian gamelan festivals, luxury tours of the bowling alleys of Liechtenstein.
Horst, though not exactly hanging around the house all day, is finding time for the boys, more time, it seems from Maxine’s increasingly out-of-focus memories of the Horst Years, than he has ever spent before, taking them up to see a Yankee game, discovering the last skee-ball parlor in Manhattan, even volunteering to bring them around the corner for a seasonal drill he has always avoided, back-to-school haircuts.
The barbershop, El Atildado, is below street level. There’s a noisy subarctic air conditioner, back copies of OYE and Novedades, and 90 percent of the conversation, like the commentary to the Mets game on the TV, in Caribbean Spanish. Horst has just gotten absorbed in the game, which is with the Phillies, when in off the street, down the steps, and through the door comes a party in a Johnny Pacheco T-shirt, schlepping a full-size outdoor barbecue complete with propane tank, which he is looking to sell at an attractive price. This happens a lot at El Atildado. Miguel, the owner, always sympathetic, patiently tries to explain why nobody in here is likely to be too interested, pointing out the logistics of walking home with it on the street, not to mention the police, who have El Atildado on their list and keep sending the same beefy Anglos in plainclothes getups that wouldn’t fool your baby sister screeching up to the curb to jump out and into action. Indeed, according now to a doorman from down the street on a break, who sticks his head in with the latest cop-watch update, this very scenario is nearly upon them. There is some tense low-volume conversation. Laboriously the barbecue guy maneuvers his sale item back out the door and up the steps, and no more than a minute later here comes the Twentieth Precinct in the form of a cop in a Hawaiian shirt which does not not entirely cover his Glock, hollering, “Ahright, where is he, we just saw him on Columbus, I find out he was in here I’m gonna have your ass, you understand me what I’m sayin here, all you motherfuckers, gonna be in some deep shit, mierda honda, tu me comprendes,” and so forth.
“Hey, look,” sez Otis, as his brother makes dummy-up signals, “it’s Carmine—hey! hey, Carmine!”
“Yo, guys,” Detective Nozzoli’s eyes flicking to the TV screen. “How they doin?”
“Five–nothin,” Ziggy sez. “Payton just homered.”
“Wish I could watch. Gotta go chase a perp instead. Say hi to your mom.”
“‘Say hi to your mom’?” Horst inquires after the inning has ended and commercials come on.
“Him and Heidi are dating,” Ziggy calmingly. “She used to bring him around sometimes.”
“And your mom…”
So it comes out also that Maxine has been coordinating with the cops, some kind of cops, the boys aren’t sure which. “She’s into criminal cases now?”
“Think it’s about a client.”
Horst’s screenward gaze grows melancholy. “Nice clients…”
Later Maxine finds Horst in the dining room trying to assemble a particleboard computer desk for Ziggy, blood already streaming from several fingers, reading glasses about to slide off the sweat on his nose, mysterious metal and plastic fasteners littering the floor, instruction sheets torn and flapping everywhere. Screaming. The default phrase being “Fucking IKEA.”
Like millions of other men around the world, Horst hates the Swedish DIY giant. He and Maxine once blew a weekend looking for the branch in Elizabeth, New Jersey, located next to the airport so the world’s fourth-richest billionaire can save on lading costs while the rest of us spend the day getting lost on the New Jersey Turnpike. Also off it. At last they arrived at a county-size parking lot, and shimmering in the distance a temple to, or museum of, a theory of domesticity too alien for Horst fully to be engaged by. Cargo planes kept landing gently nearby. An entire section of the store was dedicated to replacing wrong or missing parts and fasteners, since with IKEA this is not so exotic an issue. Inside the store proper, you walk forever from one bourgeois context, or “room of the house,” to another, along a fractal path that does its best to fill up the floor space available. Exits are clearly marked but impossible to get to. Horst is bewildered, in a potentially violent sort of way. “Look at this. A barstool, named Sven? Some old Swedish custom, the winter kicks in, weather gets harsh, after a while you find yourself relating to the furniture in ways you didn’t expect?”
It was years into the marriage before Horst admitted to not being a domestic person—by then, to nobody’s big surprise. “My ideal living space is a not too ratty motel room in the deep Midwest, somewhere up in the badlands, about the time of the first snows.” Horst’s head in fact is a single nationwide snowdrift of motel rooms in far windswept spaces that Maxine will never know how to find her way to, let alone inhabit. Each crystalline episode fallen into his night, once, unrepeatable. The aggregate a wintry blankness she can’t read.
“Come on. Take a break.” She puts the tube on, and they sit and watch the Weather Channel for a while, with the sound off. One anchor meteorologist says something and the other looks over and reacts and then looks back into the camera and nods. Then they switch, and the other talks, and the first one nods.