Read Online Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont - Free Book Online Page A

that she hadn’t washed; he could tell by her hair, where it was matted and stringy.
    The bed was the same, same sheets, unmade as ever, the comforter in a heap on the floor. And over the bed, that painting, one of those Chinese ones they peddle all over Times Square, her name in watercolors, letters shaped from flowers and birds: J * O * R * D * A * N . A gift from her parents the time they came to see the New York life she’d made for herself. He hated how it brought out what was tacky and juvenile about her. “But it’s pretty,” she’d said. She liked looking at it.
    The overhead came on. “You can tell her I want this month and next,” Arabella said behind him.
    He looked at her like who was the crazy one. “She isn’t here.”
    “No shit, Sherlock.”
    “Do you know when she’s back?”
    “She’s with you.” Arabella shifted her feet. “You aren’t here for her stuff?”
    He said, “No,” and clearly that was the wrong answer.
    “That fucking—cunt.” She began unfolding and refolding the waist of her pants. “I don’t even. Monday she said she was going to the
vet.
”
    The guinea pig, Jack realized, was gone. The albino puff with red eyes that he’d tried to keep away from but that still got its little hairs on everything, had made Travolta distrust him before anyone else did.
    “Look,” he said. “This has been a mistake.” Arabella was starting to sweat in front of him.
    “But you have to know where she is.”
    “No.” He moved in reverse and she forwarded. “I’m the last—believe me, she wants to talk to me even less than—least of all people. I mean, you don’t think she’d do anything, to hurt herself, do you?”
    New rashes began to blossom on her chest and the rounds of her cheeks. “I could call the police.”
    “You should.” Backtracking along the hall, arms out behind him. “I think you
ought
to call the police.”
    “Yeah and I’m sure they won’t want to question
you
. The married boyfriend.”
    “Hang on, okay? Hang on.” He saw the backs of his hands and realized he’d put them up. “Let’s see if I can make this easier. What’s rent for her room, like six hundred? Six fifty?” He began to feel into his pockets.
    “Nine.”
    “Christ,
nine
? Okay, okay, wait.” He pulled a billfold of twenties from his back pocket, then smaller denominations from the front of his jeans, balled up and crunchy. “I’ve got…one—one twenty…one thirty…seven. A hundred and thirty-seven. Dollars. For you, from me. A gift.”
    She did him the favor of taking it.

The next morning, Jack’s studio looked like the set for a movie or TV show, the pieces of house laid out the way he’d have them in the gallery. The movers were coming that day for the walls. Really they were blocks, but Jack thought of them as walls, and lining the space of the gallery, they’d look like walls. He was still packing them in felt and tarp when the buzzer rang. Four guys and a couple of mattress carts.
    When everything was loaded, he took a cab to the gallery and met them there. He’d wanted to ride in the back of the truck, but the muscle men told him no, there wasn’t room, what if one of the blocks fell over. “I’ll fall
you
over,” Jack muttered, but hailed a taxi anyway.
    At the gallery the staff left him alone to set everything up. Even the little receptionist out front he made leave. He listened to her heels clack across the hardwood of the lobby and out.
    Then he mixed the plaster, rigged the explosives. Peering at angles through the walls’ windows, he adjusted the furniture inside. He turned over a chair he’d welded himself, broke a ceramic dish into the ground. He brought out a stuffed animal, a tiger he’d found in their building’s playroom. The one found object in the space. With a good pull he tore a leg off and let the stuffing cloud out of the stump.
    Around lunch he got a falafel and carried it to the park, tahini sauce dribbling out the foil. He sat on a