“They’re from Finn,” I said, a little too quickly. Then I angled myself so my skirt covered my feet.
There were a few seconds of awkward silence, then out of nowhere Toby started talking in a fake reporter’s voice. Using a weird accent and pretending to hold a microphone out to me.
“So tell me, Miss Elbus, what fascinates you about the Middle Ages?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and gave him a look.
“No. Really,” he said in his normal voice. “I want to know.”
It was the kind of question that made me go completely dumb. I almost thought about pretending I hadn’t heard it, but I knew he’d try again. My brain flicked past all the possible answers. Castles; knights; dark, candlelit nights; Gregorian chants; and dresses that came right down to your feet. Books that had to be copied out by hand and decorated by monks in the most beautiful colors. Books that were illuminated so they glowed.
“Maybe . . . I don’t know . . . Maybe it’s just that people didn’t know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it. You could believe in dragons and saints. You could look around at plants and think that maybe they could save your life.”
I’d been staring at the rug the whole time, because I had a feeling I wasn’t making any sense and Toby might be laughing at me. But when I glanced up, I saw that he wasn’t. He was nodding.
“I like that,” he said.
“Really?” I watched Toby to see if he really meant it and, when I was convinced that he did, I went on. “And, well, also maybe it seems like it would be okay not to be perfect. Nobody was perfect back then. Just about everyone was defective, and most people had no choice except to stay that way.”
Toby sat there nodding. He had his hand resting on his knee and I saw how callused his fingers were. “But it was also filthy and dark and there were rats and plague . . .”
“I guess.” I looked down, thinking. Then I looked up at Toby and smiled. “So not so different from New York, then.”
Toby laughed. “Good point.” He nodded to himself again, like he was mulling something over. “Except . . . well, except that we have AIDS instead of the plague.”
It was the first time I’d heard Toby say that word. AIDS. He glanced away from me when he said it.
“They’re not the same.”
“Well, not exactly, but—”
“Not at all. You couldn’t help it if the plague got you. It was nobody’s fault. It just happened. Nobody was to blame.” The words shot from my mouth before I had a chance to stop them.
Toby started twisting a loose thread at the edge of his jacket pocket. I thought about apologizing, but I didn’t.
“June, nobody knew anything about AIDS. Do you understand? There wasn’t even a word for it when Finn and I met.”
“Then why does my whole family think you gave it to him? Why would they say that?”
Toby tipped his head forward and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath before opening them. “Because that’s what we decided to tell them.”
“Who?”
“Finn and me. Mostly me. Your mother assumed that’s the way it was, and we decided to let her believe it. I told Finn I didn’t mind. That if it made her feel better, we should let her believe it.”
“But—”
“Let it go, June. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
But it did matter. The truth mattered. It wasn’t right for Toby to take all the blame when it could have been either of them. When it was nobody’s fault.
“Why would Finn—”
“Shhh,” Toby said, and he put two dry fingertips up to my lips. I froze and he slowly moved his fingers away.
“But—”
“I’m telling you all this because I need you to understand how much I loved your uncle. Then maybe, maybe if you understand that, you’ll . . . not hate me quite so much. Finn was like you, he wanted to tell the truth, he wanted everyone to know it wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was me who pushed it. I loved him, June. And if taking the blame made things easier for Finn, then that’s what I wanted to do. Now let it go, all right? We’re miles past any of that mattering anymore. All right?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Please? It’s what Finn would have wanted. It really is.”
How do you know what Finn would have wanted? I thought. But I shrugged and said, “I guess.”
“Good.” He looked away, out the window.
I sat there feeling like I was about to cry. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t because Toby had been noble and good. It wasn’t because probably nobody in the world would ever know the truth except me. It wasn’t because I finally had news to tell Greta but it turned out it was news I couldn’t tell anyone. I stood there letting that animal sadness drape over my shoulders, waiting for it to tell me why it was there. And then it did. It crawled in close and whispered in my ear.
He loved Finn more than you did.
That’s what it told me. And I knew it was true.
I could feel a hard cold knot forming in the center of my chest. I’m not a jealous person. I’m not a jealous person. I’m not a jealous person. I thought that to myself over and over again, slowing my breathing down. I looked up at Toby.
“Well . . . did Finn ever paint a portrait of you?”
As soon as I said it, I realized how pathetic I sounded. How sad and mean. But it was like Toby didn’t even hear the meanness. He held up his index finger, telling me to hold on a second. Then he jumped up from the couch and rummaged around in the secret drawer in the desk until he found a key. He held it up and smiled.
“You haven’t been to the basement, have you?”
Toby was right. I hadn’t been down to the basement of Finn’s apartment building. But my mother had. Sometimes on Sundays, while Finn was painting us, she’d do a load of laundry for him. She’d come back up shaking her head, saying never again. “That basement is like something out of a horror movie,” she said once.
Toby stuffed the key into his pocket.
“What about the basement?” I said.
“Come with me.” He was beckoning me with two hands like a lanky Svengali.
“I don’t know. What if I don’t want to?”
“You will. I promise. There’s a lockup. Each apartment has one. Like a big storage cage. Come with me.”
An image of me being locked in a cage in some kind of creepy cellar came into my head. I didn’t even know Toby. Not really. And he said himself he was jealous of me. Maybe he would lock me in this basement and nobody in the world would ever guess where I was.
Toby’s shoulders drooped, and he cocked his head to one side and said, “Please,” in the most pathetic voice ever. Then he perked back up. “Look, truly, June. You won’t be sorry.”
I thought about it for a few seconds and came to the conclusion that a real psycho wouldn’t have mentioned the cage. A real psycho would have lured me down there by telling me there was a puppy or something.
“Okay,” I said, “but you go first, and I want my coat.” I wanted my coat because my quill pen was in there and if worse came to worst I could always stab Toby with it.
He threw up his hands. “Absolutely fine.”
Toby pushed the B button and down we went. In the small space of the elevator I could smell stale cigarettes but also, underneath that, there was the nice freshness of soap.
“You won’t be sorry,” Toby said again as the elevator clunked to a stop and the door slid open. He stepped out and I followed. As soon as I had a chance to look around, I could see that my mother was right. The cellar did look like something out of a horror movie. The hallway in front of the elevator was narrow and lit with bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The whole place smelled like overheated dust, and the walls were yellowed and crumbling. As we walked, I saw that there were little dead-end hallways and rooms leading off from the main hallway. Some of them had grubby mattresses in them, lik
e there might be people who lived down there. Over my shoulder I watched as the elevator door banged itself shut. It creaked and churned as it lifted its way up out of the basement.
I looked at Toby’s shoulders in front of me and I started to feel glad that he was with me. Not that it seemed like Toby would be much help if a real psychopath was waiting in the basement, but, still, it felt better knowing I’d be hacked to death with somebody else instead of all by myself.
We passed through the laundry room. A dryer was tumbling some clothes around, but nobody was in there.
“Just here,” Toby said.
We turned a corner and came into a long room lined on one side with padlocked floor-to-ceiling chain-link cages. Each one was about ten feet across and pretty deep, and each had a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I followed Toby along the row of cages, peering in at the stuff people kept. Most of the cages were stacked high with things like bikes and boxes and chairs. One had a stuffed fox that stared right at me as I walked by. Another had about twenty different birdcages in it. Another had three ceiling-high stacks of unopened boxes of Campbell’s tomato soup.
Toby stopped at the cage that said 12H. I stood next to him, squinting at the sight of the thing. A burgundy velvet cloth, like a full-length curtain, hung from the inside on all sides so it was impossible to see what was in there. Toby pulled the key out of his pocket.
“It can be a bit . . . troublesome,” he said as he worked the key into the lock.
“What’s all this” I asked, pointing up at the curtain.
“Ah, there we go.” Toby wriggled the lock open and off the cage door. He glanced up to where I was pointing. “Just privacy,” he said. “Now, I need you to give me a minute.”
He stepped in first and I waited outside. I heard a match being struck inside the cage, and then I could smell that it had been blown out. I stepped closer to the door. I stood for a few more seconds and was starting to get edgy when a metallic sound, like a big door being slid open, echoed through the basement. Then a whoosh and a loud thud.
I must have let out a little gasp, because Toby poked his head out. “Incinerator for the rubbish. That’s all. It’s all the way at the other end of the building. Don’t be frightened.”
“I’m not,” I said, even though I was. I stepped toward the cage door and pulled the curtain back. “Can I?”
He offered me his hand, which I didn’t take, and I stepped in.
“Oh, wow.”
I wasn’t planning on being impressed, but it was impossible not to be. Inside, the cage didn’t look like any of the other ones we’d passed. It didn’t look like a storage cage at all. It was like stepping into a Victorian parlor. Instead of a bare bulb, there was a small crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. There was a worn Oriental carpet in blues and greens on the floor, and on top of that were two old upholstered chairs and a green velvet chaise longue. A short dark-wood bookshelf filled with little red leather-bound books nestled against one side of the room, and a fat candle burning a low flame sat on top of it. There were two side tables with lion’s-claw feet. One had a deep blue glass bowl filled with miniature chocolate bars on it, and the other had one of those crystal liquor bottle sets that rich people sometimes have. Each bottle had only an inch or two of drink left on the bottom, and Toby poured some into a crystal glass.
“Take a seat,” Toby said, smiling.
I wondered if this had been here all along. All the times I’d visited Finn. Another secret he hadn’t bothered to let me in on. I had a sudden hope that maybe Toby had set this all up after Finn died.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Finn made it. The annex, he called it.”
I didn’t want Toby to see the expression on my face, so I walked to the bookshelf. I squatted down and saw that each of the red books was a field guide to something. Sea life, wildflowers, trees, gemstones. They were beautiful. I pulled out the one about mammals and flipped through the stiff gold-edged pages without really looking. I held the book in my palm, my back to Toby, and felt my thumbnail scratching into the leather spine. Back and forth I scratched, until I was sure the mark couldn’t be rubbed away.
I heard Toby stand and I could feel that he was right behind me.
“This is where I used to come when you were visiting,” he said. “Not always, of course, but sometimes if I came back from somewhere and I wasn’t sure you’d left yet. That’s why he made this place.”
Finn hid his secret boyfriend in the basement? I might have felt sorry for Toby if the place wasn’t so beautiful. If it wasn’t so completely obvious that a person would only make someplace like this for someone they really loved. I thought of all the times I’d been upstairs in the apartment, and now those memories were getting mixed up with the picture of Toby skulking around down here. Right underneath me all the time. I thought about the painting sessions, those afternoons after the Cloisters, that whole Fourth of July long weekend. He couldn’t have stayed down here all that time. Could he?
Then I realized that this was my mother’s fault. There wouldn’t be any underground annex if it wasn’t for her. I would have known Finn and Toby together all along. And then what? I guess I never would have been so close to Finn. I never would have thought that I might be the most important person he had. I never would have let him hook into my heart the way he did. I never would have become the pathetic girl standing here, wishing he’d made this secret room for me.
“Anyway,” Toby said, “the question was, Did Finn paint any portraits of me? That’s why we’re down here, right? So take a look back there. Behind the chaise whatsit.”
I squeezed behind there without looking at Toby. There was a wooden pallet on the floor with a white sheet draped over the top. I could see what they were without even lifting the sheet. It was a big stack of Finn’s canvases. I stood there without moving.
“Go ahead,” Toby said.
I bent down to lift the sheet, but then I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face more parts of Finn I’d never seen before.
I shook my head. “Maybe another time.”
Toby nodded like he understood. “All right,” he said, landing a tentative hand on my shoulder. “Whenever you’re ready.”
As we turned to go, I saw what looked like a miniature stage with a blue velvet curtain. It had legs so it stood about chest level, and it looked like an antique.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, that’s just an old flea circus. A job’s a job sometimes.”
For the first time that afternoon I laughed, because that seemed like the kind of thing people usually said about waitressing or working as a garbageman. It didn’t seem to fit with the idea of running a flea circus.
“It’s yours?”
“Yeah, I used to set it up in parks. Or sometimes fairs.”
“And the fleas?”
Toby smiled. “Of course, the fleas. My little mates.”
“So . . . where are they now?”
“Who?”
“The fleas.”
Toby gave me a funny look. Like he was trying to figure something out.
“Sit down,” he said.
Great. This was going to be some kind of fantastically dorky performance that I’d have to try to smile my way through. I wondered if Toby came down here to feed the fleas. If they had a special flea-size cage and some kind of tiny water bowl.
“Don’t hurt any fleas on my behalf,” I said, trying to angle my head to get a peek at what Toby was setting up.
“What do you take me for?”
That was the thing. I didn’t know what to take Toby for. I still had no idea.
He turned the whole platform around to face me. It was like a shrunk-down three-ring circus. There were tiny ladders and a tiny wire bicycle. There was a trapeze wire that stretched across two stands and a rickety miniature trapeze that hung from it. I couldn’t help smiling as Toby went into full showman mode. The trapeze swung and the bicycle moved slowly around the edge of the stage. All
the while, Toby gave gentle orders to the fleas, and when they did what he asked he told them how wonderful they were, praising them over and over again. “Bellissimo!” he said. “Bravo!” After a while, he told them they could have a rest and asked me to give them a big round of applause.
I gave a few light claps, then crossed my arms over my chest.
“There are no fleas, are there?”
Toby gave me a mischievous grin. “No, June. No fleas. It’s a trick. Sleight of hand.”
“So you’re like the man with the golden hands.”
I wasn’t sure if I meant it to come out as mocking as it did, but once again Toby didn’t seem to notice my tone. Or, if he did, he decided not to let it bother him.
“No, not really,” he said. “Well, maybe for stupid fiddly things. I can’t write or paint or draw. Nothing useful. And it’s just my hands, really. Look at the rest of me. Clumsiest man on earth.”
“So, like a superhero with one power.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. Anyway, what’s yours, then? What’s the one superpower of June Elbus?”
I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands.
“Heart. Hard heart,” I said, not sure where it came from. “The hardest heart in the world.”
“Hmmm,” Toby said, tapping a finger in the air. “That’s a useful one, you know. Very handy. The question is . . .” Toby paused like he was considering this all very seriously.
“What’s the question?”
“The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt?”
Toby took his time, neatly folding away all the little parts of the flea circus. He might have kept the apartment a mess, but he seemed to take extra care to make sure the flea circus was packed away neat and tidy. I wondered how many times he’d been down here, talking to his invisible fleas, while I was upstairs with Finn. I wondered if Finn had bought him that flea circus. I wondered if Toby hated me. If maybe he hated my whole family. I couldn’t have blamed him if he did. He closed the top of the box and hooked a rusted latch into a catch.